90: Grit Personified with Gong's top SDR Sarah Brazier

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. This episode is sponsored by the 2020 Sales Success Summit that will happen here in Austin on October 12th and 13th. For complete details, For more details, click over to top1summit.com. Today on the Sales Success Stories podcast, my guest is Sarah Brazier. Sarah is the top sales development rep at Gong.io. Welcome to the show, Sarah.

0:43 Sarah Brazier: Thanks for having me. I'm stoked to be here.

0:45 Scott Ingram: I'm stoked that you are here. And why don't we start like we always do with some immediate value and talk about the top 3 things that you believe have contributed the most to your success as an SDR?

0:57 Sarah Brazier: Yeah, totally. So, I think that there are 3 contributing factors that have helped me be a good SDR. The first are really about grit. So, I'm from a family of 7 kids. I'm number 4. And my dad is a former major in the Marine Corps, Marine Corps officer. And we have a culture that's sort of in our family. I think it's partially from my dad. I think it's partially from my mom. But the idea is everything that we do, it's not worth doing unless there's some suffering involved. So, like a good example of that is, On Thanksgiving morning, everybody wakes up and before we do anything, we just run a half marathon. And that's how we start Thanksgiving. Or, you know, like growing up, we would go camping, but camping is not like pulling up the van and parking it somewhere and like setting up a tent by a lake. It's like, you know, we're going to backpack in 15 miles to the top of this mountain and we'll sleep on top of the mountain and then we'll do it again. And then after 3 days of that, then we'll be done. And you're doing that when you're like, 12 years old. So, I think that there's just sort of this culture of kind of suffering and grit that I was just born into. And it's not until I grew up that I really recognized that about, you know, how I was raised. So, that's the first thing. The second thing is that I did competitive speech and debate, and I did it high school through college. In high school, I was really bad, but I worked really hard. And by the time I graduated, I'd been a state champion and I finaled at nationals. I got… I was the runner-up in the country. And so that led me to earn a scholarship to compete for what was at the time and still is one of the top 3 schools in the country. But at the time they were the reigning school in the world for speech and debate. And so you're taking, you know, classes every day. I had a full 17, 19-credit semesters going on, but then working 20 hours a week on my speech and debate stuff. The season is September through April. Every weekend you go and you compete Saturday, Sunday. So, you're hopping in a van on Friday afternoon, Friday night, driving out, and then you compete starting around 8:00 AM. It's when competition starts. It goes till 6:00 PM. And then, you do the next thing on Sunday. And then, Sunday night, you get back in the van and you go to class on Monday morning having van sleep. So, I think that those 2 things really helped with grit. And then, the last thing is just I had a really amazing manager. His name is Tanner Robinson. He works over at Gong. And when I started out as an SDR, I was really terrible. So when I got to Gong, I just felt lucky that they were taking a risk having me there. And Tanner was so good at explaining to me and supporting me and coaching me through what it takes to be a great SDR that it just kind of clicked. And from there, things really took off. So those are my 3 things.

3:48 Scott Ingram: Love it. Love it. So talk more about What did Tanner explain? Like, what was that? If you can sort of encapsulate those lessons, and I'm sure there were lots of them, but what was it? What was it that clicked in terms of understanding what really is this role?

4:01 Sarah Brazier: Yeah. So, I think for some reason, when people get into a sales role, at least for me, and what I think happens with a lot of SDRs starting out, is that you forget that you're a human and that the person on the other side is a human too. You're just trying to do whatever, and it doesn't relate to the person on the other side, on the receiving end. And so, Tanner was really good at explaining, like, if you're a VP of sales or a CRO or director of sales, because that's who we sell to, these are the things that they care about. These are the daily sufferings that they have. Let's get into their brain, and then let's think about how we can create language around what they're feeling. And what our solution does to help them and articulate that in a really valuable way. So, that was kind of the first thing, is just helping me really empathize with our buyer. And then, the second thing is when I first started out, you know, I'd get someone on LinkedIn to respond to a message, and I would be freaking out. I'd be like, oh my gosh, they responded to me, and they said no. What do I say, Tanner? And he'd come by and he'd help walk me through what good objection handling sounds like. How to make a point that makes them think a little bit more. So instead of them saying, not interested, they say, okay, that's fair. I get where you're coming from. That actually sounds like it might be helpful. Or, you know, as soon as I'd get off a cold call, he would get a notification that I'd had a cold call and it didn't end up in demo scheduled. So he'd listen to it and he'd comment on it immediately and kind of point out where I had missed the mark and helped me understand what I needed to do. So he's just like, actively hands-on coaching me on a regular basis. And that's when things started to click.

5:42 Scott Ingram: You know what's really interesting about that is I think that, and maybe it just ties into the stereotypes of sales, but, you know, we fall into this, let me put on my sales hat. And now as a salesperson, I'm going to say salesy things. And the person on the other end of the line puts on their prospect hat and they say, go away type of things. If you sort of flip that around and we just try and take a more human approach, it probably sounds really different from the typical salesy types of things that you think you're supposed to say that don't ever really work.

6:17 Sarah Brazier: Exactly. I mean, I just got back from the Sandler Conference, the Sandler Summit, and that's like what Sandler selling is all about, right? It's just like, just have a conversation and have a conversation that where you're on the same side as the customer, you're selling with them, not to them. And if you can kind of move your brain around that way and say, okay, I'm on the same side as them. And so then I want what's best for this person. Well, then getting a no or getting rejected becomes a lot easier because if it's not the best thing for them, that's okay. So then how do I approach that conversation? And then it's much more casual. It's just like, Hey, listen, like, I noticed these things about you. I noticed these things happening in your business. I'm curious, like, have you had this problem? Is this problem a thing that's an issue for you? And then they can tell me yes or no, or they can unpack that for me. And then I'll say like, hey, why don't we just have a no-pressure exploratory conversation around like what Gong can do to help you out? And that has been like coming at it from that angle instead of being like, hey, check out all these features we've got. It's been really, really helpful for me as, you know, top of funnel, tip of the spear SDR.

7:29 Scott Ingram: Yeah, absolutely. Now, hopefully, most people listening already know, but for those who don't, what is Gong?

7:36 Sarah Brazier: Oh, yeah. So, Gong is revenue intelligence platform. And basically, what that means is, you know, when sales leaders typically lack visibility into their sales conversations, they have, you know, a CRM that is updated by reps, but Typically, that's a little bit outdated. It's not always accurate. It's biased information. So, what Gong does is we just tap into your face-to-face conversations, your emails, your web conversations, your phone conversations, and we start surfacing insights around, you know, what separates top performers from everybody else, so you can close that gap, so that you can remove the delta on your team and get everyone to be excellent at sales, or, you know, when it comes to your deals, I read a Gartner study. It's like 46% of deals that are in commit actually won't close that quarter. So, that's a really big problem for sales directors, sales leaders, VP of sales, right? So, Gong can tell you exactly what deals aren't going to close this quarter. What are your at-risk deals? Where do you need eyes so you can course correct? And then, we answer questions around like strategy. You know, if you're rolling out new messaging, new pricing plays, new competitive messaging, you know, what's the best messaging to go to market with? That's a really important question. Is this going to work? 2, like, are my reps doing it? I told them to at SKO. Is it actually happening? So, you can understand adoption, and then you can understand, you know, does it resonate in the market? And so, Gong answers those 3 revenue questions, and that's what Gong does.

9:01 Scott Ingram: Excellent. And great, great company to follow. You guys put out some really fascinating research, I think, put good spin on it. It's entertaining and insightful and just good stuff all the way around.

9:11 Sarah Brazier: Yeah. I mean, working at Gong has been so helpful for me as a new person to sales. And our marketing team is just so smart because they get real sellers. Like, Devon Reid is our head of content marketing, but, you know, he was selling on the floor for a really long time before he made his move to marketing. So, he knows how to talk the talk. He's walked the walk. And then, we've got all of this data from all these conversations that we're capturing to really surface these answers and help salespeople put some data behind what we think the best practices are in sales.

9:40 Scott Ingram: Great stuff. Great stuff. Yeah. One of the more recent ones, although maybe it's not quite as recent anymore, you guys were talking about how cursing sometimes can serve you well in, in the sales conversation. But we won't do it on this show because I have this philosophy because I listen to podcasts while I'm in the car with my kids at times. So, I wanted to keep that safe for, for other folks. So, I'm not going to let Sarah drop any F-bombs.

10:01 Sarah Brazier: No F-bombs for me. Yeah. But it's interesting that because we knew that, like, we know from sociology studies that people who swear together That is a sign of comfort. And so, it makes sense that that can happen in a sales conversation. And the most effective time is when the prospect is the one who feels so comfortable with the salesperson that they start swearing, and then the seller swears with them. But it's typically around this, it's very casual. It's this conversation. It's not like the salesperson is just like cussing out the prospect. I think like some people read that headline and they were like, No, never. And it's like, well, let's take a step back and actually look at not just the Gong data, but the data that has been around for, you know, 10, 15, 20 years.

10:47 Scott Ingram: Well, it's one of those things where you have to read more than just the headline to get the point.

10:51 Sarah Brazier: Yeah, exactly. But I think it's fascinating, and I wasn't surprised when that data came out, but I was like, yeah, here's another point. So, yeah, it's cool stuff.

10:59 Scott Ingram: Absolutely. Now, before we talk about the specifics of Sarah's results, let me tell you just a bit more about the Sales Success Summit. This is our 3rd annual event built for this Sales Success Community that's happening here in Austin on October 12th and 13th. This event is different from every other sales conference out there because it exclusively features the top-performing sales professionals you've heard here on this podcast. And my rule for guests on this show is they have to be active quota-carrying individual contributors who are either the outright number one top seller in the organization, or at least in the top 1% of performers on a very large team. You won't find any gurus or quote unquote sales experts on the stage at this event, only real practitioners like Sarah. It's an intimate experience with a max of just under 200 participants where we all get an opportunity to learn from each other. I could go on and on, but the details are available for you at top1summit.com. And the sooner you register, the better your price as tickets increase $50 per month until they're sold out. Again, all the details are at top1summit.com. All right, Sarah, talk to us about your results. What have you done?

12:10 Sarah Brazier: Yeah. So 2019, I came in at 140-ish percent to quota for the year. Last quarter, Q4 was my best quarter. I hit 160%. And then in 2019, I had, I think I produced like 3 point $5 million of pipeline, something like that. So, I feel like those are good numbers for me.

12:34 Scott Ingram: Good stuff. Good stuff. Now, I'm really curious about how you got into sales in the first place. Doesn't sound like it was in the family. How did you make this transition into this profession?

12:46 Sarah Brazier: Yeah, actually, it is in the family. My dad is a sales guy. So, my dad majored in the Marine Corps. So, he was in the Marine Corps. He was active duty for a while, then he moved into the Reserves. And when he moved into the Reserves, he got a job in sales. And his degree is in physics, actually. So, he wanted something that was going to challenge him a lot in terms of problem solving and really take advantage of his physics degree. But he's also just good at talking to people and good at understanding problems. And he likes being on his feet and always having something different to do every day. And so, he started selling water purification equipment for a company called Betz. So, it's, you know, it's like 1 to 3-year-long sales cycles going into industrial companies, figuring out what they need in order to like meet standards in terms of the kinds of pollutants that are being released from their factory, making sure that it's clean water, clean air. So, my dad was in sales and he always told me I'd be good at it. And then, all through my life, every time I've interacted with a salesperson, they always told me I'd be good at this and that I should try it out. And I was like, yeah, I'll put that on my list of jobs to try. So when I graduated from college, I went and worked for a nonprofit. And I was like, okay, cool, I've done that. And then I went and I was a teacher because I had teachers who were always like, Sarah, I think you'd really be a good teacher. So I thought, well, this opportunity is in front of me. I guess I'll go, I'll go teach drama and coach speech and debate at this middle school in Texas. So I did that for a while. And then I was like, I want to be an actor. So I moved to San Francisco because my brother lived out here. And I was like, I'm an actor now. And I lived on his futon and I was in a bunch of shows. But the thing is, is that the theater, like live plays, it doesn't really pay you a lot of money. So I was just doing a bunch of jobs to support myself. I was the bookkeeper at a church. I coached speech and debate down in Fremont. So it was like a 3-hour commute round trip. I was a barista and I worked as the front desk girl at a startup called Optimizely. And at one point I would wake up at 4 in the morning, run to the train station to catch the train. At 4:30 I'd be opening up the coffee shop. 9:30 I'd leave the coffee shop to go be the front desk girl. I'd take a shower at their office so I didn't smell like coffee. And then I'd be at the front desk at 10 and I'd do that till 5. And then at 5 o'clock, I'd head out to rehearsal from 7 to 10. And I was working every single day of the week because rehearsals are also Saturday and Sunday. And I was working about 80 hours, 90 hours a week. And I was really tired. And I thought, there's got to be a better way to do this, especially because I was making pretty much no money. I had just enough to pay my rent. I couldn't even fully afford food. Which is why I picked the startup because they had free lunch and a bunch of snacks.

