177: A Sales Rebel: Building Success off Fundamentals and Human Selling with Christian Pallazola

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0:46 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.

1:02 Scott Ingram: Today on the Sales Success Stories podcast, my guest is Christian Pallazola. Christian is the top account executive at Nice Actimize and another mentee of Jack Wilson's. Welcome to the show, Christian.

1:13 Christian Pallazola: Pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.

1:15 Scott Ingram: I'm going to call this out. I really appreciate you putting a blanket over your head just so we can have really great sound quality because most people don't know this. I hate Yeti microphones and unfortunately that's what you're dealing with. So For my audio nerds out there, you can ask me all about that later, but these things are the bane of my existence.

1:33 Christian Pallazola: No. And if you know Scott, he's not holding back. He's a man who cares about his audio. He gave me a lot of recommendations on mics. I went with the one he hates the most, but we're making it work. So pleasure to be here.

1:45 Scott Ingram: All good. So let's kick things off like we always do with some immediate value. And I would love to hear about the top 3 things that you believe have contributed the most to your success in sales.

1:56 Christian Pallazola: Sure. And I want to start off just by saying that trying to narrow down the top 3 things that I truly believe have contributed the most is a lot harder of a thing than I realized was initially. But doing some thinking on it, the big 3 I kept arriving towards all essentially boil down to fundamentals and fundamentals that arguably go well beyond just the profession of sales. And the first one I want to share is just actually pertains to how and why I got into sales in the first place, which It was conveniently by coincidence. And right now I'm an account executive at a company called NICE Actimize. I sell anti-money laundering, fraud prevention, and financial crime management software to banks. Now, the specifics around how I got there is probably a story I'm sure we'll get into later on in the conversation, but I fully believe that what I do and who I am today is a direct result of being told just to try something new 10 years ago. And Scott, before you call me out and tell me that the message of don't be afraid to try something new might sound cliché, I promise there's a story with value behind it if you're open to hearing it.

3:03 Scott Ingram: We call the show Sales Success Stories for a reason, so whip out your story.

3:08 Christian Pallazola: Sure. Well, back when I was, I'd say, 18, fresh out of high school, I had attended an accepted students day at my now alma mater, Providence College, and Just to preface, I'd gone in there thinking in the back of my mind that I perhaps wanted to do something in business, but had no idea what that would entail or what real options existed. And all I knew was that college was supposedly going to be a lot harder than high school. So in my mind, I was focused on things like making sure that was going to be the most epic summer vacation of all time. And honestly, just trying to save up for college once I eventually got there. But Doing so, I'd been working a bunch of different food service and restaurant gigs. I ended up losing all 3 because, like Scott and I were talking, I'd conveniently broken my elbow the day before I graduated and could no longer do things like wait tables. So there goes that epic summer vacation. There goes any prospect of income. I went into the Accepted Students Day just kind of spiraling with anxiety, feeling down in the dumps, but I'm sitting there and the dean at the time was giving this wonderful speech that I was sort of listening to. But the number one thing I remember from that speech was to try and go home and do something new. And I kid you not, I actually went home that day kind of feeling down in the dumps, but by the grace of God, found a sketchy envelope in the mail from some company offering interviews for a business-related job that happened to pay $18 hourly. And while I may be young at that time, I do want to preface the fact that I'm old enough to remember a time when $18 an hour for a high schooler was unheard of. So I'd grown up in a nice home with my family in a New England farm town, but to me, $18 was sort of FU money. So I called, I got an interview scheduled for the next day. I drove to it knowing nothing about what it was going to be for. I get there and it turns out it's for some door-to-door sales company called Cutco. And Against all judgment, I could have not been more excited. So that's an opposite reaction to, I'd say, 99% of every other 18-year-old who gets those letters in the mail. But I had no other options, so decided to jump face first into it. I get to day 1 of training, learn a few different things. Number 1, training's not paid for. Number 2, the $18 hourly thing is actually $18 per sales demo that you actually have to go out and schedule. But The third was the fact that Cutco makes the greatest freaking knives on planet Earth. They can cut a penny, cut a rope, and they're forever guaranteed. So I spent that entire summer driving around in my blacked-out, excessively loud Volkswagen Jetta with no AC, going house to house, sweating bullets, and just giving everyone in a 50-mile radius a Cutco cutlery presentation. And when I wasn't driving around, I was Cooped up in a sketchy office building, essentially calling homeowners until the wee hours of the night, asking if I could come by, demo sets of knives to their families. So we're talking exactly the type of thing that everyone, homeowners, their husbands and wives want to be doing for the months of July and August. And I'm assuming most of your listeners know that you care about your audio, but also probably have heard of Cutco before as a company. I just want to let the record show that I couldn't have had a better experience doing that job. I had fun, fostered a lot of lifelong friendships along the way, took a lot of funny stories away from the table, but also ended up selling about $32,000 in kitchenware and cutlery sales. So what that job did for me wasn't just a financial impact, but it solidified my interest in sales. But it also made just about every single sales job I've worked to date an absolute walk in the park. Compared to that one. So that's, I guess, my long-winded story about never being afraid to try something new because it got me here, got me on this podcast with you, Scott.

7:09 Scott Ingram: Very nice. There's actually been a decent number of folks who have Cutco origins who've been on the show. And years ago, I pivoted to only interviewing B2B sellers. But if you go way back to episode 15, I just looked this up. I talked to the number 3 all-time Cutco sales guy at the time. This has to have been 5, 6, 7 years ago at this point, just given how old this show is. He had sold $4.5 million worth of Cutcos. Oh yeah. $4.5 million. It's incredible to me.

7:45 Christian Pallazola: $32,000 to me was pretty impressive, but there are 7-figure earners doing that job. Some of them that trained me still there today doing their thing. Yeah, they don't call it Skills for Life for nothing. So I'm going to have to go back into your history and try to connect with that guy.

8:02 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Great stuff. Josh Mueller. He's actually local to me in Austin, so I haven't talked to him in years, but he did. He presented at the very first Sales Success Summit.

8:10 Christian Pallazola: Awesome. Which, by the way, I got to make it to at some point.

8:13 Scott Ingram: Yeah, well, like October is a really good point. What's your second thing?

8:18 Christian Pallazola: Second thing, being good at sales means just being good at going above and beyond the role. Just going past the extra mile. And again, kind of unspoken truth here, but there's not too much of a story to be told with that example. After working a few different jobs, internships, I was able to get some marketing and account management experience, which kind of helped solidify my full circle of experience in sort of a go-to-market function. At the same time, it kind of helped me get good at the areas that I was lacking in sales. So You probably know this, as do your listeners. Sometimes in sales you have to go the extra mile, do the marketing. Sometimes you have to take over as an account manager depending on what type of motion you're in, who you're selling to, what the cycle looks like. But being able to just go beyond the role of sales, not just for job function, but also being there to support your customers day in and day out. I mean, it goes without showing that that's, I think, what separates a salesperson from a really good salesperson, if that makes sense.

9:26 Scott Ingram: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And bring us home. What's your third?

9:29 Christian Pallazola: People buy from people. So be authentic and bold. Ask the hard questions. Do the things other people don't want to do. And this is actually inspired not from another job, but I'm going to give my guy Dale Dupree a little shout out over at the Sales Rebellion. People buy from people. Believe it or not, the person you're prospecting, you're sending a cold email or cold call to, is a human being that likes their own things, that has probably a lot of shared similarities with you, probably a lot of things that make that person unique. So cater to it. I mean, be yourself. I like Dale's philosophy of the crumpled letter and a lot of other things that they employ there and teach sales mentees on. But at the end of the day, if you can recognize the fact that your buyer is a human being, you could probably connect with that individual on a human basis versus just be another random number that pops up on a cold call.

10:24 Scott Ingram: Great stuff. Awesome. So looking forward to digging into all of this. Let's contextualize just a little bit more though. Talk about your current role and how you got to be number 1 there.

