♪ And I'm hiding down ♪ ♪ I crank the volume loud ♪ ♪ 'Cause I've been waiting for so long ♪ ♪ Been singing out ♪ ♪ La la la la la ♪ ♪ La la la la la ♪ ♪ La la la la la ♪ ♪ You know the way down ♪ ♪ And I'm hiding down ♪ ♪ I crank the volume loud ♪ Welcome to the At The Wire Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Dan Sweeney, Associate Professor and Program Chair for the Sport Management Program within the Plaster College of Business and Entrepreneurship at Linda Wood University. Targeting young and aspiring sports business professionals, the At The Wire Podcast is designed to enhance and support classroom learning by helping students to connect theory to practice and to help transition from college to industry. Guests have a passion for helping the next generation of industry pros to navigate and find meaningful post-college sports industry careers. Why are we about guesting? Contact me at
[email protected]. This week's guest is Luke Leckner, co-founder and director of sales at Advanced Recruiting Intelligence. I'm pleased to welcome to class, Luke Leckner. Welcome to our sales class, Luke. - Thanks, Sam. I'm happy to be here, excited to talk with you. - Thank you. I'm thrilled to have you here and I want to provide the students with just a little bit of an introduction to who you are. If I get anything wrong, please correct me unless it's just fantastic stuff and you just want to go with that and we can keep that on the record. But as the students know by now, they're going to be seeing this video, probably a good four weeks into the semester, unless we have some of those go getters who are really looking ahead and watching videos ahead, but about four weeks into the semester now, they're going to be looking at this video. And by now they know that I've put out, I'm very excited to have you here because I put out the call about six weeks ago looking for sales professionals to help with this sales class. And one of the things that I did and the reason I put the call out instead of just focusing on our network or industry contacts, 'cause I wanted to see who out there was passionate about the industry in sales and what they're working in. And you answered the call. We didn't know each other prior to this. And I love the fact that you adopted a perspective of giving back and helping the next generation of sales professionals. So these students in the class. So you, another fascinating part of your background that I love is that currently you're the co-founder and director of sales for ARRI recruiting and we'll get to what ARRI does, what your role is, et cetera. But if you take a little bit of a dive into your past, the company that you founded beforehand was Informathletics back in 2016. And the cool thing about that is when I look a little bit further into your LinkedIn profile, you were a student at UNC Chapel Hill in Communications and Media Study from 2014 to 2018. Which means if we added all up, you started that company Informathletics while you were an underclassman in your undergraduate studies. So you were an entrepreneur before you even had your degree. And so that's really cool. So there are a number of reasons. And the last thing that I'm really excited to talk about is in sport management. When we focus, when our students think of sport management and people think of sport management degree, we tend to focus on that part of the sports industry that we visibly see in the media, like pro sports and college sports. And we tend to focus our attention to those areas. And we neglect at times the parts of the sports industry which support the things that we see. And it seems to me that the companies that you have founded and the one that you're working in now, ARRI, that's a mouthful, right? ARRI recruiting is one that supports the sports industry and serves a vital purpose. So there's the introduction, again, welcome. And I'd like to get started today. And by the way, today's the purpose of today's session together is to really talk about prospecting and the sales call, right? That's where we are in the semester. And we're going to talk about how you find and go about finding new business and then how you present yourself to potential clients and how that all works. But before that, it's always useful for students to learn about your path and your background. So to that end, can you tell us a little bit and you can choose which direction you wanna go? Start with inform and work forward. Start with ARRI and work backward. But tell us a little bit about what you do and your path to getting there, if you would. Definitely, so starting back, like you said, in 2016. So I started school at UNC Chapel Hill in 2014 and I was a college swimmer there as well. So it was my sophomore year, it was second semester, sophomore year. I was taking an intro to entrepreneurship class in the first day of the class. It's pretty intimidating actually thinking back on it. They lined us all up and they had us pitch an idea for a business right off the bat. So luckily, it was in the back of the line. So I was kinda just thinking through problems that I'd had and being a swimmer and an athlete. My mind just went there for some reason. I thought about my experience as a high school athlete. So I was a good at high school athlete, but I wasn't the greatest. So I didn't have coaches knocking down my door. I had to knock down their door and get in touch with them and pretty much cold call to them, cold email. So I thought back about my experience as a recruit and kinda the inefficiencies that were there. Basically, I'll summarize it real quick. The issue was if you wanted to express interest in the college to compete at the university, you'd have to fill out a form for each one that basically an interest form. And they could take up to 20 minutes an hour to fill out. So when you'd have to do one for each one, do all the research about where. So the idea that I kinda thought up while I was in that line was simplifying that process where you just fill out one form, fill out all your, personal information, academic information, obviously sport information. And