109: Harnessing Who You Are with Talview's Kyle Rasmussen

0:00 Scott Ingram: This episode is brought to you by Alyce, Vidyard, and our newest sponsor, Proposify. To learn more about them and all of our sponsors who are supporting this podcast and the Sales Success Community, click over to top1.fm/sponsors. You're listening to the Sales Success Stories podcast, where we deconstruct world-class sales performers to provide insights and strategies to help you improve To learn more, visit us at top1.fm. Here's your host, Scott Ingram. Today on the Sales Success Stories podcast, my guest is Kyle Rasmussen. Kyle is the top SDR at Talview. Well, he's the only SDR at Talview, but he was the top SDR at Glassdoor before that. Welcome to the show, Kyle.

0:50 Kyle Rasmussen: Hey Scott, thanks for having me. Excited to chat with you.

0:52 Scott Ingram: Yeah, absolutely. Our, our little pregame has me pretty excited. I think we're gonna cover some pretty interesting ground. And for folks who are new to this show, it's worth noting that I only interview active quota-carrying individual contributors like Kyle, who are either the outright number one top performers at their companies, or they're at least in the top 1% inside very large organizations. And a quick shout out to Justin Michael, who connected Kyle and I for today's conversation. So Kyle, with that, why don't we start like we always do with some immediate value and, and just a lot of meat and talk through the top 3 things that you believe have contributed the most to your success.

1:30 Kyle Rasmussen: Yeah. So the first thing is just hard work, especially when you're new to an SDR role. The only thing you can control is how hard you work. So that was what helped me get to the top of the leaderboard at the beginning of my career. I just took the formula that Glassdoor gave me and I looked around at all my peers and what they were all doing. And I just was like, I'm going to double what they do. And that should work to a certain point. That works really well. But you get to a point, especially as you start trying to break into larger companies where you need to figure out how am I gonna stay at the top of the leaderboard? You can't just play the volume game anymore. And so what helped me stay at the top of the leaderboard, there's 2 things, genuine curiosity and time blocking. And so I know that Millie had shared those 2 as well. So I'm gonna put an asterisk to number 3, and, and there's this desire to be way different from every other SDR out there. And to be authentically myself in all of my, in all my emails and all of my LinkedIn touches and all of my phone calls. I want to harness who I am and be different from every other call or email my prospects get. And I think that's also played a huge role in helping me stay at the top of the leaderboard.

2:40 Scott Ingram: Yeah. And I mean, that's the one I certainly want to dig into. I'm glad you chose to do the asterisk because to your point, I mean, your top 3 are things we hear consistently. On the show, but they're not interesting. They're not sexy, right? It kind of goes without saying that I talk about this a lot. Like, I haven't found like the 4-Hour Workweek version of sales, right? Like, there's…

3:02 Kyle Rasmussen: doesn't exist.

3:03 Scott Ingram: Yes, you can work smart and you should work smart, but you're also going to have to work hard. There's no just, hey, I'm going to build this machine and totally kick it and, and do great, right? It's… and so I love that you built sort of that double everything formula. And I think you said Your results were essentially double quota. So you, you kind of got out what you put in. Is that fair?

3:22 Kyle Rasmussen: Exactly.

3:23 Scott Ingram: Perfect. So let's talk about like being way different from every other SDR out there. And I'm also a huge fan. Again, another consistent theme that I hear is you've got to kind of find your way and figure out the way to be the best version of yourself. So it sounds like you're very much down that path, but you've got kind of some interesting ways of getting there and kind of figuring out what that was and what works.

3:48 Kyle Rasmussen: Yeah. So everything I do, there's really no tricks to what I do. It's nothing special. I just, I absorb a lot of content from folks like Josh Braun, from Becc Holland, Dale Dupree. And I just absorb as much of, as much content as I can on what they're doing and learning what's working. And I just figure, you know what, like, It's working for a reason. I'm not gonna try and reinvent the wheel, but I'm gonna try and take pieces from all of these different strategies and put my little twist on it. Just what that means is just put my personality, how I talk into everything I do. And I think it shows. I think people see that it's not just some marketing person that wrote emails for the whole SDR team and they're blasting. They see this is, this is Kyle reaching out to me. And he has a reason for reaching out to me. And I just get creative by taking all of the… I guess you can't really call that creativity since I'm just stealing all the work that some of those LinkedIn influencers and thought leaders are putting out there for us. But I'm just putting my little twist on it.

4:55 Scott Ingram: Well, it sounds like your creativity is more in the combinations, right? So there's a lot of folks who've put out a lot of ingredients, which is really the way that I think about this and in the way that I think is really the best way to absorb this show and this content, right? You kind of listen for the ingredients And go, oh, you know what? I wonder if I can add a little bit of that spice to my process or or what have you. So, I mean, give an example. What is kind of one of your favorite kind of combinations, if if you will?

5:22 Kyle Rasmussen: Yeah. So, one of the things that I did at Glassdoor that helped me become so successful once I got into the enterprise space was I got a hold of Sam Nelson's Agoge sequence, and it's it's a sequence that's. Made its waves throughout most SDR teams, I'm sure at this point now. But I found that it's continued to work even when I transitioned to Talview, it was continuing to work. And then I saw something Dale Dupree, he's got this thing where he'll write these crumpled up letters and mail them to his prospects where there's a little bit of self-deprecation. Like you're probably wondering why this letter is crumpled up. Here's why I'm reaching out, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, oh, that's really interesting. What if I just write down why, what I would typically write in an email? And take a picture of it and then create a sequence of pictures of handwritten notes in the Agoge format. And so it really wasn't that special. I just used an erasable pen, so I just erased the names every time I take a picture, but it worked really well. I was able to get conversations going with companies like Lowe's who I never thought I could get a company like Lowe's interested in Talview, but like They're sending, and it's funny, you'll see if you have a tool that you should go try it. If, if you have some flexibility to change how you, you do your sequences, you'll see these messages get forwarded around like crazy. Like Lowe's has viewed my, it's been months since I've talked to them, but I still get notifications of them viewing my email just cuz they, I think they feel good when they see it.

6:56 Scott Ingram: Kyle just inspired me to try my own creative combination in this sponsor shout out for Alyce and Vidyard. This is a perfect example of something that you can use in combination, and I actually have. So first, some context. Alyce is a personalized gifting platform that you can learn more about at top1.fm/alyce. And Vidyard is a tool that allows you to easily create, upload, and share videos, and you can learn more about them and get their free Chrome plugin at top1.fm/vidyard. But what if you were to put a personalized Vidyard video into the email that Alyce sends when offering a truly personalized gift to a prospect? They're already integrated and this really does work. So now if you were to reach out to one of your top prospects, offering them a gift based on a recommendation from Alyce's AI-based research that found something they're gonna love that's connected to one of their 5 to 9 interests outside of work, and then make that even more personal with a video from you introducing yourself and why you think they're gonna love this gift and the start of a new relationship. Creative combinations, and this is just one example. I bet you can think of another way to pair some of our sponsors. Give it a try. You'll find them all listed at top1.fm/sponsors, and Alyce and Vidyard are a fantastic place to start. Just so we have a little bit of context, why don't you tell us about your role today and about Talview?

8:25 Kyle Rasmussen: Yeah, so I was brought on to Talview to help build our SDR playbook. Talview is a recruiting automation platform, and we operate off of this philosophy called insta-hiring. And the biggest problem for companies today is that the best candidates in their pipeline are typically only available for 10 days. And so hiring for speed is everything. And so Talview just enables companies to be able to hire those people and identify who their best candidates are quicker and hire them quicker. Than if they didn't have Talview. So there's a lot of different nuances to the platform, but that's, that's what we do in a nutshell.

9:04 Scott Ingram: Nice. Love that. And then walk us through kind of the results. I realized Talview is a little bit newer, so maybe we want to sprinkle in some Glassdoor here, but why don't you credentialize yourself? Why are you here?

9:14 Kyle Rasmussen: Yeah. So from the actually predating Glassdoor, I worked at Paycom as an intern. We had, there were 17 interns. I wasn't number 1 there. I was number 2. And That was back when we didn't have any recruiting automation tools. So it was just straight cold calling all day, every day. And then moved into Glassdoor, I think because of my experience at Paycom where it was 100 phone calls a day to people who you really don't know why you're calling them. Moving into Glassdoor, I felt a little bit more confident in the solution that we were selling. I had the work ethic and so was consistently at 175% plus to plan. In the SMB and mid-market tiers, was always for 10 months was number 1. Moved into enterprise SDR role where I was consistently in the top 3, where I was at 130% plus to plan. And then after like 6 months in the enterprise SDR role, was then promoted into an account executive position where I helped launch our franchise business unit at Glassdoor. And then one thing led to another. I followed my boss from Glassdoor to Talview to start SDR. Here at Talview, we had zero outbound opportunities in our pipeline before I joined. Now this quarter, we've got 22 enterprise outbound opportunities. So especially for a company who's, who's built for companies like Amazon and Facebook, an outbound motion is essential to to fitting your product and putting it in the right, the right hands at the right companies. It's been a lot of fun.

