PODCAST 136: From the Opera to the C-Suite: Taking the Leap and Founding a Company with Matt Klepac

If you missed episode 135, check it out here: Pushing Through the Zone of Discomfort Towards Personal Growth with AJ Bruno

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Show Agenda and Timestamps

  1. Show Introduction [00:09]
  2. Who is Matt Klepac and what is Vertify? [2:20]
  3. Transitioning from the opera to B2B technology [8:40]
  4. Gaining the confidence to take a leap [12:20]
  5. Lessons learned from founding a company [16:46]
  6. Camels vs. unicorns [19:33]
  7. The RevOps revolution [23:17]
  8. People and ideas that impacted Matt [27:38]
  9. Sam’s Corner [32:07]

Show Introduction [00:09]

Sam Jacobs: On today’s show, we’ve got Matt Klepac, a co-founder and CEO of Vertify, a really interesting company focused on revenue operations. They’re pioneering what they say is the revenue operations revolution. Matt started his career as an opera singer in addition to being a CMO and marketer. We talked about how to make transitions. Plus, we discussed risk and the guiding principles of starting a company.

Before we get there, we want to thank our sponsors. We’ve got two sponsors today.

This episode is brought to you by Loopio. When you get an RFP, do you waste hours searching through email chains, Slack threads, and old documents to find the answers? Please, please don’t do that to yourself anymore. Loopio’s response software automatically fills in your RFPs based on answers from past proposals. So you always have the right responses without any of the hassle. You can see how easy it is for yourself by getting a personal walk through today. Just go to Loopio.com/saleshacker to test their automation on your new RFP.

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Have you applied to join Revenue Collective yet? We’ve actually recently announced the launch of Operations Collective. Finance, legal and HR professionals need their own community, just like revenue executives and leaders do. And so we’ve created a community that is specifically for operational executives. Again, people that are running finance, legal and human resources or people functions within high-growth companies. To learn more you can go to Revenuecollective.com and click “learn more,” or you can email me Sam@revenuecollective.com. We’re building the Operations Collective website as we speak.

Now, without further ado, let’s listen to this interview with Matt Klepac.

Who is Matt Klepac and what is Vertify? [2:20]

Sam Jacobs: Hey everybody, it’s Sam Jacobs. Welcome to the Sales Hacker Podcast. Today. We are honored to have Matt Klepac on the show. Matt is the CEO and co-founder of Vertify. He’s a 15-year B2B technology veteran responsible for executing the company’s vision. And we are going to dive into what Vertify is. Matt’s a marketer at heart with a unique blend of creative and operational expertise. Before Vertify, Matt built the media technology, marketing and operations practice at RSG Media in New York City.

And before jumping head first into technology, he had the privilege of building his marketing and sales expertise at the NBA, CBRE, and Icon to name a few. He has a master’s degree from the University of Oklahoma and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor. He’s an avid golfer, lover of the Houston Astros who cheat, and an accomplished professional opera singer. He lives in Austin. Matt, welcome to the show.

Matt Klepac: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it, Sam. I’ll date myself a little bit. I grew up with Nolan Ryan and Craig Biggio and these guys with the Astros. So pre-cheating, but we’ll get through this too. We’ll get through this too.

Sam Jacobs: Fair enough. Well, I am a Washington Nationals fan, so I take great delight in our victory over you in the World Series last season.

Welcome to the show. You’re the CEO and co-founder of Vertify. We want to give you an opportunity to tell us a little bit about Vertify. It’s doing an incredible thing. So in your words, what does Vertify do?

Matt Klepac: Let me take a step back and give you a little bit of my background because I think that influences what Vertify does. I have a little bit of a strange background as a tech CEO. I was an opera singer for 13 years. As a founder and as an entrepreneur, I take a lot of my experience as a professional singer into what I do within our company. But I was fortunate to be able to build both sides of my brain, both the marketing and business side, and the music side simultaneously for many years. And as a marketer, I was really sick and tired of being sick and tired. I struggled with being able to align our sales and marketing teams across New York, LA, London, Delhi all of these different places. And with data becoming just the focal point for everybody, we had to figure something out.

