How to Stand Out and Crush your Interview - Amjed Aboukhadijeh - Head of Sales at Socket

When I think about our sales process and where we win or lose deals and where it really takes skill and where you can really identify who the best sellers are, it's when the evaluation starts. It's when the customer says, "Okay, this is a real problem or you convince them it's a problem," and they say, "I am going to invest my team's resources into actually running an evaluation or a POC, right? Proof of concept for this tool." And that's when it gets real. We are back with another episode of the Elite Selling Podcast. It is your host, Frankie and Griffin. Today we have got Amjit, a book of DJ, head of sales at Socket. They just raised their series B, Hot Cybersecurity Company, and we've got Amjit on here talking about his unique interview process, his style, what he looks for in Elite reps before he makes the decision on hiring. You're not going to want to miss the details here, especially if you're interviewing at Socket, we've got some inside baseball for you. But before we jump in, if you're enjoying the podcast, if you're liking it, do Frankie and me a huge favor, hit that five star, subscribe, without further do. Here is Amjit. Amjit, welcome to the Elite Selling Podcast. How you doing? I'm doing great. Thank you guys. It's an honor to be here and looking forward to chatting with you both today. No, it's a pleasure to have you. It's a pleasure to have you. We're looking forward to this conversation. Before we jump in, I wanted to share with the listeners, you know, we've got a ledger UCLA track and field cross-country legend on. And I had to ask before we jump in what your personal best mile is. Have you had one of the last time you ran it or what's your what's your PR? What if that's on his event, though? Yeah, it's better than mine. I bet it's better than mine. So, yes, it's been a while since I've ran a timed mile. It's funny you it's funny you mentioned this because one of the enterprise AES on my team is a runner as well and he keeps messing with me saying that at the next sales kickoff he wants to go to the track and race him in a whole mile. So I have about two months. If I'm serious about that, I need to start training again, but no, yeah, so yeah, growing up, I ran a lot, right? I played all kinds of sports, but for some reason, I, you know, just excelled in track and field and, you know, I've got a scholarship to UCLA. Like you mentioned and ran there and I did run the mile. I ran the I was a little bit better some of the longer distances like the 5K 10K and then post college, I actually ran, you know, somewhat professionally half marathons and marathons for a while. My big claim to fame is I won the Alaska marathon, the largest marathon in Alaska, which I hate the cold. So if anyone knows anything about me, I hate the cold, but managed to tough that one out, but yeah, I ran a 407 mile. That was my fastest seven. That was before the fancy shoes and all these crazy things. So kind of the gold, the North Star, you know, for runners in the track and field is to break four, right? It's so rare. And I've got some buddies that never, never gave up after college. They kept rolling with it and a decade later, they're finally under four minutes. So I definitely don't regret it. But I respect everybody that can kind of keep going. It's it's not an easy sport and it's very underappreciated, especially in America, right? You don't you hardly make any money. It's nearly impossible to make a career out of it, but it should be treated equally like any other, you know, professional sport in terms of how much work goes into it. So where you were, where you were at the old Nike waffle shoes before the technology was upgraded or something. I'm not that old. I got a lot of getting started up, but the startup definitely aged me. But no, I, I, they, you know, they had some more advanced shoes, but just nothing like what you're seeing today. So it's crazy. It feels like cheating. Like I'm you can basically buy three hundred dollar pairs of shoes, cuts time off like crazy. Well, this is why like whenever you hear people comparing like NBA from generation to generation, you can't compare. You can't compare like the points, the average point scored and things like that. So in track, you can't really compare times, but you can still sort of compare championships, right? Because everyone's on an equal playing field now. So the best people will always find a way to win a championship, right? And things like that. So that's I think a more fair comparison, just having gone through that myself. But yeah, no, it's a guy who might need to table the, the NBA championship. Who's the goat, but you know, where are the championships way in that I could go, I could go a couple hours on that one. Frankie, you know, he's he's not so much, you know, yeah. I'm a Lager span. I love, I love the NBA though. It's, it's fun. I, I die hard Lager span, but oh my gosh. You know, he's okay. I mean, so I got to go. Yeah, I mean, I love. He's not like for me. He's not super exciting to watch. I don't know what it is. I just, I, in his earlier days, obviously, these highlights were incredible. I just got put into basketball by my uncle and he was a Laker span. So I just became a Lakers fan and it just happened to be, you know, in the 2000, 2003, you know, three Pete with Kobe. So kind of grew up with Kobe fan and everything about it. So, so, you know, just as mentality and all that. So my favorite player all time in NBA history is Russell Westbrook though. So yeah, that's, that's my, that's my rider die right there. You want to know if I heard yesterday, I don't know if this is an urban legend or not, but supposedly Steph Curry, whatever stadium he goes to, he eats their popcorn and he has like a popcorn rating of each stadium that he plays in. Isn't that funny? That's pretty fun. Yeah, I'm breaking. Someone said they saw him walking in a Costco the other day in the Bay area. I don't know if you, you know what? But yeah, he lives up in Appleton. Allegedly, I don't know. That's not too far for me. But, uh, no, I think Costco, he might, he might go a little bit further north than the one that I get. He's trending on the news. I'm like, he's just a normal person. Like, he's not allowed to go to the grocery store. Yeah, that's kind of exciting. