56: Evan Kelsay of Seismic - 800% Achievement with a Massive Deal

0:08 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. Today on the Sales Success Stories podcast, I've got a really special guest. Evan Kelsay is a senior director of global accounts at Seismic. And the conversation that I'm going to have today with Evan is one that I've hoped to have since I started the show about 2 years ago, because Evan drew inspiration from this podcast. And so far this year is over 800% of his plan. He's been a true fan of the show, has sent me a few messages, supported the book project, and even recommended his colleague Mike McDonough, who was the star of episode 47. So when Evan sent me a note about a month ago to let me know that he just closed the largest largest deal in company history and earned himself a massive commission check. I couldn't wait to talk to him about how he did it. Welcome to the show, Evan.

1:13 Evan Kelsay: Great to be here, Scott. Longtime listener, first-time caller. Love it.

1:16 Scott Ingram: So Evan, I know you know how this works, as I always try to immediately jump into something valuable. So let's start like we always do with the top 3 things that you believe have contributed the most to your success.

1:29 Evan Kelsay: I, as a, as a big fan of the show, I love this part because it really makes you focus in and really do some deep thinking around what has really contributed to the success that you've had in your career and really, you know, if there's anything that you're doing differently. Most of the time when I, when I've done this thinking, I don't think I'm doing a whole lot differently than what you would ask of any other seller. But I was lucky to have… I kind of boiled it down to 3 things. And the first one being never grow up. You got to be Peter Pan. If you can keep that childlike sense of Wonder, curiosity, but not just those two. I have, I have two twin boys at home. They're toddlers, they're two and a half. When I think about their amazing ability to be resilient, to actually focus on things for a very long time, you know, one of my twins, literally just the only thing he wants to do is, is drive trucks all day long. And if you can think about their ability to be extraordinarily kind and vulnerable, Along with kind of having a bad short-term memory, all these things I think are really, as you apply them to your career in sales, can really, really help you. And I think if you can just continuously keep that mindset, I think it's going to lead to success.

2:50 Scott Ingram: I love that so much. I mean, for so many reasons, right? I mean, one, I think being able to learn from your kids, especially when they're that age, is so powerful. And I've called this out a couple of times in more recent episodes because somebody emailed me. I tried to email him back, but the email bounced, and I forgot his name, otherwise I'd give a shout out right now. But he was saying, like, this is all well and good, Scott, but you keep going through these folks' morning routines and what they're doing, and it feels like they're single guys and they don't have families and they don't have the other pressures and concerns that I do. Now, I think he had more than 2, although you did 2 at the same time, which is its own challenge. And I've really made a point, I think the last few episodes we've had here have been with folks like you and I who have families. And, you know, there's a lot going on and sort of finding a way to manage that. So anyway, so the first one is never growing up. Let's talk about number 2.

3:41 Evan Kelsay: Okay. So this is going to be a little more selfish, but I have to thank my parents for this because they gave me the wonderful gift of hyper-competitiveness. And, you know, it not, not from a financial standpoint, it's just, uh, we, I grew up in a very athletic family, you know, game, you know, board game, game-oriented family. We love to compete. And I have that at my core for better and for worse. Uh, you know, I think I married a doctor and my wife is, a physician who is also hypercompetitive. So actually our biggest fight to date, I think, was over a game. It was over just a board game. And anybody with a wife can probably laugh at that. But it's really funny because as I've become a family man, quote unquote, I've seen that transition of competitiveness really go from really ego-based. And, you know, when I was in my 20s in sales, you know, starting out and kind of mid-career, I would look at the top seller and I'd think to myself, dang, I think I'm better than him. I think I can be, or her. And when I, and I'd kind of go after, you know, the top spot in that same mindset where, you know, the really the wanting of external recognition from leadership or what have you. And kind of as I've transitioned, had a family, gotten married, I really I've kind of focused in on all that's well and good, but it actually doesn't mean very much if you don't have a craftsman's mindset, if you're not, if you're not working towards mastery. And if you have that craftsman's mindset about your career, you know, you're bound to be successful because it means trying to do whatever you did yesterday, trying to do it better and better and better. And you may not see results you know, tomorrow or next week or next month. But over time, there will come a point where you look, where you look back and you say, wow, I'm a lot better than I was. And it's that type of kind of call it craftsman competitiveness that I think has really helped me out in my career. And I, I can't sing enough praises for, for other folks.

5:47 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Well, and we'll certainly come back to the motivation piece, but I think that if you, it's a pretty consistent theme on the show is often we're not competing with other people on our team. The best results often comes when we're competing with ourselves and our best selves.

6:03 Evan Kelsay: Yeah, I would wholeheartedly agree with that.

6:05 Scott Ingram: Yeah. All right. Take us to number 3.

6:08 Evan Kelsay: All right. I wrote this down, probably not the best phrasing, but it's, it's a desire for win-win scenarios. It's the recognition that all of your clients, all of their internal contacts that they are trying to, you know, get a deal done with, they're navigating their internal waters. All the internal waters that you navigate at your own company to help, you know, help you sell, you're still just dealing with human-to-human interaction. And everybody, if everybody, if you can find a kind of a middle ground where everybody can walk away feeling okay about the situation or, you know, even happy about the situation, it's kind of this, you know, call it like sales karma or whatever, but it really, I think, builds on itself and has momentum for your career over time.

6:52 Scott Ingram: And so, and it sounds like you mean that in like virtually every context, right? So this, this is not only working with your prospects and clients, but also just managing relationships and opportunities and things internally as well.

7:06 Evan Kelsay: Absolutely. You have to, you know, give double what you take when you think about those things, because if, you know, if you're ever going to get kind of big deals done, there's always going to be, you know, kind of interesting waters that you have to navigate internally and people that have to usually go out of their way to help make sure that that deal is shepherded along and that client is taken care of, as well as, you know, emboldening and empowering all the people that you're talking to on the client side or that prospect side to make sure that you let them know that I understand that your world at your company to even get try to get a deal done like this is very complex and is only increasing so. And you're probably going to have to call in a lot of favors to get it done, even if the value is obvious. So, you know, it's that, it's that looking at, you know, looking across the table, you know, at every interaction and you just, you say, you're a human being. I wish you happiness first and foremost.

8:06 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Awesome. So now let's contextualize all of this a little bit. Talk to us about your role, about Seismic and about this deal to the extent you can, because we're not able to talk about the specific company or any other proprietary details. So we're going to keep you clean from that perspective.

8:22 Evan Kelsay: Well, sure. So I worked at LinkedIn actually previously for about 6 and a half years. I started with them in 2011 and, you know, I'd probably call it when I started with them after my previous company, you maybe had like a, call it a high school diploma in sales. And after 6 and a half years at LinkedIn, I felt like I really had, you know, maybe, maybe somewhere between a bachelor's and a master's in sales. And they, you know, they've done a really great job of preparing me and training and enabling me to do really great work. And when I started thinking about LinkedIn, I really thought about, okay, kind of along this track of mastery craftsmanship type mindset, how can I go get my PhD in sales? How can I go get my postdoc in sales? And I was looking for companies that kind of, I ultimately was looking for companies that had leadership that were, you know, senior, grizzled, battle-tested sellers, and that they had the knowledge of how to get big enterprise software deals done that I could learn from. And so that's what really impressed me about Seismic. And, you know, when I decided to join, I have just, this has been, I'm getting exactly what I what I started out to do. I have never been happier in my career than I have been this year because, you know, I've had some great success, but that's really come because I'm really learning so much from the people around me every day. And they're also, they have a recognition. Seismic seems to have a very serious recognition that salespeople and the sales organization really have a pretty monumental impact on their revenue. And, you know, I know friends at kind of other, call it, you know, tech companies where that may not be there. It may be a very engineering-driven culture, but Seismic has a really good mix of, you know, strong engineering culture, but also I'd say equally as strong kind of recognition and value of the sales organization and what they bring to the table. And so what that allowed them to do is really resource us properly. So, you know, I'm a senior individual contributor at Seismic, but I have 2 full-time employees underneath me whose only job it is to get me meetings with decision makers. I can't tell you how night and day that was from kind of anything else I'd experienced in my career. And call them out, you know, Alex Montano, Connor Green, they've been absolutely rock stars for me. This year. And it's, you know, it's the support, you know, below, but it's also to the side, you know, they… because there's this recognition that the sales process really matters. And you need to really free up, free up everybody, everybody in their roles on a deal to do their, you know, the highest value activities. I've been really lucky that that's how Seismic is set up. You know, a lot of my year has been preparation for, for calls and kind of the things that you always really wanted to do, things that always, I always wanted to do in previous roles. I just really never had the time to do, which is, you know, spend hours delving into the Investor Day presentations, the quarterly earnings reports, you know, the Glassdoor reviews, the, you know, the connections on LinkedIn, you know, the job descriptions they have open for, for different roles. So you understand kind of what you know, the, what they value in that company. And that type of deep work research has allowed me to really, I think, have the most fun I've had in my sales career because I'm having really high-level business conversations. I guess when I talked before about getting into always keeping that childlike sense of wonder and curiosity, it's hard when you don't have a lot of information about the company. And there's kind of usually a moment in a call or a meeting when, you know, that information about that company runs out and you kind of hit the panic button and go back to talking about your company. And this year has really allowed me to dig in deep and really properly research my accounts and the people that I'm speaking with. And, you know, you can get into kind of this great, you know, flow, I guess, flow state of mind where you're, you're really just fully concentrated on, on their company, their role, their world, and, you know, more importantly, their clients. And it's, you know, it's allowed me to have just an awesome set of, you know, value-based conversations that really are, are focused on, on that company.

