The Salesforce Career Show
The podcast dedicated to helping you HIRE, GET HIRED and SOAR HIGHER in the SALESFORCE ecosystem.
Enjoy these live recordings of The Salesforce Career Show from X Spaces and YouTube's JoshForce. A guest + AMA format hosted by Josh Matthews, founder of Salesforce Staffing, LLC, Joshforce and The Expand Exchange and Vanessa Grant, Dreamforce speaker, 9X certified BA, consultant and social media darling. Recordings are 3x per month.
The Salesforce Career Show
Achieving Success in SaaS Sales and Beyond
Uncover the secrets to mastering a career in sales within the Salesforce ecosystem, guided by the insights of Dylan Ferguson, a seasoned professional with 17 years of experience. This episode promises to enrich your understanding of SaaS sales, the nuances of effective interviewing, and the significance of resilience and adaptability in a sales role. Dylan, now at Fullcast, shares his journey and valuable tips for aspiring salespeople.
Explore the essential traits for sales success, such as financial prudence and the power of personal connections, illustrated through compelling real-life anecdotes. We examine the contrasting interview techniques at different companies and the importance of thorough preparation to safeguard team dynamics. The conversation extends to the evolving landscape of sales, shaped by AI, and the crucial role of genuine relationship-building in achieving long-term success.
Discover the concept of "curious execution" and the transformative impact of mentorship on personal and professional growth. The discussion touches on the complexities of job hopping and strategies for achieving career stability, emphasizing the importance of self-improvement and introspection. Finally, we delve into the unique strengths of individuals with dyslexia and the surprising benefits of childhood trauma in cultivating exceptional empathy and people-reading skills. Join us for an insightful conversation that not only illuminates the Salesforce ecosystem but also offers profound lessons for personal growth and career advancement.
And now the number one audio program that helps you to hire, get hired and soar higher in the Salesforce ecosystem. It's the Salesforce Career Show with Josh Matthews and Vanessa Grant. Okay, welcome everybody.
Josh Matthews:We are joined by Dylan Ferguson today. Okay, welcome everybody. We are joined by Dylan Ferguson today. Dylan is awesome, not just because we happen to go to the same university, probably at slightly different times, but he's been involved in the ecosystem the Salesforce ecosystem for 17 years. In fact, he was right around the 7,500th employee at Salesforce. He spent some time there. He's been deeply involved in SaaS sales. He's operated as channel manager and he's run sales teams. In fact, currently he's over at Fullcast right and he's the go-to market expert over there. We're going to be diving in with Dylan and talking about some interesting topics. I think we're going to talk a little bit about what it's like to be a salesperson in the ecosystem. We're also going to discuss and touch on interviewing, both as a hiring manager and as a candidate too, and a couple other topics. In the meantime, let me introduce my co-host, vanessa Grant. Welcome, vanessa.
Vanessa Grant:Hello Josh, Happy to be here with all of you again. Vanessa. Grant, I'm a product owner from FinTech Company and excited to co-host and talk to Dylan who apparently we were co-workers for like three years and just didn't really cross paths.
Josh Matthews:Yeah right.
Vanessa Grant:Large companies remote, you never know.
Josh Matthews:That's true. You forgot to announce to you that you're also a social media darling.
Vanessa Grant:I am a social media darling.
Josh Matthews:And we have our regular panelist, mr Peter Gansa. Welcome, peter to the show. Always a pleasure gang. Great Good to have you here. So let's go ahead and just talk topical stuff. Anything been going on. Anything been going on in Salesforce. I mean, I think it's kind of a quiet week over there. I think they've got an earnings report coming out about. Well, maybe it came out half an hour ago, so maybe that's something we can talk about in a couple of weeks. But, vanessa, I'm assuming a low travel situation for the last couple of weeks. How have things been going?
Vanessa Grant:Good. So Tahoe Dreamin's next week. So that's what I'm gearing up for, Excited to go to Tahoe again, I know. So I did hear like that there were like 300 layoffs on the Salesforce side, I think, maybe in Europe, but that's something that just also crossed my radar. And then also in happy news and I don't think we discussed this last time but the Dreamforce speaker announcements came out and so I'll be hosting, like it's not hosting. I'll be speaking in like it's not hosting. I'll be speaking at in the admin theater for two sessions with my speaking partner, Tom Bassett, and I'll also be hosting a Salesforce business analyst networking community event at Dreamforce.
Josh Matthews:So congratulations yeah thank you, congratulations on those. That's awesome, pretty exciting. I think the only thing I'm going to be doing at Salesforce that might be or excuse me at Dreamforce. I'm just going to kind of hold open office hours on a picnic table for a few hours so you can come up, say hi, catch up, maybe get some free advice either on your career or on how to hire people.
Josh Matthews:I do want to just address what you shared about the Salesforce layoffs. With the 300 people it's 0.000375% of their employees. Okay, it's nothing like. It's literally absolutely nothing. Don't look at that and be like, oh, you know, the sky is falling. It's not. If they didn't fire that many people in any given sort of amount of time, I'd be shocked, because there's turnover and adjustments and some people join and then they guess what they join and they don't succeed, and so then they're let go. Or maybe there's a new push for data cloud and so they don't need all the resources that were on some other cloud. Right, it's just how it goes. So not a big deal. It's not like a year and a half ago during the Christmas layoffs of 22.
Vanessa Grant:Oh, yeah, it wasn't 23, 22.
Josh Matthews:I can't remember.
Vanessa Grant:I'll throw in one other little tiny bit of news. So there's going to be a new Dreamin event which is supposedly going to be on August 8th. Registration just opened up for SoCal Dreamin. We're actually going to get an event in LA which I'm pretty excited about.
Peter Ganza:Oh, that's cool.
Vanessa Grant:Newport yep.
Josh Matthews:Yeah, because it's so hard to drive the five hours. You know that's good.
Vanessa Grant:Well, I mean to get a Dreamforce hotel, though it's just cheaper to go to Tahoe or I guess. Socal now. So that's the issue. It's, like you know, early bird, I think, for Dreamforce was like $1,400, something like that $1,500.
Josh Matthews:Yep, yep, and that ended yesterday, yeah. So now you're going to cough up two G's and I'll tell you something too If you're not going this year, but you are going next year, then when they announce the dates which is generally around March, I think usually around March as soon as they announce it, book your hotel. That's what I do, oh yeah.
Vanessa Grant:I think I booked my hotel. Actually, I think I found out about the Dreamforce dates almost soon, right after last year's Dreamforce, because my hotel's been booked since last November I think, and I'm paying like $1,000 for the monster and I'm staying there for a week and, yes, I'm sharing a bathroom, but I'm not going to get closer to Dreamforce than the monster, and certainly $1,000 for a week, dreamforce week.
Josh Matthews:Yeah, that's great, I have another hot tip.
Vanessa Grant:So if you're a little bit intimidated by those Dreamforce prices and you are maybe interested in speaking, or even if you're not little bit intimidated by those Dreamforce prices and you are maybe interested in speaking, or even if you're not interested in speaking, when the call for speakers for Dreamforce opens up, submit an abstract anyway. Even if you get rejected, they will likely give you a very large discount this year it was a 35% discount for folks that didn't make the cut but still submitted to speak.
Josh Matthews:Yep, yep, I got one of those. Yeah, that is a good idea. Game the system is what Vanessa is saying. Just game the system, save a few bucks, good job. Yeah, well, guys, let's dive in. Dylan, tell us a little bit about yourself and what you're doing right now.