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, this has changed. We got to change his podcast to the Elite Sports podcast. Right. Exactly. I love it. It's so funny. You mentioned the mom of mentality because I think that's like the exact of what we were talking about. Uh, uh, a head of this podcast was Elite selling elite sellers to make up the characteristics. You're obviously putting together a team at, at socket as a head of sales. And I want to dive into socket and help things are going. But what we, we talked about that really stood out to me was you're sort of unique approach to hiring and your unique interview process as you're vetting, you know, sellers to find out. Can they sell? You know, what's their experience like? What's their approach? What's their style to determine their level of grittiness, their, their level of eliteness, right? As we call it. So, I'd love to, I think, Frank, and I would both love to learn a little bit more about how you developed that, that interview style and how you go out and, and build and look for elite sellers. Do you want to give us your take? Yeah. Yeah. No, happy to. So I think really like, you know, the, the secret sauce of the, the hiring process, I think that really differentiates us, at least from hiring processes that I've been a part of. And what I hear, you know, some of my peers doing in their hiring processes is sort of how tailored we make it to the role specifically to socket. So I'll just back up, right? So, I mean, there's so much noise out there when it comes to hiring for sales folks. And, you know, at quick glance, it's very difficult to actually assess how good someone is based on like a resume or their LinkedIn profile. I always joke about it, but I'm trying to coin this phrase. I mean, I have never met a salesperson in my life that hasn't hit 100 plus percentage of their quota. I mean, you look at every resume. It's 193 percent. You know, it's a top performer 150 percent. So then why do I even need to interview you? Clearly, just hire you and you're going to hit 200 percent, right? It's, it, but as we know that's not the case, right? And so being able to sift through the noise, I think what would be useful for this conversation would be specific to like where I think the meat and potatoes is of our hiring process, like really where I'm able to know confidently that I want someone on my team because I think they're an elite seller rather than going through the entire process. Absolutely. I'm happy to, you know, elaborate on it if you guys have questions, but Frankie's a meat and potatoes guy, you know, big meat potato fan. Cool. It's all right to it. Yeah. So I mean, like, first of all, let me just say that, you know, just because someone is in a good seller, you know, for this role at SOC, it doesn't mean they're not, you know, if I say they're not a good seller, you know, in my opinion, for this role, it doesn't mean that they're not going to be great in another role. And with that said, like they may have been a good seller, you know, at the stage in when we were from zero to one million, right? But a zero to one million seller is different than a one to five million. That's different than a 50 to a 100 million seller. And so like identifying the right person for the right role at the right time and where your company is is what's the most important thing. And you really can, you really can get down to it where you feel higher confidence rating. I mean, we know all know and sales, there's high churn and things happen and, you know, market trends change and, you know, new competition comes in and all these different factors that can kind of play a role in a rep's success. But you could do the bet. All you could do is the best you can to, you know, bring set yourself up and set the rep up for the most success and the company up for the most success. So what I would say is, you know, we typically go through the usual process around screening. We get deep into deals. And I really challenge people on like helping me understand like what deals they went through. And then I drill into it, right. And all that usual stuff. Sort of the big part of every hiring presentation, you know, hiring step for a sales person is the presentation phase as you guys know, right? There's always some level of presentation. It doesn't matter. matter if it's an SDR or an AE and AE manager, there's always some form of a showcase what you can do. So with SDRs, we know it's typically like give me a written assessment, you know, how would you send a LinkedIn message, right? It's pretty, especially with chat GPT and things like this today, pretty easy to get through that. For the calling side of things, you know, for the SDR side of things, I should say I put a very big emphasis on calling, right. And so we do a big mock presentation where we go through, you know, three or four call calling scenarios live. And I get the whole sales team on the call to kind of create that