Alina Vandenberghe: Finding your strengths and excelling in your career

Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Make It Happen Mondays, where we talk about sales, business, entrepreneurship, personal growth, mental health, and everything in between with guests who I truly respect and I think make a positive impact on the world around us. Now, this is a very special week since I'm going to be attending and speaking at HubSpot's inbound conference in Boston all week. Now, because of this, we decided to do a HubSpot takeover of the podcast with my good friend, Russell Bradley Cook, who's actually the senior app partner manager over at HubSpot. And he's going to be talking to some of the leading CEOs in the tech industry about the future of sales and where sales is going, especially in this world of AI.

We're going to release these episodes daily, so make sure you tune in and let me know what you think. Let's make it happen. Hi, John. Thanks for the intro. I'm Russell Bradley Cook, and I'm thrilled to be a part of this. As John mentioned, he's at Boston at our annual inbound conference, and I'm going to be bringing you not one, but five episodes this week featuring the CEOs of top software companies with integrations on the HubSpot's marketplace. They are Seismet, Sixth Sense, G2, Chili Piper, and Typeform, talking about how AI is being used by their sales and marketing teams and in their product, as well as the future of sales and partnerships. Thank you very much for joining us. You can join John and I on LinkedIn with hashtag JB Sales and hashtag Let's Make It HubSpot Monday.

Let's kick it off. Alina, welcome to Make It Happen Monday. I'm so happy to be again with you here. Thank you. For those of you who don't know Chili Piper, it's a meeting, booking, and routing technology. If you are a chief revenue officer or in RevOps and want to increase the conversion of your inbound leads, you should definitely talk to Alina and her team. And it also does really slick handovers between marketing and sales, which is always a source of tension in any company. And I had the pleasure of interviewing Alina last year in Dublin alongside Sastock. And one of the things that she told in that story, in that interview, was a story about when she was a child in school and the teacher threw chalk at her.

And as somebody who is in sales and has to deal with a lot of rejection, that was something which really resonated with me and stuck with me really for the year and up until today. And so I just wanted to ask you like how you got the toughness to deal with that of somebody like actually throwing something at you in class. It was a cultural thing in Romania at that time. And I hope that things have changed. I don't know, because now I've lived most of my adulthood in the US, but there was this thought that teachers are superior and they know a lot more than you and that when you're saying stupid things, they will point it out. And oftentimes I would be called out or thrown chalk at and other nasty things.

And I think that there are many ways one can deal with that kind of rejection, as you call it. You can just shut down and your entire nervous system just learns to be in a state of freeze. And as a result, you're unable to take action. And that's a very unfortunate state to be in. Most people in those cases, they turn aggressive and they say, I'm going to teach them a lesson. I'm going to show that I'm better. And they use that as a catalyst to do more damage themselves. And then there's another way to handle rejection in which you're saying, OK, in this particular case, I'm learning something. And you look at it with curiosity and you look at what it is that you're learning. What is it that that person feels in that moment where they feel so much fury to throw chalk at you?

You try to understand their motives a little bit better. You try to understand yourself a little bit better. It's a long process. And as a child, it's definitely if you don't have the right people around you, you configure things on your own. But the more you understand about the other and where they're coming from, the more opportunities to learn. And as a result, I've developed a very high level of curiosity around everything that happens around me. And I think that that's what helped me along the way. I do think some of that I told you so, it can be a powerful, positive motivator as well as definitely causing more destruction. Do you agree or not? There is a there is some drive that I have inside of me that comes from that.

There's no doubt. I don't feel it's my strongest driver, though. So it might have worked as a lever to some extent. However, the biggest driver in me didn't come from that. Okay. And you posted on LinkedIn recently about your motivation to become a CEO from a very early age. And not that surprising from an entrepreneur. But the thing that was surprising was that you posted that it was because it was based on a desire to end violence. And you felt that if you had that power, then you could help reduce, if not end, violence in the world. And so maybe can you expand on that a little bit? I was, as you can tell, Romania and communist times were not, was not the most peaceful type of environment.