Caller:Yeah, the father of seven. That's my most important thing I do. I recently left seven years of Salesforce consulting where we built a pretty large company. I started when there was about 30 employees, we built it to 7,000 and it was acquired by Infosys and now I work with a lot of the same people that did that with a company called Fullcast, which is specifically focused. It's a managed package that plugs into Salesforce, but not exclusive to Salesforce, and it's really a platform around the whole revenue operations lifecycle. So anything from territory management and having automated policies pushed directly into Salesforce for you to manage those territories that you build, to capacity planning, to quota target management so right now a lot of that's really manual and in spreadsheets and so or you're using modules from three or four different behemoth technologies like EMR and then Salesforce or some CRM, and it's just not a centralized go-to-market strategy. So there's a big opportunity in that space and that's where I spend most of my free time is helping people figure that problem out.
Josh Matthews:Yes, and you're very good at it, and you're also very good at collecting art, so Dylan has some amazing stories. You just came back from a month in Europe where you I believe you shared that you loaned one of your degas for the exhibit. Is that accurate?
Caller:Yeah, that sounds fancy, it's fancy, it gets uh it's fancy, it gets because it's fancy, though it's fancy okay the story is, I found in utah an original sketch that edgar de god did, and it was the first sketch, what they call a premier pense in french, uh, which means the first thought of a painting that actually hangs in the national gallery in london. And the unique nature of it. It's called miss lala the cirque fernando. And the unique nature of it. It's called Miss Lala the Cirque Fernando. And the unique nature of it is that it's a sole source painting of a person of color, not in a service mentality, so it's a circus performer. She's hanging from her teeth from the rafters of a place called the Cirque Fernando.
Caller:And so they wanted to put an exhibit together of all the studies that they got did leading up to that final version that just hangs in the gallery. And so I got to take all seven of my kids to Europe for a whole month. It's my first like career break that was longer than about seven days in 20 years. So I got my first summer vacation since I graduated high school. It was so much fun, oh my gosh.
Josh Matthews:You have waited a long time for that, my friend.
Caller:Yeah, yes, it was. It was so nice to be able to do that. But, like we, we did some cool things, like we took our kids to the, to the a hundred acre woods where AA Milne wrote Winnie the Pooh. We stayed two doors down from the house where he wrote it, so we literally had a three minute walk to the Pooh bridge, to and the forest that Christopher Robin played in. It was so much fun, so a lot of cool things like that.
Josh Matthews:I love it. That is fantastic. Well, let's dive into some career-type stuff for a second. A couple of the One of the things that we spoke about when we last chatted was a little bit more on the sales side.
Josh Matthews:Right, we have largely ignored the fact that within this ecosystem exist thousands of AEs and RVPs, people who sell SaaS products, people who sell consulting services for Salesforce partners and all of the folks, all the good folks over at Salesforce, who are in some sort of account executive or leadership around sales capacity.
Josh Matthews:At the end of the day, I think a lot of times people forget it's Salesforce and it's sales sales, right, that's how it starts. It's sales, right. But we've paid very little attention on this program to those folks and maybe some of the needs, demands, curiosities, things that they may want some assistance with. So let me ask you this Now you have hired many sales folks over your career, right, and you've also worked at major brands like Salesforce, like Workday, over the years too. So I'm really kind of curious when you think about the kind of person that maybe they're not currently selling SaaS products, you know, maybe they're not even in sales. What are some of the qualities or things that people can do to investigate whether or not that might even be a viable career trajectory for them.
Caller:Yeah, great question. I think it's a couple of things. It's a little bit of DNA. You have to really discover that you're going to be comfortable being uncomfortable. Some people wake up every single day with a knot in their stomach because there's a number and they have to get themselves to that number. There's a lot of variables that affect whether that's a possibility or not, and you tend to rely on a lot of people to get that to that outcome, especially in the Salesforce ecosystem. Whether you're selling Salesforce Direct or if you're selling services, there's just a lot of coordination. So you've got to be good at working with people and that the people enjoy working with you, or it's going to be a short lived experience.
Caller:you've got to become yeah, you've got to be comfortable knowing that the, the the game resets every month or every quarter, depending upon what kind of a plan you have. So it's like you've got a chess game going and then someone just throws all the pieces off at the end of that month and says you got to start all over again, no matter you were. So if you're not comfortable with that for the rest of your life you may not want to do it.
Josh Matthews:Right. And then there's the commission component too, where you know, oftentimes people who accept sales roles are paid less than what they actually need from a base standpoint to live on, right, yeah, so maybe someone, for instance, might be living a $150,000 lifestyle. They make commissions that allow them to save. Maybe they're making 170, 200k typically, but they may only be getting a base salary of $90,000, right, which means they and some sales folks get paid quarterly. Some sales folks get paid monthly. Some sales folks get paid monthly, others every week. It's generally monthly or longer, and you have to be able to have money in the bank and not spend it and that's not easy for everybody.
Caller:Yeah, and taxes can be tricky with that too, because they don't necessarily deduct the amount of money that you might need them to, because it's not a consistent number every single time you get a commission check. So I've had a lot of experiences with people in sales who get it, spend it, think they're making a lot of money. At the end of the year they owe six figures to the tax man. Yeah, right, yeah. So you know it's high risk, high reward, for sure I mean. One thing that I love having had seven kids is that if I need a raise because I got another baby coming, I just got to work better and smarter and faster. But I can't do that, you know. Lucky for me it's worked out.
Josh Matthews:It's funny, my uncle, who's a realtor, he's a commercial realtor, he's a broker, and what I do it's not dissimilar. Right, right, you know pretty good commissions for every deal, but you know, you don't know when the next one's coming, necessarily, and and we always joke about like oh yeah, I got to get my windows replaced on the house, or something like that. It's like, yeah, no problem, just one more deal, right, just one more deal, yeah yeah, that's exactly.
Caller:It's kind of nice spring though for me, like if you have the right like I'm talking about, you know dna and what makes someone successful is if the idea of not being capped right an operations program, an IT staff, and they're giving you a product that's been vetted and tried and true and all your only job is to go out and find people who are going to value that and build strong relationships and continue to stack on top of that over time. So if you look at it from that point of view, that you really own your own business, but there's a lot of the stuff that you probably aren't interested in spending your time on, like operations or marketing or it, whether it's front office or back office nice thing is that that's all done for you. All you've got to do is now take what's been built and go out and find people that are going to be interested in that value and then being a good steward of conveying that value. So that's what's really nice and that's you know, I did that at salesforce, I did that at simplest when I was on the consulting side was really building my own business over a period of time. And to you know your earlier question about. You know what kind of characteristics had yielded. You know people who are good in that area.
Caller:It's people who are creative. You know you, these, these deals, don't get done the same way every time. You have to find, like the unique nature of the deal and the creative nature of the deal, whether that be flexible payment terms, whether that be. You know a couple clauses that explain that you know if this one issue doesn't work, here's what we can do to fix that issue and just really understanding where the fear lives and then figuring out how you can partner to overcome that fear. So just that resilience to deal with.
Caller:You know rejection and knows, and also the creativity to and especially in a saturated market, help your client understand what's unique about you, because in a lot of ways they're buying what you're putting out there, but also what's unique about the product and the team of people that you're bringing to the table. So that whole skill set tends to yield really well. And I find that a lot of the people that I work with tend to be first children, which may sound like a strange stat, but they spend most of their lives talking to adults, so they've always had to punch above their own weight class. They also had to be pretty resilient about going out and finding the things they want and there was no blueprint, so they got really good at asking questions and being you know inquisitive and that yields, that yields you know positive results. And so it was.
Josh Matthews:It was one of the questions I would ask quite often when I met other salespeople is are you the oldest in your family? And very often they'll say yes, yeah, it's a really great point. There are also studies around folks who have have grown up with dyslexia as an example right, where they were really forced to be more verbal in their communications. I'm, I'm, look, communications, look. Dyslexia is definitely something that can be managed right, absolutely can. I don't want to dive into it too much. I don't have it, but I have people in my family who do and it's a real thing. There are amazingly successful people in sales who just at a very early age, had to deal with feeling different, having to figure out different modalities for learning, different modalities for communicating, and they got really good at reading people, really really good at reading people, and it's so critical in sales for people to like you and be an authentic person that they like, not faking it.
