Episode 102: Luke Ward –  Curiosity Killed the Cat, But Helped the Salesperson

The term sales can oversimplify the SDRs role into one singular action: selling. However, Luke Ward points out that it’s a true challenge of learning how to change people’s minds and communicate ideas in a simple, but meaningful way.

As an SDR, Luke challenged himself to learn essential communication skills while making sure that he knew his product backward and forwards. This dedication allowed him to excel in sales and eventually land his current leadership role as sales development manager at Rubrik.

In this episode of Tech Sales is for Hustlers, Luke reflects on his sales journey through various companies and different roles, while breaking down the essential qualities and conversational skills to ensure a sale.

Guest-At-A-Glance

💡 Name: Luke Ward

💡 What he does:  Luke is a sales development manager at Rubrik.

💡 Company: Rubrik

💡 Noteworthy: Luke was born and raised in Austin, Texas. In high school, he moved to India because his parents were missionaries there. When he returned, Luke went to the University of Texas at Austin, and during that time, he was involved with the RuffaloCODY call center, where he was a caller and supervisor. He also worked as an annual giving officer on the fundraising side at UT. In addition, Luka was involved in the church and served in the student ministry.

💡 Where to find Luke: LinkedIn | Website

Key Insights

⚡ Sales is changing people’s minds. Luke worked in a call center for three years, and besides that, he was heavily involved in church, and in all that, he recognized that sales was the next step. As he says, it was clear to him that sales was actually a job for him. “There was this desire to figure out: how can we, in the most simple way possible, communicate an idea in a meaningful way? And also, go back into the church thing too; it’s about changing people’s minds, which is really difficult. Most people don’t want to change their minds, so I think that appealed to me, and I was like, ‘Well, I can go do that in sales.’ I also like to talk, and I thought, ‘They’ll pay me to talk if I do sales.'”

⚡Learn the product quickly, and you will have a successful sale. Through the training he received at memoryBlue, Luke learned a lot and developed the skills necessary to be successful at sales. According to Luke, he learned early on how to do an upfront contract with people over the phone, which he is still teaching his SDRs. “From outbounding, you have to learn a product really quickly to be able to get on the phone and create enough interest, maybe overcome an objection or two. […] The other thing was that what I didn’t know, I could just be curious about. Talk to the prospect on the phone and be genuinely curious about their company, their environment, and what their pain points are. And that really helped the sale; it helped book the meeting at least and get further along.”

⚡ It’s important to ask the right questions. In sales, the relationship with customers is often a critical point, and it is imperative to develop a good relationship with them. Through extensive experience, Luke has come to see that there are different types of leads and that they must be handled differently. Luke emphasizes that the most important thing is how you conduct a conversation with potential clients. As he notes, you must get to know them well, understand them and what is crucial is ask them the right question. “I had to ask my clients the right questions so I could know how to sell what we were selling when we were there, and then, ask prospects the right questions to scope out their project, their requirements, and what’s important to their organization. And, that’s what I really try to arm my team with. It’s like, ‘Ask the right questions, and then, know enough technically to be dangerous.'”

Episode Highlights

From memoryBlue to SupportNinja

“I found out pretty early on that they were mostly referral based on their client structure. And I was like, ‘Oh, we’re paying a referral fee for our clients. We haven’t had a true salesperson who could bring in a homegrown contract. We’ll make more money if we sell.’ So I got a wrangle on the leads. I implemented a CRM within the first three months because their Salesforce was just very unstructured lead data, and a lot of mess in there. So we needed a way to control pipeline and forecasting, so we implemented a CRM. I thought, ‘Okay, I need to make these processes repeatable.’ So, I started taking calls, and at that point, the outsourcing industry was booming to the point that the inbound calls alone were almost as much as I could handle. […] We were growing fast, and they were offering me to be the president of that company. I was in over my head, but I was like, ‘I’ll do it if nobody else will; this will be a good experience for me.'”

From SupportNinja to Indeed

“It’s crazy being the president of a startup. I honestly wanted to get more structure back into my career, so I took a step back to go be an AE. I wanted to stay in Austin; I wanted to try a new industry and a new type of company. The outsourcing experience really helped me, and so I got a job with Indeed and was, obviously, still in tech, hiring-related, and an Austin-based company. […]

I was immediately in a sales role, so I started on the acquisition side. We were working with clients who used the free version of the product and convincing them to try paying for it and showing them the way that the solution could work if they paid. A lot of people are successful enough on Indeed; they don’t ever have to use the paid version. And it was like, ‘Well, you could hire better. These tools work better.’ But a lot of it was just education. Teaching people how to use the product was probably the biggest thing because we would teach them how to use the free version better.”

From Indeed to Deep Instinct

“I decided, ‘I’m just at the peak of this experience at Indeed; I’m out of here.’ I wanted to go out on top; I wanted a change. I really felt confident in my abilities to sell HR tech. And I know that I could get a job at a lot of HR tech companies, but I thought, ‘I think I want to get involved in a more complex sale.’ And I had some friends in cyber security, a lot of friends at SHI on the channel side here, so I started asking around a little bit about that. My first manager from Indeed calls me up and tells me, ‘Hey, I’m looking at these companies; let me know what you think.’ He was looking to make a move. […] He was starting the mid-market segment at this company Deep Instinct, and they had no sellers. It was all green space. And I thought, ‘I want a big territory that no one has sold in before.’ […]

It wasn’t just that the solution was more complicated; it’s that the sales process is more complex. And there are different stages to it. The POV process works differently; you have to get a technical win on the product and an internal win with the structure of it. In addition, for most IT sales, you sell through the channel. So you don’t just sell directly to the client, you also work with your partners in the channel who help them make their purchases. So there are two layers of people to sell to in most IT sales, especially infrastructure and software licenses.”

Transcript: 

[00:00:00] Luke Ward: Nobody wants to be on a cold call, but I still think you can make a cold call a highlight of someone’s day instead of that annoying moment.

[00:00:07] And so I think I learned pretty quickly, like how do you create a real connection with someone quickly on the phone? I was learning what’s the best way that I can get people excited about programs at UT. That’s very similar to what’s the best way to articulate the value proposition of this product. 

[00:00:46] Marc Gonyea: Luke Ward, we’re just going unicorn all day. We’re all podcast while we’re in Austin ’cause Luke, you, you’re Austin born and raised. 

[00:00:54] Luke Ward: Austin, Texas, born and raised.

[00:00:55] Chris Corcoran: The eyes of Texas. 

[00:00:57] Luke Ward: Absolutely. They’re, they’re upon all of us.

[00:01:00] Marc Gonyea: Thanks for joining us. It’s been a while. 

[00:01:02] Luke Ward: Yeah, just, I, I feel like I saw Chris at a Christmas party.

[00:01:06] Chris Corcoran: That was it. 

[00:01:06] Luke Ward: Yeah. And, that was at Eberly or something like that. I don’t know. That might have been two or three years ago. Yeah, it was, 

[00:01:12] it was a one like… 

[00:01:13] Marc Gonyea: a memoryBlue holiday party. 

[00:01:14] Luke Ward: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 

[00:01:15] Marc Gonyea: That was the last time I saw Luke. 

[00:01:16] Luke Ward: I think, I think Aspen another podcast guest, we crashed the party.

[00:01:21] We didn’t tell, we didn’t tell them that we were coming and we showed up. 

[00:01:24] Marc Gonyea: That’s great. 

[00:01:25] Luke Ward: We bought our own drinks. That’s, it was fun. We 

[00:01:27] can find, I remember talking a lot of UT football. 

[00:01:29] Yes. Which is what we were doing just now. Yeah. Maybe we’ll get into it. I don’t know if that’s the topic for today. 

[00:01:34] Marc Gonyea: We can hit on it, if you want to, I’m not gonna talk about Virginia Tech football, that’s for sure.

[00:01:39] Luke Ward: Alright, sometimes all, all programs have to rebuild. 

[00:01:42] Chris Corcoran: Damn it, as in if that’s what you wanna call what we’re doing. 

[00:01:45] Luke Ward: Well, that’s what Texas has been doing for 10 years. 

[00:01:47] Marc Gonyea: I know. 

[00:01:49] All right. Well, we know you a little bit about you, right? There’s obviously more to learn, which we’ll learn along the way too, but the folks listening don’t know anything about you.

[00:01:57] So why don’t you share with us, share the audience a little bit about yourself, kind of where you grew up, little bit as a kid high school college, and we will like move you along or like focus on things and they jump out. 

[00:02:07] Luke Ward: Yeah. You pick what you like. Uh, there you go. We already said born and raised in Austin, Texas.

[00:02:11] So grew up here. Family was all pretty local. It was a very different town at that point. Well, part of the area, South Austin. 

[00:02:19] Marc Gonyea: South Austin. Okay. 

[00:02:20] Luke Ward: Yep. Lived in Utah just for a second, but mostly South Austin, 78749. And now, you know, still live a little bit South Austin. I haven’t made it very far from, from where I grew up, but in high school, moved to India, which was a wild experience.