So I was being exposed to all sorts of atrocities, especially because people are less familiar with this kind of behaviors, but they a lot of them have might have read, George 1984, and the Big Brother type of scenarios where people listen to everything that you say, and they punish you for not saying the right thing. And that was the case in communist Romania. So there was a lot of aggression between people. And for instance, our house was bugged, and we couldn't say certain things, and we would be afraid of people at all times. So the thing that comes out of that is that you start wishing that there was a different world, a world where people are not afraid of approaching one another. They're not afraid of being criticized or labeled, or they just have a trust in the community, that the community is out there for them.

And that was a dream that I've had alongside because I would see that the city life was so different than the village life where people would be so much closer to one another. And it's been an ever evolving dream to try to understand how one can impact that at scale. And in my mind as a child, I was seeing that the people that would impact change were those that were at the helm of organizations and of corporations. And I felt that that was my way to impact positive change. I'm glad it was your destiny in a way. And I think one of the things that's challenging for a lot of people, certainly for me, is that there's so many bad stories that are happening in the news. And I don't think that those stories are false.

I actually think that there's a lot of important stuff happening. But the challenge with the news is it's the concentrated version of everything happening bad in the world onto your phone at 6.30 or 7 a.m. Whenever you wake up, boom, like nonstop. Everything bad that just happened in the last 12 hours while you were sleeping, fire hose plug into your brain. And so how do you stay positive in the face of that onslaught? It's the structure of how social media and news organizations are structured, that they get incentivized by most engagement and most clicks. And us humans are a lot more wired to pay attention to the negative. And it makes sense that we're wired like that because it has served us well through the years as humans got formed.

You know, if a person would come to you and they would say, you know, everything's good, you can go in this cave, there's no tiger there, don't worry, you can just be safe in there. You'd not be wired to pay attention to them. But if somebody would say, well, you have to pay attention, there's a tiger there, you have to be cautious at all times. So we've learned to pay attention to the negative, but even more so, it has proven that we think that people that point out negative things are more intelligent. And we give people that, uh, bring, uh, negative things, higher IQ points, like just by, uh, by sheer proximity of it. Um, obviously it's not the case anymore. We're no longer in danger at all times.

We've been, we've never lived longer. We've never lived better in terms of, uh, access to, uh, um, food and, and then the basic necessities. Um, so it's a, it's a matter of retraining ourselves on how to, uh, live within this new context and this new environment. Um, myself, I, I rarely read, um, the negative news. I do read things because I do want to be kept up to date, but I keep it to a minimum and only to the things that can affect my work. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's very relevant for, for salespeople. It's, it's hard to operate in that, in that, um, environment of negativity. And I remember operate, I was in sales in, in 2008 and Lehman brothers crashed. And it was just like, you put your head in your heads and you're like, there's no way anything good can come from this.

Um, but still you have to keep going and, and keep that positivity inside you. So I wanted to, to thank you, um, to thank John Barrows and, and folks like Seth Godin who really elevate, um, kind of the sales and marketing profession. So I, I wanted to, uh, thank you for that. It's been very inspiring for, for me, um, to, to jump into the sales and marketing, uh, piece. Do you think sales and marketing are two distinct things? I've always said, uh, that, uh, marketing is just sales at scale. Um, the reality is that now that AI is here, marketing can be sales personalized at scale as well, because you can do a lot of personal outreach and, um, have little input from humans. And, um, um, so the lines are blurring a lot in what it takes to do one or the other.

I've noticed that my best sales reps are my best marketers and, uh, vice versa. The best marketers are also based best salespeople as well. It's not always the case I'm, I'm generalizing, but there is something true in there because in order to get someone to get to the outcome that you might want to, uh, to move to a specific outcome. You have to understand very well, the psychology of how the human mind works and how humans make decisions, especially your ICP, obviously you don't want to deceive and you don't want to, uh, move people in the wrong direction. If it's, they, they shouldn't move in the wrong direction, but there is a commonality in understanding that psychology of what moves people and how to create paths that, that move people.

And, and so for, um, one of the things that, that John has talked about on the show is, is kind of the career progression of BDRs and that historically it was BDR, AE, sales leader, VP sales. Like that is the way, the only path that makes sense. Whereas now it seems like more organizations are looking at moving BDRs into a customer success role or into a partnership role. Um, how do you handle that? Like, what does the career progression look like at Chili Piper? I'm the biggest fan of BDRs. You know, they, uh, they, uh, they start in the, in a position that makes them, uh, deal with rejection all day long and they have, uh, to achieve, they have goals that are stressful to achieve. Once you learn to be successful in that role, there are a lot of things that you can take as a career path.