And so Vertify was basically born out of that problem. And at the end of the day, Vertify is a revenue operations intelligence platform that turns disparate data into intelligent answers for revenue teams specifically. So if you think about it from the perspective of, marketing has their system of record, sales has their system of record, customer success has theirs. While we’re looking at the revenue operations revolution is Vertify being that system of record, looking over, taking all of that data from all of those different sources. And then really turning around and helping marketers, salespeople, customer success people get the most out of their data. Get it where it needs to be, make sure it’s clean and then get actionable analytics to better shape strategy, to improve execution, to better plan, better predict, and ultimately have next level revenue growth. And that’s ROI. That’s the revenue operations intelligence platform. And that’s Vertify.

Sam Jacobs: It’s a platform. So you log into it and it’s got its own visualizations, or is it a piece of machinery that sits in the background connecting disparate systems like Marketo and Salesforce. Or do all of those plug into Vertify?

Matt Klepac: Brilliant question. It’s a little bit of both, right? So we have the operational foundational piece, which is the back end, which is completely automated. So connecting that data from system to system. Think about it as integration, where connection from CRM to marketing automation, to customer success. Making sure that data can align and be flowing. And that’s all in the back end, that’s all automated. So you don’t need IT involvement, it’s all for the business.

And then on the front end, you have the ability to log in right away and get answers right off the bat as a marketer, as a salesperson, for things that you’re spending three to five hours a week trying to build reports in these individual systems such as Salesforce, Marketo, HubSpo. And so we’re able to kind of give you the ability to get those answers very quickly, right upfront, and not worry about the operational stuff, know that your data is being managed on the backend and really benefit from the intelligence, benefit from the analytics, that are right in front of your face.

Sam Jacobs: When did you start the company?

Matt Klepac: Started about 3 ½ years ago in the great city of Austin, Texas. You know, we’re fortunate to be in a phenomenal startup environment here in Austin and doing some cool things there. So we started 3 ½ years ago. We have an interesting kind of founding story as well. When I was living in New York, I was looking to build this product and found a company in Austin that was a services based business, and had some internal tools that they built for their services business. And ultimately came in and bought some of that and sold into the services based customer base and then have evolved it and built it from there. We bootstrapped it for a long time until the fall of last year where we brought in our first bit of capital. And now we’re actually currently in a raise cycle again. But we’re north of 2.5 million in ARR. And we have about 22 employees here in Austin. We have a couple in Atlanta as well. So doing some really cool things and building around the people.

Transitioning from the opera to B2B technology [8:40]

Sam Jacobs: What’s your favorite opera? If people out there want to experience opera, where do you recommend they start?

Matt Klepac: I could go to some that I sang in. So La Boheme. I sang La Boheme several times. It’s by far my favorite music, Puccini Opera. But I think a great starter for everybody would be Rigoletto. It’s funny, it’s a great piece. It’s Giuseppe Verde. So it’s a phenomenal composer. So start with Rigoletto, maybe then move to Boheme and maybe wait for some of the new age stuff until you get into the art form a little bit.

Sam Jacobs: What is the life of a professional opera singer like? But how did you make the transition from that world? Like at what point did you say “I need to get into B2B technology.” And how did you make that leap?

Matt Klepac: Growing up, I was surrounded by really successful sales leaders. And so, my uncle Mike Mirabella was a big influence on my life from a business perspective. In schoo, I studied music and I studied business. Then, I moved to New York, and I’m obviously an entrepreneur. We liked risks. We like to take on some challenges and it’s in our DNA. And so I moved to New York with no job and started right off the bat, working at the NBA. And I also simultaneously got a music gig singing with a local opera company. It was Dicapo opera at the time, now it’s City Opera, and started working with both.

