156: A Great Sales Culture Is Greater Than the Sum of the Sales Team with Triple Whale's Brantley Atkinson

0:00 Brantley Atkinson: I just had a mentor, a boss of mine when I was working at NC State University. His name was Lewis Hunt, and he would walk into a meeting with people he did or didn't know, and he would make sure in his first couple sentences to either drop the F-bomb or some other kind of excrement like that. So he would just say these things to kind of, A, catch people off guard and make sure they're paying attention. But it was always not ruthlessly just throwing in these words to be funny or anything, but If we were having down-to-earth conversations in his office as well, and someone came in from that we weren't really that familiar with, and we were just having a conversation, when they leave, he'd be like, "If they didn't curse or have the mouth of a sailor, I don't really trust them." So it's basically just a way to get to know people, kind of take the the edge off a conversation if you can slide one in there in in certain scenarios. Obviously, you don't want to be just spouting filth all the time, but I think it was just a funny way that he used to get people out of their comfort zone a little bit and let them know that it was a more relaxed. Environment than they were used to in meetings at a stuffy bureaucratic university. 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.

1:25 Scott Ingram: Here's your host, Scott Ingram. Today on the Sales Success Stories podcast, my guest is Brantley Atkinson. Brantley is the top account executive at Triple Whale, and he is out of Raleigh, North Carolina. Welcome to the show, Brantley.

1:38 Brantley Atkinson: Hey, Scott. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.

1:41 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Looking forward to digging into this for a lot of reasons, and I'll talk about some of the reasons a little bit later, but we have to jump in with some immediate value like we always do. And you went deep on this. I want to talk about the top 3 things that you believe have contributed the most to your success in sales.

1:57 Brantley Atkinson: Yeah, absolutely. And we'll get into it, but I'm obviously, the more I think about it, the more maybe I am from a traditional sales background, just given the experiences I've had, but I do count myself as an outsider in this kind of sales role. So the last 10 months, I think patience, persistence, and small talk have been kind of the number one key. Some situational things with how I build relationships at work, as well as my mentor I've had and kind of the volume of what I've been able to do in the last 10 months, given the explosiveness of our company. As well as kind of my non-sales background. And again, I touched on that. Maybe it is sales and I just didn't realize it, but we can get into all that, I'm sure.

2:34 Scott Ingram: Yeah, gonna be fun. And you sent me a ton of really interesting, brilliant notes on these, so I'm gonna let you kind of dissect these. So your first one was patience, persistence, and small talk. Go.

2:45 Brantley Atkinson: Yeah, well, first I put just persistence when I emailed you my kind of list a couple days ago, and then I went back and I said, you know, in a sales way, that kind of has a negative connotation, right? Like You don't always want to be poking people. You want to be poking people who you know need your product. You want to be poking people who have explicitly told you a reason or two that they need it and that you know are still engaged or interested, right? You don't want to be bothering people or a nuisance. And that's part of my non-sales background, right? I'm always very conscious of, damn, am I the one in their inbox that is annoying them or the one in their inbox that they're like, I can't believe this sales guy keeps messaging me. So I try to keep it relevant, even if it's not about what I'm selling them. The soft sell, I think, is something that's really unique and interesting. I've been fortunate to travel a lot in my life. I keep up with the news. I pretty much watch the news every night, the nightly news and things like that. Just having a worldview that is knowing that you're not the center of the world and there are other things going on, being able to make those connections and send something that's relevant, whether it's about your product or their product or not, or just relevant to the conversation you had, I think goes a long way in building an actual relationship versus a transactional, I'm going to sell you this and you're going to buy it and then we'll never talk again type relationship.

4:03 Scott Ingram: Yeah, absolutely. Any additional detail that you want to give just around this particular item?

4:08 Brantley Atkinson: Yeah, like in my initial outreach, I personalize every kind of email that I'm sending to people. There's only so many ways you can really slice and dice what we sell, and I'm happy to go into what Triple Whale is and why it's special as well. But just off the top, right, we sell an attribution software, meaning Companies who are D2C focused, so direct-to-consumer on Shopify, they're spending a lot of money on advertisements. There's reasons why they can't see where all that money goes when it comes to Apple privacy issues, as well as other factors related to browser-side cookies. I'm not going to go too far into it, but there are reasons they need our software. So my initial outreach, there's only so many ways you can slice and dice why they need this, the problems they're likely facing. But you can certainly look at their product and determine whether it's something you would actually use, determine kind of some of the issues they might be facing. Like if it's a higher average order value item, they might have a longer sales cycle. And that's something that our product is really good at and something they probably have never heard of a solution for yet. So I can generally know something they'd be interested in, but I also sometimes, like we had a certain drinking mug on Shopify that is shaped like a Viking horn, right? So Whale and Ale, I think, was the subject line. And I just, I made a poem about how we would ride off into Valhalla together if we were to do a partnership. So I think just funny stuff like that that they're not used to seeing in their inbox is really helpful because my boss says all the time, you know how many of these a day I get in my inbox of people that have just done no research on me whatsoever or have the bullet points of why I should buy them? He's like, I close all of them. I delete them all. I don't need it.

5:47 Scott Ingram: Yeah. And it's the unfortunate thing, I think, in a lot of ways, right? The reputation that we get as sellers because there's so much lazy, undifferentiated, spammy type outreach. But the good news is the bar is kind of low. Like it doesn't take a lot to really stand above and beyond to go, oh, this guy actually spent the time to reach out to me personally.

6:07 Brantley Atkinson: Absolutely. And with the availability of information out there, at least for me, like Facebook's ad library exists. So these companies that are spending, let's say, $30,000 a month to $1 million a month to, you know, $100 million a year potentially on ads, and maybe that's a stretch, but you know what I'm saying? They're spending a lot of money on ads. I can look at all their ads that they're running on Facebook Ads Library. I can go to Google. I can see all the ads they're running. I can go to their reviews and I can look at what people are actually saying about their product. All that takes me less than 5 minutes and it gets me at least an easy paragraph I can say about them. And then there's LinkedIn and stuff too. So it's really, really easy to get a personalized paragraph, sentence or two, and then literally give your bullet points or whatever after that, slice and dice however you want. But you can figure it out if you spend more than 2 minutes looking up a person.

7:00 Scott Ingram: Absolutely. And in fact, I mean, your being here right now is a result of my cold outreach and it took me 5 minutes. To get from I want the top seller at Triple Whale to getting to you. And I didn't even know it was you, right? I just knew that I wanted the top seller. So I'll come back, we'll tell that story, but let's keep going with your top 3. So your second thing was situational. What does that mean?

