← Always Be Testing
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- [00:07]
Ty Degrange
Hello, hello, hello. Welcome to another episode of the Always Be Testing podcast. I'm your host, Ty Degrange and I'm really excited to talk to Sam McKenna today.
- [00:15]
Sam McKenna
Sam, how you doing? Hi Ty. So good to see you.
- [00:18]
Ty Degrange
Good to see you too. It's been a moment, it's been a minute. Absolutely. We had the pleasure to be with a bunch of other LinkedIn power users in San Francisco with a special invite top secret video that never aired.
- [00:33]
Sam McKenna
It's in the, it's in the archives somewhere. It's in a, it's a cave deep under the San Francisco Linkman office.
- [00:40]
Ty Degrange
Yeah, yeah. They get in, they use like a little old wagon to bring it down into the cellar and pull it back up. So for those of you don't know, Sam is a sales expert, to say the least. The CEO and founder of Sam Sales and she's done some amazing things. So there's going to be a lot of fun stuff today.
- [00:57]
Sam McKenna
I can't wait.
- [00:58]
Ty Degrange
Yeah, maybe get us caught up on just what you working on right now. What's the latest?
- [01:03]
Sam McKenna
So after spending 15, 14 years in enterprise sales in corporate America, I launched SAM sales, which is had the hope of basically being a company that would consult a few companies, let me work part time and make half the money I made in SaaS. I was like, that'll be, this will be great. I'll go to yoga at like 10am and life will be good. And I probably should have known myself a little bit better being very type A, disciplined, competitive, that, that would fly out the window in about a week. And so now we're an all women team of almost 20 people. We've been in business for almost six years, over 250 clients and we really focus on just a couple of things. So top of the funnel. Sales training is something that's near and dear to my heart. I think so many people just never got great training on it. They don't know what good looks like. They don't know how to prospect. They don't know how to build a process around it. They don't even know how to do a discovery call. The well, the great way. Right. How to show up well on a first date, so to speak. So we train a lot on that. And I think what makes us really different there is that we focus on a buyer centric, manners driven approach. So how to do your research, how to show up with a point of view, how to make sure you know how to pronounce the name of the company that you're meeting with like One on one stuff, but really taking a different approach to sales there and then other thing that we're focused on outside of LinkedIn and social selling and all of that is building brands for execs on LinkedIn. So we really have a niche in this space and I like to say that we really invented the full strategy and line of business around this where we write content for executives, we ghost write their posts and then we manage the strategic administration of their back end. So just some really nerdy things there where we get to work with just titans of industry, celebrities and series A founders alike. But lots of momentum there, especially in this market with SEO struggling with influencers taking a front seat to a lot of work, there's just been a really cool ride.
- [02:55]
Ty Degrange
I love it. That's amazing. It's been fun to watch the progress and for both of us and tip of the cap to you on all the success you've had. It's amazing. On the show we obviously with always B testing we talk a lot about learnings. What are some of your favorite learnings from the client engagements that you've had and some of the like moments for you?
- [03:14]
Sam McKenna
You know, I think for us that always be testing is spot on, especially with our marketing dollars. What should we spend it on? What should we do? What's going to be home run? And I think there's a lot of things that have been surprising for us, not even in working with our clients, but in building our own business. So even in the early days, we're like, we'll do giveaways, we're going to try to bolster our newsletter, we're going to try to get people to show up to a webinar. We're going to say if you sign up for this, if you do this, we'll give you $100 or top prize $500. And not a lot of people did it. And I was like, oh my gosh, I would. Back in my day, I would have moved a mountain to win $500. I can't believe that this didn't work. So really throwing money at things, evaluating the data and thinking what do we need to do differently? Why? And something didn't. So the giveaways don't seem to work. But what's interesting is starting to think about how do we approach sales in a different way. So I'll give you a great example of a test that we ran that is really, really successful. We built something, a whole process called Expand the Sandbox. And what I mean by that is that on LinkedIn I have a network and you all have a network. It might be 500 people, it might be 50,000 people, but I have 115,000 followers, something like that now. And with that, that's a sandbox that I have. It's kind of an echo chann chamber. And there are 20 million other people that don't know that I exist. That I would really like to have know that I exist. So we started this thing where we said, you know what, we're going to go find our core ICP, we're going to find the SVPs at, at and t of the world that we want to get in front of and we're going to see do they post on LinkedIn. And if they do, we're going to save them a list and we're going to comment on their profile, their post a couple of times. We're then going to send them a connection request, we're going to comment a few more times and then we're going to go in for the kill. We're going to say we would like to sell you something. Would you like to take a meeting? In a slightly more elegant way than that. But what was really cool about this is it worked. So we were able to close a deal with the chief revenue officer of Equifax, who definitely knows our play and has authorized us to share this now. But we did exactly that. We found her in a LinkedIn sales blog. We sent some materials her way, like commenting on her posts and then just connected, did it again and then went in for the kill. I think just some things. Yeah, like how to stand out, how to be different prospecting, sales marketing doesn't have to be that hard. You just have to do things that other people aren't willing to do.