Caller:Yeah.
Josh Matthews:So if you're unlikable, you probably shouldn't go into sales.
Caller:Yeah, I would say that's accurate, you know. I'll give you an example. When I was interviewing for the job at Simplist, I met with the CEO, a guy named Ryan Westwood, and it was one of the best interviews I've ever been in, because we spent. Our conversation turned into a two hour conversation and he never once asked me about a deal I'd closed. He never once asked me about anything really related to business. He got my life story. He said tell me about yourself. Where did you grow up? Where were you born? Tell me about what your friends were like when you grew up. What was a challenging thing that you had to overcome when you were growing up? And you know what did that. What did you learn from it? And after two and then he'd share things with me. And after two hours, he says well, I think I know everything I need to know and we're we're interested in making you an offer. And I was, because I know enough about you as a person to know you're going to be successful. And I thought it was one of the most Jedi mind tricks that I've ever been through in an interview. And he was right.
Caller:In the seven years I worked there, I never once missed a quota. I averaged 50 deals a year for seven years and I did 11% of the all-time revenue. And it was all based on the fact that he knew to ask me about my family. He knew what my why was, why I get up and go to work every day. He knew what obstacles I'd been over. He understood that I'd seen and been through trauma, which means I'm probably a bit of an empath and I'm going to be able to read a room well, and he also saw me cue into not just talking about myself, but I would tend to flip it around and say well, how about you? Because I wouldn't just interview and ask just to answer questions. I would ask him for responses to similar questions. I'm like this is how I handled it. What about you? What's the hardest thing you've ever done? And then you should curiosity.
Caller:Yeah, and then you know people love to talk about themselves. And then you get to learn as a candidate, a lot about the person you're potentially going to go work for, especially if it's like a C-level and you're like can I trust this management team to do what they say they're going to do, especially if it's in like a startup phase. You know, tell me about how you got funding in a company that's in this. You know a saturated market Like Salesforce is only venture backed. At the time I was going to Simplus four other partners ever in history and there's 1600 partners in the ecosystem. So tell me how you got Salesforce ventures to give him capital. And that was a fascinating story. But I learned a lot about this. This guy didn't have a problem getting money. He spends most of his day telling people no, and that was a really interesting like key for me to know that I was on the right track with the right leadership group that really could do it.
Caller:And now the same team is building this company full cast, which is why I came over, it's why I invested my own money into it and you know, that's that's the big component, and that thing I love about the salesforce ecosystem is. You end up building you a bit of a network, but almost a family of people that you, you've been in the trenches with, that you struggle with, that you did hard things together with, and then you come out and better as a result of those things that you, you, and so that makes it nice for a job hunt. You meet enough people in this ecosystem and you do enough complex deals. People know what your skill set is. They know what you bring to the table, and so, as they scatter and go to other places, you end up on podcasts like this, or you end up at a different SaaS company, or you get a phone call saying, hey, I just started my own thing, would you want to join me? And so that's another way of just creating longevity for yourself in an ecosystem.
Josh Matthews:I love it, man, and that style of interviewing that you described, that's like some Jack Welch level stuff. Yeah, you know, like for real, that's really unique. I'm curious how did that experience, that singular two-hour experience, influence the way you interviewed and screened candidates for joining your teams?
Caller:That's a good question. I mean, it taught me that tell me about a deal that you closed, one that you weren't supposed to win, is maybe the worst possible question you could ask somebody, because it makes them feel like they're taking an ACT test. But getting people to open about who they are tells them that you care about them as a person, you care about the people in their lives, you care about the challenges they've gone through at a personal level and that right there, like I went into that interview not planning at all to join, I was like the CEO invited me to come in for an interview. You don't say no to that but I had no intentions of joining a 30-person firm while I worked at Workday I mean, it was just not even on the table In two hours I was ready to sign and I'm not an easy person to do that with. But it was just such a unique personal approach and it told me a lot about the culture that was being developed there.
Josh Matthews:Now, was this the first conversation with anybody that you'd had at the company? It was, so this wasn't like the third interview or something like that.
Caller:So this wasn't like the third interview or something like that. No, it was the. They were hiring their first enterprise salesperson and the CEO said I want to. This is the most important hire I might make in terms of the next jump for our company. So he wanted to be to get his first impression first. So the recruiter has reached out to me and said okay, brian, I'll meet with you on this day. And I went in and met with them and then I met with everybody else after the fact.
Josh Matthews:Yeah, I like that. And you know, you said something that really resonates with me, which is that first impression. Right, because so many, so often, people get a first impression and then they spend a lot of time basically trying to undo that first impression, right, which I don't think is necessarily a bad thing, right? Because and we've talked about this a lot on the show, if you've heard us discuss this in the past one of the things I encourage people to do is to try to find.
Josh Matthews:If you really like someone immediately, then go find a reason why they might not succeed in the role or a reason why it might not be a successful relationship to have this person on your team. You got to do that. That's how you de-risk the team and protect your other employees from a bad hire. Right, but at the same time and I can share this and use a golf analogy so often when you walk up to hit your putt, that first idea, that line and speed that you're thinking of, that's the right one. But the longer you stand there over the ball, you know your brain gets in the way of what you know what Malcolm Gladwell describes in Blink about you know you've got this supercomputer going on and it already knows Don't mess with it, yeah.
Caller:Yeah, I mean that experience compared to what my experience was when I left Seagate to go work for Salesforce. Salesforce, I was only 30 years old and I was applying for a job as a senior account executive, which is? I didn't know at the time, but I was the youngest person ever hired to be a senior AE in the enterprise space and when I joined the team, everybody was in their 40s or older and they actually thought I was there to set meetings for them until they found out I was an AE. But the interview process was super intense. So what happened was I was at Seagate and my boss in New York left and went to Salesforce to become an RVP and we were implementing Salesforce. And I thought, wow, this is really revolutionary. This is 2012. And I said why am I working here? I want to go work for this company. That's like changing the world.
Caller:So I reached out to my old boss, who's now an RVP in New York, and I said, hey, are there any Salesforce jobs out here in the West Coast that you're aware of? You can see their job board. And he's like actually, I think there is one I was just talking to an RVP that covers that area out there, let me reach out. And it turns out he was trying to manage a guy out which is going to take some time. But I got a warm recommendation from my boss to this guy and so he agreed to meet with me and we met probably three times twice on the phone and the once in person and he says, okay, you know, he let me know like it's going to take me some time to manage this guy out. So if you can be patient, I really like what I see here, but you're going to have to convince a lot of other people. I said okay, so the interview process took nine months and I met people. I said okay, so the interview process took nine months and I met. I had seven SVP or higher interviews before they were willing to give me the job. That's incredible, yeah. I mean my final interview was with a person who was one rung below Mark Ben at the time. So they really vetted their people out, especially on the sales side back then, and, like I said, I ended up getting the job.
Caller:I went to president's club the first year but there was a lot of like concern when they saw how young I was when I walked in there and it was really boiled down to the preparation Like every single meeting I'd get.
Caller:I get the recruiter to tell me their name, their background, anything they could tell me about their personality, work on every possible question he might ask me, and I would research and just scour the internet, watch a million videos on YouTube, because they had 40,000 videos on their Salesforce platform on YouTube, and so I'd watch all these videos and just be as prepared as I could. I'd have notes in front of me while I was doing the interviews so that I could just use the right vernacular, speak their language, and it worked out. So it was like a completely polar opposite experience. When I was talking to the CEO of Simplest and we never once discussed what I would call traditional interview questions. They'll give you a scenario and say, okay, how would you sell this deal or how would you overcome this objection, and then you're just on the spot to do it versus tell me about what was the toughest thing you went through as a kid.