7:21 Brantley Atkinson: Situational, I think you got to make your own kind of situation at work, right? Like I worked at a university and it was totally and wholly bureaucratic and they wanted you kind of pigeonholed in your role. And that's not what I wanted to be. I didn't want to be pigeonholed at all. So I would make an effort to do a lot of cross-departmental, cross-functioning things and get other people involved. And that's kind of harder today, right, in the Zoom world that we all live in. I work remotely, so I just put 15 minutes on people's calendars. When I started, we had 35 employees. Now we have like 135, so it gets harder. But I met with everyone who worked there essentially in my first month and said, hey, I have nothing that I want from you, nothing that If you want something from me, obviously let me know, but I just want to get to know you because we work at this company and, you know, our goal is that this company is going to be huge and we're going to get, you know, we're going to have better lives together because of it. So why not get to know each other?

8:17 Scott Ingram: Yeah. So good. You know, one of the things that we have been really diving into a fair amount in the Sales Success Community is kind of this team selling and the way that you manage your internal resources and relationships and those types of things. Just that act, just by having spent time with each individual on your team, I'm sure there's nobody else that's done that. I'm sure there are other people in your organization, especially those who aren't in sales, that haven't had a conversation with any other salesperson on the team. And so you just stand above, and if you need a favor, they know who you are. They're that much more likely to help you out when you need that little something.

8:54 Brantley Atkinson: Yeah, it's absolutely true. And the thing is, right, like A lot of the times when I say something to someone or do something to someone, like, I do it out of the genuineness of my heart and how I feel and how I'd want to be treated by others. Like, some people could see a salesperson asking you a favor or buying you a gift card for helping them, or all that stuff is like, oh, they're trying to butter us up. And yeah, partially it's that, but otherwise I'm genuinely grateful for what they've done. So I don't just buy them… like, if I do buy a gift card for a customer success team member who is like really, really helpful on a big deal, I don't just buy them a gift card to whatever. I find out what they like, where they like to go, and I get it that way. And like, it was just reinforced by when I had a baby, some of them bought me something off my registry, right? So it's not a one-way road. I have genuinely built those relationships. And then the other thing I would just say about that is it was really touching and tickling the other day. We had a new customer success member start and I did my thing. I put my 15 on their calendar just because I saw their name pop up. In our team Slack as a new person. And when we got on the call, they said, oh, Brantley, like, I've been looking forward to meeting you. The whole success team has a joke about when is Brantley going to put his time on your calendar and like, when are you going to meet him? It's like a rite of passage at Triple Whale. So I really found that kind of touching.

10:10 Scott Ingram: That's awesome. That's awesome. And I mean, it's such really little effort, right? It's that little bit more of, oh, I hit reply to the announcement email where we welcome somebody new to the team and everybody says, hey, oh, welcome, yada yada. But, you know, you grab 15 minutes, that's all it takes.

10:26 Brantley Atkinson: Absolutely. And then you never know, like, what connections you have or what you're going to make. And, you know, the goal of our company, right, is to grow so big we get bought one day and then maybe we all have to find new jobs in a good situation. Right. But when that happens, you're never going to know who from there is also successful and is also remembering that, hey, they'd be a great team member to bring along with me.

10:46 Scott Ingram: Yeah, love it. All right. Third point was your non-sales background. Let's talk about this.

10:51 Brantley Atkinson: Yeah, I thought I had a non-sales background, but the more I look at it, the more I maybe was in sales, right? So I worked at NC State University for about 7 years, and I went from intern to associate director of communications and marketing for a large division that housed things like undergraduate admissions. We had the campus visits system, parents and family services. So a lot of outward-facing groups at the university. In my team's job, I was a professional photographer and videographer. Our job was to create all the print items they needed, all the website items. We actually created a campus visit website. And then the day we launched it, the pandemic closed the university. So like, talk about great timing. We were ahead of the curve when it came to things like that. And I always volunteered to give the presentations at the visitor center when someone was sick. It wasn't part of my job, but I did it. I guess I was selling the university to prospective families in that regard.

11:46 Scott Ingram: Nice. And so, but how is that part of your superpowers or like how did that contribute to your success in this role?

11:54 Brantley Atkinson: Yeah, I think just the ability to talk to anyone. A lot of the times at the university, I would be talking to, you know, well-established parents who wanted to be assured that this was the university for them or this was the place for them. And when I get on these calls and I'm talking to people that are spending $100,000 in ad spend a month, They want to know their baby, their ad spend and their product that they've spent their whole life or their last couple of years or their professional career, like trying to launch is going to be okay with us. And so I think a lot of that is also in setting expectations as well, right? Like I have like one of my mottos at the university for all the people we had to work with was kind of the under-promise and over-deliver. Of course, in a sales role, you never want to under-promise, but you do want to set reasonable expectations and then over-deliver.

12:44 Scott Ingram: Well said. Well said. So let's talk about… I want to give a little bit of context before we get into some of your additional context in terms of who Triple Whale is and this whole background. But what prompted this for me, I've really decided that I want to lean into organizations that have great sales cultures this year. You know, I, I hear way too many stories of just super toxic, awful situations. And as I look at the Sales Success Community, part of this is I think it's a minority of sellers that really see this as this is my profession, this is a craft, I want to be great at sales. And they're the folks that listen to this podcast, right?

13:30 Brantley Atkinson: Right.

13:31 Scott Ingram: Similarly, there's sadly a minority of companies that see their sales team as more than a necessary evil, as more than a means to an end. But these are humans. They're worthy of investment and development. They are the front lines. They are the ones that set the expectations for our customers and help us grow and all of those things. And I thought, you know, I want to be able to really feature and spotlight the great sales orgs really as an additional service to this community, right? I want to show places that, you know, this is a great place that you could potentially work. And so where we came together, I was looking at, somebody turned me on to, and I'm gonna put this in the show notes. So if you go to top1.fm/156 or top1.fm/brantley-atkinson, you'll find all the notes from this episode. Bravado did this naughty and nice list and they kind of reached out to their community and said, hey, we wanna know who are the great companies that are doing it right. That are setting reasonable expectations from a quota perspective, especially in kind of a challenging economy and all that's going on. And on the flip side, who are just the bad apples? Who are the companies that are doing it wrong that you want to stay well away from? And read a great comment on that nice list in reference to Triple Whale. Ironically, this comes full circle because Brantley, apparently you wrote that comment.

14:59 Brantley Atkinson: That's true. I did. Absolutely. I think that's such a noble cause, right? And especially in a place that is as misperceived as sales, which I'll be honest, I thought it was what people say about it, right, before I actually became a salesperson and realized the craft behind it, just like any other job. And I've had friends in sales that joined after college and they've all been cut loose. I had a friend fired from sales on New Year's Eve, right? So companies like that and treating salespeople like that is probably where it gets the bad rap. And Scott, yeah, what you're doing is awesome and that's why I agreed to be a part of it.

