Episode 55: Dan Yorkey – Be a Mentor, Not a Boss
If you grow up in wine country, making fancy wines might seem like a natural career choice. But Dan Yorkey pivoted off that path early on and he’s never looking back.
A native Californian now turned East Coast sales pro, Dan discovered a natural talent for sales born from his early experiences helping customers and working for his parents in an auto parts store. And as you’ll hear in this episode of Tech Sales is for Hustlers, Dan keeps a few core beliefs that are sacred to his success in sales.
Today Dan is a successful Senior Manager of Global Business Development at BioCatch. Among other priceless pearls of wisdom, tune in to hear why he always knows his sales numbers cold, why he prioritizes desire over experience when hiring SDRs, and the secret sauce behind his equal parts manager and mentor leadership style.
Guest-At-A-Glance
Name: Daniel Yorkey
What he does: Dan is the Senior Manager of Global Business Development at BioCatch.
Company: BioCatch
Noteworthy: When Dan was younger, his dream job was to become a fancy winemaker.
Where to find Dan: LinkedIn
Key Insights
⚡ We should let our team members grow. Dan agrees that the team leaders and superiors should let their team members evolve professionally. “I don’t want you on my team. I want you to get hired by your client. I want you to get elevated today inside the sales team to the talent team. But that doesn’t mean you can’t keep teaching new people and showing people that there are other ways to do the SDR job. The whole motto here is that we elevate people.”
⚡ Our teams need a mentor, not only a boss. Dan suggests that team members should feel comfortable with their bosses, who should be bosses and mentors. “I’ll walk a fine line between being their friend and being their manager. Because at the end of the day, as a DM or as an SDR manager, BDR manager, you’re their first boss. But they not only need a boss, but they also need a mentor. They need someone they can turn to and can find honest answers.”
⚡ I am not looking for young adults with experience but for those who want to be in sales. According to Dan, experience is not as necessary as an honest desire to be in sales. Therefore, he tends to hire young people sure about their future in sales rather than experienced yet indecisive individuals. “I don’t care about experience. I’m looking for young adults that want to be in sales. I don’t care if you want to be in tech sales. I don’t care if you want to be a medical device salesperson. I don’t care about any of that. I’m good with ‘I want to be in sales.'”
Episode Highlights
How Did Dan Yorkey End Up In Sales?
“I went to school at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo for Agricultural Business. I thought I was going to be one of those next fancy winemakers and that I was going to make a million bucks. I grew up working with my parents in the auto parts store. I was a delivery driver. I was constantly talking to people, not selling them stuff, but educating people on parts, how much it is, etc. I never thought about sales as a career, to be honest with you.
But when I took the interview, I said, ‘That’s interesting. It sounds like something I can do. I learn about a product, I get to talk to people, and I get to sell them.’ So, it probably didn’t hit me that I was good at sales. I thought just, ‘Yeah. Cool. I’ll try. Let’s see where it goes.'”
Free Sales Advice: Get in Your Office Before Everyone Does and Take Advantage of Quiet Time
“Get in early before everyone. People think I like to come in at 5:00 AM or 6:00 AM because I like to get up early and work early. The reason you get early is to get your calls in from 6:00 AM to 8:00 AM. No one’s in the office. So you have all that time to sit there and dial.
You’re getting free time to spend it talking to your coworkers and having a good time because you’ve already booked your meetings. You’ve made your phone calls. That’s free sales advice right there. Get in before everyone because you get quiet time. When you have enough people there, that’s loud.”
The Best Part of the Job is Hiring People, Training Them, and Letting Them Flourish
“I think the best part of the job is hiring people, training them, watching them have that “Aha!” moment, and seeing them take off and flourish. I’ll take 20 SDRs and only do the training aspect and leave everything else to somebody else seven days a week for the rest of my life.
It’s the fun part. It’s creating new messaging. It’s finding the titles. And us telling them upstairs, ‘Don’t go with the features that you have to sell, but learning how to be a consultative seller and finding out what clients need.’ We know where their pain points are and how your product can help them. And that’s the fun part – seeing the results and all the numbers.”
Let Your Team Meet You Outside of the Office
“People not only need a boss, but they also need a mentor. And that’s the one thing that I pride myself in, ‘I’ll go out with you, and I’ll go to dinner with you. I’ll go to the bar, and I’ll have a drink with you.’ Because you’ve got to know what they like to do outside of work, that’s how you connect with them. That’s how your work relationship gets better with these people.”
The People Who Post on LinkedIn All Day Don’t Have Time to Do Their Actual Jobs
“I always say that the people who post on LinkedIn all day don’t have enough time to do their actual jobs. I’d love to have their job. I’ve got more important things to do than go on LinkedIn and scroll through. The other reason I don’t go on LinkedIn is that everyone who’s there says they’re a sales leader. They’re a sales guru. They’re all out there posting these polls. And I didn’t even know you could do polls. I don’t have time to go through that and a thousand responses to polls and then send out an email that says, ‘Hey, these are the results to this.'”
You Want a Promotion? Work Hard to Get It
“There are the people who think they’re the best because they’ve done it once. You closed the biggest deal. You have the most meetings booked or occurred this month. You get one out of 11 months. The other 10, you were middle of the pack. So, if you want to get promoted and want to do things the right way, prove your worth consistently. Every single month, show everyone that you’re consistent, that you can do this over and over again.
We’re going to promote people, but it’s not going to be handed in. You gotta work for it. How bad do you want that promotion? How hard are you going to work?
We’ll promote you. People tell me they never get promoted, and they come to the interview with me. ‘Why are you leaving?’ And they say, ‘I was promised this, and they never did it.’ And I’m just smiling.”
Transcript:
Marc Gonyea: Today. Live and direct with the one and only, Daniel Yorkey, aka Dan Yorkey. Aka this guy is a man of many talents. Not only is he a sales enablement, sales ops, sale development guru. If he lets you in on some secrets, he knows a shit ton about Harleys, cars, boats. A native from California who’s now cold kicking it in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Mr. Yorkey, welcome.
Dan Yorkey: Thank you. Thank you. Very happy to be here. First, imagine you’ve been out of the office over a year. It’s probably been about a year and a half, so it’s been a very interesting day. It’s been great to be back in the office. You know, to see a lot of faces that I haven’t seen a lot.
Chris Corcoran: It’s the very first California alum to be a guest on the podcast in person in the Tyson’s HQ office. Welcome Mr. Yorkey. And we appreciate your making time to come back and talk with Marc and the listeners and me. It should be a lot of fun.
Dan Yorkey: Absolutely.
Marc Gonyea: I tried to put him on display in the office today to Tyson. So were people pinging you?
Dan Yorkey: Yeah. I had a few people come by to talk to me, a few DMs came by. I talked to a couple of SDRs in the front left and then I had like six or seven of the SDRs add me on LinkedIn. So yeah.
Marc Gonyea: Lucky.
Lucky with it. All right. Well, Dan, the purpose of today is to catch up with you, but also we’ve got listeners who are alums, listeners who are SDRs and DMs who work here now and then people who are thinking about coming to work for us. You’ve done some really cool things. So before we get into those things that you’ve done and what you’re doing now, we’ll talk a little bit about Dan Yorkey, a short amount of time.
Where did you grow up? What were you like? Where are you from? We’ll talk a little bit about that stuff.
Dan Yorkey: Okay.
Marc Gonyea: So the listeners can get to know you a little bit.
Dan Yorkey: Absolutely. Yeah, so as I said, you know, I’m actually from California born and raised, down in South Bay, down in San Jose, California. Actually went to school at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo for Agricultural Business.
I thought I was going to be one of those next fancy wine makers. I was going to make a million bucks, but at the time I said, “Absolutely. Oh yeah. Oh yeah.”
Marc Gonyea: That’s a Californian thing.
Dan Yorkey: Yeah, absolutely.
Marc Gonyea: Right. Yeah.
Dan Yorkey: I mean, you got, you know, the Central Coast, you got Napa, Sonoma and there’s also good wineries out there.
There’s a lot of farmers. My buddy actually owns a great farm up in Lodi. But, you know, I went in and graduated and found out that she doesn’t pay any money and you asked her at the very bottom, so there’s no way I was doing that. And that’s how I fell into the lap of memoryBlue, actually. I was actually,…
Marc Gonyea: Hold on. What were you like in high school? What kind of kid?
Dan Yorkey: Oh man.
Do you really want to know?
Marc Gonyea: Yeah.
Dan Yorkey: So in high school, let’s see. So I was the kid, you know, who had the hair, you know, as long as you know, your shoulders. Thought it was the coolest chaos, about 4, 11 going into high school, maybe 98 pounds soaking wet. Couldn’t make the wrestling team, ’cause I couldn’t make weight.
Yeah, I was too light.
Marc Gonyea: Category?
Dan Yorkey: It was like 103, right? But they’re like, “You know, you’re 95 pounds. Like you’re going to get to short, everyone’s six inches taller than you, you know?” But yeah, so, you know, I played sports growing up, baseball, soccer, all that, all the way through high school. Through high school, man, let me tell you that was a good time.
You know, just getting into trouble with, you know, with the friends, not really the family. But you know, just trying to be a good kid. Stayed out of trouble, you know, sneak out at night, go to parties, you know.
Marc Gonyea: ‘Course. All that stuff.
Dan Yorkey: You know, just doing the normal things. Of course there’s no drinking and driving.
Don’t condone that. Stay away from all that. But you know, just really enjoyed life, right? Always outside, like you said, always on the boat, always out there on my bike, skateboarding. Always trying to do something outside, you know? And of course never stopped talking, like I still don’t stop talking now.
Marc Gonyea: Did the sales thing kind of soark itself, [00:05:00] you nailed it back on yourself growing up like, “Okay, now I can understand why I’m in the sales world.”
Dan Yorkey: No. So I grew up working from my parents, right, in the auto parts store. You know, I was, I was a delivery driver, right? Go all the way through the a little bit on the parts counter, things like that.
But you know, you’re constantly talking to people. Not really selling them stuff, but you know, you’re educating people on they’re doing this, they need this part, how much is it. I never really thought about sales as a career, to be honest with you. I really didn’t. When I actually took the interview, I was like, “That’s interesting.
It sounds like, you know, something I can do. I learned a product, I get to talk to people and I get to sell them and so, you know, show them the benefits.” So it probably really didn’t hit me that I was actually like good at sales. I wanted to be in sales probably until I was probably five, six months into being an SDR.
I thought it was just, “Yeah. Cool. I’ll try. Let’s see where it goes.”
Marc Gonyea: And then what was it like? So what, walk us back to that. Do you know, do you remember how you found out about us or anything like that?
Dan Yorkey: I actually think I was, I was just applying randomly to jobs on LinkedIn, just sending out my resume. Yeah. Carpet bombing, you know, you, you know, you’re 21 years old trying to find a job, you know, you got to make some money to buy stuff.
So I just send stuff out and then I don’t know what recruiter I talked to. But I do remember that I did talk to a to Jeanne Ball.
Marc Gonyea: Jeanne Ball.
Dan Yorkey: And and Mike Mishler. Come on, come on. You know, I think that’s not right. We had just opened, you guys had just opened the California, if I was right. We were in the, in the first small building, right?
There was like eight people in there. Mish had his office and that was in the conference room was about the size of this, maybe.
Marc Gonyea: Yeah. I forget about that. I never saw that office.
Chris Corcoran: They were only in there for a couple months.
Dan Yorkey: Few months. I mean, I mean, at that time right there was there’s a Kyle McDowell. There was Jennae.
Wow. Let’s go back with some more of the DC people. We had Ian in there. Oh man.
This is all off the memory, I’m trying to think. We had Welch. Was it her last name?
Marc Gonyea: Sarah Welch. I saw her. She’s married now, right?
Yeah.
Dan Yorkey: Who else was there? There’s a, I don’t even [00:07:00] know, there’s a lot of people there.
Oh, that was a really cool office.
Marc Gonyea: Our next Podcast guest star, we haven’t released it yet. Kaitlyn Garrish.
Dan Yorkey: Absolutely.
Marc Gonyea: And we asked KG who the best person in the office was besides herself, of course. And she said, Dan, Dan Yorkey.
Dan Yorkey: But why?
Marc Gonyea: I don’t know. She said…
Dan Yorkey: Yeah. You know, we had a good time, right? I mean, I watched all these girls from, you know, eight, nine people, right? We got into the, into the offices and now, right? I think it was from the smallest to the big office. And I remember, you know we brought everything over our parts, you know, we didn’t get a moving crew.