15:43 Scott Ingram: Gotta love the startup culture.

15:45 Sarah Brazier: Yeah. So, I was doing those things and I was like, okay, well, let's find something smarter. Let's do something better. I was also bored. Like, being a barista is like fine, but it's kind of boring because, you know, you're just doing the same motion every day. It's like, how complicated can this get? The most challenging part was memorizing people's orders because you never wrote it down. And I was like, I just need something that's going to challenge me a little bit more and pay me enough that I can work less hours in the week and continue to do theater. So, I started talking to everybody at that startup. I went out for coffee with the CMO of the company. I went out for coffee with the guy who ran enablement. I just basically was talking to anybody and everybody who could give me a little bit of insight into what the world of business looked like. Because until that time, I'd only pretty much ever worked for a nonprofit or a school. So I talked to the head of enablement. His name was Jim Jones. And Jim was like, here, read this book. And it's a book called To Sell Is Human. And I was like, okay, cool. I read the book. Now I know to be a salesperson is to be a human. I don't think it clicked all the way, but I was like, got it. So I told Jim I read the book and he was like, cool. Do you still want to do sales? And I said, yeah, let's try it. And he introduced me to a couple of people who were on SDR teams. And then that eventually got me my first SDR job. And that's how I got into sales. It was really just like, I was desperate and hungry. And then I was really bad at it, my first company. And then I came to Gong and I was like, I'm going to be good at this. I just made a decision I'd be good. And then from there, it's just been, it was like, It's kind of addictive. It's kind of fun. Yeah, I like it. Yeah.

17:28 Scott Ingram: And I know you're actively interviewing for an AE role now.

17:32 Sarah Brazier: Yeah, I'm stoked on it. I hope I do a good job. It's the end of this month, so everyone pray for me. All right.

17:37 Scott Ingram: All right. Right, right about the same time this will be going live. So, as you're listening to this, check in with Sarah or just follow her on LinkedIn. She does an awesome job there and see how that's going. I'm curious about, especially kind of coming through the SDR process, if you were starting over today, knowing what you know now from the sales experience that you've had, is there anything that you would do differently?

18:00 Sarah Brazier: Yeah, I think the answer is kind of yes and kind of no. The things that I did wrong at my last company, I'm glad I did wrong because it brought me to Gong and Gong answered a lot of questions for me that I had been struggling with. And so I'm glad I came to Gong because It has been probably the best thing for my career to date. But what I wish I had known or had challenged myself, and I think it just comes from experience, is there were questions that I didn't ask that I now would ask if I took an SDR or any kind of position anywhere else. And they're just around like, how does my manager define success? How has my manager taken an SDR who was struggling, who wasn't hitting quota, and helped them become a top performer? What are the company's values? What does the C-suite look like? What are the executives like? How does culture trickle down from the top? Questions like that, questions around quota attainment, and just big picture things that I didn't have the previous knowledge to ask that I know now, and that I wish, like, If you're coming out of college or you're just transitioning into the world of sales, those are really important questions to ask and to be aware of. Yeah, that's kind of what I wish I'd known, but I wouldn't change it because I think the things that went wrong prepared me to correct them, to correct those mistakes and have actually made me better, if that makes sense.

19:31 Scott Ingram: Yeah, it does. So I want to go deep on both of those things. So I want to talk more about like what was wrong. And then I want to talk more about This is a huge topic for me, just this idea of how do you properly do due diligence to find the right sales job? Because if you're in the wrong one, it's just miserable. So, in the first SDR experience, what was off? Like, why weren't you successful the first time, Sarah?

19:54 Sarah Brazier: Yeah, I didn't know how to make a cold call and I didn't know how to send an email. And that sounds silly, but like I came from teaching writing long-form speeches. I did a little bit of social media marketing. And when I would write these emails, these cold emails, they were way too general. They were way too broad. And they were just like, hey, have you ever heard of our company before? What's in it for you? Take a meeting now. And like, I spent way too long creating these sequences. Every single one had like a video of me unpacking some value proposition. It was just like too much. It was like, Oh, actually, in sales, less is more. Actually, you only need a 3-sentence, very tailored email specifically to that person. That's like, hey, Scott, I know who you are. I know what you like. I know what you don't like. I imagine this might be a problem for you. Is this a problem? If so, do you have time to talk for a little bit? Just like, great. I didn't know how to do that. I would call people. I'd make way more dials there than I did at Gong, but I wasn't calling the right people because I didn't really know what my ICP was. And when I did get someone on the phone, I had no idea how to A, objection handle, B, I didn't know what questions I should be asking to really get someone to start thinking about their company in a way that, that would make them realize that the problem that they have, because, you know, a lot of times in startup land, we're disrupting something, we're disrupting the status quo. And so, there has to be an element of education, especially in a cold call. From an SDR because they probably don't know that the problem they have is really a problem, right? So, you have to ask a good enough question that gets someone to go, huh, I never thought about it that way. I didn't know what that question was or how to ask it. I didn't even know how to call someone and say, hey, listen, the reason for my call is XYZ. Can I just have 30 seconds of your time to tell you a little bit about what we do and then you tell me if it makes sense to continue the conversation? I had no idea how to do that. I didn't even have like 27-second dog and pony show to give anyone. And so I was just like wasting all of these cold connects and I wasn't getting any results. And then there, I also had to run discovery calls and I didn't know how to run a discovery call. So I would pass these leads off to an AE and I think they were qualified because I did my BANT checklist, but my AE would get it and they'd be like, No, why did you send this to me? You just wasted my time. So I was just doing everything wrong and I just had no idea what the right way to do something was. So yeah, I did a lot of things wrong.

22:35 Scott Ingram: Well, and that was great because you answered a lot of my questions that I would have asked in between in terms of like, okay, well, what does your cold call sound like? And some of those things, right? So from a development education perspective, was it really just finding the right manager? I mean, was that kind of the secret sauce that helped you come through this? I mean, I know you talked about it before, but I'm just wondering if there were kind of other resources that helped you get there.

22:57 Sarah Brazier: Yeah, I think one is the right manager. It's someone who's like, who knows that coaching is the best way to get a young, fresh, green SDR the business acumen they need to be successful. Because coming from the world of theater, I didn't know what ARR meant. Like, I was like, well, I can talk to you about Meisner. Have you ever heard of viewpoints theory? But, you know, like, that's probably above most salespeople's heads unless they've taken some acting classes. And it's the same thing. Like, I had no idea what the terminology was. So, yeah, I needed someone who was invested enough to help me understand that. And that meant I needed a company that took their enablement both from a coaching, hands-on, day-to-day perspective from the manager seriously, and also from how they educate their sellers to make them the most successful. And yeah, I mean, like everything from, you know, knowing the right thing and then being on a team, like my team at Gong is so like, everybody's just helping each other out. It's like, hey, I noticed that you're hunting down this account. I actually, one of my friends works there. Do you want me to set up a call with you so you can kind of pick their brain and kind of get the lay of the land so you can better tailor your messaging? It's like stuff like that. It's like, everybody's just like, helping each other out. So, it's very, very like, we're all in this together. We're going to win as a team. And that was important. It was important to have the right manager. And then, it was important to have a company that took how they enable their SDRs really seriously, because there is a problem within startup culture that's like, SDRs are young, they're green, they're a dime a dozen. Like, turnover is usually typically high in a lot of SDR orgs. And companies just are like, that's fine because we'll just get someone else to fill the seat. But that's like a broken system. And you want a company that knows that SDRs are incredibly valuable and that the hardest part right now in sales, basically everybody who's, not me, because I don't know anything, but like when I talk to people who've been in sales for a long time, like I was just talking to our new VP of sales, Bob Spina, and he was saying, yeah, top of the funnel is the hardest part. There's so much noise. So, having someone who can cut through it is so important and that takes a lot of training and a lot of enablement to get someone that skillset. So, you have to have a company that takes that really seriously and Gong does. So, yeah, I mean, I think those 3 factors were super important for me.

25:21 Scott Ingram: Yeah. So spot on. I mean, I was talking about this, I don't know, a month or 2 ago about, and I think I did a Daily Sales Tip on it just in terms of like, I think the SDR role and sort of that traditional model that you described in the beginning, right. Where it's just super high turnover. I'm like, it's a career trap. You're never going to get the experience you need. You're never going to be able to move beyond this unless you find an organization like Gong that is treating this as, hey, this is a super important developmental opportunity. Like we need to grow people and help them be successful in this role and have a place for them to go, right? So that they can move into an AE role. Or I also believe that we can actually professionalize the SDR role. Like if somebody is really great at being an SDR, Why don't we just pay them like an AE? Because they're probably generating 3 or 4 times as many meetings as somebody that's new and fresh that would churn in a typical organization.

26:11 Sarah Brazier: Yeah, exactly. And I just think like it's better for business to invest upfront in a new SDR because that SDR is going to become your next CSM, your next AE, your next whatever. And that ends up being incredibly economical, right? We spend so much money trying to get great people in seat to be a commercial AE or commercial CSM, or, you know, have an entry-level marketing role. You know, if you just took that money and you spent it on developing an SDR, you have someone that you don't have to ramp. You have someone who's invested in the company. Like, to me, it's so much smarter to get your SDRs really good at being an SDR because you also develop so much grit. You develop massive business acumen. You could be a resource to a company in a myriad of areas, but people just have to invest in them.

27:02 Scott Ingram: Yeah. So, we've been dropping like acronyms like crazy. So, I'm going to do like real quick definition on stuff just in case. So, ICP is an ideal customer client profile. ARR, annual recurring revenue. SDR, sales development rep. AE, account executive. CSM, customer success manager or client success manager. I think I got them all.

27:24 Sarah Brazier: Yeah.

27:24 Scott Ingram: So, Sarah, I want to come back because you, you already started to outline this, but I want to just go one layer deeper. If somebody is either thinking about their first SDR job or they just interested in sales, maybe they're in an SDR job, but they know like, I'm never going to develop and grow here. Like, this is not working, but I still want to do this. Let's go crazy with the questions and just that due diligence process. Like, what are the things they should be looking for? What are the questions they should be asking to find that right opportunity that's really going to give them an opportunity to develop and grow and build just an amazing foundation for themselves so that they can become that enterprise account executive that's, that's making multiple 6 figures, maybe even 7 figures?

28:08 Sarah Brazier: Yeah, I mean, so I think one of the first things, if I was just starting out as an SDR, I'd want to know who I was selling to. I think one of the things at my last company was that I actually really didn't identify with our buyer. And it was kind of hard to imagine myself, you know, use my imagination and my empathy skills to get in their head. And I love talking to salespeople. So getting on the phone with a VP of sales or a CRO, and then I always ask them at the end of my cold calls, like, hey, what should I have done differently? How could I make this better? And it's like immediate coaching, you know?

28:44 Scott Ingram: Love it.

28:44 Sarah Brazier: It's amazing. It's great. And I like the conversation. I like that type of person. I like the way salespeople think. So I think like first off the bat is like, who do you want to sell to? Because tech sales, you could be selling selling to a CFO, you could be selling to a CRO, you could be selling to CTO, a CIO, you could be selling to a tier down from that. Like, who do you like to talk to? And as an SDR, you don't need to necessarily know the answer to that question because you might grow into liking what you're selling. But, you know, do you want to be involved in a far more technical sale or do you want something a little less like that? Do you want to be talking to CMOs or who do you want to talk to? I think is important. I think like another important question is when you get into that interview is just like, you need to be asking questions about like, so what's turnover like? You know, how many SDRs have actually quit in the past year? How many SDRs have been promoted? What was their promotion path like? How long is your ramp? How many SDRs have hit that ramp? How many SDRs are currently hitting quota? Like, what's your average quota attainment a month? How are you comping people? You know, what kind of accelerators do you have in place? Just questions like that, because you're interviewing them as much as they're interviewing you. And like, until coronavirus gets super bad and the economy takes a downturn, it's still an employee's market. So you can say no if they don't answer the question the way you want them to. I also think like, do you want like questions to starting out SDRs is like, If the company is, you know, 100 people, you're going to be one of the first SDRs, which means there's going to be a lot of experimentation and failure and processes aren't going to be built out as much. Are you comfortable with that? That's a personal question you have to answer for yourself. Versus if you're working at a larger company, they might have processes in place that might require you to be in seat for a certain number of months, which might limit or make being an SDR longer before promotion becomes an actual feasible opportunity for you. So, be asking questions around those things. And then, I think, what am I missing here? I'm kind of, kind of tangenting now.