- [05:32]
Ty Degrange
Obviously got my attention. Is there anything there that you have learned or seen? Kind of reminds me of the gong conversation I had recently. And is there anything that maybe kind of jumped out at you as wow, people often show up like this when in fact they really need to show up like this.
- [05:49]
Sam McKenna
Yeah, I will say it's interesting like this came up on a webinar that I did yesterday, but that one of the things I've, I guess maybe naturally prioritize without knowing it is that it's really important to me that I build connection and rapport and look for any opportunity that I can do that. So as an example, I just posted about this on LinkedIn a little bit ago, 30, 45 minutes ago, and talked about how sometimes we get on calls with our clients and it might be our partners, channel partners. It might be cross functional partners, whatever. And we get on calls, and they aren't on camera, but we are. Are. And so in this particular instance, somebody came on, they said, hey, it was our buyer, a prospective client. And they said, I'm not going to come on camera. I'm eating breakfast. Don't mind me. And so what's the norm? What's the standard there? The standard is, no worries. Here's what I want to talk to you about. And you're like, cool, riveting. But instead. And it's definitely because it's my personality type, I was like, well, wait, now we have to know what you're eating. Tell us what's going on over there. And the person responded, and he's like, okay, well, I'm a little embarrassed to say this. Don't tell anybody, because I don't often do this, but I totally went to McDonald's today. And we're like, what? And everybody on the zoom, like, reacts. They start to talk. We're weighing in on breakfast foods, et cetera. We talk about all that. And then I say, okay, well, have you had the ultimate, though? Have you had the Chick Fil A chicken breakfast sandwich? And you can see everybody's on mute. And they're like, oh, my God, it's the best. Yes. Love it. And the guy says, I haven't. And we're all like, what? And the room erupts, right? We're talking, et cetera. We ended up signing the deal. And of course, as a result, in our true show me, you know, me, Sam Sales fashion, we sent a little $15 G card. Was absolutely nothing. $15 gift card to Chick Fil A. And we said a little something to celebrate our engagement and for you to always remember who funded your first Chick Fil A chicken breakfast sandwich. Right? And just, like, showing up in a different way, not only the way that we engage, the way that we build conversation, we build rapport, we pull threads, like, just build a relationship with these people, no matter what role you're in in the organization. And that's what I love, I love about our business, is that we try to show up in a different way all the time.
- [07:47]
Ty Degrange
I love that. There's so much there.
- [07:49]
Sam McKenna
How hungry are you for Chick Fil A now?
- [07:51]
Ty Degrange
Yeah, I mean, I'm gonna definitely have some, so. No, I love that. I love that. And you. You've seen kind of the. The magic from a variety of angles in house to Sam Sales, to building out a company for aspiring sales Leaders, as maybe cliche as that sounds, is there things that you kind of give people that they kind of need to be aware of or think about if they're kind of on the leadership side from a sales perspective? And I'm assuming there's probably some similarities to what you just shared, but I'd love to hear more about that.
- [08:26]
Sam McKenna
Yeah. Are you thinking about from a. Do you mean from a leadership perspective of just like, how to be different as a leader or how to things that they should be thinking about if they want to start their own business? What's your angle there?
- [08:37]
Ty Degrange
I think maybe more sales leadership as opposed to just straight sales.