13:07 Scott Ingram: That's awesome. So give a little bit more context just around the role. Like, what, what is your territory? Who all are you calling on?

13:15 Evan Kelsay: So mine is, I'm based in New York. So I call on a set of 50 accounts, only one of which was a current client. And it's not really geography-based necessarily, but there, there are, you know, the leadership has done their best to kind of try to put accounts in my patch that are somewhere near my geographic location. But, you know, as you know, when you're working kind of giant accounts, um, that you're your influencers, your decision makers, your coaches, your champions, they can be anywhere.

13:48 Scott Ingram: Yeah, absolutely. So give it… give us some context then about this particular deal. When, when did this thing start? And just give us kind of the 40,000-foot highlights. We'll dig a little bit deeper a little bit later.

14:00 Evan Kelsay: Sure. So it actually started in 2016. The company had actually acquired a company, a small company that was a client of ours. And so that turned into kind of a little bit larger, you know, a bit larger, actually, quite a bit larger deal within a smaller division of this larger company in 2017 before I joined Seismic. And all credit to the account executives on those deals, all credit to the customer success people on those deals, because that's really, that really is what laid the groundwork, I think, is that those 2 divisions were giant champions of ours throughout this process. And it's one thing to sell value from the outside. It's quite another to have internal folks selling, singing your praises, you know, throughout the whole process of a larger enterprise-wide deal. And I guess then when the account came to me in January, I, as I said, I was… Seismic gives you the opportunity to really delve in and do research. So, you know, to have a really large deal like this come together, 1,000 things have to happen, you know, positively on the client side, but also 1,000 positive things have to happen on your side. You have to be, you have to be ready for it. So I, I did a lot of research. I… investor days, quarterly earnings, you know, those types of segments, and really found out that the company was, had been struggling for a number of years, but not because that they, not because they had kind of a a lack of innovation, but because Wall Street was telling them they actually had a failure of execution. And luckily, you know, Seismic sells sales enablement technology. We're the leader in that space. And so it really got me excited that perhaps there was, you know, an opening or kind of there might be a significant recognition at the senior levels that great, you know, company gets great marks for innovation, poor marks for execution. So that's That means you have to put a focus on sales and selling and the sales process and the technology that enables that. And so when we reached out, you know, at the beginning of the year, we did a full evaluation of account mapping for this account. You know, luckily a lot, a lot of that work in terms of org charts, org charts and structures for the different divisions had already been done. We updated them and we, I went and interviewed actually 5 sellers, either current or former at the company. And, and I asked them, you know, tell me about your world. Tell me about your problems when it comes to finding and building things to show your clients. Because that's, that's really where we address it. We kind of put a discipline of excellence around what you show your clients. And, you know, they, they just, it was really hard for them. They were struggling. I kind of got some really great, somewhat horrifying quotes from them about the current state of things. And so we kind of took the financial information, you know, the bullet points there. We took some of the great quotes that we had. We turned that into a really great outreach campaign to the company. And, you know, those… that research and those interviews actually carried on throughout the deal as we were building momentum with each division successively. And, you know, it's kind of this idea. I actually give a lot of credit to Trong Nguyen. Because he really hit the nail on the head and helped, you know, help me understand. And, you know, I tried to execute on how, how he painted the vision of getting a big deal done is, you know, you have to, you have to obviously have significant conversations and hopefully, you know, early conversations with people at the top, but you also have to be always speaking to people who are on the ground seeing, you know, living the day-to-day pain of what you're trying to solve. And so as this deal progressed, basically we got ahold of one of the key… ended up being a key champion in February. And luckily he was actually just trying to get his head around standing up an entire enablement organization at the company. He's a brilliant person. He was wonderful to work with. And he was really, I think he'd been handed this type of, you know, this mandate or kind of charter from, from above with his boss and said, you know, help change the face of sales at our organization. What do we need to be doing differently to bring sales and marketing together? You know, how can we enable the field better? How can we have everything focused around our client experience and, and really kind of exercise on our value proposition to our clients, which is that, you know, you work with us because we innovate and we have an army of industry expertise, and that's what you're going to feel as a client. And so he wanted, you know, his charter was to really realize that vision and improve it. And so, gosh, you know, that kind of conversation started a series of conversations at senior levels. And, you know, they were… this particular company, because this was such a big organizational focus, actually was doing it, you know, in parallel, they were doing an evaluation of their technology. And all of the technology that they have to enable their sellers, enable their marketers, their kind of people who, their marketers who support sales and the people in the process and saying, okay, how much of this do we really need? The number of tools were in the hundreds and like, how many do we actually need? Can we simplify? Can we standardize? Can we modernize? And so there was a great kind of, moment early on when they were looking at this technology. I think they, they kind of started to realize that we could really, really consolidate a lot of this. And this is an organization that I think historically has preferred to build their own software versus buy their own software. And that has been, I think, recently changing, I think for the better. And they really thought this was a great opportunity to massively impact and enable the field by aligning kind of a much smaller amount of powerful technology that they can kind of call it integrate into a, into a nice mosaic that leads from, you know, the start of the buyer's journey on through to the end of the buyer's journey, on through to the entire client experience afterwards. And, you know, my, my hat is off to that team because they're really realizing it at this point. So, you know, from a, I guess I'll pull it back from that. Point. From a tactical standpoint, I tried to approach it, you know, like I said, winning… like, uh, Trong Nguyen kind of pointed out… from a, you know, top-down and bottom-up approach. So this company has over a dozen different major divisions, all operating historically fairly, I think, autonomously. And so I kind of knew intrinsically that Even though we were talking to people at the top who had a lot of centralized power, I used to live in Hong Kong and there was this great saying, it's like, the emperor is very powerful, but he's also very far away. And so I knew that we had to really help build this groundswell of momentum by getting to these different divisions, get to all of them and get all of them on board if we were going to have a chance to do an enterprise-wide, really large deal. Does that make sense?

21:34 Scott Ingram: Yeah, it does. So I'm going to come back to this and we'll dissect the deal a little bit more, or maybe a lot more, but I want to take one really big step back and just get a sense of… you talked about the 6 years at LinkedIn. What's your origin story? How did you get your start in sales in the first place?