15:30 Scott Ingram: Yeah, awesome, awesome. So again, if you go to top1.fm/156, we'll have that link to the naughty and nice list. There's some eye-opening statements in there. There's a couple other companies that are on my radar that I'm reaching out to, but Brantley's comment really stood out to me. I mean, they're all anonymous comments. Like I said, I only discovered that after the fact. And so I thought, you know what, this sounds like an amazing company. I just cold connected. I sent without any context, I sent a bunch of connection requests to a bunch of people in the sales org at Triple Whale. It was your boss who accepted the first connection. And all I did, I mean, again, this example of kind of a personalized message, I just said, hey, look, Triple Whale has popped up on my radar in like a really positive way. I only interview number 1, top 1% sales reps. Would love to get that person on the podcast. Who is it? And then my favorite part is, and I know you're not quite there, but I got a little bit inspired after I sent that first note. 30 seconds later, I came over top of it and said, and please tell me they did 300% of their numbers so that I can title this episode, X person did 3x at Triple Whale. I know you didn't do it in your first 10 months. But that's how that connection got made. And, and he said, hey, it's Brantley. He's on my team. You know, let me get you guys connected. And the rest is history. And again, it took 5 minutes, absolutely cold outreach. Now I'm not selling anything per se, but I don't think that's any different from any other personalized sales outreach, right? It was personal. It was relevant. I had a very specific ask and here we are.

16:58 Brantley Atkinson: Yeah, it's easy as that. And I think Nick is one of those guys too, who's really, Nick Locansole, he's, he's a great kind of leader on our team, and he's awesome to work for. He's really humanizing of all your efforts and the things that you do, and really enjoyed him. He just had a child as well, so congrats on that. But yeah, he's really active on LinkedIn. I think a lot of people are these days when it comes to this kind of sales thing. So literally, if you tap into someone who is active on LinkedIn and they follow salespeople or D2C people who are really big in the e-com space, all that type of stuff, They're going to be receptive and they're going to be open to you. So what's the harm in reaching out? Even I reached out to Steve Reed today, who was on your podcast from the Vikings. Obviously, you know that. And he responded to me in 2 minutes. I listened to his kind of to prep and it made me feel good about coming on here.

17:44 Scott Ingram: Brilliant. Perfect. Perfect. Yeah. And I'll say this, right? Reach out to me, especially if I want to get a note from you, send it on LinkedIn, send me an email at scott@top1.fm. Especially if you work for an organization that has an absolutely stellar sales culture. I want to start building this list. And this is something I've got a couple other things that I'm kind of working behind the scenes. I'm really kind of doubling or tripling down on this particular idea. But if you work for one of those organizations, please raise your hand. Please let me know, hey, this is an amazing place that I'm working. All right. Enough about that, Brantley. Let's contextualize you. So talk a little bit more about your role at, about Triple Whale and what it took to get to number 1.

18:27 Brantley Atkinson: Yeah. So Triple Whale has been around for about 18 months at this point. I wasn't around for the first kind of 6 or 7. I've been there for 10 months now. So I reached out to Zach Rigo, who's our head of sales at Triple Whale. Awesome guy, incredible sales leader. He's been doing it for a long time and he was number 1 at a much larger company. So you know that he knows what he's talking about. I reached out to him. I grew up in Wilmington, North Carolina, and he was friends with my older brother. And I just said, hey man, I promised my wife I'm going to leave this job that I'm not enjoying and I'm going to make us more money. So, what do you have for me? He said, all right, I'm at a startup. It's called Unstack. Why don't you use the next 3 weeks? I'll kind of guide you through some prep to apply. And once you're ready, we'll let you apply for the job. And if you get it, you get it. I said, that's awesome, man. I appreciate the opportunity. You know, four weeks later I had the job and I started. I actually took a month off of work before I started. Went to London to see a friend. I highly recommend that if anyone's ever changing careers, take as much time off in between if you can. It was incredible. So anyways, I started at Unstack. Two months later, Zach gets on the phone with me. Hey man, something serious to tell you about. I'm actually leaving the company. I'm going to another company. He had worked there a lot longer than I had. I'm going to another company called Triple. Whale. Not sure if they need any other people on the team, so I'll get back to you when I can. I'll do right by you. I feel bad about it, but I gotta do what's right for my family. So for about an hour, I thought I had made this big career pivot in my life and I was out of a job with a child on the way and all this stuff. I thought, what have I done? Thankfully, he got me on the call with the CEO, Max Blank, in due time. He's a co-founder with AJ Orbach of Triple Whale, and basically my pitch to Max was, I don't have all the experience in the world. In fact, I've got about 2 months of it, but what are you doing on a day-to-day basis? And he's like, well, you know, I'm taking all these sales calls and I'm doing this and there's just not enough time in the day. It's like, perfect. I'll take all of them. I'll do all the sales calls you ever want me to do at any time. I'll learn this product so fast, so quickly, and I will just give my all and my whole to you. And that's what I did. In the first month, I ran 85 demos and the next month I ran 100. And these are 30 to 45, sometimes an hour-long demos. So that's a lot of demos in one month for a very complex kind of software.

20:46 Scott Ingram: All right. Talk about that more, because that's insane. And when I read that in your notes, my head nearly exploded. So I'm just curious about, I mean, obviously there's a fair amount of demand, right? You had a lot of, a lot of it kind of coming to you, but how were you able to get up to speed quickly enough? And what did you kind of learn through that process? Because I'm sure like that is trial by fire hose.

21:05 Brantley Atkinson: Yeah, absolutely. And this is not my background, right? E-commerce, you know, I was associate director of marketing and communication, but it was much more communication, much less so marketing. So basically to get up to snuff, I did the same kind of schmoozing as I did with customer success. And schmoozing is a bad word for it, right? Because I'm getting to know these people, but I got to know the devs and the CS team and the product managers. And every time I had a question, you know, I'd kind of bounce around between them because I didn't want to overload anybody or really make someone like, God, Brantley's asking me 20 questions again, but I would hop on the calls that they were on with customers and learn what they were saying. I would keyword search things in our Slack channel and see what was going on there. I would try and see if I could talk to active customers and see how they're using us. So it was more so just using all the resources I possibly could at a time when we weren't that resource dense either, because we were just building this product. And the thing about Triple Whale that's insane So we launch a new piece of our product every few weeks, if not every week. And that's what's kept us ahead of the competition in the space. We just launched an integration for Amazon this week, which is pretty wild for a Shopify-specific aggregation and attribution tool. So like things like that are really just keeping us ahead of everyone else and keeping us at the forefront and keeping up with all that launch material in our kind of internal Slack is, that's a job in itself. That could be 40 hours a week. Reading the messages people send about what's being launched.

22:35 Scott Ingram: Amazing. So looking back on that, right? So you're making a career transition, you're stepping into your first role in sales. Knowing what you know now, is there anything that you would've done differently if you could kind of go back and start that process over again?

22:49 Brantley Atkinson: Yeah, there are. If you gimme a second to think about it. I mean, there's a few things about my approach that my sales manager doesn't love, right? I talk to you all the time about building genuine connections. That gets me in a lot of trouble with couponing. In front of my face and behind my back, I'm sure I'm the coupon king of Triple Whale. So I'm toning that back. I'm learning a bit more about actual negotiations and just realizing that it's okay to be selling something. You don't always have to be, you know, helping someone and their grandmother and their budget and all these types of things. They know what they're getting into. If they're spending X amount of dollars, they can likely afford it. It's super nice to want to help people. But from a sales organization standpoint, you don't always have to do that. But, you know, within reason, you can certainly help people out in other ways or make sure their support is totally and wholly what they need when they do sign up. But from a sales perspective, yeah, that's one thing that would put more money in my pocket. It would put more money in our company's pocket. And it's something that I'm kind of actively working on being just as friendly but less friendly. You know what I mean?