I was able to juggle, and I was like, “Hey, you know what, I can do this.” And so I was able to build both and kind of evolve my careers. And I was fortunate when I got into technology marketing, I worked with RSG. I don’t know how they dealt with me, but they did. They said, “You know what, we’re fine with you traveling 10 to 14 weeks out of the year. And we want you to work and build our marketing practice.” And it was a big effort. We were transitioning from a services business to a product business and trying to grow it all organically and doing some really cool stuff. And so we did that and they allowed me to travel.

I was able to work from Italy, Germany, Amsterdam, or wherever it might’ve been. And then when I was back in New York in the office. It worked out quite well. So it’s very different, but singing gave me perspective as a founder and as an entrepreneur, I think it really, I guess, hardened me a little bit, right?

When you hear “no” 99% of the time as a singer and you get up and you perform in front of 3,000 people, you get hardened. So you find ways to push through, you find ways to persevere, and perseverance is a big deal. Resilience is a big deal. I think music really helped that for me. And it allowed me when I was ready to do my thing and take that step into a complete ownership of, in the business world, I was ready to do that. I was ready to take that risk and kind of be resilient through it. It didn’t hurt that I, at the same time, I had a seven-week-old baby and I was tired of traveling. And so it was time to really go all in. And so that was how the transition took place.

Gaining the confidence to take a leap [12:20]

Sam Jacobs: What was the series of decisions that gave you the confidence to be your own boss and to start your own company? Because I know a lot of people are always wondering that about themselves is now the right time. When is the right time, of course, people that have done it say, “It’s always the right time and never the right time.” But what are the decision points in your head? Because as you mentioned, you had a baby. And how did you have the confidence to take that leap?

Matt Klepac: I think it’s the people you have around you. I think it’s the support crew in many ways. For me, it is. I mean, it’s different for everybody. But you’re right. It’s never the right time. It’s always the right time. And I’ve always been one that’s not shied away from chasing my dreams, right? I mean somebody that’s wearing two hats chasing a professional singing career and chasing the highest level of success as a marketer. I think it’s just kind of in my DNA in many cases. But that started early on. My parents were a big part of that for me. They developed this don’t let anything get in the way attitude for me, and chase, and always be chasing. And so I think it was a natural thing for me to say, “There is a problem. My team is suffering from this problem. My colleagues are suffering from this problem. Why not me? Why not go fix it? Why not go figure it out and help my colleagues.”

And so we were at a good point in life. And I think just, you take those transitions. You have a new kiddo, you have these different phases in life. And some people would say, “Wait, you transitioned when you had a seven week old baby.” Yeah, I did. And we moved from New York to Austin, Texas. It was crazy. But I think you got to be a little crazy to be an entrepreneur. I think that’s just part of it. And I like crazy. I like weird. And that was it for me. It was never a question of is it worth the risk? And it’s always worth the risk if you’re willing to put in the effort. So I think that that’s a big thing.

Sam Jacobs: Why did you move to Austin?

Matt Klepac: We moved to Austin because it was there, but also Austin was where we wanted to be to build a business. Startup culture is phenomenal. It’s a great place to find great talent that wants to take chances and work for really cool, smaller organizations. Not to mention we have family here too. So that was also a big piece of it. Family’s a big backbone of what we do here and in my family. And so that was, that was a big thing moving to Austin was for that reason. But doing the research to find the company that was here and talking with that services business and convincing them that they had a product. They were not a product company.

They knew they had no idea how to build a product company, but they saw the vision. And so I think what always makes a great founder, a great leader is being able to get people to understand your vision, to be able to communicate clearly. I mean, it’s a challenging thing to do, but they did, they understood it. They saw it, they believed in it. And so what we basically did was we came in and my co-founder and I, Wayne Lopez is my co-founder. And he’s the product, he’s the data vision, he’s the data guy. I’m the marketing and operations guy. And so we came together. And he was in Austin and we started to take this product and massage it and manipulate it and turn it into something that had a really good go to market around it. And we were able to then buy that product from the services based business and take it off on our own and go to market.

