Episode 120: Thom Lacalle – Don’t Tell Them, Show Them

Sales reps often fear that cold calling is an intrusion on their prospect’s time. However, it’s really the act of presenting them with a fitting and convenient solution, which in turn saves them the time of doing countless hours of their own research. For this reason, Thom Lacalle challenges sales reps to enter each conversation confidently rather than apologetically. 

In this episode of Tech Sales is for Hustlers, Managing Director Thom discusses his first experiences with growing confidence in sales roles, while exploring the ways sales is often a team sport, and the importance of managers leading their teams by example.  

Guest-At-A-Glance

💡 Name: Thom Lacalle

💡 What he does: Thom is a managing director of memoryBlue.

💡 Company: memoryBlue

💡 Noteworthy: Thom was a successful SDR with a passion for coaching, leading him to become a DM and then an MD. He is also a ping-pong king. 

💡 Where to find Thom: LinkedIn

Key Insights

⚡We sell convenience. It is a simple, but not always obvious, argument. Salespeople don’t reinvent the wheel; they sell products or services you can probably find in different places. But, what a salesperson does is free you from the trouble of looking for a solution by yourself. For instance, Thom sold donuts while in middle school. It was his first sales job. Interestingly, he held the monopoly because everyone else lacked consistency. ”The biggest competition was some of these kids’ mindsets. They’re like, ‘I could buy that for half the price at the grocery store.’ And I said, ‘Go, do it. It’s a three-mile walk.’ That’s when things started to click. I was like, ‘Okay, I’m selling convenience, and that was my whole reputation.”’

⚡Put your ego and pride aside if you want to succeed; sales is often a team sport. Thom had a great team when he started at memoryBlue, so he learned this lesson the easy way. In fact, it was teamwork, the company culture promoting collaboration, and everyone’s willingness to help and learn from each other that made him accept the offer in the first place. ”Kendall came in three months after me and kicked my ass. He booked on his first day or something. He learned a little bit from me in the beginning, and then I learned a lot from him going forward. I had to lower my pride ‘cause I was like, ‘I should be better. I started three months earlier.’”

⚡Tip for managers: don’t tell your people what to do; show them how. It’s interesting how you only realize what you could have done better in the past when you move on to a different role. That happened to Thom when he went from an SDR to a DM and an MD. A valuable lesson he learned is not to expect his team members to act or do the work like him, especially if he’s just telling them to do something. Instead, a good manager is a team member open to helping his people get the job done. “Many of us — people who aspire to be managers — all we need is to be told: ‘Do this.’ And we do it. So we become managers and think that’s how it works: you tell people to do things. [Well,] it doesn’t work that way.”

Episode Highlights

Experiences You (Don’t) Expect to Prepare You for an SDR Role

”It was an SDR role — I didn’t know it was SDR — calling for a photography company, trying to book people that needed ads. So I had that job. I had to write my script and had a cold call. […] So that gave me a little bit of foundation, and it made the recruiter love me. 

And I had another job, not sales-related, but it taught me how to be comfortable in any situation, which also helped with the nude modeling for art classes.”

Challenges of a Newbie

”Most restaurant workers have a small hurdle to overcome, which is equal business stature. When you’re the host or hostess for a restaurant, instantly turn your voice up three octaves, and you say, ‘Hi, how’s it going?’ Or if you’re in customer service, you’re like this accommodating, ‘Whatever you want, sir.’ And you have to level up that equal business stature. 

Now with the whole missionary background that was 10x that, I wasn’t like, ‘I didn’t catch you at bedtime?’ I was like, ‘How’s your day going?’ whispering in Mickey Mouse’s voice. It was horrendous. I was getting hung up on left and right. 

So that was a huge hurdle to overcome — this whole equal business stature. I thought I could win people over by being nice and accommodating. […] I showed up to the interview role play, A+, but when I was here, live, I was like a C–. And so I had a lot of growing to do and had to do it quickly.”

Passion for Teaching and What Came Out of It

”I love teaching and coaching. I’ve been doing it since middle school. I’ve been a tutor for my younger brother, who is on the autistic spectrum. So coaching was like a game, figuring out how to teach simple math concepts. You have to do it by questioning. If one way didn’t work, you have to adapt and find another way. 

And so, throughout, even starting in middle school, I loved coaching, teaching, tutoring, and helping people with table tennis. I coached a few people with table tennis as an SDR. I love doing that. I don’t know if it’s watching them improve or [if] I love hearing myself talk. I’m serious. I love putting on that teacher show.

I thought I wanted to be an AE and then, maybe ten years down the road, be a sales coach. I realized that the delivery manager is exactly that. […] And I think I got the role around month 12 as an SDR. It was during COVID, so I got to do the remote DM thing.”

Lessons Thom Learned as a DM

”Everyone thinks, ‘I’m going to be the first DM that everyone loves’ or ‘I’m going to be friends with everyone. I’m going to be cool with everyone, and they’re going to listen to me.’ No, you can have both with few because you need a deliverable done. […]  There’s a point, maybe six to eight months, in which no one in your team knows you as an SDR. And that’s what clicks. Now you’re fully manager. 

The other major lesson and this isn’t just me; this is like four out of my five last DMs all said this, ‘I just don’t get it. I tell my team to do something, and then they don’t do it.’ And this sounds so obvious; it’s almost stupid to say it out loud — your team is not you.  

One out of ten is. They didn’t do what you asked because two forgot, two half-assed it and didn’t complete it. A few of them didn’t know how, and they didn’t ask you for all these different reasons. And then the other reason is that you told them, you didn’t show them, you didn’t do it with them. ”

Transcript:

[00:00:00] Thom Lacalle: There’s a balance of praise and sticking to giving hard feedback. Take coaching. And I was a cheerleader, so my, my advice would be don’t be a cheerleader. It’s not worth much unless there’s a counterbalance where you can hold your team firm, and then they’re gonna thank you for it.

[00:00:16] ​ Chris Corcoran: Thom Lacalle in the house with the stash.  

[00:00:44] Marc Gonyea: How you doing, man?

[00:00:47] Thom Lacalle: I’m doing good. 

[00:00:48] Marc Gonyea: We’re in your office. 

[00:00:49] Thom Lacalle: Yeah. 

[00:00:50] Marc Gonyea: Doing this. 

[00:00:51] Thom Lacalle: Yeah. So, you’re telling me you don’t do the, you know I’m ready, Gonyea. Is it live? That’s not live. 

[00:00:57] Chris Corcoran: That’s not live. That, that, that was memorialized. 

[00:01:00] Marc Gonyea: Oh, that’s classic. Looking forward to that. 

[00:01:04] Chris Corcoran: But it’s not over yet. 

[00:01:07] Thom Lacalle: Okay. 

[00:01:09] Marc Gonyea: Yeah, we can, we’ll do it at some point or. 

[00:01:10] Thom Lacalle: Sure.

[00:01:11] Marc Gonyea: We go play ping pongs. I know you think you’re good at that. 

[00:01:15] Thom Lacalle: Yeah. Welcome to San Jose. 

[00:01:17] Marc Gonyea: It’s good to be here. We’ve been doing podcasts with past folks who went out with some of your team last night. I sat down with him today. We got some, a lot of talent out here.

[00:01:28] Chris Corcoran: Definitely. 

[00:01:29] Thom Lacalle: Would you concur? 

[00:01:29] Marc Gonyea: Yes. 

[00:01:31] Thom Lacalle: West Coast, best Coast.

[00:01:33] Marc Gonyea: Let’s get into that. But before we get into that, let’s get into you. Let’s prick some things down.

[00:01:38] Thom Lacalle: Okay. 

[00:01:39] Marc Gonyea: Let’s start a little bit about where are we, where are you from and tell us about growing up. 

[00:01:45] Thom Lacalle: Okay. 

[00:01:47] This one, I don’t know if this will be a surprise, but I was a little weird growing up. 

[00:01:53] Chris Corcoran: You’re laughing. 

[00:01:55] Marc Gonyea: I don’t think it’s a surprise.

[00:01:56] Thom Lacalle: Am I the same? Yeah. 

[00:01:57] Marc Gonyea: No. Go. 

[00:01:58] Thom Lacalle: Okay. I’m gonna start, I’m gonna start a, a ways back. 

[00:02:01] Marc Gonyea: Dude, please. 

[00:02:02] Thom Lacalle: Okay. 

[00:02:04] Didn’t really talk ’till I was three. 

[00:02:06] Marc Gonyea: Okay. 

[00:02:06] Chris Corcoran: Wow. 

[00:02:07] Thom Lacalle: Oh yeah. 

[00:02:07] Chris Corcoran: The silent, the silent treatment. 

[00:02:09] Thom Lacalle: Yes. 

[00:02:09] Marc Gonyea: You’re just taking it all in? 

[00:02:11] Thom Lacalle: You could say that. I didn’t talk. I wasn’t really verbal. People, my parents didn’t really understand me until I was like 6 or 7.

[00:02:19] I wasn’t master at puzzles. Oh yeah. Video games. 

[00:02:24] Chris Corcoran: Rubik’s Cube? 

[00:02:24] Thom Lacalle: Piano. 

[00:02:25] Chris Corcoran: Okay. 

[00:02:26] Really? 

[00:02:27] Thom Lacalle: They took me to the doctor. They said, “He has autism.” 

[00:02:30] Chris Corcoran: Yeah. 

[00:02:31] Marc Gonyea: Really? 

[00:02:31] Thom Lacalle: Yeah. And, and then they said, “But he is gonna grow out of it,” which 20 years ago, they didn’t really know what it, they didn’t really understand it like they do now.

[00:02:39] You don’t grow out of it. And you don’t really diagnose like that. So, I was weird growing up. A weird start here. 

[00:02:47] Chris Corcoran: So, you were clinically diagnosed with autism? 

[00:02:49] Thom Lacalle: No. 

[00:02:49] Chris Corcoran: Okay. 

[00:02:50] Thom Lacalle: I never got officially tested. 

[00:02:51] Chris Corcoran: I see. 

[00:02:52] Thom Lacalle: And so, doctors don’t normally do that, but it was a weird, you know, through grade school, in the middle school, I was kind of an oddball and eventually turned that into humor and started to win over friends, classmates through that. Me and my first friends around video games, but then kind of evened out in grade school, joined a soccer team and I kind of normaled out, but, but I was always like a, the communication and, like, building friends and all that stuff.

[00:03:19] That was, that was hard. Challenge. 

[00:03:22] Marc Gonyea: Really? 

[00:03:22] Thom Lacalle: Yeah. Oh yeah. 

[00:03:24] Chris Corcoran: You turned it into a superpower, it sounds 

[00:03:25] Oh, yeah. I, yeah. 

[00:03:26] Marc Gonyea: Superpower. Have you heard this guy interview people? 

[00:03:28] Chris Corcoran: Yeah, I have. 

[00:03:29] Marc Gonyea: He’s the best interviewer in the company. 

