Episode 65: Stephen Labay – Bet on Yourself
From working in hospitality to managing a team of SDRs, Stephen Labay knows with change, comes an opportunity to learn new things, add to, or refine your current skills, and push yourself to achieve more than last week, last month, last year.
Alum Ruben Rosado saw Stephen’s competitive nature and ability to grow in tough situations and referred him to join memoryBlue as an SDR. Rolling with the punches was key to Stephen’s success in the SDR role. One day you’re hitting it out of the park, and the next, you’re striking out. Now a Sales Development Manager at Couchbase, Stephen can assure you that viewing these moments of trial and tribulation from a different perspective can change not only your mindset, but your performance.
In this episode of Tech Sales is for Hustlers, Stephen talks about the key qualities of a great SDR, how to create your own opportunities to further your career, and why you need to trust yourself and your abilities. Remember that resilience and determination are attributes you already possess, or you wouldn’t be doing this job in the first place.
Guest-At-A-Glance
Name: Stephen Labay
What he does: Sales Development Manager
Company: Couchbase
Noteworthy: Stephen was a Semi-Finalist for the memoryBlue 2021 Alumni of the Year Award.
Where to find Stephen: LinkedIn
Key Insights
⚡ There’s no golden ticket. It’s important to learn how to adjust and keep going after a failure as an SDR. There’s no secret to success. Keep an open mind; if you’re learning you’re growing.
⚡ Create your own opportunities. Be on the lookout for ways you can excel constantly. Nobody will just hand things to you. Seek out the things you want because no one is more invested in your future than you are.
⚡ You can always be better. Soak in as much knowledge as possible, especially as a new SDR. Use each role or client as an opportunity to improve various aspects of your craft as a salesperson. Small incremental changes accumulate and will pay off in the long run.
Episode Highlights
Bad Experiences Can Make You Better
“I absolutely hated this guy, but it wasn’t until memoryBlue where I appreciated him really because I was probably more confident in being on the phone because I had to talk to this guy constantly in front of my peers over anybody else. […] So, it really was just an eye-opening experience where this guy who would just ridicule me at work made me a better salesperson.”
Recruiting vs. Sales
“The main difference is, when you’re recruiting, you’re not trying to sell anything to anybody besides the company itself and at that point myself. So you’re not trying to have them spend a whole bunch of money. If it didn’t work out with me, if I couldn’t find them a job, they were already in a job. It wasn’t the end of the world. I didn’t find anything.
Where, if you’re in tech sales specifically, you’re a salesperson probably trying to rip and replace at some point, and really expensive technology people have invested time and effort into making at least do what they were hoping to do. It might not be the best way of going about it. And there might be some kinks in it, but they spent time, they spent effort, and now you’re calling to have them spend even more money to fix what they weren’t able to really accomplish.”
Bet on yourself
“I had to take definitely hours of just laying in bed thinking about it. This is what I want to do, but I knew at the end of the day what made me happy? Was it the SDR work and really getting the commission, or was it teaching these SDRs? And these, my fellow peers, the best processes that I’ve learned. And it was teaching them; I really enjoyed it. And I figured this opportunity wasn’t going to come across all the time. So I decided to stick with it and become a manager.”
What makes a good SDR?
“I really think the main thing about being a good SDR is finding that ‘no,’ and not being afraid of it. And having the will to drive. I mean, everybody says an SDR has to be an entrepreneurial base, that was my whole concept, but I have plenty of other SDRs who never went that route. Some of them, even computer science, some of them, communications.
But if you find somebody or you are an SDR who takes things personally and wants to see yourself succeed, that’s what’s going to make you succeed. You can’t just think, ‘Oh, somebody’s going to hand me a yes, or somebody’s going to hand me an opportunity to grow my career.’ You have to be the one to create your own destiny. At that point, you have to be the one to strive.”
Transcript:
[00:02:03] Marc Gonyea: Stephen Labay, welcome.
[00:02:14] Stephen Labay: Thanks for having me, guys.
[00:02:16] Marc Gonyea: The pride of the Jersey shore. Let’s get into it. We played a little volleyball yesterday, right, Corcoran?
[00:02:26] Stephen Labay: Was a good time.
[00:02:27] Marc Gonyea: The portion of the cash-based team.
[00:02:30] Stephen Labay: Half of our volleyball players came in and showed up, so.
[00:02:34] Marc Gonyea: Yeah, you’re living an Austin lifestyle, we’ll get to that. We’ll get to that. Before I get to it, for the folks listening, tell them a little bit about yourself.