[00:02:35] My parents were missionaries there, and I came back and went to UT, going to, uh, UT was always my dream as a kid, ’cause we don’t have a pro sports team. So that was the big one. Grew up going to the games. And that was kind of my first goal, which is harder than you think. Like, I guess it’s, it’s pretty hard to get in if you’re an inter, considered an international student.

[00:02:54] Luke Ward: So I took my little path to get there. That was kind of my first big goal. I was very passionate about it. So I was involved in the call center there. Okay. We hired a few people at memoryBlue from the call center. 

[00:03:04] Marc Gonyea: RuffleCODY. 

[00:03:05] Luke Ward: Yes. RuffleCODY’s who manages it? I think they still manage the call centers there, but I met Joey Sorenson, and Don, too, there.

[00:03:15] Who did we hire? One more. I can’t remember, those are the main three. If I forgot somebody, I’m gonna feel bad. So going, working there, I learned how to cold call basically. You’re you don’t even have anything to sell. You’re just, you’re just convinced, getting someone excited about something and then hoping that they’ll give you money before they hang up on you.

[00:03:33] And I liked it. So I liked, I learned about the metrics, and I learned about the messaging. So when I was getting out of school, that there was an obvious job there, I’d kind of like carved out a role in the fundraising org, ’cause I did pretty well. And I’d been involved in supervising even. Stayed way too long in the call center, maybe three years, that was a lifer for them.

[00:03:52] And then when I got outta school, I worked at UT a little bit in the fundraising side. And one day I was thinking, you know, this is different than maybe what I want. Like I think I kind of enjoy fast pace. I think I, I, I really enjoy UT. Relationship building, and, and giving and fundraising is different than a sales role.

[00:04:13] And in my head, I was thinking, man, it’d be great to get into like technology sales or something where I can, you know, kind of, early in my career, make some money, based off of the effort that I put in. And that’s when I started looking around for jobs and found memoryBlue through Joey Sorenson. 

[00:04:29] Marc Gonyea: Wow.

[00:04:30] All right. Let’s come back to that ’cause I wanna jump in. So, fascinating couple things. Your parents were missionaries.

[00:04:35] Luke Ward: Mm-hmm. 

[00:04:36] Marc Gonyea: Right? What did you think you were gonna do? You know you wanna go to UT, but what did you think you were gonna do when you grew up so to 

[00:04:42] speak? 

[00:04:42] Luke Ward: Oh, I thought I was gonna be a youth pastor.

[00:04:44] Yep. I was very interested in communicating, so I was going to school for advertising, and maybe part of the way through my first year of advertising, I was like, I feel like I wanna be doing something that really matters. Like I need to find something that’s closer aligned with my passions. And, and I think it was just an idea, but I had gotten real involved in church at the time 

[00:05:04] Marc Gonyea: Mm-hmm 

[00:05:05] Luke Ward: and was serving in student ministry, getting to this point where I was like doing sermons.

[00:05:09] And I thought that was gonna be the path, for sure, when I graduated. 

[00:05:13] Marc Gonyea: And, yep. Another thing, we’ll come back to that actually, ’cause turned out not to be the path, but I mean, it can be in other ways, but know you can share that list if you’d like.

[00:05:20] Luke Ward: I will. 

[00:05:21] Marc Gonyea: Austin. Like tell us about like what it is like.

[00:05:24] So you, you moved around, but like what, how, what are your feelings about there? The crazy growth. ‘Cause Chris and I have seen, we 

[00:05:31] opened the office. 

[00:05:32] Luke Ward: Oh, your real estate prices are skyrocketing. 

[00:05:33] Marc Gonyea: Yeah. But so 

[00:05:35] what’s your take is get native as to like the 

[00:05:37] transformation of the city?

[00:05:39] Luke Ward: I mean, I think it’s great. Any city’s gonna transform, like it can’t stay the same.

[00:05:43] Marc Gonyea: Yeah. 

[00:05:43] Luke Ward: Everywhere changes. And we, I think we’ve seen a lot of cities growing and changing in the past 20 years, but Austin in particular, I mean, just always on the number one charts for places to come to. It’s interesting to see who sticks. Some people come here, they, they don’t like it. They don’t make it and they don’t stick around forever.

[00:06:02] And you’ve seen some people moving out of Austin for the first time. But it’s now I think what, what really changed it when I knew it was changing for me is how long it would take me to meet another native Austinite. I mean, probably one in 20, one in 25 people I meet now is actually like that. And so it’s, it’s really different, but it’s brought flavors from everywhere to the city, and it’s exposing a really unique culture and place to people from other places.

[00:06:29] Like we’ve got places that I worked like Indeed and places like you guys, memoryBlue, like. Oracles are here. 

[00:06:34] Marc Gonyea: Mm-hmm.

[00:06:35] Luke Ward: They’re all hiring people because they know that that’s where young people wanna live. And it’s cool to see some people fall in love with the city and stick around, and we’ve got more to do than you could ever imagine.

[00:06:44] That was a little bit different before, too. 

[00:06:46] Marc Gonyea: Yeah. 

[00:06:46] Wow. Wow. Nice. So many places to go. 

[00:06:49] Chris Corcoran: Well, let’s talk 

[00:06:50] about just growing up as in high school. Yeah. What kind of, what kind of person were you in high school? 

[00:06:54] Activities, 

[00:06:55] extracurriculars? 

[00:06:55] Luke Ward: Ohh, goodness. I mean, I announced high school football in elementary and middle school before we moved to India, grandfather.

[00:07:03] Yep. You did public address announcing. Uh, that’s kind of when I fell in love with football and was meeting the coaches down on the field, doing the spotting, going over the rosters. So I was always, you know, big into sports. I was always pretty involved in church. I’d been homeschooled growing up so my, a lot of my social community was church-based, which is why I think I stuck there and why it had really, you know, mattered to me.

[00:07:27] And I was passionate about it. I’ve always been into live music. So I, that, I mean, big part of the Austin scene here and something that I still do now, too. 

[00:07:34] Wow. Very good. And then, so how long did you live in India? Two and a half, three years, right around that mark. It was most of the high school period.

[00:07:41] Chris Corcoran: And 

[00:07:41] you graduated high school in India? 

[00:07:43] Luke Ward: Yep. 

[00:07:43] Chris Corcoran: Wow. And then, and then came 

[00:07:44] back for your freshman year? 

[00:07:46] Luke Ward: Well, I came 

[00:07:47] back a little early. I needed to establish in-state residents so I didn’t have to pay out-of-state tuition. So I came back and did like ACC classes, worked a full-time job to kind of get myself, you know, ready for, I mean, I paid my way through college, so it was, was like, we gotta figure this out.

[00:08:03] Par missionary parents don’t flip the tuition bill, apparently. So you just pray a lot. You hope God does.

[00:08:14] Marc Gonyea: Oh, Luke, that’s a good one, dude. 

[00:08:16] Chris Corcoran: So you came, you came 

[00:08:16] back, you worked full time. Worked at, went, went to college, took some classes at Austin community college. Yep. Then. Moved over to UT Austin. 

[00:08:23] Luke Ward: Yep. Well, UTSA first, was in San Antonio for just a year. They had a cap program that I was a part of where, and I was like, “Hey, I actually, I hear that classes might be easier at UTSA.” Some of the freshman classes at UT are brutal, but they had a program where if you went to another UT institution, you did full time, and you got over a 3.5 GPA,

[00:08:44] you wouldn’t even have to apply. They, you literally, the next year, you would just show up.

[00:08:48] Marc Gonyea: Rest of your classes. 

[00:08:49] Luke Ward: Oh yeah. You just show up for registration and boom. You don’t even go through like reorientation. So it’s a good program. 

[00:08:54] Chris Corcoran: That’s awesome. Yeah. 

[00:08:55] Marc Gonyea: That’s the way to do it, man. It was especially 

[00:08:57] nowadays with what stuff 

[00:08:59] costs.

[00:09:00] Luke Ward: Oh yeah. 

[00:09:00] Marc Gonyea: Even in-state tuition, even in 

[00:09:02] Texas, less expensive to go to ACC and work and then do the year. 

[00:09:07] Luke Ward: Well, and I got a lot of confidence in my work experience from, from that, you know, working in high school, you know, I worked at like a litigation support company calling for medical records, subpoenas or something, but yeah, it was an in-office job.

[00:09:21] My first experience, like seeing how a company worked pretty early. And I think that gave me some confidence later on as I moved into other jobs. Wow. 

[00:09:28] Chris Corcoran: And then how how’d you get involved with the, the UT fundraising call center? 

[00:09:32] Luke Ward: Oh, they were dying to hire people on campus. Yeah. Literally dying to find anyone that would do it, but it was an evening job.

[00:09:38] So, I could do my, I could do my internship at the church. I could go to class all day and then work three and a half, four hours in the call center in the evening. But I, I also wasn’t involved in many student orgs. I didn’t live on campus ’cause it was super expensive. And so as a commuter student, I had probably fewer friends, even a lot of my, like friends from growing up here just didn’t go to UT.

[00:10:01] So it felt like I was in two different worlds sometimes. And then when I went to the call center, I had all these people that I worked alongside and like nothing bonds people more than getting hung up on. You get hung up on together then you, you really feel a close bond. 

[00:10:16] Marc Gonyea: Wow. 

