Meredith Chandler - The Power of Leadership, Continuous Learning, and Coaching.

(upbeat music) - You're listening to The Great Day in Sales Podcast, brought to you by Lysio. (upbeat music) Hello everyone, welcome to A Great Day in Sales. We're really excited to have Mary the Chandler on the podcast today, who's head of new business over at Unicorn, a fractional VP of Sales Group. We're gonna ask you a few questions around that, understand that a little bit more. There's a few of those popping up around. You've heard of fractional SDR companies and I think more and more sales leadership as well. Just makes sense sometimes to bring on someone fractional. So Meredith is just the person she's been at some fantastic companies leading sales team. So Meredith, thanks for joining us. - Thanks for having me, Justin. I am thrilled to be here with you this morning. We love a thrilling morning for you, so hopefully we can give that to you on the podcast. Meredith, why don't you add an interest, you have an interesting background in sales only because you've worked at, well, starting at SPIF, and then you worked at Captivate IQ, which are direct competitors. So I'm very curious as to just walk us through your career, some of the choices you made, leading different teams. I think it'll be interesting for our listeners to kind of understand why you made the choices that you did. - Sure, kind of been all over the place, but always in tech, I'm from the Bay Area originally. So made the most sense to kind of get into tech sales right when it was booming, got my start at Yelp, then moved over to Indeed, and then from there, started my career in startups. And I was one of the first sales reps at a company called SamSara. And SamSara was a really unique place in that the founders had a very successful exit previously. And so they were very selective with who they brought on. And I think I just kind of threw my name in the hat there to see if I could get it. I didn't think I would even get the job in, it's illegal now, but at the time you had to show your W2 and prove that you were a top performer, right? Because I'm sure as many of your listeners know, people can fake an interview really well. Oh, I'm a top rep because I do this, I do that. At SamSara, they did such a great job protecting the talent pool that you actually had to show them. I'm a top performer. Here's my W2 to prove it. And so that was an incredible place to work because everybody was an A+ player. I broke some sales records there. And then I moved into management. And then went to a different startup called SPIF when I moved to Utah, got in as one of the first reps there. Broke some more records at SPIF. Helped move from mid market up into the enterprise space with a million and a half dollar deal, which was right around the company's ARR at that time of series B funding. And so from there moved into management again. And I've just been leading and scaling teams ever since, which brings me today to Unicorn, like you mentioned, which is fractional sales for usually tech startups. And we're just hitting the ground running there too. - Very cool. Yeah, I think that's interesting. I mean, we definitely ask the question, have you been hitting quota? People share that on their resume, things like that. But Sam Sarah asked you to share your W2 with them. How common is that? Maybe I'm oblivious, but I wonder how common that actually is. - So today it's illegal. There's all these different rules around comp now. And I don't know if you or your listeners have seen but certain states on the inverse of that, you have to show the comp range now in job descriptions. So there's a lot of different rules and regulations. You legally today cannot ask someone for their W2, unfortunately, because I think a lot of mishires and hiring mishaps could be avoided this way. But there are certain things that you can, as a hiring manager say, such as, you know, I believe what you say about top performers, but as you can imagine, I hear that all the time. Like what kind of proof can you show me that would alleviate any concern? So you can kind of prance around it, but that was, I will say, Justin, it was fairly unique at the time. - Yeah, that's true. - It was a unique place. They went public, so. - Yeah, yeah. Well, you figured out how to hit some home runs at the companies that you've been at, probably learned a ton at each one. I'm curious, the move to Utah, how was that move from Silicon Valley to Silicon Slopes? Was it, I don't know. Eye-opening, was it shocking? Was the, you know, how do you feel like you assimilated? Like, what was the experience there? - It was a lot of fun, actually. So luckily there is Silicon Slopes there and the community is very welcoming and also just a bunch of hard working, good-hearted people there, I think. And so actually on my third day there, this amazing organization called Utah Women in Sales hosted their annual, they had an annual awards ceremony at the time and it was my third day and it was blizzarding and I, you know, typical