pressure. We have made it somewhat easier at times where we will turn our camera off, so it feels like it's a little bit more real. And so that's kind of how we do the SDR thing. When it comes to AE's, what we see across the board of every company is it's usually like, hey, give me a presentation on either one of two things. And please tell me if you guys have seen it differently. But it's usually give me a presentation on your sales deck that you're selling today, your product you're selling today. Or it's, hey, here's an example deck of socket. Practice it. Ask me if you have any questions and why don't you come in and present it like it's an intro call or discovery call. It's always the same thing. It's like 90% of the time, you know, maybe there's some differences. So that's fine. You know, I have an element of that. But that's like the least important thing to me, like when I think about our sales, you know, process and where we win or lose deals and like where you really like where it really takes skill and like where you can really identify who the best sellers are. It's when the evaluation starts. It's when the customer says, okay, this is a real problem or you convince them it's a problem. And they say, I am going to invest my team's resources into actually running an evaluation or a POC, right? Proof of concept for this tool. And that's when it gets real. And so you almost have to, it's a balance, right? It's a balance of keeping your sales cap on at times. But it's really a project management cap, especially at the enterprise level. It's about, you know, threading and finding all the different stakeholders that are going to be in part of the evaluation and then putting it into an actual plant like into a checklist, a spreadsheet, capturing their criteria. What is it, what are they actually going to make the decision on? Is it, you know, is pricing involved? Who needs to be involved in that process? What does the procurement stage look like? Can we do certain things in tandem, right? To expedite the process? I mean, there's like all these convoluted things, especially when you think about cyber security. It's never just one team making the decision. It's engineering. It's security. It's procurement. It's legal. It's finance. It's five, six things. And so my interview process that we've created here at Socket that I'm super proud of is two parts. The first part is let's warm you up with something you're confident in that you better blow out of the park, which is a 20, 25 minute presentation, pretending to be a discovery intro call with you presenting your deck. And don't worry, we're not going to do research on your product, but we'll, we'll, you know, chop our way through it, right? You assign a role to us, you assign, you make up the scenario, you know, we booked on the website, an SDR booked it, whatever it is. But we go in, it's 20, 25 minutes, something you should just blow out of the park. So the idea there is, let me see you at your very best, something that you've been doing hopefully for the past several years, right or whatever, something where you should be just absolutely crushing it. And then, once we get through that part, we flip script immediately, five minute break, and then we go right into a mock POC kickoff. So you are now kicking off a POC, but the most difficult part is you're kicking off a socket POC. So what this does is number one, it tells me, can this person do research, right? Like, are they going to actually go do research to figure out enough to know who are, what's our competitive landscape? You know, are they going to be resourceful? Are they going to reach out to my other AE's, my other SDRs to try to gather, gather information? I welcome them to do it. I always tell my reps that people reach out to you for hiring if you have the bandwidth, take it. Like, I don't see that, I don't see that as a negative because that's what it is at the end of the day. It's sales. It's like, we're going to ask people and try to call people and get info. And so what's interesting about this process, though, is what it tells me is it tells me that the assumptions you have to make have to be educated. So when we kick off the mock POC, what I do is I ask them to say to assume all of the meetings that have already happened. So you can assume the information. I'm not telling you what the scenario is. I'm not saying, oh, we're Costco. You're selling at Costco, right? And I'm the CISO and whatever, right? It's you come up with a scenario. You come up with, hey, you know, we've done a technical demo. We've had multiple conversations. It sounds like these are your pains. We identified that this is your success criteria. And so I want to see, are the success criteria they're putting up there actually make sense to what we're doing? Do they know what we do? Have they even tried? Now, it doesn't need to be perfect if a word is off here. They're not phrasing something perfectly. That's all teachable. But is there, is the way they're thinking about it and the way they're structuring this plan the correct way? And then just real quick to wrap. And then I'm sure you have questions. But the once you kind of go through that, you know, hey, here's the current situation. Here's what I heard. So, hey, here's what typically we see companies similar to yours go through in terms of an evaluation process. And so I wanted to just take a couple of minutes. It's not set in stone, right? We'll customize this for you. But I wanted to take the liberty and just presenting what other customers have gone through when they've evaluated socket in the past. And so now you're showing them this spreadsheet, right? It's