23:51 Scott Ingram: So call Brantley. He's going to get you the best deal. Is that what you're saying has been happening?

23:55 Brantley Atkinson: You know, a little bit of that, a little bit of the other, right? So no, it's just more so that just learning the curve of negotiations, right? And so like I picked up a book that I'm hoping to start, Never Split the Difference. So like a former international hostage negotiator from the FBI kind of tells you his like field-tested approach to high-stakes negotiations. And I think, you know, it's kind of a joke that you would read that in sales, but like you take some of those and kind of apply it to You know, as we talked about earlier, sales as a profession versus sales as a looked-down-upon art.

24:29 Scott Ingram: Yeah, absolutely right. And certainly, I mean, I think that's something we all learn, right? You bring a lot more value to the organization the more you're able to keep those margins intact and really sell the value of your solution and realize, yeah, I don't necessarily have to discount to get a deal done, right?

24:44 Brantley Atkinson: And you don't want to degrade how great your product is and the value of it, right? These people are going to see the value. It's just a matter of how you pitch it. And I think some of my pitches originally on were, you know, taking some of the value that we obviously provide and not necessarily selling it as best I could and then offering a discount to compensate. Or, you know, I will say for what it's worth, and my sales head of sales will maybe not love this, but like, that's a great way to get people to come back if they've ghosted you is, hey, in the subject line, 15% off if you let me know how things are going and if you want to rediscuss Triple Nice, nice.

25:19 Scott Ingram: Awesome. Good learnings. Good learnings. So, I mean, the show's called Sales Success Stories. Do you have a story of your favorite sale, or maybe just a sale that you learned a lot from that you can tell us?

25:30 Brantley Atkinson: Yeah, I mean, I have one. I like big logos. Of course everyone does, right? And it's cool when it comes in the Slack channel when it says the name of the company and people have heard of it and they're excited. I won't say exactly who it is, but it's a very well-known NBA team. I'm also working on one with a very popular, if not one of the most popular football clubs in Europe, right? So things like that are very cool, and just the amount of legal work and other things that it takes to get names like that is mind-numbing. It's wild. So I think a lot of those bigger deals that I've worked on that end up working out and bring a great logo to Triple Whale and a great partnership people who are doing great things in the space that are not traditional D2C e-commerce players. I think a lot of the legwork done on those deals kind of builds the foundation for future deals at our company that are going to be big deals, big brands, and kind of disruptors in the direct-to-consumer space.

26:27 Scott Ingram: Yeah, great stuff. Great stuff. So, I mean, you have gotten off to a great fast start inside an organization that seems to be off to a pretty strong start in even a little bit of a down market.

26:39 Brantley Atkinson: Absolutely.

26:39 Scott Ingram: What are you most proud of in that?

26:41 Brantley Atkinson: I think that… so most proud of it is just that I proved to myself that I could do it, right? Like any career change, you want to make sure that you're not going to let your family down. I promised my wife I'd make some more money, right? I'd set up a good future for our child. I've done that. And then I've done it kind of more than I ever imagined in the first couple of months, right? So there's money to be had in sales. We've got a good company for rewarding you for super hard work. And I'm just a diligent worker. Even if I was getting paid pennies, I'd be diligently hardworking. And it just so happens that sales is a great place to actually make money that is comparable to the amount of effort you put in.

27:19 Scott Ingram: Yeah, absolutely. What do you find to be the biggest challenge? What are you struggling with the most right now?

27:24 Brantley Atkinson: One of the things that I have struggled with is that following up with people and persistence and keeping following up, because you do want to walk a fine line when you're doing that. Another thing I'm struggling with is kind of the core of sales, right? Coming from a non-sales background, you do want to know the things like the never split the difference, the negotiation tactics. You do want to know things about driving pain points in customers and making sure you're listening to them and understanding their needs as opposed to just doing a product dump. And I would say my first couple demos that I did, right, I wasn't aware of really doing the discovery aspect of understanding their needs versus just selling how great Triple Whale is and what an awesome product it is and how we solve this, that, and the other. You got to find… you got to qualify them first. You got to find out if they have that problem and then you tell them how you solve it, right? So I think every demo, every day, every month, I'm continuing to get better at that. But of course, that's a real struggle if you were never kind of classically trained in sales and in this kind of world.

28:29 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Continue to talk a little bit more about just how you're continuing to work through that stuff. How are you trying to get over those humps?

28:35 Brantley Atkinson: Yeah, I think Steve Reed, who was on your podcast a couple episodes ago from the Vikings, he has a very personal role, right? He's getting people to come to a Vikings game and he's building genuine relationships. That's tough to do in 30 minutes on a demo call, but I try to do the same thing first so that ladder problem I talked about where people ghost you or you don't know how to follow up or you're being too persistent, that kind of goes away the more you actually get to know a person or the more genuine they feel you are. So I think a lot of working on that and then reading some of the suggestions from my head of sales, Zach, like that book on negotiating or SPIN Selling, some of those others, you can brush up on the traditional classic sales techniques anytime. And there's plenty of people on LinkedIn who are doing an awesome job of reminding you of those tips as well.

29:23 Scott Ingram: Yeah, great stuff. All right, so you talked about a lot of this, a lot of the earnings side of things is really just dependent on the hard work that you're doing. I want to dig into just how are you structuring that work. So probably my favorite question to ask is just around the way that you structure your day. So your alarm clock goes off, I want to know what time that happened, and I want literally the blow-by-blow until your head hits the pillow at the end the day?

29:49 Brantley Atkinson: Yeah, so it goes off at 6:45 AM and then it gets snoozed 3 or 4 times. Not all the time, but we have a baby who is recently waking up through it all throughout the night again. So trying to get, you know, 5 more minutes of sleep in the morning, that's always great. I don't know if I'm weird in this regard or not, probably too personal. I shower every day, most times morning and night, right? So that's just a place to think, especially after a long day of staring at the computer at the end of the day, I will just turn off all the lights and take a quick shower. It really helps wake me up, jog my memory. But as soon as I'm done, I'm grabbing likely a breakfast bar and I'm at my computer. I'm looking at all the contacts who have been assigned to me overnight or since the last time I was at my computer. The first thing I'm doing with those is setting a task, and I'm setting that task to be due at 8 AM of the same day. So as soon as it's set, it's likely either the first thing I see in my kind of HubSpot CRM of what you need to do today, or it's already overdue. And if something's overdue, I hate it. I'm gonna attack it head-on. So I've also, in those tasks, I've also got people that need following up on from previous days' demos or from other things like that. And when I say previous days, I mean multiple days ago, because after every single demo, I get out a very robust recap of the discussion that we've had. That discussion is very specific to the needs that they said they had, very specific to kind of the timeline that I tried to hold them to. And that's one thing I've worked on a whole lot is at the end of that call, right, our social contract we set up at the beginning of the call was we're going to figure out if this is for you, we're going to show you a demo, and then we're going to see what the timeline is based on your needs. I really hold them to that at the end. When am I going to talk to you again? When are you going to have information for me? If you don't know now, when can I follow up with you? And you might have that information. So after every call, I follow up with them. If I have back calls, I will follow up with them, you know, as soon as I'm done with my consecutive calls. But basically the day starts out with a bunch of emails, catching up on anyone who's assigned overnight, hitting up my list of probably 50 tasks of, hey, it's time to email this prospect again, or this person you already demoed. And then I just go through the day having demo, demo, demo. Not a big lunch guy, but I try to make some time for it now. Just so I can get to the end of the day around maybe 5:30 and have my day wrapped and be ready to spend that precious few hours with my child before they go to bed around 7:30, 8.