Josh Matthews:Yeah, it's a very different thing, isn't it?
Caller:Yeah.
Josh Matthews:You know, I've often told people that being in sales is. You know, we talk about thinking creatively, right, to be able to overcome objections, and oftentimes it's really about figuring out, you know, what's your obligation to the client. Right, because a lot of people don't want to be sold, but at the end of the day, I think most people actually do want to be sold. What they don't want is poor salesmanship. They can find that annoying, they can find it cheesy, whether it's something simple. I remember talking to this one guy who wanted to join my team. This was back when I was at Robert Half and he was mirroring me. We know, mirror and match. He was mirroring me, so so close, it was so obvious and I was like buddy, like we're going to get along just fine, okay, but you, you know, if I scratch my nose, don't scratch your nose. You're being a little obvious. Yeah, exactly, you know, take it easy, just be.
Josh Matthews:Being authentic is so critical. However, if you're authentic and you haven't prepared, that will show. And you have to be better than the other people who are interviewing and even then you have to be at least as good as someone who's mid-range or better on the team, and I tell hiring managers this all the time. They're like, well, we want to see five people, we're not going to make a decision until we interview a minimum of five people. It's like okay, but you've got 30 people on your team, right. Interview a minimum of five people. It's like okay, but you've got 30 people on your team, right. 20 of them are doing okay, 10 of them are killing it. Do you remember interviewing those other 10? Yeah, okay. So just compare it to that right, because if they're matching to that, you don't need to. You don't. You only need to talk to one person who can do the job really well. You don't need to meet with five people. That way, you can make a decision.
Caller:That's it and that's the other challenge, too, is like if people are really boiled down, the hiring and interviewing it's sales. Like you know, if you're hiring, you're buying and if you're looking for a job, you're selling. The challenge is that the product's you and some people are very comfortable talking about features and functions and value with themselves and other people aren't are absolutely horrified to talk about themselves.
Caller:That's true, they're not good at their job. It just means that their personality and their dna is different and so it's really incumbent on the interviewer to understand the difference. Like, just because they're not, mr Extrovert does not mean that they're not perfect for the job. It just means you've got to be. You got to ask the right kind of questions to understand there's probably two types of people that are going to be great at this job People that don't have to be the prettiest guy in the room or girl in the room. They have to have all the attention. But someone who's going to empower the people on the team to get the right people in the right rooms for the right reasons to have the right conversations. There you go, there you go, yeah.
Josh Matthews:I will. I just want to add one little thing because we talked about. We talked about the idea that the person getting interviewed is the one who's selling and the person who's hiring is the one who's buying. But I think it goes the other way sometimes right, particularly if you're penetrating the passive candidate market. Someone's got a good job, like I talked to a guy today. He's like man, I got a great job, I make great money. I just kind of have this dream that I might go to XYZ company at some point. So if you hear something, let me know. Like that kind of a thing.
Josh Matthews:And we have to sell. In my role, we have to sell opportunity to, and so do the hiring managers you know, for the clients that we support, to certain people because they have a lot of options. They might have 10 options. I had one guy, double masters from MIT, 10 years in the ecosystem, and he was probably like 32 years old, right, I mean, the guy just crushed, he just killed it. I blasted out 500 people. I got him three offers and he had seven other offers from other companies. He took one of mine, which was great.
Josh Matthews:But these hiring managers really do have to sell. And I recall one of the conversations he had and it was with a CEO. He said all the CEO did was talk about himself and talk about the company. He never asked a single question. He didn't listen to anything. Of course that was a hard no and it also was not my client. So thank God for that. But it can go both ways. It just depends on where is the power right. Who's going to be more disappointed if it's a no? And then you know where you stand and now act accordingly.
Caller:Yeah, I love that because I've been in those situations where you could also you realize, wait a minute, they're starting to sell me. There's a turning point in the interview process at times where you realize, wait a minute, they're convincing me of their culture. They're trying to convince me of what I would experience if I was there and why I should be interested. And you're right, it comes from a passive scenario very often, when you're like you're already in a good place, you're making good money, you have a great lifestyle why would I disrupt that? There's got to be a really, really compelling reason to do that and usually money is not enough.
Caller:So understanding and knowing, like what your 30 second pitches for people that are in that top 1% that you know, execute everywhere they go and have a track record you were talking about job jumping earlier. There's also the idea of people who go and have good tenures in good places and they have success at each place and you can see that they're progressing in their career. Those are the people that everybody's after and, from a recruiting standpoint, if you know those people and you've built a relationship with those people and you can get them a guy that can do 50 deals a year for seven years. Then they're always going to come to you knowing that, whatever your price is, it's going to be worth it because of who you actually know. So again, your network is your net worth on that front.
Josh Matthews:Yes, I love that. Your network is your net worth. I really love that saying we're going to take a quick pause. Oh, go ahead, vanessa oh no, it's just.
Vanessa Grant:I had a couple questions myself, but uh quick pause and then we're going to come to you.
Josh Matthews:So the pause is really simple because I'm going to ask you to share exactly where people can go if they would like one of their questions answered live on our program why yes?
Vanessa Grant:so if you guys have not checked it out already, we have a new website salesforcecareershowcom. It is awesome, and if you scroll kind of halfway down the page, there is a bright pink section called Ask Us Anything, where you'll be able to submit any of your Salesforce-related career questions, no matter where you are in your career. You can submit anonymously if you want as well. If you put your question in there, we will do our best to address it on the show.
Josh Matthews:Thank you, vanessa. Well put, and there's also an area, too, where you can request to be a guest on the show and just so you know you don't even need to do that.
Josh Matthews:All you got to do is show up to the live shows. They're every two weeks, starting at 5.30 pm, just like right now, okay. Show up to the live shows. They're every two weeks, starting at 5.30 pm, just like right now, okay, and raise your hand. We'll bring you up on stage and you can ask a question. You can contribute to the conversation, tell a funny joke if you want, for all I care. So you know, come hang out with us. We love doing this. It's a lot of fun.
Vanessa Grant:That's what I did, and then I got invited. That's right, we had a fun episode.
Josh Matthews:Peter, that's right. Very cool, dylan. Oh, sorry, no, vanessa, you had some questions. I'm glad that you do. I'm glad Go for it.
Vanessa Grant:You know sales is not my wheelhouse of anything. I know everybody kind of has to be a little bit of a salesperson in every role, but I don't know, the thought of sales scares me a little bit. But that being said, I don't know a ton about it. I do get the occasional person who reaches out looking for how to break into tech sales, particularly in the Salesforce community, other than pointing them to the Sales Blazer resources community, other than pointing them to the sales blazer resources. I guess my question to Dylan is you know how would you recommend somebody get started in a sales career and are there any resources that you particularly like?
Caller:Yeah, yeah, absolutely. There's like what I call the traditional path, which is usually like you start as a BDR or an SDR as they call them. Now Some people are using the term SDO now that there's AI. So there's more like learning to operate in an AR format to do outreach. But you start there because you're going to work with salespeople. Like Salesforce's program when I first started was if you were an SDR, you were there for 10 months. If you weren't hired into an AE role after 10 months you were let go. They were really just using that as a farm system to find young talent that was cheap, that was enthusiastic, that wanted to climb the ladder and it worked out really well for them. If that doesn't work, then there's learn to sell by doing it anywhere you can. So if sales is really where you want to be, learn to sell something, whether it's cars. That tends to be a lower barrier to entry in some of those kinds of fields where you can go in and kind of learn some basic principles.
Josh Matthews:I did that and it was like freaking bootcamp man and it was great. Yeah, it was great. It's different now, but it was great.