almost like a checklist. Now you can use a tool, you know, a tool for this. There's SaaS tools now. You can do it however you want. I don't care. But it's like, doesn't make sense. So it should be like, hey, here's the steps we've done. We first met at the conference. Then we set up this technical demo. You told me to go talk to this person on your team. Here's what we uncovered. Here's the meeting notes. Here's the date it was completed, right? Then we set up, you know, the scoping call. This is where we started talking about your technical requirements. And then here's where we're at today. We're on the POC kickoff. So the goal for today is to do the following, right? I want to turn it over to my SC. I want to actually get the app installed for you guys so you can begin testing. But before I pass it to him, I want to make sure I run through like here's what the plan looks like to see if you're on the same page with it. So I'll pause there. I mean, I can get really granular into like things I look for and I'll show you where people fail on this because it's incredible. Like people shake in their boots and this crumbles people. I mean, just crumbles them. Yeah, I mean, if anybody's listening and about to interview at Socket, they have the playbook now. So you just gave it away. So I guess that's a good thing if somebody's coming to research. But I heard a lot of good stuff in there. I'm curious. I have a lot of questions I'm sure Griff does. But how much are you weighing this skill versus the will? Like somebody coming in and maybe they don't have all the skills to be successful right today. But as you're talking, you mentioned a few things without saying it like creativity. How are they researching? Like, are they leading the call? Are they setting the upfront contract? Are they closing for next steps? Are they guiding you to those next steps? Do they come in with a point of view? Do they have confidence? You know, at least as much as they can without selling your actual product? Have they done their research with other people ahead of time? Like, how much are you how much are you balancing the unteachable stuff? Like the grit versus, okay, does this person know what they need to know on day one? Yeah, it's a really good question. Creativity is great. I give it very little credit in this process. I mean, if you want to use like a SaaS tool online or something and make it a little prettier and stuff, you know, that's fine. I was joke like, I'm the worst at arts and crafts. Like, they don't ask me to ever edit a sales deck or something, right? Like, we pause on that. I have a question about that. Yeah. I feel like as a as a whole as a SaaS world or even a selling world, we maybe we've over rotated on like getting cute with tools and stuff like that and like trying to package stuff up super nice. Like, to a certain extent, it definitely helps you accelerate things and makes it easier like deal rooms and stuff like that where you put it all in one place. But I feel like we kind of as sellers get in our own way of like, okay, it's got to be this perfect presentation, blah, blah, blah, blah. But it's like if somebody wants to move fast, somebody knows what they want. Like, you're going through and evaluating. Like, don't get in the way of the process. Like, I'm I'm curious what you think about that. Yeah. I mean, it's funny. This came up yesterday in my leadership office site that was up in Seattle and then we had the customer thing. And like some, you know, some of my team was giving a presentation to the team and they went out of their way to create a deck to kind of go through it, which, you know, could have just talked through it in five minutes and along they spent on the deck, but I could tell you it was several hours. I mean, it got to a point where AWS completely just banned presentations internally at their company. Like, if you're going to present a new thing or a new rollout to someone, they just don't let you make a deck. It's I find it to be wasted time. It's like, it's it's I don't want to call it fake work, but it's it's unnecessary, right? And it's like, we should just be focusing on efficiency and like doing the right thing. So if you're spending 80% of the time trying to get our the perfect logo of the mock customer that you're pretending in there and make it look nice and have bubbly letters and stuff, that's not great because I mean, I'm we're going to have like that sales operations job, right? That's product marketing. They're going to give you the deck. This has been stress tested and against the market and we know it sounds good and works good. If you have suggestions, go tell the sales office person, we can try out something new. But the creativity is cool, but I prefer the creativity and the actual deal motion. Like, yeah, how are you going to get your champion reengaged? How are you going to get the decision-maker engaged? So the answer is depends on the creativity. When it comes to like arts and crafts, the kind of the deck itself, almost none. Like I could care less about that, right? Okay, how about the how about the how about the other stuff like the the research, like how you're guiding, how you're setting up the call? Like, what about that? The research should be pretty good. good, but it should be actionable. So it should be like, it should be like, Hey, you know, I saw in your guys is, you know, and now like if you're going to pick a company in Costco, then make it relevant. Like, Hey, I see you with the C so this former company. And hey, by the way, that former company is a socket customer, right? So it's like, Hey, I know it might not have been around your time. But