then you could send it to everyone similar to the common application. So that was kind of our slogan. But I pitched that idea there and I just couldn't stop thinking about it. It was supposed to just be like a foreign class exercise but I kept thinking about it. Talked to some of my professors there and some other people that were kind of in the entrepreneurial community formed a team and then just kind of ran with it. So we built a working application. So it helped high school athletes connect with college coaches via email. So they fill out one form and then it would send out that form to all those coaches. But flash forward two years, you know, I was still running with it, building it out. Software development takes a long time, I've found. So anyone, it can take longer than you think. So we built it out. But throughout that process, I was doing a lot of market research with college coaches, you know, being at the campus, having, you know, obviously being an athlete and having coaches around me all the time. And I found that there's the same inefficiency was on the coaches side, maybe even more so, but a little bit different. So basically the issue that college coaches have is especially at the division three, division two, community college level. You know, they're put into this position with no sales experience really at all or management as far as, you know, managing upwards of 10,000 recruits and expected to, you know, have a return. You need X amount of athletes every single year. And they're kind of scrambled doing it. And they know it was not very efficient. So that was the birth of ARI where advanced recruiting intelligence. So simply what we do is we are a recruiting platform for college coaches or CRM, which stands for customer relationship management. A tool for them to manage their recruits, their current athletes and their contacts, just one platform to manage it all and to make it a little bit more efficient. And as far as my role there, one of the co-founders there where there's three of us and I'm the director of sales. So I help our sales team, you know, come up with creative approaches to getting sales and getting driving business. And then also working with the rest of the team to, you know, build out new features based off of our current clients and potential clients. I'm just kind of building the product and also driving sales, yeah, sales, I guess. - So you, in this business then, you actually have two sets of customers. Almost you have to partner and find customers who want to use your service on the college end, but you also have to find athletes who are willing to work with you. So how does that work? So what's the business model? - Yeah, so yes, it's just kind of a yes and no answer that question. So our product is solely used by college coaches. Athletes don't use it at all. The only interaction that they have is we have a built-in form. So that form I was mentioning earlier that I thought of that, you know, interest form. So we allow coaches to build out that form that they send to athletes to fill out and then they're in the system. - Okay, so they send it to you. - Yeah. - They send the form to the athletes I mean. - Exactly. Or they just import all of the athletes that they have where they find, you know, being excel sheet into the system. And once they're in the system, it's just solely the coaches managing that whole process and where they stand with each athlete and all that. - Got it, okay. So you're not trying to marry athletes to schools. You let the schools take care of their recruiting. You're trying to help them manage their recruiting. - Exactly. And just facilitate that whole process. So instead of, we have lots of features that I could go on all the day about, but just the main features, you know, are mass emailing, kind of a lot of campaigns, things that, things that coaches didn't have previously, that just facilitate that process a little bit more effectively. - Okay, so you're the co-founder, but you're also the director of sales. So what are your responsibilities as director of sales? And then what does your day-to-day look like? - Yeah, so yeah, as the director of sales, we have a team of four account executives. So, you know, salesmen and women. So on a day-to-day, do a lot of role play, practice with them weekly. We have four team calls every week where we kind of come together, strategize, talk about what's going well, what we could work on. So kind of, you know, leading in that way. And then I also had my own activity to have a half a territory. So I'm also doing sales myself. So kind of in the trenches with them and then coming together and coming up with strategies and trying to develop the process a little bit more in our knowledge and the space. And then in addition to that, our calls are the rest of our team. So a director of marketing, or sorry, a director of product, talking about where the product stands. CEO, our COO is kind of talking about operational stuff. So I kind of pop in and out of those kind of calls and then woven in, you know, during my own sales and demos. So the process for us, we call call, or email. Code calling is what we do primarily. Get the coach on the phone and our first sale is actually, we're not selling right off the bat. We're setting up another call to show them the platform. So that's about a 20 to 25 minute zoom demo where we show them the platform. And all that, and I'd say average, probably 10 to 20 demos a week. So that's kind of woven in throughout the day. Now, are you presenting to individual coaches of all sports, or are you sometimes pitching to athletic departments as a whole? How does that work? - Yeah, it's a mixture. I would say 90% of it is just an individual coach or coaches for one team. Ideally, the goal is to push it, where you, you know, we just get our foot in the door with one coach, ideally get them on board and then we use that to get in touch with the other teams and other coaches. But I've done a handful of department demos as well. So basically, it's the whole department. It's all on Zoom now, but they all hop on and I present