21:53 Evan Kelsay: Professional politics, Scott. I'm not in it now. I may still run for small-town mayor at some point in my career, but coming out of college, I thought I was going to be Josh Lyman from the West Wing. I wanted to try my hand out in the world of government politics. So I actually worked, you know, I graduated from Purdue and I accepted a job working for the state Senate as a campaign manager for kind of a major-focused Democratic state Senate race in Indiana where I'm from. And so I moved to Columbus, Indiana. I started the campaign trail. It was incredibly exciting. We were a Running, we were, I was running a Democratic candidate in a district that was two-thirds Republican. So we had a lot of, you know, headwind against us, but that wouldn't be the first time in my career that that's the case. And, and we, you know, we ran a great campaign. I was really proud of it. We ended up coming the closest any Democratic candidate had come in 40 years in that district. But I kind of realized quickly after that professional politics has the opposite of job security. It has an end date to your employment. It's called Election Day. And if your person doesn't win, then well, time to start looking for a new job. And so I kind of, during the course of the campaign, I kind of realized that that wasn't going to be for me, that career. And I had a business degree. I wanted to try my hand out actually in marketing. So I moved, you know, classic story. I moved to New York City. I stayed on a buddy's couch. Thank you, Jonah and Gary, and actually ended up you know, getting a job at the company that I was with for 4 years that I'm incredibly grateful to, called Vault. Vault.com is basically Glassdoor before the Glassdoor. And this was back in kind of the mid to late 2000s. And they, they were just opening up an office in Hong Kong. Their first, you know, they had just got bought by a private equity firm and they were expanding globally and they wanted to open their first office in Asia. And they, I think they literally went to every single salesperson in the office and asked them to go and they all said no. And so I had done my study abroad in Hong Kong. And so they went to me and they said, well, so you've, you've been to China. Would you like to go run sales for Asia? And I kind of looked at them. I said, you understand I'm like 23 years old, right? So to their, you know, to my ever, you know, everlasting gratefulness, they gave me the job and I went over to Hong Kong, grew that office, you know, helped grow that office with some, with a brilliant GM. Ed Sheeran for 2+ years and always knew that was going to be a short-term stint. But I, it's still my, to this day, my favorite city. Some of my best friends are still there. Actually, they've recently moved to Singapore, but like there, it's a wonderful place. If you ever have the chance, go work abroad because you always find people who will look at you and they will be continuously accepting friend applications and they will, you know, your friends become your family. When you're living abroad and it's a wonderful thing. And so then I basically got transferred back. I did, I did well there. So I transferred back and actually 2 people, 2 salespeople, 2 senior salespeople had left Vault. And so I took over their patch and promptly kind of doubled their, their revenue out, you know, their, their revenue quota attainment, and then did it again the next year. And, you know, Vault, uh, it's a smaller company. I wanted to work for a larger company. And kind of find out what that was like. And Vault was in the HR technology space, and so it was a natural… it was actually a natural transition to go apply to LinkedIn. And thank you, Alexis, for the referral. So LinkedIn obviously, you know, built its core business is actually selling talent solutions, you know, ways to actually recruit and keep your… the talent that you have. And so I worked in that division for 4 years, uh, got promoted a couple of times and made club a couple of times. And really, you know, that's where I, I think, I feel like that's where I really went from, you know, a, uh, a high school diploma to, to the master's degree when it comes to sales. I had some great leadership, great training, great clients, you know, even though it was tough, you know, selling to HR is, is not for the faint of heart in the sense that It's really hard sometimes because even though your champions might fully believe in the solution, HR, for kind of, for whatever reason, in a lot of companies doesn't get the respect it deserves and doesn't get the respect that the quality of talent deserves in terms of its effect on your revenue. And so it's a lot of times it's really hard for people in HR to go ask for a budget, to go ask for the budget that they need to make the changes that they kind of envision really impacting the company. And so that is a sale that is, you know, there's always a bit of risk in any of those sales because, because that's, you know, at the end of the day, that, that's a key factor. I don't know, Scott, does that make sense to you? Have you ever had that experience?

27:04 Scott Ingram: I have. I've actually sold to HR. I've sold to a lot of different parts of the organization. And I think one of the things, you know, as you're sort of going through your career is figuring out who you want to sell to and what the right size organization is, both to be working for and to be selling to. I mean, all of those different dynamics, there's a big difference between strategic enterprise sales and more transactional sales. And there's a big difference between working for a company that's, you know, 50 or 100 people or 300 people versus a company that has 60,000 or 130,000 people. So, you know, I think that, you know, I always typically ask at this point, you know, if there's anything that you would have done differently through that process?

27:50 Evan Kelsay: I mean, knowing what you know now, you know, it's funny because LinkedIn has a really, it's actually famous for being really incredible culture for its employees. And that is absolutely true. Your experience there as an employee is, is fantastic. They really value team culture. They really value, you know, person-to-person employee-to-employee interactions. They encourage you to have, I think, interests outside of work that you can actually then bring into work, you know, and it's amazing from that standpoint. And in reality, I probably, I probably wasn't disciplined enough when it comes to the craft of selling. And I was, you know, I wouldn't say that I overly took advantage of, you know, the, the, the culture aspect of being an employee there, but it's definitely, it's something that actually takes, if you wanted to, it can eat up a lot of your time. And I think kind of my years would always start that The first 6 months, I would probably, you know, do what I, what I needed to, to kind of get by and build pipeline, but probably not things that, that you would build, you know, you do that to actually 2x, 3x, 4x your number. And then I would be scrambling in the second half of the year to actually overperform. And I, you know, I always did, but I think I probably could have been a lot more disciplined in terms of how I managed my time. How much time I was putting in, how much time I was putting into, you know, making sure that I was doing kind of all the activities that you need to do to be successful in sales. And really that would probably be my advice to my, to my younger self was, you know, like be more disciplined, you're, you know, focus in on your craftsmanship and, and it will pay enormous exponential dividends for you.

29:37 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Well, I think, I think that's a perfect transition. So what I decided to do is self-sponsor this episode. So this episode This episode is sponsored by the Sales Success Summit, and one of the first things Evan did after he closed this mega deal was to register for the 2019 Sales Success Summit. And we've done… we've got a heck of a deal running on the summit through the end of 2018, including the option to make monthly payments. So Evan, I'm actually going to let you talk about why you decided to register for the summit literally a year in advance at the time.

30:10 Evan Kelsay: Yeah, I was already planning on going, but I closed the big deal and I thought to myself, you know, the best, the best investment I can make with this commission check is, is on my own skillset and, you know, in my own network. And I guess I'll say that if my wife is listening, your medical school loans were first, honey, and I'm really glad we bought the house, but, but I have to say your, your event, Sales Success Summit, spoke to me, like spoke to me at the core. I firmly and fundamentally believe that steel sharpens steel. And if you want to be a master at your craft, you have to surround yourself with other masters of their craft. And that's the, that's the whole billing for the Sales Success Summit. You know, get the 1% together and have them all learn from each other. And magic happens when you do that in any field. And I didn't even know of another industry event that did that. So I, I was really excited to sign up for the Sales Success Summit. I encourage everybody who's really serious about getting excellent at sales and even sales leadership to do so. And hopefully we'll see you in Austin.

31:18 Scott Ingram: Yeah, that's fantastic. And so the best way to get the rest of the details, just go to top1summit.com. That's the number 1, T-O-P, the number 1 summit.com. And you'll find all the details there. That'll be October 14th and 15th here in Austin in 2019. So Evan, talk about that. Let's, let's use that transition point though, because when we first talked after you closed this deal, after you sent me this note, you told me that it was really the decision that you made at the beginning of the year to just double down on being a student of sales and making this your craft. Talk about that a little bit more and what that decision was and then what you did about it.

