Meeting Title: Uttam <> Dillon Date: 2024-12-09 Meeting participants: Dillon Tedesco, Uttam Kumaran
WEBVTT
1 00:01:31.990 ⇒ 00:01:32.820 Uttam Kumaran: Hey!
2 00:01:33.020 ⇒ 00:01:34.450 Dillon Tedesco: Hey, Tom, how are you.
3 00:01:34.450 ⇒ 00:01:35.850 Uttam Kumaran: Hey? Good! How are you?
4 00:01:36.330 ⇒ 00:01:38.789 Dillon Tedesco: Doing well, glad to finally connect.
5 00:01:38.790 ⇒ 00:01:44.909 Uttam Kumaran: Thanks for taking the time. Yeah. Sorry for all the confusion during holidays, just like time zone
6 00:01:45.080 ⇒ 00:01:46.490 Uttam Kumaran: issues, like I.
7 00:01:46.490 ⇒ 00:01:47.210 Dillon Tedesco: I am.
8 00:01:47.210 ⇒ 00:01:55.087 Uttam Kumaran: I’m here in Austin. Of course, I I work with people like in mountain time, east coast. So yeah, it’s insane. But
9 00:01:55.430 ⇒ 00:01:58.050 Dillon Tedesco: Is that a Bucknell logo behind you?
10 00:01:58.050 ⇒ 00:02:04.269 Uttam Kumaran: It is a Bucknell logo. How do you know? You know people usually ask me if it’s Boston, and then I have to get it correct, though.
11 00:02:04.270 ⇒ 00:02:07.169 Dillon Tedesco: I’m from about 20 min north of Lewisburg.
12 00:02:07.390 ⇒ 00:02:10.050 Uttam Kumaran: No way. Okay. Amazing. Great.
13 00:02:10.090 ⇒ 00:02:12.460 Dillon Tedesco: My sister-in-law actually went to Bucknell.
14 00:02:12.810 ⇒ 00:02:30.769 Uttam Kumaran: Oh, wow! Okay. Small school. Yeah. I think people who are from PA. They’re like they usually know it. Nobody. Everybody in the West coast are like, never heard of that. But people know Patriot League. So yeah, yeah, yeah, I went to Buck. Now, I just had some friends. Friends from school visit this past weekend.
15 00:02:30.910 ⇒ 00:02:33.609 Uttam Kumaran: But yeah, very strong. Bucknell household.
16 00:02:34.060 ⇒ 00:02:37.629 Dillon Tedesco: There you go. Nice well, how how do you know? Sheldon.
17 00:02:38.460 ⇒ 00:02:46.020 Uttam Kumaran: We work together? So actually, they were a client of ours when I was at flow. Code flow. Code. It’s like this. QR code.
18 00:02:46.433 ⇒ 00:02:50.569 Dillon Tedesco: Know, I know. So you know Sheldon, from octopus. Then.
19 00:02:50.570 ⇒ 00:02:51.140 Uttam Kumaran: Correct.
20 00:02:51.140 ⇒ 00:02:55.480 Dillon Tedesco: Okay. So I was the I was Sheldon’s boss for quite some time.
21 00:02:55.480 ⇒ 00:02:56.449 Uttam Kumaran: Oh, okay. Okay.
22 00:02:56.450 ⇒ 00:03:01.810 Dillon Tedesco: I was a chief revenue officer, and found founding member of Octopus so.
23 00:03:01.810 ⇒ 00:03:02.399 Uttam Kumaran: Okay, so yeah.
24 00:03:02.400 ⇒ 00:03:11.669 Dillon Tedesco: I know flow code. Well, I know I know Dave over there I was. I knew Megan quite well before she left.
25 00:03:11.670 ⇒ 00:03:24.069 Uttam Kumaran: Great. So I was like on the back end of a lot of the stuff that we were doing for you guys. I ran like internal reporting. And then also ran data products there. So all the reporting that that you guys got off of the QR.
26 00:03:24.660 ⇒ 00:03:27.569 Uttam Kumaran: That all came through me and my team.
27 00:03:27.750 ⇒ 00:03:34.260 Dillon Tedesco: Excellent. Yeah. I I talked to David Schwarzberg about
28 00:03:34.310 ⇒ 00:03:38.504 Dillon Tedesco: potentially about the chief business officer role over there.
29 00:03:38.970 ⇒ 00:03:39.980 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah. Okay. Okay.
30 00:03:39.980 ⇒ 00:03:47.905 Dillon Tedesco: Moving forward because they they wanted somebody in the office like 4 or 5 days a week. But that was not gonna happen.
31 00:03:48.400 ⇒ 00:03:54.889 Dillon Tedesco: Maryland. But but yeah, that’s awesome. It’s great. Tim, Tim’s a a really really cool guy. So
32 00:03:55.350 ⇒ 00:03:56.360 Dillon Tedesco: yeah, so.
33 00:03:56.600 ⇒ 00:03:58.777 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah, I was there and then I worked
34 00:03:59.080 ⇒ 00:04:06.940 Uttam Kumaran: After that I worked you know, that was a couple of years ago, and then I worked for this company called Prequel it was a data transformation startup. I was like the
35 00:04:07.010 ⇒ 00:04:09.960 Uttam Kumaran: I was like one of the 1st hires basically led
36 00:04:09.990 ⇒ 00:04:12.450 Uttam Kumaran: product there and like, built the initial product.
37 00:04:12.934 ⇒ 00:04:18.760 Uttam Kumaran: kind of didn’t end up seeing eye to eye on like where that company was gonna go in the vision so left.
38 00:04:18.839 ⇒ 00:04:23.320 Uttam Kumaran: And then I had done some contracting work. Of course, my background’s in data engineering.
39 00:04:23.788 ⇒ 00:04:29.019 Uttam Kumaran: I’ve managed data teams like ran reporting. But I was like, Okay, if I can
40 00:04:29.150 ⇒ 00:04:44.249 Uttam Kumaran: initially for me, it was just like, Do I want to decide to start like a consulting business? Part of it was. I just had a huge network of not only what are the 2 sides of that business? Part of it is like the the recruiting. So like I. I’m an engineer. I have a huge pipeline of engineers that I work for.
41 00:04:44.270 ⇒ 00:04:46.969 Uttam Kumaran: really confident getting talent the other side it
42 00:04:47.060 ⇒ 00:04:51.990 Uttam Kumaran: getting clients. That was a lot of word of mouth like, I just a lot of friends.
43 00:04:53.280 ⇒ 00:04:58.489 Uttam Kumaran: I just said, Hey, I’m available to hire, and a lot of people just sent me cool. We need someone here. We need someone here.
44 00:04:58.510 ⇒ 00:05:09.790 Uttam Kumaran: It’ll get through the fact that, like, okay, are they willing to bring me on more like fractionally, and then sort of was able to stack some contracts and start to you know, build a team. So started the company last April
45 00:05:10.010 ⇒ 00:05:14.180 Uttam Kumaran: brought on like our 1st engineer beside me, and and
46 00:05:14.570 ⇒ 00:05:19.509 Uttam Kumaran: in December, and then. Now we’re about 10 people and growing
47 00:05:19.995 ⇒ 00:05:30.230 Uttam Kumaran: have a mix of like onshore and offshore folks. But it’s been like insane. It’s been the hardest thing I’ve ever done my entire life, especially like
48 00:05:31.010 ⇒ 00:05:36.019 Uttam Kumaran: be doing it after a year and a half. It’s I. It’s like it’s. It’s been very, very
49 00:05:36.170 ⇒ 00:05:39.600 Uttam Kumaran: fulfilling. And like, I don’t know if I can go back
50 00:05:40.181 ⇒ 00:05:56.999 Uttam Kumaran: but also there’s I’m learning stuff every day. And one of the things you know, I’m learning a lot about. And we’re really prioritizing for next quarter is, how do we really make the sales process more procedural. We have a lot of experience now with things that work, things that don’t work.
51 00:05:57.320 ⇒ 00:06:02.335 Uttam Kumaran: those types of services we offer, what we don’t offer the models things like that.
52 00:06:02.750 ⇒ 00:06:11.199 Uttam Kumaran: But again, my background is really running engineering teams, and I’m I’m pretty good at recruiting and operations sales stuff I’ve been good at just
53 00:06:11.320 ⇒ 00:06:16.694 Uttam Kumaran: just getting on calls and kind of it’s just being myself. But of course it’s not a way to scale that
54 00:06:17.100 ⇒ 00:06:26.649 Uttam Kumaran: And so we started by like, really helping, 1st thing we did is really scaling a couple of different channels. So we have our website. We do cold, outbound email and Linkedin.
55 00:06:26.660 ⇒ 00:06:34.470 Uttam Kumaran: and then they’ll get word of mouth. We also have some referral partners. That send us leads pretty consistently now.
56 00:06:34.957 ⇒ 00:06:42.052 Uttam Kumaran: Of course, then folks move into a funnel. You know where we we try to qualify them and and understand
57 00:06:42.840 ⇒ 00:06:50.330 Uttam Kumaran: And yeah, and then to give you a sense of like kind of the work that we do. So we offer both data and AI services on the data side.