to the entire department, including all the coaches, the athletic director, director of compliance, and a few other key roles in there as well, or key people. - So you mentioned you have half a territory. So I know this is a sales operations question, but it actually does then lead to prospecting. How do you divide up your territories? Is it by, is it geographically and level division one, two, three, et cetera? Is it by sport? Is it by, how do you structure that? - Yeah, so at this point in time, or key customers are at the division three, NAIA and Juco level, so those are kind of our three. So we do it by territory geographically. So I have the Midwest, in Northeast, we have five reps in total. So it's all geographic for those three categories. As we open up new products, we'll be going after more of their division two and ideally soon, probably in the next year or so, division one market. And we'll, depending on the opportunity for each territory 'cause schools are spread a little bit differently, and we want equal opportunity for each salesperson. We'll have to assess that and see what makes sense as far as dividing it. But to date, we've been doing it geographically, so just a number of schools and then dividing it by state. - Was the decision to start with division three and NAIA, et cetera, Juco? Because those are the organizations that have the most need, perhaps, and would see the most value with this type of product given their budgets and staffing profiles, et cetera. - It's a mixture. I'd say they definitely have the biggest need for it, but it's also from the platform itself. There's just certain features that we need to open up some of those division two and division one market, compliance specifically. They're really, really heavy on that division one and we're gonna get there, but we're just kinda have seen. We have our sweet spot right now, which is that division three and NAIA Juco market. And then as we add on new features, it's gonna open up more other markets being that division one and division two. - Okay. So you have your sales folks divided up by territory, now, so what's the process then that they go through? And I know you have your meetings and so forth, but what's the process? What's the responsibility on the salesperson to then find new business? And how do they do that? So I guess we're getting into prospecting a little bit. What are they doing in their day to develop new business? - Yeah, so we are lucky enough to have a, being an industry where all information on our potential clients is public. So every single college coach, every single university, it's all public information, that contact information. So it's up to each salesperson to number one, prioritize what they know, they know, they've a list of every single one of their schools. So they need to prioritize, all right, I really wanna grab for this person or just if they have an in at certain schools, they need to prioritize who they're going after first. And then they need to build out. So our own sales theorem that we use, it's called Fresh Sales, which I'll send the information that you can pass along to that students. It's their responsibility to upload that information into Fresh Sales being the leads or coaches, doing their research on, like I said, who they wanna reach out to and then calling them, basically. So we average between, per salesperson, we average between 250 and 400 calls a week. So we mainly do that Monday through Wednesday, we've found it's the best days to call, but yeah. You mean they do the call, that's their responsibility. Have that conversation. And then like I said, ideally set up demos. So we have a couple of different metrics. Number one is how many calls are you making? Number two is how many demos are you scheduling? Three is how many demos are you completing? 'Cause some coaches, we've had the issue of no shows, like had it scheduling the demo, but them just not hopping on the Zoom call. So that's another one that we're trying to focus on. And then the last one is deals one. So those are kind of the metrics in the conversions that we keep track of. - So let's talk about needs analysis in the prospecting call. What are some of the top needs that your product fulfills for your potential clients? What have you, through these, you learn a lot through these calls. And so what are the top needs that folks have? - I'd say, first one is just having one centralized location for all of their information. A lot of coaches are working out of, you know, between three and 10 different services and trying to loop it together, but it's not really seamlessly integrated. So having just one place where you can manage your recruits, your current athletes and your contacts, really an emphasis on that recruiting. Just an easy way to facilitate and track any and all communication that you have with recruits, whether that's emails, phone calls, text messages, you know, instead of, you know, if you're a staff of coaches, it gets even more complicated 'cause, you know, you could have six people on your staff and you don't know who's talked to, which recruit or who's talked to last. So ours is just pretty easy and user-friendly for the coach. There are some solutions we have competitors for sure, but ours definitely are user-friendly interface and just how simple it is to keep it all in one location is kind of satisfies the needs of those coaches. And a lot of time they don't know that they really need that because they have just been used to what they have so far. So it's kind of, and this kind of goes into the call and we can, I can talk more about this, but just kind of unveiling the needs that they don't know they have or the issues. So asking them kind of probing questions of how they're currently doing it or, you know, kind of poking things that we already know the answer to on our end, but they are not aware of that there's a remedy out there to solve that. - So you bring up an interesting point of sales. I think the perception for a lot of students, a lot of people in general when they hear the term sales, it's where, it almost has a negative