10:51 Scott Ingram: Nice. Nice. So you give us kind of a preview. I mean, I think the walkthrough is helpful, but what's the origin story? How did you get into sales in the first place? Why take that path? Yeah.

10:59 Kyle Rasmussen: So I started in Cub Scouts. We, every fall had a popcorn selling competition. And at that time it was like, if you sold a crapload of popcorn, you got really cool prizes. And I was like, I remember there was this, I don't even know, it was like a TV that you dialed. It was an old-fashioned TV and you dial it to find the channels with a little knob. And I thought it was really cool. And you had to sell, I don't remember how much popcorn, but I was determined to do it and you had to be number one to do it. So I just knocked door to door to door until I knew that I had more than everyone else. And so did that all throughout elementary school. And then I forgot about, like, I didn't think of that as sales. I just thought of it as doing what you had to do to get a cool prize. But then got into college and was in finance and I was like, what the heck am I doing in finance? Like, I have no idea. I hate numbers. And just by chance ended up in a sales class and my professor hit me with something that was pretty convicting. He was like, you don't, like, if you're an accountant, if you're a whatever it is, You do not have a job if salespeople are not selling. You just don't have a job. And so I was like, oh, that's pretty interesting. That's actually something that I think I could be good at. It sounds pretty valuable. And so I spent the rest of the last few years of college. Our university actually had a sales program. So I went into that sales program. We competed, got to travel a little bit with the sales team at University of Missouri. And then from there, Just interviewed at several companies that were at those events and ended up with Glassdoor.

12:38 Scott Ingram: Nice. Nice. So, yeah, I mean, you've had a few stops, right? You had the internship, you had spent some time at Glassdoor, now you're at Talview. If you were starting over today, is there anything you'd do differently or think about differently from a career perspective?

12:51 Kyle Rasmussen: It's hard to say I would do anything differently because I love where I'm at. And if I would have done something differently, I don't know if I'd be where I'm at. So no, I don't think I would do anything differently.

13:02 Scott Ingram: Nice. And I'm sure it'll come out, but you are clearly passionate about the SDR role and the SDR function. So I'm excited to talk a little bit more about that, but is there a favorite story? And maybe you, maybe you got the meeting, maybe you didn't, but some place where you learned an interesting lesson. What is that for you?

13:22 Kyle Rasmussen: So this was actually in my internship. I'd mentioned that 100% of our day was spent cold calling. I actually lied. There was one day where I actually went door to door in downtown Chicago. One of the sales reps there had a few people that they wanted me to get meetings with. So they had me go into the buildings and try and show up at someone's desk essentially and schedule a meeting with them. And so I'm 21 years old. I really don't know what I'm doing. I walk into this massive skyscraper. In downtown Chicago. I get up the elevator, somehow they let me through. I had a gift bag, so maybe that's why they thought that they should let me up to this. It was like the 34th floor. I'll never forget. I walk in the front desk, I ask for the person's name. He's like, yep, opens up the door, points me to his desk, but leaves me out to dry. And so it's a big open floor plan. And I walk up to this guy's desk and he turns around and basically in front of the whole entire office humiliates me. You have the audacity to come into this office. And I'm like, honestly, you're right. And so he has me escorted out of the office. And from that point on, cold calling never felt so easy. I kid you not. Coming to a company like Glassdoor who gave me all of the tools where I could send good emails, I could call people, I had good phone numbers, I didn't have to go unannounced into people's offices. That stuff felt easy from that point on.

14:54 Scott Ingram: That is fascinating, right? Because nothing's quite as bad as like this giant public humiliation that never happens when you're cold calling.

15:01 Kyle Rasmussen: No, you might feel humiliated because they hang up on you, but like no one else saw it.

15:07 Scott Ingram: Yeah. So I'm curious, like just from a philosophical perspective. So you've been in a place where you were legitimately making 100 or more dials a day and, you know, you've had a lot of different tools and processes. What's your perspective on kind of the quality versus quantity that type of volume, like that sort of approach.

15:27 Kyle Rasmussen: Yeah, I have my convictions there. So I would maybe schedule 1 or 2 meetings a week, which was really good at my internship. So that's 500 dials. To give you some perspective, I might make 10 phone calls in a day now because I have tools that, one, I know that they're good numbers. But 2, I know where I'm, I know why I'm calling and I've already done my research. And so it's, they're not actually cold calls. And so it might take me 10 calls to get a meeting now. So you do the math, like 500 calls to get a meeting or 2 or 10 calls. That's what my opinions are on quantity versus quality. And it's funny too, this is a side note. I feel like more people are picking up these days than they were even back in like 2017.

16:16 Scott Ingram: Picking up the phone?

16:17 Kyle Rasmussen: Picking up the phone. Yeah. Sorry.

16:19 Scott Ingram: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, I'm not going to hold off anymore. I mean, why don't we talk through kind of your typical approach? First, is there such a thing, right? How much, how much variation in your approach is there? And if there is a typical approach, what does that look like? Actually, before I let Kyle talk through his typical prospecting approach, I want to introduce you to our newest sponsor, Proposify. Now, Kyle just told a story about having to make 500 calls to get 1 or 2 meetings in a week. That is wildly inefficient. What if there were another part of your sales process that was that inefficient and ineffective? Wouldn't you do something about it? I'd be willing to bet that your proposal process might just be that. Proposify is an online proposal software that provides modern sales teams with control and visibility into the process. It streamlines the process of proposal creation and then allows you to track how it's being consumed, and you can even include the e-signature process right in your proposal. Proposal. And Proposify has found that proposals with e-signatures are 3.4 times more likely to close. You've got to check this out. top1.fm/proposify will take you there. And now back to Kyle and his typical prospecting approach.

17:36 Kyle Rasmussen: Yeah, so up until… so I had started my role at Glassdoor in January, and up to December I had been getting by and doing really, really well. I was a top performer because of hard work. I actually missed my quota in December that year, and I remember being on the phone with my manager at the time, and I was beside myself. I didn't understand why this could have happened. And as she helped me kind of understand and dissect my activity and just my mindset, I wasn't focused on the things that I can control. Especially in December. I was focused on the things that I couldn't control, which was setting meetings. And so moving forward, one of the things that… and I haven't missed a quota since then, whether it was as an SDR at Glassdoor or an AE at Glassdoor or now an SDR at Talview. I spend all of my day focused on the things that I can control. I don't think about hitting quota. I just think about, okay, I know at Talview I need to find 50 new people. I need to find them and I need to figure out why they should care about Talview and I need to reach out to them. If I do that every day, my numbers will come. I just need to trust the process and make sure that I'm super disciplined in doing those things. And that's what it is for me. It's pretty simple. It's just doing the things that, you know, you need to do and being religious about it and the results come.

19:05 Scott Ingram: Dude, I love that. And I think the timing of our conversation around this is pretty perfect, right? As we start a new year and, you You know, a lot of people are doing goal setting. I have personally moved further and further away from goal setting for that exact reason, because typically your goal is something you can't necessarily control. And I think of it more as habit setting. Like, what are the things that I can do consistently that I can measure and set goals around that to where, look, unless I'm totally blowing it, the results will follow.

19:39 Kyle Rasmussen: Yep.

19:40 Scott Ingram: And it sounds like that's really the approach that you've taken.

19:42 Kyle Rasmussen: Yeah. And it, there's just so many other implications of taking that approach too. Like you have a bad month. I remember in December, I told you I was distraught because I had no idea why I didn't do well. I didn't feel good about myself and the work that I was doing. I had a low, I had low self-esteem. Like it had a huge impact on me, but I know now, even if I actually hit Last week for our quarter, but even if I were to miss this quarter, I would feel good about the work that I was doing because I knew that I did what I needed to do, at least what I thought I needed to do. And all that would need to change is if, if I were to miss, I just up the activity or maybe improve the quality because the way I look at it is it's just control what you can control.

20:28 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So walk us through again, coming back to kind of that traditional process and approach. What is that for you? Give us kind of the blow-by-blow through that.

20:37 Kyle Rasmussen: Yeah. So I start my mornings with the part of my job that I hate the least, or I hate the most rather, which is going through LinkedIn and figuring out who I need to reach out to. And so I spend probably from 7 to 8:30 or 9 finding those people. Typically what I do is I'll look for a list. I want them all to have something in common to make personalization a little bit easier. So I'll look for, you know, I'll go through Forbes World's Best Employers list. And so I'll just go through company by company, all the personas that I want to reach out to. That way, at least from the get-go, I've got something that I can use to at least be somewhat personalized at some point in my sequence. And then I'll go through, add them all into my sequence. And I don't necessarily write all of my emails individually. I kind of, if you're familiar with Mad Libs, Did you ever do those?

