Host: Joe Barhoum
Guest: Jeremy Ruch
Transcript
00:00:01 Joe Barhoum
Jeremy Ruth, thanks for.
00:00:03 Joe Barhoum
Joining the podcast today. How's it going?
00:00:05 Jeremy Ruch
It's going great. How are you Joe?
00:00:06 Joe Barhoum
Doing well now you're up in New York, right?
00:00:09 Jeremy Ruch
Yes, so I am. I'm personally actually based in in New York City. Our talent facility. At the end there and I'm sure we'll get into this is based actually in upstate New York in a place called Binghamton, NY.
00:00:21 Joe Barhoum
Is everybody in the office now or they're working from home?
00:00:24 Jeremy Ruch
No, our entire team has been remote since. I guess it was the Wednesday night. Yeah, so I guess I'm assuming March 11th we sent everybody home and I thought I was, you know we were making this decision for a week and I drove back to New York City and thought I'd see everybody you know a week later and here we are.
00:00:45 Jeremy Ruch
Seven months later now. So it's been been a bit of a wild ride, yeah, but I think our teams to a good job adjusting.
00:00:52 Joe Barhoum
Well, I definitely want to talk about that. I also want to talk about you an it might be worthwhile to talk a little bit about how you founded the company. So why don't you get me to that point? So who are who is Jeremy Rush? And how did Jeremy rush?
00:01:07 Joe Barhoum
Get to where he is today with bandolier.
00:01:10 Jeremy Ruch
Yeah, so I think.
00:01:12 Jeremy Ruch
So like any company on some level, we were founded based on a problem that we saw in the world, right? Like in Nice that we we thought we could fill and in our case was something very specific which was in a previous role I had. I I was managing an inside sales team for a startup based here in New York City called Bond Street and that experience.
00:01:33 Jeremy Ruch
This is really my first exposure to what an absolute frigging nightmare it is to hire folks in entry level sales roles. And really, I would say entry level customer facing roles more broadly and I would say that that is particularly true in places like New York City, San Francisco, where a lot of technology companies are based.
00:01:52 Joe Barhoum
Why do you think that is?
00:01:54 Jeremy Ruch
Yeah, so we we sort of boil it down to three factors right the 1st and probably most obvious of them is how expensive it is, right? So most technology companies I should say most technology companies but a good chunk of fast growing startups are based in some of the most expensive places in the country, right? So New York City, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago.
00:02:13 Jeremy Ruch
As you come in, I think of this as tech hubs, right right happens to also be really, really expensive places to live, and by direct extension of that they also are very expensive places to do business, so that's sort of point number one hiring lots of people, which is typically what you're doing as the head of a sales team ahead of the customer experience team.
00:02:34 Jeremy Ruch
Tends to be very expensive in those areas. Point #2 is that these teams require a lot of training, right? So in contrast to a say, software engineering team or a marketing team where you tend to hire somebody with a specific skill set that they're bringing in and deploying on day one with a sales team or a customer service team. But you're typically doing is hiring somebody with little to no experience.
00:02:55 Jeremy Ruch
You're training them up and and then they're going from there, and as a big company that's not such a big deal, right? If you think about in Oracle or Salesforce, they've got very established training programs that they've had for decades. To do that. If you are a series air Series B startup, that first of all you really don't have that and 2nd is actually fairly difficult thing to build because you're focused on whatever it is that.
00:03:16 Jeremy Ruch
That you're doing is a startup, and the other thing that I notice is I, as I talked to my friends and other startups, we were sort of all reinventing the wheel together, right? So like we all had this sort of basic entry level sales curriculum and we were all in is pretty common across all of us and we were all having to do this so these teams require quite a bit of training, which makes it difficult for startups to build them.
00:03:38 Jeremy Ruch
And then the Third Point is flexibility, right? Is a startup unlike an Oracle current Salesforce, you barely have visibility into it. It's gonna be 2 months down the road, let alone a year or two. The idea of hiring 10 salespeople. Wow, that maybe not a huge deal for a large company is a a fairly big deal for startup and so hiring a lot of people generally.
00:03:58 Jeremy Ruch
On teams where there's a heavy manpower need, can be can be a challenge, and so those three things combined just made the process of building that team both politically like internally at the company, but also from a logistical standpoint fairly challenging.