Utah, I was like, do I go hit the ski slopes or do I go to this networking event? I almost didn't go, but I'm so glad that I did. And I forced myself to sit at a table, not that I was gonna know anyone regardless, but there were tables of companies that had sponsored and some very welcoming people come sit with us. But again, that was a group of nine people that all knew each other. And so I purposely sought out this table of kind of a hodgepodge group of people, a lot of people who came alone and I figured this is gonna be my best networking play. I'll get to meet nine different people and companies. And at that table, Steve Arns from Campfire, I don't know if you know him, yes. - Wonderful. - Yeah. - Yeah, wonderful guy brought up the company spiff. And I, you know, everyone at the table kind of three different companies and connections in the hat and I wrote them all down, connected with everyone on LinkedIn, looked up spiff later in the commission space. Now rewind a few years ago, I have been the victim of a terrible commission story. It's a long story long, but I was actually overpaid many moons ago by tens of thousands of dollars over the span of years. So it's not like I got a lump sum of $50,000 one day. It was $800 one paycheck, $700 paycheck. And when you're making money and when you're a top rep, you don't count those things. You're paid of California at the time, you're obligated to give that money back. So I had a terrible taste in my mouth of withdrawing money from, you know, different accounts and tax, et cetera, to pay it back. And so I was very interested in compensation tools at the time. So that's how I wound up at spiff and was one of the first employees there and learned a ton under that team as well. And they were right there in Sandy. - Yeah, so what, did you have something lined up when you made the move to Utah? - Nothing, no. - Wow, okay. And what was compelling about Utah? Just big-time skier or what brought you to the state? - Yes, big-time skier. I just needed a break from San Francisco. I'm born and raised, grew up in tech before tech boomed. I did go to college and spent some years after college away, but then moved back. And so I'd been skiing in Utah for years and just really loved the lifestyle there. And every year I would go for Sundance and I would go for a weekend. And a weekend turned into five days, a week, 10 days a month. And my family was like, just go move there already. - Yeah, yeah. Well, welcome, welcome to the Valley. We love it here in Utah. And you'll obviously, you've already been assimilated into the Silicon Slopes, but it's a great place. So interesting. So you felt like a match made in heaven at spiff. You joined as I see, but quickly became a top contributor. What a huge deal that you mentioned being a part of. And obviously, spiff is now a part of Salesforce. Then you have the opportunity to join captivate. You walk us through some of the, I mean, there's a lot of tribal knowledge you gain that you can maybe kind of apply. And but there's, I don't know. I'm just really interested to see kind of the thought process there in that move. - Sure, so I had always been interested in what the competition was doing when I was at spiff, captivate IQ was the one competitor. I didn't mind losing deals too because I thought they had a great product because it's kind of like an excuse my terrible analogy here. It's kind of like Microsoft to Apple, right? You either really like one or you really like the other and you kind of understand why either party likes the competitor if that makes sense. It's like, oh, yeah, you want that feature. Microsoft doesn't have it. You should go to Apple and vice versa. So when I was at spiff, you know, there were some competitive deals I'd lose and then that doesn't make any sense. But if I lost to captivate IQ, I was like, okay, yeah, that makes sense. They've got something going on. And so there was that. And then candidly, I am a money motivated individual and there were some compensation discrepancies that came up time and time again, which I found highly ironic for a compensation tool. And I get it, they're a startup and every startup has, you know, their glitches and I can give a lot of grace. But after a while, when I see an opportunity to put an abundance of food on my table versus some scraps, I'm going to, you know, go for the, what's the thing I think's giving? Corticopia. - Yeah, that's totally fair and pretty fascinating. I'm just going through these different experiences, having success, having to deal with commissions, even at a commission, you know, software company, really fascinating. So you move to Utah, you find success at spiff and then it captivate IQ. And then what lead, and you've also started your own sales consulting company. But now you're focused into this fractional group of sales leaders. What does that look like and what drew you into that opportunity? - Yeah, Unicorn is really cool because I think it's part of the future, right? And so when anyone's thinking of joining a company, you