Jamie Shanks: ‘Social Sales’ Can Lead to Real Connections Online

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. This was a fun conversation. My good friend Jamie Shanks is the CEO of Pipeline Signals and used to be the CEO of Sales for Life, who was a direct competitor of mine about 10 years ago. They were doing a lot of stuff around social selling when it was first hot. And so every time I started talking about social selling to my clients, I kept bumping into him. So we were a little bit frenemies, I guess, early on in our careers and we've evolved to be good friends now.

And we talk a lot about entrepreneurship and what it takes and his journey from being a stockbroker to getting into sales and his passion around that and talked about the skill of networking and how when we were introduced to this world of sales, we didn't have the LinkedIn's, we didn't have all these tools and resources. So we literally had to go knocking on doors, going to events and how much that serviced us. So when the technology hit, it was a natural evolution to leverage those tools, but in the right authentic way. And that's what he was teaching people to do with Sales for Life. And now with his role at Pipeline Signals, taking that to the next level and really trying to cultivate and develop relationships.

So it was a great conversation with him going down memory lane a little bit and learning a lot from where he's come from and where is he going. And again, a lot of it is just about doing the job and being your authentic person, but never forgetting where you came from. So hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did and got some little nuggets out of here. If you're on your journey to figure out some ways that you can skip a few steps, like based on the mistakes that both Jamie and I have made, because we've made a lot of them. Enjoy the show. What's happening, Make It Happen family. Big shout out to our partners today, Gong, Proposify, Vidyard, and Chili Piper. Gong's data is more than valuable.

It's cornerstone in any organization looking to collect the data that's going to tell them where they can improve and where they need to spend their time making changes. Proposify is one of my favorite teams of all time. What they do is they make the proposal and contract processes easy for the sender and the recipient. And who can't benefit from that being a great experience, right? Vidyard makes it easy for people to use videos anywhere, no matter whether you're sending videos in email or on social media, posting them somewhere or sending them in a DM, Vidyard has got you covered. Our friends at Chili Piper are so much fun to be around. They make it easy for people to get on your calendar and every sales rep has got to have this function locked in.

It's one of the most important things we can do as a seller. How can I get you on my calendar easily? Chili Piper can make that happen for you. Be sure that you're checking out all these great tools. And now let's pass it over to John to find out who's joining him today. See you soon, everybody. All right, Jamie Shanks, my good friend from back in the day where we used to compete so much and now we've come to respect and have a really good relationship. How are you, my friend? Fantastic. Hope you're doing well. I can't complain, man. I just came back from a week-long trip in Sedona, Arizona, where it was a little bit of soul searching and a little vision quest type stuff. And it was a very, very well-needed break and I'm ready to get back after it here.

So you're my first guest coming out of that. How do you like coming back to the East Coast where it's 40 Fahrenheit and raining every day? You know what? It's, I think, you know, the more people I meet out West, it's interesting, especially in Sedona. It's always an East Coaster who is at a certain stage of their life and they just got sick of the cold and they just, and then they moved out West and then, you know, found whatever they found out there. And I'm not there yet. I'm still, I'm still an East Coaster, true and through. I still get, you know, I still like the seasons, the winter's wearing on me a little bit. So, you know, give me a few more years. My daughter's 11. She probably graduates in about five or six more years.

By that time, we're out of here. There's no question. We'll do the snowboard thing at least. You're used to watching all your sports teams win. All you need is like a couple years of garbage teams and you're out of Boston. Well, actually, sidebar, I mean, that's like one of the things I always comment about West Coasters and how they're soft fans. They're just not soft fans and it's not their fault. It's just they have way more options and shit to do. So like for in the winter, when it's cold as shit over here, and I'm not like, I used to ski. I used to do all that stuff. I just don't do it anymore. And so really, what is there to do? Sports. So that's why East Coasters are so deep in the sports passion where West Coasters are like, eh, they're more fair weather fans.

And at least my experience, there's more to do. So Jamie, let's back up here a little bit because you and I have kind of grown up in this space together here, right? And the sales enablement training, you know, you went towards the, you know, kind of a little bit more on the social selling. I want a little bit more towards the prospecting. But let's back up a little bit and talk, give us, give us your story, give us your story and then let's come up to what you were doing and where we met and then we'll take it from there. Is that cool? Absolutely. So I'll start it at the point of the beginning of entrepreneurship. I was a VP of sales at a SaaS software startup in Toronto, Canada, and they were selling data rooms.

They were an innovator to compete against the mayors and the interlinks. I think it was called of the world and I was employee number three and we took it from zero to $3 million ARR and it became then self-sustaining and profitable. And, you know, I was watching from afar people like Trish Bertuzzi as example and this pioneering topic called sales 2.0, if you remember like 2010, 11 and 12, and this is the beginnings of predictable revenue and the segmentation of the AE from the, you know, BDRS tier. Long of the short is I felt that there was this void in niche specifically in Toronto, which is at that time lagged behind a couple of years behind any U.S. kind of sales force. So I decided I would hang a shingle.

I would leave my job and I would start a consulting company. And that failed miserably. And I actually have, I remember being in a boardroom and I didn't know the answer to something like a customer asked me something. So I picked up a phone and I called Trish Bertuzzi pretending to be somebody else as a customer to pick her brain. Like, and I got about like question six in and she exploded on me on the phone. And she's like, who are you? What are you doing? Later to become great friends, drinking buddies a little bit. But I, I was making it up as I was going along. And what I came to realize is I was a jack of all trades, master of none. It is the classic failure of a professional services firm to hang a shingle, spread out your vest and say, buy anything for me and I'll do it for time and materials.