[00:10:17] You’re gonna be good in this role that you’re in now.

[00:10:19] Luke Ward: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, for sure. 

[00:10:20] Chris Corcoran: And so you did a good job, just, you were calling different fun, former alumni or former students, alumni, Texas EXs, parents of students, 

[00:10:29] anything? 

[00:10:29] Luke Ward: Little bit of parents. Okay. Mostly alumni. Okay. I mean, there’s a lot of ’em yes. More living alumni than any other university. So they had an endless list of people to call.

[00:10:38] And I started to learn about like data segmentation, like, oh, if some of these donors gave money multiple years in a row, then they’re gonna be more likely to give money again. And I even started to see how they would position different reps to different things. Like if you were good at talking to a certain demographic, similar to like certain industries that I see in sales now, then you might do a better job.

[00:11:00] And they would, we would kind of position the reps in that way. Okay. But we, it was also the first time where somebody was coaching my calls. Okay. And where I was getting the benefit of somebody saying, I think you could have done this a little bit better in the intro. You know, here’s a way to ask that question that doesn’t make you seem.

[00:11:16] like a jackass, right? Like how can you, how can you ask a question without being invasive or how do you overcome objections even, for the first time? So that was very cool. 

[00:11:26] Chris Corcoran: And so you worked in that job for three 

[00:11:28] years? 

[00:11:29] Luke Ward: Yep. 

[00:11:29] Chris Corcoran: How many years as a caller and how many years as a supervisor? 

[00:11:32] Luke Ward: I never stopped calling.

[00:11:34] Chris Corcoran: Oh really? 

[00:11:34] Luke Ward: Yeah. Once I was supervising, they would let me pick up extra shifts to call. Okay. And then I could make a little bit of extra money school ’cause everybody got three or four. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean not, pretty close. Yeah. Yeah. Did, it was pretty good for that. And then, I got involved in creating the training program, so I never stopped calling, but I think it was within six months, they were angling for me to move into a coaching training role.

[00:11:57] And then yeah, the rest was history after that. 

[00:11:59] Chris Corcoran: So you wanted, you were going 

[00:11:59] to school, you wanted to be a youth pastor, you’re making money at the call center. And then kind of 

[00:12:04] what happened? 

[00:12:05] Luke Ward: Oh, man. You know, I went through these changes. I, I think it’s very normal for people, I think a lot of pastors’ kids and missionaries’ kids go through this experience when, where their faith transitions in college, in high school, that kind of thing.

[00:12:20] And I’d kind of been once you’re in the ministry, on the church side too, it also kind of changes your faith a little bit. ‘Cause you’re seeing a wide spectrum, but there’s also a personal responsibility there with this, you know, this thing that you’re sharing with other people, you want it to be real.

[00:12:36] You don’t, you don’t wanna be hypocritical about it. That’s like, I guess that’s in the book. It says not to be hypocritical. Yeah. so I was going to church and our church got absorbed by another church, and that was too messy of a process for me being on the staff and seeing how it unfolded. I tried to kind of go to some churches again after that, but for a while, I was just a little jaded on the church side of things.

[00:12:59] And I was like, I don’t know. I, I have some baggage here that I need to work through and a good, a really good, pastor that I had at the time. He said, “You don’t need to go to church.” He told me, and I felt this release, hearing it from, yeah. You know, a pastor. He was like, “You don’t need to go to church.

[00:13:16] You can take a break. “And I was like, “Okay, I’ll take a break and see how that works out.” So I still feel like faith’s very important in my life, but, you know, man pastors, their, their burnout rates about as high as salespeople may be higher. It’s, it’s a tough job.

[00:13:30] Marc Gonyea: That, I mean, that’s the sales job. 

[00:13:32] Luke Ward: Yeah, it is.

[00:13:32] Oh yeah. 

[00:13:33] Marc Gonyea: You know, 

[00:13:33] I mean, not, it’s a much bigger job than that. 

[00:13:37] Luke Ward: Yeah. 

[00:13:38] Marc Gonyea: In my mind. Yeah. But it’s, but there’s a lot in today’s modern 

[00:13:42] worlds.

[00:13:42] Luke Ward: Big time. 

[00:13:43] Marc Gonyea: Right. You’re selling religion, people that helping them, you know, get through the day to day world. It’s, it’s a lot of work. 

[00:13:51] Luke Ward: They’re big organizations, you know, churches are big organizations.

[00:13:55] They’re very near and dear to people’s heart. They do give their money to it. And, and certainly, pastors are relationship builders, and I think that’s kind of the part of what sales is. 

[00:14:06] Chris Corcoran: Okay, so you, you take a break and then, but you, you’re making money at RuffleCODY. What did you, did you, what did you wanna do when you graduated from UT?

[00:14:14] Luke Ward: Oh, I had no clue at this, this point, the church, the church plan seemed like it was the move. Yeah. I was certain that God was telling me to go do that. God, maybe God tells people to do things. I was like, this is God’s will, at least at that point in my life. And I was like, well, I guess it’s not, you know, maybe it’s not.

[00:14:31] And so I didn’t know what I was gonna do after. So I was like, this fundraising thing is probably gonna help me figure it out. Let me just go apply the skills that I’ve learned and do what I think I’m good at, which is just, you know, sharing my passion with other people and, and trying to build a relationship with them.

[00:14:49] Luke Ward: So we had a couple of people in the, on the UT side had, had me get involved in this project called 40 for 40, and they had included me to kind of be the student representation for, and the call center representation on this group that was starting a new timed-giving campaign. Huge giving campaign now.

[00:15:11] Right? We set it as $40,000 goal the first year because of the 40 acres, but we knew it would be more than that. They’re doing like $400,00, 4 million now. I mean, it’s been what, five, six years since this happened. And so, by serving on that grouping, I got more involved with UT’s actual development office.

[00:15:30] And they had a young alumni group. They were saying, we need to figure out a way to target young alumni, get them involved in active from an earlier phase because alumni giving was related to satisfaction rates with your degree. And the earlier they started making get the more likely they would later all these things, but I thought, great I can

[00:15:49] do this stuff and do it full time and maybe make a little better salary. And it was really cool being on campus and working, you know, like I said, I dreamed of going there when I grew up. So, yeah, that was, that was a pretty neat time. But, eventually, I thought, man, sales just might be the move, and that’s.

[00:16:05] Marc Gonyea: Did you know people in sales?

[00:16:07] Did you like, how did sales, you know, your missionary parents are missionaries, right? You’re in school, you’re heavily involved in your church. 

[00:16:16] Luke Ward: Mm. You, you know, I probably knew some people in sales, but I knew after the call center stuff, seeing how that worked out, I was like, this is the correct application of my skillset.

[00:16:30] This is something that I’ll enjoy doing, right? Even the advertising freshman year. Right? That was this desire to figure out how can we, in the most simple way possible, communicate an idea in a meaningful way. And also, you go and go back into the church thing too. It’s about changing people’s minds,

[00:16:48] which is really difficult. Most people don’t want to change their mind. And so I think that that appealed to me and I was like, well, I can go do that in sales. I, I also like to talk if, if you didn’t notice by the length of the sentences on the podcast so far, I do like to talk, and I thought they’ll pay me to talk if I go do sales.

[00:17:06] Chris Corcoran: So you’re doing the, the development ATT, and then did Joey Sorenson re, reach out to you? Did you, did you reach out to him? Like how did that whole thing become? 

[00:17:14] Luke Ward: Well, I mean, we had worked together for so long at the call center, and I, I think he must have, you know, just been getting settled with his first client, maybe in his first six months or so.

[00:17:26] And he was saying that, you know, Hey, this is a pretty cool opportunity if you’re looking to get into sales. I can’t, I, I can’t remember exactly how, but once, once he sent me the link and I read up on the concept on y’all’s website, I was like, interesting. So they’re gonna put me out in front of a whole bunch of different types of clients, and I’m gonna at least be able to have somewhat of a say in where I end up because once I got involved in interviewing or looking for a job, especially I’m like one year outta college, I was like, this is overwhelming.

[00:17:56] Right. And I don’t feel like the interview process is working well for me. I probably didn’t know how to interview very well back then, but I, I don’t know if I do now, but I, I, I was like, I don’t feel like I’m connecting, and I don’t feel like even when I connect with the company that I know it’s the right fit for me yet.

[00:18:13] And so the model where you get a peak inside and you’re already working for them, I was like, if I can get a client that I wanna work for, I’m very confident in my ability to get a job and secure a job there. And so, I was like, let’s go, let’s go try that out. We need more of 

[00:18:29] Chris Corcoran: this. Yeah, I 

[00:18:29] Marc Gonyea: know. So. I mean, you’re at the epitome of it

[00:18:32] ’cause you only worked with us for four months. 

[00:18:34] Luke Ward: Well, yeah, it was real short, which is okay. It was great. Yeah. I can think of like four or five different clients that I worked for in that time. And I still think about all of them, though. So I think it was, it was…

[00:18:45] Marc Gonyea: Good exposure for you. Yeah. Who’d you 

[00:18:47] interview with when you came to interview at memoryBlue?