21:31 Scott Ingram: Yeah.

21:31 Kyle Rasmussen: Yeah. Yeah. So I kind of have the shell of my sequences written and then I plug in personalization points throughout each step of the sequence. And that's what I do the rest of the day because that doesn't take too much. It's easy. It's kind of, it's mindless. So I do that when I'm tired, but then at the peak, so I get a lot of energy after I eat lunch. And so that's when I make my phone calls. So I'll call all the people who have been opening my emails. Or the people who I just really, really want a meeting with who maybe haven't been opening my emails. And then I'm usually done by like 3 or 4.

22:03 Scott Ingram: It's so interesting. One of my very favorite HBR articles of all time… there's a couple, but one of them is this idea of managing your energy, not your time. And it sounds like that's a lot of what you're doing. It's sort of recognizing like, okay, well, this is when I'm at a low. That's probably not when I should be reaching out to people. I'll do the mindless, dumb Mad Lib work then, but when, when I'm pretty torqued up after having lunch, that's when I want to be client-facing and I want people to hear me and feel that energy.

22:31 Kyle Rasmussen: Exactly. And that's, that's one of the things I do too, is I'll actually block my schedule so that like I will not have any client-facing calls unless it's absolutely necessary before 10 o'clock, because I know like I will not get those 50 people prospected. If I don't do it before 10, because I just won't have the energy and the lazy side of me will more than likely come out if I don't just get that done and be disciplined in blocking that time out.

23:01 Scott Ingram: Right, right. So let's go through and pull the rest of the day apart since we're already kind of down that path. So you've given us the when the list building happens, but when does the alarm clock go off and what happens from there?

23:14 Kyle Rasmussen: The alarm clock goes off at 6. I actually, I get into bed at the same time every night too, so I'll be in bed bed by 9 and I'll get up at 6. I need a lot of sleep for some reason. If I get less than 8 hours of sleep, I'm in a fog for the entire day. So I have to be really disciplined about going to bed by 9, usually asleep by 10, up by 6. From there, I've got to have my coffee. I need some time to myself. I read, I hang out with my wife, and then at about 7, 7:30, I'm working. Once I feel like I've had enough time to myself to, I guess, one, energize myself and two, just be ready for work.

23:54 Scott Ingram: And what, what are you typically reading in that morning spot?

23:57 Kyle Rasmussen: I read my Bible.

23:58 Scott Ingram: Excellent. Excellent.

23:59 Kyle Rasmussen: Yep. That's for me what gives me a lot of purpose in my life.

24:03 Scott Ingram: So beautiful. And okay. So you did a pretty good job of taking us up to about lunch. What happens from lunch until that 9 o'clock I'm in bedtime?

24:12 Kyle Rasmussen: So after lunch, I actually, funny enough, I don't like taking a break during lunch. I feel that if I take me time in the middle of the day, that, that just turns into me getting lazy because I'm actually a very lazy person, like naturally, if I'm not really intentional about it. So I just keep going. So I'll eat my lunch usually at my desk. And then as soon as I'm done eating, I just get on the phones and start calling people. Depending on the day, that might be 20, 30 minutes. Other days it might be a couple hours, just depends on how I'm doing and if I'm setting appointments or not. Typically, because to be honest, I hate cold calling still. It's not hard for me to do, but I just would prefer to not do it if I don't have to. And so if I set a couple meetings, I'm going to start getting ready for the next day and maybe get a head start on prospecting those 50 people. And so I will, you know, maybe around 2, if I've set a couple meetings, I'll start going through LinkedIn again and doing what I did in the morning. But just a lot slower.

25:14 Scott Ingram: I mean, is that the bar? I mean, is that the thing that determines whether it's just 20 or 30 minutes of calls versus a couple of hours of calls is you got a couple of good positive outcomes and kind of once you get those, you're like, okay, cool. I did the job and I'm going to reward myself with some, some lazier work or what? What's the thought process there?

25:31 Kyle Rasmussen: Well, so it depends. So if I, if I've called through, I mean, some days I'll just be calling through a list of people who haven't been opening my emails. But I prefer to only be calling people who have been engaging with my stuff because I know that there's something striking a chord and I want to use my time right. I know that I'm not, I'm not Iron Man. I'm not Justin Michael. I can tell you that. And so what I'll do is, yeah, I mean, if I'm going to set 2 meetings over the phone, heck yeah, I'm going to reward myself and I'm going to stop calling people for the day and I'm going to set myself up for success for the next day because I want to build on that momentum. I don't want to burn myself out. I do everything in my power to not burn myself out. And honestly, that might be one of the reasons why I've stayed at the top of the leaderboard, because I'm super intentional about not burning myself out. I'm intentional about working hard and about working smart while also being intentional about not working myself to the ground.

26:25 Scott Ingram: Have you been there? Have you burnt yourself out?

26:27 Kyle Rasmussen: No, not yet. I'm sure I will at some point, but not yet.

26:31 Scott Ingram: So when it comes to, I mean, I think we're getting some glimpses, but just the overall way that you are maintaining your mindset, what is that?

26:41 Kyle Rasmussen: I think the reason why we touched on it is just controlling what you can control and letting that dictate how you feel about your day and your success. So for me, that's controlling how many people I reach out to and the quality in which I'm reaching out to them with. If I finish my day and I made all of my calls, I prospected 50 people and I put them on quality sequences and I didn't set a single meeting, I'm not down on myself. Granted, it feels better when you do set meetings, but that doesn't dictate how I feel about myself or who I tell myself that I am. And I think that's one of the things that keeps me from feeling that sense of burnout because I know I go to bed every night feeling like I did my job well to the best of my ability and excited to wake up and do it again tomorrow because I know I'm going to do what I've set out to do. I'm not going out to set 2 meetings. I'm going out to reach out. I'm starting my day to reach out to 50 people and follow up on all the other stuff I need to do. That's how I dictate how I feel about myself.

27:43 Scott Ingram: Yeah. And I mean, it sounds like you've also got, there's quite a bit of focus to your day. It almost sounds like Just maintaining that momentum and not letting go, right? Not, not letting a drawn-out lunch sort of throw you off and keep going so that, so that, you know, come 3 or 4 o'clock, you're like, okay, I put in a solid day. I'm good. I'm done. I'm going to move on to other stuff. I mean, is that, is that a fair observation?

28:04 Kyle Rasmussen: Yes. Except for when someone emails me back. If someone emails me back, especially someone I've been trying to get a meeting with, I'll, it'll be 6 o'clock. And if I know they're on the East Coast or the Pacific Coast, or they're in a time zone where they're still working, I'll call them. If they're not emailing me back with a time to meet, but they're showing interest, I'll call them just because I, I want to get the meeting. It doesn't feel like work, but for the most part, yeah, it's, it's 3, 4 o'clock and I'm done, but I go hard that whole time.

28:34 Scott Ingram: Yeah. That is not an uncommon theme. I'm thinking about the conversation I had with, with Andy Duwe. I mean, I see a number of folks sort of take this approach where it is like truly hard, truly focused, real work. But the beauty is, if you do that, if you actually work a 7, 8-hour day, to your point, you can probably do twice as much work as, as everybody else does, maybe. And it may take them 10 hours, but they're just not focused and as disciplined in actually doing work.

29:07 Kyle Rasmussen: It's so true because I remember actually my colleagues at Glassdoor a lot of times got a little bit frustrated with me because I would get into the office. I started working a little bit earlier when I would have to go into the office just to beat traffic. So I'd get into the office around 5 or 5:30, just depending on the day, and would leave by like 1 or 2. And I would beat them every single month. Like, what the heck is this guy doing? He's leaving the office at 1, but I was putting in more work than them. Just quicker. And I guess a lot earlier too, but yeah, I agree.

29:44 Scott Ingram: I like it. I like it. What are you most proud of? You've had a lot of pretty good consistent success. What do you like hang your hat on?

29:50 Kyle Rasmussen: What we're doing right now at Talview. It's really exciting to me. I think that, so it's just been really interesting. So when I was at Glassdoor, I had my eyes set on becoming a strategic sales executive. Selling 7-figure deals. That was where I was going, and there was nothing that was going to stop me from getting there. However, I feel a lot different than that now. I am back in an SDR role building the playbook so that we can scale and go hire people like myself, 3 years younger. And so what, you know, Talview, when I, when I started, we were not generating any outbound opportunities. And so to bring it to a point where There's slides that I've used in my outreach that our account executives are now using on sales calls because shout out to Justin Michael, his Venn diagrams. He's been another big influential person in kind of blending his methodology into my outreach. And so being able to go from saying, hey, Talview is generating $0 in outbound pipeline each quarter before I joined to now millions a quarter in pipeline. I'm proud of that. And it's just got me thinking a lot about what the role of an SDR is or what I think it should be and where it's actually at, at a lot of companies. And it's got me really passionate about, I don't know, maybe staying in SDR for a while longer and just becoming the very, very best at it and helping other people, young professionals who love sales and want to work for a great company and to help them be great at SDR and help them get wherever they want to go. So I don't know. I may end up ditching that whole strategic account executive route and getting into SDR leadership. Who knows?