00:04:13 Joe Barhoum
It's really interesting, so there's this is how we got introduced it through a mutual friend who saw some type of alignment between the fact that I do sales training.
00:04:21 Joe Barhoum
And I come from that enterprise software sales background like Oracle, actually Oracle. And then the fact that you're running Bandolier and trying to solve these problems in this way. And so I think we can have a pretty good conversation about this. And I don't want to jump into it too early 'cause I think that we'll miss an important part of why I wanted to interview you, which is to get to know you a little bit better too.
00:04:41 Joe Barhoum
So I'm going to table that part of the conversation. I want to go a little deeper into who you are so personally, so what's your background? Where are you from? What do you like to do? Those kind of things?
00:04:52 Jeremy Ruch
Yeah, so I. I am from New York City so I haven't moved far. I guess I'm I'm probably a mile or two right now from from where I was born. I've had some stops though along the way so you know, I I went down to North Carolina for college. I went to Duke Ann and then after that I spent a year out in Singapore actually. So I started my career in finance.
00:05:13 Jeremy Ruch
Uh, spent a year out there, which was one of the most interesting years in my life, but I think sort of two conclusions I came to find that experience one was I I probably wasn't gonna be in Singapore for the rest of my life, but second of all, institutional finance probably wasn't for me, right? Like I was really focused on building things from the ground up. I really enjoyed the process of watching things being built.
00:05:32 Jeremy Ruch
And I guess the other thing that is sort of core to who I am, what we're trying to do with bandoliers was a public policy major in college, so I was really focused on private sector solutions to social problems, and one of the things that prompted me to start Bandler to get back to the original question was this idea that I was seeing a problem on the client side, right which?
00:05:52 Jeremy Ruch
I was experiencing which is hey, it's really difficult to build these teams and I was also seeing a societal problem, which was that if you look at places like New York City in San Francisco, they're fairly divorced and this isn't a particularly original insight, but they're fairly divorced from the reality of life in other parts of the country, right? So the tech revolution that I was seeing.
00:06:12 Jeremy Ruch
In New York City, the hiring boom, the fact that all of these startups were hiring for the exact same role at the exact same time. When I came back from Singapore, wasn't challenging. Find one of these roles, but there's tons of companies hiring for it somehow that wasn't translating.
00:06:25 Jeremy Ruch
In some cases at all to other parts of the country where there is a lot of talent that could fill these roles that didn't feel right to me, right? Because you know, obviously there are some areas of inequality that are really, really challenging to address and.
00:06:39 Jeremy Ruch
That aren't the result of phenomena that have existed over decades, but this was one where it's still kind of obvious. Hey, there's all these talented people all over the country. Why in the hell are we concentrating all of these roles in the most expensive places in the country? Especially in 2020 when it's easier than ever for us to sit here? Joe, I mean, we're on a zoom call in.
00:07:00 Jeremy Ruch
Podcast across the country, we can use Slack to communicate. You know, we've got analytics tools that allows us that allow us to measure the productivity of workers. It's easier than ever for people to work for companies that aren't in the same city or town as ever, even in the same country is now. So it felt really bizarre that all these companies were just only looking within.
00:07:20 Jeremy Ruch
You know 10 mile radius of where their headquarters were to hire folks, and I think that is a point that has become more obvious as a result of everything that's going on with kovid. Obviously because you know a good chunk of the workforce is working remotely, but to us in 2016 or 2017, it's still fairly fairly revolutionary.
00:07:37 Joe Barhoum
Yeah, I'm glad you got ahead of the curve because there's there. I think we're both trying to solve.
00:07:42 Joe Barhoum
The same problem.
00:07:43 Joe Barhoum
So with my teaching and my my lectures and that type of thing that I do, I'm trying to help young aspiring salespeople, or even at what I do at the University is people who don't even know they could have a career in sales. I'm trying to help these people not act like the prototypical salesperson, and to instead take what's within them that's.
00:08:03 Joe Barhoum
Yeah, good qualities and things that make them happy and passionate and aim them towards a career in sales so that they don't. They may be perceived out of the gate as, oh, another salesperson who's trying to manipulate means after Commission check. Then they get into a conversation and the buyer realizes OK, this is actually a good person. There's so much misconception out there about.
00:08:24 Joe Barhoum
Sales and to a degree we deserve it because there's a lot of sales people that misrepresent. You know that we call it a community or job or the career or whatever. So I think we're both kind of approaching the same thing but from different angles, and I, let's jump into that now. If you don't mind. So I took some notes I had to 'cause what you're saying is so good.