[00:03:31] Hands down. 

[00:03:33] Thom Lacalle: Appreciate it. Yeah, it was, it wasn’t as smooth as, it wasn’t your typical sports, you know, had typical kid.

[00:03:41] I was, I was like a hermit. So, yeah, it was weird. I, I was a weird kid. 

[00:03:47] Chris Corcoran: Introverted. 

[00:03:47] Thom Lacalle: Yeah, very introverted. Even now, I know how to perform, like, I love to put on a show with these interviews we’re running office-wide, but outside of that, I, I still am a little bit of that hermit. But middle school is where things turned around.

[00:04:01] Three major things happen, and this is where it kind of starts going into sales. I was able to turn that quirkiness into, uh, humor. I was at the weird outcasts. I was like, “Oh, this guy’s fun. Thom. Few things happened. Got really involved with church. 

[00:04:17] Chris Corcoran: Okay. 

[00:04:18] Thom Lacalle: Which is sales. 

[00:04:20] Marc Gonyea: Yes.

[00:04:21] Modern, modern day is sales. 

[00:04:24] Thom Lacalle: It’s a bad comparison, but in, in certain ways it is. It’ll, it’ll tie in a lot later. And then I started selling candy, business at school. 

[00:04:35] And then? Yeah. I got into music and so that, that, that’s who I became. 

[00:04:40] Marc Gonyea: How old were we talking? 

[00:04:42] Thom Lacalle: This is like middle school, early high school.

[00:04:43] Marc Gonyea: Okay. Okay. Yep. 

[00:04:44] Thom Lacalle: Yeah. So, this is about when I decided that I am destined to be a missionary. 

[00:04:50] Marc Gonyea: That’s what you thought? 

[00:04:51] Thom Lacalle: Oh, yeah. Yep. 

[00:04:52] Marc Gonyea: Okay. I can see that. 

[00:04:53] Thom Lacalle: Oh yeah. From, from, from middle school all the way to halfway through college, I was going to be a missionary. I was gonna go to Africa or East Asia.

[00:05:02] Chris Corcoran: That was my path. Throughout high school, I sold a ton of candy donuts. I was making, like, 50, 60 bucks profit a day. I was out working my friends who had part-time jobs, I, I’d sell for about 15 minutes after school, be sold out, go home. Where, where did you get your candy? Did you go to Costco or something, or? 

[00:05:20] Thom Lacalle: Go to Costco.

[00:05:21] I pre-ordered the donuts from the bakery the night before. Had a whole system, had a wave of evading our campus security and all this stuff. Got caught, had to change my operation, all this stuff. But this was initially, and I was, this was a, a wrong assumption, but I thought, “Man, I’m good at business and sales.”

[00:05:41] All I was doing was transporting product, but. 

[00:05:43] Chris Corcoran: That’s business there. 

[00:05:44] Marc Gonyea: Hustle. 

[00:05:45] Thom Lacalle: Oh yeah. That’s, that was my grind. So, I was known as the candy man. I was also, you know, Youth Group kid. 

[00:05:52] The candy man. 

[00:05:53] Thom Lacalle: Oh yeah. 

[00:05:53] Chris Corcoran: The candy and candy. 

[00:05:54] Marc Gonyea: Did you have any competition? Did, did it have any in little Tom Lacalle imitators? 

[00:05:59] Thom Lacalle: A few, but they, they’d get burned out.

[00:06:02] They were afraid of being, you know, approaching was uncomfortable. I was kind of already the weird but loved kid so I just went up to everyone. 

[00:06:11] Marc Gonyea: You didn’t care. 

[00:06:12] Thom Lacalle: Yeah. The biggest competition was some of these kids’ mindsets. They’re like, “I could just buy that for half the price at the grocery store.”

[00:06:19] And I said, “Go do it. It’s a three-mile walk.” 

[00:06:22] Marc Gonyea: Exactly. 

[00:06:23] Chris Corcoran: It’s such convenience. You’re. 

[00:06:25] Thom Lacalle: Yeah, exactly. I 

[00:06:25] was like, and that’s when things started to click. I was like, “Okay, so I’m not, I’m, I’m selling convenience. So, that was my whole reputation. I was the candyman, I was kind of weird musician, Christian kid.

[00:06:36] Chris Corcoran: Really nice. 

[00:06:37] Marc Gonyea: What, what, but where did the selling, was it, did money give you freedom? Like, what, like? 

[00:06:44] Thom Lacalle: It was, it was just a, a little bit, but yeah. 

[00:06:48] Isabelle, the first dance sold like five.

[00:06:50] Marc Gonyea: The commerce. 

[00:06:51] Thom Lacalle: Candy bars and then, like, seven. And I was like, just got addicted to this, like, “Oh, I beat the record.”

[00:06:56] I tell my brother who, who initially bought me my first box, he said, “Go sell it.” Until I got up to, like, my record was, like, 60 bars and then once I brought in donuts, it was all over, had a way higher margin. So, or it was, it’s a lot more profitable, so. 

[00:07:11] Chris Corcoran: The donuts are. 

[00:07:11] Thom Lacalle: Oh yeah, those are like 30 cents. Candy was 50. Everything’s a dollar, so, yeah. 

[00:07:17] Marc Gonyea: Did you, uh, did people question, ask what you were doing with the coin? 

[00:07:21] Thom Lacalle: Uh, not really. 

[00:07:22] Marc Gonyea: Not really? Okay. What’d you do with the money? 

[00:07:25] Thom Lacalle: Took out my girlfriend to Chinese restaurant every week. 

[00:07:29] Marc Gonyea: Nice. That’s great. Okay. So, that and what did you say? Youth, Youth Group?

[00:07:34] Thom Lacalle: Okay. Yeah. So I, I got super involved in this nonprofit, and that was my first, one of my first jobs in college. I, I was a, I directed a middle school Youth Group type thing. It was like outreach. It was really great. Had great mentors. I stayed, I didn’t take a, I accepted a Chico, but stayed home so I could do this nonprofit thing.

[00:07:53] So, I went to JC, ran this nonprofit with, with some mentors. 

[00:07:58] Marc Gonyea: Outta high school? 

[00:07:59] Thom Lacalle: At what high school? 

[00:08:00] Marc Gonyea: Out of high school. 

[00:08:01] Thom Lacalle: Out, yeah, outta high school, during community college I was running this thing. 

[00:08:04] Marc Gonyea: Wow. And your parents were like, “Hey, don’t worry about you call.” Was that a tough conversation or like, “This is such great, such a good do-gooder or what?

[00:08:12] Thom Lacalle: Yeah, it, it’s funny ’cause they’re, they’re the ones that, you know, that, like, got our family into church. And then once I was like, “This is gonna be my life, mom and dad,” they’re like, “Are you sure you don’t wanna get, like, an engineering degree?”

[00:08:22] They’re the, they’re the ones that, you know, inspired it. So, okay. How does this all connect? So eventually. 

[00:08:31] Marc Gonyea: No, this is good. No, this is good. 

[00:08:32] Thom Lacalle: Oh yeah. Eventually. And I had to raise my own donors to fund my salary with this nonprofit. That’s how it works. You sit down with people who have real jobs, and you say, “I want you to pay me money to go do good things for other people.”

[00:08:47] That’s the value. That was the cringing thing I’ve ever heard. You’re closing people without giving them anything. You’re. 

[00:08:55] Marc Gonyea: Yeah. 

[00:08:55] Thom Lacalle: Yeah. So, I took my first sales course so I could learn how to close. 

[00:08:58] Chris Corcoran: Okay. 

[00:08:59] Marc Gonyea: Where? 

[00:08:59] Thom Lacalle: At CRC. It was, like, personal selling. 

[00:09:01] Marc Gonyea: Okay. Okay. 

[00:09:02] Thom Lacalle: It was okay. I hated it. Yeah. 

[00:09:03] Chris Corcoran: Where’s CRC?

[00:09:04] Thom Lacalle: It’s one of the smaller, uh, JCs in Sacramento. 

[00:09:09] Chris Corcoran: Okay.

[00:09:11] Thom Lacalle: It is a good class. I did pretty well. I’m still just, so I walked outta that class thinking, “I’m, I, I could never do sales, and I still don’t want to close people for this donor thing.” But that was my first intro. 

[00:09:23] Marc Gonyea: Okay. 

[00:09:24] Thom Lacalle: Yeah, it was.

[00:09:25] Marc Gonyea: And how, how long did you do that? 

[00:09:27] Thom Lacalle: Uh, what?

[00:09:28] Marc Gonyea: The, the JC, and the. 

[00:09:30] Thom Lacalle: Oh, yeah. That was, took, I got two years of JC done in, just in three years. Yeah. Took me a while. 

[00:09:37] Marc Gonyea: That’s okay. You know, you were busy. 

[00:09:39] Thom Lacalle: Yeah. I, I put a lot of focus into this nonprofit stuff. Eventually, I did get picked for this trip to Jerusalem, and I was a little sour, so I said, “I’m gonna focus on school.”

[00:09:49] Transferred to Chico. Said, “I do, I should get a real degree, you know, even though I’m gonna do mission stuff.” Went to business, chose accounting. Everyone said, “That’s not you. Went to marketing.” Eventually, I found out that marketing majors don’t get to direct their own commercials out of college.

[00:10:09] Marc Gonyea: They’ll tell you that when you’re, when you’re in school. 

[00:10:11] Thom Lacalle: I thought I was gonna be. 

[00:10:12] Chris Corcoran: On the brochure. 

[00:10:13] Marc Gonyea: Yeah. I know, I know, right? That’s what they, that’s what they say on the brochure. 

[00:10:17] Thom Lacalle: Yeah. I thought I was gonna be, like, the creative lead designer of the next Nike commercial.

[00:10:23] Chris Corcoran: Yeah. 

[00:10:24] Marc Gonyea: Right. 

[00:10:24] I, I thought, you know, marketing majors from tech got the lead Coke’s brand extension in the carbonated beverage, non-carbonated beverages.

[00:10:33] That’s all it happens. 

[00:10:35] Thom Lacalle: Yeah. 

[00:10:35] Disappointing. Disappointing. Had a business professor that said, this was the switch. Their daughter, they said their daughter, you know, graduated with a bachelor’s, was in sales, and she had a colleague who had, like, a master’s or something, doctor and some other business function.

[00:10:56] And the sales daughter with the bachelor was, was not only making more money but had her feet kicked up on her desk, laughing, talking to clients all day. And I thought, “No way.” I thought your income only went with, you know, how much education you have. And so, I was like, “This is it.” So, that’s what officially converted me to sales.

[00:11:18] I was like, “You mean you could monetize your ability to connect with people beyond what your education level is? I don’t need a doctorate to make X amount?” So, that’s why I made the switch and I joined the Seufferlein sales program. Yeah. And so. 

[00:11:38] Chris Corcoran: The legends are made. 

[00:11:39] Thom Lacalle: Yeah. That’s where legends are made.