10:34 Christian Pallazola: Sure. I mean, it goes without saying, if you've heard of NICE Actimize before, we're a pretty large organization. We're a global company. I am what's number 1 on my team, but there's a lot of different teams that work a lot of different functions there. I ended up getting the a job after leaving my past role, but how I got it was another, I mean, example of pure coincidence. I had in the summer of 2022, unfortunately lost my previous role due to some organizational changes, and I wanted to break into my first full-time role in B2B tech as an AE. I had experience as an SDR, did a few internships, but I'd never worked a closing role specifically at a SaaS company. I spent probably the months of late August, September to December interviewing at maybe 50 different companies that I'd found on Indeed that I'd been referred to. And I was having no luck. Interview after interview, getting to the 6th round and just having been told some crazy advice as to why I didn't get the role. But I ended up having this one company, now Actimize, take a shot on me. They actually liked the Cutco experience, believe it or not. There's got to be more to the Skills for Life for a reason. But I ended up getting the role, joining January of 2023, and now I work as a full-time account executive. Again, we sell anti-money laundering, anti-fraud, and financial crime management software to financial institutions. My team focuses in on community and regional banks. There's a number of other teams that sell to most of the largest financial institutions. And then our parent company, they basically make software that helps route 911 operator calls, dispatches. They uphold communications between air traffic control towers and pilots. So a lot of mission-critical stuff that I really found very exciting and wanted to get behind, and I'm fortunate to be there.

12:38 Scott Ingram: Awesome. And then put your results in perspective for us. What have you done for us lately? Sure.

12:43 Christian Pallazola: I mean, right now I can speak to sort of the raw and uncut status of where I'm at in this fiscal year. That's 2024, just wrapped up the month of June. We work on annual quotas. I'm about 70% of mine. Fortunate enough to have driven about $1.3 million in contract value over the last quarter, which was a pretty impressive success story that I don't take lightly, but a lot more work to come.

13:08 Scott Ingram: Very nice. Very nice. I want to go back to… usually I have folks talk about their origin story, but we already got that. I'm curious though, 2 things. What I typically ask about is if you were starting over, what you would do differently. I'm also interested in maybe couple that with some of the weird feedback that you got having all of those conversations and having gotten into late rounds, right? Because I certainly see that. And I'm curious if there's advice that you have or thoughts that you have on ways to just, again, from a career trajectory perspective, to have maybe overcome some of those issues that you heard.

13:43 Christian Pallazola: Sure. I'll try to answer it in the order you asked. So a couple of things I wish I had done differently was ironically follow the first piece of advice I had given you when we started the podcast, Scott. Out of college, I had joined a startup sort of bootstrapped marketing agency, and the word startup doesn't really give it credit. Truly, it was an organization that had a couple of different people that were fully employed. There was the administrative assistant, there was the CEO, a few full-time account management hires, and then there was myself who was brought on to do a business development role. This was a tried and true startup where there was no base salary. It was 100% commission. I was essentially kind of working a hybrid of being a business development person, but also coming from having studied marketing in college. Has to consult on small businesses about their marketing strategies. So fresh out of college, I was that guy giving fancy slide decks to businesses that I didn't know a whole lot about. So it was pretty daunting. Personally, I wish I had spent a little bit more time assessing other options. And it's not because the role didn't have an impact financially or professionally on my career, but it's because of what you had just mentioned, which were the obstacles I'd encountered when I was forced into the position of having to get creative and lucrative with finding a new full-time job. I made decent money at the end of the day at the marketing agency. Starting first year, I was there for about 3 and a half years, but starting the first year, I pulled less than minimum wage working 100% on commission, but helped them scale a few million dollars in annual revenue and obviously compounded that First year salary, pretty high. But looking back on it, I wish I followed my own advice, looked at what other individuals were doing, networking more proactively instead of just sort of living at home with my folks in my comfort zone.

15:45 Scott Ingram: Yeah, yeah. It's really interesting. I mean, my thoughts on this evolve pretty constantly, right? And one of those is at what point in your career do you go to work for a startup? And I think when you say startup, to your point, there's a huge range. I've worked for a number of startups, but they were not 2 people or 1.5 people or whatever it was. These were companies that had received millions of dollars in funding and had real runway, and they already had product-market fit, and they were well on their way to being successful. And I think going to work for that type of an organization can absolutely accelerate your growth because I watched tons of people who They're getting promotions every 6 months because that's how fast the organization was growing. And the opportunity to move up was really tremendous. The flip side, though, is, again, I do think when you can take risks in your career and when you can find a company that's on some crazy trajectory… I mean, both of the startups I went to work for went public. So pretty amazing conversions and outcomes on that. But in both cases, I joined a couple of years before they went public. There was much before me. I really like the idea of going to work for an organization. I think you got this from Cutco, that where you're going to actually get some training. Sales is so freaking hard. It's so broad. It's so nuanced. To have to figure out everything is daunting and insane. There's somebody else really early on in the podcast, I think it might actually have been Bill Pai, suggested going to work for a management consulting firm. And if you go to business school, that's a typical kind of first step for a lot of people. They rinse people out. Nobody spends very long working for these organizations because they work you 80 hours a week and kill you. But if you do those couple of years and you have that credential on your resume, not only that, but just the depth of business experience that you're going to drink from a fire hose is gonna serve you really well in your sales career. So I'm always super fascinated by this. And again, the way that the job market has evolved, I mean, we're long past the times that you go to work for one company and you're gonna work there for 20, 30 years and enjoy a pension. That ship has sailed a long time ago. So it's really an interesting conversation around how do you put the pieces together? Through 3, 4, 5 different companies in your first 10 or 15 years, that's going to build you an incredible foundation to get you to the height. So just always interested to dig into that side of things.

18:27 Christian Pallazola: And I do want to preface that today I'm 27, soon to be 28. So I like to, in the grand scheme of things, think that I'm very early into my career now. I've been selling a number of different things from Cutco cutlery to widgets to outsourced BDR services to marketing services to financial crime management software over the last 9. But I do, even though I'm part of that generation that's looking for full-time remote work, I know there's popular talk on the streets, people in my generation love to bounce around at different companies and never get comfortable. I honestly wish there was an opportunity to truly put in an impressive tenure, a decade, 2 decades, 3 decades at a company. But absolutely, you hit the nail on the head, Scott. I mean, the way the market is, it's almost not even feasible for a lot of the employees because of the way the market works. I honestly wish it was so. Yeah.

19:28 Scott Ingram: And a lot of times you limit yourself through that. You oftentimes in that single company track, it's hard to get the bumps that you need to progress in your career. And I've seen this in larger organizations where, gosh, to get the raise and to get the title change, you have to leave and come back. It's just the way it is. So at the end of the day, there is no loyalty on the company side anymore, and you really have to just look out for yourself and be really thoughtful. And I think the more you can get experience, the more you can think about this as building your foundation. I mean, gosh, the first 10, maybe even 15 years of your career is how do I just build a platform to build from that's going to take me to greater heights? So thanks for indulging me on that topic. Why don't we pivot back to the stories again? Show's called Sales Success Stories. What is your favorite sales story? Whether you won or you lost, I'm sure there was something that you learned and stuck with you. What was that?

20:26 Christian Pallazola: That's a really good question. I think one of the biggest sources of sales success for me actually had nothing to do with a deal or an opportunity or a closed won, closed lost scenario. It was actually something that got me back into not being afraid to try something new. I know I shouted him out before, shout him out again. Dale Dupree's connection to the Surf and Sales organization over with Scott Leese and Richard Harris. When I was in this startup marketing role, I got pretty good at doing that job of both being their number one or sort of their only source of revenue generation, but also kind of popping in once I learned the trade a little bit more as sort of a junior marketing consultant for small businesses in the New England area. I got pretty good at that, and I also got a little bit too confident at it where I wasn't even entertaining the thought of I don't want to say jumping to new heights, but even going elsewhere. And it wasn't until I actually received an invitation to attend that Surf and Sales Summit as someone who really didn't have full-time closing experience in the tech industry, where I got to meet a lot of other individuals, some of which have probably been on the show, to hear from their experience, hear what they're doing. And it exposed me to a world that I really didn't even know existed. And it exposed me to that world and made me honestly think about, okay, what about the next year? What about the next 5 years? At one of the companies I had interned during college after I moved on from Cutco, it was called Arrow, and they had a business philosophy that was driven around the idea of 5 years out and how they're a company that prides themselves in wanting to think creatively and develop innovation 5 years out from the present time. And I realized I wasn't doing that for myself. Here I was, I was interning at this company and I completely forgot about the number one message they were supposed to leave me with. So being able to actually sort of break out of small fish in small pond, I would say it was probably the biggest factor of experience for me in terms of sales success because What that conference did was not only was it amazing, I mean, it takes place in Playa Grande, Costa Rica. Outside of sales, I'm an avid photographer, videographer. I got to bring my camera and take pictures in one of the most beautiful places I've ever been, but it also crafted a lot more of those lifelong connections, lifelong friendships, some of which I'm actually getting together with this Friday at the Boston Red Sox game.