But, the moving crew was the SDR team. Hey, you know, I go into more details. I’m not, I don’t know if it’s possible on this podcast. But so after work, you know, we all had to get out ’cause they had to go take everything down to, you know, put them in down there and put in cars and build it all over and set it up. And there’s obviously that literally was empty. There was like 10 people and you know what, a 3000 square foot office going right, what are we going to do now? You know, like I could have held a yoga classes. I could have put a gym in there. Like [00:08:00] it could have been, you know, the next 24 hour fitness.
Yeah, no. I’m actually talk, talked to KG last week after she did the podcast. She’s like, “I told them that, you know, I couldn’t tell them, you know, all the reasons why, but you know. We,… you know, I talked about all of it.” I was like, “All right, cool. I’ll make sure I don’t talk about it either.” But yeah, no, the time as an SDR man. We got in there, I remember I didn’t have a client. I walked in to try to find a client,
I was on a PPM, I was on century technology.
Marc Gonyea: This is Mishler just hired for…
Dan Yorkey: A good way. Mishler..
Chris Corcoran: He was the, he was the master.
Marc Gonyea: If you could just pause he’s like, “Who is it? Like the, the sun….” So somebody has like 17 first round picks in the next four years.
Mishler was like, he would accumulate picks that he would, he would hoard talent. So he did have,… but he’s like, ” This guy, Yorkey is going to be good.” I hired him.
Dan Yorkey: Yeah.
Marc Gonyea: So we hired him, Yorkey, which is great. Risk taker too.
Dan Yorkey: And you know, and I was just sitting there working on this, this PPM century. I just said, “I have no idea what I’ve done.
I don’t know what Salesforce is. I don’t know how this dialer works. No, I don’t, I’m staring at my computer screen [00:09:00] gone. I think I made the wrong decisions. I could barely turn my cell phone on. And I’m over here trying to sell technology like. I don’t know. Right?” So, you know, but everyone else was great, right? It was a very small team, you know, so and when he called breakdowns
everybody was in there, right? And you know, if you needed help, you go walk over to SDR, you go walk to initially go watch or go to J Ball’s desk, right? And they’re always a help, which was good. Right? So I was, “Okay, I just I got some help here, you know, they’re going to guide me through this. I’m gonna figure out how to use my computer actually.
It’s going to be good. Yeah.”
Chris Corcoran: What I have a hard time understanding is if you grow up in Silicon Valley, how did you not like automatically want to go into tech?
Dan Yorkey: You know, like I still always ask this question, like, “What is your dream job you want to do when you grow up?” I’d love to know the answer to that question. I think when I was a kid, I wanted to be a marine biologist, but I realized at a very early age that I wasn’t good withmicroscopes and I wasn’t good at biology. Right?
Marc Gonyea: So through the water.
Dan Yorkey: So I love the water, right? [00:10:00] So I learned, “Okay, I need to go away from things that, that are going to involve computers and working on things.” And I was like, “I can play sports. I can catch a baseball. I can run, I can kick a soccer ball.”
Right? So I went that route. I’m going to go outside and figure it out. But you know, like I said, everything comes back, right? It’s Silicon Valley. Right? It was the tech capital of the world. I don’t know if it’s still is, right? So like everything comes full circle. Right? You know, you start taking computer classes, things like that,so you can use a computer. And the next thing you know, “Here I am, and you know, I’m, I’m running Salesforce, I’m running reports, creating dashboards, things that I, you know, I never would have dreamed of doing.” So, you know.
Marc Gonyea: So you were obviously, you got good at it. Tell us about how you got good at it because Kaitlyn called you out as being good at it.
Dan Yorkey: Yeah. I mean, so, you know, I, I think this is also something we talked about right? About knowing my numbers. Right? You know, I can always go to my boss. I can always go to someone else and figure out what my numbers are, right? And have them pull reports at the end of the day. Like, “They’re busy and I need to know my numbers.
Well, if I can’t go and look at them, what am I doing?” So, you know, Timi [00:11:00] was another one in there. I’m going to shout him out a few times on here. Timi is the one who was all like, “You always gotta know where you stand. You always gotta know where you are. If you’re not, if you’re, if you’re not first, you’re last. Like, like if you’re second, you might as well go home.
You shouldn’t be here. Right?” So I always wanna know my numbers, right? So doing that, you gotta be good at Salesforce, you know, always checking the DHR, right? Always having your own stuff, keeping your own numbers. So when I was an SDR, I keep my own numbers. I like the DHR, I’d be able to see everything I did in Salesforce.
What’s been updated, what it hasn’t been updated. When I was got my client at ThreatMetrix you know, as an SDR, right, I didn’t really have access to a lot of things that was in their Salesforce, things like that. And my, my sales rep, Juan Pastor was the one who started showing me how to use Salesforce.
“Hey, you, you need to know this, you know, how to pull reports, how to find contacts, lead to all this stuff. Because suddenly someone is not going to be there to help you one day. And if you don’t know how to do it, you’re going to be stuck.” So I started learning from him at a very, very young age in my SDR career how do you use Salesforce, how to run reports, how to look at dashboards right.
So I could find everything I needed to be [00:12:00] successful and not rely on someone else. I don’t think I really got good at Salesforce ’till I came back to memoryBlue as a DM. When I sat down, I could talk to you. You and I talked to Nimit and we had dinner. And he, he says he had to convince me for why I should come work for memoryBlue. You know, but I was already slowly coming back anyways.
But, but,…
Chris Corcoran: Well, we gotta talk about it because you were, you know, you’re a unique alumni. You were a boomerang.
Dan Yorkey: Yeah.
Chris Corcoran: And so you got on at ThreatMetrix. And for our listeners, our office in San Jose is right downtown. Right downtown San Jose.
Dan Yorkey: Yeah in San Pedro Square.
Chris Corcoran: Right by San Pedro Square, which is that icon market right in, right in downtown San Jose. And your client that you were on was like two blocks from there. It was right as like a walk.
Dan Yorkey: Yeah.
Chris Corcoran: So talk a little bit about what you were doing and your involvement with the client.
Dan Yorkey: Yeah. So, so that was probably one of the more odder things we had that office, right? ‘Cause they wanted us in their office five days a week.
So I would show up and I would go directly to their office first, right? I’d be in, you know, 5, 5:30 in the morning work east coast hours. And then I would go back and [00:13:00] to, to AM huddle with J Ball’s team. And then I’d go back for PM huddle.
Chris Corcoran: Wait, so you’d walk from the client office back to…interesting.
Marc Gonyea: So close.
Dan Yorkey: Yeah. I mean, it’s like one long walk. It’s like maybe three or a third of the mile each way, but you know it’s like, they gave us a parking pass, I parked in the parking garage. Like I wasn’t going to get out, get my car, drive to the other parking area and parked there then walk in. You know, it would take longer.
But you know, so there was me, there was Nick magic Pinto who was there for a while. Stephanie Giles was there. I actually got an email from Marc that day about to hear that I did not respond to, but I will respond to that. I promise. To hear was actually not there when I was there, but he was also a ThreatMetrix SDR for a long time.
Right? They did a good job, right? They built that work right, but when we came in, right, we were still in cybersecurity to banks, to e-commerce to gaming gambling insurance companies. Right? You know, in a way to help, protect, you know, people from account takeover to kind of originations things like that. It’s actually what I’m getting back into right now.
But, but it was interesting, right? We were not [00:14:00] in memoryBlue Salesforce. We’re not using,… I think at that time we had inside sales.com or one of those, right? And I think going from that to like connect and sell to somebody else, they’re trying all these different things, but I wasn’t using those tools.
I was using their Salesforce. I was using their, their tool for ours it was… I couldn’t even tell you what it was. It was the most basic thing I’ve ever seen. Like you like work on, you log in and it could do like a phone call and like an email, but like you had to type in all these things and you had to go log it in Salesforce.
It was the oddest tool. So that’s why I had to get proficient in Salesforce because I couldn’t go and create a list through ZoomInfo or discover.org. And then send it to someone at memoryBlue and have them uploaded, that’s not how it worked. So that’s how it was a lot different from my experience as an SDR than it was for the normal ones, right? Because I’d come back and were PPMs, right? I’ll go on LinkedIn, you go find all the people. Go to ZoomInfo or discover.org fund, you know, emails, phone numbers, right? And you send it over, they upload them. Right? And then it’s in your campaign inside the memoryBlue Salesforce, right, using that tool. So so I [00:15:00] got, you know, a lot broader array of tech stack tools that I would be potentially using later.
Like, honestly, I’ve probably used almost every automation tool that’s out there and when it comes to sales outreach. You know, so, so that’s how my time was different, right? I didn’t get the normal, “Hey, let’s go sit in the bullpen over here, you know, with 30 other SDRs and let’s grind it out.” I sat in office that was dead silent with four SDRs. Now we’re just making phone calls and being loud, everyone’s just staring at you like, “Hey, can you guys be quiet?” You know?
Chris Corcoran: Like we hear that a lot from SDRs. You go on the client site where it’s like the developers are in and the developers want to give you advice on what to say on the phone.
Yeah. It’s like, “Hey man, can I kind of review your code?”
Dan Yorkey: Yeah. So that period is in the wrong spot and if you do that, it’s gonna break the code up here. And then this isn’t going to work down here and you have to start all over and it’s going to take 12 hours.
And then just walk away.
Marc Gonyea: And say, “Hey, we’d like your CEO’s to come work out of our office.”
Go over there I don’t ever want to go back there again. The most [00:16:00] time that was yours, it’s not really sales friendly. They are let to be in charge. They’re, they are be in charge because it will bubble up in the weekly meetings. Well, why don’t you say anything to them while they’re over there?
Chris Corcoran: Yeah.
Marc Gonyea: Or this is why they don’t want to go over there because it’s not sales friendly. It’s like, nobody’s standing up, you know, there’s nobody talking again. I mean, there’s pros and cons.
Dan Yorkey: It’s that right and like, they know you’re a contractor, right? They know you’re not an actual employee of the company, right? So like, they kind of look at you, like, you know, you’re not as good as them, you’re not as worthy as them. And it’s kind of funny ’cause it’s like, you look at some of them, you’re like, “I don’t know how this guy got that job.” Yeah. So we, I know. I mean, and you know, I had a ton of clients that wanted people on site, right?
I mean, I think at one point I was driving three, three days a week to clients now to their offices. And I was like, “Oh, great. Here we go. We’re going over this client. We’re going over this client.” Ryan, it’s like, “Oh, I’m going to sit in this office by myself and then they’re going to come talk to me for 10 minutes and that’s it.”
You know?
Marc Gonyea: So we’re trying to get to move away from that a little bit. But it’s good though, because we have an office here too. ‘Cause you have these clients that want to work with the memoryBlue people in the flesh, but they also want the dedication to like doing the huddles, doing the blitzes.
Chris Corcoran: It been on the clients come on….
Dan Yorkey: It’s better.
Chris Corcoran: when they come here. Yeah.
Marc Gonyea: But, but you learn a lot.
Dan Yorkey: Yeah.
But you know, I also would have liked to have more time with all these people here dialing and having that energy, right? Because it’s a really big thing. Right? I mean, a lot of people are talking about it, not like everyone’s working from home.
Like I saw them in London who in… His girlfriend down in Florida, right? And he’s like, “Yeah, you know, we’re both in sales, we’re both making calls, but the energy’s not there. If I, you know, if I’m having a bad day, she’s having a bad day ’cause my energy rubs off.” Right? When you got 25 people over here, I mean,…
Marc Gonyea: Somebody’s having a good day.
Dan Yorkey: That floor was buzzing earlier. I was like, “Man, like this? I haven’t heard this in a long time and I like it.” Right?
Chris Corcoran: The West Coasters, man. You, you can’t even, you can’t keep up with the East Coast.
Marc Gonyea: You are an East Coaster now.
Dan Yorkey: All I’m saying is that San Jose office, we held it down.
Marc Gonyea: I’m sure.
Dan Yorkey: Don’t want to ruffle feathers, but these East Coasters I am in their building right now. I’m just going to see, I think I have more first-place finishers on the DHR than probably anybody in DM history.
Marc Gonyea: Oh, I’ll tell you what. And I don’t know if you got this from Timi. This is more how you were maybe Timi amplified it, but whenever I went to talk to you about where you were at every game I’ve ever talked to the history of the business. Maybe I need to talk to more because we have like 30 of them now, but still,… you would always know where your numbers were for the month where they were for the week.
