117: Playing the Long Game as an SDR with Qayam Noorani of Klue

0:00 Scott Ingram: This episode is brought to you thanks to the generous support of Gong, Terryberry, and Vidyard. To check them out and to check out all of our sponsors who are supporting you and your learning through this show, just click over to top1.fm/sponsors.

0:24 Scott Ingram: 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.

0:39 Scott Ingram: Today on the Sales Success Stories podcast, my guest is Qayam Noorani. Qayam was recently promoted to an account executive role at Klue after an incredible run in an SDR-type role where he put up some incredible numbers. Welcome to the show, Qayam.

0:54 Qayam Noorani: Thanks, Scott. Super excited to be here.

0:55 Scott Ingram: Absolutely. And I need to give a shout out to Jacob Gebrewald, who connected us. Jacob is another super impressive guy. And his recommendations carry a lot of weight. So thank you, Jacob. All right, let's get started like we always do with some immediate value and talk about the 3 things that you believe have contributed the most to your success in sales, especially from a pipeline generation perspective. What are those?

1:20 Qayam Noorani: For sure. So I think the number one thing is just, just being hungry. Like it really boils down to you really got to want it. Nothing comes easy in sales, right? I'm sure everybody that's listening to this knows that it's a tough job and it's a grind and You got to have a chip on your shoulder. You got to have something that you kind of revert back to in your mind that will always keep you pushing, whether you're at the top of the leaderboard, the bottom of the leaderboard, whatever the case may be. So that was definitely the first thing that I think stuck with me and will always stay with me for sure. Number 2 is actually really interesting. This is something that I picked up kind of naturally and organically. It's just having this weird obsession of just having to know everything about everyone's deals all the time. And it's actually a funny story how that started, Scott. I'd love to tell you that if that's cool.

2:03 Scott Ingram: Let's do it. We call it Sales Success Stories, so you're allowed to tell stories.

2:06 Qayam Noorani: Fair enough. Yeah. So I started at Klue. The first like 4 or 5 months I was in an SDR role, just trying to figure things out. I had nothing, like no experience in sales. I didn't really know what I was doing at all. So I kind of got the grip on things and was doing okay. I kind of snuck my way to the top of the leaderboard and I was competing against some folks who, who weren't giving me too much trouble at the time. And then we hired this guy, Nick Ross. And Nick Ross came into the company and I immediately knew like he was going to be a challenge. He was going to be someone that I had to pay attention to, to make sure that I could always stay on top of. So what I did was I would just obsess over everything that he was doing. Anytime he put up a company on the board, I would look it up and figure out exactly how he did it. And that just grew from like an obsession of knowing what Nick was doing all the time into like this awesome value add where I was learning all this cool stuff that was working for Nick and not working for Nick. And I was able to implement all those same strategies and, and that really helped me up my game. And then that grew from just obsessing over Nick to obsessing over everyone from people at the bottom of the leaderboard all the way to the top, because everybody, whether you're at the bottom or the top, you're doing something right or you're doing something wrong. And there's a lot of learnings from those. So that was definitely one of the biggest things for me.

3:19 Scott Ingram: I'm going to interrupt Qayam right here to share something with you that happened after our interview. I knew that we were gonna bring Gong back on as a sponsor, and without telling him why, I asked him this very simple question. How much of your obsessive curiosity is powered by Gong?

3:35 Qayam Noorani: Oh, a lot. Gong is awesome. Gong is crazy. I'm like, sometimes I'll go on Gong and I'll just like skip to the end of somebody's demo just to see how they wrapped it up, or like just listen to the discovery of how they did things. Or like, I'll give you an example. Jacob closed this one deal recently. Masterful work, like really, really, really good work. And like, it made me so curious to see, like, he built a business case for this deal and I had to build a business case. So I asked him if I could look at his and just kind of pick and pluck from it. And it was really well done. Did a really great job at quantifying the problem and quantifying the solution and all that stuff. And yeah, and that just made me want to go and dig into that demo and like understand exactly how Jacob asked those questions. Like, what did he ask to get the answers to this stuff? And like, how did he navigate the conversation? Close the deal so quickly, you know? So Gong is… I love Gong. I don't know how I used to do my job without Gong.

4:24 Scott Ingram: I don't think I could have said it any better. Click over to top1.fm/gong to check them out. Now back to Qayam and his final success factor.

4:34 Qayam Noorani: And then lastly, you can't succeed unless you have a great team behind you. So I think Klue really did a great job at being super picky about the types of people that we hire and not just trying to hire people who are like really smart. From like an education perspective or, or just have a lot of experience, like really looking for the person behind everything. I had no, no reason to be hired at the time that I was hired. I had no sales experience. Jason, our CEO, was, was starting a company and it was really important that he had a strong SDR team behind him and he took a chance on me, which I thought was pretty cool given that there was no real reason he should have done that. And it worked out for both of us. So those are the 3 things I think that really helped me.

5:12 Scott Ingram: That's awesome. So I want to start with, you talked about having a chip on your shoulder. Like what, what is your chip?

5:19 Qayam Noorani: Yeah, that's a good question. My chip is my parents both immigrated here when they were young from, from Africa and India. And like, I was never a super, like, we were never a super wealthy family. We weren't poor by any means, but it was like, there was a lot of always looking at like what I wanted and what I wasn't able to have at the time. And, and I always just told myself, I will do whatever it takes to make sure that when I'm older, I'm comfortable and I can make sure that my kids and my family are comfortable. And just like always make sure that we're in good standing and you can't get to a place like that. For someone like me, actually, like there's no way I could ever get to a place like that with anyone's help. Like no one's going to help me get there. I got to get there myself. I always knew that growing up. So that's my chip, man. Like I just gotta, I gotta grind and I gotta make things happen for myself because nobody's going to do this stuff for you. So yeah.

6:05 Scott Ingram: Yeah. I mean, and not to lump you in with a lot of other people, but I feel like I've heard this as a consistent theme with It's like the immigrant chip, right? Like immigrant and their kids. Like it's, hey, my family made all these sacrifices to get us here. And now we've, I've gotta, I've gotta make good on my end of the bargain.

6:24 Qayam Noorani: It's crazy. It's crazy. And like growing up, just watching how hard my dad worked for everybody, I guess that kind of just instilled itself in me. Like it's, I guess it's the reason why I'm able to grind so hard without it feeling like such a difficult thing to do. And yeah, I think the immigrant story, like, I'm not surprised to hear that a lot of other folks go through that, Scott, but it's probably because it really works. Like, it's a real chip that really drives people. So that's really cool to hear.

6:50 Scott Ingram: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Now, I love this, this obsessive curiosity thing. I can certainly identify with that. But I'm curious about… you talked about even looking at the folks that were at the bottom of the leaderboard. What are you seeing? We'll talk a lot about what's working and what you've done that's worked. But I'm curious, like, are you seeing commonalities these at the bottom in terms of what doesn't work and where people get stuck?

7:16 Qayam Noorani: Yeah, honestly, absolutely. It's really funny. Like I think folks at the bottom, sometimes I think one of the biggest commonalities is, and I'm talking specifically about the SDR role here, they're trying to take the SDR role and play a short game. And I know the SDR job is like a very, it's kind of like a quick job, right? You get in and you get out kind of thing. But if you're trying to approach prospects with that short game mindset, like Hop on a call with me and let's talk right now. You know, like it's the first email I've sent you, but let's talk. Or I'm going to call you right now and ask for your time. That kind of thing. It just doesn't work. Like you got to get into your prospects' heads a little bit and try and understand what makes them tick. What can I email them today right now that's not going to piss them off? That's going to actually make them, even if they don't respond to the email, just say, hmm, like, okay. And just move on, you know? So yeah, just playing a little bit of chess rather than checkers, I think. I don't know if that gives enough context. Feel free to dig in there.

8:07 Scott Ingram: Yeah, well, we definitely will. I want to come back to it, right? But that idea that even though it is sort of a transactional feeling role, you can still play it as a, as a longer game, right? Because if you do, if you do churn that person and you kind of burn them out, you can't go back there. And maybe just the timing wasn't right, which is often the time.

8:28 Qayam Noorani: That's true. And I have a really funny story to tell you later on, Scott, about how sometimes you actually can go back there. But we'll get there.

8:35 Scott Ingram: All right. All right. Good tease. Good tease. Well, why don't we, why don't we contextualize this? Because you have just moved into a new role, probably because you've performed really, really well, but talk about kind of your, your history, what you've been doing, your results. I'll just kind of lump that all into one thing and let you talk us through that.