32:19 Scott Ingram: Nice. So just a little bit more context, like how many demos these days is an average day?

32:26 Brantley Atkinson: So I'll just pull up my calendar real quick. If you don't mind me clicking around, you can maybe hear some of that. But on Monday I woke up, you know, I dropped my child off at daycare. I blocked off a little 30 minutes for some emails. We had an all-hands sales call, and then I had 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 demos, 5 demos that day. And then some time I blocked off for a follow-up with somebody. So some days are 5, some days are 3, other days are 1. And I truthfully am thankful for those days so I can send 200 emails as opposed to the 40 to 60 I get out usually. So it just ebbs and flows with the time of the year.

33:04 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Nice. And then in terms of the output side of things, like how many accounts are you bringing on in say a given month? Round numbers.

33:13 Brantley Atkinson: Yeah, it's really dependent. I mean, a lot of the reps on our team are doing a really great job and generally you would see, you know, you would see 15 to 20 deals per rep close a month.

33:24 Scott Ingram: Perfect. Perfect. And then what about, I mean, are there any other kind of habits or routines that are really core to your success and just the way that you operate?

33:33 Brantley Atkinson: Yeah, I think meeting recaps are important, right? So I talked about building that relationship with customer success earlier in our conversation. If you are going to send someone who just paid you $2,000, $3,500, whatever, $200, if you're going to send them to then get onboarded, you want to make sure you're not setting up that customer success person for failure. So always do the meeting recaps of what they need, what they've done. Always send them a very thorough follow-up of, hey, you said to reach out to you in 2 weeks. I'm going to do it. You said to reach out to you in a week because you will have talked to your CEO by then. What kind of information do you need from me after this email with all this, you know, a novel of information? What more do you need from me to present to them Triple Whale in the best possible light? All that type of stuff. I just, I try to be as thorough as I can in all these things and as personalized as I can. So that generally, you know, takes up a lot of the day.

34:31 Scott Ingram: Yeah. I mean, it really sounds like you've got a lot of really strong diligence in your process, right? You're doing the research on the front end so that you can send a really differentiated personalized message. You're doing really strong immediate follow-up that is specific to the things that you talked about and the commitments that they made. You're doing a good handoff process right now. I've closed the deal. Now it's time for me to hand it over to client success. When are you kind of fitting all of that in? Does it all just kind of flow? Are you time blocking that? Like, how are you structuring that?

35:01 Brantley Atkinson: Yeah, I do a good bit of time blocking on my calendar for sure. And there's some days I work late as well. Like one of the reasons and one of the keys to being successful before my child was born that I didn't put in our notes, but we were getting a bunch of Australian clients, and they would come in our chat and they would complain that no one was ever online to talk to them about sales. So for the next month, I went out of my way to take calls from 6 PM to, you know, 12 at night, right? So I was talking to as many Australian reps as I could, or as many Australian prospects as I could, so that I could close those deals. So no one asked me to do that. No one expected me to work late or told me I had to. But at a startup, that's kind of what you're in for. And then, you know, until you have a child that takes you away from kind of the nighttime duties, I just work as late as I need to to make it work while still having, you know, a great relationship with my wife and time for dinner together and time to walk the dogs and stuff like that.

35:56 Scott Ingram: Love it, love it, love it. What about your information diet? What are you reading? What are you listening to? What are you watching? And when does all that happen?

36:04 Brantley Atkinson: Yeah, I don't know how many people you speak to that are in the e-commerce D2C Shopify or WooCommerce or any of those kind of online brands space, but like a lot of it is on LinkedIn, like I mentioned earlier. And a lot of them have their own podcasts kind of like yours, right? Like if you find a podcast that is specific to how to run ads for e-commerce, there's no amount of reading or anything else I could do that would be more beneficial than just listening to an hour with somebody who's actually spending $30,000 a month and listening to how they're doing it and why they're doing it. And what challenges they're facing. So a lot of it for me is market research on where can I find people who are doing what my prospects are doing and they're doing it well. So people, you know, whether I'm qualified or not on these calls, people ask me for advice about what their marketing strategy should be in these things. And, you know, that's not a mark on them on, oh, they're asking a sales guy at a company what their marketing strategies are, but they expect us to know the space. So, you know, if I can pass off information to them saying, hey, it's not my idea, but I did listen to a great podcast. This guy's verified. We know he's a client of ours, or we know kind of what he spends based on what their company does. It seems to be working for them. I would definitely look more into this strategy. And honestly, if they are a client of ours and you sign up as well, we'd love to get you introduced to them so that you can talk to them specifically.

37:30 Scott Ingram: Awesome. Very, very cool. What about the tools and apps in your life? You mentioned HubSpot. What else are you kind of running your world on?

37:37 Brantley Atkinson: Yeah, this could very well turn into a commercial for Gong. I don't know if you know Gong.io, but that is an awesome tool that we use. Basically, it records your calls. After the calls, it gives you highlights of did you talk too much, which if it listened to this podcast, it would say I certainly did. But I guess that's the point of being a podcast. Yeah, that's right. But, you know, it tells you if you're within the reasonable range of… did you talk too much? Did they say anything interesting about pricing or small talk or all these types of things? It really helps you. You know, I have some deals, and one of the reasons I've stayed number 1 for a while, or at least been near the top… and, you know, I think my team would give me a hard time if I said stayed number 1 because we all are doing great. It's all back and forth who's at the top of the charts. But basically one of the reasons I think I've done above quota every single month since I've started is that I'm able to go back and look at these meetings from a couple weeks, couple months ago and pick up little tidbits of something they said and quote it back to them. So Gong is invaluable for that type of thing of saying, you know, I'm never going to remember 50 calls ago, but I can certainly remember it when I go and listen to I can turn on just what they said. I can turn off everything I said that was probably silly and overwrought and too many words. And I can listen to just what the prospect said and what was paining them at the time and the things they told me about when and why they're going to buy Triple Whale.