31:57 Evan Kelsay: I joke with people that I think probably if I'm lucky enough to write a I read a post in your book that is going to be entitled, if you want to make a lot of money in sales, live with your in-laws. And like, because of kind of a weird circumstance where we were buying and renovating a house and we were moving from California, I actually have been living with my in-laws since, you know, since last year. And with 2 toddler twin boys that take up a lot of your time, potentially you need helping hands around, you need family around, you need… luckily this is, you know, we moved to my wife's hometown. And all of her family is very close and they've been so loving and giving. So I know this is kind of a roundabout way to answer your question, but you need to make the choices in your life to give you the time to really hone in and focus and kind of be that, you know, start to build that mastery, you know, to actually execute on those 10,000 hours it takes. And I'm really lucky that kind of my family life allowed me to do that this year. And I'm really lucky that Seismic you know, sales enablement technology that allows me to do a lot of that and has set up its sales organization to where it actually, you know, it takes a lot of, you know, call it maybe lower value sales tasks, still very valuable, but maybe not so strategic, maybe more tactical, all those tasks off of your plate. And so it really has made a conscious decision to say, if we're going to hire senior sellers, we're going to give them the time to really prepare and be excellent at every client interaction. And I'm not saying I did that every time this year, but compared to previous roles, I had got an enormous amount more time to just focus in on doing the things that all the experts tell you to do to be great in a sales process. And so I, you know, I buckled down, I focused in from January on, and I started saying, okay, what what podcasts are out there. I'm a big podcaster. I like it when I work out and just driving. And, you know, found yours, found some others that are really great, and yours obviously being the best. And I actually would firmly believe that and stand by that. And, you know, really started to read all the… I'd read some books around it, you know, in previous years, but I wasn't a student of the game. And really started to read significant amount of volumes of text around the craft of sales and, you know, do… doing the things, like I said, that all the experts tell you to do, you know, truly taking the time to fully, you know, to really understand the company from the CEO's perspective. From, you know, I do not have a financial background. I don't have a great financial mind, but if you watch enough Investor Day videos of those, of those public companies and those clients, you really get this great sense of how they, how they want to pitch, you know, where their, where their company is going, because they're in front of a pack of people that, you know, they want to invest in the company. And so they have to be open with, you know, what's going on at the company, what's, what's challenging, what's rewarding, you know, what, what's growing, where are our focus areas. And if you do the work, you know, if you do the proper preparation work, you're able to really, in the first 5 or 10 minutes of a conversation, establish your bona fides on their business. And then you can just have this great flow of conversation about really what's going on in that person's world and how to make it better. And, you know, they gave me the chance to develop what you always want to do. You want to have a point of view for whoever you're talking to. You want to have a point of view of what's going on in their industry. You want to have a point of view of what's going on in the company. And you want to have a point of view on, you know, where… what you believe that they need to change to really make things better. And what we sell, I fully believe does that because at previous roles, I would literally spend 2 to 3 days of my week finding and building things to send and show my clients. And now it takes me, you know, a matter of minutes to build all this. I'm a big fanboy, not of just your podcast, but also my own company, but it puts a discipline of excellence around what you're showing your clients. Which most B2B companies, you know, there's a lot of fragmentation. You know, it's not there yet for a lot of those companies and it's manifesting itself in a poor buyer experience.

36:32 Scott Ingram: Yeah. So let's go back to the deal cycle that you ran. What part of that are you the most proud of? What went the best?

36:42 Evan Kelsay: Good question. Well, I guess in terms of things, there's a lot of things that I'm really proud of. At, you know, I think mostly it's around what other people had done to really get this get this thing from start to finish. And you know, because Seismic has this great sales culture, they were really open. You know, my my inside team supporting me was really open to doing the work necessary to to focus in on one account. It was a big risk for them. And quite frankly, for me to spend the majority of my time this year on one deal. And luckily, you know, when, as kind of each week as I would kind of update my leadership on the deal, I would say, you know, just so you know, I'm spending the majority of my time on this deal. And to their credit, each week they said, no, we think, you know, based on your process, based on what you're telling us, based on our, our experience, our hardened kind of sales experience, we believe there's a there there and continue on. And if it doesn't work out, we will figure out a way to take care of you. But we believe that this is a potentially transformational deal for the company. Keep working on it. And everybody involved had to put in extra effort and kind of make that same risk. You know, I had the most fantastic sales engineer I could ever ask for spend an enormous amount of time this year Demoing to everybody and really, you know, following up with them and helping them fully understand the technical capabilities of the platform. And, you know, our… there was a lot of, you know, there were some internal selling that we had to do because we, because quite frankly, you know, we had to change a couple of… we had to add a couple of things to what we're doing from a product set standpoint to be able to close the deal. So, so, you know, our technical organization had to make that… our leadership were really, really open and generous with their connections at the company and really helping make kind of higher-level intros, or even sometimes intros that just were informational interviews so that I could kind of take that, you know, that pain back to our leadership. And, you know, I think at some point in Q2, there just came this moment when I was updating my champion kind of every week of all the divisions that we were talking to, what those conversations were like. And I think at that point, at that moment, he really, he really got excited. He really got excited about… I think it gave him permission to really go after this. And, you know, to his credit, you know, probably it's a very large company. So if you're at the senior leadership level, there's probably a lot of people that are content to sit back and not really rock the boat. And those that do, you know, put in jeopardy a very, very safe job. And to my champion's credit, he… I think he really understood the value of what we do, and we had kind of done a great job of, as an organization, really conveying, you know, unique value, differentiation, and business outcome to what we do. But at the same time, kind of equally as important, he had to have the confidence that there was enough groundswell and enough, you know, pain and also popularity of what we do that he could actually, you know, put his neck out there and, and really go to bat for us internally in a highly matrixed, highly political organization.

40:04 Scott Ingram: Yeah, that's, that's huge. And you called out something that I really had planned to dig into as well, which is just the risk with this type of a, type of a thing. And it sounds like you were in a pretty unique situation where, because I was going to ask how much sort of managing up you had to do and expectation you had to do with your leadership around what this deal meant, what would have happened if you hadn't closed this deal? What would have the rest of your year sort of looked like?

40:34 Evan Kelsay: I would have had a pretty, you know, I call it a much emptier pipeline than you would want at that point in the year. You know, I will forever thank them for this because it gave me the confidence to continue to go after it. But they kind of indicated to me early on that, you know, if I were to spend a lot of time on this and it doesn't work out, that they would find a way to make it up to me. And I have my trust is with them. So I believe that that was true. And, you know, if it hadn't worked out, you know, they would… I don't… I actually believe it. I don't think they would have been disappointed because they, you know, again, I was looking for a company that had really seasoned sales leadership and they, they can appreciate a really good process and they can appreciate, you know, they could see me doing the right things at each stage. I was, you know, Pulling in connections from our leadership, pulling in connections from our investors, making sure that I was working with marketing to put together custom materials for the people that we were, we were doing ABM campaigns for, you know, kind of making sure that the inside sales team was doing hyper-personalized outreach and how I was using my sales engineer, you know, cross-functional partner was appropriate and how they would want that to be. So it. I think they were seeing it allowed… they basically gave me permission to just run the sales cycle that I've always wanted to run. And it's got like… the deal that was signed was literally 70x the largest deal that I've ever signed in my life. But it was the same process. It was the same process that I would have done, that I did for that other deal. I just had more time to run a more robust process this time.

42:15 Scott Ingram: Yeah, well, and I think the key to that is… and you were in a very unique space where the maturity of your leadership, just understanding what that is and what the risk is. Because I feel like the traditional scenario is if, if you're going to swing for the fence like that, you're either going to be a hero and walk away with like, I don't know, a Cadillac Eldorado, or you're just going to get fired, right? Because it's, it's pretty binary. You're either going to really, really win and be a hero or you're, or you're dead and folks not having an understanding of the risk of that. So to follow that then, where do you go from here? What's that expectation look like?

42:55 Evan Kelsay: You know, I got a, I got a text from my CEO on commission day and he said, he said, I was happy to write this check, go do it again. And, you know, we, he's interested in enabling transformational deals. And that's, you know, I wouldn't say that's rare for a tech CEO, but there's certainly many out there that I, I don't think value sales and the selling organization as much as ours does. And really, you know, believes that the sales, you know, how you sell is actually as important as what you sell.

43:26 Scott Ingram: Yeah, that's amazing. So we talked about the part you are proud of. What was the hardest part? What, when were you the most challenged in this deal?

43:34 Evan Kelsay: Well, kind of as I alluded to before, this is a company that has a lot of, a lot of engineers. They like, you know, historically they've really liked to build their own software. And the, you know, the things that we were, we were potent, you know, the, that our champion and kind of his team were thinking that we could potentially replace were, you know, there was many tools that they, we could potentially replace. And so there was a big kind of, there came This is where the 3-dimensional chess in sales comes in, is that they, you know, he had to have the confidence that he could fight those battles internally with those folks that were saying, do not spend this money outside the organization, you know, spend it inside the organization and you will get best-in-class technology. And he firmly believed that this was not the company's core, you know, what we sell was not, you know, sales enablement technology was not core competency of their company, and that they, you know, buying a best-in-class solution was the best way to actually enable the field. And so there was, you know, there was just a series of fights. I mean, the original, you know, I think the original business case was made on cost reduction and, you know, looking at their technology stack and saying, where could we reduce? But in fact, You know, the bigger opportunity and kind of as the, you know, because, because they made it on that, I think there was a lot of pushback internally and there was a lot of, you know, the people who wanted to build it became very noisy and they said, okay, we're talking about sales enablement technology here. We're talking about things that actually allow us to be better in the field. Let's make this business case on revenue and this, you know, this will actually bring a lot more revenue into the company and, you know, without increasing headcount to do it. And so they, you know, that was a, that was kind of a key inflection point in the deal is that my boss and I talked about it from kind of the early days of the deal is that, that will ultimately, I think, be, you know, one of the key battles that had to be fought and we couldn't fight it because it had to be an internal battle. So we all, you always had to have in the back of your mind, how can I prepare, you know, our champions, our coaches, our influencers to really have that battle and be confident they could stick up for what… for Seismic when it came… when push came to shove.

