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In this episode of the Advanced Selling Podcast, I share a story about my grandson and his really bad method of making friends, which there s probably a lesson in there for us all.
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We re also going to hear a sales rep blunder, featuring our guest Chris Budegrop, and the importance of celebrating small wins.
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Welcome back to the Advanced Selling Podcast, the longest running sales training podcast over 15 years, close to 16 years.
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I m one of your hosts, Bill Kasky.
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I m the other host, Brian Neal.
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Welcome, everybody.
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Glad you are with us.
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If you are a new listener, make sure you go to advancedsellingpodcast.com.
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There s a little place there where you can put
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your email address in and make sure you jump on our email list.
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And I think we have a list of the top 25 episodes.
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So if you don t want to go through all 1,100 of them, which might take a couple weeks, you can go to the top 25.
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And welcome if you are a new listener.
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If you re an old listener, welcome back.
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Old meaning you ve been here a while.
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Oh, yeah.
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You know what we need to do?
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We need to find out the date of our first episode.
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Do you know?
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I don t even know the date of the last episode.
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Well, Travis will have to research that.
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It s a trivia question.
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The first drop.
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I mean, I know we ve got our.
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ridiculously huge microphone video that s still on YouTube.
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Yeah, you can t go back on the platform because we missed 500 episodes that when we changed something, they kind of went away.
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But I think, yeah, right.
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Yeah, I ll go back in my diary because I write.
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So we have a big, we have a big, you know, so big like a show like for a thousandth episode or whatever that is, you know, or the anniversary date would be fun to celebrate.
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Get a kick.
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I had an interesting thing happen this weekend.
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We were babysitting our grandkids, and they re almost five, four and a half, four and three quarters.
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And so there s a boy and a girl, and the girl s sweet, and she just is no drama.
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I mean, she just is easy, easy to take care of.
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Boy is a boy.
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And we live next to a family who has two boys, one a little bit older than my grandson, Evan, and one a little bit younger.
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And they had some other people over, and so Evan, you know, was kind of standing outside looking at their driveway, because they re all out there playing, and he wanted to go over, obviously.
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I said, well, just go over and say, do you mind if, can I play with you?
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And of course, that s a little, that s a bridge too far for a five-year-old.
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So he was waiting on them to invite him, and they didn t, and they didn t.
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Finally, I look over, and he s kind of in the garage.
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So he s made his way through the play area into their garage.
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And my daughter was kind of watching him to make sure he wasn t causing trouble.
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And all of a sudden, he hears him saying, stop slamming that door.
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I m going to kill you.
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So if you want to ingratiate a host of a party to you, probably threatening to kill one of the kids is not a way to do it.
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And so he came back, and I said, Evan, what did you say to them?
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Pretending like I didn t know, he goes, I just told them to stop slamming the door.
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And I said, no, you did more than that.
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No, that s all I did.
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And finally, he goes, I told them I was going to kill them, but not really.
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I wasn t really going to kill.
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Well, that wouldn t be a good neighborhood transaction.
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But then, and I know your daughter pretty well, so then what happens with the parents, with her and her husband, are they thinking, where did our kids get that from?
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You saying that?
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You start to wonder.
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That s when some random stranger hears that and calls CPS.
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They re teaching their kid, dude.
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That s one of the things they re saying.
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We re gonna kill people.
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They d say that on an airplane, you d get arrested.
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Oh, yeah.
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Right?
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Yeah.
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Remember our friend Dave C., who s a listener, who wrote the foreword to your book.
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His kid came when I worked with him one time, and he s...
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He s picking up the phone and he s picking up the phone in on Dave s desk.
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And he s going, shut up.
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Shut up and slam it.
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Shut up.
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And he d slam it over and over.
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I remember that.
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He was just, is that what the way he saw the business world?
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I guess so.
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Right?
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Exactly.
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Oh, the thing.
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What do they say from the mouths of babes?
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Yeah, right.
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That s the deal.
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So, well, hey, we re back.
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Repeat guest, one of our faves.
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And we ve got some really, really cool.
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We had a good conversation, really good conversation last time.
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And I was really intrigued.
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I just love when people come up with great ideas that are helpful to salespeople.
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You as our listeners, you re always looking for that.
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So we re going to bring back our friend, Chris Rudegrop.
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How did I do, Chris?
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Woo.
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Third time s a charm.
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Yeah.
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Beautiful.
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Bill had two tries and got it.
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You got it the first try.
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I ll see, but I got to watch him first.
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That s kind of unfair.
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Chris is CEO and founder of Sendoso, which is a platform that allows salespeople
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to with a click of a button, send just about anything to a prospect, to a customer for onboarding, for prospecting, for nurturing a lead through a, through a process and just a fantastic, uh, creative idea and solution for salespeople as we work so hard to stand out.
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So Chris, thanks for coming back today.
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Yeah, thanks for having me again.
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I feel like that last episode went so fast.
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So I m excited to continue the conversation.
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Yeah, for sure.
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And we re going to talk a little bit more in depth about use cases.
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And I think one of the things we love to have when we have guests like you on, so obviously you have a platform that helps salespeople and their companies can go and talk to you all about that.
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And that s one thing.
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There are things that the ideas that you have, though, that people could try to execute on their own.
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You know, and I think our listeners, if you re listening to this, you might say, well, I don t know if I want to, you know, my company wants to pay for Sendozo.