39:04 Scott Ingram: Love it. Love it. And the cool thing about that is like, you can really, really listen in the recording, right? As much as we try and be fully engaged and fully listening and in the conversation that we're having, We are thinking about, you know, shoot, what's the next question I'm going to ask? Or, you know, what else do I need to learn? So you're always kind of context switching live in that conversation. So to be able to go back and just hear them in their own words, right?

39:26 Brantley Atkinson: Right. And going back to the story I told you at the very beginning, right? Like saying or doing something kind of outlandish or off the wall, or what are just sliding in a certain either curse word or sliding in a certain… and, you know, you don't have to the curse, but sliding in a certain thing that is an interesting thing to say, and then going back and watching their reaction, you can tell if they genuinely like you or if you've actually built a relationship, or if they're like, oh, what is this guy talking about? So literally going back and looking at, you know, and improving your game by doing these things, but also looking back and kind of see the moments where they have a wow or aha moment, or when you just talk through a feature For nonstop for two minutes, and then you go back and watch the recording. You're like, oh my God! Halfway through, their eyes lit up and their jaw dropped to the floor. I should have stopped right there and said, yeah, that's a great feature. What do you think about it?

40:21 Scott Ingram: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So I usually ask this question of folks that have been at this a lot longer, but I'm really curious if you subscribe to a particular sales philosophy, or maybe you've kind of developed your own thoughts on a sales philosophy.

40:36 Brantley Atkinson: Yeah, I think educational and nurturing is kind of my philosophy. I have been on a few calls or listened to certain gongs or seen other people where you really go at it with that salesy approach of they say something about… you ask them a question that is a loaded question. Hey, does this really pain you in a day? Or like, how are you doing this? And obviously the answer is, well, you know, I'm on the call because I'm doing this in Excel spreadsheets every day and it sucks and it takes up my whole day. And then you say, well, wouldn't it be great if I told you that I had a solution for that? I don't subscribe to that, right? I subscribe to finding out those answers for sure, doing the discovery on those for sure, but then not having a kind of non-custom retort that is like, yeah, well, that's exactly why this part of our product's great. I think that that's a bit too salesy for me. Other people it might work for if they're a little more candid about it. I'm more of a therapist when I'm talking to these people. Some of them are on the call because their CEO told them to, and they're overworked and they're overtired, and our tool is genuinely going to save them time and money and effort. And our job is to find a way that they can then pitch what I've told them to their CEO so that they can get the tool and be happier at their job. So it's a mixture of just listening to their genuine problems and trying to come up with a mutual solution because I'm not selling them anything. If they want the tool, we're on the same team.

42:01 Scott Ingram: Yeah, absolutely. And then stylistically, I mean, how would you describe your overarching kind of style and the way that you're doing that?

42:08 Brantley Atkinson: A lot like this podcast. I think it's conversational. Like an example, yesterday I had looked up a client and on LinkedIn it said that they were a lawyer and then they became, you know, this entrepreneur. So the first kind of question was like, all right, well, we're not gonna You know, we can talk Triple Whale all day long, but I kind of want to know more about this. How do you go from being a lawyer to e-commerce? He said, oh well, my mother started this business. She needed help with it. The other person on the call is actually my uncle, and it's kind of a family business. And so I was a lawyer in Argentina and we moved here. And then that's the perfect entry, right? Like, unless you've been living under a rock, you understand that Argentina just won the World Cup. Oh man, Argentina won the World Cup. Like, how is that possible? For your family and all. So we spent the first 15 minutes talking about how excited and how it was genuinely the best month of his life. And after that, you are friends and you are making a general, very easy conversation about, yeah, that's awesome. I'm so happy for you guys. If we got time, let's go over this tool real quick. And of course they always do because that's what they booked it for. And they say, and they're much more at ease. They're much more willing to follow up with you later, even if they're on the fence about the tool. They remember you as the person who tried to get to know them.

43:21 Scott Ingram: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So, Brantley, what motivates you? How do you think about motivation and just kind of overall drive?

43:29 Brantley Atkinson: Yeah, I think I'm a pretty emotional guy when it comes to wanting to do right by others and hoping they would do right by me as well. And, you know, not everyone is going to live up to your expectations of that. So that's something personally that I've had to get better with over my life of expecting other people to have the same expectations that I do out of life. But my father was the CEO of a hospital for his entire professional career, starting at the age of 30. So he bounced around from hospital to hospital managing 8,000 people and you know a really life and death situation on most days. So he taught me the value of education. I got a master's degree as soon as I finished undergraduate because that was valuable to our family and to our kind of core beliefs. And I just think you know if you're not working. Working hard and if you're not going to give it your all, then what do you have to show for your character? I'm the captain and the kind of leader of our adult hockey league team. I have coached high school lacrosse and all these other things. And I think just being a good person that cares for others and kind of hard work, they all go in the same breath because being a genuine person who helps other people is hard work. And if you can't give hard work to everything you do, then Why are you doing it? What's the point? It doesn't interest me unless there's a reason to be doing it.

44:45 Scott Ingram: Yeah, you know, I'm curious. What's the perception of your family in this move to sales?

44:49 Brantley Atkinson: Well, my little brother, long story short, he's much more on the non-for-profit world, and at first he wasn't in love with the idea. But he sees the passion I bring to it, and he's grown to realize that Triple Whale might be a unicorn when it comes to how we're helping merchants, what. We're doing. And it's a company with a great story and great people working there. And then my older brother, he works at Triple Whale too. He's our head of growth. So that always works out well. If you're at the same company, you have a good perception of it. And my dad is just happy to see, you know, he came over before I recorded this podcast. He was very tickled that I was on this podcast. So he's just happy that I'm successful at something that I enjoy.

45:28 Scott Ingram: Nice. Well, we'll give them all a shout out here. I'm sure they're going to listen. I mean, it's Such an interesting thing. I mean, just like you coming into this role and having kind of one perception and one idea of what sales is, I think the reality is, I mean, again, having done over 150 of these interviews with top performers, what you're describing is what sales is. It's helping people out. It's taking care of people, right? And if you do a great job of that, then all of this other, you know, fun stuff, big W-2s and all of that kind of comes along as a really nice side effect and bonus.

46:02 Brantley Atkinson: Yeah, absolutely. And not to discredit anyone on our sales team or myself in general, but we have a very strong inbound funnel. These people need our solution. It doesn't mean that it's transactional and, hey, you need to buy this, or else we wouldn't have a difference between who sells what month to month, right? Like everyone would sell the same amount every month. But it is a product that our co-founders, our development team, Our sales team is positioning very well. Our head of sales is really doing a great job and it is a product that people need and it is product that we are continuing to meet their needs at every corner. So it also helps if you have a product with product market fit.

46:44 Scott Ingram: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Let's keep going on kind of this seller perception thing. Is there something you believe that the average or typical sales rep would think is crazy?