8:52 Qayam Noorani: Yeah, for sure. So my history is really interesting. I went to school, did a psych degree. I didn't really know what I wanted to do with my life when I went to university. Definitely didn't want to be in sales at that time. So I did the psych degree. I thought it was really cool. I wanted to be a psychologist, but I didn't like the research aspect of it. So when I was finishing school, I kind of transitioned out of psych and did a business minor. That was really helpful and it gave me enough of a sense that I knew I wanted to be in the business world. So I, like many other people, got a job corporate, started working at a bank. It was cool. It was interesting. I got to learn a few things, but I definitely didn't learn as fast as I wanted to. So I ended up just like kind of digging around for startups and I found Klue. And I still at this point, Scott, I did not want to be in sales, which is super funny. I just thought Klue was a really cool company and I thought Jason was a cool founder. So I was like, my only in here is to start as an SDR. So I'm going to do that. And I started as an SDR and what do you know? I loved it. And I think part of the reason I loved it is just because it's, it kind of aligns really well with all the things that we just talked about, right? Like it's a grind. You got to have a chip on your shoulder. You got to be able to like overcome any challenge. And you're going to get a bajillion nos, right? And that one yes has to carry you through everything. So that really lined up well with my values. And I think one thing that was really cool was just the fact that sales, you're always on a leaderboard, right? So you can always see where you are. And I think just being a competitive person and playing sports my whole life, that kind of lined up well with me too. So I started working and it was really funny. I hit my ramp schedule. I think it was like a 3 or 4 or 5 month ramp schedule and one month something just clicked. And Scott, I can't even tell you what it is. Like one month I went from, from hitting like my, my regular quota to doing 160% of it. And from that day on, I never did less than that. I was always between 200% and 400% of my monthly quota. So those were my results all lumped together really quick. Does that give you enough context?

10:46 Scott Ingram: Yeah, that's fantastic. Gosh, I want to, we'll come back to it. I'm going to dig. We're going to figure out what the heck that switch was and what clicked.

10:55 Qayam Noorani: Love it.

10:56 Scott Ingram: Because yeah, there's got to be something there, and hopefully we can help other folks kind of find that switch. Because I, I think that this idea shows up with some regularity, and, and it's either… it's either a switch, and sometimes it's a dimmer, right? Sometimes it's kind of a gradual thing, and you just kind of start to figure it out, and it becomes more comfortable. So we'll come back to that. But so you spent, what, about 2 years in that in that SDR-focused role?

11:22 Qayam Noorani: Yeah, that's correct.

11:23 Scott Ingram: And then you were also, you were helping kind of coach and lead the team in some capacity as well, weren't you?

11:29 Qayam Noorani: Yeah, that kind of happened naturally and organically as well. I never like wanted to be in a leadership position or never envisioned myself there, but just like working with the team was cool because we're always looking to elevate and do things outside of our job descriptions. So one, easy way that I thought I could provide value to the team was just with SDR-related stuff, right? Like, how can I help you book more meetings? How can you build better lists? How can you do a better job at targeting and things like that? So that was like my bread and butter. It was stuff that came naturally to me and easy to me. So it was kind of easy to transfer that knowledge over to other people. I didn't necessarily like working on onboarding and training schedules and stuff like that. So that naturally gravitated to other SDRs who wanted to take that over in a leadership capacity. But I was very focused on like the sales aspect of it.

12:16 Scott Ingram: Got it. Got it. And like what percentage of your time were those activities?

12:21 Qayam Noorani: When it started out, it was definitely a lot less of my time than, than actually doing the job was. And by the end of it, it was, it was way more of my time. Like it was, I was spending probably like 70% of my time doing things outside of like actually trying to book meetings and do things for myself.

12:36 Scott Ingram: Wow. But still, even as it ramped up to that level, you were still able to maintain that, that 200 to 400% level of booking meetings.

12:44 Qayam Noorani: Yeah, I think it actually made me better at my job because I knew that I had to make do with those 3 to 4 hours that I had, right? Like, I had no choice and I can't make an excuse and say like, oh, I was helping other people. That's why I didn't hit my numbers, right? So I just had to like find a better way and just be more efficient with my time. And I think that came down to like a mental thing more than anything, just like not wasting time thinking about what to do next, find something to do and do it.

13:10 Scott Ingram: Yeah, that's brilliant. And you know, it's, it's interesting. I've heard this come up on, well, I guess I don't hear what happens on LinkedIn. I've read this a little bit on LinkedIn, but just this idea of this is kind of the value of having a side hustle too, right? It sort of forces, and this is certainly true for me, it just forces this massive level of efficiency and effectiveness because otherwise you just, you can't get it all, all done. And so it's, it's just that. You know that this is going to limit the amount of time that I have. So I better really maximize the way that I use that time.

13:43 Qayam Noorani: 100%.

13:44 Scott Ingram: But today you're in an AE role, right?

13:47 Qayam Noorani: Yeah, that's right.

13:48 Scott Ingram: How's that going so far?

13:49 Qayam Noorani: Oh, it's humbling. It's very humbling. When I was an SDR, I used to look at my AEs, I'd be sitting in demos and I'd say, man, I wish, I wish I could run this demo, or, man, you should have said this when the prospect asked you that question. And It's so funny to be on the other end of it. It's very humbling. It's a challenging job for sure. It reminds me a lot of when I first started as an SDR, like just getting nervous going into calls and like sometimes I'll be talking to executives and it's very nerve-wracking and stuff. So it's, it's a lot, it's a lot to learn for sure. Yeah.

14:20 Scott Ingram: Well, and I'm sure that obsessive curiosity piece is really carrying over. Were you looking at all the behind the scenes with what the AEs were doing when you were still in the SDR seat, or is that sort of a newer thing that I'm sure you've carried over?

14:33 Qayam Noorani: To some extent, yeah, for sure. I would definitely pay attention to like as much follow-up activity that I could try and get a taste of like what legal and procurement experiences were like and stuff like that. But it's really hard to really understand things until you're fully in it.

14:48 Scott Ingram: Right, right. Yeah. A little too early to talk about that, but obviously you're on a good career progression and hopefully the same thing kind of clicks into place for you and you'll have that role solved and you'll be running circles around everybody else once again. Right.

15:00 Qayam Noorani: That obsessive curiosity piece though has definitely, has definitely kicked in already, Scott. Like there's, there's one person on my team, Chelsea. I hope you listen to this. Shout out Chelsea. She's awesome. She joined the company not too long ago and she's just a great person. And we both started in the role around the same time. So she's like my person, like we compete, but we're friends. And, and anytime anything happens with her deals, her deals or her pipe, you can, you can bet money that I'll know about it.

15:24 Scott Ingram: So love it. Love it. Well, that, okay. So that brings us back to, I really didn't dig into just being part of a great team. And this has been such a big theme. I actually think we're going to carry it forward into the Sales Success Summit this year. I'm really… I've become obsessed with this concept of world-class sales teams. And you actually touched on a piece that I've been thinking about a lot, which is while sales, at least from a leaderboard perspective, is an individual sport, right? Like we're all competing individually and we have individual numbers and quotas and things like that. And we talk about sales being a team sport, but in some ways it's kind of not if you're not doing the type of collaboration that you just talked about.

16:10 Qayam Noorani: I love that, Scott. You're totally right. I think that's a perfect segue into our team. And I think that really boils down into a little bit of a culture thing as well, Scott. Like you can have a culture where it's a bunch of pieces coming together and hopefully creating a puzzle, or you can have a culture where the puzzle is everything, right? Like you need to solve the puzzle together. So I think at Klue, when I started at the company, we were very small. We were like 20 people. So I think it was… Jason did a great job at like instilling this culture of like humbleness, but competitiveness and supportiveness. Jason's our CEO, by the way. And that was, was really cool. And we have this weird motto at Klue where everybody's super competitive, but we're really supportive. So the same person that you're competing against to beat and that you're just paying attention to everything that's happening in their pipe and their leaderboard. You go to them and ask them a question and they'll take 30 minutes out of their day, stop whatever they're doing, sit down with you and help you with what you need help with and help you get to the same place that they're at too. And I think that just helps everyone level up. Like even myself, when I first started in this whole like coaching leadership capacity, it was a little like strange to share my secrets with everyone else. You know, like the stuff that really helped me. Get to the top. It was a, it was a weird dynamic to share those tips and those secrets with other people. But what I learned is sharing that stuff makes you better because they'll take whatever you taught them and they'll tweak it and they'll put their own spin on it and they'll use that. And then you can learn from that too and get even better than where you just were. So that whole team dynamic is really cool.

17:42 Scott Ingram: This is a great spot to talk about Terryberry because I think this type of dynamic is all about culture. And Terryberry is all about building cultures of recognition. What gets recognized gets done. So recognizing performance and teamwork can change the game. And Terryberry's platform can help with their award-winning 360 recognition platform. To learn more, just click over to top1.fm/terryberry. That's T-E-R-R-Y-B-E-R-R-Y. And now back to Me. Yeah, man. I'm actually thinking back to, because both of these things kind of came up for me here recently. I was catching up on the Michael Jordan documentary, The Last Dance. And so I'd been watching that, but I grew up with the Lakers in the '80s. And so I didn't like Jordan because I was a Magic fan and I was a Lakers fan. And what Magic did, like he, every level, like high school, college, NBA, every level that he played. His teams went to the championships, and his stat was the triple-double. And so the triple-double, if you're not familiar with that, it's double digits in points, assists, and rebounds. And for me, like, the key to what Magic was is the assists piece, because I doubt that Jordan ever got double digits in assists. He'd just take the shot, right? And so it was just sort of a different thing. But I… that, I think, is sort of what encapsulates it, from that sort of… that type of team that is about how do we elevate everybody's game. And when you're at the top of the leaderboard when everybody's playing their best game, that's even more satisfying than, hey, I know these secrets, but I'm not sharing them because it's… it's what allows me to get to the top of the leaderboard. Like, that's… that's sort of a crummy way to play the game.

