180: Riding the Sales Roller Coaster & Making Them Laugh with Zach Goggins

0:00 Scott Ingram: This episode is brought to you by the 2024 Sales Success Summit coming here to Austin on October 7th and 8th. For all the details and to grab your tickets, click over to top1summit.com. That's top, the number 1, summit.com.

0:24 Scott Ingram: You're listening to the Sales Success Stories podcast, where we deconstruct world-class sales performers to provide insights and strategies to help you improve. To learn more, visit us at top1.fm. Here's your host, Scott Ingram.

0:39 Scott Ingram: Today on the Sales Success Stories podcast, my guest is Zach Goggins. Zach is the top-performing enterprise account executive at Encapture. Welcome to the show, Zach.

0:48 Zach Goggins: Hey, Scott. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

0:50 Scott Ingram: Yeah, looking forward to digging into this, but we're going to kick things off like we always do. I'm all about providing immediate value right out of the gate. So what are the top 3 things that you believe have contributed the most to your success in sales?

1:02 Zach Goggins: Yeah, happy to share. So I'd say the first one is definitely getting guidance from my leadership and my peers as well. The largest deals I've sold at Encapture have been because I've gotten our leadership team involved in the sales process early and kept them engaged throughout the entire process. I know I, you know, came in, I was out of college starting my first job. I didn't have any sales experience compared to some of the reps that I'm around too. They have a lot more experience than I do. I don't think I'm at the top because I'm more skilled than anyone else. I think I'm just in this position because I realize that other people have a lot more experience and skills than I do. And rather than trying to operate on my own silo, on my own island, I say, you know, we've got a great team here, great leaders here. Let's tap into a lot of that experience, some of the trials and tribulations that they've gone through, glean some lessons from that, have them involved in the process. That way I don't have to go through, you know, 10+ years of sales just to get to where they're at in order to achieve the result that I'm looking for. So that's definitely been a big component of my success, I feel, is getting guidance from my leaders and my peers. Second component is discipline, I'd say. So doing the quote unquote little things consistently has been a big part of my success. I make prospecting a priority every day by cold calling net new prospects, which they probably don't appreciate my discipline when they're hearing from me every day, but it's something that I do. It's something I learned early on in my career, do the hard things and do them early, get them out of the way before things get too busy for you. So also disciplined by not just on the external front, doing the prospecting and the cold outreach, but also making sure that I'm disciplined with the activities and the little things that happen on an internal perspective. So at Encapture here, it's very much a team selling philosophy, getting our sales engineers involved, our head of sales, some members of our customer success team involved. So there's a lot of different perspectives, a lot of different roles for people to play whenever we're going customer facing or prospect facing. So I stay disciplined by making sure as we're leading up to those types of meetings with folks outside our organization that we want to make a good impression with, making sure that everyone from the Encapture team knows what their role is going to be going into that conversation. And they know well ahead of time that way, if we're 3 days out from a client or prospect meeting and there's things that need to be done, everyone is aware of that. And I'm the one initiating the charge on who's going to take accountability for accomplishing task XYZ. That way we can go into that meeting, make a good first impression, and that everyone can leave feeling comfortable and confident about a partnership moving forward. And then the third thing I would say on how I got to where I am today is definitely connecting one-on-one with the stakeholders that are involved in each of my deals. So spending the extra time to reach out to each person at my prospect's organization that is or will be in the future involved in my deal has helped me gain a lot of information that's allowed us to close a significant amount of business. So after doing a demo where there's, say, there's 6 people from a prospect organization. We work primarily with banks and credit unions. After a big demo happens, you know, days following that, I'll reach out to each individual person, send them individual emails rather than a big group email to get each person's perspective rather than just what the group's consensus is. So that's definitely opened up a lot of insight that they've been comfortable and willing to share and understand how do the people that are, you know, close to doing the day-to-day work, how are they going to be affected by this? How are they feeling? How is the feeling and perception of what we can be doing, what is that as far as middle management goes? And then at the executive level, how are we being perceived? And so being able to have those one-on-one communications with those key individuals has definitely made our team feel a lot more comfortable growing into situations where we're going to be presented in front of an executive leadership team and everyone is going to be looking, do you approve? Do you approve? Do you approve? So reducing the chance of uncertainty on if everyone feels confident about if Encapture can meet their needs or not. That's, I say, is the probably the third one to round us out there.

5:13 Scott Ingram: Yeah, dude, I love that approach. I think, you know, it's one of those things people maybe talk about or think about but is rarely executed on. So really cool that you're going to that level. And I always, a lot of sales activities I really try and look at from a customer experience perspective. And if you think about the customer's experience, if I'm just a day-to-day user or I'm just, I'm involved, I'm on the committee, but I'm not a decision maker, I probably don't have a one-on-one conversation with any other vendor's sales rep, right? They don't know me. They don't know what I'm after, right? So that to me feels awesome because now you gain that additional perspective. You get kind of that insider, maybe they're offering you some coaching, maybe they're offering you some tips. Maybe you're understanding, okay, this is totally my detractor. And I've got some work to do to try and kind of turn them around. The rest of your points, I mean, I appreciate the humility to your approach, right? It takes a big person to say, hey, I don't know everything. And so I'm going to lean really hard on the rest of the organization and have them help me do this deal. And, you know, sales is a team sport and, you know, that's how we win. So love the approach there.

6:21 Zach Goggins: Yeah, appreciate you sharing that. I mean, to your point about the individual user that would be using, you know, whatever platform or services being sold to them, There's been cases that have come up where, you know, in the sales role, you know, we're trying to get to power, we're trying to get to the economic buyer and do that as soon as possible. And so that's definitely a lesson that I've learned in my short career going through and realizing, okay, well, yes, you get that person, but the challenges you're trying to solve, yes, they are ultimately responsible for the outcomes, but also they're not the ones that would be directly interacting with this. And so there's been times where we've spent a lot of effort trying to get involved with that person. And then we finally have a conversation with them and then they refer us down a level or 2 and say, this is the person that you need to work with. If they approve it and they sign off on it and they feel comfortable with it because this is their world day in and day out, I'm comfortable with it. So that's something that I learned. Okay, well, let's get power involved early, of course, but also let's not gloss over the importance of getting some feedback and some buy-in from people that are at different levels of the organization. And I would hope to, like you said, from a customer experience standpoint, I would hope to that changes the perception on the customer side of, okay, these people are just reaching out because they want to sell me something. If they're having conversations with me about what I'm looking for in the tool and how we can make it better, hopefully that also makes them feel more comfortable. Like, okay, once I sign a contract, I'm going to hear from them again. It's not like, okay, you're handed off, moving on to the next deal. It's like, okay, we actually want to build a relationship with you and make sure that We're doing what we promised you that we're going to do.

7:57 Scott Ingram: Absolutely. Cool. Let's contextualize a little bit. So talk about what is your role? What's your territory? Tell us about Encapture. Just kind of paint the picture for us.

8:06 Zach Goggins: Yeah, of course. So Encapture, so we're an intelligent document processing organization. Our software, we do a lot of different things for a lot of different banks and credit unions, financial institutions, really saving them a lot of time in their document and data reviews and saving them and mitigating a lot of regulatory risk that they face, which is growing and growing. Growing over the years, especially as it relates to lending. So my role in allowing the company to continue to grow and succeed and hit our goals is really doing a mixture of account management as well as a mixture of net new prospecting. So taking account management, making sure that our current customers with the solutions that they've purchased from us, making sure those solutions are going well, implementations are going well, as well as identifying other opportunities within their organization where we can be helpful. So there's a lot of upsell potential because we've done a lot of things as an organization from… we've established in 1998, so we've done a lot of different things for a lot of different organizations. Oftentimes organizations just come on board with us to solve one problem. Once we are solving that problem or have solved that problem for them, they're saving a lot of time. Then it really opens the floodgates and we share recommendations on… there's another bank like you that was in this part of the US. They were facing this similar challenge after we helped them solve this. Is this the case for you all, or is this more relevant for you all as well? So being responsible for really the whole bank relationship and determining how best we can grow that where fit. And then on the net new front, doing a lot of my own prospecting and then running the full cycle sales all the way from the start of the sales cycle and the discovery meeting. Once we actually get them in the door all the way through till close, and then doing the transition over to our great customer success team to lead the implementation there and Also collaborating internally too with our customer success team on our current customers, making sure implementations are going well. If there's, you know, times that we need to get involved just to either help level set things or if we can step in and provide some additional support, get other team members involved on our side, we step in and help with that as well. And then working closely with our business developer representative who does a lot of work for us in terms of generating demand and outreach for us there too.

10:19 Scott Ingram: Nice. Given what you described, I'm curious, do you find the biggest deals to be kind of those first initial deals where you're working to solve, you know, maybe that one critical problem, or is it the follow-on deals where, hey, we've already solved one problem, now we've got some trust and we're able to tackle 2 or 3 or 4 more?

10:35 Zach Goggins: That's a good question. So I would say that's changed kind of over time. So a few years ago when I first came on board to Encapture, that was December of 2021, we were focused on solving a problem as a result of where the interest rate environment was helping a lot with mortgage lending. And those often led to very large deals. Because just the size of the organizations, the volumes that they were putting through, and how our pricing structure works, those would lead to higher deals. And so then the upsells for those, once they were on board, were kind of on the smaller side compared to the initial deal for the other problems that we could solve there. Now, probably since I would say maybe June of '22, the deals that we have been bringing in from a net new perspective to solve that one problem have really been all about regulatory compliance and helping banks adhere to the new regulations that are coming out and the regulations that are growing and the seriousness is increasing. So those deals, because they've been so repeatable for us, we're able to do at a lower cost than the mortgage solutions that we were initially rolling out a handful of years ago. So I think that's what we've experienced is over the last 2-plus-ish years is it's a smaller initial deal, but the implementations, they get done a lot faster compared to each project is unique. There's a lot of standardization with the regulation that we help banks adhere to and solve for. So the implementation is able to go a lot faster, and then that opens up opportunities to go elsewhere in the bank where the deals can grow because there's higher volumes, there's other executives that are involved, other bigger problems to solve that might be a little bit more long-term. And then there's the cases where, like, the second biggest deal that Encapture has done was something that our team closed 2 or 3 months ago, and that was a partnership with another technology vendor. So they came on board to us and they started off as a pilot. So that was a very small initial deal as a 1-year pilot. And then after that pilot went well, thanks to the support of the entire Encapture team across all departments, then their contract with us what we agreed to went up exponentially. So that was an example of the second biggest deal our company has done as a result of the upsell. I think that's probably the track that we're going on moving forward.

12:55 Scott Ingram: Yeah, I feel like that's becoming more and more common, right? People aren't willing… organizations aren't willing to take a giant bite right out of the gate, right? They either want to do… want to do proof of concept or we want to solve for this one problem. And if you can deliver on what you say you can do, then there's a way bigger opportunity on the backside. And it's interesting because a lot of organizations just aren't prepared for that, right? It's either their delivery's not strong or they've got too many handoffs in the sales process. And so the person who is meant to capitalize on that larger opportunity kind of drops the ball. So it's again, just curiosity for me, interesting to watch the market sort of evolve in that way and to see our organizations matching that and lining up to that and, you know, capturing that value, which it sounds like you guys are. And there's others who maybe aren't. So Put your results in perspective for us. What has it taken for you to get to number 1 at Encapture?