46:56 Brantley Atkinson: Something that they would think is crazy? Not truly. I think that if people were just on a Gong call with me, they are really a sales call with me sometimes. Like, for instance, I was talking to a company that sold ankle braces. I stopped the call before we got on. I said, all right guys, my ankle has been killing me. I'm wearing a brace right now. Threw my leg up in the air, pulled my kind of like pant down and said, look at this. What brand is this? And they knew the brand. I was like, perfect. All right. So you know your competitors. You sell me your ankle brace, I'll buy it right now. So just like being willing to do things like that, I think is not the general philosophy, but I know I've gotten away from your question, but off the top of my head, that's what came to me. So sorry if I didn't answer you there.

47:37 Scott Ingram: No, but you know what? It's fun because I was in that space at one point in my career. I was working for Bazaarvoice and we were selling ratings and reviews platform. And you know, there's something about selling to brands like that where you know, just being able to come around and share your passion for what they do and being able to be excited about that, whether it's just you or it's others on your team. I remember there was one day one of the reps was in a sales cycle with Harley-Davidson and, you know, they just sent out a message to the whole company and they're like, hey, if you're into Harley, like bring your Harley gear, we're going to take this big picture. And, you know, everybody comes together, they do this big picture. We did that all the time. And again, that's the stuff that breaks through, right? It's just that little bit of like, We are passionate about your brand. So of course we want to be passionate about your success and what you've got going on. And it's a little bit harder to do that in the B2B space sometimes, but it is super fun being able to do that. I've never whipped out an ankle brace though. That's pretty wild.

48:34 Brantley Atkinson: Yeah, that's right. And along the same story, right? You got to be able to back it up. So this is one of the sales things that I've learned. A lot of people think salespeople are liars or fibbers, right? They'll just say whatever you want them to say. So you have to be able to back up your enthusiasm for these products. One prime example, I was prepping for a really big call with essentially, I'll say, a meat thermometer, right, for cooking. And it's like a digital one that has an app. I messaged them, and this is how I got them on the call. Oh man, I love this. I'm doing this Whole30 diet where basically I have to eat steak every night because you can't have grains, you can't have this, whatever, right? And so we get on the on the call and the guy says, you know how many people tell me that exact same thing to get me on a call? He's like, and they never own it. I said, oh, well, that's funny because I've got it right here. And I pulled it up, right? Like, so if you're gonna be like that with people who don't know your intentions or don't know if you're telling the truth, you have to be able to back it up, man.

49:30 Scott Ingram: So let me give you the worst example of that that I get all the time, and it drives me crazy. I get… I mean, you can't imagine how many people reach out to me because they want to be on the podcast. But this is the general stuff. Like, this is just the, hey, here's a list of podcasts that, you know, we're gonna reach out to. And so many of them open with, oh, I listened to your show, I love your show. I'm like… and I can see right through it because if they knew anything about my show, they knew that they shouldn't be pitching whoever it is that they're pitching to be on the podcast. Like, you would immediately know, oh wait, Scott only interviews top-performing individual contributors, so this marketing person is completely irrelevant. And the thing that I feel on that is you are opening with a lie, right? If you open with a lie, I can never trust you. So don't do that. Like, it, it drives me insane. And again, that one is just in my face all the time. And sometimes I'll just reply and I'll tell him, like, you know, you're doing yourself a disservice opening up this way because it's clearly not true. If you're reaching out to 50 podcasts today, you didn't listen to all of them. You didn't listen to any of them.

50:45 Brantley Atkinson: And how hard would it be… you know, I genuinely did listen to Steve Reed's, right, to prep for this… but how hard would it be for me to read the show notes and tell you, you know, oh, what a great interesting thing about the Vikings. I too wanted to work Austin Spurs, and now I'm working here. I'm the top salesperson. Like, you… it wouldn't be that hard to come off with a better lie than what you're… what you're saying, right?

51:06 Scott Ingram: If you are gonna lie, lie convincingly.

51:09 Brantley Atkinson: Yeah, just do a little better, you know, 2 minutes of research. We talked about it. Just do that.

51:13 Scott Ingram: Yeah, that's all it takes. Again, it's stepping over that low bar. It's doing just that little bit of research to show that I know who you are, I know what you're about, right? There's some type of connection, there's something relevant going on. I know Triple Whale has a great sales culture. It's all I needed.

51:29 Brantley Atkinson: There you go. And we do. And everyone likes praise too, right? And like along the same vein, I had another funny one. A guy tried to… he was a super nice guy, but he tried to call me out a little bit on it too because I was like looking up their company. It's in this beautiful place in Montana. And so I said the name of the little town. I was like, oh, I've actually been thinking about visiting there. He's like, what? Who? Why? It's like, why would you even know this little town? I was like, well, my dad is a history buff, and for the last couple years he's wanted to see Custer's Last Stand, which is you know the Battle of Little Bighorn. All this type of stuff. He's like, okay, all right. Well, now that you know the battle, and now that you know all this, I understand that you would probably see this while you're going on that trip with your father. You know that's not you know other people would probably lie about that. I was like, well, I wasn't, and I was literally looking up flights to Montana.

52:18 Scott Ingram: That's awesome. That's awesome. Hey, I want to come back to the sales culture thing a little bit and just talk about that specifically. Like what is it? About the culture there that makes it special. And maybe you want to kind of reference what you shared on the Naughty or Nice List.

52:33 Brantley Atkinson: Yeah, I mean, I think on the Naughty or Nice List, I just kind of shared, A, that, you know, I was doing 100 demos when I first started, right? So the head of sales, Zach Rigo, I mentioned, when it was just me and him on the brand side, of course we have an agency team that is grade A, they're awesome. But when I was just doing individual brands, He would come on a lot of calls with me if he had the time, or he'd be doing the same thing himself, running that many demos to meet our demand at the time. So initially the support was there from other people. I have other people on the team who are in the development or the product management side that hop on calls with me all the time to try to sell somebody based on they know that they need technical expertise on the call. Obviously I've gotten a lot better about understanding where we are technically. Technically, but that's always really helpful. We have a lot of people on our team who will make connections to you. A lot of people on our team who are very supportive. So today's actually a good day for me. I had a really big sale come through. And when that sale came through, there were 15 messages on the Slack and we have a bunch of emojis that are personalized for when you make a sale, which is something that I started back in the day. I have a Carolina Hurricanes kind of spinning logo that I put on all my sales because back in the day when we first started, you literally had to mark your sale because it wasn't going through to HubSpot that that was your deal and all this stuff. But then it became kind of a moniker of job well done. So, you know, just 20 people that aren't on the sales team and people that are on the sales team all adding that emoji to deals and saying great job and all those types of things. Everyone is happy with everyone's success at this company. Company. In the conversations I have on the sidebar in Slack, you know, we're always asking each other for advice. We're always commiserating about anything if there is something to commiserate over in the e-com space, much more so the marketplace than our own company. But we're a solid team and we all like each other up to this point. Maybe when we meet in person for our sales kickoff this year, that could change, but we all really like each other and we're all very supportive of each other.