19:39 Qayam Noorani: 100%. 100%. And you know what, Scott, I'm a big basketball guy, so I know what you're talking about when you talk about Magic and Jordan. If I had to say what kind of basketball player I was, I would probably peg myself as Kobe Bryant because for the first year and a half of my SDR career, I was selfish. I was just trying to focus on myself and take every shot and score 81 points a game. And then I got to a point where it was like, this is not fun anymore. I got to start lifting everyone up. And if you watch Kobe at the end of his career, he really took a a shift from trying to score a lot of points to getting a lot of assists and playing the point. So I think that's a good example of kind of how my trajectory went.

20:19 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's, that's such a great example. And I think the other thing that ties in that has also been just a significant theme here recently is, and we'll get to it with you too, cause I'm sure you've got it, is just the discipline. Right. And Kobe, if it, well, all of them, I mean, Kobe, Jordan, all of those guys for sure. Like the level of discipline. And just putting in the work was extraordinary.

20:42 Qayam Noorani: 100%. It's crazy. And you know what, Scott, like Kobe's my hero. I followed him from when I was a kid. So that discipline definitely instilled itself in me and just coming from, you know, my parents were immigrants too. So they were big on discipline and behavior and stuff like that as well. But yeah, I think discipline mostly just came from my dad. Like he was a very disciplined person. He never like was late to anything. You know, he had this saying that tomorrow never comes. So if you are thinking about doing something and you're like, I'll just do it tomorrow, that's not going to happen. Like, do it right now. So just like little things like that. Yeah.

21:18 Scott Ingram: And what does that actually look like for you? Like, when you think about your own discipline, what are those kind of core things?

21:24 Qayam Noorani: Yeah, for sure. Core discipline. I'm trying to think of what would be actually positive to say because some of my discipline is actually not positive. Like, I'll start working and I won't eat like I'm supposed to. I won't eat breakfast. I'll just start grinding and working and not stop. But discipline for me, maybe I'm not as disciplined as I'd want to be. Discipline for me would actually be taking better care of myself outside of the job, like waking up early and eating breakfast and giving myself some time to get into my day. Whereas I come into work and I just start working. And maybe that's a different kind of discipline, but for me, Yeah, it's a bit of a struggle right now.

22:01 Scott Ingram: That's interesting. Like I said, we'll definitely come back to that. I'll work on dissecting your day and we'll talk about what you are doing and maybe we'll talk about what you wish you were doing. Yeah. We'll let you inspire yourself in addition to everybody that's listening. I wonder if, I mean, you had an extraordinary level of success in these couple of years as an SDR. If you were starting over, is there anything that you would have done differently?

22:27 Qayam Noorani: Absolutely. One thing that I never did, Scott, was like, and even to this day, and people that are listening to this podcast are going to cringe and they might even like, yeah, I don't know what they're going to think when I say this, but I've never listened to a sales podcast or read a sales book or done any kind of like formal sales training or learning at all. So if I could start my career over, I don't think I would dive into like every single sales book or methodology out there. But I definitely would pick one that I think really resonated with me and tried to instill some things from that into my game and just tried to learn some things from that because my learning was all organic and it was all natural and it was all from watching other people. So I think that would have really helped me.

23:10 Scott Ingram: Sure, sure. Well, I also happen to be a big fan of the watching other people style. So one of the places that your episode will be listed For folks that are particularly interested in the, the SDR space, if you go to top1.fm/sdr, I've built just a list of all of the SDR-specific episodes like this. So you can hear other folks like Qayam who have really, really excelled in the SDR role. So if that's of interest, go check that out. That's a really great resource. I wonder if we're going to do kind of the storytelling thing a little bit more. What's your favorite sales story so far?

23:49 Qayam Noorani: Oh, this is a really funny one. When I started as an SDR, I had no idea how to reach out to people, how frequently to reach out to people. I wasn't putting myself in the prospect's head, you know, like now when I send an email or I reach out to somebody, I think about how they receive that email. And I think that helps me with my success a bit because I'm not sending emails that are pissing people off. Or giving like this like negative feeling, like go away or stop annoying me. But back then I did not know how to do that. So I was reaching out to this one prospect at this company called Guidewire. And it was really, really funny how like looking back at those emails and I have them open right now, it was really strange. Like I almost had this sense of entitlement that folks should talk to me and it was just a matter of like finding a time with people. And I was reaching out to this one person and I was like, hey, Let's talk. And I would email her again and go, hey, let's talk. And I emailed her again and, you know, in other words going, hey, let's talk. And she got back to me saying, hi, Qayam, with all due respect, I think I'd benefit more by spending my hour studying this resource. And it was a hyperlink. And when I clicked this resource, it took me to an article that was called How to Politely Handle Aggressive Salespeople. So yeah. Hilarious. I'll never, ever, ever, ever forget that.

25:12 Scott Ingram: Wow.

25:12 Qayam Noorani: All right.

25:12 Scott Ingram: So we're gonna put a link to that in your show notes episode for sure. So I'll make sure I get that from you. I wonder, is that one of the things? So I'm going to figure out where this clicked for you. Was it more of like the external? Was it you kind of figured out, okay, here's what's working. Here's kind of the style. Here's what's resonating. Or was it more internal? Was it something just from a mindset standpoint in what you were doing and just kind of taking ownership of it and running with it from there?

25:44 Qayam Noorani: I think it was a bit of both, actually. And now that we're talking about this, I think I'm starting to formulate what clicked at that time. And I think it was actually around the time that this happened as well, that this story happened, because this was about 6 months into my SDR career. But it was definitely a bit of both. It was definitely some external, like learning what messaging and positioning and how to resonate with prospects. What they actually care about, what they care about outside of what I'm trying to sell them was very helpful in understanding how I could resonate with what I am trying to sell them. But part of it was internal. And I think this was a good story, a good example of that, because in this story, right, I was playing the short game. If you think about it, I'm just trying to get her to give me her time. It's like, give me time. Let's talk. Let's chat. I can help you. I can help you. And Sales is a relationship game. Like everybody knows sales is a relationship game and so is the SDR game. So I think when I realized that I was, I was trying to skip a step here, I was trying to skip the whole relationship piece and just try to get people on a call with me. Nobody wants to talk to you because of your product. Like people want to talk to you because of you. And yeah, sometimes they have a need for your product, but a lot of the times, like it has a lot to do with you as a person. So the thing that clicked for me internally was just that I got to start approaching these people in such a way where I'm earning their respect. I'm earning a place at the table before I ask for anything. I got to provide enough value. I got to give you things to a point where you now agree that I'm a valuable asset to have in your network. Then maybe I can ask for your time and then you might give it to me. You still might not, but you might give it to me. So I think that helped me a lot.

27:23 Scott Ingram: Oh, we're going to come back to this, but I first want to know, did you ever turn that around? Did you ever get a meeting with her?

27:29 Qayam Noorani: I did. Yeah, I did.

27:30 Scott Ingram: So finish the story. How did that happen? Play this through.

27:33 Qayam Noorani: Yeah. This has happened on multiple occasions where I've messed up with a prospect and they've given me feedback and it's honestly quite easy to convert those people, right? Like they have told you exactly what you need to do to fix the problem. And the prospect in this situation, maybe she wasn't as direct, like You need to be less aggressive. But she definitely made me understand like what I was doing wrong, right? So I gave her a lot of time, right? Like I gave her over a year. I was like, I'm not going to bother you or bug you for over a year. And she came inbound one day and downloaded some content and I reached out to her and I was like, hey, I hope you remember me. I was the one that you absolutely destroyed with this email. My whole company still reverts to it and laughs at it all the time. Let me know if you ever want to chat again about competitive. I know, you know, this wasn't a priority at the time, but I was much more like passive. I wasn't actually asking for anything. I just offered up the chance for her to learn more about the company again. And she got back to me and she was like, thanks, Qayam. Like, I think she appreciated that I referenced that whole thing that happened before and didn't make the same mistake again immediately. And she was like, she gave me a timeline to follow up and I followed up in that timeline and she popped on a meeting with me. So yeah.

