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On this episode of the What Worked podcast, Mike Wu sits down with Tyler Rachal to discuss his pre-Hireframe days and the changing sales landscape.

We covered a ton of great topics:

• Tyler's war stories as a quota-carrying salesman at a startup that turned into a unicorn
• The biggest changes in sales channels today
• New AI tools and the return of old-school sales tactics

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Transcript edited for clarity:

Mike Wu

Thanks for joining us for another episode of the What Worked podcast. You're joined by the two usuals, Mike Wu here and co-host Tyler Rachal. Together we host this podcast, What Worked, and probably better known, if at all, for starting and running a company called Hireframe, which is an overseas staffing firm. We help a range of companies, from startups to enterprises on the NASDAQ and New York Stock Exchange, we help them with outsourcing. 

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And today, we are actually guestless. We usually like to have friends and customers and guests on the podcast, but today, we're gonna do something a little bit different here. Tyler, would it be okay if I interviewed you? So let me be the interviewer and get to know you. I think it's a rare experience for two close friends to get to interview one another. I feel like we know each other very well, but I think it'll also be very cool to get to ask you some questions about your past experiences and that sort of thing. How does that sound?

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Tyler Rachal

More than okay, Mike. I‘m, first of all, thrilled to welcome myself. Let's talk about that. I was patiently waiting for the invite to be a guest on this incredible podcast. And so I'm pumped up and I'm not just pumped up. I am C4'd up, my dude. Today we're going to be talking about one of my favorite subjects, which is sales. So naturally I got to get back into my bro mode, my sales-bro mode here and that includes getting... 

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Mike Wu

Yeah, we gotta get a C4 sponsorship. 

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Tyler Rachal

Yeah, C4 if you're listening, please.

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Mike Wu

Look, we've been talking for a while, we've been doing this podcast for about a year. We've been talking about doing an episode about the origin of Hireframe story. But this is not gonna be that exactly. I think of this actually more of the prequel to that story, because I'd like to spend this bit of time with you talking about your past life, what you did prior to Hireframe because your experiences before Hireframe have had an immense influence on what Hireframe has become and specifically around the sales staffing we do with our customers. And so I think it's going to be a really interesting conversation. 

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Also, our sales staffing out of all the different departments that we work with at a company like accounting, marketing operations, customer success, the sales staffing probably, I don't know if you would agree with this, makes sense though, probably has the most direct impact on our customers' revenue. So, starting just at the top of the P&L, we're going to be talking about revenue today. I think it's a topic that many companies are thinking about and it's a big part of what we do here at Hireframe.

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Tyler Rachal

Without a doubt, everything else is effectively a dotted line for us, but we're really fortunate, a lot of times it's where our relationships start with our customers. We typically find that sales is a really great entry point for us. And we of course love that because, no easier way to ask for more business than to earn your customer more revenue. That's typically the best time to ask for that. It's also, I will give a little shout out to our sales Hireframers, they are incredible, but also our customer success Hireframers, which are effectively another sales position, but more on the account management side. 

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Mike Wu

Totally.

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Tyler Rachal

Those are two areas where direct line to revenue, always a good thing for our customers.

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Mike Wu

Yep, that's right. So speaking of direct line of revenue, I think in your past life prior to Hireframe, you had one of those. You were driving revenue for another company. Could you take us back, go as far back as you'd like, but I wanna bring it back eventually to your time, just a couple of years leading up to Hireframe.

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Tyler Rachal

Yeah, without a doubt. Let's start with my birth story. It was a cold day in September in Evanston, Illinois. No, I'm just kidding. We'll fast forward. As anybody who's listened to this podcast knows, boy, am I a talker. So I'll spare everybody and I'll try to be concise and focused and stick to the most relevant part. So let's fast forward past birth, past high school, past everything else, college, etc. To really, I call it, my most meaningful, significant career experience before Hireframe, which was I had the pleasure of joining a little startup in Santa Monica, California, a company called TaskUs. If you ever heard that song, they paved paradise to put up a parking lot. Well, I like to think about the old TaskUs HQ, which was literally a dilapidated, California bungalow building that, I'm not kidding, it got actually condemned because it was not safe for occupancy and so that could give you some sense of when I joined the company what the state was. 

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I joined TaskUs in 2012 at the time TaskUs had been around, I think they were technically founded in 2009, so let's call it three years. But it was really, not discrediting any of the work that was done before I joined, but it was a baby version of what the company is today. So when I joined TaskUs, I was effectively employee number four in the US HQ side. TaskUs, for anybody who doesn't know the name, they're pretty well known at this point. It's an outsourcing company. So, similar to Hireframe, they're in the staffing outsourcing business. They provided call center services, specifically to what they really focused on was all of these venture-backed consumer technology companies. So I always like to say, take a look at your smartphone, open up your iPhone and look at all the apps that you typically use every single day. There's a pretty good chance that TaskUs either worked with them in a past life or they're working with them now, providing things like customer support, content moderation, et cetera, et cetera.

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Bringing it back to when I joined, the company was quite small. We were doing, I don't want to reveal numbers because I never know how these NDA things work, but let's just say single digit millions. And by the way, anybody who's listening to this and wants to fact check me, Taskus is now a publicly traded company. So you can go and Google Taskus S1 filing and you can read their filing and see is Tyler full of it or not? 

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But if you think about the timeline there, I joined in 2012, single digit millions revenue. We had a single call center, if you will, in the Philippines in an area south west of Manila. With about, at the time, I'd say probably around 50, FTEs, whatever you want to say at 50 team members, 50, I hate the word agent, but agents is the probably the most commonly used word with call center team members. But yeah, we had about 50 folks and I was at TaskUs from 2012 to 2018. And during that time period, what I will just share that I think I can share, is that I was in the room is what I like to say. I was a quota carrying salesperson. I helped the old startup thing, I wore a lot of hats. I helped out with many aspects of the company. But the single thing that I would say is that I was in the room as the company went from single digit millions in revenue to over $100 million in revenue in a short period of time, which is an incredible growth story.

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And then TaskUs, ultimately, and this is all public information, they were purchased by Blackstone Private Equity in 2018, which is when Mike and I started working together and I left TaskUs. And then in, I believe it was 2021, TaskUs went public on the stock exchange. And as I mentioned, you can look at the S1. If you look at when I joined 2012, single digit millions all the way to 2021, I think the number they did was 478 million in gross revenue, half a billion dollars call it. 

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So, it was quite the experience. But like I said at TaskUs, I always like to say, I found my forever home in sales. I love sales and I got, really to your point Mike, the opportunity to have a direct impact on revenue, which I candidly, I became kind of addicted to, so I was out there closing deals. I don't know if this will be of interest to you or anybody else, but I'm happy to tell some of my war stories about, you know, selling big deals, etc.

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Mike Wu

Yeah. I want to hear about them. I've heard some of them. So I'm curious which ones are top mind for you today. Cause I can't remember the last time we chatted about them. come up every so often, but before you do that, could you just talk about TaskUs worked with some of the most well known names in tech in that 2010s era, I would say. So could you share a little bit about what companies TaskUs worked with and then like, what was the service being provided to bring it to life a little bit?