31:33 Scott Ingram: Well, and it's, I mean, it's interesting you share that and you and I talked about this a little bit on the front end. I was on a thread with Justin and I don't want to out him because I don't know where this is supposed to come out, but he's working on kind of this, this manifesto thing that reminded me, I recorded a Daily Sales Tip. I actually looked it up. It was, it was much earlier this year. So beginning of 2020. I was talking about how I thought the SDR role in a lot of circumstances might be a career trap. And so his manifesto kind of reminded me of that. His was much smarter and much more comprehensive. And, but, but to me, part of the solution is we need to professionalize the SDR role. There's a ton of value if you are able to legitimately generate millions of dollars in pipeline why wouldn't we pay you as much as a strong performing strategic account executive? Because that has just as much value and not sort of force you to have to go down that route and say, well, if I want to make adult money, then I have to go, go down and become an AE and then a strategic AE or an enterprise AE or whatever it is. Why can't you stay in this space where you're having a ton of success and we kind of stop this treadmill thing that sort of happens where we bring the most junior people in and expect them to, to generate all of this business and all of this opportunity. When, to your point, in, in some of the things you were talking about early on, you're like, I have no idea what I'm doing right now.

33:02 Kyle Rasmussen: Yeah. And that's the truth. I was talking earlier about how my, my professor in college said that no one has a job in a company if salespeople aren't selling. There's a certain truth to where a lot of enterprise sellers today don't have a job if they don't have an SDR generating them pipeline so that they can go close and do their job well. I agree. I think that there needs to be a change. It's never been harder to book meetings with executives. It's never been harder to book meetings with anyone for that matter. And so I think that there's certainly a… it creates an interesting space to create this career path for SDRs that maybe wasn't there a couple of years ago.

33:43 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's going to happen, right? I think people are sort of seeing like, wow. And part of the challenge and part of what I was talking about sort of in that tip or that concept was it's a career trap because why would I take this person out of this role where they're generating so much opportunity for us and then put them into this other opportunity where they have no experience and it's, it's going to take a lot more work for me to get them as productive as they are Currently, right? So it's kind of because you were so successful, you put yourself into a box and a lot of times it's a limiting box. So my hope is we just kind of start to take off the limiters. It's just like, no, you're great at this. Let's turn this into a legitimate role for you to have a ton of success in and keep doing it.

34:29 Kyle Rasmussen: Yeah, exactly. And there's a whole nother question to be asked then that I don't know the answer to. I'd be curious your thoughts actually. And maybe there's just a new path carved out for you to rise as an SDR and make the kind of money that strategic account executives make. But where do you, where do you then find, is there an entry-level account executive role where instead of starting as an SDR, you get into like a freemium AE model? I don't know. That's a whole nother conversation that I don't know the answer to, but it's fun to talk about.

34:59 Scott Ingram: Well, it is fun to talk about because I think it really comes with having good career pathing and good training, right? What, what has to happen for that to actually work? And be productive is you have to allow the SDR the opportunities to learn and develop the AE skills while they're in that role. So, when they're ready to make the jump, it's not 70% of my role is brand new to me and I've never done any of this before. We've got to kind of have some ways to start to bridge that gap and make that transition a little bit more seamless. And, you know, it's interesting as we're recording this, I think Monday. So, yeah, I'm losing all track of time and what tip number we're on. I think the tip number tomorrow is 695, and Reva Pellerin from Vidyard is on there, and she's talking about how she decided to step out of her leadership role and move back into an AE role. And, you know, just there was a little bit of wrestling with that around like, well, is this a step backwards? But it was the right move. It was… she's like, God, I missed this. And it sounds like you almost did the same thing. You told me the same thing. You're like, man, I was in this AE role and I missed I missed your stuff.

36:09 Kyle Rasmussen: Yeah, I did. In my view and just in my personality, there's no better feeling than getting someone, especially now at Talview, because no one's heard of Talview. Even at Glassdoor though, from getting someone who has no idea who you are or who your company is and bringing them to a point where they're like, hey, I need to buy what you're selling. I can't live without it. I mean, that's it for me is that feeling when someone's like, this is crazy. Yeah, let's talk. And then, and then getting into it at Talview, one of the fun things is I sit in on most every call in the sales cycle, especially with the bigger clients, because I'm still trying to figure out. It helps me craft messaging when I hear our prospects speak in their language.

36:54 Scott Ingram: Yeah.

36:55 Kyle Rasmussen: And it's just fun. Like 2 months ago, this person had no idea who I was or what Talview did, and now they're here saying, You know, we need to implement this by before the end of the year. It's rewarding.

37:07 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's fantastic. What about the flip side? What do you find to be the most challenging part of, of your role?

37:15 Kyle Rasmussen: For me, it's, it's empathizing with my prospects. I sell to talent acquisition individuals in talent acquisition. I've never been… I've worked in recruiting. Glassdoor sold to talent acquisition professionals as well. Talview sells to talent acquisition professionals, but I've never been one myself. And so there's this… I don't know if you know, you, when you're a kid and you watch those movies, there's like the good guy on one shoulder, the bad guy, and there's 2 different voices talking to you, telling you all the things that you're good at and all the things that you're bad at. And there's that, that bad guy on my left shoulder telling me, you don't actually know the real pains. Like, you've never been in their seat. You don't know, like, you shouldn't be selling this. And so overcoming that, I think at a lot of points it's been difficult. Think about like, I'm not super active in posting on LinkedIn. I want to be. I would love to post a lot about like sales stuff, but I feel like, oh, if I'm gonna post about sales stuff, that's selfish and my prospects will see that and count me out. But then I'm like, I'm not an expert in recruiting, so how… I shouldn't post anything. So there's that voice that's like, You're not an expert in recruiting. You're not an expert. So does that answer your question? Is that what you're looking for?

38:27 Scott Ingram: Yeah, it's fascinating to me, right, on a number of levels, right? I think there's a dose of imposter syndrome in there that is ridiculously common, but there's also sort of a dose of like what gets me pretty excited is like the fact that you see that and know that like I sort of have this gap, like I can do a better job of understanding who it is that I'm selling to. That to me is just smart, right? And I'm sure you're doing things. I mean, what are you doing to bridge that gap and work to get in their head a little bit more?

39:02 Kyle Rasmussen: Yeah. So one of the things that I do, Grant, so I've been at Talview for 6 months now, so I'm not completely new anymore, but I get on to probably 75 to 75% of the calls that I set. Well, I'll always run the initial Discovery. So we were talking a minute ago about how the the role of SDR is evolving, and you know the importance of not just setting meetings but getting to a point where you know you're already doing 70% of the job of an AE. So if you do want to go that route, you're ready to go. So I'll run the initial discovery, but then on the demos also, I'll sit in on the demos, and you know I'll introduce the the account executive at the beginning of the call and kind of just frame it as like. I'm just here to learn from both of you. I'm new here. And so that creates some space too at the end of the calls where if they say something that I didn't quite understand, it makes sense to them if I ask a clarifying question. So for example, I was on a call with a large company in Silicon Valley on Thursday this week, and she talked about something called interviewing fatigue. I had no idea. I hadn't heard that term anywhere before on any of the calls. So I asked her what that means. And it was really interesting, her response, like all the hiring managers get really tired of having to interview a bunch of people that aren't good fits. There you go. I learned something right there. That's their language, not mine, not Talview's, that I can now go use in my messaging. And it's, it's likely something that a lot of people are experiencing. It's just not the words that we maybe would have used with our sales hats or marketing hats.

40:39 Scott Ingram: Yeah. And that's, you know, it's interesting. I just, I just responded to, I think it was a HubSpot thread and they were asking for, you know, advice for, for new marketers. And I've sold to marketers for over a decade. And, you know, I think this is true for sales and marketing. You should start interviewing and having conversations with your customers and your prospects just with this goal of trying to learn and then never stop. Because the more that you can use their language and understand these challenges, the more relevant and competent and everything else, the more trust you're able to build with your other prospects because you actually know what you're talking about.