connotation for some people. They almost feel like they're trying to set, it's a used car salesman type of thing, right? We're trying to sell something to someone that they may or may not need. We're almost trying to get them to buy something. Whereas, you know, and what you just brought to mind for me was oftentimes it's just helping existing customers and potential and existing customers meet needs that they know they have or that they might not recognize they have and helping them to understand how they might be able to do their, their make their jobs easier, essentially, through the products that you might offer. So to that, let's talk about a little bit of the anatomy of a sales call. So you've done your prospecting, you have your lists of those that you wanna call who are gonna use your product. And now you're going to call. And the reason I asked Needs First is obviously wanna understand your customers before calling. So tell me about, you know, and I guess I can put you on the spot and we could roleplay a little bit, but tell me how the call begins, the real true nuts and bolts, and then how you train your sales people to progress through a call. - Yeah, and I'd say, you know, just to emphasize kind of what you already said, it's just the, I think of sales just as a conversation. I mean, it's simply a conversation. Back and forth, you wanted to know more about them, and I think that's something that, I know when I was first beginning, I wasn't really aware of how it's more robotic, reading a script, but really when it comes down to it, it's two people talking, you just wanted to know, and if you're a good salesperson, you truly do want to make their lives better, if you have a good product, and you're trying to help them. So you're not, you know, shoving anything down there through, you're just simply talking, and then the more you talk, which, you know, a lot of our calls can be between our initial calls, just to kind of go and attend it a little bit. - Yeah, please. - You know, between four and six minutes, but I've had coaches where I've, you know, I've never talked to them, never had any point of contact, and I've sat on the phone and talked to them for 45 minutes. You know, just simply just going back and forth, asking about their season. So this kind of answers your question. You know, at the beginning of a call, it would be, you know, A, Dan, this is Luke Leckner with ARI, recruiting, how are you doing today? - And a lot of people don't see it. - Great, thanks, yeah. Yeah, so I tend to ask that question a lot, and also in our sales team, we always go back and forth, 'cause sometimes you can ask it and you don't get a great answer. Sometimes, we're just trying to. - But I'm skeptical when you make that call to me. I'm skeptical now. It's like, oh, okay, what does he want, right? And so I like to, is there a reason why you use my name and form a connection, but I'm like, okay, great, I'm great, but who are you and what do you want? - Yeah, yeah, so it's kind of a role, the dice for your aspect, it's off-putting, but for me, in my experience, if they respond kind of short or something, I can sometimes either laugh, but I'll kind of take a comical relief a little bit. You know, be like, oh, I'm not just another car salesman or something like that. I'm just here to talk to you or hear a little bit more about how it's been interesting with the pandemic and how we've woven that in, 'cause it's made a big impact on sports in general, including athletics, so that's actually, I felt that people in general, I think, but our clients have been more vulnerable, I think, and letting their guards down and like, talking about what's really going on. So I tend to weave that in a lot, as far as how this is impacted them and just hearing a little bit more. So making it way less salesy, more truly, how are you doing, how are things, and then, you know, kind of going from there. - How early and quickly in the call, do you have to really identify not only who you are and so forth, but the purpose of the call and why you're calling and how quickly does that happen? - Yeah, I normally do it pretty pretty, I mean, after asked the how are you questioned, depending on their answer, if they're short, then I'll just be like, listen, we're all getting right to the reason for the call. You know, ARI, we are recruiting a team management platform, we help coaches like yourself, manage their recruits, current athletes, and contacts. So we're relatively new company, and sometimes we'll throw in, you know, I'm not trying to sell you anything on the phone right now, I'm just trying to tell you about what we provide for coaches and hear a little bit more about what you're doing. - And the reason for that is what, like you're not trying to sell them is for what purpose. The reason of the call is just to tell them more about what we do. - I mean, why are you telling them, and I'm gonna try to be very basic here in the state, to talk about this, but why do you tell them, why do you, what's the benefit of telling them, I'm not trying to sell you anything at this moment, I just wanna provide information. So what are you hoping to do in that moment? - Number one, to just take off the pressure of the call, a little bit, you know, no one, or some people, but no one really wants to just be, have a product or something shove down their throat on it, especially on an intro call, when they don't even know who to act your. So I think it just kind of, for me, in the way I deliver it, takes the pressure off a little bit, and then, I mean, I'd say 90% of the time, they're open to at least hearing. Coaches and I think people in general want to get better and want to know more information, they're pretty competitive. So if they hear a quick little, you know, where about what we do, they're more open to hearing. So the reason for that is just to kind of get their ears open a little bit more, so they can kind of hear what we have to provide. - So what you're saying is the purpose of your call, really, especially in an initial call, but the purpose of the call is actually not to sell in