30:53 Scott Ingram: No, I think you're getting a lot of it. And I think, as you were talking about, you know, if you're going to be the first one in a role, right, if you're at that sort of scale of organization, I think really just understanding their expectations, right? If they don't have the experience of this is how many people are achieving ramp and are at quota and those types of things, Just understanding how quickly are you expecting me to be productive and kind of calling out the fact that you realize you've never done this before, right? There's a lot of stuff I'm going to have to figure out. And also the things you were talking about earlier in terms of just vetting the leadership and the management, right? Like the culture of an organization is always top down. This applies both positively and negatively, but the negative way I think about this is a fish stinks from the head down. So if something is squirrely, oftentimes that emanates from the C-suite. So what's the personality of the CEO and what is their track record? And then your immediate manager. I mean, Sarah, to your point, I think you're a perfect testament of this. I don't know that I've interviewed anybody on this show ever that is wildly successful despite their manager. It's typically because of their manager, right? They've got a great partner that is helping them win, that is a great coach that is developing them. And is in this with them, right? So, I think you've really got to dig in and just figure out, is this somebody that is going to help me get better and is going to coach me and develop me, or is this just somebody I'm going to fight with and my life's going to be miserable?

32:23 Sarah Brazier: Exactly. And I think to that point, it's like, is your manager incentivized to move you forward in your career? I think sometimes what happens is an SDR manager, you're a top performer and If they lose you, they're gonna lose a big chunk of their number, right?

32:39 Scott Ingram: Yes.

32:39 Sarah Brazier: Yes. So, what is currently in place at the company right now to make sure that person is invested in you developing your skillset so much that you're not only a top producer for them, but also so that they can confidently recommend you into whatever role you want in the timeline that you both agree is fair? Yeah, I think that's super important.

33:04 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Good stuff. Awesome. Well, I'm, I'm so glad we talked about that. I mean, again, it's something that I keep coming back to because very few people do it well, right? What you said that was super important is you're interviewing them also. Like, this is not a one-way street. You're just not trying to sell yourself and get the job. You've got to figure out, is this even the right job for me? You're about to invest a huge percentage of your waking hours You gotta make sure that this is right for you. So, you know, taking on that responsibility and asking these questions and just doing the work, and don't just ask them of one person, right? You've really gotta kind of triangulate these details. I'm always asking, you know, let me talk to somebody that just finished their ramp. I wanna understand what that new person experience is like from somebody who just went through it, not somebody that went through it 5 years ago, but that went through it now. And let me talk to the somebody that's at the top of their game that's doing really well. What does that look like? And just getting those different perspectives to understand not just what the hiring manager might be telling you, because they might be desperate and working really hard to put a butt in a seat and they'll tell you anything. That's bad too.

34:09 Sarah Brazier: Yeah. You always have to do that back investigative detective work. It is so important. And it's also a sign that you're a good SDR because that's literally what SDRs do all the time. We're constantly being detectives. So, it's just, it's good practice.

34:22 Scott Ingram: Exactly. Exactly. And I tell people, I mean, that's the number one piece of advice that I have is if you're looking for a new sales job, job, that is a sales job. So, act like it, right? Like, build a great pipeline. You know, have a lot of people that you're interviewing with. Those interviews, it's like a discovery process. Run it like a discovery process. Make sure you're following up well. I mean, you run it like a deal. You've got a close process. Okay, explain what are the steps in your process before you hire somebody. Understand all of those and who's involved and manage the freaking process. It's a sales job.

34:52 Sarah Brazier: Yes, exactly. In that same realm, I've been thinking about this a lot lately because one of my coworkers, Adam Ochart, said it to me, and he's so right. It's like, when you're an SDR and you're trying to get promoted into the next position, especially if it's a closing role, think of it the way you would a deal cycle. Run those conversations like a deal cycle. Figure out who your actual buyer is versus who your champion is and who you need to be talking to and communicating with and getting on the same page as you work your way through, through the organization and through the company. That's been something I have been actively learning as I'm gearing up to become an AE. It's like, how are we going to get this done? And how are we going to get it done today, guys?

35:31 Scott Ingram: Yeah, there you go. There you go. Yeah. Sarah, what is your favorite sales story? Talk about an experience that you had. Maybe it was a super hard-to-get meeting. It's a meeting that you're super proud of, or maybe you just fell on your face and you learned something from that process.

35:45 Sarah Brazier: Yeah. So, one of the things that I think is challenging as an SDR is knowing what professional persistence actually is. I think that what happens often is someone tells us no. And so, we think that no is a no always instead of a not yet or not now. So, every time I hear a no, I think no for now, if I believe the no is actually a no. So, my first thought when someone rejects me is, well, they haven't heard the pitch. They don't actually know why I'm talking to them. That's on me. It's my bad. So, I just need to take a new approach, try to get an opportunity to educate them a little bit, because I know that if they hear my pitch, they're going to be more intrigued. And then, if they tell me no, then maybe it's a no for now. And then, it's like, okay, so, like, when is my opportunity going to happen? So, like, there's a company that I was hunting, and this happened pretty recently, but I read their quarterly earnings call for end of Q4, and they just launched a new product. They've been talking about like how they want their sales team to be performing. This product that they launched, they felt like did really well, but the CEO was talking about how he's got these really big expectations for it. And it hasn't fully reached the expectations that he set out because he literally says multiple times throughout the quarterly earnings call, like, I've got big expectations. And this product's supposed to differentiate them. It's a company in the security space. 2020 is a big year for security, especially because of the elections. But a lot of customers are consolidating vendors. So, if you're selling to security, this is a great time, great time to sell software to them. So, there's this guy, I know he's my guy, and I send him an email, and I know he's reading it because Outreach is telling me he's read it, and he keeps reading it. He keeps opening my emails. I call him, I get his buddy because he left his cell phone in his buddy's car, and he's like, yeah, What do you want? And I was so thrown off that I fell on my face and I just missed an opportunity to pitch to his friend who has a cell phone. So I call him back and he picks up the phone and then he hangs up on me. And so for the next like 2 weeks, I'm still sending him emails. He's still reading them a lot. And I just keep calling him and he keeps hanging up on me. And then finally I was like, I'm going to see what happens if I send him a text. Because like, Let's just see what happens. So, I say something like, hey, we keep playing phone tag, or like, I keep missing you, something like that, or like, I just have such a terrible connection shooting you a text. Wanted to see if you have some time to chat a little bit later. Can't remember my exact language, but he texts me back. He just texts me a time and a day. So, then I go to the meeting with him and my AE, and he brings 2 of his managers with him. So, he's a director of sales. He brings 2 managers. So, all of a sudden, I've got way more buy-in. And we run this call and for the first 10 minutes, he just talks about how he loved how persistent I was and how he wished his SDRs were just like me. And then he loved my AEE's pitch so much and how she set up and ran the call that at the end of the call, he offered both of us jobs. And I think like, that's, I think that's like a little bit of the grit that you have to have as an SDR. And you just got to keep thinking like, Is he really saying no or is he just busy? His answer is probably busy right now. So just keep, you know, don't be too much, but if he keeps reading the emails, then I think you have a shot at asking for a meeting. So yeah, but I mean, on the other side, one time I emailed a lady and she opened my email like 15 times and I thought, well, she's probably interested if she opens it 15 times. So I called her once or twice and finally I shot her an email. I was like, hey, you know, I've noticed that you've opened my email 30-some times. So, either I did something really good here or I did something really bad. If I did something really bad, I guess I'll just go crawl in a hole. But if I did something good, you know, what's resonating with you? And she responded that what I wrote did resonate, but I was too aggressive calling her and it overwhelmed her. And now she doesn't want to talk. So, then I fell on my sword and I was like, oh, I'm so sorry. Like, I'm new to sales. I'm trying to figure out the balance of professional persistence. I really didn't mean to overstep my bounds. Is there any chance that I can make it up to you? Like, what do I need to do differently to earn the right to have an opportunity to speak for 15 minutes? And she was just like, yeah, no, no, it's not going to happen. She was going on maternity leave. So, she was like, you can talk to me in 6 months. And I was like, okay, I'll respect that. Well, last week she just had a conversation with an AE and she remembered my emails and she remembered my persistence. And she was like, I'm ready to talk now. And now they're in a buying cycle. So even when you get a no, and even when you fall on your… like, you should, A, fall on your sword if you overstep your bounds and, you know, try to rebuild trust and respect. But just because it's a no, it's just for now. I think that's like the sales story I have. Does that work?

40:49 Scott Ingram: Yeah, no, that's fantastic. And what's so interesting about that, I mean, part of it I think is just being able to call on sales professionals, right? Because we respect the game. And if somebody is playing the game well, then it's a little bit easier, I think, in that perspective, right? I think in some ways we're a little bit more open to it when it's well, although at the same time, I think it's probably a double-edged sword in that if you suck and you're generic, you're really easy to ignore.

41:16 Sarah Brazier: Yeah. Well, I think that's actually how I feel a lot right now. Like one time I posted on LinkedIn and that post got tons of likes and views. And so now I've accidentally like fallen into having a following. Which is cool and can sometimes be helpful. But I also feel this added pressure of all of my outreach needs to be really good because I need to continue to walk the walk that I keep talking about. And so, it's definitely like, I'm like learning double fast right now. But yeah, like, you need to be good. If you're selling to sales leaders, you need to be good. And when you're not good, you need to say, hey, listen, I'm messing up here and I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong. You're a sales leader. Can you just give me feedback so that no one ever has to suffer through such a boring email ever again?

42:07 Scott Ingram: That's awesome. Let's talk about the LinkedIn thing. So, how did this start? It sounds like it was kind of an accident. You posted something that just went really big. And then since then, you've just kind of had this following.

42:19 Sarah Brazier: Yeah, that's exactly what happened. I had called this VP of sales. I called him a couple times. I would wait like a month between each call. And every time I called him, he was in a bad mood. So, I called him once. I called him like a month before. He's like, yeah, I can't talk. I'm not going to talk to you right now. Call me in a month. And the company, it was such, it's such a good use case. I was like, I have to get somebody from this company on the phone because I know, like, if we could just start a conversation, we could have a critical impact on their top-line revenue. So, we have to talk. And this guy sometimes answers his phone, even though he's grouchy when he does. So I called him and he was just like, why are you calling me? It's Q4. Don't you know not to call people in Q4? And then he hung up on me. And I thought like, wow, first of all, this is literally the first week of Q4. So let's settle down. And 2, like, you are a sales guy. Why are you telling salespeople not to make calls? You're not telling your team not to do that. Like, that's crazy. So I just told that story on LinkedIn and I was like, yeah, that guy, he's just in a bad mood. I'm just going to keep dialing. And somebody from like the Revenue Collective or some, I don't know what happened, but somebody commented on it, which suddenly gave it tons of visibility. And by the end of the day, I had like 1.5 million views, 10,000 likes, and just like hundreds of comments. And I had literally hundreds of people asking to connect on LinkedIn. And it was just like, oh my gosh, well, this is crazy. This is sort of like fallen into my lap. I have booked tons of meetings from people commenting on people at my companies, like their LinkedIn posts, because typically if there's engagement, then I can sort of start a conversation around what they're engaging with, understand why they commented, understand how that is either a symptom of something that's happening at their company. There's just like a lot of opportunity there to start a very casual conversation that can turn into a very like no-pressure ask, which has ended up helping me book meetings that turn into closed-won revenue. So, why don't I try that? And so, I just started posting more. And every time I posted, I'd get a couple hundred likes. And I was like, well, this is really cool. I should just keep doing it. And that is how I became what I like to jokingly refer to as LinkedIn famous. It's just like, that's it. I just posted once and now I've got a Following. It's so weird.

44:45 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Yeah. What's interesting is like any of the things that I've done, and I mean, I've been using LinkedIn for years, anything that has ever gone borderline viral, I think I posted something a couple of years ago that got, you know, several thousand likes and maybe got to a million views. It's never had anything to do with what I do. I'm like, well, that's great. Like I've got all this visibility and attention right now, but it's not connected to anything that is relevant. So I think what's cool about what you were able to do is it was directly connected to your world and the people that you want to attract and sort of having that audience. But I'm really interested in… talk more about the casual conversation approach.