28:53 Scott Ingram: That's, that's so good. You know, what's really interesting is the episode that will come before yours. I actually just recorded it yesterday, but it'll be, it'll be a couple of weeks before this. We were talking about a lot about mentors and one of the kind of key pieces being circling back and sharing, sharing the feedback and just letting them know like, hey, I heard you. Here's what I did to try and fix it. Right. So I feel like it's a little bit of that. I'm actually kind of personally struggling with and just, well, not struggling with, just sort of thinking about, does it make sense? Is it worth the effort to provide feedback like this on all the crummy outreach that we get? Because I get a lot of it and I'm watching. What Kyle Coleman is doing. So if you follow Kyle on LinkedIn, he's literally responding to every bit of cold outreach and giving some little bit of guidance or tip. And I keep thinking about, gosh, you know, does it make sense to do that? How can I scale that in sort of a useful way? Because the crummy outreach probably comes in, in, you know, 4 or 5 different consistent categories. So, you know, maybe I record a daily sales tip about each of those and just point people at that or something like that, because To your point earlier, I think a lot of people don't get the coaching, don't get the training, and they're just learning through this trial by fire and they're failing because they just don't know what to do. They don't know that what they're doing totally sucks.

30:23 Qayam Noorani: And part of that too is just like, I'll tell you one thing, Scott. Like when I first started, like I had an ego and if people tried to give me feedback like this, like a random person tried to give me feedback, like I wasn't going to take that, you know, like I would brush that off. I had an ego. It took some time for me to get to a place where I was like, I don't know everything. I actually know nothing. And I need to start listening to other people, especially the people that I'm trying to sell to.

30:46 Scott Ingram: Man. So is that part of it? Was that another ingredient? So when did this happen? Like how far in were you into the SDR role? You'd been making your numbers where you just turned it on and went to 2 to 4x.

30:58 Qayam Noorani: Yeah, it was probably 5 months in, about 5 months in.

31:03 Scott Ingram: And was that about the same place? I mean, it sounds like this particular incident was certainly along those lines where you you had to kind of humbly accept this type of feedback. So was that one of the ingredients as well?

31:15 Qayam Noorani: I would not be surprised if this like really kicked me into gear because I like, I'll never forget this, right? Like this is when you asked me that question, this was the first thing that came to my mind immediately. Like I will never ever forget this story. And I think because it's so cemented in my mind, it must've had some serious impact. And I don't think it's a surprise at all that it lines up really well with when I started to really click with the role. So this was a lot, like this taught me a lot, right? This taught me, there's a lot of little nuanced things that this taught me, but I think this was like my first taste of turning the short game into a long game.

31:50 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Well, you're, you're starting to inspire me and make me think that, you know what, this may be worth the effort because even if, if most people ignore the feedback, but it turns one person around. And they're able to really excel in sales and do it and do it well. Right. So much of what I think about that I want to achieve with this show is the professionalization of sales. And the professionals are doing what you're now doing and not what you were doing in those first 3, 4 months.

32:20 Qayam Noorani: Totally. I think you absolutely should provide as much feedback as you can, Scott. Like if you help one person like me, you'll turn their whole… you could potentially turn their whole career around. Right. Or give them that moment where like, things click and now all of a sudden they're on this like insane trajectory of learning. So I think it's absolutely worth it. I think Kyle Coleman is, is doing great work and he's, he's obviously like leading by example, right? Like, so I think that's really cool what he's doing. I have a lot of respect for Kyle.

32:47 Scott Ingram: Yeah, absolutely. And if you're not following him on LinkedIn, cause he's just publicly sharing a lot of these things that he's doing behind the scenes and it's so cool to watch. Let's talk about, I'm really interested in this idea of, because I think it may be counterintuitive to a lot of people. That even in the SDR role, it's still a relationship game. So how do you apply that? How are you building relationships with kind of cold prospects? What's that approach?

33:13 Qayam Noorani: Yeah, it's, it's really interesting. It's a lot of what Kyle Coleman actually talks about, right? If you look at a lot of the feedback that he gives SDRs, it's, it's very, very structured feedback. It's like, you want to start off by resonating with the prospect, right? Like find some kind of mutual interest or common interest. That will really just connect you to, like when they, when they read your email or get your LinkedIn message or your phone call, like it's not just, they know you're not just like that, you know, that 10th SDR that's messaged them about something. So just try and break through the noise like that a little bit and then provide value, like share content, invite them to a webinar, share an insight, share some feedback about how their peers approach this problem, share an additional thing that they might not be thinking about, share something, ask, like provide some value. And then don't ask for anything. That was the biggest, most insane learning for me was reaching out to people and not asking for anything. Because you know what, Scott? Prospects know what you want as an SDR. They know you're not trying to make friends. I can't tell you how many meetings I booked where I never actually asked for their time, but they knew what I wanted, right? So starting out, just like trying to connect with someone on like a personal level, then providing value. And then not asking for anything. And I think that was really helpful in playing the long game and starting to build relationships.

34:33 Scott Ingram: This is the perfect opportunity for me to tell you about Vidyard because Vidyard allows you to share yourself in video form and really stand out. And the crazy part is it's free and Vidyard won't ask you for anything. Seriously, their free Chrome plugin is an incredible tool and you can get it for yourself at top1.fm/vidyard. And now back to me again. Yeah, that's really good. And one of the things that I'm going to kind of double-click on is the idea of like being specific with that feedback, because here's, here's what happens in my world. I get tons of podcast pitches and it's a lot, a lot of times it's PR agencies and all this stuff and everybody's trying to get their people on the guest. And oftentimes I'll get, I'm a big fan of the Sales Success Stories podcast. Pitch. And my biggest issue with that. So first of all, there's just nothing specific there, right? Or even if there is kind of specific, it's still fake specific, right? It's like, hey, I'm a big fan of the Sales Success Stories podcast. I just listened to the interview with Qayam.

35:36 Qayam Noorani: Okay.

35:37 Scott Ingram: But it's almost always BS because if you did listen to it, like there, there would be something of substance there. Like you have to go that one step further and reference something specific because the issue that I have with those is they're actually starting their first ever outreach. Their first impression that I have of them is you've just lied to me. So you're done.

36:00 Qayam Noorani: I love that. You know what? I love that. And that makes me wanna talk a little bit about different styles of prospecting. And I'm gonna take it back a little bit to that, that, that colleague that I mentioned earlier that, that gave me that obsessive curiosity, Nick Ross. Me and Nick had completely different styles of prospecting. He was very much so on the like, let me listen to Scott's podcasts and find like some specific insight in there and then reach out to Scott about that insight and do a really good job about it and come across as if he actually cares and it's not bullshit. But with me, I like, I didn't really resonate with that. Like I would listen to people's podcasts or, or read an, an like an article that they published or some kind of blog that they published about something that didn't make any sense to me, like something about their technology in a space that I knew nothing about. And try and email them about it or resonate with them on that. And that just came across as fake. And even if I could, even if I could like turn it into an email that didn't sound fake from the prospect's receiving end, it just felt fake to me sending it. And it just like, it just didn't start things off on the right foot. So I quickly realized that my style of reaching out to people was much more on a personal level. Like I would dig through people's Twitters when I was doing research on them. I would try and find anything that I could. That was personal. Like, for example, I would look up people's Medium blogs, right? And rather than going through like the actual articles, I would just read their bio to see like what they were interested in. And as soon as I read like, oh, this person is interested in hockey, or this person is interested in like this or that, that like really resonated with me. That just made it so much easier to reach out to them and like connect with them and not come across as like, that person that's reaching out to you, Scott, going like, hey, I just listened to your podcast, like we should talk, you know?

37:47 Scott Ingram: So yeah, yeah. Qayam, what are you most proud of?

37:50 Qayam Noorani: I think what I'm most proud of is earning a spot at the table at my company, just like coming from not knowing anything and just being a stupid kid who had an ego to the person that I am now. I'm really proud of just like just being humble and always trying to get better and learn and And just be a good person. You know, one thing that I actually had to get better at was being a good teammate. You know, like I actually struggled with, this is something that I'm really proud of. When I was doing really well as an SDR, a lot of it was because like I took everything that I could get, like any scrap at the table, I was eating it, you know? And eventually I got to a point where like, I think Katie, Katie's, she was my old boss. She was leading the SDR team. She kind of taught me that like, you gotta bring other people up and you gotta help other people get to a place where you are. I don't know. I can't remember exactly what she told me or how she said it to me. I don't think I could repeat it in a way that would be valuable, but she basically made me feel as though I should start sharing my success. And also like if I get an extra lead that, you know, that could be someone else's, like give it to them, you know, like help other people eat. And I think that is something that I'm proud of because that was not easy for… it's never easy for a top performer to give away their numbers. Right. But yeah, I got to a point where I was able to do that and still be at the top. And it felt really good to be able to like help other people as well.

39:11 Scott Ingram: Love that, man. That's a lot of growing in a couple of years.

39:13 Qayam Noorani: So much. So much.

39:16 Scott Ingram: What about the flip side? What's the biggest challenge? What's the hardest part?

39:20 Qayam Noorani: Whew. The hardest part for me, for me, the hardest part is not letting other people's success, you know how some people can be like, can look at other people succeed and just get really happy. And be like, that's awesome that you're doing so well. It was never like that for me. I'm never the kind of person who's naturally happy for other people when they're succeeding and I'm not. I want to be there too, right? So that's one of the biggest, most difficult things for me. It was difficult for me when I was an SDR. It's difficult for me in the place that I am right now as an AE is looking at other people succeed and trying to take positivity from that rather than taking negativity from that. So rather than feeling down about myself and how I'm not there and how I have a lot of stuff to do to get there, Just like looking at that and going, that's where I want to be. What can I take from this person to actually get there and just be happy for them through that? Right? Like I can be there too. They're not taking away from my success by getting to the place that they're at. So that was like a very, that was a mental struggle for me that I still struggle with to this day.