[00:11:41] It was the start of the, it was the start of the program. You might have heard the name Tom Villa. 

[00:11:45] Chris Corcoran: Yeah. 

[00:11:46] Okay. 

[00:11:46] Marc Gonyea: Yeah. 

[00:11:47] Yeah. 

[00:11:47] Thom Lacalle: And so, yeah, that’s, that’s how I eventually made my transition to sales and decided, “You know what? Put a hold on this whole nonprofit good, you know, goody-touche thing.” And I convinced myself instead of being one person that makes a difference, I can make a ton of money and fund two people.

[00:12:07] Chris Corcoran: There you go. 

[00:12:08] Thom Lacalle: Have I done that yet? No. 

[00:12:11] Marc Gonyea: Not yet. 

[00:12:11] Thom Lacalle: As you get older, there’s more responsibilities and you. 

[00:12:14] Marc Gonyea: You may get a difference sometimes, we’ll get into that, what we do here. 

[00:12:17] Thom Lacalle: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. 

[00:12:17] Marc Gonyea: It’s a different kind of difference. 

[00:12:19] Thom Lacalle: Oh yeah, no, totally. 

[00:12:20] Marc Gonyea: Like, right? This is we got Kendrick Trotter right now working to try and get some people to run, run work for you in your office.

[00:12:28] Thom Lacalle: Yeah.

[00:12:28] Marc Gonyea: Like, he’s looking for people who are trying to give access to tech, who normally wouldn’t have it. That’s Kendrick’s story. 

[00:12:35] Thom Lacalle: Totally. 

[00:12:36] Marc Gonyea: Right? So, it’s a different, the operating model here, we’re doing a lot of that. They, they may not know it at the time when they’re working here, when they’re working for you, but you’re, you’re impacting their life.

[00:12:45] Thom Lacalle: Oh, totally. 

[00:12:45] Chris Corcoran: Tremendously. 

[00:12:47] Thom Lacalle: Oh yeah. 

[00:12:47] Marc Gonyea: If Chris and I believed that we, we’d probably be doing something else. 

[00:12:51] Thom Lacalle: Absolutely. 

[00:12:52] Marc Gonyea: I got a question for you about your Chico. When did championship table tennis player come, and when you, did you go in the Chico being the ping-pong king? 

[00:13:02] Or did that, was that all formed in? 

[00:13:06] Chris Corcoran: On the Youth, Youth Group circuit? The church Youth Group circuit. 

[00:13:11] Thom Lacalle: Yeah. It started with the church Youth Group circuit. 

[00:13:13] Marc Gonyea: That, that’s what I was saying. 

[00:13:13] Chris Corcoran: Don’t sleep on the church Youth Group circuit. 

[00:13:15] Thom Lacalle: Yeah. 

[00:13:15] Marc Gonyea: I was waiting for him to volunteer. 

[00:13:17] Thom Lacalle: Yeah. I, I played, you know, I started PE and then played with a bunch of, uh, yeah, Youth Group friends.

[00:13:25] And then, in Chico, I was still straight-edge kid. She goes to party school. This is embarrassing. I went to, like, three parties. That’s it. In my time there. The most nights, I was at the gym working out or playing table tennis. 

[00:13:42] Like, “That’s it. Really?” 

[00:13:46] Marc Gonyea: What’s wrong with that?

[00:13:47] That’s great. You know what, you know what gets you going. 

[00:13:50] Chris Corcoran: Flying straight, brother. Right? 

[00:13:51] Thom Lacalle: Yeah. So, I played it all seven of the uh, tournaments there, their intermurals. I won them all. I don’t know. Have you read my bio on the website? 

[00:14:04] That’s probably why it’s still up there. It’s the least professional line. It talks about my ping-pong history. 

[00:14:07] Marc Gonyea: Yeah, that’s what I’m asking. 

[00:14:09] So, I’m asking you about table tennis. 

[00:14:11] Thom Lacalle: Yeah. 

[00:14:13] Marc Gonyea: He has seven-time table tennis, saw on LinkedIn. 

[00:14:16] Unde, come up undefeated. 

[00:14:18] Thom Lacalle: Yep. 

[00:14:19] Chris Corcoran: Wow. Has anyone beat you here? 

[00:14:24] Thom Lacalle: Uh, yeah, I’m upset. Hate to admit no one that works here right now. Kendall Melton, alumni. Yeah. You hit the bell. I used to whoop him. We play every day. Back in, back in the day, anytime you get two or three books, you can play King Kong as much as you want. 

[00:14:41] Marc Gonyea: Yeah. That’s right.

[00:14:43] Thom Lacalle: You get none. Like, don’t touch it. Yeah. We, we played a ton. He, he’s a quick learner, and so he eventually got to level where he could beat me, and then I did have one, a game I let slip with, with Nicky Mohammadian and… 

[00:14:55] Marc Gonyea: I’ve heard about this. Yeah. Yeah. He always talks about it. Feel like, I thought he told me about it.

[00:15:01] Thom Lacalle: Yeah. So, never happened again. Never haven’t lost in this office. Yeah. And I’ve never lost one in shorts, so. 

[00:15:09] Marc Gonyea: Oh, that’s right. That’s why people were in shorts. Alright, I love it. Alright, let’s go back to Chico. 

[00:15:17] Thom, you’re rolling out of Chico. 

[00:15:19] What you think you’re gonna do? So, you got in the sales program. 

[00:15:23] Chris Corcoran: But he was on the, you were on the competition team, the sales competition.

[00:15:25] Right? So, tell, tell, tell us a little bit about that. 

[00:15:29] Thom Lacalle: Oh man. Okay. It’s, it’s an awesome experience.

[00:15:33] I’ve gone to judge it twice now too. We got to go back. It’s, it’s great, and maybe I’m bitter ’cause I didn’t get top 20. They get to move on and, you know, they’re, they get awards and all this stuff.

[00:15:46] I was, I was in the, in the next quartile. It’s a great experience. It’s role-play experience, but that, but that might be the thing that I missed out on, you know, in a school environment. It’s, it’s perfect. Everything’s perfect. It’s like you get the perfect prospect, they’re asking you questions.

[00:16:01] Marc Gonyea: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. 

[00:16:03] Thom Lacalle: It’s, still is extremely valuable to be in front of someone. Of course, you know, of course, words are rushing. You have to put together, you know, all your value props and your pitch, your clothes, but that’s about it. But besides that, yeah, it’s a great, it’s a great. 

[00:16:15] Marc Gonyea: But it socializes the idea of getting into sales.

[00:16:18] Thom Lacalle: Exactly. Right? Yeah. 

[00:16:19] Marc Gonyea: When I was in school, I was a finance major and, like, going into sales, like, “Shhh, sales, why would you wanna do that?” You wanna sell, this is no disrespect, insurance or timeshares or mortgages or stocks and, like, there wasn’t, it was all, and that’s, those things were all B2C. 

[00:16:39] There was very rarely nothing, no focus on B2B. So, at least it does fine. It’s like, it’s hard to replicate that in a class, but at least it socializes the idea. Right? 

[00:16:52] Thom Lacalle: Yeah. And that’s the goal. And it does great at that. It is, it’s an amazing, it’s, it’s an amazing experience. It does what it’s supposed to, which is expose you to sales, get you in a safer environment.

[00:17:03] It’s definitely different than outbound cold calling. 

[00:17:06] Marc Gonyea: Yes. Right? 

[00:17:07] Chris Corcoran: It is. 

[00:17:08] Thom Lacalle: So, two separate beasts. But yeah. It was, it was an awesome experience. I highly recommend. Tom Villa runs a great program with that. 

[00:17:17] Marc Gonyea: Oh, yeah. 

[00:17:17] Thom Lacalle: And they’re competing internationally this year. 

[00:17:19] Marc Gonyea: Really? 

[00:17:19] Thom Lacalle: It’s a big deal. Yeah. 

[00:17:22] Marc Gonyea: And how’d you do?

[00:17:22] What do you mean you were top 20? 

[00:17:24] Thom Lacalle: Yeah. So, top, uh, top 20% go to this, what would they call Sweet 16. I was, like, in between 21 and 40. Yeah, so. 

[00:17:34] Marc Gonyea: That’s alright. You always gotta pick them up. 

[00:17:35] Thom Lacalle: Yeah. Yeah. I, I whoop them any day. 

[00:17:37] Chris Corcoran: Yeah. 

[00:17:38] Thom Lacalle: So. 

[00:17:39] Chris Corcoran: So, you, you, you compete, you’re part of the sales program. You graduate from college.

[00:17:42] What do you think you’re gonna do? 

[00:17:43] Thom Lacalle: Okay, so I go to career fair. 

[00:17:45] Talk to some of these companies. I, I talk to a wine company. A power tool, one for sales, memoryBlue, and then an office supplies one. 

[00:17:55] Chris Corcoran: Okay. 

[00:17:56] Thom Lacalle: Few things. I was nervous about pigeonholing myself. I was like, “The wine guy would be cool.”

[00:18:03] Chris Corcoran: Yeah. 

[00:18:04] Thom Lacalle: Still would. Yeah. Like, Thom has unlimited access to wine. I don’t really care about alcohol, but it would be cool. Power tools, not my thing. Office supplies? That’s exciting. 

[00:18:16] So, I’m interviewing with all of them. 

[00:18:21] Thom Lacalle: Uh, the wine one loved me ’cause they ran our, they ran one of our sales competitions, and I crushed it.

[00:18:26] I crushed that one. That wasn’t the, the big competition. They loved me. I was whatever. Power tools didn’t because funny story, memoryBlue said, ” Hey dress, you know, dress casual for an interview.” And the Power tools was like, “It’s an interview. Dressed like it.” I was an idiot. I did half and half.

[00:18:43] I did uh, dress pants, dress shoes, belt, tucking a nice black t-shirt. So, I got to my memoryBlue one. They’re like, “Oh, you look great. You didn’t have to dress up.” I was like, “Oh, I have this other one later.” And I got to that one, and they’re like, “Dude. Collar shirt.” 

[00:18:57] They said that. “Don’t, you can’t.” 

[00:19:00] Marc Gonyea: They said, “Dude,” or they just said, “Collar shirt.” 

[00:19:02] Thom Lacalle: No, I don’t think they said “Dude,” but he was like, “Hey, Collar shirt.” And I didn’t get a callback, so. 

[00:19:07] Yeah. I should have just dressed. 

[00:19:08] Marc Gonyea: Their loss. 

[00:19:10] Chris Corcoran: Yeah. 

[00:19:10] Thom Lacalle: Yeah. Other funny story. Someone just interviewed who is set, I’m working here and just turn them down. I’ve had a few 

[00:19:19] Marc Gonyea: Oh really?

[00:19:19] Thom Lacalle: people from that company interview with us from Chico. So, people who went that route. 

[00:19:23] Chris Corcoran: Really? 

[00:19:24] Thom Lacalle: Yeah. 