00:08:43 Joe Barhoum
So when you're looking at hiring into for your supporting organizations that are hiring entry level sales, people who are also customer facing talk to me about that convergence right there. The fact that their customer facing and their entry level sales people why is that particular convergence of concern?
00:09:01 Jeremy Ruch
Oh, you're saying from a hiring standpoint.
00:09:03 Joe Barhoum
Or I'm saying from an execution standpoint, so operation. So if you're the hiring manager, why would you be XY would have a different type of concern over your sales hires because they're customer facing?
00:09:16 Jeremy Ruch
Well, I think on some level you know most sales hires are are going to be are going to be customer facing in some respects, but I think it is true and this has been, you know something that I think has had to become a a real point of emphasis for us that.
00:09:32 Jeremy Ruch
When you are hiring salespeople, obviously they're going out there and representing your brand to perspective customers, right? So it's not quite the same as an example for our clients, outsource sales as it is as it would be for them to outsource software development, right? Because these folks are acting as representatives of their brand, and for that reason I think.
00:09:52 Jeremy Ruch
One of the things that becomes really important right where I suppose a few things become important and and this is we found to be true in our interview process one is you need folks. I had a baseline level who can communicate right? Who can represent your your brand? Well, one of the things that we found candidly that you know our universities in our high schools aren't necessarily doing all that well.
00:10:12 Jeremy Ruch
His teaching folks had a right that has become a skill that I think, especially as more and more communication moves over to email versus all being over the phone the way it might have been, you know, 3040 years ago have become an essential skill in the workplace, and it's something we're really focused on as we build out the Angileri University, we can talk more about that than our internal training program.
00:10:32 Jeremy Ruch
So that's a particular concern for folks to you know who are customer facing, and I think that's largely true of any any sales hire.
00:10:39 Jeremy Ruch
Uh, the second piece is the representative of your brand, which means that on some level they need to mold their voice to your brand's voice, right? So everybody comes in with an individual sort of filter on that. Everybody's got their own style and we encourage our sales people to bring that to the table. But it's also true that somebody is getting on the phone and representing bandolier. There's a specific way I want Bandler being.
00:11:02 Jeremy Ruch
Positioned right and for that reason one of the things that we look for in any higher bandolier is Coach ability is the idea that I don't care how good you are or how good you think you are in this role. You are going to get feedback and you need to be able to take feedback from the standpoint of hey, this is helping make me better in my job.
00:11:22 Jeremy Ruch
Not.
00:11:24 Jeremy Ruch
This is a weakness and and I'm getting real defense. And then there's actually a bunch of questions we ask in our interview process that are tailored towards finding that type of person because it can be a little bit. It can sometimes be at odds with the concept of a traditional sales person who's really pushing really aggressive with those folks might not be the most receptive to.
00:11:44 Jeremy Ruch
The feedback right, which we've actually found to be more predictive of success in sales roles than somebody who's naturally pushy and aggressive, which we have not found at all, to be predicted predictive of success in these roles.
00:11:53 Joe Barhoum
So I would agree and obviously we do things differently, but I I don't see pushiness as a virtue when it comes to sales. Yep, but being able to how do I put this?
00:12:06 Joe Barhoum
Let me back up a second. So when a buyer goes to the buying process, the first step is need recognition and then they go into solution definition, right? So I need definition rather so I have something happened. OK now I gotta figure out what happened. I gotta define it. So once the buyer defines what the problem is, they'll start to do research towards a solution. Now when the salesperson
00:12:27 Joe Barhoum
Enters in adopt buying cycle. You know they're starting at stage one for them, or stage two, prospecting. They there's an intersection occurs, and now K, where is the buyer in the buying process. So what I see a lot of salespeople do, whether they're pushing or not is they try to take the buyer and force them into their sales cycle, right? Regardless of where the buyer.
00:12:48 Joe Barhoum
Is in the buying process to the truest extent of that statement, because the buyer may have an ill defined definition of what their problem is. So when I hear about pushy?
00:13:02 Joe Barhoum
I I can maybe take out of that. OK, persistence is a good quality and aggressiveness can be a good quality, but when you're trying to push and you're trying to say no, that's not your problem. This is your problem. Or you're trying to say hey, the next step is this. Regardless of what the buyer wants to do. Then I think that pushy salesperson sort of earns the perception of being pushy.