So about two years in, this is now 2011, I basically bankrupt. In fact, about to claim bankruptcy, it was so bad. And I just got married. I had no idea what I was doing. And through luck, happenstance and whatever divine being helped, it gave me a path to showcasing that this emerging tool called LinkedIn, there was no curriculum on the topic. There was no word call social selling, but I was self-discovering how to reverse engineer my cold calling days and my email blitz days into a tool like LinkedIn. And we call it social selling. And so long to the short is I recognize that my customers in Toronto were far more interested interested in this new emerging social selling thing than was whatever I was selling before.

And slowly, one at a time, I would convert them into my training class, which was a PowerPoint slide and me doing a dance at the front of the boardroom. And so that's where it all began. And you fast forward 10 years later, we enabled 600 global customers. We really did focus on the global enterprise, global mid-market, trained a quarter million sellers around the world. I love it, man. And that's, I mean, I remember, you know, when I started hearing about social selling and not knowing anything about what it was, I mean, it always kind of struck me as like, isn't sales always social, but okay. Just because we're using these platforms. It was name. It was a name. Yeah, exactly. Totally. I mean, branding is everything, right?

You need, you need the, the, the acronym, you need the thing. But it was, I was definitely curious. And I remember going into it kind of kicking and screaming as far as like the, the personal brand building, I got the LinkedIn component of it, which was, okay, I'm going to, I'm going to build a real relationship with somebody, but take it slowly. I'm not going to try to co-call you and slam something down your throat. I'm going to watch what you do. I'm going to engage with your stuff and I'm going to try to connect with you and, and, and show some type of give a shit factor that I'm not just, you're just not a name on a, on a, you know, a number on a sheet for me. And so I fundamentally understood that part.

The brand building part was really where I was like, oh, come the fuck on, you know, getting, you know, 10,000 followers and tweeting and posting and stuff that just, to me at first didn't really resonate. Cause I'm like this, this seemed fake at the time. How, you know, with your focus on LinkedIn, how did you make that transition? I, again, it's, it's pretty evident now looking back the power of LinkedIn as far as engagement and whatever, but how did you, I never really dug into this with you. How did you deal with the personal brand building part of social selling? Or how did you think about that early days? Was that just part of the DNA of how you were approaching LinkedIn? Or did you kind of segmented out to say social selling is both building your personal brand and engaging in an authentic way?

I'll start it from the customer side that actually had me self-reflect on my own self. So I saw this tool from day one. I've always, and I even images that I draw on, if you look at prospecting, I believe is a left brain and a right brain motion that happens simultaneously. Essentially the left side of your brain collects data, facts, and intelligence to make informed decisions and it makes decisions like account selection and prioritization. It then shoots it over to the right side of your brain, which is the creative side that will come up with something compelling to say in an engagement. And ultimately LinkedIn offers both sides of that equation, like data and engagement platform. So when I started in this endeavor with social selling, because, and this is a huge failure to every other social selling guru and trainer that came along, they didn't evolve off of this first step that I took.

What I started to do was teach the only thing that I knew, which was the creation of an inbound magnet. So create a brand, share content, build a social network connecting to people. I thought that every seller was supposed to just do this, but a couple of years in recognized that all I was doing was emulating the sales motion that was working for me, a micro business. And the more I put out there, the more inbound came into the basket, hit the fish as it came into the boat, eat fish. And eventually the fishes got a little bit bigger, but my customers are Thomson Reuters, Oracle, Intel, ADP. And they go, hold on a second. My sellers are account-based sales developers who have a finite total addressable market of 50 accounts.

They don't care about anything outside of these 50 accounts. And I had to first re first, no, actually step one, learn an account-based model myself, because I had always been part of startups who could live on the inbound machine till about 10 million ARR. And I believe there's these fundamental stages that happen between inbound, hybrid, and beyond. Long and the short, learn it myself to change my own self and our go-to-market strategy to practice it. Then we evolved the curriculum. And that later spun out what we call spear selling, book number two. And it helped me understand that I needed to evolve myself and that there was more than just putting out a post every couple hours and connecting with a zillion people every day.

There had to be something thoughtful around, I want to win Apple. How do I take a moment to pause, build a strategy, an account-based strategy, target Apple? And that's what evolved the curriculum and ourselves and Sales for Life into a hybrid of inbound and account-based. So I hope that answers your question. So let me back up though, because I think there's some fundamentals here that I'm a little worried about in today's generation compared to ours. Before you hit the entrepreneur stage, remind me again, what were you, like coming out of college, what were the, because I want to, I want to talk to you about your sales approach in those, but, but let's get that, that lineage right there. So the lineage is when I was in grade nine, my dream, all I wanted, ever wanted to be was a stockbroker.

And so I did my job shadow days as a, in high school as a stockbroker. And I walked into the Bank of Montreal, Nesbitt Burns in first year and volunteered two days a week. And by my third year, they hired me full-time and I did my undergrad part-time live in a student house of eight guys and try to do part-time university and work full-time. Yeah. I was showing up with some red eyes every day. So by the time I was in say fifth year, victory lap year, I had accumulated a couple of years of experience. So my job was, I was what was called an investment representative. So basically your stockbroker has somebody that kind of supports them. I supported the six most awful brokers in the office. What had happened was the dot-com boom and bust of 2000, 2001 happened.

I saw the ugly side of bad investing. I got jaded. I left to Australia, did my master's degree for two years. And when I came home, no one would hire me because I didn't have both sales experience and enough finance experience. I want to do, maybe get back into stockbroker. So the only company that hired me was a commercial real estate company on a hundred percent sales commission to bang the telephones all day, talking to CFOs to talk about office leasing. And that's where I cut my chops. The founder of that firm was the president of Xerox Canada. So he brought the Xerox selling motion into commercial real estate, pounded the phones all day, every day, then moved from there into that tech company where I was employee three.

All I did was took that same playbook with a little bit of lead lander inbounds birdwatching of who's on our website. And we just called investment banks, private equity firms, law firms all day long, selling debt. So how did you look at relationships in those first few years? So you were making cold calls. So there was a numbers game period. But as far as networking events and partnerships and those types of things, what was your, what was your exposure experience and mentality around that? I've talked about this often. So the only time periods of my life where I was not part of a professional services firm were for the two years prior to starting, it wasn't even called sales for life then.