[00:19:24] Marc Gonyea: Did you tell him the story? No. 

[00:19:26] Thom Lacalle: No. I didn’t want to tell. I was little embarrassed I didn’t get the job. 

[00:19:32] So, was interviewing with them. Didn’t go with the wine. Came down to office supplies and memoryBlue. Went to the office supplies, interview. First thing I looked for, ping pong table not there. Seriously. 0And there weren’t that many people in the office. A bit older, which is fine. In the memoryBlue. It was a table. This was important. I, I brought my paddle to the interview. 

[00:19:58] Marc Gonyea: You did?

[00:19:58] Thom Lacalle: Yeah. And, and, you know, it’s funny ’cause you met with Kevin too. 

[00:20:02] Marc Gonyea: Yeah. Hey too. 

[00:20:04] Thom Lacalle: Yesterday. 

[00:20:05] Marc Gonyea: Yeah. 

[00:20:05] Thom Lacalle: He was one of the first I met, and I showed him, and he was like, looking at my paddle. He’s like, “Dude, this is awesome.” Like, and we were talking paddles ’cause he also plays. They’re passing it around over the cubicles.

[00:20:15] Marc Gonyea: Was it random? This is totally random. 

[00:20:16] Thom Lacalle: It’s random. And I was just waiting for my interview. 

[00:20:18] Marc Gonyea: And did you know we had a ping pong table? 

[00:20:20] Thom Lacalle: That we had one? 

[00:20:21] Marc Gonyea: Yeah. When you brought the ping pong? 

[00:20:22] Thom Lacalle: I don’t, I don’t know if I knew. 

[00:20:24] Marc Gonyea: You just brought it anyways. 

[00:20:25] Thom Lacalle: Yeah, I, I, I think I saw on the, on our website.

[00:20:28] Marc Gonyea: Okay. You’re like, “Just in case.” 

[00:20:30] Thom Lacalle: There’s a video of someone playing, I was like, “Oh.” 

[00:20:32] Marc Gonyea: So, Kevin just started chatting you up about your ping-pong pattern? 

[00:20:34] Thom Lacalle: Yeah, a few people kind of crowded me and that, they’re 

[00:20:37] passing it around, and they’re like, “Wow, why is the rubber, like, whatever. And I was, and then they’re passing it across the cubicles.

[00:20:44] It felt amazing. And really, that, that was. 

[00:20:49] Marc Gonyea: The culture’s, this is a bigger point. You’re right. Keep going. 

[00:20:51] Thom Lacalle: It, it, it was, for me, it’s stupid. I, I make, I’ve made a lot of decisions off of stupid things, but panned out, right? Yeah. 

[00:20:59] Chris Corcoran: Ping pong? So, the one didn’t? 

[00:21:02] Thom Lacalle: There are other reasons I picked memoryBlue, but that was, that really, the culture got me.

[00:21:07] Yeah. And then people started amping up my paddle, and then they liked my socks. I was just being amped up by the whole team. Crushed the interview. Had a really embarrassing moment when Joe Reeves… 

[00:21:23] Marc Gonyea: What was that? 

[00:21:24] Thom Lacalle: It made my own poker chip. The label maker. It was hideous. It was a blue poker chip. My name and my number. I’ll show it to you after. 

[00:21:36] Chris Corcoran: Oh, you have it? 

[00:21:37] Thom Lacalle: It was meant to be a joke, like, “Isn’t this stupid?” Look. And, and he took it, and he said, “Wow, buddy, that’s really cool.” I was like, “Oh, it’s a joke.” And he’s like, “No, it’s, it’s cool. I like it.” I was like, “Dude, that was a joke.” Didn’t click, and I walked out, bright red, but got the job.

[00:22:01] So, yeah, that was my journey. 

[00:22:03] Marc Gonyea: Did, did you know what you were getting yourself into? 

[00:22:06] Thom Lacalle: Actually, a little bit. So. 

[00:22:07] Marc Gonyea: Okay. 

[00:22:07] Thom Lacalle: So, backing up a little bit. I did take an internship. I had no idea what it was. It was an SDR role. Oh really? I didn’t know it was SDR. I didn’t know this was SDR, calling for a photography company, trying to book them, people that need ads.

[00:22:21] Chris Corcoran: Okay. 

[00:22:22] Thom Lacalle: So, I had that job that actually I had to write my own script and had the cold call. Had no idea that was. 

[00:22:27] Chris Corcoran: Where was this? Chico? 

[00:22:28] Thom Lacalle: Yeah, in Chico. It’s called Results Imagery. So, that actually gave me, like, a little bit of foundation, and it made the recruiter love me. And I had another job that, not sales-related, but it taught me how to be, you know, comfortable in any situation, which also helped with this.

[00:22:41] Chris Corcoran: Wow. What was that? What was that job? 

[00:22:44] Thom Lacalle: Nude modeling. 

[00:22:45] Chris Corcoran: I beg you a pardon? 

[00:22:47] Thom Lacalle: Nude modeling for art classes. Yeah. 

[00:22:50] Chris Corcoran: Are you serious? 

[00:22:51] Marc Gonyea: Yeah. I asked you about this. 

[00:22:52] Thom Lacalle: Yeah. Yeah. You know, art classes. 

[00:22:55] Chris Corcoran: No, no, no, no. 

[00:22:58] Thom Lacalle: Art classes, you know? 

[00:22:58] Marc Gonyea: You’re in college at this point. 

[00:23:00] Thom Lacalle: Yeah, I was in college, you know? 

[00:23:02] They need to. 

[00:23:03] Marc Gonyea: Why’d you think was working out on Friday and Saturday night?

[00:23:05] Thom Lacalle: Yeah. I, I wanted to be. 

[00:23:08] Marc Gonyea: You get called back. You look like David, Michelangelos David. You get called back. 

[00:23:13] Thom Lacalle: Yeah. 

[00:23:13] It’s, it’s, it’s fun. You go up on this little stage, and there’s all these artists, all them art majors, and then you just drop the robe, and you take a nap. 

[00:23:21] And if you could do that, you could cold call.

[00:23:24] Yeah, you can, you could, yeah, you could do anything. Doesn’t matter if it’s a, if you can do the most uncomfortable thing. 

[00:23:32] Chris Corcoran: There’s, how did you find that job? I mean. 

[00:23:36] Thom Lacalle: I think I saw, like, an ad on a, on a cork or a billboard-type thing. And it was for a, an art club. That one was fun. You got to keep the art. Have you ever had someone send you a nude of yourself?

[00:23:52] Yeah. The artists were giving me my art. It’s pretty cool. Yeah. Joe wasn’t, about that, when I brought up, when he was like, “What’s your last role?” And I was like, “Nude modelling.” He’s like, “Okay, do you have another one?” And I was like, “Yeah. The sales role.” I thought he would’ve, you know, dug in then, like, “Oh, that’s funny.” But he was, Joe’s very, uh, PG at work. 

[00:24:18] Marc Gonyea: “Okay. Do you have another one?” 

[00:24:20] Chris Corcoran: Yeah, he’s memoryBlue’s bastard. Yeah. 

[00:24:22] Marc Gonyea: Next. Yeah. So, what was it like kicking, getting going here? 

[00:24:28] Thom Lacalle: Here? 

[00:24:28] Marc Gonyea: Yeah. 

[00:24:29] Thom Lacalle: That was rough. 

[00:24:30] Marc Gonyea: Yeah. What, tell us about it. 

[00:24:32] Thom Lacalle: I was terrible. 

[00:24:34] Marc Gonyea: Everyone’s terrible. But tell us about your, okay, so degree of terribility. 

[00:24:37] Thom Lacalle: Yeah.

[00:24:37] So, I’ll tell you who’s terrible. Most restaurant workers have a small hurdle to overcome, which is equal business stature. When you’re host or hostess for restaurant, instantly turn your voice up three octas, and you say, “Hi, how’s it going?” Or if, or if you’re in customer service, you’re just like this accommodating, “Whatever you want, sir.”

[00:25:05] And you have to level up that equal business stature. Now with the whole missionary background, that was like 10 x. That, I was, I didn’t do catch at event. I was like, “How’s your day going?” Whispering and Mickey Mouse boys. And it was horrendous. I was getting hung up on left and right. So, that was a huge hurdle to overcome, this whole equal business stature thing.

[00:25:26] Marc Gonyea: Oh yeah. 

[00:25:27] Thom Lacalle: I tried to, I thought I could win people by being nice and accommodating. 

[00:25:31] Marc Gonyea: Yeah. 

[00:25:32] No. In the worst one, but it might happen once, and you’re like, “Oh, it works. I’m gonna keep doing it.” 

[00:25:37] Thom Lacalle: Exactly. I was calling HR and they… 

[00:25:40] Marc Gonyea: Oh my gosh, they’re nice people. 

[00:25:41] Thom Lacalle: Some of them took it, so. That was, that was rough.

[00:25:46] I definitely was a paralysis by analysis, couldn’t get to a hundred dials. I showed up to this, this, you know, the interview role-play, A plus, but when I was here live, I was like a C minus. And so, I had a lot of growing to do, and it was, I had to do it quick. So, pretty quickly, I was able to identify who the good leaders were.

[00:26:11] Thom Lacalle: Mm-hmm. Um, Trevor Shan. I wasn’t on his team, but I knew that guy is good. Yeah. So, yeah, I came to him for everything. 

[00:26:20] Marc Gonyea: Yeah. 

[00:26:20] Chris Corcoran: How’d you know he was good? 

[00:26:22] Thom Lacalle: I could tell by his, honestly, it’s probably his confidence in the way that he gave his feedback. He kind of had a Wolf on Wall Street vibe, which I’m not gonna say that’s, like, the,

[00:26:35] you don’t need that to succeed, but he definitely had that sort of confidence of, like, he could persuade anyone. That’s how he came off. And yeah, so yeah, he, he was great. He, he’s still a mentor of mine and so we, we keep in touch. 

[00:26:51] Marc Gonyea: What, what did, what did you get good at doing the job, though?

[00:26:54] Marc Gonyea: So, you were obviously, you had overcome this equal business stature mindset, you know, what, what became kind of your calling card? 

[00:27:00] Thom Lacalle: Okay. 

[00:27:01] What I got good at on the phones? So, I, I succeeded, I relied on one tactic too much. Circle of leverage. But I’m not talking about referrals. I’m talking about, like, circle of leverage on any and everything that you can.

[00:27:19] So, I call one guy, Bob picks up, like, to catch a time, bedtime, and he’s like, “F you. Don’t call me back.” Click. I call the next person at his company, and I’ll use that. I’ll say, “Yeah, I just got off the phone with Bob, but I should be talking to you.” They’re not gonna ask and, and, and that’s. 

[00:27:40] Marc Gonyea: That’s true. Completely true. 

[00:27:42] Thom Lacalle: I, and that was my other thing. I’m, this is where I’m still a little strange. I will never lie. 

[00:27:46] Marc Gonyea: Yeah. Well, then, that’s good. 