[00:02:42] Tell us where you’re from, where you went to school.
[00:02:45] Stephen Labay: So, I grew up in New Jersey, Princeton. So, right outside of Princeton. I had the Jersey shore, did the surfing, did the snowboarding, played football, played lacrosse. I love surfing. Snowboarding came easier to me than surfing, [00:03:00] and for, I guess sports, lacrosse was really easy for me to pick up, I was a captain of the Varsity team as a freshmen, kind of just picked it up, and then football, I just had the most fun with it, just loved the team that I was on. And, lacrosse was more like a sport or like a job, really, just trying to become the best I could and trying all the opportunities camps I could go to, everything like that, and succeeded and then decided, probably didn’t want to do that for a college,
[00:03:28] I didn’t want it to be a job anymore, so I went to Coastal Carolina, or visited.
[00:03:33] Chris Corcoran: And, let me jump in real quick before we get to cool stuff. So, you’re in the sales development world, and you’re a manager, right? You’re in the sales high-tech world. Did you know, at any time, like, when you were growing up in high school, like, was sales even, like, a thing?
[00:03:46] Stephen Labay: No, actually, the funny story is, my advisor in high school was like, “What do you want to do when you grow up?” And, at that time I was just, said, “Professional sports.” She was like, “All right, well, what’s your backup?” At that time, I was scuba diving, surfing, meeting a lot of people, I had a lot of, especially when I was scuba diving a lot, meeting a lot of people in the marinas, and at one point I met this treasure hunter, you know, and watching all those movies, it was a treasure hunter, you know, watching all of this ocean movies.
[00:04:17] Marc Gonyea: What’s a treasure-hunter kind of guy like?
[00:04:18] Stephen Labay: You know, they go out and they look and they think that they can find, you know, sunken ships or anything like that, so.
[00:04:26] There is something of value, a modern-day Heinrich. Yeah. Yeah. So, it was a good time. I decided that maybe I would want to do something like that. Loved Pirates of the Caribbean, so I was like, “All right, this is my career. If I, if I can’t be with professional sports life, I’ll be a treasure hunter.” Whether then, she wrote “Undecided”, fair enough, and when she told my mom that, my mom started laughing as well, said it fits the unit, so, wanted to find a college and the best way to find a college for me was typing “colleges by the ocean” ’cause I [00:05:00] was surfing and wanting to keep that up. So, Coastal Carolina popped up. It was on the way to go check out all these Florida schools, so we drove down, checked out Coastal Carolina, fell in love with it and went there, played rugby, it was like, “All right, I’ll play football, play lacrosse.” There was a club team for lacrosse there too, but picked up rugby, great time, first game, pretty much shattered my cheekbone, kept playing and it was a good time. Yeah. And then played rugby in college.
[00:05:27] I played for two years and then I, there was a new fraternity that was getting started up on campus, and, you know, all of the fraternities were great there, but I just, none of them I wanted to be a part of it. I just didn’t felt like I didn’t really fit in, and this was an opportunity to create a fraternity that I thought I could fit in and others like me could fit in. So, went through the interview process with their national team and ended up being a part of the organization when we started to assign one. I went for the VP and got a VP position.
[00:05:55] There were two VPs and then the president, and then, a year later, when I’m contested as to be the president of the fraternity there. Yeah, it was about 120 guys when I was the president, so it was a full-time job, but it was a good time, I met a lot of people, a lot of, a lot of my fraternity brothers are still really close to me.
[00:06:12] So.
[00:06:12] Chris Corcoran: Labay, so, hold on. We’re talking big man on campus.
[00:06:16] Marc Gonyea: Yeah.
[00:06:18] Stephen Labay: There was plenty of other fraternities. We were the new one, so, everybody was interested in us.
[00:06:23] Chris Corcoran: What a prolific athlete, what you quickly ran past was, you were an exceptional surfer, you, you were even sponsored. Let’s talk to the listeners a little bit about that.
[00:06:35] Stephen Labay: Yeah. I mean, it’s a job. You get into, like, local shops, you talk about that and, you know, there, you, you have a team and everything, so, that was a great time to go and kind of experience. But, at the end of the day, you want it to be a hobby, your hobbies, you don’t necessarily want to be jobs, right, and it’s, it’s, hobbies escaping reality, sometimes, and it’s there for you to just unwind sometimes. So, so, you know, growing up, that was surfing for me and snowboarding and all of the kind of adventurous kind of activities that you could think of, I loved that because it got me away from school, it got me away from sports. It just became, like, this escape for me. So, you know, I obviously wanted to have that in college, knowing how hard college could be. I needed something like that, so that’s why I went to Coastal because there was a beach. Fortunately, we ended up calling it Lake Myrtle because there wasn’t as much surfing as we expected, but even just the beach lifestyle was a nice escape from reality.