It was something else that tech company in Toronto, which was a product that was selling a virtual data room outside of that from commercial, from stockbrokering, commercial real estate to consulting, to sales for life, to pipeline signals, everything had been professional services. And I believe that it's important that sellers cut their chops, whether you're working with service delivery and your own tech company, or go work in a pro serve and recognize that the only thing you sell is vaporware. It's you. You sell you and your own relationships. And I believe in my heart of hearts, it helped me in my sales career because I came to meet people and learn from actual people rather than selling a widget.

And this is why I think you were so successful in the social selling world. And this is the piece I worry about because I was similar to you in the sense that I came out, I did DeWalt, you know, big companies, Xerox, knocking on doors, relationships too, but then startup, right? Fifth person on, fourth person on board at a professional services, ITC, right? And I was 23 years old and I was the sales marketing and everything and we had no budget at all. So yes, I would hang, I would bang the phones all day long. I knew my equation like it was going out of style, but I also was part of like three or four networking groups every morning. So I, every morning I would wake up at like six o'clock. I would go into downtown Boston at seven.

I'd meet with 10, 15 people that were in my space and we'd share leads and we develop relationships. And then I'd cold call knock on doors all day long. And then I would go to networking events all night. And so for me, the transition to something like a LinkedIn was like, oh, this is just an easier way to do that. And so like, and I think, I don't know if you're familiar with it. I don't know if they got to have it in Toronto, but is my first networking experience was being a business networking international. So BNI. And BNI went next to me was a guy who owned a paint store. Person who were here was in some other random industry. And the beauty of it was, and I'm sure it was the same, like for people listening, you know, you grew, you got together with a group of 10 and every town had one, almost every town had one, right.

Not just the major cities, like a lot of the towns in Boston did too. And it was 10, 15, 30 of your peers. You, you couldn't compete. So there couldn't be somebody in that room that competed with you. And the idea was you stood up every day at seven o'clock in the morning, once a week, and you, you gave your little 30 second pitch about what you did. And then you had these, literally these cards, these little lead list cards where you wrote down, Hey, I get, and it wasn't, Hey, Jamie, you should go talk to this company. Cause I know they're doing some cool stuff over there. No, it was like, Jamie, um, this person, Bill Smith over here, I've talked to him about what you're looking, you know, what you do.

He needs what you have. He's expecting your call. Right. And the mentality was giver's game, giver's game, giver's game. And I just remember, I was like, okay, I'm just going to give as much as I possibly can. And, and if I can get stuff great, but my whole philosophy was I'm going to try to shake hands and kiss babies with as many people as I possibly can and do as many favors for as many people as I possibly can. And lo and behold, that combined with my activity of driving and doing cold calls started to balance out. And then all of a sudden shit started to come to me. So when I looked at LinkedIn, I was like, well, this is actually makes a lot of sense because now I don't have to actually go to these events anymore.

I can just jump into a group. I can put, you know, send an email to somebody to look for an intro. I can ask for an introduction from somebody else. So that's where I think it came natural. Accelerate everything that our generation knew to be true. So how do we now let's land on COVID now. Let's land on the fact that most everything is virtual. Yes, there are still events happening all over the place, but in the world that we tend to live in this, this predictable revenue model that I think is breaking and we'll talk about that, but, or is broken. Um, how do we address that now with where, what are your thoughts on real relationship development at this point? I wish, um, I wish I had an answer for how to teach.

So there's soft skills that can be taught, right? My company has taught the mechanics of reverse engineering somebody's LinkedIn social network to look for referrals and I've taught the mechanics of how to monitor every person that leaves your customer base, goes into a prospect. So that part of the left side of the brain is super intuitive to me. And I know how to teach it. One thing I don't know how to teach is things that happened to me in my lifetime that I, maybe I took for granted the ability to walk into a room, be humble, be sincere. Ask questions, be truly interested in the person across the table virtually or on our live and actually care to solve their problems. Like some of the ultimate soft skills that you're describing, I, I, I often wonder it's like that old adage.

Is it nature versus nurture? Can they truly be taught? And I wish I knew that answer. So relationships, uh, I'll tell you a story, um, around relationships. My wife and I have a nine and an eight year old, and we constantly battle this idea of private school versus public school. My kids are in private school. We do this because my wife went to a private school. I went, I grew up a country bumpkin. I grew up in the public system and my friends that have been in the private system, their networks are on like shockingly unbelievable. Why do you go to Harvard? You don't go to Harvard for the education. You go to Harvard because you get connected to all the fucking kids that went from Harvard. Queens of Canada.

My God, these people would know them. So I often think about how there, I remember when my mother used to tell me, it's, it's, you know, it's not always who, you know, it's what, you know, remember that old saying, it's not who, you know, it's what, you know, but I came older. I got, I was like, mom, I don't think that's right. And so I do believe, um, the forming of real authentic relationships. I can't tell you how important that is going to be. You and I have known each other for 10 years and, you know, and good things will come out of each of our lives and businesses because of that. And, um, I, so I don't even know how to answer it. It's a hard, it's a hard question to answer because I've been searching for it myself and I, and I worry outside of just, well, because we're in such a short term gratification world right now, we're, you know, and it comes from the top down to like, again, in our, in our space, the tech, the SaaS space, the money that comes to the VC is go, go, go, go.

So there's no opportunity. You know, it's almost like when we talk about prospecting, it's, I say to reps all the time, like it, look, if it was up to me, I'd have an hour to do research on every single person that I was going to make a connection to. So I could really get to know them. I just know that's not reality. You know what I mean? So that's why I train what I do. Like I look, I train, you know, I train cadences. I train, you know, persona driven seven touches and all this other stuff. But fundamentally, do I really think that's the right thing to do? Fuck? No, I don't. I don't. But you know, what makes me sleep at night is I know that, that what we're bringing to the table for these, you know, professional, you know, young or older professionals is better than what they're doing.