[00:27:48] Thom Lacalle: Anything. Yeah. 

[00:27:49] Marc Gonyea: Yeah. Nor, nor should you. 

[00:27:50] Thom Lacalle: Yeah. Right? I try, I just kind of leave out the part where Bob cus me out, but I did just get off the phone with Bob, and it seems like I should be talking to you.

[00:27:59] And I go into the call and, and that lowers their guard. 

[00:28:01] Marc Gonyea: Yes. 

[00:28:02] Thom Lacalle: Just like, yeah, you know? 

[00:28:03] Marc Gonyea: You say it very well too. He says it well. 

[00:28:07] Thom Lacalle: Yeah. So, that’s one way. In other ways, lots of these engineers, they’re, I, I played on their FOMO. I said, “Hey, I know a lot of your buddies went to AWS re:Invent this year.

[00:28:18] Did you get to make it?” “No.” “Okay. Let me catch you up to speed on what we’re showing them. I’ll loop you into this demo.” “Oh yeah. Yeah.” So, playing on this FOMO and, like, anything you can that references other people, I was king at that. I’d booked one meeting, and then I, everyone I caught that account, I’d be like, “Yeah, we’re already meeting with so-and-so,” even though it’s a fifth reschedule or it’s been dead for, you know, I’m still trying to reschedule,

[00:28:44] get them back on. Yeah. So, how’s my superpower? I, I didn’t actually get good at the rest of the, the game until I was a DM. Objection handling, discovery, you know, all that stuff. ‘Cause my client didn’t have call recordings, so. 

[00:28:56] Marc Gonyea: Yeah. Why would you have that? Why would you want your upstairs to get better? It was a constant struggle with that, or at least it was in my mind. So, okay, so you’re doing your thing as an SDR, right? Wh, who, who are some of your contemporaries, contemporaries, SDR? 

[00:29:18] Thom Lacalle: Uh, my, my crew? 

[00:29:19] Marc Gonyea: Your crew. 

[00:29:19] Thom Lacalle: Kendall Melton. 

[00:29:22] Marc Gonyea: Kendall. 

[00:29:24] Thom Lacalle: He, he came in three months after me. He kicked my ass, like, like, booked two his first day or something.

[00:29:32] Chris Corcoran: Was he on the same client? 

[00:29:34] Thom Lacalle: No, he was on a different client. For our first three months, we were different clients, but the, it was the same product.

[00:29:41] Chris Corcoran: Oh, interesting. Yeah. 

[00:29:42] Marc Gonyea: Look him up. Yep. 

[00:29:45] Thom Lacalle: He, I was on Alio. He was on Eightfold. And so, he learned a little bit from me in the beginning, and then I learned a lot from him going forward.

[00:29:53] Mm-hmm. I had to lower this, this was a big piece. I had to lower my pride ’cause I was, like, “I should be better.” I started three months earlier, but Kendall’s been persuading people all his life. Guy, this guy got what he wanted. He’s the reason why my quota lowered. He talked Trevor Shan to lowering our quota because, eventually, we, we moved on to the same client.

[00:30:16] Marc Gonyea: Yep. Yep. 

[00:30:17] Thom Lacalle: And yeah. So, he’s the one that beat me in table tennis. So, yeah, he would, it’s mainly, me and Kendall versus, uh, yeah, versus the whole Sumo Logic internal team. And trying to think who else. K2 and a few others were some of the old timers that sort of moved their way out.

[00:30:36] Uh, my first couple months, Kristian Carillo. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, those are, those are some of the few notable ones. 

[00:30:45] Marc Gonyea: Was there anyone in the office who was strong, like, “Man, that person’s good,” you’ve got copying their game, or it’s just you with the T Shannon? For like? 

[00:30:52] Thom Lacalle: It’s T Shannon and Kendall?

[00:30:54] Marc Gonyea: Yeah, yeah. 

[00:30:54] It’s good. You kind of know, you know where to go to get the goods.

[00:30:59] Thom Lacalle: Yeah. I’m trying to think. I dunno, Joe Reeves. 

[00:31:03] Marc Gonyea: Yeah. That’s good. You were fine. Yeah, I mean, the high performers fan. 

[00:31:07] Thom Lacalle: I can’t, yeah, I mean, I, I kind of came in and put my head down. I talked to Kendall, were on the same campaign, talked to the managers and kind of did my thing, but. 

[00:31:16] Marc Gonyea: What top strips did you go on? 

[00:31:19] Thom Lacalle: All of ’em. 

[00:31:20] Marc Gonyea: Did you go to Costa Rica? 

[00:31:21] Thom Lacalle: Oh, okay. Well, that was, that was before. 

[00:31:23] Marc Gonyea: That was before your time. Yeah. But in all of since you’ve been here. 

[00:31:26] Thom Lacalle: Yeah. 

[00:31:27] Marc Gonyea: Nice. 

[00:31:28] Thom Lacalle: So, starting at Cancun, I think it was Playa Mu, Mujeres. 

[00:31:32] Marc Gonyea: Yeah. 

[00:31:34] There you go. Okay. The Spanish is amazing.

[00:31:36] Thom Lacalle: Thanks. Thanks. Yeah. 

[00:31:37] Marc Gonyea: So, you’re doing your thing. What did you think you wanted to do? 

[00:31:42] Thom Lacalle: Okay. So, I thought I wanted to be an AE. Mm, not yet. I, I love teaching and coaching. I’ve been doing it since middle school, high school. I, I, I’ve been a tutor for my younger brother who is on the spec, he’s, he’s actually on, on the autistic spectrum. So, coaching was, it was like a game, figuring out how to, how to teach simple math concepts, like, you have to do it by questioning if, if one way didn’t work, you have to adapt and find another way. And so, throughout, even starting in middle school, I, I loved coaching, teaching, tutoring, helping people with, with table tennis.

[00:32:22] I, I coached, yeah, I coached a few people with table tennis as SDR. Like, I just love doing that. I don’t know if it’s, you know, watching them improve or, I just love hearing myself talk, which is, I’m serious, like, uh, I love putting on that kind of the teacher show. So, ultimately, I thought I wanted to be an AE and then, maybe 10 years down the road be a sales coach. I realized that delivery manager is exactly that. You’re, you’re a sales coach, you’re. And so, around, um, month 11, is Joe or, or T Shannon that, that asked me about it, put the, put the idea in my mind and after, you know, thinking about it for two weeks, I really saw myself in it.

[00:33:04] And I think I got the role around month 12 as an SDR. This was during COVID, but so I got to do the remote DM thing. 

[00:33:13] Marc Gonyea: What was that like? 

[00:33:16] Thom Lacalle: Tough. 

[00:33:16] Marc Gonyea: Oh my gosh. 

[00:33:18] Thom Lacalle: It’s, it’s the hardest job at memoryBlue. It’s probably harder than…

[00:33:22] Marc Gonyea: The DM job? Yeah, absolutely. It’s the hardest job. 

[00:33:25] Chris Corcoran: And then, and then do you do it remotely?

[00:33:28] Thom Lacalle: Yeah, in remote. 

[00:33:29] Marc Gonyea: Oh, man. 

[00:33:30] How do you do that? Because you had to. 

[00:33:33] Thom Lacalle: Yeah, it’s, you don’t, right? 

[00:33:38] Marc Gonyea: Well, how do you try to do it? Yeah. 

[00:33:40] Thom Lacalle: Gosh. I mean, you’re just doing a bunch of Zoom shadows. You’re sitting at the kitchen table at these hardwood chairs. Maybe you sit on the couch, just watch people blitz. You blitz with them.

[00:33:54] Shadow blitz. Yeah. There’s no, there’s no energy. You’re dealing with, the tough thing is, you’re dealing with a lot of anxiety and depression. And, like, some in, sometimes in serious cases, I do not recommend starting your SDR career remote. You get cussed out on the phones, someone hung, hangs up on you, and it’s just you sitting there in your bedroom.

[00:34:15] And then that’s it. And then you gotta make the next call. 

[00:34:18] Marc Gonyea: The worst. 

[00:34:19] Thom Lacalle: Here you get cussed out, and you, you lean over to your neighbor and you laugh about it. And then they tell you a time when they accidentally called someone and when they’re at a funeral, and then you’re like, “Ah, that’s, I guess that’s worse.

[00:34:31] And you, you get it off your chest, and you move past it. And you, when you’re at home, man, that anxiety builts up. I had some superstars. One of my top performers on a three FTE, she was my best one on that, on that team. Had to bow out because anxiety. It’s, it’s a scary rule. 

[00:34:52] Marc Gonyea: It’s, yeah. It’s just the echo.

[00:34:54] The echo, the silence of the home working from your house.

[00:35:00] In a sales development role, role at any stage of critic, ideally, you shouldn’t to do that, the earlier, the front-end SDR piece. Like, you’re not gonna learn as much if clients come into the office like, “Okay, you’re right. I’m not doing this for myself.” I mean, they should do it for themselves if they can set it up the right way. But, like, if you’re, “I’m happy,” work outta their house. Or even hybrid. Hybrid might be the worst of both worlds. Like, like, so, so you were DMing? That was how you, you, uh, forged initially? Yeah. 

[00:36:25] Thom Lacalle: Oh geez. Oh, yeah. So, yeah. It was, it was rough.

[00:36:30] It had its ups, you know, you could pull laundry while you data-blitz. But, but yeah, don’t recommend it. 

[00:36:40] Marc Gonyea: Everybody loves doing laundry with their work from home. It’s such a pain in the ass. Every, everybody says. 

[00:36:45] Thom Lacalle: Now, sadly too, I don’t know how, but my days were somehow 8:00 AM to 8:00 PM.

[00:36:50] Chris Corcoran: We kinda did stuff, right? Yep. 

[00:36:53] Thom Lacalle: Yeah. And your, your house became your work. At the time, I was living out of Chico, and we had gone through some pretty rough fires and so we couldn’t even go outside, couldn’t go to restaurants ’cause it was COVID. Oh yeah. It was tremendous. The sun didn’t come out for, like, a whole week, one of these weeks ’cause of the ash. It was, like, it was, it was rough during COVID. 

[00:37:13] Chris Corcoran: Oh yeah. 

[00:37:14] Marc Gonyea: Enduring COVID in California. 

[00:37:17] Chris Corcoran: Oh, scared cats. 

[00:37:18] Thom Lacalle: Yeah. Yeah. So. 

[00:37:20] Marc Gonyea: Okay. 

[00:37:21] How, how did it change when you got back into the office? 

[00:37:26] Well, who talked to, T Shannon talking 

[00:37:28] to be in the DM too, or no? 

[00:37:29] Thom Lacalle: Yeah. 

[00:37:30] Chris Corcoran: Yeah. A little bit. 

[00:37:31] Thom Lacalle: He and I DM together. 

[00:37:32] Marc Gonyea: Okay.

[00:37:32] Yeah. 