[00:07:35] Marc Gonyea: That’s cool, man. You got to give us some tips and tricks.
[00:07:38] Stephen Labay: For sure.
[00:07:40] Chris Corcoran: Yeah, winter surfing the Jersey shore sounds like you like to get out there all the time. It’s good to actually do stuff.
[00:07:46] Marc Gonyea: Yeah. So, we played volleyball yesterday, so he starts telling me about us, about his volleyball team, so that’s your, your, is your team or you’re a league?
[00:07:54] Stephen Labay: I’m in a league as well.
[00:07:55] Yeah. Yeah, with some of the Couchbase people and then people that we’ve just, we didn’t have enough people to create a full team, so others joined and you end up making friends with them and they become really good, I mean, if you’re willing to be on any team, at some point you have to be pretty good at volleyball,
[00:08:10] so we pieced together this miscellaneous team and ended up killing it in our second-season summer league and decided we wanted to bring it into the balls.
[00:08:19] Marc Gonyea: So, Labay, what cool with this is like, you like to organize, do, you like to do stuff? Well, tell us about that, but why are you always doing stuff?
[00:08:30] Stephen Labay: I am one of those people who don’t like to just sit. If you see me in the office, I’m always standing, going to different conference rooms. If I’m in a conference room for an extended amount of period, I’m the one standing against the wall. So, I just, I like to experience things, and I also like to meet new people.
[00:08:46] I think that’s the biggest thing for me. I think that’s why I fit into sales really well, is, meeting new people is, it is a fun experience for me. I love to hear their stories. I love to just get to know them, and I really like having friends, like, it’s, it’s one of the best things. If you can escape life, like I said, with hobbies, friends are a great escape as well, where you can complain about the same things, about, you know, different kinds of topics, but you don’t necessarily have to work together, but if you have similar personalities, it’s easy to just connect.
[00:09:16] Chris Corcoran: So, let’s talk about Coastal. So, you’d go to Coastal, and what you study?
[00:09:20] Stephen Labay: Studied business, business management. I wanted to, going into it, I, in high school I took an architect class and had a great time with that, so I thought maybe that was my path, but I didn’t really want to do the whole engineering part of it.
[00:09:33] I had a friend who was doing the full engineering, really close friend of mine, and, so, I decided, well, if he’s doing the engineering part, I will do the business part ’cause I really liked business. I’d like to learn about it, and I thought it interesting. So, we did that and I started the entrepreneurial management part of the business organization there and when I got into it, I loved just owning my own thing, love the idea of owning my own thing [00:10:00] so, that was always a great time. And those classes were the ones that, you know, I flaked on a lot of other classes throughout college, but those ones I was always at, I found it the most interesting. And, in college, I started running a liquor store with a friend and the owner was really, really nice and he trusted me and my close friends, so, we started running it and I realized, maybe small business is where I want to go. So, that’s why I kept continuing that path of business entrepreneurial management.
[00:10:25] Marc Gonyea: That’s great. So, you got out of school? What’d you think you’re going to do, let’s talk about this?
[00:10:28] Stephen Labay: So, going out of school, I graduated in May, had to finish out my lease in, for the summer,
[00:10:35] so I spent the summer kind of living a, freshly graduated college kid lifestyle, so, made enough money for graduation that, you know, I kind of just hung out, met other people that I’d never really met in college because, when I was president, there was not a lot of time for extracurricular. I didn’t really go out all that much, when I did, it was just with my fraternity brothers.
[00:10:56] I didn’t get to meet other people. So, this was my time to just [00:11:00] unwind, meet other people that I’ve never met before in college, ended up meeting my girlfriend when I graduated too, when I stayed that summer. So, that was great. To this day?
[00:11:08] To this day, yeah. So, moved here to Austin together when she graduated, she was a year behind me.
[00:11:12] So, had a great experience that summer, and didn’t really know what I wanted to do. I heard about sales, I actually had uncles who are salesmen and they were always telling me, “You’d be good at sales, you’d be good at sales,” but it was a scary world for me to think about commission and all of that, where I tried to avoid it.