23:11 Scott Ingram: Nice, nice, nice, nice. So as you think now from your 5-year perspective, what are the types of things that you're doing to position yourself for future?

23:21 Christian Pallazola: Sure. I think it all boils down to fundamentals. What I'm doing right now is I'm trying to really understand what I've done over these last 5, where I want to be over the next 5, and what I need to do to sort of get there. And Part of the big 3 that I had just started the podcast with. I mean, those were sort of lived shared experiences I have earned over my career, but never fully came to understand in the grand scheme of things until recently. So more about that stuff and thinking 5 years out from now. Like I said, I'm a pretty young guy. I'm in the process of moving in with my girlfriend, wanting to really take it to the next level. Continue growing at my current organization, but also seeing how else I can continue to support other people who were in my shoes either early into their sales careers or are currently in my shoes in the middle of their sales careers. How else can we learn from each other? How else can we develop a community that actually builds off each other's experiences and continues to advance the people within?

24:26 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, for me, that's the game. It's who you surround yourself with and being surrounded by some folks who are ahead of you on the journey who can kind of point out the hurdles and the challenges and the opportunities and the forks in the road that are going to kind of help you rather than go on all this alone. So whether you find that here with us at the summit or you find that at Surf and Sales or with Dale, I mean, there's so many different places to do this. And I think at the end of the day, you have to find your people. You have to find the type of folks that resonate with you, who are speaking your language, that you can connect with and We all stand on the shoulders of giants, right? None of us got here by ourselves.

25:04 Christian Pallazola: I like that quote. And yeah, another reason why I think attending the Surf and Sales Summit for the first time was so impactful is because it did connect me with my people, so to speak, people that taught me about the world of SaaS. Prior to going there, I'd never heard of the term angel investor, or I'd never even heard of the company Gong. So it was cool to hear those names for the first time. It was cool to live. It was cool to learn off of what a lot of these people have been doing for decades longer. Most importantly, it was really cool to hear about the adversity individuals had faced in their careers, personally, spiritually, physically, and how they went about navigating those challenges to become the people they are at the end of the day.

25:51 Scott Ingram: Yeah, this is not an easy, seamless road. In fact, one of the things I'd love to ask, and I'll ask you now, is What is your favorite failure?

26:00 Christian Pallazola: I think my favorite failure is actually something that got me to NICE Actimize today. It was a failure that occurred when I was sort of on the bench looking for my next role, and I had been interviewing with a number of those startups like the ones you had mentioned. Now, I do want to preface that this was during the year late 2022, so Not the best time to be looking for a B2B SaaS sales role, but I'd been interviewing with a lot of these startups nonetheless, and one of which had gone on for months. I'm talking 6 rounds of interviews, multiple presentations, multi-threaded calls to people in the organization that are currently doing the job or connected with others doing the job. I mean, a conversation with their investors, which was Kind of cool. I had to pitch myself to them, but ended up not getting the job, not because they went with another candidate, but because they ultimately just straight up said, we've decided not to hire anybody, which you work in sales. I mean, you've gotten that before on a deal when you work your face off for an opportunity, you put in the work, you go above and beyond that role, and just to find out it comes down to a no decision. It's worse than losing a deal to your biggest competitor. Well, that would happen to be on my birthday back in 2022. And I remember I was at dinner with my family that night, and I honestly just saw my mom crying, and it made me upset because, I mean, she's seeing me work my face off for a new role. I don't have pity for myself by any means because the grand scheme of things, these are very first-world problems, not the end of the world, but it just kind of sucked. So I ended up just taking a shot on this company called Actimize that I'd interviewed with in the past. There wasn't an immediate role open at the time, but I just pulled out all the stops, tried to do whatever I could to land that next round. And it actually ended up being 1 for 52 on B2B SaaS companies that actually gave me an offer that didn't get rescinded and it actually went through. So I think that failure, again, I know a lot of the examples I've given you so far aren't necessarily sales-specific, meaning relating to an existing deal. But at the end of the day, I mean, this is above the role of sales. This is the type of stuff that people do on a daily basis that sales has the absolute roots in. So I feel like that was one of the biggest failures that really motivated me and ended up paying dividends at the end of the day, next to breaking my elbow the day before prom and getting me into sales in the first place, which You can spin up a success story with that however you want.

28:43 Scott Ingram: But yeah, what about the flip side? What are you most proud of?

28:47 Christian Pallazola: What I'm most proud of is the ability to actually do what I want to do. I have come to realize that I don't hate going to work every day. Technically, I'm a remote hire. The only times I'm in person are when I'm doing an onsite with a customer or attending a conference. But nonetheless, I'm excited to wake up log into work every day, and I don't mind working after hours. I think I'm most proud of the fact that I like what I do because there are so many people who don't, and it's because they haven't found that true balance yet that allows them to not just build a life of their own but also be happy in it. I don't want to say truly comfortable because, I mean, that's the American dream and definitely not there yet, but I think I'm most proud of the ability that I get to do this job and like it.

29:38 Scott Ingram: Nice. Nice. And you're making more than $18 an hour, believe it or not.

29:42 Christian Pallazola: Yeah. I don't know what Cutco pays these days. I'm sure it's high. I think everyone adopted the 18-hour thing once COVID hit, but yeah, I'm luckily doing a little bit better than my original salary.

29:53 Scott Ingram: Nice. Nice. Let's switch gears a little bit and get into just some of the day in the life stuff. Walk me through pretty granular detail. Like, how do you structure your day? Alarm clock goes off. What time did that happen? And give me kind of the blow-by-blow until your head hits the pillow again.

30:11 Christian Pallazola: So remember how I'd mentioned people are people at the end of the day? I'm a firm believer that no one has a perfect routine. I am pretty meticulous on trying to repeat the things that I do day in and day out, but I mess up here and there. I like to have my alarm go off 6:30, 7, be up doing what I got to do, getting dressed. If I'm not making my own coffee in the morning, there's a coffee shop about a block away from my current address that I get to walk to. They know my order from heart, which is a large black cold brew over ice. It's a pretty quick trip I get to make, and then I'm immediately online. Now, I know there's others who wake up every day and they run a half marathon or a 5K, and they're getting it in, getting it done before I'm even up. And that's great. That doesn't work for me. So I have my morning routine. I try to give myself a little bit of grace and peace, not have any meetings until 9, 10 in the morning. Once I have my coffee in hand, usually I'm just taking care of emails that may have come in from across the pond over in the UK or India. Maybe I'm just sort of structuring my day, what else I have to do. But I'm a big believer in wanting to just timebox my entire calendar a week in advance. So I kind of know what I'm getting into well before I log into Outlook or Teams for the start of the day.

31:33 Scott Ingram: And Christian, when do you do that? When do you box out your week?

31:36 Christian Pallazola: Depending on the scenario, I could have demos come in or demos get booked a week, a month in advance. So it kind of happens fluid and organically, but I actually like to do that once on Monday, once on Tuesday, and once toward the end of the day on Friday, just to make sure that I'm putting in the right activities that I know I need to do in order to be successful or get to where I want to be, whether that's generating X amount of opportunity value, trying to generate to X amount of closed won revenue this quarter towards that end of year goal that I talked about. I'm pretty meticulous on wanting to do that at least 3 times a week in addition to the stuff that's organically happening as meetings either get rescheduled or get scheduled in the first place. So I kind of have a much more fluid sort of regimen day in and day out, but I like to, at the start of the morning, take care of what I got to take care of. I like to have my nights available for if I either just want to chill out, if I want to work on some photo projects, but also even sometimes prep for, for the next day ahead.