[00:37:33] Thom Lacalle: Getting back into the office was a breath of fresh air, seeing everyone. Everyone was amped excited. Of course, people drag their feet ’cause it’s, it’s candy to be able to work from home. 

[00:37:44] Marc Gonyea: Oh my god. 

[00:37:45] Thom Lacalle: It’s addicting, and you don’t wanna stop. 

[00:37:46] Marc Gonyea: It’s a drug. 

[00:37:47] Thom Lacalle: It’s a drug. It really is ’cause, like, you prefer it out of comfort.

[00:37:52] So, being back in office, it was tough for some, but, you know, you could tell it, it made a difference in whole work-life balance, the energy. So, yeah, that, that turned around pretty quick. Yeah. No, DM, DM’s tough. There’s, there’s a lot of lessons that you learned throughout the way. 

[00:38:10] Marc Gonyea: Let’s talk about those. What are some of the lessons you had to learn as an SE, a DM? That, you know, especially transitioning, what’s fascinating about the SDR roles? You trans, one day you’re someone’s colleague or contemporary, I guess they could still be your contemporary, but, like, now you’re kind moving to the food chain and your different role.

[00:38:29] Chris Corcoran: Mm-hmm. Management. 

[00:38:30] Marc Gonyea: Especially management and memoryBlue with the clients have to hold us accountable. 

[00:38:33] Oh yeah. 

[00:38:33] Thom Lacalle: Managing your friends, fun dynamic. 

[00:38:38] Chris Corcoran: It is. 

[00:38:40] Thom Lacalle: Because you don’t want to be, you know, you want to be cool at first. Everyone thinks, “I’m gonna be, I’m gonna be the first DM that everyone loves. Or friends.

[00:38:49] I’m gonna be friends with everyone. I’m gonna be cool with everyone, and they’re gonna listen to me.” 

[00:38:55] Marc Gonyea: No, you can’t have both. 

[00:38:57] Thom Lacalle: You can have both with few. 

[00:38:59] Marc Gonyea: Yeah. Right. Okay. 

[00:39:00] Thom Lacalle: That’s true. Because yeah, you’re, you need a deliverable done. They feel like they’re, you know, “We’re cool, Thom. Getting, I’ll get it to you tomorrow.” Or yeah.

[00:39:11] So, anyways, that, that doesn’t last too long. Eventually, there’s a point maybe six to eight months in where none of your team knew you as an SDR, and that’s what clicks. Okay. Now you’re fully manager. Um, the, the other major lesson, and this isn’t just me, this is, like, four out of my five last DMs all said this.

[00:39:31] They come up to me, like, month one, I think. I was listening to Chase’s podcast. He said this, he said a similar thing. Yeah. Chase Edwards. He realized, like, DMs came up to me, and they’re like, “I just don’t get it. I tell my team to do something, and then they don’t do it.” And the real, and this sounds so obvious, it’s, it’s almost stupid to say it out loud, your team is not you. One out of ten is, one out of, one out of ten are. The other nine, they didn’t do what you asked because they forgot, two of them forgot, two of them half-assed in, didn’t complete it. A few of them didn’t know how, and they didn’t ask you. All these different reasons. And then the other reason is that you told them, you didn’t show them, you didn’t do it with them.

[00:40:24] There’s other methods than just telling someone. Now, the problem is lots of us, uh, people that aspire to be managers, all we need is to be told, “Do this.” And we do it. So, we become managers. We think that’s how, this is how, this is how it works. Tell people do stuff. Doesn’t work that way. So, almost every DMs come up to me, literally same problem, “I don’t get it.

[00:40:47] Why don’t they just do it?” 

[00:40:49] Um, you need to, you need to adapt. Everyone’s different. Yeah. Different motivators. So that, that’s probably the, the biggest lesson. Yeah. 

[00:41:01] Marc Gonyea: What else? What about the, uh, what about working with the clients? So, you talked about, like, the transition from when you’re a contemporary to now you’re a manager, and you, you, this is important too, like, the SDRs you inherit versus the ones you hire yourself.

[00:41:16] ‘Cause Chris and I always talk about when you’re a delivery manager, when you’re a new SDR, the SDRs are coming to work for the delivery manager. They’re not coming to work on that, though. 

[00:41:26] Thom Lacalle: Yeah, no, totally. 

[00:41:27] Marc Gonyea: Right? I mean, remember who’s the, the vessel. 

[00:41:29] They’re coming to work for the DM. 

[00:41:31] Thom Lacalle: Totally. 

[00:41:31] Marc Gonyea: Especially when we were in a competitive scenario, and we’re like, “You gotta go in that candidate.” 

[00:41:37] Thom Lacalle: Yeah. 

[00:41:37] Marc Gonyea: Especially, and I know you know that ’cause you’re the best interviewer in the company. 

[00:41:41] Thom Lacalle: I’m getting there. 

[00:41:42] Marc Gonyea: No, you are. So, and I’m not trying to, if someone, if, if I’m upsetting any current memoryBlue employees, just come see me and, and prove it to me. I, I would love, I would love to hear it.

[00:41:53] Chris Corcoran: Bring some game tape. 

[00:41:54] Marc Gonyea: Bring some game tape, please. So, so, but seriously, like, how, uh, what about on the client side? ‘Cause you also go from minute, you’re an SDR, and you’re probably high-performing SDR, or you knew your client really well. You’re on Sumo to now you’ve got a breadth of clients, and you’re being responsible to these results that you’re not, unless you’re like you and you’re doing a million things right now, you’re not the one on the phone sending the emails, doing the list building.

[00:42:18] Thom Lacalle: Yeah. I mean, you need to understand it’s more than just, you’re not booking meetings, you’re running their outbound sales function, you’re running their lead generation. You are, like, a whole team of their business. You and your one SDR are the lead gen team. Yeah, you need to get meetings, you need to get them insights.

[00:42:39] You need to have a confident direction or at least be confident that you know where to find the answer, and that’s where you get to really be a consultant. In the beginning, I thought I was just booking meetings because there’s still a little bit SDR mindset. And so, having that game plan, whether you have it or you go hit up your MD or more senior DM, you’re, you’re steering their ship

[00:43:02] and that’s, that’s not something that be taken lightly. And so, it’s a big deal. It’s, you’re running, you’re running a big function of a business. That was a slap in the face, you know? When they, when they turn to you, and they’re like, “What? How should we pivot?” You’re in, you’re in control

[00:43:19] Thom Lacalle: so you need to put on your consultant hat. On the flip side, when they say, “Uh, we’d like you to run our script that starts with this one-minute bio of our company history. 

[00:43:31] Marc Gonyea: So, they find it so important. 

[00:43:33] Thom Lacalle: Yeah. And then ask them how their day is going, you have to be the consultant and say, “No. Here’s why.

[00:43:42] Because then we won’t get results, and you’ll fire us.”

[00:43:48] Marc Gonyea: You gotta trust me in this. 

[00:43:49] Thom Lacalle: And that is hard. That’s really hard. 

[00:43:50] Chris Corcoran: It’s hard, yeah. 

[00:43:51] Marc Gonyea: ‘Cause the clients have their preconceived belief. And then you kind of call the baby ugly. 

[00:43:55] Thom Lacalle: And they’re, you know, there’s the whole dynamic, you know, I, I was an SDR for a year. 

[00:44:02] Marc Gonyea: You, a LinkedIn with some kid now. 

[00:44:04] Thom Lacalle: Yeah. You’re talking to some VP. That hey, maybe in many cases, they’ve never made a cold call either, though. Yeah. Sometimes they have, but sometimes. 

[00:44:14] Marc Gonyea: A couple. 

[00:44:15] Thom Lacalle: Couple, yeah. 

[00:44:16] Marc Gonyea: You know, some. 

[00:44:17] Thom Lacalle: Cold Calder buddies. 

[00:44:19] Marc Gonyea: Some. 

[00:44:20] Thom Lacalle: Yeah. 

[00:44:21] Marc Gonyea: Interviewing. So, I’m pump-up interviewing, but you gotta let us in on the secret. Like, what is the key, and that’s a learned skill. Right? And when you’re a DM, the people are the thing, the people are critical to this. You go through some of these names, T Shan. 

[00:44:41] Thom Lacalle: Right. 

[00:44:41] Marc Gonyea: You both, you guys were DMs? Kendall was a DM, some of these other folk, K2, I mean, excuse me.

[00:44:47] SDRs. SDRs. How, just talk to us about how your interview game has was formed and developed and what the secret is. 

[00:44:56] Thom Lacalle: Yeah. And I wanna double down on that. You’re, who you interview and bring in is the root of all your problems and successes. 

[00:45:05] Marc Gonyea: All your grace, joys, and biggest losses or most misery.

[00:45:09] Thom Lacalle: Yeah. 

[00:45:09] Marc Gonyea: Right? 

[00:45:10] Thom Lacalle: Exactly. 

[00:45:12] Chris Corcoran: So, sometimes that’s all wrapped up in one individual. 

[00:45:15] Thom Lacalle: Yeah. 

[00:45:17] Marc Gonyea: Unfortunately, it’s usually the, uh, always, always the case. It’s usually one extreme or the other. 

[00:45:21] Thom Lacalle: So, I was good at opening up client, the candidates. I was pretty good at relating on anything. They mentioned video games, we could talk eSports.

[00:45:32] Health. They mentioned fashion or jewelry. Pretty well versed. Talk to my fiance about it. You can talk about anything, TV show. So, that’s how, what my skill used to be. I opened them up for the competition. So, he ran this interview competition. 

[00:45:47] Marc Gonyea: Well, hold on. What’s the, we’ll come back to the. 

[00:45:49] What’s important about opening them up? 

[00:45:51] Thom Lacalle: They need to feel comfortable. And, and I, I, I like to, you can’t do this with everyone, but get them to, to a point where they’re gonna be a little more candid with you.

[00:46:00] Chris Corcoran: Hate you… 

[00:46:01] Marc Gonyea: Oh. 

[00:46:01] That’s the best. Test the most. Get ’em to reveal their true self. 

[00:46:05] Thom Lacalle: Yeah.

[00:46:06] You know? 

[00:46:06] Marc Gonyea: So, you kind of know. 

[00:46:07] Thom Lacalle: It’s not a, a good sign if it’s a, a double-edged sword when you get someone to cuss on an interview. You’ve opened them up, but hopefully, they’re not too, yeah. You, so you wanna open them up enough past that interview persona ’cause that thing, it’s, it’s useless.

[00:46:24] That whole facade of, “Everything’s great. I’m gonna tell you what you want to hear.” 

[00:46:28] Marc Gonyea: “I’m always on time.” 

[00:46:29] Thom Lacalle: Yeah. We need, ‘I’m always on time, and I’m a perfectionist.” 

[00:46:31] Marc Gonyea: “I’m goal-oriented.” 

[00:46:32] Thom Lacalle: Yep. So, can you get them past that and then, gosh, there’s, you have to learn how to read people. Mm-hmm.