[00:18:51] So you had Sorenson puts you in touch with us. We reach… 

[00:18:55] Luke Ward: I haven’t talked to Nimit, talked to Nimit for sure. Maybe I think I did one interview with Will Vining, he’s here. Yeah. I already hugged him. He was my first manager. And then I think you, I think you burst into the conference room in the middle of my interview.

[00:19:13] Yeah. At least for two or three minutes. Yeah. 

[00:19:14] Marc Gonyea: Nimit probably told me to do that. Yeah. So we were trying to, like, you had got some Gause and UT. You need to let ’em know that, you know, RuffaloCODY. 

[00:19:23] Chris Corcoran: Yeah. Yeah. That’s like our, our like five-star recruits. 

[00:19:26] Marc Gonyea: Yeah. I think I did. Maybe we talked about one IQ. That’s not how I knew you ’cause right,

[00:19:30] ’cause you weren’t there that long. And I was in the office a little bit. I remember talking to you when supporting was making their move on you. Right. And maybe the interview. So, so yeah. 

[00:19:39] Luke Ward: I remember my other clients were ExecRank. 

[00:19:42] Marc Gonyea: Okay. 

[00:19:42] Luke Ward: The big one. 

[00:19:43] Marc Gonyea: Oh yeah, we’re selling… 

[00:19:44] Luke Ward: I still talk to Andrew Burdick all the time.

[00:19:46] He’s not there anymore. He’s at a staffing company now. He, he was there for a long time. Yeah, but those ExecRank, that was fun ’cause I had, you know, closing style experience from the UT stuff where people were giving us their credit card information on the phone, and that’s the same thing we were doing with ExecRank, was getting executives to, you know, buy a $250 subscription. So I did that. Got more closing experience, which is pretty rare here. Yeah. And then same thing with support, you know, the way Nimit aligned me with those clients was I guess the stroke of genius. I mean, unless he wanted me to get hired out that fast and he wanted me to stay longer, but yeah, I got to close deals in those roles.

[00:20:24] And so I kind of skipped over the SDR component of my career because of that. Yeah. Like my future jobs were all closing related. Had to book my own meetings, though. So I guess it’s good I learned. 

[00:20:37] Marc Gonyea: So both your clients at memoryBlue, you were closing.

[00:20:40] Luke Ward: Yeah. 

[00:20:41] Marc Gonyea: Wow. That’s rare. 

[00:20:42] Luke Ward: And I had a third client, Israeli, back cyber defense company. I only worked with them for like three weeks. Okay. And they almost never called me. I tried to get in touch with them. They were, that was tough. That was my first true like IT sales role.

[00:20:59] And I saw that it didn’t matter how good you were on the phone, like getting through to IT people is still one of the hardest things that, that was a new set of talent I had to be learning, and this was at the very beginning of EDR, and they were kind of pioneering. 

[00:21:14] Marc Gonyea: What’s EDR? 

[00:21:15] Luke Ward: Which EDR? 

[00:21:16] Marc Gonyea: No, no. What is EDR?

[00:21:17] Luke Ward: Oh, oh, oh, detect and response. It’s endpoint detection and response software, right? Yep. Yep. So this is gonna be on top of AV now. Endpoint detection and response that’s gonna be like SentinelOne crowd strike now. And what I was learning at the time was that they could create, you know, ways of hiding the data internally.

[00:21:35] They could monitor the behavior that an attacker was taking, but this was the very beginning of this. Something that stuck with me until this day that I learned on the job was that the NSA tells you to assume breach and how are we gonna respond if we assume a cybersecurity breach, we’re going to, you know, basically know that they’re gonna get in and contain and track them once they do so that we can future in the future fortified defense.

[00:21:59] Now, we’re sitting here years later, I worked at a cyber defense company that was providing AV software. That was a defense layer, trying to tell people, “No, you don’t have to assume breach.” So we’ve taken that, those types of steps, but that was my first ever IT and, and cybersecurity client. Man, I wish I could remember their name off the top of my head. 

[00:22:21] Alright, so you’re at memoryBlue. Do you remember any of the folks you were working with here? Like your 

[00:22:26] Marc Gonyea: colleagues. 

[00:22:27] Luke Ward: Oh, Shay. 

[00:22:28] Marc Gonyea: Shay Gordon. Yes. Aspen Sweeny, Ramone Flavedo. Oh, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. You guys have him on yet? 

[00:22:37] Chris Corcoran: No, we need to get him on.

[00:22:38] Yeah. I, I had a great conversation with him at the, 

[00:22:40] at that Christmas party. 

[00:22:41] Luke Ward: Yeah. I have, I had a podcast with him last year. You may need another type of dinger. I’m not sure he needs like a buzzer. I produced it. It was tough to edit. But yeah, Ramone was great. Who else? Obviously, I worked with Devin.

[00:22:53] I feel like now I’m forgetting people, and I feel bad. 

[00:22:55] Luke Ward: That’s alright. Don’t Kelly worked here? Who else did we end up with? Well, Nimit, I feel like Nimit deserves big shout-out. Oh, Andrew Sturkey. Yeah, Sturkey. I think he’s at Rapid7 now. Amazing. 

[00:23:08] Marc Gonyea: He’s that, Red Canary. 

[00:23:09] Luke Ward: Red Canary.

[00:23:10] Marc Gonyea: Yep. That’s okay. 

[00:23:11] Luke Ward: Same thing. Right? Rapid7 and Red Canary. 

[00:23:13] Marc Gonyea: I don’t know. Maybe. I hope not. 

[00:23:15] Luke Ward: They can write us and tell us.

[00:23:16] Marc Gonyea: That’s right. That’s right. 

[00:23:17] Send me a text, Andrew. All right. And then you recommended Aspen, your cousin come work. 

[00:23:23] Luke Ward: Oh yeah. 

[00:23:23] Marc Gonyea: Right. 

[00:23:24] Luke Ward: She was working at a call center. She probably told you, so I won’t go too deep into it.

[00:23:28] I think she was at a, at this place called Zebra something at the time. It was a real estate leads. They were, they were developing leads for real estate people. And I’m like, wait a minute. You’re in a call center. You’re rapid dialing homeowners in the evening. Yeah. Like, come on, we got, this might be a better position for you.

[00:23:44] If you’ve got those type of chops, then you should come work at memoryBlue. 

[00:23:48] Marc Gonyea: And when you came on, so you were going outbound, maybe it is that great. Might have been passing to you, people to call and qualify their work, you were definitely going outbound for, your other, for your, for SportNinja. Yep. What did you learn in that role?

[00:24:02] What do you… 

[00:24:03] Luke Ward: Oh man. I mean, the, I, the training we did was great. I mean, it, it, I think you guys have come a long way with your training, even since then. But it was, it was great to just sit down with Will and, and to hear weekly conversations with Nimit where we were going over Sandler like the stuff that Sandler teaches has stuck with me throughout my sales career to this day and I think we listened to these guru Ganesh tapes from this.

[00:24:27] What was that guy? Like the original Birkenstock sales tape. Yeah. And that was amazing hearing him. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and so, and plus he was like a hippie salesperson. Yeah. And I was like, this is a little different than some of these sales trainer types. Right. So I remember that training early on learning how to do an upfront contract with people on the phone. That I still teach my SDRs and do all the time. And then, you know, from outbounding, you just, you have to learn a product really quickly to be able to be on the phone and create enough interest, maybe overcome an objection or two.

[00:25:02] So one of the most valuable skills that still stuck with me is, you know, how can I learn about a product really fast, and I think that’s so key for salespeople. But the other thing was that if, what, I didn’t know, I, you know, I could just be curious about talk to the prospect on the phone and be, you know, genuinely curious about their company, their environment and what their pain points are.

[00:25:24] And some that really helped the sale, even if, you know, it helped book the meeting at least, and, and get further along. 

[00:25:31] Marc Gonyea: And so you were inviting team. What did you get good at? What was like your superpower, like, you know, I mean, obviously you just said up for a contract. I don’t know if it was that or something else.

[00:25:41] Luke Ward: We, well, I got really good at working with the clients, like working with my client, you know, Will gave me free rein. You know, he helped out in the beginning, but he saw that Ramon and I, and, and Sturkey had developed a good relationship with Andrew Burdick on the ExecRank team. So when it came time to work with the support engine team, they were pretty unique, and he thought, “Okay, I can tell that Luke can handle this pretty well.”

[00:26:07] And he gave me the space to work with them and develop that relationship. So I was really grateful for that. And I think it, it taught me a lot of confidence because it’s unique that you’re, you’re the per, the client is also the person you’re selling for that’s so unique. But it taught me a lot about being a salesperson and learning their needs and how to execute on them.

[00:26:29] So, you know, I saw that they didn’t have much structure. I was like, well, we need to figure out a proposal. We need to take a look at the contracts. These, there’s gonna be disputes related to this contract. And I learned, okay, there’s different types of leads, and I need to handle those different types of leads differently.

[00:26:45] And then just learning what, how to have those conversations with prospects afterwards, whether it was on ExecRank or SupportNinja, you know, there was a way to have a helpful conversation with someone. And I think Will was really good at teaching me how to overcome objections and ask, ask the right question to keep that conversation moving forward.