45:26 Sarah Brazier: Yes. I learned this more and more as people start hitting me up on LinkedIn. Like, it's weird. It's kind of like I'm an SDR, but now people are prospecting me. I know that often it's because people think I'm not an SDR. People think I'm something else. And they didn't go to my page and look at the part where it says senior SDR. So, they think I lead a team, or one time somebody thought I was like a director of content. That's what they told me. They're like, hey, you're the director of content, right? And I'm like, no, I'm not. I'm an SDR. I'm just an individual contributor. So, what I do is if someone comments on my post, or sometimes people will chat me, And they'll say, hey, I really enjoy your content. Well, they just happen to be an ICP. Usually it's someone that's actually like in one of my coworkers' names, but they're like the right person and they're the right account, the right kind of industry. So I'll just respond to their note or I'll just say hi to them. I'll say, hey, I appreciate you commenting on my post. That's actually really interesting. And I'll ask them an open-ended question about what they do. And then we start talking and then I just ask them questions about them and ask, you know, it could be one time I talked to a CRO and it was just about, he manages a team in San Francisco, but he lives in Atlanta. Like, why? What's that commute like? And we just talked for like 5 days back and forth. And then I was like, hey, you know, you can totally tell me no. I always say this. I'm like, hey, listen, I know it's not cool to pitch over LinkedIn, so you can totally tell me no. And my feelings won't be hurt. But I did notice these couple things are going on in your company, or you write this thing about yourself on LinkedIn, or you've been following our content. I'm just curious, like, would you be open to a 15-minute, no-pressure conversation? But that ask comes after we've spent a lot of time chatting and building rapport. And I pick the people that I ask really specifically because there needs to be like a very clear, clear something that's happening in their company. Or something that they tell me in our conversations that makes it worth the ask. Because otherwise you're just going to step on someone's toes and I don't want to do that. I want to talk to people who want to talk to me because like, that's what we do as salespeople.

47:41 Scott Ingram: Yeah. So, I'm interested specifically in kind of the patience piece because I feel like the best I get is like fake patience where somebody starts the casual conversation. But about the most they can go is like 2 messages and 2 minutes. And then here comes a pitch. It's like, you know what? Gosh, you need to just chill for a minute. Like 2 messages, 2 exchanges. It's not even a whole conversation. So what do you look for? Like, is it 5 days? Is that a magical thing? Like, how have you developed this patience to just Because it works if you do it, but nobody does.

48:20 Sarah Brazier: Yeah, well, that's when you use… like, when do you ask somebody out that you just met at a bar? Well, definitely not… it's not the first line, it's not the second line. Typically what you do, if people still do this, like, if people don't Tinder about it or Bumble or whatever, like, if you meet someone that you find interesting and you just strike up a casual conversation with them, you have an hour-long conversation at the bar or on the park bench or wherever, but you talk to them for a while. And then after you've talked and you've gotten to know them, that's when you can qualify them into, should I ask this person out or not? And I think the same rule applies to sales. Like, I lead the conversation into asking qualifying questions, but super casually. Like, hey, you know, I saw that your team just grew like 200%. Like, what's that experience like? How are you doing that? Or I'll say something like, I noticed your team's growing really, really rapidly. Our team is too. What are you doing that's working as you scale? And I genuinely am curious what other companies are doing because like our company's growing really quickly. So I just want to compare, you know, are we like other people or not? And I think once they're like kind of qualified, once there's something happening, but 2 lines in is not enough to get to know you at all.

49:40 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I think if you take that to the bar analogy or the dating analogy, you're like, you barely got past my name and you're asking me inappropriate questions.

49:49 Sarah Brazier: Yeah. And I think if people just stopped and they thought about how would I feel if I was on the other side of this conversation, then you go, oh yeah, right. That is weird. I probably shouldn't do that. Now, granted, like sometimes I've tried that move where I've just tried to ask interesting questions and I know that people are reading my messages. I know that they're ignoring my cold calls and my voicemails. And I know that they're reading my emails, but they're not answering them. And that's okay. So then what I do is I send them a video with a little context and I send it to them on wherever I know that I'm getting actual views. So a lot of times, And this is actually what a girl I work with, her name's Abigail, she does this really, really well. She just sends a video when someone accepts her connection request. And so I did this with a VP of sales at a company where 2 of their biggest competitors are Gong customers. So I know that the conversation would be valuable to him. I pitched it as like, worst case scenario, you spend 15 minutes learning about what your 2 biggest competitors are doing to gain competitive insights. On what you guys do. Like, that's it. And I sent him a video being like, hey, I want to introduce myself and the reason for my outreach. And then I pulled up his LinkedIn page and I highlighted the exact lines in his LinkedIn that I thought were important. I highlighted a post that he'd recently posted on LinkedIn about how to enable salespeople and how to help them learn more on the job. And so I took those 2 things and I said, Gong can help you do that. Additionally, 2 of your biggest competitors use us, and one of the main use cases is you can gain competitive insights. So, worst-case scenario is you walk away knowing what they do differently. How does 15 minutes sound for a no-pressure conversation? If it still doesn't make sense, you can let us know, and we can shake hands and part ways friends. And then, he messaged me back immediately a time and day. Yeah.

51:43 Scott Ingram: Love it. Love it. I should call out because as this interview goes out, we should be 2 days before I release a whole bunch of stuff. So there's gonna be a webinar, there will be a PDF, there will be an ebook. There's sort of 2 titles that I'm playing with right now. I think I might actually use both of them in different pieces. One is the name of the webinar is Finding Sales Success on LinkedIn. And kind of the overarching theme here is this is all content from LinkedIn sales stars. So Sarah is one of over 30 people that I reached out to who are driving just massive levels of engagement on LinkedIn. And, you know, I'm constantly working to improve my game as well. And I thought, you know, I, I wanna learn from the best of the best. So why don't I do that? Not just for myself, but let's kind of share this with the audience. So Sarah was generous enough to contribute to that effort, and that will all be going out again starting April 2nd. If you go to top1.fm/linkedinsalesstars, I will have everything there. So if, if you If you happen to be listening to this after April 2nd, no worries. There will be a link to the recording of the webinar. And then again, PDF, ebook, lots of just, it's so good. We're recording this probably a month before that, just a little bit after that. And I'm learning a ton. So really looking forward to releasing all this. And Sarah, thanks for your help with that project.

53:03 Sarah Brazier: Yeah, absolutely.

53:04 Scott Ingram: So why don't we talk about routines a little bit and you kind of walk us through the day in the life as a poor starving thespian. What's a day in the life look like now? When does the alarm go off? Give us the blow-by-blow until your head hits the pillow on a typical day, if there is such a thing.

53:19 Sarah Brazier: Yeah. Okay. So, my attempt is to wake up at 5:30 in the morning. And I say attempt because this is something new I'm trying to do. Chris Orlob, who is another LinkedIn influencer, I would say, who also happens to be the Director of Growth at Gong, I was talking to him a couple of weeks ago. And we were just talking about grit and I was like, how do you practice grit? If you're already a gritty person, if you think of yourself as gritty, what do you do to practice that? And he said, well, you put yourself in uncomfortable situations. You just do like a little bit at a time. So for him, he's making himself wake up earlier than he usually does just so he can make himself just that little bit uncomfortable and become disciplined with that. So I thought, okay, I should do that. I could do that. I'm going to try that. Still talking myself into it. So my alarm goes off at 5:30. Sometimes I hit snooze, or what I really do is I like kind of roll over and I start reading things and I'm trying not to read on my phone. I'm trying to be like, let's read a book. But yeah, so 5:30 AM is when I wake up and then I get to the office between 7:30 and 8:00 AM. I ride the bus. So It's like a 30-minute commute on the bus, get to work. The first thing I do is wash my hands because I just rode the bus. And then I get a cup of coffee and I put my headphones on. And I put them on because one, they're noise canceling, so I can't hear anything around me. And 2, I think that headphones on just like gets me in game mode. I don't listen to music when I work pretty much ever because I just want like the quiet. And before I start making cold calls, I make a list of what I want to achieve. This is also a new habit I've recently been developing, but I found that it's increased my productivity immensely. And I do, it's Sandler because I'm reading Sandler's book, You Can't Teach a Kid to Ride a Bike, at a seminar. And he talks about like, you need to have a goal for your I, your R, and then you need to do your face-to-face. So, your R is your role. And your I is… now I'm blanking on what I stands for, but it's basically you as an individual. So, like, who am I versus what's the role I'm playing? Well, I'm Sarah. The role I'm playing is SDR. And, like, what is, from all the input that I'm putting in, what's my output going to look like? So, for my I, I usually challenge myself to not be frustrated because I think there's like so many things that can easily frustrate me about being in SDR, getting hung up on, or the internet's not working, or Salesforce is being slow, or whatever it is, or, you know, this thing interrupted my day and now I'm out of my, my flow and my mojo. And so, my challenge for myself for the past 3 weeks has been be a duck. Let whatever happens just roll off my back. You know, whatever storm comes by, just let it roll off my back. And stay positive, positive mindset. It's like the first thing I write down. Second thing I write down is what do I want to achieve in my role? I want to usually create a new sequence specific to a company that is one of the companies I own and I'm going after. So that means like read their quarterly earnings report or do some research on what's recently happened in the news and build out a tailored sequence around events that are going on in their business. That are directed toward business pain, find 20 people from that company and add them to that sequence, make 40 to 60 dials depending on where I am, and send like 20 to 40 emails. And that's my goal. And then usually I want to book one meeting a day because I do enterprise. If I was downmarket and SMB, it'd probably be more, but one meeting a day. And then I have like names of people that I know are engaging, or I know would be a great fit. I know they're the right guy to talk to, and I just write their names down. And so, I make sure that I have something to say to them, like something interesting. And then, I log how many connects do I get over email? How many people email me back? How many people answer the phone? How many people respond to a LinkedIn something? How many of those converted into a meeting? And then, at the end of the day, I write down how many emails I actually sent versus my goal, how many calls I made, versus my goal, how many people were added to sequence, et cetera. And then I do a historical review and I just write down like, these are the things that I was frustrated about that I had trouble letting go. Why is that? Why am I having trouble letting go of these frustrating things? Okay. So, how do I need to rethink about that? What shift needs to take place in my mindset? So, that's my historical review for my I. For my R, it's like, okay, I didn't make as many dials. Why is that? Did I space out? Did I go into la-la land after lunch while I was digesting? Or What did I do? What did I do that made me not get what I wanted? How can I change that? And then, how do I feel about myself? How do I feel about me versus how do I feel about the way I performed in my role? I rank that on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the best, 1 being the not so best. And then, I just ask myself why. Why am I not feeling good about me? Well, it's probably because I only got 6 hours of sleep last night, drank too much coffee. Let's fix that. Let's fix that for tomorrow. Or, you know, I don't feel good about how I performed in my role because I really blew it on some cold calls. Well, let's tag my AE and get her to give me some feedback on how I should have actually been framing those questions or how I should have objection handled this email, or, you know, what did I do wrong and what are the steps I need to take to fix it? So that's sort of a day in the life of an SDR from like how I frame it. And then I just make a lot of dials and I'm sending a lot of emails. I build out a lot of sequences and sometimes I go to a lot of meetings too. I try not to go to too many meetings though, because that gets in the way of getting stuff done.

59:05 Scott Ingram: So I have questions and then I'll let you go through kind of the evening. So you said that you make 40 to 60 calls depending on where you are. What does where you are mean?

59:14 Sarah Brazier: Yeah, it's like how many people are actually in sequence? You know, like how many people am I actually reaching out to? So I build out sequences in Outreach and I use the Agoge sequence that Sam Nelson talks about. There's like a, if people want to find that, you can go to his LinkedIn and he's posted an article about it. It's just like the outline is what I use. And so, I don't call the same people every day. So, it's like where I am in terms of sequences. And then also, where am I in terms of quota attainment? And how do I look in terms of meeting my goal? Because if I'm behind and there's people opening my emails or whatever, Or they're not, maybe the best way to reach them is the phone. And so, I think making dials is the best way to get my activity metrics up. I don't think about activity metrics too, too much, only in the fact that they help with outcomes. And if making more dials is going to be the outcome is more meetings, then, and it's easy to do that. I don't have to spend a ton of thinking time figuring out what my sequence is and what my messaging is. I already know because I wrote them an email 2 weeks ago, drop them into a call sequence. The task and just call them and see if I can repeat what I said in my email to them over the phone and get a meeting out of that. So it depends on where I'm in, both in terms of like, who do I need to call today? And am I hitting my goals? Am I hitting my metrics that I've set for myself?

1:00:34 Scott Ingram: That makes sense. And that's a pretty good transition to… it sounds like you are really kind of essentially capturing your conversion metrics. So just understanding how effective you are in email, on the phone, in LinkedIn, and basically all the channels that you're leveraging. Did I hear that right?