54:34 Scott Ingram: You know, I think the most interesting part of that callout is a great sales culture is bigger than the sales team, right? It's really, it's a company culture. It's a culture of sales across the organization and recognizing that everybody is part of the sales team, right? So, being able to celebrate together, being able to celebrate the people outside of the sales team that contributed to a win. One of my favorite processes, it's so funny that you keep bringing back these Bazaarvoice stories, They actually had an absolute, maybe one of the best sales cultures I was ever part of. And we would do these after we won a deal, we would write up these how the deal was done emails.

55:12 Brantley Atkinson: Oh, nice.

55:12 Scott Ingram: And we would share them across the entire company. And that was the opportunity to call out every single person who had touched that deal, right? We would call out the customer success people that jumped on a call to show, hey, here's how we're going to take care of you after you sign on with us, right? And we'd bring in product folks and talk about the roadmap. I mean, obviously there's legal that was contributing to the deal and the red lines and all of that stuff. And it really was like the entire company was part of the sales team. So I appreciate you calling that out. This is kind of a fun… I'm excited about this year, right? And really, really truly digging into this topic of what is a great sales culture. And I think that is a huge, huge ingredient that always starts with the executive leadership, right? They have to believe in sales holistically.

55:59 Brantley Atkinson: Yeah, absolutely. And in a company that's growing like ours, which was, you know, your 300%, you could put it in there because our company growth-wise over the last couple, you know, I think it was calendar year was, I believe, over that. We just had our kind of call initially. I won't say exact numbers, but yeah, if not there, pretty damn close. And so it's pretty amazing to be at a company like that. And one thing that our head of sales said to us a couple months ago, right, when all these other companies are experiencing layoffs, especially in our space, and they're laying off members of all these divisions, it is nice to feel like as a part of the sales team, the better you do, the more sales you bring in, the more protective of those other people's jobs you are because you're bringing in revenue and you're hopefully contributing to revenue that can keep jobs on at your company. And I think that's an awesome way to viewing sales as an actual legitimate career that people should be proud of.

56:55 Scott Ingram: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. We provide the blanket of revenue that others sleep under, right?

57:00 Brantley Atkinson: That's right. That's right. And not that they should thank us for it endlessly, but I do think that some of the misconceptions about salespeople and all those things, if everyone looked at it in that light as what a necessary thing the sales team is, and I'm so happy that they're doing so well because It's keeping the revenue going, and I think that's a great way to look at it. And it changed my perception of it as well when I heard that.

57:23 Scott Ingram: Yeah, absolutely. So Brantley, what advice would you give to somebody that is just starting out in sales today?

57:30 Brantley Atkinson: Yeah, I think there's one thing that has been driven into me by the head of sales, Zach Riga, that I mentioned a few times. When I was doing the 100 demos a month, it was difficult to personalize. It was difficult to You know, we're going to go back to the same thing, right? It was difficult to get everyone everything that they needed. But as soon as you do have that time, he came up to me and he said, why are you still sending X number of templates to these people or this or that? You need to go back to your roots and you need to refocus on really giving these people that customized experience that you wanted to give when you didn't have the time. And now you have the time, really refocus on that. So I think I think like we've talked about multiple times, if there's any snippet you take away from this as a salesperson, literally if you do 2 minutes of research, you can get enough personalization to get someone's attention. Because again, someone like Scott or someone like my boss or maybe someone like me one day does get hundreds of these emails a week, a day. And if you're not putting the effort in, it's so obvious to see it. It really makes things so much easier when people respond to you and are actually happy about it.

58:40 Scott Ingram: Brilliant, brilliant. So Brantley, I have to tell you, I'm a little bit disappointed. We put on like this whole disclaimer at the front of the episode because there was going to be a lot of cursing.

58:51 Brantley Atkinson: Fuck.

58:52 Scott Ingram: And not once. So, so, okay, only once has there been anything. Let me ask this. As we wrap this up, I first want to just ask, I mean, we've covered a lot of ground. We've talked about a lot of great stuff. Is there anything else that you were hoping to share that somehow I just, I didn't get to? I didn't ask the right question.

59:12 Brantley Atkinson: You didn't ask me the qualified results, which actually I kind of appreciate, right? Talking about money is not always the most beautiful thing, but I've done well and I'm happy with it. I think some of the things that I had had out here for maybe tips for other people that my head of sales says. All the time are time kills deals. By that, he just means be on top of it, right? Be… if someone emails you at 8, yeah, you can put your child to bed, but if you got 5 minutes at 8:30, shoot them an email back the same night. We talked about kind of under-promise and over-deliver, but in sales, you don't want to under-promise, right? You want to set reasonable expectations and over-deliver. The other big one that I like is if you say it, it's an assumption. If they say it, it's true. So those are kind of things that I try to live by, and I try to get them to say it. And then going back to Gong, the great tool that I love, and you Gong, you know, we can use 15% off because I'm promoting you so much. You know, if they say it's true, great, they've said it. You've got all the fodder you need to close this deal because they said they need you, right? Not much else to that other than, you know, any pre-sales rituals. I kind of have a weird one. If it's a big sale or a thing like this that I was a little nervous about. On my wedding playlist, we have a lot of soul music. I say A Little Prayer by Aretha Franklin is my go-to to calm me down before a big call or before something like this.

1:00:36 Scott Ingram: Nice, nice. All right, perfect. So the last question, I like to always wrap this up on something actionable, right? Like, talk is cheap. What would you suggest that our listener do over the course of the next, say, 1 to 2 weeks to improve themselves and improve their results?

1:00:53 Brantley Atkinson: Yeah, it's something that until we had Gong, I wasn't doing and I hate doing, but I do it now. I go back and I turn off the… you know, I told you earlier you could turn off yourself and listen to only the things that the client or prospect said. You can also go back and you can turn off them and only watch yourself Only listen to yourself. And I've done that a few times. It's not always pretty what you see, right? So continual feedback on your own pitch, your own performance. There were a couple months that went into this and I realized I was totally misrepresenting how one of our attribution models worked. And that's a big part of selling this software, right? So I was astonished that no one had called me on it. And there's even an email I sent to a demo I did the day before, like, I'm so sorry, this is actually how it works, right? So going back and listening to yourself, if you have the means to do that, you can record a Google Meet, you can record a Zoom. I think that's been something that I don't always like doing, but it's been very helpful and anyone can do it. And I guarantee you, you're going to pick up on something you're doing that you shouldn't, or you're going to pick up on something that you wish you were doing differently.

1:02:01 Scott Ingram: Love it. Love it. Great challenge. Record yourself, watch it, do that painful work. Of watching yourself on replay and learn from it and taking action. Brantley, this has been fantastic. Thank you for your time. I appreciate it.

1:02:13 Brantley Atkinson: Yeah, Scott. I hope it's been good, and I hope that anyone listening, if you've made it to the end to this part, kudos! Great for you, and thank you for that. And add me on LinkedIn.

1:02:21 Scott Ingram: There we go, and we'll have that link at top1.fm/156. Thanks, Brantley.

1:02:26 Brantley Atkinson: Yeah, thanks so much. Talk to you later. 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.