45:59 Scott Ingram: How many times did you think you were going to lose the deal?

46:02 Evan Kelsay: Oh, I think there's this great quote I kept repeating to my wife from how the Affordable Care Act was passed is that they said, you know, this thing is going to this thing is going to die, die twice before it lives. And I think there was probably… I could probably count them on 2 hands, the number of times that I thought this deal might have been done, done for, I should say. And, you know, at each time I kind of, you know, I kind of regroup with my people internally. And, you know, as clients do, they go dark in deals, and they go quiet. And you don't know what's going on over there. And so Keeping patience and kind of having this backing of the leadership that you know what you know you're doing the right things you have the the right sales process on this just you know continue to be patient with it and and keep pushing but you know don't don't freak out if they go dark and it's one of those things that that gave me the the confidence to push on and continue on and and continue to do the outreach. To, you know, like I said, to everybody, every, you know, relevant person at the organization that we could get to, to sell them on the value.

47:13 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Talk about sort of your mindset, especially in those periods, right, where you feel like, oh man, like it's, it's going to die. There's, there's no way I'm going to be able to bring this through. Like, how did you maintain through all of that? Because I know how these go. Like, it is not all roses and unicorns.

47:31 Evan Kelsay: I mean, Scott, you got kids, man. Like, you… we got a family. Like, it's not… it's not… this is not the end of the world. Nobody's… you know, we're selling software here. It's really transformational software, but, you know, we're not curing cancer. And, you know, having, having my wife who, you know, sees patients every day and tells me about their struggles keeps me grounded. Like, you know, coming home and getting, you know, 2 big hugs from my, from my boys You know, or just have them like throw their Cheerios in my face. Like, you know, each of those things keeps me grounded. Like, you know, at the end of the day, you take a step back and we, you know, you do the right process, you put your best efforts in, and you try to be as smart as you can about that sales process.

48:16 Scott Ingram: Yeah.

48:16 Evan Kelsay: But you can't take yourself… you never can take yourself too seriously.

48:19 Scott Ingram: Yeah.

48:20 Evan Kelsay: Because otherwise you're going to drive yourself crazy.

48:22 Scott Ingram: That's great stuff. Well, let's dig into kind of the routines and things of that nature. So just, you know, I mean, you know, you've known my routine here. So walk, walk me through your day. Alarm goes off, what time, what happens?

48:34 Evan Kelsay: So I'd probably talk about it in like a typical week this year for me. So my alarm clock would go off, call it 5:15, 5:20, and I'd get up, you know, I'd go work out. And I, you know, go work out, you shower, you get ready for the day before my kids would get up around 6:45 or 7. I, I'd I, you know, feed them breakfast with my wife. We play with them for a little bit, 8 o'clock. And then literally I just walk upstairs. You know, I really liked… I really like working in an office, but I've been hyperproductive working from home because I just walk upstairs and I start to knock out the things that I need to do for the day first. You know, I don't know if he's the greatest person to quote, but Ashton Kutcher had this great, you know, quote in this article that I read of him where he said, You have to, you have to, you have to get the things that you need to do that day done first. You know, get the emails out that you need to get out first before you respond to anybody and, you know, kind of prioritize your day, you know, really like just be hyper-focused and serious. And, you know, in some ways, you know, you have to be mean or bad about like saying no to things early in the day that are not going to be adding value to your pipeline, you know, or adding value to your deal cycle. And, you know, I'm not the best person in the world at it, but I got a lot more serious about it this year, and it has proven enormous dividends. And so, you know, I work from 8 to noon. Usually that work is, you know, a good portion of that work, and most, you know, a lot of my weeks this year have just been having, you know, a few calls a day, or a few meetings a day, but really delving into the research about those companies so that I'm, you know, really… I feel like I'm really confident and properly prepared for those conversations. And, you know, do those, you know, come walk downstairs, play with the kids for, you know, 10 minutes, you know, help feed them lunch maybe, and then, you know, walk back upstairs. Do that in the afternoon. Like I said, it's been a really fun year of sales because I get I get to delve into the research and kind of, you know, peek under the hood of really interesting companies for a living. And, you know, getting the time to do that has been awesome. It's been really interesting this year. And, you know, I guess knock off, you know, knock off around 6 or 6:30. And, you know, my, my mother-in-law is a world-class chef, even though she's not, she doesn't have the credentials for it. And usually go, you know, eat dinner with the family, come back. I might do a little more work between that and then bedtime, but that's, you know, that's a typical day for me. Believe me, you've had, you've had many more guests on the program that spend… that are… I've been, I've been, you know, floored with. I'm not worthy in terms of the number of the production of those folks and how many hours, you know, how little they sleep to be very good at what they do.

51:41 Scott Ingram: Yeah, well, so I think it's all relative, but, you know, it sounds like to you, I mean, similar to my world, I don't think I can go work in an office again. It's funny, just the level of productivity when I do go into the office, it's amazing just because you're there, like how many meetings you get dragged into that when you're out of sight, out of mind, and able to focus on your prospects and clients, you just don't have to hassle with that stuff. So, I think that certainly Makes a difference in all of that. What about kind of other… before I go there, what about you're doing a lot of this research and preparing for the calls? Did you have a specific structure to those calls? Like, was there a, was there a call plan that you had documented? What did that look like?

52:23 Evan Kelsay: Yeah, I mean, there, there is a documented call plan for, you know, in terms of my own that I work with for my inside team and my sales engineer. And when I pull in leadership, you know, to these calls for, you know, first, second, third conversations, because a lot of this year was spent on, you know, initial, initial first, second, third conversations with different divisions and different people within those divisions. You know, you're… I'd like to… I always like to have the structure around, you know, in the first call, you always have to be really helping them understand that you understand their business. And if you don't understand their business, you have to, you have to discover, you know, it's that, you know, it's not rocket science. It's not, it's not brain surgery. It's not rocket surgery. It is, you know, asking, being highly inquisitive, but informed inquisitive. You know, I, you know, starting off with, I want you to have value out of this conversation, so let me tell you about what we think is going on in your industry and within your company based on the research that we've done. And kind of walk them through and have them validate that that's really what's going on. And that usually opens up larger questions around, What's limiting growth? You know, what, what is fundamentally limiting growth at your company? And is it a strategy issue? Is it a people issue? Is it a process issue? Is it a technology issue? Is it all the above? And it gets you into this, you know, when it works, I mean, it works really well. It gets you into this great flow conversation of what's going on in their world and really what they believe can really impact that. And so it's kind of establishing your bona fides there because you've given them a point of view on their industry, their company, even their job, and given them a point of view on their client's world. And so at that point, the conversation should, if you're doing it right, it should veer off in 1,000 directions. It should really delve into, again, like what what they believe is limiting growth at their company. And then, you know, you kind of give your point of view on what you believe is limiting growth at their company. And that's where our technology comes in. And it's really, you know, telling them like, hey, this may be a fit for you, this may not be a fit for you, but we're going to find that out in this conversation. And there's no point in me showing you the technology if you don't believe that it's going to be helpful conceptually. And, you know, I try not to structure my calls too much because, you know, it's that classic like Mike Tyson line, everybody's got a plan until they get punched in the face. And so you have to, you know, you have to be a student of improv and you've got to be just continuously curious if you're gonna have great conversations consistently and be able to go down, you know, tangents that that may, on the face of them, not seem helpful. But if they want to take you down and you feel like you're talking to the right person and they have a good enough perspective on their business, then that's usually where you want to go.

55:32 Scott Ingram: Nice. So if I'm a proper student, I should say, yes, and. I want to hear more about what your information diet looks like. You alluded to the fact that you were listening to a lot of podcasts, you were reading more books. When was that happening? And then And let's get into some more specifics there in terms of what other podcasts and what books made the biggest impact for you in the last year or so.