Caller:The biggest conception I think that people make the mistake of when they think about sales. It's like same thing as with lawyers, I think well, I'm a good at arguing, it has nothing to do with a lawyer's skill set, but you hear it a lot. It's same thing with sales. It's like it's it's convincing someone to do something that they don't want to do and that has. That's really not what sales is. Sales is overcoming fear. It's understanding what the fear is, what the obstacle is for them, to overcome that, and helping them find the confidence that that fear is holding them back from progress and value. And so that is really the name of the game, of what you're trying to achieve. The second component of it is psychology. It's understanding the person across your table, not from a how can they enrich me, but how can I help them solve big problems that they're likely going to have to bet their job on the outcome, and if I can help them do that, then you've established a relationship that you can lean on, potentially for the rest of your career. I call them lifetime customers, and so when you understand that you genuinely care about someone else's success and that you're not so focused on yours, your success will happen by lifting others. So you lift yourself by lifting others, which is more of a service mind than it is like a what you might think of as a red alpha type personality that's out for themselves and they'll squash anyone in their way. That doesn't really work in today's world very often and when it does, it only works for a short window. It's kind of a scorched earth approach. But relationship selling is the future because AI is going to do a lot of the skill set type stuff.
Caller:The salesy stuff that people find cringy is largely being handled other ways. But it's the relationship side of things. It's like can you look someone in the eye and know that they genuinely have your interest in mind and can you be honest and say it does this, it doesn't do that. We're so afraid to say things don't work or things don't achieve the goal. So that's, I guess that's the number one thing I'd say is start somewhere. Start wherever you can lift, where you stand, and then, once you've got some experience, then make a run at the company that you really want to work at. Meet some people that are doing those jobs, connect on LinkedIn, join networking groups in your community, like here in Utah we have a place called Silicon Slopes. There's a tribe house which is kind of a an executive networking group. So learn to join those people and build a network, because those are the people you're going to call when you have something to sell and they're going to have a reason to answer the phone because they know who you are and they know what you're about.
Josh Matthews:It's a. It's a really great question and a great answer, and I just want to add one other thing, which is they generally don't teach you how to sell in college. Right, there aren't a whole lot of degree programs, you know, business degrees and things like that. But actually getting the reps in it's like you can learn how to ski on the mountain. You know you're not going to learn it from a video. You know, unless you actually go out on the mountain, Like it doesn't work like that right, you have to be in the trenches to figure it out. And to do that, it really helps to have some foundational knowledge about sales and with that in mind, there are so many really fantastic sales trainings now available on YouTube. They weren't available when I was coming up or when Dylan was coming up, but just check out a couple good books. One of my favorites is how to Win Friends and Influence People by Carnegie was coming up or when Dylan was coming up. But just check out a couple of good books.
Josh Matthews:One of my favorites is how to Win Friends and Influence People by Carnegie. It's probably the first book on sales and relationships and I'm a huge fan of anything produced by Og Mandino. That's O-G that's his first name Mandino, M-A-N-D-I-N-O. He wrote the Greatest Salesman in the World, the Greatest Miracle in the World, a whole series of books, and I found some of his guides to be absolutely invaluable, particularly when I was 24 years old selling Subarus, right, that stuff. Every night I'd read that stuff because it'll give you some of that support and motivation that you absolutely need when you're listening to no's all day long, Because you're not just going to be automatically successful. You know you might get lucky, right, but long term, if you're not investing in yourself to become a master at your craft, no one else is going to do it for you, and so you must have that desire to invest in yourself. There's no Salesforce trailhead for this, for instance, right.
Vanessa Grant:I mean, I know that they have like the sales blazer program, if we're kind of going back to the Salesforce side, but I feel like that's only been around for like the last year and a half. They've got the sales representative certification and I don't actually know how valuable those things are. So I would love to, I mean, dylan, if you've explored any of those things.
Caller:Just I was curious to hear what your perspective on some of those things were. To be honest, I haven't. But there are some, some programs and some universities I do know that do offer sales tracks as a, as a four-year degree, like Weber State here in Utah actually has the oldest sales degree program in the United States. Oh, that's cool, yeah. And so I know some people there's, like the CEO of MarketStar sits on the board over there and helps support that organization and they do some really cool stuff. As a matter of fact, when I worked for Evolve, which is part of Seagate, I did 200 interviews in one year to hire for 11 reps and most of the reps we hired came from MarketStar because they all had gone through that Weber State sales program, ended up at MarketStar, got their start kind of on the phone at the very, very, very beginning of SaaS sales and then we hired them in and we kind of train them on our process and we probably had an 80% success rate on those, those resources. So you know, understanding from a hiring standpoint, we're we're some feeder either companies and or programs are, and then maybe even establishing like internships and things like that can be a good way, especially if you're a cash strapped. You know, up and coming company internships, where people are are eager to get that experience, but they know the market's saturated and it's very difficult to get hired. Both can get a win there.
Caller:The side component to that is what you were saying is I love the idea of the YouTube thought. I love that you have things like Twitter where you can reach out to people you know are successful in an area that you want to be successful. You can see their feeds. If you're lucky, you can connect with them and ask them questions there. Lucky you can make, you can connect with them and ask them questions. Like there's a whole influencer community now that you can look to and try to understand. If you, if you're good enough to understand what they're selling because that's how they're making money and how they're selling it you can learn a lot just by watching them do it and that influencer because that, you know, that's the number one thing kids want to be growing up now is they want to be influencers, and so understanding that component is going to be the future of sales. I guarantee you that.
Josh Matthews:Yeah, those are great points. Can I ask you, did you have a mentor when you were first coming up? Was there someone? I mean, you know now and this is why I'm I'm posing the question nowadays, so many salespeople they might. Someone might get their very first sales job and then they're working from their bedroom, you know, in their apartment, doing sales. No one's listening to their calls, right, no one's reviewing their emails.
Josh Matthews:Nothing like that's going on for some of these folks, and I can't imagine how much longer it would have taken me to adopt some of the basic skill sets that have allowed me to have a successful career in sales over the last 30, 30 years or so, without having people sitting across my desk saying don't, don't say that, say this, right, tell them this right now, like you're on the phone and they're like coaching you as you're going Right. Or you know, maybe I've got a customer at the, at the sales lot. I can run into the manager's office and be like hey, jeff, they just said this, what do I do? And he's like say this, then say this, and ask them this, then say this. And it's invaluable, but a little harder to do now.
Caller:Yeah, what you're talking about is another feature of what makes a great salesperson their DNA, and I call that curious execution. So it's not enough to have a question, but you're going to go do something about your question. And so I was the first person in my family to graduate college or high school, and first person to go to college. I also happened to be the oldest in my family too, and so I had to just learn to go ask questions to get information that I didn't have. And so, to your point, I had a lot of mentors.
Caller:Like I have a piece of art. You know I have an art habit, and one of the it's a picture Art habit. I love how you put that. I have an art habit. The painting is of this father holding up his little boy above his shoulders, and the father is standing on a whole bunch of people's shoulders below him, and the general ideas that were all lifting each other and that no one's self-made, everyone's standing on someone's shoulders love that. That's a metaphor for my career. It's like I.
Caller:I look for people that I knew would take an interest, because they knew that if they gave me their time and their, their, their counsel, I would put it to work, and so every time I would meet with somebody, I learned this little trick and like I'll share it with you guys.
Caller:Here is when you get to a company or do you get someplace and you find somebody that you admire, go up to them, tell them what you admire, why you admire them, and say could I grab 30 minutes once a month with you just to ask you some questions so I can get a little better, a little smarter, a little faster?
Caller:You're asking them for the most valuable thing they have, which is their time, because they'll never get it back. But they're only willing to invest that because someone else did it for them, and I made a living off of getting those nuggets from people but also showing up prepared, so I had questions. I would give them a quick update on our last meeting, things they shared with me and how I had applied that, so they knew that they were getting a return on their time with me, and then showing them my results and or my failures, and so that's something I passed on to my kids, and I too have been lucky enough to be able to mentor some other people. But I feel like if you put good out there, you get good back, and so we all have that obligation, and so I still have mentors today that I work with and I do very similar things, and I also am quick to make sure that people know that my calendar is up to date and if it's open, it's theirs.