00:13:23 Joe Barhoum
So I'm curious, outside of Coachability, right? What are some other things that you look at and maybe within that persistence category? What are some of the virtues or traits that you pull out?
00:13:35 Jeremy Ruch
Yeah, it's a. It's a great question and I think something that is absolutely key for us, especially given that most of our folks are actually setting up meetings. So most of these folks are doing, you know, top of funnel SDR roles where they're picking prospects interest and setting up a follow up meeting for one of our clients, which means that what they're doing is, you know, hopefully coming up and interested prospects. And if that prospects not actually interested.
00:13:58 Jeremy Ruch
We're gonna hear about it from our clients, right? They're not gonna be that excited about having open qualified meetings. It doesn't do us any good to be overly pushy. Drive someone to a meeting that isn't a good fit for them so.
00:14:10 Jeremy Ruch
In terms of what we sort of trained to and what we look for, one of the things I was actually just trying to say. One of the things we found to be most productive.
00:14:18 Jeremy Ruch
In our interview process and sort of giving, giving away the keys a little bit, but hopefully someone who's interested in bandoliers. Notice there we go, no go get some sort of some secret tips to our to hacking our interview process. One of the things we found to be most predicted is the. Actually the questions that folks ask us. This is not something we used to grade out. It used to be. We just ask people informally like hey, what questions do you have?
00:14:40 Jeremy Ruch
Right and then we hired a sales associate who, I think very astutely noted, that people who are likely to be really good at this job probably ask really good questions, so why wouldn't? You know we grayed out everything and we probably got the resume. We agreed out be grayed out the phone call in each question you know very specifically one to five. How did answer me? The questions were great now so we said why don't you?
00:15:00 Jeremy Ruch
Develop a rubric in which to do that. So we did that, and we've actually found their performance on the questions they ask us. The quality of those questions to be among the most predictive factors of their success in these roles, right? And that's not at all surprising to me, because it's also something that we emphasize fairly heavily in training. Is that usually.
00:15:18 Jeremy Ruch
You know a good solution to a problem you have as a salesperson is to ask better questions. Yeah, that is very I. There's no kirils. There's no perfect advice. You can give everybody in every scenario, but that's one that I find applies a lot of the time, and it's also helpful from the standpoint you're talking about about pushing this, because I think the more we can think of ourselves.
00:15:40 Jeremy Ruch
As doctors you know prescribing medication.
00:15:44 Jeremy Ruch
The better off will be versus pushy salespeople pushing something on it would be the concept of a doctor pushing.
00:15:51 Jeremy Ruch
A medical treatment that's not needed is inherently offensive to people, right? Right? We have a natural revulsion that we should have exactly the same thing in sales, both because it's not the right thing to do, but second of all, because it's not profitable thing to do, because in the long run what's gonna happen is you're going to waste a whole bunch of time being pushy with folks, but ultimately from a psychological standpoint, we're going to be turned off by the fact they're pushy.
00:16:12 Jeremy Ruch
Um, and so you're wasting time and you're damaging a potential. As you alluded to, a a potential future prospects who might one day be a good fit for what you're selling or something else you might be selling down the road.
00:16:23 Jeremy Ruch
Um, and so it is interesting, and I have found this to be true. Like you know, when I'm selling bandolier.
00:16:30 Jeremy Ruch
The folks that I don't think are a good fit are often actually the.
00:16:34 Jeremy Ruch
The ones who wind up being the most interesting is actually sometimes a challenge to be like, hey, this is a breakup conversation like we're not a good fit for you, but there's a reason for that. Which is, I think folks are attuned to expect sales people to push something on to them. And when somebody doesn't, they get pretty surprised by it. Yeah, well?
00:16:49 Joe Barhoum
Is there something interesting about all this and I've been trying to figure out for a while now.
00:16:55 Joe Barhoum
So chicken or the egg. I don't know which one came first, but the construct of quotas and commissions I think is a. It's something that needs to be explored further by people smarter than me.
00:17:07 Joe Barhoum
The pressure that's put on salespeople to perform monthly, quarterly annually depends on what they sell, right?
00:17:14 Joe Barhoum
That pressure, I think, drives some of the behavior that we're identifying as things that we don't want our salespeople to be doing. Things that we don't want to be doing.