want to make sure the product or the service is either in high demand today or is going to be in high demand in the future, right? And so if we think about sort of the current landscape, and I know in sales and in tech sales and you know, still on slope, still on value forever, the landscape's always changing. If we think about the last year and a half, pocketbooks are a lot tighter, right? Because of the economy, still because of, you know, reps and sales teams are turning away from being order takers and having to sell really, really hard, right? But also with that, we're not hiring as aggressively as we were when VCs were just dicing out money and over fist, right? VCs are a lot more focused on profitability and long-term growth instead of that kind of rocket ship graph, which used to be the norm three to four years ago, right? Before it was higher and grow at all costs and it's just a totally different ballgame now, right? And so what's happening is that CEOs, CROs, are not as aggressively hiring and they're not wanting to, rightfully so, invest in a full-time employee without the guarantee that they can perform because it's expensive, it affects your runway, it goes into the numbers, you report to the board, it's, again, it's really risky and we've seen the numbers from RepView, only 40% of reps are hitting quota, right? So it's a high investment with little reward and so what we aim to do at Unicorn is bring in fractional help so that you can still make sales and grow your revenue that way, but not have to pay the hefty price tag and you can sign on for a four-month, six-month contract and then if things are going well, renew. So you preserve your bottom line that way, but you can also afford the top talent as well because our pods kind of stick together. We've sourced all these amazing sales leaders and sales talent at Unicorn and we deploy these pods versus, you know, if you're a CEO at a company, you likely can't afford the 200 OTE, but if somebody's working multiple accounts are kind of getting that pool of money like they do at Unicorn. - Yeah, yeah, interesting. Well, that's cool that you keep these pods together to deploy them and you're a new business. So what's been your, like what are the indicators in a company that's really primed for your product specifically? 'Cause I think there's a lot of, I mean, myself included, right? We're looking at the next stage of our go-to-market. We found some success. We need to potentially scale. Sales start putting more money into marketing and we've wondered, you know, do you continue to hire sales reps or do you kind of go the fractional route? So it's not, they're not on your payroll. It's a little bit easier to kind of, the ebbs and flows of sales. I mean, so what are some of the indicators that people could be looking for that may fit more of this fractional approach? Yeah, a few different indicators. So exactly what you're saying, which is switching from a founder-led sale to a sales-led organization. You know, founders do a great job at first going into their network and getting the first few sales to prove product market fit, but your network's only so big, right? Eventually you have to scale and allow people that don't know you exist to find you. And so when you wanna transition from founder-led to sales-led, or that's a great spot, also, you know, founder only has so much bandwidth. They can only do so much. And most of them haven't sold before, right? So not only are they having to sell, but they're having to learn to sell, which can be very time-consuming versus focusing on other parts of the business that can really help it run quickly. So that's a good indicator and another one. You know, we work with all sorts of companies from founder-led to very established, which is kind of that second scenario that we talked about earlier, which is maybe you just had to let a lot of people go in your sales org and you can't bring on those pricey sales people anymore. You need kind of just the pod structure where the sales rep is still highly talented, but getting business from other companies so that you still get the same grade of talent for your org. - Yeah, so founder-led, moving into sales-led, that stage of a company, obviously, the more established companies as well, you can plug in your pods and kind of help teams scale that way. Is there an average contract value? Is there a value proposition that you feel works better than others? Do you typically come in and validate the business and feel like there is an opportunity and then unicorn steps in? Or are you guys kind of just taking anyone that's interested? You go help them figure out maybe more and more of that product market fit? Like what are some things you look for in the company? - Yeah, a little bit of everything. So we'll do an initial assessment and ask what your goals are, what you're looking for and what's not working right now. And then we'll come up with a very strategic game plan, right? So maybe you're looking at top of fun on, so we need to really double