41:19 Kyle Rasmussen: Yeah, absolutely. And it's funny because so I was always taught to overcome objections, overcome objections, overcome objections. And at this point in Talview's history as a company. I'm just like, I just want to learn. I just, I don't care necessarily about overcoming objections, whatever you want to call it. I just want to learn. And so my response to any email I get that's like, hey, I'm not interested, it's like, cool, can you give me some feedback on my messaging? And it's crazy. That's the reason why, you know, I'm doing well at Talview is because all the not interested people who have then responded with what they think about my messaging, that gives me again their words. And it's amazing how much people are willing to help when you just ask for it.

42:04 Scott Ingram: Yeah.

42:05 Kyle Rasmussen: And I think it also, it shows this other side of the person sending the email where it's like, okay, this is another person. He's actually, he's probably just some young kid who wants, who has big dreams and I'll help him out a little bit. And it, it's gone a long way.

42:18 Scott Ingram: That's awesome. That's awesome. So we've gotten through the bulk of your day and your routine, but there's, there's one window I haven't figured out yet. So what happens from kind of the, time you finish quote unquote work, so 3 or 4 PM until 9, what do you do with that time?

42:34 Kyle Rasmussen: Hang out with my wife or our family. So whether it's, so we, we actually just moved from Chicago to the Atlanta area. So there's a lot more outdoor activities available to us. So our routine is changing a little bit, but I'll get done around 3 or 4. We'll go to, they call them greenways for some reason out here. Which is just a nature path. And so we'll go on a walk with our dog. That's kind of taken place of my commute. My commute used to be the time where I would kind of decompress, detach from work, which I need to do. Otherwise I'm just thinking about like my messaging or what I could have said to this prospect on the phone or whatever. So we'll go and detach and then we'll maybe go to the grocery store, cook dinner. We love cooking. I'm terrible at it, but I like doing it. My wife is great at cooking, so I'm usually the sous chef. And so I'll do all the chopping. And so I like doing like mindless stuff that helps me not think about work and just detach from work so that I can then come back the next day recharged with a little bit of sprinkle of some podcasts that don't have anything to do with work. And that's one of the ways that my wife and I like to to connect is listen to podcasts and talk about them. We're passionate about adoption, so we'll listen to adoption podcasts and talk about it and figure out that's something that we want to do. Just stuff that has nothing to do with work.

44:01 Scott Ingram: Yeah. What, what, what's some of the podcasts you listen to?

44:04 Kyle Rasmussen: Oh, Jennie Allen is, it's any podcasts that my wife likes, I'll listen to. They're usually like Jennie Allen or Jamie Ivey, who's actually in Austin. I don't know if you've ever heard of her. She's a big-time podcaster out of Austin.

44:16 Scott Ingram: Really? No, I swear. I don't know what is going on. Austin is becoming the literal center of the universe.

44:24 Kyle Rasmussen: Podcast mecca.

44:26 Scott Ingram: Well, not just podcasts. And, you know, so I mean, Tim Ferriss has been out here for a while and I think Joe Rogan moved here now. So yeah, we, we get to claim the podcast thing.

44:34 Kyle Rasmussen: I just read Oracle just moved there, right?

44:36 Scott Ingram: Exactly. Yeah. So Oracle just moved here. I think Elon has said that he's moved to Texas. I'm like, okay, well, if you're going to move to Texas, you're going to live in Austin.

44:45 Kyle Rasmussen: He's been saying that for a while here. Yeah.

44:48 Scott Ingram: So yeah, it is. I mean, the companies, I mean, every one of… I'm pretty sure Apple is in the process of building what will essentially be their HQ2. It'll be their largest outside of the Bay and that giant donut thing that they've got over there. And then Facebook is trying to lease a million square feet downtown, which apparently won't fit in a single building. They're like, okay, well, fine. We'll lease 2 buildings.

45:14 Kyle Rasmussen: We'll just expand downtown for you guys.

45:16 Scott Ingram: It is bonkers. It is absolutely bonkers what is going on here. I've been here now for 14, 15 years and I need to go back and do the math cuz for a long time I've been saying I'm watching the population double for the second time. It may be done. I may be watching it start its third doubling since I've been here. It's, it's been insane.

45:38 Kyle Rasmussen: Yeah. I feel like Austin used to be, at least I used to think of Austin as just a college town.

45:43 Scott Ingram: That's pretty much it.

45:44 Kyle Rasmussen: They had the Longhorns.

45:44 Scott Ingram: You had the college and the state capital was here, so it was a lot of government and you had the Longhorns and there wasn't much else going on, you know, 20 or 30 years ago. And it has, it is just, it's become something. The secret's out, folks.

45:58 Kyle Rasmussen: Yep.

45:59 Scott Ingram: How'd we get there?

46:00 Kyle Rasmussen: I don't know, but I appreciate the ref. Yeah. I haven't been to Austin. My wife is a huge fan. We keep saying we want to go there. We actually planned a trip there and then had to cancel it. Like I'm sure every single one of you has had to do at some point.

46:15 Scott Ingram: Well, we'll talk about the Sales Success Summit when we're done, and I'm going to give you the perfect excuse to be here in October.

46:20 Kyle Rasmussen: Yes, please do give me an excuse.

46:24 Scott Ingram: We will talk. We will definitely talk. All right. So we were talking about… oh, you know what it was? We were talking about podcasts, which is a good lead-in to… is there anything that we missed? I always like to ask about people's information diets and the things that they're reading and listening to and watching. So, so far we've got the Bible in the morning. And your wife's podcasts after hours while you're cooking. What else? Is there anything else that you're consuming?

46:47 Kyle Rasmussen: So there's little sprinkles of things that actually are throughout my day when I get distracted, but it's, it's kind of intentional. So I watch pretty much every video that John Barrows puts out, or every… I read every post that Kevin Dorsey or Josh Braun or Justin Michael puts out. Those are little nuggets of information, or Sam Nelson. Those are little nuggets of information that I just digest. I think subconsciously comes out in the work that I do. And that's why I'm so intentional about like the only social media that I have is LinkedIn. So even if my wife is out doing something, it's probably not good for my initial reaction to go grab my phone when I'm not around anyone, but I'll go and I'll scroll through and look for posts from Josh or Josh Braun or any of those sales thought leaders. And then as things go, as I see a post about a webinar that solves a problem that I'm experiencing, for example, there Sam did one on… Sam Nelson at Outreach did one on a sales tech stack a couple of months ago. We had no sales tech here at Talview. So I'll digest content very specifically based on problems that I'm experiencing. But it's been down a lot since I haven't had my commute because that was where I used to soak up everything.

48:04 Scott Ingram: Yeah, yeah. Well, one more Austin thing. This is totally ridiculous. So Scott Leese, Kevin Dorsey, and I all live in the same zip code within about 2 miles of each other in…

48:13 Kyle Rasmussen: Oh, no kidding.

48:13 Scott Ingram: West Austin. Yeah, I didn't realize. I knew Scott was here and we were out for a walk and talking. He's like, you know, KD just moved here. I'm like, you gotta be kidding me. So yeah, it's, it's pretty fun. We're having a good time.

48:24 Kyle Rasmussen: Yeah, that is fun. And I'm, I'm actually in his… he's got like a Patreon group and Justin Michael has a similar Yeah, like community, and I'm in this group called SDR Nation. And so that's kind of how I almost digest most of my content, and my information diet is almost on a community level where it's real-time giving feedback on certain people's messaging and getting feedback on your own messaging and things like that.

48:48 Scott Ingram: Love that. So we will link all that stuff up. So top1.fm/kyle-rasmussen… sorry, I'm gonna screw up your name there… or top1.fm/this episode number, which of course I have lost track of. Once again, and you said that you guys were just kind of developing your stack because I typically like to ask kind of the tools and apps that you can't live without. Maybe that's maybe that's so glad you asked thing, but what's happening there?

49:13 Kyle Rasmussen: Yeah, so have you have you heard of Ample Market?

49:15 Scott Ingram: I have not.

49:16 Kyle Rasmussen: Yeah, most people haven't. It's a brand new well actually I think they they had been in stealth mode for a while, but picture Zoom info and outreach combined in one platform. I spend my entire day in Ample Market, so I actually don't really use… I said I spend my day in Sales Nav prospecting people. That was because that's just what everyone's familiar with. I actually spend it in Ample Market, which is integrated with Sales Nav, pull all of my contact information through Ample Market, and then they… I can put them onto my sequences in Ample Market. And it's crazy. They've got this thing called Liquid Language. Is that a term you're familiar with?

49:55 Scott Ingram: Also not. I'm getting my education here. Keep going.

49:58 Kyle Rasmussen: Okay. Liquid. It's fascinating. You can basically… I've had to learn. It's… I don't want to call it coding. That makes it sound harder than it is. But you add in all of these if-then statements into a sequence so that if they're a VP of talent acquisition, then this is the value prop. If they're a CHRO, then this is the value. And so you get… or if they're in this industry, then you talk about these case studies. And so you build… I mean, the sequences look really ugly when they're in the draft stage because there's all this code. But basically it just makes it so that you can plug in the 1 or 2 or 3 snippets of information that you find on their LinkedIn profile, and the rest is already like relevant based on persona, job title, industry, etc. It's really… it saves so much time. I'll have to show it to you sometime.