40:15 Scott Ingram: That is so interesting. And I think it goes back to what we were talking about earlier with kind of this conflict between the concept of the inner workings of that sales team, right? Where like you want to be at the top of the leaderboard, but you also want to be everybody else playing their own game. I mean, if I'm totally honest, I think I struggle with that exact same thing. Like I'm pretty good about being excited about every other, everybody else's accomplishments and I want them to be doing well, but, but really it's kind of like, yeah, as long as it's just not better than me, as long… I'm just so competitive. Like as long as I'm still at the top of the leaderboard, It's all good, right? But I definitely understand like that challenge of, okay, I'm supposed to be happy and excited for you, but you just freaking lapped me and that's not quite as exciting for me.

41:08 Qayam Noorani: Yeah, no, 100%. I'm glad it's not just me, Scott.

41:13 Scott Ingram: But again, like I think it does come back to it. It really is a cultural thing and it's something that, you know, we probably all as an an industry, maybe it's not really an industry, but as a profession need to be kind of working on that. Like, how do we continue to grow in ourselves and allow for that to happen, especially those that perform at the highest levels and getting comfortable with helping, even helping people pass us?

41:41 Qayam Noorani: Yeah. And I think it's just like, just like staying hungry for your own success, but also realizing that like, other people are not taking out of your, your pool. They're not eating from your plate, right? Like, you can still, you can still do just as good as they're doing, if not better, without them affecting you, right? The only thing that you can take from that person is positivity. The only thing that you can take from that person is things that will help you. So like, flipping that switch is only going to help you in the future.

42:09 Scott Ingram: Yeah. All right, well, we'll keep working on this together. So let's talk about Just the way that you are structuring your day. So I want the super detailed blow-by-blow. Your alarm clock goes off. What time did that happen? And I want to know everything that happens until your head hits the pillow.

42:28 Qayam Noorani: Yeah, for sure. My alarm goes off. Listen, Scott, when I was doing the SDR role, it's a tough job, right? And if you don't find easy ways to do things, you're not gonna succeed. So I was trying to take the hardest things and turn them into the easiest things. I wasn't trying to work hard. I was trying to work smart. And that's the only way that I was able to succeed in the limited time that I had to prospect during the end of my SDR tenure. But what I would do is I would wake up, you know, first thing I would do is shower and have a coffee. Like, I would not sit down in my chair if I didn't have a coffee.

42:59 Scott Ingram: Wait, wait, what time? You didn't give us the… I need to know the alarm clock time.

43:03 Qayam Noorani: Yeah, I was waking up a lot earlier as an SDR than I do now, but probably 6 to 7 AM, I was sitting in my chair and that's Pacific. And that was, that was because, Scott, like I worked with a lot of Mountain, Central, and Eastern time folks. So if I didn't hit my chair at 6 AM, I'm missing out on a solid window to reach out to people and engage with people. So if any SDRs out there are listening to this and you're on Pacific time, you better be starting your day at 6 AM because I promise you, you'll get more meetings like that. That extra hour that you get to reach out to folks, who are in the other time zones who are going to be off before you is huge. But so yeah, I would get up, have my coffee, sit down, and the first thing I would do is like, of course, answer all my emails. You want to have a sense of urgency as a salesperson or as an SDR, especially like when someone reaches out to you, get back to them right away. So if I had anything in the morning, I would get back to them right away, respond to those messages. And then what I would do is I would sit down and I would You got to prioritize, right? So like any super extremely hot leads that I had that were like ready to convert, requested a demo, told me they were interested, that kind of thing.

44:11 Scott Ingram: No-brainer.

44:12 Qayam Noorani: Like reach out to those people first, handle that stuff first, right? Get all the stuff that you have right now in the pipe that could potentially move, work on that first. So I would go through those, all my hot leads, any, any, you know, inbounds or anything like that. And then, and then what I would do is I would actually sit down and I would build lists in SalesNav for folks who are moving, moving in between companies within my industry or within companies that I reached out to. Because when folks… one thing that I noticed, and this came from my CEO, Jason, like when folks move companies, they're usually looking to make an impact. And they also aren't scared by the procurement processes at their company, right? Like you might be working at this large company and you're like, I'm not engaging with no salesperson. Like, I don't want to go through this whole insane evaluation and procurement process that's not going to go anywhere. And I'm not going to be able to get budget because my CMO sucks, you know, like Folks move to new companies and they're like, they don't know that stuff. So they're much more willing to like kind of engage with salespeople. And also they're looking to make an impact, right? So if you can convince them or provide enough value where they think it's actually worth their time to talk to you, then it's just easier to engage with those people. So that's… I would start there. So any cold prospecting I was doing, I was trying to find folks who were new to companies or had recently moved, recently been promoted, things like that. So I'd find all those people. Reach out to all of them on a personal level without asking for anything. Just try and establish a relationship. Like just try and introduce myself and introduce Klue. That's all I was trying to do. And then from there, like it was just as much, I would just try and send as many emails as possible in the limited amount of time that I had. Cause I was doing a lot of one-on-ones at the time. I was working on a lot of like sales strategy, which was a really cool experience as well. So it was like, I have this hour now. I got to put my head down and send as many emails as possible, make as many calls as I can. And I was never big on making calls, Scott. I'm not a big cold call guy. I like to make a lot of warm calls and I like to call people who know who I am and who will give me the time. So I would spend a lot of time crafting these really, really good emails where I was earning the respect of my prospects and not asking for anything. And that gave me the open door to actually call them. And then when I called them and they answered the phone, And I said, hey, it's Qayam from Klue. They weren't like quick to hang up or tell me to fuck off, you know? So that I thought was interesting and cool. And then I would try and spend as much time on LinkedIn as I could as well. Those were the 3 channels that I really worked in and I would bounce back and forth from all 3. I'm not the kind of person who's like, I'm going to block off an hour and send 10 emails in this hour. It's like, I'm going to block off an hour and just grind for this hour. So maybe my mind takes me to LinkedIn for 10 minutes and then takes me back to email. And then I realized that I should call this one person. I'm bouncing all over the place, going back and forth from different things, almost like a bit of a scatterbrain, but in a structured kind of way. I wouldn't forget about anything. And then just try and, try and like always, always be doing some kind of outbound activity. Always like never be sitting around trying to figure out who to email or who to call or what to do next. That's a lot of how I spent my day. I'm sure you'll have questions to dig into.

47:12 Scott Ingram: Yeah, a couple. So the first is just kind of your closing point. I feel like And I was so the opposite in this early in my career. And it wasn't until I like really figured it out that things started to switch. But it sounds like you have like this real bias towards action. Like, it doesn't have to be perfect. I just need to be like moving forward and acting. Is that, is that fair?

47:34 Qayam Noorani: Oh my God, yes. Always. 100%.

47:35 Scott Ingram: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because again, like when I started, it was like, okay, well, I need to think about this and I need to figure out the perfect way to do it. It's like, no, the way that you figure out that perfect way is by having done it 300 times. So just do it.

47:48 Qayam Noorani: Totally. And that really reminds me of this one person that joined Klue a little while ago when we were first building out the SDR team. And this person was not successful in the role and ultimately didn't stick around. And I think one of the reasons that that person was ultimately not able to succeed was they were so analytical to the point where like everything that they did took way too long because it was so perfect. And like, Scott, like the stuff was great. Like this person was emailing VPs. At like 3,000-person companies and getting meetings. Like it was cool, right? Like it was definitely like cool stuff to see, but it was like you'd get 2 of those meetings a month, right? Because you're spending so much time trying to craft the perfect email or like do so much research that when you call this person, you have stuff to talk about, but they hang up on you anyways. So, you know, so 100% it is, it's just doing the, getting the reps, getting the reps. And that's where I'm at right now as an AE. Like I'm just still, I'm still in a phase where I'm just trying to get as many reps in as I can. Because not every demo is perfect. Like not every follow-up email is perfect. Not every conversation is perfect, but the more of them I have, the more I'll learn, the more times I'll fail. And the more times I won't do those things again, the more times I'll succeed. And the more times I'll continue to hammer down on those things that are actually working. So yeah, I love that. It's just about reps for sure.

48:59 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Yeah.

49:00 Qayam Noorani: Yeah.

49:00 Scott Ingram: Yeah. I'm also interested, like this whole concept of you really don't make cold calls. You're using email to warm up your call. So what does that look like in practice typically? Like how many emails is that? At what point do you feel like, okay, I've got enough of a relationship here that I'm going to pick up the phone?