32:46 Scott Ingram: Nice. And then are there any key habits or routines that kind of fit into that? I mean, it sounds like there's a lot of fluidity to your approach, but what are the things that you for sure do every day or every week?

32:59 Christian Pallazola: Yeah, so I mean, daily activities. We work on a pretty long sales cycle. So I'm on a team that, as you mentioned, sell to community and regional banks. That's obviously not the same sales cycle as the team that's selling to the world's largest financial institutions. But nonetheless, my team still works off of anywhere from a 3 to 9 month sales cycle. Typically what I've been working recently over the last year and a half is about 6 months. So we're talking about a pretty long, complex process that involves dozens of different buyer personas that you either have to build a relationship with and constantly manage and stay front of face with on an ongoing basis and make sure that everything in the deal is being scheduled. Next steps are coordinated and that sort of thing. That's on top of just managing pipeline. I'm not going to be the first person to say that every successful account executive prospects on a daily basis. And that doesn't mean you have to cold call 100 people like I was at one of my internships. It could be as simple as, okay, maybe picking 5 distinct key accounts that you want to focus on. Any given week, maybe you send an email and call out to five individuals at those five key accounts. So that's typically what my activity looks like on top of the usual stuff. So we're talking discovery calls, first demo, second demos. If we're wrapping up a contract, there's a few legal or due diligence conversations I got to be a part of. I'm also someone I'm following my own advice a little bit better by trying. To go above and beyond of sales. I like to hang around with my customers after a contract gets signed. So oftentimes I'm on a call just making sure the implementation, the onboarding's going smoothly. So it's a lot of stuff. And that kind of goes back to why I like to meticulously manage and plan those weeks out well in advance, just because it can so easily overburden you and kind of spiral out of control if you let it.

35:04 Scott Ingram: Yeah, for sure. What about your information diet? What are you listening to? What are you reading? What are you watching? And when does that happen?

35:10 Christian Pallazola: Well, I listen to the Sales Success Podcast from noon to mid… nah, I'm just kidding.

35:15 Scott Ingram: That's the recipe for success right there.

35:17 Christian Pallazola: Exactly right there. Exactly. You're probably gonna hate me, Scott, but I actually don't listen to or read a ton of sales content. I have personal favorites, and I don't think I would be here today if The Sales Success Podcast wasn't one of them, but I know the guys at Surf and Sales, so I've listened to the Surf and Sales Podcast. When I was at the marketing agency, routinely listened to what was formerly called the State of Demand Gen with Chris Walker. Now I think it's called Revenue Vitals. But aside from that, I'm not a big podcast person, at least for business-related topics. I kind of do my thing. I peruse LinkedIn. I see some good advice, some not so good advice. I choose to adapt and learn from the stuff that I either see or hear. But in terms of information diet, it's pretty catered. It's pretty light, if I'm being brutally honest with you and myself. And on the record, I don't think I've ever read a sales book from start to finish. So as we look at the 5 years out, I know as people continue to learn and grow, That's probably something I should get around to doing and developing the willpower for. But as of right now, I mean, it's a pretty light informational diet, I would say.

36:34 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Yeah. What about just tools and apps and things like that? What can you not live without, whether it's on your phone, it's on your laptop, whatever?

36:41 Christian Pallazola: Things that I cannot live without. I'll throw this on the record as well. So my girlfriend right now is a registered dietitian. She works in the healthcare field. She is appalled at the level of caffeine that I intake on a daily basis. And I mentioned that going to that coffee shop is part of my daily routine. I'm probably drinking like a quart of cold brew a day, and that's probably not the healthiest, but I cannot go one day without that stuff. So I'm definitely a coffee junkie. I used to, over the last 7 of 9 years that I worked in sales, I was okay with working on a laptop. I felt like that was enough for me, but I've also gotten now complacent with the dual monitors and that sort of thing. So I always make sure that I have that on me whenever I'm traveling, whether that's going to catch up on work after hours or somewhere. I always have some portable monitors in the back of my car. I'll probably get some heat for that, but it's true. Once you get that big screen or the double screen, you never want to consolidate it back in one. I would say another thing that I absolutely like to have on me 24/7 is some form of camera, whether that's my DJI drone, whether that's my digital, whether that's one of my point-and-shoot film cameras. I'm a big photographer outside of sales. I haven't been putting my work out there much, so if you find it, it's probably old, but I always like to just have a camera on me wherever I go just to help ground myself in the present. As you probably know, this is a job that's very stressful at times. Sometimes if I'm driving on a back road, I'll come across an open field. Maybe there's some horses or cows in it. Makes for a good moment to just take a few seconds, walk outside your car, snag a photo, and just be present in that moment for a second.

38:32 Scott Ingram: So if I got that right, I mean, this is a really interesting lens, pardon the pun. It sounds like you almost treat photography as a form of meditation.

38:40 Christian Pallazola: In a way, in a way. And the best way to kind of describe it was someone told me way back in the day that it's almost like I let the photo take themselves. It couldn't be any more true. I mean, I'm not a professional photographer. I don't have a studio. I don't have the best gear on the market, but I just kind of have it on me wherever I go because sometimes you go to the gym to blow off steam. Sometimes I like to go to the coast, go somewhere remote just to anchor myself in the present. And photography has been a way that really helps me remain in the present, but also relive those moments, kind of craft those moments. And what I've been doing recently is every time I do fly to a conference, every time I do go to an onsite, I have one of those things on me. Preferably it's my digital, but sometimes I'll take a point-and-shoot camera. Sometimes I'll just be taking photos at the airport at 6 in the morning. People will be looking at me wondering why I'm taking a picture of some post that has some light on it. But to me, I don't know, it looks good to me and it either comes out like the best photo I've ever taken or a piece of garbage. But I just kind of let it do itself and I've been able to sort of blend that into my ongoing daily habits.

39:57 Scott Ingram: That's awesome. Very, very cool. So, Christian, do you subscribe to like a particular sales philosophy?

40:05 Christian Pallazola: A particular sales philosophy? Probably not. Like I'd mentioned, I have a lot of respect for what the group of the Sales Rebellion do. If I were to pick one, that's probably it. I mean, there's probably MEDDIC, but that probably goes without saying. I would say the rebellion and trying to demonstrate to other people who do this job on a daily basis that the best way to stand out is to be human. That's probably the best philosophy I've ever heard. It makes the job fun. It makes the job exciting. And subscribing to that philosophy has really played a part in me being able to do bullet number 2 that I mentioned at the start of the podcast, which is go above and beyond the role of sales. I recently had a customer who encountered a death in the family, and that sucks. I just had one of myself. So as just sort of a courtesy, I just sent some flowers in the mail, overnighted it, wasn't thinking much of it, but I didn't know how much of an impact that made on the individual who received those flowers. Just stuff like that. I'm not trying to give myself credit or props or anything for that stuff, but if I were to pick a philosophy, I would pick the rebellion because it teaches people that you're talking to human beings at the end of the day. I don't know the statistics. You might have better insight, or someone you've interviewed before might have better insight into this, but How many cold calls would you say that a typical CRO, CEO, COO receives on a daily basis if they even have their phone on?

41:37 Scott Ingram: It's a lot because I ask them this question. Okay.

41:40 Christian Pallazola: What do they say?

41:41 Scott Ingram: Dozens. I mean, really any executive. And this is something that, again, I'm always profoundly curious about, particularly on the receiving end, right? It's one thing that this is something that we do. But what does this feel like on the executive side? It's overwhelming. One thing that's kind of interesting is a lot of them have… they all kind of develop their own coping mechanisms. How do you deal with that? To your point, some of them just block it all. None of it gets through, or there's other filtering mechanisms. I mean, there's typically something going on because it's… if you took every cold call that came your way, you'd never get any work done.