58 00:06:50.620 ⇒ 00:07:03.500 Uttam Kumaran: it’s either a full stack sort of data engineering data modeling and and also some clients use us for more product analytics like analysis. We also have a couple of people that are interested in more like strategic
59 00:07:03.530 ⇒ 00:07:18.879 Uttam Kumaran: be training and enablement related services. And then on the AI side, which is something that we’ve started doing over the last, you know, 3 months. We help people build internal AI automations. And then, as well as helping people build customer facing AI agents.
60 00:07:19.070 ⇒ 00:07:22.070 Uttam Kumaran: So that’s really like the scope and
61 00:07:22.510 ⇒ 00:07:25.339 Uttam Kumaran: kind of brain dump about about us, and and what we’d
62 00:07:27.040 ⇒ 00:07:29.140 Dillon Tedesco: Well, 1st and foremost congrats.
63 00:07:29.530 ⇒ 00:07:29.880 Dillon Tedesco: Thank you.
64 00:07:29.880 ⇒ 00:07:35.710 Dillon Tedesco: Yeah. Taking the leap is is a tough one, and I commend you for it.
65 00:07:35.710 ⇒ 00:07:36.270 Uttam Kumaran: I appreciate it.
66 00:07:36.440 ⇒ 00:07:40.349 Dillon Tedesco: I am after. Gosh! 3,
67 00:07:40.470 ⇒ 00:07:47.960 Dillon Tedesco: 3 ish years back in corporate outside of startups, I’m definitely getting the itch of the
68 00:07:48.120 ⇒ 00:07:58.480 Dillon Tedesco: the startup life and everything that comes with it. And you know, on my end. I you know, I think there’s the the likelihood that I will eventually open my own consultancy on the.
69 00:07:58.480 ⇒ 00:07:58.970 Uttam Kumaran: Great.
70 00:07:58.970 ⇒ 00:08:01.020 Dillon Tedesco: Fractional, cro.
71 00:08:01.360 ⇒ 00:08:03.230 Uttam Kumaran: There’s a huge need for that.
72 00:08:03.230 ⇒ 00:08:04.700 Dillon Tedesco: Huge need for that.
73 00:08:04.700 ⇒ 00:08:05.020 Uttam Kumaran: And.
74 00:08:05.020 ⇒ 00:08:24.379 Dillon Tedesco: I have a few, you know, advisory roles and so forth, but they’re kind of hands off check in here and there. But the idea to eventually just kind of have 5 or so clients where I you know I am kind of their head of sales until they are ready to hire is definitely interesting to me. I’m just not ready to do it just yet. I have
75 00:08:24.530 ⇒ 00:08:28.188 Dillon Tedesco: 2 kids under 3. So.
76 00:08:28.920 ⇒ 00:08:31.463 Uttam Kumaran: That’s a different startup. That’s the start out.
77 00:08:31.720 ⇒ 00:08:35.959 Dillon Tedesco: Having the cushiness that comes along with the corporate gig sometimes is is a nice.
78 00:08:35.960 ⇒ 00:08:36.640 Uttam Kumaran: Yes.
79 00:08:36.640 ⇒ 00:08:39.242 Dillon Tedesco: But yeah, look, I think.
80 00:08:39.669 ⇒ 00:08:45.409 Dillon Tedesco: you know what you mentioned in terms of just kind of where you guys are at and what you’re looking to do.
81 00:08:46.790 ⇒ 00:09:09.630 Dillon Tedesco: I have no doubt that as the founder you’re going to be able to go in, regardless of your experience in sales. Go in and sell effectively because you’re the founder, right? You’re well spoken. This is your baby. You’re going to be passionate about it. You’re nobody’s going to sell through the the value and the differentiation of what you bring to the table better than yourself and I
82 00:09:09.870 ⇒ 00:09:21.560 Dillon Tedesco: I had. If I were interviewing somewhere or talking with someone, and I spoke to somebody, to a company who had a founder that refused to do that. I would run for the hills because how.
83 00:09:21.560 ⇒ 00:09:21.920 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah.
84 00:09:21.920 ⇒ 00:09:38.189 Dillon Tedesco: Having the founder, regardless of what their expertise is being willing to go out and knock down some doors themselves, says a lot about the company, and the culture and the the success that I I would expect you to have in the future. So kudos to you, man, because I obviously like if you’re an engineer, that’s not your.
85 00:09:38.190 ⇒ 00:09:40.350 Uttam Kumaran: I know business. Yeah.
86 00:09:40.350 ⇒ 00:09:45.740 Uttam Kumaran: it it took a lot, and it took a lot. But also for me. I realized my job is a run towards the pain.
87 00:09:45.850 ⇒ 00:09:48.989 Uttam Kumaran: you know, and run towards the thing you’re scared about most.
88 00:09:49.560 ⇒ 00:09:53.293 Uttam Kumaran: It’s like a muscle to learn. It’s like a cold plunge basically every day.
89 00:09:54.283 ⇒ 00:09:55.669 Uttam Kumaran: But yeah.
90 00:09:56.521 ⇒ 00:10:06.080 Dillon Tedesco: So yeah, look, I I would say, as far as it comes to scaling sales strategies, understanding
91 00:10:06.450 ⇒ 00:10:19.639 Dillon Tedesco: what metrics are, gonna be important to you. And you know where you guys will probably have a leg up over some others is that you live and die with data. So once you know what data is important.
92 00:10:19.720 ⇒ 00:10:25.190 Dillon Tedesco: and actually know what to do with that data in a sales capacity.
93 00:10:25.430 ⇒ 00:10:30.829 Dillon Tedesco: you’ll shorten your learning curve in terms of sales scalability very quickly. Right? So,
94 00:10:32.650 ⇒ 00:10:45.269 Dillon Tedesco: I’ll give you a a brief kind of background on myself, so you can have a little context. I don’t know what Sheldon shared with you other than Hey, you guys should connect. But you know, I was on the founding team of
95 00:10:45.710 ⇒ 00:10:58.440 Dillon Tedesco: our 1st company, which is pre octopus. That was a dynamic discounting app for restaurants. So we created an algorithm that brought yield management to locally owned restaurants.
96 00:10:58.940 ⇒ 00:11:05.109 Dillon Tedesco: how to couple 1,000 locally owned restaurants, each of which we signed individually. So in terms.
97 00:11:05.440 ⇒ 00:11:13.519 Dillon Tedesco: sales scaling had to create strategies that allowed my team to scale the mid-atlantic
98 00:11:13.590 ⇒ 00:11:40.780 Dillon Tedesco: in mostly small markets without having to hire hundreds of salespeople. As Ftes came up with some strategies that were able to do that, but not before we were able to kind of create a formula that helped us identify the markets that we kind of knew. Very, very specifically, we would be successful in and creating the criteria that we’re gonna allow us to go out and kind of rinse wash, repeat that, and reverse engineer that process.
99 00:11:41.246 ⇒ 00:12:10.299 Dillon Tedesco: During that process what we found a couple of things. One is really really hard to make money on the backs of locally owned restaurants. They don’t pay their bills, they don’t stay open very long they’re attending. They’re going to pay their alcohol supplier and their food supplier and their paper supplier before they pay the discount guys. So while we had a lot of traction. We raised a good bit of money. We were having a really hard time, one making that money back, and 2
100 00:12:10.310 ⇒ 00:12:17.610 Dillon Tedesco: finding users of our app on non Facebook, related channels.
101 00:12:18.054 ⇒ 00:12:24.209 Dillon Tedesco: We would do like a Metro takeover, and it would cost us $75,000,
102 00:12:24.570 ⇒ 00:12:37.159 Dillon Tedesco: and we’d have no idea how many people we reached, how successful it is or anything we do. Radio hits. We do TV, we do bus raps all of the non or all of the very traditional media formats.
103 00:12:37.230 ⇒ 00:12:50.150 Dillon Tedesco: So during that process, we were like, Well, we’re when we do do these things. The only thing we see are like we get some downloads. And those downloads typically come from people in the suburbs. And they’re like 55 years old, because that’s who watches cable television.
104 00:12:50.390 ⇒ 00:12:56.279 Dillon Tedesco: So we started to think, okay, outside of Facebook, outside of Instagram, where is the 30 year old that eats
105 00:12:56.310 ⇒ 00:13:02.249 Dillon Tedesco: out 4 or 5 times a week? Well, they’re taking. They live in Major Metros, and they take Uber and Lyft to get there.
106 00:13:02.390 ⇒ 00:13:22.680 Dillon Tedesco: So we created an Mvp. Product of tablets. We put those we literally went out ourselves and recruited a handful of drivers and like, Hey, can you just put this in your car? It’s free. Your your passengers will like it, and we started to see the right kinds of results. Everything was trackable, everything was measurable. So we modeled that out
107 00:13:23.400 ⇒ 00:13:38.740 Dillon Tedesco: of what that actual business could look like at scale. We went to our investors, said we had a few 1 million bucks left from our series, a of our other business. We’d like to pivot and use that money to start this new idea, and.
108 00:13:38.740 ⇒ 00:13:39.340 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah.