You know what I mean? It's better than the spam engine marketing blast, piss everybody off. It's at least tailored, it's at least targeted and somewhat relevant to the people that we're going after. And, you know, there's a framework to it, but man, really, it's about everything that we're talking about here. As far as relationships, going out and meeting people, really give, I call what you mentioned there, the give a shit factor, like really genuinely giving a shit. And I, and I, and I have a hard time. I think I taught it once. And I think I try to with the passion in these type of conversations, you know what I mean? It's like, there's that, there's a couple of kids out there who might be listening to this, who might be like, you know what?

Yeah, I don't feel right. And so I'm going to try that. I'm going to take the chances and I'm going to do those things. And Morgan was probably my biggest, like, yes, it clicked. And it was when he was, and I've told the story multiple times, but you know, he was, he worked for me for a little bit and he was doing a good job and he's running his cadences and he was, you know, we were getting good results, but he came to me and he said, John, you know, I feel like my results have plateaued and I really don't, you know, know what to do. Like why I feel like I'm doing all the right things. And I said to him straight up, I said, Morgan, your results aren't going to change until one thing does. And he goes, what?

I said, until you start giving a shit. And he's like, what? I'm like, dude, I know you give a shit about working here. I know you give a shit about your job and all this, but until you genuinely start caring about that person on the other end of that phone, until you look at them as more than a phone number and an email address that you have to hit to get your target today. And you start thinking of them as Jamie Shanks, who's working for pipeline signals in Toronto and what the weather's like up there and what he's dealing with as an entrepreneur and where he is. Like, and still you start thinking about that. Nothing's going to change, man. And thankfully for him, the light bulb clicked and he started giving a shit.

Now he's where he is, but it's tough to train, man. Well, if I were to give advice to a generation of sellers younger than me, obviously I already mentioned number one. I think that a seller, even doing a small tour of duty and a pro serve professional services will help them tremendously see the human side of rumoring professional services. There's none to sell, but you number two. And I, I would love to do a study. Some like ask, uh, you know, Craig at Topo or something, you know, to, to do this kind of study. I want you to take a hundred sellers and monitor them for 20 years. I know this is like the most insane study. 50 sellers who are allowed to jump from job to job, industry to industry as they see fit.

So what will happen is come guy will from Microsoft to, uh, selling it services to selling HR software to Salesforce to like, and then the other 50 pick a bowling lane, stay in an industry. And if you're going to move, move to companies that serve that same vertical. Um, I have buddies that have been selling in the HCM space for 20 some years, and now they are asked on those, um, public, uh, like stock calls. They're on board of advisors. When they go to these networking events, they're the Kings and Queens of the HCM space. And I think what's benefited you and I is I've spent the vast majority of my selling career now is serving one master, the sales and marketing community. And so I think that that's helped a lot for credibility, for networking.

I think that could benefit a seller is like, don't jump every vertical industry because you're going to go two years. It'll take you a year to even learn the other and build a rapport in it. What's up, everybody. I know you're enjoying this conversation. John does a great job with genuine curiosity on these episodes and our guests consistently bring the heat. We want to take a moment here and let you know that you've got an opportunity, an opportunity to become better than you were yesterday. And you can do so by gaining access to all of JB sales content. All of their training tips, techniques, tactics, and takeaways can be yours for $1 a day. $365 for the year gets you annual access to everything, including our private Slack channel for members only, which you get access to all of us directly, a hundred percent of the time, 24 hours a day.

And then at the same time, you're going to get access to our biweekly ask me anything sessions where you can bring real deals to the table and get the help that you need where you need it. This is very, very important. Sales reps that invest in themselves are often found at the tops of their leaderboards. Join us today and get the help you need to become the seller that you deserve to be. That URL one more time is joinjbsales.com. Let's get back to the show with JB and our guests for this week. I see too many companies do this too, is they hire the person with the Rolodex and that might work once on that Rolodex. So for instance, like you built your Rolodex in a certain industry or whatever it is, you got people who trust you, right?

And so you got people who trust you, right? Okay. So you spent a few years at that organization and then you go to, you know, another organization, maybe a competitor or something like that. And you bring your client list with you and look, let's go back to the stockbroker world. This is like inherent in that world. I don't care about the company. I care. Jamie, if you're managing my money, I trust you. And in that world, that makes all the sense in the world, right? But when you're going to another company, that's like a different software or a different product or a different type of thing. I think you got one chance to say, Hey, come with me now. I'm over here and it's something better. I, you know, I know I thought this was good, but I've moved here for that reason.

But the second time you do that, the third time you do that, you start losing. You start losing people's, uh, and so I think you're, to your point, it's that 10,000 hours. It's that it's the, the pick the lane. It's the, you, you, you genuinely become a trusted advisor just because you've been in this industry. You can be a challenger for instance. Like, I don't think you can be a challenger. I, I got myself in trouble a while back. You'll appreciate this, but you know, or 10 years ago when challenger was super hot. Right. And I stood up in front of a group of like 20, you know, about 2000 people at a conference. And I was like, could y'all do me a favor and stop teaching 22 year old kids how to be a challenger, please.

I'm like, like, like until you have some business acumen and you know what the fuck you're talking about, don't you dare challenge somebody with your knowledge here. Okay. So to your point, ask questions, be curious, get somebody else to think about it, but don't you dare challenge me until you know what the fuck, even me. I had a prospect call at five o'clock today with the chief information officer of a prospect. Can you imagine challenging, I would get melted on the phone. And look, Jimmy, even, even you and I right now, like if I'm trying to sell it to you, like, and, and say you're a, you know, a VP of sales who's only been in a space for a while, but, and I've been in this space for 26 years and I know this backwards and sideways and I've talked to hundreds of you, I'm still not, I still, I still have a hard time with challenger sale, not coming across as fucking arrogant as shit.