[00:46:40] You need to know how to, you know, sift through the bs and pull stories out of them. That’s, that’s those, those are a few tools. So, stories is, nothing they say matters until they can back it up with the story that you believe. And so, yeah. So, originally it was, it was opening ’em up, better than up, relate and see what I could, you know, pull from, from that. More recently, I’ve been doing a lot of negative selling. I’ve been selling this job as, “This is the hardest thing you’ll ever do.” And. 

[00:47:13] Marc Gonyea: Which is true. 

[00:47:14] Thom Lacalle: Yeah. It is. 

[00:47:15] Marc Gonyea: For most people. 

[00:47:16] Thom Lacalle: And I think that yields better results than, you know, the interviews that you, you watched.

[00:47:22] I, I try to scare ’em. 

[00:47:24] Chris Corcoran: You can make it kinda scared straight. 

[00:47:26] Thom Lacalle: Yeah. Seriously. ‘Cause there’s gonna be a few people that they get excited about that. They want something hard. And so, my tactics have changed over the years. But during the interview comp, competition, we had different topics like best spiel on culture, best one on training.

[00:47:48] Um, and I would prime them. 

[00:47:54] Chris Corcoran: Yeah. You would. 

[00:47:55] Thom Lacalle: I would ask them, so we have this, this is a great question that, “How would you rank, rank training, culture, salary, and growth?” Whichever one you say first, 80% chance they’re gonna say it first. So, when it was, when. 

[00:48:11] Marc Gonyea: Sneaky. 

[00:48:11] Thom Lacalle: When it was culture week,

[00:48:13] I got, like, three people to say culture was first. I was like, “What’s most important? Culture, training, growth, or salary?” And then they would be like, “Culture.” 

[00:48:25] And then, and then my snippet would be them saying culture’s most important, I’d say, “Okay, well, here’s our culture. The next week, training, next week grows.”

[00:48:32] Marc Gonyea: Oh, Jesus. 

[00:48:33] Thom Lacalle: Oh, yeah. 

[00:48:34] Marc Gonyea: Thom, Thom smoked it. Damn it, I take everything I said back. 

[00:48:38] Chris Corcoran: That’s great. 

[00:48:39] Marc Gonyea: No, but, so both giving them an open up, which is don’t do as much, but you probably still do it to a certain extent. To break them out of the interview facade and then you wanted to get these stories so you can kind of verify they are who they would we think they are.

[00:48:54] And then, but the negative-reverse selling is you’re trying to ignite their, their competitive fire? 

[00:49:00] Thom Lacalle: Yeah. I’ll see if they…

[00:49:01] Marc Gonyea: Getting to buy in. 

[00:49:02] Thom Lacalle: Are they gonna jump at the opportunity to have a higher quota and higher expectations and get a lot of uncomfortable feedback? That’s, that’s who I need.

[00:49:12] They’re, we’re in the Silicon Valley and there’s a lot of places that are gonna pay a ton, have lower quotas. Uh, yeah. You won’t get a ton of coaching, and you’ll probably be an SDR for two to five years. It’s a whole different lifestyle. And, and I’ve gotta visit a lot of these companies.

[00:49:31] Thom Lacalle: You know, it’s, it’s just different. Kombucha to, on, bring your dog to work every day. It’s comfortable. It’s different. I, I came here to be uncomfortable and I, I stayed here ’cause I’m still uncomfortable. I still get challenged. I’m working under Kristen now.

[00:49:50] Mm-hmm. I get real challenged.

[00:49:54] Marc Gonyea: Absolutely. 

[00:49:54] Thom Lacalle: She doesn’t hold back. So, and that’s, that’s why I’m here. With, same, with, you know, {a name} a DM, he’s, he’s here to be challenged. 

[00:50:04] Chris Corcoran: Um, you can tell. 

[00:50:04] Thom Lacalle: Yeah. But I have a, I have a few that they seek that out, so that’s where the whole negative sell comes from.

[00:50:12] Marc Gonyea: And then what do you look at for people? What, what are you looking, looking at? What’s important to you?

[00:50:20] Thom Lacalle: These are cliches but break it down. Everyone thinks they have a positive attitude until you fail two weeks in a row getting told no and you have to, you have the salon commute.

[00:50:33] Mm-hmm. Getting shut down on the phones every day, and then you have to drive back to work the next day to just get shut down. If you get shut down by the prospect, then your DM or Thom tells you all the things you did wrong, and then you go home. 

[00:50:47] Marc Gonyea: You show up for a weekly client call, nothing. 

[00:50:50] Thom Lacalle: Yeah.

[00:50:50] Marc Gonyea: Client’s a little upset. 

[00:50:51] Thom Lacalle: Client’s upset, and they, they ring you, like, left and right. That’s not uncommon. That’s part of the journey. If you can, if you get excited about that, that’s what positive attitude is. Everyone thinks they have a positive attitude until they get to that point. Then we really see, same thing with coachability.

[00:51:09] Everyone thinks they’re coachable. If I were to teach you table tennis, you would be open to it. Because, are you good, Marc? 

[00:51:21] Marc Gonyea: No. 

[00:51:21] Thom Lacalle: Yeah. Okay. You’re not good. You know you’re not good. So, whatever I tell you, you’re gonna listen. 

[00:51:24] Marc Gonyea: Yeah. 

[00:51:26] Thom Lacalle: Sales coaching is different. Sales coaching doesn’t, is just another word for communication coaching. Do you think you’re a good communicator? 

[00:51:36] Marc Gonyea: Sometimes. 

[00:51:37] Thom Lacalle: Yeah. You, you do.

[00:51:41] Most people think they’re a good communicator. 

[00:51:43] Marc Gonyea: Yeah. 

[00:51:44] Thom Lacalle: Try telling someone who thinks they’re a good communicator, how to communicate better. That hits your pride. 

[00:51:52] Marc Gonyea: Yeah. It’s very personal. 

[00:51:53] Thom Lacalle: It’s very personal.

[00:51:54] You break down calls with people, they’re gonna say, “I said that for a reason. I said this, I did that because of this.” 

[00:52:02] Marc Gonyea: Excuseful. 

[00:52:03] Thom Lacalle: ‘Cause you’re, you’re criticizing something they think they’re good at, which is communicating. That’s what sales coaching is. 

[00:52:10] Marc Gonyea: Yeah. 

[00:52:10] Thom Lacalle: So, you’re not, everyone thinks they’re coachable until you start getting sales coaching on how you talk and how you deliver, and then you kind of see who has the excuses and who squirms. 

[00:52:23] Marc Gonyea: Do you know what’s funny, Thom? You know what a lot of these alums talk about in the podcast? The call coaching. 

[00:52:32] Thom Lacalle: Big deal. 

[00:52:32] Marc Gonyea: Right? 

[00:52:34] Thom Lacalle: Yeah. 

[00:52:34] Marc Gonyea: Well over half of the people bringing up, 75, 80% of the people bringing up the call coaching sales time stop doing it when they leave.

[00:52:42] Thom Lacalle: Yeah. 

[00:52:43] Marc Gonyea: For the most part. Or they’re like, “Yeah, we recorded looking for keyboards for the sales cycle.” I said, “Okay, nice.” Great. It’s not really gonna help you, pardon of my French. It’s not really gonna help you develop. 

[00:52:54] Thom Lacalle: Okay. All right. 

[00:52:55] Marc Gonyea: Yeah. Fascinating. And these are the things for SDRs who are listening, who want get into a DM role here at memoryBlue.

[00:53:01] We’re curious about how Thom got to the ascend the throne, get to an MD spot. These are the skills you develop. Managing people, interviewing people, figuring out what you think is good on your team. Why some people do the things that you think they want to do. Working with the clients, right? Telling somebody who’s been in the business 25 years that, what you think, their long, preconceived belief that this is how you should do these sorts of things.

[00:53:25] Like, “No, no, no, no. I’m gonna do this for three, four years. I’m gonna tell you exactly how you should do it.” Right? Those are all beautiful things about the job. 

[00:53:35] Thom Lacalle: Yeah. 

[00:53:38] Marc Gonyea: Anything else? We, keep talking about the journey. 

[00:53:41] Chris Corcoran: We, he, we need to talk about 

[00:53:43] Marc Gonyea: Go ahead. 

[00:53:43] Chris Corcoran: moving from a, an SDR manager to a manager of SDR managers. Yeah. That, yeah. That’s what, that’s, yeah, that’s where I want to go. I just wanna make sure we, before we get there. 

[00:53:54] Thom Lacalle: Yeah. 

[00:53:55] Marc Gonyea: Anything else? 

[00:53:56] Chris Corcoran: We’re good. Let’s talk about it. 

[00:53:58] Thom Lacalle: Yeah. Let’s see. My major takeaway, maybe you’ll disagree. 

[00:54:05] Marc Gonyea: Well, we can’t disagree with your takeaway. It’s yours. 

[00:54:08] Thom Lacalle: Yeah. 

[00:54:08] Marc Gonyea: This hasn’t been an M, MD in, like, 50 years.

[00:54:10] Thom Lacalle: We talked about it. 

[00:54:11] Marc Gonyea: Maybe it’s been like 30. 

[00:54:12] Thom Lacalle: We, we talked about this yesterday. You, people stepping up to the role when, when they’re put in the position, I wish I was a DM longer. Same with SDR. 

[00:54:25] Chris Corcoran: That’s how, that, that, that’s like, you know, the philosopher says that wisdom is when you think you know nothing.

[00:54:31] Thom Lacalle: Yeah. 

[00:54:32] Chris Corcoran: Like, the more you, you. 

[00:54:34] Marc Gonyea: Well, you know the less you realize you don’t know. 

[00:54:36] Chris Corcoran: Yeah. 

[00:54:36] Thom Lacalle: Yeah. I, my goal was to get bored with the role before I moved on, you know? Got excited, took the MD role. It’s the biggest game of telephone I’ve ever played. Managing people who manage people. Oh yeah. It’s, you need, you need the people on the end to take direction or go a certain way, but you have to do that through your managers, and you can only shadow so much.

[00:54:59] You can’t shadow every single SDR interaction with managers. So, it’s a complex game, but again, it, it goes back to the whole, the why. My why was the passion behind coaching. So, I, it was an obvious next step. I was coaching a lot of the other DMs. Primarily with interviews, client calls, how to run a dashboard, how to run a weekly sync, all that stuff.

[00:55:23] Like, I, I thrived on that. I didn’t realize that there’s more to the job than just. The DPT, hate that thing. It’s a, it’s an Excel sheet that we have to update every couple days, or they yelled at, uh, it’s important. You can manage forecasting for work, work that’s coming in, candidate pipeline, all that stuff,

[00:55:42] So, you’re. 

[00:55:43] Marc Gonyea: Are you leaving? 

[00:55:43] Thom Lacalle: You’re running a business. 

[00:55:44] Chris Corcoran: Well, it, it is, it is not all that different from the candy and donut operation you had. 