Um, in our organization, I think, I'm, I'm, I'm certain that most of our, uh, other departments are just BDRs that have been progressing through our organization. Um, we have, uh, BDRs in our marketing team. We have BDRs in our product team, BDRs in our customer success, you know, partnerships. Um, and they've flourished in beautiful careers all the way to director and, and further and it's beautiful to watch. And how do you promote teamwork across them? Um, cause I think in one of the challenges with sales is it can be, I don't want to say cut through, but it requires a certain degree of competitive, competitiveness to succeed. And so how do you then make that also work across teamwork? One of our top values is this idea of, uh, of, of help.

And when we started, uh, Chili Pepper, we created our values early on. Um, and this one was a very important one for me. And, uh, the example that I gave earlier on how in village, in villages, people just have their back and support one another a lot more than in city where we're all in a box separated by our neighbors. Um, because there's a lot of dependency, you depend a lot on others. Um, somebody might have, uh, a cow and they might give you milk and somebody might have a chicken and they might give you eggs. So there's a lot of co-dependency. It's hard to recreate this idea of a community inside of a company because, especially remote, um, because there's no eggs to give. Um, however, if the first people that you hire have the value very strong in them, then they're a lot more likely to hire people that share that value and they're a lot more, um, careful on scanning for it.

So we do pay a lot of attention in our hiring process to attract those kinds of people that have each other's back and, and are more willing to share their techniques and, and helping others and lifting one another like that. And in terms of that, uh, so also interviewing Doug, uh, from seismic as part of the, the podcast takeover, how do you do that? Like enablement or that training across teams as a fully remote company? So these days we're focusing a lot on, um, uh, as an example, training on empathy and, um, Empathy is, is quite some, you can train on product demos. You can train on, on industry knowledge. Um, empathy is a lot harder because you cannot fake empathy. You cannot fake that you, uh, really care about the other in front of you and paying attention to the unspoken words.

Um, yet, if you want to create relationships with those in front of you that are authentic and based on trust, you can only do so if you fully understand the person in front of you as they are. Beyond their business goals and, um, that's something that we have, um, all sorts of groups that are helping each other on, on that particular skill, um, every week in every team. It's not only sales, it's everywhere because you, it's hard to collaborate and create relationships in, in any environment. Um, but remote is even, um, even harder. So we pay a lot of attention and we have weekly goals around it. But in terms of like just very practical things, like this is, uh, case studies, this is assets that you can share.

Even when you sit all in the same building, it can be quite confusing about what, what is the most recent topics, what is up to date, uh, do you allow BDRs to change stuff on, on slides or they have to stick with the marketing official version? Um, how, how do you, how do you, how do you manage that internally? Organic, uh, training, um, we've, um, we're a little bit more untraditional actually Piper in that, but ownership comes from everyone. Um, there's not, um, one place that holds the decisions or holds, holds the process and we encourage everybody to take ownership over things. So for instance, if someone notices that a page is not updated, uh, they just go and edit it. There's no like a stiff approval process because Alina didn't say so or Alina said so.

Um, we, for, for bigger things, when it's not about just editing something that was incorrect in, uh, in a sales resource, uh, we have a decision memo process. Where you're creating a, um, a document and you, you're, uh, getting rough consensus from everybody before you change something that's a bit more major, but for things like, like training materials, everybody chimes in and everybody, uh, helps one another when, when they're in trouble. And, um, that's beautiful to watch. There, there's something about that, that it's, it feels a little bit magical. Yeah. I love it. And so, um, I think maybe it's a natural, uh, segue into AI. Like, can we get a magical friend to, to help us do all of these things?

Uh, I was curious, how do you see AI, uh, impacting, uh, your business? I spent a lot of time thinking about that, um, actually, uh, more time than, than one would, uh, imagine that, uh, that, uh, um, I have available. And, uh, it's really hard to predict beyond the 10 year mark, maybe even five, but maybe five is a bit too early. But beyond the 10 year mark, it's really hard to predict what's going to happen with corporations, with, um, governments, with people, uh, in this new, uh, stage. Short term, it does create a lot of opportunities for a lot of people to automate the mundane things and get better at things that are a lot more meaningful. Um, so the repetitive tasks and, uh, anything that might require someone junior to, uh, in a junior role to do.

