The Transaction

TT - 033 - Kyle Porter - Full Episode
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[00:00:00]

Craig Rosenberg: We gotta, let's just start the recording. I was gonna be three minutes late, and then the elevators downstairs were broken, but the guy, there was no sense of urgency from the lobby guys, because they're like, oh, we'll just let the broken one close and then the next one will call up. The, the broken one was closing like this.

It was,

Kyle Porter: slowly, gradually.

Craig Rosenberg: I'm like, you guys are like, okay, just let it close. So I let it close, go up, press the button again. It reopens the same one. I'm like, and so we had to go do all this stuff to get up. And so, no, I did not climb 11 flights of stairs. Thank

Kyle Porter: I have a great elevator story for you guys. It was early sales law, probably 14 employees and one of them had to go and I had to do the firing. And so I texted him the day before making sure he'd be in the office the next day. He shows up, he's like dressed better than I've ever seen. He's got a manila folder.

He's got glasses on. He gets his pen out, opens it up. He's like, I'm ready for the meeting. And I'm like, well, today's your last [00:01:00] day at sales loft. And he closes the folder real quick. He goes, I got all dressed up for this. Goes back to his desk and he starts, he grabs a box and he's taking things off his desk and slamming them into the box, making this big loud noise.

And everyone's looking around. He literally does the nice working with you. Nice working with you. Nice working with you. Puts his hand out to his manager. He's like, no, man, you suck. Pulls his hand back. Gets on the, I walk him to the elevator as the elevator doors are closing. Like I'm, I'm on one side. He's in there closing.

And he goes, you click.

Craig Rosenberg: no way.

Kyle Porter: I got a call 10 minutes later from security downstairs saying he wasn't leaving.

Matt Amundson: Oh,

Craig Rosenberg: No way

Kyle Porter: Yeah. I don't know. This is recording, but

Craig Rosenberg: it is, but that's all right. After anything, there's legal disclaimers on this thing. That's, that's a way better elevator story than mine of the elevator breaking down and being late to the transaction.

Kyle Porter: Well, it reminded me. I love the [00:02:00] name of the transaction, guys. Whose idea was that?

Craig Rosenberg: Uh, that's a good question.

Matt Amundson: I'll give Craig credit for it, maybe?

Craig Rosenberg: Well, I had to, I have, the only thing I had Kyle was that I wanted the word. I love like titles that have the word in front. I don't like when they're saying I like something. And then, um,

Matt Amundson: Craig's very anti Sean Parker. Alright,

Kyle Porter: The Faunaholic? I

Craig Rosenberg: I didn't like the Facebook. I think that was a good move,

Matt Amundson: alright,

Craig Rosenberg: I wouldn't do funnel Holick, I'd say the funnel Holick. I don't know. I just, it was just a thing. And then we wanted something that would allow us to be. Uh, hard hitting, right, but, um, in cover, not just marketing or sales or vice versa, you know, like had everything.

So I think we just literally put a map, might've created a list of like a thousand names, right?

Matt Amundson: Yeah, we use chat GPT for a lot of it, [00:03:00] too.

Craig Rosenberg: So you can see, hey, we're AI driven in our titling and our, uh, cover art, everything. All right. So let's get going since Craig was late. Um, sorry guys. so today's guest is, uh, I don't know if this is sentimental and awesome at the same time, don't you

Matt Amundson: Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Craig Rosenberg: Kyle was like part of my life for years. So, but I, I don't know if you know the time when I met him, he's probably bored.

I get this story all the time. So basically I, uh, um, I had two things happening at the same time. One was there was this employee from sales [00:04:00] loft who looked like he was a 14 year old kid, comment, spamming every blog post and tweet I ever did. Okay. So that's one, but I didn't, I know.

Kyle Porter: I looked like a 16 year old kid, I guess,

Craig Rosenberg: That was our buddy John Birdsong, who became, who is one of my favorite guys of all time.

And I met him because he was comment spamming. So like, I start to get this visibility, then Mike Damphaus is like, Bro, you've got to check out the sales loft. And at the time you guys were doing job change alerts, which was amazing. And so I'm like, damn, I got to meet this guy. And he's like done makes the intro cows like, yeah, three o'clock, whatever we get on, he's driving, right?

Cause there's no way he's doing something. This kid is making it happen. We get on his energy, like, uh, in explaining himself and what he did and how he came to it. I was just like, Dude, this guy's going to make it. I, I, there's like these certain, there's this characteristic of someone, even if they have to seek to find [00:05:00] what that thing is, which in the case of sales loft, there's historical there where you sought the market and brought it up.

But I'm like, this dude, this dude's going to make it. And so that was sales loft from the relationship started in the LinkedIn. Uh, Nate, uh, job change alerts all the way through the transition into becoming, uh, one of the leading sales and, uh, engagement platform vendors or, you know, sales tech vendors, and then one of the folks that were able to come out the other side with an incredible exit.

Um, and you know, it was along that way that I just watched him from this guy that just brought energy to a guy who was always refining. His management skills and CEO skills and learning and incorporating that and leading in a way that was amazing. And you know, Matt was, uh, that's where I met Matt was right.

Or no,

Matt Amundson: At Marketo, but yeah.

Craig Rosenberg: yeah, yeah. But you did a really sweaty presentation at [00:06:00] Rainmaker.

Matt Amundson: wasn't sweaty, it was sweary, and it

Craig Rosenberg: Yeah, sorry. Yeah,

Matt Amundson: yeah, yeah. I was, I had lost my voice, but I did bring the house down and I feel very confident in saying that even, you know, 10 years past, uh, that was one of my better presentations. Uh,

Kyle Porter: times you brought the house down with us, and the best one for me Was when you came to our office and did it with the whole company. And that was in office next to Atlanta tech village. We're probably 35, 40 people at the time, very early cadence days. And I remember sitting there and I go, I just learned more shit in this presentation than any other sales and marketing presentation.

No offense to the funnel Hawk. I learned a lot from yours as well. Glad

Craig Rosenberg: today's guests in the transaction. It's an honor. We've wanted to have you on for a long time. Here is Kyle Porter now living in Florida, surviving hurricanes and doing a whole bunch of stuff. So Kyle, welcome to the show.

Kyle Porter: to be here. Very excited. And, uh, um, really, [00:07:00] uh, honored that you guys thought to have me on.