00:17:24 Joe Barhoum
Being pushy, for example, believe me. I've been there. You know, 4 five days away from closing out the quarter and below my quota. I'm going to put on your paper if I don't hit my number, what can I close like go through all the opportunities and figure out what do I have to do to get you in this car today, right? And I'm curious what your thoughts are kind of nodding along, so it's a good makes you feel good. What are your thoughts on?
00:17:44 Joe Barhoum
Quotas and how those either should be constructed or historically are constructed. How they use a tool to dictate behavior.
00:17:53 Jeremy Ruch
I think it's a really interesting psychological question, and it's one we thought quite a bit about. At at Bandelier, you know, on one hand we obviously want to incentivize people probably want to incentivize them to to do a good job. The flip side of that is to your point, we don't want to incentivize the wrong type of bait, which becomes actually quite.
00:18:13 Jeremy Ruch
I think it's challenging for any sales organization, but it's actually even more challenging on some level. In our context, because we're providing an outsource service over which our folks don't have full control over the outcomes, right? So the fully aligned thing obviously would would be to provide commissions to our team members based on closed deals of our clients. But actually our team members don't have involvement.
00:18:34 Jeremy Ruch
In closing all those deals, right so there becomes an inherent sort of misalignment of what the actual role is relative to how they're getting paid, so I guess there's there's sort of two questions wrapped up in in one here. The first is well, should commissions exist at all in the second? Well, if they do exist, how should they be structured to sort of minimize the problem we're talking about? So the first question, should commissions exist, and I think.
00:18:56 Jeremy Ruch
There's good points on both sides here. One book that was recommended to me that I really enjoyed. I don't agree with all of it, but I think it's really interesting. This book, called The Machine by Justin Roth Marsh, where he makes a pretty compelling and a fairly well structured argument against commissions existing and the overarching point is, hey sales isn't all that different from other functions within a company.
00:19:18 Jeremy Ruch
And we should treat salespeople the same way we treat.
00:19:21 Jeremy Ruch
Folks in other functions within the company, right? And we should stop encouraging sales people to be sort of lone Wolves.
00:19:28 Jeremy Ruch
Or they go off on their own and do their own thing like we want to encourage sales people to behave as part of a team, the same way we would.
00:19:34 Jeremy Ruch
A software engineer the same way we would have marketer who we don't pay commissions to write. We just say do your job of. Of course, the challenge with that as an individual actor is, even if you agree with that from a systemic standpoint, if your company doesn't have commissions, you're now in a position where you're one of the only ones that doesn't, right? So what does that do to your hiring funnel when you say, OK, we're one of the only companies.
00:19:55 Jeremy Ruch
It doesn't have commissions relevant. All these other companies, and that's usually the objection here, which I think is well taken is. Yeah, like maybe I agree in this. Agree with this vision of a pie in the Sky Society for sales people don't earn commissions. But if I'm the first person to do it inherently, what's gonna happen is I'm just gonna miss out on a whole bunch of really really good sales people who don't want this job 'cause it doesn't payout commissions.
00:20:16 Jeremy Ruch
Right which I I think is true.
00:20:19 Jeremy Ruch
And so then the second question becomes, well, OK, if you have to have commissions.
00:20:24 Jeremy Ruch
How should we do it in a way that's that's most fair and I for this I really like there. There was a blog post. I think we've discussed this before on on from Hub. The folks at HubSpot, who basically outlined three criteria they use in designing Commission schemes. The first is that they should be aligned with the company's interest, obviously, so you don't. As an example, you don't encourage your salespeople to sell something.
00:20:47 Jeremy Ruch
That you know then gets cancelled within the month. You encourage them to sell something that you know folks are going to stick around with for a year, let's say, and that eliminates some of the problems you're talking about, right? So if you sell a car that somebody doesn't need, and they return it within seven days based on, like, you know, return policy? Yeah, that that's sort of misaligned with companies interest, so maybe we should encourage folks to sort of a longer term view.
00:21:07 Jeremy Ruch
The second, which is somewhat in conflict with that, is the idea of control. So the idea that you know reps should have control over what they're being paid out for, right? So as an example.
00:21:22 Jeremy Ruch
Don't say you know your your Commission is dictated by the customer's level of satisfaction with the car five years later because their satisfaction with the car probably doesn't have that much to do with your performance as a salesperson, right? And then the third is simplicity that they shouldn't be things that require.