Josh Matthews:So that's the short answer to that that's wonderful, that is, it's truly wonderful. I particularly like that you demonstrate you describe demonstrating the value that you like that you took their advice and this is what the result was Right, because otherwise you just suck. You just suck in someone's time so well, but I taught you this last month. Why are we meeting again and not talking about something different?
Caller:and not talking about something different. Exactly, and if you're asking for something and they're seeing that you're doing something with it, they tend to get excited because they remember what it was like when they learned it.
Josh Matthews:Exactly, and I think in general, this idea too, of just go out there and help people right. Help them out and once in a while you'll get paid for it, right. It's a mentality that has served me well. I think it's served Stephen well, other people on my team and on teams that I've run in the past. If you're helpful, I mean now charge for what you sell, right, but outside of that you know it's free. What can I do? How can I help you? Who can I introduce you to?
Caller:If you're really wise, you're going to do that outside of just your career. You're going to do that about your relationships. You're going to do that with people you admire that do a sport or a skill or an activity that you've always found fascinating. I have art mentors. I have spiritual mentors. I have family, I have dads that I look up to. I have those kinds of things. I have people that I know that are younger than me, that are doing really cool things, that have a skillset that I don't have.
Caller:I'm. I'm reaching out to them for mentorship, whether it's entrepreneurship, whether it's. You know, they've just gone through some crazy tragedy and yet they're. They're positive and upbeat and healthy and happy, and then you did trying to understand how they're seeing that Right. So just even if it's just a conversation where you're showing up for somebody you're going to, you're going to be mentored as you mentor, and vice versa. So deploying that principle goes above and beyond just the career. It's like if that's a good question for everyone to ask is like what is it that I admire in the world? Is that I like and do I know somebody that can help me enjoy that part of the world or my part of life better, then go do it.
Josh Matthews:It's, it's so valuable what you're sharing with everybody today. Dylan, I can't thank you enough for being on the show and sharing your unique history and some of the not just the experiences but the mindsets that have persisted throughout your career to achieve what I would describe as a wild success throughout your career. To achieve what I would describe as a wild success. And you know, guys, I don't know if you really cued in to the first part of the conversation here with Dylan, but he said that he just took a vacation and it was his first summer vacation in 20 years. Right, and so there's something about hard work, dedication, know all of these things and, let's face it, a lot of sacrifice, because when you're in a sales, or when you're in sales as you kind of mentioned, it's you're only as good as your last month or your last quarter.
Josh Matthews:And it's true, you know, and companies can be some companies can be very forgiving and other companies can be ruthless about it. We don't care if you were number one in the world last year, you have not met the minimum expectations for the last quarter. Your job's on the line. That sort of conversation happens every day across this country, right, and so getting yourself into to a position mentally where you can handle that you know and not have excuses, but just own what's going on in your world and grow from there. I think it's absolutely critical.
Josh Matthews:Yeah, you nailed it, so tell me. I want to ask you first of all, vanessa, do you have any other questions for Dylan before I you know, before I dive in, I don't want to.
Vanessa Grant:No, no, go for it. I'm enjoying the conversation tremendously.
Josh Matthews:Yeah, it's a lot of fun. I love talking about hiring and sales and so much of it is well, 100% of it's relative to me in my life, right, but I think so much of this is actually relevant to absolutely everybody. I actually wanted to ask you, vanessa, I wanted to ask you, peter, as people who are not sales folks, you know what are the things that salespeople do at a high level? I'm not talking about you know the person helping you find the mops at Target, right? What are the things that can be real turnoffs for you when you're interacting with a salesperson?
Vanessa Grant:For me. I think the I've been getting a lot of just kind of cold messages through LinkedIn and that's kind of generally an instant no for me. I tend to like to have a little bit more of a rapport. If they're like pushy on getting something closed within some kind of I don't know sound like an invisible kind of timeline, like they completely understand like the scope of my project or the reality of my needs, like I don't feel like they've done their due diligence and they strike me as they're more trying to sell me something rather than trying to fill my needs.
Josh Matthews:So non-consultative selling right yeah.
Vanessa Grant:Non-consultative selling, I think, is a good overall way to put the type of selling that does not work for me, unless I'm desperate for their product.
Caller:Yeah, vanessa is talking about the difference between a numbers game guy or gal and a value person. Exactly. If they show up with a bird in their mouth, you're probably going to care about what they put in your LinkedIn inbox, because they're giving you something you didn't have before that you're finding value in. They're showing up with hey, when are you free to meet, you're not even going to open that. 're finding value. But if they're showing up with hey, when are you free to meet, you're not even gonna open that.
Josh Matthews:Oh yeah, I get 20 emails a day that say they all say the same thing. They're all from different companies. Hey, josh, quick question Could you use three more clients this month? It's like come on, guys, you know like what's up with that? Y'all getting it. Is this all that chat gpt is spitting out now? The same garbage to everybody. Yeah, yeah, yeah actually I would.
Vanessa Grant:I would be curious, dylan, with the consultative selling which is a lot of what you do, especially, I imagine, in the salesforce ecosystem. I know from being a consultant for a number of years. There's always been that challenge of how do you scope a project properly, particularly with Salesforce where there are so many out-of-the-box features. But it is a very complex system when you're trying to customize it for a specific industry and especially when you're talking about revenue operations. It can even get even more complex if you're talking like CPQ and then connecting with ERPs and things like that. How do you approach projects to try and scope them properly?
Caller:Good question. Well, typically you're dealing with a multi-pronged animal, so you're not going to do it in one hour. And I always laugh when people say, well, we scoped it, we did a scoping call, so we're ready to start building a statement of work. I laugh. It's like you did a scoping call but you haven't scoped the deal, because you got to make sure you've talked to IT. You got to make sure you've talked to the key stakeholders in the product. So if it's a service cloud project, you got to make sure not only have you talked to the service team, but have you done a day in the life? Have you sat in a chair and done a ride along with the people using the tool and understood what challenges, where they got hung up, how many clicks it takes to get through something? So it's good. Consultants will go to each person involved and they're really going to understand the preflow of how that job gets done and what that customer's journey looks like, so that, as they're really thinking through all the areas that have to be considered, that they are asking all the questions in each of those categories, then you're also going to look at what are the limitations. Okay, they're doing a process that doesn't replicate into your system. So helping them understand what they do get and what they're going to have to change and what we call that change management, how they're going to fundamentally change the way they operate as a business, and the training that's going to be required, in that A lot of consultancies do a really good job of selling you the technology and the mousetrap. They don't do a very great job of setting you up for success so that the money you spent on the mousetrap actually gets utilized by the team of people that are going to be handed it. And so that's where you get the difference between adoption and realized value and getting a C grade. From a CSAT standpoint, you're getting an eight or lower because people don't even know how to use the tool. They don't understand fundamentally how their job just changed and they're just going to be what I call participating skeptics.
Caller:So to your point, vanessa, it's not one person doing that. It's, like I said, getting the right people in the right rooms, and that's the thing that drives me crazy about salespeople is they think that they're the star of the show and they're really not. They're a facilitator. It's getting a Vanessa Grant in the room to have the conversation about her skill set and her unique knowledge and her past experience and projects and have a one-on-one conversation with the person that's terrified that if she signs up for this project and it doesn't work she's going to get fired. It's having a conversation not only just with the department head but also the people that support that department head.
Caller:So lead routing Well, that's a marketing conversation. Are they aware this product is happening? No one wants to do a project in Salesforce and it's their project. So if it's IT doing it and they go tell sales and service that they now have a new tool, it's going to feel like IT's tool. But if you get sales, it and your service team involved from day one, it's going to feel like it's their tool. So you got to have a shared sense of ownership across the business and if you do a good job all that heavy lifting up front you're going to get eight more projects when that's over, but most people just care about that project. They're going to do it bad, they're going to pick a different partner and you're going to lose that business for the rest of your life.