[00:27:05] Chris Corcoran: How, how much did your three years in the fundraising world, how much did that help you? 

[00:27:11] Luke Ward: Oh, that was, that was so helpful. 

[00:27:13] Chris Corcoran: In what way? 

[00:27:14] Luke Ward: So helpful. 

[00:27:15] I mean, you know, I feel like calling someone for a business reason is a little bit considered a little bit more legitimate than when you call them on their cell phone at night.

[00:27:24] And so that’s always people’s first objection is at the end of their day, they really don’t wanna be talking to you. So, you know, how can you make that a, a positive experience for them still, nobody wants to be on a cold call, but I still think you can make a, a cold call, a highlight of someone’s day instead of that annoying moment.

[00:27:42] And so I think I learned pretty quickly, like how, how do you create a real connection with someone quickly on the phone? And then, you know, I was learning what’s the best way that I can get people excited about programs at UT that’s very, that’s very similar to what’s the best way to articulate the value proposition of this product.

[00:28:05] And then thick skin. Like, I mean, you, you just realize that it, it was a little bit of a numbers game, right? I mean, they were busting us through like 300 auto dials a night waiting for a connection on the phone. And it was like, you know, you, you need to be ready when someone gets is, is picking up the phone and, and, you know, how can you look at the information that’s on the screen quickly and respond to create a connection with them?

[00:28:29] Huge. I mean, all of that transaction, 

[00:28:32] all the reps. Yeah. All the reps.

[00:28:34] Marc Gonyea: Man, three years of it, 

[00:28:36] 300 busted through 300 dials. 

[00:28:39] Luke Ward: We didn’t have to bust ’em. It auto-dialed. That was really nice. 

[00:28:41] Marc Gonyea: I know. Yeah. I know. I know. I just like the way you described it. Yeah. That’s great. So you have memoryBlue junior thing.

[00:28:47] You’ve got this colleague of folks you’re learning from, I guess, it’s, it’s your first corporate job, not your first real job. And I know you worked at other places after, but I’m curious now that you’re a self-development leader, how do you model your, what you’re and what we’re jumping around, but how do you model your, you know, what you’re teaching your people on your team or training them based upon your original experience at here in, at, in job or at, at all the places you’ve been?

[00:29:17] Luke Ward: I think one of the things that I try to teach my team the most is how to ask the right questions, and that, like I said, that was true for my clients. I had to ask my clients the right questions so I could know how to sell what we were selling when we were here and then asking prospects, the right questions to scope out their project, their requirements, what’s important to their org.

[00:29:38] And so that’s what I really try to arm my team with. It’s like, ask the right questions and then know enough technically to be dangerous, like, so that it’s actually interesting. You need to have a certain level of credibility, but no one expects you to be an IT professional. And, and how do you avoid being that negative part of someone’s day?

[00:29:56] Luke Ward: How do you avoid being another spam message or just another annoying phone call? And how do we differentiate our messaging? Because you know, the, any of the, any of the products that we sell, there’s something different and unique about them. And so when I talk to my team, it’s like, well, if the marketing language is the same as Veeam Cohesity, how, what is valuable about what we’re doing is that we can speak directly to the differentiators in a more precise way and talk about that.

[00:30:26] So making sales more into like a human thing than a spam thing. 

[00:30:31] Marc Gonyea: Interesting. All right. That’s awesome. What might being on your team? So you, you’re working with us, what you think you’re gonna do, you know, people get into the role and they kind of know why they’re going in, but things are happening at a rapid pace for you.

[00:31:39] Walk us through how things kind of went down that one quarter.

[00:31:43] Luke Ward: I think that I saw quickly that okay, the client, there’s not a lot of control that I have over what clients that I get. Right. Right. And I just need to be ready to learn and put myself in the right position. I got concerned. This was a really a different world than we see today. I got concerned that I was gonna have to move somewhere when to find the right client, which is true for job hunting anytime.

[00:32:10] Sure. It’s like, great. If I want the right job, I might have to move for it. And so when I got connected with an Austin client, I was like, okay, this might be the one that I want to try to take. And so I think that was one of the biggest things that helped me hone in on SupportNinja, but also because they had that closing role.

[00:32:29] And once I had a taste for it, I was like, yeah, getting a meeting would be fine, but I like closing. And you know, I didn’t have as much success with some of the other clients. And I thought, well, this is probably going well, this is a very early stage company for what, what memoryBlue typically does.

[00:32:48] And so I wanted to grow with that company. I, you know, thought it was the right time part of I called you, and part of our conversation was, “At least you’re young in your career, and now’s a good time to take a risk. You’ll never have all of it figured out.” And I was like, “Yeah, yeah.” And I didn’t know when the next client would make an offer,

[00:33:08] so I went into salary negotiations with them in Card Boiled and then came out pretty good and was like, great, Austin client, I guess I’m going see what this like, memoryBlue was a little bit of a startup back then. Yeah. But SupportNinja was like a true, yeah. 

[00:33:22] Chris Corcoran: True 

[00:33:24] Luke Ward: pre a pre their angel invested, basically.

[00:33:27] Yeah. 

[00:33:27] Marc Gonyea: And so when you, and you were hired by the CEO 

[00:33:30] of the company.

[00:33:30] Luke Ward: Yes. 

[00:33:31] Marc Gonyea: Right. 

[00:33:31] Luke Ward: CEO and, and the president was involved at that point too. He was my direct manager, but the CEO definitely wanted. 

[00:33:37] Chris Corcoran: Yeah, that was amazing. Yeah. And then you, then you went over there and what was that like? What’d you do 

[00:33:43] for them?

[00:33:44] Luke Ward: Well, once I got there, I was like, I think, I think figuring out how to sell this product is my job now. You know, I found, I found out pretty early on that they were mostly referral based in their client structure. And I was like, “Oh, we’re paying a referral fee for our clients. We just haven’t had a true salesperson that could bring in a homegrown contract.

[00:34:06] We’ll make more money if we sell.” And so I got a wrangle on the leads. I implemented a CRM within the first three months because, you know, their Salesforce was just very unstructured lead data and a. lot of mess in there. So we needed a way to control pipeline and forecasting. So we implemented a CRM. I, I thought, “Okay, I need to make these processes like repeatable basically.”

[00:34:30] And so I started taking calls, and, at that point, the outsourcing industry was booming to the point that, you know, the inbound calls alone were almost as much as I could handle. But we just weren’t handling the leads super well. And we didn’t know how to go through a volume process of bringing on clients rapidly.

[00:34:50] So we thought, “Well, let’s put some pressure on the system,” and started closing some deals. You know, what I learned was, any type of company might come to an outsource company for anything. And it was like, “Okay, I need to understand our internal capabilities and what we can deliver well, and then I need to figure out the right ways to help clients see that.”

[00:35:12] And one of the things was that a lot of companies still wanted was like, piecemeal work. Like we wanna pay you per lead. And we didn’t wanna do that. We didn’t think that that was a good model. We thought it was better to have a, a customer support rep or your outsourced rep aligned to the client long term.

[00:35:28] Yeah. And that they should be able to develop and kind of be an extension of that team. 

[00:35:32] Marc Gonyea: Kinda like know we did memoryBlue. 

[00:35:34] Luke Ward: That’s what I learned at memoryBlue that I had taken over there was that if we’re gonna do outsourced work, it’s better if they’re embedded on the team long term, we’ll have a better relationship and probably execute at a higher level.

[00:35:45] And those contracts were a lot more stable. So we kind of looked at which types of clients we were bringing on. I think by November of that year, I, I left around April, June by November of that there had been a lot of changes on our side. We were growing fast, and they were getting, offering me to be the president of that company.

[00:36:05] And so that’s great. I was in over my head, but I was like, I’ll do it if nobody else will, this will be good experience for me. And so I came back and thought, well, I can go pay memoryBlue to hire Aspen. I need a sales rep. I don’t have time to train somebody. I already know what she’s like. We’re, we’re close.

[00:36:20] So we brought her on, I call, I thought it was hilarious. I don’t think Nimit probably ever expected SupportNinja to call and ask to hire a second rep.

[00:36:32] He might have been mad. I was stealing Aspen. I’m not sure. She, she was probably one of, one of the best.

[00:36:36] Marc Gonyea: I trying to figure out, ask you if you paid us or not. I’m pretty sure you did.

[00:36:39] Luke Ward: At SupportNinja? Yeah, we did. ‘Cause we talked. We did. Yeah. Yeah. We talked about it. I think. Well, yeah, it became an issue ’cause I was getting involved in the accounting side of SupportNinja at the time.

[00:36:48] Yeah. And I was like, what do you mean we haven’t paid? Nimit told me one day that we hadn’t paid yet. And I was like, “What do you mean we haven’t paid?” Yeah. And he was like, “Yeah, we sent over this invoice.” And I was like, “Okay. Yeah, I guess I’m in charge of finance now, I better go figure out who hasn’t paid that invoice and get it taken care of.”

[00:37:02] Chris Corcoran: Yeah. That’s great. That’s 

[00:37:02] amazing. So that what a whirlwind. So you go you’re, you’re supporting them as an SDR and then, just a few months later, you’re the president of the company. 