actually, this might be relevant to you. This company now uses socket. And the reason why they chose socket, we have public case study, right? I just wanted to spend a minute share of case study, share the slide, right? Like, this is why they came to us. So you were there. You probably remember some of these tools that you guys are using. And this is where we're differentiated, right? And so like that type of research is super important because it just kind of validates, okay, I can actually believe this person was 150%. Again, it's just additional data points for me to actually believe back up what they're saying in their resume, right? That they were president's club. This is these little things, right? So research is important. Now I don't need you to go, you know, to go try to understand all the technical, you know, components of it. It just has to make sense. If it can all flow smoothly, make sense, not like it's super cheesy, but it just feels natural. So what I focus mostly on is the process. So can I throw for if it's let's just take an example, if it's an enterprise role I'm hiring for, can I throw this person in the boardroom with JP Morgan with 10 executives in the room? And are they going to be able to hold their own? Because we're going to rattle the shit out of you in the interview process. Like my counterpart, Doug, who's the VP of customer engineering, who does all the technical stuff alongside the AES, I mean, he's going to rattle this shit out of you and say, Hey, I want to change the scope. You know, we've now are actually using this new programming language. Do you guys support it? And like, that's very easy. You can go to our docs page and see what programming languages do we support, right? And so like, being able to just kind of get an understanding of like, okay, what does socket do? Okay, it's important that they protect languages. Let me just make sure I have the basic knowledge or at least have this tab open so I can have a good answer there. You know, that kind of stuff I think is important research wise. But in terms of the process, I want to know like, can can I put them in a boardroom and can they be successful? And like, can they acknowledge and then bring it back to the plan, right? It's like, let's get back on track, right? And bring it back and like, Hey, that's why we have this step in here, because we're going to be doing that at this stage. That's okay with you, right? And doing it in a tasteful way, right? That doesn't rub them the wrong way. You know, it's also stuff. Basics, basic, you know, I call them soft skills, right? Like confidence, like ability, all those things play a factor as well. Super important because that's the kind of thing you can't coach. Like, no matter what you tell someone, if you don't like him, you know, or they just don't come off like someone you would buy from, how are you going to change that? Right? Like that's that's kind of that innate. I don't know if you want to call it talent or what it is. But you just like I just hired someone, we just made an offer to a commercially, I mean, extremely likable guy, right? Like you just, you can't help it, right? But you just you want you would buy from it. And so that's you're not going to hire a griff. No, griff's on the. He's not that likable. I'm a hard ass dude, okay? You know, I come in, I'm pissed. No, I'd hire both of you guys. No, no. So yeah, so I think hopefully that answers your question. I mean, it's definitely the nation of things, but it's more so focused on like, would this person be successful in this environment? I think a big challenge. Sorry, Grip, just to wrap that thought, a big challenge is people come in and with the interview, and they think they have to have every single thing known to man, like every answer done all the end, but like you're inevitably going to get rental value or your engineer, the technical counterpart, you got to be able to navigate and like reposition and like continue to move forward. So it's just, it doesn't, it doesn't excuse the fact of not researching, but it also is like, you're going to have to know that you're going to deal with some objections along the way. So I'm just a thought, go ahead, Grip. Well, I'm curious about you mentioned that this process is designed to, quote, rattle the shit out of you, right? That's the goal. You want to see how reps perform under pressure. So I'm wondering if you can give us an example of where, you know, let's talk about the negative in the process. Where do you see reps in the interview process? Get rattled. Like what, what is the part? Is it, but what you just mentioned where the scope gets changed that you throw in a variable, like where do reps may struggle most often in that process? And then maybe give us an example of a situation where you're interviewing someone, you tried to rattle them and they responded very well. I'd love to, if you have any examples to share with the audience. Yeah. So I would say the, the way people get rattled the most, if I were to bucket into two categories, it's either one, we uncover that they haven't actually gone through that many evaluations or POCs because they don't know how to do something that is so simple. Have you gone through it multiple times? So I give examples. And number two is they don't, we rattle them and we find out that they're not actually taking this as serious as it should be treated, which is like, I always tell people going into the interview process when they say, do you have any last minute advice? So yeah, treat this as your biggest deal of the year. This is a million dollar contract. You're gonna make a quarter million dollar commission on