You, I mean, when I say the numbers, like he knew.
Chris Corcoran: I know I wrote that down.
Knowing your numbers, it’s like they talk about it on the shark tank, you got to know your, you got to know your numbers. Yorkey always knew his numbers.
Marc Gonyea: Like in the car in the Austin calling you or we go to the airport and you were driving back from the client office in California and you were like, “Marc, I know, I know I’m gonna hit my numbers. You know, huge, the first ever tops.” Right? Qualified for being number one in Costa Rica.
Dan Yorkey: By the way.
Marc Gonyea: I’d always be in awe of how, how such a firm grasp you had of numbers, strong.
Chris Corcoran: Needed him as part of the sports.
Marc Gonyea: What is that from? So to drop a little science or something like, why is that so important for everyone to do? That’s just Dan Yorkey.
Dan Yorkey: So, so you guys made a good point, right? So Timi, right? When we were SDRs, right?
There’s always going to be that competition, right? And it’s always gonna be the good kind of competition, right? It’s not going to be able to be on this not talking down to someone, but it’s letting someone know that you had a better day than them, right? So, so Timi started the chain outing in the California office, right?
“Yeah. There’s chain and yeah, I got premium. That’s what I got this chain.” It was really just probably his personal chain that he brought from home and wore that day. He’s having to get three meetings that day. But you would always compete back and forth, back and forth, right? So I knew Timi’s numbers better than I knew my own numbers and vice versa.
And every time I’d come walk in the office, there’s a good story. Coming Doughnut Dan. He would look and he would [00:20:00] look at who put in meetings in the memoryBlue Salesforce that day and I would walk through that door, he’d be waiting. And that door would open and he’d be like, “Everybody look, guess who was here.” And it was like, “Who?” He’d be like, “Doughnut Dan just walked in.” Oh, it was shameful. It was shameful.
There are, there’s a lot of reasons why you got to know your numbers and there’s a lot of reasons why you don’t ever want to have zero as one of your numbers any day of the month. I, ’cause you, everyone needs someone like that. That’s going to make sure that you’re working to your best potential.
Marc Gonyea: Right? Right.
Chris Corcoran: Wow.
Dan Yorkey: Oh, Timi, Tim, you need to get Timi on this Podcast as well. Just to talk about the stories that he used to have with the competitions in the nicknames that people had for him and that he had for other people. That, it would be pure comedy for an hour.
Chris Corcoran: Do I remember him taking James to school? Like his first, when he first started?
Dan Yorkey: Yeah. Yeah.
Chris Corcoran: It was lunchtime. Everyone got up to go to San Pedro Square, Timi went over to James, “James, this is how we’re, this is what we do the work.”
Dan Yorkey: Absolutely.
Chris Corcoran: “This is what we do the work…”
Dan Yorkey: You get in early before everyone? This is free right here, right? This is sales advice for free. People think that I like to come in at 5:00 AM, 6:00 AM ’cause I like to get up early and work early. And people think I like to work through lunch because I don’t like eating. Right? There, the reason you get in early is you get your calls in from 6 to 8:00 AM. No one’s in the office, you have all that time to sit there and dial. I would do it too
and then James would do it. Joe Reeves would be in there and then… He, he was like, “Hey, I’m going to be the national. I’m going to be at the top. I’m into do what you guys are doing. Right?” So we, we had two sales orders coming in the same time this East Coast Austin would show up. The problem the ones who didn’t do that, well, they show up at 8:00 AM. We’ve already done our dials for the morning.
Marc Gonyea: But yeah.
Dan Yorkey: We’re playing ping pong. We’re getting breakfast, right? Well, they want to come in and talk to us and they wonder why they didn’t have a good morning [00:22:00] while you’re talking to people who already worked this morning. Right?
But the problem is, is that we already worked and you didn’t and now you’re going to lunch and we’re going to get another hour and a half in before you guys get back in and settle down. So you’re getting free time. So you can spend your time talking to your coworkers, having a good time ’cause you’ve already booked your meetings,
you’ve made your phone calls. You’ve already encouraged your meetings. That’s free sales advice right there. Get in before everyone and wherever people want to work in. Because you get quiet time, you know, you have enough people in there that’s loud. You got people to help you. Things like that. It’s not just you, but you don’t got 30 people all going, “Oh, how was lunch?
What’d you have? Oh, you went here. Oh yeah, it was good. I went over here and we did this. Oh yeah. Where’d you go?” And next thing you know, you’re halfway through your blitz and you’ve done nothing.
Marc Gonyea: There you go.
Chris Corcoran: Yeah. Yeah. So there’s a, Dan, so you were working with your client. How long were you working with them before they wanted to bring, bring you on full-time?
Dan Yorkey: That process is a long process and I think any SDR that’s gotten hired out by their client has gone through the same thing. I think I was about eight months into my time in memoryBlue. I think I was six months, five and a half months with the client.
Chris Corcoran: Okay.
Dan Yorkey: But you know, as we all know, when the client starts talking about they want to do it right, then you get into the actual paperwork and everything getting done and approving, right? So I think last time I got hired out as probably almost a year.
Chris Corcoran: Okay. Were you, did we definitely gonna take it? It’s a lot of times the SDR is ..If their client is interested, the SDR automatically takes it.
Dan Yorkey: It wasn’t, I was automatically going to take it, right? You had factored in a lot of things, right? And this is what I do with everything I do when I’m deciding to leave a company, joining a new company, “Is, is it, is it the right fit? Do I see myself growing there? And is it where I want to be?”
At that time, right, this was really small, right? We had 10, 11 SDRs, right? We weren’t going to have another DM. We had mission, we had J Ball, right? So there wasn’t really room to grow there. And you know, my time at, or my contract with memoryBlue was going to come up eventually, right?
Chris Corcoran: Yeah.
Dan Yorkey: And I said, “Okay, do I want to start all the way over at ground zero and start from day zero again.” Because you know, if you have SDRs but you think that eight months, that new com coming your day one, it doesn’t matter. You’ve been that you’ve already done this for eight months. [00:24:00] So I go on and start over at ground zero.
So you factor that in right ThreatMetrix was a great company, right? They have a great product. They’re in a great space that’s actually my competitor now. But it was one of those things like it fit my, my sales reps over there were really great. I learned a lot from them. That’s where I could have halfway success too, was then mentoring me and teaching me.
So I think I, you know, I had a really good overall fit and I was going to take it no matter what, just because there was no room to grow with memoryBlue at that time. You know all that.
Chris Corcoran: Right.
Dan Yorkey: And you know, all the sales team, everything, all that was still out here in DC. So it was either go to ThreatMetrix or get a new client, finish my contract and then go start over again somewhere else.
Chris Corcoran: Gotcha. Okay.
So it’s about a year and you get hired when, when you got hired at ThreatMetrix. I, I forget the details, but it did it where they no longer memoryBlue client, they hire all the SDRs. What was your role there? Just explain that to the listeners.
Dan Yorkey: Yeah. So let me think about that. What happened there?
So it was me, I think it was me and Stephanie were still there. Nick, sad story that I’m not going to go into that, but he got let go. I [00:25:00] believe I could be wrong. So it was just the two of us left, I think. And I think Stephanie got hired out if I’m, if I recall. So I know, I believe when, when I got hired, I think Nick got hired to, I swear. Can be wrong. Either way, when I got hired I think that ended the contract with memoryBlue.
Right? So it was me, me, Stephanie, they had a, this guy, Brandon that they hired. He was a referral from one of the people who already worked there. So there’s three of us. And they didn’t have a need for a fourth, they didn’t want to backfill whatever happened. So it was just, so after that, right, I mean, because I was already over there every single day, like my day to day didn’t change,
right? I didn’t have to change offices. I ended up doing that. And building that change I didn’t go back to memoryBlue. I didn’t have to go to my huddles. I only had to work in one Salesforce, things like that. So I did it, it didn’t really change, right? Continued working financial institutions on the East Coast.
Did that for, I think, four more months, five more months and then I got promoted to team lead. When I got to team lead, I think that’s when Stephanie took off. She went to another firm Simpler, I believe into another role, a bigger role. And I had to backfill her with one person and they wanted to do it internally.
And I hired [00:26:00] this guy, Nico Lam. Right? And that was through the recruiter they had, whatever they did, they brought people in. But that was the end with memoryBlue at ThreatMetrix. Anybody, you know, in the, in that team lead role I still did a lot of SDR work, but instead of doing the same stuff, I was dealing with financial institutions.
Like we wanted end up in breaking into emerging markets. So I broke into insurance when I went to gaming and gambling. And started working on new messaging, new ways to break in and make more money for the company in verticals that they hadn’t either trying to get and have success. And then I think I ended up taking over the UK team and overseeing all their work and their numbers as well as the APAC region.
Chris Corcoran: Wow. And so who were you rolling into, you role to sales or marketing or?
Dan Yorkey: So I rolled it into Demand Gen, so Marketing. Yeah. So I was… my boss’s Dany Kurian.
Marc Gonyea: Dany?
Dan Yorkey: Dany, he’s at Balbix.
Marc Gonyea: Yup. Yup.
Dan Yorkey: He actually came on and he still were… There the guys, when he came in to work when I was there like two months before I left. But so I role into Dany, Dany rolled into the CMO. Yeah. Armen.
Chris Corcoran: Cool. And so how many SDRs we’re kind of rolling up to you? Just 3? What about the EMEA and APAC team?
Dan Yorkey: Well, so if you, if you count them, right, so there’s two, two in the EMEA region and then one out in the APAC region.
Dan Yorkey: What’s funny about those regions is they weren’t completely different than how we work here in the United States. Just ’cause you know, in the UK you have GDPR, you know, there’s a lot of regulations that you have to follow. And you can only reach out to people with, with marketing collateral if they’ve opted in, you got to give them an opt-out link. You know, calls and emails for, to to a company email’s fine. But if it’s a personal email to get some it’s kind of like can with canned spam, right? And then in APAC region, it’s just, it was all in person, which now it’s all not in person.
And I’m still trying to figure that one when out again. Yeah. So I think I’ve had 7 in total.
Chris Corcoran: Okay, good. And then how long were you there?
Dan Yorkey: So I hang on there as in total of just under two years. Was a year, year and 10 months, 11 months.
Chris Corcoran: Very good. And then, and then you made your triumphant return?
Dan Yorkey: Yeah, it was great. I got a through my vacation. I think I was done with ThreatMetrix in December. I [00:28:00] met with Nimit and J Ball. The two of you talked to all that, you know, heard the game plan was like, “Oh, it’s like a February start.” I was like, “Perfect. I need a vacation.” You know, so I hung out for three months. I went down to LA for a month and hang out, hung out there.
Santa Monica, went down to San Diego for a month just kinda, you know, just took my time and had a good time relaxed. Just checking out new places, it was good. And then I came back.
Chris Corcoran: So talk about that with you in terms of how it was different. Because you, you were, when you left ThreatMetrix you were an SDR team lead or were you an SDR manager?
Dan Yorkey: As a team lead.
Chris Corcoran: You’re team lead.
So you still learn when an SDR, but you also have to lead the team as well, you do both. And then when you came back to become a DM, how was it different?
Dan Yorkey: That’s a good, it’s a good point. Right? So when I came back, it was almost like, I felt like I had to prove myself all over again, right? In multiple ways.
Right? I probably had to prove myself again that I could do the manager role to Nimit, to the two of you. I had to prove to Joe that I was also equal and better [00:29:00] than him. I always wanted to be the best. I always tried to be, because I’m not saying I’m better than Joe. I’m not saying that, but you know, like you felt you had got to prove yourself. I’m like you had to go above and beyond.
You got to do all this extra work. But then to the SDRs, right? Because I came in and I think I only took like two or three SDRs from Joe, right? But they don’t know me, they know Joe.
Chris Corcoran: Right.
Dan Yorkey: They’re like, “Who’s this guy coming in? Is he cool? Do I like him? How does he manage?” Right? So there’s a lot of aspects.
Right? And then you got to try to learn the client side, how you got to work clients, what they like. Each one’s very different. Right? And, you know, and I think that’s the biggest takeaway that I got from being a DM is everyone, you know, you try to achieve your SDRs as individuals, but you end up treating them all the same, right?
Because that’s your team, but they’re all individuals. Right? And they all need to be coached different, they gotta be taught to differently. They don’t learn the same way, right? There’s the four, the four SDR people and right. Visual hearing on the board, whatever video, right? I forgot what it’s called.
