Tech Sales is for Hustlers Podcast

Episode 52: Thaddeus Walsh – Success is Addictive

Imagine being so curious and committed to problem solving that you end up building a Google Sheet for sales reporting that nearly breaks the internet.

Thaddeus Walsh is that guy – a sales pro who goes way beyond the call of duty because he takes time to really understand the heart of the matter. That “dive deep” style has led him to continuous success at every step of his career.

Thaddeus, now a Solutions Architect at Cmd, is simply one of memoryBlue’s most notable alumni. A standout SDR and Delivery Manager, Thaddeus shares why taking the time to understand your space inside and out sets you apart, how he refuses to accept that something is too difficult to learn, and why managing people has taught him five times more than any individual contributor role he’s ever held.

Guest-At-A-Glance

Name: Thaddeus Walsh

What he does: Thaddeus is a Solutions Architect at Cmd.

Company: Cmd

Noteworthy: Thaddeus has always been interested in technology. The lack of technical background didn’t stop him from pursuing and building a prolific career in the industry.

Where to find Thaddeus: LinkedIn

Key Insights

⚡ Don’t tell yourself that you can’t understand the technology. As Thaddeus explains, many SDRs get scared when they encounter an issue they are not familiar with. They believe it’s beyond their capacity to comprehend it; therefore, they don’t listen. Thaddeus, on the other hand, has a different approach. ”I don’t write code, but I can understand what a piece of software does in a broader context of a system. It’s like when I’m talking to somebody about their environment or technology or whatever. I’m drawing a literal picture in my head using the context clues and even being able to place things.”

⚡ Treat your team members as people. Being an SDR comes with many responsibilities, but it is nothing like being a DM. Thaddeus admits he was not a good DM. He didn’t understand how complex the role is. Today, he knows that being a good manager means listening to your team and coaching them, treating them like human beings. ”You need to care about them more than you care about yourself. Invest your time, and the placements, the growth, and the successful stable client base will come. I didn’t understand that dynamic. I was pushing people to do better instead of coaching people on how instilling skills and knowledge that I thought would help them do better.”

⚡ Once you start realizing success, it’s like a drug. Considerable results come when your goal is in correlation with your company’s success story. However, your professional growth only depends on your ambition. ”If you want to be successful, you can come up with a lot of good ideas for additional avenues to put the effort in. That’s going to increase your likelihood of success. And then, once you start realizing success, it’s like a drug. When you get good meetings, when you’re jamming with a client, when you’re making good money, work is fun, and you’re excited to do it, and all the negativity washes away.”

Episode Highlights

The Educational Side of the Consultative Sales 

”One of the best things about the consultative sales process is if you can get a prospect or a customer at whatever stage in the sales cycle, talking to you in the realm of what you’re trying to discuss with them, it is the best learning opportunity for anything. I would say 99% of what I know about how enterprise organizations operate comes from the mouths of hundreds of people that I’ve spoken to in sales conversations, in QPRs, when I was a customer success manager.

You ask a good question; people explain how something works. That’s their whole life. So they’re generally pretty good, and you get very good takes; you start to hear patterns. That was super beneficial to me because I would hear the same sentiment dozens and dozens and dozens of times.”

I Don’t Have a Belief That I Can’t Learn It

”Most people get stuck because they believe that they don’t have the capacity to understand the thing that they’re hearing. It’s not important to them, and therefore they don’t listen. I think it’s almost like a child-adult sequence. It’s like, ‘Do you want to learn something?’ You need to want to learn stuff in general to learn stuff. But then it’s almost like a gut check. ‘Is this the type of thing that I could know?’ 

I think a lot of people make a self-conscious decision like, ‘Oh, this is too technical.’ The phenomenal sales reps that I’ve worked with, whether they exude that in dialogue with their customers or not; whether they lean on their technical knowledge or not, they know it; they very deeply understand it. And so, by saying, ‘I’m not that technical,’ you’re essentially artificially introducing a ceiling on your career level performance. There are other people that aren’t going to put that limitation on themselves.”

I Learned a Ton as an SDR; I Learned Five Times as Much as a Manager

”At the time, my focus, what I was measured on, was P&L — profit and loss, and that completely transformed the way that I look at business in general. It laid some foundations for how I think about and talk to executive leadership when I’m in dialogue with them, C-suite or executive VPs or whatever. So that in itself was huge, but all business problems boil down to people management problems.  

If you have the perfect person in the perfect role and they’re independent, do it better than you could have expected, do it better than you could. That’s the ideal scenario, but that’s unbelievably rare. That probably doesn’t realistically happen. 

My biggest takeaway was at the time I was managing, I wanted my team members to be successful. I genuinely wanted them to be successful, but I wanted them to be successful for the wrong reasons. I wanted them to be successful because that would be a positive for me. I wasn’t sitting there cheering for them and getting excited. I was personally staked in their career and their success. I  didn’t understand that at the time.”

What Does a Pre-Sales Engineer Role Include? 

”Most of the time, I get tagged in when it’s time to start explaining how the tech works, how to use the technology. But running demos, showing what the technology can do in a way that is intelligible to different levels of technical audiences.

You could be talking to somebody who isn’t going to be the operator, but maybe it is the person that the operator would report to. You have to be able to explain the value without overwhelming them with the technical minutia. But then you may also be talking to somebody who’s been like a Linux administrator for 40 years, and you have to be able to dialogue with that person.”

Your Success Target Has to Be the Business Success Story

”I used a thought experiment, and I would say, ‘Okay, you think your quota is too high. I’m telling you that if your quota is lower and you hit a lower number, we’re not going to keep the client. I can’t give you a target where you can succeed, and the business fails. Your success target has to be the business success story.’ And if that’s impossible, then that’s a self-solving problem. In two months, this all goes away. If your client wants 70 leads, they want to pay for halftime SDR, and, look, champagne taste, beer budget, that exists in every market, and you can’t necessarily solve that problem.”

Transcript:

[00:01:35] Marc Gonyea: Today we have Thaddeus Walsh. 

[00:01:46] Chris Corcoran: [00:01:46] Thadds 

[00:01:48] Marc Gonyea: [00:01:48] Thaddeus Walsh in the house. This is a little bit different than some of our normal podcasts, because Thaddeus, Thaddeus… excuse  me. Thad started over 10 years ago. July of 2010. Welcome, Thaddeus. 

[00:02:05] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:02:05] It’s good to be here. It’s good to see you guys. 

[00:02:07] Chris Corcoran: [00:02:07] It’s really amazing that you even joined the company. And I’ll tell you why.

[00:02:15] I’ll never forget this. 

[00:02:16] Marc Gonyea: [00:02:16] This is going to be good. 

[00:02:18] Chris Corcoran: [00:02:18] The recruiter, we were looking to hire SDRs and this swashbuckling recruiter came up to my desk and was like, “I got the perfect candidate for you. He’s awesome. He’s smart. He sells wine. He’s in sales, he’s analytical.” I’m like, “Sounds great. Let me see his resume.”

[00:02:35] And I get the resume. I see Columbia, Maryland and I say NFW. 

[00:02:42] Marc Gonyea: [00:02:42] NFW.

[00:02:44]Chris Corcoran: [00:02:44] And, and, and to the recruiters crazy, like, “No, you got to give it a chance.” I was like, “All right. All right. We’ll give this guy a chance, but we’re going to make every single interview at 8:00 AM in the morning. And if he’s late, it’s over.” And lo and behold, you made it. 

[00:02:59] You interviewed and you kicked ass for us. So I’m glad to see that we were able to make it happen. 

[00:03:07] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:03:07] I’m glad Phil found my resume on CareerBuilder. I actually distinctly remember checking the box. It’s like, “Do you want to show your resume to recruiters who are like searching the CareerBuilder database?” And and I remember thinking like, “Well, I might as well.”

[00:03:23] It’s like, “I’m in the job hunt,” and like, “If I don’t check this box and that means that, like, I don’t get looks that I would have otherwise gotten…” You know, the worst case scenario is I get inundated with a bunch of spam and you know, I can just have like email filters for that at some point. It honestly, it was like that decision to check that box when I was setting up my CareerBuilder profile was probably one of the most impactful decisions in my life, given that I came to come work for you guys and then to create path since. So… 

[00:03:55] Marc Gonyea: [00:03:55] Speaking of that, we were talking before we got going about now we have these we call them Tops Trips. President’s club trips twice a year, which we would have loved to have gone on with you.

[00:04:04] That would have been so much fun. And then you immediately responded with, “What did you say?” The reasons to come work here are so much better now than they were then. And I’m like, “That’s not to say I wasn’t excited to come work for memoryBlue when I started, but… damn.” There’s just like so much more going on. The swag, the trips, the, just like the scope of what, you know, the growth.

[00:04:29] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:04:29] Right? When I started, there was no… It was you two  managing contracts and campaigns and, and clients. And you know, there wasn’t, there wasn’t like management. There wasn’t growth, like natural next steps to take. So,…

[00:04:45]Marc Gonyea: [00:04:45] So that leads me to the question of exactly why did you join us?  ‘Cause it was far as shit away.

[00:04:50] Chris Corcoran: [00:04:50] Who knows what Phil told him. 

[00:04:52] Marc Gonyea: [00:04:52] Yeah.

[00:04:57] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:04:57] I desperately needed a job. So like paying rent is a really important reason to go get a job, but yeah, I mean, I’ve always been interested in tech. Like I built my first computer when I was in high school. I, when I was a student senator in my undergrad I like negotiated for, so like 75 grand out of the gen, student general ledger to go towards like a GPS tracking system for the buses which like vastly improved quality of life for a lot of the community populations.

[00:05:22] So like I’ve always been interested in the technology, like in, in technology in general. And so it was exciting to, to be able to get into that world because like I don’t have a coding background, a technical background, like from a an academic standpoint. I did a degree in sociology, so I’m probably like academically qualified to pump gas.

[00:05:43] So seeing that there was a way for me to get involved with tech without necessarily having like a CS or a copy background was, was really enticing me. Then you guys pitched it really well. 

[00:05:57] Chris Corcoran: [00:05:57] Like I said, who knows what Phil told him. 

[00:06:00] Marc Gonyea: [00:06:00] Let’s talk about that for a second too. So you, you grew up, just give us a quick, quick and dirty rundown. 

[00:06:05] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:06:05] So I grew up, so I grew up in Massachusetts, South Shore. Scituate, Mass. Go Sailors, graduated and then went to UMBC. 

[00:06:15] Chris Corcoran: [00:06:15] UMBC. 

[00:06:17] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:06:17] University of Maryland, Baltimore County, so officially UMBC. Which is one of the state schools in Maryland. And got my degree and was sort of kicking around and had a couple of jobs and then was like in the, in the real job on. And landed at memoryBlue which was like extremely fortunate.

[00:06:38] Marc Gonyea: [00:06:38] And how was that like? Okay, well actually I want to talk about this. What did you do in college? I mean, you, you’ve got a talent, with all this, you were in a an acoustic group. Is that? It’s not acoustic groups. Acapella group. 

[00:06:50] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:06:50] Yeah. So I sang in the UMBC Mama’s Boys. I played rugby. I was a student senator.

[00:06:57] I was probably meant to be on a team. And basically just enjoyed the extracurricular and like social life of college. Definitely not the best student, but,..

[00:07:11]Chris Corcoran: [00:07:11] But big man on campus. 

[00:07:13] Marc Gonyea: [00:07:13] Big man on campus.

[00:07:14] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:07:14] I knew a lot of people. I wouldn’t consider myself popular, but like I knew a ton of people and it was a lot of fun.

[00:07:21] I really enjoyed my time at school. I think sort of like the student profile at UMBC is, is really cool. It’s very diverse. It’s very interesting. People are generally like serious about their academics and just interesting people. 

[00:07:35] Marc Gonyea: [00:07:35] So got it. No, we are lucky to have you because you’re extremely well rounded guy and all sorts of luck in life.

[00:07:42] All right. So you started and then what happened to the…? Walk us through that. Do you remember what that was like? Did you, did you do the commute from Columbia? 