[00:11:29] So, I went home, I managed a Urban Outfitters for a bit and realized I didn’t like the atmosphere in New Jersey, I just wasn’t myself there. Back down to Coastal Carolina, girlfriend was still in school for her senior year. I started running a hotel at the front desk. I was a manager of a hotel, and it was over 700 rooms.
[00:11:48] So, it was a pretty big property. Worked my way up there. When she graduated, decided Myrtle Beach wasn’t my passion, didn’t want to really do the hospitality industry, so, visited Ruben who worked for memoryBlue.
[00:11:59] So, he was one of my fraternity brothers and he was actually the, the social chair, so he was in charge of all socials. Yeah. So, he was living out here, posting about it, constantly texting me to come visit, come visit, so finally pulled the trigger, came to visit. Me and my girlfriend came to visit. We ended up loving the area. A month and a half later we were coming out, we, while we were driving, we both had kind of a door-docking jobs as, like, for starters. Once we got here, realized that probably wasn’t our passion,
[00:12:30] so I found a recruiting agency actually, and, here, at this recruiting agency, there was different divisions and mine was neurosurgeon. So, my job was to call neurosurgeons and get them to almost work for me and find them jobs at different hospitals, and be almost, like, a traveling surgeon. So, that was an interesting experience.
[00:12:51] Marc Gonyea: Tell us about that. So, you told us you had had experience working ’cause you, you ran Urban Outfitters, you charged people, clothes and all sorts of stuff. The hotel, this is kind of your first foray into sales, right?
[00:13:05] Stephen Labay: Yeah. So, going into it, the recruiter, I had friends who were doing recruiting on the East Coast and they seem to be loving it, so,
[00:13:12] it’s like, “Let me try it here.” And, so, you know, at first you expect recruiting to be a lot of LinkedIn, not many calls, maybe just calls like kind of vetting people out. Well, walked in and, you know, as soon as I sit down and they’re like, “Okay, you’re expected to make a hundred calls, and you have to hand jam the whole hundred calls.”
[00:13:31] Okay. So, I’m a little bit more sales-y, but okay, I can probably do this. And then they told me I was calling neurosurgeons. And I was like, “Oh, okay.” So, you know, fresh 24-25 year old going in, and I’m like, “Oh, so, you know, these guys have been in their industry for 40+ years and I have to get them to want to work for me.”
[00:13:49] And, so, every morning, all of the recruiters, there was the accounting team and then the recruiting team, so, all the recruiters would get into this big conference room, about 25-30 of us, [00:14:00] and there was this director of the recruiters who, he could just be an asshole, to be honest, he loved to pick on everybody,
[00:14:08] but, at first, he was really intimidating, and it was like, my first week there. And, so, you sit into this conference room and he would point somebody out, tell them to go to their desk and you have to call in and pretend like he’s a neurosurgeon or whatever your department was. And, so, within, like, the first two days, he, like, looks at me ’cause I’m smiling and I’m all eager, but then, “Your desk.”
[00:14:32] And then I was like, “Okay, I got this, I feel was pretty confident.” So, you know, I go to my desk and I call up, and within my first two sentences, he hangs up on me, and I tried to call him back again and then say, “Oh, I think you disconnected with me, you know, must be, you must be going through a tunnel or, or maybe I lost the connection, sorry about that.”
[00:14:52] And he appreciated that, but hung up on me again. I had to go back with the tail between my legs and then kind of figure out what I did wrong. [00:15:00] And after that he would pick on me probably two or three times a week, just always me, going back to my desk, and I remember going into work and being like, “I hate this guy.
[00:15:09] I absolutely hate this guy.” But it wasn’t until memoryBlue where I appreciated him, really, because I was probably more confident in being on the phones because I had to talk to this guy constantly in front of my peers over anybody else. So, you know, if I’m calling a prospect, they have no idea who I am, it’s, they don’t even know, you know, my company at the point,
[00:15:30] so, it really was just a eye opening experience where, like, this guy, who, you know, would just ridicule me at work, made me a better salesperson.
[00:15:40] Chris Corcoran: Wow. How old was he?
[00:15:40] Stephen Labay: He must have been probably late thirties, late thirties.
[00:15:44] Chris Corcoran: And you’re young, I could see that. Yeah. So you’re recruiting neurosurgeons, just in Austin or across the country?
[00:15:51] Stephen Labay: Across the country.
[00:15:52] I was calling into Arizona. I was calling anywhere you could find. It, it was a kind of like the wild west over there, where, if you didn’t have, if a lead didn’t have any activity, they had their [00:16:00] own homegrown CRM system, so they didn’t have any activity, you could just take it. There was no territory, nothing.