I’m not, I’m not smart enough for that. I know, I know what they are. Right? And so like you learn that talking to [00:30:00] clients like, “Oh, well, if I do that with my clients, ’cause they’re all different. Right? I should have the same with my SDRs.” So like you, you get a lot of learning, right? When you get the coaching from Nimit, right? From Joe, from the other DMs, from the two of you, right?
From, from, from Wease, right? ‘Cause I mean, she’s been doing this forever. Right? But like you, you really learn a lot about yourself and where you can sit with the clients, right? And that’s the biggest thing, right? Like the SDRs are going to come, they’re going to go, right? The, the whole motto here is, you know, ‘We elevate people.’
Right? And that’s the goal. That was my goal. I don’t want you on my team, I want you to get hired by your client. I want you to get elevated today inside sales team to the talent team. Like I don’t want you on my team. Become a DM. Morgan Blehm. Right? She was a DM, right? I said, great. Absolutely, you should definitely hire her.
Yeah. Because that’s what she wants to do, she’s good enough, she proved herself. Right? So let them grow. Right? But that doesn’t mean that you can’t keep teaching new people and showing people that, you know, there are other ways to do the SDR job. You’re not always right. You know, and it’s humbling. [00:31:00] Right?
It’s like, and I tell this to everyone I’m gonna hire, right, “This is not my team. It’s our team.” Right? The biggest thing here, it was our team. It was a, it was a collective unit, right? Just because I’m the boss doesn’t mean I have the best ideas. It doesn’t mean that my way that I think is the most efficient or the best way to do it.
Right? Then when you look at the office of your memoryBlue, I try to hire the same way now. Right? Very diverse, different mindsets, different people, because they all bring something different to the team. So I think that was the biggest thing for me was the clients and going back to the whole numbers thing, right?
That’s why I always know my numbers, ’cause and I was talking to, is it, is it safe upstairs?
Marc Gonyea: Yeah, safe..
Dan Yorkey: So safe. So he’s a new DM there over three, four months now, five months. Right? And he’s like, “No, I’m doing this.” I was like, “Hey man, it never gets easier. But, but the task is easier.” Right? The reporting, what you need to do. I was like, “If you always have your numbers ready and you’re always honest with your clients, they’re going to give you more leeway.
They’re going to give you more time. They’re going to respect you more because they know [00:32:00] that you’re not lying to them.”
Chris Corcoran: Right.
Dan Yorkey: So I always knowing my numbers, always knowing what my SDR was doing, where they were at. Where they at home, where they have onsite, we know were they still in the office. Right?
What were they doing? Their numbers, phone calls, emails, meetings booked occurred for the week, right? When they call randomly, which we all know they do, whether they’re happy or not. Well, if they’re not happy and you’re having a great week, you’re like, “Hey Chris, I get it. You’re not having to be…. We had a bad week last week.
Right? This happened, this happened, I know Steve was on vacation. I know it’s not okay. Right? He should have got more working, but this week we’ve done X, Y, and Z. We’ve done this. We’ve got five meetings booked.” But they’re like, “Oh, that’s awesome.” And they’re happy again. But when you’re unprepared, you’re like “Now what?”
Right? So like, it was a lot of learning and growing personally and professionally.
Marc Gonyea: What about going from being like kind of a colleague of these folks, when you’re an SDR? You, when you come back as a team lead, some other people might, might’ve known you before, “That was Dan. He was an SDR when he left.” Than he has come back as a manager.
And how do you separate yourself from that when you have those kind of give that SDRs a hug, not literally, or give them kick in the ass? Or should we kick in the ass?
Dan Yorkey: Not literally.
Chris Corcoran: Marc’s side. Touchy, feely side.
Dan Yorkey: So, yeah. So now I understand why you guys have an actual HR person.
Marc Gonyea: Yes. Right.
Kick in the ass. How did you, how did you do that separation? That’s hard for a lot of SDRs to become DMs.
Dan Yorkey: Yeah. Right. So, so I got kind of lucky on that front. Right? Because I think when I came back, I didn’t really know any SDRs at the time. Right? And I, I didn’t get promoted from the SDR to the DM ranks. Right?
But at the end of the day, right? Like, and I still do this to this day, right? I’ll walk a fine line between being their friend and being their manager. Right? Because at the end of the day, as a DM or as a SDR manager, BDR manager, whatever you want to call it, you’re literally their first boss. They might have one job before you.
So it’s one of those things, it’s like, they not only need a boss, they need a mentor. They need someone that they can turn to and, and, and can find honest answers with you. Like, and that’s the one thing that I pride myself in, right, is all go out and all go to dinner with you. I’ll go to the bar and I’ll have a drink with you.
Right? “Hey, I’m going out and going golfing. You want to go golfing, right?” Because you got to know what? They like to do outside work. That’s how you connect with them, right? That’s how your work relationship gets better with these people. So a lot of people in the, I know when like, Morgan, it happened. With Trevor it probably happened. With who was it like that…Nick Jones. Right?
Marc Gonyea: Right.
Dan Yorkey: Because they were all SDRs before. They all got promoted up Ryan, that was the biggest issue. And it’s because they need, they feel like they need to prove themselves. I guess there’s other SDRs that think they’re better than them.
And that’s fine. Right? But at the end of the day, numbers don’t lie. If you’re better than them, why are they always higher than you on the DHR? Why are they always, you know, increasing their, their client from one FTE to two FTE from one to one and a half, right? Why are they always getting more, more commission than you?
Why are they helping other people, you’re not. Right? And they don’t see that. Right? ‘Cause they’re so focused on one thing and that’s themselves. And those are the people I know, and I’m not talking down on anyone, you know, it might’ve eventually, but the ones that are in it for themselves are the ones that usually don’t get promoted.
They’re the ones that end up being an SDR for 2, 3, 4, 5 years, they keep going company to company, right? It’s because they’re not looking at the big picture, they’re looking at themselves. And then they’re not seeing in, in taking into the fact and listening to the coaching they’re getting from their boss about what they’re doing wrong.
They’re like, “Well, I’m hitting my number. I’m doing a good job. I’m doing this.” It’s like, “No, you’re not, you’re doing one part of your job. You’re not updating your Salesforce since you’re not doing this right.” So I think it’s a fine line. Right? And I think Morgan did a good job of it, overall, while I was there of managing that aspect.
Right? You know, and of course, like I hung out with her when she was an SDR, we got to the lab and you have cold drinks after work, sometimes. You know, me, her, Brian Ball, Becky Rangel would go out and buy, you know,… Trevor Shan, a little bit.
Marc Gonyea: Trevor Shan. Shan.
Dan Yorkey: John Lane, but half of my team.
Marc Gonyea: Yeah.
Dan Yorkey: Right. Yeah.
Because, because it’s the right thing to do, right? Hey, it’s w we have we had a tough week, let’s go get a couple of drinks. Right? Like that’s okay. Right? A lot of team leading it’s, it’s, “I’m their manager. I can’t hang out with them. This is not okay.” [00:36:00] And that’s fine. That’s your mindset. That’s how you think. You probably don’t have a good relationship with your team at all.
You probably don’t know who they are as a person, what their passions are, what they like to do outside of work. You just have, “This is, this is John Lane. He’s an SDR on memoryBlue and he’s on my team and his client is Rick Court.”
Marc Gonyea: He is a robot.
Dan Yorkey: That’s it.
Marc Gonyea: Right. Right.
Dan Yorkey: So, so, you know, I, I think the hardest part, right, is getting that respect. Right? And that is going into call breakdowns and you know, you’re going to tear someone to pieces. You’re going to tell them, like, “This call was not good. This is why…” It’s not making them respect you it’s, but it’s like them going, “Okay. They know what they’re talking about. They were the right person for this.”
Right? And it’s like, I don’t know the right words to say, it’s not asserting your dominance, but you know, it’s literally saying, “I know what I’m doing. This is why I’m in this role. This is why they put me here.”
Right?
‘Cause they trust me to be able to help. Coach you and make you grow and bring in new people and, and get you and all these things up to speed as well.
Yeah. You know, and if, if people don’t like that, it happens. Right? You know, it’s not anyone’s cup of tea, right? Like you can’t make everyone happy. So, so why try? Right? I’ll I’ll do my best.
Marc Gonyea: Love it.
So you were at memoryBlue and you spread your wings, right? And you’re with Securly. Just tell us about that. What would you do for them?
Dan Yorkey: Yeah, so, so my job…
Marc Gonyea: Then we’ll talk about our, our favorite topic. We’ll talk about LinkedIn and the internet. Let’s talk about Securly first because you obviously, anyone listening knows Yorkey is a practitioner.
Chris Corcoran: For sure.
Marc Gonyea: He’s a craftsman, but we’re not talking about the craft work you do at Harley’s. We’re talking about the craft work you do in the sales, development world.
Dan Yorkey: But I always say, right? The people who post on LinkedIn all day don’t don’t have enough time to do their actual jobs. So I’d love to have their job.
Marc Gonyea: First you post on LinkedIn, the next you do the work?
Dan Yorkey: 100%. Well, we’ll get into that later.
Anyways. So, so yeah, so I went to Securly, right? I was a BDR manager. So I was running it, I walked in at the team of four SDRs, [00:38:00] BDRs, whatever you want to call them. Same thing. And my job was to come in and one get them up to where we needed them to be. They had three people who had just started,
so we were going and getting them up to speed, you know, trying to get them to, you know, what we thought was an adequate number for quota. You know, and then, you know, you walk in there and you know, it’s how it goes every, everywhere in the company. Right? You know, you think you’re walking into, you know, to, to this, this perfect patch of grass.
You know, the perfect tree with the perfect shade and a swinging bench underneath. You know, you got some Kool-Aid over here. You know, some people fanning you.
Marc Gonyea: Yeah.
Dan Yorkey: It’s hot, you know. And it never goes that way. So, so it’s just not,… yeah. So you go in there, you know, and you just see, “Okay. Like, what’s going on, what tools do we have?” All that stuff.
Right? They had all the tools, they had a Salesforce, they had SalesLoft. They, they, they had the tools you needed. Right? ZoomInfo, Sales Navigator. Right? Okay, what, how are we working? What are we working on? You know, and you walk in, they go “Oh, wow, I just opened up my SalesLoft and whatever tasks are due is what I’m working on.”
I’m like, “Well, what’s [00:39:00] been they’re?” Like, “Oh, the marketing team does. Well, where are they getting them? I don’t know.” They’re like, “Well, what do you mean? Like how many dials are you doing today? Oh, I only have eight today.” Okay. Swinging into this day. Sit here, respond to emails, follow up with people is like, “Okay.” So it’s like, you know, you kind of go and, you know, you peel back the onion, right?
So like I was telling the DMs upstairs, “Right here you focus on.” And then, like you’re saying here, like I work here. And no one knows where I w where I work now, so that doesn’t make sense. So memoryBlue, right? You focus, you focus on the, the main part of, of what top of funnel pipeline building is and that’s the SDR is getting up to speed and having them fill your sales reps or your client’s sales reps with meetings, right?
That’s what everyone thinks the SDR manager is. That’s not really what an SDR manager does. That’s just a portion of what you’re going to end up doing, right? Because you start working with sales ops, we’re with marketing ops, we’re at demand gen the VP of marketing, right? And I say, Demand Gen, right?
You’re going to have an events person, [00:40:00] you know, a webinar person. The people who do like the DG emails for the for like white paper downloads, right? You know, you’ll have sales ops, right? You’re gonna work on all the processes to get all those going. Then you work with the sales directors that run, you know, either one sales director who runs all sales reps or you have East-West, or for me, for me now I have global so four of them.
Right? And you’re working on strategy, you’re working on messaging, you know, you’re working on how, how can we improve the MQL to SDR hand-off? How can we improve the SDR to SQL or the sales rep and off, right? You start working through all these things, but what what’s lead score, what’s this right? And you’re sending there.
Right? I’m I’m S I’m an SDR manager. And we make sure we have the data and we put them into here and we, we book meetings. Right? But also I walked in, right? And you know, it was a lot more of, “Hey, here’s a list. This is the version we want, right? ‘Cause you know, hey, it’s school districts. And we want to talk to people in IT.
That’s the main person that we talked to then on every single deal that we need. But it was messaging strategy, how can we get in, you know, to the, to the top 10%. Now, how we focus on 20K student [00:41:00] districts and more? Right? And really forming strategies or how to help get to the number. Where here, right,
the number is, “Hey, we’re going to give you 12 meetings every single month per SDR. Hey, we’re gonna give you eight. Right? And what that is, breakdown? This is what we’re going to give you.” Where here it’s more like, “Okay, great. We’re getting 10 meetings, but we’re not getting to our pipeline number. If you don’t have enough to get in the Demand Gen funnel to get to our quote at the end of the year.”