[00:07:49] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:07:49] Yeah, I mean, I was waking up early, hopped in the car, driving down. You know, we’d get in and just… So the nice thing was when I started, I was on one client, who’s Nexsan and very fortunately we had, at the time I didn’t realize it, but in retrospect a very talented, prolific demand generation manager on the other, like sitting on the other side of the table, the client side. 

[00:08:18] Marc Gonyea: [00:08:18] Who was that? 

[00:08:19] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:08:19] Jeff Goodfellow 

[00:08:20] Marc Gonyea: [00:08:20] Mister Goodfellow. He’s a lot the, that you said that very talented.

[00:08:23] Indeed. 

[00:08:24] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:08:24] He is very talented.

[00:08:25]Marc Gonyea: [00:08:25] Yeah, absolutely. 

[00:08:26] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:08:26] And, and so he was, I mean, he was basically just like pumping us with contacts, names, numbers, doing like, you know… I don’t, I don’t even know all of the ways that he was getting us, you know, people that reach out to, but it was global. I mean, we are getting contacts with all over Europe, all over you know, less so in, in, in east Asia.

[00:08:48] But I mean, I would call people in like Turkey and, you know, the Eastern Mediterranean, it’s like I,… So I would get in at 7:30, 8 o’clock in the morning to beat the beltway traffic rush and pick up the phone and start calling UK or whatever, which was great. 

[00:09:06] Marc Gonyea: [00:09:06] I remember, 

[00:09:07] I remember. Did you know the what you were doing, what you signed 

[00:09:10] up for?

[00:09:10] Did you 

[00:09:10] have a good idea if…? You’re a smart 

[00:09:13] guy, you figured it out. 

[00:09:14] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:09:14] I mean, I felt like the hiring process did a really good job of articulating the overwhelming majority of what the job was going to look like. At least from, from an SDR standpoint. Like I had no idea that I was going to transition into a management role and like… You know, that certainly was not anything that I, I didn’t want insight or vision or expectation of. When I started it was, it was pretty clear that I was going to be on the phone most of the day, dialing to reach out to people that to generate garner interest, make connections, book meetings, that sort of thing.

[00:09:49] That was like sort of the high level sentiment that I took away throughout the hiring process. It was, I would say more, more rigorous than I think I anticipated. Like, I mean, when I was calling for Nexsan, I was like doing easily 200, 250 dials a day. Because there was, you know, there were, there was a volume play.

[00:10:18] They were giving us really good contacts. And so there wasn’t a whole lot of persuasion or navigating the conversation. It was, it was like, “Hey, you downloaded this white paper, you know, what generated your interest?” And sort of just carrying on from there and it was usually people interested in stories.

[00:10:36] So like. Sorry. 

[00:10:39] Marc Gonyea: [00:10:39] That’s fine. 

[00:10:40] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:10:40] So part of it, yeah. I thought I turned that off. So it was, I mean, other folks had like totally different like phone dynamics. Like they had to make laser focused rifle shots to find the right person because their target, total addressable market would be like, you know, maybe 5 or 10,000 people in the US whereas like every company, at least in 2010, especially sort of on the backend wave of the virtualization like overhaul of everybody’s data center. It was like, “Oh, well, we got rid of all of our pizza boxes and we replaced it with blade servers.”

[00:11:16] Well, the pizza boxes all had like a crappy, you know, 72,000 RPM spinning hard drive in it and the blade server has no storage in it. So like, what do we need? We need a big bucket of storage and that’s what we were selling. So it was a great time to be selling storage because that like macro level market shift.

[00:11:33] And, and because Jeff was so good at getting us high quality contacts. You know, Mike Porter has like a hundred leads. 

[00:11:40] Marc Gonyea: [00:11:40] Yeah, I remember. Everyone gets so upset. 

[00:11:43] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:11:43] A hundred. 

[00:11:43] Marc Gonyea: [00:11:43] Yeah. So who were the, who were the, who else was working at the company when you joined? 

[00:11:47] Chris Corcoran: [00:11:47] These guys, who did you report to? 

[00:11:48] Was, was Marc your DM?

[00:11:50] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:11:50] Marc was DM. But, but so when I, when I started Stu Dyer… Since like July, and I think I started in maybe like October or something. And so he was like a couple of months ahead of me on the account, but he had been at memoryBlue for a little while for, you know, prior to prior to working on the Nexsan account. And

[00:12:13] I mean, Stu already had a really solid relationship with Jeff. And we, you know, definitely very different style. 

[00:12:23] Marc Gonyea: [00:12:23] Which is good, not bad, like both. Right? 

[00:12:25] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:12:25] That was actually really limiting. Like it’s something that I’ve come back to many, many times in my career where it’s like, if I’m frustrated with like, “Why am I not seeing success,

[00:12:35] why am I struggling to make the sorts of rapport level connections with customers?” And stuff like that. And I just think back then, it’s like, “Oh, I can just like try and be a little bit more like Stu and like…”, ’cause everybody loves that guy. Everybody loves everybody that guy. You can’t spend an hour with him and not like have a really positive sentiment towards him.

[00:12:58] I feel like I’m totally the opposite. Most people… 

[00:13:00] Marc Gonyea: [00:13:00] Come on. 

[00:13:02] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:13:02] Most people meet me and they’re thinking like, “I know it all, asshole.” And think I’m, I’m very full of myself, which I don’t think I’m full of myself. I think I’m just like really passionately interested in everything. And I guess the way that I talk makes people think that I’m,… 

[00:13:19] Marc Gonyea: [00:13:19] I like the way you talk. 

[00:13:20] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:13:20] I don’t know.

[00:13:20] Marc Gonyea: [00:13:20] It’s very authoritative. 

[00:13:23] Chris Corcoran: [00:13:23] So you’re, you’re, you’re on Nexsan with Stu, are there other folks on that account with you or just the two of you?

[00:13:27]Thaddeus Walsh: [00:13:27] At the time, no. It was just us for six months. And then… 

[00:13:31] Chris Corcoran: [00:13:31] It’s a powerful team on Nexsan. 

[00:13:32] And how to run it, like one- two, like all the time? 

[00:13:38] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:13:38] Yeah. We were one-two like October, November, December, that year.

[00:13:43] I mean, maybe I was like three in there or whatever. December, 2010, I had a quote of 110 and a quote of 117 leads and like businesses…. 

[00:13:55] Chris Corcoran: [00:13:55] I guarantee, I guarantee people were the reason why you guys were one-two was because you were at Nexsan. 

[00:14:00] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:14:00] Yeah, but the thing is people would get up at 11 o’clock at the end of the blitz and go have a cigarette and go, you know, BS around the water cooler

[00:14:07] and like soon I would be sitting there calling until like 1. And like most days we would both take lunch at our desks and we would be doing lead write-ups and submitting, submitting leads like we’re like registering our leads over lunch. And then like the afternoon blitz we’ll roll around and we, we basically just like never stopped dialing.

[00:14:30] So when people used to complain, ’cause they’d be like, “Oh, it’s so easy.” It’s like, “Well, it’s easy in the sense that the people I’m calling aren’t resistant to me calling in the way that a lot of the people that…” Like, it was an easier head game in a lot of ways because like, it was basically you just sit down and, you know, turn the crank and, and do the job.

[00:14:52] And it was, and it was somewhat consistent. It got me a huge number of bats. I had like a ridiculous number of conversations with prospects. Like a ridiculous number of my first year which was like a lot to do with why I was able to advance quickly. There was a lot of, I mean, there’s a lot of folks that I worked with that would dial maybe not as aggressively as me, but they would have like five conversations a day.

[00:15:16] That’s really hard to give yourself the feedback loop if like there’s two hours in between, you know, the two conversations you have in the morning. So I, I mean, it was definitely an advantage for my growth. 

[00:15:29] Marc Gonyea: [00:15:29] Oh yeah. 

[00:15:29] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:15:29] I don’t think it was easy in the way that a lot of people probably thought it was easy because there was a lot of work.

[00:15:34] Like I would stay until like seven o’clock at night, a lot of times time ’cause like the paperwork and the administrative side of things. And just like prepping and getting stuff ready. ‘Cause like when, when you’re handed a list of like 8,000 people and it’s like, “Hey, I need you to call these people as soon as humanly possible.”

[00:15:52] It’s like, “Well, they’re spread around the globe, I need to figure out what time zones they are.” If you’re at one, I’m going to call them like in my timeline so that it’s hitting at like optimal windows. So I’m not calling them on lunch, I’m not calling them at seven o’clock in the morning their time unless there’s CSO or CEO or CTO or whatever.

[00:16:09] And like just sort of making all those decisions prior to like doing the dials the next day or like for the whole week or whatever. 

[00:16:16] Marc Gonyea: [00:16:16] Who else was around, who were some of these people who were at the top important? You were…

[00:16:20]Thaddeus Walsh: [00:16:20] I don’t know. I feel like, I feel like everybody was like pretty much jamming when I started. Like w we had a pretty strong crew.

[00:16:29] We had a really strong crew folks like, Willie McMillan, Dion Mitchell, Myers. We don’t want to talk about a workforce. 

[00:16:40] Marc Gonyea: [00:16:40] Yeah. 

[00:16:40] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:16:40] That guy out hustled. I mean,…

[00:16:44]Marc Gonyea: [00:16:44] Are we thinking about the same

[00:16:45] guy? 

[00:16:45] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:16:45] I’m kidding, I’m kidding. 350 dials a day every day for like months. God. Who else was around? Trying to think. 

[00:16:59] Marc Gonyea: [00:16:59] When the Mitchell come in, right.

[00:17:03] That’s right. When did Mitchell and… 

[00:17:04] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:17:04] Matt Bright was there. 

[00:17:06] Marc Gonyea: [00:17:06] Wow. All right. Yeah. 

[00:17:08] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:17:08] So, so Ryan Mitchell started I assume like the next spring. 

[00:17:12] Marc Gonyea: [00:17:12] Okay. 

[00:17:12] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:17:12] And and so Stu left and that, that put a hole in the Nexsan account team which at the time was still means Stu, but they were running like VAR campaigns,

[00:17:26] so I was like coach. I would coach other, other team members on how to pitch Nexsan, but like all the leads that they would generate would go to a particular reseller. And I remember we were like just burning through that stuff. And so, you know, Mitchell came on board and I think he was originally gonna like call for E plus and then. 

[00:17:44] Marc Gonyea: [00:17:44] Yeah.

[00:17:44] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:17:44] And then the whole and the Nexsan account  pumped up and, and it was like, “Oh, here you go.” And so, you know, that guy officiated my wedding. 

[00:17:54] Marc Gonyea: [00:17:54] Yeah he’s great. And

[00:17:55] I remember interviewing him so they like give him on his podcast and he rolled down. There was purple Friday, 

[00:17:59] as we were talking about. 

[00:18:01] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:18:01] Oh my God.

[00:18:01] Marc Gonyea: [00:18:01] Right, Friday. Right. 

[00:18:03] He had purple lot, like a purple tie and purple shirt on. And this nice purple shirt is like purple… 

[00:18:09] Mitchell’s a great. 

[00:18:10] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:18:10] He’s a, he’s a work horse to speak of a work horse. 

[00:18:13] Marc Gonyea: [00:18:13] Yes. 

[00:18:14] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:18:14] He’s like one of my best friends. Yeah. Yeah. I still, I talked to him like earlier this week. Yeah. It’s great. He’s a, he’s an awesome dude.

[00:18:20] So I mentored Mitchell who absolutely knocked it out apart he, you know, took the job and like grab the reins of the job of being an SDR and rode it so hard. 

[00:18:35] Marc Gonyea: [00:18:35] Oh, well, yeah. 

[00:18:36] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:18:36] And I mean, I learned a lot from him too. Like his whole like passion thing, like his big thing is passion. If you can, if you can communicate in a way that articulates that you’re passionate about something, you make such a different impact. And it helps you like be immersive and like remember dialogue and stuff like that in a way that you can, if you’re sort of like playing the aloof, “I’m too cool for school.”

[00:19:02] So yeah, Mitchell and, you know, Erica. 

[00:19:08] Marc Gonyea: [00:19:08] Oh, the Hammer. 

[00:19:10] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:19:10] Yeah. Formerly Higginson. 