Craig Rosenberg: Yeah, I thought so much of it that I was 10 minutes late. I'm sorry about

Kyle Porter: It's all good.

Craig Rosenberg: was

Kyle Porter: We had time to razz on you before you showed up. We'll

maybe bring how you gotta hit record. That stuff plays so well on the internet.

Matt Amundson: It's true.

Craig Rosenberg: So, so Kyle, let's get into it and get, I mean, people like this, what's cool is like people get to hear from you again.

We used to have to hear, we get to hear from you every day. So, um,

Kyle Porter: That's the biggest thing I missed. Two things I missed. One is, I no longer am leading a high performance team on an ambitious mission. That's number one. And number two is I'm no longer like I have all these things that pop in my head. They're not out on the web and out on content the way they used to be.

So that one, I'm probably going to solve for at some point in time. Maybe you guys help me out there.

Craig Rosenberg: all right. So let's start with the big question. We like to ask, which is, um, you know, what, what's, what is [00:08:00] something or. You know, some things that, uh, the market believes that they're doing right. It could be approach, methodology, management, tactics, anything, uh, where they're, they're actually wrong and they should be thinking about doing another way.

And so what is that? And, um, what should they be do different? What should they be doing differently? So we are going to hand the mic to you and let's hear what you have to say. And then we go from there.

Kyle Porter: Well, let me give you, I'll give you a high level leadership, kind of CEO founder level, and then I'll give you down to B2B marketing and sales.

Craig Rosenberg: Awesome.

Kyle Porter: So at the top level, I believe the world of business, especially the tech industry, Is plagued by leaders who focus too much on being smart and not enough on being different and being healthy.

And so to kind of extrapolate on that, you know, in our journey at sales loft and I've seen it many times. You know, outside of that, especially in tech, CEOs are trying to create the newest [00:09:00] technology, innovate on the stack, working with AI, doing anything they can to build kind of that next level of technology.

And we did all those things also, but where we focused a ton of our attention and what I believe to be true is that organizational health is the biggest, most significant advantage that any company can have. And that there's a formula to making that work in a company. That nobody else follows the way it could, you know, some people do, but not many follow it.

Then as you take that down into B2B marketing and sales. I believe that these organizations and teams have become too data driven, overly focused on metrics and not focused on taking risks, being creative, creating the right team dynamics and winning the way that, you know, involves a 360 degree view of approach, not just focused on numbers,

Craig Rosenberg: Wow. Okay. We have some connective tissue to the AJ Gandhi episode, don't

Matt Amundson: Yeah, yeah, we definitely do. And that's, that's two [00:10:00] people that are now, you know, on the investing side advocating for, uh, for, for this type of, uh, of activity, which I think is, uh, you know, that should be a signal. Right? This is a signal. It's not just people talking about on the street. It's people that are sitting in your board meetings talking about this.

And I think that this is a big deal. This is a big deal. We talked a lot over the course of this show about the way the pendulum swung on marketing, uh, uh, tactics being a little too robotic or a little too like quote unquote data driven, automated, et cetera. The same on sales tactics. But I think it's the ideation piece that matters as well.

And. There are lots of marketers, lots of sales professionals out there today who they're like, well, I'd love to do this, but I don't know how to measure it. So I won't do it. Which is a huge mistake. Huge mistake.

Craig Rosenberg: Yeah. Cause, and by the way, Kyle, we want to go back to the organizational health, but let's, let's dig on this [00:11:00] because

Kyle Porter: hard to measure. And another reason why people don't invest in that a lot.

Matt Amundson: Exactly.

Craig Rosenberg: that's right. But, but, but. Uh, this is an organizational, an organizational wide thing where people are actually constrained by the metrics instead of trying to do big things. And like, and so Kyle, like, um, I actually think what would be interesting here, cause Kyle took as a CEO and founder of sales, one of the things they did to get attention was they took incredible chances.

Matt Amundson: Yes.

Craig Rosenberg: And those are great stories. I wonder, Kyle, if we could dig in on that, like, like tell us some of those crazy things you guys did at, at SalesLoft as you guys were building it up. And while you do that, I will be right back. Keep going. Oh,

Kyle Porter: talked about some of these in kind of the preview call, but, uh, I read that book behind the cloud, the Benioff book [00:12:00] and love stories of the stuff he was doing. It was like, Hey, we're, we're going to the SAP conference and we're renting all the taxi cabs and we're going to take every customer from the hotel to the conference and put a rep in the shotgun seat.

And they're going to have conversations. That was genius. Or when, you know, Benioff kind of protested the SAP conference with the signs of like, you know, free software, right? Like free software, jail of, of the, uh, you know, into the cloud and from the client server model. And so, you know, we wanted to, we wanted to poke back at Benioff a little bit.

And so we had a few fun campaigns there. You guys know about the first one. I think you might know about the second, but I actually found the Craigslist posting. There's a Craigslist posting where it says wanted fake Mark Benioff lookalike. Right. And we, turns out some dude I played poker with at one of our reps knew it was like, you should call cam.

And so we call cam and the guy looks enough like Benioff to pass. So we offer him a free [00:13:00] flight to San Francisco. He can stay in the house that we rented. We've got an extra room there and, uh, and we dress them up like Benioff. We give them a Pardot hat. We get them the exact same outfit that Mark's wearing.

We even take like black Converse and one of the marketing ladies paints a blue cloud on the Converse. And like, just, just, we get took the one of those head pieces that they give you on the airplane and like wound it around a pen. So it kind of looked like one of those, like springy things. Anthony Zhang, our sales guy, who was also a model, a male model.

He's wearing a full black suit, the headpiece in, glasses on. And he's walking around with Benioff. Tammy McQueen, who was our marketing director at the time, you know, South African, she's wearing her Louboutin shoes and a black dress, carrying a clipboard, following Benioff around everywhere he goes. But the best part was when their security came to our booth.

And said, Hey, we know what you're doing. We saw the Craigslist ad [00:14:00] Mark would like to meet you. So we're like, all right, so Mark comes down. He shakes the fake Mark Benioff's hand. We do a photo shoot. He thanks him for taking those press interactions that, uh, Mark couldn't get to in time. I mean, this guy got on stage and accepted like a nonprofit.