00:21:39 Jeremy Ruch
You know calculators to figure out because if they are, they're probably not that motivating to people, and so that's the principle we try to use a bandolier. We're designing our Commission scheme, and I say we add a fourth component to this, which is we do keep it to a relatively minimal, I think relative to a lot of sales organizations. Portion of compensation, which is different, right? So we wanted to be there. We want to tell people, hey, we do have commissions. We do have mechanisms of incentivizing you.
00:22:02 Jeremy Ruch
But you're not gonna be. You know, we we try to tell folks, don't depend on the Commission portion of your compensation to pay your bills, right? Come in here. Make sure the base salary covers your needs and then you have this sort of kicker and you know we view that as it keeps us up the spirit of friendly competition. It does motivate people, but we also want to make sure we're being fair, particularly in outsource context where you could be placed on clients.
00:22:26 Jeremy Ruch
On a relative basis that are harder than the others, but I don't think they're perfect answers and and different things work for different organizations.
00:22:33 Joe Barhoum
Well, I mean, it could backfire really badly. Like the car example, right? Some returns the car, but I witnessed a good salesperson sell a very close a very complex deal and it was a giant checking things close to 6 feet.
00:22:47 Joe Barhoum
And they end up suing his employer. So the clawbacks are about to kick in, so we quit. You don't give up, let's call it $80,000. You go, you walk away. You keep the money right, and so it's did hurt the employer twice as much as it hurts. You know the customer. It's not good.
00:23:06 Jeremy Ruch
Well, and there's another hidden cost, right? Which is an an I think.
00:23:09 Jeremy Ruch
This gets really interesting in smaller transactional sales, so like if you have four sales people and you are selling enterprise level products that are $500,000 million dollars. Let's say early stage company, one salesperson men could make or break your company literally like one really good salesperson could make all the difference. And so you just that person is a Lone Ranger. They go out and they really get what they do.
00:23:31 Jeremy Ruch
The most sales organization like right most sales organizations either selling something that's a little bit lower in value or have more sales people. So it's more spread out. And that's obviously ideally you want to get to the point where in Oracle or Salesforce for like.
00:23:42 Jeremy Ruch
You're installing a good culture, not relying on Lone Lone Rangers, and so you know, there's also the question of how does the performance of somebody who's dishonest within an organization or willing to compromise on the company's values going to impact.
00:23:57 Jeremy Ruch
The long term performance of the company, and you know if you if you look at examples from the last few years, I think benefits is one really good. One of what can happen when like a sales driven culture it can go awry. Where like hey, if you create a culture where you know anything goes to drive revenue, you could wind up in in a place that you don't really want to be. Even if you grow really quickly for short period of time.
00:25:14 Joe Barhoum
No good, I'm gonna look that one up. It's crazy, yeah so let's talk about bandolier a little more so tell me what your best customers look like.
00:25:23 Jeremy Ruch
I would say our best bow. There's there's sort of two categories, so we've got clients on the.
00:25:30 Jeremy Ruch
What we call our talent as a service program, which we actually just launched as a service offering. More recently, we're providing a salesperson to clients that has been vetted and trained through Bandolier University, and they're essentially adopting the companies process, right? So they're going in their reporting directly to represent company. We're using the company system, and this, I think, is fairly unique for vendors in our space to structure things this way where?
00:25:54 Jeremy Ruch
We're not having hands-on involvement in the strategy, or, you know, the list behind the campaign. We're just sort of providing the talent. This tends to work really well for clients that haven't defined outbound sales process for inbound sales process and just need somebody to execute. Yeah, and the other really nice thing about that program is if you wind up liking the person that you're working with, you can actually hire them directly and redoubles a recruiting agency.
00:26:15 Jeremy Ruch
That respect, so these are typically SAS companies that we also work with. Some professional services companies that have a really well defined process need somebody to execute on it. Don't have an HR team, don't want to hire people directly so they go onto our portal. Interviewing onboard somebody within 24 hours.
00:26:31 Joe Barhoum
Is there an average deal size in that Sass play where it makes sense?
00:26:35 Jeremy Ruch
Yeah, it sort of depends on the nature of of sale of this, so it's that's happening, right? So as an example, we just downloaded the clients doing inbound sales. That's gonna look a little bit different from from more traditional sort of outbound sales campaigns, but I would say, generally speaking, we're talking about products that probably have, you know, $5000 ACV enough is usually what we see. There are cases where it's a little bit lower than that.