[00:16:07] There was a few times where people were stepping on each other’s toes and you’ve just got to get the person on and want to, you know, put in an optimal opportunity for that person to say “yes” to you. So, it was really, if you didn’t get that “yes” on that first call, chances are, when people saw that that person answers their phone, they’re going to go after that person.
[00:16:25] Chris Corcoran: Wow. And, so, what, you were just calling these surgeons and trying to get them interested for opportunities?
[00:16:31] Stephen Labay: For opportunities to work with me, and I then worked with an accounting member to see if they had any openings at their hospitals for neurosurgeons, trying to find, “Hey, this person’s based out of Arizona,
[00:16:43] he wants to be working in Baltimore for a month, check out the area, you know, will you be willing to hire him and show the resumes?” And everything like that.
[00:16:52] Chris Corcoran: Wow.
[00:16:53] Marc Gonyea: So, what was the biggest, biggest thing you learned from that? It was, it was it from what just told us?
[00:16:58] Stephen Labay: Yeah. Yeah. I think it was [00:17:00] mainly just being confident on the phone.
[00:17:02] I mean, these guys have a huge God complex, right? They’re the best in the world at what they do. And, “Why should I listen to this 25-year-old, 40, 24-year-old, and expect them to make me money?” Right? “You know, I, I can do this on my own.” So, I really had to sell myself, not at that point.
[00:17:19] Marc Gonyea: How did you hear of memoryBlue?
Stephen Labay: So, I was working like a dog at this recruiting company and, you know, long days, leaving the office, coming back home, and Ruben was my roommate, and every day had a big smile on his face, making a lot of money, having fun, and I was like, “Maybe I’m in the wrong industry.”
So, he was working for memoryBlue at the time, I decided I wanted to do the whole memoryBlue thing, interviewed, he was working for Couchbase as well, so, he recommended me to work at Couchbase, so, like, that was my first client, Couchbase, and just started off hot with booking a lot of meetings in my territory, and kind of showing up some of the [00:18:00] veterans and, you know.
[00:18:01] Marc Gonyea: Who were those veterans? Remember?
[00:18:03] Stephen Labay: At the time it was Ruben and Blake.
[00:18:08] So, but it was funny. It was only the four of us or three of us really, and then we have one more in the Austin office here. It was pretty competitive between us. I mean, you know, we, we had our, our own way of doing things, but Ruben taught me, Blake taught me, we kind of just held each our own and helped each other out, at the same time, we were always trying to beat each other with booking the most amount of meetings. There was times where, you know, my girlfriend would text me and just be like, “When are you coming home?” And all, I would text her, “I haven’t started the meeting yet.” So, I wasn’t going home until I booked at least one meeting.
[00:18:39] I knew I had to get that meeting, and, so.
[00:18:41] Chris Corcoran: How long were you doing the recruiting thing before you came here?
[00:18:43] Stephen Labay: I probably did that for about three or four months, and that was enough for me to realize I needed to be making more money for doing exactly what I was doing.
[00:18:54] Chris Corcoran: So, how similar was that compared to this? And, as far as the differences, what was different? What was harder? What was easier?
[00:19:03] Stephen Labay: Yeah, so, I think the, the main difference is, is really, when you’re a recruiter, you’re not trying to sell anything to anybody besides the company itself, and, you know, at that point, myself,
[00:19:14] right? So, you’re not trying to have them spend a whole bunch of money, if it didn’t work out with me, if I couldn’t find them a job, they were already in a job, it wasn’t the end of the world, right, that, you know, I didn’t find them anything, where, if you’re in tech sales specifically, you know, you’re a salesperson probably trying to rip and replace at some point a really expensive technology.
[00:19:37] People have invested time and effort into making, at least do what they were hoping to do, right, it might not be the best way of going about it, and there might be some kinks in it, but there, they spent time, they spent effort and now you’re calling to have them spend even more money to fix what they weren’t able to really accomplish,
[00:19:57] and at the same time, we’re really ripping [00:20:00] replacing, so that’s the tougher part of it, right? And, and when you’re a recruiter, you know, people, you’re a people person, at that point, and if you’re calling into tech sales, a lot of times, IT people aren’t the friendliest, right? So, you gotta get them out of their shell and just have that rapport with them to be a little bit open with you.
[00:20:17] Marc Gonyea: Okay. Very good. What was the biggest thing you had to do differently when you rolled in the memoryBlue and Couchbase? Was any of it shocking because you’d been on the phone, so, yeah, you’d have to go through the phone thing, but what were some things you had to learn you hadn’t learned yet?