this, right? Like that's how serious you should come into this. And so being able to rattle them to realize that they may be, they're not, they're not paying attention or focusing on the attention to details much. So in the first part, like I can give you a really silly example. So we were interviewing somebody. This happens all the time, by the way, but we were interviewing someone and they put in their next steps, like in terms of the mutual action plan, that one of the remaining steps that we had to get set up was a joint Slack channel. So we can have ongoing communication throughout the evaluation. So they said, were you able to get our last time we were on the call? You said you, you know, I can send you a Slack connection so that we can create a joint channel. Were you able to receive that? I said, no, I didn't receive it. I think it got blocked on our end. And they said, okay, no worries. You know, we can just use email. And I said, no, we actually want to, we want to use Slack for ongoing communication. So what should I do? I didn't receive the connection. I think you got blocked by my IT team. And so it just, and they were like, what should we do? And I was like, just pointing, wanted to see what they would say, right? And I mean, what I was looking for, I mean, they basically didn't have a good answer, right? And this happens all the time. They're like, well, I could try to send it again. But big corporations always don't allow these channels to get. So what I was looking for is like, hey, so there's, there's two, there's two things. One, you can try sending me a connection because it might just be a permission on your end that's blocked, right? By your IT team. And number two, if that still doesn't work, do you mind chasing down that IT person to make sure that they can get that approved so we can start this evaluation? So what you're doing is you're stress testing the prospect. I think what we do all the time as sellers is we're just like, we don't want to burden people. I don't want to make you do any extra work. But if the guy doesn't even want to set up a joint Slack channel, which he asked for, is he even serious about this evaluation? Exactly. Doing it with another vendor. So it's like little things like this, like have you actually, like that to me is red flag. If I'm getting into a big meeting and we're to kicking off a POC and we're going to put a shit ton of resources in and they don't even want to like talk to their IT person to get the channel. That's a red flag. Like do it. Am I working with the right champion? So that's number one. On the flip side, what I'll do is we'll ask them all these objections knowing that they're not going to know the answers. But then what they'll do is they'll say, Hey, let me, you know what, I don't want to give you the wrong answer. Let me check with my technical counterpart. And I'll get back to you after the meeting. You hear this all the time. We do this all the time. So that's fine. I mean, I don't expect to know everything about socket. But then what I always do, my famous question at the end, and this is a clear giveaway if anyone that's hiring is going to listen to this. But I always say, they said, okay, and I'll go ahead and send you those next steps. And I go, yeah, and just so that I remember, do you mind repeating back to me with those next steps where all the things that you're going to be sending me? And nobody remembers what the questions were. So they didn't write them down. They didn't write them down. So are you like, I mean, how are you going to do? Is it in a real deal? Now I know there's people could argue, well, we have gong and we have tools. We can go back and all this. But it's just another thing that just shows me how prepared is this person. That's a nervous, that's a nervous thing is they didn't, they were so nervous to get on to the next thing that they weren't actually in the moment listening and saying, yeah, you know, I really don't know that one. Do you mind saying it again? I just want to make sure I get that to you as soon as I can right after the meeting. And then write it down. Yeah, you said you wanted this. You said you wanted this. You said you wanted that, right? Etc. So those are a couple of different ways. The third one is kind of like the no brain or one. It's like the golden rule. I always say, hey, what is this going to cost us? And I don't expect them to be experts on our pricing model. But you know, they'll say something. And then I'll say, yeah, cool. If you could just email me the quote so I can look at it, right? And especially for enterprise sellers, like, you never want an email quote without actually explaining, walking through, looking at the whites. It's like trying to assess it. And a lot of times you'll just see people say, yep, no problem. I'll send that over to you after. And I'm just like you later. Are you selling a transactional product? Like because that's not how it is at a startup, you know, with 30 people. Like it's a little bit more complicated than that, especially in cyber security. So there's just like little things like this, right? Where we try to we try to rattle people and it's it's pretty it's been pretty successful. So and I don't expect everyone to be perfect. But again, you'll come out of that knowing like this person did really well versus not. Yeah, yeah, I think I mean, if that's just good selling, if you're listening to this and whether you're interviewing for a new role or whatever, it's just it's good to know these these processes. Like you call it out so many good things around how to build champion, how to stress test people, how to own the call, take people through a