Episode 112: Michael Woods – From Squash to Sales
Your success in sales is contingent on nobody but yourself. This may be daunting to some, but it’s been incredibly empowering for Michael. It’s transformed his career from a mundane and concrete pathway to an uncharted territory full of the freedom to explore different strategies and create his own opportunities.
In this episode of Tech Sales is for Hustlers, one of Ping Identity’s Account Executives Michael Woods shares how he got into sales, his commitment to relying on hard work and strategy rather than luck, and his experience transitioning to Account Executive.
Guest-At-A-Glance
💡 Name: Michael Woods
💡 What he does: Michael is an account executive at Ping Identity.
💡 Company: Ping Identity
💡 Noteworthy: Prior to joining Ping Identity, Michael worked at Ripcord and memoryBlue. He is also a professional squash player.
💡 Where to find Michael: LinkedIn
Key Insights
⚡I loved going off the script. This is probably the last thing your sales executive would like to hear. But if you have someone like Chris Corcoran as your manager, you’d know that the best strategy is the one that works. That includes having a certain level of work autonomy and experimenting with approaches. So here’s what Michael did at the beginning of his tenure at memoryBlue. ”I would usually try and kick off a call — if I ever got someone to pick up — by asking how their day was going, and the nice ones would ask how my day was going. I would say, ‘I got a beautiful blue sky day here in Colorado. My dog’s asleep on the couch, and thank god, she’s not peeing because she does pee in her sleep.’ So, if there’s a follow-up question, I’m also ready for X, Y, and Z. […] But I wanna let them know that I’m a human.”
⚡Don’t rely on luck. Create it. And remember, prospecting never stops. There’s always time to make one more call; if someone answers, try to make the most out of it. Otherwise, the prospect will hang up, or worse, choose your competitor because they know how to better connect and engage with that potential customer. ”My family has come to the philosophy that the right thing will come along and the right thing will happen. My dad and I have a different philosophy: ‘I’m going to make the right thing happen. I don’t know what it is yet, but I’m going to make it happen.’ I’ve been in sales for 18 months, and I’ve been an AE for about nine months.”
⚡I always ask myself what’s next. Although sales was not on Michael’s wish list, he knew he wanted to advance once he got into it. So transitioning to AE became his goal. Therefore, he put a lot of effort into proving he was worthy of the opportunity. ”The goal from day one, with me getting into an SDR role, was acceleration. I felt like I was getting into the game late, and I wasn’t. I was 26, so I was still pretty young for it. Most of my coworkers were 22. They were talking about going out. I’m like, ‘No, I’m saving money. I’m trying to buy a house.’ We were having different conversations. And that helped me out a ton. So I wanted to accelerate as fast as possible to get myself into that position.”
Episode Highlights
Michael’s Experience With memoryBlue Academy
”Bootcamp, yeah! I didn’t want to take it from my dining room because I was living with a married couple at the time. […] I took it from my squash club down the street; I set up my big desktop, and I’d carry it home every day. […]
You learn how to pay attention pretty quickly, and you learn how to break down the walls right away. Building rapport was one of the first things that we talked about, aside from how to make things operate.”
I Wanted to Go Straight to an AE Job
”Once I realized that, [I talked to] Hannah Hoaglund, the account executive I worked with at Ripcord. I let her know, ‘ I want to be an AE. I’m getting into this a little bit later than I’d like to, and I would love it if I could sit on some of the calls past the discovery phase.’ A lot of the time, it’s just that a discovery call happens, and the AE runs with it.
And I was like, ‘I’d like to see how the sales cycle works. And even be ready at the end of the call to book the next meeting for you guys.’ She had a great dynamic when it came to those things. […] So we ended up working out as a great team.”
From memoryBlue to Ripcord
”I started with memoryBlue in February 2021, and at the end of April 2021, I beat all full-time employees for booking meetings. I wasn’t being compensated for them from the Ripcord side. I was making my salary here [memoryBlue]. It was fine.
I’d also built a very strong relationship with my manager at Ripcord, and […] the team members I had at Ripcord all came from memoryBlue. So they understood the process. I spoke with them about how to get hired, and then I mentioned it to my manager.
I asked, ‘What is your timeline for hiring me? I would love to get an idea of what that looks like so I can level-set it in my head.’ And he goes, ‘I’d say look for another six to seven months of consistently hitting [targets].’
I was like, ‘Okay. I’m going to try to move that timeline up a little because I’ve proven that I can beat your full-time employees at this for three months. And I’d like to work for you full-time.’ And he was like, ‘Okay, you gotta exceed quota for the next two months, and I’ll write you an offer at the end of June.’ And those were the hardest two months.”
Transcript:
[00:00:00] Michael Woods: A lot of conversations in sales are not easy conversations to have. We’re talking about budgets, we’re talking about big numbers. They don’t want to pay those big numbers, they’re uncomfortable conversations. That practice of having that uncomfortable conversation, I think it helped me tenfold down the line.
[00:00:34] Marc Gonyea: Michael Woods in the house. How you doing?
[00:00:38] Michael Woods: Not too bad, not too bad. I got a nice day out here in Denver and so I’m shining. You really can’t complain. Nice day to come back into the office. I also, even when I worked here, I think I was in here three times, Joe could count on his hand how many times I actually was here.
[00:00:53] Marc Gonyea: ‘Cause you, COVID, COVID
[00:00:55] Michael Woods: COVID guy, yeah.
[00:00:56] Marc Gonyea: Really?
[00:00:57] Michael Woods: Oh yeah. Three times, just about, yeah, it wasn’t much, but
[00:01:02] Marc Gonyea: Interesting days, Chris.
[00:01:04] Chris Corcoran: You know, my hat goes off to all the people, all the SDRs who started during that time ’cause it was, it’s not an easy thing to do, and they were able to generate results and produce in a very challenging environment.
[00:01:16] Michael Woods: No, but it was kind of a blessing in disguise at some points, especially as a BDR, because it kind of gave this green light to calling people’s cell phones. My connection weight rates went skyrocketing when I was like, I’m just keep on getting voicemails, I’m waiting on people’s desk, they’re not at their desk, they’re on their cell phones. So, I just started calling people’s cell phones numbers, took a big 180, and made a ton of sense to me then, yeah.
[00:01:38] Marc Gonyea: Dude, we wanna talk about that. Before we get into it, well, thanks for joining us today, it’s great to see you. You’re right, it’s, we’re here in Denver. Snowed yesterday morning, right? It’s cold outside, warmed up a little today, it’s been cold.
[00:01:50] Michael Woods: A little bit.
[00:01:51] Marc Gonyea: Let’s get into it. So, educate the audience, and then Chris and myself, let’s start a little bit where, where you from? Where were you born? Where’d you grow up?
[00:01:59] Michael Woods: So, I’m a Colorado native guy. Born in Steamboat Springs, Colorado.
[00:02:02] Marc Gonyea: Oh, really? It was one of my favorite places on earth.
[00:02:04] Michael Woods: Yeah. It was, it was a great spot. I didn’t live there too long until I was about four. We moved to Palm Springs, lived up here a little bit with my dad, okay, and actually had my first job up in Steamboat was a car washer or a gas station attendant. Filling up people’s cars with gas.
[00:02:20] Marc Gonyea: Excellent. That, was that, like, in the summertime or?
[00:02:23] Michael Woods: Yeah, there was always like this, he owned gas stations, and there was always a softball tournament in town. My brother and I would make a killing that weekend.
[00:02:31] Marc Gonyea: Yeah, alright.
[00:02:32] Michael Woods: Month-long killing for third grade.
[00:02:33] Marc Gonyea: So, you have a brother?
[00:02:34] Michael Woods: Yeah, brother, and then a sister who lives in Ireland.
[00:02:37] Marc Gonyea: Oh, wow, okay.
[00:02:38] Michael Woods: Just got her Ph.D., big shout out to her.
[00:02:39] Marc Gonyea: There you go. I, I almost heard like an Irish accent when you said that.
[00:02:42] Michael Woods: No, I think it’s just me trying to replicate it.
[00:02:44] Marc Gonyea: Okay, alright, okay, I wasn’t sure. Alright, so, so you’ve grown up Colorado Springs. What were you like as a young man?
[00:02:53] Michael Woods: I mean, with all this sunshine that we get out here, we would, my brother and I would just play sports all day long. My dad kind of drilled into our heads for every half an hour of homework that you do, you do a half an hour outside. So, my brother was a, you know, very accomplished skier.
[00:03:09] We’re all very athletic individuals. I took to squash pretty well, but we just all just focused on sports a ton. My sister did as well, she was a collegiate athlete.
[00:03:19] Marc Gonyea: Okay. What, what was her, her
[00:03:21] In squash.
[00:03:22] Marc Gonyea: Squash, okay, both of you, okay, wow. All right.