[00:20:36] Stephen Labay: Yeah, it was first-off an OBS side.
[00:20:39] I really didn’t have an opening pitch. I just kind of, at that point, you know, that company didn’t have the greatest training, it was just, “Hey, get them on the phones and try it out on the recruiting company,” and when I came here, there was training of, “Hey, you need to have that opening statement, you need to create some kind of value,
[00:20:55] So, you know, you can’t just wing it.” And, so, like, within the first two weeks, I realized very quickly, “You can’t wing it,” you really need to have, do your research ahead of time and have something in front of you. Even if you’re a veteran at that certain point, there’s going to be times where you’re going to have a day where you don’t get anybody on the phone,
[00:21:13] so you’re kind of out of it, you’re a little rusty that day and what, but when you get that one person on the phone, you gotta make it worth it, so, you should always have a script in front of you just in case. You know, you might be confident in yourself, but just in case you have a day like that, that script has come in handy for at least me even as, even now,
[00:21:31] yeah, right, it’s a safety net, exactly. Like, when I’m on the phones with my SDRs, I, I have a script in front of me and, you know, I train them on what to make this script out of it.
[00:21:41] Marc Gonyea: Of course, let’s talk about that for a second. Well, let’s go to the struggles of the SDRs, maybe. I don’t know, I don’t know, did you hit that as an SDR or would you see that more as, as you admitted when you were at the memoryBlue side?
[00:21:54] Stephen Labay: As, there were struggles, I definitely had struggles. It was.
[00:21:57] Marc Gonyea: Could you manage the team of SDRs, right? And you helped people to get to all these other roles, like, we’ll just have a sit, spin, never had any problems in SDR, that’s not how it works, right? What was it like for you? What did you, like, learn?
[00:22:09] Stephen Labay: So, there, what I learned was, you can’t get comfortable.
[00:22:13] I think that’s the biggest struggle, is, when, even you get the best SDRs and I was coming off hot, mainly because I was working on the territory that was really green. So, if I got somebody on the phone, people were at least just interested in learning more, but once you hit it after six months, the same people,
[00:22:31] it starts to then, “Okay, now I really need to learn how to prospect. Now I need to start doing my research.” So, I was, you know, on this pedestal, I’m confident, and then a month later I dropped, and I think just, the rollercoaster can be hard, right? Because you, you have a great month, you’re on top of the world and you can have the next month where you’re just rock bottom and you can’t figure out what’s wrong,
[00:22:54] you start getting into your head, and I think that’s one of the biggest struggles I had, was, I would get into my head, [00:23:00] I would try to understand, “What am I doing wrong that, you know, I was doing right before, and it’s the exact same process, so why is this not working?” And, you have to learn to adapt and adjust in any scenario in sales,
[00:23:11] but especially as an SDR, because if you have something that works, there’s no golden ticket to make it last your whole career, as that’s going to work every single time, right, so you have to be able to adjust. Even, and, so, the biggest thing for me, though, was, I started panicking, I went into panic mode and tried new things almost every single day and every week I was trying something new, but I never got to make it last, you know?
[00:23:36] Marc Gonyea: It happens to a lot of SDRs.
[00:23:37] Stephen Labay: Yeah. You start to panic and you change something up and change, start changing everything up and you don’t know what is working and what’s, you know, is still the problem because you don’t give it enough time to see the ROI, if it’s positive or negative. So, I think, you know, being a manager, you kind of have to have your SDRs avoid that, and being a, an SDR myself, you know, [00:24:00] you, you’re trying a whole bunch of stuff and you just need to breathe for a second, step back and organize yourself, so, you know, as a, for my team, I definitely make sure that, when I see an SDR kind of in a panic mode, I say, “Hey, you know, let’s just take a day, don’t worry about the phones,
[00:24:16] don’t worry about, you know, your call scripts, anything like that. Let’s just break it down.” Because, if you invest even just a day in organizing yourself, figuring out who you’re going after, figuring out your processes and just fine tuning little things right there, that can go a long way and turn an entire month around in one week.
[00:24:34] Marc Gonyea: In one day or a week. When you were an SDR, so nine months of your on memoryBlue, who else besides the Couchbase guys are really good? Other folks in the office you could have learned from?