that call, right? - Yeah. - Your goals, your objectives for that initial call are not to get the sale in that call. - No, I'd say it's-- - I think that's an important thing to tell students, no, you're not calling to sell in that call. So what is, I guess we should have started with this, but it just came to me. What's the objective for that first call, really? - Yeah, the objective is to make the connection, I think, to initiate the relationship, because it's all a relationship building, just initiate it even if it's service level. Two is, it's more of a, I call it a discovery call. So you're there to talk to them, and if you, for us, if you know, or for anyone in sales, if you know your product well enough, which that's one bit of advice I'd give you, before you pick up the phone at all, and you need to know what you're selling inside and out. So the reason I mention that is when you're having that call, when we have that conversation with coaches, they can mention something like a small little, you know, cue or something, if you're asking them, you know, how's the season going? And they mention that they're out evaluating, or if they're out of competition. If you just know little things that your solution can, can fix and you can intertwine what they're saying and what they're talking about with what you can provide. So, and not too pushy, but just bring it up, and it's an easy intro into that conversation. - So what are some typical responses that you get from folks when you call them, and you've expressed to them what the purpose of the call is, and who you are, what happens then? - Yeah, so I'd say, let's say the biggest one is, is it gonna cost us any money? And to that, you say, we do cost money, but we're actually, and this is true to us, we're doing a lot of promotions right now, do as a result of COVID and how that's impacted. So I'd love to talk to you more about that. And that's actually why we designed this demo to show you the platform and have that discussion to where, you know, switching to AI, or using AI can actually be a cost, or a budget neutral decision for you. And so we're in a good position where we're actually, either saving them money if they're switching, or just a very affordable cost. So that's a pretty easy objection to handle. So without giving away your competitive advantage in this call here, where do I guess coaches here, but athletic departments, where would they realize cost savings? How does this, what are the, I know there's a benefit in terms of having everything in one place and an ability to manage more efficiently, I guess, but from a dollars and cents perspective, where do they save? How does this impact, you know, resource usage for these coaches and athletic departments? - Yeah, so I'd say, well, number one, we just, as we, we are more affordable than our competitors. So if they're switching to us, they're gonna in turn save money. So that's a quick one. But as far as, like, if they're, let's say, let's say that's not the case and it's the same price. A lot of coaches in our industry are paying for something, but they're just not using it. So they're, they're required to store their recruits in a, basically, just a database or an Excel sheet, which is what their competitors are for the most part. So they're paying, but they're not using it. So it's just kind of a wasted cost with us. We can incentivize them to utilize it more to where they're getting value out of it, saving time and saving money, basically. We're spending the same money, but just getting more value out of using our platform. - What are the initial objections you hear from, from coaches in athletic department that you have to overcome and then how do you overcome them? - Yeah, that's a, so I'd say the biggest one, and I think about it, and it, even more so than price, is it's a coach. They always say, I'm not the one who makes that decision. It's the athletic director, which is the, which is true for a lot of the, you know, cases, the AD athletic director, makes those decisions on a departmental level. So, you know, and they may have got on board with our competitors five years ago, and they're just kind of locked in, and they're told by their AD this is what we're using. So basically the objection or the, how you would respond to that is, you know, basically what we're trying to do, coach, is I want to show you the platform. I know you don't make the decision. I know that's out of your hands, but what we, what I would like to do is show you, get you interest, or gauge your interest, see if this would provide some value to you in your program. And then we found from our experience, that that's better ammunition to go into a conversation with an athletic director. Instead of going in cold, you know, I could call Mr. or so and so right now, but we found, you know, we want to make your lives a little easier and give you a better and a superior product. So, like I said, nothing binding, just trying to gauge interest, so then I can go to the athletic director or that decision maker with some, you know, like I said, ammunition or people that have seen the platform and seen what it could do for you in your department. - So really you're asking this in these calls. I know the purpose of the call is to build a relationship so that you can call again and further that relationship with the hope of a sale. But really, it sounds like part of the real goal of this call is also to get them to agree to take information from you and see what it is you have to offer and then sort of leave that with them. And get them to say yes to yes, you can send me something. - Yeah, exactly. Or either send you something or like I said, it's just that Zoom call, which is when the real sale is. - Right. - So that's when you show them, you know, the whole platform itself and also even more so build that relationship. And then they just kind of facilitate that connection with the athletic director to where ideally it would be a departmental switch. So all teams switching over. It's kind of case by case a little bit for us. We do have some teams that are signing up, you