109 00:13:39.340 ⇒ 00:13:44.152 Dillon Tedesco: And they kind of saw the writing on the wall, and they they let us do it. And
110 00:13:44.450 ⇒ 00:13:52.210 Dillon Tedesco: The I actually forget. I think we hired Sheldon after the fact. But you know, at that point in time we transitioned
111 00:13:52.230 ⇒ 00:13:55.579 Dillon Tedesco: to what became known as octopus interactive
112 00:13:55.983 ⇒ 00:13:59.620 Dillon Tedesco: and launched that business, and that went from, you know.
113 00:13:59.780 ⇒ 00:14:07.830 Dillon Tedesco: $0 in revenue to a 14 million dollar arr. By the time we were acquired in in january 22
114 00:14:08.404 ⇒ 00:14:15.859 Dillon Tedesco: and it it took a lot of creativity. And how how could we learn from our mistakes around
115 00:14:16.210 ⇒ 00:14:21.009 Dillon Tedesco: being a startup, a growth startup? And prior and this time around being.
116 00:14:21.130 ⇒ 00:14:25.749 Dillon Tedesco: you know, prioritizing operational profitability from day one
117 00:14:26.691 ⇒ 00:14:44.320 Dillon Tedesco: so you know, creating those strategies around, kind of go to Mark, go to market launch partnerships, packages, finding out who those anchor partners are creating referral partnerships. All of that, you know, kind of ran through, you know most of what I did.
118 00:14:44.440 ⇒ 00:14:55.750 Dillon Tedesco: And then, once we got acquired by T-mobile, T-mobile at the time, was already doing about 300 million dollars in an ads business on an annual basis. They had a pretty big ads. Business.
119 00:14:56.170 ⇒ 00:15:03.989 Dillon Tedesco: had no idea where that money was coming from, what they were good at, what they were bad at who was doing what I mean. It was a totally it was.
120 00:15:04.000 ⇒ 00:15:09.359 Dillon Tedesco: It was a a high rise, built on quicksand, like they just had no.
121 00:15:09.360 ⇒ 00:15:11.499 Uttam Kumaran: And what were their, what were their ad products?
122 00:15:11.710 ⇒ 00:15:25.442 Dillon Tedesco: So T-mobile advertising solutions is fully built from acquisition. They acquired a company called Push Spring a few years before us, which used maids to to use 1st party data to target
123 00:15:26.360 ⇒ 00:15:28.220 Dillon Tedesco: when we got there.
124 00:15:28.230 ⇒ 00:15:40.719 Dillon Tedesco: Essentially, the product was an audience network using T-mobile audience data based on app ownership and app usage data. So T-mobile could go to a brand and say.
125 00:15:41.300 ⇒ 00:15:46.140 Dillon Tedesco: Hey, Starbucks, would you like to target dormant Duncan users?
126 00:15:46.648 ⇒ 00:15:52.549 Dillon Tedesco: Who have the Duncan app on their phone, but they stopped using it, which means they may be ripe for a switch
127 00:15:52.630 ⇒ 00:16:02.540 Dillon Tedesco: so we can create an audience based on users, and we can target them on Ctv on display, on Youtube, etc, and so on and so forth.
128 00:16:02.550 ⇒ 00:16:11.059 Dillon Tedesco: Then we had an app install product which allowed us to go to any app who well qualified app, who wanted to drive app installs. It was a.
129 00:16:11.400 ⇒ 00:16:16.310 Dillon Tedesco: you know, full performance, based product, and essentially say, when somebody
130 00:16:16.760 ⇒ 00:16:24.820 Dillon Tedesco: opens up their new Android T-mobile phone, they will be prompted to download the app during the setup process.
131 00:16:24.820 ⇒ 00:16:28.980 Uttam Kumaran: Great product. Yeah, there was the other app install tracking
132 00:16:30.200 ⇒ 00:16:32.656 Uttam Kumaran: a bunch of work with them at Floco, too. They’re called
133 00:16:34.705 ⇒ 00:16:35.450 Dillon Tedesco: Unity.
134 00:16:35.450 ⇒ 00:16:40.220 Uttam Kumaran: I don’t know if it was sure I forgot, but based
135 00:16:41.890 ⇒ 00:16:49.319 Uttam Kumaran: that’s and early in flow code we were almost an agency. Some partners that we had an app called weather bug that was using us to help track their like.
136 00:16:49.470 ⇒ 00:16:52.690 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah, we were doing installs tracking to them.
137 00:16:53.106 ⇒ 00:16:56.310 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah. Very familiar with with all that. But that’s a great product. That’s.
138 00:16:56.310 ⇒ 00:17:03.019 Dillon Tedesco: So so they had, those 2, and then they acquired octopus to get get into out of home.
139 00:17:03.170 ⇒ 00:17:03.680 Uttam Kumaran: I see.
140 00:17:04.044 ⇒ 00:17:09.390 Dillon Tedesco: We had a partnership with them for 2 years, leading up to the acquisition which I managed.
141 00:17:09.609 ⇒ 00:17:12.635 Dillon Tedesco: They effectively served as our
142 00:17:13.819 ⇒ 00:17:23.849 Dillon Tedesco: programmatic reseller team. So my team more specifically focused on creating really deep, fully integrated
143 00:17:23.910 ⇒ 00:17:38.192 Dillon Tedesco: creative brand activation. So like, Hey, Red Bull, we’re gonna build you a red Bull branded pac-man game that’s fully interactive on our screens. They’re not gonna get that from anywhere else, certainly not what we could do for them.
144 00:17:38.750 ⇒ 00:17:39.830 Dillon Tedesco: And then
145 00:17:40.190 ⇒ 00:17:50.029 Dillon Tedesco: the T-mobile team. You know, they had 35 sellers. Nationally, they had the T-mobile umbrella of credibility. So they went out. And essentially, you know, we’re our partners there.
146 00:17:50.540 ⇒ 00:17:57.739 Dillon Tedesco: And then we got acquired. When we got acquired I came in and took over leading our revenue Operations division
147 00:17:58.170 ⇒ 00:18:00.310 Dillon Tedesco: more or less building it from the ground up.
148 00:18:00.490 ⇒ 00:18:04.060 Dillon Tedesco: understanding our revenue. What our forecast was.
149 00:18:04.450 ⇒ 00:18:12.229 Dillon Tedesco: all of the operational levers that we could pull to make ourselves more efficient. In terms of not only revenue
150 00:18:12.500 ⇒ 00:18:22.520 Dillon Tedesco: productivity, but also internally like, how do we get shit done? How do we get things through legal? How do we get things through invoicing. How do we bill our clients so on and so forth.
151 00:18:23.075 ⇒ 00:18:32.500 Dillon Tedesco: And then, you know, as that evolved really led, led it down a path of intelligence. You know. What? Where, where do we get smarter in our sales efforts?
152 00:18:32.879 ⇒ 00:18:49.880 Dillon Tedesco: You know, where do we fail? Where do we? Typically over over index and success, and then taking that information down to the individual seller and and communicating and educating them on. Hey? Did you know that you’re the best on the team at getting meetings.
153 00:18:50.370 ⇒ 00:18:54.899 Dillon Tedesco: But you’re the worst on the team of getting the meeting to the proposal stage.
154 00:18:54.900 ⇒ 00:18:55.240 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah.
155 00:18:55.240 ⇒ 00:19:01.280 Dillon Tedesco: So let’s spend some time coaching you up on asking for business at the end of a meeting.
156 00:19:01.460 ⇒ 00:19:07.283 Dillon Tedesco: and vice versa. Go to somebody who best proposal
157 00:19:08.330 ⇒ 00:19:19.009 Dillon Tedesco: stage rate at on the team right tons of proposals, but the lowest win rate or middle of the pack and win rate. All right? Are you asking for too much business? Are you.
158 00:19:19.020 ⇒ 00:19:28.599 Uttam Kumaran: Under qualifying someone and getting to that point, and just being like, Oh, let’s just put a proposal together and forcing the issue without properly qualifying the opportunity.
159 00:19:28.940 ⇒ 00:19:41.399 Dillon Tedesco: Let’s talk about. You know what an appropriate qualification process looks like in order to boost your win rate. So it was a lot of that, and then taking that information. And then, you know.
160 00:19:41.410 ⇒ 00:19:44.600 Dillon Tedesco: delegating it out to actual sales leadership
161 00:19:44.630 ⇒ 00:19:55.888 Dillon Tedesco: so that they could influence the overall strategy with with that that data. So that’s a lot of what I’ve done. Now, I’m at Simon Property Group, where I lead our
162 00:19:56.510 ⇒ 00:19:59.129 Dillon Tedesco: omni-channel retail media team.
163 00:19:59.500 ⇒ 00:20:00.040 Uttam Kumaran: Great.
164 00:20:00.180 ⇒ 00:20:01.799 Dillon Tedesco: Are you familiar with Simon at all?
165 00:20:01.800 ⇒ 00:20:05.159 Uttam Kumaran: Yes, yes, and I’m familiar, you know. I’ve been reading a lot about the networks.
166 00:20:05.250 ⇒ 00:20:06.400 Uttam Kumaran: A friend of mine worked.