[00:03:25] Michael Woods: Yeah, brother was good enough, he just wanted to go longboard the whole time, have some fun with it.
[00:03:30] Marc Gonyea: Okay. So, grew up, like, in a competitive,
[00:03:32] Michael Woods: Very competitive fam
[00:03:33] Marc Gonyea: household, sports. When you were in high school, what did you think you wanted to be when you grew up?
[00:03:39] It’s kind of a relative question, I mean, what have we really done growing up?
[00:03:42] Not, yeah, but what did you, you know, you know, when you, you’re young in high school, you think, okay, when I’m older this is what I think I wanna do.
[00:03:49] Michael Woods: I mean, first job, like, I wanted to go be a squash pro, that was what I wanted to go do, I absolutely loved the game. And after that, I had really no idea, like, part of me always wanted to come back to the west and, you know, be a cowboy pretty much. But it’s kind of a dying profession. So, ended up going up to college and just focused on squash, focused on squash, ended up being a women’s history major, oddly enough.
[00:04:16] Marc Gonyea: Okay. Let’s talk about that. So, you were in high school, weren’t sure what you wanted to do, professional squash maybe, didn’t think about, like, corporate America, or anything like that?
[00:04:24] Michael Woods: At no point, it even crossed my mind.
[00:04:25] Marc Gonyea: Tech sales, sales, nothing like that.
[00:04:27] Michael Woods: No.
[00:04:28] Marc Gonyea: So, you were playing sports, doing your schoolwork, right? And then you end up, so you end up where, where’d you go to school? Did you go there to play squash in part?
[00:04:36] Michael Woods: Primarily, yeah. My, my sister had gone to that school, it was called Canterbury School in New Milford, Connecticut. And I went there and ended up absolutely loving it. Was there for four years and then picked small school Upstate New York.
[00:04:50] Marc Gonyea: To, to play squash? Will you, great, great school.
[00:04:53] Michael Woods: Yeah, I worked, not a bad school.
[00:04:54] Marc Gonyea: Yeah, not a bad school.
[00:04:56] Michael Woods: Could find lacrosse school as well.
[00:04:59] Marc Gonyea: And then, what, tell us about that. What was college like?
[00:05:03] Michael Woods: College was sweet, it was small, really small campus, as an outgoing social guy like myself, you know, 2000 kids gets pretty small pretty quick, I felt like I knew everyone, each of the years I was there.
[00:05:14] Marc Gonyea: Were people there from the northeast, all over the country?
[00:05:17] Michael Woods: I think I was actually the only one from Colorado, especially the only one from, like, a ski town in Colorado. Yeah, there was one actually, I guess, technically, one other guy from Denver, but not any ski, ski town guy.
[00:05:28] Marc Gonyea: And what, what was school like with squash?
[00:05:31] Michael Woods: It was pretty easy, yeah, I mean, I, my teachers were all really understanding when I’d have to, you know, go away for a tournament or something like that, yeah, and they were, they were awesome, great teachers.
[00:05:39] Marc Gonyea: Did you do that all four years? Uh, I did it for three years. I was the captain, sophomore and junior year, and then I was the president of fraternity my senior year, wanted to just do that full time.
[00:05:50] Yeah. Was it tough to stop playing?
[00:05:52] No, it was pretty easy, I just kept my diet as though I was still playing and put on a quick 30. It was rough.
[00:05:59] Marc Gonyea: A quick 30.
[00:06:00] Michael Woods: It was a very quick 30. It was a senior spring 30.
[00:06:03] Marc Gonyea: Wow. There you go. You’re making up front of your friends,
[00:06:05] Michael Woods: Long last time.
[00:06:06] Marc Gonyea: right? Double it in six months as a senior.
[00:06:09] Michael Woods: Exactly.
[00:06:10] Marc Gonyea: All right. What’d you major in? You told us, but why’d you pick that, and what’d you think you were gonna do with it when you were coming out?
[00:06:17] Michael Woods: So, even still, as you were saying, man, I did pick a women’s history major. Freshman year, I was kinda sitting there, I’m like, “Where are the women gonna be on campus?” And they were at women’s history. And so, I ended up taking a couple of classes, found a couple teachers that I absolutely loved, and was, like, “Why would I study anything but this? Like, I, actual classes I’m enjoying.” You know, academics was never really our focus.
[00:06:46] Marc Gonyea: Yep. When you say never really our focus?
[00:06:48] Michael Woods: Like, in my family. Because we were just, you know, so, sports were so ingrained for us. And yeah, so, ended up doing that, becoming an American women’s history major, and never thought I was gonna use it,
[00:07:01] Marc Gonyea: Really?
[00:07:01] Michael Woods: at, at no point.
[00:07:03] Marc Gonyea: Which, I’m gonna ask you an American women’s history question. Which American woman in, woman, woman in history did you, you, like, admire the most?
[00:07:11] Michael Woods: Mine is
[00:07:11] Marc Gonyea: Gimme two, least gimme one.
[00:07:13] Michael Woods: Yeah. My one, and I absolutely just love her, is Sacagawea, yeah, just riding along, doing the west thing with the fellows, and really just showing them the entire west. Yeah, I think she was extremely knowledgeable to be able to know where to go and how to do it. Big, big fan.
[00:07:30] Marc Gonyea: Yeah, I can, I can relate to that. All right. So, what did you think you were gonna do when you got outta school?
[00:07:36] Michael Woods: I, when I got to Hobart, I was, you know, you had to start thinking about what you were gonna do. I originally was actually supposed to come back to Denver and work for a non-profit here.
[00:07:45] Marc Gonyea: Mile High 360?
[00:07:46] Michael Woods: Mile High 360, that’s the one, yeah, yeah, I currently still serve on their board, but I got a text message in February of my senior year from a good buddy of mine, not now at least, and he said, “Hey, I forgot to turn in the application for you to get funding.
[00:08:00] You can’t work here.” And so, I had, like, four years of built up, like, I was going to get into, you know, the community service side of things, and kind of came to, like, a screeching halt, and had to find something else to do. So, I was like, “I know I’m good at squash, I’m gonna go be a squash pro.”
[00:08:17] And it was between Charleston, Cincinnati, and a small town called Tuxedo Park, New York. I picked the small town in Tuxedo Park, New York, to be close to my college girlfriend. We broke up about a month after I took the job.
[00:08:31] Marc Gonyea: Okay, as the world,
[00:08:33] Michael Woods: Yeah, perfectly.
[00:08:34] Marc Gonyea: as the world turns. Did you meet her in one of the women’s studies class?
[00:08:38] Michael Woods: I did, actually.
[00:08:38] Marc Gonyea: Okay. So, that worked out.
[00:08:40] Michael Woods: Yeah. Laura Free, didn’t even know that she was setting us up as when she assigned us to be partners.
[00:08:44] Marc Gonyea: There you go.
[00:08:44] And yeah, sure enough, ended up taking that job, I worked there for about three and a half years.
[00:08:50] Marc Gonyea: Wow, okay.
[00:08:51] Michael Woods: Yeah, and just a bunch of squash, bunch of tennis, and my term was,
[00:08:56] Marc Gonyea: You teach, teaching people and still playing?
[00:08:57] Michael Woods: It was a fair bit of teaching and then a lot of playing as well, and then
[00:09:02] Marc Gonyea: Was it nice to come back to it after the, the senior 30?
[00:09:04] Michael Woods: Yeah, my boss was a little less pleased ’cause he was like, “That’s not the guy that I hired.”
[00:09:10] Marc Gonyea: Oh, oh, oh.
[00:09:12] Michael Woods: Not the job, and then it really took off, hit the rails right. And so, he, you know, he was like, you gotta lose that weight quick, and I was like, “Okay, I, I’ll get it done.” You know, two months later, I was back down to my flight weight. But, I mean, it was a super obscure job, and then 2019 came around.
[00:09:29] Marc Gonyea: But why was it obscure? It’s ’cause most people go to Hobart, and like?
[00:09:32] Michael Woods: Yeah. It’s not like a squash pro, not like a normal path, career path for you to get into.
[00:09:39] But you must have enjoyed it, you did.
[00:09:40] Michael Woods: Absolutely loved it, yeah. And, honestly, you know, we’ll get to it later as well, but Ping Identity is great about letting me playing tournaments.
[00:09:48] Marc Gonyea: We’ll, we’ll talk about that. Ah, no. Oh yeah. All right.
[00:09:50] Michael Woods: Um, and yeah, so 2019 came around, and I played in a tournament out here in Denver, and the guy who actually taught me squash as a kid, it was his tournament. He saw me play, and he was like, “Hey, do you wanna come work for me?” And I was like, “Yeah, I absolutely do.”