Like he was like depositing cans and a nonprofit on stage. We signed autographs at the booths, like three booths behind us. I didn't think you looked that much like him, but it worked enough. I think it was the whole entourage. That was the first time. So then the next year rolls around and we're like, man, how are we going to do?

How are we going to upstage that? And by the way, the best part about that whole thing was when we're at your party, Craig, and you stopped to welcome everyone to the party. And then you say, before we get going, I've got to commend Kyle and the sales team on what they did. And like, that was actually the ROI because then I had 40, 50 people to talk to all night long about it.

You know, and prospects. So that was like, we're actually like, that would have been hard to calculate. Oh, we're going to get, we're [00:15:00] going to be the most favored nation status at Craig's party. If we do this and that will lead to X number of leads in relationships. Like you can't calculate that. Right. We also wrote a blog post like how we impersonated Benioff.

That was awesome. So we got, we got to step this thing up and we're like, how are we going to do, what are we going to do next year? So the first idea we have or the first one that we decide we're going to go with. is that we're going to take 2 bills and we're going to get a custom stamp that says Benioff for president, Benioff 2020 president.

And we learned that you can actually do this to money. So you can't deface money unless it's for a political purpose, then you can. So this is actually legal. So we take like 200, bills or 300, 2 bills. Which, by the way, is like 1 1, 000th of a Dreamforce booth, right? We stamp this thing, and we have two people that we pay to dress up in stilts with Uncle Sam costumes on that are handing these things out, and they got a [00:16:00] little, uh, you know, short link that goes to the SalesLoft website.

Not so sure what that one was going to do for us, but Adrian Grenier, the star of the show Entourage, ends up with one. And ends up with a pen, Benioff for president, puts it in his mouth, takes a selfie, posts it on Instagram. Hey, can I be your running mate? Business Insider sees it, writes a whole article about how Adrian Grenier wants to be Mark Benioff's running mate.

At least if sales loft gets what they want and details who we are. So that was one. Number two was we had drones and this is, this is 2000, like what is this? 2016, 15. This is 15. So we hire drones to take giant banners up and fly them all around Moscone. that say SDR on them and sales loft on the back. The guy shows up at our office with a drone from Philadelphia, flies up there.

He's got the banner. This is like the test. He [00:17:00] takes it. This is on the sales of the roof of the Atlanta tech village sales loft headquarters. He flies the thing up in the air. It tilts on its side. The blades hit the ground. Everything starts shattering. Stuff's flying past our faces. I'm like, uh, what's going on?

And he, I go, can you fix it? And he goes, no. And I go, do you have another one? He goes, no. And I go, well, the good news is there's flights back to Philadelphia every hour, bro. So this guy flies back. So that one didn't work. But the last one was we had these extra 2 bills. And we decided to put them in money guns and then we decided we were going to try to shoot them from the bridge and land in Jim Cramer's filming of Mad Money on the scene at Moscone.

Craig Rosenberg: Are you kidding? Yeah.

Kyle Porter: don't know how we got to this, but you know, we're just like, we want everyone to know who we are. So, so it was 2015, you know what I mean? Like Cadence was like launched that year, you know, [00:18:00] 12, 12 months prior. So Tammy and Sean Kester, who you guys know, they're like, Kyle, you can't be the one pulling the trigger on them.

I'm like, okay, I'll go down and film while you guys go do it. So Sean and Tammy go up the bridge and I see, I see Sean, his gun gets stuck and then Tammy just letting him fly and they're all, and then Sean's working, they're letting him fly. We shoot 150, you know, 2 bills out and they, they, they don't land on Jim Cramer.

But he films an Instagram saying they did. And in the Instagram, he's like, why are you guys talking bad about sales loft? I'm the one who thought they were fake money. I should have been collecting them because he's like, I thought they were fake money. So we've got this Jim Kramer from CNBC, mad money talking about it.

And he's going sales loft, sales loft, like over and over again. So yeah, that's another example. We got countless ones, quite frankly, but. Those are some of the fun ones. And, you know, I remember there was some blowback on that one. Cause Business Insider wrote an article that a [00:19:00] startup shot money into the streets of San Francisco as a way to say it was like a sign of the bubble.

And then the ToutApp CEO, who was a competitor at the time, you know, he kind of went away fast after that. He like went on and tried to play that we were like, Offending homeless people and, you know, it's all these like virtue signaling things. And then I wrote back and I go, here's how much you paid for your booth.

And here's how much I paid for mine. Cause this is like the gold booth. It was like 750, 000 and mine was like for silver. That was like, you know, 14 K for first timers or something like that. So

Craig Rosenberg: You know, what's amazing though, is that on those stories, Matt is like how, um, so, you know, one of the things that Matt and I, when we started the show, wasn't just that we wanted to hang out, but, you know, they're like, we were at the time advising series, a startups, you know, late seed, whatever. And it's, it was clear.

That, um, if you just, if you didn't do [00:20:00] anything, you better have the greatest product of all time because that's the only thing you got. If you, but if you did the baseline of what was working for the last 10 years, you also couldn't move the needle as well as you. And we were like, there's a new playbook, but there's also this like, Thing that maybe it's part of the playbook, but like what we've seen the best stories on the show We just wanted to have the show so he'd come grab these stories Worse like we had this kid, uh, Mac Reddin he came on and he just had these crazy ideas He dude he is like you I mean he did a chicken wing eating contest at pavilion Without even having the company launched and nobody knew him and he had a third of the conference pre sign up to go visit him No demo software, no nothing, just chicken wings and like five different sauces.

And it was like, it was thinking outside the box, but by the way, so, so this thing though, [00:21:00] is that right now there's so much software, uh, there's so much feature parody, there's so much noise that you do. It doesn't have to be as zany as like, you know, the stories we're just talking about are as aggressive, but it has to stand out.

Yeah.

Kyle Porter: at Dreamforce then, because that was a circus, man. I mean, you got to do something wild for anyone to even remember you were there.

Craig Rosenberg: Totally. Like Maria Pergolino, who I work with, is like, if you're at a conference as a, as a vendor, you have to remember one thing. They will remember one to two things when they leave. As a marketer, your job is to be one of them. And like, it's a, it was really cool. And by the way, though, when, when Kyle was telling the story and Benny off sort of, uh, jumped in on that, you know, Benny off, if you, I mean, I'm old enough, I don't know if you guys are, you know, when they jumped in, they had a fake protest in front of Siebel, no software.