You know what I mean? Being like, and you know, for those of you listening, if you don't know what challenger sale, the mentality of challenger sale is like, Hey, look, you make this decision once a year. I help people make it every day. Let me tell you where people make good decisions and bad decisions. That's, that's challenger sale outside of the lead with insights, whatever shit, but like that comes across. But when it's natural to your point, when you, when you've put in the work, you've put in the effort and then all of a sudden you wake up and I don't know about you. How old are you? I'm born in 78. So I'm 43 and a half. Let me ask you. So I'm 46. Let me ask you. Did something change for you at 40 where all of a sudden you were starting to have conversations that you thought were normal and people were looking at you like you were, you knew really what you were talking about or was it earlier for you?

Yeah. Okay. Yes. Yeah. No, I know exactly what you're talking about. And that's for everybody listening. That's when Jamie says, pick a lane. That's what happens. 20s, you're always looking up because you don't know what you don't know. You're always kind of, you know, the gray beards and stuff. Holy shit. Your 30s, you kind of start feeling like, I think I got this, but I still am looking up and I'm still holding on to my 20s. And you'll have massive imposter syndrome because you'll be put into rooms where you could very well know more than the others in the room. And then you'll be put in rooms where you feel, I am so woefully unprepared for this. A hundred percent. But then all of a sudden you kind of hit your forties and you're like, huh?

Like, cause I don't know about you, but like, I'd be in conversations with people who, you know, in their twenties and thirties, and I'd be talking about stuff that I just, it's like drinking water to me. You know what I mean? And they'd be like, oh my God, that's fucking genius. And you're like, what, like, what? Like, that's like, that's like what less than one-on-one shit for me right now. But then you're like, it's like time batching and stuff. Like I know that when yourself or Steve Richards will mention that, you know, how to organize your calendar in time, that just becomes a forced function of like having kids. You just had to do it. Yeah. So I think that picking a lane is, is important, but it, you know, look, and that's why I think your twenties are beautiful because you should test as many things out as you can in your twenties.

Like try as many different things as you can to figure out what your lane is. My kind of general thesis is pick, you know, do a bunch of shit in your twenties because there's really no risk, right? You could live in your parents' basement. You can eat whatever it is. You could fail hundreds of times and still be fine in your thirties. Kind of pick a lane in your forties. If you haven't really picked that lane, you're kind of. Now it's mastery time. Yeah. Because now the work that I've put in, I will, like in my fifties and sixties, I will, I will serve the sales community and I'll even be able to serve it from a more passive position. But the tailwind will come with me from all the work that I've done.

Exactly. Yeah. So let's talk about that, that, that continued journey here. So sales for life did really well. You and I bumped into each other a few times. You were, you were much more focused on the enterprise than I was. I mean, I, I dipped my toes and that was Salesforce and such. But I was more mid-market. And then talk to me about what happened with sales for life and, and then we'll jump to where you are here. But what made you, what made that transition from sales for life for you? Sure. I'll talk about it from the customer's perspective and then the entrepreneur's perspective. Cause I know that you like talking about, so we'll start with the customer's perspective. So year in, year out, I'm teaching sometimes tens of thousands of sellers in that particular year, how to do one of the most basic, what I would consider one of the most basic business development pieces to account selection and prioritization, which was this concept called the sphere of influence, which meant that you should reverse engineer your customer base to look for people that leave it to go to prospects.

And these will be what some companies will call triggers or compelling events, reasons to reach out. So we've been teaching this for years and upon certification in our final program, a seller needs to pick an account, plan it, engage it and create a real life sales opportunity, make a vineyard video seven to 10 minutes long as a case study defense that looks like the TV show sharks. They're basically defending their case study. We have, you know, terabytes of these. And long to the short is as part of our business case review, we would aggregate the data and we would put it all together. And then we started lumping customer and customer data and we started seeing all these patterns. The way that sellers were booking meetings and creating opportunities primarily was when change was afoot in a business.

People were going into companies, getting promoted, leaving companies, and it created opportunity and risk. So that was part A. Part B, we'd get these support tickets and sellers would say, let me get this straight. Like, why are you training me and my scaled sellers of a hundred to do this? Why don't you just do this for us? Now, when you sell a hammer, everything looks like a nail and you'd go, well, I'm a training company. I'm supposed to teach you this. But then, you know, a light bulb went off. And in fact, a cybersecurity customer of ours actually pulled me into a boardroom and tried to pay us money to say, build a global command center, monitor it like we do in the cybersecurity space.

So by 2020, COVID hit, I wasn't on 80 flights a year anymore. And it gave me an opportunity to reflect what if, what could we do? So we selected three customers and we did this alpha. And the alpha was, tell me who your customers and prospects are. I'll tell you if there are any of these relationship signals somewhere in, we'll use, look through LinkedIn and try to identify some stuff for you. Unbelievable. They don't, of course, there was all these job changes. Then we moved to beta. So we went back to our sales for life customers and said, let me do this for you for free. Let me see if this works. Again, it worked. So basically in the summer of 2021, we incorporated pipeline signals and it does, if you're a seller listening, what our job is to do is to buy back your time.

And so that you can focus on the value creation of great engagement, the proper account selection and prioritization. And what we'll do is identify who's leaving your customers going into prospects, who's just been promoted, who took a new job. And in an aggregate level, if you're revenue operations, you have a bird's eye view of which accounts you should focus on today, not tomorrow. Should I go after account A versus account B? And we're providing an adjacent puzzle piece in sales intelligence called relationship signals that is a great partner to buying intent. And so that your sales team shouldn't get too excited and over-indexed on buying intent. It's just a story of what's going on in an account.