Peter Ganza:And then when?
Caller:they go to five or six different companies. They're not calling you to replicate what they just did.
Vanessa Grant:The last company, Yep, I think that's great, thank you.
Josh Matthews:Yeah, super helpful. This has been a really terrific conversation. I did want to take just a moment, guys, and talk about a very specific career issue with a lot of folks and that's job hopping, and we're going to get to that right after Peter Ganza. Go ahead, Peter.
Peter Ganza:Everybody is in sales. I'll just say that at the outset, when I was at Symantec many moons ago, the CEO at the time, john Thompson, had a great line that I use often this is the most important quarter, because next quarter there won't be any incentives, right? So I just wanted to put that out there, and I mean in terms of like the noise on LinkedIn from you know salespeople, I tune that out. It's all just automated garbage as far as I'm concerned, unless it's relevant and I am a salesperson for I mean for what I do, that's pretty easy because it sells itself. But I also act on behalf of my clients, salesforce partners, and I got to admit I love it because I'm an ass about it. I mean, I'm outside of the company and I can just push for discounts and free stuff and I actually enjoy it.
Josh Matthews:Thanks for contributing, peter. Yeah, some really good points. So I had a follower of mine reach out today. This individual is curious about what opportunities are out there for her. It appears that she recently accepted a new post, about four months ago. It also appears that it's her second job or third job in eight months. I think she was with the one two jobs ago for a little bit longer, but we've got some serious job hopping going on and I wanted to address that.
Josh Matthews:So, just by a show of hearts, if you could throw up a heart, if you've ever had three jobs or more in a year, I'd love to see that. Or even you know, most people have had two jobs in a single year. That happens especially in your 20s. Okay, no one. All right, that's good. So when we job hop, it's sort of to be expected a little bit in our 20s. Right, it's not looked upon kindly, but it's to be expected because you're finding yourself and you're figuring things out.
Josh Matthews:However, if you start doing a lot of job hopping into your 30s and, god forbid, into your 40s or later, it poses a real challenge and puts up a lot of barriers to high quality companies that will not have an interest in you because you cannot compete, because they cannot trust or in some way justify to the powers that be that this is the job that you're going to make it right. It's no different than being a serial dater three months in a relationship, then three more months in a relationship. Six months in a relationship. Three months in a relationship. It's going to be pretty difficult for someone to feel confident that your marriage material if that's something that you desire it's going to be really hard right, and so one of the things that I shared with this gal was that it's generally one of three things are going on. The three things to pay attention to are one it might be because it's a bad job market, right, maybe it's just. Maybe the economy's tanking and you lost your job and everybody else did, and then there aren't a lot of great companies hiring at that time that fit your skill set and you have to work, and so you'll say yes to something that otherwise you normally never would. So that's reason number one.
Josh Matthews:Reason number two is poor screening of the companies that you're joining, in which case I strongly recommend reading an article on Salesforce Ben, you can find it. It's called Career Checklist, and to get there, just type in joshforcecom. Forward slash career checklist. Okay, again, it's joshforcecom forward slash career checklist. This is your go to guide. Whether you're in the Salesforce ecosystem or not, whether you're going to work for a Salesforce partner or not, this is the article that will teach you exactly how to deeply research an organization, as well as excellent questions to help vet that company to make sure that it's going to be a really good fit long term.
Josh Matthews:And then the third reason is really about your own personal mental health, I think, right, personal challenges, either with your ability to focus, your ability to take direction, to be held accountable by others, maybe you have thin skin, or possibly just a lack of realistic expectations. Now, I have interviewed I don't know how many hundreds of people who are job hoppers and I hear the same thing all the time. It's generally they'll explain you know seven job hops. They'll own one of them and then they'll blame all the managers or the companies for the other six. And it doesn't actually work like that, because if you're in a job and you're not happy or you don't think it's right, don't leave that job till you've examined deeply, deeply, what part of this is me?
Josh Matthews:In what area am I being fragile, right, so much so that I'm so unhappy going to work, or I'm so afraid to talk to my boss, or I dislike the product so much so that I'm so unhappy going to work, or I'm so afraid to talk to my boss, or I dislike the product so much, or I dislike our clients so much Because, if you've bounced around a little bit, there's almost a not quite, but there's almost a hundred percent chance that you're going to experience the same problems wherever you go.
Josh Matthews:You really will Just like if you can't keep relationships with friends or partners, romantic partners, right, you're going to have to do a little bit of digging on yourself, get a therapist, get a coach, get a friend group and deep dive and work on the stuff that make you particularly sensitive to certain environments. Okay, so I just wanted to cover that for a little bit and now I'll open the floor to other people. Tell me what do you think about job hopping and what are some ways that people can mentally get into a position that they hang onto that job and start working on themselves, so they don't keep persisting with the same issue?
Vanessa Grant:Oof, that's a tough one.
Vanessa Grant:I mean in general, when I've, I think the mental health aspect is probably the most important.
Vanessa Grant:I mean if it's really, you know, like a manager or a really bad work situation and you can usually speak to a few people and get a sense of especially if you're new on how unusual your situation might be Like if you've got somebody screaming at you every day like that's a problem.
Vanessa Grant:But other than that, though, I mean I think there is something to sticking around long enough so that you feel comfortable enough in the role, because I think sometimes maybe people get a little bit flustered in the beginning and I don't really feel like sometimes, unless they have like an astoundingly amazing onboarding process, which most places don't, it usually takes, I would say, even six months to a year to truly settle into a role and have a mastery and be proactively good at your job. So striving towards that type of excellence before you start making other moves and start money chasing especially if you have a decent situation where you're at, I think is important. Master your craft and make that. Attract money rather than chasing money in different roles is, I would say, generally how I tend to advise people.
Josh Matthews:Yeah, those are excellent points and there's also a really great question you can ask people. Just visit thesalesforcerecruitercom, click on resources. There's an article in there on the number one question you can ask your future employer. I recommend everybody check that out. Even if you're not looking for work, even if you're listening to this, you're 100% happy in your role, that's great. And if you own your own business and you're never going to leave it, that's fine. Everyone else I would definitely check it out because you'll be able to do some of that more penetrative querying, like Dylan does when he's gone and had interviews with CEO-level folks at amazing companies. So definitely prep yourself, definitely want to prep yourself for all of that stuff. I'm curious, dylan, what are your thoughts on this, on job hopping in general and what people can do about it?
Caller:Yeah, as a hiring manager, I saw a certain personality. I don't really think it's a personality. I think it's a habit that people get into and I think it comes from our culture of watching TV. We are constantly comparing ourselves to others. What would I do in that situation? What would I do if I was that person? And comparison really is the thief of joy, and I think that we get in this habit. We go someplace.
Caller:Very often, people are focused on people and not on their job or the outcome or the goal. Maybe they don't even have a goal, and so if 99% of your problems are people, it's because you don't have a goal bigger than any one person and you're comparing. I call it the monkey cage. You're in the room, you're looking at everybody and you're finding. What really happens is you're finding the negative in every single person that you're looking at, and there's a really simple trick that I've learned that has cured me of my own version of this, which is, instead of looking at them, saying where's the problem, where's the fault, I would look and say what's, what do I like about this person? So when I meet somebody the first time, I'm going to mention that you're looking for what do I like about them and I'm going to tell them that I like that about them. Like you know, I really enjoyed this conversation.