[00:10:05] He’s like, “Okay, don’t quit or anything yet, like, I’ll make you an offer in about seven months.” After about five months, I was kind of done with it, and I was like, “Yeah, I’m gonna, I’m gonna quit tomorrow.” And he was like, “No, I really don’t think you should do that yet, I can’t promise you the job.” And I was like, “No, I’m, I’m gonna get the job, I’m gonna get the job.” And, uh, ended up coming back here getting the job.
[00:10:23] Marc Gonyea: And where, where was that?
[00:10:25] Michael Woods: That was just actually down the street at the Denver Athletic Park.
[00:10:27] Marc Gonyea: You can see it from this office?
[00:10:29] Michael Woods: Yeah, right out the window.
[00:10:30] Marc Gonyea: From this window, you can see it. Oh, they’re trying to get in there, they said its numbers only can’t come in.
[00:10:34] Michael Woods: Name-drop me.
[00:10:36] Marc Gonyea: Next time, I’ll name-drop you ’cause they tried to go there last time I was here, like, hell outta here. Alright. Tell us, so the squash thing, I’m fascinated by this ’cause you obviously in love, deeply in love with the sport.
[00:10:47] Michael Woods: It’s a great game, yeah.
[00:10:47] Marc Gonyea: Great game. Why don’t more people in the United States play squash? It’s not, we’re not exposed to it, like?
[00:10:54] Michael Woods: Like, part of it there is kind of just, like, a stigma about the game itself, where it’s kind of reserved for an elite group, which is something that Mile High 360 was some, what part of their goal was breaking down that barrier, and they actually kind of re-sparked a love for the game that I kinda lost.
[00:11:10] Marc Gonyea: That’s great.
[00:11:10] Michael Woods: Because it was very elitist. But so, their goal is that you get involved as a student in, like, second, third grade, something like that. You learn the game of squash, and then you put in enough hours in the classroom and athletics, then you end up getting a scholarship to college.
[00:11:26] Marc Gonyea: Oh, wow, okay. So, that’s what Mile High 360
[00:11:29] Michael Woods: That was what’s their big focus on.
[00:11:30] Marc Gonyea: Okay, okay.
[00:11:31] Michael Woods: And so, one of the kids I actually used to coach in when I was working here, working for them in the summers and stuff, just graduated this last May from University of Denver, kid who came from pretty dodgy section of the Highlands, to getting a, you know, being a first college graduate from his family. So, and that was, that was huge, so.
[00:11:51] Marc Gonyea: Through Mile High 360?
[00:11:52] Michael Woods: That’s through Mile High 360.
[00:11:53] Marc Gonyea: That’s great. Yeah. All right.
[00:11:54] Michael Woods: So, I mean, did their big thing, and I’d say the reason why people don’t know about it is it’s either way up here on, like, elite or, you know, the upper or urban class that’s working their way into it. So, it, it is still growing, still expanding, it’s slowed since pickleball took off, but yeah, pickleball, you can’t stay on the games, too noisy.
[00:12:15] Marc Gonyea: Tom Brady, Tom Brady and Kim Durant buy a pickleball franchise.
[00:12:18] Michael Woods: Yeah, who else bought that one? There was another guy, big-name the ball.
[00:12:21] Marc Gonyea: I’m not sure, they’re all getting into it.
[00:12:22] Michael Woods: They’re all getting into it.
[00:12:23] Marc Gonyea: So, you came back and you’re working at the Denver Athletic Club as a squash professional, right? So, you did that for a little while, still reigniting the love affair with squash where mile High 360. How did memoryBlue, like, when did you make that decision? You go, “Okay, I want to go the corporate America,” sales, the sales thing, ’cause you’re, there’s an element of sales when you’re selling, you’re selling Tennis Pro or Swash Pro, right?
[00:12:47] Michael Woods: Absolutely, yeah, I mean, biggest thing from that is they have to sell yourself. And it’s not that you’re competing against your other, the other pros at the organization, but it’s that you’re, you know, you’re trying to make sure that you have your own living. Like, if I don’t have any lessons or I don’t plan any tournaments, I don’t make a very good living. So, I need to make sure
[00:13:03] Marc Gonyea: You make money from tournaments?
[00:13:04] Michael Woods: Oh, yeah.
[00:13:05] Marc Gonyea: Okay, alright. So, you’re making money in playing sport? That’s so great.
[00:13:10] Michael Woods: And so, the biggest thing was just making sure that you had repeat customers coming back to you, and if all of a sudden you stop doing a good job and you don’t bring your A game, they might go to your competition, there’s really your, you know, your best buddies, but,
[00:13:22] Marc Gonyea: Well, they might stop playing
[00:13:23] Michael Woods: Or they might stop playing, yeah. So, you gotta, there’s a fine line of, like, knowing how to build rapport with someone to keep them coming back and keep them engaged and then while still getting them better.
[00:13:33] So, you’re still trying to, like, you, you can see the problem, it’s a matter of getting out to the solution. So, you know, if you think about it like that, sales is a one-to-one translation to it.
[00:13:45] Marc Gonyea: Interesting.
[00:13:46] Michael Woods: But yeah, ’cause the COVID hit and squash was like the last thing to come back into, you know, the real world ’cause you’re indoors and you’re in a confined space.
[00:13:56] Marc Gonyea: Close quarters.
[00:13:56] Michael Woods: Close quarters, people breathing, heavy sweat all over the place. So, after I, after COVID, you know, it was about the summer, that first summer of COVID, 2020, I started to consider, I was like, “Well, I should probably look to get out of this line of work because pandemics could happen again.” And my actual girlfriend at the time was like, “I don’t really want to date a squash pro for the rest of my life, or mary squash pro.” And I was like, “Okay, what should I do?” And, uh, she and her father were like, “Sales, you’d be a good fit in sales.”
[00:14:24] And so, I started interviewing at Salesforce, who, I had a buddy who was a, he was a tennis pro, became a Salesforce AE. So, I figured out a good in there, didn’t get the job, and went to LogRhythm where I had a couple buddies, didn’t get the job. Went to VMware, didn’t get the job. And, you know, kind of, I was, I was in my wit’s end, I was like, “Maybe I just
[00:14:46] Marc Gonyea: Salesforce, LogRhythm, and then VMware, it took a pass.
[00:14:48] Michael Woods: Yeah.
[00:14:49] Marc Gonyea: Because, why? Lack of experience?
[00:14:51] Michael Woods: Lack of experience, and I was like, “Well, I’m going for entry-level job guys, like, you have to know I don’t have any experience.” And then, I called my buddy Caleb, who actually, oddly enough, interviewed with Joey years ago
[00:15:02] Marc Gonyea: With Joey Plesce?
[00:15:03] Michael Woods: Yeah, years ago. Manager director.
[00:15:05] Marc Gonyea: Yep. Yeah. Denver office.
[00:15:06] Michael Woods: And Tanner Luck was the guy, Tanner and Caleb were, like, best buddies from back in Virginia. And so, Caleb put me in touch with Tanner, Tanner put me in touch with Joey, and then Joey made me an offer, I think on our second or third call, he was like, “Yeah, you got it.”
[00:15:21] Marc Gonyea: Yeah, you represent, like, we’ve got the make rats that we go after, but then also people who start, starting out, start along the way, and you represent another sweet spot for what memoryBlue wants to try and get are people who got, you know, you got a competitive background, to a great school, work with the schools, lots more people, and you’re pursuing a passion, and I don’t know why the big companies will penalize you for it.
[00:15:44] I think they didn’t use too risky at first until you get street credit.
[00:15:47] Absolutely.
[00:15:48] Meanwhile, you’re, you’re hustling to earn a living and then you’re also giving back, you know, so you good, good, good person, but like, they don’t have the, I don’t know what it is, what would you call it, Chris? They’re just risk-averse, or they
[00:16:00] Chris Corcoran: They have a, they have a formula.
[00:16:02] Michael Woods: Yeah. I guess they do a pretty good formula.
[00:16:04] Marc Gonyea: They have a formula and, like, but on the formula, someone like Michael at the time of hire didn’t fit into the formula because he just did it, the equation, like, what part of the equation is that?
[00:16:15] Chris Corcoran: I mean, he just doesn’t check the box, I mean, that’s fine, that’s what we, that’s where we make a living.
[00:16:20] Marc Gonyea: Yeah.
[00:16:21] Chris Corcoran: Michael, so, how do you know Caleb, and how does Caleb know Tanner?
[00:16:25] Michael Woods: So, Tanner and Caleb, I wanna say, grew up together,
[00:16:29] Chris Corcoran: Okay.uh, out in Virginia. And then, when I moved out to Denver from New York in 2019, I lived with a couple buddies from LogRhythm where Caleb worked, and Caleb would sleep on our couch pretty much every Friday, Saturday night ’cause he was living up in Fort Collins. And so, we’d go out in Denver, he’d sleep on our couch, yeah, became really good buddies,
[00:16:49] Michael Woods: and, um, that’s how I got in touch with Tanner, that’s how I got in touch with LogRhythm, and I used a couple of my own connections to get in that Salesforce and VMware. Yeah, that’s the, that’s the least the long story of how I know Caleb, and we still keep up a ton, see him every weekend, and he actually serves on the Mile High 360 board as well.