We're the other side of the story. What's going on with the human beings that sit within that company? So that's how it all began. And on the entrepreneurial side, and John, you and I have had this conversation, I tried my darndest to create a recurring revenue machine at Sales for Life. Yeah. And I would call it reoccurring. So you have a cohort of customers that pay you each year, but you renegotiate the statement of work each year. And then the problem with learning as a service or recurring, true recurring revenue, is learning is consumed like a plate of food, right? Or like locusts. They go over a deal, they eat it. The sellers then, like locusts, would look back up and go, what else you got for me?

And so the challenge with learning as a service is you either constantly need to be adding content or value add. So long of the short is Sales for Life, to turn the $3 million it needs every year to eat, that's a lot of money. You just pour back into the fire. And so Sales for Life is stable, and we have a roster of customers that are actually on recurring contracts. What we've done is taken the best of Sales for Life, the intellectual property that is of these relationship signals, and brought them to a managed service over at Pipeline Service. Yeah, I chased the same. I came to the conclusion a long time ago, and I just did it recently too. I'm like, could somebody please punch me in the face next time I try to pretend like I'm going to create recurring revenue, please?

Because the whole concept, what I was chasing was recurring revenue. But what I should have been chasing was what you pointed out, which is recurring value. Like if you can provide recurring value, then you can get recurring revenue. But training is a consumable. So it's more about, okay, it's like I used to sell packs of licenses for our training, and then their renewal would come up. But I basically should just say, okay, do you want more licenses? Yeah, do you have any, because nobody would ever renew if they weren't growing, right? And the only renewals were the people that were new. So if I grabbed onto a sales force that was growing like a fucking weed, well, yeah, that's recurring revenue because they're, but it was, there's a, and I also, for people listening, there's a big difference between passive income and recurring revenue.

Passive income is you got a, you got a, you know, training in a box basically that, that somebody can buy online. That's awesome passive revenue. I don't have to get out of my bed to do it. It's money in the sleep. The credit card comes in. I get a Bing on Sunday night that somebody just bought one of these things, but that is definitely not recurring revenue. And then the other falsity that, that you brought up, um, for people chasing and you talk about triggers and those, those, um, relationship signals, if you will, it's, you know, everybody always thinks, and this is why I love what you're doing with this pipeline signals is everybody always thinks that somebody coming into a new job is always a great reason to reach out to them.

And I tell them, no, it's not unless they're familiar with your shit, because what executive in their right mind is going to invest in a new technology in the first six to 12 months of their job, you got a better shot at seeing God than that happening because that's nothing but risk. You know what I mean? It's like, oh, sure. I'm brand new in this organization. Let me start making some waves. And I've never seen you vendor before. Come on in. But that what they're going to do is they're going to bring their shit with them. And I'm the biggest benefactor of that. Like when a sales rep, when a, when a, when a sales leader leaves Salesforce, for instance, and let's talk directly with pipeline signals here, my highest conversion ratio by far, and I set it up on LinkedIn with LinkedIn sales navigator to be alerted, where if you, and I set it up as like worked at Salesforce past.

So not past or present past, but now have a VP title in my ICP. When that happens, I get an email once a week or whatever with a laundry list of about 10 people and all I do is, Hey, Jamie, looks like a congrats on the new role over at XYZ company. It looks like you were over at Salesforce. I'm sure if you were at Salesforce, you probably went to the Basho or Jay Barrows training. Now that you're on their team, you want any, any interest in having to come on board and light that fire up and buy you some time so you can implement your bigger strategies. And it's like a 75% conversion ratio. Like, you know, when it comes to like, yes, John, Hey, what's up? I mean, I might not get that meeting.

I might, Hey, well, I'm not ready yet, whatever. But those I built my career off of you, I've made an impression on you and you trust me. And now you're over there. Let's go talk. And that's a lot what this is all about. And for John and I, who we both monitor our own relationship signals, it's scalable for us because we know every past customer and we know the accounts we want to go into. And this is why this was invented. Now you have a Salesforce who has 1,251 customers and 3,000 prospects and a dispersed range of sellers all around the world. Well, those sellers, that seller in Philadelphia is working a series of accounts and somebody ups and leaves their customer base or prospects, goes up and out and moves to Seattle.

The seller in Philly no longer cares. Number one. Number two, they would have to notice every single day if one of these signals happened. And then put it in a place where the organization, not only themselves, but the organization can make informed decisions on this. Let's call it Salesforce or CRM. This just isn't happening at scale. And so what was happening was you had a Pareto's law. You had a group of sellers and each customer who, of course, understand the power of LinkedIn and would capture these needles in a haystack for their own particular accounts. But the broader range of every seller and at a RevOps level, your CRM was depleting, not growing. You were single threaded, not multi-threaded because you weren't seeing all these changes.

And so we're keeping everybody abreast of these changes so that they can be first to engage and add value before their competition. And to me, it sounds like the common thread of your evolution here goes back to listening to the customer and the trends in the industry and not necessarily thinking you're the smart kid. Would that summarize it? Well, you know where this product idea actually came from? So in 2012 or 13, right when this social selling thing came out, there was a tool in LinkedIn that lasted six months called Signals. So the designers and the engineers there built this thing where what you could do is if you connected, it started out with everybody. So you could pick a person and you could watch all of their, it was like a stock ticker.

Now it comes back to my stock ticker. You could watch every transaction that they made, who they connected with. If that was the crazy one. So then the engineers shrank it to whoever was in your first degree. So for about six months, I was teaching this, connect with as many of your customers as you can because you could watch if they connected with a prospect during the showdown, the broker bake-off, and you can see if you have competition in the deal. And then they closed that out. But I had this idea like, oh my God, I'm seeing this. Can you imagine monitoring everything that's going on? And that's where it all kind of came. I think that's the, and you know, I've realized that, you know, there are those visionaries out there.