42:17 Christian Pallazola: Absolutely not. And I am an account executive. So I don't even have the word director, manager, never mind VP or C-suite. I don't even know how many connections I probably have on LinkedIn, probably in the thousands. I am no means a top voice influencer. I still get 12 a day from various companies trying to sell me stuff. I have sales guilt, so I try to take as many of those as I can just to hear them out, make them feel a little bit less, although that probably makes them feel worse at the end of the day. But Going back to the original point I just made, I mean, it doesn't even have to be a C-level. If you're a person getting dozens of outreach per day, who's going to be the person that they call back? Now, Dale and the Rebellion, they have a philosophy of sending… I don't know if you've heard of the crumpled letter philosophy, where you write down, tried reaching you but you didn't pick up, on a crumpled letter, spill some coffee on it, hand deliver it to their office the next day. Yeah, that might get a callback. For me, I'm selling to banks and credit unions, so it probably wouldn't fly, but doing something similar or the equivalent, trying to find a way to stand out, be personable, asking people how you can help or how they are can mean the absolute world of difference. So I'd say that's my sales philosophy is just being your authentic self, not just trying to stand out to stand out, but truly trying to make a difference and going above and beyond the typical norm of how that's being done.

43:47 Scott Ingram: Love it. And if anybody wants to do a deep dive on this, I know these episodes in and of themselves are often quite long. My conversation with Dale didn't even fit into one. You'd have to go back and listen to episodes 71 and 73 to get the whole story. Dale is a fantastic guy. I love his philosophy, love his thinking. It's really, really great stuff that he does, and hopefully we'll get a chance to see him here again at this year's summit. We've missed him the last couple of years, but I think there's a very good chance that he'll be back. Christian, talk about just what drives you.

44:22 Christian Pallazola: I would honestly be lying to you if I told you I want to be in sales for the rest of my life. Eventually, I could probably see myself in a world where maybe when I retire, I own a farm and I tend to that farm every day. Believe it or not, that may sound corny. That's one of my drivers. But the bigger drivers is the fact that money's important to me, not because I want to spend it frivolously, but I have people in my life that I have to take care of. My brother, when I have a family someday, I want to be able to take care of that family. I want to make sure that they're set up for success. I will entertain opportunity for if my kid ever comes to me and says they want to work in sales, they have to sell me on why first before I give them the green light to interview. But I would say what drives me is preparing for the future, but also doing what everyone else wants. The ability to kind of live life on your terms. It's kind of American dream-esque if you think about it, but more importantly, being able to help people, being able to take care of the people that I love, the people that I'm close with. That's probably some of my biggest drivers at the end of the day. It'd be hard to get specific, but I could try.

45:32 Scott Ingram: I want to go back to this, this idea of if you have a kid one day and they want to go into sales, what are you telling them? How are you having them think through that decision or that idea?

45:43 Christian Pallazola: I want them to do what I did, which is make the decision for myself. So when I got that envelope in the mail from Cutco, Nobody told me to take that job. In fact, it was quite the opposite. I had family friends who had sold Cutco knives. I had family members who had sold Cutco knives. There was not one person who would hear me out on how great an opportunity it would be to make $18 or whatever it was calling it, because, you know, that company has a reputation of being a scam. I don't know why. There are certain things I'd probably change about their positioning, but I made the conscious decision to just say screw it and do it. I want my kid, boy or girl, to be able to make the decision for themselves. I'm not going to be that guy that pressures my children into being a salesperson. One, because that's a tough life if you're not cut out for it. And 2, I want them to be their own people at the end of the day. So if they ever want to go into sales, I want them to make the decision themselves. And I want them to prove it. It's getting hot under this blanket, man. It's wool too. That thing's heating up.

46:52 Scott Ingram: Taking one for the team.

46:53 Christian Pallazola: Oh, I am. I'm in the room with the tallest ceilings too, so that's doing it no favors. So this blanket's kind of coming in clutch.

47:03 Scott Ingram: Oh, this is too funny. You're gonna have to send me a blanket selfie.

47:07 Christian Pallazola: You want one?

47:08 Scott Ingram: Yeah, yeah.

47:09 Christian Pallazola: Let me snap one right now.

47:10 Scott Ingram: We'll drop that sucker in the show notes.

47:14 Christian Pallazola: Yeah, my permission to share this.

47:17 Scott Ingram: This is like, this will be the bonus track. We'll, we'll throw this on the back.

47:21 Christian Pallazola: I love the bonus tracks.

47:23 Scott Ingram: Gotta do it. You gotta do it. I mean, since we're sort of in the advice giving sort of idea, because I do typically ask sort of the advice that you would give to people starting out, I think that's a great way to think about that and frame that. What about somebody that is a little bit further into their career? And they're either struggling or maybe they're good, but they haven't made it to the top yet. What do you tell them?

47:46 Christian Pallazola: I think it's a lot to do with situational awareness. I mean, there could be a number of reasons why you're not at the top. I'm under the firm belief that I could be at the top today. I could be at the bottom tomorrow, depending on if I get a promotion or wherever life takes me. The only advice I probably would have on that topic is If you want to be at the top, your actions will carry you. Learn from your peers. Again, I don't mean to keep bringing up the same 3 points over and over again, but they have some truth to them. Being good at sales means you are not afraid to go above and beyond the role and go past the extra mile. I like to… and what helped me get to the top at my team where I'm at today was I came into the organization I was kind of nervous, to be honest. I'd never done this job. We're in a unique position of being recognized as a market leader for a lot of the larger financial institutions across the world, but kind of an unknown category competitor to some of the smaller ones that we sell to. I was kind of getting into a role that I'd never done before, an industry I've never worked in. I've had the least amount of tenure, probably the least in actual age as well, and going into this role knowing that my job was going to be to try to take business from a category-leading incumbent and bring it to the unknown. I would say the first thing I did was, in addition to try to get exposure by any means necessary, was try to understand the product inside and out. Because one of the biggest weaknesses in some of my other roles were the fact that I wasn't the information guy. And I still don't claim to be one, but the more you know about your product, how it works, but more importantly, how it's actually going to benefit people depending on their situation, the better you can be at actually creating a business case around it, the better and more clear your delivery of business value will be when you go to pitch that product to either an individual, a team, or a whole unique set of stakeholders. When we're selling to banks, I mean, we're working with multiple different departments. So the fraud department, the BSA department, we're working with the IT department, the operations department, and all the way up to the C-suite. Now, these are people with very unique jobs, sometimes unique personas, and a whole array of distinct needs that everyone feels different about. In terms of prioritization. So being able to truly know your product, but also know the people that you're speaking to is going to make the world of difference in actually being able to create a case that's in line with where the customer wants to go and how you can help get them there. And that might have been long-winded, but I would say, again, it goes back to doing what probably isn't in the job title, depending on where you're at and trying to become a product expert or next to an SME if you can be.

50:49 Scott Ingram: And how did you go about getting to that point? Like, how did you develop that depth of product knowledge?

50:56 Christian Pallazola: I'm still learning day in and day out, but I had the fortunate opportunity to not just train off the job in my off hours, but also train and roleplay with the customer, which, by the way, no one ever wants to do. But sometimes when you encounter something new, it happens. Fortunately, I work with a lot of SEs, engineers, and other stakeholders at Actimize that are always on conversations with me. So I'm an osmosis learner. If I'm trying to understand a very complex topic, I have a natural tendency to just want to listen about it. I want to know how it works to a degree. So once I hear a message time and time again, it becomes very easy to sort of centralize those messages in your mind and try to map out How they work together. When I first got to this job, I remember my first ever discovery call was after day one of my employment, which was SKO in San Francisco. I proceeded to go home, flight landed Thursday night. I woke up Friday morning and I have this discovery call on my calendar at 10:00 AM. I'm thinking, okay, this must be a mistake because I'm new here. Oh no, it's my meeting. I got to run it. I pulled in one of my SEs and I asked my normal sales questions and then put myself on mute, put myself off camera like a coward, let Dave take it away. But after doing that a couple times, you kind of learn through the grapevine or through osmosis what this is all about. So I think if you can just sort of drop your ego to the floor, not try to be the information guy, but try to be a sponge. And try to bring in the people that actually know the stuff, have degrees and stuff, you're actually going to learn a lot in some of those conversations and you're going to be able to talk the talk and eventually understand what it is you're talking about. So I think just kind of doing it on an ongoing basis daily is what really helped me learn not just the product, but also what my customers care about and how I can help them.