[00:17:07] Chris Corcoran: That’s great.
[00:17:07] Michael Woods: Yeah.
[00:17:08] Marc Gonyea: So, you were interacting with Plesce, Plesce said, come on in? Or not come on and come on work from your house ’cause of COVID, right? And what was that like? So, did you know what you’re getting yourself into?
[00:17:19] Michael Woods: Absolutely not. I, I had no real idea, and, you know, obviously no formal sales training. Where they’re like, “Yeah, just, you know, go into ZoomInfo and pull some contacts.” I’m like, “I don’t actually know what you’ve just said,” I was like, “Can I just get on the phone with someone?” And they’re like, “Yeah, this is how you do it. This is how you get on the phone with someone.”
[00:17:36] Marc Gonyea: Did you do academy remotely?
[00:17:38] Michael Woods: Yeah.
[00:17:38] Marc Gonyea: Bootcamp?
[00:17:39] Michael Woods: Yeah, I did it. I didn’t want to take it from, like, my dining room ’cause I was living with a married couple at the time ’cause me and the, the girl that got me into sales, we broke up. And so, I took it from, like, my squash club down the street. Like, set up my big desktop right there, and I’d carry it home, like, every single day.
[00:17:55] Marc Gonyea: A desktop?
[00:17:55] Michael Woods: Yeah. I didn’t know if they’re still out there, I don’t think they are.
[00:18:01] Marc Gonyea: Right, you take the desktop.
[00:18:02] Michael Woods: I take the desktop, set it up every day.
[00:18:04] Marc Gonyea: What do you remember from Bootcamp?
[00:18:06] Michael Woods There’s a lot. Well, I think the, the first thing that we, like, really talked about was now you can check off your list of being on a Zoom call for eight hours straight, you learn how to pay attention pretty quickly, and you learn how to, like, break down the walls right away. So, building rapport, I think, was one of the first things that we really talked about, you know, aside from, like, how to make things operate,
[00:18:26] Michael Woods: but building rapport was probably one of my favorite things with someone. So, I finally get someone to pick up on a cold call, and yeah, I almost feel like we weren’t supposed to ask them how their day was going, I loved going off the script and breaking off the script, you probably are gonna hate to hear that.
[00:18:43] Marc Gonyea: No, no, listen, there’s no, what were you gonna say, Chris?
[00:18:48] Chris Corcoran: I was gonna say, Michael, you know what my favorite thing, my favorite strategy is?
[00:18:52] Michael Woods: Hmm.
[00:18:53] Chris Corcoran: The one that works.
[00:18:54] Michael Woods: Yeah, that’s a great point.
[00:18:56] Chris Corcoran: So, if it works for you, who am I to say? Not to mention, man, walking into this job, rapport building, you had years of that, right? So, that, that’s your strong suit.
[00:19:08] Michael Woods: Yeah.
[00:19:09] Chris Corcoran: So, you know, play that card in which that sounds like what you did.
[00:19:12] Michael Woods: Yeah, so, I mean, I would usually try and kick off a call if I ever got someone to pick up, ask their day was going, and the nice ones would ask how my day was going as well. And I said, “Yeah, you know, I got a beautiful blue sky day out here in Colorado, my dog’s asleep on the couch, and thank god she’s not peeing because she does pee in her sleep.” So, if there’s a follow-up question, I’m ready to, for X, Y, and Z there, as well.
[00:19:33] Marc Gonyea: So, you have some stick?
[00:19:34] Michael Woods: I have little stick on it.
[00:19:36] Marc Gonyea: You humanizing little joke, right?
[00:19:39] Michael Woods: Lightens the mood, it, and then they, they might ask me what kind of dog I have.
[00:19:43] Marc Gonyea: That’s not that different than what we, what we, we like to roll, and that’s a little self-deprecating humor in a way, right? No, I don’t say we like stuff that works or there’s a, a thought out process to it, like the way you just dropped it down, you honing that.
[00:19:58] Michael Woods: Oh yeah, no. So, that’s part of it.
[00:20:00] Marc Gonyea: That’s part of your opening statement.
[00:20:02] Michael Woods: Yeah, yeah, before we even talked business, I, I didn’t like to just dive straight into it ’cause it just didn’t make sense. I wanna let them know that I’m a human, and sometimes it’s a hard thing to do on a cold call. I say the other trick that I love to do is calling into phone numbers that already, I have a 719 zip code, dialing on a local number, pick-up rates, skyrocket.
[00:20:26] Marc Gonyea: And then you hit ’em with that same thing, you’re like, “How’s the weather down south? I’m just a little bit off north of you.” And, and then, so you had never done that before? So, what was it like learning that? Was it hard at first? ‘Cause you still, you know, we’re telling you to do one thing, you kind of wanna go your own way, but you’re, you’re definitely incorporating some of the stuff that we taught.
[00:20:44] Michael Woods: Yeah, oh, for sure.
[00:20:45] Marc Gonyea: But you hadn’t done it.
[00:20:46] Michael Woods: No, I’d say the biggest area that I got help was on the, like, the admin side. I mean, I loved conversing with people, it actually got to the point that my AE at Ripcord let me run a couple meetings, and she was like, yeah, you got, but again, I’m sure we’ll get into that as well. Yeah, I mean the biggest thing I needed help with was admin, you know, the problem that I was trying to solve for people when I was cold calling out of memoryBlue and Ripcord was, do you have paper, and do you want it on your computer?
[00:21:15] If they didn’t want those two things and they liked having paper files, I’d still give ’em a quick pitch and see if I could even just get a meeting set. If not, you know, they probably had at least some level of interest and then I’m like, “Hey, just, you know, take the meeting.” There were a couple angles that I tried to learn and kind of teach myself ’cause with ZoomInfo, they don’t, people don’t like having their cell phone numbers called.
[00:21:38] Marc Gonyea: Well, let’s talk about that.
[00:21:39] Michael Woods: Yeah. So, yeah, so, obviously, it actually does, the biggest thing I picked up from the academy was how to hedge.
[00:21:44] Marc Gonyea: Yeah. So, tell us, tell us what that means.
[00:21:46] Michael Woods: Yeah, so, hedging is pretty much just owning up before they can call you out on it. And, like, “Hey, I, you know, I’m sorry I’m calling you on your cell phone, it’s all I have listed here. Now that I’ve got you, do you have, you know, 30 seconds of your time?” They usually are, you know, receptive to the fact that I’ve apologized to ’em and they liked that, and that I can get the “Okay to continue the conversation.” Some of the ones that were mad that I called ’em on their cell phone number, I had a little angle for that one as well.
[00:22:12] And I’d go like, “Look, I’ll teach you how to get it off if you take a meeting with my company.” They weren’t the most qualified, and I know my AE was ready to kill me, right. I’d let her know, and those would be the ones she let me run.
[00:22:23] Really? She was not, not so thrilled with those ones, I gotta get ’em in the room.
[00:22:27] Marc Gonyea: Yeah, that’s, that’s good job.
[00:22:29] Michael Woods: I got ’em in the room, yeah. And I, I learned, I got very familiar with how to take someone’s phone number off of ZoomInfo.
[00:22:34] Marc Gonyea: They probably appreciate it.
[00:22:35] Michael Woods: They loved it. They actually loved it. No one bought. I got to my number, which was tight.
[00:22:40] Marc Gonyea: So, there you go. I like it. So, you’re figuring it all out, right? Was there a moment as you’re doing this where you’re like, “Oh man, maybe being a squash pro full time is, like, maybe I need to,” did you have any doubts?
[00:22:52] Michael Woods: A little bit, I mean, like any job in sales, like, the, the highs are awesome, the highs are high, it was kind of snake.
[00:22:58] Marc Gonyea: What are some of the highs?
[00:23:00] Michael Woods: Energy, like, energy is the biggest high for me. And if you don’t connect with people, like, literally just connections on the phone with someone, it’s tough to keep that energy going. And then, with the lows, it’s just knowing how to get out of the lows. There was a piece of advice that was passed over to me when I was, you know, I hadn’t booked a meeting in like a week or two, and unfortunately, it wasn’t from Joey, I wish it was.
[00:23:19] Marc Gonyea: That’s all right.
[00:23:20] Michael Woods: It was from my manager at Ripcord, Chad.
[00:23:22] Marc Gonyea: Yeah, the client, oh, yeah, Chad, Chad Knutson
[00:23:25] Michael Woods: Knutson.
[00:23:26] Marc Gonyea: Okay, got it, right.