167 00:20:06.510 ⇒ 00:20:11.070 Uttam Kumaran: Both told me a lot about like their program there. And yeah, super familiar with
168 00:20:11.180 ⇒ 00:20:14.270 Uttam Kumaran: diamond, like the the malls and outlet malls.
169 00:20:14.270 ⇒ 00:20:23.039 Dillon Tedesco: Yeah. So so for the last 20 years they’ve had, you know, fully scaled in Mall network of screens, mostly digital out of home, out of home.
170 00:20:23.624 ⇒ 00:20:29.395 Dillon Tedesco: Has been largely successful. It’s about a hundred 70 million dollar business.
171 00:20:30.330 ⇒ 00:20:35.329 Dillon Tedesco: but it’s very transactional. Just go out. Wait for an Rfp. Here’s how many impressions.
172 00:20:35.330 ⇒ 00:20:35.890 Uttam Kumaran: Hmm.
173 00:20:35.890 ⇒ 00:20:39.110 Dillon Tedesco: Here. Here’s how many screens we can sell you and boom! Boom.
174 00:20:39.280 ⇒ 00:20:42.279 Dillon Tedesco: So you know, part of my job is to
175 00:20:42.510 ⇒ 00:20:45.260 Dillon Tedesco: take our 1st party shopper data which we.
176 00:20:45.260 ⇒ 00:20:45.720 Uttam Kumaran: Nice.
177 00:20:45.720 ⇒ 00:20:49.289 Dillon Tedesco: Variety of sources, and then be able to curate that.
178 00:20:49.430 ⇒ 00:21:00.350 Dillon Tedesco: to expand our reach beyond when somebody’s inside of a physical property, and you know, reach that that shopper when they’re watching TV when they’re online, etc.
179 00:21:00.613 ⇒ 00:21:06.169 Dillon Tedesco: and then the next phase of that is, how do we connect the 2. How do we get? How do we get a brand to buy
180 00:21:06.570 ⇒ 00:21:14.520 Dillon Tedesco: digital audience targeting? And in Mall simultaneously and then measure it effectively. So you’re getting one cohesive package of
181 00:21:14.670 ⇒ 00:21:19.260 Dillon Tedesco: I did these 2 products, and the result was.
182 00:21:19.260 ⇒ 00:21:19.590 Uttam Kumaran: Yes.
183 00:21:19.890 ⇒ 00:21:26.557 Dillon Tedesco: Across the board. So we’re we’re getting there as you, you know, as I alluded to
184 00:21:27.750 ⇒ 00:21:40.180 Dillon Tedesco: getting shit done at a big company, especially a reit, is really really hard and really, really slow. So we’re we’re getting there. It’s it’s been a little bit more painful than I was hoping it would be.
185 00:21:40.180 ⇒ 00:21:47.470 Uttam Kumaran: That’s a huge. That’s a huge business. By the way, like I’m that’s surprising. I mean, I I see the screens, and I see that over the years, like, I know that
186 00:21:47.520 ⇒ 00:21:51.021 Uttam Kumaran: there’s been some work on that like when I go to the store and see them.
187 00:21:51.300 ⇒ 00:21:52.890 Uttam Kumaran: But that’s awesome. Yeah.
188 00:21:55.163 ⇒ 00:22:01.616 Dillon Tedesco: Yeah. So that’s that’s kinda so you get an understanding of kind of where I sit, what I’ve been able to do
189 00:22:02.170 ⇒ 00:22:04.915 Dillon Tedesco: So I guess I’ll pass it back to you.
190 00:22:05.690 ⇒ 00:22:27.219 Dillon Tedesco: yeah, I’m happy to chat whenever you want, and just have. You can have a friend in your corner, and you can vent and do whatever you need to do, because I’ve probably been there in some capacity. But I’ve also, you know, always open to other other. You know, relationships that you know, are maybe a little bit more formal, so I don’t know what your expectations were of this call other.
191 00:22:27.220 ⇒ 00:22:28.230 Uttam Kumaran: Oh, yeah.
192 00:22:29.310 ⇒ 00:22:41.910 Uttam Kumaran: yeah, on one hand. You know. For me, it’s I always try to meet people that are 2 or 3 levels ahead of us like not really directly meeting peers, but also not directly meeting the people that are just like the
193 00:22:42.060 ⇒ 00:22:48.829 Uttam Kumaran: the next step. It’s like people who have done it successfully from 0. I think. One. It’s just as you mentioned like, how do we accelerate
194 00:22:48.870 ⇒ 00:22:55.910 Uttam Kumaran: learnings? I think definitely this next year we’re really thinking about going from this sort of small organization.
195 00:22:56.730 ⇒ 00:22:59.710 Uttam Kumaran: Have a couple of clients. I’m no longer working on client stuff.
196 00:22:59.820 ⇒ 00:23:02.629 Uttam Kumaran: I’m spending a lot more time on sales. We’re really almost trying
197 00:23:03.397 ⇒ 00:23:20.920 Uttam Kumaran: like triple our annual revenue, and we have some clear goals on how to do that. We have a great recruiting pipeline to fulfill that demand. And really, right now is, we’re we’re a mode of like, we have our leads tracked. We have the channels. They came through the stages. We we’re accumulating all that data.
198 00:23:20.920 ⇒ 00:23:33.839 Uttam Kumaran: I think the biggest thing for me is just trying to get as many people on our side with, like on the advice. And how do we actually, what are the if we were to do 2 things this month? What do they need to be? Because I think
199 00:23:33.840 ⇒ 00:23:42.489 Uttam Kumaran: you know you as just as sure as you know like, hey, I can only play play a couple of games at a time, you know I have to sleep.
200 00:23:43.351 ⇒ 00:23:52.939 Uttam Kumaran: And so for me, it’s knowing what the right games are, and of course, pride every pride. We’re doing cold. We have partnerships. We have referral some stuff that were some stuff that didn’t.
201 00:23:53.280 ⇒ 00:23:55.560 Uttam Kumaran: Of course, non stuff is like
202 00:23:56.240 ⇒ 00:24:05.930 Uttam Kumaran: that was more formal than others, but it’s really trying to nail on like, what are the things that the highest leverage think that we should think about? Or what’s the path to figuring that out?
203 00:24:06.418 ⇒ 00:24:09.450 Uttam Kumaran: I think that’s what’s you know, most important
204 00:24:09.470 ⇒ 00:24:11.589 Uttam Kumaran: to us, like we have the ability to execute.
205 00:24:11.750 ⇒ 00:24:14.170 Uttam Kumaran: I think our risk
206 00:24:14.964 ⇒ 00:24:20.625 Uttam Kumaran: not executing the right thing and and not and like it’s an endurance game, you know, for us.
207 00:24:21.620 ⇒ 00:24:27.260 Dillon Tedesco: Yeah, look, man, your your early days, and you know there’s no
208 00:24:27.980 ⇒ 00:24:30.119 Dillon Tedesco: there’s no silver bullet for sales.
209 00:24:31.007 ⇒ 00:24:38.740 Dillon Tedesco: And whatever your you could have a cold outreach strategy that’s going gangbusters today and tomorrow
210 00:24:38.990 ⇒ 00:24:49.929 Dillon Tedesco: it just goes cold. Right? I mean, that’s the nature of the beast. I I think you know, having multiple things going at once, always learning, collecting that data.
211 00:24:50.670 ⇒ 00:25:06.930 Dillon Tedesco: creating a Frankenstein’s monster from some of those those strategies is, you know. Well, honestly, it’s something I’ve used frequently. Where, hey? A part of this worked and a part of that worked, and if you put them together now, you have something a little a little stronger, but
212 00:25:06.950 ⇒ 00:25:32.871 Dillon Tedesco: it sounds like you’re doing all the right things, and you have the right mindset of around what the the growth trajectory needs to be and like, yeah, look, I, I like having smart people in my corner, too. And just, you know, people to chat with and learn from and you know, if there’s scenarios where he’s like, Hey, I’m a little stuck on a sales thing. Yeah, I’m always happy to chat. You know a friend of Sheldon is a friend of mine. But
213 00:25:33.430 ⇒ 00:25:35.169 Dillon Tedesco: I would say also.
214 00:25:35.400 ⇒ 00:25:42.060 Dillon Tedesco: it’s the one thing that has always kind of been a foundation of any sales team I’ve I’ve run
215 00:25:42.913 ⇒ 00:25:47.650 Dillon Tedesco: has been consistency across the team.
216 00:25:47.860 ⇒ 00:25:48.450 Uttam Kumaran: Okay.
217 00:25:48.450 ⇒ 00:25:53.160 Dillon Tedesco: You know you’re the founder. You’re gonna have a different
218 00:25:53.930 ⇒ 00:25:57.479 Dillon Tedesco: pizzazz to your pitch, because you’re the founder.
219 00:25:58.210 ⇒ 00:26:02.620 Dillon Tedesco: But finding people that can replicate that passion.
220 00:26:02.980 ⇒ 00:26:03.530 Uttam Kumaran: Sure.