process. So I don't know a little bit. Do you have grip? Do you have any other questions in particular about the interview process? I want to kind of zoom out and ask a little bit more about traits around sellers, unless you have something else. No, the only other one. I thought that was great. And I think some good takeaways for our listeners. I am curious if there is anyone that caught you off guard with how well they did handling objections or what specifically shocked you about someone that's passed the test with flying colors and anything that stood out to you about them that that you want to share with the listeners. And if not, if this is like a, you know, it's designed to break it and you know, no one's really, you know, passed the test with 100% that's all good, but I'm just I'm curious if there's a lot of great work like six A.E.s. So I was impressed at least. Yeah, there you want to shout out or something that they did that stood out. No, again, like I met a lot of amazing sellers. And I have, you know, I'm lucky to say that like I feel like I know some of the best sellers in the Bay Area, like at some of the best tech companies. And again, they not wouldn't necessarily be perfect for socket because of our stage. And so I would say like the thing that's the most impressive to me is when, is when people bring the the right energy to the call. Like it's a lot of times, you know, when people go through an interview process, they're usually interviewing at like at least four or five places. And so like it gets daunting. Plus, you have your day job, right? And all these other things going on. And like if I if I see someone that comes in and they're like, they just they look like they're fresh. They just woke up. They just had a cup of coffee. And it's just but it they get they give off that vibe. Like that that that specific energy that to me is somebody that I you know, that's someone I want to be in the trenches with. Like that's contagious, right? Especially when you're building a culture. So that that is like an area that I mean, back to your question, Frankie, I mean, I would I lean on and on that a lot too, you know, the energy and like, is this person going to bring up the group? And so the folks that have done the most, the best, I would say, graph are the folks that kind of come with that energy. And that's the way I'll answer it 100%. I love that. And I think it's it's it's something that is controllable for the for that rep. It's it's something that you can control. You always, I'm such a big believer in focusing on what you can control and knowing what you can't control. Your energy, your attitude, the way you approach, you know, an interaction that kick kicking off a call, that's energy that you bring, you can control that. And that's one thing like you have to be able to do as a seller is bring that sort of energy and bring that and meet the customer where they are, right? You can show up and be energetic. And if there may be a little less, right? You can bring it down a little bit, talk a little bit. But if they're meeting you and matching you that keep leaning in, keep leaning in like this. So yeah, I totally agree. Yeah, yeah, it's like they want it, right? Yeah. You can tell them want it. And that's and that's the kind of folks that I want on my team. Yeah, 100%. I know, I know we've got a few minutes left. So a couple last questions for you. Is there anything that, whether it's the interview process or just what you love best about your, the top sellers that you worked with, like anything that we haven't discussed that you want to make sure you share before you start to rank up? Yeah, yeah, totally. So like, I would say across the board, I mean, there's all these books on this stuff too. So I mean, I don't know how I'm sure you guys have read the challenger sale and things like that. So I mean, they talk about all these different personalities of the best selling seller types. I would say like, there's a combination of like some of the qualities across the board. I would say if I were to summarize like the three key things that I've seen that just the best sellers, I mean, the people that consistently make presidents club, it's not luck. They figured out the formula. There's usually three, like, common things that they have in common. The first is like, I would call it like everyone calls it customer obsession, right, or customer centric. But what I mean by that is like, they get offended if they're support or technical counterpart or CSM or somebody on their team, on their overlay team does not respond to a customer's message like fast enough, right? So frustrating. Yeah, you like they it's like it drives them crazy, right? They will sleep over it. It's like, why are we not getting back to them? Like, so just that that ability to like really feel like, Hey, I want to help this person. We have a real deal here. And like caring more even though it's like, you can easily just say, Oh, well, that's my SC to do that. Or hey, that's it. I already closed the customer. Like, that's the CSM's problem. But like, it should bother you, right? It should really it should really irritate you that what you promise them in the sales process is not being delivered in the post sales process. And so like, that is just a quality that I absolutely love because especially at our stage where our customers are growing, there's so much more opportunity for growth. And so that's like, that's probably in my opinion, the first, the first thing. The second thing in this a little bit more specific to enterprise, but having a long term focus, like, I think a lot of times, I'm guilty of this early in my career. I