00:26:56 Jeremy Ruch
That's sort of the typical range. Great man. And then on our managed service side, what we're providing is basically an outsource inside sales Department so you know this is hey, you get, you know a Rep, two reps, three reps, but you also get a manager for those reps. You get a sales operations Department that can build leafless and basically provide the value that you might get from subscribing to like an enterprise.
00:27:17 Jeremy Ruch
Lead database or something like that, but we're providing that you bundled with this program and strategy and analytics so you can analytics dashboard that actually benchmarks your results relative to those of the typical bandolier client that's powered via size sense and you have regular strategy consultation so those programs tend to be a better fit for companies either that are looking to take an existing sales function to the next level.
00:27:40 Jeremy Ruch
So as an example, companies that you have a handful of SDR's, but they're not ready to hire A CR. Oh, or, you know, they want to kind of benchmark their existing sales team against another one. Or they, you know, they're sort of using this as a bridge to something else, or companies that are looking to set up an outbound sales function for the first time. We see a lot of that.
00:27:58 Joe Barhoum
And so do you have like an average customer duration?
00:28:02 Joe Barhoum
They used to strive towards, you know it.
00:28:05 Jeremy Ruch
Really depends because I think anybody in this space and this varies I. I think it's a little bit different. As an example from from software sales you have sort of good churning batcher, right? So that turn obviously is outlandish didn't work right where like we're able to generate results that would make the program ROI positive.
00:28:23 Jeremy Ruch
That does happen. It's gonna happen with any sales or marketing campaign. There's gonna be times it works really well. There's gonna be times where it doesn't and we try to do as good a job as we can. Predicting that up front. But it's not a perfect science, right? You never really know until you execute on the campaign. And obviously we would prefer to eliminate all that turn 'cause we love all these programs to work perfectly. Then you've got good churn and the good churn is where things are actually working.
00:28:44 Jeremy Ruch
Fairly well and folks decide to bring it in house, and that happens. You know, that's happened where you know folks might decide to hire one of the folks on our campaign directly in House. And we always say that's really bittersweet for us. 'cause then one and it's aligned with our mission of connecting. You know, people with with these tech companies and sort of transforming their careers. But obviously we hate to lose our.
00:29:05 Jeremy Ruch
Pradeep also explains how a little bit of a balance there or where folks are just, you know experimenting in different direction, taking their company in a different direction so you know, I would say we're more focused on the individual circumstances of hey, what's the feedback we're getting from clients? You know? What are we hearing? What is the value we're adding both on the client side and on the talent side than you know.
00:29:25 Jeremy Ruch
Any specific number?
00:29:27 Joe Barhoum
We spent a lot of time, a lot of lot of our time talking about how you could benefit other organizations. I'm curious how you benefit the individual hires as well that you bring onboard bandolier and let me just back that up for a moment. So when I train, I train on 4 rules. Be honest, be inquisitive, be prepared and create obligation, and those are 4 rules. But I know going kind of fast, but I'm sorry I just say it so often I.
00:29:49 Joe Barhoum
Forget that the other person hasn't heard it, but anyway, those with that those four rules and the skill sets in the tools, that sort of all culminate within that. There's, I think, setting up people for a healthy long-term sales. Karere, Yep, and I'm curious what you're doing, because I would imagine if if I'm a potential customer of yours.
00:30:11 Joe Barhoum
And I'm weighing the pros and cons of, you know, using an organization like yours or building it in house. If I'm going if I'm going to train, I'm probably gonna train on. Here's how to sell my widget. I'm not going to train on. Here's how to sell because what's going to be more beneficial to me. It's to find somebody who can sell my thing and then go sell my thing and then prove you can sell my thing. And then maybe we can talk about doing some additional education later on. After you proven that you can.
00:30:35 Joe Barhoum
Actually bring value to the organization. So what are you guys doing for the individual?
00:30:40 Jeremy Ruch
Yeah, so it's interesting in our context, right? Because we've got to train people actually fairly generically, 'cause we don't always know which programs are there going to be on. So we've developed and then we actually just announced this week that we're making this available to the public. We've developed some something called Bandolier University, which is overtime going to include, you know, continuing education for folks within Bandolier and.