221 00:26:03.800 ⇒ 00:26:09.349 Dillon Tedesco: Is is gonna be really instrumental early on, and like just people, that the the
222 00:26:09.480 ⇒ 00:26:11.530 Dillon Tedesco: the care and the passion
223 00:26:11.950 ⇒ 00:26:22.389 Dillon Tedesco: that you have because this is your baby finding people that have that like mindedness, is pivotal in the early days, because you don’t have the credibility left yet
224 00:26:22.480 ⇒ 00:26:27.270 Dillon Tedesco: regardless if you’re a data provider, and it’s, you know, black and white. At the end of the day.
225 00:26:27.270 ⇒ 00:26:30.740 Uttam Kumaran: We’re we’re manufacturing that at the moment. Yeah.
226 00:26:30.740 ⇒ 00:26:38.760 Dillon Tedesco: So the the credibility is is going to take time. And new Logos will do that over time. Case studies will do that.
227 00:26:38.880 ⇒ 00:26:44.569 Dillon Tedesco: But at the end of the day there’s some big companies in the space. They may not do exactly what you do, but they’re they’re out there.
228 00:26:44.570 ⇒ 00:26:45.070 Uttam Kumaran: Totally.
229 00:26:45.070 ⇒ 00:26:45.719 Dillon Tedesco: And
230 00:26:46.670 ⇒ 00:26:52.840 Dillon Tedesco: a lot of the time people will just buy from, so they’ll give somebody a chance if it’s a reasonable ask.
231 00:26:52.890 ⇒ 00:26:55.199 Dillon Tedesco: So you know, having
232 00:26:55.250 ⇒ 00:27:13.080 Dillon Tedesco: being willing to test with clients, being willing to give a little bit in the early days. And then having the people that are behind behind the vision that are going to go out and sell it and they’re not just selling it because it’s something to sell. That’ll go a long way.
233 00:27:14.110 ⇒ 00:27:24.619 Dillon Tedesco: So there’s that consistency. And if I ask you, and if I ask your sales rep, and I ask your Vp. Of sales, and I ask another engineer. Hey? Tell me about Brainforge.
234 00:27:24.880 ⇒ 00:27:28.650 Dillon Tedesco: The response across the board is pretty similar, right.
235 00:27:28.650 ⇒ 00:27:29.370 Uttam Kumaran: Sure.
236 00:27:30.450 ⇒ 00:27:34.300 Dillon Tedesco: And then second of that is objection handling.
237 00:27:34.750 ⇒ 00:27:35.150 Uttam Kumaran: Okay.
238 00:27:35.150 ⇒ 00:27:43.799 Dillon Tedesco: I hammered objection, handling with every single salesperson I’ve ever spent time with and trained.
239 00:27:44.449 ⇒ 00:27:54.649 Dillon Tedesco: There is an art to it where you can defend your turf without coming across as defensive.
240 00:27:54.790 ⇒ 00:27:55.340 Uttam Kumaran: Test.
241 00:27:55.340 ⇒ 00:27:55.715 Dillon Tedesco: Right.
242 00:27:56.210 ⇒ 00:28:08.179 Dillon Tedesco: and that that comes with confidence. And that comes with expertise. Knowing the industry inside and out, knowing your direct competitors and being able like
243 00:28:08.300 ⇒ 00:28:10.410 Dillon Tedesco: when it was octopus.
244 00:28:10.910 ⇒ 00:28:16.489 Dillon Tedesco: I could tell somebody more about my competitor than if they got on the phone with said competitor.
245 00:28:16.900 ⇒ 00:28:27.100 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah, no, I mean, I’m the same way with every about like 3 for me, whatever question I’ve I’ve
246 00:28:27.300 ⇒ 00:28:28.740 Uttam Kumaran: those folks before.
247 00:28:29.017 ⇒ 00:28:33.139 Uttam Kumaran: So it’s super super clear to me, but I totally see what you mean. Like keeping
248 00:28:33.270 ⇒ 00:28:35.199 Uttam Kumaran: track of like those objections.
249 00:28:35.200 ⇒ 00:28:40.499 Dillon Tedesco: You’re creating that repository, creating that that sales Bible
250 00:28:41.088 ⇒ 00:28:52.599 Dillon Tedesco: that serves as the foundation for the team, that they can always go back and reference. It. It creates really good habits from the from the beginning. So if I was just
251 00:28:52.690 ⇒ 00:29:00.870 Dillon Tedesco: going into a new place, starting from day one, obviously I’d want to learn everything and anything about the company and the product. And once I did.
252 00:29:01.410 ⇒ 00:29:07.800 Dillon Tedesco: what is, what is that forward facing, messaging, that anytime somebody asks whether I’m at a dinner party.
253 00:29:08.000 ⇒ 00:29:13.680 Dillon Tedesco: a bar, an elevator, a lobby. Somebody says, Oh, what do? What do you do?
254 00:29:14.280 ⇒ 00:29:16.680 Dillon Tedesco: I work at Brainforge, and we do.
255 00:29:16.970 ⇒ 00:29:24.250 Dillon Tedesco: And and then, if you’re in a sales pitch, it’s Oh, well, is that similar to X.
256 00:29:25.190 ⇒ 00:29:29.200 Dillon Tedesco: Knowing how to answer that, and then keeping the conversation
257 00:29:29.230 ⇒ 00:29:33.240 Dillon Tedesco: going. I I refer to it as absorb and deflect. You know.
258 00:29:33.240 ⇒ 00:29:33.770 Uttam Kumaran: Yes.
259 00:29:33.770 ⇒ 00:29:39.069 Dillon Tedesco: You gotta acknowledge it. Because if you don’t, you know there, you just not answer my question.
260 00:29:39.890 ⇒ 00:29:43.310 Dillon Tedesco: And if you can say, like, Yeah, absolutely.
261 00:29:43.890 ⇒ 00:29:46.560 Dillon Tedesco: Boom, boom! All right! And back to this.
262 00:29:46.560 ⇒ 00:29:47.060 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah.
263 00:29:47.060 ⇒ 00:30:05.929 Dillon Tedesco: And keep it going. So like those those are just, you know. It comes with confidence. It comes with time and experience, but it incorporating that into kind of what the sales culture is which will inevitably different, be different than some of the other parts of your business
264 00:30:06.210 ⇒ 00:30:08.990 Dillon Tedesco: that that has always helped me win. It’s always helpful.
265 00:30:08.990 ⇒ 00:30:16.240 Uttam Kumaran: Speaking about speaking about that in particular. I know we have just a minute. Are there any in terms of process for your team like right now.
266 00:30:16.760 ⇒ 00:30:23.579 Uttam Kumaran: 2 of us that are selling we were gonna think about probably the next 2 quarters bringing someone dedicated
267 00:30:23.600 ⇒ 00:30:25.440 Uttam Kumaran: to just do outbound
268 00:30:25.991 ⇒ 00:30:47.440 Uttam Kumaran: and like, take meetings and qualify. Are there any other kick processes like? If you were to only have like couple of meetings to book a week that you would do right. Now. We have a daily leads meeting where we just talk about everything in process. Of course, there’s probably something again I’m used to on the engineering side. You have some sort of like retro on how stuff went some sort of planning like, can you just think about like.
269 00:30:47.460 ⇒ 00:30:55.999 Uttam Kumaran: or if you can give me a sense of like what’s worked or and or what holes to not fall into, because I’m also not. I’m also opposed to just having like a hundred meetings
270 00:30:56.020 ⇒ 00:30:59.990 Uttam Kumaran: for meeting stake, because I want people to kind of fail and try stuff. So.
271 00:31:00.220 ⇒ 00:31:03.496 Dillon Tedesco: Yeah, I mean, I would make sure that those meetings are with
272 00:31:04.290 ⇒ 00:31:16.750 Dillon Tedesco: lower tier, like, figure out some practice practice versions where like, if they don’t buy or they rip you a new one. It’s they, you know. It’s not that huge deal. As far as process goes.
273 00:31:17.050 ⇒ 00:31:25.710 Dillon Tedesco: You know, there’s gonna be numbers that you want to pay close attention to and numbers that you don’t. I? I am personally, never someone that thinks that
274 00:31:25.810 ⇒ 00:31:32.970 Dillon Tedesco: the amount of emails and the amount of meetings. And you know the amount of calls that you make
275 00:31:33.060 ⇒ 00:31:38.330 Dillon Tedesco: should be a number that anybody in leadership pays attention to.
276 00:31:38.340 ⇒ 00:31:41.679 Dillon Tedesco: because everybody’s different. Right? There’s people that
277 00:31:42.030 ⇒ 00:31:47.530 Dillon Tedesco: you know you have a number, and that’s the number that you need to hit. How you get there.
278 00:31:48.040 ⇒ 00:32:00.519 Dillon Tedesco: You should be coached, and it should. You should look at it at an individual micro level. But at the macro, you know you and leadership. You need to know what you got to at the at that number.
279 00:32:01.440 ⇒ 00:32:09.040 Dillon Tedesco: I think there’s a couple of version you know, flavors of that. I would say that
280 00:32:11.270 ⇒ 00:32:18.449 Dillon Tedesco: understanding and really understanding where your strengths are in terms of
281 00:32:18.620 ⇒ 00:32:31.359 Dillon Tedesco: product offering to category is gonna be really important because it’ll keep you from wasting time in areas that just probably don’t make a lot of sense. They did historically, don’t buy this kind of stuff.