50:48 Scott Ingram: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Awesome. I'm sure everybody is, is now scrambling. So again, All the links are on that show notes page, folks.

50:54 Kyle Rasmussen: Ample Market.

50:55 Scott Ingram: Ample Market. We'll link that up for you. And I'm eager to, to dig in and learn a little bit more. Kyle, we talked about your mindset and some of the ways that you're managing that and managing not to burn out. What about the motivation side of things? Like what motivates you? How do you motivate yourself?

51:11 Kyle Rasmussen: Yeah, it's a really interesting question and my answer is probably going to be very underwhelming. So I was actually on a call with our SDR Nation cohort. That's one of the sales SDR communities I'm in. And there were like 6 of us and we were all talking about what our whys are, what our motivation is. And everyone had all these really deep answers. Yeah, I want to provide for my wife and I, but my motivation is I just love, like, I have fun doing what I'm doing and I like doing things that are fun. So that's my motivation is I want to do what I'm doing. It's like the same reason why I grew up playing baseball. Like I did it because I liked it. That was my motivation. I didn't really have, you know, I wanted to go play college. I wasn't good enough, but I wanted to. And I do this because I want to.

52:02 Scott Ingram: I love it.

52:03 Kyle Rasmussen: It's fun.

52:04 Scott Ingram: What makes it fun? How do you make it fun just to kind of continue so that it continues to have that sort of allure and continues to pull you forward?

52:12 Kyle Rasmussen: I think it goes back to getting someone from having no clue who Kyle Rasmussen is or who Talview is and getting them to a point where they're like, yeah, you know, they've got maybe one 30-minute gap a day in their calendar, if that, and getting them to a point where they're like, yep, I'll put Kyle in that one 30-minute gap to learn about what Talview is and how they could potentially help solve some of our problems. It's like a game. It's challenging. And anything you do in life that's hard, when you find success in that thing that's really hard, whether… I'm not a parent yet, but you hear every parent talk about how hard it is, but yet at the same time, how rewarding it is. I don't want to compare setting a meeting with being a parent, but it's that feeling of like, wow, I just earned a spot on this very busy person's calendar. And there's probably 100 200 other people today trying to get that spot and they gave it to me. That's just really fun to me when that happens. And that gives me enough to go on and try and get the next one.

53:16 Scott Ingram: I love it. I love it. So we opened up and you were talking about really wanting to differentiate yourself, you know, from kind of all other SDRs and you really inserted yourself into the process. How would you describe yourself? What is your style?

53:34 Kyle Rasmussen: Ooh, that's a good question. I'm trying to think of another word from different, but I'm just different. I look for what everyone else is doing. So there's all kinds of resources out there, like the top 50 sequences. I think HubSpot has like a top 50 sequences or top 50 templates or whatever. And I read all that to try and figure out what not to do.

53:55 Scott Ingram: How to sound like everyone else, right?

53:57 Kyle Rasmussen: Yeah, exactly. So I'm like, and that goes same thing with Sam Nelson's Agoge sequence and Becc Holland's Flip the Script and all that stuff. Those are just really popular, I guess, outbound methodologies. Everyone else is doing it. So like, there's a reason everyone else is doing it, but like, I want to do it kind of different. And I want to… there are 7 billion people on this world. Not one of them is alike. So if I write my own emails the way I would say them, they're not going to be like anyone else's. I can use the methodologies. That I know are proven to be successful, but you won't ever have… you'll have a lot better podcast interviewees than me, but you won't have another Kyle Rasmussen. You won't have another Millie. There's no other Scott Ingram. So just harness who you are the way… I don't… am I making sense?

54:48 Scott Ingram: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you are. And actually, the thing that I'm thinking about right now is because there's all of these things out there, right? And maybe you picked it up because it is one of these things that, you know, somebody on LinkedIn has advocated communicated for, or, you know, your marketing team wrote your, your emails or things like that. What I'm actually thinking is, gosh, wouldn't it just make sense for everybody to take what they're doing and just at the very least put it in their own voice? Like rewrite this the way… because, and for me, I've always found writing pretty easy because I write the way that I talk.

55:26 Kyle Rasmussen: And talking is easy.

55:27 Scott Ingram: Yeah, talking super easy, right? And so So, you know, here's inside baseball kind of thing. I actually script out most of the Daily Sales Tips that I share, but it's super easy for me because I write the way that I talk. So I write it down and I think that might surprise, I hope that surprises some people are like, wait, you're reading that? Because to me, they're the same thing. Right. And to your point, nobody else sounds like me. So at the very least, you know, just going through your materials and like, yeah, I would never say this. How do I make this sound like me? And by nature, by definition, that's going to make it sound more human and hopefully a little bit more relatable.

56:09 Kyle Rasmussen: Exactly. And one of the things that you'll notice and that I noticed as an SDR at Glassdoor and just working with a lot of really great enterprise sellers is when I'd read their email threads between prospects that they were engaged with, the way they wrote to each other was so different than the way that my marketing emails that I was sending sounded.

56:30 Scott Ingram: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

56:31 Kyle Rasmussen: And that's one of the attractive things that I think about Justin Michael's method is it just makes so much sense. Like, talk to people the way they talk to people. And we talk in short form. We don't use a bunch of filler words that are overly hypey when you're texting your friend or your colleague. You get to the point and you say everything that needs to be said, and then you go away and wait for them to respond.

56:53 Scott Ingram: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And along those lines, like, I think it's okay to use emojis. I think it's fun to use GIFs, like, because in our normal normal exchanges, we do that because it's fun. And I'm not trying to sound all stuffy and lame.

57:07 Kyle Rasmussen: No. And you know what, there might be some people… like, there might be someone who's, who's just very formal for whatever reason, and, and it might turn them off that you're so casual or whatever. But I think the vast majority of people take a deep breath when they're like, okay, there's a human on the other end of this just like You know, that's so funny.

57:31 Scott Ingram: You reminded me of, I think I've actually, because I bash on this role every, every now and then, I think I've actually taken it off my LinkedIn profile, but I spent a little bit of time at a company that was very, very old school. And, you know, I went in for kind of that initial, like almost orientation. I mean, I was, long story, like this was not a big formalized thing. I was going into a new department that was really kind of being invented. And the Chief Revenue Officer who had the head of sales walked by and, you know, I just engaged him in conversation. And I heard later that he reached out to my then boss and was like, who's this guy? Who does he think he is that he can talk to me? I was like, oh my God, really? Okay, well, sometimes those things happen and you really… you're like, that's cool, because we were never going to get along.

58:16 Kyle Rasmussen: I love it.

58:17 Scott Ingram: Oh, actually, yeah, I hadn't thought about that in a long time.

58:20 Kyle Rasmussen: Yeah, who's this guy to talk to me?

58:22 Scott Ingram: I'm like, are you kidding me? I work for you. I don't get it.

58:27 Kyle Rasmussen: I don't get it. I don't get why You know, some people want to just… do they enjoy that? You can't tell me that they enjoy being all stiff and formal all day when they go back. I don't know. But are we allowed to go back and talk a little bit more about the SDR?

58:43 Scott Ingram: Are we allowed? Of course.

58:47 Kyle Rasmussen: I just want to get your…

58:48 Scott Ingram: you know that like it's not unusual for these things to sometimes take 2 hours because like it's all allowed. What do you want to talk about?

58:56 Kyle Rasmussen: Well, I just, I just think it's something that like there are so many people, and I can think back to several colleagues of mine at Glassdoor. We would talk about SDR stuff and our eyes would light up and we loved it. And then we got into account executive positions and we felt like we had to like it. There's a difference. We loved being an SDR. We felt like we had to like being an AE. And I liked it. I enjoy all aspects of sales, but I just don't feel like there's that many. I feel like you'll see a post on LinkedIn here or there about how, you know, SDR is changing, but I just don't feel like there are very many conversations being had about, no, like it can be a career and it can be incredibly valuable. Like an enterprise SDR position maybe someday should or could be just as valuable as the enterprise account executive position. But maybe, I mean, have you seen, are there any folks out there who are making progress with this or is it kind of all just talk at this point?

59:57 Scott Ingram: That's a really good question. I don't know that I can think of a specific example where there's an organization that's really headed down that path. I think it is still a little bit all talk at this point, but it's, to me, it's one of those things. This is pretty obvious. And, and especially if you look at the results, right? The people that I'm thinking of, and of course, you know, they're, they're people that have been on this podcast and, and so by definition they are top performers, but if you're doing 200% of your number and the majority of SDRs are not even achieving that number, isn't that at least twice as valuable? And it's sort of a known consistent Like the results are much more predictable versus, okay, now we need to hire another 2 SDRs and we're gonna hope that that works out and maybe they're…

1:00:56 Kyle Rasmussen: and that those 2 together do the work of that one.