It was [00:22:00] Gorilla marketing at its finest. And Siebel, I think called the cops, right? I think they literally had the actors that Mark hired arrested and they had the horn and the signs and all this stuff, but it was like, you know, and that was like a, maybe a lightning strike, like a big sort of here's the category that's coming in your case.

You're like, look, I'm going to this big event where, you know, as you said, you had just launched cadence. It's like, how do we go out there and make noise? And you got to take chances and can't measure that.

Kyle Porter: The other thing we would do is walk up to people and we would walk up to people and say, Hey, excuse me, you look like someone important that I need to know.

Craig Rosenberg: No, you did

Kyle Porter: And that's how we start conversations.

Matt Amundson: all the sales off people used to do that. They were notorious for doing that. And it

Kyle Porter: You look like someone important that I need to know.

Matt Amundson: Yeah, it was the greatest opening line and it got you guys so many conversations and it totally just You know it it disarmed everybody and they're like, oh,

Craig Rosenberg: Hold on though, Matt, [00:23:00] you,

Kyle Porter: always do this. They're like, they chuckle and they go, what do you got, man? I'm here for you.

Craig Rosenberg: Matt. You knew about this

Matt Amundson: Yes Yes,

Craig Rosenberg: All I can think about was Kester using that line, not just as a business line, but anyway. Um,

Kyle Porter: So one more funny one. And then there's a lot of real, you know, there's a lot of substance ones too. We can get into, but, uh, you Rainmaker conference and that was probably the biggest, like modern sales conference at the time, uh, until Topo, until Topo came along, but you guys are marketing and sales. Uh, but there was a ton of energy on that.

And we, we really loved it. And it, you know, we, we had a blast doing it. Um, got to spend a ton of time with customers and prospects, but our competitor outreach came out with the conference some years later. And they called it Unleash. And so Unleash, uh, 17 is coming out and I'm like, people are emailing me like their tweets and stuff.

And I'm like, I don't want to see any of this stuff anymore. O'Malley, O'Malley's running marketing for us. I go, O'Malley, can you [00:24:00] get, can you take over their hashtag? Somehow? The hashtag is Unleash 17. He goes, all right, let me think about it. I'll come back. On the day their conference starts, you know, they got one of those like led boards.

It's like streaming the hashtags, right? It's pretty unique. Hashtag Unleash 17. O'Malley comes back and he goes, I got it. He goes, this morning at the Atlanta tech village, Bosley's place, which is an orphanage for underage puppies. Is going to bring a bunch of puppies, put them in a pen in the lobby of Atlanta tech village, our building.

And anyone who wants can come down and pet and play with these puppies. We're going to unleash them. And the hashtag for this puppy party is unleash 17. And I'm like, this is mind blowing how smart this is. Right. You literally have the hashtag of like them on the main stage at unleash. And then you have countless posts of people playing with puppies, puppies from up top, puppies from below. We raised thousands of dollars for the [00:25:00] puppies. Every single puppy got adopted and there were like 50 hashtag images with puppies and sales off reference all up on their board for the

Matt Amundson: my god

Kyle Porter: 2017 Puppies Gone Wild.

Craig Rosenberg: That is amazing. But that goes back to Matt and AJ's point in that last show, which is like. That's not gonna show up in the MQL report that you deliver.

Kyle Porter: yeah,

Craig Rosenberg: Yeah. You have to have this, like, you know, this mentality on like, can we sit in a room and think of things that we could do to now in that case, was that for PR for sales loft or was that a, uh, a competitive, that was a competitive,

Kyle Porter: that was, that was like, uh, we want to be all up in their hashtag. So if they're going to, if they're going to get this buzz that comes from having a conference and anyone's going to be clicking and watching and seeing all this, we want to be in the middle of it so that they see us too. And think about us too. I was, I [00:26:00] mean,

Craig Rosenberg: can we, yeah, well, I want to go back on organizational health. Cause I, I actually, I want to make sure we define that. Yeah. If that's all right, just because like, you know, we just had a meeting in the, you know, and like the guy I was with, it's like, well, that's soft. I'm like, no, dude, he's not talking about working out and doing yoga every morning.

Let's tell you how to be really strategic. So I do think it's worth laying out. So this was just for the audience. I'm going, I had to, we went, we sort of dug in on this one area, but the first thing you said is most founders worry about being smart instead of organizational health. I want to go back to that.

What is it? What is that? Yeah.

Kyle Porter: Well, it's, it's pretty simple. A healthy organization is one that has less politics and confusion. It's got higher morale, improved productivity, uh, lower regretted attrition, easier recruiting, you know, name a leader on the planet that doesn't want those things. Right. And, and what, where this differentiates from being smart is that building organizational [00:27:00] health into your company does not take complex thinking and analysis.

It takes. unrelenting levels of commitment, courage, consistency, right? It's simple in theory, but it's difficult in practice. And so I think that's why, uh, but I mean, you know, when you have it, everything is better. You have smarter people, more dedicated to the cause that work better with each other, creates the environment where ideas can flow naturally, where big things can happen, where smart people can do smart things, right?

Where product can innovate and, and, you know, and out and differentiate and, you know, outcompete the competition. But I think it's got to start there. And, um, you know, it's like building a cohesive leadership team, creating organizational clarity, over communicating that clarity, and then reinforcing your organizational health through human systems.

And when you do all those things, you know, it's lights out on what you can build inside of a company. You know, we saw it firsthand, right? You know, we continue to stay the course. I remember there was a time when our investors were pitting us down. They're like, [00:28:00] what are you going to do different to win in this market?

You've got a lot of competition, you know, there's new competition coming in. And by the way, our biggest competition originally was Yesware. ToutApp gone, then it was InsideSales. com gone, you know, and like it. And now even the people that were our competitors three years ago are not our competitors anymore.

So I think, you know, my answer was always, we're already doing it. We're going to stay the test of time. We're going to operate healthy and we're going to continually love and serve our customers and our people better than anyone else. And when you care more than anyone else, you're going to win ultimately.

And it's a long play. So I think, you know, a lot of people are like, Hey, uh, there's a lot of biases that hold people back from really jumping in and doing this. Like one is the sophistication bias. I think I told you this in the, in the prep call, the CEO Southwest most profitable and successful airline commercial airline of all time.