282 00:32:31.843 ⇒ 00:32:36.170 Dillon Tedesco: They don’t have the right person to even evaluate it. So.
283 00:32:36.230 ⇒ 00:32:44.949 Dillon Tedesco: taking the time upfront to do the appropriate level of prospecting, so that when you do the outreach it’s personalized right.
284 00:32:44.950 ⇒ 00:32:45.470 Uttam Kumaran: Okay.
285 00:32:45.470 ⇒ 00:32:56.569 Dillon Tedesco: If if you are getting into volume games and and trying to do a ton of outreach, and we gotta hit this. Many people as opposed to.
286 00:32:57.260 ⇒ 00:33:03.919 Dillon Tedesco: I’m gonna take my time and find 20 or 30 just perfect
287 00:33:04.060 ⇒ 00:33:16.510 Dillon Tedesco: brands or or teams at those brands or companies that I’m going to reach out to and then take the time to really craft personalized outreach that is leading with value.
288 00:33:16.560 ⇒ 00:33:23.709 Dillon Tedesco: leading with a specific problem that in all likelihood they are facing and make it specific to them.
289 00:33:24.540 ⇒ 00:33:31.040 Dillon Tedesco: Your, the ratio of email to meetings to closing Will Skyrocket, because
290 00:33:31.560 ⇒ 00:33:42.839 Dillon Tedesco: because the upfront effort is being done, you know, liken it to watching film. If you’re an athlete, right? You’re doing the upfront effort, so that when you get into the real situation you know exactly what’s coming.
291 00:33:43.216 ⇒ 00:33:46.519 Dillon Tedesco: You know, when when I’m training a team, it’s
292 00:33:47.520 ⇒ 00:33:49.829 Dillon Tedesco: find out who you want to email.
293 00:33:50.190 ⇒ 00:33:53.569 Dillon Tedesco: And on the second screen of your desk
294 00:33:53.690 ⇒ 00:33:56.429 Dillon Tedesco: have their Linkedin page in front of you.
295 00:33:56.890 ⇒ 00:34:06.919 Dillon Tedesco: Look at their face while you are writing that email as if you were talking to that person. Look at! Look at their last most recent post. Find out what they’re talking about
296 00:34:06.940 ⇒ 00:34:12.129 Dillon Tedesco: on Linkedin. See what their about me section has to say
297 00:34:12.230 ⇒ 00:34:17.949 Dillon Tedesco: like in my Linkedin, like I have a very personal story about, you know something my dad taught me.
298 00:34:18.679 ⇒ 00:34:33.829 Dillon Tedesco: I’ve never not answered an email that somebody referenced like, Hey, that message is awesome. Man like it works. It’s cheesy. It’s cliche to just be like, look at the person’s picture while you write an email about them. But it does go a long way, because now you’re you’re not just
299 00:34:33.840 ⇒ 00:34:38.570 Dillon Tedesco: writing a blind email off to the ether about somebody you’ve never thought about before.
300 00:34:39.136 ⇒ 00:34:45.730 Dillon Tedesco: So it’s just that. It’s a rambling way to say when you’re prospecting, put in the work upfront.
301 00:34:45.850 ⇒ 00:34:52.439 Dillon Tedesco: Think about the exact situation where that individual would find value from your offering
302 00:34:54.570 ⇒ 00:34:57.570 Dillon Tedesco: and then have more meaningful conversations around that.
303 00:34:57.760 ⇒ 00:35:01.120 Dillon Tedesco: Now one thing for consistency sake.
304 00:35:02.292 ⇒ 00:35:08.960 Dillon Tedesco: Especially early on figure out 4 or 5 components
305 00:35:09.230 ⇒ 00:35:13.190 Dillon Tedesco: of each conversation, whether it’s a discovery call or a meeting
306 00:35:13.860 ⇒ 00:35:19.920 Dillon Tedesco: that your yourself or the rest of your team needs to take away and make it a requirement. Right?
307 00:35:20.000 ⇒ 00:35:24.320 Dillon Tedesco: For me, it was typically pain, power, value, vision and control.
308 00:35:24.760 ⇒ 00:35:28.250 Dillon Tedesco: Right? So what’s the pain point? Who’s in charge?
309 00:35:28.520 ⇒ 00:35:31.989 Dillon Tedesco: What’s the value to them or us. It can be both
310 00:35:32.350 ⇒ 00:35:41.050 Dillon Tedesco: vision. Did they buy in? Or do I need to spend time to re-engineer that vision and control? What is the next step. Who is it left with?
311 00:35:41.190 ⇒ 00:35:43.829 Dillon Tedesco: Do they have the buying power? So
312 00:35:43.860 ⇒ 00:35:46.090 Dillon Tedesco: it doesn’t have to be that that’s
313 00:35:46.724 ⇒ 00:36:02.319 Dillon Tedesco: pretty tried and true version of solution selling. There’s a lot of different flavors. Do some research figure out which one you like or make your own up. But as long as there’s some consistency. And you, you know, in your Crm, if you’re using one
314 00:36:02.440 ⇒ 00:36:06.732 Dillon Tedesco: that’s in there and it’s tracked, and it’s reportable.
315 00:36:07.440 ⇒ 00:36:14.519 Dillon Tedesco: that’s gonna save you a lot of heartache down the road, because the last thing you want to do is
316 00:36:14.970 ⇒ 00:36:26.160 Dillon Tedesco: not be able to kind of consolidate your efforts when you are doing some deeper analysis. Right? Hey? I want to go through and just do a query of everybody that ever mentioned price
317 00:36:26.370 ⇒ 00:36:39.499 Dillon Tedesco: you just go through and you can pinpoint it, and then you can sit down with your team and say, Okay, every single one of these guys said that if it, if all all things were even Price was the issue. All right. Well, let’s talk about a strategy to go back to them
318 00:36:40.160 ⇒ 00:36:45.280 Dillon Tedesco: right? So there’s there’s a lot that you can learn from deploying. Some of these.
319 00:36:45.640 ⇒ 00:36:50.740 Dillon Tedesco: Call them levers early on and you can kind of go from there.
320 00:36:51.080 ⇒ 00:36:54.549 Uttam Kumaran: Okay, that’s super helpful. We are doing a lot of tracking and
321 00:36:54.830 ⇒ 00:36:59.579 Uttam Kumaran: lot of stuff with AI on the tracking side to like all of our meetings get recorded, and we’ve kind of
322 00:37:00.070 ⇒ 00:37:02.640 Uttam Kumaran: do as much that little as possible.
323 00:37:03.326 ⇒ 00:37:08.590 Uttam Kumaran: But total set up having for every every bit.
324 00:37:08.840 ⇒ 00:37:09.670 Dillon Tedesco: Have, a.
325 00:37:10.230 ⇒ 00:37:12.930 Uttam Kumaran: End up with some sort of artifact that we can
326 00:37:13.200 ⇒ 00:37:20.840 Uttam Kumaran: kind of back on her back on right now. We but of course.
327 00:37:20.840 ⇒ 00:37:27.399 Dillon Tedesco: Keep breaking, coming in and out. I don’t know if it’s picking up on your headphones. There.
328 00:37:29.040 ⇒ 00:37:30.830 Uttam Kumaran: Have an hour better.
329 00:37:31.160 ⇒ 00:37:32.340 Dillon Tedesco: That’s better. Yeah.
330 00:37:32.480 ⇒ 00:37:42.050 Uttam Kumaran: Okay, sorry. It was just coming through the headphones. It’s a better. Let me just leave it on. No, I said, what what you said about trying to have that consistency and basically
331 00:37:42.090 ⇒ 00:38:00.970 Uttam Kumaran: create that framework after every single lead is super super helpful. And then again, for me, I’m quickly trying to identify what our process is and what our process isn’t, so that when I evaluate someone to come take over, we have something clear I can’t like. I can’t throw that person into something, especially on the sales side, where they’re not like set up for success.
332 00:38:01.379 ⇒ 00:38:07.149 Uttam Kumaran: Especially. I know how systematic the sales thing is. So I wanna make sure that they have
333 00:38:07.240 ⇒ 00:38:18.450 Uttam Kumaran: everything they need, or at least as much as like I know, so that they can take that and then begin to build before we make an investment on, you know, a full person doing it. So we’re close on that
334 00:38:19.650 ⇒ 00:38:29.627 Uttam Kumaran: but it’s hard. And then, yeah, we’ve done some stuff with like spray. And pray outbound some stuff, works some stuff I get pissed off because we mess up the messaging or something.
335 00:38:29.950 ⇒ 00:38:41.089 Uttam Kumaran: it’s tough, because I just don’t have cash to like, get someone to spend like that much time per lead. But there are some areas where we see that there is a need. And then I could almost be like they turn off.
336 00:38:41.690 ⇒ 00:38:47.579 Uttam Kumaran: Then let’s go like, do more direct approach. We see that. So the outbound is working.