And so that’s exactly what we did. And that’s why Austin ended up being where we wanted to be. But you know, it easily could have been San Francisco. It easily could have been Atlanta. It could have been Portland. You just never know, it could have been New York. We could have stayed, but it was Austin. And that was where we were supposed to be. And that’s where Vertify was born. And we built our entire team on the ground here from day one, and then we’ve spread to Atlanta as well. So that’s why we’re in Austin.

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Lessons learned from founding a company [16:46]

Sam Jacobs: Makes sense. What’s the biggest lesson you took away from founding your company?

Matt Klepac: I’ve learned a lot about myself. I think you do when you’re in the trenches with other people. But I’ve always known I liked to take risks. I get to flex that muscle a little bit. And so that’s one factor. I also have always known that I like to move fast. So startups have made me see that clearer, that I like to move with a sense of urgency. And that’s a big thing. But one of the big lessons learned from starting the company and being in the seat, being in the CEO seat, in the founder’s seat, it’s just very different. I think it’s like having a baby. I say this a lot, all the time.

When you don’t have kids, and then you have kids. Before you have them, people are telling you all the time, “This is what it’s going to be like, it’s the most amazing thing in the world.” And you, we’re like, “Yeah, okay.” I mean, my wife and I were married 12 years before we had kids. And we were like, “Yeah, sure. It’s going to be great. Yeah, yeah, yeah.” But then we have them and it’s transformative. It is a transformative thing when you have a child. It’s the same thing sitting in the CEO seat, as opposed to the CMO seat. You can see it, you can hear it, you can talk through it, people tell you about it, but until you’re in it, it’s transformative. And so you really kind of learn that, look, you can’t convert everybody. You can’t make everybody happy.

And so kind of learning that, make believers of the people you can make believers of and you convert. And then kind of making fools out of those that don’t jump on the train. That’s kind of the methodology here. And then the other half of that for me is when something fails, because if you’re not failing, you’re not innovating. Period. So if you’re not failing, if you’re not making mistakes, you’re not moving in the right direction. So when those things happen, when you fail, when horns honk in the background, you basically just look at it, say “Good.” And turn that into an opportunity. You know, that’s a big thing. Every time something hits you in the face, just say, “Good. Good, I can learn from that. Good, let’s move on. Let’s go.” And I think that’s one of the things we try to fuel within Vertify in our DNA is that kind of mentality.

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Camels vs. unicorns [19:33]

Sam Jacobs: You’ve mentioned in the past that you want Vertify to be a camel, not a unicorn. And obviously we all know unicorns, the billion dollar plus valuation, raised a ton of money. And I think I know where you’re going when it comes to camels. But tell me what you mean when you say that you want to be a camel, not a unicorn.

Matt Klepac: Well, look being in Austin, we got a lot of unicorns. We got a lot of folks that are certainly kind of honed in on the top line. They enter the market and they say, “We’re going to grow, grow, grow, grow, grow. And we’re going to focus on top line.” I’m a firm believer, when we started Vertify maybe it’s because of our bootstrap mentality or whatnot, but you got to look at everything. You got to look at both. You got to look at the bottom line and top line. And ultimately what you really need to do is focus on the people, focus on the people that are going to make this magic happen. It’s not you, individually. It’s not your co-founder. It’s not the technology. It’s the people.

And so if you could do that, if you can look at the people, number one, you can have a solid technology stack, number two. And you focus on the top and the bottom line, then you let success be a by-product of that of putting the right people around you and growing. So it’s not all about, “Hey, only thing that matters is our top line metrics.” No, it’s much more than that. And I think what’s so important and it’s one of the reasons why Vertify has grown 72% in COVID-19 era. We take that mentality. If you don’t, you get hit by these environmental factors and man things can go out the window pretty quick. So I always just say, “Be a damn camel, be a camel. And let success be a by-product of you being, being focused on the top line, bottom line, and people number one. And ultimately that valuation will be there. You will get there.”