Um, when asked why the competitors don't do the simple things they do to bring, build organizational health, [00:29:00] he like sadly sighs that they think it's beneath them, right? My competitors thought it was beneath them to do the things that we did to make our company healthy. Another one is adrenaline bias.

Like you're off building products, selling products, serving customers. And like, you think that you're too busy to do these things. And the other is the one that you keep that we've come back to multiple times is quantification bias. It's hard to measure the success of organizational health. Now we can tell you our glass door was higher than anyone else's for the longest period of time.

We won number one, best place to work in Atlanta three times for every size that company was. I don't know if you, yeah, we, we got a report from LinkedIn once that showed our attrition was less than everyone else in the marketplace, right? So all of these things kind of prove that. And, you know, and still today, I mean, you talk to any ex lofter, hear them talk about their journey at sales loft.

You know, I wanted to create an environment where others could come to learn more, do more, become more, take their career and their talents to the next level, you know, find fulfillment and serve others, and I wanted [00:30:00] that to be the greatest place they've ever worked. I didn't want to be the ultimate greatest place to ever work.

They're going to go on and hopefully find better and, you know, bigger and better things as their career progresses. But that created the environment that allowed us to compete and win.

Craig Rosenberg: That's amazing. Yeah.

Matt Amundson: I'll always like to tell about Kyle and usually, you know, I'll tell this at the, I should have probably told this at the beginning of the podcast, but we're, we're, we're all kind of getting through everything. And, um, you know, when I bought sales loft for the first time, I, I transacted online.

Right. I just, I, I, I think I talked to a salesperson, but I think I put a credit card in, uh, and so, you know, I had it, I had a single license. There was not a lot of sales loft users in Silicon Valley at that time.

Kyle Porter: This is prospector, right?

Matt Amundson: yeah, prospect. And I'm, I'm, you know, I'm trying to build it. Yeah. No, no, no, no, no, no. It was cadence.

It was cadence.

Kyle Porter: okay, okay.

Matt Amundson: Yeah. So I'm trying to build it. I'm building out our initial cadences. [00:31:00] This is when I was at EverStream and I had a problem. So I hit the chat like, Hey, how do I solve this? Blank. A pops this name. Hmm. Okay, cool. This person helps me, solves my problem. No problem. Uh, it's, uh, you know, after hours I'm working on it, you know, maybe it's like midnight Pacific coast time.

I hit the chat for support, not expecting anybody to get back to me until the next morning. Bing. Somebody responds right away. And then I'm, I'm in the office and I'm talking about. Hey, you know, I love this sales off tool. Uh, what's amazing about it. It's a great product, but it also has great customer service.

There's this guy, his name's Kyle. He's, uh, he's responding to every single one of my, my, my help requests. Like, uh, you know, I'm just, I'm chatting in for support. And, uh, Carolyn Fibelman was like, that's the CEO dummy. And I was like, no, there's no way that's the CEO of the company. This guy's responding to my, my, my stuff at, you know, lunchtime in Atlanta, three o'clock in [00:32:00] the morning in Atlanta, there's no way it's that guy.

Yeah, it was Kyle. It was Kyle. And

Kyle Porter: That's when the hairs went gray, those days.

Matt Amundson: So when you talk about, when you talk about things like that are beneath you or not beneath you, you know, being customer obsessed, it can't be a thing that you just put on the wall. It's something that you have to embody and all cultures of companies are driven by the CEO of their company, without a doubt.

So when you're demonstrating to. Not only your customers, but also to your employees that you have no problem even, you know, being the CEO of the company, jumping in to support customers. Uh, it just becomes a part of the culture in a way that like saying it at the top of a company all hands meeting, uh, you know, it, it, it doesn't have the same, uh, uh, impact on the employees as it does if you just go do the work.

And that's what always, you know, blew me away about sales loft. And the, the, the thing about it is, you know, Kyle talks a lot about the way, uh, [00:33:00] you know, he, he created culture for the employees and the experience that he wanted to have for the employees. But being a customer was like that, you know, being a customer, it felt like you were a part of something, you know, uh, this, this, this sort of revolution.

And I, I mean, you know, I think I attended the first five Rainmakers before we had to cancel in 2020 for, for, for the pandemic. And it's just each one got bigger and bigger. It felt as a customer, like you are a part of something, not just that you are a customer of a product. And that's one of the things that I think really gets lost in today's world is, you know, we talk about being customer, uh, obsessed, but we're not, we're not, it doesn't feel like we're a part of a movement when we buy these, these, these tools or these products, the way, you know, I felt like it, It was when people were customers of Marketo and certainly the way it was to be a customer of sales loft.

And, and that's something that I think we have to drive back in, but people think a lot about, you know, Hey, this gets, [00:34:00] um, this gets created because. You know, we're going to talk about it. We're going to write it on the wall, but when you empower your employees, the way the sales off team empowered their employees, they're out doing the work.

And then that trickles down into how they treat their customers, not just their prospects, but their customers. So taking care of your employees. Actually helps you take care of your customers because people are like, you know what? Yeah, it's five o'clock, but you know what this customer needs? They need something.

So you know what? I'm going to stay on my laptop or Hey, I'm out, uh, at, at Dreamforce. And Oh, that person's a sales off customer. I'm going to make sure that they have a ride home or they have an invitation to a party or that they get in through the door of this, uh, this, this restaurant or whatever, because everybody cares.

Everybody feels like they're a part of this journey. It's not just, Hey, we're, we're a company and we're trying to make money. Certainly every company is that, that culture just trickled down through the employees and down to the customers. And that's what creates this big [00:35:00] movement. And, and all the marketing stuff that you talked about, all this stunt marketing that you talked about, that made the customers also feel great about being customers.

You know, I get, I

Kyle Porter: Yeah, you're giving me goosebumps right now, man. You might even be able to see them here. I, I'm, I'm, dude, you know, when, when a customer bought SalesLoft, I had the mentality that they had just saved my life and I was going to treat them as such. And, and, you know, you, you ever heard this saying, like if someone's depressed and down, What's the antidote?

The antidote is go serve someone, right? Like you, like think about the times you've shown love to someone. That's like the best feeling in the world. And so my job was to shower love on the lofters, to love on them so deeply that they then turned around and put that right on the customer. And I would do that too and show them kind of ways to do it.