337 00:38:47.870 ⇒ 00:38:53.209 Dillon Tedesco: Is what? What’s your outbound in general? Is it? Is it
338 00:38:53.320 ⇒ 00:38:56.750 Dillon Tedesco: email? I mean, it’s, I’m sure it’s email based. But is it?
339 00:38:57.700 ⇒ 00:39:02.509 Dillon Tedesco: Are you leading with like? Here’s a white paper. Here’s a case study, is it?
340 00:39:02.510 ⇒ 00:39:15.300 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah. So we typically like once, we have a particular like, for example, we did some work for Vitaco. Now, when we’re going after beverage companies. We basically say, Hey, we just solve this key problem for Vitaco. They had the stock out issue
341 00:39:15.300 ⇒ 00:39:38.399 Uttam Kumaran: would love to tell you more about it. We didn’t. We basically have also gone to target like wherever we implemented solution, find other companies that are there that probably need this. And then we kind of create a list of the people there and then we send this messaging to them. So we do have a super clear value prop like a super clear like name, dropping somebody and then saying like, Hey, we’d love to give you a trial the solution, or just tell you more about it.
342 00:39:38.996 ⇒ 00:39:41.359 Uttam Kumaran: I would say the messaging is pretty good, and and.
343 00:39:41.360 ⇒ 00:39:42.310 Dillon Tedesco: Yeah, that sounds.
344 00:39:42.310 ⇒ 00:39:47.279 Uttam Kumaran: We have some decent personalization to make that happen. I think
345 00:39:47.390 ⇒ 00:39:53.680 Uttam Kumaran: it’s gonna work for some of these smaller deals for the stuff. That’s a larger enterprise
346 00:39:53.760 ⇒ 00:40:01.790 Uttam Kumaran: like it’s we’re gonna have to have a more account based strategy. Because somebody said, we’re sending up selling a point solution
347 00:40:01.910 ⇒ 00:40:06.629 Uttam Kumaran: that yeah, they maybe wanted they bring us on. But if we want to talk about something larger, more strategic.
348 00:40:06.780 ⇒ 00:40:10.520 Uttam Kumaran: I think. We’ll have to think larger about that. But
349 00:40:11.110 ⇒ 00:40:19.089 Uttam Kumaran: that’s where I I kind of will try to think about involving more people. Some of the data services are like, you know, 10 k, 5 to 10 KA month.
350 00:40:19.200 ⇒ 00:40:43.470 Uttam Kumaran: That stuff, I think we’re fine to sell it this way, but if there’s a deals get larger sizes, I’m sure you know, like we, we’re gonna have to spend some more effort targeting, crafting. And then then it’s also what you said, like finding the art of like find a way in. Is there someone in my rolodex that can get an intro? I’ll give you my entire contact. Find someone whose mom works like, figure it out, and I’ll I’ll make the intro. But that’s also what I want to provide the team which is like, look.
351 00:40:43.490 ⇒ 00:40:51.637 Uttam Kumaran: I have a lot of credibility. A lot of people know me. I’m sure I’m like 2 degrees from everybody like find a way to like leverage me to get in
352 00:40:52.190 ⇒ 00:41:01.920 Uttam Kumaran: and that’s also where we’re building up like a partnership network, too. So we have a lot of thankfully, I’ve got a lot of friends that are been helping out. But we want to try to formalize something there and rely on partners work because
353 00:41:02.140 ⇒ 00:41:06.279 Uttam Kumaran: found. The I mean having anything that comes in even comes in even slightly warm.
354 00:41:06.310 ⇒ 00:41:09.489 Uttam Kumaran: like the odds of actually getting the meeting is is way better.
355 00:41:10.790 ⇒ 00:41:13.519 Dillon Tedesco: It’s awesome. No, I mean makes total sense.
356 00:41:14.030 ⇒ 00:41:19.609 Uttam Kumaran: Cool. Okay? Well, yeah, this was super super helpful, I think. Like, look, I would love to just
357 00:41:19.870 ⇒ 00:41:28.239 Uttam Kumaran: see if I have any questions. And of course, like, if I end up bothering you way too much, would love to think about something formal again. It’s just like having people in our
358 00:41:28.260 ⇒ 00:41:54.899 Uttam Kumaran: camp that have done this. And one is the people that I want to spend the most time listening to and implementing exactly what they say. And it’s worked in a couple of other areas. And for me, that’s it like, that’s that’s that’s our strategy. The wheel are trying things like. And I read a lot of books like you mentioned expertise. I’m reading this book called Business of Expertise. It talked about exactly like what you said, which is confidence. And if you know, you’re confident, and you don’t have to like
359 00:41:54.940 ⇒ 00:41:58.049 Uttam Kumaran: really bow down to some of those objections. And things like that is.
360 00:41:58.120 ⇒ 00:42:01.120 Uttam Kumaran: I’ve been learning about recently. So that’s been super super helpful.
361 00:42:01.120 ⇒ 00:42:05.930 Dillon Tedesco: Yeah, like it make making it seem effortless
362 00:42:06.020 ⇒ 00:42:13.389 Dillon Tedesco: when the hard questions come up. And oh, yeah, of course. And like, Oh, it’s almost like, Oh, yeah, of course you asked that.
363 00:42:14.050 ⇒ 00:42:14.710 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah.
364 00:42:14.710 ⇒ 00:42:16.190 Dillon Tedesco: Talking. I mean.
365 00:42:16.580 ⇒ 00:42:25.979 Dillon Tedesco: it is shocking when I’ve done like sales training, and, like, you know, had other people, and like industry vets and stuff, and like they just get tripped up.
366 00:42:25.980 ⇒ 00:42:29.090 Uttam Kumaran: Is it, Con? Is it confidence, or what do you think it is like.
367 00:42:29.090 ⇒ 00:42:32.779 Dillon Tedesco: Well, I think sometimes there’s lack of confidence in the product.
368 00:42:33.220 ⇒ 00:42:33.810 Uttam Kumaran: Okay. Yeah.
369 00:42:33.810 ⇒ 00:42:37.889 Dillon Tedesco: That’s definitely to that can definitely play a part.
370 00:42:37.970 ⇒ 00:42:42.269 Dillon Tedesco: Confidence in their sales pitch itself
371 00:42:43.162 ⇒ 00:42:50.319 Dillon Tedesco: being over reliant on memorizing a pitch versus understanding, the product, the client.
372 00:42:50.320 ⇒ 00:42:58.739 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah for me. I don’t think I’ve gone to any meeting memorized. I don’t have time to do it. I’m just like, where am I today like, who am I talking to? Great.
373 00:42:59.000 ⇒ 00:43:10.280 Dillon Tedesco: So and then also, you know, a lot of time. I think, somebody I’ve I’ve often found that somebody went to a meeting. And and look, you’re probably similar to myself and some other folks where
374 00:43:10.550 ⇒ 00:43:17.690 Dillon Tedesco: you don’t need to do a ton of homework on the actual client you’re in front of, because you can dissect a business
375 00:43:18.009 ⇒ 00:43:31.949 Dillon Tedesco: fairly quickly. You can like, look at their website and and in 2 min have a pretty good understanding of who you’re talking to and what they do. Not. Everybody can do that. So you know, if you get a salesperson who may be.
376 00:43:32.120 ⇒ 00:43:39.060 Dillon Tedesco: did take the appropriate amount of time for them to really learn about their their prospect.
377 00:43:39.160 ⇒ 00:43:44.269 Dillon Tedesco: And then that prospect asks, ask a question specific about their business.
378 00:43:45.160 ⇒ 00:43:46.660 Uttam Kumaran: Yes, you’re just right.
379 00:43:46.660 ⇒ 00:43:56.377 Dillon Tedesco: Trouble fairly quickly. So you know, a lot of it can be very easily mitigated. Through effort. Frankly. But that’s also,
380 00:43:56.980 ⇒ 00:44:15.900 Dillon Tedesco: you know, cultural thing people want have to want to put through that or put forth that effort and and really kind of go above and beyond. So but yeah, objection handling does go a long way. I had for octopus alone. I think I had 50 of the most frequently asked questions, and exactly literally bullet by bullet.
381 00:44:15.900 ⇒ 00:44:31.640 Uttam Kumaran: Very jealous I’m gonna do. I’m gonna do that this week. I swear I’m gonna do that this week, because also I’ve recorded a lot of our meetings. So just to try to run some of that through like AI and even help us pull some of that out. And yeah, I’m gonna put that together for our team.
382 00:44:32.410 ⇒ 00:44:36.219 Dillon Tedesco: Yeah, go go through it. I went as far as
383 00:44:36.640 ⇒ 00:44:50.569 Dillon Tedesco: dissecting it down to like almost like a an answer tree of if you’re talking to this level or above. This is how you answer. If you’re talking to this bit level or below, it’s this, how you answer, and just kind of you know. Let.
384 00:44:50.870 ⇒ 00:45:01.320 Dillon Tedesco: here’s the information. Do with it what you will, but you can’t, can’t ever say that the answer wasn’t provided. And it does. It just goes a long way with building out that
385 00:45:02.780 ⇒ 00:45:15.810 Dillon Tedesco: that team consistency and the expectation from leadership of like, hey, we. We already did this for you like the hard part is over. You’re you’re not going out there by yourself, getting asked a question that I’ve never been asked or answered.