Um, so we're a lot more empowered for sure. Um, and if we're not careful with how we continue to evolve our own skillsets, our, um, interactions, even with AI and how we're training AI on what we're training with AI. Um, it can get off rails and it's a little bit, uh, tricky to manage, um, but in the short term is positive where I, I, I benefit a lot from it. Uh, my team is benefiting a lot from it to, uh, to just get a better, better at our craft. Do you have any concrete examples of how, how you're using AI, uh, within your, your sales and marketing team? Yes, it's, um, it starts with, uh, even more harder to crack subjects like, uh, how to coach someone, uh, that might be struggling with a specific skillset or might be struggling to achieve certain, uh, type of, uh, uh, rapport.

Um, and for that, we use, uh, I use a tool called P.AI. Um, actually I use it for all sorts of, uh, other personal, uh, challenges that I have. And we talk a lot at night, I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing, but it happens. Um, we also use it a lot for any kind of, uh, data manipulation to write scripts to, uh, from what data sources together to get better at targeting and get better, uh, uh, accounts lists. And better information about who we might invite to an event and so forth. And that it's so much faster than it used to be with, uh, with AI. Um, we, uh, also, um, whatever we bring the specific topic, we, uh, do a lot faster research. Of course we chat GPT and Bard and all these tools to make sure that the, the topics that we're bringing, we don't have any holes in them.

Um, so creating like a partnering thoughts for the things that we're producing is also helpful. It's not as helpful if you yourself don't have the knowledge to understand if it's hallucinating or if it's bringing things that make no sense, but it's helpful to see if you might be missing things or my, you might have not thought about something as a brainstorm partner and, and things of this nature. Yeah. And you're in video as well. Uh, yeah, we, we use it all for video. for, for advancing our scripts on videos, um, for advancing the, for speeding up the, the shorts, um, we also do some editing. So if I say something wrong and the word that it's not quite, doesn't sound quite right with my accent, we might edit that as well.

Though I love being unedited because I think that, um, if I get edited, I'm no longer myself. Um, but if there's like a huge mistake, then we might repair it with, uh, after, uh, editing as well. Um, fantastic. And so I think you kind of answered the question, but, um, it seems like you see AI giving salespeople superpowers rather than putting, making them irrelevant. Yeah, that's correct. In the short term, that's, that's the fact in the longterm, I have no idea what everybody's future looks like, including my own. I don't know if I can be replaced with AI, I may be, but it is hard to predict. And so where, where do you think salespeople, uh, who are listening to this, how should they think about advancing their own skills?

Like what, what do you think are the skills they need to, to progress and be successful in the next five years? The best learning, uh, path for anyone, and it's not only about sales, but every other, um, career path is to find someone who you have a lot of respect for, and you wish you'd be more alike and follow that person and be around them. Um, because you're a lot more likely to learn from people than from books and from listening to videos and, uh, or podcasts. Um, there's just something human in us where imitation is our best, uh, way to learn. Um, so really being surrounded by the people that you respect and you want to learn from is, uh, is the number one way to, uh, to get better. Um, I also encourage everyone to have a very, um, good friend or someone in the organization that they trust and they respect that can point out the things that, um, might need improvement.

It's a lot harder to hear it from a manager. It's a lot harder to hear it from, uh, from peers. But if you have a friend who can be genuine and kind with the things that you might need to improve, you, you are more likely to listen. And, um, if you have that, uh, strong relationship with someone that that's the kind of thing that's very valuable to fully unlock traumas or, or, uh, things that could really make a difference in your career. Yeah. Seeking, seeking out the, the things that need improvement is, is a tough one. And I agree with you. I've had some, some bosses, my, my current boss, Greg Carolis is very good at giving direct feedback and I just tried to like take it, take it on board.