13:50 Zach Goggins: Yeah. Are you looking for like from a numbers perspective or kind of journey-wise?

13:54 Scott Ingram: I like numbers.

13:55 Zach Goggins: Numbers. All right. Sounds good. I'm at 83% of my plan, my quota for the year. So the enterprise account executive reps over here at Encapture, we've got a $900K quota for the year. So I'm at $745K right now. So 83% of plan for the year.

14:10 Scott Ingram: Good. With more, not quite halfway to go, right? So, yep.

14:14 Zach Goggins: But as I'm sure you've heard from a lot of folks that have come on the podcast is there's no rest. It's not like, all right, 83%, we're sitting good. It's always like, okay, we need to go find more. Always looking for more.

14:24 Scott Ingram: Absolutely. Absolutely. And Zach, I'm most interested in, we had some interesting conversations about this before we set up for the podcast. What's your origin story? How did you get into sales in the first place?

14:33 Zach Goggins: Yeah. Yeah. So probably different than what the traditional approach would've been, or at least the traditional approach that I was exposed to around some of the people that I was attending college with. So I didn't know that I wanted to do sales or even had considered a career in sales until the first semester of my senior year of college. I thought, you know what, I'm going to be marketing. I think that's going to be a good fit for me. I want to do that. But I had to take at UW-Whitewater, where I went to school up in Wisconsin, the requirement for the business school in order to graduate. Was each student had to take this Intro to Professional Selling course. So I decided to take that first semester of my senior year, and I fell in love with it. I thought it was great because it was all new. I had the stereotypical assumptions on what sales was, which a lot of people have, but then going in day one and then learning from the professor that I had, Shannon Cummins, talking about her experience as a salesperson and now teaching and talking about really what the possibilities are for a career in sales. It's what you make of it. You get out of it what you put into it. And that was something that really motivated me and inspired me. And so I thought, okay, probably time to shift my focus a little bit from just prioritizing marketing opportunities and seeing what sales opportunities have to offer. But I wasn't a part of a sales organization at my university like some of the other students on campus were that had been in it, you know, for a year, 2 years at that point in time. So I had to figure out what was going to be my angle. How was I going to fit? And even if this was something that I was going to be wanting to pursue as a career. So I learned more and more about it through that course. And then we had a career fair that everyone had to go to in the class that was just sales recruiters for different companies across the country. And so I remember that I was looking, I was at my checklist with my assignment, had to get 3 signatures from 3 different recruiters. I was trying to figure out where to go next. And then Liza Stenz is a recruiter from Gartner, was a recruiter from Gartner at the time. And she came up to me and we started talking. And then I learned about this opportunity with Gartner, who I knew nothing about, down in Fort Myers, Florida. And so all the other opportunities that were in that room for different companies were based in Wisconsin. My my parents, they were moving out to South Carolina once I graduated college. So I thought, well, I'm probably the only person on campus here. If I take a job coming out of college and I'm in Fort Myers, Florida, I'm actually going to be closer to home than if I stay in Wisconsin. So that definitely helped me be a little bit more open to taking the opportunity. But then I thought, okay, well, I need to figure out if I can even do this because I have zero experience. I don't know what I'm doing, but I'm so excited. I just want to give it a try. So that same day after the career fair, the university had a perfect pitch competition that all the students had to participate in. And then a lot of other students that weren't in the class that wanted to do it across campus had to do it. So you had to go and you had to stand in front of these recruiters and give a 60 to 90 second pitch on why you'd be a good fit for XYZ company. That was their, you know, their example for the contest. And so even though I didn't have any sales experience, I've had a lot of different experiences, a lot of odd jobs, a lot of things like that. And so I went in and I thought, okay, well, I need to stand out somehow. If I'm not going to stand out because of my sales experience, I need to stand out and really make an impression with some of the experiences that I do have and lead with that. So I went in the room and I talked about how I would be a good fit and tied it back to the 3 prior springs in college when I was the Statue of Liberty for Liberty Tax Service in Janesville, Wisconsin. That was spinning the sign January through March, reminding people to come in and file their taxes. And so that was a non-traditional approach, I would imagine, but it did enough to get me to the finals. And I think I finished like second or third in a campus-wide contest and then talked to the recruiter from Gartner afterwards. And she said, hey, I think you've got, you know, I think you could be a good fit, you know, to pursue this further. I think it's worth a shot for you to go and at least check out what Gartner has to offer and go through the interview process and see what it's like. And so I followed her guidance. I did that. I went down in November after going through a few interviews and went down for their Invitational Day where it's me and 39 other students that are seniors looking for work at Gartner in sales. And we're all in a room and it's a full day-long interview with different exercises and role plays. And I remember being very nervous going into it, but I took the same approach that I did with the Perfect Pitch Competition on campus. I said, I've gotta, I just have to figure out what my approach and what my angle is going to be. And it's really, I think, guidance that I've heard from other managers, not just to me but for other people too, is just to go in and be yourself and try and make an impression and put your best foot forward. If you show your true self and it works out, great. If it doesn't, wasn't meant to be. But as long as you give it your all and are yourself and it works. So I remember going in and they had this exercise where during, like, it's 10 people and you do the exercise where you have to sell yourself as they give you different bios of different execs. I think I was the CEO of Netflix, and then there was the CEO of IBM and Apple and Microsoft and all that in a room, and you had to justify why you should be the one to get the life jacket that's on the sinking ship. And so everyone has to go up there and give their spiel. And so I talked about how people bond over Stranger Things and things like that at the time. And then everyone went through and finished their pitch. And then as we were getting ready to deliberate who was going to be, I guess, voted off the boat, for lack of a better term. I said, well, let me clarify a question here. What kind of life jacket are we talking about? And then I think the recruiter expected that question. So he said, well, whatever kind you want it to be. I said, all right, well, how about it's not the vest? It's just one of those summer camp orange ones that you tie around your head. And I said, we could probably, if we unclip that, we could probably fit about 2 or 3 or 4 of us on there. And that kind of blew up the role play. But my future VP was in the room. And I think she appreciated just kind of the unique problem solving and just looking for opportunities and being naturally curious. And then it eventually wound up for me getting an opportunity at Gartner to come on board, which I'm incredibly thankful for. And that was a great experience. So that was kind of my journey from going from not knowing anything about sales. And then a year later, moving down to Fort Myers and starting up at Gartner.

21:15 Scott Ingram: Nice. I'm doing the math though on, you're in Wisconsin. It's January, February, and March. March, maybe not quite as big of an issue, but you're outside dressed as a Statue of Liberty spinning a sign. It strikes me that it must have been awfully freaking cold.

21:30 Zach Goggins: It was, it was definitely not. It was a job I found on Craigslist, which I think when you, when you put into account the weather conditions with the time of year, it sounds like a job that would pop up on Craigslist. So yeah, they were, they were looking for some help. I don't think indeed they were getting too many applicants that were coming through and wanting to do that, but I figured, you know what, I'll just go for it and see what it is. And it was a It was a great time. It was nice. Just put some headphones in and just kind of dance with the sign. I wasn't nearly as cool as the people that others might see on Instagram spinning the sign and flipping it up in the air and catching it, because like you said, it was January through March in Wisconsin, so there were 30-mile-an-hour winds. My goal for the day wasn't, can I do a front flip holding the sign? It was, can I keep the sign from flying into the middle of the road? And so thankfully that never happened, but it was nice being up in… I'm a Midwest guy, so you get some of the nice… there was times where just nice grandma would pull over her car and bring me a nice cup of coffee and a scarf. So that was nice.

22:25 Scott Ingram: Nice, nice. I'm really curious about just if you could go back and change the way that you sort of approached your entry to sales, or maybe let's think about it this way, right? You're speaking to Professor Cummins' class right, right now, right? And, you know, here's a group of students that they're probably in their junior, senior year. They know that they want to go down the sales path. What would you tell them? Like, how would you advise them as they begin that journey?

22:53 Zach Goggins: I would say to don't let your nerves get you in the way of doing what you want to do. Like, it's a very nerve-wracking experience going into sales where you are, you know, compared to some other careers, directly responsible for the income that you bring in, whether you have a good year or a bad year. So that was a lot of weight to bear when I first started and still is now. I don't know if that'll go away over time. It's just something that you learn to manage. But the fear of having conversations with strangers, that's something that in talking to a lot of people, they have or they have had. So especially as someone who's 21, 22 years old and you're junior, senior in college and you're wanting to do something like this, but you're kind of nervous about it, I would say go and do it. It's not going to hurt anything. I remember talking with an old roommate of mine who worked with Gartner with me at the time. And we were talking about just the comparison that we had when we were just starting out and we were comparing ourselves to some very tenured reps that were there like, oh man, they're so good. Like, I don't think I'm ever going to get that good. And then talking to them and having the realization, well, you're comparing yourself who's brand new to someone who's been doing this for 5 years. Like, it's not a fair comparison. And so that's the message that I would give to other people, like students in Dr. Cummins' class, saying like, if you see people or you have a good experience or people are telling you like how tough it is and you're seeing how good they are in person at it, like you can get there. You just have to stay in the game long enough to do it and be a sponge, like take in as much information as you possibly can and find best practices and do what works and then and do your best to find your own spin on it and keep it fun. But don't compare yourself to other people right out of the gate because you're just going to get disappointed. It's perfectly natural to struggle when you start. If you're not struggling when you start, there's probably something that you're missing or you're not self-aware enough to be able to identify those issues which keep you from growing in the future. But I've talked with friends about this as far as advice that they would give, and we've come to that same consensus. And I've been in a band for years and years and years. And so we talk about it too. It's like comparing, okay, well, we're comparing our demo tape to Led Zeppelin III, like, it's not a fair comparison. Everyone had their garage demo tape that was not good. Like, that's your career at the start. It's just you've got to stay in the game long enough and learn tips and tricks and get better and go through some tough times and improve in order to get to Led Zeppelin III. Like, it's the same thing for a career. So if there's kids that are nervous about getting into it, know that it's perfectly fine to be nervous, but don't let that keep you from taking action and doing something you want to do.

25:37 Scott Ingram: Nice. Nice. I think that perspective is awesome. And then your first gig was at Gartner, who, you know, has a reputation for having like pretty good sales training and really helping you learn what sales really is. How was that for you?