know, one at a time. But the end goal would be to get to in front of the AD and to get a full department to switch it over. - Part of the awkwardness of a sale's call is when it is finishing the sales call and closing the sales call. And I don't mean necessarily in this intro call at least closing is in securing the sale. We can talk about that in a minute when we're in a different call. But how would you, so you've explained the product, they've agreed to a demo or to hear what you have to say. And then you kind of just stare at each other and go, well, okay. So this has been great. Yeah, like, well, talk to you how to tell me ending a call as we teach students is you want to make sure that you set the expectation in part for what comes next. - Yeah. - So how do you do that? What does that look like for you guys? - Yeah, so with us, I would say the last maybe 10% of the call of that initial call is like you said, setting up the expectations for the following call. So what you'll do is you'll, or we do, as we go back and forth, you know, once they've agreed that they're interested, you go back and forth scheduling. So we actually schedule that call on the phone. We don't want to turn it over to email and then expect to do that. So we actually do it on the call. We say, all right. So Tuesday and next week with that work for you, they say yes or no, with morning or afternoon work, you basically go back and forth, find a time. And then we say, all right, well, this sounds great. I have my Zoom pulled up right now and I just want to clarify, is this the correct email address that we have for you? And then they'll just either say yes or no, you'll either update in that or CRM that I was talking about. So we have that screen pulled up. And then you just let them know, all right, we got that email, I got that email, I'm sending it over right now. Are you by your computer? Just asking more questions where they're clarifying that they're receiving it and that they're looking forward to it. You send over that invite on the call. And then what we started to do recently, which has been really helpful, is at the end of it saying, all right, well, I'm really looking forward to talking with you on, so and so data, so and so time. Is there any reason at all that you would not be able to make this call that we just scheduled adding that? And then they'll either say yes or no, which is just kind of more clarifying questions that they're gonna be there and they're ready for it. And then the last thing is asking them for their cell phone number. We've also started doing, just 'cause, the way I position it is with Zoom, with technical difficulties, it can sometimes be hard to get on the Zoom call, get off sometimes. So would you mind giving your cell phone number just in case we have any technical difficulties and then you're out of the office? And almost all of them will say yes and agree to that. So that just kind of adds more assurance that they're locking this in on their calendar, basically. - How much of your business has done over the phone? Now we tried to record this a few days ago and you were traveling. And do you travel at all and meet clients in person? I imagine that can get quite expensive and it's not as efficient, but does that happen at all? - Yeah, we definitely, in the last year, we haven't traveled as much, just 'cause of everything. But prior to that, I would travel a lot. Sometimes I would just show up at random campuses and just walk in with good, don't get donuts and buy two boxes of donuts and just walk in and try to get to talk to as many coaches as possible and exchange for a donut. So yeah, once things get back to normal, we'll definitely be going back on campus. - Is that work? Our donuts, the best sort of option to bring to people. Any food, yeah, but is there a food? I mean, this is where little off sides are food that really gets you in the door. - I think yeah, I think donuts have worked the best so far. - Yeah. As you build your business, you are a young company, obviously. How much do you ask for referrals after you have satisfied customers? Is referrals a big part of you helping to generate new business? - Yeah. - And how does that work? How do you ask for a referral? - Yeah, so that, we definitely want to wait. So we have two kind of sectors of the business and those businesses do. Again, we have our sales team and then we have our customer success team. Our customer success team is in summary. They're in charge of onboarding our clients, making sure they're happy, answering any questions, checking in. So once we make the sale, we kind of hand off to customer success. And would I personally give it about a month of them using the platform and interacting with our customer success team? And then I'll check in with our team and be like, all right, how is so and so doing? Do you think it's about time that I can call just to check in from the sales sides, check in, see how they're doing, and then, yeah, I ask them for referrals. I'll say, hey, do you have any other coaches at campus or do you recommend? And then, you know, I'll either send an email and CC that coach that made the recommendation or referral, just to kind of, I guess, facilitate that referral between that coach and the person that they are recommending to reach out to. One thing I would recommend to all the people who listen to this are, you know, if you wanted to get into sales, I would also look into customer success as well 'cause it is also sales as well. And I think, you know, it's sales, especially with us, we have a lot of products that are additional charges, which is up to the customer success team to basically upsell them. So it's, I think it's a really growing industry or growing category, customer success in general, and there's a lot of sales kind of built into that. - And we talk about that, right? So basically sales is finding new customers and keeping existing customers and not only keeping existing customers, but then as you said, move them to higher levels of consumption within the organization and hopefully you have like a product line developed that