had a little bit of impatience. But like, I don't know if even patience is the purpose, the, you know, the perfect way to describe it. But it's really about this, this sort of long term focus on like, treating your business over like, think about it over a two or three year period, right? Like, what am I going to do? You know, this year, next year, the year after. And like, how does this all sort of play together? And like, taking that sort of approach to the way they approach their business. Like, this is what I see across all the best enterprise sellers is they always just kind of seem calm, right? They always feel like it's, it's going to, things are going to, I'm doing all the right steps. And that's in my control. And the, you know, the deals will take care of themselves. And so I would say like, that is another extremely good quality that I see. And then the last thing, you know, just from like a sales perspective, I would say is just like storytelling, right? You hear this a lot. But just the ability to tell a good story. So making it relevant, I mean, all these slides, they mesh together, like, so we're in the cybersecurity space. I mean, our big conferences are like the RSA conference or the black hat conference. You go to Las Vegas, you go, if you've ever walked through those booths, I mean, you just can look up and see what all the stands say. They all have the same five buzzwords, zero trust, you know, malware detection, like all, you know, instant response. Like it's always the same things. Then, you know, boring. Nobody knows what you do, right? And so like, like making it, being able to tell a story. So like, I have a rep on my team. He starts every meeting off. And he goes, Hey, I just want to, I just want to tell you guys a quick story because you remind me of another customer that I worked with at a similar stage. You know, in our last call, you mentioned, you're using this tool. And you guys are about this size. And these are some of the challenges. And your engineering team is out numbering you by 5x. And that's exactly where so and so customer was. And so what they did is they came to us. And, you know, they ultimately chose because this is what we did for them. You know, we got it set up in a couple of, couple of clicks, right? You know, they built, they build this story. And so right away, when you're buying and you're on the other side, you're thinking, OK, here's my problem. That's my exact situation. That's what I want to solve. And oh, they just did this with four or five other people. Now I can get into the details. OK, do you guys cover this? Do you cover that? Do you cover this? But already, they're kind of already sort of selling and leading themselves into it. So being able to like, take that, you know, and make it feel like it's more real. And like, where the ones to trust, we've done this so many times before helps helps majorly with the processes. So I'll say those three comment, you know, those three, those three skill sets, I mean, being able to tell a story to kind of help your top of funnel push POC's along. The ability to, you know, be very like thinking long term about things. And then actually following through on what you say, right? And like being very customer obsessed and making sure that like the customer feels very appreciated and, you know, having fast response times. And I mean, all that stuff matters a lot. Well, said definition of elite seller right there. I love that. Those are three key areas. So we appreciate you calling that out customer obsession, long term focus, being able to tell a story. We could do a podcast on each of those individually. So we'll have to have you back on jet. I know this is a frank and I appreciate you jumping on. This has been a great conversation. ton of great takeaways for our listeners. So we appreciate you sharing sharing some wisdom. Awesome. Of course, yeah, no more than happy to. And I really appreciate you guys having me on. It was love talking about this stuff. And yeah, just can't think you guys enough. Absolutely. Last question. Last question is socket hiring. Yes, we are. Yeah, we are. We're using our series B. We announced it about a month ago. That's awesome. Yeah, we're just 40 million B. So yeah, growing the growing this SDR team business development team, but also the account management team and post sales. So CSNs hiring across the board to kind of meet customer demands. So let's go. I love the book. So no excuses to change the process. Now that's I know you do. I get a ride on this time. Yeah, I don't know. We'll see. Maybe we'll just, well, maybe I'll just ask a bunch of sports questions, right? Yeah. Hot route. Yeah. Oh, Jen, thank you. We appreciate it. Likewise, take care guys. Thank you. We'll see you. Thanks for joining the elite selling podcast. So many good takeaways from this. Whether you're going to interview for socket or another company, I think the point of this whole episode was unprepared. Do your research act like you want to act like you want to close the deal. Treat that as that million dollar deal that Omjet was talking about and really focus in on how can you guide That customer or that interviewer through those next steps and how you're gonna take them through that process and show them What makes you unique as a seller during that interview process is your chance to showcase your skills and your unique value prop So don't be afraid to go above and beyond and get creative and do the research that he talked about So again, if you're liking the episodes if you're enjoying the show, please like subscribe share this with a friend As always thanks for listening. We'll see you next time