down on the BDR function and the business development versus, again, we work with all different types of companies. So maybe you're preparing to get acquired or you're preparing to go IPO and you want that top level leadership. Again, just for six months or so, you don't need to prepare to be acquired or IPO for more than a year, a year and a half. So why bring on a full time employee? Then you get all those cost savings, right? Just hiring, training and retaining that talent is about 20 to 30 grand. Then you've got their benefits, et cetera. Again, we alleviate all of those extra costs. So it's very cost effective and we've already bedded this talent that works together time and time. Again, just depending on what the client needs. - Yeah. What are some things, what are some things that you've seen in your career growth that you feel like when you mentioned that you've got this awesome talent as a part of unicorn? Like what does that mean? What does awesome talent mean? Is it just that closing deals gene? Is it being very productive, high volume of activities like walk us through what you identify as a very talented sales person? It's interesting you say the closing deals gene. Do you think people are born closing deals? I'm curious. - I mean, I said gene just because it does become, I feel like you could take a great closer out of one situation and plug them into another one and I feel like they figure it out. So I say gene in the sense that it becomes part of their identity. Not that they're not so much that they may be born with it. So I could correct course a little bit there. But I mean, that is something I believe. What are your thoughts? - No, I was really curious because that's kind of an age old debate that I get into often with colleagues is kind of like Maybelline. Maybe she's born with it, maybe it's Maybelline. - Right. - I do think our closers, and I say our closers in the world are born with a little bit of it, but I also think most of it is largely learned. If you think back to your first sales gig, I don't know about you, but I can distinctly remember the first time I made a cold call. I remember it in the iconic Yelp building in downtown San Francisco. There were 70 other people around me. I called a bookstore owner in Salinas, California, and it did not go well. But when I think about those innate qualities, I think yes, a tried and true closer, which is only earned through experience and so you have to fall on your face a thousand times in different work scenarios to be a closer. Somebody who can ask direct and difficult questions, I think that makes top talent stand apart from anyone else and I think you can actually decipher that pretty early on in an interview process, but I would also say curious in a growth mindset. So I'm sure again, you or the listeners have all worked with people who are very good closers, but they don't work well with others or they don't show that genuine care for their customers or colleagues and it doesn't end well for them either. So those are some main characteristics. But what would you add? What am I missing or what am I, what did I get wrong? No, I, I, um, I mean, one thing we really believe in is just, I think some of the best closers out there just figure out how to use their time really, really well. And there's a lot of ways to do that. There's just identifying deals that you know aren't going to close, even if they qualify through Metvic, even if they do X, Y and Z, right? It's, it's identifying the deals that's actually worth putting time into also just for just for what we're building at Elicio, right? We're aiming to increase productivity for teams. So people that again figure out the right deals to work, but also just how do you fit more into your day and not to overwork you by any means, but how do you, how do you just become highly productive? And that's a big key of top performers as well. So that's kind of where my head goes when, when we're talking about, okay, who has that? Who is a true salesperson, right? I think they're highly productive. I think they know what deals they, they've got great pattern recognition skills, right? That's a huge one. And basically, I mean, just career people, right? You got to know pattern recognition. I don't know, I could go on. I've kind of fallen in love with salespeople over the last year or so, you know, building Elicio in this podcast, especially. I just think the way salespeople think, it's so, it's competitive. It's, they're trying to beat themselves constantly. It's not just competitive with the person next to them, but they're trying to get better and better all the time. And you know, I'm sure that's what you've seen too, right? In your career. - Yeah, I like your answer better than mine. I think my management is a huge, huge piece of that. Everyone can be busy, right? What's the quote, like even the answer busy, but are you busy on the right things? And so you nailed it. And Elicio does a great job of trying to mitigate time mismanagement. - Yeah, yeah. I've gotten into the