49:20 Qayam Noorani: Yeah, I think it really depends. Like I personally would like, I play a lot off engagement. Like, I don't know a lot about a lot of other SDRs, but I focus a lot on like watching my email open rates and my click rates and stuff like that. So like when I, as soon as someone clicks on something that I sent them, boom, they're getting a phone call. You know, because they're going to know who I am. And as soon as like someone has opened my email like 3, 4 times, they're getting a call as well. And also like if I'm just reaching out to like a very high-level person that I know gets a lot of really crappy SDR emails and I know that this one is going to break through the noise because I found this obscure thing about them and I put in the subject line and they open the email, I'll call them too. And then what that actually looks like in practice, Scott, is every email that I created, All I was doing was creating a script for my call, you know? And it wasn't an actual script. Like, it wasn't like, I'm going to call them and be like, hey, it's Qayam from Klue. Like, I read your book on XYZ and I thought it was really cool, like blah, blah, blah. It was literally like, hey, it's Qayam from Klue. I shot you an email the other day about the LA Dodgers. Does that ring a bell? And they go, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember that. What's up? And that what's up was like my in right there, you know?

50:27 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Yeah. And so I think what I'm hearing is that the bar is low, right? It's not like, okay, we're going to make sure that we're best friends via email. It's really just once you're to the point where, hey, I know that if I call right now, my name is kind of top of mind for them. So this isn't going to be totally out of the blue, totally out of context.

50:48 Qayam Noorani: 100%. My, my, my whole goal was like, if I call this person and I say it's Qayam from Klue. Will that ring a bell? If yes, I'm calling them.

50:58 Scott Ingram: Love it. Love it. What tools are you using to enable all of that?

51:02 Qayam Noorani: Yeah, so at Klue right now we use HubSpot. We were using Outreach, ZoomInfo. They're like the main ones. For prospect research, my whole, like my whole flavor of prospect research was like we were talking about earlier, Scott, it's very personal. Like I like to dig, I like to find personal things about prospects, not so much professional stuff. And I think a lot of, you can find a lot of that stuff on like Medium and Twitter. So I would use those a lot. What else? I think those are probably the main ones.

51:32 Scott Ingram: So walk us through kind of the details of that prospect research. So if you were researching me, right, you were going to reach out to me, what would you do? How long would you take and where would you look?

51:42 Qayam Noorani: I wouldn't spend more than like 5 minutes on research because if you can't find something in 5 minutes, you should just move on. Or like, here's a tip. Like there's a lot of times where I would spend time doing research on prospects and I wouldn't be able to find anything that I could connect with them and resonate with them on. I would just send like a crappy email and get it out. And that's a really important thing, I think, for people who are listening. Like, if you can't find the right thing to personalize off or reach out to someone about, reach out to them anyway, send them a crappy email because that crappy email might still work. And that happened for me last week. I got a response from my prospect and I was looking back at the email I sent them and it was an email where like I couldn't find anything about this person to reach out to them about. So I sent them a crappy email and it was like, hey, you might be interested in this. Let's talk. Got back to me and converted because it was the right time. So just a side note, but prospect research. Yeah. What I would do is I would first like pull up your LinkedIn and try and find your Twitter on your LinkedIn because a lot of people will link their Twitters to their LinkedIn. If not, I'll go on Google, I'll type in your name and Twitter. So Scott Ingram Twitter, I'll try and find that. And then I'll look in the Twitter bio for your interests. I'll look through your posts to see if maybe you posted like 4 years ago about going to a Lakers game, you know, and like, I'm not going to reference that 4-year-ago event, but I'm going to know that you're into the Lakers, right? Just try and pick up little, little personal interests or hobbies or things that you, that you like. If I can't find anything on Twitter, then I look on Medium again, like look through blogs. And again, I'm not trying to find professional type stuff. I'm trying to find more, more personal level stuff because I wasn't, I wasn't really good at the professional kind of personalization. And if I couldn't find anything there, then what I would do is, and I reach out to product marketing managers, so they're highly involved in like product launches. Anytime a company is launching products, if they're not like an enterprise account, there's likely a good chance that that product marketing manager was involved in that and actually heavily involved in that. So I would look up the company that I was reaching out to and just try and find news about the company. Like, have they launched any products recently and like reference that because Like that I can resonate with. Like a lot of work goes into a product launch and a lot of these product launches are actually really cool. So I could try and reference that kind of stuff. And if I couldn't find anything there about the company, then I would turn to the professional stuff, like see if I could find an article or a blog that wasn't like super technical or something that I just didn't understand at all, try and reference that. And if I couldn't find anything there, then Scott, I'm going to your LinkedIn. And I'm going like, hey Scott, you run a podcast for Sales Success Stories. That's really cool. You know, sending you that crappy email because it might just be the right time for you and you might still respond. So.

54:17 Scott Ingram: Right. Right. Well, and probably the most important part of that is, is that you are not pairing that with like a pitch right out of the gate. Right. So to your point earlier, I know what you're there to do. Right. So I can look at your profile and go, oh, you know, this, this is interesting. You actually, maybe Klue would be. Interesting and relevant for us, I'm gonna, I'm gonna give Qayam the time of day.

54:40 Qayam Noorani: Yep, exactly, exactly.

54:42 Scott Ingram: I'm gonna come back to something completely different because the Laker thing has come up a couple of times. One of my favorite daily sales tips of all time, and I did this series around Kobe Bryant when we, when we lost him, because it was certainly shocking to all of us. There is a… and I don't remember if it was a court recording. I don't think so. I think it was, I think it was a transcript and I just, I just read it, but Kobe Bryant talks about cold calling. You ever seen that?

55:11 Qayam Noorani: No, no. You need to send this my way, Scott.

55:15 Scott Ingram: I promise I will. And in the show notes, we'll include the link to it. It's one of the Daily Sales Tips. I don't know what the number is, but if you actually, if you go to dailysales.tips/all and just type in Kobe, that'll get you there. But I'd encourage you to go to top1.fm/this episode number, and I don't know what number it's going to be. But that'll have all these different links and things that we reference. So I'll definitely put it in there, but it's pretty fascinating. And he basically says like, I'm just fearless. Like I pick up the phone now, it's a totally different bar. And Kobe may have some level of name recognition, but he's basically, yeah, I'll just cold call Oprah because I have a question about how she's doing this in business. I'm like, oh my God, this is mind-blowing.

55:57 Qayam Noorani: That is really, really cool. And it's definitely a sense of fearlessness. There's a few folks in my company, Scott, who like You know what's funny? Like at Klue, we never ever pushed cold calling. Like I think our leadership team was so good because they were so focused on like outcome and results and not focused on like the things, the specific things you need to do to get there. Like if things are working for you, just do that, right? Like I never had to make 100 calls a day or a week because I was doing well with email, right? So, and I think like Ethan is one person that we worked with at Klue who's on the SDR team right now who really like started to push cold calling. Ethan and Mishi, these 2 SDRs, they just like, I don't know what it was. I think for Mishi, he just like didn't really like to write emails because it took too long. And I think Ethan just like is fearless like that, right? Like he's not scared to get hung up on and stuff like that. And they just like called and called and called and called. And the whole point I was trying to get at was this whole fearless thing. I think Ethan is just like fearless on the phone and Mishi probably learned and kind of learned that same skill of just like, you're going to get hung up on. Like people are going to tell you to fuck off. Like you're going to have these responses.

57:02 Scott Ingram: Right.

57:02 Qayam Noorani: And you got to just laugh at them rather than like take them seriously or take them to heart. So I think, yeah, that's really cool. And Kobe's obviously a fearless guy. So I'm going to try and embody that myself, actually try and be a little bit more fearless.

57:14 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I think to me, the best part of what you said from an underlying perspective is just being given that freedom. Because stylistically, we're all, we all have different approaches and there's different things that work for me that may not work for you and things that you do that would never work for me. And being given that space to just do what is going to work, because all that matters at the end of the day is the outcomes. As long as we're getting the right kinds of outcomes, does it really matter how you got there?

57:43 Qayam Noorani: No, no, not at all. It's so, so interesting. And I think it's really important to pay attention to the details if you're not hitting those outcomes, right? If I didn't hit my number, you could bet that Katie or Jason would be like looking into my, my actual like output numbers going like, okay, you know, maybe you should make more calls. Like maybe that would help you, you know? But like if you're, if you're doing well and you've, if things are working for you and you've figured it out, like just double down on that and people should support that rather than trying to change that. You know, like it's one thing to, and don't get me wrong, like they still pushed calls on me and they're like, Q, you should make some calls. You should try and make more calls. And they were right. Like I should have, right? And I did. And it, and it helped me book meetings, but I just didn't want to flip the script and make that my number one priority when I knew what was working for me.

58:28 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. I don't know if this question is relevant given your comments earlier, but I'm curious, what does your information diet look like? What are you reading, listening to, and watching? And when does that happen?