[00:23:28] Michael Woods: And it was that he was like, “Look, you’re, you know, you haven’t, you’ve been on a bit of a cold streak, that’s fine, but just know that you are two calls away from going back to back.” Because, like, you know, it, it’s, it’s an algorithm, it’s just, like, it’s a way of thinking about it differently, and I had a buddy actually who became an SDR, not here, but somewhere else down the street,
[00:23:47] Michael Woods: and he called me and was like, “Hey, I’m having a dry, you know, low dry spell at this thing.” And I was like, “Look, man, you’re two calls away from going back to back.” He got four meetings booked that day, and I couldn’t have been happier for him. It is really just a bad matter of mentality, the highs are awesome.
[00:24:02] Marc Gonyea: Yeah. What about the lows?
[00:24:04] Michael Woods: The lows just stink ’cause it’s not necessarily something you can do about it right away, especially if it’s just, yeah, you know, I’m not getting connections, so I can keep on the phone, you know, we, we try and keep at memoryBlue that idea of like a hundred phone calls, ten connections, one book meeting.
[00:24:19] Marc Gonyea: That’s a perfect day, right?
[00:24:20] Michael Woods: Yeah, yeah. It’s a little tougher when it’s a hundred phone calls, no pick-ups.
[00:24:24] And actually, Riley Smith was my mentor here, and he had one of the hardest clients to get, like, I mean, there were weeks he didn’t have a, a connection with, and, like, I felt so bad for him.
[00:24:38] I’m like, “Yeah, I just booked four meetings.” And he’s like, “Sweet. I haven’t had a phone call all day.” And so, you know, you learn a little bit more about people in the, the different lines of communication that they have, you know, on the calling side.
[00:24:51] So, you learn, you got, you’re obviously good at rapport building, that’s some of the stuff you learned when you were squash pro, you got good at this kind of hedging component, which is important. What else were you kind of, like, you ease it into, it sounds like you, you were good work, working with the clients.
[00:25:05] Michael Woods: Yeah. I’d say the, the thing that I probably struggled with the most was understanding things on a technical side from literally A to Z, couldn’t really tell you much getting started with what or how report was doing its project or doing, you know, selling their solution. I just knew that there was a problem that they had that I needed to fix. And then, the biggest thing is just, again, just getting them in the door, getting them to take the meeting, and then kind of knowing your role.
[00:25:34] So, I would only talk in my meetings if my AE kind of gave me the, the green light, um, and other than that, I just had to kind of understand that my job was getting them in the door, yeah.
[00:25:47] Marc Gonyea: When you got into the role, and you were doing it, working remote, where did you think you wanted to go with things once you kind of figured out that, “Okay, the high, I like the highs, I can work, I can deal with the lows.” ‘Cause some people come in who have other experience and they’ll, they’ll go back to that, but you kept doing it during COVID, which is not an easy time, right? Post-COVID.
[00:26:05] Michael Woods: Yeah, well, especially, I mean, just to talk on that for a sec, like, I never really use a computer as a squash pro. I mean, when I was hired, I was still pretty much doing this. There’s a finger, finger points. He’s finger-pointing for
[00:26:17] Marc Gonyea: He’s doing, but he’s hunting, hunting and pecking.
[00:26:21] Michael Woods: Yeah, under the keyboard. Since learned how to type, it’s not very fast that’s more accurate, thank God for Grammarly. But, and those were some of the biggest things was just knowing how to sit at a computer all day long.
[00:26:34] Like, this is your new home for a little bit. Um, doing it at home wasn’t actually so bad because, I said the Joey’s one of the reasons I didn’t really want to come back into the office ’cause he, he, he tried to get me back, and I was like, “Hey, I really, you know, prefer to stay at home.”
[00:26:49] And he was like, “Why?” I said, “Well, when I have a bad call at the office, what do you think I’d do?” He’s like, “Oh, you know, I walk around the block or something.” And I was like, “Yeah, and that takes, you know, 10, 15 minutes outta my day to go do that and clear my head, which is fine.” And I said, “What do you think I do at home when I have a bad call?”
[00:27:05] He’s like, “I have absolutely no idea.” Like I mentioned, I have a silver lab at home, and we love to wrestle, like, I will wrestle her all the way to the ground, and like, we’ll just play games for five minutes, and it just, you know, it gets you out of that lower, it’s like, you know, there’s something bigger.
[00:27:20] Marc Gonyea: Little dog therapy.
[00:27:21] Michael Woods: Little dog therapy. And that was, like, my biggest reason for not really coming back in at all. There, there was another question that I’m blanking on.
[00:27:28] Marc Gonyea: No, no, not this is good ’cause people like to hear the stories about people, what it’s like doing SDR job at home during COVID.
[00:27:34] Michael Woods: It’s tough.
[00:27:35] Marc Gonyea: Like, so, you’re doing this for a little while, you’re like, “Okay, I can get into it.” Where’d you see yourself taking it?
[00:28:43] Michael Woods: Yeah. I wanted to go straight to an AE job, and once I realized that, her name was Hannah Hogan, that was the account executive I worked with at Ripcord.
[00:28:52] Once I realized that and let her know, I was like, “Hey, I wanna be an AE. I’m getting into this a little bit later than I’d like to. I would love it if I could sit on some of the calls past the discovery phase.” A lot of the times it’s just that discovery call happens, and the AE runs with it.
[00:29:07] And I was like, “I’d like to see how the actual sales cycle works, and, you know, even just be ready at the end of the call to book out the next meeting for you guys.” You know, she ended up having a great dynamic when it came to those things.
[00:29:19] Marc Gonyea: That’s great.
[00:29:20] Michael Woods: And, you know, you learn how to read the room, like, in a, in a squash cord, I’ll read the room beautifully, and it takes time to learn how to do it, you know, on Zoom, behind a camera, sitting at home, it’s a different, different way to read the room, but, you know, I learned how to read the room and would, no one to jump in, or if she said something that sounded weird, I’d kind of chime back in and be like, “I just want to clarify,
[00:29:44] I think that she actually meant to say this,” and she was like, “Yeah, sorry, I’m all over the place today.” So, we ended up working out as a great team, and I was like, “Oh, AE sounds like a ton of fun, like, you’re just talking to people, building rapport, and figuring out what to get ’em for Christmas some, sometimes.
[00:29:58] Marc Gonyea: There you go.
[00:29:58] Michael Woods: That was always a ton of fun.
[00:30:00] Marc Gonyea: Yeah. So, you kind of had a deal with your client, I’m gonna continue to book these meetings for you, in exchange for that and, yeah, for that, can I get along, can I ride along for the whole process? And I like how you added value by helping, helping everybody goes off script a little bit or might be distracted, but also that last piece, I’ll help make sure you book the meeting coming out of the next, coming out
[00:30:20] Michael Woods: Exactly right, yeah.
[00:30:22] Marc Gonyea: So, that kind of kept you engaged in the actual hall.
[00:30:24] Michael Woods: Oh, it’s huge. And then I, you know, I see some SDRs, I’m like, “Why are you guys not wanting to be on these next calls?” They’re like, “Oh, I don’t have enough time.” I’m like, “You can find time, guys.”
[00:30:34] Yeah, you can find time, I mean, it’s the ones who want it are the ones who are gonna get it. You know, there’s, my family has come to the philosophy, like, you know, the right thing will come along and the right thing will happen. My dad and I have a kind of a different philosophy where it’s like, “I’m gonna go make the right thing happen,
[00:30:49] don’t know what it is yet, but I’m gonna go make it happen.” And, I mean, that’s kind of been my whole philosophy, I mean, I’ve been in sales now for 18 months, and I’ve been in AE for about nine of those months at this point.
[00:31:01] So, it was a very quick transition from BDR, became a senior BDR at Ripcord, and then I was like, “I want, I’m ready to go be an AE. They were like, “No, not, not yet.” I was like, “Okay, um, I don’t think I’ll look elsewhere.”
[00:31:13] Marc Gonyea: Yeah, right, yeah, well, ’cause you have, how many years were you working before you started?
[00:31:18] Five.
[00:31:18] Marc Gonyea: Five. So, you get five years of
[00:31:20] Michael Woods: Life experience.
[00:31:21] Marc Gonyea: life experience.
[00:31:21] Michael Woods: Yeah.
[00:31:22] Marc Gonyea: In hustling.
[00:31:22] Michael Woods: Yeah.
[00:31:23] Marc Gonyea: Hustling.
[00:31:23] Michael Woods: Tons of hustling.
[00:31:24] Marc Gonyea: Tons of hustling experience.
[00:31:25] Michael Woods: In very literal sense of the word, not just in every blue side. Yeah. Tons of hustle there.
[00:31:30] Marc Gonyea: So, you kind of saw, you knew what you wanted to do, so you kind had to architect that path. So, that started too with by getting converted by the Ripcord. So, Ripcord said, “Hey, we would like to pay memoryBlue, you to hire Michael to come work with us full time.” How did that go down?