[00:19:11] Marc Gonyea: [00:19:11] Higginson. Yeah. 

[00:19:12] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:19:12] Collins? 

[00:19:12] Marc Gonyea: [00:19:12] Collins. Yes. So she, she came on board. 

[00:19:16] So like the murderer’s

[00:19:17] row, was that, is that 

[00:19:17] aria? 

[00:19:18] Chris Corcoran: [00:19:18] No, that was…. 

[00:19:20] Marc Gonyea: [00:19:20] Onward? 

[00:19:20] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:19:20] I wasn’t onward, but yeah, that was definitely my plate. 

[00:19:24] Marc Gonyea: [00:19:24] Your time. 

[00:19:24] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:19:24] My time. 

[00:19:25] Marc Gonyea: [00:19:25] Yeah. Okay. 

[00:19:26] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:19:26] RU is great.

[00:19:29] RU actually came in later. 

[00:19:32] Marc Gonyea: [00:19:32] And then you were rolling on storage learning and you’re, you’re really smart guy. 

[00:19:37] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:19:37] Well, I was learning on my calls. Like one of the best things about the consultative sales process is if you can get a prospect or a customer, you know, at whatever stage in the sales cycle, talking to you about the subject that you are trying to like, in the realm of what you’re trying to discuss with them,

[00:20:02] it is the best learning opportunity for anything, any technology, any business process, any enterprise standard. Like I would say 99% of what I know about how enterprise organizations operate comes directly from the mouth of hundreds of people that I’ve spoken to in sales conversations, in QPRs when I was a customer success manager. Like I give demos now ’cause I’m an SE

[00:20:29] and like, you know, people like… you ask a good question, people explain how something works. That’s the whole life. So they’re generally pretty good at explaining it and you just get like very good takes. And you start to hear patterns. Like that was really why like Nexsan was, was super beneficial to me was because I would hear the same sentiment, like dozens and dozens and dozens of times.

[00:20:57] Oh, we’re virtualizing all of our hosts except for our database host, we’re still keeping those bare metals. It’s like, oh, so that’s a little information nugget that like, back in 2010. Nobody was virtualizing their database hosts because like Oracle still decided that their licensing model was, you’re not allowed to virtualize this stuff because that was their decision.

[00:21:15] And there was a whole lot of fun in the marketplace about like performance. And it was like totally unfounded, but that was just the sentiment. So I knew that, and I can drop that into conversation not because I had experienced it or because I’d made that decision before or because I’ve learned that from being an operator, but because I had just heard it from so many people so consistently that it was just like industry, like normal knowledge.

[00:21:41] And I still do that to this day. Like as you know, selling security, it’s like the sentiments of the general security ethos, like comes out when you’re talking to people. And so I can make commentary about something. And even if the person that I’m speaking to disagrees with it, they, they aren’t going to treat me like I’m way off in left field.

[00:22:03] So I basically used every single call as a learning opportunity where I could get any like breadcrumb of information for the prospect. And then over a relatively short period of time that helped me build an understanding of how those people thought and what was important to them and what their challenges were and all that sort of stuff.

[00:22:26] Chris Corcoran: [00:22:26] Great. That’s great. So let’s talk about how, not only were you a great SDR, but how you 

[00:22:31] broke the internet. 

[00:22:33] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:22:33] When you say broke the internet…

[00:22:34]Chris Corcoran: [00:22:34] With the advent of the Thadd machine. 

[00:22:36] Talks, talk to the listeners a little bit about what was that, that machine? 

[00:22:41] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:22:41] So in my first three weeks I had gotten on the phones, I was calling and I remember, you know, we didn’t do like,

[00:22:53] didn’t religiously do weekly calls with Jeff. And when I started, he wasn’t even really like, “I need to see like dials and talk time numbers or, or whatever.” You know, he was a little bit looser. So I think it was like maybe three weeks in and Stu sent me an Excel sheet as like, “Hey, just fill this out.

[00:23:11] We gotta like, fill this out on a weekly basis and send it to Jeff.” And I was like, “Oh, okay. This is like very normal.” And Marc made the exceptional comment of, you know, “This is important because this is our product.” We produce leads, but this is the deliverable on a weekly basis and so if you don’t have leads, which never happened with X and ’cause like so much volume on. But if you don’t have leads this is you’re like, this is your whole communication

[00:23:40] your, it’s your client potentially. ‘Cause like, if they cancel the meeting, you don’t have an opportunity to dialogue with them about what you’re doing in the meantime. So, I remember I got the Excel sheet, it was broken. Like the formulas had been just typed over and I was like, “Well, I know enough about Excel to like, fix this.”

[00:24:03] So I fixed it and then I sent it back to students like, “Hey, this is fixed.” And then he sent it to a couple of other people and then like two days later, somebody comes up and is like, “Hey, your, your like template is broken.” I’m like, “What do you mean?” And so like, the person had typed over like the formula and I’m like, “Oh, well, you don’t type over the formula.

[00:24:24] You’re just like putting your daily dials, daily talks, daily CWPs or whatever.” And they’re like, “Yeah, but like, it’s, it’s not working.” I’m like, “Right, because like you put the total number in not like the individual days.” And that was like, “Oh, okay.” So this is going to be a problem because like I made this thing, so people are going to come to me to solve this problem.

[00:24:42] So then I made a locked version and was like, “If you show up and you have the online version, like don’t even talk to me, like…” And then people were coming up to me saying, “I just need you to unlock it.” It’s like, “No, you don’t. You don’t need to unlock this. Just fill out the form on a 

[00:24:58] day-to-day basis and 

[00:24:59] the numbers in the totals column will equal the total of those days.”

[00:25:04] And so I think Google forms was like maybe  six or nine months out of data and I like been playing around with it a little bit. I actually like was going to write a Ruby application to do it. Having never written a piece of software in my life, I was like, “This is annoying enough that I’m just going to do this.”

[00:25:22] But fortunately, thank God, I I ended up building a Google form which fed into a Google spreadsheet and then I like basically built some reports and like super locked down the sheets. There was one sheet where it was like, you put in your initials and you put in your client name and then it just would query against the,

[00:25:40] the form submission. So then the training was at the end of the day for every client that you call down, just fill out the form and then when you go to get your report, it’ll pull the report. And that was like, this is like the definition of terrible organic business application development. It was like, there is a distinct problem,

[00:26:00] it is very like, it is very solvable, but the next steps were like so unpredictable because we started doing the leaderboards off of it. We started doing, I started putting quotas in and so in order to facilitate the leaderboards right at reference points, create the quotes and all that stuff. 

[00:26:19] Marc Gonyea: [00:26:19] So awesome.

[00:26:20] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:26:20] And then we, we literally like maxed out Google, like Google sheets. Like we had more, I mean, as we got up to, like, I think it was around the time where we had like 20 to 30 reps. Like, you know, 1.5 accounts per rep per day. And like, we were just hammering it. So at some point I had to like purchase storage records and that caused problems because people wanted to like report quarterly for, you know, a big meeting, like an onsite with their client or whatever.

[00:26:54] And it was just like, “Oh, I didn’t anticipate like any of these problems.” And the funny thing is like, it worked really well for what we needed it to do, which was produced a consistent weekly Excel file that could be sent to clients that like the individual reps couldn’t break. Data entry was a nightmare,

[00:27:13] like people would come to me all the time be like, “Aw, so, I put it in 350 hours of talk time instead of 35 minutes of talk time.” 

[00:27:23] Marc Gonyea: [00:27:23] That’d be like, ’cause they couldn’t get them the formatting right. Are they, not 

[00:27:26] you, but they could have figured out how to, you know, hours, minutes, seconds. 

[00:27:30] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:27:30] Yeah. I think, I, I think I messed with that.

[00:27:32] Like probably half a dozen times. I put a lot of, of I did a lot of exploration work and, and there was some very interesting calculation flows across like eight sheets, eight tabs within that Google sheet. But it was great because like it took, I remember when I started every single week without fail. The two of you were spending a bunch of time reviewing the reports to clients before they went to clients because they were consistently… 

[00:28:01] Marc Gonyea: [00:28:01] Always wrong.

[00:28:01] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:28:01] Yeah. They were consistently messed up and like, that’s not a fun conversation to have like, “Why does it say you have Y number of dials when like I can literally do this math in my head and like, it’s not even close to?” 

[00:28:15] Oh yeah. 

[00:28:15] That was the number last week, it’s like, “Well, what?” Like, there’s just such a head-scratcher and you know, certainly we’re not hiring for like business analysts, like people with business analyst backgrounds like Excel Wizardry.

[00:28:29] And I mean, I was like, you know, “I can run like pivot tables and stuff like that, just because I had used it in college for like research projects, but the overwhelming majority of, of like, what I did was just like learning because I sort of had, had a goal that I wanted to get to and like just failed until I got there.”

[00:28:52] Chris Corcoran: [00:28:52] Yeah. When Thaddeus, the Thadd machine exists and lives on to this day. 

[00:28:57] Marc Gonyea: [00:28:57] Just the original code in there. So every day comes over. I look at it every day to come down every everywhere. 

[00:29:04] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:29:04] It’s like, it is the lens through which you can validate that the program is running the way that it’s intended to and that what’s being delivered to memoryBlue’s clients is the sales pitch, which is we’re going to put in the light work.

[00:29:18] We’re going to do the work. And if you can’t articulate that very easily and very clearly, it’s, it’s really hard to maintain confidence especially when there’s a dry spell. Like every early August there’s a dry spell. Why? Because tons of people take their kids on vacation. And so they’re not in their office,

[00:29:38] they’re not available, they’re not responding to email. They’re not looking, well maybe now they’re looking at LinkedIn. ‘Cause like when I’m on vacation and stuff, I like check LinkedIn way more than I do on my day to day, but I mean, yeah. So the reality is like you have to be able to, I mean, memoryBlue is a consulting business.

[00:29:57] Like you have to be able to maintain the relationship with the customer regardless of, of the number that you’re putting on the board. And, and I mean, there’s a whole story to it. I remember working when I was a DM, like working on campaigns where we had like a pretty stiff ramp period, because we had to learn a lot about the, the prospect space, who do we get information on,

[00:30:25] what titles were working, weren’t working, what messaging was working with, which titles and all that stuff. And there’s like a big time in a row achieve that success and oftentimes we would get up and running and you get a couple of leads on the board. And then, and then it, it sort of runs itself because the, you know, the rep is invested in it and they understand enough, but it was like, yeah, you gotta be able to produce like quality reports and output.

[00:30:50] And it was also just academically interesting, you know, like a huge data nerd. If couldn’t tell. 

[00:30:55] Marc Gonyea: [00:30:55] No. I mean, I’ll tell you a couple of things. We skipped over real quick, but what you said before he said with the Thadd machine. It shows can you, like, people always ask me what is important to being successful in this role or in business.

[00:31:08] I tell people, “You have to be curious. 

[00:31:10] And you’re one curious motherfucker.” 

[00:31:12] Right? And it gets you a lot of things in life because you learn, but I want to point this out to the people who listen to most people listen to our SDRs who work at memoryBlue. That whole concept that you hit over about getting a more so or I might it call to kind of further edit, edu, educate yourself about the client’s role or the prospect’s role or their space or what they do that is tremendously valuable advice.

[00:31:37] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:31:37] It’s like…

[00:31:38]Marc Gonyea: [00:31:38] Tremendously valuable. 

[00:31:38] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:31:38] It’s ridiculous. I know way more about the subjects that I sell into than people who’ve spent their entire career in, in, in certain respects. Like, could I sit down in a seat and build a SOC from scratch or, you know, architect hardened Linux kernel for, you know, for an enterprise organization.

[00:31:58] No. I could not do that because that’s not my skillset, but if you want to talk about programmatics, if you want to talk about optimizing the way that business workflows or processes, transition information from team A to a team B like, you know, purchasing pace for storage like all that sort of stuff. I, like in a lot of cases the sales person gets exposed to a much more diverse set of environments and ecosystems by way of their customers, by way of the prospects that they’re reaching out to.