25:48 Zach Goggins: Oh, it was incredible. It was incredible. I couldn't ask for anything more. I will… how much time we got? An hour and a half left. I could sing their praises until the cows come home, and… but no one wants to hear me sing anyway. I'm not that good. But it was a real great experience. I mean, just especially for a kid coming fresh out of school who didn't know much about anything. Especially as it related to sales, getting the crash course on here's what it takes to do things, here is what the best practices are. I think the strength for them is they're a research organization, so they have all of this data and information that people have worked incredibly hard in order to gather. And they don't just have it, they actually put it into action on what works and what doesn't work. So being able to walk through, and the way that their training was set up at the time was it was a big class. There was was me and 90 to 100 other kids that were fresh out of college, had just graduated 2 or 3 months prior, and we were all down there. This is our first job out of college, and everyone was in the same boat, and everyone was away from home. So I think that also helped as far as creating a community of people that I still keep in touch with on a regular basis and some of my closest friends, because when we were all going through this thing together, we were all nervous about our first job. And I think if we were all in that situation, but we were at, you know, maybe another company that didn't have near the amount of resources that someone like a Gartner does, we would all be in very different places. But like the experience of working one-on-one and in small group settings as well with the trainers that were all individuals who had been at Gartner and who had been top achievers and they had exceeded their quota multiple times for multiple years, they had proven track records of success. As well as were skilled enough to not just be able to sell, but be able to teach how to sell, which are 2 different things, different skill sets there. I can't be more thankful and grateful for my time at Gartner.

27:46 Scott Ingram: Yeah, such a great foundation. I mean, one of the things I think about a lot for folks that are going into this craft, it's funny to me, we've got a presentation coming up at this year's summit that Kaleigh Conners is going to give on self-enablement rather than sales enablement, because I think that's the reality in the vast majority of organizations is you're kind of on your own. And if you've never done this before, good freaking luck, right? I think the foundation that you get initially going to work for an organization that has a really strong, you know, education training program going in to help you onboard and really understand what sales really is, and it's becoming so rare. That used to be common, I think, with a lot of these larger organizations, and anymore it's pretty rare. And again, you know, like Gartner's got a great reputation for that, and you're obviously praising what they've done. So love all of that. So to this point, I mean, 2 different companies, you've had really good success in your current role. What's your favorite sales story? Maybe you lost and you learned a great lesson, but what's your favorite story?

28:49 Zach Goggins: Yeah, so it's one that I won, but it came as a result of a lot of things that… a lot of deals that I had lost. Leading up to that where I was able to learn a lot of lessons that helped me win this one. So this is one where it was a bank that we brought on in the middle of last year, Ad Encapture. And I think what makes it great for me is the people that we worked with on the bank side were so great that were involved in the process. And it served as a good example of how going the extra mile can really pay off, doing the little things like I mentioned earlier at the top and having those one-on-one conversations with stakeholders involved in the deal, those serve as good testaments here. So we mainly worked with the chief compliance officer at this bank. The business developer and I that were partnering on this, we heard in our first call with that chief compliance officer, we heard her say that her daughter was getting married in a few months. And so the business developer, Camille, that I was partnered with on this, she went online after the call, she looked up, she found the daughter's registry for the wedding. And then she bought a gift for her daughter from the Encapture team. So the daughter and her new husband were probably incredibly confused on their big day since they had no idea who we were, but a gift's a gift. But her mom probably thought it was great. And so we built a lot of trust there right off the bat. We showed that we really listened and cared about her, not just what's going on at work, but we cared about her as a person and her family as well as her team. And that's still something… I mean, that was a year ago and she still brings that up, that chief compliance officer. Her whenever we have conversations with her. And that was from our first call. And we continued working the deal, meeting with some of her leadership team. As we got closer and closer to the deal getting done, our proposal had to go in front of their executive leadership group to get their approval. And because of the trust and confidence we had built with her and we had built with her team by us having conversations with the different layers of management and the folks that do the day-in and day-out work like we talked about earlier, she She felt confident enough and trusted us enough to open the doors for us to engage with her boss, the chief risk officer of the bank. So I remember I met with her boss one-on-one when he was on vacation in New Orleans, and he stepped away from brunch with his wife and the friends that they were vacationing with, and he found, I don't know, some alley, some other coffee shop, what have you. And we jumped on a Zoom and went through slide by slide the presentation that we were going to give the CIO of the bank and the chief operating officer of the bank. Slide by slide, and he gave me his feedback based on previous experiences of him seeing new vendors be presented in front of this committee. And we went through, we were able to go through, get his feedback, make some tweaks, make some changes. I was able to say, hey, I think it would sound better in this meeting with the CIO and COO if they didn't just hear from the Encapture group. I think if they're expecting me to come in and say about how great this is and how much of an impact this can have, I said, I think it would impact and resonate with them a lot more if on this slide, as we're talking about potential FTE savings and time that can be reallocated to pursue all these other initiatives, I said, I think it would be much more impactful if you step in and take the mic there and you share that. And he said, I agree, I think that would be good. And so then we had that meeting with the CIO and the COO, get their thoughts on us, and then executed the plan that we had talked about in the pre-call meeting with the CRO. And things went really, really well, which led to us getting presented in that forum with the CIO and COO who were chairs of that committee and ultimately wound up getting approved. And so yeah, it's my favorite sales story just because of that whole team over there has been great to work with, is still great to work with. We're working with them continuously today, us building great relationship with them through doing the right things, doing the little things. And it serves as a good example of how taking extra time to make sure each person involved feels that their needs are met leads to a better outcome for everybody.

32:55 Scott Ingram: Solid, solid. Perfect follow-up to your point about engaging with each individual stakeholder in the deal, right? That's why it works. So, I mean, you're still relatively early in your career, but to this point, like, what are you most proud of?

33:07 Zach Goggins: Still being in sales. I don't know if that's a cheesy answer or not, but still, still being in sales, like still being here in the profession, I think is something that I'm proudest of because it was not easy. I mean, I've gone on probably longer than you were intending about the start and the journey going into Gartner. But once I got there and the training was fantastic. Absolutely. But no matter like how great the training is, you're still going to have a lot of ups and a lot of downs. And when you're starting off, you're gonna have a lot more downs than ups. So just sticking through with that and still being here. Like, I remember the day before the first day at Gartner started, the training started. I remember being in Fort Myers, just like sitting in my room. Like, can I do this? Like everyone is so much more experienced. They've been in these international sales competitions for the last 4 years. I'm someone who told the recruiter in a room full of VPs that we should use a different life jacket for this exercise, and I was the first to get voted off the boat. I don't know if I can do this, but you show up, you give it your all, you work your tail off. And that was my approach. Okay, if I don't have the experience of everyone else, then I'm going to make up for it by working harder than everyone else and really studying the material and doing what I can and learning from whoever is willing to teach me. And so that's what my approach was. But again, even though you work your tail off, what I learned, you know, not just learned in my career, but, you know, a lot earlier on in life, but definitely it's come to really reality. A really big reality for me is the delayed gratification in sales. So just because you put in all this time this year doesn't mean that the results are going to pay off at the end of the year and you're going to be where you want to be, or even the following year. I remember coming in and I went territory live in September of 2018 at Gartner. And was ready to hit the ground running and do whatever I could and be a sponge and pick things up. And I learned a lot, but at the end of the year, there was an account that I owned and it came down. So I finished the year negative. That's how I looked at it. And then I'm like, okay, that's all right. I had 4 months. People probably weren't… it would've been great if I didn't, but that's probably not a common thing where you've got 4 months and you're going to come out and you're going to hit your quota. So my grads are right, 2019 is my year. So 2019 starts, I've got a new manager, bonding with him a lot, bonding with my new team a lot. Things are going great. You go through the ups, you go through the downs. It was a pretty good year. And then come to the end of the year, I'm sitting in a spot where I'm, you know, within arm's reach of hitting quota. And on the last day of the year, I'm at the office and 2 renewals for me that we had kind of expected, but you just hold out hope. They came down on the last day of the year. And so I remember that meant that I finished the year negative again in 2019. And so just this whirlwind of emotions. I'm like, all right, halfway through the year, I'm doing great. Now at the end of the year, I'm in the same spot I was last year. So there's a lot of doubt that was going through my head, a lot of negative thoughts that were happening. And so that was a point in time where I'm like, I don't know if this is for me. I don't know if I can do this. I think I can, and I've shown success in bringing deals forward, but to get to where I want to be here, I don't know if that's something that's in the cards for me, but I'm going to keep on trying. I'm going to keep on doing it. And so I went into 2020 and talked with my manager about saying, hey, just being open and honest with him, which is something that I've learned to be more comfortable with in my short career. And had a real heart-to-heart with him about how I was feeling about things. I said, I, 2 years in a row, I feel like I am working as hard as I can on things and I don't get the result that I'm looking for. And so telling him that, hey, I just want to figure out what I can be doing better. Like, I don't want to go through this again. If there's other things that I can do, let me know. And he and I had and still have a really good and close relationship. But I think a lot of it is because of him helping me through 2019. And 2020, just work through all of these emotions that I was having in these deals, of course, but definitely just how I was feeling through everything. And I had some tough conversations, which is something that I've told other reps that have come on board at Encapture since that time. And even in my last little bit at Gartner is just sharing with your manager what's going through your head and how they can help you. And if they can't help you, giving you recommendations on who else can. I remember telling my manager in 2020, I said, hey, I think there's things Like, I don't want you to feel like I can't take… like, if there's constructive advice that you can give me, I don't want you feeling like you can't tell me because you're afraid of how I'm gonna feel about it. And so what he told me actually has given me a lot of confidence and made me, like, put those concerns to the side in terms of how he views the team and my performance. He said, if there's things that I think you can be doing better but I'm not telling you you, that's hurting me as well because I'm measured on your performance. And so having him share his perspective on how he's viewing things, like, I now, from that time on, I have never like had that worry about any manager that I've had since then. And so that's something where, again, starting out very fresh, very new, I'm like, I think I'm a nice guy. I don't know if people are just kind of wanting to, you know, handle it with kid gloves as as advice and areas for improvement go, but I don't want that to hinder what my potential could be. And so ever since he brought that up, that thought has left my mind. I'm like, okay, I know that the managers that I have, they're going to give it to me on whatever I can do to improve. And I've shared that with them too. I said, I'm all ears. I'm a sponge. I'll do whatever I can to be successful. And then it wound up paying off in 2020. I was able to go through and the craziness that 2020 was, but I was able to go through and exceed my quota and actually hit President's Club at Gartner for the first time. So I thought, you know, this is like, there's gonna be ups, there's gonna be downs. Last year at InCapture, we had some new reps on the team, and so sometimes the different reps, they'll go through and they'll share, you know, during a lunch, they'll share their experiences and present on whatever topic they want to talk about. And so I talked about the sales roller coaster and I went through what I just went through here of my sales roller coaster of having the ups and downs throughout the journey, but just sticking with it. And I think that's what I'm most proud of is that I didn't give up. And whenever I didn't get the result that I was looking for, I didn't just say, well, I'm just going to stick with this. I figured out what are the tweaks that I can make in order to further improve my game and not just be stagnant.

39:50 Scott Ingram: Yeah, there's a lot of good stuff in that. I mean, I think the first one is your call out. I mean, if you've you've got even a halfway decent manager, generally speaking, you're going to be well served by just having that really open relationship. And, you know, if you're going in guarded and, you know, you're just not able to be open with each other, right? It's a two-way street. Nobody's served in that. But, you know, I think that maybe the more important thing is, especially early in your career, man, this is such an emotional… like, nobody really talks about how mentally challenging this job is. I mean, you're not kidding, the roller coaster and just how high the highs are and how low the lows are. And, you know, that can happen several times a day sometimes. My first traditional sales job, I had a similar great kind of training onboarding experience working with ADP. And, you know, on paper, I was doing great. I did not ever… well, not maybe not ever, but I rarely felt like I was doing great. Like, I just felt super anxious, so much pressure. I had a very young family at the time. And, you know, it was crazy. It was totally crazy. And I think, you know, over time, it takes a long time to just kind of figure out how to work through that stuff, right? Just how to know that this is a challenging gig. But what I have found is over time, as you gain those skills, as you get better, as you get more confidence, it gets easier. And it gets… I think it gets a lot more fun. Like when you can just really settle in and you're like, now I can just freaking have a conversation with somebody, right? Like I'm just there to help them. And I don't have all of this pressure that I used to put on myself and hey, look, everything works better.