1:00:52 Sarah Brazier: Yeah. Yes. Because like, I think like KPIs are only as good as the quality of outreach within those KPIs and can end up becoming a red herring for a lot of SDRs. It's like my boss said I had to make 60 dials. So they make 60 dials to crummy numbers or they don't have good connects or whatever. And they're just doing it. They're just going through the motion. If I conceptualize KPIs that way, That's not going to help me be successful. So I think about outcomes. My dad talks about this all the time. Like when we talk about sales together, it's like you focus, what is the objective and what is the outcome? So don't manage to the activity you want me to do, manage to what the objective and the outcome is. And if a KPI helps me get there and we both agree that I'm better on the phones than I am via email or whatever, then yeah, then I should put my energy into making more calls. Right? And I feel like conversations over the phone are just more efficient. And I can say what I need to say on the phone. So I want to connect with someone on the phone. Because it's way easier to objection handle over the phone than waiting for someone to respond to an email. Yeah, that's how I think about it.

1:01:59 Scott Ingram: And I was gonna ask along those lines, and you maybe have already answered the question, but maybe you want to go a little bit deeper, is what are you finding that is working the best? And is it because it's working best for you because you're just better at the phone? Or are you seeing just any sort of change or shift in the channels and the way that people are responding these days?

1:02:18 Sarah Brazier: Honestly, it really just depends, right? It's kind of like how I was more intense with my outreach with that guy who loved it. And when I texted him, he was ecstatic, right? And he was like, yeah, let's meet, because I love your persistence. And then he loved the way we set up the call. So like, That's that guy. That's like the way he is. And he liked that versus other people might want you to back off a little bit. One trend I noticed is that like, where are they from? People from the East Coast respond to that kind of gritty upfrontness. Like we're going to talk or we're going to talk way better than someone from the West Coast in my experience. Right. And that's very anecdotal. Like I could be totally off base, but that's kind of an observation I've made. So, like, yeah, phone works with some people and it works with some people really well. Other times people are like, they're mad that I called them and I can't say anything. I can't give them like a, hey, well, how about I just, can I tell you the reason I called? And then you tell me if it makes sense to continue the conversation. Like, no, you can't. And then they'll hang up on me and that's fine. I'm not going to call them. I'm going to find a nicer way to approach them. Maybe I'll send them a gift tailored to who they are via Sendoso or sending them a nice video. I don't know. So the phone works sometimes really well for me. It definitely worked really, really well when I was in SMB. Email works really well if I have a really, really good email. And that depends on what I can find out about the company and how much I can figure out what's going on with them that I can tailor to their business needs. So if I read something in a quarterly earnings call that's directly related to top-line revenue and how their strategy is changing this year. That's like an awesome opportunity for me to talk to a sales leader. And so, if I craft my messaging around that, I can get a lot of follow-ups. So, I did that with a company like 2 weeks ago, and I've probably booked 6 meetings in that same company off of the same email that I sent to everyone that was specifically about an interview that happened with their CRO and 2 pain points I knew the company was experiencing through talking to like someone in operations who was like an IC in operations who just like was willing to tell me like, hey, this is actually what's going on. Which is like the other thing is I leverage LinkedIn a lot to talk to individual contributors who follow Gong or like follow our content. And I say like, hey, I noticed you follow our content a lot, or you've downloaded a lot of our webinars or, you know, one-pagers. I'm curious, like if you were me, if you were an SDR, like what would you do in order to penetrate this account? And often, I'd say 80% of the time, they respond to me and then we have a conversation. They're like, yeah, I love Gong. I really want it. This is who I would go after if I were you. These are the problems that our company's experiencing right now. And so then I take that information and I use it to tailor an email. So if I can do that, I get a lot of responses over email because it's so on point with what they're struggling with versus LinkedIn. It's like, Oh, a VP of sales from a company that's actually in my account list follows me on LinkedIn. Well, I can just say hi to him and he'll say like, hey, I'm really enjoying your content. And then we just talk about content generation and creation. And then I say something really casual like, hey man, you can totally tell me no and go away, but you're actually like, your account is in my account list. And would it be fair to spend 15 minutes to just tell us a little bit about what's going on in your company? And see if it might be worth continuing a conversation. If not, totally fine. Just wanted to put it out there since like you are in my account list and we are talking right now.

1:06:01 Scott Ingram: I'm halfway there. Come on, buddy.

1:06:03 Sarah Brazier: Yeah. So like I'd say every avenue works. It's just like, how are you pulling that lever? Like how are you pulling the lever? And like, how are people engaging with it? But I can't say like phone calling is the best for me or like LinkedIn is the best for me. It's all of it. It's like pushing all of those buttons and just making sure like, okay, well, LinkedIn's not working for me today, so let's go make some cold calls. We're like, wow, no one's picking up. It's been 40 dials. Maybe we should build out a sequence, you know?

1:06:30 Scott Ingram: Yeah, absolutely. So, the last thing that I want to ask about the role part of your day is when you get to the end of the day and you're rating yourself, what's a typical rating? Are you hard on yourself? Are you usually doing a pretty good job? Like, what does that look like?

1:06:43 Sarah Brazier: It's all over the place. It's like, if I didn't get the KPIs I put for myself, because these are all things that I'm giving myself, not my boss. Like, these are expectations I have for me. If I can't meet my own expectations within my role, well, that's a problem, right? I'm going to have a problem with me, with me playing that character. I use my actor brain and I put it as a character. Like, I, as a human being, my individual self, is very different than the action of being in SDR. So, I'm not going to compare me with my role, but the role I have, if I didn't play the character well, then, like, let's figure out what needs to be adjusted. So, like, sometimes it's like, wow, I didn't build any of the sequences I wanted to build. I got coffee with someone for an hour and a half when I shouldn't have. It was supposed to be a 30-minute meeting. Like, no, bad. X. And so I'll give myself a low rating. But, you know, if I had a goal of booking one meeting and I booked 3 and I had some really wildly good conversations and I felt like, wow, like I feel like I overachieved on my goals. I did more than I asked myself to do. Then I'm going to give myself like a 9 or a 10 because I asked myself to do those things that I did more. And Jordan Peterson, he writes about this in his book, but he just talks about like, you have to be kind to yourself. If you do what you asked yourself to do, then you should give yourself a reward. Like, people struggle to manage themselves more than they do to manage other people. You know, like, you have to parent yourself. Sandler talks about that. There's the child, the parent, and the adult, you know, of these personas. But you have to parent yourself sometimes. You have to ask yourself to do things and then you have to do them. And then if you do them, you have to say, good job, me. So that's kind of how I think about it. And then with my, like, individual self, like, I'm pretty comfortable in who I am as a human, but I can be disappointed in me when I'm not being nice to me or when I'm letting things get to me that I know shouldn't. And then that's when I have to talk myself through, the reason why you're frustrated right now, Sarah, isn't actually because the situation that's happening is really frustrating. The situation is normal. You're overreacting to it because you didn't take care of yourself over the weekend, or you didn't take care of yourself this week. You weren't kind to yourself leading into this moment, i.e., getting enough sleep, eating the right things, drinking too much coffee, that kind of stuff. So I think it's like that constant analysis and self-awareness of like, did I do what I needed to do earlier to feel good now? If that's the case, then we need to correct. And it's cyclical. No one is perfect. And being okay with not being perfect is also important. And it's just sort of like those kind of continuing conversations.

1:09:26 Scott Ingram: Yeah. What was the Jordan Peterson book?

1:09:28 Sarah Brazier: It's 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, written in 2018. It's controversial.

1:09:33 Scott Ingram: How so?

1:09:34 Sarah Brazier: It's controversial in that there… so Jordan Peterson says things that a lot of people don't like. Well, a lot of… see if I can say this tactfully. So Jordan Peterson is a conservative former Harvard professor who will make statements about, you know, to really achieve equality in work. Why are women paid less than men? He asks some big hard-hitting questions about maybe what needs to happen is adjustments need to be made. Let me step back even farther. There's an interview with Jordan Peterson where he is talking to a woman who is a very liberal feminist and she is asking him, Why are women paid 80 cents to the dollar for men? And his explanation is like, well, if we actually look at the roles that women are in versus men, we see that that number is actually a lot less. And she makes an argument about like, we need to hire for more feminine traits. Like, we need to hire more women into roles that aren't feminine. And he's saying, well, like, men are going to be competitive with those women. They're not going to let go of those jobs easily. So maybe women need to take on more masculine traits in order to get the jobs that they want. So there's things about that that make people feel like he's a controversial kind of guy because he pokes holes in a lot of what I consider to be like not fully feminist theories. Like, he pokes holes in pop feminism. But if you are a pop feminist, you're probably not really getting to the core of like feminist philosophy. And there's also like multiple forms of feminist philosophy that disagree with each other. And I think there's like people who like read like one-liners of Jordan Peterson and get really offended by him and get angry about it. So like once I was having dinner with a couple that like someone brought up Jordan Peterson. I didn't, but this woman literally left the room because she was so offended that this other guy would bring up Jordan Peterson in her presence. And then that couple stopped talking to me and that guy because we were like, yeah. And I was like, whoa, this is so weird. So sorry for tangenting so much, but yeah, like Jordan Peterson, some people are really like really into him and some people are like, no, no, no, no, Jordan Peterson is practically Hitler returned. I don't think he's that at all. But I actually decided to read his book because like I consider myself to be a feminist, but I also consider myself to be a rationalist. And so I was like, I'm having trouble seeing that this guy is actually… there's a lot of guys who like fall into the incel women should be happy with working from the household and being in matronly roles. And like, there are some guys who also cling on to lines of Jordan Peterson and totally misinterpret what he's saying. And so, it's like more like the populism around what people think he's saying versus what he is saying that make him controversial.

1:12:19 Scott Ingram: Got it. Got it. Since we've opened this box, what does a rational feminist such as yourself think about women in sales?

1:12:25 Sarah Brazier: I think that the data shows that women tend to be the top performers in Salesforce. We know this. So, more women should join sales. I also think that if we just look at sales as a whole, it is clear that it's mostly dudes and usually white dudes in sales. And that's just the way it is. That's the status quo. And we can ask ourselves questions around, so, why is that? And I think typically sales is considered to be a male profession. And It's considered to be a little more white-collar than blue-collar. And there's like lots of reasons for the way sales is the way it is. And there tends to be a lot of men who are former athletes in sales because we consider sales to be competitive. And so, we want to hire people who we think of as competitive. So, who competes a lot? Athletes do. So, that's what we have. And that's the status quo. I think like the reality is, is that probably be best for business if that changes. If you think about who are business owners, Who are our buyers? They're not all white dudes who probably played sports. That's just a fact. Minorities and women who run and own businesses is a multi-billion dollar market, multi-trillion dollar market actually. So it would be smart and savvy if we diversify our sales floor. And so getting more women and more people of color and more minorities, in whatever definition that is, onto the sales floor is good because whether we like it or not, the reality is the way we're hardwired as humans, as animals, is that we flock toward people. Birds of a feather flock together. We spend time with people who look like us. It's easier for us to build relationships from people who look like us. And I don't mean like literally physically look like us, but that we have commonalities with. So, to me, I think Like, it is a no-brainer to diversify the sales floor. We also know that when you have more diversity in leadership, i.e., like more women in leadership, women tend to hire women, men tend to hire men. That's like also a fact. There's like a Forbes article I read about it and you can go look it up. So, if we want more women on the sales floor, we need to hire more women into sales leadership or promote women into sales leadership or people of color or whatever kind of minority. And so, we need to have more people who are diverse up top making business decisions, hiring more people. They'll probably hire people who look like them, because that's just what we do. These are unconscious biases that we have, because it's better for business. And we also know that people who employ a more diverse leadership team increase their bottom line revenue by 19%. So, it's like, there's a clear business reason to increase diversity. It's not just like, Hey, it's nice and it's good because it gives people opportunities. Yeah, that's like a moral or, you know, a good benefit to it, an ethical benefit, because you can feel warm and fuzzy for doing the hashtag right thing. But if you're going to be like shrewd CFO, I'm a business person. If you're a finance person or a numbers guy or gal or person, it is smart for you to diversify the sales floor. And yeah, the numbers also show that women tend to bring in more business. Like, our top salespeople at our company, there was a large percentage of them that were women, but our sales floor is not 50/50. We're working on that, but that also means that we need to do things. So, like, then that brings to the question of, like, okay, so, yeah, we're trying, like, we're trying to get more women to be on our sales team, but we just can't find anyone. It's just so hard. And I made a point about this on LinkedIn a couple of weeks ago, and some people got a little bit butthurt, which is fine. They're allowed to be butthurt. I'm not upset about it. But like, I was basically just like, we need to think about how we look for and invite people into the conversation of maybe you should be on our sales team. And I remember when I first, first, first started looking at sales jobs, before I ever was the receptionist, I looked at a couple and I thought, ah, this sounds not fun. Because it was all like, you're a hunter, you're competitive, you're gonna go out and get it done no matter what. And I just thought like, I'm like, that doesn't sound like me. That doesn't sound like what I'm attracted to. And if I were to write a description of being a salesperson or an SDR, I would talk about, you get to be autonomous and make decisions for yourself about how you run your book of business. You're crafting messaging that resonates with a buyer. You are having empathetic conversations to help solve real business needs. I would just explain it more in terms of just, A, it sounds more like my day-to-day because I don't feel like I'm a hunter. I don't feel like I'm hunting. I'm definitely prospecting. I'm looking, but I think of it more as I'm connecting dots. I'm a detective and I'm connecting the dots, figuring out, trying to determine what your status quo is, where your pains might be, and how my solution could fit into actually solving your problem. And I think like, if these people that, you know, when you're writing those job descriptions or you're writing what you're looking for, if you write it a little bit differently, it might attract different people to the job. So you need to get the input of more women or more whoever. So yeah, that's like, as a feminist in sales, I would just say like, yeah, of course we need more women in sales. It's good for business. And therefore we should kind of like think about how we're trying to get more women into sales roles. And I think, like, more importantly, we need to get more people of color into sales roles. Because even when I see women getting hired, they look like me. They're white people. And that's fine. But that's not the best move for the business.