386 00:45:15.810 ⇒ 00:45:20.400 Uttam Kumaran: That’s what it that’s exactly I think about. If I was to be hired at Brainforce to sell today.
387 00:45:20.530 ⇒ 00:45:35.640 Uttam Kumaran: and that’s who I think about right. And so for me, I’m like we’re not there yet, where I’m confident, but I’m confident, for the reasons you mentioned about just being a founder, and that that builds some amount for me. It’s even like, how can I rely? How can I rely on those processes?
388 00:45:35.740 ⇒ 00:45:38.140 Uttam Kumaran: And do I see that impacting and then
389 00:45:38.170 ⇒ 00:45:43.069 Uttam Kumaran: bring someone in will will be the right time. So, okay, that’s super helpful.
390 00:45:43.770 ⇒ 00:45:47.415 Dillon Tedesco: Yeah. Well, yeah, if I can help with anything.
391 00:45:48.160 ⇒ 00:45:51.360 Dillon Tedesco: you know, even as you’re thinking about what that role
392 00:45:51.620 ⇒ 00:46:01.239 Dillon Tedesco: should look like. No, I’ve I’ve written quite a few of those Jd’s and hired a hell of a lot of people. So anytime, man, it was a pleasure to talk to you.
393 00:46:01.240 ⇒ 00:46:05.890 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah. And if I can, if I can be helpful on the motivation side of starting the consulting firm, please
394 00:46:07.034 ⇒ 00:46:10.350 Uttam Kumaran: me know, just did that actually so.
395 00:46:10.590 ⇒ 00:46:17.839 Dillon Tedesco: Yeah, I think it’s I think I probably got a few few more years in corporate. And and we’ll start doing. I am.
396 00:46:18.360 ⇒ 00:46:25.960 Dillon Tedesco: I am going to at least just set up my S. Corp, so that when I do talk about it
397 00:46:26.130 ⇒ 00:46:39.279 Dillon Tedesco: it’s done, and if an opportunity does come up, I can entertain it if it’s not conflicting with my actual job. And you know, if I want to take on you know, one or 2 here and there. It’s just more.
398 00:46:39.850 ⇒ 00:46:43.259 Uttam Kumaran: Consult. Yep, 10 HA month consulting, or something like that.
399 00:46:43.260 ⇒ 00:46:53.710 Uttam Kumaran: I think it’s it’s really clear you’re like super passionate about. I mean again the things you’ve just told me on this meeting. I’m going to do this month, and I know they’ll move the needle for us.
400 00:46:53.710 ⇒ 00:46:54.200 Dillon Tedesco: Appreciate that.
401 00:46:54.200 ⇒ 00:46:59.939 Uttam Kumaran: I think a lot of people would benefit. I’m sure you already know that, and you know that if your time is valuable and then double the price
402 00:47:00.000 ⇒ 00:47:08.510 Uttam Kumaran: or triple the price. And that’s what we do here. So I, I think. Yeah, I think there’s definitely people out there that that would
403 00:47:08.590 ⇒ 00:47:23.450 Uttam Kumaran: that would pay and would get a lot of almost definitely way, more value than they pay for that sort of stuff. So but you can fractional people especially in sales and engineering. Now you can get people here and there. But sales is very, very hard, and of course, like
404 00:47:23.540 ⇒ 00:47:28.720 Uttam Kumaran: it’s hard to do sales for 10 HA week, you know, but I think of your leverage point and
405 00:47:29.230 ⇒ 00:47:30.930 Uttam Kumaran: I think it’s it’s really great.
406 00:47:31.340 ⇒ 00:47:33.780 Dillon Tedesco: Appreciate that. And you’re you said you’re in Austin, Texas.
407 00:47:34.175 ⇒ 00:47:34.570 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah.
408 00:47:34.920 ⇒ 00:47:37.103 Dillon Tedesco: Man I love that city.
409 00:47:37.870 ⇒ 00:47:39.960 Dillon Tedesco: Have you been to love Barbecue.
410 00:47:39.960 ⇒ 00:47:42.540 Uttam Kumaran: Yes. Well, you know, they just won the Michelin.
411 00:47:43.230 ⇒ 00:47:44.830 Dillon Tedesco: Really.
412 00:47:45.126 ⇒ 00:47:48.679 Uttam Kumaran: Star 2 weeks ago, and so the line I was just driving
413 00:47:49.220 ⇒ 00:47:50.839 Uttam Kumaran: mine is around the whole corner.
414 00:47:51.000 ⇒ 00:47:58.990 Uttam Kumaran: so now I can’t. I’m not. I can’t go there anymore. Other. There’s another great barbecue place just up the road from there.
415 00:47:59.597 ⇒ 00:48:02.450 Uttam Kumaran: That will win the Michelin, I’m sure. Next year
416 00:48:02.824 ⇒ 00:48:09.219 Uttam Kumaran: but like fought for out of the 6 or 7 places that went for the places I’ve been like multiple times.
417 00:48:09.250 ⇒ 00:48:14.280 Uttam Kumaran: And then, now, yeah, I don’t know if I’ll ever get a chance to go back. But yeah.
418 00:48:14.450 ⇒ 00:48:19.105 Dillon Tedesco: That’s I. I’m bummed to hear that, because I don’t have any
419 00:48:19.560 ⇒ 00:48:25.220 Dillon Tedesco: Austin trips lined up anytime soon, but I’ve I’ve been dreaming about going back to.
420 00:48:25.220 ⇒ 00:48:40.569 Uttam Kumaran: Once you come back. I have some like very like great food racks, but also barbecue. We just went there on Saturday. I took my friends, that visit here to this place called Mom’s Steakhouse great Pastrami. Great great brisket.
421 00:48:40.730 ⇒ 00:48:46.569 Uttam Kumaran: great sides like butcher paper, you know, like.
422 00:48:46.950 ⇒ 00:48:47.516 Dillon Tedesco: I do.
423 00:48:49.410 ⇒ 00:48:52.999 Dillon Tedesco: Oh, man, that’s awesome! Well, I’m I’m happy for the barbecue, then that’s.
424 00:48:53.000 ⇒ 00:48:53.860 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah, yeah.
425 00:48:54.050 ⇒ 00:48:58.250 Dillon Tedesco: Good group over there. And when did? When did you graduate from Bucknell?
426 00:48:58.250 ⇒ 00:49:00.040 Uttam Kumaran: I graduated 2018.
427 00:49:01.300 ⇒ 00:49:05.620 Dillon Tedesco: 18. When did my sister-in-law graduate just before that?
428 00:49:06.700 ⇒ 00:49:11.690 Dillon Tedesco: Yeah, she’s she’s much older. She’s 33.
429 00:49:12.320 ⇒ 00:49:14.990 Dillon Tedesco: Yeah. You guys would not have crossed the paths.
430 00:49:14.990 ⇒ 00:49:19.970 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah, Bucknell’s great. I mean, also strong network of people, a very small school. So I feel like it’s.
431 00:49:19.970 ⇒ 00:49:25.850 Dillon Tedesco: Yeah. So you were there while the country cupboard was still there.
432 00:49:26.506 ⇒ 00:49:27.820 Uttam Kumaran: Yes. Yes.
433 00:49:27.820 ⇒ 00:49:28.170 Dillon Tedesco: Whoa!
434 00:49:28.645 ⇒ 00:49:30.069 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah, they did.
435 00:49:30.070 ⇒ 00:49:34.810 Uttam Kumaran: I was really, really upset. Every time I drove home I stopped there and got some pies for the house.
436 00:49:34.810 ⇒ 00:49:36.840 Uttam Kumaran: and then we’d always go to street of shops.
437 00:49:37.642 ⇒ 00:49:42.800 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah, I’m trying to think. And then we went to. We go to skeeters on the on the hill.
438 00:49:42.800 ⇒ 00:49:45.780 Uttam Kumaran: Yup, yeah, I’m from. I grew up in Williamsport.
439 00:49:45.780 ⇒ 00:49:46.560 Uttam Kumaran: Okay? Okay.
440 00:49:46.560 ⇒ 00:49:49.130 Dillon Tedesco: Just like literally 2025 min I got.
441 00:49:49.780 ⇒ 00:49:53.052 Dillon Tedesco: I’ve been kicked out of Lewisburg’s High school gym numerous times.
442 00:49:53.350 ⇒ 00:50:04.120 Uttam Kumaran: Cool, cool, cool, cool. I was there. I was there, maybe 2 years ago. And yeah, I feel like the construction is almost done. I don’t remember if it was done like on 15 when I was there.
443 00:50:05.990 ⇒ 00:50:10.259 Uttam Kumaran: But yeah, spend a lot of time in Central Va, so yeah.
444 00:50:10.260 ⇒ 00:50:14.759 Dillon Tedesco: Alright good stuff. Well, Austin’s a little bit more exciting.
445 00:50:16.400 ⇒ 00:50:20.370 Dillon Tedesco: Awesome man. Well, great to meet you. Congrats. Yeah, we’ll stay in touch.
446 00:50:20.370 ⇒ 00:50:21.070 Uttam Kumaran: Definitely.