Don't get me wrong. You know, the Elon Musks and the, you know, you name it. Right. You have to pay 44 or whatever billion for Twitter. Jesus Christ. I gotta, I gotta, I gotta get stoned with him and ask him what the fuck that big picture is all about. Cause I don't, I don't, I still don't see that one. But I'm sure he's got to, but I think there are those visionaries. Right. Um, but I think I've resided to the fact that I'm more of an evolutionist in the sense that I want to make sure that I keep moving forward and paying attention to what's happening around me. So for you, I guess, and it seems like you're the same, right? You're not necessarily like, I'm a super visionary and I'm going to build this thing.

And I define myself, uh, uh, people have asked like, what is your skill? I have two, one, I have a motor mouth. That's obvious. Two, I'm able to see specifically in the sales community. I can see around a corner about one to two years faster than others in my space. I can kind of get a sense of what my community that I've been serving for most of my career would want before they totally know they need it. Because you're doing the job too, right? It's not like you're just sitting there thinking, oh, what are these ideas? And I, I think that to me is, you know, the same thing. I say that my superpower isn't, I'm not the smartest kid by any stretch of the imagination, but I have an ability to kind of look at things and take two or three data points and make a pretty good gut check on, okay, no, this is the right direction to head.

And, you know, I've made my mistakes in the past, but I think that's a, that's something where I, and I don't ever get married to any idea that I have to say, oh, this is the best idea. I don't give a shit. I don't care where the idea is coming from. As long as it's a good idea, let's go do it. So what's your kind of, I guess, from a leadership standpoint, now that you're building, is this a subsidiary of Sales for Life or is this a totally separate business? It's a incorporated business. We actually, some of our teammates from Sales for Life, we moved over, took employment at Pipeline Signals, but we're building it. And let's face it, this is a missing feature. This is a point solution that will one day be an excellent acquisition target for a bigger platform.

We are solving a problem that hundreds, hopefully hundreds of customers will be on. It'll be its own entity. So let me chat just to finish up because of where I just went for the past week or so with how do you build a business with you at the helm leading the charge? And talk to me about the why and the values of how you live those or how you build your team around that, right? Because I think that one of the things, and I'm working on a keynote right now around, which is I think COVID give us all this opportunity to kind of take a step back. And say, what's really important to us? And are you living your values or not? And if you're not, reset on those. And I'm watching and I'm doing a lot of homework on some of the companies that came through COVID super successful and thrived out of it and other companies that failed miserably out of it.

And there's a common thread that I'm seeing here, which is the ones that had strong core values and kind of had a strong foundation and were able to adjust and were agile in their mentality. So evolutionists, if you will, they were able to move quick, but they stayed core and they didn't fire all their employees. And they, and now they're absolutely thriving because of it. The ones who were on shaky ground with their values, the ones that, you know, we're expecting this to go back to normal. They're all fucking dead. So for you as seemingly an evolutionist here, how do you integrate the values of you and your business as part of that ride? So it's interesting. I, um, I am, I would say one of my weaknesses is like, I'm not the foosball table and free snack kind of CEO and culture.

So I've built virtual businesses. Although sales for life had a beautiful office in midtown Toronto before that didn't, it was a waste of money. Long of the shortest, my values are actually a little bit different. One is I am an extremist on a results-driven, I know people say this, but a results-driven culture. I care zero about the hours people work, people logging in and out. We live an EOS model to the fullest. And what EOS is entrepreneur, uh, organization system or operating system. And essentially we call out what we need to do every week and then every quarter. And all we have to do is we just achieve these, these milestones every week, every quarter. And so our team is a hundred percent virtual.

They work from their pajamas, from their homes, and they know what their tasks are. What that also, I have a culture. There's no politics, no religion turns out, like as an example, um, we also believe hugely in, in global talent workforce. We scour the world in talent. Our teammates are in Philippines, Bangladesh, India. What that allows us to do, uh, we have teammates of every ethnicity, every religion, but it allows us to be a hyper competitive and profitable. And so our teammates, uh, call in from around the world on zoom, working from their pajamas in the comfort of their home, not sitting in traffic, um, doing the job. We do, and again, not back to politics or religion. Let's talk business.

Let's get on the call tomorrow. Let's talk business. Um, so for me, that's the kind of culture that we create. My culture is steadfast on EBITDA profitability, uh, never ever blowing the bank on crazy ideas, spending very little amounts of money until you were profitable. Um, and so that everybody knows, and I'm extremely transparent. Everybody knows what's in the bank. Everybody knows what's going on. So what that does is it gives the employees, um, comfort knowing I know what's in the bank. I know what's going in and out. I know what I'm getting here. I get to work from home. I know my job's secure. Um, and I come from a culture which needs more security because, you know, places like the Philippines.

Yeah. So I guess that's my style and culture of complete virtual workforce. Oh, and I think that the culture, the values, those types of things are the, the things that, uh, thankfully I think are getting a lot more attention right now. Um, yeah. And, but I'm not like a hug and kiss kind of, um, no, and I don't think that you need to be, I think as long as expectations are clear of who you're hiring and what those expectations are and those values are pure, then, you know, you can be what, whatever type of leader you want to be, as long as they line with the type of people you want to hire. You know, if the challenge is when you want to be that way, but then you're hiring a hug and kiss person, it's like, uh, this isn't going to work.

Right. Cause we don't have the same, we have similar values, but it's not the same mentality as far as where we want to take this. Like that CEO from Coinbase who basically bans politics, religion from being talked to Slack. I think that's amazing. Like we are here on a mission to serve the sales community. I don't want to talk about anything else that doesn't help, you know, a CRO scour for leads and create sales opportunities. Outside of that, like need not apply. Appreciate it. So last but not least, uh, you're back in the game now, right? You're, you're, you're not a, you're not an armchair CEO. You're, you're doing the prospecting now, aren't you? Yes. And in fact, so I would say one of the, I have many regrets as an entrepreneur.