So you start digging into in strategies, historical data, all these numbers that you don’t necessarily do it at at, I don’t want to say ’cause I know that it’s coming from large companies that may be worshiped, but some of the startups have never done it before. Like, yeah, it’s great. Right? But I, you start to grow all of your metrics grow with it.
Right? And it gets very complex. You’re doing dashboards, you’re doing reporting, you know, you’re doing things that you didn’t even know you, that you knew how to do. And you’re just throwing them together and you’re like, “Oh, this looks really good.” But you know, it’s a lot of processed stuff. Right? And so a lot of working with marketing, you know, and, you know, you end up with a lot of, a lot of meetings on your calendar. But at the end of the day, right,
when, when you hit your goal, you do your stuff, it’s very rewarding. And I still think the best part of the [00:42:00] job is hiring people and training them and watching them have that ‘a-ha’a moment and seeing them take off and flourish. That’s still the best part of the job. I’ll take that. I’ll take 20 SDRs and only do the training aspect and leave everything else to somebody else, seven days a week for the rest of my life.
Marc Gonyea: Yeah. Wow.
Chris Corcoran: And why is that? It’s the fun part, right? It’s the call breakdowns, it’s the pitch message. It’s working on the pitch. It’s creating new messaging. It’s finding the titles, why we’re talking to them, you know, uncovering, you know, and us telling them upstairs, right?
Dan Yorkey: “Don’t go with the features that you have to sell.” But learning how to be a consultative data seller and finding out what they need. We know where their pain points really are and how your product can help them. Right? And that’s what I think you’ve kind of mastered your craft is when you no longer feature yourself.
And you’re just telling them the benefit that you’re proxying to give them the ROI, the, the reduce false positives, that’s going to lead to X amount of hours that your fraud team isn’t going to have to work, things like that. And that’s the fun part, right? Is seeing the results. All the numbers, right?
[00:43:00] Like, it’s cool. It’s there, but like, you can sit there for hours and hours and hours and I can do one report and Marc can do another report and our numbers are completely different. And then you put it there and then you sit down the next day and do it again and you’re like, “Ah, we don’t know whose right. We’re going to go with Marc’s report.”
And that’s not fun to me. Like I knew I took accounting in college. I got terrible at accounting, so I wanted to graduate fast. I wanted to graduate faster. So I took like beginning accounting and I was like, “God, that was easy.” But the only class that was aware that I could take those under one of the prereq things I needed to do was like some type of farm accountings
As an ad. Right? But it was like, it wasn’t just the basic stuff. It was like the harder stuff. I can’t even tell you what it was. But it was, it was the, the remote free days class I ever took in my life. And I studied so hard for it. And I think I got like a C minus and I was like, “You know what? I’ll take that.
I’ll take that.” I’m never looking at finance again. So numbers aren’t my thing. I just like to look at it and say, “Yep, that looks good. Move on.”
Chris Corcoran: Good. So you, you, you joined, you joined the company. Got four SDRs there. It, the the situation, the situation wasn’t as rosy, as
Dan Yorkey: Never.
Chris Corcoran: As as what you thought it might be. And then, so talk about what you do now in that role and grow the team?
Dan Yorkey: Yeah. So, so the first thing you do is you look at the sales process, right, it’s broken the fact that the SDRs, you know, aren’t working the right way out of Salesforce through your leads or contacts, right? Because it depends on, on your business, right?
For us, we had to find it countless, so contacts was fine ’cause we talked a lot about before so we worked on contacts. But the fact that they didn’t know where to even find the contacts was a problem. So you got to go back and retrain from the very beginning, right? The things that you teach at memoryBlue with the first thing I’ll bet,
“This is how we work. These are the leads. This is what you do. You convert leads, you do this.” Right? And then really understanding how good the data is. Right? Do we have a deduping tool? Do we have, you know, a tool that we can use for lead scoring and figure all that stuff out? Okay, where are the inbounds coming in?
Who do they go to? Get all, all those rules done the [00:45:00] right way. Right? And then you gotta make sure that your team isn’t focusing just solely on inbound because now getting the inbound right at the right way. And they’re getting way more than they were before, but still doing their outbound work. So I did that.
We redefined territories. Made it fair. So it was, it was in the six territories on four SDRs. And then we started, you know, moving the needle. When I say moving the needle, right? You talk to a lot of companies out here, you know, they’re getting 5, 6, 7 outbound meetings a month. To me, I can do that with my eyes closed.
Right? Like that’s like, “Huh, like, that’s it?” So I, I raised everyones quota, rather because you guys, aren’t going to have a quote, let’s start with 10. Right? And then it was 10 ready to do 15. We’re already doing that. Right? And we were like, “Okay, this is what we’re doing. This is how we’re going the other side of schools we’re doing.
If you have your whole territory from one student, all the way to, you know, 80,000 students.” So we had them pumping out 20 plus meetings a month. On average it was 16, 17, 18 outbalance from each territory. Grew the team over, you know, the [00:46:00] course of two years from four SDRs to 14.
Marc Gonyea: Wow.
Dan Yorkey: You know, and that came with, you know, pretty much redoing SalesLoft getting in the right way, making sure everything maps back and forth.
So the leads has a change, right? So like for you guys, right, it’s always see what callback needed. See what meeting scheduled. Right? So you go and you, you find what you need to do. You get those mapped into Salesforce and have it on the lead, have it on the contact, make sure all the details that come in are all going from the lead to the contact level into the opportunity level.
All your notes are good. Right? My last boss, Luis Curet fantastic guy. He’s a very, very sharp guy when it comes to getting everything done in Salesforce and it has to be, it has to be in Salesforce. It’s not in Salesforce, it did not happen. And I’m a strong believer of that now. So even at my new company, if it’s not Salesforce, it didn’t happen.
If it wasn’t Salesforce we needed it and we figured out how to get it in there. A lot of projects went into all that stuff, don’t lose a single piece of data. Right? Clean up the database, have the most pristine database you can possibly have, make it easy as possible for your SDRs to be successful. And I think that’s where a lot of companies fail is they have dirty databases.
They don’t have really good processes put in place. And the SDRs are kind of sitting there, not really flapping in the wind going what’s next, but they’re kind of sitting there like, “Well, this is how we’ve been doing this. I’m gonna to continue doing this way. No, assuming I’m doing anything wrong.” So, you know, you build out those processes the right way.
You train your team the right way. They build a good habits. Eventually they don’t need you. And when I say they don’t need you, right, and as I tell my every SDR that I’ve ever hired on my team even here is, “You can do this job without me. And if I did that, that means I did my job the right way.
And that means you’re going to get promoted. You’re going to get, go into it in eight year old. You’re getting into customer success.” Right? So like I met Allie at Securly, right? I think we had at my time there, I think we got four or five people promoted into account executives.
Marc Gonyea: Wow.
Dan Yorkey: Backfill them and hire more.
And then I had three people go into the customer success team. Right? I had one, one girl who was an intern going to finance, doing deal desk type stuff. But you know, it’s always good to see teams grow, promote, get people promoted from within, right? And then we expanded it right when I said the 14 people.
Right? So I did and so we broke out inbound and read it that whole process. And I did my outbound and we had our, our territory accounts. Then we brought in some, some AE SDRs, right? They only focused on AE there’s 2000 students in below. And then we brought in people to work on customers. So trying to upsell them, cross the one more products, right?
Increase that ARR for, for the company. And all that comes with a different set of processes. We did that for two years and it was, it was a good run. We had really good things, that awesome company, awesome product. Doing a really good thing in this world.
Chris Corcoran: So you’ve hired on the SDRs?
Dan Yorkey: Yeah.
Chris Corcoran: And what do you look for when you, when you’re, when you’re looking at an SDR?
Dan Yorkey: Yeah, so, so when I look for, I don’t, I don’t care about experience. I really don’t. It depends where you are in the world around, you start to like, see that. You know, in certain regions, they, they’re gonna have more experience than others, but you know. I’m looking [00:49:00] for kids. I say kids and then my boss calls me a kid.
I’m looking for young adults, you know, that, that want to be in sales. Right? They’re not like, “Oh, I think I want to go into marketing or I may want to go into this. I just want to kind of try things out.” I don’t like those people.
Chris Corcoran: Was that, wasn’t that you?
Dan Yorkey: Yeah, I was. But, but, but you would never know. I have the best poker face. You know, I was going to go into a lot of people, so I’ll, I’ll wait for her off, but there’s also another time when I have really good poker face.
Chris Corcoran: Yeah.
Dan Yorkey: That’s usually after 10:00 PM,
But, no. Right? So like in the way that memoryBlue hires has affected a lot of how I like to hire as well, right? But you know, like if you played a college sport, right? If you even played high school sports all the way through so I mean, any sport, competitive sports, right? Because it shows that you’re coachable, you’re going to learn.
I look for people, you know, have that drive. They don’t, they, they’re not kind of getting into it because their friend’s home again the sales or they think it’s a good career path. I don’t care if you want to be in tech sales. I don’t care if you want to be a medical device sales. I don’t care about any of that.
So I want to be in sales. I’m good with that. And I think my, I think the biggest question that I always ask, and this is kind of what I’ve learned is my deciding factor. Is they can say the right thing for why sales, why tech, why this company, right? I can go through what motivates them. Right? And, and you know, it’s good.
And then I always ask them, you know, motivate some passions, kind of throw them off from interview questions, you know, you know, dream job, things like that. And then it hit with a hypothetical. “Hey, so let’s say we go through this process, everything works out, you get this job.” Like, “Okay.” I’m like, “Where do you see yourself in three years?”
And that question right there, it tells you if I want to hire that person or not. Because if, if they, it’s okay if they hesitate, right? Because a lot of them don’t know what they want to do, but they have an idea of ahead of where they want to go. They know they want to be somewhere. Right? It’s not an, “Oh yeah.Well, I hope to, you know, to still be with the company, you know, in a bigger role doing, you know, marketing or sales, you know, whatever.” No, no. Yeah. You know, so, you know, I want to come in, I want to prove myself. I want to work hard. You know, of course I want to grow. I don’t wanna be an SDR forever, right?
I know. And you’ll get into a closing role, you know, potentially even on a role like yours. Perfect. Right? It shows that they have that, that ambition, that drive that they want to do something more than staying an entry level or a junior level role for a long time. But that’s what I’ve learned, right? I mean, there’s a lot of questions you can ask to figure that out, but for me, that just kind of feels like the best gauge. You can kind of tell people to be honest, if they’re lying, right? It’s even easier now to tell people they’re lying, because everything’s done over the computer. So it’s easy to tell them when their eyes start darken every which way and they don’t know what to say next.
So it’s been interesting. At first I didn’t like it, it was too hard. It was too hard to interview. So I’m like, “I’ve never done this. Like I see the person, I can see their hands move for their feet or like moving stuff.” Right? So you’re like, “Okay, well maybe their eyes are moving ’cause they’re looking down at their stuff to take notes,” [00:52:00] But then you realize that their hands are like right
’cause you can see their arms and you know that if they’re not doing anything. You’re like, “Okay. Like this person’s like they’re, they’re, they’re kind of squirmish and they don’t know what to do next.”
Chris Corcoran: Yeah. Interesting. To think about the best SDR that you’ve ever led in, in what, what made that SDR the best?
Dan Yorkey: The best SDR that I ever led? Does it happen in memoryBlue?
Chris Corcoran: No. No
Marc Gonyea: Anyone.
Dan Yorkey: So I think I had a lot of really good SDRs. You know, if I want to go to the one, I wish if, if I could, if I could mesh SDRs together to continue to make the best SDR I will do that next. So let’s do this. So actually, so many people with memoryBlue. I’m gonna say Omar.
Marc Gonyea: Omar.
Dan Yorkey: Also, they all know that I’m here today. And I got a [00:53:00] story that I have to tell it was a great story as it was after one of our first Fridays that Marc was in town for. And, you know, I’d still kind of, you know, a bone or, you know, a thorn in my side because I, I offered up my whole commission check for this. And Marc still didn’t agree to it.
I mean, he, he would’ve lost nothing and it was great. It was, it was a great bet. So, so we were out one night, I think we went to the Sushi Spot, whatever it is right there. And then we went to the Wagon and we were hanging out and ended up being me, Marc, Omar and Colby. The three worst people that you should be out with them in San Jose.