Sam Jacobs: A I guess to the point of the bottom line, you mean don’t over-hire, grow at a more natural rate, be precious with capital, be capital efficient, try to do more with less and trust that you’re not going to miss some huge opportunity because you didn’t hire 30 salespeople or 50 engineers or whatever?

Matt Klepac: Yeah. I think growing fast is great, right? I had a great conversation with Kevin Kiley from OneTrust the other day. 40,000% growth in three years. 48,000% growth in three years. Amazing stuff. You can move fast, but don’t get ahead of your skis. Don’t get ahead of your skis. Hire right. Ask people. People want to do more. They do, and they want to own stuff. And that’s what you just can’t lose sight of. The people around you, they want to go to bat. Because you’re going to bat with them. Right. You know, if you’re leading, if you’re a leader, that’s leading by example, that’s in the trenches, that’s going to bat with your team. They want to go to bat for you as well.

And so people want to do more. And so extend that team as much as you can, and then build yourself very methodically with the right SMEs around you. The right subject matter experts that can take those things. And then you as a leader, really put that on them. Let go. You’ve got to let go if you want to scale. So let go. Let people take this business to the next level with you. And I think that that’s what being a camel is all about. It really is.

Sam Jacobs: Wow. I love a good camel, so thank you for that.

Matt Klepac: Yeah. And it’s funny inspiration for me. So we started the business. We’re all about building being a camel and there’s a ranch on the way to the house that has camels. And I see them every day on the way home, every day. So it’s a good reminder for me.

The RevOps revolution [23:17]

Sam Jacobs: I want to give you an opportunity to talk about this concept of the revenue operations revolution. Why is revenue operations so important and so hot right now?

Matt Klepac: It’s alignment. I think when it comes right down to it, it’s alignment. We’ve always struggled as marketers, as salespeople, as success, with alignment across the revenue stack. It’s all part of the revenue team, right? You’ve got demand creation, you’ve got closing, winning, and ultimately you’ve got retention. If it were all part of the revenue, and the fact that we are just now getting to this point where we’re saying, “Okay, let’s really consolidate everybody under a revenue team.” Under revenue operations, under a Chief Revenue Officer, to better align what is happening between sales, marketing, and customer success. I think that we’ve all been on this search for so long for this alignment issue. We’ve tried to buy hundreds of different technologies. And ultimately we’re now getting to the place where we’re finding ways through this kind of convergence of this revenue operations machine under one roof to really start to build alignment.

It’s where Vertify was born from. Our entry point is selling to marketers. So marketing managers, marketing directors using our product. But sales and success are all benefactors because we are delivering intelligence into sales and intelligence into customer success to benefit from that. Bringing everybody together, making marketing a hero, making sales happy because they’re actually getting opportunities to close at a higher rate because demand that’s being created is better. It’s more efficient. And then success is actually retaining customers at a higher rate because marketing is bringing in the right people. And so if you can start there at the demand side of the house and talk with marketers about, “Hey, let’s make everything about revenue. Every metric you are looking at should be about revenue.” I get pretty tired of talking to B2B marketers and then talking about building Facebook followers. And not of being a metric that really is important.

It’s a bit controversial maybe to say that, but it drives me nuts. And so every metric should be tied to revenue and should be tied from the minute a prospect comes in the door two, three years down the road when they’re still a customer. And bringing in the right customers, the right prospects and servicing them properly is what it’s all about. And this kind of holistic revenue team is the only way to do it. And so we see it as going from these siloed groups that were trying really hard to be the best at what they did now, bringing that together and just creating this alignment across all three.