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You can still.
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So I make, I want to make sure our listeners are taking elements from your story and from your ideas.
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Cause there were some stuff last episode.
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I thought if I m listening to this episode, I m like full on taking notes, like writing stuff down.
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I am, like I was.
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I d reiterate that too.
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I got started by doing a lot of this myself.
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I bet that a lot of listeners actually are like, oh yeah, I send stuff to my prospects.
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Oh yeah, I have done this before.
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A lot of salespeople, the best ones, have their own stories of sending something unique or breaking into a new account
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And I want to start, and this is kind of like a little news, so we re not really a news show.
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But I did want to talk about and address, you know, you re a startup, and a lot of our listeners are in the SaaS world.
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A lot are not, though.
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And they sometimes aren t familiar with what goes on in a startup world.
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So typically, firms will raise money from friends and family, then they ll go out to some angel investors, and they do these, what they call series of rounds where they
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they raise money from investors.
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And it s a very celebratory thing because it says I ve got a good idea that other smart people thinks a good idea so much so they want to give me money.
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Can you tell the audience, first of all, where you are in that process and the event that just happened for you?
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We just recently announced our Series C for a $100 million investment led by SoftBank.
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That was quite an accomplishment for us.
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Like you said, a great validation and allows us to continue to grow and help millions more salespeople hit quota, crush quota, and be successful.
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That s fantastic.
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And I love that good intention.
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That s why Chris is here.
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Cause what he didn t say was, yeah, it allows me to go, you know, out of here and San Francisco, get an 8,000 square foot house and get a big yacht and sail off.
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He said, he s going to take that money and try to help you, our listeners.
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That s really, really great.
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And, uh, any investors, uh, aren t really keen on you going to buy in the yacht.
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Are they?
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Well, longer term, if we IPO and go public, when we do that and it gets me a yacht and they get themselves their own yacht.
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For now, it s all about the customer and using that money to expand more globally, to help build an even cooler product and really hire a bunch more people.
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We ve actually scaled up quite nicely, almost about 500 employees just in the last few years.
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So can you talk, I want to talk a little bit, I just want to, on that story, because we talk about sales team, we talk to salespeople, our listeners are mostly salespeople, some sales leaders, and everybody has these ceilings, these mental ceilings that they hit.
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They think, man, I could, I could never do that.
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I could never make a million dollars as a salesperson.
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I could never get a deal that s a eight figure contract.
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Can you talk about your own mental ceiling with like this?
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Like you ve, you ve, you started a company from nothing that just got some money, a hundred million bucks from SoftBank, which is a very, very well known in that world.
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Talk about as you work through the process, you re like, is this really happening?
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Like imposter syndrome stuff.
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Your own version of that.
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Yeah.
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So I think I m an over-optimist, where I actually have never had a problem with imposter syndrome.
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I think even when I was in sales, I was always like, I can close any deal.
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I was overly confident, but not too cocky.
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I just would say I m very confident in my abilities.
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So starting the company, I think you have to be kind of crazy as an entrepreneur too, of like, I m going to quit everything and I m just going to start something, go to square zero,
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billion dollar company.
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And so I think as part of my success is just due to my ability to just say, F, I could do anything.
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And that s really paid off.
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Yeah, have the big dream, but you re still grounded in some sort of reality so that you re not.
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Exactly.
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But I do think in the early days, some of the things that have helped is really celebrating the small wins to try to drive momentum.
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Because there is ups and downs, it can be a roller coaster at times, but I think if you celebrate as much as you can, and I think we ve built that into our company culture too, of little mini celebrations.
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You really find more times to celebrate and you find these little wins and then you just feel that momentum, you feel that energy, that snowball rolling down the hill and it s unstoppable.
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Brian and I have talked about that on the podcast several times, especially recently, this idea of it s OK sometimes to look back at your accomplishment, big or small, and say, no, it was a pretty good job.
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I m proud of myself there.
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I m happy with the way it turned out.
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We just don t do that enough because we re always at the next horizon, the next thing, the next building, the next mountain to climb.
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We rarely step back.
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consciously and intentionally and say, let s celebrate where we ve been this last year, this year.
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It s been a tough six months, let s just say, and we ve hung on and we re starting to see the blinds open again.
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Let s celebrate.
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I just don t think we do that enough.
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So I m really glad to hear that.
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Yeah, one of the things I actually did back in sales, and I still do this now in a different capacity, was whether it was a couple times a week, I d go back and look at a Salesforce report of my three largest closed deals, and I would mentally remember to celebrate that in my head the morning of, and it would almost give me a little adrenaline rush to go close more deals, because I m like, dang, that was a big deal.
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Pat myself on the back a little bit, and just give myself a little bit of momentum from my previous deals
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Already passed, but I can still be like, damn, that was a huge deal.
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Awesome.
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I m going to do it again.
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Absolutely.
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That s so great.
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I don t say nobody.
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Almost nobody does that.
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And our managers are the worst culprits because they re always asking, hey, quarter s over.
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You know, that s in the past.
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See you later.
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Let s go.
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I would love a culture like you re talking about, Chris.
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We d celebrate and say, let s just go back on the month and talk about all the little wins we had.
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Totally.
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I think that s a great tip for managers.
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Like, look back six months and be like, hey, these three deals you closed six months ago, like high five.
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Like it just like gives you a little bit of extra little wind in your sail.
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Yeah, for sure.