But, but if, you know, if I just focused on the customer, then now it's hard to get them to follow. I'm giving it to them first and then letting it go from there. [00:36:00] Okay. And that works. I'm in a forum for YPO. It's 10 guys. We meet once a month for six and a half years. And one of the guys, I kind of took over as moderator two, three years in.

And the guy goes, my wife told me. That she knew this meeting would work forever when you guys started using the word love. And that was my contribution. Cause I saw what it did at sales loft. I mean like you could still click the hashtag sales love and it's still sales off stuff out there. You

Matt Amundson: That's right.

Kyle Porter: I wanted to name the Rainmaker conference sales off.

I go back in time. I might

Craig Rosenberg: Um, yeah, it is amazing. Actually, I know, uh, on the, the, the, the way that your culture. Um, transcended the walls of sales loft and out into guys like Matt. And you know, uh, it was remarkable. Now I will say this, which I think is really interesting. You could agree or disagree, but I do think your main, your, your main competitor at the [00:37:00] time outreach also built a community and it was the wildest thing.

I was an analyst at the time, just so the market could see it. I'm watching as these armies. Of customers. And it's, it was like, it's almost like the political scene we see out there right now, which is they were in camps.

Matt Amundson: Mm hmm.

Craig Rosenberg: And these camps were vocal. Like it come to battle it out on a LinkedIn post

Matt Amundson: Oh my god, yeah.

Craig Rosenberg: I had to, uh, my buddy, our buddy, Pete Cassandra, you amazing dude who had created this forum. It was like that. I used to just couldn't wait to see how people were engaging. It was early. Then it just became sales law versus outreach. And then the armies came out on LinkedIn sales offers that the armies read it.

LDS play. It was like, we, cause we would try to track all that info. And we just were like, And it was this, the, these, this, this army because they had done a really, you know, in a different way, [00:38:00] but like had built the, you know, their army too. It was a

Kyle Porter: they bought sales hacker, which was a smart move.

Craig Rosenberg: yeah, it was an incredible battle. It, I mean, it was epic, honestly.

And so anyway, as we think about what Matt's talking about, which is, um, it before this sort of became what it was, which was this battle of this customer armies. You had to, if you hadn't done what you had done, which was to take this beyond the product and extend your love out there, you wouldn't have built the army.

Honestly, you would have lost big, big, but you had this army of folks like Matt, man, he was such an advocate. I remember, uh, you know, in like, uh, uh, strong out there every, you know, at the time we were all going to events all the time and Matt, you know, was out there. Um, And like, I remember like just looking at the room, Matt had done one of the Topo things.

It was [00:39:00] amazing. And like, he went through his tech stack and whatever. I'm just watching the room and I'm going, you had the other sales lofters. It's, it was like, ah, he's one of us.

Matt Amundson: hmm.

Craig Rosenberg: It was, it was,

Kyle Porter: for that, we are incredibly eternally grateful too. And I hope you've, you know, felt that from us. Cause you

Matt Amundson: I felt it. Yeah. I mean, that's the thing. It's like the way your employees acted because, you know, you, you supported them and love them up. That's the way I acted as a customer because I felt supported and loved up by the brand. You know, like I could tell. A hundred stories of the times that Kyle personally jumped in to help me out in various different situations.

I mean, this dude at Rainmaker 3, I believe, he gave me the presidential suite. He gave me his hotel room at the hotel that the conference was at. I mean, that's the kind of guy he is, right? Like, I mean, You know that, I mean, I don't, I've never, I don't think I've ever been a customer of any other product where I was treated as well by the, not just the CEO, [00:40:00] but the brand as a whole.

Right. And so there was, there was just, there was so much pride of being a sales off customer that like getting on LinkedIn every morning and being like, all right, who am I fighting with today? Who, who am I going to have to beat up around why sales loft is better than outreach today? You know, I I'm taking on all challengers.

Kyle Porter: don't, I want to make sure the audience doesn't get distracted from the fact that. Also, this love translated directly into obsessing about the technical challenges that these sellers were trying to solve and making sure that we built the most user experience, easiest, most simplest, most effective way for them to generate opportunities and close deals.

Right. And so this love translated, it's like, I would tell the team, I'm like, imagine your best friend. Is about to like really make a bad decision with a girlfriend or boyfriend, right? Like you're going to do what you can to stop that, right? Imagine someone's about to jump off a bridge. I'm going to stop you.

Like I want you to think about these sellers that [00:41:00] level. You need to love them so much that you are going to eliminate the problems in their lives. And I want you to figure out specifically what those are down to the way that they use the software and use technology to get their job done. What are those jobs they're trying to make happen?

And how can we make their life easier through all of that? Because that's love, right? And so, I mean, it was all elements of the business.

Craig Rosenberg: so let me ask you guys

Kyle Porter: Hold on. I got a question for you, Craig.

Matt Amundson: Ooh!

Kyle Porter: I remember the time you came into town. We got Gus's fried chicken. Fantastic.

Matt Amundson: He, He,

Kyle Porter: You said something to me then. You said that the thing that could possibly hold me back from winning was that I was too nice. I want you to comment on that.

Craig Rosenberg: I will add to this story because when you had your outcome, And you and I were hanging out. I think we were down in Atlanta at that Mediterranean restaurant. And you and I were on the side, you know, drinking a couple of drinks. And you're like, remember when you said that, uh, I was too nice or you were wrong. [00:42:00] So if you, if the, like Matt, you can ask the question, what's something Craig thought was right. And he was actually wrong. And she'd be thinking about it differently.

Kyle Porter: It might've still been good that you did it. Cause I thought I've remembered it, you know? Awesome.

Craig Rosenberg: but I will defend my because, uh, uh, you know, at the time it was hyper competitive and there were like, you just, you know, you were very trusting guy, which, uh, and I'm going to talk to it in a sec. And I was like, my main point was, man, there's guys that. You know, this was, this was a battle and like, I'm like, you know, you got to think about, you know, who, you know, who you're going to be nice to and who's not, because they may not be nice to you in the background.

Now I was wrong and I learned from you and actually I've changed a lot as a result, which is like, [00:43:00] uh, you know, if you. As a, if you set the standard of trust and you allow for the fact that they met, that may not work out, it's actually a better way to live and you have better relationships with the people that you're working with.