55:54 Evan Kelsay: Sure. So that diet, when I would work out in the morning, I would usually listen to… I would either listen to a political podcast, a sports podcast, or a sales podcast. And majority of time this year, it's been a sales podcast because there's some really great content out there and people doing some really great work. Around helping, you know, pull back the curtain on the black art of sales. And, you know, I'm not the fastest reader. My wife has lapped me in 3 degrees. So I do my reading usually, you know, around bedtime, but there've been some really fantastic books that have imparted, you know, some, some great knowledge to me and not just kind of tactics, but also strategy. Cause I find, I think probably my My reticence to read a lot of sales books prior really revolved around sales books that were put out that were not very specific. I'm a fairly concrete person. I like to touch it, taste it, feel it. And if you're not giving me real concrete examples about different selling scenarios and how to interact and how to adjust and how to pivot and how to overcome different selling scenarios specifically, you know, in kind of a story format, I might get a little bored. And so that's why I really gravitated towards your podcast is that these were real-life stories from real-life people who were doing it in the field. And that's where I found some amazing learnings and gave, you know, it kept me hungry. It kept me, kept me thinking to myself, okay, I'm doing the right things. I'm on the right path. These people are going to have a similar process.

57:29 Scott Ingram: And what about what, what others, right? So what, what other podcasts, what books?

57:33 Evan Kelsay: Okay. All right. So I will pull it up now. I will say that your podcast, I think, is the most helpful for people in, you know, in my position. But I think if you're just, if you're starting out in sales, if you're mid-career in sales, if you are, you know, a global account manager at a Fortune 500 company, you still, you should always be listening to other people at the top talk about what they are doing. It goes kind of… it really does go back to that steel sharpens steel, you know, saying. And I would say that there's been a… I listed about a dozen. So The Brutal Truth About Sales and Selling. Brian Burns is, I think, doing some great work with his podcast, and he himself is a wealth of knowledge about the complex sale, how today's modern buyer thinks. There's actually a… if you're listening to this, please bring it back. But there was a podcast series called The Sales Roundup that existed in 2009 and 2010, and it was with a couple of kind of complex tech enterprise software sellers. And it was fantastic. I had… I listened to every episode. It gives some great knowledge and please, you know, If you're, if you're listening to this and you were the authors of that podcast, bring that back. Cause, cause I would love to listen to more episodes. Women in Sales with Barbara Giamanco. She, she does, she's a fantastic interviewer. She does some great work with really, you know, again, top, top sellers in their field around the craft of sales. You know, it's, it's billed as a podcast around female salespeople, but like, it is a wealth of knowledge for anyone who is, you know, interested in the craft of sales. The Alignment Podcast with Jeff Davis. I think Jeff does some great work around really helping, you know, if you're a salesperson listening to his podcast, really helping you understand how marketing and sales work in tandem, kind of how they, you know, how they don't work in some cases and how they really should work. And really like has some great guests and is a great interviewer. And then funny enough, like I actually listened to a couple of investor podcasts. So if, you know, again, if you want to, one of the best pieces of sales advice I ever got was from the chief financial officer of a hospital system. And he was giving, he was actually retired and he was giving us a coaching session at LinkedIn. And he said, uh, you see who you sound like, meaning if you sound like me, you get to speak to me. If you sound like people below me, that's who I'm going to push you down to. If you sound like people above me, I will recommend you to go meet with them. And I'm kind of a nerd when it comes to lexicon and language and like the words that you use and having an economy of words to convey that value. And invest… like investors really seem to have a great perspective on how they sum up entire industries, how they sum up, you know, trends in different companies and different marketplaces. And there's one that Patrick O'Shaughnessy does called Invest Like the Best. And it has been really, really helpful in many cases to really help me understand, you know, how investors think, but also they, you know, they're the people, you know, the people who they talk to every day are senior leadership of these companies. They really, they understand how, how they think. And, you know, picked up some, some kind of great language and perspective and understanding on different industries by listening to Invest Like the Best. And then, you know, there's, there's some great inside selling podcasts. Just Get in the Door is one of them. Inside Selling is another. And, and then there's actually some, like a couple of procurement podcasts that I listen to on occasion because, you know, they do, they do a pretty good job. Uh, one's called The Art of Procurement and the other one's called The Procurement Revolution. They do a pretty good job. Really helping, you know, if you're a salesperson listening to this, you're doing it because you really want to understand how a decision gets made at these, you know, at these complex, highly matrixed organizations. And they, you know, in many cases they've got episodes where they do a great job of explaining it to you and really letting you into insights that you wouldn't get if you didn't talk to procurement professionals. They really help you understand how the sausage is made to get a deal done internally at the client you're trying to That's fascinating.

1:02:12 Scott Ingram: And what we'll do with all of these, Evan, is put them in the show notes page. So if folks go to top1.fm/56, we'll have all of those podcasts linked up. And then, Evan, what about the books? What books have been most impactful for you?

1:02:26 Evan Kelsay: Right. So, you know, clearly your book has been very impactful to me. I'm about 2/3 of the way through it right now and learning something in every chapter. So I can't thank you enough for that. You know, the book, the other books that I've, I've read this year that have been really helpful have been Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss. He's a former FBI negotiator. And he also, because of his profession, you, you have to be very, very good at, you know, the economy of words to convey value and really not, not using trigger, you know, not using trigger words and then kind of using the type of, you know, structuring your sentences so that it really leads to a level of comfort with the person that you're talking to. And I really loved, I really loved his book. You know, there, there's actually, uh, like, you know, a couple of books that are not sales that have been really helpful to me. One's called Team of Teams. I think General Stanley McChrystal really talks about, you know, the team, you know, team structure and kind of team achieving goals in a way that that really resonated with me and the kind of team selling that we're doing at Seismic. And the other book was… it's a book around, call it Deep Work by Cal Newport. And Deep Work, you know, he writes about basically that in today's society that concentration and the ability to concentrate and kind of get into a flow state of concentration is becoming a rarer and rarer skill And that if you're… people do their best work in kind of, call it, minute, you know, minute 80 of a longer concentration session. So, you know, I try to kind of take that sentiment as I'm doing this kind of big, you know, in-depth research into these companies and really, really try to limit my distractions and focus in and not respond to anybody, you know, try not to take phone calls as much as you can. So that you can really get into that deep flow state, so you can really develop that that high point of view on what's going on in their business and their industry. And then, you know, the classic Simon Sinek, Start with Why. I love the book. Love his videos. You know, the the idea was so profound to me that you know the the part of the brain that makes decisions cannot understand language, and you know it operates on gut. And if you can't convey what you believe in a way that gets them to buy into that and they really believe it in their gut, that you're, you know, you're not going to get a deal done. It's going to end in no decision, or you're going to lose to a competitor, or something, something, you know, it's just not going to work. Because, you know, similar to this deal that I got this year, they had to believe that it was going to be transformational to their business. And in And by the way, it's going to be, but that, that is, you know, that is something that you always have to keep in the back of your mind. You always have to continue to repeat in the sales process or just reconfirming with the people that you're talking to that we all are here. We're all talking today because, because we're talking about something transformational and starting with why is very important.

1:05:39 Scott Ingram: Evan, that's a great list. Again, we'll have those on the, on the website, top1.fm/56 or top1.fm/Evan. Either of those should get you there. What about tools and apps and things of that nature? Obviously, Seismic is a big core piece of that. What else?

1:05:55 Evan Kelsay: I love Sales Navigator. I use it every day, and there's no better way to map out the power structure at any prospect or client is to use LinkedIn Sales Navigator to do that, and LinkedIn in general. So I'm a huge proponent there. Obviously, I have to give a shout to our own technology, which literally, you know, I was able to put… so Scott, if you allow me, I'll just tell a quick story about our technology that just floored me, which was it basically streamlines a lot of the content building process as part of what we do. So of course, you know, during this deal cycle, there came a moment where my champion called me up and said, Evan, I'm meeting with the CMO tomorrow. I need a proposal. I know, I know we haven't talked about this, but I need a proposal. And in my previous companies, it would have taken me weeks to put that together because it was a really, really large figure. And because of our technology and because I had already listed all the whys in Salesforce, I'd listed all the details about the deal and who we were speaking with and what the pricing was going to be. And, you know, why, why do anything? Why do it now? Why do it with Seismic? Seismic, you know, all that was there. Our technology was able to just assemble the right value statements, the right case studies, the right pricing, you know, what have you. I put that thing together in less than an hour, and it was one of the largest deals in our company's history. So that amount of time saving has again allowed me to do great work this year. But beyond Navigator and beyond Seismic, you know, I'm a big proponent of, you know, I guess when it comes to actual sales tools, and I'm sorry, I'm blanking here. I know there's more out there that I use. I'm just, they're not at the tip of my tongue.