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Tyler Rachal

Yeah, absolutely. If you look at, again I'll kind of stick with the S1, if you look at some of the logos they put on their S1, it's the who's who of technology and big companies today. So they talk a lot about their relationship with Meta, which has basically changed our lives in many ways. Netflix, Coinbase, the list goes on and on. It's pretty well known that TaskUs was Uber's first

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customer experience service provider, so call center services for Uber, and really managed to ride this Zerp era wave. 

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And so to bring it back to my job as a salesperson, I'll describe it really plainly.Basically, I read TechCrunch like it was the New York Times. I read it religiously. I would refresh the page probably like 47 times a day and I was just constantly hunting for that next big company. So if there was a group of five tech folks in Palo Alto who were starting a new food delivery marketplace, I was all over it and I was constantly hunting for those new opportunities. Because the secretsauce, if you will, to TaskUs for growth was they were really able to in a world of call center services where it's typically hard to land these large deals. If you look at the traditional big call center blue chip accounts. It's all the ones you would expect. It's AT&T, Sirius XM, all these businesses, think of any insurance company. 

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Mike Wu

Large banks like B of A, Chase.

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Tyler Rachal

You got it. And those companies, because they need it, have oftentimes thousands of customer care agents or team members. And the problem is that those businesses are well established. So to win those deals, you can kind of only be like a handful of the largest outsourcing companies in the world. Those are the ones that compete on those RFPs and win. Where we found a different angle at TaskUs was getting in with the companies of tomorrow today. So if you can get in with a last mile food delivery company, well, there's a really good chance that that could become this incredible blue chip account. And because of the nature of tech and the ZERP era, that could become an incredible thousand person account within the matter of, call it two to three years, which in the world of call center is really, really fast. 

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Mike Wu

That definitely sets the stage for the era of tech that we are in and some of the names that were up and coming. You mentioned a delivery app. There's a couple of big ones today. I'm curious, how does a startup service company like TaskUs, how do they win new business? How do you go out there and get new customers? And I don't know, do you have a story? Maybe.

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Tyler Rachal

I got a million stories for sure, I'll put it very simply. What we discovered on the sales team, which was critical for us, we discovered that RFPs were our kryptonite, right? So anybody who's ever had a business where you have to compete regularly in RFPs, you kind of hang your head when you're a small company. Because you just go into these things and you're like there's a snowball's chance in hell that I win this. You're up against bigger companies. You can sometimes just tell from the list of questions. It's like the equivalent of they're like, Hey, tell us how you do how you handle information security. Like what are your protocols? What are your certifications? Well, Mike, when you have none certifications, guess what, buddy? That section is going to look pretty bad. So you're kind of like, there's only so many ways I can kind of, you know, butter this up. 

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So what we really focused on as a sales team is we were all about getting in early. And the only way to get in early is you had to get a meeting scheduled with some type of decision maker and you had to start that relationship early. The reason being is that a lot of these companies we were chasing, we knew that they were going to eventually want to outsource, but typically they weren't ready to do so. And so it was all about being top of mind for when that time comes. So hopefully you can win the opportunity and it's a non-competitive opportunity, meaning they're not gonna put it to RFP and they're not gonna shop around to a million vendors, because that was death for us at TaskUs, right? 

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 I'll not leave out the question. I'll definitely get into some funny stories that I'll tell you about just me personally as a salesperson, some blunders that I had, various crazy stunts that I did.  I will get into that, but what I don't want to lose sight of is there was a specific thing that we did at TaskUs to get really, really good at getting those initial meetings scheduled and we had to be the most cost efficient because we were a bootstrap company and there wasn't a bunch of venture funding behind us. It was effectively, like I said dude, and if I didn't set the stage appropriately, let me remind you, dilapidated California bungalow, not fit for occupancy, okay? When we would get Baja fresh, it was like watching hyenas come down from all the different, you know, it was like we were literally hungry, Mike, literally hungry.

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Mike Wu

Hahaha. Yeah, I think a lot of companies, especially in tech, there's the romanticized building in your garage. This is way worse. There's probably mold, weak framing, drywall that's cracked.

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Tyler Rachal

Yeah, way worse. Yeah, well I'll give you a funny one. know, right? Bathrooms, people need bathrooms, right? And the whole thing at a startup is that you work crazy hours, right? So we were working like borderline, you came from the world of investment banking, investment banking hours. Well, here's a fun catch. That bungalow that we had did not have a bathroom in it. So we would use this building that was next door that was owned by Santa Monica Airport, it was a public building effectively. Well, here's the catch, City of Santa Monica, those workers leave at five o'clock. Meaning that if you've got to pee after five o'clock, you gotta figure it out somehow, some way. I'll leave it at that. But yeah, real deal challenges. I do want to tell you some war stories, if you'll humor me really quick.

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Mike Wu

Yeah, how did you get in front of some of these customers?

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Tyler Rachal

I'll give you just some funny ones. There's a certain, let's just call it a grocery store delivery company. I'll just leave it at that. I was obsessed with these guys for forever. And this one actually didn't involve me, it involved an SDR that was working directly under me. I had this guy, my SDR, so laser focused on finding this company. What we knew was that the founder, one of the founders, was at South by Southwest and we were down in Austin for South by Southwest as well. My SDR, it was like, think of us as some cops that are running a sting operation. We had like a picture of this founder on the wall and I was like, dude we got to get this guy no matter what. So this wasn't me, but this was my SDR He called me, I think that probably hammered at this point. He's like at one of the South by Southwest party, he's like dude we're so in with Insert Company and I'm like, how so? Did you meet him? Did you find him? He's like, yeah, but I don't know. He's like, either he'll really appreciate my approach or he was really scared by me. And I was like, dude, tell me what did you do? He's like, so I ran into him in the bathroom and he was at the urinal next to me. He's like, so I just, just started talking to him. I told him who we are and I said we could help out with customer service and he's like, he just said to email him and that was it. 

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I was like, all right, that's probably a little bit too aggressive, but that gives you that should hopefully paint the scene for like how on it we were as a company. And then there's a million other stories that I kind of won't bore you with, but the only one other one that I thought you might appreciate is we were bootstrapped, right? So, you know, we were always about finding really clever and cost efficient ways to break in. So one of those ways was essentially we finagled our way onto the guest list for actually a competitor's private dinner, I think this is like at TechCrunch Disrupt. One of our biggest competitors was hosting a private dinner. Our founders at Taskus happened to be really tight with the head of sales at that company, one of their close friends. But long story short is, our founders managed to get me and a couple other sales guys on the guest list for their private dinner. And essentially, I'll just leave it this, I got escorted out of the room and the reason being was that same VP of  sales, he was like, listen dude, I have nothing against you, but I'm watching you and you're pitching all of our customers on your services.He's like, it's time for you to go. So that was another fun way. Yeah, man, got escorted out of that and a couple other rooms as well. 

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Mike Wu

How far did you make it in that night? Did you eat? Was it after dinner? 

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Tyler Rachal

No, it was literally during cocktails. It was kind of during cocktails or hors d'oeuvres

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Mike Wu

Cocktail hour, already out. Already pitched everybody. Classic.