[00:32:33] And so you get sort of this filtered glimpse into a whole universe that exists and that’s that person’s whole world. And it frames their whole perspective on things, you get to see thousands of those. And then you can start sort of just intuitively immersing yourself in saying, you know, “What, w what’s normal? What’s consistent?

[00:32:54] What’s, you know, what’s the outlier? What sounds like a good idea?” 

[00:32:58] Marc Gonyea: [00:32:58] And I think the

[00:32:59] point is that you said that these people are diluting what they do every day like their lives work into this conversation with you, so you’re getting some pretty good stuff. And a product, your hands pretty good versus maybe reading an article somewhere or reading a research report from gardener,

[00:33:13] like you’re talking to people who are actually doing it, using technologies and tools. So you get the good shit. 

[00:33:18] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:33:18] Yeah. I mean, I’m also like a hyper extrovert. So like doing it in a dialogue with a person who I can like sort of emotionally reflect with, empathize and just like… 

[00:33:32] Marc Gonyea: [00:33:32] When you listen to the listener, because if you get to listen to that stuff you’re not going to sound like a computer.

[00:33:38] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:33:38] I think, I think to that point it’s mostly like, I don’t have a belief that I can’t learn. And I think most people just get stuck because they believe that they, that they don’t have the capacity to understand the thing that they’re hearing. 

[00:33:53] Marc Gonyea: [00:33:53] They just miss it. So therefore it’s not important to them and therefore they don’t listen.

[00:33:57] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:33:57] Yeah. Yeah, I think it’s, I think it’s basically like people decide, I mean, it’s almost like, you know, child, parent, adult buyer sequence. It’s like, you know, do you want to learn something? You kinda need to like want to learn stuff in general in order to learn stuff. But then it’s almost like a gut check,

[00:34:15] like. Is this the type of thing that I could know? And I think a lot of people make a self-conscious decision that they they’re like, “Oh, this is too technical warning.” Like the number of sales reps that have said like, “Yeah, that’s way too technical. Like I don’t,…” It’s like I have the phenomenal sales reps that I’ve worked with, whether they exude that

[00:34:36] in dialogue with their customers or not, like whether they really lean on their technical knowledge or not, they know it. Like they very deeply understand it on. And, and so like by saying, “I’m not that technical,” you’re essentially artificially introducing a ceiling on like your career level performance, because there are other people that aren’t going to put that limitation on themselves that have all of the constant data of sales expertise that have… 

[00:35:04] Chris Corcoran: [00:35:04] Ding, ding

[00:35:04] ding.

[00:35:05] I’m doing my… that’s… keep going. 

[00:35:07] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:35:07] Yeah. Cold man. Yeah. I mean, it’s basically just like, don’t, don’t tell yourself that you can’t understand the technology. Like I don’t write code, but I can understand what a piece of software does in a broader context of a system and I can, I mean, I called them the mental white board.

[00:35:29] It’s like when I’m talking to somebody about their environment or a technology or whatever, I’m like drawing a literal picture in my head using the context clues and even just being able to like place things. That’s like the first step. It’s like, “Oh, this thing runs. This is a piece of software. It runs on a server.

[00:35:49] That server is a virtual server and it runs on a hypervisor. And the hypervisor runs on a physical piece of hardware somewhere.” Like being able to place that, that is the technology stack. Like you’re starting to construct the building blocks. 

[00:36:02] Marc Gonyea: [00:36:02] The problem with all your knowledge is that Corcoran gets you caught up in the appendage to the issues back in the day.

[00:36:08] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:36:08] Well, right. Yeah. I mean, unmanaged, unmanaged Dell switches in the tel… Do you guys remember what my office was? Literally a folding table in a telecom closet with a pet, with patch panels. 

[00:36:28] Marc Gonyea: [00:36:28] Blue cords everywhere. 

[00:36:29] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:36:29] Oh my God. That was nuts. That was absolutely nutty. 

[00:36:34] Chris Corcoran: [00:36:34] I 

[00:36:35] think that was that was, that was a result of the the campaign,

[00:36:38] when we went head to head with the real Housewives. 

[00:36:43] Marc Gonyea: [00:36:43] Those that we worked with, the like we went…

[00:36:45] Chris Corcoran: [00:36:45] We went head, we went head to head with a bunch of moms out of St. Louis, their boat raced us. 

[00:36:52] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:36:52] Aren’t you talking about…? 

[00:36:53] Marc Gonyea: [00:36:53] I don’t know. I remember, I don’t know… 

[00:36:55] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:36:55] What his campaigns? What’s that? His campaign? 

[00:36:59] Was that Cleo?

[00:37:00] Marc Gonyea: [00:37:00] Oh, yeah. 

[00:37:02] Chris Corcoran: [00:37:02] Thaddeus knows. Thaddeus knows why he got into the telco 

[00:37:06] closet. 

[00:37:06] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:37:06] I was so bitter that I lost that. I was really bitter. I got them a couple of monster leads, like monster lead. But I mean, look, I didn’t dial enough. So like, I didn’t do like that. 

[00:37:24] Chris Corcoran: [00:37:24] Let’s talk about 

[00:37:24] your, your, your, you know, your elev, elevation from being an SDR up into a management role.

[00:37:29] Talk about a little bit about how that came into fruition. 

[00:37:34] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:37:34] I believe it was like sort of a weird day around the July 4th break, probably in 2011.

[00:37:42] Chris Corcoran: [00:37:42] At this point you’re an SDR just for Nexsan? 

[00:37:45] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:37:45] Just one year. Okay. Yeah. And we go into the conference room where we did training and you guys get up in front of everybody and you’re like, “So we’re giving you an extra day off.” And everybody’s like, “Sweet.”

[00:37:59] And then it was like, “And we’re going to be changing the comp plan.” And everybody’s like, “Oh no.” Which credit, where credit is due that was a, that was a monumental shift overall in sort of the mindset of the way that that SDRs got comped. And I think it’s still retained the spirit of like the memoryBlue attitude towards compensating, performance compensating success and, and compensating on, you know, and, and, and being in a place where you can make good money.

[00:38:34] Like I was making really good money. Like compared to my peers like I was top performing rep consistently month over month. So like I was in the money consistently. I was hitting bonuses, like, and it w you know, I wasn’t worried about it ’cause I was, I’ve always been in the mindset like, look, if you immerse yourself in the, in playing the game of, of comp minutiae on a consistent basis, you’re just wasting a ton of your time.

[00:39:03] You can just like, go sell another deal. 

[00:39:06] Marc Gonyea: [00:39:06] Right. 

[00:39:06] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:39:06] So, so I, I didn’t, I wasn’t super worried about it, but at the time it was like, “Hey, here’s this monumental shift,” to the way that everybody’s going to get paid whichever a lot of people were nervous about, a lot of people were sort of like, “Oh, this sounds great.”

[00:39:18] And then and then it was like, “Oh, and by the way, like, we’re going to have new positions. We need recruiters for to bring like new SDRs in. We’re going to have like people selling memoryBlue that are not Marc and Chris. And we need people to manage accounts.” And I distinctly remember, I came to you guys afterwards and was like, “Yeah, I would love to sell memoryBlue.

[00:39:38] I would love to be, I would love to be one of those people pitching memoryBlue out in the field.” And you guys were like, “Ah, you’re going to be delivered.” 

[00:39:47] Chris Corcoran: [00:39:47] This is a monumental moment time in the history of the company, because at that point prior to that meeting it was just Marc and me and SDRs. 

[00:39:53] Marc Gonyea: [00:39:53] Yeah.

[00:39:54] Chris Corcoran: [00:39:54] And we’re here and we’re saying, “Hey, we’re going to change these. We’re going to start putting in different layers.” 

[00:39:59] Essentially. 

[00:40:00] Marc Gonyea: [00:40:00] Yeah, I think… 

[00:40:00] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:40:00] Do you remember Doug? 

[00:40:02] Marc Gonyea: [00:40:02] Doug Smith?

[00:40:03]Thaddeus Walsh: [00:40:03] With the sweater?

[00:40:04]Marc Gonyea: [00:40:04] Yeah. He’s still, he still 

[00:40:06] works with us. Yeah. He still works with us. 

[00:40:08] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:40:08] I mean… 

[00:40:08] Marc Gonyea: [00:40:08] I talked to him yesterday. 

[00:40:09] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:40:09] I remember you explained to the crowd, so there’s a couple of different models.

[00:40:16] There is, “Keep it small and keep it all.” Or we can grow the business, we can invest in the business it’s going to be, it’s going to require change. And we want to grow this business. We want to, we want to change in a healthy way so that we can sustain more clients because we think that…” Because at the time there was like a, I think like right around that time, you guys just closed like a number of deals.

[00:40:42] And we were starved for people and it was like, you know, Marc would be out selling a client you’d be, you know, running some recruiting effort at like JMU or whatever. And it was just sort of like your guys time was just like carved up in so many different ways. And like, obviously you could both do sort of everything that needed to be done in order to like close business and keep the machine running.

[00:41:07] But I mean, it was just like, it was hard to get time with you guys at the time. And so I like, I certainly appreciated that move and the transparency of like what the thought process was to get there. That was very enlightening to me because I had never worked somewhere where like the business trajectory and strategy was being dialogued with like the staff.

[00:41:30] So, you know, that happened, I want to say like a month or two later we talked while I think I did a presentation for you guys about going and pitching companies on like sales training and then delivering sales training. ‘Cause I think I had done a couple of trainings at that point where I had like

[00:41:48] run the training session. 

[00:41:49] Marc Gonyea: [00:41:49] There’s a little hire training. You’re doing that stuff.

[00:41:52]Thaddeus Walsh: [00:41:52] I don’t think I was doing the hire training. I was involved like, because I was more senior. 

[00:41:56] Marc Gonyea: [00:41:56] Yeah. 

[00:41:57] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:41:57] And like and I, and I was able to continue producing like my lead numbers and still have like some time in the margins to be able to coach people. You know, spend some time with new people in their first week or whatever, you know, talk to people about new clients like all that sort of stuff.

[00:42:12] So, I mean, I, I was certainly like a resource that was being tapped, but I don’t think it was formally like running new hire training or anything like that. But I remember I did a presentation you guys and, and you guys were like, “Yeah, that’s great, but you’re going to be a delivery manager.” And I was like, “Oh, okay, sure.”

[00:42:28] So, so I, I mean, I was still calling for Nexsan but I was dialed back to part-time and additional resources were added, I think that was when maybe Twist or Brandon was.  And then…

[00:42:46]Marc Gonyea: [00:42:46] Brenda Taylor. 

[00:42:47] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:42:47] Yeah, maybe Gannon… 

[00:42:48] Chris Corcoran: [00:42:48] That’s 

[00:42:50] right. Yeah. 

[00:42:53] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:42:53] I think Gannon. So, it was, it was me and Mitchell and Gannon for a little while all full-time and then I dialed back and then I think one of the other guys was added onto the on the campaign so that I could start like managing, managing accounts.

[00:43:09] And that was like, that was really hard. You guys took a huge risk and I feel like I like whiffed so hard in so many ways on so many accounts.

[00:43:25] Okay. If you if you talk to Rowan, he may have a different. 

[00:43:28] Marc Gonyea: [00:43:28] Oh, Rowan came back. 

[00:43:32] Multiple times. Yeah, he was telling me that… I liked Rowan. 

[00:43:38] Of course. I mean, he’s

[00:43:41] smart. Another super smart dude. 

[00:43:42] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:43:42] Yeah. I really enjoyed working for him. I just found it really difficult to like, I just wasn’t familiar with BI and I think I reached sort of a point of stubbornness where I sort of wasn’t in that like always learning mindset in the way that I had been for storage.

[00:43:59] And I think that was one of my first accounts that it sort of transit that, that you guys had transition to me from a management standpoint. And so, I mean, yeah, like I made literally every rookie management mistake you can possibly make like every single one. And struggled a lot. And learned a lot, like a lot, a lot. Like like SDRs, if you think you are busy, you are not busy, right?

[00:44:25] Like you are not busy. I was managing 17 clients across something like, yeah, across something like 14 or 15 SDRs, like some people were split 

[00:44:37] or whatever.