[00:31:47] Michael Woods: So, it was interesting. The whole memoryBlue Ripcord relationship was kind of funny because there was a girl who worked here, her name was Christina. She got the job that I went for at Salesforce. I took her job here, and also on the Ripcord team. So, she was on both the RipCord team
[00:32:05] Marc Gonyea: I see.
[00:32:06] Michael Woods: and the memoryBlue team. And she ended up taking my job in Salesforce, we never met, we ended up meeting at, like, a coworker’s birthday party or something, asked what team she was on in Salesforce, and I was like, “I interviewed for that team, like, you literally took my position.”
[00:32:21] Marc Gonyea: Yes. Here you go.
[00:32:21] Michael Woods: She was like, “How do you know these guys?” I’m like, “Oh, memoryBlue.” And she was like, “You took my position.”
[00:32:26] Marc Gonyea: Hysterical.
[00:32:27] Michael Woods: Yeah, uh, it was, it was absolutely crazy, we went out a couple times, we’re, we’re good friends now. It was just a very small world. In terms of the getting hired out from memoryBlue over to Ripcord, it was a pretty easy process, I mentioned to my boss at Ripcord, you know, same kind of thing, willing something into fruition, I was like, “I want to be here full time.” Nothing against memoryBlue, I just love…
[00:32:52] Marc Gonyea: That’s the model.
[00:32:53] I love my AE at, uh, at Ripcord, we still talk, she’s literally pinned, is one of my contacts on text messages, we talk all the time.
[00:33:01] Marc Gonyea: She’s still there?
[00:33:02] Michael Woods: She’s not, she’s over at Coupa, so, she actually tried to bring me with her when she left. And yes, then I just popped over to memoryBlue, or popped over to Ripcord, Joey was totally on board with it, and, you know, I was able to still keep up with a lot of the guys here. I dunno if you’ve met Crawford Phillips yet, he’s out there.
[00:33:20] Marc Gonyea: Yeah, I know Crawford quite well.
[00:33:22] Michael Woods: Yeah, um, Crawford was my mentee when I was working here.
[00:33:25] Marc Gonyea: That’s great.
[00:33:25] Michael Woods: And when I left memoryBlue, we kept our one-on-one going for another five months or something
[00:33:31] Marc Gonyea: No way?
[00:33:31] Michael Woods: like that, yeah, it was mainly we wanted to talk fishing, but…
[00:33:34] Marc Gonyea: Sure. Why not?
[00:33:35] Michael Woods: Yeah, exactly.
[00:33:36] Marc Gonyea: So, you went over to Ripcord, and how did you architect that process? You said, “Hey, this is what Chad made it happen, and your AE made it happen,” or how’d that go?
[00:33:44] Yeah, pretty much. Because people wanna know, some people wanna know, I wanna go for how I, like, do I approach the client? Do I talk to my DM about it? ‘Cause Ripcord had a history of converting our folks, right? So, it wasn’t totally new to them, but how did you kind of make that, take that initiative?
[00:33:59] Michael Woods: So, just to kind of level, set the timeline, I started with memoryBlue in February of 2021, and April, 2021, at the end of April, 2021, I beat all of the full-time employees for booking meetings and I wasn’t being compensated for them from the RipCord side. I was making my salary here, it was fine. I’d also built up a very strong relationship with my manager at Ripcord, and Joey and I were really tight.
[00:34:28] The team members that I had at Ripcord all came from memoryBlue, so they understood the process. I spoke with them about how to get hired out, and then I literally mentioned to my manager, I said, “Hey, what is your timeline for hiring me out? I Would love to get an idea of what that looks like. So, I can level-set in my own head.”
[00:34:44] Michael Woods: And he goes, “Yeah, you know, I’d say look for another, like, six, seven months of consistently hitting, and I was like, “Okay, well, I’m going to try and move that timeline up a little bit because I’ve shown, proven myself that I can beat your full-time employees at this for three months, and, uh, I’d like to, to work for you full-time.” And he was like, “Okay, well, what you gotta do is you need to have, you know, exceed quota for the next two months and I’ll write you an offer at the end of, at the end of June.” And those were the hardest two months ’cause, like, there was so much writing on the line, at least in my own mind
[00:35:17] Marc Gonyea: Of course, no, that’s what you wanted to do, there’s a lot, and you, you got to that point, so now it was make it happen.
[00:35:24] Michael Woods: Yeah. And no one, I don’t think anyone wanted it more, like, Ripcord wanted to bring me, they had me there full time, but they had such a great relationship here with memoryBlue, they were worried it might tarnish that relationship, I don’t believe it has, I think that there’s really good. And so, I finished out May, I had booked out my meetings, and I took a piece of advice from Joey words when you’re done with one month, you should already have, you know, half of your quota for the next month taken care of. Absolutely love that philosophy.
[00:35:51] Marc Gonyea: That’s good advice.
[00:35:52] Michael Woods: Yeah, or at least your quota scheduled because, you know, the show rate changes, but you should be showing at least half your quota for the next month, it’s a great way to kind of level set going into that next month. And so, I had, I think four of eight booked for June, booked a few more, and didn’t really stop there ’cause I, you know, if I stopped working, I still have to go over to Ripcord, do my job there in July and August. And so, I just had to, you know, continue working, didn’t have a big celebration or anything, I, I think the next time I was in the office here was returning my computer.
[00:36:28] Marc Gonyea: Excellent. That’s great.
[00:36:30] Michael Woods: Yeah, that, that’s pretty much how it came to fruition there, you know, one of the things that I think they respected is it’s not an easy conversation to have, but a lot of conversations in sales are not easy conversations to have. We’re talking about budgets, we’re talking about big numbers,
[00:36:43] they don’t want to pay those big numbers, they’re uncomfortable conversations. That practice of having that uncomfortable conversation, I think it helped me tenfold down the line, which is, like, “Look, this is what I want, how can we get this to have?” And it’s, it’s going in there with, like, a mature and comfortable attitude of like,
[00:37:01] “Look, I’m the one asking for something here, you don’t have to oblige, but this is what I would like.” And that does, that conversation helps you out. I just think it makes you more comfortable having harder conversations, you know, asking someone what their budget is, asking someone what their timeline is, asking, you know, not only if they have budget, but what that budget is. Those are tough questions to be asked in a sales cycle, and they just need to be asked if you get uncomfortable asking hard questions.
[00:37:28] Marc Gonyea: When you elevated and got hired out by Ripcord, and you kind of knew you were on this same path, how did you change your game as an SDR to kind of, ’cause, so, you change, you were an SDR, trying to change your game to get hired by the client, right? Modifying your game and position yourself. How did you transition yourself to become an AE? Not, not just internally at the company, but also, like, skill-wise? Yeah.
[00:37:51] So, eventually, we do know you left Ripcord to get the job at Ping, which we’ll transition to in a few minutes, but what were you doing from a skills development standpoint? ‘Cause you were on these calls listening in.
[00:38:00] Michael Woods: Yeah. Absolutely. Biggest thing that I was trying to take to the table was holding myself to a higher quota. I wanted them to make sure they were getting something out of the deal as well, you know, if they’re about to sever that relationship with memoryBlue,
[00:38:12] Marc Gonyea: I wanna make sure that I’m bringing value to their team and making it not look like it was a waste to not bring me on board. So, it actually ended up getting to the point that I held about twice the quota that the rest of the team had. And after about a month or two of that, I was like, “Okay, I would like to have a promotion, I’ve shown, again, that I’m ready for this.” So, you, you backed up your ask with promotion, right?
[00:38:34] Michael Woods: And, I mean, the goal from day one, I’d say, with me getting into an SDR role was acceleration because I felt like I was getting into the game late and I, I really wasn’t, you know, I was 26, I’m still, I’m still pretty young for it.
[00:38:49] Marc Gonyea: Yeah, exactly, yeah.
[00:38:50] Most of my coworkers were 22, you know, they were talking about going out, I’m like, “No, I’m saving money, I’m trying to buy a house.” We, we were, we were having different conversations. And, and that actually found, like, that helped me out a ton. So, I wanted to accelerate as fastly as fast as I could to get myself into that position of growth because I, I wanted to be a fully AE after a year.
[00:39:15] Marc Gonyea: Got it.
[00:39:15] And all my managers were like, “Never gonna happen.” I was like, “Well, how long should it take?” “It, like, two years.” I was like, “Cool. Hold me to twice the quota.” I was like, ’cause then that’s, I was like, “That’s the same number of meetings booked. Hold me to twice the quota.” I mean, for you that’s a novel approach.
[00:39:29] Michael Woods: Yeah, right? Why not? Yeah, you know you can do it.
[00:39:32] Marc Gonyea: Well, you know what? Lots of companies will do it by just production, production occurred, and you just said, “Okay, accelerate the timeline.”
[00:39:40] Michael Woods: Just make the timeline sooner.
[00:39:41] Marc Gonyea: All right. You were able to do that?