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Tyler Rachal

Everybody started to sit down. And then this guy was like, listen, dude, I think they're like one of their blue chip customers was like Microsoft. And he's like, dude, this guy, he points to me. This guy is so all over my top account. He's like, you need to go, bro out. So anyway, that's just some of the fun, fun war stories. 

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But I mentioned that I wanted to bring this back because this is, you mentioned the Hireframe origin story, right? Which we have to talk about, you the first ever position that we staffed for a customer was effectively a position that me and some others, I'm not taking full credit for, but me and a couple others at TaskUs, this is like a position that we, I'll say, invented, right? I'm sure somebody else had thought of a similar thing, but we really built it for our own needs at TaskUs. And the original version of this was a team that we called Kaizen, which was a specialty team that we had built in the Philippines. I'm going to stop right there, me being interviewed,  what do you want to get into with the Kaizen team? Because I could talk a lot about it. It was an incredible solution.

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Mike Wu

Yeah, look you were talking about this was a need for you. From my purview, I've heard this story before. I didn't hear the urinal or the dinner party story before so but this one I've heard. There's a need, so I want to know what was that need and then I want to know, you guys were a bootstrap company, still very scrappy obviously and so you had to use some of the resources that you had on hand or some of the expertise that you as a company, as TaskUs, that's uniquely understood and had. So there was obviously a marriage of those two things. So walk us through what was the need and then what was the solution that you guys created?

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Tyler Rachal

This all started and anybody who's done sales or is in sales operations will be vigorously nodding their head. This all started because we read a little book called Predictable Revenue by Aaron Ross, which if you're looking at a sales ops person or a sales person's bookshelf, I got a bookshelf here behind me. I'm sure it's on there. It's a must read if you are in sales. Right. And Aaron Ross, for anybody who doesn't know the story, the meat of it was that he joined Salesforce in their time of rapid growth. You can kind of trace his time at Salesforce with their crazy hockey stick. The company was not small when he joined, but he took them into call it, unicorn status, hundreds of millions and then billions in revenue. 

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And there was a specific approach that he took to sales that a lot of people have now taken on and we took it on to TaskUs as well. This concept was that sales before, what you saw with sales is the entire sales process would typically live within a single role, right? You'd have your like classic quota carrying salesperson, they would be responsible for sourcing their own business, they'd be responsible for pitching that business and nurturing it, and then ultimately, you know, winning the deal and then handing it off to somebody in operations, client services, et cetera. Right. And the idea that Aaron Ross really focused on was he said, if you look at that, that's a lot of different tasks and functions to live within one person. And it's like this concept of if you're putting together, I know you and I are big basketball fans. When I think about incredible players, right, you're a Miami Heat guy, Dwayne Wade is incredible. A team of Dwayne Wade's is not going to win a championship. You need these different role players, you need your shot blockers, you need your facilitators, all the above, right? And that's why those winning teams are so effective is because people typically are specialists. They're really good at certain things. And that was that same concept that Aaron Ross talked about. 

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So what he looked at was he said, let's look at this entire process. And really from Predictable Revenue, he was one of the first pioneers of the SDR role. He said, hey, this entire function that is focused on opening doors, that should live within one person because that's a skillset that requires expertise. It requires tremendous focus and it requires a full time commitment to that job. Salesforce's SDR program is legendary. They take people that have no sales experience, they make them into incredible salespeople, and a lot of their success comes from the fact that they're helping people to be laser focused on this really, really valuable skillset. 

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So TaskUs, we read that book and we took away that same lesson. What we looked at was, for us, our cost per qualified meeting was extremely expensive. Because you had all these resources, typically in Santa Monica, that were doing these parts of the process. So for us, really where we were most effective was writing cold sales emails. What was crazy was, we had SDRs in Santa Monica. I'm trying to think of what they are paid, it was obviously a while back, so it would be a lot more today. But let's just say we had SDRs that were making like 50,000 a year or something like that, plus, you know, their bonus and all that sort of stuff. When you take a look at that and then the fact that these SDRs were commonly writing completely cold, fresh sales emails, it would blow your mind how low their productivity is. What we typically saw was a high performing SDR in a given day, they might write 12 to 15 sales emails. It's so expensive. If you think about an hourly rate, 

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Mike Wu

It's not enough.

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Tyler Rachal

It's not enough, exactly. And so if that's like the most important kind of data input for your calculation of what a qualified sales meeting costs, we're talking about Mike, our qualified sales meeting costs, I believe, was $2,000 per meeting because when you send 12 emails, you're not getting 12 yeses. You're sending a hundred emails and getting maybe four or five yeses. That makes sense, right? 

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It was prohibitively expensive. So our thought process was what aspects of the SDR job can we delegate? What tasks can we delegate to another resource? And bada bing, bada boom, we're an outsourcing company with a lot of really incredible talent in places like the Philippines, where it can be more cost efficient to have those roles. If we're able to shift those responsibilities, here's the key part, without losing any quality, then we'd be able to dramatically lower that qualifying sales meeting cost. Which I'll just tell you, off the top of my head, I think we took it from 2,000 to, I wanna say we got it down to like $150. Which is really, really, really meaningful when you're talking about a bootstrap sales team.

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Mike Wu

So the need, if you boil it down, comes down to the cost per meeting was just too high. It was unsustainable. 

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Tyler Rachal

Yes. Way too high.

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Mike Wu

And it sounded like your SDRs couldn't focus on the most important things. And so the solution was, Hey, we've got access. We’ve got know-how of how to hire and work with really fantastic talent overseas. already in the Philippines. And so you built up the Kaizen team, which I'll use some of our language that we use today, was a team of sales researchers, or sometimes we call them account development reps. 

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Tyler Rachal

Yes. ADRs.

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Mike Wu

It's folks that are doing probably 80% of what modern software companies call SDRs. They’re doing everything that SDR does aside from cold calling. I imagine you're cold calling any kind of phone work, any kind of demo zoom meeting today is being done by the local team in Santa Monica. And your Kaizen team was focused on everything else, providing the information, doing the research to craft really great personalized cold emails.

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Tyler Rachal

Without a doubt, I also want to stress something. So you nailed it. The term that is probably most relevant now is sales researcher or ADR. And this Kaizen team, this was effectively the original ADR team and it ended up being the very first position that we ever implemented for one of our Hireframe customers. So it was kind of to your original point, it was the origin story for Hireframe. 

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And what I'll say is this, this is the critical point. You mentioned something important. You said they're probably not doing cold calls, right? The idea has become a framework that I approach all work with. The idea is to give the task to the best resource for that task. So oftentimes, people think that it's all about getting it done as cheaply as possible when in fact I would I would say this we had Santa Monica SDRs, they all think they're really good at writing cold email and Mike they actually suck and the reason being is that they don't spend their entire day researching companies. They don't spend their entire day thinking about the company's ICP and who really fits that. 