Um, but I've had previous bosses where either they haven't given the feedback or they give it. And it's just like, I can't deal with how that, that, uh, it's just hard to compute. It's, it's hard to compute for some, especially if you're early in your career and you're not used to receiving feedback in that way. And most managers are not very skilled at, uh, giving feedback either. And they might say something positive and then you wait for the negative thing and then the positive thing again, the sandwich, you know? Um, I'm, I'm completely obsessed with, uh, skill sets and mapping skill sets. I have actually published it, uh, on Chili Piper on the things that I think are the type of things that drives people these days, especially in the era of AI, what are the skill sets that are important?

And I map them by a role and I go deep into the levels and examples of the levels. Um, I think it's the number one thing that I can do as a leader to, uh, make sure that our team is empowered on the right skill set. So I sit in HubSpot's, uh, partnership team, uh, we just won partnership leaders, uh, award for, for most innovative, uh, partner program. And we have got a lot of cool things going on, but Chili Piper is one of the most impressive partners that I have seen. And I'm not just saying that because, because you're here. Um, I was curious just to cite one example, like the, the G2 partnership, uh, that Alexi was your, uh, email partnership, a global partnership leader. Now, um, um, did to embed Chili Piper forms on the G2 marketplace, uh, like once you sign that, so you get, you sign the partnership, what do you do next?

How do you make that successful at Chili Piper? Uh, I'm also very admirative of HubSpot, uh, partnerships and how yourself and, and everybody manages that, uh, process. Um, I think a lot of people can learn from, from, from you. Um, we have partnerships as an important, uh, motion at Chili Piper as well. And we pay a lot of attention to it because it's a big driver of our pipeline. Um, for partners that we sign up with, we have different, uh, levels of, um, uh, partnerships, um, which can unlock all sorts of types of content of social, uh, promotions of events of, uh, uh, go to market campaigns. Um, in addition, we also have, uh, cross beam as a tool to see. Who are common audiences are common accounts, common prospects to make sure that in all our communication, we can bring the right, um, uh, people together.

So for instance, we have a summit that's happening in September with G2 and we're bringing, um, some Chili Piper customers and some Chili Piper prospects and some Chili Piper, some G2, uh, customers. And it makes a difference when you have a prospect sitting next to a customer and from the different companies, because the more, um, touches you have from people that might not be yourself, the more likelihood to, uh, have that person be a lot more open to the idea of, of bringing you on board. Um, so that's like an important step as well, this, this pollination of audiences and making sure that you, um, have as many touches as possible from your partners. You mostly thread as many, uh, in our case, because we sell to B2B, you multi-thread as many personas of that account as well to increase the chances of the deal happening.

Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. I'm digging into it. Cause I, I, uh, at HubSpot, we learn a lot from our partners. Uh, the chairman of my old company, uh, would often say that all of my money comes to my customers and most of my best ideas do too. So I'm always picking the brain for my partners about how they're doing the, the GTM. And so even thinking about the G2, uh, partnership, how do you make sure that like G2 sales team gets enough value from that, that they are pushing it to say like, this is good. This is going to be a win for me. If Chili Piper is successful. Um, the beginning of a relationship is the hardest. Um, unless you have some success stories, you're not going to be able to convince anyone and having that first sales rep who has a win, that's the hardest part, because if one sales person, then it's easier to get the second one and, uh, get more, uh, sales people to be, uh, convinced by it.

So it's really, uh, it's a lot of work at the beginning to finding a common success story, finding some, uh, an account executive who benefits from that success story. And then they can bring it to other customers and saying, well, um, if you bring a Chili Piper on your listing, then you're more likelihood to close because you have a qualified sales meeting immediately instead of waiting for that leads to, uh, be responded the 24 hours or whatever. Um, and, uh, and, uh, we produce, uh, that customer story together, um, and it become a lot easier from that point on. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and I, I'm curious, so you mentioned, uh, that you source a big percentage of your pipeline from partnerships. How do you measure partnerships?

Do you measure based on, on pipeline, on net new customers, on increased retention? We look at, uh, we look at influence for, uh, net new business, but we also look at influence for cross-sell for upsell for churn. So we look at all, uh, places in the funnel and we don't look at it as, uh, attribution channel, more of an influence channel across. Nice. Do you, uh, do, do, uh, release how much of your pipeline comes from partnerships? We have two, uh, uh, partnership motions that are successful. One is channel, uh, partners and one is, uh, product partners. And, uh, we also, we're looking into potentially creating two new channels as well, um, because it's so, such a big percentage of it. Uh, right now it's probably around 20%, I would say 20 to 30%.