Sam Jacobs: You’re saying part of it is like uniform sets of data so that we’re measuring the same things. And then is part of it like kind of incentives and really confirming to the marketing organization, “Hey, we’re going to measure success for the whole organization on revenue, not necessarily on marketing qualified leads or marketing-generated pipeline.” Or is that what you’re saying, are you saying something different?

Matt Klepac: I’m saying that exact same thing. It’s all about the funnel when it comes down to it. And if we can get the funnel right from start to finish and then the retention right then ultimately we have better alignment. And it’s about taking those revenue goals and embedding them in the minds and in the actions, and in the process of this one team. This one revenue team with this one revenue goal. Sure, they all have their own individual tasks and metrics they have to report on, but they all report up to a revenue goal and it all aligns with what the Chief Revenue Officer is looking to do for the organization. And ultimately what’s most important is that it aligns with the customer. It’s a customer-centric vision. We’re bringing in the right customer and we’re providing the right value to the right customer. And it comes full circle with that.

People and ideas that impacted Matt [27:38]

Sam Jacobs: I love it. Matt, we’re almost at the end of our time together. But the last thing we like to do is we like to pay it forward. What content, people, or books have made an impact on you and your life that you think we should know about?

Matt Klepac: Let me start with just kind of mentorship, number one. I’ve got a Rolodex of five or so CMOs and five or so CEOs that have just been super influential in my life. And literally daily influence. I’ve got a call here at 3:00 with one of those coaches. But Larry Warnock, former CMO turned CEO many times over, has done great things here in Austin. He’s dynamic, he’s an amazing individual. And he’s a big part of, I think, our success here in my development. And Scott Abel as well. And so I’ve got a laundry list, but those two guys are very impactful in my life. And then just from a creative marketing perspective, Jonathan Mildenhall, Airbnb is where I kind of ran into him.

He’s hyper-creative, he’s now at Dave. But it was a privilege to meet him in person at the Adobe Summit many years ago. He’s a brilliant creative. And I love to just kind of learn from him from a creative perspective, and he’s done some great things. So if you don’t know, Jonathan Mildenhall go ahead and check him out. It’s pretty amazing. So I would say from a business coach perspective, I’ve got a laundry list. But those three kind of stand out. And then when it comes to books, one of the big influencers here at Vertify is, is the book Traction by Gino Wickman. I don’t know how familiar you are with that book.

Sam Jacobs: I’m not familiar with it. So now I am. It’s awesome. I’ll look it up.

Matt Klepac: Check it out. It’s pretty cool. And it’s all about the entrepreneur operating system that they’ve developed. And we’ve implemented that here. It allows us… One of the things we’d like to see your Vertify is “Be a pirate, be a pirate. Don’t worry about being a Navy person at this point.” And it allows us to have everybody acting as a pirate, but us to have some, some kind of principled Navy processes in place that we can follow and keep us aligned. So check it out. Traction’s a great book for entrepreneurs at a million dollars in revenue, or at $50 million in revenue. It’s really amazing.

And then I’m going to exclude your podcast from this. But Jocko Willink is a former seal, just a bad-ass and an amazing guy. He takes a picture on Instagram every morning at 4:30.

I saw a Twitter conversation with Jocko and someone was like, “How do you do it? How do you wake up so early?” He’s like, Well you get one of these things called an alarm clock and you set it to whatever time you want to get up. And then when the bell goes off, you get out of bed.” “But what if you want to hit snooze?” He’s like, “Then you just get out of bed.”

Sam Jacobs: Matt, it’s been awesome having you on the show. If folks want to reach out to you, ask more questions, maybe learn more about Vertify what’s the best way people can get in touch?

Matt Klepac: You can email me matt@Vertify.com. Or you can go to Vertify.com. You can find me on LinkedIn, Matthew Mirabella Klepac on LinkedIn. Just feel free to ping me that way. If you’re a marketer looking to stop wasting time on reporting, let’s just start there. And then we can take it further. Just give us a shout.