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There's a beautiful thing that happens when someone, this was me, a young hungry, maybe not that young, but hungry salesperson, was that I was consuming TechCrunch to like, I don't know if you've ever seen this, Tony Romo, former quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys. Now he's a play by play guy for whatever, CBS. And there's this thing that Tony Romo does that people were really into, especially when he first started. It's almost like a magic trick. He had so much in his brain football knowledge that he was able as a commentator, he would be able to basically predict what was going to happen. He was still reading the game. He was reading the offense, the defense

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Mike Wu

He was analyzing. He's an analyst now.

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Tyler Rachal

He was analyzing. And people would do this. My version of that is I was reading TechCrunch, Mike, so religiously that I could go to a big event. For example, like a TechCrunch Disrupt or a South by Southwest. And I would bump into somebody or talk to somebody and they would introduce themselves and they say, Hey, I'm the founder of XYZ company. And from just like my photographic memory and consuming this stuff, I would just rattle off. I'd be like, yeah, you guys raised a series A recently from Sequoia and your compan=y does this and that. And they'd be like, how the hell did you know that? I never really admitted that I was stalking these companies so aggressively. 

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So I'm saying that that same thing happened with our Kaizen team, that they became far more effective at their jobs than our Santa Monica SDRs because it was focused. They weren't also tasked with doing other things. They were singularly focused on researching companies and, and effectively writing these templatized emails that had a high level of customization.

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Mike Wu

Yeah, so you're talking about a couple of things. I'd love to talk about how ADRs, how sales assistants are used today, how we repurposed this for Hireframe. We work with a number of companies and we've staffed account development reps, Hireframe account development reps on their sales teams. And every company actually uses them a little bit differently. As you can imagine, everyone's sales motions, org is different, and so there's different uses. You mentioned a couple that are really great, there's writing the sales emails, there's doing the account research, reading the news, that sort of thing, and applying it to the work you're doing. What are the top three responsibilities of a Hireframe account development rep as you see it today? Either at our company or at the companies we work with.

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Tyler Rachal

Totally. The more things change, the more they stay the same. I would say that the single most common use case for an ADR today is still this general process of basically sourcing accounts, right? So finding accounts that fit that company's ICP, identifying contacts at those accounts that fit their buyer personas, doing a little bit of research that gets used in this customization process for sales emails. And ultimately, sort of managing that process of sequencing leads. Now, that's either sequencing leads on behalf of, let's say, an AE who doesn't have a supporting SDR and they want to be doing some level of prospecting, or it could also be sequencing leads on behalf of an SDR who is going to be more focused on doing things like cold calling. So that's still today, that's like table stakes. Most commonly people are talking to us about that example. 

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The second one that I would give, it's a lot more of the same, but it's a little bit more focused singularly on research. So a lot of times companies that we work with, they'll typically have either research that requires some level of critical thinking or subjective decision making. So a good example there is, you know, you and I know we worked with a company where they were looking to basically label every single account. They wanted to label that account as a uh…

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Mike Wu

Like revenue model, is that what you're about? 

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Tyler Rachal

Yes. And so I point those things out because those examples are, I think, in this age of everybody in sales kind of has the same information. Everybody's a zoom info customer. Everybody's an Apollo customer. So what I would say is that there are going to be instances where there's information that's highly valuable to your organization, but it's not readily available in a database format because it's harder to get. So that could be like, that could be that example…

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Mike Wu

Can I actually chime in here? Because I think this research one is the one that is probably a little bit more nuanced and hard to understand at the surface level. Because most people think sales research is like, I'll use Zoom info. I'll use Apollo. I'll use LinkedIn. And I'll get the information I need. can scrape things and that sort of thing. But the example I think that you alluded to was around revenue model. One of our customers uses a sales assistant to understand pretty much every software company. Their market is all software companies. But the way they message to them and connect with them is based on their needs, which are based on their revenue model. So is it a pure subscription model? Is it a usage-based model? Or is it like a product model, like a one-time fee model, revenue model? And so that information, doesn't exist in Zoom info, as far as I understand. And that takes someone going onto a company's website and looking at their portfolio of products and services and either discerning what the revenue model is based on what's available on the formation or even maybe taking a step further in reading reviews about the product or even reaching out to the company. So that's the type of research. I'll say like the other one that is kind of nuanced is if you think about the databases, you mentioned there's information just outside of the databases that is really valuable for companies to get. So it's just out of reach of some sort of automation or I would say like a filter in a database.

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Tyler Rachal

A great example would be job posts. Job posts are hugely valuable.

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Mike Wu

Yeah, so job posts is a really good one because there's unique information in job posts for sure. And another example would just be like industry segmentation. So we have a customer that targets fintechs. Okay, fintech. If you think about the filters in the databases, you might be able to get to financial services or even fintech maybe in Crunchbase. They want to understand things like hey is this a neo bank, is this a personal financial management company, is this a credit union. And that again needs someone to come onto their website, do a little bit of deep diving to figure out hey what actually does this company do, what products and services do they provide? And again, that's not in the databases 

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It comes down to what you're alluding to with your analogy around Tony Romo. Tony Romo is a football analyst now, so is he able to understand what's going on and provide second level insights to the game in real time. And so the Kaizen team or account development reps, that's what their skill is. It's this research that is very human in nature, sometimes takes a little bit of training to get there, but it's something that today you can't just automate. So there's a dozen reasons, a dozen more examples of this nuanced research that account development reps to you, but I thought those few would be helpful for people listening to this.

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Tyler Rachal

That’s awesome, Mike. And I wanted to give just two a little bit more niche examples, but they're, I think, great reflections of what the ADR skill set can really be. So one other one that I'll say is that typically ADRs, this is a little bit of a change in the way sales teams are structured, ADRs will typically report to someone in sales operations is the most common thing that I see, a marketing operations sales operations person. Versus say a head of sales or even what you might think is that they would report to like an SDR manager something like that, the sales ops is actually the most common one and so what I would say with that is that there is a lot of administrative work that a sales operations team member does on a daily weekly monthly quarterly basis you know this information if you think about it is is absolutely vital for things like investor board meetings and that sort of thing. 

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And so a lot of times what these ADRs will be tasked with is I call them like special ops projects, right? So it'll be like things involving data hygiene, report building is another good example. We mentioned that example of what is their, sorry, you said it

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Mike Wu

Revenue model.

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Tyler Rachal

Revenue model, exactly. You mentioned that example, right? Which is ultimately something that they would use for their marketing efforts, which is what that customer wanted to do. What I would also say is a lot of times there's certain data that a sales operations person will want the ADR to work on and what that becomes critical for is actually for reporting. They want to understand their wins, what industries are their recent wins that they've had and losses, what industries are they actually coming from. To your point, this is information that does not live in ZoomInfo, but the juice is worth the squeeze because it tells them directionally where they needed to go as a sales team. So that's one example. I'm calling that special ops admin work, et cetera. 