41:32 Zach Goggins: Exactly. Yeah. I totally agree with you. Now I'm curious from your perspective too, because you said you started off and you had a pretty young family, then you had a great training setup there with ADP, learning to take some of that pressure off of yourself. And my old manager used to call it like white, not white-knuckle the steering wheel and have some fun with it. Like, is that something that you just kind of learned over time or is that something where like you and your manager were having these conversations and they gave you some guidance to say, hey, maybe loosen up a little bit?

42:02 Scott Ingram: Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, I had some very strong managers while I was there. I think I got some of that. The bigger thing for me, and this is another thing that took me years to work through, I was just a crazy overthinker. Like, I felt like I had to have everything figured out before I did anything. And now my approach is exactly the opposite. I'm like, let me just do this 10 times and figure out, like, and get comfortable with it and figure out, does this actually work or not? Rather than trying to have… I mean, it's kind of like the battle plan, right? You can have the perfect plan and it all goes to heck the minute the first shot is fired.

42:41 Zach Goggins: Yeah, right.

42:43 Scott Ingram: So it was just learning that. And again, you just can't get there in your head. It comes with the repetitions. You can't think about… I mean, I could build the perfect weight training plan, but I'm not going to get stronger unless I actually lift the stinking weights and do the reps. That's what it comes down to.

43:00 Zach Goggins: Yeah, well, that's good to know. That's good to get your perspective on it because I was curious. Again, I only know what I've gone through, and it was a mixture of me kind of figuring it out, but it took that, to use your weightlifting analogy, it took me going to the gym with my manager in order to actually be the ignition for the car to start and us to move forward. I remember a biweekly meeting I had with one of my clients, and I would normally come prepared with like, all right, here's what I think, here's what we could do, here's some things we could look at, here's what he might be thinking. He said, all right, well, your next meeting with them, just don't prep. What are you talking about? This is the exact opposite of what I've been told, what I've been following this advice for. He said, no, just don't prep. Just go in and have a conversation. And see how it feels. And I'm like, okay, this was… and I tried it and I was nervous, a lot of sweat, but I did it. And I'm like, okay, this felt good. Like, it was just seeing that this is possible. It can be done another way. But I mean, of course the recommendation was, okay, we're gonna have other meetings. You're definitely gonna prep for those. But it was just to see, like, this is how you can be you. You can be natural when you're not stuck to this battle plan of these are the steps that I have to follow. I have to do this at this time. And so from that one experience, I've been able to just go through and kind of follow. It sounds like the pursuit that you've gone through is just okay. Now it's coming more and more natural and a lot less overthinking.

44:15 Scott Ingram: Yeah, I think the other key that and you pointed this out is just the patience is recognizing this is not going to come immediately. Like this is really going to take work, and if we expect this is actually going to take years. And to your point of comparing yourself to others, the guy who brought me into the organization. Was one of the top 3 guys in the country consistently. So, you know, he was top 3, and we're talking just this division, just this sales organization was 800 people nationally. He's in the top 3. You can't begin to compare yourself to that. And I'd go on a lot of calls with him. I learned a lot from him. But the biggest learning, and I don't think I got this right away, is there are things that he would do that I could never do just stylistically, right? And it really is that you have to figure out your way. It's so hard, right? Because we want to emulate others, and you have to do… I mean, the reason people are listening to us right now is they're trying to glean like, what are those insights? What are those things that I can apply? But they can't be you. They can't do it exactly the same way. They can't be me, right? It's… you try these things, you use this for inspiration, for ideas. Like, oh, that's interesting. I wonder if I can incorporate that. I mean, I do think anybody could start thinking about, hey, I'm working this deal and there are 5 people who were in the last call that we had, but I haven't had one-on-one conversations with 4 of them. Okay, well, anybody can reach out to those 4 people and have those conversations. How you have those conversations, that needs to be more you.

45:51 Zach Goggins: Yeah, that's a good point. Like, it's finding your way way. And if you were to do what the person who brought you on that's in the top 3 of the whole team and region, if you were to do everything that he did step by step, well, there's probably a handful of things that would just feel completely unnatural. So even though you're doing those things, it's like, well, I'm not getting the results. What am I doing wrong? It's like, well, you've almost stuck to the battle plan so well, it's to a fault now where you haven't stretched your legs and figured out what's a good feeling. But I think if I'm reading it right, and let me know if I'm not, like you have to have that core best practices to follow. You've got to have that as a foundation to adhere to and have reps on and then start to kind of find your way on what's going to be your flavor of each thing.

46:36 Scott Ingram: Yep. Yep. I also think about this from a leadership perspective too, right? A lot of this is to your point, there is a broader framework. There's sort of a broad idea, but the way that you tailor that and the way you customize it really has to be set to the individual person. And the analogy that I like to torture, I've never polished this all the way, but sort of the idea that I've had leaders who were not good, who were, look, you have to do it this way. That was one of those, like, that is very unique to you. Like, yes, I could see where that works amazingly for you. Those words coming out of my mouth are never going to resonate. And the way I think about this is like, I'm a 42 regular. If you ask me to wear a 5-size dress, it's not gonna look pretty.

47:19 Zach Goggins: Seems like a pretty polished analogy to me.

47:24 Scott Ingram: Well, you know, every now and then I like to bring it out, but I think there's a lot of that that happens, right? Is, oh well, this is the way, do it this way. But if that doesn't fit, it's not going to work. So let's go to the flip side. So we talked about what you're proud of today. Day, what do you find to be the most challenging part? What do you still struggle with?

47:41 Zach Goggins: I think it's getting people's attention. I think it's getting prioritized. There's so much happening now. There's so many ways that people are getting reached out to where they're… the people that are reaching out are wanting something from them. And so, you know, when I started at Gartner, their big principle was the WHYU now. That was the methodology that they were teaching, and it was very much, you come in, be researched in your prospecting messages, be relevant, come in with a hypothesis on how we can help. And so we try that and it leads to some results, but it had been a methodology that had been in practice for a while. So over time it's like, okay, well, the prospects, they've kind of heard this song and dance before. So now you got to tweak it and you got to get in front of it a little bit with another way. And now at Encapture, We're learning new things and figuring out different ways that we can help. So it's just trying to figure out what's most relevant when people are so bombarded with stuff that's coming external to their organization and there's things that are changing internally that they're having to stay on top of. So it's trying to figure out a way to always stay in front of them and not just assume that your product or your solution is something that is relevant, but just trying to tie your solution to something that is relevant. Like your technology cannot, in my perspective, like your technology cannot be the most important thing. You have to figure out what is the most important thing and try and attach onto that. And sometimes, you know, you take shots in the dark and it works. And then sometimes you come in with really researched hypotheses. And I remember I used to tell people like, there's cold emails that I've written these prospects that I would be proud to print off and put on my fridge with magnets and showcase to my parents when I came over for dinner that did not get a response. And then there's emails that I've, you know, I would not print off and show to anybody and probably delete from my phone that have gotten meetings. I guess just figuring out as things are changing so much, what's going to yield the best results. And the target always seems to be moving, but there seems to be some core principles of being relevant, being tailored. So I've just tried to do that as best as possible. But again, the results vary on it, but just trying to think of new ideas in order to do that.

49:53 Scott Ingram: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think that's an ongoing challenge, right? It's certainly not gotten better in terms of the number of channels, the number of distractions, the number of kind of messages and ideas and priorities and everything else that we all need to work on and have to break through. Let's pivot a little bit and talk about kind of some of your habits and routines and the way you set up your day, starting with maybe that you talked about the discipline in your prospecting. We're talking about prospecting. What is your prospecting approach and when does that fit into your day?

50:21 Zach Goggins: Yeah. So I try and knock out my prospecting early in the day. So I go through and, you know, we at Encapture, account executives, you know, they're expected to, you know, have 150 dials at least a week. And we all know how the week goes. Things pop up. Sales is always changing in terms of, you know, there's customers that need attention. There's current deals that you're working. There's new deals that are early stage you're trying to progress. There's legal redlines you're having to read through. There's vendor due diligence requests that come through. There's a lot that happens. Happens. And so I try and, you know, start my workday earlier than, you know, probably expected, you know, jumping online at like 7:30 in the morning and just to kind of get ahead of some of the emails that have come in from overnight or some of the pending items from before, and then make sure that I've taken care of any urgent items that have happened from the night before, the day prior, take care of those. That way I can start hitting up and calling and emailing my East Coast accounts Right away at the start of the day and try and get in front of that. So that's where prospecting fits in. Fits in for me from a traditional cold outreach perspective, and something new that I've been you know collaborating with some team members at Encapture on recently is figuring out how we can stay engaged with some of the opportunities, some of the prospects we've had meetings with either earlier this year or the year prior. How do we keep them engaged? And so it kind of ties back to what we were talking about before and trying to stay in front of them and what's relevant. So rather than just sharing, hey, here's Encapture. In the news. Here's a new feature we released. Just trying to figure out, okay, they're probably expecting Zach Goggins at encapture.com is probably going to send me something Encapture related. Well, not necessarily. I know that there's other priorities that you have. Old manager I had used to say, we are, we are 1% of their job. They are 100% of our job. So kind of use that frame of reference when trying to get engaged with these people. So other than Encapture on their day-to-day, which they're probably not thinking about since they're not a current opportunity, What else do they have going on? Well, they've got a budget for next year. They've got to put a strategy together for next year. So that's content that I've been sharing with them, and I've started doing that after I've gone through and done a number of dials in the first hour of the day and emails, is sharing with them content on, hey, here's some justification on why banks are having a hard time finding compliance officers right now and why some teams are using automation in order to help with that. It doesn't say anything about Encapture. It just says, hey, compliance officers are tough to find right now. And if you're going to try and find them or develop them internally, here's some recommendations. Nothing of us is mentioned, but I just send them the link to the article and say, hey, saw this, thought of you. You're probably going through budgeting conversations right now. I have a lot going on, so you might not want to read the full article. I did. Here's 3 bullet points on what I thought was insightful for you. And even though I don't work at Gartner, I'm still sharing free Gartner webinars. There's a strategy, like an Art of the One-Page Strategy webinar. I'm sending that out to my current prospects right now and other leads that I've had from the last year saying, hey, me again. You probably have to go through some type of strategy process or get people bought into what you want to do next year. Here's some storytelling recommendations from this webinar. It's free if you want. It's nothing encapture related. So I try and make sure I'm fitting in time for that and kind of viewing it not so much as like, oh, this is kind of not as big of a priority right now because they're not current deals. And it just feels different than sending a, hey, want to meet? Or doing a full-out cold call. It's still prospecting, but it's just different. And so I think that's kind of where I've dropped the ball in the past is not prioritizing that type of habit. Help in my outreach. So that's something that I'm bringing more to the forefront. And so that usually comes after I've knocked out the prospecting dials and the cold emails that happen in the morning, is staying engaged that way.