you can, as you said, upcharge them, upsell them, provide more benefit to them. - Yeah. - So what you do then and what your sales team does is find new business and then you turn them over to the folks that manage those accounts, make people happy, keep them happy, and then suggest how they might benefit from additional services. So that's also a very important part of the sales effort. So you've kind of separated it that way. - Definitely. - Yeah, service after the sale too, yeah. Okay, cool. All right, so that was a nice segue because at this point, that's where I'd like to go to a little bit with you is so we have, most of this class is comprised of students who are in their junior and senior year. So they're a lot closer to graduation than they have less runway ahead of them essentially. What's some advice for students who are interested in a career in sales? You just provided some, don't only look to sales, look for those support type roles within organizations. What's some advice you can provide for our students? What should they be doing now to help them to position themselves to be competitive for positions in sales? - Yeah, network network network. - What does that look like? How would they go about doing that? - So what I did, and I did this, I think I started doing it my junior year and I still have it today. Can I add to it is list, if you wanna go into sales, list every single person you've ever met. That you can remember that is in sales or that is in a role that you would like to be in at some point. And I have a Google sheet, name, LinkedIn URL, cell phone number, email. You can reach in on LinkedIn as well. I don't do as much on there personally. I think I'd direct either phone call, text message, email. And definitely start with your friends and family. I think if you have an uncle that's in sales, to talk to him, ask him if he has any recommendations to him or her or whatever. Just try to use your smaller network to expand and just have weird phone calls. I think people would like to give back and to talk about their experience. And they're very open to helping. So even if it's a little awkward at the beginning, you could just say, hey, I wanna get into sales or I wanna get into whatever business. Would you have a couple minutes to talk in the phone or I'll put on a Zoom call or grab a coffee or beer? We should graduate just to talk about your career path, how you got to where you are. And I think you'll be very surprised with how many people like to talk about themselves and what they've done, you know, they're, yeah, let me just, let me just giving you advice too. So that to me seems like it would be a very impactful exercise to call people up sort of informational interview. Hey, I'm interested in what you do. Can you tell me about it? And so forth. And it's a great way to learn. Do you find a lot of people are doing that? A lot of students are doing that? Or is that sort of a unique thing that would be like, oh, wow, this person is calling me. That's great. They're showing a lot of interest and passion. - I think, I mean, I don't know if it's changed in the last three, two years, but when I was in college, I didn't see a lot of people doing that. And yeah, I don't think people do it enough. Maybe they do it a little bit, but I think as long as you're being very, you know, real with the person and just, you know, being a little bit vulnerable, letting them know that you don't know what you're doing or you don't know what you want to do. I think most people are very open to that. Especially if you have some kind of personal connection to them to start. And then it just, I mean, it's all the network effects. So if you have a friend and family that connects you here, then you can use that to connect somewhere else and just kind of see how far you can, you know, expand that one single connection point. - If students using this, well, the student card, essentially, I'm a student, I'm learning, is that, do you think that opens doors more to those conversations? 'Cause I always thought, and maybe you can tell me your impressions, that once you're not a student and you have a, and you're attached to an organization and you have a sort of that name behind you, it's now the relationship almost changes, right? When you're a student, it's almost, it opens more doors for you to be able to talk to people. - Yeah, I mean, I think you, after graduation, I think you probably have a year to continue to use that card, if you say I'm a recent graduate, or whatever, but yeah, definitely, they definitely like helping students more. So I would do it as soon as possible. And a cool feature too on LinkedIn, which I know I briefly mentioned earlier, is the, you can search by school and by industry. So you can say, all right, show me everyone in sales that's graduated from, you know, Lindenwood, and you can just go through that list. And if you have any mutual connections, reach out to that person to try to connect you, just try to get creative with how you're connecting with them. But yeah, I definitely would say that, they like helping students more. So use that student card for as long as you can. - Very cool. Is there anything else I haven't asked you that you wanted to, that you felt was important to share with the students who are listening to this? - We'll be playing this. - What if I missed? - Yeah, so I would say I have two things that I'd mention. One is kind of on the sales call side of things. So this a little further once you guys get a sales job. But I would do as much research prior to the phone call. You know, it's easy to get in the mindset of just dialing and dialing and dialing. But if you do, like with us, like I mentioned, all of our potential leads are on a website and they have a bio page. So I can know what schools they were at before. Do they have kids? You know, or do they, how did their last season go? So I try to go into those calls with as much information as possible, or at least easily, you know, it could be on the screen while I'm on the phone where I could pull information. Some people I think are against doing that 