Caller:I really liked the way you focus on how other people feel, that you're really making sure everyone feels comfortable, and if you become a complimenter, you stop becoming a complainer, and that's typically why people leave is because they basically talk themselves out of their own job. And if you can talk yourself into understanding the value of the people that are around you, you'll start to understand the value of the company. You'll start to believe in the team and not just in your work and how it's not getting valued or it's not getting, you know, measured up, or someone's looking at you sideways and makes you feel like you're not good enough, and so you start getting into that tailspin, thinking but if you can start looking at being a first liker, people will like you, and then they're going to care about you and they're going to do things they wouldn't ordinarily do for you, which is interrupt their daily job to help you with something. And then, all of a sudden, you have people who have a vested interest in your success, in your career and in your well-being.
Josh Matthews:That's genius level stuff right there, dylan, I think Tony I don't know if I'm quoting it correctly or even if he's the one who penned this but anxiety and gratitude can't exist in the mind simultaneously. When you're feeling gratitude, gratitude can't exist in the mind simultaneously. When you're feeling gratitude, right, it's like the ultimate shield on negative stuff, right? And so to your point. Find something that you're, as you mentioned, that you like about them or that you're grateful for or grateful about for somebody, and it really quiets the mind very quickly and kind of helps your prefrontal cortex get back online. The other thing is too and we've talked about this in the past careful of your friend group. Now, dylan made a recommendation earlier Find one of the most successful people who's doing what you do, and ask them. You know you can spend 30 minutes with them once a month and then do the work and provide value to that person as well. Doing what you do and ask them. You know you can spend 30 minutes with them once a month and then do the work and provide value to that person as well. Help them to feel like their advice is actually working, right, like so doing. That's really critical.
Josh Matthews:But on the flip side of that is people who are complainers at companies generally don't hang out with a lot of people. People have over time learned that's a sewer rat and they avoid them and they hunt the newbies. They do right. So when you join a new company and you walk in, they're often often not always, but often the very first people who do outreach to you are the people that don't have strong, valuable relationships in the company already. I'm not saying that's the case 100% of the time, or even 50% of the time, but it happens a lot, right, and you must be careful about who you partner with and who you spend time with, because that person might just be like hey, I'm going to tell you all the insides of this company, I'm going to tell you who to work with and who not to, and this and that, and it might be really genuine, it might be really good advice, or it could be really crap advice and they might be messing with you and you know what.
Vanessa Grant:That's actually great advice, not just for when you're in a new company, but even in the I would say even in the community. You know, when you go to conferences, when you go to networking events, sometimes you know, I think, that there's a lot of even factions within a community. So just be open minded and don't necessarily align yourself with folks. There's that kind of stuff really can be anywhere. That kind of stuff really can be anywhere.
Josh Matthews:Yeah, and it's infectious, right. It multiplies like a virus in you and next thing you know you want to quit. And the only thing you need to quit is that relationship with that Debbie Downer, not the company. Yeah Well, dylan, thank you again for being on the show. Any last thoughts, any last wisdom that you would like to impart to our audience, who's been gracious listening this long, all the way through the whole podcast? Good job guys.
Vanessa Grant:And let me just say, dylan, if you end up writing a book like a self-help book, I'm first in line. You've dropped some great nuggets today.
Josh Matthews:Yeah, really Fantastic. And I love what you said, dylan, specifically about coming. You know, having experienced trauma which forced you to be able to be particularly gifted at reading people, right, yeah, yeah, the same here for me, right, childhood was no picnic. And you, you know when you're in, when you're in a family that has challenges like that, where you're walking on eggshells and having to tiptoe around and kind of gauge, like, is this the right time to talk to this person? And so you know, because the consequences can be very devastating, very devastating, if you pick the wrong time, the right top or the wrong topic or the right, whatever it is.
Josh Matthews:It can be really difficult and people who've gone through that when they're young do make generally very good sales people. I know so many people who are amazing at sales and a massive proportion of them had some sort of severe drama or trauma growing up which gave them that empathic ability which otherwise would not have been present, that empathic ability which otherwise would not have been present. So I appreciate you being vulnerable and sharing that. That actually had a significant impact on your success later on. So good on you, mate.
Caller:Yeah, I guess I just leave it with this idea. Sometimes our greatest gifts come in disguise as our most difficult challenges. That's right, and if we're wise enough to learn from them and recognize that there's going to be people that come after us that don't either have the wherewithal or the guidance or the maturity to understand the value of sitting with it, I think we spend most of our time trying to avoid pain. Even as parents, we try to keep our kids away from something difficult or hard. We want to do everything for them, and doing so we rob them of the opportunity of self-discovery. We rob each other of the opportunity of growth from having gone through the pain. I'll give you a final example the buffaloes.
Caller:I grew up in Idaho next to a buffalo farm, and most animals. When a storm storm comes, they'll huddle together and they'll just stay put, and so they wait for the storm to get to them and they spend them the whole time in the storm and the storm passes. What a buffalo do is they huddle up together and then they run towards the storm and they run through the storm. So they spend actually the least amount of time in the storm of any of the other animals, but they take the worst of the storm. So they spend actually the least amount of time in the storm than any other animals. But they take the worst of the storm, but for the shortest period of time. Oh my God.
Josh Matthews:I freaking love that.
Caller:Sometimes, if we just look at our struggles whether it's a job hunt or difficult relationship or a health concern and we just make the decision to run through the storm, we're probably going to grow faster and quicker than the rest of our peers who huddle up and talk about the other animals and don't don't do something about their situation. So I love that man.
Josh Matthews:If that resonate, if you're listening that resonates with you, go get the book. The obstacle is the way it's by Ryan Holiday and he never used that in his book, but he sure should have, because I haven't heard of a cooler story, particularly one that because you grew up next to these buffalo it's not like everybody knows this, right, it's not that many buffalo around anymore, so cool the other book I'd recommend is Team of Rivals.
Caller:It's about Abraham Lincoln, who had his own sense of tragedy and struggles and hardships and it's about how he saved the country by bringing together into his cabinet his number one, all his political rivals, where he invited them into his cabinet, everyone that hated him, and because he brought them in, he won them over and he was able to keep the union together. And it's a super long book, but man, is it great.
Josh Matthews:That's awesome, Can I ask you? Maybe you know this from the book. It used to be that the vice president was whoever didn't win right, yeah, and they became vice president. Was that still going on back in the early 1860s?
Caller:It wasn't, and it's funny you say that because I'm a huge history buff I set a goal to read a biography on every single American president, and so it. Actually it stopped about the time John Quincy Adams came on board, okay, but yeah, it was so early on, a little bit, a little bit before Lincoln, that stopped. But the running mates were largely chosen by the party, not by the candidate, so there's, can you imagine?
Josh Matthews:if Joe Biden, if, instead of Kamala Harris right now, trump was VP, Can you imagine that world? Team of rivals. Yeah, yeah, team of rivals. Okay, team of rivals. The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln is the recommended book and that's by Doris Kearns Goodwin. You can get it on Amazon for like 14 bucks, so great recommendation. Thank you, dylan.
Josh Matthews:Thanks for being on the show, carving out time out of a very busy father schedule, work schedule, art schedule. Thanks to Peter for showing up. Again. All of our amazing listeners, thank you guys for joining us on this live program. Casey's here.
Josh Matthews:Michael Steven, thank you so much for showing up and if you have enjoyed this program, I would love it if you could please go to your favorite app that you listen to this show on. Give us a thumbs up and if you've got a recommendation or you want to leave a positive comment, please go ahead and do it. If you've got a negative comment, well, you can just give me a call and we'll talk about it, okay. So thanks guys. Vanessa, as always, you rock. I hope that you have an amazing time at Tahoe. I'm sorry I'm not going to be there this year, but have an amazing time out there and we'll be back in two weeks with special guest Chris Newdecker. Chris is the Senior Director of Engineering at BHG Financial. I've known Chris for a couple of years, looking forward to having him on. That's going to be July 31st, at the end of this month, and that's all we've got for today. Have a wonderful week, guys. Bye for now.