1:00:58 Scott Ingram: Exactly. I think that's really the business case, right? Because once you get to that level of performance and you can do it consistently and it's orders of magnitude, it's 2 or 3 times what an average or entry-level or, you know, rookie SDR is able to develop, I don't know, seems to me like that it's more than worth it to pay that person 2 or 3 times as much because at the end of the day, you're making that investment for the result, right? I'm going to pay this much and I'm going to get Y results from a pipeline perspective. So, it's just a different, it's a different way of looking at the math because if you don't do that, then you've got these great performers Who are then going to have to move into another role in the organization where they may or may not be great, or they're just going to get fed up and frustrated and they're going to have to go somewhere else and do it again. Like, again, it just comes back to me. It's as simple as we have to professionalize this role because there's so much value in it. And those who are great are significantly better than, you know, pick your random cohort of rookie SDRs. And by definition, like, aren't almost all SDRs rookies? Because it seems to be like it's just this entry-level role in order to get good at something. So I, I'm planning on sharing… I'm gonna need to do some work. So this month, it's December, I just rode my 450th ride on my Peloton. And congratulations, this is like my 3-month or 3-year anniversary on, on the bike. So when I get to 500…

1:02:32 Kyle Rasmussen: I ask my wife every day for one of those. Oh, you gotta do it, Cody Rigsby.

1:02:36 Scott Ingram: Gotta do it. So when I get to 500, I'm actually planning… or I don't even need to have… need to get that far. What I want to look at is 3 full years of being on the bike, and I'm pretty sure what it's going to show… and I have been, for lack of a better term, an indoor cyclist for a really long time… but over these 3 years I have gotten better every single year. And sales is like that too, right? You make the most gains in the very beginning, right? When you're figuring it out. And if you can avoid the plateau and you can continue to grow, it takes time to get really good. I don't think you can become a great SDR in 6 months. That's not a thing.

1:03:25 Kyle Rasmussen: Heck no.

1:03:25 Scott Ingram: It takes longer. So we have to set up the incentive structures and everything else to allow for that to happen.

1:03:33 Kyle Rasmussen: So I spent a year and a few months as an SDR at Glassdoor. I don't know that I ever felt like I… my numbers were great, but I didn't feel great at the job. I still felt like there was so much more there for me. And even now, I still feel like I wouldn't want to be done being an SDR right now at Talview. There's so much more for me to do and so much more room for improvement. And it's just, imagine if you had a team of 20 SDRs and they all had 3 years of experience of what your pipeline would look like, right? It'd look like a pipeline, probably similar of a team of 40 or 60. Brand new SDRs, right?

1:04:17 Scott Ingram: Sure. I mean, I don't know that it's that obscene, but yeah, I mean, it would be markedly different, but what it requires is a change in the leadership thinking around it. And it also changes kind of the mindset of the SDR because every SDR I talk to is trying to figure out how quickly they can get into an AE role. Yeah, because there's not a great opportunity to be a great SDR.

1:04:45 Kyle Rasmussen: No, you got to make money that way. You got to, you got to make money.

1:04:49 Scott Ingram: Right.

1:04:49 Kyle Rasmussen: And a lot of companies, you can't… a lot of people get into sales because they want to make good money and they don't see SDR as a place to make good money long term.

1:04:59 Scott Ingram: That's it. That's it. It's this entry-level job. It's, you know, how you… I don't know. It's like hazing, sort of.

1:05:06 Kyle Rasmussen: Looks like the same idea.

1:05:08 Scott Ingram: Here's… we're going to sort of punish you for this period of time and then it'll be fun and we'll let you have a real But again, it shouldn't be like that. There really should be an opportunity, and these should be choices, and these should be paths. And you can stay on the SDR path and still make great money and still add great value to the organization and be recognized and rewarded for that. Or you can go down and go down an AE path, or you can go down a leadership path. There's not any one of those is superior to the others. They're different, and you've got to kind of figure out like, what am I best at? Yeah, what aligns with me? What, what turns me on? Because, you know, some… you get all fired up about the SDR stuff and you're like, I don't know, the AEs, they don't seem excited. Well, there's a lot of AEs like, we love what we do.

1:05:53 Kyle Rasmussen: Yeah.

1:05:53 Scott Ingram: So, you know, it's, it's really finding your… finding your spot, like finding where can you have the most impact, or do you just enjoy yourself the most? I mean, that's the other thing I don't think we spend enough time thinking about from a career perspective is Because if you're enjoying the work that you're doing, you're just going to be better at it versus like, oh, this is a chore. This is like some torture that I have to be subjected to. Well, of course you're not going to be good at that.

1:06:19 Kyle Rasmussen: Absolutely. I'm a big believer in like, I don't necessarily prescribe to the idea of like following your passion. I am, however, a huge believer in like getting really, really, really good at something. And as a result, you'll become passionate about it. Like, if you would've told me when I was 13 that I would be… my day would be spent cold calling people and scheduling meetings, I would've said, that sounds so boring. I want nothing to do with that. But like, here I am doing it and I'm getting… and I'm really good at it. And because of that, I love it because I know that there's value in being really good at something that not that many people are really good at.

1:07:06 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Well, this, this is the perfect setup because I always think of this next section as kind of the soapbox section. So you dragged out the soapbox and had me stand on it. Now I'm gonna let you stand on it. Is there something you believe that the average SDR would think is crazy?

1:07:23 Kyle Rasmussen: I think that the average SDR would say that cold calling is dead. And I would say that's crazy. Or I think the average SDR would say that the rest of December is a wash. All their prospects are taking off until the new year. I'm going to check out too, because all my prospects are. I think that's what the average SDR would probably say or be tempted to believe. And I would say that's crazy. Now's the best time.

1:07:51 Scott Ingram: Yep. Yep.

1:07:52 Kyle Rasmussen: Maybe there's not 30 minutes on their schedule anymore that I was talking about, that one 30-minute gap a day. Maybe there's like 3 hours.

1:07:58 Scott Ingram: Or maybe they don't have anything on their calendar yet.

1:08:00 Kyle Rasmussen: Or maybe there's nothing at all. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:08:03 Scott Ingram: What about the flip side? Is there something they believe that you think is crazy?

1:08:08 Kyle Rasmussen: I think that's what I'm answering. I think that SDRs would say that like cold calling is dead. Average SDRs would say cold calling is dead. I think that's crazy. Average SDRs would say that, you know, at this point in the year, it's not worth working that hard because prospects aren't working that hard. They're taking time off. But to the flip side of that question, is there anything that I do that the average rep would think is crazy? I don't think so, because everything I do, everyone knows that the recipe for success is working harder and smarter. But a lot of people just choose not to do that. So I don't think that they would think anything that I'm doing is crazy. They'd be like, yeah, that makes a ton of sense why you're doing well. I just don't want to do it. Okay.

1:08:52 Scott Ingram: So help me resolve this then, right? Because, because you are doing it and yet you described yourself as being naturally lazy. So how are you overcoming that?

1:09:03 Kyle Rasmussen: So I did this thing, it's called the Pomodoros. And it's where you basically, you don't, you don't really block out your day, but you write down your most important tasks of the day where it's like, if you do this one thing, then you'll be happy. And then you kind of list You make your priority list and you don't move on to the next task until you're done with the first task. So prospecting, cold calling, webinar, whatever it is. And I've just kind of implemented it. I don't do it anymore because I think it's just become ingrained in what I do. I'm on my soapbox right now. I'm forgetting the original question that you asked, if that's what they would think is crazy.

1:09:46 Scott Ingram: No, I was trying to resolve your laziness and yet you still work.

1:09:49 Kyle Rasmussen: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry. So that's why I started doing that, because I noticed, I just knew that I tend to be a lazier person. Like my wife asks me to call customer service for whatever we need to call customer service for. I hate doing that. I keep pushing it off. I keep saying, no, I didn't do it. No, I didn't do it. No, I didn't do it. So I know I just need to do the hard things first. And because if I don't, then I'm not going to do it. And if I don't do it, then I'm not going to have a job. I need a job. I'm all or nothing, Scott.

1:10:20 Scott Ingram: With Pomodoro, was it just kind of the mindset of, okay, I'm just going to put my head down and I'm going to work for these 25 minutes and just having it sort of chunked out that way?