[00:24:45] Stephen Labay: Yeah. There was Sean Saxton. He was, he was bold on the phone. So, yeah, he, he wasn’t afraid to just be honest with them, and at a certain point in time you could see, like, if he got a no, he didn’t care, he [00:25:00] would move on to the next person, where a lot of times you can see the struggle of SDRs,
[00:25:04] they really feel for that “No.” “What did I do wrong?” And, the big thing is, is, you know, when you’re an SDR, you always want that “yes”, but you also really, really want that “no.” Because, if you get a “no” that’s one less person you need to follow up with, so your list of 200 people, if you get plenty of those, goes down to 50 people, and then you have more time to hone in and get the “yeses” from those 50.
[00:25:27] So, him just not being afraid of the “no” I think is the biggest thing for me. So, I learned a lot from that, just being bold. “Hey, are you actually interested in this or not?” And if they say, “Ah, you know what, I’m not.” “Hey, no worries, you know, thank you for letting me know,” and hang up and go to the next person.
[00:25:43] So, I learned a lot from him. Joey was my manager, Joey Sorenson was my manager. Yeah. He was, he was extremely helpful. There was definitely times where I was in that panic mode. At first, you know, I was golden child, right, and then, I started panicking and I was like, “What’s going on?” And, he talked me off the ledge [00:26:00] multiple times and just being, “Hey, you know, just focus on one thing at a time. Don’t change or don’t really boil the ocean, right? You can just, you can boil a cup, you can boil a pan, a pop, but you can’t boil the ocean. Take it one step at a time.”
[00:26:14] Marc Gonyea: And, then, you’re doing this, you’re working here and then Couchbase had hired people?
[00:26:20] Stephen Labay: Yeah. So, they hired Blake and Ruben and that was the next big thing. I wanted to be on Couchbase. We had fun sales kick-offs.
[00:26:28] Marc Gonyea: That’s awesome. So, now you’ve invaded us, established, got a new job in the sales development world, working at memoryBlue on Couchbase, and then, what was kind of going through your mind, is like, “Okay, where do I wanna go with my career?”
[00:26:39] Stephen Labay: Yeah. So, you know, I really wanted to be a part of an organization that recognized me, you know, and my success, in my career, right, and so, seeing Couchbase hire out Blake and Ruben, you start to get a sense of, “Wow. They really appreciate what Blake and Ruben are doing, you know, they really want them to be a part of the full team and give them the benefits and, you know, have that kind of morale.” And, so, that automatically made me think, like, “Well, if they can do it, I can do it.”
[00:27:11] And, I’ve always been really competitive. So if I, you know, when I was in football, in high school, I started as a freshmen on the freshmen team, and some of the, I saw some of my peers go up to the JV as a freshman, and I was like, “That’s what I want to do.” So, that was my end goal. By the end of the year, I played JV. And, you know, when I was a sophomore, I really wanted to play Varsity, and by the end of that year, I was playing Varsity, like, it was a stepping stone, right, and I saw getting hired out by Couchbase as my stepping stone to the rest of my career. And, there was multiple other things, you know, that kind of really wanted me to get a part of that. I really loved my manager, Niki,
[00:27:43] she was awesome, yeah, she was great. She was extremely informative and helpful with me, a lot of times when I was in panic mode as well. So, you know, I wanted to be a part of an organization like that, and I really believed in Couchbase’s technology. I saw the value in it, and I really loved whenever I hopped on a phone with anybody at Couchbase, they were extremely friendly, they really wanted to know who I was.
And, you know, even my first sales kickoff, I’m walking around and our CEO, Matt Cain just walks up to me and starts a conversation with me, and I realized right then very quickly that, you know, being in the startup atmosphere, you, you don’t get many chances, being in corporate, to just talk to a CEO, where I got to talk to one of the best CEOs that I’ve ever heard of face-to-face and he valued what I was saying and really wanted to dive into what my role was and all of that, where, after that moment, I was like, “I need to be a part of this company.”
[00:28:41] Marc Gonyea: And it happened.
[00:28:42] Stephen Labay: It happened, right? Yeah. So, it happened. I eventually got hired out of, and, you know, the next thing was, as soon as I was hired out, they kept adding more, right, and this team of just three, four SDRs turned into a row, a row, turned into two rows, and I think [00:29:00] we ended up taking three rows.