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The last one is the one that I love. It's the one that's to me, it gets my sales creative juices flowing. It's the above and beyond work that you really need to do nowadays to win, you know, a strategic account. So what I mean by that is a couple things, it's sometimes what customers will use us for, use an ADR for is, they'll have their list of top 50 accounts and they say for these top 50 accounts. The AE is the one who's going to be actually doing the networking and the outreach and all that sort of stuff. But they say you need to basically arm this AE with as much information as they possibly can get so when they do talk to somebody, they sound like they know that company inside and out. And I love that stuff because you and I know this, you definitely come from this world, investment banking consulting, this is like real deal, high level business research, market research work that these team members are doing, which is really cool. And then also we have a really cool example from a customer where basically they'll utilize their ADR to build out a customer experience journey mapping that they use in their prospecting efforts as well. 

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So like, again, I dig this stuff. And I think it's indicative of what's possible with an ADR because the reason why you're able to do this is because they're focused and you're able to train them and give them effectively a street, a street MBA. And I think it really pays off in this age of so much noise in sales. So to be focused, to be different, to be high quality is more important than ever.

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Mike Wu

Yeah, everything's about quality now. We're gonna talk a little bit about that I think. I wanted to talk about team structure, we are a staffing company, and so how do ADRs actually work at Hireframe? How do they work at the companies we work with? There's like three main org structures that I've seen with ADRs. As you talk about sales ops versus sales and who they report to. One where the most one of the most common structures is like hey we have an ADR supporting some SDRs or some full cycle account executives. So how that looks is the account executives have someone that they on Slack that they can message to in real time give them customer feedback. Hey, okay. I just met this person the conference, Hey, how's that campaign going? that sort of thing so very much like the traditional AE/SDR, ADR team structure. 

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Tyler Rachal

Yes, pods, usually.

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Mike Wu

Yeah like a pod, then what we're seeing more and more is like this centralized go-to-market ops team, which ADRs are part of. So it's marketing and sales ops have been combined, they serve the go-to-market team, but they're truly their own marketing sales operations team. And ADRs oftentimes live on those organizations. And then the third structure that we see a lot is founder led sales. I mentioned earlier that we work with some early stage startups. We love working with them. They're doing some of the most interesting things. It's exciting for us. And also, Hey, we're hoping that they grow and we can grow with them. And so founder led sales used to cap out at the founders bandwidth. But what we've discovered is that we can expand their bandwidth by giving them an ADR or two that can essentially free up their time to oftentimes go back to work on product, go back to develop relationships and partnerships in the space they're working in and do a lot of the hands-on sales that they have to do in the beginning to get their first 10, 20, 30 customers just beyond their personal networks and essentially give them more time to build more pipeline, probably either achieve or get closer to product market fit before they make their first go-to-market hire. Their founding AE or that head of sales type person. 

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And so those are the three structures I've seen. So it's either traditional sales structure, AESDR, ADR, centralized ops team. And then this third one, which is founder, direct to founder, scaling the founder led sales.

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Tyler Rachal

Yeah, without a doubt. I want to insert this, this is the first ever What Worked sound effect. This is a flashback. I want to do a flashback to our episode with none other than Mr. Frank Golden himself. And he talked about this change in sales team structures because we were talking about the disappearance of these large SDR teams. And he was mentioning what he predicted for the future was more commonly there'd be like this central node, right? Where all prospecting would kind of run through, which would be like a marketing function, a sales function, however you want to see it. But it's all about, you know, leveraging AI, leveraging solutions like ADRs, et cetera, et cetera. You'd have almost like a single person that is sort of directing traffic and they're getting all the feelers out there. Versus, think of your normal boiler room, hundreds of SDRs on the phone, whatever, whatever. It's the idea of being a lot more efficient. So that really fits with that second example that you gave. 

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And then what I loved is I loved that you talked about the founder led sales part because I think that's more important than ever in this post-ZERP era. Guess what, buddy? Long  one to the days where you're getting 25 million with just an idea and a garage in Palo Alto. Those days are gone. You're more commonly seeing now series A's are looking a little bit more normalized. They're looking like sub 5 million bucks. So these founders are being asked by their VCs, by their board members to really lead the charge in sales. And that's for two reasons. One is because the bucks aren't there. And to your point, it's too early to make that first sales higher. But the second reason is, these founders are still figuring out product market fit. So every single sales conversation, whether that's on the phone or it's even an exchange via email, you're getting valuable, valuable feedback on your product. And do people, pardon my language, do they give a shit? Really it's what it comes down to. 

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But the thing that I want to stress that you did not point out is when it comes to shifting that work, dude, it is about founder fatigue. Anybody who's ever done prospecting, and I mean prospecting at any level, even if you commit yourself to writing five sales emails a day, the research part of that is exhausting. It is fatiguing. You have to consume a lot of information. You're making a thousand different decisions on who to reach out to and for what reason you're crafting your message and all that sort of stuff. And my point is, is that that takes a lot of time and it's actually very fatiguing for your just your brain, your soul, et cetera. And so for a founder to be doing that and also doing all their normal founder responsibilities is very hard. And that's why I think the combo of a founder plus an ADR is a match made in heaven. It's taking that fatiguing work, delegating it to someone who can really focus on it, and allowing you to really be honed in on where your time is most valuable.

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Mike Wu

Yeah. And this reminds me of this founder / Hireframe ADR combination is very powerful, but also we've learned it's hard to make that magic happen. And so I think some people might be wondering, how the heck do you find someone in another country to come join a startup and work directly with their founder effectively? Because founders are probably some of the most challenging people to work with because they're short on bandwidth. They don't have a lot of time and energy to essentially train people, especially early on. They're looking for solutions that can help them that are more plug and play, I would say. And so it is, it's super hard, but it is also the thesis of why we built Hireframe. It's, you had this background of outsourcing in terms of like large contact centers that had layers of management that were serving a lot of these consumer companies. And so we thought, Hey, there's a lot of these other tech companies, largely B2B companies that don't need a contact center of a hundred or a thousand people. But what could be very powerful for them is having one, five, 10, 20 people. 

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But that person is a different talent profile than the person that's working in the contact center. Just to cut to the chase, that person needs to stand on their own two feet and needs to produce. And they're not going to have a learning management system or a user interface where they're being told if then this is the decision making tree. They need to be critical thinkers. And so we learned that, sometimes in the early days we learned that the hard way because it was very hard to find that person. I think the first thing we naturally did when we were looking to hire folks in the Philippines for this ADR role was for people with experience that we thought would be transferable. And so that's lead generation. There's a lot of folks with lead generation experience all around the world. We made some hires. We hired some people with lead generation experience and we quickly learned people with lead generation experience don't end up being great ADRs. 

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The lead generation experience that people usually came to the job with was usually, I think consumer B2C lead generation experience. It was high volume, low personalization, a lot of templated emails, a lot of templated phone calls, and that didn't translate. We talked about the level of research and business analysis required for this job. That's actually what we ended up looking for. What we ended up learning was it's hard to hire someone off the streets to do this job. There actually needs to be a fair amount of training to get people up to the level of quality and skill to stand on their own two feet at a company with reporting to the founder, reporting to an SDR or AE, reporting to a head of sales or head of sales ops. And so we developed the training program where it takes weeks and sometimes months to get people ready for a position at one of our clients. 