53:02 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Anything else? Because I was going to ask a follow-up just around getting to know the customers. Like, how did you go about learning them?

53:08 Christian Pallazola: I'm going to take a step back and all of what I've been saying, it's not just specific to my current role. This could be anywhere. You could be selling industrial equipment paint to an industrial equipment supplier. You could be selling microtech and chips to a startup tech company. Regardless, it all starts with a conversation. I have a very hot take. That I'm gonna share, and it's the fact that I like discovery calls to be 1 hour, no shorter. And I know there are people who say there is no way I can spend more than 5 minutes, 10 minutes on a qualifying call. I believe that a discovery call is not meant for a salesperson to qualify if or not this is going to be a qualified opportunity to count towards their pipeline. It's an opportunity for your customer to either learn how a company can finally solve their problems or discover a new vendor that's just like everyone else. And it's up to you to kind of guide the conversation, but also understand what the customer's need set is to try to create the prior impression. I used to do discovery calls and ask the same stuff everyone was asking. How much do you know about our company? What's your employee headcount? Or how much revenue do you do every year? And I'm just spitballing things. I never have to ask those in conversations, but I'm sure there's a business model where you kind of do. But I remember I ended a conversation one time thinking in my mind, this call went great. I can't wait to share it with my manager. And my manager turned around and asked me, great, what are the names of their kids and what sports do they play? And like, I looked at him like he had 10 heads. Like, why would I ask that question? And basically, I mean, you got to pick and choose who you ask that question to. But the message was more, okay, did you actually talk to a human being or did you pitch your sales stuff? Did you talk about your marketing stuff or your product demonstration when you should have been learning, when you should have been trying to create a story to tell?

55:12 Scott Ingram: I think that's right on. When you first said if it's a qualifying call, there's a huge difference between discovery and qualifying. And I think we don't do enough to put ourselves in the position of the buyer. I mean, could you imagine getting on a call where the sole purpose of the call is to figure out whether or not you're qualified to go through the rest of a process? I mean, it's such an asinine concept or idea. And to your point, I absolutely agree with you. I mean, more is better, and our for sure gives you that time. I mean, 30 minutes is going to be rushed. You're not going to have time to really get to know somebody and really dig into what's going on. The other thing, it's so funny, if we're calling it a discovery call, why is there any pitching? I think in so many ways you can demonstrate your knowledge by the questions you ask and the follow-up questions you ask and the follow-ups to the follow-ups that you ask. If you do that right, you don't have to say anything else. Sure.

56:21 Christian Pallazola: I believe there is… it's not truly black and white. Is there a time to pitch on your discovery calls? Maybe. I throw the word maybe in there because maybe you have a technical audience that's been dying to learn about your product, dying to learn about how it works and how it can solve their problems. And the best example I can give is I see this playing out time and time again. On LinkedIn, a very qualified inbound lead comes in. They're either VP, sometimes even C-level, and they've seen the product before. They're either a returning customer or a customer who's displayed interest over the last 3 years. They've had some encounters with your company at trade shows. They're looking to finally see that product in action. And instead of being able to talk to someone who knows what they're talking about, they get routed to either an entry-level BDR, which no disrespect to SDRs or BDRs, but those SDRs and BDRs are instructed to ask templated qualifying questions where they could probably do a better job at actually bringing in an SE or an AE even and just holding a conversation, whether it's 5, 10 minutes to say thank you for investing time to chat with us. It's great to finally meet with you one-on-one. We want to make this a good impression for you. We want to do a good job. We want to make sure any demo we show you is going to be in line with what you want to see and what you need. Can you tell us what that is? 5 minutes or less. That's a whole lot better of a qualifying call than the guy who asks, so what's your headcount? Because at that point you're just going to get fed up. And I promise you, at least this is from experience, I used to do this earlier in my career. If you play back some of your earlier discovery calls, you've probably done this in the past. And if you were on the receiving side of that conversation, you'd probably write an angry tweet about it. I guess that's all I can leave it.

58:19 Scott Ingram: Yeah, fair enough. And if you're asking any question that you can find the answer to online, you shouldn't be answering and asking the question. You should have done your research. You should have done the prep and done that. And to be totally fair here, There's no black and white. I mean, it's all gray. In fact, I just looked up, if you Google demo-scovery, you'll find a tip that I did ages ago. It was dailysales.tips/386 or 389. Shoot. I just looked it up. You have to click when you Google it.

58:49 Christian Pallazola: Good memory.

58:50 Scott Ingram: No, I just looked it up. That's why when you Google it, you have to click. No, I actually meant to say demo-scovery. I didn't just wildly misspell discovery because those are the original results that you'll get because sometimes a more nuanced give and take makes sense. Again, what you have to think about, what is the customer perspective and the customer desire here, right? The worst thing that can happen is they schedule a demo which has a set of expectations that go with it, and the seller treats it as a discovery, right? Right. Like, okay, wait a minute, I just wanted to see this thing so I can figure out if it's going to fit my need or not, and instead I get a freaking interrogation. What is happening here? But sometimes, and maybe even if it's a pure demo, you should always be doing a demo discovery. You should always be learning what's the most important thing, like where are we focusing? The worst thing you can do on a demo is try and show them everything.

59:48 Christian Pallazola: Absolutely.

59:49 Scott Ingram: 70% of it's going to be irrelevant. Why don't we only look at the 30% that matters, that's going to impact the business?

59:55 Christian Pallazola: Absolutely. And luckily we have a pretty complex product. I mean, it's a product that's been using things like AI and machine learning since 2013, before it was kind of cool in circulation and dare I say mainstream. But I'm not going to pretend to know everything about that demo system because I don't. My job at the end of the day is to try to bring people who are way smarter than I am to talk to people who are way more tenured than I am in their industries and try to make sure the story is aligned with what those people told me they wanted to hear. And I know I'm grossly sugarcoating the role of an account executive here, but in the grand scheme of things, I've been able to at least understand my product enough to kind of walk them through a high level of how it works, walk them through some slideware, some information, in real time and answer some product-specific questions while ultimately working toward that bigger summary of value or story behind why we want to be a vendor that's different than the others you've spoken with and why we want to be the last you work with.

1:01:05 Scott Ingram: Yeah, love that, love that. Well, since we're maybe just a little bit ranting, why don't we continue that party? I would love to know Is there something you believe that the average or typical sales rep would think is crazy?

1:01:18 Christian Pallazola: Man, I gave you my 2 cents on discovery call time. Average sales rep would think is crazy. I don't know. I'm gonna try. And I don't think sales reps are gonna go crazy about this. I think everyone outside of the role of sales is probably gonna do a double take at this. Outbound is not dying, guys. It's not. Maybe the current approach to cold calling is, but in the grand scheme of things, if something dies, it becomes irrelevant. Nobody does it anymore. And when nobody's doing something, if someone ends up doing that very thing later on in the future, it becomes new and unique again. So there, I mean, I'm just kind of throwing it out there. Outbound is not going anywhere. We source most of our revenue through outbound, or I will say kind of lukewarm bound, if that makes sense. But it's going nowhere. And that's my rant. But if you want to add, if you want to counter to that, be my guest, because I know there's people who are going to agree heavily. And I know there's going to be people who disagree heavily, but I see the polls time and time again that look like engagement farming. I just want to say it, outbound's not dying.

1:02:33 Scott Ingram: Yeah, I think you make a really great point, which is, I mean, first of all, nothing ever dies. It's all still around. I'm sure there's somebody still using a CD player. Hell, records are like a thing now. If you think about sort of that cycle, and what you called out is, well, if everybody moves off of a thing, that makes the original thing sort of an open space, right? I mean, think about it from a marketing perspective, like Everything's gone digital. Everything before 20 years ago, 30 years ago, we put stuff in the mail. Well, now the mail is unique again because nobody does that. Everybody else moved on. I think the same things apply, but I think your caveat is what's really key is, well, maybe not the same old tired way. What is that for you? Like what in your outbound approach works?