And I’m not talking about myself. I’m talking about Marc, Colby and Omar. It’s not that late. It’s probably like 10. Yeah, no, but Omar and Colby, they’re great guys…
Marc Gonyea: With me is one of the more of, right? That day,
Dan Yorkey: Probably
Chris Corcoran: Right.
Dan Yorkey: No, they’re young guys. They’re probably 25 now, 26 maybe. Right? So they were like fresh 21, 22.
And they love to have a good time. So, you know, [00:54:00] w w we went out to happy hour and went out, getting a few more drinks, right? Omar. Right? Omar was good and he was good because he didn’t care. Right? He made people laugh. No, Omar in the office, you guys need to have like a live stream in every office.
So you guys can see what people are doing. And not to like, watch them like to make sure they’re working, but it’s like, see the energy. Although I would walk in on every dress-up day and have the most ridiculous costume, he’d be in there and like, he w he was the guy who had the most self-deprecating humor ever.
He would make fun of himself more than anybody else could make fun of him and it didn’t matter even if you try to make fun of him he would say something worse about himself right after and laugh. But, but just, you know, he’s, he’s a sales guy. Like he can connect with anyone. He can talk to anyone. He doesn’t care if you’re a C-level, he doesn’t care
if you’re a manager, he’ll talk to you the same way he gets on the phone, makes some laugh. I mean, like that got crushed up from outlets, crushed in. Like, I think, I think single-handedly because of Omar’s, I think it started out as a one FTE, I [00:55:00] believe. He grew from a one to a four. It was like a one to a two, a one to a two then two to a four.
It was one to a four. And I was like, “What? Like, that’s insane.” So my best SDR memoryBlue, definitely Omar. That guy was a bold and he worked hard. He was in there early, he prospects like three hours being there ’till 8:00 PM. But anyways, back to the story. So I got Omar and Colby. We’re sitting there.
We’re sitting at the bar. Omar walks up feeling real good. He goes, “Marc, I want to offer challenge. DC thinks they’re better than us. They’re always looking at my leads saying that my leads aren’t real. Dan always goes through and vets all of them. And they’re always legit. I’ve got a proposition for you.”
And Marc’s like, “All right, what do you got?” He goes, “Me and Colby against one of your whole teams in DC. We’ll beat them.”
Chris Corcoran: A whole team?
Dan Yorkey: Whole team. And…
Chris Corcoran: I would’ve taken that bet.
Dan Yorkey: At the time, right it was like teams are like five, six out here. It wasn’t like 9, 10, 11. Right? So like, but they were dead said, “Of course.”
Like, “Yeah, let’s do it. Yeah, we’re in, yeah. Come on. Marc, you in? What’s going on, right?” This is one of the words that we probably can’t say on this podcast, we’ll bleep them out and I don’t want to do that. And Marc’s like, “You guys are serious?” And he looks at me and I’m like, ” I didn’t say this.” But I was like, “Yeah, yeah, we’re serious.”
“These two will beat anyone you got over there. Let’s go out and ask about that my commission check.” It probably would have happened anyways ’cause you all would’ve gone home in the morning and you probably would’ve forgot half the details to it. So probably wouldn’t have mattered. At least Omar and Colby. But yeah.
Chris Corcoran: I like the swagger.
Marc Gonyea: You hired Omar?
Dan Yorkey: Oh, Colby is good.
Chris Corcoran: Omar story. He was ridiculous. Good too.
Dan Yorkey: And I am like, I don’t know how this happened, but I acquired them.
Marc Gonyea: You hired them?
Dan Yorkey: I hired Colby. Colby was the one, so we were trying to hire people. And then now we’re came in they wanted to add three FTE.
They’re already trying to hire more people. Like we couldn’t get people into our fast enough. Colby was the one who was working. I think he was doing, like daycare of the special needs kids. And we literally made him quit like on the spot. And so like three days later, he goes to good…
Chris Corcoran: Do you know Taylor Pierce?
He was in Charlotte.
Dan Yorkey: Taylor, Taylor was out here. He’s the VP of Sales at… He was, he was near you. He’s in North Carolina.
Or something.
Chris Corcoran: I think he said he’s a VP of Sales. Anyway, so Taylor was he’s living in the Bay Area. In San Jose. And he had, when he was moving back to North Carolina, he went and got like a truck, like a ryder truck. Omar was his sales rep and Taylor, Taylor referred Omar into memoryBlue.
Taylor, Taylor Pierce. Yeah.
Dan Yorkey: That’s cool.
Chris Corcoran: So we, I’m out there in San Jose and I interview them and they’re like, hey, someone was like, “Hey, you need to take a look at this guy.” I’m like, “Why, what do I need to do? We need to hire this guy.”
But like, we didn’t hire him for some reason. Oh, and I was like jumping up and down…
Dan Yorkey: When he applied twice.
Chris Corcoran: I’m like, “Guys, guys, what are we doing? If we can’t, if we can’t know that this guy’s going to be good, we should just shut down this office because it’s… this guy’s going to be amazing.” Fortunately, we ended up bringing him on.
He turned out to be one of the best SDRs you ever worked with. He’s crushing it. And that you’re in Carolina, you and Taylor and he…
Dan Yorkey: He’s in Raleigh.
Chris Corcoran: He’s in Raleigh?
Marc Gonyea: That’s okay. Big state.
Dan Yorkey: It’s not that far actually. It’s like the two, two and a half..
Marc Gonyea: Two and change.
Chris Corcoran: So, Carolina boys need to stick together.
Marc Gonyea: Should take that bet.
Dan Yorkey: But that was 100%.
Marc Gonyea: You know, it was just, you have these rivalries in this office, that’s where we were so we started doing the tops, right? Yeah, because you have the guys in DC, look it at Omar and Colby, “Look, what the fuck, man, those guys whose leads are weak, we’re going to look your leads up in Salesforce to book their [00:59:00] meetings with.” Then you’ve got Colby and Omar looking at the people in DC,
they’re like, “Look at these guys. I’m going to cyber campaign and yada, yada, yada.” So we were like, “We got to get people together, so they can meet each other.” And they’re like, “Oh, okay. You know what that of at the top of the leader board, every time. Omar, he’s a great guy. He’s not a villain.”
Dan Yorkey: I literally knew every single lead that guy put in by certain reps for my team, because I knew at the end of the month I was going to have to have a story about why this is booked and why this was a good year and all that.
And I would just come prepare, like “I have a whole spreadsheet and images here. Just send it to them, just send it to them.”
Marc Gonyea: So, Yorkey, you sound like you know what you are doing, how come you don’t ever talk about stuff on LinkedIn?
Dan Yorkey: If I had the time to talk on Linkedln, I would. So I’ll, I’ll be completely honest with you. I go on my LinkedIn. Now I need a little bit more free things ’cause I’m hiring a lot of people, you know. Going in there and saying, “Hey, you know, I’m interested.” I send them the link and things like that. Before that I was doing probably 30 plus hours of meetings a week plus all my other work, my reporting, my trainings, all that. I don’t have time to be on it. Right? Like, let’s be real.
Like I got more important things to do than go on LinkedIn and scroll through like I already do that on Instagram too much. Like I’m trying to stop doing that. But you know, it’s way cooler like Harleys for sale, boats for sale that I still can’t afford, but one day I’ll be able to.
Marc Gonyea: That’s right.
Dan Yorkey: And do that then go on LinkedIn. The other reason I don’t go on LinkedIn and this is, this is a good topic is everyone who’s out there says they’re, they’re a sales leader. There they’re a sales guru. I’m the SDR bad-ass. I’m the best one out here.
Marc Gonyea: SDR whisper.
Dan Yorkey: Yeah. They’re all out there posting these, these polls and I didn’t even know you could do polls.
I want, I got on one end the pools and like I’m like, “What are we on?” Like, like we’re crowdsourcing information from LinkedIn, from your network. People are sharing your post and their network who are like engineering backgrounds who have all engineering friends talking about how many cold calls should you make a week.
Or what should an outbound [01:01:00] quota it’s like, “Are you the best person in the space? Like shouldn’t you have the data? Like, like you’re trying to get data from LinkedIn.” Like, like I don’t have time to go through that and, and go through, you know, a thousand responses to polls and then send out an email that says, “Hey, these are the results to this.
This is why you should do this.” When I can go to say Gong who gives me actual insights, I’m not even paying custom anymore, security was. And I get all these things from them with actual data insights and actual things that they’re seeing through their platform. Like there’s companies out there, like a SalesLoft that puts real stats on LinkedIn from their, their, their C-level people from their VPs.
Right? I’d rather be those people than the ones CrowdSourcing information of LinkedIn.
Marc Gonyea: Sure.
Dan Yorkey: Like I decided I don’t have the time for that.
Marc Gonyea: There’s also, a slight joking about it because there’s a, there are people who are actually doing it. Why don’t you go ahead and try it and then talk about it versus speculating about it for someone who did it 15 years ago?
Dan Yorkey: Yeah. I would also, you know, like, I’m not saying that these people don’t know what they’re talking about. Right? But 15 years ago, 20 years ago, there were no SDR rules. Right? You came in, you were a closing rep, right? You came in, you got your accounts. You did your thing way differently than you do it now,
right? Prospecting, finding all the information, going through 10 Ks, right? They got all this information you need to go and get a meeting with that C-level, right? They make it seem like it’s so easy, but I’d love to see them actually sit down for a month or maybe even I’ll give them two weeks to build a list and give them a month and see how many meetings they can actually schedule.
Marc Gonyea: Right.
Dan Yorkey: I’d love to see it and I’ll do it right there with them. I’ll I’ll, I’ll sign up for….
Chris Corcoran: ICPC – internet celebrity prospecting challenge.
Marc Gonyea: You have one of those ESPN networks, right, right in, right after the ultimate fighting thing.
Dan Yorkey: Now I know there’s a lot of people who don’t know what I’m going to say in that, but you guys know MTV study, definitely. Yeah, it’ll be like that. It’ll be cool. It’ll be cool.
Marc Gonyea: I love it. [01:03:00] All right.
Dan Yorkey: Yeah. But yeah, I don’t have time for that. You know, I’ve actually thought about getting into that, you know, throw some things out there, you know, putting my, my wisdom out there. You know, maybe create my own event, you know, a virtual event, charge people money and then say 70% off, you know, for this week, you know, you never know. I’d throw it out there.
Marc Gonyea: So Yorkey, what are you up to now? Let’s start with this real quick. Talk about the blend between sales development, sales ops and sales enablement. Because you’ve got experience kind of taking over some of those things or executing on those things.
Dan Yorkey: Yeah. So what am I doing now? So I’ve been for the last month.
Well, let’s take a step back first. I took a vacation. I went to Cabo San Lucas, for really good friend’s wedding. That’s awesome. And then right after that, I got back, I finished my time and Securly, did all that. And then I joined a company called BioCatch which is a competitor to ThreatMetrix.
Instead of doing device intelligence, things like that, we’re still cleaning some of that PII and some of that, but we’re doing behavioral biometrics. So we’re looking into how you’re doing it, what’s the intent behind it, key strokes. You know, how, how hard you push on your phone or how hard you push down on your, on your buttons, how you move across your mouse pad. Things like that. For, for banking or from implanting institutional fraud. Trying to stop account origination fraud and account takeovers in that social engineering, right?
Everyone gets the phone call now saying, “Oh, your credit card has been expired or whatever. You got a call and, you know, give us this information.” It’s your like your address, whatever. Trying to stop all that stuff. So my role there is Senior Manager of Global Business Development. So right now I’m currently looking to build a team in Singapore, Brazil, North America, obviously and then the UK. Solely focusing on, you know, Brazil, the German market and then kind of going into the Singaporean, Malaysian market over there and the banks. So that’s what I’m doing now.
What does that entail? So, so I’ve been been there for a month. I’m doing some interviews for the last couple of weeks, trying to get my team in place. But in the meantime, right, I’ve been doing a lot of meetings with the marketing team. With the, now there’s a whole thing called Revenue Operations.
That’s actually who my boss is. So I go, I report into the VP of revenue ops who kind of runs sales, operations, marketing, operations. It’s all flows into him because he’s the one who needs to make that engine work so we can get, you know, the dashboards and reports done. So meeting with the Demand Gen team. We have two ladies there from RSA that do events, webinars all of our emails that go out for white paper downloads, things like that.