[00:37:11] Luke Ward: Yes. Yeah. That was wild. Startup world is kind of like that sometimes of course, but it was also a very unique company, and it was a unique time to be there.

[00:37:20] I mean, I went out to TechCrunch, disrupt with them that October and was pitching at like a major, you know, major conference for a first time and developed a really solid relationship with the CEO and Aspen. And I had a sales team that was growing. The company was when we got there, the company was struggling a little bit, but their growth just took off.

[00:37:39] I think we closed two or 3 million in deals. Aspen might have mentioned Coinbase, I closed Pit House while we were here. Yes. And House magazine was their first deal. I think once they saw that they close a deal, they, they thought we should hire a staff. And so they, we just grew so, so fast and their whole other set of challenges that comes with growing a company that fast, a lot of pressure on the system to figure out.

[00:38:01] And so we ended up parting ways, but they, I mean, their growth rate was incredible, and, you know, Cody did a great job as the CEO there before. I, I, I honestly haven’t kept up with them much recently to know, but I’m, I’m pretty sure they’ve continued their growth, like up over a thousand employees and some major clients.

[00:38:17] Luke Ward: Wow. They, they were ink. They, this is probably on, this is on my resume. So the growth that Aspen and I influenced while we were there, led them to be, you know, one of the top 10 fastest growing companies in Austin and maybe 86 on the ink 5,000. Yeah. At one point. So they, I mean, it was like 800% growth in a handful of years.

[00:38:36] Marc Gonyea: What a moment of time. 

[00:38:36] Luke Ward: Yeah. 

[00:38:37] Marc Gonyea: Moment in time. Excuse me. 

[00:38:38] Yeah. Right. ‘Cause you’re a really smart guy. And you were trained in some of the basic part of sales I’d already, you were trained in your entire life actually. And then you did the thing at UT and put a cup of coffee with us, and now you’re helping this emerging company get to the next level.

[00:38:55] Yeah. I don’t think I was ready to be president at that point. That was, that was a little over my head, but I mean, I wouldn’t have been there without memoryBlue, that’s for sure. And, and I still see that as just some of the best experience that you could get in your career. It’s like, as long as you’re not harming things, it’s okay to get in and a little over your head.

[00:39:14] Chris Corcoran: Of course. Yeah, definitely. So from SupportNinja, where, where did you, where did you take things? 

[00:39:18] Luke Ward: After SupportNinja, I was thinking, man, these 80-hour weeks are really stressful. It’s crazy being the president of the startup. I honestly wanted to get more structure back into my career, and so I took a step back to go be an AE.

[00:39:35] I wanted to stay in Austin, I wanted to try new industry, and new type of company. The outsource experience really had helped me. And so, I got a job with Indeed, here in Austin, and was, you know, obviously, still in tech, hiring-related and an Austin-based company. And so it hit a lot of the major stuff, but I thought, you know, I wanna get corporate experience now.

[00:39:57] Luke Ward: Because wild west is one thing, sales works differently in other environments. And, and I thought there were still some things I had to learn in my career. And so, I wanted to get a little more stability back after the crazy startup times. And went over to Indeed and couldn’t have made a better decision.

[00:40:15] Marc Gonyea: What were you doing? 

[00:40:15] Chris Corcoran: Yeah. Talk to us about that. 

[00:40:16] Luke Ward: I was immediately in a sales role. So I started out on the acquisition side. We were working with clients who used the free version of the product. And convincing them to try paying for it. You know, and showing them the way that the solution could work if they pay. A lot of people are successful enough on Indeed that they don’t ever have to use the paid version. And so it was like, well, you could hire better. And these tools work better, but a lot of it was just education. You know, teaching people how to use the product was probably the biggest thing because I, we would teach ’em how to use the free version better too.

[00:40:50] We just thought that if they could get good use out of the product, that eventually they would try paying for it. And that definitely served to, to be true at Indeed. 

[00:40:58] Chris Corcoran: Interesting. So, I’m just curious about just to kind of get inside that industry for a moment. Like what, what how, how did Indeed, like whatever happened to Monster and CareerBuilder? 

[00:41:09] Luke Ward: Obliterated.

[00:41:10] Chris Corcoran: And, and Indeed, like what did, what did they do to kind of take those companies really off the map?

[00:41:14] Luke Ward: They had a job seeker focus. That’s the, the biggest difference between Monster, CareerBuilder, Indeed, even LinkedIn. They were the best place to get a job. So that’s where you want to go find a job. So they have the audience, right? Indeed was all about making the process as good as possible for the person trying to get a job.

[00:41:36] And then they said, all right, now we’ll give it to the companies for free, but they created a, a search engine-based version of job boards. So job boards were just, you know, pages and pages of jobs. Well, they added the search engine component into it as well. So once they had the largest audience and the best way to market and find the jobs, it was like selling SEO for jobs instead of just job slots on a board.

[00:42:05] Chris Corcoran: I see. Where were you, where were you selling this?

[00:42:09] Luke Ward: In Austin. Yeah.

[00:42:11] Chris Corcoran: Was your territory North America? 

[00:42:13] Luke Ward: It was all of North America. Yeah. My, my leads were basically anybody who hadn’t paid, so there were enterprise clients in there for sure that had never paid for Indeed, and they would get assigned or routed to me.

[00:42:23] And I would hang onto those. There was some prospecting component where I could drop about 10% of my book every week, and then would get new leads in. So I would kind of try to qualify ’em out and then get rid of some of ’em bring in new ones. And then eventually, you know, I liked, I even liked that and didn’t leave the acquisition segment, even though I could have, could have gone to work with bigger clients.

[00:42:48] I, I knew the difference. I was like, great. We could either work on like maintaining this relationship and growing it, or I can continue to have like more fast turnaround with clients. I liked having new clients at the time. Like, I really liked bringing in new ones and being at that phase ’cause you could set somebody up really well for a long time.

[00:43:06] And then, I would hand them off to an account manager and that would be thrilled to get a, a well-educated client who had had a great experience and the money was about as good. So, I stuck with that for a while, and then with the cha, I thought, great. I, I kind of got to a two- or three-year mark where I was like ready for something new.

[00:43:24] And they gave me a chance to go work with clients that spent like a million dollars, a quarter, or a million dollars a year, and so I went from having like a 90K quarterly quota to a 900K quarterly quota. And, uh, wanted to try that out and see what if it was much different, and it turns out it’s not. Like a lot of the same insight about your company, or knowing how to have these same types of sales conversations that we’ve been referencing. It was the same thing.

[00:43:49] Marc Gonyea: So let me, make sure I understand. So, these view it from people who weren’t paying you as a dime, who were using the product, the solution for free? To. All right, Luke, we’re gonna put you over here and these folks were paying us a lot of money. And what were they paying for? Just to be clear. 

[00:44:07] Luke Ward: I, I think I got it, but job ad placement. Well, and it was multi-product at that point. So some, sometimes they would buy a recruiting service, or they would buy a resume search tool, or they would buy Glassdoor branding ’cause Indeed and Glassdoor had merged at that point.

[00:44:21] Marc Gonyea: Yep. Yep. And they, we want you to get them to spend more or spend more effectively or re-up?

[00:44:27] Luke Ward: Yes, I mean, I was an account manager essentially, but it it’s a sales role ’cause there’s no contracts with Indeed. You know, somebody could shut everything off that day and never come back on. So it’s our very high churn risk usage, usage-based.

[00:44:43] Yep. It’s usage-based. You can shut down everything and you won’t keep spending. That was probably the other big difference between CareerBuilder and Monster is they were trying to lock people into contracts that they didn’t wanna pay. Right? Yeah. And. So, it was like making sure that everything was getting delivered effectively from the customer support side, making sure that, you know, they were actually evaluating and monitoring the results.

[00:45:05] So showing them, “Look, this is working,” in case they didn’t know how to use the analytics or the reports, and then finding improvements for ’em. So, I went out and I would meet with my best, you know, top 20 clients every week. 

[00:45:16] Marc Gonyea: Who were those? Give us some names? 

[00:45:19] Luke Ward: Ooh. I had an animal supply company here out Texas. One of my favorite clients was a behavioral health company out on the West Coast. And you know, a lot of these companies just have really unique hiring challenges. And when I went into this role with these big companies is when COVID started. So a lot of them were pivoting their hiring strategies at the time, and either stopping, they didn’t have either their budgets were getting slashed, or they, they couldn’t keep spending. So, it, it was crazy figuring out how they were gonna hire on different budgets, or, you know, maybe they went through a hiring boom. The behavioral health company that I worked with needed more in-home caregivers than ever before.

[00:45:59] Yeah. And there’s not, it wasn’t an industry that people were like trying to get into at that point. Yeah. 

[00:46:06] Marc Gonyea: And how would, you know, what to go talk with them about? Would you learn about their business first, learn what they were using? Because if they’re not using the Glassdoor thing, would you say, “Hey, you guys could take it away?” How would you?