- [08:41]
Sam McKenna
Yeah. So I think one of the things. One of the most frustrating things to me about sales leadership is that we're often promoted either based on potential and having done nothing, really a great accomplishment as an individual contributor, or we've been an amazing individual contributor. We get promoted and we get absolutely no sales training or leadership training whatsoever on what we're supposed to do. We're given a team. It's like. It's like when you have a baby, they like. They send you, like, with a congratulations, whatever, blanket and a baby, and they say, good luck, and we're like, wait, are you sure? This seems precarious. Something seems amiss, but same thing as a leader, right? You're giving your team your territory a quota, and you're like, good luck. Good luck figuring out how to run team calls, how to run one on ones, how to have difficult conversations, how to hire. We don't know any of that stuff.
- [09:30]
Ty Degrange
You're a great ic. You have to manage people. Good luck.
- [09:33]
Sam McKenna
Good luck. Yeah, we wish you well. And please hit your quota or we'll fire you. Oh, God. Okay, great. Really low stakes there. But I think a couple of things in terms of being different. I think for me, I have always thought about how. I feel like we have a responsibility as leaders to create exceptional experiences for the people that are on our teams. So I think life is short. And I think if you even apply those same principles to your friendships, to your relationships, to your marriage, to your whatever, it can pay off in spades. And how awesome for you to be a part of that. So as an example, you know, we talk about show me, you know, me all the time at Sam Sales as our trademark line, how does that apply to leadership? Well, what do you know about the people that report to you? What do you know about your directs? What do you know about your reps? Right. And a lot of people don't know much they don't know their interests, they don't know their kids names, they don't know their partner's names. Right. And so I think there's an opportunity for us to learn about our people. What motivates them, what are their dreams, what are they working for? You know, what do they do on the weekends? And to that effect, one of the things that I did, in fact, I did it at a previous company and then I did it again here at Sam Sales, was I knew that one of our reps was really, really close to their family. So she had text chain. Seven of them were on it or whatever, and all they did all day was text. They were so, so close. So when it was finally time to promote her, I'd reached out to one of her family members and I said, hey, off the record, we're promoting your sibling. Wanted to let you know X, Y, Z was happening. Can you show up on a Zoom call? I was. It was Blue Jeans back then. I don't even know if Blue jeans still exists, but can up on a Zoom call, and I'm going to surprise her. So what I did is I got in cahoots with one of our IT guys. I went in the conference room, I pulled up the Blue jeans. They were on, they were ready to go. And I turned off the tv, so the feed was still live, but the TV was blocked. She and I go in the conference room. IT guy comes in and he's like, oh. He's like, do you mind if I interrupt for a second? Like, I just need to check some wires. And we're like, sure. And like, he walks by, and I'm like, can you believe this guy? Interrupting our meeting? All staged, of course. And then we throw the tv, we're like, talking to her, et cetera. And then I throw the TV up after the guy leaves, and she's like, what's happening? And her family's like, you're getting promoted. And it was just like, one of the coolest. I mean, like, I still tear up, like, thinking about that moment. And then we did the same thing here at Sam Sales, because why not? Why not take something that might be still an amazing thing or an ordinary thing in their life or something they've been working hard on? And why not amp it up? Or to think about that, of how you can support them in the things that they want to grow in and do? Like, how are you investing in them? We have a rep on our team, Sarah, who has been in one corporate job before, and she's now here and so one of my questions to her today was, do you want to learn how to forecast? Like we don't forecast here and thank God I never have to be on a real forecast call ever again. But we don't forecast like we know what we're going to bring in. We have plenty of money saved, we're in good shape. I'd rather do that than ever have to forecast again. But can I teach her something that's going to be valuable to her at some point when she flies the coop and leaves Sam Sales, which hopefully she never does. But thinking about those things, I think the final thing right Is how to run a really effective team meeting. And we've all been with a lot of leaders who run really crappy team meetings. So think like what do you want to learn? What are you struggling with? Can we bring in guest speakers to talk to you about something? Maybe it's vulnerability, maybe it's multi threading, maybe it's difficult conversations with other people in your lives. Like how do we use our time to make sure that you really look forward to these things? Just a few things there.