And building out those workflows, how are we going to follow up on them? Who should get them? What the MQL score should be? Why they should be that way? A lot of data analyzation. Right? The, the, the, not the not sexy part of anyone’s job, right, the things that you don’t want to spend your hours doing, but it’s very vital.
And you know, I think that’s what a lot of companies struggling. And it’s not because they don’t want to do it, they just don’t have the head count to do it. So someone needs to do it. And like you have one sales ops guy. They’re too busy building rule sets, try to make workflows happening. They don’t have time for that.
Right? So there’s someone that’s gotta be able to pick up that slack. And that’s where, honestly, in most companies, the SDR [01:06:00] managers should be taking ownership of some of these pieces because it directly affects what I do and what my team does. So I go on through all of the MQLs and the scores and why they’re that score,
are we scoring them the right way, right? We’re not missing any low hanging fruit, right? Because I’m setting the threshold of what I think should be flowing into my team. I would, I would rather have my team follow up with 20 extra MQLs that are bad than not follow upon those 20 and 15 of them were good.
Right? ‘Cause it’s not, it isn’t a lot of time out of your day. But it goes back to the process thing and in the attention to detail. And that was another thing I think when I got hired here as a DM was one thing that I had to work on was my attention to detail. Right? And that’s what I still work on. I’m still trying to get better and better and better because at the end of the day, your data needs to be perfect.
It has to be perfect. If you’re off, someone will notice and then they’re going to come out like, “He’s not fit for this role”. So it was getting all of that in place, ironed out. When does it go into a nurture campaign versus when does it go to the SDR team? At what point do we hand it off directly to the [01:07:00] sales rep?
At what point does it get back into the nurture campaign? Right? How does the inbound workflow versus the outbound workflow work? When they’re in a nurture campaign, how’s it work with your outbound campaign, campaigns, right? Because they don’t want to double touch, they don’t want the same people in there, but that’s an inevitable. It’s going to happen.
Right? But it’s building out all of that. And that’s what people don’t understand is the effort that happened on the back end to make an an engine work. Right? And it’s like, you know, Emma goes to a car dealership, right? Or they want to go to, you know, get a boat or whatever. Right? You walk in you buy it and you just drive off.
Well, the car just starts and you go, right? I go, “Okay, well, I paid to show his work, but they don’t understand how long it took to build that car. How many nuts and bolts and what needs to go in there and how many intricate pieces and they need to cut here. Well, it’s here, right? It’s going to break at some point, so you want to build it as strong as possible. So I’ve been doing that for a month. Strictly with the marketing team, the VP of Marketing, everyone in Demand Gen. And now I’m finally finalizing that and I’m getting in to the sales portion, right? When the MPO against me or [01:08:00] my outbound team schedules a meeting how’s that SQL or that meeting being handed off, how, how are we going to track it in Salesforce?
What’s the right way? What’s the process? What happens if it goes, “It’s not a sales accepted lead.” Right? “We don’t want an opportunity”. So ’cause inflate pipeline, so how are you going to do that? Right? And all those small intricate details that some companies do one way and others do the other, but when you get multiple people from other companies, all at one, they’ve all done it differently, right?
It’s how he now has been the best way so it all works cohesively. But that’s the easy part, right? With the sales team, because let’s be real sales guys are sales guys at the end of the day they want it done the easiest way possible. So that’s not too bad. And then I think the last piece right, is, is the training programs.
Right? You know, and I, I’m thankful to have come from memoryBlue. I know to get training program looks like. I know how effective a training program can be if it’s done the right way. So I have a sales enablement team. Luckily that, you know, the company that I’m at, they value all of these pieces of company very, very well. They wanna make sure it’s done the right way. So I’m working with that team for the last couple of weeks we’ve been putting together a whole onboarding program. I like to scale line down into a condensed version. I like do a four week onboarding. I’m not saying they’re fully ramped after four weeks, but you know, they should be proficient enough to get going, right?
Like here, you know, you get a client in six business days we’ll be on the phone. Right? I give them an extra week. I say by the beginning of week three, we get them on the phones. Right? And that gives them a week for product, that week for competitive knowledge. Go over objections, white boarding into like role-plays right?
And then, “Hey, you got some training wheels for the first couple of weeks? See you later.” Right? And we’re building that out and you know, and it’s always extensive. It’s a lot of work from a very beginning, but it lets them know like, “Hey, this job, like, I’m getting ask a lot from you.” But you put all those three pieces together and you do them the right way, you never have to do it again. You may have to tweak it, you may need to edit these and changes this as you continue to grow, but you’ll never have to worry about that engine slowing you down. And I, I think that’s the headpiece that people don’t understand. Right? And I think a lot of companies, you know, they hire people literally just to manage the SDRs. “Hey, you have numbers to hit?
You have this? I’ll tell you do. Just make sure your team is there.” Right? And I think that kind of separates, you know, the people that stay in the SDR manager roles and want to be more of a, I won’t say a farmer, but you know, just kinda make sure everything’s working. I’m I’m comfortable. And if you want to get out of the comfort zone, like me, I’m always trying to grow.
I want to keep going and going and going. Right? I was, I was a team lead. Then I was a DM. Then I was a manager. Then I got into a director role. Now I’m a senior manager. Right? And now the more you go, the more responsibilities you get. But to me, life isn’t fulfilling, if I’m just doing the same thing every single day. I wanted to go to that,
I got to go get a job at Costco. Clock-in and clock-out. See you later.
Chris Corcoran: Yeah. And so what inspired you to leave the Bay Area and move to North Carolina?
Dan Yorkey: Man, you guys are getting into my good stories now. So can I I’ll tell you 98% of the story, I got to leave out a certain part of. So, so I sit in California, right?
And everyone knows how it’s expensive. I mean you guys live here. It’s probably expensive here now, I’m assuming.
Marc Gonyea: California.
[01:11:00] Dan Yorkey: It’s expensive. Three bedroom, two bath housing now, you know, at 1.2 million.
Marc Gonyea: Yeah. You know, I made good money, but I still don’t want to, I still can’t afford that.
Dan Yorkey: I mean, even that $5,000 a month in mortgage, insurance, car payments, bills, not where they’re at. I, I don’t wanna be a slave to my house. So we had COVID go. Right? And I got, “It was only gonna be four months. It was only gonna be four months, five months. I know it’s going to be the end of summer.” I was like, “Okay, whatever.” Sat there and been like six, seven months I’m sitting in this house. It’s, you know, it’s 110 degrees.
California’s on fire. And I think you were in town last year for that, right? It was on fire. Right? It’s literally, like I saw two days of blue sky the whole time all summer before I moved out here. There’s prior a little bit of an exaggeration, it was bad. And I called my boss one day. I was like, “Hey man, like I want to buy a house. Let me go back to the office
and when we go back, how many days a week are we going to go?” He goes, “I’ll probably go back two days a week.” I’m like, “Okay.” Thinking about it, 70 and be like three hours away. I was like, “I’m not moving to Bakersfield.” Discovery baby cool on the water, I got to have a boat, I like boats aren’t be there, that’d be sick.
Right? [01:12:00] Too expensive. Right? Like everything that was like 1.5 and more, it was like a tiny little condo. Good. Went down to slow, right, we went to school. Love to go back there one day. But the houses they’re kind of, and I’m not too expensive, but they need a lot of work on that. Doesn’t really sound like a good fit.
I mean, I was in North Carolina. I was out here like every quarter for a week, week and a half. So I was like, I was like, almost like, “Hey, can I move to North Carolina?” He goes, “Are you serious?” I was like, “Yeah.” He was like, “As you move out here,… I was dead serious. I just needed a contract in my hand. I would’ve signed it.”
Right? I was dead serious. He’s like, “Are you sure?” Like, “Yeah, absolutely.” He’s like, “You sure?”. I’m like, “Yeah”. He goes, “When I was like, I don’t know. I was like going to go fly out there. I’m going to talk to and really let you know.” So this isn’t like May. So we’re what, four months in the pandemic, three months in the pandemic, I’m already over it.
You know, when I start to think about it and like mid June, I was really over it throughout here in July for a week. And I stayed right in what they call uptown, which is like the downtown area. My whole team that I managed was all in that area within like a mile and a half.
Marc Gonyea: Corey is still there..
Dan Yorkey: So, so I sent this order [01:13:00] like 20 houses that I liked, certain areas
I like, ’cause I we’ll take Tuesday, Wednesday off, we’ll go show you houses all day. So I grabbed my, my SDR. I was like, “Hey, I don’t have a car. You have a car. What are you doing?” And he goes, “Well, I’m working.” I’m like, “Cool. Well, I need your help.” He goes, “I got to work.” “Well, you worked for me. So, so you’re going to drive me around today.
I’m going to pay you.” I probably shouldn’t say that because my old boss is probably going to hear that too.
Marc Gonyea: You got to drop some…
Dan Yorkey: Yeah, of course, no big, big day of sales training, you know? So we went to all these houses and the second day we go to the, this house I sent her like three weeks ago that went under contract, but it fell through because the job that got us moving out here for filter as well.
Marc Gonyea: You surprised by the real estate market in the Charlotte area versus one California?
Dan Yorkey: 100%, 100%.
Marc Gonyea: Pleasantly surprised. Not surprised, actually pleased.
Dan Yorkey: I’m more than pleased. Once I saw like the size of houses and how much land you can get in the area you’re in for the price. Like it’s a no brainer leave California, California is a great place to visit. And tell them that like, “Hey man, when you come back? Hey, when you come back? I was like, I’m never coming back.
Like, I’ll come visit. You tell me when I’ll fly out there.” I can afford that all day. Right? And but anyways, so we see this all, all these houses, she calls me and we have one more for now. She just came back on the market like two hours ago. And I was like, “Cool, go check it out.” I was like, “Oh, this is, this is the house I, I centered.
Right? And checked it out until I was sick. You know, it’s a big decision, right? It’s 3,400 miles across the country, all that stuff. So I’m like, all right. Best way to make a decision. Right? Go to the bar. Right? I’m not kidding. I’m not kidding.
Marc Gonyea: I know. I know. That’s why I love this.
Dan Yorkey: So we get done. It’s like two in the afternoon,
I go up, I go back to my condo, started working. Do that, it’s five. Go to the bar. So drained and like considered it, like there’s three house I really liked. I was like, “Okay. I like these two.” I was I’ll really do this. So I just kept drinking. Kept drinking, kept drinking, you know, you know, I’m just there. Bar close.
I go back, you know, I’m in a hotel room, call my mom, call my brother, call my friends. But yeah, you know, “If you want to do it, you should do it.” Next thing I know, it’s like one in the morning. You got working four hours, five hours, you know, still drinking. And I go,” You know what? Why not?” So I texted my realtor at two in the morning saying, “Put an offer on the house.”
She called me at seven and goes, “Are you serious?” And I was like, “100%, like it said, put an offer on the house.” And then she goes, “Yeah,” she goes, “but it was also really late. So I figured that, you know, you weren’t sober.” And I was like, “It’s a good point, but still put the offer in.” And she put it in and got it.
And it got accepted. And I was like, “What have I done?” I was like, I was in California. I had this bag and I was like, “Oh shit.” I was like, “I just bought a house in North Carolina.” And I was like and then I, packed up my stuff. Everything. I shook half my stuff and then I hooked anything else to my truck. My dad and I, we drove out here in 37 hours, 38 hours. Straight.
The truck never turned off. Just took turns, sleeping in the truck.
Chris Corcoran: Balling out.
Dan Yorkey: Yeah. And now…
Chris Corcoran: That’s amazing. That was great. How long have you been in Charlotte?
Dan Yorkey: 10 months.
Chris Corcoran: 10 months. Okay. That’s great. Okay. And the company you work, you worked for? They had an office in Charlotte?
Dan Yorkey: Yeah.
Chris Corcoran: Okay, perfect.
Dan Yorkey: Yeah, yeah.
Yeah. I mean, so now I mean, as you, as you all know, right? A lot of guys, aren’t going back to the office. They’re trying to get rid of them, so they’re trying to leave work. So they’re trying to find, you know, like shared spaces is like, “Oh, we don’t want to go back.” So I mean, as of now, they’re not coming back for awhile, but they will eventually.
Chris Corcoran: Yeah. Interesting. Very good
Marc Gonyea: Yorkey. What, a couple of questions and we’ll wrap things up. In this, so this is another guy we’ve got to have a part two with something.
Dan Yorkey: But part two is going to be me asking you guys questions.
Marc Gonyea: So that’d be great. We should get them all, all star cast to do that.