[00:44:38]Chris Corcoran: [00:44:38] So, so at that time you were the only 

[00:44:40] DM?

[00:44:41]Thaddeus Walsh: [00:44:41] I was, I was the only person managing, managing accounts that were actively going, that were not you and Chris.

[00:44:52] I think it was maybe like three or six months later. The D Jack came back. Yeah. And then I was a DM for a little while and then Nimit was working on Clarabridge for like… 

[00:45:09] Marc Gonyea: [00:45:09] You referred Nimit. 

[00:45:11] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:45:11] That was the best thing I ever did.

[00:45:14] Marc Gonyea: [00:45:14] Nimit was one of 

[00:45:16] your 

[00:45:16] guys from… 

[00:45:17] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:45:17] Yeah. So I, yeah, I sang with him… 

[00:45:19] Marc Gonyea: [00:45:19] In the Mama’s Boys? 

[00:45:21] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:45:21] In the Mama’s Boys. And he was a freshman when I was a senior and we were at like a like reunion barbecue thing for the summer. And I was talking to, I was like, “Hey.” Like, and at the time he was a senior and was thinking about going to law school

[00:45:36] and I was like, “Okay, cool. Like just, if you, at any point decide you don’t want to do law school, like hit me up ’cause I can get you an interview and I think you would be great at this job.” And he was literally the only person that I, that I would’ve heard in business. 

[00:45:50] Yeah. 

[00:45:51] You guys were always like, “Well, you got to know people.”

[00:45:54] It’s like, “Yeah, but like none of my friends were like, like have the chops. Like I don’t want to just like put people in the, like into the recruitment pipeline ’cause that, that negatively affects my relationship with a company. That negatively affects my relationship with like friend. “Like that’s not awesome.

[00:46:09] Like you, there sort of is like, you got to do some, like pre-filtering. And I mean, when, when Nimit was a freshman, he was, he was clearly not a shy guy, but like he wasn’t, you know, he wasn’t Mr. Campus. I went to a show, I had gone to a show maybe like four months before that barbecue and it was like, “Okay, this guy is Mr.

[00:46:35] Campus.” He knows everybody and everybody loves it. And like, he just exuded Brisbane. And he’s super articulate, can tell stories. Like he is amazing storyteller and like, and he’s ridiculously smart. And so I was like, “Yeah, dude, if there’s one person that, that I think should take a look at this company, it’s you…

[00:46:56] And so if you go off and be a lawyer -great…” Like I would not do that personally because that’s just not the angle that I would take on the current, on job market at the time, there was a glut of lawyer. It was basically like, “Oh, you are J D, so like, you know what, what department store do you work at?” Is like, it was sort of, you know, the, the average sentiment.

[00:47:19] And so he didn’t internship over the summer in New York and with a law firm and then I guess like after that experience or like, he was, “This isn’t really what I want to do.” And so you just sort of call me out of the blue and I was like, “Yes.” I remember going to your office and being like, “Here’s a resume.

[00:47:36] This is my guy. You have to interview him.” And you were like, “This guy lives up in Laurel, Maryland. Like, are you kidding me?” He’s like, “No way.” And I was like, “Chris, this is my one, like you have to interview this guy.” And then I was like I didn’t coach him at all. Like, I didn’t even know what he was coming in for an interview like, because stuff happened like sort of quickly.

[00:47:59] And then I think there was a couple of weeks involved, ’cause like…

[00:48:02]Marc Gonyea: [00:48:02] We’re busy. 

[00:48:03] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:48:03] I mean, I was ridiculously busy. 

[00:48:06] Marc Gonyea: [00:48:06] But in past fits in IT while there were Angelo’s clients. 

[00:48:10] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:48:10] And on breaking 

[00:48:11] the Thadd machine fairly routine basis. But yeah, I mean, I always sort of thought like, oh, if you were, if you refer somebody you’re going to like coach them along and like, you know, put a bug in people’s ears like trying to, nope,

[00:48:25] not at all. Like that whole process went through. And then he was like, “Hey, I got an offer.” I was like, “Sweet. I didn’t even realize you were having like your final interview. Good job.” Like and I mean, he came in, he was working for Clarabridge and it was…

[00:48:38]Marc Gonyea: [00:48:38] I was DM in that Clarabridge.

[00:48:40]Thaddeus Walsh: [00:48:40] With a Tiana at the time? And he was just like took off like a rocket ship

[00:48:50] and so he had been working for memoryBlue for, like nine months and I think it was nine months. And became a DM and it’d take me like a year and a half or whatever. I was like, “Dude, you’ve gotta be kidding me? Really? You call me in here and just like totally, you know, stepping stone twice as fast as I did or whatever.” But I mean, it, when it was when it was me, Nimit or D Jack as DMs you know, it was a lot of fun because that was my core group.

[00:49:19] Marc Gonyea: [00:49:19] That was the core group?

[00:49:21]Thaddeus Walsh: [00:49:21] Yeah. I mean, like that was when we were doing a lot of like paper meeting programs and it’s just… I mean, there was a while where I was over in tech corner to my, my whole team minus the folks who were split between multiple DMs. So all the people that were that I was full-time managing were over in tech corners split between two rooms in like sort of isolation, but it was, it was interesting.

[00:49:47] ‘Cause like we still had a lot of the same culture. Like nobody was there wasn’t like any sort of internal animosity everybody got along really well. Yeah. Yeah. Oh my God. We were, I was in a room with Christian Mori, 

[00:50:01] Marc Gonyea: [00:50:01] Christian Mori. 

[00:50:03] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:50:03] Nelson Imade.

[00:50:07] And like that, that was a blast. That was an absolute blast. I remember, I think Breslin. Yeah. Breslin was definitely over there. Yeah and Nicole.

[00:50:21] Devlin. Nikki D. 

[00:50:24] Marc Gonyea: [00:50:24] She’s 

[00:50:24] a client now. She should be soon.  

[00:50:27] I hope so. 

[00:50:28] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:50:28] We’ll, we’ll tease her.. 

[00:50:30] Marc Gonyea: [00:50:30] Yeah. 

[00:50:30] Do you count on the…?

[00:50:31] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:50:31] Yeah. Who else is over there? 

[00:50:32] Marc Gonyea: [00:50:32] Who else over there…

[00:50:33]Thaddeus Walsh: [00:50:33] That’s a good group. Yeah, it was fun a lot. I, I sort of look back and think like, “Wow, I could have done so much more.” ‘Cause like I had a lot more autonomy to like manage the way that I wanted to manage, but I was just like, so mired and like…

[00:50:48]Marc Gonyea: [00:50:48] You were busy, man.

[00:50:49] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:50:49] Yeah. But like, I was busy because of doing things that were low value a lot of the time and not doing the things that are high value enough at the time. And it was actually the thing about this like, you know, on the drive down, it’s like, you know, ’cause like I have a huge number of criticisms of my own management.

[00:51:09] I think I was a terrible manager. Like, you know,…

[00:51:13] Marc Gonyea: [00:51:13] Don’t…

[00:51:13] be hard on yourself, 

[00:51:13] man. 

[00:51:14] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:51:14] Yeah, but like…

[00:51:15]Marc Gonyea: [00:51:15] Two years out of college. 

[00:51:16] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:51:16] I was like 20. Yeah. It was like 23 at the time. But like, but, but at the same time like I, I have had great managers in both of you and other jobs that have had since and thinking about how I was as a manager to somebody who was straight out of college and this was their first job experience.

[00:51:35] Like, “Sorry.” So… 

[00:51:39] Chris Corcoran: [00:51:39] You learned it, we’ve learned a lot as an SDR. 

[00:51:42] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:51:42] I mean, I learned a ton as an SDR. 

[00:51:44] Chris Corcoran: [00:51:44] You learned a lot as a

[00:51:45] manager. 

[00:51:46] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:51:46] I learned five times as much as the manager. 

[00:51:49] Chris Corcoran: [00:51:49] Talk more about that. 

[00:51:50] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:51:50] So like, at the time my focus, like what I was measured on was P&L so profit and loss which most salespeople never, it doesn’t fly across their mind ever.

[00:52:01] And that completely transformed the way that I look at business in general. And it made that sort of laid some of the foundation for how I think about and how I talk to executive leadership when I’m in dialogues with, you know, C-suite or executive VPs or whatever. So that in itself was huge, but basically all business problems boil down to like, like people management problems, right?

[00:52:27] If you have the perfect person in the perfect role and they’re sort of like independent just sort of do their job, do it better than you could have expected. You know, better than you could and they do it without guidance, that’s like the ideal for, you know, without like supervision guidance, oversight whatever where you’re like driving their work.

[00:52:53] That’s like the ideal scenario, but like that’s unbelievably rare. Like that, that probably doesn’t realistically happen. So like how, how do you get other people to perform in the way that you would want a bunch of you to perform? Like if you could clone yourself and just have a bunch of clones, how could you get a group of people who don’t think like you, who don’t have the same experiences? All that stuff.

[00:53:27] And like, my biggest takeaway was at the time I was managing, I wanted my team members to be successful. I genuinely wanted them to be successful, but I wanted them to be successful for the wrong reasons. I wanted them to be successful because it was that would be a positive for me. Not, I wasn’t sitting there cheering for them and getting excited because I was not as a primary reason, but because I was personally like staked in their per, in their career and their personal success.

[00:54:04] I didn’t understand that at the time. And if I go like wind back the ends of times, I would slap myself and be like, “Hey, treat your people like they’re people, like you care about them more than you care about yourself. And invest your time that way. And the placements and the growth and the, you know, successful stable client base will come.”

[00:54:31] And I just didn’t understand that dynamic. It’s like I was pushing people to do better instead of coaching people on how instilling skills and knowledge that I thought would help them do better. And so there was a lot of just like, “Go get them, tiger.” You know, not super high value, like pep talks that in retrospect were probably like a negative in a lot of ways.

[00:55:02] I think I’m a genuinely nice person. So like, I didn’t, I don’t think anybody really like despised me personally, but I just don’t think I was a great manager. I also like did a lot of, you know, ‘do as I say not as I do’ type stuff which is like a cardinal center management. You can’t tell your people to do something and then not do it yourself. That you, I mean, that is the definition of leading from the back and you can’t… I, that just never works.

[00:55:33] You lose all confidence. So… 

[00:55:37] Marc Gonyea: [00:55:37] Dropping. Some knowledge for them. 

[00:55:39] Chris Corcoran: [00:55:39] So just something you learned a lot as a, as a man, as a manager. 

[00:55:42] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:55:42] I learned a ton and it actually made me a better rep further down the line because I could, I could see what my manager was thinking or doing or why they were pushing something.

[00:55:55] Because in a lot of cases, it’s like, oh, your manager tells you you have to do this thing or you know, you’re going to pivot or you’re going to switch territories or you going to do something. And whether you, regardless of whether you agree with it or not, like your response is going to impact your relationship with your boss in a positive or negative way or a neutral way and a moving forward fashion.

[00:56:16] And if you don’t understand like the why behind their decision and you meet it with resistance, then it, it sort of, it’s very easy for a manager to get frustrated with that sort of response from, from salespeople. And I think a lot of salespeople just sort of say, “Oh, well, I’m getting true to here, blah, blah, blah.”

[00:56:41] And it’s like well maybe, maybe not. Maybe your manager already went to bat for you and this is a decision that’s being made outside of their hands. And like contextualizing all of those sorts of details make it a lot easier to like digest changes that represent risk or, you know, lower levels of certainty of income and all that sort of stuff.

[00:57:06] So it definitely helped me a lot. The P&L insight was great because, I mean…

[00:57:13] I remember when I… So I went from memoryBlue to go work for Windward. I got hired one of your clients. 

[00:57:18] Marc Gonyea: [00:57:18] Yep. 

[00:57:18] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:57:18] Got hired by one of my clients. Went to go work as, as a bag carrying rep, but I was mostly based inside ’cause I was focused in the DC Virginia area selling to the, to the private sector.

[00:57:32] And that company had about a 50:50 split between private and public, but I remember a conversation I had with the CEO, Sean. Sean McDermott on where, you know, he had been negotiating like switching our email provider and you know, there had been sort of a sentiment of like, “Oh, why are we wasting our time on this?”