1:03:24 Christian Pallazola: I'm going to give a real-world example and it is not going to be as outbound-ish as say starting a sequence and hitting go on it. That's not what I'm talking about, but I'm going to talk about a scenario that actually led to a substantial amount of closed-won revenue for our company. You want to connect with customers you've never interacted with before. You want to give them a taste of what you can offer, how you've helped others very similar to them. I would maybe start, and this is a very low-cost way to get in front of customers that isn't true digital outbound. I would start with calling a certain number of accounts in your territory. Maybe if you cover a certain state like Wisconsin, call every, I don't know, every manufacturing company in Wisconsin that is under a certain qualifier that you look for, be it revenue or headcount. Invite those manufacturers to something that's actually going to give them value. Invite someone who they all know to attend that event and make it like a 1-hour, a 2-hour in-person lunch and learn, an in-person thing. At my last organization, we were working with, or we were talking to an IT company, they outsource IT. And one of their things, the way they built community is they leveraged relationships that they had with the Chamber of Commerce. And would host movie nights once a month. They had, and this is going way back in the day, a couple of years ago, they were selling to dentists. So they invited all these dentists over to see a premiere of the latest Avengers movie that happened. I think it was Endgame. I'm not a Marvel head. So I know Jack is, don't butcher me if I'm getting the names wrong, but that works for them. They would get in front of their customers. They would build a lasting impression doing something that's either fun or doing something if it's a lunch and learn. Someone that has the status of an SME or an authority in their industry can ask and get their questions answered with. And if you want to reserve 30 minutes at the end of it while people are having lunch, people are grabbing drinks, to give your spiel on how you've helped X number of others with the exact same problem and it led to X as a result, great. Now, we had done that a couple times last year across different states. Where we invited some of our friends over at the Federal Reserve or some of our consulting partners to talk about new things that banks had their attention on, like FedNow, instant payments, new legislation that might impact how they monitor certain payment types. And we were bringing in SMEs, some of our senior people, and I was there to kind of prospect 20, 30 different banks and credit unions to show up. And I greeted those people when they walked in, engaged with a lot of them. I'd say 12 showed up at the event, had a good experience. Maybe we had 3 convert to open opportunities. 3 to 6 months later, we ended up closing one. Maybe we just built half a million in contract value, which if that event altogether costs you… and I am conservatively overstating a sum of $5,000, I have no idea what that would cost. You've just had what others would call a 100x increase on your marketing strategy. So it could be something creative, but doesn't have to involve reinventing the wheel to try to have outbound prospecting success. And the reason I'm calling it outbound is because the way we got those individuals to show up to that event was on the phone. We sent them emails, we connected with them on LinkedIn, we asked current customers to attend and invite some of their friends. We would be at other industry-related events and we would go invite those individuals over to ours. So just 2 cents, just an idea that's been fruitful for us in the past. I know there's other businesses that have done it with other different types of audiences. I'd like to see more people doing that in their outbound strategy as opposed to just either the sequence or prospecting your direct network. Like you said, Scott, There's gray matter and we got to find new creative ways to navigate it.

1:07:41 Scott Ingram: Yeah, I love that approach and maybe partially because I've done some of it. I mean, to connect some dots, I frequently will ask executives about kind of their perception. When I was working for Eloqua, this was pre-IPO, we hired a brand new CMO to help take us public and she'd been a customer. So the very first event she was at, I went up to her and I said, okay, look, I need to just understand. What was your experience as a buyer of our product, as a prospect? I also asked her more broadly about, again, that day in the life, like how many calls, how many outreach attempts are you getting on a daily basis? And just wanted to really understand what breaks through, what breaks through all of that noise. And she told me this story about a recruiter. She said, recruiters are important, important people for CMOs because we only last about 2 years in, in a given role on average. We need them to find our next role, but also when we land in a role, frequently we are scaling up a team. So they need that recruiter to help bring on the staff that they're going to need to execute within that new role. So she says, I get prospected by recruiters all the time, but there's this one woman in San Francisco and she knows That we CMOs don't get nearly enough time to spend with each other. We want to be able to connect with our peers, but it's difficult. We're busy. We don't have time. So she hosts a dinner, and I don't know if this is quarterly or whatever it was. She said she hosts this regular dinner with a bunch of my peers. It's super valuable for me to go. We get to have this conversation about… again, we're marketers. We're inundated with marketing junk. And we want to know, hey, what's actually legit? What's working for you? What's garbage? What do I focus on? Who are the good vendors? Who are the bad vendors? Spill the dirt on all of this stuff. And that recruiter really rose to the top because of what they were able to do. So it's the same story. And what I have found in putting together these types of events is once you have kind of that one well-known person in the industry that's there, the rest, it's super easy. And then once you have 2 or 3, I mean, I put together a dinner in Austin years ago where I had a client we were doing some work with. I think I started with National Instruments. I had the guy from NI, and then I reached out to Dell and said, hey Dell, I've got the guy from NI. Oh cool, we'll come. And then I went to AMD and said, hey, I've got the people from NI. And Dell? Oh, we'll come. And it just got easier and easier and easier as you sort of built that momentum. People want to make these connections. Sometimes they probably know each other by name, but oftentimes they just don't get the opportunity to come together, and you can create that opportunity, and it doesn't cost very much money.

1:10:39 Christian Pallazola: No, it doesn't. I even want to go back to what you said about how you had actually called some of these people well in advance to understand how else you can help. I mean, That's something I don't think any salesperson's doing because, for lack of better terms, it's not in their job title or someone else is supposed to be doing that work. It sounds like you built a phenomenal relationship with someone that you would count as an ideal buyer. You added value, not just to that person's life, but also the person who came in to either co-sponsor or speak. I mean, you're adding value in a lot of different areas. It's almost like 3D chess in a way. It's absolutely mind-boggling how you can create an impact that profound, have it be a lasting impression that helps take your business even farther as more people hear about that experience and want to continue or kind of want to take part, but also just being able to build your name out there and get that in front of your peer circle as well. I mean, that's huge, Scott.

1:11:39 Scott Ingram: That's exactly it. And it makes this job way more fun.

1:11:43 Christian Pallazola: It does.

1:11:45 Scott Ingram: I mean, it's… how great is it to be that person that brought that together and you're building those types of relationships in person? And if you do it right, with some great food and probably some nice drinks along the way.

1:11:57 Christian Pallazola: You know what can't do that?

1:12:00 Scott Ingram: AI.

1:12:01 Christian Pallazola: Throwing out another hot take. I know there's going to be people who disagree, but that's mine. And again, since the market is the way it is today, I'll double down on something you also said, Scott. It's cheap. It probably costs less than lead gen software or a lead gen partnership. You can have one SDR, one AE, one SME working this entire event. Maybe you have someone in marketing, maybe create a landing page for it. Other than the venue and whatever food of your choice, that's really all you got to worry about, right? Doesn't have to get much more creative than that to have strong success. In the outbound formula.

1:12:40 Scott Ingram: Yeah, that's, that's it. Awesome. I'm really glad we got both of these stories. I think it is absolutely a powerful approach. And which is going to stand out more, right? The person who I had dinner with, the salesperson, we spent a couple of hours together in a valuable session versus another minute-long call, one of dozens that I got that day.

1:13:01 Christian Pallazola: Sure.

1:13:01 Scott Ingram: One of those is going to be memorable. The other just completely forgettable.

1:13:06 Christian Pallazola: Absolutely. And if at the end of the day it does nothing more than get you exposure with your people in person, it'll teach you to kind of adapt because we live in a remote world now. I know a lot of companies have a hybrid approach, some have 100% in person, a lot of them are remote, but I'm a big believer in the fact that you got to go in person to truly close business and to build that next level relationship. So if nothing else, It'll get you exposure with the type of people you want to meet, the type of people you want to see in person, but also it'll give you the more confidence you need to be bold, to be authentic, and not have to put on a digital identity to try to please people on a 30-minute or 1-hour Zoom call. Yeah, for sure.