58:39 Qayam Noorani: Yeah, it's so funny, Scott. Like, I know I can't imagine what people think when I tell them that I haven't read a sales book or listened to a sales podcast or anything like that. But it's funny because my new sales director, Calla, He's a big fan of Sandler. Here's a funny story too. I came into the sales role and I had no sales skills, like none. And I wonder why. Probably because I haven't read a sales book or listened to a sales podcast in my entire life. But I was really good. I'm like, I'm good with the personal stuff. Like I can hop on a call with somebody and I can talk to you for an hour and I can show you my product and I can speak to its value and all that stuff. Right. But what I couldn't do was like ask the right questions to get the information that I needed that was going to push this deal forward. You know, like the actual tangible sales skills. I don't have that. So I'm trying to learn that right now. And the only like methodology or anything that's kind of helping me is Sandler. And I'm not, I haven't dove into it headfirst by any means at all yet. I'm just kind of taking it piece by piece by what my sales director Kala shares with me. So he's been sharing some stuff with me from the Sandler and I think it's really, really cool. There's some cool stuff in there that really helps. Personally, for someone like myself who doesn't have those sales skills to help understand what kind of questions you should ask and how you can get to people's pains. So yeah, that's one thing that I'm using. And my other information diet is just LinkedIn, Scott. I have a network. When I started at Klue, I had like 100 connections on LinkedIn. Now I have like 2,500 connections on LinkedIn and like 2,400 of those are all product marketing managers. At companies that I reach out to. So like, just being on LinkedIn and like reading about what they're talking about is really helpful for me to understand how to resonate with them.

1:00:20 Scott Ingram: Man, that right there, I think is really, really good because it's probably more important that you learn your customers and their world than it is that you learn sales skills. I think it's actually a better priority.

1:00:34 Qayam Noorani: I would tend to agree with you. Otherwise, I wouldn't even be able to do anything in this role right now because I don't have sales skills. I'm learning them right now.

1:00:41 Scott Ingram: So, so we talked earlier about kind of the chip on your shoulder, but I also like to ask kind of explicitly about motivation. Like, how do you think about motivation? What motivates you? Like, what drives all of this?

1:00:56 Qayam Noorani: Yeah, what drives all of this is just wanting to succeed. Like, everybody's going to have a different, like, Everybody's going to paint a different picture about what success looks like to them, right? For me, I don't even know exactly what success looks like to me, funny enough, but it's just what motivates me. That's a really good question. I think it really does come down to that whole chip on the shoulder thing for me, Scott. It's just wanting to better myself every day, wanting to learn and knowing that I'm not the best and I'll never be the best. Even if I get to a point where I'm the best in my company, there's someone out there who's doing better than me at another company. So that drives me, just knowing that you can always learn and get better. And you know what else motivates me too, Scott? Like, it's fun breaking the ceiling. Like, it's one thing to just get to the ceiling, but it's really fun to break the ceiling, to smash the ceiling, you know, and break your own bar. Here's a good answer to that question. What motivates me is first, like, breaking the bar that's been set for you, right? Whether that's like your quota or your teammate's quota or what they've achieved or whatever. But like, eventually you want to get to a point where like you're trying to break your own ceiling. And that's where I was as an SDR. I was trying to break my own ceiling.

1:02:01 Scott Ingram: That really motivated me. Me.

1:02:03 Qayam Noorani: Like, I'd come in and I had a quota of 10, right? And I think one month I did 36 ops in a month. So that was like, like, that motivated me. Like, I wanted to see if I could ever break that. It started with like 16, and then I did 20, and then I did 22 and 25 and 27. And I got to a point where I did 36, and I was like, damn. Now that really motivated me. It's like, can I break that? Can I set an unbreakable record at this company? So that motivated me. I thought that was That was something that was cool. That coupled with the chip on my shoulder of just like wanting to succeed and wanting to like make sure that I put myself in a place in the future where I'm not stressed out was very motivating.

1:02:39 Scott Ingram: That's awesome. Did you ever break the 36 record? That is a ridiculous number.

1:02:43 Qayam Noorani: No, no. But I'll be honest, Scott, like that 36 was in my first year as an SDR and the 36, the quality of those opportunities was probably like a 70%. And then in my second year as an SDR, I did 32 opportunities in a month and I was much more proud of that than I was of the 36 because it was way better quality, way better accounts, way better prospects, way better use cases. And they all did better in terms of like the pipe, the sales pipe. So I was proud of that, man.

1:03:12 Scott Ingram: And that, that is such good recognition. I mean, that's one of the other things that drives me a little bit bonkers in terms of kind of the more traditional SDR measurements is there's very often no quality metric. Like all we're looking at is meetings. I'm like, okay, all meetings are not created equal. Let me tell you.

1:03:29 Qayam Noorani: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. For sure. For sure. It's crazy. And being able to recognize that is something that helps you get better. Like you'll never get better if you cannot recognize what about the work that you're doing is not good. Can you sit there and look at your work and say, and point out the flaws in it? Like point out the things that you should have done better. That is difficult to do. I feel really happy that I'm in a place now where I'm the first person to call out my own stuff. Like if I make a mistake, I'm the first person to call it out because that's the fastest way to deal with it. And that's the fastest way to fix it. And learn from it.

1:04:01 Scott Ingram: Fire.

1:04:01 Qayam Noorani: Don't beat around the bush. Yeah.

1:04:03 Scott Ingram: Fire. Love it. Love it. So is there something you believe that the average SDR would think is crazy?

1:04:09 Qayam Noorani: Yeah, maybe the long game thing. Like maybe people would look at kind of my outreach. Sometimes I don't ask for a meeting until like I'm 5, 6 emails in, you know, or ask for time at all because like, again, I just know deep down that prospects know what you want. They know why you're reaching out to them. They look at your title. And they know what you want. So just don't ask for stuff. Like, don't ask them for a meeting. Don't ask them for their time until they engage with you. They ask you a question about your product. They compliment your outreach. They give you a bone in any way. Then that's your moment. That's your opportunity to ask for time. But if you ask for time before they even respond to you, I just don't see why they would ever give that to you. I mean, I personally wouldn't want to give that to you if it was If it was someone reaching out to me. So nice.

1:04:58 Scott Ingram: One of the things I wanted to talk about is your transition to AE and the amount of time that you spent as an SDR. Like, do you think your time in that seat, in that role was the right amount of time? Was it too little? Was it too much?

1:05:12 Qayam Noorani: This is such a good question. I love that you asked me this, Scott. I think it was the perfect amount of time. And if you asked me this question a year ago, I would not have given that same answer. Because a year ago I was like a year into my SDR career, I was itching to be an AE and I had done really well at that point, right? As an SDR, like I had crushed my numbers and I had thought I figured things out. And I was like, I was talking to my CEO Jason and he was telling me, like I was pressing him on why I want to be an AE and stuff like that. And he took me for a walk around the block in Vancouver, just down by the water. And we had this really honest conversation where he was telling me like, look, I can make you an AE right now. Like you obviously have earned your place at the table, but I think I really, really think that there's still a lot for you to learn. I think there's a lot for you to learn in terms of working as a teammate, being a teammate, being a professional, bettering yourself, and a lot of SDR tangible skills too that I still had to learn at that point. And I'm telling you, playing the long game, I was not perfect at that at that point either. So he was just really honest with me and told me, take a little bit more time. Just take your time because If you fail as an SDR, that's okay. Like you're not hurting your career, right? But if you fail as an AE, like that will have a career implication. So you really want to make sure that when you go into that role, you are super confident that you are going to be able to crush it. Like you are going to be able to figure it out. And a year ago I was itching to be an AE, but I wasn't, I wouldn't have bet on myself that I would have been able to crush it for sure. Now I would bet on myself that I know given enough time I'll figure it out and I'll do well. So I think the amount of time I spent in the role was, was a really good amount of time. And I think it's a really great topic for all the other SDRs out there that are a year into their careers, cuz I've had conversations with so many of you who have been like a year into your SDR career and just been like, F this, I want to be an AE and I'm gonna switch companies and do it somewhere else. And Kyle Coleman has talked about this too on LinkedIn. I'm like, don't do that. Like just grind it out at where you're at. If you're happy at the company that you're at, you're happy with the product that you're selling. And it's just a matter of like your own readiness to be an AE or be at the next step. Just take your time with it. You'll know when you're ready and you'll feel 100% confident that you're ready.

1:07:31 Scott Ingram: Man. Good, good talk. The first thing that just, I wanted to call out is the boss walk. There's something about that. Because it's happened to me a few times too, right? It's like, okay, this is really big. This is like too big for the office. Like we got to go for a walk. There's something really powerful about that. So I just want to acknowledge that. But I think just this idea of patience and there's starting to be some data that really proves this out and maybe I'll be able to dig a little bit up for the show notes. But, you know, this idea of the failure rate among SDRs that transition to AEs in a year or so is not a good number. But those that do it after about 18 months, the success rate is significantly… I want to say it's 2 or 3 times higher.

1:08:17 Qayam Noorani: I'm not surprised. Yeah.

1:08:19 Scott Ingram: Now that you're on the other side, and, and I mean, you're still pretty early on, on the other side in this AE role, what do you wish that you had spent more time on or tried to learn from the SDR side that would've helped you even more now in the new AE role?