[00:57:50] And I was talking to him about it, I was like, “Oh, well like if it’s $40,000 less over the course of a year, it’s like, you know what I don’t know what the prices were and like the average margin on a head count is like 10%. That’s like closing a $400,000 deal. So like cutting costs suddenly like has a profound impact on the business operations in a way that the majority of employees just generally don’t understand.

[00:58:20] And it’s like, if I can do the same, but cut 5% of my costs depending on what my typical like, you know, profitable return is on, you know, any number of additional iterations of, of, you know, an additional clients and additional, you know, widget solar or whatever, I can back the math in and say, “This is effectively the same as selling.” You know, more widgets or you know, closing more clients.

[00:58:46] And that sort of a perspective. That is how CFOs think. That is how CEOs think, because that’s how their comp, that’s what their responsibility is. And so it’s like, “Oh, I don’t understand why we’re getting rid of this tool. I love this tool. They’re making a switch to this other tools.” Like, yeah, but like, is having the tool you’d like versus tool

[00:59:07] you don’t know, if you like it or not worth like an additional $2 million in sales ’cause like that’s what it would take to justify keeping the more expensive tool that you really like. And when you can frame stuff like that it, it sort of eases a lot of the mental stress in that, in like the tumultuousness of being a, a salesperson.

[00:59:31] So,… 

[00:59:32] Chris Corcoran: [00:59:32] So you talked about kind of your growth as an SDR being based on the number of back then that you had by high volume of conversations. Talk about what it was like as a manager when it, you know, ’cause a lot of people are SDR managers where they’re working for one company and they’re managing SDRs versus as a DM.

[00:59:48] You have to oversee a portfolio of clients. 

[00:59:50] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:59:50] Yeah.

[00:59:50]Chris Corcoran: [00:59:50] So talk a little bit about that in the, in the challenges and also the benefits of…? 

[00:59:56] Thaddeus Walsh: [00:59:56] Yeah. So challenges was just keeping stuff straight like, because I was building a book out and because the need for memoryBlue services is very broad still to this day.

[01:00:09] Like I represented an additional capacity to take on more clients because and, and displacing some of the workload that you and Marc had taken on with managing and executing on clients that we were already working with. So that freed you guys up to go sell more and I had sort of, you know… The, the the overall game plan was I w I was to transition away from any SDR responsibilities at all and, and be a full-time DM.

[01:00:40] And there was like weeks where I would do like three or four onboardings. And it was just like, you know, you sit down with a client for two and a half hours, you get the whole company story, you learn about their business process. You learn, you meet their reps. You talk about, you know, you basically go through their whole, their whole go-to market pitch and discuss the logistics of you know, when are you going to meet? What the touch points are?

[01:01:02] Is the, you know, is the SDR gonna work in a my office or your office? Are they going to work out of my office four days a week in your office one day a week? Like all that sort of stuff and that’s just like a big, big taxing data dump. And you like, the second that meeting is done, it’s like off to the races.

[01:01:22] That’s like, that is go time. Because like the time between the end of that meeting and the first lead is like a big indicator on whether or not they were going to continue the contract completely. So that was like, go, go, go, go, go. And I think there were days where like, I would have a kickoff in the morning, kick off in the afternoon and, and that was like scheduling problems on my part.

[01:01:46] Like I should just have known to not do that, but like out of my own ignorance would do stuff like that. And then it’s like, I would be… because I knew the tech enough to help make the script better enough that it was worth my involvement in offering the script or, or being involved in offering the script.

[01:02:06] But a lot of it was like getting the SDR who’s on the client conversationally fluent. So that like, so that the client, the next time that they talked to us, would you usually be like three or four days later where we’re like, “Okay, this, you know, we’ve gone away, we’ve come back. This is like a sample list.

[01:02:23] And this is, you know, our sheet music. And you know, here’s like some thoughts we have around like outreach and, you know, do you have any red lines for like, you know, for the list that we put together or any of these existing clients or any of these like active deals your reps are working, that sort of stuff.”

[01:02:38] And I thought it was very important to get my SDRs up to some assemblance of being able to dialogue about the messaging in a believable way. And you’ve only got like two or three days to do it and they have to build a list. And, you know, you have to put together a sheet like a deliverable document and doing the like multiple of those simultaneously was just like, it was brutal.

[01:03:04] Like, it was, it was very difficult to do those in such rapid succession. I will say the benefit to it is I have a profound understanding of like tech in general, because I had clients that did everything under the sun. Like, you know, generic sort of box moving resellers to, you know, file transfer solutions like Cleo and order to cash billing like cycle 30 and business intelligence and business intelligence consulting services, info SAPs and

[01:03:41] like wifi antennas that can support like thousands of people with Xirrus and solar winds, which was like, sort of my first glimpse into the whole like operations management, network management, config management type stuff. And so, like I just gorge myself on like enterprise technology like ener, anything to do with technology that would be sold to an enterprise organization,

[01:04:04] I had probably worked with a client who was in that market or at the very least directly to Dixon’s at that point. And so I had a really solid understanding of a ton of different pieces and that lended a huge amount of credibility to me, because I would like, I would just like chat with clients or like, you know, a rep would come to the office to sit down with the SDR and you know, they would have a background in something else it would have come from, you know, like, I dunno, look of firewall company like F5 or whatever,… And they would,

[01:04:38] be selling BI and I’d be able to talk to them about, you know, their background at F5 and you’d be like,…

[01:04:44] Hell yeah, you would know about that stuff. 

[01:04:46] Chris Corcoran: [01:04:46] Yeah.

[01:04:47]Thaddeus Walsh: [01:04:47] Which was which I felt like a lot of credibility. That was, it’s still super useful to me because like, I have a phenomenal context of like what enterprise IT ecosystems generally look like.

[01:05:00] And there’s whole product categories that people like are woefully unaware of. People have absolutely no idea how complicated logistics streams are. And the only reason I know about it is Cleo, like, you know. Walmart route, their own file transfer protocol, like standard so that people wouldn’t send, you know, a truck full of ice cream to a warehouse that doesn’t have enough refrigeration space for it.

[01:05:27] Like they were really good at that and yeah, so just like sort of the technology and the business processes that, that, those technology support, like that was a huge benefit to me. 

[01:05:38] Marc Gonyea: [01:05:38] Let’s talk about that. So, so what kind of, how you transition your career? And what you’re doing now? And kind of, kind of 

[01:05:45] where you’ve gone, because, you know, you were for Nexsan and then you were in Cyber for a little while or not so much in Cyber anymore, but that because you would know a lot of these backgrounds.

[01:05:55] So I think it’s very curious for the people listening kind of how you approach… 

[01:05:59] Thaddeus Walsh: [01:05:59] yeah. So like I’ve gone all the way around the Maryland, Baltimore, let’s say. So I went to work for Windward, they were IT service management consulting. So config management, ops management, setting up like network optimization, orchestrating server provisioning, all that sort of stuff.

[01:06:14] And they do that for the federal in the commercial space. I went from working at Windward to working for a company called Chesapeake Systems. They are a video post-production tech integrator. So like video editors need like really ridiculous, like performance capabilities and they’re big headaches with like collaborating on video editing.

[01:06:36] So, that, that makes that technology ecosystem very complicated and they’re very specialized in that. So I did that. And then I went from Chesapeake to actually worked for Nexsan as, as like a W2 employee. And so I was on their inside team, I got promoted to be a channel manager. They cut the channel manager role

[01:06:57] and so I got let go. So a week after I closed on my house and a month before my oldest son was born. 

[01:07:06] Marc Gonyea: [01:07:06] Wow. 

[01:07:07] Thaddeus Walsh: [01:07:07] And but I mean, the nice thing was two weeks later, my former boss who I had reported to on the inside sales team called me up and said, “Hey, can you come back to the insight team?” And so I actually,

[01:07:20] it turned into like a two week vacation or they take me out all night, like stored PTO, all my accrued PTO. And, you know, I was able to go back to the inside team and…

[01:07:30]Marc Gonyea: [01:07:30] McDermott? Or is somebody else?

[01:07:31]Thaddeus Walsh: [01:07:31] Was reporting to a woman named Chris Bucci. 

[01:07:34] Marc Gonyea: [01:07:34] Okay. 

[01:07:35] Thaddeus Walsh: [01:07:35] Shout out to Chris Bucci. I would recommend hiring that woman and working for that woman any day of the week.

[01:07:40] But I actually was supporting. 

[01:07:41] Marc Gonyea: [01:07:41] Okay. 

[01:07:42] Thaddeus Walsh: [01:07:42] So I was doing like 300 to 400 quotes a quarter for that guy. 

[01:07:47] Marc Gonyea: [01:07:47] Wow. 

[01:07:48] Thaddeus Walsh: [01:07:48] I mean like the guys have the definition of, of hustle. Like he, he, I don’t know how he kept so many deals in flight in his head at all times using like yellow and white legal pad. That’s literally is his process. 

[01:08:04] Chris Corcoran: [01:08:04] In two cell phones.

[01:08:07] Marc Gonyea: [01:08:07] Like it was not work. 

[01:08:08] Thaddeus Walsh: [01:08:08] People laugh about two cell phones. Like I would stay like we would do, you know, we would go to VMworld or, you know, he and I would meet up very relatively infrequently to like go and, and, you know, do a show or whatever. And I would be like standing five feet away from him and watching him literally like flipping mute on and off on two different typhoons simultaneously and like carrying two different conversations.

[01:08:33] And like I could tell when I was one of two conversations he was carrying, so I’d be like, “I’ll let you go.” Like, “Can you be like? Nope.” Like we’re, we’re talking about this discount like, “Whoa, tell me, like, what do we need to be at in order to close this deal level bar?” Like, you know, “What are you going to get pushed back on?”

[01:08:50] So working for McDermott was awesome. And, and so I was an inside rep at that time. I had a son, which was awesome because I would I’d walk him to daycare and then go and walk and pick them up, which was phenomenal. I got just like, not having a commute tons of time with the kid was great, but like, you know, storage was not necessarily the market I wanted to live and die in, just ’cause like every new application starts in AWS or Google Cloud or, you know, not a data center.

[01:09:22] So the number of opportunities was declining over time and the quality of the opportunities and the competitiveness on those deals was getting worse and worse. Like we had to get, we would take deeper and deeper discounts in order to like win business. And, and a lot of resellers were just like, “Yeah, we’re just not focused on this.

[01:09:39] We’re selling software, we’re selling, you know, other… We’re selling services, we’re selling other stuff.” So, then I randomly got a call out of the blue from a recruiter over at Tenable, which is headquartered in Columbia where I live. And and he was like, “Hey, I saw your profile on LinkedIn. You know, I’ve got a commercial territory manager position open.”

[01:09:58] And I was like, “What does commercial territory management mean?” It’s basically like, mid market. Right? And I was like, “Pass.” And then he was like shocked ’cause he was like, “You’re an inside rep and you’re like, this is a quota-carrying position, presumably like more money.” But I was getting paid pretty well by Nexsan.

[01:10:17] So I wasn’t like, I wasn’t gonna go to like take them you know, mid-market role. 

[01:10:22] Marc Gonyea: [01:10:22] No. 

[01:10:22] Thaddeus Walsh: [01:10:22] And, and he was like, “Well, what, what do you mean?” And I was like, I just like gave, I just had to explain the storage architecture that I came up with to like a VP of engineering at McKinsey as to why they should buy us as opposed to spending another like $2 million on extra grid to support their Splunk environment.

[01:10:44] Like I’m, I’m not trying to sell the like, you know, mom and pop shops of like 50 people or whatever. And he was like, “Oh, okay, well, I don’t have any enterprise territory management rep positions open, but I do have a bunch of enterprise customer success manager position.” I was like, “I’d never heard of customer success.”

[01:11:03] And now I can’t believe I hadn’t heard of it ’cause it seems like, I mean…

[01:11:08]Marc Gonyea: [01:11:08] It’s everywhere. 