1:07:50 Scott Ingram: Well, and what about the opposite, right? So what I heard as you were talking through the books is that you really focused on the deep work and getting into the flow, which means you're ignoring a lot of technology. How are you doing that?

1:08:04 Evan Kelsay: Well, I am not, even though I do do it, the majority of the outreach to our prospects and clients are done by my inside team. And, you know, it's work. We've got a great system where, you know, I'm doing the deep work to really come up with a perspective on the business, to come up with the bullet points around, you know, what, why they should, you know, demonstrate we understand what's going on and why they should care. And then our team does a… has done a phenomenal job of the actual tools and the outreach. So like they're using SalesLoft and they're, you know, I think using a couple of other automation type of outreach tools, but, and I, now you jarred my memory because I have to put a, I have to put a shout out for Gong, Gong.io. It, I don't know, you know, it records your calls and actually gives you intelligence on what's working and the ability to have You know, to go back and actually listen to the game tape for successful and unsuccessful calls, not just my own but others within the company, has really been invaluable. And I've, you know, taken so much great learnings and actual, you know, quotes from those conversations and reused them again and again. So that's been great. Nudge.ai does a great, does a great job of, you know, actually letting it, letting me know when different connections of mine or people that I'm following on Sales Navigator, you know, it might be tweeting out something interesting or posting something interesting or something that's kind of gaining popularity. So that, that's been fantastic.

1:09:38 Scott Ingram: Awesome. So you finished asking the tools question, but I want to, I want to finish the like anti-distraction question.

1:09:46 Evan Kelsay: Right. Yeah. Sorry. Got distracted there. You know, it's, if you, if you looked at the room that I'm in right now, you'd call it pretty bare. I mean, there's, there's a, you know, philosophy around, you know, doing your deep work that needs to, you know, you need to do your best to avoid all distractions. And so I've got, you know, notifications turned off on my phone. I've got notifications turned off on our, you know, messenger service, you know, team-to-team, person-to-person talking, you know, network online at Seismic. And I've got, you know, I try… I don't have notifications on my email, so like my screen is very clean when it comes to things that pop up. Like, that doesn't really happen. So you're just able… I highly recommend you just focus in, eliminate all the notifications you can, and, you know, the distractions will lessen by an exponential factor. And you'll find over time that your ability to concentrate actually increases and increases and increases again. So you're able to concentrate for longer and longer periods of time. And it really, it really has helped me do, you know, some higher-level thinking about what, how we can impact their business and how to really get, you know, what's really going on in their business that they can help enable their own customers better.

1:11:08 Scott Ingram: That's fantastic. And, you know, it's actually something that I personally have sort of slipped on recently where I've, I've turned on a couple of notifications and I've allowed some of that noise to creep back in. And my God, I just… for the last month, I just feel off my game. And so, you know, I've got to go back through and turn a bunch of stuff off and get back into that space of focus. Because man, when you don't have it and there's stuff coming at you every, every couple of minutes, you just… you don't… to your point, you don't get to that point of flow. You don't ever get productive.

1:11:41 Evan Kelsay: You can't. And, and, you know, there's all these articles about former engineers at these social media companies, and they're like, yeah, we know exactly, we know exactly how to distract you. And so you need to combat that and be aware of that. And, you know, call it screen wellness, needs to be a big factor in, in your day.

1:12:00 Scott Ingram: Love that. Well, there's, there's my takeaway of many, I'm sure. So Evan, what, what about your sales philosophy? Is there something that you subscribe to, or what was the model that you sort leveraged as, as you went into this giant deal?

1:12:17 Evan Kelsay: I really tried to be more focused, I think, than I had been in the past at just speaking about their business and everything. You know, obviously you need to, you need to connect what you're doing, you know, what you're selling to, you know, how it's going to help the company. But if you can impart to the people that you're talking to that you just fundamentally care about making their business better, making their lives better, making their clients client interactions excellent, then, you know, that's really… I think I had done that in the past, but I didn't, like I said, I didn't have the time to do the research to really be confident in really speaking about their business after a certain number of minutes. And then you just, you hit the panic button, you go back to talking about your own company, talking about your own solutions. And there's no, I think, greater return on investment than really doing the work of of understanding what's going on at that company. That was probably the difference when I came to this deal. And so that's really carried the day and kind of every interaction that I've had, you know, with that company, but also my other prospects throughout the year. And I think it's been a massive difference maker.

1:13:29 Scott Ingram: Yeah, that's huge. What about… how would you describe your style?

1:13:33 Evan Kelsay: Probably a little irreverent, Midwestern friendly, combined with, you know, are you I don't want to waste your time, but I definitely don't want you to waste my time. And being, you know, really just almost challenging consistently their own belief in their reality. You know, what is going on right now? You know, Seismic is in the sales enablement technology space. That is a space that is, you know, was nascent but is now kind of growing. But, you know, in a lot of ways we're still creating the market for it. It's a big deal. You know, you have to, you have to do a really good job of getting people out of their comfort zone and helping them understand that maybe what their preconceived notions are, kind of their view of how, you know, how to impact growth at their company, how to enable the field, is perhaps frozen in time. And so the style probably comes through as a nice Midwesterner who likes to throw firebomb challenges at you.

1:14:35 Scott Ingram: What have been the most important decisions you've made or lessons you had to learn to get where you are today?

1:14:43 Evan Kelsay: Oh man, I mean, probably the most important decision I made was marrying my wife. I mean, you're getting into personal stuff now here, Scott, because, you know, who you marry has a great impact. It's probably the biggest, like, biggest impact in your career. Would you agree?

1:14:59 Scott Ingram: It matters. Yeah, for sure. That's a great one.

1:15:02 Evan Kelsay: You know, and, and I think if you can, like I said, the biggest, you know, the most amazing part of this year for me has been working for a company that really values the sales organization and the sales process, and that the sales process can add an enormous amount of value to, you know, your products and kind of, you know, that's how you really maintain your margins. That's how you don't get into a dogfight where you're cutting your prices. It's the the ability to impart massive value throughout the sales process. And a company that believes that and really resources us properly to be able to run an excellent sales cycle, you know, that has been so impactful to my, to my success. And, you know, I would set it up the exact same way if I were to start a company.

1:15:50 Scott Ingram: Yeah, that's, that's awesome. I mean, one of the reasons, one of the things that I was really trying to act on when I started the show is the Jim Rohn quote that says, you're the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with. And to your point, right, you can't help the fact that your spouse is going to be number one in that equation, right? So, that matters a ton and you've got to get that right and have somebody that's going to support you. I mean, I certainly wouldn't be able to have the success I've had or be able to do this show and the book and the summit and all these other things without Emily, my wife, being there to support all of that. And then, you know, certainly, there's going to be some core colleagues, right? Like your boss is probably high on that list. So choose wisely. And, you know, and kind of the kind of companies that… yeah. So talk about that. I mean, one of the things you've done that I want to call out that I really appreciate is you have given a lot of shoutouts to a lot of people who have impacted various parts of your life and this process. So I'd love to hear about your Jedi sales manager as part this.

1:16:56 Evan Kelsay: He's a, he's a brilliant individual, and he's the individual that I believe that I am getting my PhD in sales from. And I, I have to… like, this, this deal does not happen, not even close, without him. And he, you know, he is just an excellent… like, what you want, you know, what you want in sales from a great manager is a combination… or I guess what I've always wanted is a combination of, you know, a person who can take administrative work off of your plate. So it allows you to kind of do higher value work, but at the same time is incredibly knowledgeable. So you feel like every time that you talk to them, you're learning something. Every time you interact with them, every time you see them with clients, you're learning things. And it can really help you strategize on that 3-dimensional chess aspect of selling a complex deal. And I'm so humbly grateful to have him in my life. And, uh, he, you know, I think you have said this before, that people, you know, people aren't… people are not successful despite their boss. And, you know, the exact… you know, that is so true in this scenario because, you know, again, the organization tries to hire for people… they just… they've done a great job of hiring for people who are servant leaders but also highly knowledgeable about our space and highly knowledgeable about, you know, what it takes to get a big complex enterprise software sale done and have done that in the past. And so I'm really grateful to him.

1:18:30 Scott Ingram: Is that something that you sought out or kind of qualified on as you were coming into the organization? Like how big of a factor was that?