54:14 Scott Ingram: Nice. If we think about like the whole of that, what's the breakdown? How much is pure kind of cold prospecting versus that I'm trying to reignite, keep warm, kind of ongoing other conversations that we may have started previously?

54:28 Zach Goggins: I would say it's more so… it's probably like 75/25. Or 80/20 as far as the pure cold outreach versus the, the, hey, I'm here trying to help because they're usually different. It's not the same person I'm trying that approach on, but it'll probably lead to after I've put these prospects through a sequence of, hey, give it and capture a shot. Here's what we can do. Here's how we can help you. And then, you know, work on hitting them up a certain amount of times, you know, for that month or the next 2 months and say, okay, Okay, maybe now isn't the time. Let's figure out another way that I can help you, even if it's not in Capture related. And so, once they've gone through that initial sequence of here's how we can help you at In Capture, then probably transition those folks into that here's some non-In Capture resources that could deliver some value to you.

55:14 Scott Ingram: Gotcha. And what are you thinking about in terms of number of touches? Maybe right if you're putting somebody into that initial sequence, it's a couple of months long. How many times are you trying to touch them through what channels? Channels?

55:24 Zach Goggins: Yeah, so I'm usually… so we've got different… our sales enablement team member over here, Marta, she does a great job helping build out some of those sequences for us, which really are just reminders for… there's some pre-built emails in there that we can go and tweak, and then there's some templates, go in, customize it, personalize it a little bit for them. So, but really just serves as a good schedule for how often to touch these folks. So I'd say probably across the multiple different channels, you know, LinkedIn, phone call, email, text, stuff like that, I'd say maybe across those different mediums. And sometimes it's not even engaging with them. It's just looking at if they're posting things on LinkedIn. I think taking all that into account, you know, maybe it's, you know, 15 to 20 times.

56:01 Scott Ingram: Yep. Yep. Nice. Cool. So let's take a step back and talk about the whole of your day. So we've talked about the prospecting window that happens in the morning. Let's start at the very beginning. Your alarm clock goes off. What time did that happen? And then I want a pretty detailed blow-by-blow until your head hits the pillow. Again.

56:18 Zach Goggins: Sounds good. I usually wake up… I say usually, I'm trying to give myself some credit here. Some days don't happen all the time. I'll wake up at 5, take my dog out. She's usually antsy to get outside. So I just moved into a house recently, so I got a fenced-in yard. So wake up, roll out of bed, open the door, let her do her lap and chase out any foxes that might be hiding out in the backyard or any birds that are sitting out there. So she'll go scare them off and then I'll come back inside. And then I'll pack up and head to the gym, work out there for about an hour, and then come back, shower, throw on a pot of coffee. Then while I'm getting ready for the day, I usually listen to some music or listen to some comedians. Some comedy specials is a good, just a fun way to start the day. And like I said, come back to the computer at about 7:30 and start taking care of some emails that have gone through from the night before or any urgent items. I'm a big proponent component. I had to learn this over time, but of calendarizing your time, that's definitely a big thing. And then not just calendarizing your time, but sticking to it. So that's something where I'll have gone through, and over the course of the past week or so, I'll have all these reminders set up where once I would complete a task, if it's something that, you know, say, hey, send an email to Teresa to talk about having a conversation in September, I will do that. I'll send that email. On, say, Monday, but I'll set up a reminder to remind myself about it, to do it on Thursday in case she hasn't responded. That way it still stays top of mind for me and doesn't go away. That's commonly what I'll work through in those items too. If there's nothing urgent that has come through in that 7:30 to 8 hour, then usually 8 to 9, go through and take care of some prospecting, going through what I just mentioned. If there aren't any other meetings that are happening during that time, then usually the day-to-day of the accounting executive role here at Encapture can vary. I'm sure you haven't heard that from anyone that's been a guest on your podcast, but it it's going through and it's a mixture of, you know, having internal meetings, whether we have demos coming up to make sure that us and the sales engineers are aligned on what needs to be done, if there's any other people that we need to loop in for those. Going back to the discipline component that I talked about earlier, making sure that there's going to be other folks besides just me that are involved in the meeting, they know what their role is going to be, and we collaborate not just on what I think should happen, but what everyone thinks is going to be the best path forward. So we'll talk about that. Then of course you have be prospecting meetings where there's demos, there's discovery calls going through and sharing proposals. And then those meetings will happen throughout the course of the day. Sometimes our capture team, our sales team, we do different events. Like we had like a monthly book club where we'd go through, we'd read something about, you know, being a good teammate or something to propel you in your sales career. And we'd come together and we'd share feedback and findings from those and what we took from it. And some of the team members will lead some of the different lunch and learns, like I mentioned earlier, about topics that are relevant to them that they think could help the team succeed further. And then usually I reserve all of the follow-up items that I have to do. I usually reserve those for that, that 4 to 5 hour just as a way to wrap up the day. And then also as a way where if I take care of all the follow-ups from that day's meeting or the previous day's meeting and not push them off until the morning, then it helps me feel refreshed coming into that next workday where I don't feel like I'm already behind the And then once the workday wraps up, I'm fortunate my sister, she lives, her and my brother-in-law and little nephew, they live a 5-minute drive away from me. My parents, they live a 5-minute drive the other way. So it's getting together with them. Family's very important to me, spending time with them. Surprisingly enough, there's a pretty good standup comedy scene here in Southern Illinois. I do standup comedy. I've been doing that for the last year and a half. And so there's usually some friends getting together or there's an open mic that's happening, or I've been fortunate enough to get booked on some shows. So traveling to Champaign or Peoria or Decatur, or doing it locally here in Springfield or Jacksonville and doing that. And then sometimes, you know, there's meetings that we have, rehearsals. I'm going to be participating and acting in this TV pilot. So we'll have rehearsals where we go through and do that. So that also takes up a good bit of time outside the normal working schedule and then come back home and probably listen to some more comedy specials just to get some inspiration. And yeah, before I let my dog out again. And, you know, just kind of head hits the pillow there.

1:00:35 Scott Ingram: Nice.

1:00:36 Zach Goggins: So people don't think I'm only letting my dog out twice a day. I also let her out, you know, during the lunch break that I have, and we go outside and we throw the ball around, and then once after work too. So I want to make sure that everyone knows I'm a good, proud, happy dog owner.

1:00:48 Scott Ingram: That is so funny. It's hilarious that you caught that because I was going to ask if that's exactly what it sounded like. So you let your dog out twice a day? I could not get away with that. Well, I could, but I'd have a lot of extra work. So I'm curious, like on the comedy front, I was going to ask you about that because I knew about this element of you. Does that show up in your sales process anywhere?

1:01:08 Zach Goggins: Yeah. Yeah. And it sometimes goes well. Sometimes you get eye rolls, but I think people appreciate the authenticity that I'm just there making jokes, just like having fun with it. I think that's also something like we talked about earlier, like just be natural. Don't overthink everything. Don't be stuck to your battle card. I think what I've learned over time is if you're having a conversation and you're talking about something that can really make a difference for your prospect's business or them as a person and their team, like, it's okay to be excited about that and it's okay to show that you're excited about it. I think it gets them excited too. Or if you're really excited about it and they're not, that also might be a good reality check. Like, okay, maybe I missed the mark here somewhere. Let's talk about this. Maybe there is something more that's here, or they're not nearly as confident as I am in this. So we need to dive in and do more discovery and do whatever we can to get us aligned on that. But yeah, comedy pops up a lot. I did this when I was at Gartner. I did this dorky thing where I just created my own weekly LinkedIn video series. I called it Gartner Time with Goggins. So that was the title of this series. And what it was, was just me seeing that a common thing that folks do, not just sales, but common employees at companies, like where the company will make a post. And they'll just go on LinkedIn and reshare the post. They won't share like their thoughts on it, if they read it or not. Like, okay, that's fine. That's what you're supposed to do. You're supposed to network, you're supposed to post on LinkedIn. I'm like, I feel like I could take a different approach here. I can get a little creative with it. So I would come up with this Gartner Time with Goggins, where I would just take a free resource that all of my clients had access to, and everyone who wasn't a client could easily access. And so I would pick that out for a week. I would read the short article, I would summarize it, and I would usually toss in some jokes, some self-deprecating thing just to like make it fun. And I would do that, and I did that for weeks and weeks and weeks, and people would share it and people would talk about it. And whenever we jump on internal meetings, they would ask me about it. And I haven't worked for Gartner since November of 2021. I was back in Dallas a few months ago getting together with an old coworker of mine who still works there. And I went to some event where their region was there and there were like 40 people there. And like 3 of them said like, oh, Gartner Time with Goggins. I'm like, this is the closest thing I'll get to a celebrity. This is kind of cool. But as far as like, does it come into the work? Yes. Yes, it does. And if anyone's looking for some idea, like, oh, should I do it? Should I not? Should I not do it? Of course, don't do the Gartner Time with Goggins. Find your own thing, what works for you. But I've gotten some good feedback from clients and prospects about it. Like, I got an email, I got CC'd on an email that a CIO who was a client of mine sent to her entire team and the health system CEO saying, hey, Zach Goggins is our in-capture account executive. He posts these free resources and does a fun video on it every week. You should follow him and connect with him and take advantage of these free resources. Like, he's adding value to us all Even though you're not exactly a member of the partnership. So that's something that I'm very proud of because that wasn't the intention. It was just something to like share resources. I didn't know that it would lead to helping build you know trust and that other people would get something out of it. It was just something that I thought was like fun for me to do that was tied to work. So comedy comes up a good bit.

1:04:34 Scott Ingram: Nice. You know, I think that's such an interesting idea, particularly from a whether I mean doesn't necessarily need to be comedy. I think any kind of content, I think a lot of times you might be sharing these kinds of things. And if you're doing it in a valuable, memorable sort of a way, it may not lead to people are calling me, like I'm setting meetings off of this. But a lot of times, and this always really surprised me, especially when I haven't been very active on LinkedIn lately, but you know, when I have been, or when I've been, you know, really consistent with newsletters or things like that, it's one of these, you don't hear from people necessarily, but then you end up in one of these conversations like you mentioned, you connect, reconnect with colleagues and you figure out, holy crud, you've been reading all of this stuff all these years, right? And so it does tend to be out there. And I think to your point also about, you know, how do we just stay top of mind and in the conversation? I think it's one of those things as well, right? Like this isn't the number one thing I'm working on. It's one of the 1% things. As far as what I'm paying attention to, but it's there. And if this thing does catch on fire, I'm going to reach out to Zach because I know he's there.