- [13:02]
Ty Degrange
Yeah. My mind's spinning because I want to bring all this goodness to our team and I think there's times when we do this well and there's times when we can improve it. I think there's always room for improvement and I love it. Just inspiring stuff and it's. You get in the day to day. You're running an agency, you're running a software company, you're running an E comm company. It's easy to not necessarily always invest enough and think of those high standards and show folks that you know them and all of that. So I love the detail and the story of that. It's beyond a good learning. So thank you Worm, tell us more about that.
- [13:38]
Sam McKenna
I think there's two things to have been true right the show me, you know me angle for me always trying to build rapport and connection with people and show them that I know them. And then I think the other thing is my, my mom tells us my mom has since passed but she told a story that when I was born that I was born in 10 minutes. So lucky, lucky her. But I was third kid. She'd been through this before and when I was, I was born in less than 10 minutes. And that she says that for my entire life I've had a firecracker lit under my ass. Go, go, go. Move, move, move. Speed is the name of the game. Decisive, quick to move. I will say I'm Also very intentional decision maker for big things. So you know, who to marry, what house to buy, things like that. Slow and steady, calculated really way the risks. But for a lot of other things, yeah, I move quickly and I think the urgency for everything that we do in our lives can be a great differentiator. I think it should be the norm, but it's not. And because of that it's a differentiator. So two places where I see this as like immediately applicable when we think about the deals that we chase, right? How quick are we to respond, to send proposals to follow through, et cetera? And even something so simple as this. A couple months ago we got a meeting or got an email on a Friday night from one of our clients. Really big deal, enterprise grade, wonderful for us. And it had six or seven questions in it. Great buyer intent questions. Now that takes a long time to respond to. It's awful. To do our research, we have to do math. Dear God. But the key is, should we respond quickly to say message received and here's the ETA when you'll get that back. That small tweak shows that we're on top of our shit, right? We've got our act together, gives the person an idea of if we receive the email and when we'll get a response back to them. Now some people might say that sounds pretty desperate. They're going to see that you're desperate, they're going to smell your commission breath. And I couldn't agree less. I think it is the antithesis to what sellers do these days. And in fact, I think some sellers are slow to respond because they say I'm in control of the deal and I'm going to show you exactly what that means. And I'm like, man, I hope I never work with you. So that's one thing. How urgent are we to respond? And think about the timing as well. If you get a message from a client, prospective client, at 7:15 in the morning, they're probably at their desk and they're probably available. They're not on meetings, they're not distracted by other things. So if you respond quickly or if you text back quickly, what an impact you can make. I think about this also for interviewing. So when we think about applying for jobs or submitting our resumes or something like that, we find that there's always a lag between somebody showing interest and then following up with materials. Or perhaps we say we really liked your resume, could you send us a writing sample? And then we hear from them in a week and we're like, take care by. And it's not that we're not setting expectations around what we expect. It's. Is it important to you to respond quickly? Right. 24 hours, same day. I think it's a little aggressive. Although I would same day it, no doubt. But 24 hours or so, right? Are we responding? Are we getting back? Are we even responding and saying, FYI, I'm back to back tomorrow. I'll have this to you at the end of the day or next morning that urgency can make a difference. Now, I will also tell you just a quick story here where urgency bit us in the buns. We had a gal that wanted to apply for a job with us, and we didn't have any openings, but she kept following up, following up, following up. Finally, we had an opening, and we're like, we have an opening. And we didn't hear back from her, and we're like, well, I guess your urgency ship has sailed. And then six days later, we heard back from her, and we're like, oh, my gosh. And so she gets on the phone and she says, I really appreciate that you guys. Prioritize. Work, life, balance. That'll come in handy for me and my little boy. And we're like, oh, that's amazing. You have a little boy. How old is he? He's six days old. So the reason she didn't respond is because she was giving birth.
- [17:26]
Ty Degrange
Holy.
- [17:27]
Sam McKenna
We're still. It's been a few years, and we still feel really sheepish.
- [17:33]
Ty Degrange
Oh, my God.
- [17:34]
Sam McKenna
I know, I know. Usually it's because the person's just not very urgent. Sometimes it's because they Damn.
- [17:42]
Ty Degrange
Have a heart. My God. Poor woman was giving life.