[00:39:44] Michael Woods: Yeah. And so, I got promoted to the senior BDR role in I think November of last year, about a year ago now, and I held that role until February. I had some, you know, great fun along the way. Around February, that was when Hannah left, uh, Ripcord and tried to take me to Coupa, Coupa was like, “Oh, you know, we’d love to have you come be a BDR.”
[00:40:05] I’m like, “No, been there, done that, all good guys.” And then, I showed up one day at tennis, I was ready to go play, you know, normally the way that, like, the paddle tennis league that I play in works is top players play Monday nights and, you know, it progresses down. And so I was up there on Monday night,
[00:40:25] I was happy as a clam up on, like, those top courts, and I kept having to get a sub ’cause I would be traveling for work, traveling for the holidays, life gets in the way. And I dropped, like, three court levels, so now I’m playing on Tuesday night, a different time, I’m like, “God, this is not what I wanted.”
[00:40:41] I show up and have a brittle day of work, I think my dog puked in the house or poop on a floor or something, so it’s not fun.
[00:40:48] Marc Gonyea: Yeah, not at all.
[00:40:49] Michael Woods: Going through the stresses of buying a home, and I’m like, just kind of fed up. And I walk into paddle tennis that night at eight o’clock at night, and this guy looks at me, he’s like, “You all right?”
[00:40:59] And I was like, “Yeah, I’m just having a rough day, man, like, don’t even worry about it. Don’t wanna waste your time with it.” He’s like, “Nah, talk to me. What’s on your mind?” I was like, “I’m just having a rough day at work, don’t really love what I’m doing right now.” He’s like, “What are you doing?” I was like, “I’m in sales, tech sales.”
[00:41:12] He was like, “Come work for me.” He’s like, “I, I run a team of AEs over at Ping Identity, just come work for me.” Within a week, I had a job.
[00:41:20] Marc Gonyea: Did you know him?
[00:41:21] Michael Woods: No, I’d never met him. I was playing on a different night, I was, I’m normally up on Monday, and I’m playing with this guy now on Tuesday night, and he ended up, we grabbed coffee, so that was Tuesday,
[00:41:30] we grabbed coffee Friday, it was booked for 45 minutes, we were there for two and a half hours. Yeah, he was,
[00:41:35] Marc Gonyea: He was interviewing you.
[00:41:36] Michael Woods: he was a boarding school guy, he lived in Chicago, we didn’t even talk business for the first hour, we were just having fun. And he was like, “Yeah, just look for an offer from me.” He was like, “Do you have any questions?” I’m like, “No, just get me out.”
[00:41:48] Marc Gonyea: There you go. And that’s how you secured your account executive role.
[00:41:51] Michael Woods: That’s how I got the AE role.
[00:41:52] Marc Gonyea: Nice. And you’ve been doing that for seven months?
[00:41:55] Michael Woods: Seven months, yeah, it’s been awesome. There are a few things, let’s say, as an SDR that are like, the most exciting thing is a cold call book because you’re giving someone from, like, a hard no to yeah, I’ll take a meeting. My neighborhood here is when I book a meeting, to the point of it actually gets like a dicking. And I mentioned that to my Hannah, and she was like, “Just wait till you cash a big check.” And I was like, “Really?”
[00:42:20] She’s like, “It’s addicting.” And that was, like, really what solidified me want to be an AE was just really, you know, chasing and hustling, driving.
[00:42:29] Marc Gonyea: So, you like, so good for you. So, you got, as you should, a great feeling out of booking those meetings or occurring meetings. And then you kind of stuck to it, and I love your approach, and then, talk to us about the muscles you’ve had to develop as you moved into an AE role.
[00:42:43] Michael Woods: So, there’s a lot.
[00:42:45] Marc Gonyea: And what’s that job like? Give us the day-to-day.
[00:42:46] Michael Woods: Yeah, day-to-day is awesome. So, I work a lot of inbound leads.
[00:42:50] Marc Gonyea: What’s your, wait, what’s your territory?
[00:42:52] Michael Woods: I have, I have Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Missouri, and Iowa.
[00:42:56] Marc Gonyea: And what size companies?
[00:42:57] Michael Woods: Everything under 500 million. So, it’s, it’s a massive patch, there’s 1.2 million accounts in my territory. Please do not take that from me, Ping, if you’re listening. I, I love my patch, um, and yeah, I mean, I absolutely have loved it. My day-to-day is pretty awesome because a lot of the Midwest, not only are they, like, the nicest people on earth, but they don’t have a ton of expertise in tech.
[00:43:22] So, I had, you know, for example, today, chatting with a guy I mentioned, single sign-on as SSO and multifactor authentication as MFA. He goes, “hold on, back up now, what?” Didn’t know, he was the VP of IT, had no idea. So, I walked him through it, and he was like, “This is exactly what we need, where it’s just, you know, the nicest people.”
[00:43:42] So, the day-to-day is living a lot of time in, like, Salesforce clarity, any kind of forecasting tool, responding to emails, putting out fires with customers, not customer success, but any kind of cases or support, taking a couple discovery calls, maybe something internal here and there,
[00:44:00] find some time for lunch, and I usually try and wrap about five or six. I was trying to start my day about 6:00 or 7:00 AM, I like to start my day, there’s a company that I’ve been trying to work within Israel, they’re based out of Minnesota, but they operate out of Israel. And so, for the last two, three months, we have, like, a standing 6:00 AM call two days a week.
[00:44:23] Marc Gonyea: They’re net new client.
[00:44:25] Michael Woods: Net new.
[00:44:26] Marc Gonyea: Wow. Okay. So, it’s just a standing sales cycle call.
[00:44:28] Michael Woods: It’s just a standing sales cycle call. And it’s been, been a long process, I’m hoping that they’re listening, that they’re gonna respond to my emails. Persistence, I’d say, is one of the things that you really keep as well, it doesn’t, doesn’t go away.
[00:44:42] Marc Gonyea: Have you, uh, had the portion of closing a deal?
[00:44:45] Michael Woods: Yeah. They said I wouldn’t close anything in the first six months, they were like, “It’s just too complicated of a product.” And I took it as a bit of a challenge, and that was when we closed something in the first month. It took me a month and about a week to close something. Yeah, no, that was actually, that was really fun, and I actually sold it for over list price, which was
[00:45:02] Marc Gonyea: Really?
[00:45:03] Michael Woods: Yeah.
[00:45:05] Marc Gonyea: Nice work, man.
[00:45:06] Michael Woods: Yeah, they kinda locked themselves in by saying that we have to go with you, and I was like, “Okay, I’ll give you the best that I can.” Like, I, I did, and I throw a little chair on top for me for it being my first-ever deal.
[00:45:18] And they were fine with it, and they’re like, “Yeah, this is still coming into a great deal. So, this is great for us.” And I’ve closed probably five deals since and maybe 10, 15 renewals.
[00:45:29] Marc Gonyea: That’s great. And what, what muscle have you had to develop as you transition from being an SDR to a closer?
[00:45:35] Listening and putting myself on mute, those are, like, the two biggest things. So.
[00:45:39] Marc Gonyea: That’s very insightful.
[00:45:40] Michael Woods: Uh, Austin, no, it was Austin, he, he ran my sales accelerator.
[00:45:47] Marc Gonyea: Oh yeah, from memoryBlue?
[00:45:48] Michael Woods: Yeah.
[00:45:49] Chris Corcoran: Austin Redden.
[00:45:50] Michael Woods: Yes, thank you. It’s been a while since he and I’ve caught up, but he had mentioned putting yourself on mute if you get someone on the phone because, like, background was, especially in an office, like, it’s best to put yourself on mute, and I found that things were happening too fast, I was like, I feel like I’m always, like, clicking my computer and I don’t know when I’m on mute, but now that all my meetings are taking place on Zoom, I live on mute, and then I’ll chime in when I have a question, if I need to intervene, it makes a ton of sense.
[00:46:16] Like, living on mute gives ev, the person who’s speaking the floor, and it gives them the opportunity to get their thoughts out without having to overhear over chatter or anything like that.
[00:46:25] Marc Gonyea: Sorry, it is something I wish I did more of while I was here as BDR, is living on mute, and that’s really developing listening muscles, right?
[00:46:34] Michael Woods: Yeah, ’cause it literally forces you to listen. And, you know, it is interesting as well in terms of developing muscles ’cause in an academic sense there’s not a ton, you know, there’s communications, there’s marketing as, and tech as routes to get into sales, but they don’t all lead towards sales, you have to be a really good note taker.
[00:46:53] As a history major, I love taking notes, and my hand was, like, these notes are really detailed, like, you’re picking up on their tone, and you’re writing the notes, and I was like, “Yeah, because, like, he said it with a little bit of inflection in his voice.” And she’s like, “Well, you’re not supposed to pick up on that,” and I was like, “Well, I did. So, here you go.”