1:05:45 Zach Goggins: Yeah, for sure. And I really do. And the same thing can be said for a lot of the people I've worked with in the past, like really care about the people that are my clients and coworkers too that I support, even like old clients. Like I still will go through my contacts list every Christmas morning and I'll go through my entire contacts list and text everyone, whether they're old clients, client, current client, old coworker, whoever, and just text them like, hey, Merry Christmas. Hope you have a great day. Like, hope you're doing well. And like just finding ways to just stay in touch with people. Because that's something that I wasn't sure about when I went from Gartner to Encapture. I'm like, I built such great relationships with these people over 3 years. I don't want to lose that. What happens? Like, I care about these people and it's not like I can like have them as a client at Encapture. There's nothing in it for me monetarily. It's just, I really care about you. I want to make sure that you're doing well and that it would be nice to figure out if what I did to help you, if that's serving you well, but also just want to make sure we met once a month for 2 to 3 years. I'm not just going to abandon that. And so finding ways, even current clients too, here's something that I did, started doing 2 years ago where coming up to the holidays, I dressed up in Buddy the Elf costume and I have gone to a children's hospital in Dallas when I worked there, and I just went and I participated in this Santa bingo thing that was broadcast to all of these children's patient rooms. I was like, making people feel good that way. I'm like, well, is there a way I can tie that into work a little bit? And so then I posted on LinkedIn about it, because I've also been in a band. I play guitar. I sing, not And I just said like, hey, if anyone's wanting like a little Christmas gram or like a little Christmas song for their team, like I'll just record a video and send it to you. And sure enough, like a few banks, some that I'd worked with currently and some that I had never worked with in the past, like reached out like, oh my goodness, my team would love this. Can you please do this? Here's some little tidbits that you can throw in. Sent it to them. They loved it. So again, staying top of mind, again, it's not really tied to necessarily what's propelling your business forward. What's your goal for 2025? But just going the extra mile, doing the little things that I mentioned earlier, just like showing that you really care. Like, they know that I've got nothing to gain from this other than trying to make them feel good. But I think if they like you and they feel and sense that you're authentic and care, it's going to lead to a better relationship overall.

1:08:10 Scott Ingram: Zach, I want one of these. Do you have any of the Christmas grams in like a public place?

1:08:16 Zach Goggins: Not in a public place, although I do. I'll fish around.

1:08:19 Scott Ingram: All right. We're going to put one in the show notes. So if you go to top1.fm/this episode number or top1.fm/zach-goggins, we're going to have special Christmas music for you. It'll be Christmas in… I don't know, this will probably go out in September. So Christmas in September, sounds good.

1:08:37 Zach Goggins: If you can make sure that… I don't know if people can upvote or downvote… if you can just remove the downvote option, that'd be good.

1:08:42 Scott Ingram: Exactly, exactly. So Zach, I want to talk about kind of your information diet. So beyond the comedies, What are you reading? What are you listening to? What are you watching? When does that typically happen?

1:08:52 Zach Goggins: Uh, yeah. So sometimes it's during lunch or if it's been kind of a slow day, I've taken care of the follow-ups and taken care of the prospecting for the day. I have been a big proponent of John Barrows. That's something when I was at Gartner, you talked about like self-enablement earlier about organizations that maybe don't have this robust sales training, like what ADP had. Had or has, like what Gartner has, like how do you enable yourself to continue to grow? I've been watching the John Barrows, the JB Sales webinars for years. I sign up for them every day. I've got this Outlook folder that's jam-packed full of recordings. And so I'm going through and I'm watching or listening to those. And then I've got a Google Doc of things that I have picked up from whether it's Josh Braun on LinkedIn or John Barrows or Morgan Ingram or other people that are LinkedIn that post interesting perspectives. And so rather than just seeing it like, oh, that's cool, moving on, I've got this Google Doc of just sales tips and ideas, and I will just go back and I'll take notes from the webinars and posts that I see, and I'll just update them and I'll break them out into categories. And so those are the type of content that I take in that's new, And then occasionally I'll go back and look through these multiple pages of what I've done. And to get back to what we were talking earlier about, just trying to get in front of people and how tough that is, and it's always a moving target. I'll go back and see what haven't I tried from here, and I'll go back to the drawing board and start making some tweaks there.

1:10:24 Scott Ingram: I love that approach. That is super solid. What about the tech side of things? So what are the tools and apps you just can't live without?

1:10:31 Zach Goggins: Yeah, so Scratchpad. Is that something you're familiar with? Scratchpad? I've heard of it.

1:10:35 Scott Ingram: I don't know a lot about it.

1:10:35 Zach Goggins: Okay. So it's a way, it's an app, a tool that connects into Salesforce. So it just makes for an easy way to view like all of your current opportunities, be able to see visually kind of where they're at in your pipeline. Very easy to update. That's usually what our CRO Tyler pulls up every Monday morning for our forecast call to go through and just quickly see, okay, how is your MEDDIC looking for this deal? Where's it at in the stage? What do we have to do next? So that's one that's definitely saved a lot of time versus having to open up each individual Salesforce page for a deal. It's been a big time saver there as well as Outreach. That's what we use for our prospecting as well. So very easy to use, very organized as far as putting sequences together for new outreach there, being able to go and listen to and like record your calls and be able to listen back to them as well. Helps for note-taking. It also helps… we do this exercise occasionally on the Capture Summit. Side where we have this kind of demo scorecard, almost like a rubric of like, what does a perfect demo look like? And so every now and then we'll go through and we'll come together as a team and you'll pick a recording of a demo that you had and you'll go through and you'll re-listen to it and kind of check off like, okay, what did I do? What did I not do? And then we'll come together as a sales team and we'll talk through, okay, what are tweaks that we can make? And we'll not just get our own feedback and look at our own demos, but we'll also So hear what the feedback are from our other team members, and so it's great having that access to what everyone is doing, especially since I mean Encapture is based in Dallas, where it's where a lot of our sales folks are and a lot of our company is. But I'm up in Springfield, Illinois, so I'm not hearing what they're saying in the office in passing and what's leading to their success. So being able to go and hear what they did on this demo that went so well, or how they went and handled this objection, or how they went about presenting pricing. So being able to have. Access to that call recording through Outreach. That's definitely been a big game changer for us too. And then ZoomInfo for, you know, getting those dials and those contacts and direct dials and stuff like that. It's been helpful too. Nice.

1:12:44 Scott Ingram: Nice. And then Zach, do you subscribe to a particular sales philosophy?

1:12:48 Zach Goggins: I don't think so. I mean, there's been a few as far as like methodology, there's MEDDIC there, but I guess if I had to kind of sum it up to a philosophy, I remember hearing John Barrows say it, and I remember Morgan Ingram saying it was a real big breakthrough for his career. John calls it the… I don't know, I don't know, can you swear on here? I don't know. He calls it the… all right, he calls it the give-a-shit factor. So that's really what I subscribe to as well. And the essence of it is really like, it's what we've been talking about this entire time. It's like you have to truly care about the people that are on the other side of the conversation, how they're going to go through their day-to-day, what difference this is going to make, what else is happening with them that you're not privy to, like really show that you care. That's kind of at… if I had to sum up everything, that's really at the core of what's important to me and guides what I do.

1:13:40 Scott Ingram: I like it. I like it. And I think that theme is definitely coming through. So that's super solid. What about like the motivation side of things? How do you think about that? What drives you?

1:13:48 Zach Goggins: Yeah. So for me, it's all about family. Family for me. Family's been very important for me my whole life. Like my dad was able to go and work in the mill and go through and get to a position in the mill where my mom had the option to not work when my sister and I were growing up. And so I was able to see all the sacrifices that he made to create flexibility for our family growing up. And that's the same level of flexibility that I want to be able to provide my family moving forward too. So it's just being able to make sure that I'm giving it my all. That way, that hope and that dream can become a reality. So I've always been frugal. Like you heard, I found a college job on Craigslist. So I've always been having that as a motivating factor. When I turned 16, other friends were saying, Ooh, I'm going to get this real nice car. And I got gifted a '97 Honda Accord without any air conditioning from my grandpa. And I was stoked. Like, this is great. This is all I need. I'm not going to upgrade my car to get air. I'm just going to buy this fan that plugs into the cigarette lighter and I can just hold that up to my face if it gets hot. Like, I'm all of, like, since 16 years old, I've been focused on, I'm not going to, you know, go out and get a new car or get this luxury thing. Because it's all been like, people would ask like, what are you saving for? I'm like, oh, like my family, like my kids' college. Do you have any kids?

1:15:19 Scott Ingram: No.

1:15:20 Zach Goggins: Are you married? No. Like, well, why are you saving for that? I'm like, it's gonna happen. I just wanna make sure, like, that's my big motivating factor. I wanna make sure that my family is well taken care of in the future.

1:15:30 Scott Ingram: Nice. I guess you can get away with a cigarette lighter fan if you don't live in Texas.

1:15:36 Zach Goggins: That is true.

1:15:37 Scott Ingram: Yeah. You gave me this awful flashback when I was working with ADP. I had this old Mercedes I was driving and the air conditioning went out. And contrary to what is appropriate in Austin, Austin is a very, very laid-back place, but our leader was like insistent that we're super buttoned up, we're in the financial services industry, we're gonna wear a suit and tie. So here I am driving in this old Mercedes, suit and tie, the air conditioner out, so I've got the windows down and the heat, you know, like on the page pavement, not moving in traffic in Austin at the time. I don't know, it's probably 120 degrees outside. Who knows what it was inside. So yeah, it wasn't too long before we got the AC fixed, but that was a thing. That was definitely a thing. Let's talk about… I think of this as, this is like the soapbox section. This is where you get to rant a little bit about stuff.

1:16:33 Zach Goggins: Is there something you believe that the average or typical sales rep would I think it's just like calling out that, like kind of acknowledging and not being afraid to call out that like the majority of people probably are not stoked to be talking to a salesperson. Like that's okay to do. Like I start off my cold calls and it's something that I learned and read about from Josh Braun following him. This is like a pattern interrupt and a disruptor there is like, I'll start off my cold calls, but like, hey, is this Scott? Yeah. Who is this? Well, this is Zach Goggins with Encapture. You're probably going to hate me because this is a cold call. Do you want to hang up or can I ask you a quick question? And so I get a lot of chuckles from that, which when I've told people about that, that I do that, like, whoa, what are you doing? Like, that's… you're supposed to… like, if someone asks you if this is a sales call, you're supposed to say no. Like, well, then what are you doing? Like, well, then we're trying to, you know, get them to take a meeting. Like, well, then that's a sales call.

1:17:35 Scott Ingram: Call.