- [17:46]
Sam McKenna
You bastard.
- [17:50]
Ty Degrange
Wow, that's amazing. I love it. I love it.
- [17:53]
Sam McKenna
Yeah. Move your buns. It'll pay off. People will appreciate it. Your boss will appreciate it. Your clients will appreciate it. Your cross functional partners will appreciate it. I love it.
- [18:00]
Ty Degrange
Yeah, we like to come up with slogans and T shirts here at rbl. Maybe move your buns is maybe a good one.
- [18:06]
Sam McKenna
Move your buns. It's a good one.
- [18:09]
Ty Degrange
We're coming down the home stretch. Sam, what's a trend or like a thing that's happening in your world, in our space that you're keeping an eye on, that's coming down the pipeline that's kind of impacting the way you do your job? What is it and how are you kind of responding to it?
- [18:24]
Sam McKenna
Yeah, I think it's interesting. We have. I feel like an inverse pull between what's happening with our entire AI movement and what buyers and clients actually want from us. And so you have everybody, everyone is slapping AI on their company name and claiming that they do AI even if you have nothing. I mean, we might as well be Samsales AI at this point. Even though we're like, oh my God. But it's interesting because while we do that and while we're looking for all these ways, just amazing, cool ways to be hyper efficient too, we just chatgpt how to code something and replicate websites web pages on our webpage that frankly would have cost three grand every single time we wanted to do it. Like just some really cool stuff out there.
- [19:04]
Ty Degrange
It's insanity.
- [19:05]
Sam McKenna
Yeah. But I think to a lot of organizations, this is now the new silver bullet. So Silver Bullet five or six years ago was using platforms like outreach and you have brackets in and you can personalize the name and their company. Woo. And make it look like you personalized it. But now you can do that. But also personal things. And it's what I call scaled and veiled. We can scale email communications and we veil that. We made the effort. It looks like we did something that we didn't actually do. I think, number one, why would you ever want to represent yourself as a brand that does that? That's deceitful. That's trying to make somebody feel like you made an effort when you didn't. But two, our clients see through that. No matter how good AI continues to be. I don't know that it'll ever replace humor, intelligence, sarcasm, all the things that we bring to the table and so your buyers can see through it and what they're really craving. Somebody who makes an effort, somebody who's urgent, who somebody gives a shit. If you don't know Jen Allen, you should follow her. But she has a. I say this in Jess. The patented sales methodology of gas give a shit. And I think it's hysterical. And it's so right. Right. That is a trend that I'm seeing that as we punch the gas on automation across everything that I think if we slow down or we build our soft skills and we figure out how to ask what somebody's eating for breakfast and know what to do with that next, those are the people that are going to win today.
- [20:29]
Ty Degrange
He nailed it. Took the words out of my mouth. Just to be able to do that and show that empathy and humor and thoughtfulness and giving is really awesome.
- [20:38]
Sam McKenna
And maybe that's like the geriatric millennial. Is that a thing? Elder Millennial, I think, is a thing. Maybe that's the 43 year old.
- [20:46]
Ty Degrange
I think we're in the same.
- [20:47]
Sam McKenna
Yeah, maybe that's me. Maybe every 26 year old is listening to me and saying, no, your soft skills ship has sailed. All we care about is automation and AI. And I'll say that's all right and go over to my walker and walk out of the room.
- [21:04]
Ty Degrange
I think we're of a similar mindset and I've talked about this a lot regarding our industry, about, yes, AI is coming, yes, we're using it for internal processes, but to show up as human, to make those influencer and partner marketing relationships happen, it does require some human touch, which I think is why we're drawn to it, why it still makes sense. And there's certainly a sales aspect to it all, whether you're looking at account management or recruiting or convincing a partner to continue to promote a brand. So I definitely think there's a lot of great learnings in what you do and what we do, which is really awesome. What do people not know about Sam?