1:18:38 Evan Kelsay: It was huge. And, you know, I interviewed with a few unicorn companies who were wonderful and they have excellent products. I think the difference between Seismic and those companies and kind of what I was seeking out was that, you know, again, it's kind of seeking out a sales, you know, a sales organization that is run by career sellers and not just… and this is no knock on people who are in leadership positions at companies in sales that, you know, maybe came from management consulting or maybe came from outside the industry. But at Seismic anyways, there's something about having a leadership team that is made up of, you know, career grizzled, serious adult sellers for complex software that I really, I just gravitated towards. In the end, I said to myself, like, I'm going to get the best education working with these folks. And so that's why So I went and did it.

1:19:35 Scott Ingram: Yeah, that's huge. Now, hopefully I'm not tipping you in a particular direction with that, but I want to ask, you know, what advice you would have for somebody that's just getting started out in their sales career today?

1:19:46 Evan Kelsay: Well, the best piece of advice I ever got on this was my buddy Hamish, and he said, what you learn in the early part of your career makes a lot more, you know, is a lot, is exponentially more valuable than what you make. So, you know, there… I'm a LinkedIn alum, so I subscribe to the school of Reid Hoffman, the startup view, where, you know, you want, you want to kind of optimize. And actually, this is a Jeff Weiner thing… optimize for passion and skill. So if you're starting out in sales, becoming a subject matter expert on different industries will help you you know, massively. If you're starting out in sales, really taking a focus and a seriousness to the craft of sales and really learning from the best people in your office, you know, going to looking out, you know, looking to podcasts, looking to books, looking to articles, being a voracious reader about the craft of sales really will help you, you know. And like I said, you got to keep that childlike sense of wonder. But more importantly, got to keep that childlike sense of resilience. You know, I'm, for better or for worse, I have a, I have the memory of a goldfish. And so it's actually helped me out in my sales career because, you know, you get knocked down, you know, 10 times before one success. And I can wake up every day and think to myself, hey, it's a new day. And so never not be discouraged by, you know, initial failure and that, and that if you're not failing at things every week, you're not growing. And you're not going to be ultimately, you know, as good as your peers, as good as the best. If you want to be the best, you have to fail at things every week.

1:21:29 Scott Ingram: Greatness. So here I typically ask about the advice you'd have for somebody that is further into their career. They're doing well, but they're not the best, or maybe they're even struggling. I want to change it for you, though, a little bit and ask, was there something that flipped the switch for you? Because you'd had a really good, consistently successful career at LinkedIn, and you came into Seismic and it feels like it was a whole different game for you. Like, what, what was that? Or what would you suggest that others do to, to have a similar, I don't know, enlightening?

1:22:04 Evan Kelsay: In some ways, it's a, it's a lifestyle change. You know, you have to, you have to cut out distractions in your life, whatever those may be, you know, as much as you can. And I haven't spent as much time with, you know, with friends this year. You know, I've, I've really focused in on know, being a good family man and being a good employee. And those are the things that I'm really hyper-focused on. And so I'm kind of making decisions in my social life and in my career that, you know, kind of allows me the time to really do the work that's necessary to, you know, have success. And it's a really tough thing. And that's what happened for me is that I just, I got I got really disciplined about what I was going to spend my time on and how, you know, how, what I could cut out to really, you know, give myself the time that I needed, that I believed that if I had that time, I would actually be really successful because I could do these high-value activities. In a lot of ways, I just, I feel like people sometimes are not successful because they just, they don't have the time to be successful. They have it in them, but they, You know, there, there were too many things pulling them in different directions in their lives. And then, and that was, you know, that was probably the case for me.

1:23:21 Scott Ingram: That's enlightening. Good stuff. Good stuff in there. I'm going to, I'm going to listen to that one again myself. What about, I mean, you've listened to a lot of, of these episodes, so I'm really interested in your perspective on this about just what you want to know, or maybe when you go to the summit, you know, what, what are the things that you're hoping to learn from the other folks that have been on this show at that event that you haven't already heard in the conversations that I've had with them?

1:23:48 Evan Kelsay: It's going to be the nuances, right? I mean, you know, we… I think probably everybody who goes to the summit is going to know how to run, you know, a pretty decent sales cycle. But, you know, you call it the difference between the number one tennis player in the world and the number 100 tennis player in the world. If a layman watches them, them, they probably don't understand. It looks the same, but as somebody who really is a fanboy of really great sellers, I want to get into it and just talk about the minutia of different ways to run deal cycles, how to overcome different stopgaps in different sales cycles, how to avoid no decisions in sales cycles, really You can always be asking, you know, I want to continuously gain the knowledge of how to shorten my sales cycles, maintain my margins, grow deals, make my customers insanely happy, and affect transformation at these clients. And so that's what I'm going to be seeking out. And that's where your summit, in my opinion, is going to be one of the, one of, if not the best place for a seller to seek that out.

1:25:01 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Well, do you have an example of that? So is, is there something that was like really nuancey that, that you did that either if you weren't you, you'd, you'd want to be aware of it, or maybe you didn't think of a number of years ago, but made a really significant difference?

1:25:19 Evan Kelsay: There was a moment. So there was a meeting that was coming up during this big deal that was early on. We'd had few conversations, but because, because I had been listening and learning to these great thought leaders around sales, I really had in my mind of like, I cannot show this person the platform. I just can't do it in the first few interactions. Like, if they see it and I haven't sold them on the actual overall value, this is gonna end badly. I'm gonna end up having to cut my margins or do something else that is gonna be lower value. And there came a moment in, a sales meeting that we had with him that, you know, he said, I really love this, but what is it? How do you… like, I still can't conceptually get my head around what it looks like. And, you know, it was a totally fair question. But I think because I had this knowledge that I had recently, you know, really kind of… I always had it, but recently it had been, you know, reconfirmed and, you know, re-cemented in my mind that, like, you just You don't need to show it yet. I just went to the whiteboard and drew out, you know, drew out kind of conceptually the 4, you know, the 4 buckets of what we do and listed out the capabilities from there. And I could see the light bulb go off in his head and he didn't have to see the actual, the actual software to actually get the value and satisfy his itch to, you know, wrap his head around it, to touch it, taste it, feel it. It. And, you know, he eventually did, but he was, he was really, he was really ready to do so when he did. And that was, you know, it's kind of those moments where if you have 100 sellers, 100 top sellers telling you to do that thing, then you have high confidence that that's going to work. And so it's that type of minutia that I'm going to be seeking out.

1:27:10 Scott Ingram: Yeah. And that's a, that's such a fantastic example, right? Because at the end of the day, Like demos don't sell, like you confirm with the demo. And you're right. I mean, there's, there's so much risk if you go in too early with that because you, you just sort of put yourself in a box, like whatever that is.

1:27:27 Evan Kelsay: Absolutely.

1:27:28 Scott Ingram: So Mike, last action point, like we always do, is we try and boil everything into some type of actionable challenge, as you're well aware. So what would you recommend that the listener do for the next, say, 1 to 2 weeks to improve themselves and improve their results?

1:27:43 Evan Kelsay: I would say first off, turn off all notifications in your life. You don't need them. You go check the things that you want to check at the end of the day. Secondly, I would say look at the list. I would highly recommend you start delving into these podcasts and books, and really not just the ones I listen to, but, but the other guests that have been on your program have listed some fantastic books out to really hone in. I would really… I would think about about doing, you know, doing kind of a really fundamentally hard exercise, which is, you know, where do I want to be in my career in 15 years, 20 years? And then you can start to reverse engineer that career. And I've literally used LinkedIn to do that for me, because you can see how people progress. And, you know, at the end of the day, don't take yourself too seriously unless you're selling life-saving technology. You know, nobody's going to die. And so, you know, have the confidence that you can, you know, have wins, have losses, but if you are striving for that mastery, that you will get better and you will, you will get exponentially better over time.

1:28:50 Scott Ingram: Well, Mike, thank you. And thank you for listening. I sincerely hope that this episode and this show can serve as the inspiration for you to go out and achieve something game-changing for yourself, for your company, and do yourself a favor. Join Evan and I at the Sales Success Summit. You can get all the details at top1summit.com. See you next time.

1:29:12 Evan Kelsay: Thanks for listening to the Sales Success Stories podcast.

1:29:16 Scott Ingram: To be sure you never miss an episode and for an invitation to our Sales Success Community powered by Influitive, subscribe to our newsletter at top1.fm.