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And we're training them on all the things we talked about. So understanding a B2B software sales context. Like hey, what are the objectives here? What is the cost per meeting? How do I fit into that picture? How do you actually do B2B software sales? And that's always evolving. We train them on the research. Research is probably where we spend the most time. That's the core competency of a hire from ADR. And so, using a lot of case studies and actual experience, all Hireframe ADRs work at Hireframe for months before they join a client. 

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And lastly, software and tools, like we have to train them on, hey, if you're joining this company, you have to understand how a CRM fits in your workflow, how sales automation tools fit into your workflow, how databases fit into that workflow. And so we've done that, but only because there was a need. We couldn't find people that were just ready to go for this role. So we've built out the training and education for this position.

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Tyler Rachal

Yeah, absolutely. You got me the whole time, I'm chomping at the bit. Permission to get up on my soapbox here for a second. I want to say that we really did craft a lot of this ADR program. I want to give credit where credit's due. We had a tremendous customer partner in doing a lot of this in a company called Orum. If anybody is listening to this podcast is in the sales space, I don't need to tell you what Orum does. 

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Mike Wu

You've heard of them.

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Tyler Rachal

They're one of the fastest growing companies in the sales space. And for good reason, they have a fantastic product, fantastic team. And so we really learned all the learnings that you mentioned. We kind of learned side by side with Orum and they're a tremendous example of the evolution, all the use cases of an ADR that we mentioned before Orum did it.  

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But permission, because you've got me fired up, Mike, you've got me actually pissed off. And I'll tell you why I see all the time in our space, because we have plenty of competitors that are out there. They kind of do similar things that Hireframe does, right? Here's the thing that pisses me off is that when I see other companies say that we have sales assistants or we have lead generation folks or SDRs or whatever it is I know and you know that it is baloney. It's baloney because of the reasons you just mentioned people when they say they have lead generation experience, what they actually have is they have data entry experience. That's what the most common thing for that job is is they would say to people hey, search the internet, scrape this list, enter this name into this spreadsheet, then we load it into the CRM and then we just barf, we blast these sales emails to everybody that nobody responds to and all ends up in spam. 

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You know, I'm not trying to diminish the role of any of those good folks, but we learned that that skill set, there's almost nothing that actually translates to this job because to use like an internet meme, we are not the same. That's how I would feel if I was in ADR and I was looking across the room from a lead generation person from another company, I would just be like, dude, you're in  the minor leagues, I'm in the major leagues, like we're just doing two very very different things.

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So I want to just play back you know basically what you just said. I distill it down into a perfect ADR, it comes down to these three ingredients. The first one that you mentioned is the right profile, right? And we found a sweet spot in the profile in that instead of looking at people that had lead generation experience, we found a really great fit in people that have a background in highly complex business research, right? Whatever that field might be. Maybe they worked for a market research firm. Maybe they worked for a large database company, whatever it might be. The classic example is like there's a lot of conference companies in the world. Conference companies use a lot of data, they do a lot of market research to identify people that will come to their conferences, et cetera, et cetera, that was a really great talent profile. 

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For someone to enter this ADR program that you referenced, our foundational learning program, we would exhaustively assess people, their ability to actually join that program. There was a filter there and we're looking for things like their critical thinking skills, subjective decision-making, writing ability is a really critical one. So we would really hone that in. That first ingredient, I'm calling that sourcing the right talent. 

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The second ingredient, you nailed it, that I know were different than other companies, is we provide this foundational skills training, which we call our ADR Academy. I know we've used different words to describe it in the past, but what's really cool about that is that we know that there's these core skills that are critical to that job. The ability to write is really important, like summarize information in a concise way and write that creatively. That's a big one. The ability to do really great research, look at someone's LinkedIn profile and truly understand a couple of things that you can remark upon that, you know, is this the right fit for this ICP, et cetera? And then, and then finally the ability to perform the day-to-day tasks of that entire process, enter that information into a CRM, upload the sequences, oversee the entire thing. That foundational skills training, I stand by this, is that the people that go through that program, they are rock stars and we're only selecting the best of the best to actually graduate. You wanna say something before I get to ingredient number three.

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Mike Wu

You mentioned kind of like what we learn about people and what people learn in our ADR Academy.The thing that's coming to light more and more from our PeopleOps team is the ability to observe someone's pace, how quickly they learn. So presented with a new subject matter or a new concept, how quickly do you pick that up and how quickly do you master that? We're only able to achieve that because we have time with these people in the academy. We do our best to use case studies and different methodologies during the interview process, during the first few interviews, that gets us pretty far along, so who can get admitted to the academy. But once you're there, then we get that longitudinal data, like this is how fast this person learns, or this area, this person learns slower. I think the ability to learn is something that all companies look for, no matter where you're hiring from and what you're hiring from, but it's very hard to discern that data point in a singular interview process. So the Academy gives us that opportunity to learn someone's pace and rate of learning.

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Tyler Rachal

And on that note, you already said what I was going to say is the third ingredient. You just said the word starts with a T. You said we need what we need T. Not testosterone, time. Low T, high T, not testosterone. No low T. No TRT. So time, time is the third ingredient. You said it right there. You said it's during the academy. But what I'd also say is that something people might not know about Hireframe is that these folks, they graduate the academy and then they actually work internally at Hireframe on our sales operations. They do market research for us. They do prospecting for us, et cetera, et cetera. 

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And that's the other part too, is time, time, time.  They need time to get good at this job. And that's what makes them, I use the example of like, they become basically Navy SEALs. They're going through, you know, BUD's training. Then they go through specialized training. And then at the end of it, what you get is you get a team of badass operators that can be literally dropped into any scenario and they can become highly effective at the work they're doing for their customer. And that's not by accident. That is because we do a lot to get them there. And I think that's something that is unique to Hireframe. And that's why I get a little bit tight in the chest and I want to start to beat my chest when people start saying, yeah, we worked with this company. They had people that do lead generation too. And I'm like, no, we are not the same. They're doing data entry. We're doing highly skilled business development tasks. There's a difference.

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Mike Wu

Yeah, we don't call it lead generation either.

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Tyler Rachal

No, bleh, lead generation, get out of here with your lead generation. But yeah, anyway, thanks for letting me stand on my soapbox.

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Mike Wu 

No, I don't know. I  think this might be a good opportunity to transition here. We talked about the Kaizen team, kind of like the prequel to Hireframe and your experience developing that team based on the needs you had at TaskUs. Talked a little bit about, what is an ADR? Like how do they fit into sales teams at the companies that we work with?

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But I think also like I mentioned earlier, sales is constantly evolving and changing. And when we started Hireframe, I had never done traditional sales as we kind of do it in our space today. And so I've in the short amount of time, call it five, six years, I've seen so much change and evolution in sales. And I think that's normal. Sales changes all the time. What's needed, there's too much of this, too much of that tactics change, tools change, resources change. So I don't know, do you wanna just spend some time talking about what we're seeing today? It's the most common question we get from customers and prospective customers. We're in a unique position where we're embedded in multiple sales organizations. So like a consultant at BCG, a lot of times our clients are like, hey, what's going on in the space? So could you stay on your soapbox and stay beating your chest a little bit and just talk about what's happening today in sales?