1:18:09 Scott Ingram: So yeah, that was the best question I've asked so far. You can go ahead and drop your mic now. It's so, so important, right? And I think I think one, you just gave an incredible guide to writing a job description. I mean, I think that's a really important callout because I'm sure if we looked at our sales job descriptions, we'd see exactly what you described, right? And actually not the positives of what you described, but just, you know, this is a very masculine sounding thing. And, you know, hopefully folks have recognized the fact that you're the 3rd woman who's been on this show in a row, and I'm not done. And many of you will be on the stage at the Sales Success Summit because to your point about we gravitate towards people that look like us. Okay. So let's make a particular effort to look more diverse and not be, hey, look, a whole bunch of white people speaking at a sales conference or a whole bunch of white guys speaking at a sales conference, right? We've, we've got to mix that up and be more inclusive for all the reasons that you so beautifully articulated.

1:19:17 Sarah Brazier: Thank you. Yeah, there was something else that just kind of bothered me. I've been talking to a recruiter and I was like, so, you know, what does a hiring manager look for? You know, what are they looking for? And the recruiter showed me, you know, the list of things that they look for in a candidate. And on the bonus, it was like, the nice-to-haves. The last thing was played college sports or like former athlete. And I was like, huh, why is that? They're like, oh, because it makes you competitive. And I thought, well, there's lots of things that non-athletic people do that are highly competitive. I.e., like I was thinking of myself, like debate, for example. Debate. I was super competitive in debate. You know, I'm a 13-time national finalist in debate and I would work my butt off to be good. And if you went and played softball with me, you would not want me on your team because I am not competitive when it comes to sports. And I think there's like a little mental thing. It's like, ah, that's not interesting to me. That's boring to me. I don't want to do that. Like, why would I invest my time in being good at that? Because it's not something that's interesting to me. But debate, on the other hand, speech and debate, it has way more similarities to sales. Than playing softball. And I did play softball when I was a kid. And I think like, or theater has way more similarities to sales, especially the SDR role. There's a woman I was talking to, she's a Broadway musical theater actor, did it for 8 years, 6 or 8 years, something like that. And your workday is literally, as an actor, you spend 6 hours a day, 5 days a week auditioning, and then you go and work your daytime job. And you go to like a dance call. And in a dance call, you usually wait around for like 2 or 3 hours waiting for your number to be called. It's you and 50 or 60 other people. You learn a routine in about 10, 15 minutes. That's really, really challenging. You go perform it. They call your number. If your number gets called, you get to stay. Everybody else walks away. Then you do the dance again and then you leave. And then you cross your fingers that you'll get a callback. You want to talk about rejection? Like you just literally You've been working on this for years. You go to school for 4 years to get a musical theater degree. Typically, most musical theater people have 16 years of dance training before they ever go to college. So, you're sitting on 20 years of dance training to get your shot in front of these people where you have 2 minutes to blow them away, and then they tell you no to your face. Okay, you can leave now. That is the definition of grit. Then, you got to sell yourself every time. You've got to smile, you've got to hit your marks, and then you've got your monologue that you have to do and your song that you have to do. Because that's just the dance call. And it's like, yeah, I mean, I wish that people would step back from like, the athlete means competitive, the athlete means gritty. No, no, no, no, no. The person is gritty. The person is competitive. Those are qualities that they have. So ask them, what makes you competitive? That's a question you ask in the interview. That's a quality you need to dig for. That's not like a bonus point if they were athletic. So like, you have to kind of restructure the way you think about it. It's not that we shouldn't hire athletes, it's that it's not the athlete that makes the good salesperson. It is the core quality of being gritty and desiring to be excellent that makes the good salesperson.

1:22:35 Scott Ingram: Yeah, I so resonate with that. I think you could look across the whole of performing arts and find so much of that. I don't talk about this a lot because most people have no freaking idea what it was, but I was I was the drum major and super involved in my high school marching band and then went and toured with drum and bugle corps and won world championships. And, you know, we would do 35 states a year. It's a foreign concept because it's not something that you see, but it's insanely competitive. I mean, we would rehearse 12 hours a day on a rehearsal day. And, you know, every 2 weeks we might take a day off so that we could wash our clothes. You know, it was, you know, just The level of intensity is beyond anything most people can imagine, even those who have done competitive sports.

1:23:22 Sarah Brazier: Yeah. And you're working on the same routine. It's like 5 minutes or 10 minutes long. Yeah. And you do it like every day and you're just perfecting it. I mean, like in speech, you have a 10-minute-long speech. I did the acting part of it. I didn't actually debate anyone. I was doing like competitive acting. And I tell people like, you know, One of my first practices with one of my coaches when I first started, I did the first, not even 60 seconds, it was like 45 seconds of my piece. And he said, stop. And for the next hour and a half, we worked on those 45 seconds, just like literally word by word, line by line. And that's how practice goes. And that like doesn't bother me. Like, that's fine. Yeah, of course. Obviously I want to work on them. I need to make sure everything not only sounds good the first time I did it, but the 10th time I did it. And so how are we going to make that a repeatable, beautiful, articulate, moving, winning piece? It's by getting into the nitty-gritty details. So yeah, like I think, you know, you got to open your brain and say, when you're in a hiring manager position, you shouldn't ask yourself what made me successful as a salesperson. That's like the first flaw I think is you turn inwardly and you say, oh, well, I did these things to be successful. Therefore, I should hire more people that look like me. You should stop and say, hold on, wait, what are we missing? Where are our gaps? What is this floor missing right now in terms of what we need to get to the next level? And if you can kind of like flip it around and say like, I already have these traits, where are my flaws? Then you can start hiring to fill the gaps.

1:24:55 Scott Ingram: Oh, so good. And go back and listen to the conversation I had with Amy Quick about this. So, we were talking about really what does a sales, a true sales team look like? And we were talking about strengths. And you've got it exactly right, right? If there's a gap, like we don't have this particular strength, we need that diversity. We need that input. Because if you're all good at the same thing, you can't execute things that don't line up with that finite set of skills.

1:25:20 Sarah Brazier: Yeah. And if you want to make it a sports analogy, I mean, look at a football team, look at a baseball team, look at any kind of team. They don't all look the same. Literally, physically, the way they're built is not all the same. And the things that they're good at are all very different because you have to diversify. In order to play each position right. You know, it's just very clear. So why would you only hire like tight ends? No, no, don't do that. And I don't even know what a tight end does. That's the thing.

1:25:49 Scott Ingram: Oh, that's greatness.

1:25:51 Sarah Brazier: Okay.

1:25:51 Scott Ingram: So we're going to go all the way back. We're on the biggest tangent ever and I love it, but walk us through the rest of your day. So we basically got to, you do kind of your recap and your review and you looked at, okay, here's how I did and here's what I might need to adjust as I go to tomorrow. What happens after that? What does the rest of your day look like?

1:26:09 Sarah Brazier: I turn my brain off of sales. I turn my brain off of that. I think like when it's time to go home, it is really time to go home. I'll turn my brain off one other time. It's when I take a walk in the middle of the day. Another thing that Chris Orlob said to me, and I remember him saying it, I've heard it before, but it's like the people who are the most productive know when to take breaks. And for me, I cannot obsess about my job, otherwise I will become burnt out. And I've kind of learned that the hard way with other jobs I've had. I think for an SDR, I'm a little bit on the older side. I'm 28 turning 29 a little bit later this year. So, I think most SDRs are typically like 22, 23, 24. And by the time they're my age, they've been an AE for a couple of years. But, you know, for me, I just know that when I come home, it's like, well, let's de-stress. Let's make dinner. Let's go on a run. Let's spend some time with my partner, you know, just like let's just be at home and maybe read a book. Or I try not to really watch TV or movies because I was homeschooled as a kid and my mom had 7 kids. You know, someone would finish their homework before the other person and then want to watch TV, and then the person doing their homework would want to watch TV, and then it was bad. So my mom was like, no TV ever. And literally in the entertainment center, she put a padlock on the TV.

1:27:26 Scott Ingram: That sounds like a great way to do it.

1:27:29 Sarah Brazier: Yeah. So like, I just don't watch TV. I'm not into that habit, but I love to read books. I am reading the Sandler book right now because it's really well-written and it's getting me excited about, you know, my day and the things that I'm trying to work toward. But I try to spend my evenings not dwelling on what I didn't do or what I need to do tomorrow. I try to just like close that book and then reopen it. Sometimes I'll spend like a little bit of time in the evening just trying to like go through messages people send me on LinkedIn. So I can make sure that I'm not ignoring people and being helpful. That's easier said than done because like I'm not a content person and I want to spend my day trying to reach my objectives, i.e., booking meetings. So sometimes people will get a message from me like a month later being like, hey, I just, I saw it now. Sorry about that. But yeah, like I just try to make my evenings, I try not to drink alcohol on weekdays, like maybe a glass of wine with dinner, but like I find that One glass of wine can easily turn into 2. And then I just think that like being dehydrated in the morning, any kind of headache, any kind of thing that's… alcohol also isn't supposed to help you sleep well. So like anything that's going to stop me from having a good night's rest is like, I try not to do that. So like my priority is getting good sleep. I really love sleeping and it makes me feel so much better the next day. So it's like exercise, a nice dinner, a good conversation, read a book. Go to bed early. And that's me. I'm very simple on weekdays.

1:29:00 Scott Ingram: Nice. Nice. I won't ask about the weekends. We'll catch up on that another time. What about your information diet? What are you reading, listening to, and watching? And when does that happen? It sounds like it's not professional reading really in the, in the evening with maybe the current exception.

1:29:14 Sarah Brazier: Yeah. So, I want to read more sales books. I'm kind of picky about good writing. So, right now I'm enjoying Sandler's book because it's, it's very digestible. It's readable. It's, it's well done. And I read all kinds of things. If I'm not reading, I listen to Audible, like audiobooks. My dad, since he's in sales, he travels a lot. All of his meetings are face-to-face. So when he's on the road, he's always listening to usually like really detailed biographies or other history books. So recently, like I've been listening to on and off the biography of Benjamin Franklin. It's very fascinating. I was posting a lot about it for a while. And then I kind of hit pause on reading it because I started reading the Sandler book. So, I'll probably go back to it and keep listening to it. One of the books that I was listening to for a while was Jordan Peterson's, that book that we just talked about, The 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. And it's kind of a self-help book, but it's way more than that because it's really all about how our psychology is structured and about narrative, about personal narrative. About the greater narrative of life. It's fascinating because people, I think, become very siloed in the I and the individual, but humans are incredibly social creatures. We're probably the most social animal in the world, right? And we have these greater narratives of where the I comes into play with the narrative of the world. And the stories we tell ourselves are so important. And so, that kind of comes into that mindset thing of how I think about myself and how I think about my day and how I think about my productivity and what I did well versus what I didn't do well. That's a narrative that we're constructing as we live and also plays into our greater narrative about the world. It's super fascinating. So, that's one of the books I've been reading. There's another book called Debt that is incredibly dense. And I was listening to the audiobook of that for a while and it's just about like our concept of money and our concept of debt and how debt might be something different than what we think it is. That's very fascinating and kind of talks about the world economy. And then a book that I finished reading a couple months ago, it's like Methamphetamines and the Third Reich. And it's basically like all the Nazis were on meth and Adderall. So fascinating. Really? Yeah. Oh yeah. It's such a good book. It's so well written. I listened to that on Audible and it was like my commute book for a while. It is It's so interesting. Hitler was a vegetarian. He was super anti-drugs and he somehow became a drug addict is basically what this book goes into. He was really into vitamins and his doctor used to give him injections of vitamins and it created a dependency in his body on all these. He was being overly pumped through with all these vitamins. His body naturally became deficient. And then his doctor started like lacing his vitamin shots with like methamphetamines. It's kind of like what this book is saying. It's so fascinating. And then Hitler like obviously was a crazy dude, but he gets crazier throughout World War II. And he gets super, super paranoid. And it's… and suddenly you're like, oh, whoa, it's because he's doing all these drugs. And it's just like, whoa, it's so fascinating, especially because Adderall was invented basically by the Nazis. And now, for a long time, we still are. We gave it to a bunch of kids who have ADHD. And the reason it was given to the Nazis is that's how they had blitzkrieg. They could just move so much faster, march people so much faster because everybody's hopped up on some kind of methamphetamine. So they can just go, go, go. Toward the end, they were all doing cocaine. And it's just like, whoa, that's crazy. And Like, you know, the impact that it had on World War II and of the collapse of the Nazi regime. I mean, they kind of self-imploded. And then the fact that we give little kids Adderall to correct for their ADHD, it's like, whoo, well, let's rethink that one.