Sam’s Corner [32:07]

Sam Jacobs: Hey, everybody. Sam’s corner. Really enjoyed that conversation with Matt Klepac. Maybe there are three things to take away from that. These are my summaries. So this is not the word of God. It is one man, one humble, lonely, quarantined man’s opinion.

The first takeaway: Be a camel, not a unicorn. It’s a commentary. First of all, Vertify was bootstrapped for a long time. But it’s a commentary on capital efficiency, which is another way of saying, spend your money wisely. You don’t need to hire a million people. Even if you’ve raised money, work towards some notion of profitability at a minimum, ensure that you have good unit economics. Meaning on a per customer basis, the math works, that you can build a money machine.

And that’s what Vertify is doing. Certainly the company that I run is doing that. You’re trying to make a long journey. As they say, the cliche, it’s a marathon, not a sprint. Now, again, this is contrary to what you hear. So I’m sure Reid Hoffman knows more than me, and he’ll tell you that you need to blitz scale, but, okay.

I think it’s really the market that determines those conditions, not the availability of capital. We certainly saw it with Quibi. They had $1.5 billion, and they blew through it. They were not camels. Whatever the opposite of a camel is, that’s what they were. And it’s a thought about spending your money wisely. You don’t have to run 100 miles an hour if you’re not ready to work up to that speed over time and learn the market and the business that you’re in before you start spending a tremendous amount of money. So that’s thought number one.

Thought number two, when Matt encounters a challenge or an opportunity, every time something fails, he says, “Good.”

And I want to tell you a story about this guy. His name is Yuki Kawauchi. He is a Japanese marathon runner. He came to prominence, I’m reading from Wikipedia right now, “After running the 2011 Tokyo marathon in two hours, eight minutes, 37 seconds.” But the story that I’ve always heard is, it was the Boston marathon. And he passed defending champion Jeffrey Kirui in 2018. So this was only two years ago.

And he said “He overcame extremely oppressive weather, heavy rain, strong headwinds, and temperatures near 40 degrees Fahrenheit throughout the race. Despite this, he attributed his victory to those conditions. Stating that for me, ‘These are the best conditions possible.'” And I have a pinned tweet on my Twitter account. “These are my favorite conditions.” Which is a paraphrasing of what Yuki Kawauchi said. The point is that every challenge is an opportunity. I know it sounds straightforward, but flip your mindset. You’re not unlucky. The world isn’t conspiring against you. You’ve got this, you can do this. In fact, these are your favorite conditions. This is what you love, you love it when the odds are stacked against you. You love it when the top seller on your team just quit. This will challenge you to step up. Every challenge is an opportunity to be better, to do more, to step up. So I say, these are my favorite conditions. And I am bastardizing from the actual quote Yuki Kawauchi.

The third thing is the sales and marketing alignment. How do you drive alignment? You are referencing the same set of data. That’s really important. Different departments can’t have different opinions of the truth. There needs to be one truth in your company. Even if that truth is not correct. But there needs to be one number for what sales is, one number for what recurring revenue is, one number for how many leads we got last month. Not three different numbers. There needs to be one number for how many opportunities we created. It’s more important that everybody has the same number, then that number is correct. I promise you. So those are my three things.

Don’t miss episode #137

Let’s thank our sponsors. We love the work they do, helping us with RFPs. It was brought to you by Loopio. If your team responds to RFPs, you need to try Loopio’s intelligent platform. It helps hundreds of sales teams answer RFPs in hours instead of days. Sign up for a personal walkthrough of Loopio today. Your sales team will thank you. Trust us. Go to Loopio.com/saleshacker.

Also make sure you check out the number one sales engagement platform in the universe — Outreach. Go there. www.outreach.io. If you want to reach me, linkedin.com/in/SamFJacobs. Otherwise email me, Sam@revenuecollective.com.

Guess what? I’ll talk to you next time.

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