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Tyler Rachal

Let's do it. I will touch on each thing lightly and then you can let me know where you want to go a little bit deeper. But what I really look at when it comes to what has changed in sales, it has been, I think like many other positions, because of the current climate, whatever you want to call that. You want to call that the economy. You want to call it AI. You want to call it the very solutions that we're selling, product-led, sales, marketing, et cetera. A lot is happening all at once. So I do think that it's probably the period of the most change in a long time, probably since whenever people started to really use email for sales, honestly and CRMs. I would say that since that era of companies like Salesforce and HubSpot really kind of coming to fruition, since that era, this is probably the time of the most change. And it really comes down to three, the magic number being three during this whole episode, three channels, Mike, that have changed considerably because of  different factors. Those channels being email, phone, and LinkedIn, those are your three. Some will say social blah, whatever, whatever other channel, SMS, you want to say, get out of here, dude. It's really those three core channels that for most salespeople, that's where they sell, right? 

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And there's been changes to all three, and they're kind of all impacted by the same things in different ways. Email is the one that people I think are feeling the most, because most salespeople have lived off of email when it comes to prospecting, when it comes to following up with customers, staying top of mind, et cetera, et cetera. So what has happened with email, that most people, if you're in sales, you definitely know this has been happening, but maybe if you're not to catch you up, is the ESPs have changed their guidelines when it comes to spam rules. So when you look at all the big ones, Google, Microsoft, I'm sure there's somebody that I'm forgetting, those are the two big ones, Google, Microsoft, maybe Apple. They have changed a lot of the rules as it pertains to sending people emails where you haven't exchanged information with them before. And really I think gone maybe a bit too heavy. And I'll give you some recent examples. I recently booked a hotel reservation that landed in spam. If a recipient marks your email as spam. There used to be a somewhat forgiving percentage. I think the percentage used to be if 5% of your total emails or more got marked as spam, then the ESPs would start to basically suspend you or blacklist you or whatever it might be. They have, this is just one example, they have taken that percentage now down to I think it's 0.03%. A lot of people mark stuff spam just as that's their auto move, they just don't like getting cold emails and they just mark you. So that's a brutal thing. And there's a bunch of other changes they made. 

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But just generally speaking, when it comes to email, it is really hard just to land in someone's email inbox. If you have, congrats. Now, what's really hard is that because of AI companies that are just bludgeoning people with all these emails, there's so much noise, it's even harder for someone to read that email and actually respond to you because they have so many different sales emails in their inbox. So that's one. Any questions about email before I move on to the next one being phone.

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Mike Wu

No.

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Tyler Rachal

I'll keep this one shorter. It's a lot more of the same for anybody out there who's making a lot of cold calls. The big change there is that the network providers, your AT&Ts, your Verizon's, et cetera. Because of people getting these robo calls and getting scammers and spammers calling. Now the networks are really stepping up their ability to detect these things. And so in the same way as email, you could kind of get labeled as spam, now similarly with phone you know if you're making a lot of sales cold calls. I talked a lot of sales teams and they talk about their numbers for their SDRs are getting flagged as spam really fast which makes it basically impossible to have someone, no one's answering a call that says likely spam are you Mike?

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Mike Wu

No, no

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Tyler Rachal

Yeah, that's what I Exactly. You're never going to answer. So that's the phone part. And then the last one is LinkedIn. LinkedIn I could go on and on about because I think LinkedIn is going through, they're kind of figuring out what they really want to be. But what I'll say about this is because email and phone have become so difficult just to get through, a lot of salespeople have moved their focus over to LinkedIn, which just means that with LinkedIn, it's a lot of the same. You're getting so many messages and so many connection requests. It's just so much noise that the chances of someone actually reading your message, it's pretty unlikely. And the joke that I always talk about with LinkedIn is someone had a tweet, forgive me whoever this was, but it said, excuse me, sir, your bot is showing. You and I know this. Whenever we post and promote what worked episodes, who's the first comment on every single post?

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Mike Wu

Some bot, some someone's AI.

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Tyler Rachal

I wish it was a diehard fan, but it's always some totally whack ass message. Like, Tyler, I found this episode to be intriguing and insightful. I'd love to talk more about whatever. And it's just like, no name person based in wherever, so the bots are kind of ruining LinkedIn too.

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I think because of those three significant changes to those channels. I'm gonna say, drum roll please. David, not gonna do a drum roll to ruin the sound but <drum roll> we're going back baby. We're going back in time. Salespeople are having to go to more old school sales tactics because the new school has done ruined it for everybody with the AI.

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Mike Wu

I think, anyone, especially in the sales space, but maybe just broadly in tech and software, you kind of see this on LinkedIn and probably Twitter, people just talking about how these tools, they're really great for a short while, and then they become ineffective. And I think it's probably related to what you're talking about with the email service providers, Tyler, and the changes in the spam rules and that sort of thing. But also just where AI is today. So we came full circle, and I think that's what you're referring to. We're coming back to the old school traditional ways to break through the noise of that's being created by AI.

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Tyler Rachal

Yeah, I've got a comparison with that. In old school, anybody who is listening to this who's in sales is gonna be, again, nodding their head vigorously when I say two little words called Quick question, right? Quick question. For anybody who's ever done cold sales emails, you know that quick question is the highest performing subject line of all time in cold sales emails, right? There was a time, Mike, when you could just blast quick question to a thousand people and you would get an absurd amount of replies because people would be like, I see this subject line. It says quick question. It's just a quick question. Quick question from who? I guess I'll reply to this, right? 

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My point is, that the same way with AI. The problem with AI is that AI is available to everybody. And AI is only as good as the data sets that AI is trained on. And guess what? With all these AI tools, you name it, the who's who of AI tools, they're all working off the same data sets. Meaning that if Mike wants to use AI and Mike's biggest competitor down the street wants to use AI, guess what? There is no competitive advantage. And in the same way with quick question, quick question, I remember somebody famously, famous to me, they posted on LinkedIn a screenshot. And they searched in their email inbox for quick question. And there was hundreds. It was insane, I think it was like 300 plus emails with that subject line quick question and the person was obviously, they're being prospected by a ton of salespeople. They were like, hey, you know quick quick PSA to salespeople, stop using quick question. You're not unique. I see it all the time. Now they're like I literally made a filter for quick question. It just goes right into spam, right? And so in the same way with AI, it works for a period of time, just like quick question does, but I think it's a very short shelf life to use that because you're up against everybody else who has the same data, the same tools.

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Mike Wu

Yeah, but I would say, we're not bearish on AI. I would say quite the opposite. 

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Tyler Rachal

No, no, it'll get better.

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Mike Wu

Just today, we don't see AI being an effective replacement for an ADR or SDR or AE. But our ADRs are very effectively leveraging AI to make a lot of their jobs more efficient, a lot of their responsibilities more efficient. So if you think about some of this more superficial research before they get to the part that they have to do with a human touch and the critical business analysis, we're leveraging AI tools. So part of our training now is actually a lot of new tools that they can use to get to that quick point where they can take over and apply what they've learned in the academy when it comes to business analysis. So yeah, the coupling of an ADR and AI tools is becoming very popular for us.