1:33:14 Scott Ingram: Wow.

1:33:15 Sarah Brazier: Yeah.

1:33:16 Scott Ingram: I've got a big drive to do tomorrow for an interview. So I will talk a little bit more offline and see if you fully recommend, but I might be using a credit for that.

1:33:23 Sarah Brazier: Yeah. Oh, it's so good. You should totally listen to it. It's not, it's not super long and it's just like, I'd never known that before. It was super eye-opening.

1:33:31 Scott Ingram: Fascinating. Fascinating. Sarah, what about tools and apps that you can't live without? And I fully expect you to talk about and encourage you to talk about kind of your personal use of Gong in that walkthrough. Yeah.

1:33:44 Sarah Brazier: So like in terms of SDR life, I use Gong, I use Outreach, I use Sales Navigator. I use Seamless.ai and Lusha to just like get the information that I need for my prospects, like phone numbers and email addresses. Those are kind of like the things I use. I use Sendoso as well. So kind of to unpack how I use those things. Oh, and I use, there's this tool, it's not for salespeople, but I've made it for salespeople. It's called Sentieo and it's really made for like, you know, people watching the stock market to figure out like how the companies they're investing in are actually doing. And so it sends me like alerts about like, you know, how many points they've dropped or how many points they've gained, stuff like that. But what I actually use it for is I pull up the transcripts of all of their earnings calls or their investor reviews or kind of whatever they've recently done where they've sat down and they've recorded it. Now there's this transcript and I search it for keywords and phrases so that I can figure out what's going on that relates to what I sell and how can I craft messaging that is pertinent to their business? Because literally their CFO or their CEO just said it last week. And that, I think, is like, if you're working enterprise accounts, it's really, really beneficial because you need to come with a strong business case from the get-go. Otherwise, you get hung up on. So, yeah. So, I use that. So, I'll figure out what's happening in the business. I don't spend a ton of time in there, per company. I just spend, you know, 5 to 15 minutes pulling the bits that I need and trying to make sense of what's going on. Then I go on to Sales Navigator and I find people with the right titles in the right geographies to reach out to. And then I pull all of their information either using Lusha or Seamless, and I import that into Outreach. Then I build out a 16-step sequence. Some of the steps are automated. Some of the steps are manual. The first email is always manual and the second email thread is always manual. And I take the information that I got on their business and I use that to craft some really tailored sequencing messaging for them. And then I put all the people that I just found on LinkedIn into that and I hit send and I send them an email. I hit them up with a LinkedIn connection request and I make a phone call. The best is when someone picks up their phone right away, right after they open the email, because sometimes that can be really great.

1:36:11 Scott Ingram: Saves you 13 steps, right?

1:36:13 Sarah Brazier: Yeah, it does. It saves me a ton of steps. And so, yeah, so that's how I use those tools. And so those are more like from the efficiency side that helps me become a more efficient SDR. In terms of becoming a good salesperson, that's where Gong comes into play. So for Gong, I use it to listen to my account executives' calls. I use it to listen to my own calls. I use it to listen to my peers' calls. I listen to basically anything and everything that is going to make me better. So, I've got alerts set up so I can listen to one of my peers' calls that might have… they might have connected and it might be a 5-minute-long call, but it didn't end in a demo. So, I'll go in there and I'll listen to it and I might comment on it and give them some tidbits on how to be a better them. You know, I'll use it to listen to my account executive's call that they had so I can come up with better messaging for my next email to folks. So like if I talk to, you know, like a director, like the West Coast director of sales, and I'm trying to hit up someone on the East Coast, now I have a little more information so I can pull that data or pull those facts from that call. And I'm just using it right now so I can become a better account executive, listening to good calls, figuring out what it is that I need to do in order to be better. Yeah, I think Gong is super helpful for just becoming a better salesperson because you can coach yourself, you can receive coaching, you can ask for coaching. Yeah, it's great. That's just the coaching piece of it. There's so much more that Gong can do, but for me, like, as an individual contributor, it's the coaching that impacts my day the most.

1:37:44 Scott Ingram: Yeah, greatness. Talk about the motivation side of things. Like, what ultimately drives you? How do you think about motivation in general?

1:37:52 Sarah Brazier: Yeah. So, I used to think about motivation a lot from the perspective of being a speech and debate coach for middle school students. I taught 6th, 7th, and 8th grade at a school called St. Mary's Hall down in San Antonio. And, there were some kids who just wanted to be good and they were intrinsically motivated to be good. And, there were some kids who Just like they didn't care at all, but they had to take the class because their mom signed them up for it. And I think about, like, for me, a lot of things, I'm intrinsically motivated to be good because that's just kind of how I was raised. It's like, that's why I think that the way my parents raised me about, like, you know, excellence is earned and anything worth doing has a little bit of suffering in it, a little bit of pain. Because it makes reaching the summit of the mountain that much better. If it was, if you drove to the summit, the view would not look half as good. So, for me, when I think about motivation, like, that is me. And I think about the things that stop me from being motivated. And it's typically an external factor. It's when I feel like I am working so hard and it's not being seen or acknowledged or appreciated in the way that I I feel like, you know, I'm sweating away, I'm bleeding here for you, for us to be good. And you're not saying, hey, I see you and you're doing a good job. So, when I thought about motivation for my students, I thought, okay, there's the kids who like, they want it and they're going to give me everything they have to get that national final. And I worked with them and I could talk to them differently the way that I talked to the kids who weren't interested in doing speech and debate. I talked to them about like, I could be more critical with them in a constructive way, always giving them positive feedback, but we could get more into like the what's wrong here and how can we solve. And then when I worked with the younger kids or the kids who just weren't as interested, it was like, okay, what makes them tick is something different. So let's just become their friend. Let's become like a confidant. Let's become someone that they enjoy being with. And that kind of builds that intrinsic motivation. And when I think about like Tanner, like Tanner was invested in me. Before I was fully invested in Gong, but his investment in me made me want to invest harder. So, like, if I were a manager, like, that's how I would think about my bottom performers and my performers that just, like, aren't doing what I need them to do. It's like, I need to pour more into them because they might feel it. They're going to feel it. If someone's like, hey, I see that you have the potential to be great. We just got to get you there. What do we need to do? Like, How can we make this interesting for you? How can we get you to the next level? That then makes them feel like, oh, they care about me. They care about me, not about my numbers, but about me. And then they start doing, then they start winning. And then they start saying, hey, this is kind of fun. Hey, I'm actually seeing success here. And then when that happens, then they start getting intrinsically motivated because they're seeing success. They're seeing a path forward. They're starting to set goals outside of the goals that their boss is setting for them, and they're seeing like the bigger picture, the greater pursuit of excellence. So that's kind of like how I think about motivation, both in terms of like how I am motivated and how to motivate others.

1:41:12 Scott Ingram: Please tell me that you want to go into leadership at some point.

1:41:15 Sarah Brazier: Uh, yeah, one day, but I have way too much to learn. Like, I need to learn how to close deals. I need to learn how to talk with C-level executives in a way that I'm starting to learn as an SDR, but in these bigger conversations that happen and just like how to move deals forward, how to progress deals forward, how to actually make change. That is like, I really want to get good at doing that as an individual contributor and then start figuring out what, how I can get other people to get there. But yeah, that's kind of how I'm thinking about it is like, I would love to be in leadership one day, but I know that I haven't learned enough to truly be in leadership yet.

1:42:00 Scott Ingram: Yeah, I think that's a, I think that's a great perspective. And again, I think it goes back to what we were talking about with LinkedIn, right? There's a certain degree of patience that's required, right? This doesn't all happen instantly. I mean, especially when we think about our careers, like this is not something that you're going to be magically transformed in 12 months or 18 months. Like this is a. Multi, multi-year journey that we're on if we want to be great at it.

1:42:24 Sarah Brazier: Yeah, that was a mental shift that I had to make. I thought, okay, if I just put my time in as an SDR, they're going to give it to me and they'll just give it to me because I did my time. And I think a lot of SDRs think that way because they don't really… people come to the SDR organization, they don't want to be an SDR, they just want to be a closer. But now there's this stupid arbitrary rule that you have to be an SDR for 9 to 12 months in order to even have a shot. So, I just got to do the thing. And I think that's the way that I would challenge someone to think about it differently. The SDR rule, be good at being an SDR, run your sales cycle to become an AE like you would any sales cycle, but first be good at being an SDR because it will only benefit you. It's not like AEs stop prospecting. It's fact. Like even if an AE has a one-to-one relationship with an SDR and they're, and the SDR is really good in feeding them, That's not always going to be the case. And you have to learn how to have these very beginning conversations to cut through the noise and to get the conversation going to get the deal to close. So, I think it's a learning opportunity and you should really get the most out of it before it's over because it's going to be over pretty quickly if you take it seriously as a learning opportunity because they're going to see like, ah, this person good. Let's make them an AE.

1:43:43 Scott Ingram: Yeah, absolutely. Sarah, is there something you believe that the average SDR would think is crazy?

1:43:50 Sarah Brazier: I mean, probably like, slow down, be an SDR and do it well. When I first became an SDR, I was like, oh, this is dumb. Why do we have to do this? Like, you should have just made me an AE. I'm old enough. I'm not like these other kids who just graduated from college. Like, just let me do it. I used to take 40 middle schoolers every weekend on big trips. I know how to run things. I know how to get stuff done. Just let me do it. If you just let me do it, you'd realize I'm amazing. And then Eric Lindros, who's a recruiter at Gong, but he started out as an SDR, he was like, when I kind of expressed that, not in that way, but I kind of expressed it to him when I first started out at Gong. And he was like, I think being an SDR is really valuable. And he said it so genuinely, I knew he meant it. And I thought, huh, okay, well, I'll just try that hat on and see what happens. And when I put that hat on and I took it seriously of like, being an SDR is really good. It's really good for me. Let's be good at this. Let's just only focus on being a good SDR. The amount I've learned and the amount I've grown, I've done it exponentially faster. And it's just been exponential compared to when I was just like, When is my time going to be up?

1:45:07 Scott Ingram: Yeah. So, let's take this from the perspective of that person that has kind of that intrinsic motivation and has decided, I want to be really good as an SDR. How long do you think they should spend in the role?

1:45:19 Sarah Brazier: I mean, that's a great question. I read an article that somebody wrote on LinkedIn. I read it like maybe 6 or 7 months ago. I can't remember who it is. But in the article, he linked to a couple different studies that just talked about the success of an SDR who becomes an AE, and that time in role of SDR has a direct correlation to success as an AE. So someone who's only been in SDR for 6 months and then transitions into a closing role is far less likely to exceed than someone who's been in the SDR closing role for 12 to 15 months. And I think it's like that 12 to 15 months. That's like when you can make the move and you can do it really easily. Like Tanner, that leader that I had, he was an SDR for like 5 years. He was asked to become an SDR manager because we had change management and he managed the team for like 6 months. And then he moved into a closing role and he hit 200% of his number in his first year as an AE and has closed over $1 million in ARR before he even finished a full year as an AE. So, he was an SDR for 5 years. And I think if you talk to him, he will tell you that that time that he spent as an SDR, because I mean, he's just booking his own meetings, he's just creating his own pipeline, that really put him into a place to be an excellent AE. So, like, longer than 6 months, longer than 9 months, probably a year. After a year, I mean, you should take a litmus test and see, are you ready? Like, to become an AE at Gong, your numbers don't matter. I mean, your numbers matter. You have to hit quota consistently. You need to be at least at 100%, if not more, of quota attainment. But the thing that you're measured on is actually your ability to run a discovery call. And that's your interview, is running a 45-minute-long discovery call with 2 pretend decision-makers in the room and then like 4 other hiring managers observing. And that's like, you do that for 45 minutes and the next 45 minutes is you put together your 30, 60, 90-day plan on how you're going to ramp and make sure that you hit and exceed quota as an AE. So like, that's how we measure it. So just hitting your numbers isn't enough. It's like also being prepared to become an account executive, I think is super important.