1:10:29 Kyle Rasmussen: Yeah. And for some reason that worked better than like calendar blocking, because I think it's easy for me to look over calendar blocking like, oh, I can just move that back. But when you have it on a sheet of paper and you see your number one priority and you can't move on to the next thing until you finish this thing, it's almost And I don't know if it's because I'm competitive, it almost feels like I'm competing against myself, which maybe gets me out of that lazy mindset where I'm like, okay, this is a game now. I got to complete this to get to this next stage of the game. And I think that's kind of like that mindset shift is what from 7 to 3 or 4 gets me out of that lazy natural tendency that I can get into. If I'm not careful.

1:11:15 Scott Ingram: What advice do you have for somebody that is just starting in an SDR role today?

1:11:20 Kyle Rasmussen: Take the formula that your company is giving you and look around at all of your peers, and especially the successful ones. Figure out what they're doing and don't get too crazy. Just do what they're doing, but do more of it. So go set up a one-on-one with your the top performing SDR on your on your team. Really try and understand how they set up their day, what they prioritize, figure out why they're number one, and then go do those things, but do more of it and you'll be right there alongside them or above them.

1:11:57 Scott Ingram: What about somebody that is further in, right? So maybe they came into this role and we're going to assume that they're in the typical trap, right? So they're trying to make their way to an AE role. They've been at this for 6 or 8 or 9 months. But they're not making their numbers, which is obviously not going to get them to that role. What advice do you have for them to just kind of turn it around?

1:12:20 Kyle Rasmussen: I think stop focusing so much on the future. I think it can be really, really discouraging. And just, I've had a lot of friends and colleagues who are in that spot or have been in that spot where they're so focused on getting promoted because they're so miserable in their current role as an SDR because they're not hitting their quotas. Or they just need to get out as soon as possible to go make more money or whatever it is. My advice would be just take a step back and figure out, focus on becoming great at what you're currently doing and just stop fixating so much on the future. And if you become great at what you're doing and focus on controlling what you can control, it's kind of a recurring theme in my life is just control the things that you can control. And the results will take care of themselves. The opportunities will come up without you having to necessarily pursue them even. That was how I got to Talview. I controlled the things that I could control. I don't… ultimately Glassdoor, they had to lay off a large portion of their workforce. I was a part of that, but I always controlled the things that I could control. And because of that, an opportunity came up with my prior boss of mine who had left Glassdoor. He gave me this job at Talview because I became an expert at the things that I did and didn't focus on the next thing necessarily. And yeah, that would be my advice.

1:13:43 Scott Ingram: Yeah, great, great, great advice. Kyle, what would you want to know from other top-performing SDRs?

1:13:50 Kyle Rasmussen: I just want to know like what makes them tick. I think there's certainly common threads. I think most top-performing SDRs work smarter and harder. I think I think they manage their time well, like they have their priorities straight. But I think there's nuances in the way every top SDR does things. And the more I can figure out what those nuances are and I can take those and make them my own, even better I'll be. That's why I like taking all of the content out there from folks like Josh Braun and Sam Nelson and all those people that I've mentioned and making it my own because They're at the top of the top.

1:14:29 Scott Ingram: Yeah. So, so we've got a lot of these interviews. We'll add Kyle to the list at top1.fm/sdr where you'll find all the SDR interviews. Kyle, what is your nuance like? Is there something that you're doing that's just kind of a little bit of special sauce, special Kyle sauce that we haven't yet talked about?

1:14:46 Kyle Rasmussen: Yeah. I mean, I talk about how I have fun doing the job and that's my why, but I sprinkle fun into everything. So like when I cold call someone, I have a big smile on my face and I tell them I'm cold calling them and I give them the… hey, I'm cold calling you. Do you want to hang up on me? And 99% of the time they start cracking up. And then that just sets the stage for a great conversation because I was myself. I feel good. Like they gave me the permission to talk and we just end up having a good human-to-human conversation. And so I think just like I sprinkle a lot of… I don't know if it's humor. I just, I just want to have fun when I'm talking to customers. And I think they remember that. They know I'm not a robot.

1:15:32 Scott Ingram: Yeah.

1:15:32 Kyle Rasmussen: And it shows. Like, I'll have people answer the phone and we'll have a conversation and it'll turn into like, hey, it's not a good fit. But very rarely do people just hang up on me. They know, not interested. People email me back, not interested all the time. Those people can go somewhere, but the people on the phone, when I actually get a real human-to-human interaction, it's always a good conversation. I think because of me lowering myself and not taking myself too seriously.

1:16:04 Scott Ingram: How does that sound exactly? I'd love to hear like that opening line.

1:16:08 Kyle Rasmussen: Yeah. Hey, Scott.

1:16:11 Scott Ingram: Hello.

1:16:11 Kyle Rasmussen: Hey, I'm cold calling you. Would you like to hang up on me or can I tell you why I'm calling?

1:16:17 Scott Ingram: I can see how that makes people laugh. Yeah, my response should be, yeah, man, what do you got?

1:16:22 Kyle Rasmussen: Yeah. And I don't even know, sometimes, sometimes I say my name at the front, sometimes I don't. I don't necessarily have a, hey, do this every single time. And it's not like I on purpose forget to say my name. I forgot to say my name there, but I don't think they care.

1:16:39 Scott Ingram: Yeah.

1:16:39 Kyle Rasmussen: Yeah.

1:16:40 Scott Ingram: That's fantastic. That's fantastic, dude. This has been incredible. I guess I'll ask one more time because I kind of did it with my nuanced question there, but is there anything else that you were hoping that we would cover in this conversation? That we just somehow didn't get to?

1:16:53 Kyle Rasmussen: No, I mean, I just think that it's so important that SDRs don't define and find their self-worth in their number. You have no control over your number. There are things you can control to get you to that number, but don't put all of your fulfillment or whatever it is in hitting your quota or exceeding your quota. That's a recipe for disaster. None of us are perfect. There are going to be things that come up out of our control that cause us to miss our quotas. But that's… our quota is not who we are. How we go about approaching our quota and the ways in which we do that and the integrity we bring to our job and the work ethic and things like that, that's who you are. And I've been there. I've been someone who defined who I was based on where I was that in comparison to my quota, and it's not necessarily a great place to be.

1:17:48 Scott Ingram: Love it, love it. So I always try and wrap these things up, and we, we talked about a lot of stuff, covered a lot of ground. What would you challenge our listener to do right now over the course of the next, say, 1 to 2 weeks to improve themselves and improve their results? What's the action?

1:18:04 Kyle Rasmussen: Yeah, so if they want to improve their results, I would take a step back, look at the last last couple months of activity all the way down to from how many phone calls you've been making to set a meeting, how many emails you've been sending to set a meeting, etc., and figuring out, coming up with an equation, kind of reverse engineering and figuring out, okay, what kind of activity did I put in to get these results? And then I don't know if what, if it's money that motivates Figure out what percentage to quota you need to hit to make however much money you want to make, and then just turn it into an equation. And by looking at past data, that should help you determine what you need to do moving forward to hit your goals and control those things along the way.

1:18:54 Scott Ingram: So if I understood that right, I'm basically getting to a point that I determine every time I pick up the phone, it's $15.

1:19:02 Kyle Rasmussen: Kind of idea.

1:19:02 Scott Ingram: Correct.

1:19:03 Kyle Rasmussen: Yeah, yeah, exactly. So that's why 50 is that number for me. I know that if I reach out to 50 people every day, that I'm gonna hit the goals that, that I want to hit. But I don't think about the goals like we talked about earlier. I just think about hitting those things that I can control. I feel like a broken record.

1:19:23 Scott Ingram: I think, I think that's a good thing. Hopefully folks are getting the point. And, you know, like I said earlier, I think I think the timing of this is absolutely perfect, right? As we get ready to start a new year, I think this is a great way to think about this and to do the goal setting. Or like I said, I think of it as habit setting. Like, what are those things? Like, if you can take the data, do the research, it takes some work to get to that point and sort of back into the number, but you can figure out and get this nailed down. And I mean, I love the idea of… I mean, obviously you've got it to, hey, it's 50 a But what if you knew that every single time I pick up the phone, that's $15 or $25? You know, whatever your math is. I don't know what the math is. I'm making up math. That's powerful. And if that's your driver, the results come when you make the consistent actions, when you take the consistent actions.

1:20:19 Kyle Rasmussen: Yep, exactly. And as a result, by taking those actions and being disciplined And they'll start to see they don't stress about the things that they were stressing about before.

1:20:30 Scott Ingram: Love it.

1:20:30 Kyle Rasmussen: It's amazing.

1:20:31 Scott Ingram: Kyle, this has been a blast. Thank you for taking the time and sharing your story with us.

1:20:35 Kyle Rasmussen: Yeah, absolutely. It was great talking, Scott. Thanks for listening to the Sales Success Stories podcast.

1:20:42 Scott Ingram: To be sure you never miss an episode and for an invitation to our Sales Success Community powered by Influitive, subscribe to our newsletter at top1summit.com.

1:20:49 Kyle Rasmussen: Top1.fm.