1:13:49 Scott Ingram: And here's the other thing that, like, unexpected outcome, having done this a lot of times, that happens is even the people who don't come, like, oh, I have a conflict, I can't make it. I swear those people, some of them, not all of them, but a good chunk of them will appreciate what you're trying to do and ask for a sales call. Oftentimes it's like, oh my God, I can't make that. But you know what? I am super curious about what you guys are doing. Like, can we book some time? I'd love to chat. It's like, wait a minute. That, that's just…

1:14:19 Christian Pallazola: oh, you guys are doing this all in person. Maybe you do know what you're talking about. Yes.

1:14:22 Scott Ingram: Ask for a meeting with me. This isn't how it's supposed to work, is it?

1:14:24 Christian Pallazola: I wouldn't be laughing if it hasn't happened before. I mean, it is true. And it's The best type of thing that you want to see in sales every single time. But you're spot on, Scott.

1:14:34 Scott Ingram: Yeah. So, Christian, what would you want to know from other top sellers and other organizations?

1:14:42 Christian Pallazola: What's something I would like to learn from other top performers? Just the nuances of how they make it happen again, because again, I could be at the top today, at the bottom tomorrow. How you get to the top could either be by coincidence, luck, I heard a quote a while back that goes along the lines, it says, luck is when the intersection of hard work and opportunity meet. But I'm more concerned with staying there, whether that's in the same team, in the same org. I want to know what else people are doing to stay at the top because I don't consume a lot of business literature. I've never read a business book. I am very passive on LinkedIn. And not only do I not create a ton of content, I'm not looking at the app very much. And like I said, as much as I wish I had listened to the Sales Success Summit podcast from noon to midnight every day, truth is I'm not a big podcast guy. So I want to learn from a lot of those others what other people are doing to stay at the top as opposed to just getting there for a quarter, for a year.

1:15:47 Scott Ingram: Yeah, for sure. And that's so much of who I really try and talk to on the show and who I try and put on the stage at the summit is who's been really consistently successful? Because it's one thing to win the sales lottery. Hey, I walked into this great territory and it was really ripe and we all get lucky in deals. But at the same time, you create luck and action has a… you spoke to this earlier. I mean, action has a lot to do with it. I ran across an email earlier today that was just a good reminder to myself. I think they were echoing back something that maybe I had shared this in my own presentation last year. I'm not quite sure where it was, but they quoted me back to myself and they said that you can't think your way out of burnout. And it's true about so many things. Like, you can't think your way through. You just have to act. You have to move forward. You have to do things. I think having done this massively early in my career, I was an overthinker. It's much better to be an overdoer.

1:16:47 Christian Pallazola: I'm still an overthinker. I'm gonna put that out there. I mean, I've tried to work on it. I agree with your message. It's helped me in the past. Another thing that I'd like to learn from other top performers is not just how do you stay consistent at winning in sales, but how do you stay consistent winning in sales with all the other stuff going on? I know you'd asked me a number of questions about my daily routines, what I do both when I'm working, when I'm outside of working. What are other people doing? How do you manage the pressure of a massive quota or a very stressful deal cycle when you have the other stuff going on? Again, I mentioned I'm relatively new to my career at soon to be 28 years old, but guess what? I also don't have the kids yet. I would like to learn from the person with the kids that's gone through it, that has the other stuff going on, how they stay consistent, because I think that is what makes a successful individual, not just a successful salesperson.

1:17:45 Scott Ingram: Yeah. And that speaks back to, I mean, really my own origin story with this podcast, because that's the stuff I wanted to get to. I've always been a student of sales. I've read lots of books and attended webinars and just all of the things. And I'm like, this is all well and good. These thought leader-y types of things are useful and helpful, but I'm much more interested in how are the top performers doing what they do in the real world. And shoot, it's either been 8 years or we're coming up on 8 years. Maybe it's been 9 years. I don't know. I've been doing this show for a really freaking long time. And if anything, the distractions and the things pulling on us have just gotten more and more intense. There's so much more right now. We have to talk about AI and what's the impact of that and how do we think about that? How do we use that? How do we work around that? And it's really interesting being… I'm exactly on the opposite side of what you're talking about because I was not properly prepped for how emotional is a word. I mean, there's just a lot going on with me right now because as we record this, I'm a month away from taking my oldest daughter to college many states away, closer to you than she'll be to me. Wow. Yeah, that's far. It's a thing. It's crazy.

1:19:06 Christian Pallazola: That's Texas to Boston for the listeners, guys. That's, that's a far…

1:19:10 Scott Ingram: yeah, Texas to New York in my case, upstate at that. So even harder to get to. I cannot get a direct flight to Rochester, thank you very much. But it's… wow, I had not prepared myself for that at all, at all. And it's a really big deal. And I've still got another one to go, so now I'm working on preparing myself properly. Properly for the second one who's going into her junior year. But this is why I love talking to folks that are a little bit further into their careers who are dealing with kids and families. And it's interesting, one of the excuses, and it's always an excuse and a legit excuse for people not attending the summit. In fact, I was just following up with the previous podcast guest encouraging him to come to the summit, and as much as he wants to, He's like, you know, I'm gonna have a 3-month-old at that point. Like, yep, having babies and very, very young children is a legitimate excuse. After 6 months, it's irrelevant, doesn't count, you need to come. It's a whole thing that we have to deal with. And as we work through our careers and through our lives, the challenging circumstances, they just evolve. It's just different challenges and different opportunities, different responsibilities, bigger quotas, all the above.

1:20:19 Christian Pallazola: Life gets more real. Is that fair to say?

1:20:21 Scott Ingram: Yeah, and it goes really, really, really fast. I heard, I think it was Andy Rooney is where this quote originated from. I saw it and it has stuck with me so hard and it freaks me out every time I think about it or say it. But he said, life is like a roll of toilet paper. The closer you get to the end, the faster it goes.

1:20:39 Christian Pallazola: Oh man.

1:20:40 Scott Ingram: And that scares me because how it is that I'm taking a kid to college is beyond me because I'm pretty, I feel 27, but I can't be.

1:20:49 Christian Pallazola: Yeah, I thought you were gonna drop Ferris Bueller on me, but you just hit me with something brand new that's probably gonna keep me up at night.

1:20:55 Scott Ingram: Yeah, I'm sorry, I shouldn't broadcast that quote, but it's really…

1:20:58 Christian Pallazola: it's got truth to it. It's got to be taken into perspective. I mean, it's true. I'm 27, feel 24. I still to this day, whenever I go out with friends or family, no matter what it is that I'm ordering, if I'm at a restaurant and I order a glass of wine, Oh, how old are you? 22. No, you're not. It's like, you're right. I'm not. I swear it's not a fake. It's just instinct.

1:21:22 Scott Ingram: But I've been saying that since I was 18, right?

1:21:25 Christian Pallazola: Exactly.

1:21:26 Scott Ingram: Oh man. Well, cool. Why don't we wrap these things up? This is getting to a really fun place. We covered a lot of ground, but you probably came into this hoping to impart an insight or two. Did we get all of that stuff out or is there something that we missed that you were hoping I would ask you about or a story you were hoping to tell?

1:21:46 Christian Pallazola: No, I mean, if you had Dale twice on the podcast, I can assume you'll probably have him back on a third. We'd love to have a conversation again, probably in person at the summit this year. But no, this has been a phenomenal time, Scott. I appreciate you having me on the show. I appreciate you giving me the microphone, no pun intended. But yeah, this is what energizes me, being able to connect with people who not just do it, but do it consistently, who do it managing challenges I've never even thought about or encountered before. This is good for me. Is there any other questions you have for me that you'd like me to voice here on the show?

1:22:24 Scott Ingram: No, I think we're good. This has been a ton of fun. I think getting in that place, surrounding yourself with those people so that you can have these conversations… I mean, I am in a very, very, very fortunate position in that I get to have every one of these conversations. And if you're listening to this and you don't get to have that conversation, you can come to the summit and you can talk to Christian and you can talk to me and you can have these conversations for yourself with these folks and build these relationships yourself. And that's why we do the summit. So tickets are at top1summit.com, top, the number 1, summit.com. Would love to have you out. We'll start to accelerate things here pretty quick as that's coming up early October here in Austin. And Christian, I really hope I get to see you there, spend some time with you, and we'll raise a glass. Absolutely.

1:23:14 Christian Pallazola: No three-month-old, so I don't have an excuse this time. Cheers. 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.