So I was wrong on that. I was in the, the, the defense I'm making is that I learned from you on that. And here's the other thing. Take the puppy story. Um, you guys still battled. That was the big thing you battled. against that, right? You didn't take the nice guys finish last thing you did, but you, you did put a puppy farm up to, to hijack their hashtag.

See. So look, man, here, yes, that's the thing. And that's, that's what I learned from you is let's do have build trust. And just, you can battle cause business is business, but just have fun with it. That was for me. And so, so anyway, [00:44:00] I, uh, I'm con I've commented on that, but I grew as a result of that. What I did.

Yeah. Let

Kyle Porter: it too. And, and I, I, and I, I let my sharp elbows fly from time to time. I think, uh, you asked some of the people that were closest to me in the company and they'll say that it was, um, it wasn't all, uh, you know, wine and roses working for me.

Craig Rosenberg: me give you a couple other tactics though, from your days. I'd love to for you to comment on.

Kyle Porter: Yeah, please.

Craig Rosenberg: So one was so, um, you know, early days of Topol, we were really kind of consulting and so, and you guys were early and, and so we were at, Um, I believe Gainsight and they, you know, they were looking at stuff.

I said, well, look, let me introduce you to the sales loft guys. And, um, so, you know, make the intro, they have the call, Meta comes in and he's like, dude, who are these sales loft guys? I said, why? He's like, well, it [00:45:00] sounds like we had a demo. Those guys called me like it was either Kyle or someone else. An hour later, they, and I was like, Oh my God, this is like the key stakeholder play that people are afraid to do.

These kids in Atlanta are basically doing a demo and then going right to the top, right out of the gate. And in the, and at the time, this is the things that, as we're talking about this, it's not just like a plotting cop, but like there's this thing that you could see. Cause I was on the inside about how you engage with people.

They were selling a sales tech product. They went, they have fearlessly went to the top. That was what Nick was talking about. Is that interesting? He was like, I can't believe this. We've got to do this. And so I don't know if that was a coordinated plan or just instinct, Kyle, but that is something we can learn from as, um, you know, as we build companies and markets, you know, with [00:46:00] others, like comment on that for me, right?

Kyle Porter: in Boulder, Colorado. We moved the company to Boulder, Colorado, summer of 2012 to be part of the tech stars program. And I remember sitting in the house we were renting and there might have been a little Rocky mountain high in the air. And I start preaching and I'm like, and I get done talking and I go, guys, is someone recording this?

And they go, yeah, you've asked us to record twice as recording. And the thing that I had, the thing that I had pushed the hardest was we're going to go direct to the top. We're not going to stop. We're going to go direct to the top. That was the thesis of the whole talk in the kitchen that day. But you know, why not?

Right. I mean, what do you have to lose, right? And if you're creative enough, if you're engaging enough, if you're resourceful enough, you can get through to anybody, right? There's nothing stopping you. And our whole business is set on the premise that you can reach out to someone, connect with [00:47:00] someone and turn it into an opportunity.

So we got to be the best there is at telling you to look like someone important and we want to know you or doing it in a strategic way. You know, I got something to tell you on this topic. You guys remember when that Zora deck was floating around? It was a sales deck. You're a sales deck and it was being touted as the greatest sales deck ever.

And I thought about that and I go, that's not the greatest sales deck ever. I've got the greatest and it, and marketers are going to hate this deck because it's basically empty when it starts. And I mean, we all know that the worst sales deck is the one, it's just the product, right? Like,

Matt Amundson: Mmm hmm, Mmm

Kyle Porter: We all know that.

And Zora basically said, Oh, the best sales deck is the one that makes us change our perspective on the world around us and come to a conclusion that we should be operating a certain way that just happens to be the thesis of the product that we provide. Right. When we went into enterprise deals, we, we took a, we took a really unique approach.

[00:48:00] You probably heard about this, Craig, but we, we decided we're going to go in and we're going to do this thing called progressive prospecting. So let's say the opportunity is Google cloud, right? I'm going to get the most junior guys at sales loft to call junior people at Google cloud and interview them.

They're basically going to collect as much information they can about what's working, what's not working, who's doing what, what's the tech stack, what's the political landscape. They're going to try to build a little map of something that they think that they can then improve on. Then they're going to take that information and go to management.

And they're going to say, we've interacted with your team. We've, we've learned a few things that you may not know about your team. Are you willing to set up a call? They get on the call and the deck is this. It's about them. The first slide is here's the faces of the people we talked to. Face, name, title.

Here's what they told us is working and what's not. Here's what they told us your tech stack is. Oh, by the way, did we get that right or wrong? And we will edit the deck while we're talking to you to update it. Oh, you're not using this solution. You're using [00:49:00] that one, right? Here's the hypothesis of what we think we can help with.

Here's the hypothesis of what we think it will impact from an outcomes perspective. And then here's the proof points of where we've done it before. Right? And then that deck would then build based on what they learned from them. Then I would take it to the CEO and I go, Hey, CEO, we've interacted with your staff.

We've interacted with your team. We've had seven calls. We've learned a lot of information. Can I present to you what I think you might want to know about how your team can improve sales and increase the amount of opportunities you're closing and generate double digit increases. And they're like, how do they say no to that?

Maybe they say, just talk to my CRO instead. Okay. I'll give that presentation to him or her, you know? And so I call this the ultimate sales deck. And it was like this progressive work in progress deck where we show, we don't even do it in presentation mode because we've got the cursor ready to type. As you talk into the deck.

And that deck stays the whole time. And at the end, the deck says, here's what you're going to pay. Here's the date. Here's the payment terms. Like, I mean, it's getting, [00:50:00] it's closing that deal from the deck all the way down. And here's the, here's the check in call six months after in the details of what we expect from an outcomes perspective.

So that's the kind of the mentality of go to the top, but don't just go to the top, go to the top with something that they haven't heard before, something that they don't know, something that they really, really, really want to know.

Craig Rosenberg: that was incredible and very specific. That's what we like about the transaction.

Matt Amundson: Yeah.

Craig Rosenberg: When we get specific examples like this, I guarantee Matt will call me later today and go, that was awesome. Okay. One more, uh, well actually I just had a couple I want to get from you. So one of the things that Matt and I have been harping on, and it's clear, is founder brand and leveraging that.