Stoics recently with Ryan Holiday, a previous guest on the podcast mentioned him. And there's a quote in there, you know, everyone thinks that life's, life's too short. And in reality, life's not too short. We just waste a lot of it. We just, we just waste a lot of the time we get in life. So, and I think that can apply to any role, any job. I mean, a lot of money can be made in sales. A lot of time can be wasted in sales as well, right? - Absolutely. So what, at this stage in your career, I think it's so fascinating talking to you, Silicon Valley, being at these massive, massive successful, indeed, Yelp, moving over to Spiff, Spiff Found Success, Captivate IQ. I know it's still climbing. And now you're leading this fraction work. Like, where do you see your career going? Do you ever take a moment and say, okay, what am I telling early salespeople how they should navigate their career? And then same, it's a double-sided question. How do you look at your career over the next 10 years in sales? Those are really great questions. One thing that I try to do with my consulting, which is made at the salescoach.com, not only do I help companies, but I try to help a lot of individual contributors as well, because that is actually my biggest regret, is not getting a coach for myself early on. I was just so fixated on my numbers and performing and the money starts rolling in. And so, I know it all, or I'm doing well enough, and I wish that I had a coach to bounce ideas off on a regular basis, and I even have a coach now. And she's amazing. And I just wish that I had that earlier. And so, I do a lot of that with [email protected] with individuals. And so, that's the first part of your question. The second part is, where do I foresee my career? I don't know. And I know that I should maybe be thinking about this on a daily basis. Maybe have a five-year plan, but in tech and in sales, things are just so constantly changing. And especially in these startups, it's really one day at a time. I just try to find work and a team that I enjoy day in and day out, because you're going to spend 30% of your life at work. So, you might as well enjoy the product, the service, your customers, your colleagues. And so, right now, I'm really enjoying that at Unicorn. We are fractional. So, that also gives me a little bit more leeway to kind of lean into the fractional work myself. And so, that enables me to focus a little bit more, give a little bit more time to [email protected] and take on different companies and individuals, which I think gives me, that gives me, but allows me to serve all of my customers better, because I have a bigger viewpoint of what's going on in the market. I'm not just fixated on, okay, I'm at Captivate IQ. This is what's happening here. I'm at spift. This is what's happening here. I'm talking to Justin, and I'm talking to Jane, and I'm talking to Michelle, and I'm talking to Louise, and there are all these different companies. And so, I get to hear what's going on globally, and that helps me serve everybody better. - I think, I would never have guessed, and obviously you're doing your own coaching now, which is fantastic. I'm sure some people, both early and late in their careers, would benefit, I mean, everyone benefits from having that, you know, wall-to-balance ideas off of and things like that. And early on in your career, if you're dedicated to a sales career, gosh, just, especially when you don't have, I mean, I have four kids. Like, you start getting the dependence in the mortgage, and it's like, oh, a sales, like, but if you're early in your career, and you don't have a lot of that going on for, like, invest in a coach, I think that is fantastic advice, and then you don't need to know where you're going the next 10 years. Don't worry, don't worry about that one at all. Just ride the wave, do as much you can. We did an event with Morgan Ingram and Phoenix, and one of the people that showed up did a, he sells time shares in like a sheels. Just this fascinating, super eccentric guy, young guy, early 20s. But just, I mean, he told me his whole life story, struggled early on, and then just didn't want to give up. He's like, I never give up. I was born in the Bronx, he was this New York guy, just, you know, like tons of attitude. And he got a sales coach. And now he is just like obliterating it, getting commissions are, they don't even have a good structure for him, 'cause he's breaking all the rules with how much he's close. - Love it. - And I really do think a lot of times, you know, we talk so much about product market fit. Like, those are the only two levers that get pulled in, both like in your go-to-market. And the reality is, you know, you can also have great sellers. You don't want to just be selling a crappy product and just have gray sales put. Like, that's not sustainable, they'll be churned and things like that. But getting great coaching for your sales force can really benefit how the market receives the product. How the product is positioned well. And I come from a product