[00:47:10] Marc Gonyea: She liked it.
[00:47:11] Michael Woods: She loved it.
[00:47:12] Marc Gonyea: She said you weren’t supposed to.
[00:47:13] Michael Woods: She was like, “You’re not supposed to do that.” Yeah, um,so, I mean, literally from day one, it was just kind of, like, you take notes, you sit there, you make calls and take notes.
[00:47:22] Marc Gonyea: Yeah, I mean, I would go back to the five years you were, uh, worked in professional as a tennis and squash, you, interpersonal reaction all the time.
[00:47:31] Michael Woods: All the time, yeah, and you’d be surprised that five-minute water break is often when you book out the next meeting. So, that was like the biggest piece that I took from being a squash pro is, like, if I had a standing lesson that would come to me, like, hopefully, every week, maybe every other week.
[00:47:45] Always book the next meeting while you’re in that meeting. So, I’d have my schedule up, and I’d be like, “Hey, you know, does this time work for you? Does that time work for you?” They’re like, “Yeah, yeah, I can do that.”
[00:47:54] Marc Gonyea: So, are, are you, as we’re getting close to the end, as you look back on, like, how you got into tech and kind of where you are now, are you happy that, like, VMware and Salesforce and LogRhythm kind of took a pass?
[00:48:08] Michael Woods: Couldn’t be happier, couldn’t be happier.
[00:48:09] Marc Gonyea: ‘Cause some of these more, larger companies, if they said yes, but you might have gone there, they’re way more bureaucratic than the smaller ones, they may not jive with, like, “I’m gonna, okay, how long does it take? Okay, how about I double my quote?” You know? I’m not saying all of ’em are like that, but it’s kind of funny how it works, but tell me your, tell me why.
[00:48:25] Michael Woods: So, the reason that I really loved memoryBlue, I didn’t realize it as I was getting hired, but for those people that don’t know what to do in sales or how to get into sales, it’s not that they’re holding your hand to micromanage, it’s that they’re holding your hand to then let go of your hand.
[00:48:40] It’s like, you know, learning how to ride a bike, you do it with tricycles, then you have someone kind of holding onto your shoulders or your hips, and then after that, you’re doing it on your own. So, it, the, the goal is to kind of let you go, but, you know, the way that Joey did it was beautifully, he was like, “Look, I just needed this, this, and this, you know, this is how I would find it, this is how I’d find that.” And then from there it’s pretty easy, yeah, so that’s definitely the biggest thing. One piece I’ve always thought about and even in an AE role, is that prospecting doesn’t stop, does not stop, let, let that be known to, to absolutely everyone who wants to consider getting into sales.
[00:49:17] A hundred calls is not that many, like, it’s absolutely obtainable. I do a thing actually about once a week with my partners, you know, we’re good size company over Ping, and once a week I’ll, you know, work with a partner from one company and then another, and another until, you know, we, we book out meetings.
[00:49:37] So, what I’ll do is I’ll build a list of about 200 people to call, they take a hundred, I take a hundred, and, you know, think I’m like, “Do I really wanna do this?” Like, you know, this is BDR work, and I’m like, I’ll give you 30% of the deal, like, you just, you have to sweeten the platform to make it worth their while, but it doesn’t go away. And, like, if I book the meeting while, you know, the two of us are on a call blitz, same kind of thing, like
[00:49:59] Marc Gonyea: You guys riding together?
[00:50:00] Michael Woods: We’re riding together.
[00:50:01] Marc Gonyea: The same time?
[00:50:01] Michael Woods: Absolutely.
[00:50:02] Back and forth with the dialing? No. So, I print, I print out a, uh, like a spreadsheet form, I’m like, “Hey, you take numbers one through a hundred,
[00:50:09] Marc Gonyea: Okay, got it.
[00:50:10] Michael Woods: I take 101 through two all.”
[00:50:11] Did you in person or virtual? No, we, we, I just say make sure your calls get done.
[00:50:15] Marc Gonyea: Alright, I see.
[00:50:16] Michael Woods: I don’t want to be sitting on a Zoom.
[00:50:17] Marc Gonyea: Good. I get it. So, you do your calls and then they’re…
[00:50:20] Michael Woods: Let’s reasses at the end or… And, I mean, yeah, a hundred calls takes you hour and a half, two hours.
[00:50:26] Marc Gonyea: Yep. That’s great.
[00:50:28] Michael Woods: Yeah. And biggest piece of advice, call cell phones, people get, people get annoyed right away, but just know how to hedge it.
[00:50:34] Marc Gonyea: Hedge it. That memoryBlue Academy, you’ve kind of customized it. What, what else would you have tell, told yourself the night before you started at memoryBlue, the night before you set up in the squash office with the desktop?
[00:50:45] Yeah, I’d say, yeah, again, prospecting doesn’t stop, um, some of the things I wish I knew now, download Grammarly, it helps a ton. I, I think the first five months of emails that I was sending had about a million typos. I, this is kind of funny side note, I think I booked four meetings in a year at, you know, record memoryBlue over email.
[00:51:09] Michael Woods: I vote nearly a hundred on, so, on the phone, just none of my, like, the cadences and everything that I’d set up, the sequences, I think there’s one email just introducing myself and then the one saying like, “Hey, I’m not gonna call you anymore.” Um, this is calling, yeah, I was like, “I’m just gonna call you the whole time.”
[00:51:27] I was like, “I’m gonna leave you voicemails.” that was actually something that Hannah was super stoked with. I would leave voicemails, and I don’t know what the callback, you know, return rate is supposed to be on a, on a cold call off a voicemail, fucking, like, six, seven, like, callbacks a day. You keep it nice, you keep it brief,
[00:51:45] 15 seconds, no, nothing too much longer than that, and you hit ’em with your cell phone number early. That’s something that we didn’t talk about in, in the Bootcamp, but I think it’s worthwhile, is say like, “Hey, this is Michael Woods, 719.” Hit him with the phone number early, so that means you’re not gonna waste someone’s day by making him listen to the whole voice.
[00:52:04] Hit him with the phone number early, now they’ll just call you. And it works like a charm, and if it’s not the right number, it’s fine.
[00:52:12] Marc Gonyea: My host is great.
[00:52:13] Michael Woods: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:52:14] Marc Gonyea: Everyone’s got thrown story and journey, there’s not a traditional, like, journey at memoryBlue, right?
[00:52:20] Michael Woods: No.
[00:52:20] Marc Gonyea: We hire people with experience, and we, we love, love that, and you took full advantage of the opportunity that we presented. The, everybody gets an opportunity, you crushed it.
[00:52:32] Michael Woods: I, I do feel kind of like a, a bit of a dummy ’cause I was selected for Tops, and I also didn’t know how the March Madness tournament worked, the basketball side I get, but, like, the internal memoryBlue competition that happens for booking meetings and connections and all that, didn’t know how it worked. I found myself in the finals and I was
[00:52:51] Marc Gonyea: So, you were just producing, you busy doing your job,
[00:52:52] Michael Woods: I had no idea what was going on. So, I was like, it wasn’t like the main bracket, it was the, the second draw, they, they were like, “Might in the finals, like, what are you gonna do?” I was like, “Finals a what?” I was like, I had no idea what’s going on, I was like, “I’m literally just working.”
[00:53:06] Marc Gonyea: You were keeping your eye on the other price.
[00:53:07] Michael Woods: Yeah, it’s like, I, I have a goal here. And yeah, I ended up passing on the, the Tops trip, we went to, to Mexico. I ended up going to, like, my family, to a ranch with my family up in Wyoming during that same weekend.
[00:53:18] Marc Gonyea: I think I remember hearing about that?
[00:53:19] Michael Woods: Yeah, and I was like, “Yeah, someone was gonna have my spot,” like, I was like, “I’m good.”
[00:53:23] Marc Gonyea: There you go, priorities, family time.
[00:53:25] Michael Woods: Oh, that’s actually a massive thing I do want to bring up. Over the weekend, my boss passed away, not the manager that hired,
[00:53:31] Marc Gonyea: Not Murray.
[00:53:32] Michael Woods: Not Murray. Lawrence Alonzo passed away over the weekend, and life is short. So, even though you have a job to do, spend time with your family.
[00:53:42] Marc Gonyea: But alright, we can end, end then, that’s well said. Clearly the most important thing.
[00:53:47] Michael Woods: Absolutely.
[00:53:48] Marc Gonyea: Right, Michael, Chris and I appreciate it.
[00:53:50] Chris Corcoran: This was great, man. I love hearing your story, lots of wisdom.
[00:53:53] Michael Woods: Absolutely. Thanks for having me on to let me tell it.
[00:53:55] Marc Gonyea: Thanks for coming.
[00:53:56] Chris Corcoran: Thanks for sharing.
[00:53:56] Michael Woods: Anytime.