[01:11:09] Thaddeus Walsh: [01:11:09] Yeah. Like, you know, recurring revenue softwares, salespeople, salespeople or you know, ongoing account support, farming, securing renewals and all that stuff. And I was like, “Hey, this sounds like a lot of the stuff that I really love about being an inside rep

[01:11:24] and it’s going to give me opportunity to not have to be to not have to be constantly hunting for net new.” Which was like one of the things I was frustrated about with the storage ’cause like finding net new opportunities was like genuinely difficult at that point. 

[01:11:38] Marc Gonyea: [01:11:38] Yeah. 

[01:11:39] Thaddeus Walsh: [01:11:39] And so on and so I, I took an enterprise CSM role at Tenable.

[01:11:46] Didn’t know anything about vul management, didn’t know what a CBD was. Couldn’t tell you the first thing about like network scanning and never heard the term Nessus before. But like I knew because I had worked with so many different clients at memoryBlue, when I went in my interview for a Tenable, I had like looked at their website and done a little bit of reading

[01:12:07] and I was like, “Well, the entire security portfolio consists of enlisted 25 different like technology categories that are highly relevant to enterprise security.” And it was like, and you know, vul management is like a very important piece of this. It should inform a lot of the behaviors and a lot of the focus of these other tools and the guy who eventually became my boss, who I’m talking to tomorrow was like, “Okay.”

[01:12:33] And apparently like I walked out of the room and he looked at the, the other manager who was interviewing me at the time. And he was like, “So we’re hiring this.” out. And so I, you know, jumped on that team. It was like 50 people covering the overwhelming lion share of Tenable’s rep annual revenue like in, in the form of renewals.

[01:12:53] But but I was pretty successful with, with growth just because like I like teaching. And so I did a lot of like, “Hey, you’re at this like stage of maturity, this is sort of what the next stage of maturity typically looks like. This is what it would take to get there.” And a lot of it’s, a lot of it was wasn’t even change

[01:13:09] like wasn’t even upset. I think it was just like, “Hey, you need to like configure this differently or like, you know, go talk to these people so that you can start like automatically delivering reports to them so that they can consume them without you like preprocessing and all that sort of stuff.” And then, you know, developing relationships and customers really appreciate when you help them be more successful.

[01:13:29] So then they would come back and be like, “Hey, so we’re acquiring a company. I need like 15000 more like IPS worth of licensing for my security center.” 

[01:13:37] Marc Gonyea: [01:13:37] Yeah.

[01:13:37]Thaddeus Walsh: [01:13:37] And, and so, you know, I developed really, really awesome relationships with customers because I had the ability to meet with them on a continual basis.

[01:13:46] I’m still really tight with this guy JR. who was at the University of Nebraska and he and I like texted all the time. He, you know, he’s like one of my favorite people. So that was awesome. Then they up changed the comp plan and I was like, “Oh, I think I’m going to make less money and I’m going to have to work way harder to make less money.”

[01:14:03] And at the time Taylor Pierce had just taken a, it just agreed to take a position at ZeroNorth which is an orchestration platform around application security which I knew nothing about. But he was like, “I think you can be an SE.” And so I interviewed and I knew I could be an SEO I just didn’t know if I could convince anybody that I could…

[01:14:26] So I was their first sales engineer and learned a ton about, yeah. About, you know, basically as a sales rep, I was at, you know, probably like two feet deep in terms of my level of understanding, but when you’re like, when you are in the firing gallery and you know, the the technical people on the other side of the phone are, you know, think that this product is bogus and they’re being dragged in by, you know, some leadership position. They’re going to play stump the chump or whatever you want to call it.

[01:15:00] And you gotta, you gotta know your stuff. And so I was just like ordering myself on technical information about build processes, DevOps, application security methodologies, and what the tools do and how to react to the findings those tools, all that stuff and then… And then most recently where I’m, where I’m at now I’m at a company called Cmd.

[01:15:20] So we do Linux Linux,  we call it IDR. So infrastructure detection and response. There’s a whole EDR world out there. We think that the way that other ordinance, like other solutions do that function on Linux is lacking and so we do it in a different way. We do it with new technology, shout out to eBPF if anybody listening knows what that means, kudos, because it’s, it’s pretty new.

[01:15:49] Chris Corcoran: [01:15:49] Talk to the listeners a little bit about 

[01:15:50] what your role is now as a pre-sales engineer. Like what does that mean? 

[01:15:53] Thaddeus Walsh: [01:15:53] Yeah, so I, I don’t, you know, do the little chat through the slide deck and talk about, you know, the history of the company and on most of the time I get tagged in when it’s time to start explaining

[01:16:10] how the tech works, how to use the technology. I run demos for, you know, I have three sales reps and one of the SE who’s currently out on paternity leave. So it’s been, it’s been a little tight. But yeah, just running, running demos, showing what the technology can do in a way that is intelligible to sort of different levels of technical, you know, technical audiences, right?

[01:16:36] Because you could be talking to somebody who isn’t going to be the operator, but maybe is the person that the operator would report to. You have to be able to explain the value without sort of overwhelming them with the technical minutia, but then you may also be talking to somebody who’s been like a Linux administrator for 40 years and you have to like be able to dialogue with that person.

[01:16:59] So, so there’s that. And then, you know, since we’re a startup, oftentimes the next step is doing a proof of concept. So getting, you know, getting their tenant provision within our multitenant platform and doing initial configuration, making sure that they’re able to get it set up, that they can install our agent and that and that we’re able to tune the policies and triggers. And all so that the, they basically see the important stuff and don’t have like a bunch of background noise and then helping out with how is your team going to use it,

[01:17:34] who is going to use this, where does the data go, where’s the data presented, what, what other tools are we integrating with. So we have like hooks into Slack and JIRA and all that sort of stuff. So, I mean, I love my job because I’m very interested in the technology. And, and so I don’t know if I’ve told you guys this, I like have a very strong sentiment that I will never take a job that doesn’t have a very warm welcome. Like, a very… 

[01:18:02] Marc Gonyea: [01:18:02] Let’s talk about that.

[01:18:03]Thaddeus Walsh: [01:18:03] Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like I remember when I first started… 

[01:18:07] Marc Gonyea: [01:18:07] And why is that? Because I’ve done really well. 

[01:18:10] Yeah.

[01:18:10]Thaddeus Walsh: [01:18:10] And so I remember when I first started, it was like… When I first started memoryBlue I’ve talked to the family members about like, “Hey, I got, got this job offer. I’m going to take it, blah, blah.”

[01:18:24] “Oh, what do you do?” Oh, it’s like, you know, cold calling for clients who are tech companies and generating meetings, blah, blah, blah. And it’s like, “Oh, great. Like, you know, does it pay well?” Like, that’s just sort of like a natural piece that comes up and there was like, nobody in my world was like, “Oh, you don’t want to take that job.

[01:18:45] That sounds like, you know, used car sales, whatever.” But there was definitely sort of that like sentiment of like, I don’t want to tell them that like this could be awful and like a nightmare because there are shops up there that will do like recoverable draws and all sorts of stuff and it’s basically just abusing their, you know, brutalizing their employees into either like servitude or or I dunno, like psychological submission, but like yeah.

[01:19:13] You know, and again, to the comp transition, one of the things that I really appreciated was like a bar was never taking the bonus money back. So like there’s no reason to artificially inflate a quota ’cause like the money is committed to a pot and the pot is split amongst the reps who hit their number as opposed to…

[01:19:33]Chris Corcoran: [01:19:33] Come back to the company.

[01:19:34] Thaddeus Walsh: [01:19:34] Yeah. And so I thought that that actually was like a huge point of why, why I had confidence in taking a position that had like a substantial variable  component and then I obviously did well and have done well throughout my career. So like, I obviously when I’m, you know, taking a new position or or negotiating comp with you know, with a company that I’m looking to take a job with, I’m always trying to push my base up,

[01:20:01] ’cause like guaranteed money is guaranteed, there’s no reason to not do that. But I just feel like I would have such a hard time personally, like not feeling like the urgency. If, if I knew that kicking my feet up was like an option and it didn’t affect my bottom line. 

[01:20:20] Marc Gonyea: [01:20:20] Yeah. 

[01:20:21] Thaddeus Walsh: [01:20:21] ‘Cause like, I, I need to buy a bigger house and like,…

[01:20:24]Marc Gonyea: [01:20:24] Yeah. 

[01:20:24] Thaddeus Walsh: [01:20:24] I need a new car.

[01:20:25] And like, you know, money doesn’t grow on trees. So it’s personally, I think it’s good. I, I distinctly remember a conversation I had with my brother. When I was a delivery manager remembered at memoryBlue and I was telling him, ’cause like at the time he was in sports marketing, which is like, if you don’t know anything about sports marketing, it’s like the harshest chimney across the structure.

[01:20:46] Like the people at the very, very top make a lot of money and everybody underneath them make like nothing. And, and my brother’s older than me, so like he up until that point in his life always looked at me as like the little brother and he just sort of assumed that he was like ahead of me in every aspect.

[01:21:04] And so I was talking to him, I’m like, “Dude, if you want to get out, like, you need definitely do a sales job. Like you…” Like he’s, you know, intelligent person who can talk eloquently. Like it’s, you know, he’s a, he’s a sharp guy. And I was like, “You can definitely do it.” And he’s like, “Yeah, but like, I just don’t know if I could do it.

[01:21:20] The variable…” I’m like, “Well, what are you making now?” And he tells me a number. I’m like, “Well, I made like 40 grand more than that a year on my base. And then I have this variable comp component.” And that was like earth-shattering. That was a transformative in my relationship with my brother. I think people oftentimes have a lot of apprehension about variable comp because of like a fear of like a boiler room situation. Where like, oh, you know, seller die type situation is just like, not the ways that, you know, especially in…

[01:21:51]Marc Gonyea: [01:21:51] TV and movies.

[01:21:53] Thaddeus Walsh: [01:21:53] Yeah. 

[01:21:53] Well, I mean, there are places that do it that way. There are also, you know, also historically certainly brokerage firms and stuff like that. That was that wasn’t terribly uncommon. 

[01:22:03] Marc Gonyea: [01:22:03] So that doesn’t make for a good movie though. 

[01:22:05] Thaddeus Walsh: [01:22:05] Yeah. It doesn’t make, it doesn’t make for a good movie like the overwhelming majority of, of the employees like doing really well financially, moving forward in their careers, making astronomically more money and then, you know, taking referrals.

[01:22:20] Like, I mean, I, I gotta say like the quality of so when I was at ZeroNorth, we were a memoryBlue customer, one of the first Boston office customers. And Katie Lowry, our SDR is like a prolific talent. She’s phenomenal. I spent like a little bit of time with her talking to her about some basic concepts first starting out.

[01:22:47] And like, I understood where she was coming from because I had worked for you guys and I had been as DM. So I did like a little sort of teaser trailer of like what I would’ve done back in the day in terms of like equipping an SDR. And man, she just killed it. Like she,… And so we hired her and she continued to kill it.

[01:23:09] So I mean she’s yeah, the, the, the, the quality of, of people seems to be extremely high and, you know, and my experience was like, “Oh my God. If, if this is the type of candidate that you’re pulling in, like, it must be fairly easy to find like follow on business.” 

[01:23:29] Marc Gonyea: [01:23:29] Sometimes. I mean, the game hasn’t changed. 

[01:23:32] Chris Corcoran: [01:23:32] It hasn’t. 

[01:23:33] Marc Gonyea: [01:23:33] The same thing still apply.

[01:23:34] I mean, there’s LinkedIn sales navigator and there’s a better easier way to record the calls and listen to them and break them down. But it’s the 

[01:23:41] same shit to work really hard, be 

[01:23:44] curious,… 

[01:23:46] Thaddeus Walsh: [01:23:46] Technique.

[01:23:46]Marc Gonyea: [01:23:46] Technique. Yeah, take it serious to craft and you got to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. It sounds so cheesy, but that’s, that’s, those are like the core fundamentals and everything else is a distraction.

[01:23:59] Thaddeus Walsh: [01:23:59] Yeah.

[01:24:00]Marc Gonyea: [01:24:00] Not really, but kind of. I mean, you still have to love the tech. You have to learn to 

[01:24:03] code, right? 