1:17:35 Zach Goggins: Just be upfront about it. It's going to be okay. Going back to what you said at the start, the customer experience. Well, if someone tells me this isn't a sales call and they try and get a sale with me, well, we just started our relationship off on a dishonest foot. This probably isn't going to go anywhere. So calling out that people probably aren't happy to hear from you and that's okay. That's the reality that we're living in. So if you acknowledge it and you come into things saying, yes, this is a sales call. You're probably not happy about it, but that's okay. I'm calling because I think I can help you and just kind of give them an out. I've told people about that. That's the approach that I take. And there's other ones that are out there that are probably better. There's other ones that are worse, and I'm open to learning different approaches and rolling with the punches and seeing what works. But that's the one… to what we talked about earlier, that's kind of my… you find your way on what fits and what seems natural. That seems natural for me, and calling that out. So, and it doesn't just have to be on like cold prospecting. Like, there's discovery meetings that I have and demo calls that I have where I'll just call out to cut the tension a little bit. Like, I start off my demos by saying, after we do pleasantries and stuff like that, I'll say, well, this demo usually goes one of two ways. First way, you absolutely hate what you see today. This is the worst thing since canned bread. If that's what happens, that's all right. You can let me know. It's not going to hurt our feelings. Or the other route, you really like what you see today. We have another conversation. Here's what we cover there. How does that sound. And that usually gets some chuckles as well. I think because people are so used to, hey, this is what we're going to do for you. And this is going to be great. I think if you come into it saying like, this isn't for everybody. I think it could be for you guys. But I don't know that for sure. You guys know you better than I know you at this point in time, where we're going to work to shorten that gap here today. And if at the end of the day, it doesn't fit, it doesn't fit. That's all right. Like we both know that from their perspective, they know like, okay, this isn't right for us right now. From our perspective, if it's not a fit and you figure that out early, that's a lot better than figuring it out later when you've already spent so much time on it. So I think that was something that probably I thought was crazy when I started. And now I don't think it's crazy and it's something that I try and do. So I get the initial gasps that people might be having as they're listening to this rant.

1:19:43 Scott Ingram: Yeah, Zach, this really is crazy. Are you suggesting that we should actually acknowledge reality and tell the truth?

1:19:50 Zach Goggins: Whoa, Scott, when you phrase it like that, I don't know, this might be getting a little taboo. But yeah, that's what I'm saying. Because especially, you know, I think back to when I was… before I took my first sales course and I thought that all salespeople were the same. I thought this is what sales is. I thought it was Glengarry Glen Ross. I thought it was all that type of stuff. I'm like, well, I didn't really learn what sales was until I was in it and realized it's not that. But all the people that I'm reaching out to and prospecting, they're not in sales. So they might be having that same perception as well. And I don't remember anyone in Glengarry Glen Ross, granted it's been a long time since I've seen the movie, calling out, hey, you're probably going to hate me because this is a salesperson, this is a cold call. So I think calling that out, like, I know what you're probably thinking. And there we go. Now we already got off on the right foot because you know that we're aligned, that you don't want to be on the phone with me. I think that that has opened up more conversations for me than I think would have been possible had I just gone in with a different approach, assuming that they're very happy that I called.

1:20:47 Scott Ingram: Nice, nice. What about the flip side? So like, speaking of the stale stereotypes and the dogma and everything else that's out there, is there something that the typical sales professional believes that you think is crazy?

1:20:58 Zach Goggins: I think kind of the… what's the tagline for it? Like the spray and pray, is that the term? Yeah. I don't know if that's a belief by the traditional salesperson anymore. I know that it was when I started, and it was a philosophy that I had subscribed to do kind of when I was starting out because I thought that was the way to go. Just, hey, catch as many fish as possible, and you're only going to do that if you throw your net out so many times. But it's like, no, you got to be tailored. You got to make sure that the fish that you're catching are the fish that you want to keep. Then you got to be making sure that you're casting for them. So the spray and pray is not something that I… and not something that I follow. I think it's kind of crazy, especially like what we were discussing earlier with the people we're reaching out to are so bombarded with content anyway, that is a spray and pray approach. I would imagine if you can differentiate yourself a little bit, then I think it's something that'll yield better results versus the traditional spray and pray where it's, we're just going to send out the same email to everybody and we're going to hope for the best and see what comes back.

1:22:00 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Yeah. I just had a really great conversation about this on the episode that will probably precede this one. I've got a pretty nice little backlog going here now, so who knows what the release order actually ends up being. But you know, it was, I mean, it was just this conversation of you really should invest the time in qualifying your prospect list and like everything, you shouldn't just treat them all the same. There are some where there's higher likelihood and higher propensity where you should probably invest more energy and do some more tailoring approach. And there's probably others where you're likely just wasting your time and maybe you don't want to even call them at all. Like there's just, there's no, there Right.

1:22:37 Zach Goggins: Yeah, I totally agree. And I think if you, again, each case is different, but I think if you spend the time upfront to research the people you're reaching out to, which doesn't take a tremendous amount of time, and you tailor your message and show some relevance and personalization, I think you have a higher likelihood of getting a response from that initial touch or a few touches thereafter versus if you don't research at all and just send out the same message to everybody. It's like, well, you're greatly hurting your chances of hearing back. And we're in the back half of the year now. If someone can respond to an email the same day that you send it versus not responding until your 20th email, that's like 2 months away, that could impact whether you hit your number or not. So I think if you take that time to really dig in, it could pay off. And worst case scenario, you do the research, you send the tailored You cold call them, you leave relevant voicemails, and you don't hear back from them. At least you know, okay, now probably it's because timing isn't right. It's not because timing's right; they just don't understand what we do, and they think that I'm just doing this spray and pray approach. It's like no, it's because either timing isn't right or there's something else that is going on. And whenever timing is right, you try them again. You know, in a few months or next year, you've already done that research, so you don't have to start from scratch.

1:23:57 Scott Ingram: Yeah, I was going to say on the research front, particularly if you have some type of sequencing. Tool, it's like research once and impact many, many times, right? So you can do that research all up front and now you can tailor each of your messages. You don't have to research every time.

1:24:13 Zach Goggins: Yeah, that's a very good point. That's a very good point.

1:24:15 Scott Ingram: So Zach, you clearly do a good job of this. I know we've touched on some of these things just in terms of kind of capturing the lessons learned along the way. I'm curious about like, is there one that we haven't talked about that has has been one of the most important decisions or just a lesson you had to learn that really helped you take a step up in your career?

1:24:34 Zach Goggins: I think it's really just being open and that can be applied in a few different scenarios. We've talked about being open with your manager. We talked about how important that is. Being open with your peers. That's something that I learned through going through that sales rollercoaster presentation last year at InCapture with some of my peers that I was walking through it with. With. People have come up to me and said, like a new business developer that we had come up, it's like, oh yeah, no one really talks about that. No one really talks about the downs. They just talk about like, hey, we sold this big deal. So it helps create a better dynamic with the team and the people that you're working with. That was one of the first things that I had said that was a key for my success is being able to rely and lean on my leaders and my peers is because they give me a lot of feedback and input on all of these key things that I need to be involved involved in. And if you are open with them about your background, what you're looking for, that is going to ultimately lead to them wanting to help you more. Just being a good teammate, I think, is a very, very important skill. That's something when one of my first weeks at Encapture, our CRO Tyler told me, he said, do what you can to build really good relationships with the people here because there's going to be times where you're going to need to tap them them in to do things that only they can do. And you want to make sure that you have a good relationship with these people and not so much approaching it from, I'm just building a relationship with you because I'm going to need something from you later, but I'm going to build a relationship with you because I really care about you. And I think if we're partnered on this, we can really have a lot of success together. And that's something that has paid dividends for me for sure. I've built really good relationships with the team members on our customer success team and our CEO and our CRO and my team members and team members across the group. Like every new person that comes on at Encapture, there's a welcome email that gets sent out to the company and I reach out to them on Slack and say, hey, thank you very much for being a part of Encapture. We're really happy to have you here. Let me know if there's anything that I can do, you know, to make your experience easier or to help you out and making sure that we know if there's events that happen, you know, whether it's, you know, a prospect says that their kid's got a baseball tournament in 2 weeks or a team member is having a baby, you know, in a month, like putting reminders on my calendar, like, hey, reach out to Zach in 2 weeks and see how things are going leading up to the soccer tournament or the baseball tournament. Like just doing little things like that to show you care helps build a really good relationship. And that's something that is advice that I've gotten that has definitely made a difference, not just as far as results, but as far as like job satisfaction, just happy working with the people that I'm working with.

1:27:19 Scott Ingram: Yeah, I love the theme that's emerging here just around kind of this team selling. And I've not met Tyler, but I like him a lot. I like his approach. I think there's kind of a new school and an old school way. There are old school sales leaders who are like, why are you spending all of this time talking with people internally? They're not going to buy anything from us. You need to be pounding the phone. You know, you need to be talking to customers. Like, what are you doing? It's so wrong, right? It's really this understanding that there is absolute value in having all of those other relationships because you're gonna need the help. Like, you're gonna need the help in your sales cycle. You're gonna need help in delivering what you promised you were gonna deliver for that customer so that you can get to that bigger deal like we talked about earlier. I mean, that's a key, key piece. And so I love how evolved Tyler is to even outwardly suggest, Hey, take time, build these relationships. You're going to need them. I like that. Tells me a lot about Encapture, that's for sure.

1:28:13 Zach Goggins: Yeah, he's definitely had a big impact on my career. He's been great to work with and work for and has definitely been very helpful in guiding how to be successful here and skills that will be helpful. As he says, go and take these skills and do whatever you want to do wherever you want to do it. But you're going to get an experience here that is going to help you be successful wherever you go.

1:28:33 Scott Ingram: That's the other thing too. I think, you know, understanding that people are going to move move around, right? And the best thing you can do is give them the skills, give them the capabilities, create an environment where they're going to be happy and they're going to be successful, and hopefully they stay, right? And then everybody wins. But, you know, if not, hey, awesome. You're gonna be a better person, you're gonna have a better career and a better trajectory moving forward. And, you know, like, what comes around goes around, you know? The other thing, somebody I was talking, catching up with a friend, he started a podcast and he was telling me about his co-host and just kind of some of his background. And when I heard that he started this new role and brought like the entire team on board of people that had worked for him before, I'm like, that's all I need to know about this guy. Like, I know he's solid, I know he's real, because people don't leave their job like sight unseen and go work for a bad leader again.

1:29:29 Zach Goggins: Yeah, right, that's a good point.

1:29:31 Scott Ingram: You only do that for, oh heck yeah, like this is a great Right? Like he empowers me, she empowers me. You know, they impact my career. They care about me. Gosh, it's those little things that really go a long way. And again, it's just like great training is rare in organizations. Great leadership like that is sadly pretty rare in organizations. So, you know, recognize it when you have it. Don't discount it because there's an awful lot of value in that.

1:29:57 Zach Goggins: Absolutely. Thankfully, everywhere that I've at Gartner, at Capture, all the managers that I've had at both places and all the leaders that I've had. Had. There's never a feeling like the grass is greener on the other side. It's just the grass is pretty green right where I'm at. I'm very thankful and fortunate for that. And I've got the feeling from all my managers that they truly care about my success at the company as well as my success personally. And they're going above and beyond to make sure that I'm achieving it in both ways and figuring out whatever they can do to help me out there. I remember my manager at Gartner. So another nerdy thing about me, I'm a huge professional wrestling fan ever since I've been So I remember like in my first meeting with my new manager in 2019, I told him about like, hey, this is like, I'm a big fan of this. Like, what do you like to do outside of work? I'm like, I'm a big fan of this. I'm a dork. He's like, well, I'm like, I've thought about trying it. I did some like pro wrestling training, like in college.

1:30:45 Scott Ingram: You've broken like 6 or 7 tables.