Um, but I think it could switch and, and be even a bigger percentage if we, uh, um, pop these other two channels that, uh, I want to explore. Nice. Nice. Uh, I hope so. I mean, this, um, I'm also publicly announced it, that it's 40% of attached channel partners. Um, and I sit in, I sit in the app partnership team and the channel partner team is, is doing really, really cool things, but I think that we can do even more on the product side. So I'm very excited about that. Um, we still have a lot to go. You mentioned cross beam very quickly, uh, for those who don't know, uh, cross beam and, uh, HubSpot uses reveal for, for partner data sharing, uh, to enable sales teams to be, uh, and to enable co-marketing and co-selling motions.

Uh, how do you use that data today? Actually, uh, Bob, uh, Bob, the CEO at cross beam, uh, is writing a book about, uh, ecosystem led growth. Um, and, uh, to paper is a case study in his, uh, book as well. Um, and we're progressing some numbers in that. Um, I'm not sure when this book is going to be out, but it's in the process of being written. Um, we have, um, some numbers that I can share. So for instance, when, um, a partner is involved, our velocity of, uh, a closed deal is almost half. Like we can close in half the time if we get partners involved. Um, also in certain cases, for instance, if we use a voucher for, from the partner, our propensity to close is 95%, which is like amazing. Um, yeah, those are some numbers that I can share.

Yeah, really cool. So on the first one deals closing. So, um, I've seen on the, and I think this is really the reason why I'm digging into partnerships and for sales folks who are listening, I like, what are you talking about? Uh, I see partnerships being a huge motion as part of selling in the next, like last two years and then expanding, uh, explosively in the next two to five years. I'm taking, sharing data across organizations and running co-selling and co-marketing campaigns together to, and to work, to share not only introductions, but also, uh, information, uh, and influence on, on deals. Because I agree with you that it's not only about pipeline, it's also about influence to say, this is a really good product that fits well with ours is magic to customers here.

That is what they want. They want to hear that endorsement from a different party. Um, I, I'm curious, like, as you proceed with the partnership, like, what are the, what are the challenges as you try to, to scale that, to, to go from like, we've got successful partnership with G2, with HubSpot. I'm sure you've got, I'm sure you've got Salesforce, some other ones, like, how do you say like, all right, we want to do 10 X number of partners. Um, the challenge becomes in to replicating the process because it's highly dependent on the people that you hire. And unless you don't understand what drives success for a person really, really well, as you hire the second one, the third one, the fourth one to manage this process, then you're unlikely to be able to replicate.

And we're at the point where we're getting better at understanding what kind of skillsets are important, what kind of things in the process are important, what kind of motions are important and driving success. Um, but we're very cautious with growing too fast without having that, uh, um, well ironed out so that our next new hires will be able to do the same. Um, and so, um, in terms of, I know we had talked, uh, previously about the, the first head of partnerships that you had, that it didn't work. Like, I don't know if, can you share for companies who were thinking about this to say like, okay, we need to build up a strong partnership motion. How do they like not get caught up in like something, how did they not end up in a dead end or a cul-de-sac?

In our case, we hired someone who looked great on paper and, um, they did all the things by the book. Um, however, they were not getting the results that we wanted and it was very obvious that they were trying to use playbooks that were from previous companies that in our case would not apply at all. It just, uh, we're in a different space with the different ICP, like with different types of partners that were resonating with others with different type of things. And, um, we decided to part ways with that person. Um, we started doing. We started doing just trial and error with someone in our sales team to see what works and what doesn't. It took us quite a while to see what works and that doesn't.

At the beginning, it was really painful process. It was not working. Um, however, as soon as we got a little bit of success, we started looking deeper into that little bit of success and, uh, worked our way from there. Um, it's really, um, it's really, um, it's really a lot of trial and error at the beginning and every partnership is, uh, the bigger the partnership, the harder it is to make it work at the beginning. Um, so I think that, uh, being patient and having an understanding that the beginning is hard to get by and not getting, uh, upset when, when the results are not there right away, um, is, is key. But also hiring for the right type of person. And I think that's the difference between, uh, the person that we have now versus the previous person that they're have a very strong, um, ability.