[01:24:05] Thaddeus Walsh: [01:24:05] You don’t need to know everything about the tech. You need to be conversationally fluent. That’s what I’m always for, conversational fluent. 

[01:24:14] Marc Gonyea: [01:24:14] Yes, yes. Your repertoire 

[01:24:16] that better than some others, most others, but what you said earlier is spot on.

[01:24:22] So it’s like Thaddeus is literally, you’re the same person, which I love. Chris, I love you. But you have so much more experience now that you’re dropping insights that you never would have been able to drop. Hopefully the people who are listening can take into account that you’ve got to learn these things because it’s so critically important.

[01:24:40] Thaddeus Walsh: [01:24:40] I re I remember doing a thought exercise because I had, I had a couple of reps were pushing back on quotas at one point. Having done month, frustrated their client is, you know, sort of…

[01:24:53]Marc Gonyea: [01:24:53] These rest of SDRs work for you?

[01:24:55]Thaddeus Walsh: [01:24:55] These rest of SDRs I was managing at memoryBlue. And you know, the dialogue would go somewhat similar.

[01:25:01] I actually used a thought experiment. And I would say, “Okay, so you think your quota is too high. I’m telling you that if your quota is lower and you hit a lower number, we’re not going to keep the client, right? The client’s going to be,… so I can’t give you a target where you can succeed

[01:25:22] and the business fails. Like your success target has to be the business success story.” And if that’s impossible, then that’s a self solving problem. Like in two months this all goes away, right? Because if, if your client wants 70 leads and you have to put in, you know, and they want to pay for halftime SDR and, you know… Look champagne taste beer budget that exists in every market and you’re, you can’t necessarily solve that problem.

[01:25:51] But, but think about it this way. Like imagine Marc Gonyea is assigned as the SDR on this account or Chris Corcoran is assigned as the SDR on this account and the success or failure of all of memoryBlue rests on getting leads and keeping this client happy. What did they do? Like what do you think they would do?

[01:26:19] And I would just ask the SDR who’s asking me for a quarter reduction, like, “What do you think they would do?” And people oftentimes won’t engage in this intellectual exercise because they sort of like envisioning you guys actually in the seat calling like you did at the very beginning of the business, when it was just the two of you is a very uncomfortable place for them to go. But in doing so it’s like, “Oh, what would they do?”

[01:26:46] Well, they would probably start building list. And they would probably reach out to people that they know to ask for insights on what who are good people to talk to. And, you know, do you know anything about this 

[01:27:03] space? 

[01:27:03] Marc Gonyea: [01:27:03] I don’t know Thadds, that is designed to do that better manager. 

[01:27:06] Thaddeus Walsh: [01:27:06] I mean, I, I had, I like flashes of, of, of, of okayness.

[01:27:11] But, but I mean, it was funny because sometimes the rep of like come up with some really good ideas. Like, oh, you know, start setting up like Google at the time, it was a Google alerts, which I don’t think is a thing anymore. But like, you know, running Google searches for like news articles that talk about this sort of stuff so that you can find prospects or find, you know, like talk tracks that are aligned with what your product does. You know, going and reading or watching YouTube videos that the executives of your client have produced and put out there. Like all of that stuff that maybe it’s easy to take your foot off the gas pedal as an SDR and not do that sort of stuff.

[01:27:59] Marc Gonyea: [01:27:59] Yeah. 

[01:28:01] Thaddeus Walsh: [01:28:01] Like when push comes to shove, if you’ve really want to be successful, you can come up with a lot of really good ideas for additional avenues to put effort in. That’s going to increase your likelihood of success. And then once you start realizing success, It’s like a drug. You’re just like, like when you get good meetings, when you’re jamming with a client, when you’re making good money, like work is fun and you’re excited to do it and it, and like all the negativity sort of washed away.

[01:28:31] It’s funny how money does that? 

[01:28:34] Marc Gonyea: [01:28:34] That’s a good note.

[01:28:36]Chris Corcoran: [01:28:36] No, I want one more thing I want to ask you about that is, talk a little bit about the value you’ve seen in the, the 

[01:28:43] memoryBlue network? 

[01:28:44] Thaddeus Walsh: [01:28:44] I mean, I, at my last company I’ve literally was able to transition into the job that many people had told me I should be doing for my entire career.

[01:28:54] And I was always resistant to which is becoming an SE. I wouldn’t have had that opportunity, I wouldn’t have been able to make that transition. Had I not worked with Taylor Pierce? Had I not kept up my relationship with him? We had Ian Wisecarver, on… great Brandon Eyring, was Kevin Weadock like.

[01:29:18] Yeah. I mean, like just heaps of people in my personal net. And so interestingly, I recently sort of doubled down on reaching out to people. Like I talked to Nelson for like an hour and he’s doing great. 

[01:29:37] Marc Gonyea: [01:29:37] Yeah. 

[01:29:37] Thaddeus Walsh: [01:29:37] Super new spot. At a really interesting company and he’s fired up about it. And I was like, “Dude, that’s an that’s a super awesome space to be in. Because you can be like, you can be creative and sell intelligently.”

[01:29:49] And so like, one piece of advice is what do you do in the margin time, like throughout the day, as you’re a salesperson for like indefinitely for the rest of your career. Don’t jump on Instagram, jump on Twitter, jump on Facebook, like play a game on your phone, like, you know, watch random YouTube videos. Instead, send texts to your fellow SDR.

[01:30:15] To like your peers, people who are progressing through their career in a similar fashion, because like, if you find yourself needing a job, it’s really hard to like reach out to somebody you haven’t talked to you in like a year or five. 

[01:30:29] Marc Gonyea: [01:30:29] Very interesting. 

[01:30:30] Thaddeus Walsh: [01:30:30] But it’s really easy if you have a cadence and so like the number of people that I sustained, like through, I mean, it’s like a drip, right?

[01:30:39] It’s like a drip communication. Not, not to like, overprocess eyes this concept, but it’s like, if, if you haven’t talked to somebody and you show up and you’re like, “Hey, I’m looking for like a, a sales position, do you know anything”? It’s like, “Oh, well you’re literally just calling me to get a job.” And like, “I don’t.

[01:31:01] No, like off the top of my head.” But even when you’re in a sales role, people want to know what you’re doing. So go, who are you with, what do they do. And you get to give a little, you know, one to two minute elevator pitch to somebody who’s friendly to you. You know what? They’re talking to people. And those people are very likely people that you may want to talk to.

[01:31:23] So you basically can seed the world with a bunch of people who have like a very lightweight, like prospecting engine in their head, but they’re listening for certain things that are pertinent to what you’re selling. And oh, by the way, these are people that you’re friends with that, you know, may or may not be involved in your social life directly,

[01:31:46] but at the same time like the likelihood that you’re going to run in at this point, especially with the size of the company, the likelihood that you’re going to work with other people. I mean, the reason why I got to call at Tenable was because Eric Johnson had been hired, worked on their BDR team, got promoted to a commercial territory manager position there and crushed it.

[01:32:07] And they were like, “We want more of that guy.” So they saw, “Oh, where did you work? Oh, at Tenable, memoryBlue. Where did this guy Thaddeus work? Oh, he used to work at memoryBlue.” That’s like, literally why I got a call from that recruiter. And so, you know, the, it’s sort of like the prestige of your, of, of your alma mater like as an institution.

[01:32:29] I mean, the reputation of memoryBlue is very strong in the entry. And it should because growth has been prolific. I was the 11th SDR when I started. 

[01:32:41] Chris Corcoran: [01:32:41] Wow. 

[01:32:43] Marc Gonyea: [01:32:43] That’s crazy. 

[01:32:44] Chris Corcoran: [01:32:44] Wow. 

[01:32:47] Thaddeus Walsh: [01:32:47] I mean, a huge cubicle. 

[01:32:52] Marc Gonyea: [01:32:52] Those days are gone. 

[01:32:53] Chris Corcoran: [01:32:53] These days are gone. 

[01:32:55] Marc Gonyea: [01:32:55] Alright, Thaddeus. 

[01:32:56] Chris Corcoran: [01:32:56] Thanks, 

[01:32:56] this was amazing. We appreciate the wisdom. 

[01:32:59] Thaddeus Walsh: [01:32:59] It was a lot of fun to like, think about and remember a lot of stuff.

[01:33:03] Chris Corcoran: [01:33:03] We didn’t even 

[01:33:04] talk about your seven hour drive home. 

[01:33:05] Marc Gonyea: [01:33:05] But, we talked about PREB.

[01:33:07]Thaddeus Walsh: [01:33:07] Snowpocalypse, OPM. Yeah,…

[01:33:12]Marc Gonyea: [01:33:12] That was my speaking of bad 

[01:33:13] manager calls. I remember Chris was busy with 

[01:33:15] something 

[01:33:17] and people, everyone’s coming to my office and like, “Hey, can we go? It’s supposed to snow shit done. It’s going to snow a lot.”

[01:33:24] I’m like, “Nah.” 

[01:33:26] I didn’t know. 

[01:33:27] Thaddeus Walsh: [01:33:27] At the time the response was, “What does OPM say?” 

[01:33:30] Marc Gonyea: [01:33:30] Yeah, that was it. But 

[01:33:32] even then, even then, yeah. So maybe they didn’t call it. You’re right. But even if they had called it I was cool about what OPM set for the morning starts, but for their dismissals, like OPM, like, ’cause I was so not traditional.

[01:33:43] Thaddeus Walsh: [01:33:43] So they did, done early dismissal, like two or three times a month prior and had been like,…

[01:33:50]Marc Gonyea: [01:33:50] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[01:33:52]Thaddeus Walsh: [01:33:52] And I remember you were like, specifically like, “OPM is like killing me. People, peace now.” And then like, we’re losing, you know, we’re losing call time at that point. And I was, I grew up in New England.

[01:34:04] So I’m like not afraid of driving snow aside from people in the Mid-Atlantic. But yeah, I think it was actually I think it was 11 hours to get home. I, I left around like four and I think I got home around like three. 

[01:34:21] And got call from my, you know, two hours later, wanted to know what the deal was. Like, “Jeff, 

[01:34:25] I just got home.”

[01:34:26] I was like, “Jeff, I hit, it literally took me, like I left at four o’clock yesterday.” And I felt so bad about that. I mean, it was, I stopped at the Harris Teeter and I bought like food and magazines fully expect to get stuck. And a case of water. And then I sat on the end of the toll road like for five hours

[01:34:49] ’cause people just like got out of their cars on the offering and took forever to get tow trucks down. So, 

[01:34:56] Marc Gonyea: [01:34:56] So we’ll save that for another podcast. 

[01:34:57] Chris Corcoran: [01:34:57] Yeah. Very good. 

[01:34:58] Thaddeus Walsh: [01:34:58] It’s a one time experience. 

[01:34:59] Marc Gonyea: [01:34:59] Yeah, you’re still doing 

[01:35:00] great, man. I’m, you know, and I won’t say proud of you, like you’re my son or anything, but like I’m proud of you in an inspirational way.

[01:35:06] You, you know, we know your wife. You got kids, crushing 

[01:35:10] it, you know. You’re well thought of, so we’re both very fortunate that you 

[01:35:15] chose to work here when you did. 

[01:35:16] Chris Corcoran: [01:35:16] Yeah, so 

[01:35:17] thank you. 

[01:35:18] Thaddeus Walsh: [01:35:18] I feel very fortunate that I was able to work at memoryBlue. It was hugely formative to me as a professional, as a person and so the whole community of people that I have around me to support me. Like the guy who officiated my wedding was somebody I mentored at memoryBlue.

[01:35:36] Marc Gonyea: [01:35:36] It’s great. 

[01:35:36] Thaddeus Walsh: [01:35:36] It’s like, that’s pretty, pretty high impact on me personally. So thank you guys for building the business and accepting that maybe somebody was crazy enough to drive down from Columbia, Maryland to Tyson’s corner every day, like a nutcase. 

[01:35:51] Marc Gonyea: [01:35:51] And Laurel, you know, your boy. 

[01:35:55] Bump machine. 

[01:35:56] Chris Corcoran: [01:35:56] Very good. All right, guys.

[01:35:57] Thank you very much.