00:31:00 Jeremy Ruch
Leadership and you know more advanced option inside sales. But for right now consists of one course. We call inside sales. One and that really covers what we say what we call the philosophy and the tactics underlying and you know, modern day top of funnel status sales. So that that's the starting point, yeah, and we typically in terms of the exercises were running folks through we do approach it.
00:31:22 Jeremy Ruch
Through the lens of selling bandolier, right? So we do approach it through the lens of like? OK, imagine you're an SDR for bandolier? Like how would you position this? But we try to broaden out the concepts and so you know, Matt, who's the the head of our Binghamton Office overseas, our sales team and then runs? This training does a terrific job of kind of outlining what this might look like through a bunch of different lenses selling a bunch of different products and uses a variety of examples, but.
00:31:46 Jeremy Ruch
You know, I, I think there is some. Some of this is driven by the insight that a lot of top of funnel sales training in particular is common, sort of irrespective, and those four values that you outlined are going to be true pretty much irrespective of what you're selling. So that's where it starts as people build their careers with us and and one of the ways we have of retaining.
00:32:06 Jeremy Ruch
The folks on our team is we provide that continuing education, which we're now in the process of formalizing into Barry University and some of this is what you would expect so some of it is advanced sales right OK now that you've learned top of funnel sales. Let's talk about closing deals. Let's talk about how to use some of these alternative channels how to you know, add it start bringing in figured into your and loom and you know.
00:32:26 Jeremy Ruch
Different channels into your outreach? Let's talk about you know, advanced conversations you might be getting into things like that, but it's also leadership training, right? Because we were successful in sales, chances are eventually going to be managing a team. What does that look like? And most sales organizations, I think don't do a particularly good job of training people to be leaders, and something is an example. I think our military does a pretty good job of but.
00:32:47 Jeremy Ruch
Our companies don't always do the best job like preparing folks for those very tactical situations, and so you know, one of the things we do is has folks advance in their careers with us. We bring them into formal leadership sessions. Same way we role play sales calls. Will role play situations where you're sitting down with somebody and delivering them feedback and the amazing thing is that you know a lot of folks when they're delivering feedback. I know I was like this.
00:33:09 Jeremy Ruch
First I had to give feedback was the first time I've ever been in that situation are prepared me for it, but no one ever gave me yeah formal training and how to do that. I went to a four year University. I worked for a big company. I would first company but nobody ever took me through that training, and so that's something that we're really focused on.
00:33:25 Joe Barhoum
Yeah, the first time I ever managed to group it was awful. I was terrible.
00:33:29 Joe Barhoum
I lost people. It was bad. If you don't think skill said.
00:33:33 Jeremy Ruch
Totally and I I think.
00:33:36 Jeremy Ruch
You know it is to the some of this. You learn by doing. Obviously we do say that like some of this, you really do have to be in that life scenario. Understand it. But it's also true that I, I, you know, in a sale situation you would never think. Let's not provide this person with any training and then throw them into that situation and leadership on some levels. Higher stakes than that, right? The worst thing somebody can do in a sales contest. Hang up on you.
00:33:56 Jeremy Ruch
The worst thing that can happen is a leader or somebody quits on you who you've invested his time into and so it's it's sort of crazy to think about the fact that we're not investing more time into this.
00:34:06 Joe Barhoum
That's a really good point. OK, cool, so let's say that we do have someone watching this that wants to engage with you and learn more about bandoleer. How can they do that?
00:34:16 Jeremy Ruch
Well, first of all I I wanna encourage folks to to reach out to me directly. I'm always available. My email address is just my first name. Jeremy at Bandolier Dot COI also hope you'll follow us on on social media and Instagram on LinkedIn and Facebook. Should primary channels that we use. If you know one of the things that that is true about us is we are almost always hiring.
00:34:36 Jeremy Ruch
And that's certainly true right now, so I hope you'll check out our careers stage. We hire both for part time and full time roles, and for the first time in our history, we're actually hiring outside the Binghamton area, so we're hiring nationwide now, which is really exciting. We got folks in Georgia. We got folks in Pennsylvania. I got folks in California all over the country, and so if you are interested in a career in sales
00:34:56 Jeremy Ruch
Or, you know, just interested in learning more about what a career in sales might look like. We definitely encourage you to reach out to us.
00:35:02 Joe Barhoum
That's awesome Jeremy rush. Thanks for being on the show.
00:35:05 Jeremy Ruch
Thank you Joe, it's been great, you bet.