It's key to understand how to bring value to both parties in a way that makes sense and understand that everybody's a little bit unique and different in their needs and that particular skills of mentalizing and understanding what, uh, the other party needs, um, is key in this role. Absolutely. And, um, you said in an interview last year that if the salesperson, a sales leader does not have results in the first 90 days, that they are never going to have results. Um, but do you, do you have that same 90 day cutoff for a partnership leaders as well? Hmm. The, um, in the sales process, if you have a playbook that's been shown that it works, um, so for instance, we didn't hire anyone in sales until we were able to do it ourselves.

And, um, my co-founder was, were six at that time and he was able to close a hundred K every month by himself with no marketing support, nothing. So that was his quota and he was managing to predictably get there. So we knew that if we bring people on board, on board, we knew that we could, uh, um, amplify that because we could also bring, uh, additional support for around them. Um, in the partnership is a lot harder because the playbooks are harder to figure out. So I think that, uh, it's a similar approach where you have to have a lot more patience at the beginning until you crack it and then you can replicate it. Um, so if I count, for instance, how long it took us to get to that productivity ourselves as a founder to get a hundred K every month, it's only, it's like took us two years.

And, uh, then you bring the sales leader and then they, they, they, uh, operationalize the same playbook. But, uh, it's the same on, on, uh, partnership. You have to try, try, try, try, try until you nail it. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I love that. And, um, for reps early in their career, uh, who are listening to this, I was wondering what advice, like you've been through a lot of different things. You've been in a lot of different roles. What advice would you give to sales reps who are just starting their career today? So I've worked in sales. I've worked in engineering, um, most recently in marketing. And, um, the reality is that it takes a while, especially if you're at the beginning to understand where your strengths are and when you can have most impact.

And you can get to understand yourself better by surrounding yourself with a lot of diverse experiences and skill sets. You're a lot more likely to be valuable to the organization if you start understanding other parts of that organization as well. If you start understanding how the marketing team operates or how the product team operates, because by understanding them, you can be a lot more helpful to them. And you can be, and they can be a lot more helpful to you as well. So besides the advice that I gave at the beginning that you find someone that you can learn a lot from and you follow that person, you don't go for the company. You go for the person to learn from, um, my second advice from that would be to expose yourself with as many, uh, skill sets as, and as many parts of the business as possible, because you're likely to learn something that's going to be useful in your career.

And you never know, because if you're at the beginning, you never know where you can excel at and what are the parts that are going to be a lot harder for you to work on than others that have it naturally, um, until you try and until you understand a lot more about the environment that you have to work in and then progress in. Great. Alina, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure having you here on the Make It Happen Monday podcast. Uh, John is not here to, to say hello, but I'm sure, uh, he is very excited to, to catch up with you at Inbound. So thank you very much. Where, where can folks reach you if they, they want to talk and, and to follow your thoughts? Well, they can take a selfie with me at Inbound because there's a competition going on.

There's, uh, one of, uh, HubSpot partners, Superd, is, um, giving, uh, all sorts of, uh, awards of, uh, if you, uh, take selfies with a few people and I'm one of them. So I'm, I'm, uh, happy to take selfies at Inbound and, uh, I'm also on LinkedIn and I talk a lot about, uh, the things that are happening at 3D Piper. We're building in public. We're talking about our own mistakes, so I can see everybody there. Thank you so much. Alina Vandenberg, it's always a pleasure to speak with you. Take care. Thank you, Russell. I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did. With your support and our incredible guests, we're one of the top sales podcasts out there right now. And I can't thank you enough.

Now, to keep the momentum going, it would mean the world to me if you could go and leave a five-star review on your favorite podcast platform and share some of your favorite episodes with your network. Also, check out my new website at www.johnm.barrows.com, where you'll find even more ways to engage. There's a ton of free content and you can also get trained from me directly as an individual or for your team. Look, I'm out there selling every day just like you are, and I'm doing my best to stay on top of all the latest trends and technology. So if you're looking to level up and you give a shit about this profession of sales, let's connect and let's make this happen together.