'cause it might come across like a little creepy. The more information you know going into a conversation with someone you don't know at all. But I think it's helpful. And I mean, the more information you have and know, the more you can kind of drive that conversation. - Last night, you had lasagna for Daniel. - I love lasagna. - Yeah, that was a good one. (laughing) - You're not bad for, but something, you know. - Save that for the second conversation. - Yeah, after the second call, exactly. - Very good. - And the second thing? - Yeah, the second thing, just our COO, his name's Mark, he came in and he always says this and I always, I wish I had heard it personally in college or upon graduation. But he always says fail fast. So, you know, failing is kind of weird thing. You don't want to fail, but if you want to get into sales, just try it. And if you don't like it, fail and then drive something else. And then just try something like you don't, you're not stuck there forever or that could be, maybe you don't like the first company you're at. That's a learning experience, fail from fail, but then move on quickly and kind of use that momentum and you'll be happy with where you end up. But don't kind of get stuck in, I guess if you fail, sometimes it's you get stuck in thinking that you failed, but you didn't really fail. Let's move on to the next thing and keep that momentum going. Tell me about the best things in your job and what's most rewarding for you. What do you love most about what you do? - I like, well, I like just connecting with people and kind of building those relationships, talking on those calls, building out, you know, like I said, those relationships that I have. And then second is, you know, I'm lucky to have a, I can help contribute to our business in as far as what we're building and where we're going. So I really like that side just thinking forward about, you know, thinking new features and things and how we're gonna help coaches, you know, even more down the road. So kind of this is the innovation aspect of the business. And to kind of go for that, like you don't have to start a business to contribute to our organization in that way. Like if you have, if you're at a business company and you see something that you guys could be doing better or a new feature or something, go to someone higher up or tell them your ideas 'cause those are the gonna be the people that, we were talking about this morning, we had a call about it. Like we told everyone if you guys have any ideas for features or anything that we could be doing better, come and tell us and we have a couple of people that do that a lot and they definitely kind of, you know, rised in the ranks a lot within the company just 'cause they're putting themselves out there and coming, you know, contributing good ideas. - Right, I guess the last thing is and that struck me when you were talking about how you started this business or how you even got these ideas right from your, one of your very first classes is that you're in a business and you're with a company for, that's started and based on your own personal experiences and it's very close to what you experience. Then so you're close to that. So you believe in the product. And I guess that's very important if you're gonna work in sales is to actually have a belief in what you are selling and I imagine you come off much more authentic and much more invested in the process because you truly believe that it can be the need for those you're trying to sell to. - Definitely. And I think that that's something when you're looking for a job, you could, it would make it easier to kind of, you guess, segment the jobs you really want. So instead of just being, like I'm gonna apply to these hundred jobs, you could say, all right, what do I really believe in? What do I like to do? That could be sports, that could be advertising, that could be whatever, think about what you like to do and then find the jobs. Don't just cast your net for the first sales job you can find 'cause you're gonna be a better salesperson if you are doing something and selling something you like just like you said. - Very cool. Luke, you know, I can't thank you enough for reaching out to me and to our program to help our students. I was really glad that you did. I've enjoyed our conversations thus far. And I hope that, and actually, since the students are listening, would it be okay if any students had further questions? I know the answer already, but further questions about what you do, a follow-up on any of the advice you've given. Obviously, you know, this is, we're just skimming the surface to some of these topics here. Hearing from those who are in the field, who are professionals who are out there doing it about these various topics in the sales process. And so we've just skimmed and touched the surface here without taking a deep dive. If anybody had any further questions for you, would it be all right if they contacted you via LinkedIn, email, et cetera? - Yeah, definitely. You can email me and I'll send it to you. So just
[email protected] or you can give me a call or shoot me a text. I can, my number's eight to eight, seven, seven, seven, seven, eight, one, eight, and I'm sure Dan, you can send that information along as well. But yeah, email me, shoot me a text or LinkedIn. However, you want to get in touch more than happy there to talk with anyone. - Awesome. Thank you very much for your time today. ♪ And I'm heading down, I crank the volume loud ♪ ♪ 'Cause I've been waiting for so long ♪ ♪ And singing out loud ♪ - Thank you for listening to the latest episode of the "At the Wire" podcast. A new episode is released each Monday and heard on Apple Podcasts Spotify and many more hosting platforms. Until next time, I'm your host, Dr. Dan Sweeney. ♪ So long, I'm gonna sing it out loud ♪ ♪ I'm gonna do it now, I'm gonna do it now ♪ ♪ Before my time runs out, I've gotta let it out ♪ ♪ I've gotta sing it loud ♪ ♪ I'm gonna do it now, before my time runs out ♪ ♪ I've gotta let it out, I've gotta sing it loud ♪
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