[00:46:15] Luke Ward: Yeah, I would always look at product utilization, I mean, it would always start with a conversation with them about, “What’s your hiring strategy, which roles do you struggle with?” And there, there are other things other than the way that they, you know, manage the product, we would have to talk about, you know, “Okay, is your comp competitive? Does your boss know that your comp is not competitive? Okay. Do, do is comp our major selling point here?” You know, trying to understand the hiring profile that a company would have. It was about intangibles, too, because sometimes they wanted something different than what people normally were looking for.

[00:46:50] And it was like, “How do we create that ad and create the best picture of what it’s like to work at your company and who might like that?” And then, you know, obviously, it was like, “How do we utilize your budget in the right way? Is this gonna be a really high-volume role?” And we had to look at the geography too, is this city have more talent than another?

[00:47:10] And I would have to show them this is gonna be very difficult to hire for because you, “There’s not enough nurses. They all have jobs. Everyone else in your city is paying more.” Or there were a lot of cases where people would drive 40 minutes out of town to get a better paying job, and so you had to be competitive with the region.

[00:47:27] Marc Gonyea: What, what would you, who would you meet with? Like, what did you, was it in the person over the phone? 

[00:47:32] Luke Ward: Oh, this is all over the phone. 

[00:47:35] Marc Gonyea: All the phone? 

[00:47:35] Luke Ward: Yeah. All over the phone. Yeah. 

[00:47:36] Marc Gonyea: So, you’re touching all these people from all over the country from your place in Austin. 

[00:47:40] Luke Ward: Yep. Which is great considering the COVID happened, dude. It really would’ve heard us. We were already ready to sell virtually.

[00:47:46] Chris Corcoran: What personas?

[00:47:48] Luke Ward: It was all HR, mostly. Yeah. I mean, talent act. A lot of talent act, but a lot of like HR recruiting leaders, once I was at that level. Now at the beginning, right, the people have it paid, it could be anybody, anybody. It was business owners. It was restaurant managers, you know, in hiring, you’re talking to the hiring manager a lot of the time, and you’re also sussing out is their internal hiring process working because it’s, you guys know it, it’s such a complicated part of what companies do.

[00:48:17] So we would, I would uncover all sorts of issues internally that were impacting their ability to bring in the right talent. And sometimes, you had to tell ’em that like, “Hey, the reason that you can’t find somebody is because you come off a certain way in an interview.” Yeah. And so we, we, we wouldn’t always get that direct feedback from the candidates, but when you see that somebody does 20 interviews, and it doesn’t work out, you’re like, Okay, something’s going on when they get on site.”

[00:48:42] Marc Gonyea: Yeah. What made you good in that role? Like, so Indeed, a lot of sales professionals there. Austin’s a great sales town, I’m assuming most of the people were from Austin. Like what separated you from, you know, what’s your kind of superpower in that role or roles, I guess?

[00:48:57] Luke Ward: Curiosity. Right? Always wanting to learn what’s going on with that company. Curiosity’s always gonna be one that I come back to, figuring out the right questions to ask, I don’t think that I always ascribed to the model that was given to us. You know, I had a team that chose to sell uniquely, and I chose that I was gonna try to help my clients more than just follow a sales process. And I said, “I don’t care if I’m on the phone for 40 minutes and that the deal doesn’t close, I’m gonna try to help people as much as possible, and just trust that the money will come later.” 

[00:49:37] And it definitely works like that really carried over when I switched teams ’cause then, it was like they were already giving us money, but the more that I could help them, the more confidence they would have in the, in, in what we were doing in, in the relationship, and, and then we could show ’em the execution that followed through. So, I think, you know, really focusing on creating the best possible outcome for, for my clients, and then being really curious about, yeah, you know, what’s going on with them.

[00:50:01] Marc Gonyea: It sounds like in the second role, the high-growth role, your personal selling style really coincided well with how they buy,

[00:50:09] Luke Ward: Yes.

[00:50:09] Marc Gonyea: how they buy more. 

[00:50:10] Luke Ward: Yes. 

[00:50:11] Marc Gonyea: Versus, you know, getting a business owner. What, what a great experience selling people who aren’t paying anything, and you gotta convince them. Both of ’em are really exciting gigs. 

[00:50:22] Luke Ward: Well, I, I think the other thing too is, you know, you, it’s pretty rare that your people’s first sales rep somewhere.

[00:50:29] Like a lot of times, they’ve already been sold to by someone from your company before, but it’s a new experience once you get there. So, you can, you know, that, the role that a salesperson plays in is like, you’re the face of this company for them, and so it, you know, knowing like, “Well, what, what was your experience before? Was it a good experience?” And they’re like, “No, they just call and tell me to spend more money.” It’s like, “Okay, that’s that’s not what we’re about. This is what we actually wanna do here.” 

[00:50:59] Marc Gonyea: It’s fascinating. So, you did that for four and a half years, and ultimately, decided to switch industries. 

[00:51:05] Yep. We were the tops. Sorry. With the preference club at Indeed. 

[00:51:10] Luke Ward: Oh, yeah. Top Gun. Yes. Yeah, that was, yeah, my last year. 

[00:51:12] Marc Gonyea: Tell us about that. Sorry. 

[00:51:13] Luke Ward: Ooh, it was, it was the worst year to win Top Gun. I was Top Gun platinum, I guess, if we’re gonna be, you know, it’s important while we can top 1% sales rep, huge sales org.

[00:51:23] Chris Corcoran: So top 1%. 

[00:51:24] Luke Ward: Yeah. Out of what 5,000 people or something like that. Well, it was crazy. They, they had Top Gun, and then they had the platinum one. I made the platinum one that year during COVID, during COVID, and I, um, it was a virtual, I mean, my director, my director, and my senior director had done such a great job coaching me to this point. I had this great director, Ross Schinik, who is a Senior Director VP, which is like a VP over there right now. Yeah. And he had been a sales rep there, and just we completely aligned, and he was able to coach me and help me in some ways that took what I was doing to the next level.

[00:51:59] And that year, I mean, it was crummy ’cause I was supposed to get to go to the beach, and they just sent me some cash instead. I, I bought Yeezy’s with it, but I really would’ve, I could’ve used a trip to the beach that year.

[00:52:12] Marc Gonyea: It supposed to use Texas landlocked. I mean, though, Galveston’s not really a beach.

[00:52:16] Luke Ward: No, I don’t consider Galveston’s a beach. It’s warmer than it’s warmer than the West Coast, though. That’s, if you go to the West Coast, it’s hard to get in there for very long, but the, the, the sand itself here, not super great Padre’s, South Padre’s probably the best you can do. 

[00:52:30] Marc Gonyea: Yeah. So you didn’t go, you got a nice check.

[00:52:32] Luke Ward: Yeah. I would say that for me, it wasn’t even the money or the trip, though, as much as like, once I got there and I saw that there was that competition to win, I was like, “I have got to get on that list.” And it was just, you know, sometimes in these sales contests, like somebody has a big year because they close one crazy deal, and there’s no way you’ll catch up to ’em.

[00:52:53] Yeah. That year everybody was, everybody was at home selling. So, there were extra complications. It was just neck and neck, and afterwards I was just real proud of it. And so I decided, “Man, I’m just at the top peak of this experience at Indeed. I’m out of here.” 

[00:53:11] Chris Corcoran: I wanted going out on top. 

[00:53:12] Luke Ward: Yeah, I guess so. I, I think I, who’s wanted a change. I was like HR. I really felt confident in my abilities to sell HR tech.. And I know that I could go get a job at a lot of HR tech companies still to this point, but I thought, I think I want to get involved in a more complex sale, and had some friends in cybersecurity, a lot of friends at SHI on the channel side here, and so started asking around a little bit about that. My first manager from Indeed calls me up and tells me, “Hey, I’m looking at these companies, let me see what you think.” And he was looking to make a move. 

[00:53:50] Marc Gonyea: So he was bouncing ideas off of you. 

[00:53:51] Luke Ward: Yeah. Based upon kind of what, you know, but it was a long con he wanted me to work there, and I thought, “Well, maybe he’s gonna ask me to come work for him eventually. Let’s see what these companies are like.” So, he was going through the interview process. I was asking about it, but yeah, he, he was my first manager at Indeed. And then he had left after six months ’cause they offered him a fat check at SHI to go back there. And he was ready to leave SHI to get on the manufacturing side, and so I thought, “Well, here’s my shot to get into cybersecurity. I don’t know a thing about it, but I’m gonna get a chance to learn again and sell into IT orgs with a lot more complex sale.” He was starting the mid-market segment at this company, Deep Instinct, and they had no sellers. It was all green space. And I thought, “I want a big territory that no one sold in before. That sounds like it would be good. Let me go try that out.” 

[00:54:43] Chris Corcoran: So, why did you want to go and sell something more complicated? 

[00:54:46] Marc Gonyea: That sounds harder. 

[00:54:48] Luke Ward: Hmm, that’s a good question. I, I, it wasn’t just that the solution was more complicated it’s that the sales process is more complex and so there’s different stages to it.

[00:54:58] The POV process works differently. You’re selling to a different part of the POV,proof of value, proof of concept. And it’s like this, the tech, you have to get a technical win on the product and an internal win with the structure of it. In addition, you know, for most it sales, you sell through the channel.