You did that incredibly well. So I, I guess I'll let you answer this in two ways. One was, was that conscious and, uh, and you know, how did you approach it? And two, if you were going to do this again, [00:51:00] you know, what, what would you do around founder brand? Oh,

Kyle Porter: Um, I remember, uh, Uh, carpal tunnel in my hands because I was writing a blog post every single day on my phone.

Matt Amundson: Mm

Kyle Porter: And so I was obsessed with this idea of like, if I don't publish daily, and this was for like 18 months, we probably did this. Then I won't be able to build up the talents to write. I won't be able to build up the courage to write.

I won't be able to build up the culture to write. And so I just wanted to have like publish, publish, publish, publish. But I'll tell you what was most effective. And this actually involves you. The most effective channel for, or the most effective kind of momentum we got in content is that we were nobodies and no one knew who we were.

But people knew who the Funnelholic was, people knew who Trish Bertuzzi was, or Steve Richard, or John Barrows. Or in the investor world, Jason Lemkin, Mark Suster, [00:52:00] Brad Feld, right? So I decided that I'm going to some of the blog posts that I wrote early. We're like, here's the 10 things the funnel holic wants you to know about improving your sales skills, right?

Here's the, here's, here's the playbook straight from the mouth of Trish Bertuzzi. That's going to help you double digit your, you know, new qualified opportunities next quarter. So I just read all of your stuff. Obsessed over it, consumed it. And then I promoted you on my blog in a way that you liked it because it was talking about you in a positive way.

And then Trish would share it. Steve would share it. I remember one day we got a thousand signups for job change alerts because Steve Richard went on a webinar with, uh, the guy who's the founder of insightsales. com. I'm blanking on his name. Um, not the CEO, but the other one, uh, really Joe.

Craig Rosenberg: Krogh.

Kyle Porter: Yeah. Ken Krogh.

So they go on a webinar together and Steve Richard says, You are smoking crack if you don't sign up for JobChangeAlerts. com No, the webinar. And that thing, it's [00:53:00] like 250 signups that day, right? And then we just start posting on LinkedIn quotes. You're smoking crack if you don't sign up for JobChangeAlerts.

Steve Richard, link to sign up for JobChangeAlerts, right? And so like we could tie back to like a thousand new signups for that product from that webinar. But that was after we had talked about Steve Richard 10 times. You know, and um, I'll tell you a funny one, like Jason Limpkin, who's the famous saster and

Matt Amundson: Yeah, of course.

Kyle Porter: I cold Quora'd him. is a thing. I cold connected with him on Quora because he was writing all this stuff on Quora. And he, he then went on podcast or video, Google plus hangouts with us like this. And then we would chop up the conversations into like seven bits and they'd each be a blog post. Right.

And so that relationship, Ended up ultimately being the relationship that introduced me to Emergence Capital, who led our Series A, Insight Partners, who led our Series C. [00:54:00] And he was the key element of that. But like, I think that was really, and I'll tell you one more at one point in time, I had the number one blog post ever on the salesforce.

com blog. And I had two of the top five as a guest comment as a guest blogger on salesforce. com blog. And the first one was like, Seven things Tony Robbins wants you to know to improve your sales this year. And the reason was, is that Tony was going to get up on dreamforce. And so he shared it all his networks, Benny off, shared it on his networks and the thing just blew up.

And I mean, it was great because it was like, I, by the way, how, how you created this show name. I remember sitting on a whiteboard with 40 names of this blog post written out and just scratching through the ones that would suck and circling the like simple one of like seven things. Now I know that's been played out since then, but.

But that's an example of some of the things that we did to just, we wanted people to know who we were. So we talked about the people that they already knew and we told them and we [00:55:00] condensed their message down in a way they could consume it. And then those people in turn went around and talked about us.

Matt Amundson: I mean, you really created a style of content there too, because you understood what the audience wanted. They're like, yeah, sure. I could, uh, I could buy Tony Robbins books. I could attend his seminar, but like, this is kind of a cheat sheet. I could just learn the seven most valuable things right away from this short form blog post.

And it became a thing. Like you didn't see listicles at the same, you know, uh, uh, at the same volume that you saw once you guys started creating them. And they were these things that just like blog posts that were being shared all over LinkedIn and people talking about it just because the content was easy to consume.

It was written, you know, specifically for an audience, uh, that like, wasn't you, but it was your buyer, right? Like, and, and you

Kyle Porter: any filler shit. We weren't optimizing for SEO. We weren't trying to cram stuff in there. We were saying, [00:56:00] how can we take out as many words of this post as we possibly And I think, I mean, I remember in the early, early days. You guys remember company Lattice Engines way back in the day? It

Matt Amundson: Yes.

Kyle Porter: sales intelligence.

I read their blog, every one of their blog posts and basically wrote my own blog posts from the inspiration from their blog posts and made them one fifth the length and way more snappy and added all my elements to it. And it was like, it was the, it was the content that I used.

Craig Rosenberg: Wow. That's amazing, man. All right. Well, I gotta say, We talked about a bunch of stuff. One thing you've triggered me on for our pod storytelling. I mean, that's the least Matt and I, I mean, we've talked, but like the stories were incredible here, man.

Matt Amundson: Oh, yeah.

Craig Rosenberg: So actionable, whether you know it or not. I don't know if you know that, but like.

We're leaving here with things that people can go do that and learn from you. So that's what we're trying to do, bro. [00:57:00] That's the transaction for

Kyle Porter: I love it.

Craig Rosenberg: the, it's great to have you on. It's great to be reconnect. I mean, I'm, I'm just really excited, dude. I missed the energy. It's, it's, it was great to have you on, man.

I appreciate it. I

Kyle Porter: Things have changed, but we still have opportunity to make a big impact. You know,

Matt Amundson: Absolutely.

Kyle Porter: what you guys are doing and I love it.

Matt Amundson: Thank you. Thank you. God. We gotta get down to Atlanta, Craig. Or Florida. Either one.

Craig Rosenberg: to go down to Florida right now.

Kyle Porter: I got, I got your addresses to ship some tangerines in January, uh, but we definitely need to find a time to hang out in person.

Craig Rosenberg: I love it. All right guys.

[00:58:00]