[00:55:49] Thom Lacalle: Yeah, it’s little more like… 

[00:55:51] Chris Corcoran: Yeah. It’s, it’s the same, same thing. 

[00:55:52] Thom Lacalle: It’s a little more than just coaching, but yeah. It’s, it’s. 

[00:55:55] Marc Gonyea: No campus security. 

[00:55:56] Thom Lacalle: Yeah. 

[00:55:57] Marc Gonyea: Yeah. 

[00:55:57] Thom Lacalle: No campus security 

[00:55:58] Marc Gonyea: Client, police, NPS scoring.

[00:56:00] Thom Lacalle: Oh, love it. 

[00:56:05] Marc Gonyea: I know. I, I do. I trust you. I know, I remember. 

[00:56:08] Thom Lacalle: Yeah. It’s a, it’s an awesome learning experience. It still is a lot of coaching, teaching with the, with the DMs, and you’re running a business from who you hire with your clients’ work, running up sales and the like, you’re, you’re doing everything.

[00:56:26] So, still learning a lot. And I, I do plan to stick to my goal of I wanna get bored in this role before considering anything. 

[00:56:35] Marc Gonyea: Yeah. Did you, I was looking from you talking to Caroline, you said, like, when you became an MD, you kind of saw what you weren’t doing as a DM. 

[00:56:45] Thom Lacalle: Oh, yeah. 

[00:56:46] Marc Gonyea: Tell us about that. 

[00:56:46] Thom Lacalle: It’s, it’s this magic thing that clicks, like, when you become a DM, you automatically, like, you know, what you could have done as an SDR.

[00:56:55] It’s this weird, like, now that you’re, like, looking, not, not in a level way, but, like, you’re looking at a, a team of SDRs, you finally fully understand the role. Same with MD. Once I became managing director, I felt like it all clicked. I was like, “Man, I should have pushed harder here.

[00:57:13] Mm-hmm. I could have coached better here. This is where I should have, you know, twisted the client’s arm to go one direction. That probably would’ve worked out a lot better had I, you know, stuck up with our, stuck up for our plan that we had initially rolled out.” Like, it, it all clicks. And same with, with Joe Reeves, like, when he became regional director,

[00:57:31] it’s almost like the ultimate D, MD clicked. I was like, “This is who I.” Yeah. It, it is interesting. When you take that next step that, the previous one all makes sense. So, yeah. So, luckily, I’m back in the DM role running a team and I know how to do it this time. 

[00:57:51] Chris Corcoran: What’s the biggest difference between managing managers and managing individual contributor?

[00:57:57] Thom Lacalle: Gosh, it’s that game of telephone. Moving the masses through your managers. Gosh, where to take this one?

[00:58:09] A lot of it’s similar. I mean, you still have your KPIs and your metrics that you need to hit as a team. I think it’s, uh, you know, you’re, you’re working with people at least that know how to, or drive to be, you know, take direction like I mentioned earlier. But yeah, I, you know, picking one, still working with people.

[00:58:35] Marc Gonyea: You’re still working with people. And so, economically things are a little different now, so people are a little more on edge. Right? Tell me, what would you tell yourself, you know, knowing what you know now, what would you tell yourself the night before your first day at memoryBlue? 

[00:58:49] Thom Lacalle: Would I tell myself the night before?

[00:58:51] Marc Gonyea: Yeah. If you could go back in time knowing what you know now. 

[00:58:52] Thom Lacalle: Oh, what would I do? 

[00:58:54] Marc Gonyea: If you could, like, you’re starting to remember, you know, tomorrow. 

[00:58:58] Thom Lacalle: Fail fast. 

[00:58:58] Marc Gonyea: Yeah? 

[00:58:59] Thom Lacalle: That, that, yeah. Don’t be perfectionist. The fast, the quicker you fail, the quicker you’re gonna get to that success. You, in this role, in, in many sales roles, you only, you only start to learn when you fail.

[00:59:14] It’s unfortunate, honestly, when, when you get a click campaign that’s all inbound, it’s rare, but you don’t fail as much. 

[00:59:22] Chris Corcoran: Ease, sounds easy. 

[00:59:23] Thom Lacalle: It is. It is easy. And this is the talk I’ve had with a lot of SDRs. Even as an SDR and as a DM, you’re here to learn, so find the heaviest weight. I, I hear people say like, “Ah, if only I had the easy client.”

[00:59:38] Do you go to the gym and you say, “Man, I wish I was benching five pounds.” 

[00:59:42] Marc Gonyea: Pick up the five-pound dumbbells. That’s a great. 

[00:59:44] Chris Corcoran: That’s a great one. 

[00:59:45] Thom Lacalle: Yeah. 

[00:59:47] Who else said that? That’s my thing. Five-pound dumbbell, fifty pound, you won. You’re trying to get strong at this? 

[00:59:52] Chris Corcoran: Max out. 

[00:59:53] Thom Lacalle: Get the. 

[00:59:53] Marc Gonyea: I’m gonna start using that. 

[00:59:54] Chris Corcoran: Lift heavy, brother. 

[00:59:55] Thom Lacalle: Get the hard climb. 

[00:59:56] Marc Gonyea: Yeah. Yeah. Who goes to the gym? 

[00:59:58] Chris Corcoran: You’re here for 15 months. 

[00:59:59] Marc Gonyea: Yeah. Yeah. 

[01:00:02] Fascinating. What about, in the, in the DM role? Well, actually, let me take it back. Okay. That is such good advice, Thom because the fear of failure is what pushes the call reluctance, which pushes the excuse-making, which is like, it’s, I’m not judging people, this is what works. So, if you can get behind this failing-faster thing, like, it’s a big word in the Valley here. Right? But I think, I think most of the people are clients that use this whole fail faster. They get all that wrong. It’s like feeling the right way. Not, it’s not about falling fast, about falling the right way.

[01:00:33] Marc Gonyea: Part of, part of that is failling fast, but you’re, they wanna avoid the failure ’cause that’s, like, the psychological trauma. 

[01:00:40] Thom Lacalle: Yeah.

[01:00:41] Marc Gonyea: You can get past that and feel fast. You’re going to, you’d be where you need to go. 

[01:00:46] Thom Lacalle: Absolutely. Yeah. It, I was, I, I thought I was gonna, I was so stupid. The night before, I was like, “I’m gonna change the game with this whole niceness thing.

[01:00:56] I’m gonna book 50% of my pickups.” Yeah. 

[01:01:00] Chris Corcoran: It’s throwing pants off people. 

[01:01:02] Thom Lacalle: Yeah, that’s what I thought. 

[01:01:03] Marc Gonyea: Yeah. 

[01:01:04] That, that’s that? That’s very similar to, no, that was the phone first started. 

[01:01:09] Chris Corcoran: Book 50% of the C Whips. 

[01:01:10] Thom Lacalle: That’s at a minimum. 

[01:01:13] Seriously. I really thought I was gonna change the game. 

[01:01:19] Marc Gonyea: You, you changed the game in different places.

[01:01:22] What, all right. And, and, and it, what about as a, as a 

[01:01:25] DM, you know? The night before your first day as a DM, what would you tell yourself? 

[01:01:30] Thom Lacalle: Oh gosh. I mean, the first night, night before your first day as a DM, you’re still an SDR for a month, but you, I thought I was going to, yeah, be friends with everyone, change the culture. Um, I would’ve told myself, “There’s a balance of praise and, you know, sticking to, giving hard feedback, take coaching.” And I was a cheerleader, so my, my advice would be don’t be a cheerleader. It’s not worth much unless there’s a counterbalance where you can hold your team firm, and then they’re gonna thank you for it.

[01:02:03] I was way too soft in the beating. I was quiet when things were bad, and I was celebrating when things were good. 

[01:02:09] Chris Corcoran: Common. 

[01:02:10] Thom Lacalle: Yeah. 

[01:02:11] Chris Corcoran: Very common. 

[01:02:12] Thom Lacalle: Your team wants, you know, a hard coach. It’s the same thing, you know? Do you want to be on the soccer team that practice once a week with pizza or the one that does sprints four times a week?

[01:02:26] Marc Gonyea: People wanna be held accountable. 

[01:02:27] Yeah, they do. They do. It’s just harder to do it. And people don’t like it at the time. 

[01:02:32] Thom Lacalle: It’s hard. And it’s hard to do it when it’s, when it’s your friends. But that’s what I’ve told myself like, “Hold them accountable. They’ll thank you for it. You’ll be a better coach for it.

[01:02:41] More, more results. Clients will expand. Stick around.” And so, that was, that was a hard thing too, going against the whole nicety thing. I, I’ve been breaking that, like, throughout my career here on the phones as a manager with clients, you know, so. 

[01:03:00] Marc Gonyea: Yeah. You gotta you gotta deliver the bad news.

[01:03:02] It’s not bad news, but what people may not do here. 

[01:03:06] Thom Lacalle: Yeah. Kristen’s teaching me to be tough. 

[01:03:08] Chris Corcoran: Good. 

[01:03:10] Marc Gonyea: Good. I love it. I, I’ll save the, the night before you’re at, first day as an MD, will save that for the next podcast. 

[01:03:16] Thom Lacalle: Yeah. 

[01:03:17] Marc Gonyea: Gotta get some more time outta the belt. We’ll, Thom, Chris, and I are very appreciative of your efforts you’ve been here. 

[01:03:25] Chris Corcoran: Where’s the ping pong table or paddle? 

[01:03:28] Thom Lacalle: Where’s the paddle? 

[01:03:29] Chris Corcoran: Yeah. 

[01:03:29] Thom Lacalle: It’s in my office. 

[01:03:31] Chris Corcoran: Is that, do you go anywhere without it? 

[01:03:32] Sometimes. I don’t wanna break it. I’ll bring it as a DC next time, though. Really. 

[01:03:41] Marc Gonyea: Love it. 

[01:03:42] Thom Lacalle: Neil thought he, he had me. 

[01:03:45] Chris Corcoran: Neil. Oh yeah? 

[01:03:46] Thom Lacalle: Neil Markoff. 

[01:03:48] Marc Gonyea: There you go. 

[01:03:50] Chris Corcoran: He thought?

[01:03:51] Marc Gonyea: Okay. 

[01:03:51] Chris Corcoran: Very good. Well, Thom, this was great. We appreciate the, the wisdom. 

[01:03:56] Thom Lacalle: Appreciate you having me. 

[01:03:57] Marc Gonyea: I learned something from all these podcasts. 

[01:03:59] Thom Lacalle: Yeah. 

[01:03:59] Marc Gonyea: I learned a couple things from this one, so thank you. 

[01:04:00] Thom Lacalle: Really? 

[01:04:01] Marc Gonyea: Yeah, man. 

[01:04:02] Chris Corcoran: All right, Thom. Thanks. 

[01:04:03] Marc Gonyea: Awesome. 

[01:04:03] Thom Lacalle: Thank you.​