You’ve so, but episode recently you were in the Bay in the thick of it?
And it still is the centerpiece of high-tech, I think.
You’ve seen your memoryBlue alums, your colleagues from ThreatMetrix. You’ve seen people move and chase companies or visions, or like, what are some of the mistakes people should avoid when they decide they want to cut it, go to a new firm?
Dan Yorkey: I mean,…
Marc Gonyea: What sort of mistakes people make?
Dan Yorkey: I mean, see, I mean, I think, I think that’s two full questions, right?
You know, if you’re in an SDR role is one thing, right? When you’re selling, who’s like, who’s like me, right, who was in the roles like I am, or like, like a Taylor Pierce, right? Who, you know, you get into account executive VP roles. Are you into that? Right? What you’re looking for completely changes. But if I’m starting out my sales career, right, everyone, especially the generation coming up. And my generation is guilty of this too. And they’re all about instant gratification, right? They’ve got Instagram, they’ve got Snapchat and all this stuff where they get, “Oh, I got 400 likes.” Great. You have 400 likes from people who don’t know who you are. Like, who cares?
It makes you feel good? Great. Delete it and go make yourself feel good. Like, go do something that you enjoy doing. Go for a ride, go play baseball. Soccer, slow pitch, softball, whatever you want to do. Like, like don’t worry about the instant gratification. People are so worried and they get so caught up in, in what people tell them versus what actually happens.
Right? Every company is going to sell you on, “This is your growth path. This is what we do. We’re going to promote you. We’re going to do this.” Right? There’s one company, two companies now that I’ve worked for that are actually done that. memoryBlue does that and I’ve seen that now because you guys have been growing like crazy.
I don’t even know how many offices you guys have any more, how many DMs, how many employees, but I know it’s insane. And, and I’ll ask you guys about that, about this after this question, because I know that you guys don’t have a lot of SDRs without thinking about jumping ship, trying to go somewhere else, six, seven minutes in.
So I’d love to hear how fast you guys are growing and you know, and how, you know, how it want stay and what’s happening ’cause you know, there’s been a lot here, right? I mean, I just talked to from, forgot her name and it’s like 8% opted today. She’s been here like eight months and she’s a DM. And I was like, “That’s awesome.”
[01:19:00] I was like, “That’s awesome. Like how would you know when did this COVID hit? I came back. I told him I want to be a DM.” I was like, “Awesome.” And how many people do you have? Right? And she’s going into it. I was like, “It’s awesome.” Right? I was like, “You learn, you learn a lot. You’re doing this.” She goes, “Yeah.” I was like. But anyways, so like it’s like people, I just want that instant gratification. Right? She earned her instant gratification.
Marc Gonyea: Yeah.
Dan Yorkey: If you want something, you got to go work for it. It’s not handed to you, especially in this day and age. Right? Especially with COVID. And people were realizing, right, in the Bay Area it’s not the best talent. They have really good talent, but…
Chris Corcoran: I was trying to tell you that when you were an SDR, we used to say the same thing about the Californians.
Dan Yorkey: Well, I can say that, ’cause I’m not, I’m not there anymore and because you’re trying to compare them against me. And I was still going to toe to toe with any SDR. But anyways, so, but like everyone thought the towel was there, right?
Because all the companies wanted to be there, their headquarters were there. Right? The hardest part still is they still have the most money. They will throw money around. Right? And that’s the [01:20:00] problem. And that’s what these SDR see, right? They come in and when they get here, right, it’s a good base. It’s not the highest base, but it’s a good base.
But they’re getting the training. They’re getting the guidance, they’re getting the ongoing trainings, right? They’re getting like, you don’t get a bullpen like this. You don’t get this energy. Right? Like the work ethic that you can get from people that work here, if you don’t have a strong work ethic that carries you through, right?
It shows you how you need to work. Right? And he goes, “If there’s people that are this good, and I’m only this good, I want to be that good. How do I get there?” Right? And you can learn from those people. Right? Like, and then in the sales, we were small. So we can always learn from each other, right? So the, the, the best people, we would always go and sit there and pick each other’s brain and go into comments or we just keep going and keep going.
Right? Knowing that we were going to be there for a while, right? But you got to earn your way. You got to earn it. Right? You want to get hired by your client. You can’t go to your home, like, “Hey, I want to get hired.” That’s great. You want to get hired? You’ve been here for two months. Okay. [01:21:00] Why? Then I go, “Well, I’ve been here for two months on this campaign.
You know, the first month I had six meetings and the seventh I had 10.” Okay. You’re here for two months, right? So you kind of probably go to your first one, you hit it. Your second month is prime missed quotas, it goes by 12, 13, still a good month to 10, but you didn’t, you didn’t prove anything yet. Right? There’s, there’s two different types of people, right?
There’s the people who think they’re the best because they’ve done it once. And they go around the office and they say they’re the best. They closed the biggest deal. You closed the biggest deal. You, you have the most meetings booked or occurred this month. Great. You get a one out of 11 months, the other 10 you were middle of the pack, right?
So if you want to go and you want to get promoted and you want to do things the right way, prove you’re worth, right? Consistently hit quota. You don’t need to go 150, 200% of quota. Hit a 100% of quota every single month. Show everyone that you’re consistent, that you can do this over and over again.
Right? You know, if you’re good at sports, right, you go to baseball. You always see the [01:22:00] players and the pitchers, right? Tim Lincecum, right? He had a longer career than normal. But flash in the pan, right? He was really good for four years and he was gone. Usually you see, one year you have a really good hitter or a really good pitcher or a closer and then you’re just done, right?
Do it consistently. Earn, earn your stripes. But by jumping right? Every time you jump, your clock starts over. You, you, you come to me and interview with me after leaving memoryBlue are still working here, you say you’re eight months in. I’m going to tell him, “You have eight months of SDR experience, that’s great. But what are you looking to do?” Oh, you know, it doesn’t want to get into closure. “Okay. How fast?” You know, about eight to nine months in my new role, I didn’t,…” I’m like, “Okay.” The average timeframe, and this is probably changed a little bit, you know, as of late is 16 months in the SDR role to see them be successful.
You have eight months. If you come work for me, you’re starting at day zero. So you have 16 months to prove yourself. Before you pine in and get a shot. I was like, did, things happen. I’d probably get people at eight months, a [01:23:00] year, 13 months, but you’re starting at day zero with me. ‘Cause I don’t know what you did those eight months before.
So that means nothing to me. Now you can prove yourself and it could be eight months, but you’re going to bust your ass. Right? So they want to do it the right way, you stay with one company. You do it throughout, you want to go work for a client? Prove them that you can go do that. Right? But jumping to company after company, you’ll be an SDR for five years and then you’ll be out of sales or you’ll be working in some random sales company as like a SDR, AE, customer success style role. Where do you want to be?
Chris Corcoran: Frankenstein.
Dan Yorkey: Yeah. I mean, it happens all the time. It happens all the time and some people are okay with that, but you know, you do things the right way and good things happen. Right? And I’m not saying that it has to do with the same company, you know, for your next promotion. Right? Like I tell everyone, right? Like I give 12 solid months
and after that, like I reevaluate. Not saying I’m leaving, but I reevaluate. Now more like two years I reevaluate. Right? Because what I’m doing takes longer. [01:24:00] Right? But like at two years I reevaluate, right? You look at a VP of sales or like a, a CRO like their average span right now is like 13 months.
Chris Corcoran: It’s crazy.
Dan Yorkey: It’s crazy. Right? It’s like, you don’t know what’s going to happen. So you always gotta keep your options open, but your, your options, aren’t always better. The companies that want to pay you more money, they’re paying you more money for a reason. Either they, they can’t get anyone to come work for them.
People keep quitting or they can’t figure out a market fit for their product. So that we pay more money, we’re going to get better talent will help us figure it out. But they have, but they’re not pulled out like, “Oh, we have this big growth path.” I’m going to like, I’m going to be in right now. Right? And I had people in every region asking me “What’s the growth path?”
And I was like, “That’s a very good question.” And I’m an honest person. I don’t lie. I will never lie. Even if, even if it’s going to hurt me, I’m not going to lie. Great question. I don’t have that answer for you. This is what I can tell you. This is the first BDR team we’re having here. You’re the only [01:25:00] rep that’s going to be in this region.
I’ve talked to my RVPs, I’ve talked to the CRO, talk to them weekly. We’re all in agreement that we want to build this the right way and we’re going to promote people from within. It’s not going to be handed, is it, you know, you gotta work for it, but it’s how bad do you want that promotion? How hard are you going to work?
Make it so we have to promote you. We don’t have a growth path, ’cause we’ve never had to think of it. ‘Cause we didn’t have this function but I can tell you that it will be there and there’ll be many different avenues that you can go depending on where you want to be and how hard you work. Right? I could completely lie. “Oh yeah.
We have a drill path. You know, after 12 months you do this, this and this we’ll start working on X, Y, and Z. You’ll go through a demo certification. We’ll do this. Put you in front of the RVP, a sales rep. We’ll do a lot demo. We’ll see walked through a whole, you know, cycle for a deal, all that stuff you do that.
Yeah, we’ll promote you.” People tell me that all the time. Never get promoted and they come interview with me. “Why are you leaving?” Well, they said, there’s I was [01:26:00] promised this and they never did it. Right? And I’m like, just kind of smiling. “Like yeah, happens.”
Marc Gonyea: Happens.
Dan Yorkey: Happens.
Chris Corcoran: On a regular, unfortunately.
Dan Yorkey: Yeah. I mean, you guys, right? Price the whole time.
Right? You get, especially with clients, right? They come, they go, right? I mean, you get people to memoryBlue for nine months, their client leaves, that should, I was like, “Well, what do I do? Do I stay for six more months and then kind of contract? Or do I go work somewhere else?” Right? After it happens all the time, especially now because you guys, when you guys go, I got three more offices open, two more offices.
Marc Gonyea: Yeah, six offices now.
Dan Yorkey: Where’s the next one?
Chris Corcoran: I don’t know. We’re focusing on growing the, the, the original six.
Dan Yorkey: How big is California?
Chris Corcoran: In terms of?
Dan Yorkey: Total size.
Chris Corcoran: People with probably right around 40.
Dan Yorkey: That’s good.
Chris Corcoran: Yeah, we were, we had to move out of downtown. Moving out,… Probably north first street.
Dan Yorkey: As you guys are already on north first street?
Chris Corcoran: I think we’re on St. James.
Dan Yorkey: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. St. James. That’s right.
Marc Gonyea: Your boy Joe is the, you get good talent up there you developed from the class. Joe’s grown.
Chris Corcoran: Joe’s grown, yeah.
Marc Gonyea: He certainly run the business, but he’s got the longest tenured customers and some of the biggest in the San Jose office.
Dan Yorkey: So any of my old clients there?
Marc Gonyea: I don’t know. We’ll see.
Dan Yorkey: I know Openprise gone.
Marc Gonyea: Openprise is gone.
Dan Yorkey: ‘Cause they, they just hired the last one and Trevor went to go work.
Marc Gonyea: Better too.
Dan Yorkey: Yeah. Yep. I miss that guy. Yeah.
Marc Gonyea: All right, Yorkey. Well, this was great.
Chris Corcoran: We appreciate you. Appreciate you making the trip.
Dan Yorkey: Absolutely.
Chris Corcoran: This was a lot of fun.
Marc Gonyea: You want to grab some grub tomorrow night, we’ll have some more stories?
Dan Yorkey: Maybe the bar.
Chris Corcoran: There you go.
Dan Yorkey: Get to the bar. Well, I’m no, I mean, don’t do that tonight. We got field day tomorrow. I got to hear about this field day. ‘Cause I have no idea what it is. I’ve seen pictures of this, you know, over the previous years. Especially when I was in California, I was, I know Joe Reeves. Would like to know about [01:28:00] it too and when the one in California is going to happen. ‘Cause we’ve never had one out there.
Chris Corcoran: They should. They do it with Texas.
Marc Gonyea: I think Joe should do them in California completely.
Chris Corcoran: It’s just, it’s a fun field day from elementary school from Willow Glen Elementary.
Dan Yorkey: I didn’t go there. I was right around the corner from my house. I’m excited, but no. Tomorrow, the two of you are going.
Chris Corcoran: We’ll be there.
Very good, Mr. Yorkey, thanks for sharing all your wisdom with our listeners as we catch up.
Dan Yorkey: Absolutely. We’ll do it again.
Marc Gonyea: For sure. Thanks, man.