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Tyler Rachal

We're the opposite of bearish on AI. We are very hopeful and the reason being is that I think especially a company like ours only stands to benefit from AI. I know there's this common thought around, replacement of all these simple jobs. Okay, fair. But what I will say is what's really great about AI is that you take team members like ADRs and you layer on AI to their work. Now you're looking at, like a pretty incredible resource. It's their ability to collect information but then utilize AI for all types of things. Summarizing that information, writing things in a way that is perfected for a cold email. A gap that people don't fully appreciate is the business acumen gap that you and I commonly talk about. There's all this information that someone, this is whether you're an ADR in Manila or you're an SDR in Chicago, Illinois, right? There's this business acumen when you haven't had a ton of experience in business. There's all these things to kind of learn about different business models, what their solutions are, what is the value? Why do people need a service like this? All these types of things. And I think AI is an incredible resource for stuff like that because you can ask it questions and it can deliver information in any format that you'd like. You could say hey tell this to me like I'm a third grader or whatever it might be and I use that all the time because candidly Mike, some of our customers I have a hard time understanding what they do they're doing they're doing such technical things I'm like what is you know cyber security for blah blah blah blah defense systems like ask an AI, what does this mean?

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Mike Wu

Yeah, no, totally. Hey, I think we're running up on time here. This has been a good kind of recap, thank you, for like what's going on, what you're seeing in the market today. We'll have to circle back and update this because this is always changing. And especially with AI changing so quickly. I mean, this is probably going to be outdated soon after we publish it, but hopefully not. Is there any, do you have any like last parting words or topics you want to cover before we wrap things here?

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Tyler Rachal

Definitely last parting words. We made reference to what has changed. And then let's talk about  in light of the title of our podcast, What Worked. What is working today in sales is I made a reference to this return to old school sales tactics, right? What does that mean? That means doing a...

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Mike Wu

Talking about the urinal?

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Tyler Rachal

I'm talking about hitting people up in the urinal. But now Mike, with remote work, good luck. That would be breaking and entering someone's home.

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Mike Wu

That would be creepy, right? That would be creepy with remote work over Zoom, I think, right?

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Tyler Rachal

I think it would just be outright illegal. The word you were looking for is illegal. So when I say old school sales tactics, I mean just the bread and butter of sales, really good sales, is about really, really understanding your prospect or your customer so deeply researching those companies and that means that before you even write that cold sales email, you really want to have a deep understanding of their business because that's the only way you're going to resonate with them is if you can pinpoint a potential pain point. And so that research is perfect for an ADR or whatever insert other solution that you want to look at, right? So that's a big one. 

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And then what we've also seen with some of our customers that I love is now, long gone are the days of the quick sale. When you, when you hear you look at the Salesforce State of Sales Report, you look at various revenue leaders talking on LinkedIn. What they're commonly talking about is in this particular economy or market, the sales cycles have gotten longer and longer and long gone are the days where one single person has the authority to make a decision. As you know, in this post-ZERP era, CFO is going to have to sign off on it at a minimum, right? And the CFO is not necessarily going to be involved in the initial sales pitch or any of the sales pitches, but they're signing off on it. You've got the CFO, you've got the head of marketing, you have this person, that person, blah, blah. Even in some companies, they've said only the CEO has the power to approve anything, right? So now what we've seen some of our customers doing is they're utilizing an ADR resource to market to the entire company. So even if you have an active open opportunity and it's moving along with one particular point of contact, you're going to network in to every other relevant contact of the company. So if you know that the head of IT has to sign off on this because traditionally IT folks are the ones to give the stamp of approval for anything that's going to kind of touch their technical infrastructure. Well, ADRs are helping AEs to network and get meetings or get in front of those different folks. 

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And then the last thing I'll say is, again, old school sales tactics. People are talking about the value of things like in-person networking again, right? We're back there. Long gone are the days of the COVID times or nobody went out to anything. Now people are returning to conferences. And so one of my favorite use cases is, Hey, back to the urinal thing. We're doing a less, a less aggressive version of that. We're arming our customers with incredible Intel that they can use when they go to something like a conference. So if they run into said founder of grocery delivery app, not in the urinal, but if they run into him in a very appropriate space, they'll have something to talk to him about, Hey, I heard you know the most recent product feature you guys are now you guys now have a partnership with Kroger, what does that mean for this, and then the ability to kind of weave in your solution? So old-school sales are back, baby and old-school sales require Good old-fashioned human beings my dude, which is what Hireframe does.

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Mike Wu

Let's go. I agree old school's back. I think our friend Frank Golden mentioned the same thing And so we take a lot of inspiration from our conversation with him recently. But I think that's a great place to wrap Tyler. I think the pendulum swings, we're back on this side of things, the traditional old school tactics are working today and going against what we've been growing accustomed to, which is this AI over automation of sales.

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It's a great place to wrap. Anyone can find us at Hireframe.com and probably on LinkedIn. Do you want to share why should people reach out to you? What are some good questions to ask you? And then how can they reach out to you?

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Tyler Rachal

So the best way to reach out to me is on LinkedIn or my email address which is, you could probably guess this, It's Tyler at hireframe.com. I didn't do anything sneaky. I'm just out there. Why reach out to me in terms of like, what am I, what am I looking for? Mike, I love to talk sales. And I like to think that, as you probably have seen from the passion in this particular episode of What Worked, I could talk about this stuff all day long, baby. I got war stories for days and I really, really love in particular, I love hearing about a customer's or just anybody's current sales team setup and what they're trying to accomplish and thinking through what is that ideal team structure to allow you to achieve your goals, right? So whether you're a founder that has no sales team and you're looking to just etch a few more customers so you can ultimately raise that series A and get more feedback on your product. Everything from that to if you are the head of sales operations for a company that has a massive sales team and you have a unique data problem that you're trying to think through. I love talking about this stuff. I have the experience of working with a lot of different companies in a lot of different industries. So I've just been collecting over time, basically a whole host of stories and solutions and all these types of things. So I really do enjoy this and I'll just say plug, plug, back when I would charge for my hourly consultations, I would charge $1,500. Which is a little bit jerkish to say, but I'd charge $1,500 to talk to somebody for one hour about their sales strategy questions. And guess what? If you hit me up, I'm happy to give you that hour for free 99. It just means you have to deal with my boisterous self yelling at you over the phone and probably getting way too fired up on plug, plug C4. Send me some C4s. You can pay me in C4s, not $1,500. Give me 1,500 C4s. Just kidding. Don't. Anyway, please do reach out to me. I'm happy to talk sales anytime. And then if you want to talk about other stuff, you want to talk about beautiful bald men, that's a good topic for me too. Jason Statham lookalikes, all the above.

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Mike Wu

All right. I think this is where we wrap things. Thank you so much, Tyler. Now it's been cool getting the opportunity to interview you and learn more about your pre-Hireframe life. That's kind of cool. We never really sat down and did like a Q and A, so very cool. And I think a lot of people will get some great information and value from the insight that you've shared. So thank you very much and call it a pod.

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Tyler Rachal

Thank you for having me, Mike and Tyler.

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