1:30:49 Zach Goggins: Yeah. I'm like, well, I can't afford to upgrade my car with AC because I got to pay for this table budget. But I told him like, oh yeah, like I would want to get back and start training sometime. And then like a week later, later, he said like, oh, hey, found this training class in Dallas, like, like the St. Patrick's Day weekend. I think you should do it if you want to do it. And then sure enough, I signed up and did it. So like, again, that's an example of that doesn't impact my sales performance at all, but he went out of his way in order to do that. And it truly showed that he cared and he listened to what I was saying. And so like that, like, again, as an example of like, just like the little thing, like he probably just like a Facebook search or Google search and found it in like 5 minutes and sent it over. But here we are 5 years later and I'm still remembering that. Like, it's… I've been incredibly fortunate and grateful to have worked on teams with great coworkers and for great leaders. I couldn't be more thankful.

1:31:42 Scott Ingram: Yeah. One of the talks I am most looking forward to, and this will be a whole thematic thing, like we're gonna build this into the experience this year. I had this just amazing conversation with Samantha and what she talked about is the idea of micro-moments. And it's exactly what you described. That took 5 minutes and you remember it 5 years later. And so just this idea of how can we proactively create those types of experiences in our sales process. And most of the time, I mean, the effort-to-reward scale is ridiculous, right? Like, this will take just a little bit of work if you're just a little bit more thoughtful about this thing or the way they experience that or the way you talk about that or the way you follow up. I mean, All these, there's so many opportunities that we have, right? I mean, we're always looking for, hey, what are some valuable, meaningful, memorable ways that I can reengage with somebody? So taking those, creating those micro moments is massive. And so I'm super excited about just really thoughtfully digging into those ideas. What can we come up with where we can create those in the way that we sell that, you know, to what we've talked about before, us, right? Are unique to us, right? Like I'm certain. Certainly not going to sing and play guitar for anybody because I can't do either of those things. But I might tell a joke, I might send a funny GIF, I might, you know, like there's lots of… because I like to incorporate actually a lot of sense of humor into my sales process. So I'll… there are definitely funny things that I will say just trying to get some kind of reaction, some type of engagement, a little bit of a chuckle here and there. And, you know, like all emails look alike when you're writing block text, why not throw some ridiculous GIF in there? You know, like maybe somebody needs to experience Buddy the Elf today.

1:33:29 Zach Goggins: Yeah, that's exactly right. That's exactly right. And I think those micro moments, I think that's a great description for those. And I think, I mean, everyone loves hearing that they're doing a good job. Everyone loves hearing that someone out there is thinking about them and you don't know what the person on the other end of that message is going through. And so people are looking for some advice. Advice, some actionable thing other than the 3 things that were stated at the start of the call. It's something that I'm working on and trying to do more of. I think it's something that, you know, everyone can do more of. It's the effort-to-reward ratio there. It's just reaching out, whether it's to prospects, whether it's to clients, family, friends, like let them know like, hey, heard this song, thought about you today. Saw this article, thought about you today. Like just want to say you're doing a good job. Like people just, it feels good getting a text like that or an email like that out of the blue. And if you can be the one And then it makes you feel good too.

1:34:21 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. So Zach, what would you want to know about top sellers in other organizations?

1:34:26 Zach Goggins: I think it's like some of the questions that you asked, like if you could go back in time, what would you do differently? What advice do you have for people that are just newest starting out as well as like feedback from them on and ideas on what are they wanting to do next and how are they preparing for it? Like some sales leaders or some salespeople that are very, very successful, some of them, they want to stay in that individual contributor role. So how are they continuing to stay on their game and improve their game? Some of them are wanting to excel in their individual contributor role, which they're doing, and they're wanting to get out of the individual contributor role and they're wanting to go into management or they're wanting to crush it as an IE, and then they're wanting to start their own company, whether it be, you know, a consultancy service or a training service or some other type of service. Like, with how disciplined they are to succeed in their current roles, how are they applying that to the next phase of their career?

1:35:32 Scott Ingram: How are you thinking about that? What's next for Zach?

1:35:34 Zach Goggins: I have gone through and thought about this a good bit over last probably 2 years in figuring out what I want to do. Like the reason I left Gartner wasn't because I didn't like it. I loved it. Things were great. I just felt like, okay, I've proven that I can sell to and manage relationships with IT leaders. That's who I was working with. I want to see and prove to myself that I can do this for another industry, selling SaaS and working with different people at the prospect organization. And I've, you know, the reason I'm here is because I'm being able to do that successfully. And so I had thought like, okay, once I've been able to do this successfully here, the next step for my career is going to be management. That's what I want to do. And now over time, I'm like, you know, I think I'm going to stick in the account executive role for longer. I think that's what I was going to do because I initially thought like, okay, I'll do this, succeed as an AE here this year again, and go through and, you know, work towards getting into leadership, you know, in 2025. And now my standpoint is I am liking the account executive role even more. I'm having more fun with it, being able to be more creative on things. Management is still what I want to get to in the future.

1:36:58 Scott Ingram: It's just not as near of a future as what I thought probably a year Yeah, so a couple of just thoughts on that is like we talked about before, the patience. And I think we talked about it in this episode and looking at the title of it, I really think we probably did it a long time ago. So episode 72, I talked to George Penyak and the title of his episode is Playing the Long Game. So I think that was it. He was pretty intentional about wanting to go down that path and wanting to do it within his current organization. And he in some ways like slowed himself down and took what to some would have appeared to be almost like a step down, but he wanted to just be more well-rounded, right? He's like, well, I've done this kind of sale and I've done that kind of sale and I led this kind of a team. But I think that's what he did. He was leading a team, but he went back into an individual contributor role to, I think, learn more like the enterprise, like how do I do the big deals? Because I don't have that experience, right? And so just being really thoughtful of, I want to have done this. Like, I don't want this to… I don't want to be a theoretical leader. I want to be a real practical, like, been there, done that kind of a leader so that I can… I understand what my team is going through because I've been in their shoes and can provide more kind of helpful advice. So I think I love the way you're thinking about it. I love that you're being thoughtful about it. I think, you know, too often we're not spending enough time time really considering what do we want our careers to be, what is that next step. And the second part of what you asked is, well, what am I doing now to prepare myself to be successful in that new role, right? Rather than, well, I'm gonna have this new title and then, oh, and then what? Like, probably better if you try and figure out some of that stuff now versus all on the job, all in the fire, on the deep end. And sorry, I'm mixing my metaphors there, but no, you're good. Because if you're in the deep end, you shouldn't be on fire. But in this, in this example, I think that's actually what's happening. So Zach, we've covered a lot of ground, talked about a lot of stuff. Is there something that you hoped we would talk about that we didn't manage to get to? Or maybe there just was a question that I didn't ask that I really should have?

1:39:10 Zach Goggins: Scott, I think you covered it all. I think you did a great job. I appreciate you having me on in the conversation here. I think this was a real great time and I hope hope that it's helpful for people that listen, whether I hope they get something out of it, whether it's advice, whether it's validation that you're not alone feeling nervous and scared to death as you're going into sales or even in the day-to-day, or even if you just get a laugh out of it or you get on the list to get another Buddy the Elf Christmas gram, you know, coming up this holiday season. I hope that people get something out of it. So I appreciate the platform that you have here to talk about sales and the journey and the ups and the downs and the roller coaster that is this career, but also talk about some things that apply, you know, elsewhere to other aspects of life too. I think this was really good. I enjoyed it.

1:39:55 Scott Ingram: Yeah, let's go back to that because there is one little nugget I think we can drag out of you since you put the effort into kind of that roller coaster presentation. What do you take away from that? What do you hope people take away from that as they think about just the crazy ride that is sales on this roller coaster?

1:40:09 Zach Goggins: I think the thing that I hope people take out of it is the the roller coaster, after it goes down, it goes up. If you just jump off when you're at the lowest of the low, like, you're not going to get to experience the thrill of going back up and being rewarded for the fruits of your labor. I think if you jump off the ride too early, you're going to kind of do yourself a disservice because you've put in all the work. If you've done all the right things and tried to learn as best as you can, like, you owe it to yourself to stick along for the side to be able to see the reward of all of your hard work. If you're starting off and you're going through that rollercoaster and you're getting hit with a bunch of downs, selling my first deal, I still remember it. It was May 2019, selling my first deal in the Gartner office in Dallas. And at Gartner, whenever someone sells a deal, no matter the size, no matter the term, you ring a bell and everyone within shot, walks over to that row and you're at the end of the row and they're high-fiving you. And it's just the coolest feeling in the world. And if I would've tapped out and said, you know, I finished 2018 negative, I don't know if I can do this. Things are not going great for me. I'm just going to go do something else in March. I would've never got to experience that, even though I had put the work in for, for the 6 months leading up to it. So that's what I want people to take away from it. If you stick around for some of the ups and some of the downs and you realize that's not for you, that's cool. Like, this isn't for everybody. Not every career is for everybody. But I don't want you to do a disservice to yourself if you don't stick around for the up part of the ride and just jump off at the down.

1:41:58 Scott Ingram: Love it.

1:41:59 Zach Goggins: Love it.

1:41:59 Scott Ingram: Great call out. All right, let's make this actionable, right? So we're at the end. Folks have been listening to us for a very long time.

1:42:07 Zach Goggins: Yeah, they're falling asleep. Listen, I do most of the talking here, so they've fallen asleep by now.

1:42:11 Scott Ingram: What would you encourage them to do? What's the action they can take to improve themselves and improve their results over the next, say, just 1 to 2 weeks?

1:42:20 Zach Goggins: I would say put yourself… if you've got current deals that you're working on, no matter what stage they are in your pipeline, like, take a step back and put yourself in the shoes shoes of your prospect. How would you want to be sold to? What type of service would you like? What type of interaction would you like to have with your sales rep if you were in their shoes? And start actioning on some of those things. Like what I talked about earlier, like after you have a demo, start calling those individual stakeholders to get their thoughts on it. Start calling them before the demo. Like if there's… I mean, there's cases that happen all the time where, hey, you chat with one person, you set up the demo, demo and they forward the invite to 6 people that you've never met before, rather than just saying, well, I figured out what this one person wants to see. They invited these 6 people. They must also want to see the same stuff. That could be the case, but why take that chance? And if you're coming… if you're in the prospect's shoes and you're coming into this demo blind and you don't know what to expect, if a salesperson were to reach out to you and say, hey, here's what me and your team member talked about, what's going to be the focus in Tuesday's demo, What else do you want to see? Like, what is important to you? How does your role compare to what your team member's role is? What are the things that you care about? That would lead to a much more productive use of time during the demonstration, and you just built yourself a potentially really strong relationship with that person, which will carry through the duration of the sales cycle no matter how long it goes. So if there's folks out there that have demos coming up, or you've got discovery meetings coming up, and there's other people that are going to be involved other than just one, That's what I would recommend. Before and after the meeting, connect with them one-on-one to understand what their priorities are, what they find important, what challenges that they have. That way you can make sure that you're delivering a valuable meeting that's not just valuable to one person, but the entire team.

1:44:12 Scott Ingram: Great challenge, Zach. This has been a blast. Thanks for taking the time, man.

1:44:15 Zach Goggins: Sounds great, Scott. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Take care. 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.