- [21:41]
Sam McKenna
Oh, what do we not know? So I'll give you a weird thing that I've never told. I don't think I've ever told it on a podcast. That's not that spicy. My. It's a little spicy. My dad. So both my parents have passed away and my dad used to be, used to be buried next to Charlie Chaplin. And so just a cool thing. 1 like, I'm originally from Switzerland. Charlie Chaplin's gravestone grave site, it's just outside Lausanne, Switzerland, which is where my family all hails from. But in I went, go, I went to go back and visit it a couple of years ago and it was gone. My dad's gravesite was gone and my husband was coming with me for the first time and he's like, do you think maybe you just don't know where it is? And I'm like, I know where my dad is buried, thank you very much. But it wasn't there. And I learned that in Switzerland, unless you pay an exorbitant amount of money, which obviously Charlie Chaplin's parents have or family has, after 25 years, they kick you to the curb and so they unearth it and then they resell the space. And I was like, where do the remains go? It's just the craziest part.
- [22:48]
Ty Degrange
Oh my God.
- [22:49]
Sam McKenna
Imagine not knowing that and showing up to go visit and there's no one there except for Charlie.
- [22:55]
Ty Degrange
Oh my God. That is crazy. I feel horrible.
- [22:59]
Sam McKenna
This should be the.
- [23:00]
Ty Degrange
I had no idea that happens.
- [23:02]
Sam McKenna
I didn't either. I had no idea.
- [23:04]
Ty Degrange
But I mean capitalist pigs just like cranking through.
- [23:08]
Sam McKenna
It's like sass cemeteries or something. I don't know.
- [23:11]
Ty Degrange
Recurring. Recurring business models.
- [23:13]
Sam McKenna
Horrible. This is going to be the lead in for your post advertising this podcast. Where is Sam's dad? Not any longer buried.
- [23:21]
Ty Degrange
Oh, trivia.
- [23:23]
Sam McKenna
My dad died almost 40 or 30 years ago so I can joke about it now. It's been a minute.
- [23:30]
Ty Degrange
We keep this up, we're going to end up on LinkedIn lunatics. And then we're done.
- [23:35]
Sam McKenna
We're done.
- [23:36]
Ty Degrange
Oh, that's amazing. Any segue.
- [23:40]
Sam McKenna
Where do you go with that now? Good luck.
- [23:42]
Ty Degrange
I mean we just mic drop and walk out this point, go to the rocking chair and point at the Gen Z people.
- [23:50]
Sam McKenna
Wow.
- [23:51]
Ty Degrange
Favorite book recommendation.
- [23:55]
Sam McKenna
I will. I'll give you a really great one. Book recommendation Unreasonable Hospitality. Do we know this book?
- [24:01]
Ty Degrange
Nope. I love it already.
- [24:03]
Sam McKenna
I know the title makes your heart race. It is by Will Guerdera, who was eventually the owner of eleven Madison Park. And if you're a foodie and a New Yorker or just a foodie in general, you know this restaurant which insane accolades and I think now they've gone. I don't know if it's vegan or vegetarian, but like my heart breaks. Sorry. Veganers and vegetarianers. But yeah, I know, I know, I know, I know.
- [24:30]
Ty Degrange
To each their own.
- [24:30]
Sam McKenna
To each their own right now there's anything wrong with that if you're a Seinfeld fan. But just really fantastic book about hospitality. What to do, how to delight your clients. And one of the best lessons I got from it was 95% of your budget should be meticulously managed and the other 5% should be blown on the most absurd things to delight your clients and make memorable experiences. So I know. I just, I love it so much. And so what are the things that you can do? When's the last time you delighted a customer? What did you do to surprise them? Or say some send something that shows you appreciate them. I mean, 100 opportunities for us to do that.
- [25:08]
Ty Degrange
Amen. I love it. What a beautiful thing to end on. And yeah, 5% could be a little inspiration of always be testing as well. Always be testing how to delight them. Yeah, I'll definitely be checking out that book. Sam, you dropped some amazing knowledge for everyone, for me, for the audience, for folks that want to find you and learn more. Where can they, where can they reach on LinkedIn?
- [25:28]
Sam McKenna
Where else but pop over to samsalesconsulting.com and we have webinars we have YouTube channel. We have some. A lot of free stuff, some not so free stuff. But come, come check it out and come hang out with us one way or the other. We'd love to meet you, beautiful.
- [25:41]
Ty Degrange
Awesome to chat with you as always. And I hope to see you in person again soon.
- [25:45]
Sam McKenna
Thanks, Tyrone.