1:47:45 Scott Ingram: Yeah.

1:47:46 Sarah Brazier: Does that answer your question?

1:47:47 Scott Ingram: Yeah, it does. It does. And it aligns with kind of where my head is, right? I sort of think in terms of it's probably 12 to 18 months, much longer than that. There's, there's probably diminishing returns. Like how much better are you going to get from 18 months to 2 years or 2 years to 3 years? Right. I think Tanner's probably a pretty significant outlier in that way. But to your point as well, it's also, did you develop the skills that you're going to need along the way? Were you listening to those calls? Do you understand How to run a sales process, or were you just really good as an SDR, but are going to step into something that is completely new, and you're going to have to learn everything on the job? I think that's challenging for an organization to take on. Right, and again, this is why I think it can be a trap, especially with a really strong SDR. Right, like okay, let me get this straight. So I want to promote Sarah into a role that she's never done before, and I'm going to give up. Millions of dollars in pipeline that I know she'll generate and put somebody who may have a longer ramp than somebody with existing AE experience into that role. So, I think the way that you mitigate that risk is you do a lot of shadowing and you sort of figure out as much of the rest of that process as you can so that it's not all net new stuff that you've got to learn.

1:49:03 Sarah Brazier: Yeah. And I mean, I've been practicing discovery calls for 6 months. Like, that's awesome. For like the past 3 months, I sit down once a week with one of the hiring managers. He's one of the managers for our commercial sales team, and he and I spend an hour together practicing what a discovery call sounds like and going over what I did well and what I didn't do well. And then I meet with another hiring manager biweekly to practice. I meet with the director of the commercial team once a month to show him how I've improved. And then I meet with AEs who have a little bit of time to squeeze me in. But like, if I'm not practicing that skill, then I'm not going to pass the interview. I'm not going to get what I want. And so, I need to be like really, really prepared. But also, all of this preparation is going to make my first live call with a real prospect, it's going to make it a cakewalk. Well, probably not, but fingers crossed.

1:49:56 Scott Ingram: Well, it's just like, you should leave your best practice on the field or your best performance on the practice field.

1:50:02 Sarah Brazier: Exactly. That's so true. Like, it's the Sandler line. If you didn't bring it with you, it's not going to happen here.

1:50:07 Scott Ingram: Right, right. Yeah. And I think there's a mass of practice isn't something we talk about very much in sales, right? We're always on the field performing. It's like, yeah, you know what? That's not how professional… again, if we're going to use the athlete analogies or we're going to use performing arts, I don't care what it is. In any of those things, you practice way more than you actually perform. And in sales, how much do we practice? Never.

1:50:31 Sarah Brazier: Never. I mean, yeah, I mean, as an actor, you spend a month to 2 months working on the show before anyone sees it, and you are spending hours and hours and hours in rehearsal. And when you're not in rehearsal, you're at home running the lines in a mirror, right? Or practicing the dance choreography or whatever. And then what you do is you take the show for previews, you perform it in front of a live audience, they get a discounted ticket, Reviewers aren't allowed to come to review the show, and you get audience feedback on how you're doing, and then you make adjustments, and you better make those adjustments really fast because the show's gonna open next week, and then you open the show. Like, you spend so much time rehearsing on getting it right before anybody ever sees it. And I think that if salespeople wanna be good, they should be doing that. If SDRs wanna be good, they should be doing it. And if, if a sales organization wants to be excellent, It needs to be built into the day. It's got to be built in because, like, if people are left to their own devices, it's not going to get done the way you need it to get done.

1:51:34 Scott Ingram: So awesome. We're going to breeze through the rest a little bit. I've taken up way more time of yours than I intended, but this is amazing. We've talked about this to some degree already, but let's see where this goes. What advice would you give to somebody that's just starting out in their sales career? Today?

1:51:51 Sarah Brazier: Yeah. So, the first is, like, you need to be in charge of you, and you need to have your own back. Even if you've done your homework and your due diligence about, you know, who your manager is going to be in the company, especially in the world of startups, things move really fast. And you will have a different manager pretty quickly, because that's how it works. Like, I have had 3 different managers in the past year. Tanner became an AE, we hired someone new, then a director was hired, and I've moved upmarket. So, I was an SMB, I've become enterprise. And yeah, you're just going to have a different manager, and they're going to have different expectations for you, and they're going to articulate things differently. And, you know, where you were in alignment with one manager, you might not be with this new guy. Hopefully, he'll be cool, or she'll be cool. They might not be. So, you got to take care of you. And you got to think critically about if something is going to change, if they're going to change the agreement with how you work, you need to think critically. It's like, is this good for me or bad for me and why? And how do I have a conversation about how to make it better? And this is going to happen to anyone. Like, it happens to everybody, no matter if you're in sales or you're a teacher or you're whoever. You just need to be ready to have the hard conversations that are good for you. And the other thing is you have to have the conversation in a way that makes it sound like it's good for them. And that's like a skill that I'm learning how to have is like, okay, so I want something, but I can't walk up to my boss and say, hey, I want this because it's good for me. I have to say, hey, I've noticed X, Y, and Z thing. What do you think the benefit would be of doing it X, Y, and Z way? You know? And I think like, That's what I wish I'd known in pretty much every job I've ever had is like, how do I have a conversation with the person in charge to get them to do what I want? Because it's actually good for them and articulate it that way. So like, learn that, practice it, and be on your side, be looking out for you, especially as a woman in the workplace. I think women are known for wearing lots of hats and women have a tendency to do something because they're asked to do it without asking for anything in return. It's just like we've been socially, culturally, biologically conditioned to be that way. And we can become overtasked and overworked and underpaid and undervalued. So if you're new and you're just starting out, just like be on your own side, watch your own back, because if you don't, you might get burned or you might not. You know, everybody might be super nice all the time.

1:54:26 Scott Ingram: Sarah, what about somebody that is further in? And maybe this is, you know, the advice that you would have given to yourself in the previous role. Let's say I'm an SDR and I am just not hacking it. I am not where I want to be, but I'm motivated enough. You've inspired me enough. I'm still listening to this 2 hours later. And what do I do? How do I turn this around and really elevate my game and become a great SDR?

1:54:55 Sarah Brazier: Yeah, so I think the first thing is, is like you have to ask yourself, like, is it me or is it them? There are definitely things about me that I was just doing wrong in my last job, but I would come to one-on-ones with a cold call that was 15 minutes long and resulted in no demo, and I'd say like, hey manager, can we listen to this? And he'd be like, it's too long. He'd listen to 30 seconds and be like, hey, yeah, you know, I just, I don't know if this is a great use of of our time. And it's like, no, this is exactly how we should be using our time together. And I wasn't watching out for me. I didn't have my back. So, I didn't push back. I didn't say, hey, listen, I think this is actually where I'm struggling. I need you to listen to this all 15 minutes with me and you are going to help me understand what I'm doing wrong. If I had done that for me, if I pushed back, it could have been helpful. But I also wasn't feeling or reading or seeing an investment on the company side in me, in my development. I think it was more of, you know, SDRs a dime a dozen, kind of like they had really high turnover in their SDR org and morale was super low. And it was clear to me that no one was doing anything to fix it. And I thought, this isn't the environment that I need to be excellent. This isn't an environment of excellence. This is an environment of misery. And I'm not going to sit around and work with a company that is inefficient and does not do what it needs to do to take care of its people. So I left, but that was like me deciding I was going to have my back. And I think like, if I was talking to an SDR who was struggling, I would like ask them, what have you said to your manager? How are you talking to your manager about this problem? How is your manager diagnosing it? What are they saying you need to do differently? And are you doing that? And if they're saying, well, you know, he just says I need to get my KPIs up. And I'm like, well, did you do that? And he's like, yeah, I am. Okay, well, now what is your manager saying? You got your KPIs up, but you're still not hitting. Now, what is your manager saying you should do? My manager told me I just wasn't cut out for sales.

1:56:55 Scott Ingram: Wrong answer.

1:56:56 Sarah Brazier: And I thought, you're so wrong. You don't know what you're talking about. You have no idea. You don't know me. That made me so fired up. I said, you don't know anything. I was like, I'm going to prove you wrong. Just you wait. Just you watch. I'm going to be so good. You won't even recognize how good I am. You won't even know. But that's me. It's like, I could also see that, like, my choice was to get angry and to fight back. But that could also, if it had been a different mental state, it could have been like the nail in the coffin. I don't know. So like, yeah, I think you really got to ask, like, are they invested in helping me get better? Am I invested in doing what they say I need to do to get better? Okay, let's double down on that. If they're not invested, if they don't have a plan for me to get better, if they're not going to pull me out of this slump I'm in? Because we have to be a team. Like, as any kind of salesperson, yes, you can control the things that you can control and you are responsible for what happens. But as social creatures, as human beings, we are more than just ourselves. There's so many external factors we need to get to the next level. So we have to ask for it. We have to find it. We have to get there. But like, I, Sarah, cannot be excellent in anything unless I have help from other people. This is a fact. Any success I've had, whether it's in sales or speech and debate or whatever, has only come from hours and hours of working with someone who is invested in getting me there. And so, that's one of the things that frustrates me about sales is it's all on you. It's all on you as a salesperson. Yes, but no. It is all on me, but let's be honest, we all need help. So, how can you help me get there? So, yeah, that's what I would say. That's kind of tangenty. Sorry, I'm just going off, but…

1:58:35 Scott Ingram: No, no, my gosh. I enjoy your going off. So, what would you want to know about the top sales performers in other organizations? Because, yeah, I mean, I know you're seeing it, you're studying it at Gong. What do you want to know about those in other places?

1:58:50 Sarah Brazier: Yeah, I honestly just want to know what they think has helped them get there. And like, what are the things, what are the factors that have helped them become great, whether it's The mental thing they tell themselves every day waking up, how they talk to themselves, how they're treating their body and their whole selves, their whole experience of them. And also, what are the techniques, the skill sets, the things that they're using in conversation that have allowed them to be good? And we were talking earlier, but I went to that Sandler Summit with Gong, and there's people who've been in sales for 30, 40 years talking. Stopping by the booth and just like the level of excellence in how they craft their questions, how they think about things, how they're always on the same side of their customer. I just want to like get into their brains and think about when they have a call coming up, what are the things that they are thinking about in order to be on the same side as the customer so they can sell together versus sitting on the opposite side of the table and selling to them? How do they get permission to stand up and walk around to the other side so we can all be on the same side together? That's what I want to know.

1:59:55 Scott Ingram: That's great. I love it. I love it. Sarah, this has been incredible. The last question I ask… you've covered a ton of ground, but I like to make this as actionable as we can. So what would you now challenge the listener to do over the course of the next, say, just 1 to 2 weeks until I launch the next interview that'll probably be more than 2 hours? What would you challenge them to do to improve themselves and improve their results?

2:00:21 Sarah Brazier: Yeah, I would challenge them to sit down and think about what is my objective for the next 5 years of my career? What is the next step of my career that I need to do to get to where I want to be? How can I get to the next step to get to the step 5 years out from now? And how can what I do on a daily basis today impact me incrementally getting to that goal? And that's how I think about it when I sit down to write that list of things I'm going to do in the morning. And so, once they've got that in their brain, I would challenge them to spend every morning thinking about what are the things I can do today to reach my 5-year goal? What is the things I can do today to get there? Write them down. And at the end of the day, write down if they did it, if they didn't do it, and what's the delta? What needs to change to get there?

2:01:12 Scott Ingram: That's a great challenge. So, we're going to have some great show notes. If you go to top1.fm forward slash… I don't remember the episode number. I never do. But it's at the top of your podcast player. Just type in that number or top1.fm forward slash Sarah-Brazier. Both of those will get you to the page where we'll have links to all of the books and all of the tools and everything else that we have talked about to this point. And we'll have a link to that LinkedIn Sales Stars page where you can learn some more of Sarah's insights and the insights from many others about how to be great on LinkedIn. Sarah, thanks for taking the time with me today. This has been amazing.

2:01:49 Sarah Brazier: Yeah, thank you so much, Scott. I really enjoyed myself.

2:01:53 Scott Ingram: 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.