I, it's interesting when you sales for life, I, I sales for life should have been sold for 15, $20 million five years ago with all the silly mistakes that I made. I made five incredible things happen and 95 mistakes. One of the mistakes that I made is the company went from zero to $3 million in like three years. And then I started like hiring a sales force and I went and did this like, Oh, deals are just going to magically happen. And then when I needed to right size the business, I, it's like, I lost the muscle. And so I had to rebuild that muscle with pipeline signals. Um, I have a pipeline that is growing every day because every day I am prospecting and we're also building a force to help that.

I am never stopping this. Like I have to remind myself this every day, every week, as you get older, I admit it does get harder, but I remind myself and until somebody else is the steward of this company, I am prospecting until literally that check is in my hand because I'm never having that happen again, uh, of letting go, assuming the tailwinds of inbound will just magically take you where it needs to go. I'm taking a control of my own hands. I prospect every day. And that's why I think, you know, from a leadership standpoint, still staying grounded on that ground floor so that you can have that perspective to share and stay up to date on what's happening out there in the marketplace. I mean, I can't, you know, the bigger the organizations get, the higher the C levels get and the VPs get the further detached they are from the reality of what's happening on the ground floor.

And as it gets filtered down three, four, five layers to the ground floor, I mean, I experienced this at Staples. I remember vividly when they, when they acquired us, I was working with the individual reps to try to get deals going and that type of stuff. I was having these executive meetings with these, you know, SVPs of, or presidents of these multi-billion dollar parts of the organization. And what they were talking about, visionary stuff all made total sense. But knowing what happened as it got down to the ground floor, I knew that none of the employees were actually doing anything that they were talking about. And I vividly remember being in an, like an executive meeting. I'm like, you guys do know, like I, you know, and this is why I got fired.

I was like, you guys, I love these conversations. You guys, like, you're all on the right path from vision standpoint and all that stuff. Do you know that none of this shit is actually happening on the ground floor? Cause your people fucking laugh at you, right? Cause you have a book of the month club. You don't know what's going on. You haven't made a cold call in your life. You haven't visited a customer in the past three years. And so as this trickles down, none of what you're talking about is actually happening on the ground floor. And they looked at me like I had six heads and I'm like, you might want to go on a ride along every once in a while. You might want to talk to a customer every once in a while to figure out, you know, not forget where you came from here.

Cause you fought, you forgot where you came from and all those ideas that you're trying to implement here. None of them are going to take holds because as they filter down, they don't trust you that you know what you're, you know, the really what's happening here. And I, you know, I was on at the peak before COVID, I would speak at 30, 40 sales, kickoffs, QBRs. I mean, uh, when, you know, I think the year before COVID in 2019, we like $350,000 worth of speaking engagements, right. That all evaporated. And I think I got too comfortable in playing. And I, you know, I think, I didn't think I heard that from employees playing CEO, not being a founder, like when you're sub 10 million, just be the founder, just like Brian, like the founder.

I was becoming a CEO. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's for me on my journey right now. It's I'm trying to become a different type of CEO now that the business is to a certain degree running without the need for me. It's how do I now add value to this organization to take it to the next level without getting in the way. And that's kind of what my whole mantra is moving forward here is like, I can help, but I don't want to get back involved in like the details. Cause I have people that are running that and they're doing a fantastic job doing it. Now it's what can I do to, how can I be leveraged to, to help whatever anybody else is doing get to the next level. But then where, where do we want to go now?

Um, which is a different, uh, different mentality. Cause I've been, you know, kind of historically in the business, not on the business type of stuff. And I need to balance that out a little bit more these days. So awesome, brother. Well, look, tell, tell people I know pipeline right now is, uh, you're looking for some clients, obviously where, where are we right now with what you're looking for? So we serve, uh, it's not about the size of the organization or the industry. Really? We work with companies that have a total addressable market of hundreds and or thousands of accounts, and it becomes unruly and impossible to be able to monitor and manage all of that. Um, and be able to be, to be able to get that sales intelligence in your seller's hands.

So our customers are a lot of technology companies, uh, professional services firms who have 1,000, 2,000, 3,000 accounts that are important to them. Let us take that off your hands and provide you the sales intelligence you need. And so what is it? Do you want them to hit you up at, uh, on LinkedIn at pipelinesignals.com or what? LinkedIn, uh, Jamie Shanks. I think I'm the only guy that looks like this on LinkedIn named Jamie Shanks, uh, pipeline signals, as it sounds pipelinesignals.com. All right, brother. Look, uh, it's been a fun 10 years, uh, building this relationship and I'm glad, uh, you know, we went from who the fuck is this guy creeping in on my world right now to this conversation right now where we can have some fun.

I think it was at a Salesforce conference, you know, me just trying to. And that was the one, that was the one I was obviously pretty protective of. I was like, you know, you can have all the other ones, man, you fucking touch Salesforce. And that's why I defended that one for my life for a solid 10 years for good reason. So awesome, man. Well, thanks so much for coming on board here. I appreciate it, man. I love what you're doing too. Thanks a lot. You take care. Absolutely. And everybody else, thank you for listening. Hope you got some insights out of this from an entrepreneurship growth standpoint, everything else in between. So, uh, look, like I always say, go out there and make somebody smile today.

Cause no matter how bad your day went, you make somebody smile today, you know, you had a good day and the world needs a lot more of that. So thanks y'all for listening and we'll see you on the other side. Thank you so much for your time today and listening to the podcast. I hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as I did with your support and our incredible guests. We're one of the top sales podcasts in the industry with over a million downloads. And I can't thank you enough to keep the momentum going. If you could go to your favorite podcast platform and leave us a five-star review, I would greatly appreciate it. In return, I will answer any question that you have on Instagram. Hit me up there at John M as in Michael Barrows with a video question or a DM, and I will get right back to you.

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