[00:55:16] So, you don’t just sell directly to the client. You also work with your partners in the channel who help them make their purchases. So there’s two layers of people to sell to in most it sales, especially infrastructure and software licensing. And I thought that seems interesting, but it’s also where all the big money was, all the, all the tech IPOs, like seeing where CrowdStrike was and, you know, seeing where CloudFlare was on the stock market at the time, I thought, “Man, Indeed is a big, you know, billion, multibillion-dollar-revenue company.”

[00:55:48] But I mean, it’s some of these tech IPOs I just saw and, and I was really compelled by what was happening with ransomware too. You know, hiring is a challenge that’s interesting to solve for people, and it’s always at the heart of their business, but the ransomware thing, I was just captivated by the way that it works, and how difficult it was.

[00:56:08] Luke Ward: And it made me think back immediately to my days at memoryBlue, selling that first cybersecurity product because the Deep Instinct where I, what ended up was an Israeli-backed cybersecurity company, Israeli-based cybersecurity company because they have this program in the Israeli military. Everyone’s cons, conscripted.

[00:56:27] They have this program that teaches people unit, 8,200, I don’t know. I probably sound like an idiot on here, people know, someone can put in the comments. There’s an Israeli, there’s an Israeli cyber defense unit. And a lot of people end up there, and then they go to make some of the best tech products in the world after that. 

[00:56:46] And they were applying deep learning. So, it incorporated AI. So like you’ve got AI that everybody says they have AI in their products. A lot of people have machine learning in their products, which is essentially just spreadsheets of information dumped into a computer brain. You’re teaching it how to make that decision sort of, you’re telling it what to look for, when deep learning is like the self-driving cars, the algorithms that Nava, Spotify and Netflix, there’s something different going on with the information there. Right? And so deep learning has the capacity to eliminate ransomware in malware by predicting whether or not it’s ransomware in malware, even if it hasn’t been seen before. EDR products, like I said before, they’re, they’re based on waiting for a breach to happen. EDR products are gonna show you your network getting hacked. A file can land on a system, you know, comes through your AV maybe, a lot of AV is based on known repositories and, and signatures, and so what deep learning has the capacity to do is actually look at the binary code of that file, and even if it hasn’t been seen before, know if it’s malicious. So it, it could sit out in front of EDR. EDR can monitor everything that’s happening internally and give you way more behavioral heuristics on your network.

[00:58:07] But there’s nothing that really defends the outer perimeter, I mean, fuck that, in between the firewall and your AV, but I, I was excited by what deep instinct was doing. And I mean, there, they’re deep learning patents, you know, from everything that I’ve understood are just incredible. 

[00:58:21] Chris Corcoran: Wow, so, okay. So you’re attracted to this, you’re attracted to this hiring manager.

[00:58:25] And so you come on board and what, what, what were you doing for them?

[00:58:28] So, I was mid-market account executive. We thought we were gonna have SDRs at first, and like two weeks in, they moved the SDRs to the field. So, I was not thrilled. I was very clear with my manager early on that I was like, I wanted an SDR.

[00:58:42] Luke Ward: That’s what you told me was a part of this role. And now you’re moving them to the field, and now you’re moving them to be managed by marketing, which can be good. It can be good or bad. It just depends on the situation, but I wanted that SDR ’cause I wanted that SDR relationship and to really be able to up-level my game.

[00:59:01] I thought, you know, I wanted to be in management at the time too, and I thought this is a great mentorship opportunity where I can make this person successful. And so I had to book all my own meetings. It was back to SDR world for me. And, you know, I learned very quickly that, you know, you can’t count on marketing all the time.

[00:59:18] Luke Ward: You’ve gotta go out and fill your own pipeline with deals. And that was definitely where we struggled early on was, you know, how do we, how do we get meetings booked that are quality for us if we’re also supposed to be closing deals and running full cycle for these sales that are super complex. 

[00:59:37] Marc Gonyea: Yeah, that’s why you went there. Okay. So, you said no, not like, not gonna work.

[00:59:45] Luke Ward: Well, no. I mean, I, it was good for a while. We did it. I think that is such a complicated space. There’s thousands of InPoint security companies that are competing with each other and growing at the same rate. I got incredible channel experience.

[01:00:00] You know, I, that was one of the pieces I was missing was I didn’t know how to work with the channel. So I learned about the channel, and developed out network and really started to gain some traction with them. But I wanted to get into leadership. So the opportunity with Rubrik came along, and it was hard to pass up.

[01:00:17] ‘Cause what Rubrik’s doing is, they are providing something that InPoint security companies claim to provide, but don’t, which is protecting and having an immediate backup of your data in the case of ransomware. So in a ransomware attack, do you guys know what the first thing a ransomware attack does? 

[01:00:37] Marc Gonyea: It’s copies of your data?

[01:00:39] Luke Ward: No. Nope. It checks if you have a Russian language keyboard.

[01:00:42] Marc Gonyea: Really? 

[01:00:43] Luke Ward: Yeah. They wanna, they don’t, they don’t attack at home, and they’re sending this stuff out to thousands of people. So it’s gonna see if you have a Russian language keyboard, and then if you do, it won’t attack you. If you have a US base or some kind of other keyboard, the second thing that it does, it cripples your backup. Because they don’t, if they can’t even extort you if, if you have a solid backup in place. And so I was hearing that companies were trying to use their endpoint security tools to back up their data. You know, SentinelOne has a very solid rollback feature included, but it relies on the quality of your backup.

[01:01:20] So Rubrik’s pioneering data security, and they’re working as a crossover between infrastructure and SecOps now because data, and especially sensitive data, needs to be visible and managed in very specific ways. We can incorporate that into the backup solutions that we’re offering for the cloud on-prem and now SaaS applications with 365 in Salesforce having so much mission, critical data, you know, you can end up in a situation where your reps aren’t able to close deals if your systems are down. 

[01:01:51] Marc Gonyea: And, and you wanted to be a manager. Leader. 

[01:01:55] Luke Ward: Definitely leadership. I got a little taste at SupportNinja, and as a supervisor when I was at RuffaloCODY at the call center for UT, and definitely knew that people management was what I, what I wanted to do.

[01:02:07] Marc Gonyea: And why? 

[01:02:09] Luke Ward: Couple of reasons. I think the manager that you have is probably the biggest impact on your relationship with your work. You know, I think back to when Will was my manager or, you know, Trey, and, and he brought me over to Indeed, and then brought me over to Deep Instinct, you know, the manager that helped me get Top Gun, like leadership is that relationship that you have with the company.

[01:02:32] And, and if you go look at why people leave, it’s usually because of leadership. So I, I wanted to provide that positive experience that other people had provided for me, and I also thought that I could increase my impact on organizations that way. Now, I don’t just have 500 accounts, I technically have like 5,000 accounts on my team underneath me, and we get to work on those together. So I think that’s really exciting. 

[01:02:58] Marc Gonyea: And that’s what you’re doing now? You just started doing it?

[01:03:02] Chris Corcoran: So, you’re managing all these sales development reps. And they’re scattered throughout the country?

[01:03:07] Luke Ward: Currently, my team is six reps in the Southeast and two reps in Canada.

[01:03:12] Chris Corcoran: I see.

[01:03:12] Luke Ward: So I’m Southeast and Canada. 

[01:03:14] Chris Corcoran: Wow. 

[01:03:14] Luke Ward: Yeah. 

[01:03:15] Marc Gonyea: Eastern Canada? All of Canada? 

[01:03:17] Luke Ward: All of Canada. All of Canada, Canada. Canada’s just one place they thaught me.

[01:03:20] Chris Corcoran: Yeah, okay.

[01:03:23] Marc Gonyea: Big place. 

[01:03:24] Chris Corcoran: It is a big, big place. 

[01:03:25] Luke Ward: It’s big. They, my Canada reps, get the most leads, so they’re, they’re getting their, their bread and butter hopefully, they should be. I hope they’re closing deals right now, book meetings. 

[01:03:35] Marc Gonyea: Knowing what you know now, what would you have told yourself like the night before you started at memoryBlue? 

[01:03:41] Luke Ward: Don’t meet Ramon. Don’t meet Ramon. No, I’m just kidding. What would I have told myself the night before I started at memoryBlue? Oh, it’ll all work out. Like I think taking all of those different steps in my career, every time I thought, “Is this gonna work? Is this the right direction?” And like, sometimes, you know, you gotta push yourself through it and keep going. But after I did that enough times, I was like, “Oh, this is gonna work out.” I think at that point, I was so early that I was just nervous and anxious about it, just didn’t have enough experience in my career.

[01:04:18] But yeah, it sometimes it’s like, if you go work hard in the right place, it’ll all work out.

[01:04:25] Marc Gonyea: Exciting, Luke. Very good. 

[01:04:27] Chris Corcoran: Well, Luke, we appreciate the, the wisdom.

[01:04:29] Luke Ward: Yeah. 

[01:04:29] Marc Gonyea: Perspective. 

[01:04:31] Chris Corcoran: Yeah, definitely. 

[01:04:32] Marc Gonyea: And hook them horns.

[01:04:33] Luke Ward: Hook them. It’s good to hear some hokey saying that.

[01:04:37] Chris Corcoran: One, one of those teams is competitive.