1:08:36 Qayam Noorani: Yeah, for sure. I think one of the things would've been like digging into pains right now. And this is like, this goes back to like that whole, like not having sales skills. Like I don't think I do a great job at actually getting to the prospect's like actual pains. I was better at like painting the vision and the picture of what like your life could look like. And that's what the SDR's job is, right? Is to excite people. It's to get people thinking about what the possibilities are and why they should think about this or engage with you or try and learn more about your product, right? So I would go into these intro calls and like, or discovery calls, and I'd be like trying to learn about the prospect's process. Like, what are you doing right now? How are you doing things? And then paint the picture of what things could look like. But I was never actually digging into like a prospect's pains. Like, why do you want to have this conversation? What about what you're doing right now sucks and what could we help you with that would fix that? So now I'm in AE and I'm having these conversations with prospects and it's really funny because you cannot sell to somebody by just painting the vision of what their life could look like. People are much more likely to act against pain than they are against… I read this stat somewhere, this quote somewhere, and I'm probably going to butcher it, but it was like, people are much more likely to act on their pains than they are to act on, on like a future state or like what things could look like for them. So that I think is something that I would have spent a lot more time on as an SDR. And I think that could have helped me in my role as an SDR too, right? Like it only would have made me better at booking meetings if I could dig to the pains. I did fine without doing that, but I wish I did learn a little bit more about that. And I think Sandler is a really good, good way to actually do that.

1:10:17 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Now kind of continuing on the theme around the length of time in the SDR role, what advice would you give to somebody that's just starting out in that type of SDR role?

1:10:27 Qayam Noorani: Yeah, I would tell them that the entire time you spend there will be learning. Like, don't ever think you've figured it out and you've learned everything that you can learn. Like, you will always learn. I could confidently tell you, even when I had done 36 ops and 32 ops in, in months, that last month I was an SDR, I was still learning. You know, it was still constantly upping my game. So just be extremely humble. Like, don't… if you go into that SDR role, you gotta know that you gotta be humble the entire time and just always, always, always be in a learning mindset. I would definitely try and figure out what that chip on your shoulder is. Like when I was interviewing for SDRs, like I was trying to understand what the chip on people's shoulders were. And when folks would reach out to me and ask me for advice about becoming an SDR, I would always say like, take some time to figure out like what really drives you, what's gonna get you up in the morning. When you have 200% of your quota already? And what's going to get you up in the morning when you're like 30% of your quota and not going to hit your quota? Figure out what that is. Take some time if it's not apparent to you and let that fuel you every single day, every single hour, every single minute. And then just learn from everyone around you. We all learn a lot from our own successes and failures, right? But imagine if there was 10 of you. That's 10 times more successes and failures that you can learn from, right? And there are 10 of you at these companies, right? There's 10 other SDRs that you work with or 5 other SDRs. So like, get obsessive about it. Like just try and learn every single thing at all times. You should just try and know about everyone's pipe, everything about it, how they're working it, how they're bringing them in, how they're taking them out, like everything. So yeah, those are the 3 pieces of advice that I would give.

1:12:08 Scott Ingram: Nice. And then I'm gonna come back to it one more time and maybe it's the advice that would have given to yourself to flip the switch? How do you find that next gear?

1:12:21 Qayam Noorani: I think it's just like realizing that you can't cut corners. Like there's a fine balance between finding the easy way to do things, the smart way to do things and like cutting corners. And I think when I started, I was just cutting corners, right? I was trying to get people on meetings really quickly without actually earning the right to talk to them. So yeah, just like really figuring out how to like just play the long game and just like Sometimes doing things the right way, it takes more time and it's hard to see that it'll bring you more results because you're just thinking of the amount of time that you have to spend on it. But it's the right way for a reason because it will bring you more results if you do it right. So take the time to learn and figure out how to do things that might be a bit more challenging for you. And once you figured it out, then you can slowly start to figure out how to make that more of an easy play, like how you can optimize that process.

1:13:06 Scott Ingram: Nice. I want to ask about, and maybe you're already doing this inside of your organization because it's just your process. Like, what are you trying to learn from other AEs at this stage?

1:13:20 Qayam Noorani: Yeah, right now I'm trying to learn how to demo, like how to have that first demo with prospects. I watch a lot of Gong calls and stuff like that. I'm trying to learn like how AEs get prospects to talk more than they do. One thing that someone told me recently that I've been like really trying to double down on is prospects don't remember what you said. Like you could pitch at them for like an hour and they're not going to remember anything you said, but they remember everything that they say to you, right? So like you telling them why something sucks, they won't remember that. But if they tell you why something sucks, they'll remember that. So I just try… one thing that I'm trying to learn from other folks is like how to ask like really solid open-ended questions and dig into those questions and like Really like let the prospect tell you everything that they can possibly tell you about any topic that you're talking about without like… one thing that I did as an SDR a lot was I would ask a question like, how are you collecting information right now? A lot of our other prospects are doing it like XYZ, and I would like prompt their answer and then they wouldn't give me an answer, you know? So like asking a question and actually letting them answer it and then not just taking that answer for face value, digging into it some more and some more, kind of like what you're doing on this podcast actually.

1:14:28 Scott Ingram: It is good practice. Well, we've covered a lot of ground. Was there anything else or another story or something that you had hoped that we would get a chance to talk about, but somehow I didn't ask the right question to get us there?

1:14:42 Qayam Noorani: There's one story that's kind of interesting. It's more of like a growing pain story from a startup and how I handled some conflict at the company. Actually, when I started, like most startups who are starting up, you have like your qualification criteria is not very strong, right? Because you're trying to figure out like who the right buyers are and you want to bring as many people into the pipe to kind of figure that out. So we had a fairly loose qualification criteria and myself as like a hungry SDR who wanted to book meetings, like I took advantage of that. Like I booked as many meetings as I could and like not all of them were great, right? And we had this person, Ehrin, come into our company and she was a very experienced salesperson who did really, really well at her old role. And she came in and And she was constantly complaining about how bad some of these ops that were coming in were and how they weren't the right fit and how we shouldn't be trying to push these and work on them and stuff like that. And Ehrin and I had a lot of conflict, right? Because from my perspective, I'm just working the criteria that I've been given, right? So I'm booking meetings within that criteria. And then Ehrin is trying to close these deals and she's struggling to do so because they were just poorly qualified. And it was more of a process thing than it was a problem on either of our ends. But then what happened was we had this one quarter where like we had 5 or 6 SDRs and only 2 AEs because one of them was out and Ehrin was one of them. And like we were just booking too many meetings for Ehrin and Melanie to actually handle. And what happened was we naturally had to just tighten up the qualification criteria to let less of those things slip through and just give Ehrin and Mel the best things to work on. And that naturally turned into like something that just worked. Like it just made sense even to me as an SDR who's now booking less meetings because of this. It just made sense. And I thought to myself like, okay, now we're in a place where things are flowing properly. Let me figure out how to work myself into this. So then I tried to figure out how I could like get back to bringing in those ridiculous numbers with this tighter qualification criteria. And now Ehrin and I have an awesome relationship. She's our number one seller at Klue. And I try and learn a lot from her too. So I thought that was just a cool story, how we used to really butt heads, and we were able to kind of figure things out.

1:16:54 Scott Ingram: Love that. Great story. Great story. Good way to finish, but not the official finish, because we always try and make this actionable at the end. So what would you challenge our listener to do over the course of the next 1 or 2 weeks to improve themselves and improve their results? What can they do?

1:17:12 Qayam Noorani: Yeah, I think I think the number one thing you can do and the thing that I would personally recommend you do is spend a week or two just obsessing over everyone's pipe but your own. Go and like look at every single meeting that every single person has booked. And this applies to SDRs and AEs. As an SDR, like go look at that leaderboard and every single meeting that gets put up in that board, go figure out how it happened. Like literally every single one. Get to a point where like if somebody asked you about, you know, your colleague Mike's op with Microsoft, that you could explain everything about it. Because I promise you, you will learn so much from doing that over a week or 2 that it will likely just become a naturally organic thing that, that you will just do at all times. And I think that's been a really cool thing that we've kind of established at Klue that I guess kind of started with me just obsessing over things because now I tell everybody to obsess over everything and I everyone does. And I think a lot of people get a lot of value from that. So just spend a week or two like studying, studying all the internal stuff that you have access to, like go dig through your CRM and look through everyone's work and learn from it.

1:18:21 Scott Ingram: Love that. Love that. I don't know that I've ever done this. But I'm going to issue my own challenges as well. And I'm also kind of challenging myself. And that is, for those that are listening that are in leadership positions, more senior positions, and you're getting solicited, you're getting prospected, provide feedback. And, you know, just help somebody out because I really do feel like it's worth the effort. Even if you, even if you do this 10, 20, 25, 50 times, even if one, if you impact one person, you can literally change the trajectory of their career. Like has happened for Qayam. So that's my challenge. Qayam, thank you for an incredible conversation and taking the time with me.

1:19:04 Qayam Noorani: Scott, I appreciate it. I thought it was fun. It was a blast. It was great to chat. Thanks for listening to the Sales Success Stories podcast. 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 top1.fm.