marketing background, which a lot of times that heavily falls in product marketing to do the positioning, messaging, things like that, but just a really great coach sales force. It's pretty tough to be. Would you agree? - Absolutely, and, you know, thankfully enough, a lot of these companies now are offering, learning and developing, learning and development stipends. So I'm seeing it be more normal than not to offer each individual $500, $1,000 per year to spend it on whatever you want. Whether that's books, a coach, some sort of online learning group. And sadly, I would say the majority of individuals don't even spend it. I had a team once, and only one out of the eight was using their stipend. And I would tell them, month over month, you know, you're doing yourself a disservice by not buying anything, buy a book, buy an audible. Doesn't matter, just learn something. And it's a shame to have it go to waste. And so what I would also recommend to your listeners is if they don't have a stipend, shoot your VP or your leader and know. One time I had actually used all my stipend and I wanted more coaching for a big product pivot that we were going through. And I just wrote my VP shout out, Christian Barrelli. And I said, hey, can I get an extra 200 bucks for one or two more sessions with the coach? Nobody's using their stipend. He said, yeah, no problem. Go for it. People are going to-- a good leader is going to want to invest in you and see you invested in yourself. I like that approach where you hope they use it on their own. But if they don't, almost take back that cash and develop it into some programs that you can do internally with the group, I think that's great advice. Meredith, we always ask the question, what does a great day in sales look like to you? And it can apply to your current role now. It can just in general. We've had quite the spectrum of answers. So I'm curious as to what your thoughts are about a great day in sales. Yes, OK, so a great day-- kind of my boring answer would be if you're moving the needle on anything. If you're-- doesn't have to be closed one, but if you're moving something from evaluation to proposal or if you moved it from cold calls to meeting set, any sort of movement is a great day. But I think a little bit more fun answer would be and I'll take this back to when I started at Yelp. Day one, they have you fill out a questionnaire of what you want your five-year plan to be. And everyone would put, I want to be a VP. I want to be a director. And I put-- because they paid us $36,000 a year at this point, which is not enough to pay your rent in San Francisco. So I put, I want to be able to afford whole foods on a regular basis. So a good day for me in sales is if I'm shopping at Harman's instead of Smith's or if I'm loading the car with whole foods. I love it. Shout out Harman's Utah grocery chain. I absolutely love it. Well, we've heard that many times on the podcast of great leaders asking their ICs, hey, what is it that you want? And a lot of times it is, that seems like a more-- a lot of times you get the car or a boat and they put a picture of it on their desk and things like that. And you're like, no, I just don't want to stress out when I go to the grocery store and I want to get nice things there, that I'm going to eat, that I'm going to consume. So I love that. And I think that's a totally fair way. And even inspiring way to kind of look at it. We're like, I want to be successful. I want to move the needle. And at the end of the day, I want to freaking go to Harman's, not go to Smith. So-- That's right. I love it. And you can even bring Walmart into it. So some of us are still, you know, pandering at Walmart. I don't want Fizz, yes, and so I'm not at Walmart yet. So another shout out to Harman's. That's so great. No, Mayor, it's been a great conversation with you. We appreciate it. I'm glad that you're on your way back to Utah before the podcast, Meredith mentioned. She's in the next month or so coming back to Utah. Hopefully you pick up, once again, with Utah Women in Sales. It's a fantastic group. They're still thriving here in Utah. Obviously, there's different chapters as well for people listening in and other tech hubs go and find your Women in Sales group. But Utah is very strong, and we enjoy supporting them as well. So Meredith, thank you so much for joining us. And we appreciate the time. Thank you for having me. If anyone would like to connect, I welcome all introductions and connections on LinkedIn. You can find me, Meredith Chandler. I'm at Unicorn, or you can check me out at meridethacalescoach.com. Great shout out. Meredith will totally get back to you on LinkedIn. And I love having people on the podcast that are willing to, yeah, take any messages on LinkedIn, because it's great to just connect and chat for a little bit. So thanks so much for coming, and we appreciate it. Bye, everyone. Thanks. [MUSIC PLAYING] Thanks for listening to the Great Day in Sales podcast. Check us out at podcast.alicio.ai or anywhere you stream podcasts.