[00:29:01] Yeah, it was great. It was great. I mean, and a lot of my peers who were working in the office were coming on to Couchbase and I was getting excited, and as an SDR, I wanted to see their success, so, a lot of times I would find myself, “Hey, you know, this is how you do it here, and this is how you build a report,
[00:29:18] and you know, this is what I say that helps. And, what do you say that helps? And, you know, how can we combine this?” And I just started to really get into that moment of realizing, “Wait, I’m having a lot of fun teaching these other SDRs, my peers, to be successful at Couchbase.” So, I went to my manager, Niki at the time and I was just like, “Hey, Niki, listen, I would really like to be, like, an SDR manager sometime, I think I’ll be really good at that, you know, is there any opportunity for me to do something like that?”
So, you know, she came back and she told me, “Yes, like, why don’t we have you as a team lead out there?” We didn’t, there were no managers, we were all, most of us were hired out at that point, and we had about three or four memoryBlue SDRs at the same time, but the rest of us, there was no manager to, like, really see us throughout the day, “so, why don’t you become a team lead?” And, “Great. That sounds awesome.” So, I became the team lead, who was learning a lot, hopping, yeah, hopping into meetings.
[00:30:15] Marc Gonyea: Chris right? Himself in the roles.
[00:30:19] Stephen Labay: Right. I mean, you have to look for those.
[00:30:20] I think that’s the most important thing. As an SDR, look for those opportunities. It’s never just going to, nobody’s just going to say, “Here’s an opportunity. You have to go out and seek it.” Thankfully, at Couchbase I saw the opportunity of, “Maybe I don’t want to be a closer, maybe I want to manage a team first and then I could always go back to the closer.”
[00:30:39] Right. And, so, when I became a team lead, there was, I was still doing the SDR work, but I was just having a lot more time to help out the team. And, then, I got a call from Niki one day, “Hey, you know, I found this amazing opportunity. I have to take it. I’m going to be leaving.” And I was only a team lead at that point and it was kind of scary, right?
[00:30:59] Because, you know, I don’t know who’s going to be backfilling. I don’t know, you know, at that point, the person I’m rolling up to is the VP, Jim, who I’ve only probably talked to him a handful of times, and, thankfully, you know, I got to build a relationship as a team lead with him throughout the rest of that year.
[00:31:16] I was only a team lead for about four or five months before she left. So.
[00:31:23] Marc Gonyea: So, nine months with us.
[00:31:26] Stephen Labay: Yeah.
[00:31:27] Marc Gonyea: Year and six months as a SDR, SDR at Couchbase.
[00:31:30] Chris Corcoran: Year and a half?
[00:31:32] Marc Gonyea: Year and a half there as a team lead for a year and a month. So, you were an SDR for a year, developing people, and then, what happened then?
[00:31:39] Stephen Labay: So, we ended up getting a new VP of Sales coming in and he was in charge of the SDR organization.
[00:31:45] Chris Corcoran: This is Niki’s replacement?
[00:31:46] Stephen Labay: This is Niki’s, so this is Jim’s replacement. Jim went to Director of Field Sales at Northwest, so this was his replacement. There was still no Niki replacement. So, really, I was doing a manager kind of job as a team lead but, [00:32:00] you know, it was tough at times because I was still doing the SDR work, and now expecting to me a little bit more of a manager at that point.
But, at the end of the day, you know, you have to look at the bigger picture, and I knew that there was, at some point, if I put in all this effort and I try my absolute hardest every single day, you know, give 110% every single day, there could be a light at the end of the tunnel, which me being a full-time manager was that light.
[00:32:24] Okay. And, so, we get it in a new VP of Sales Ops, Adam, who has, you know, I’ve learned in a ridiculous amount of different processes that SDR should, organization should be implementing, and, so, he came to me, “Hey, what do you want to do?” “I want to be a manager. I want to be a full-time manager. I know this is what I want to do.”
[00:32:44] He was like, “Okay, you just got to prove yourself.” And you know, you can get into that rut of being, like, “Well, I’ve been proving myself, you know, I’ve done this,” but brand new, he doesn’t know who he’s walking into, I could be saying, “Yeah, yeah. I proved myself, and, you know, I’ve done five things throughout the whole time.”
[00:32:59] Chris Corcoran: Just for our listeners, you’re, you’re, you’re, you’re spending most of your time being an individual contributor as an SDR, and then you’re also leading a team of SDRs. How many of these SDRs, how big was the team at this point?
[00:33:10] Stephen Labay: It’s a good question. It was about six to eight throughout that time.
[00:33:14] Chris Corcoran: It’s a lot of responsibility for a kind of a side hustle.
[00:33:17] Stephen Labay: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And there was definitely times where, you know, I had to make the decision, do I want to get paid by commission that month? Or, do I want to prove myself as a manager? And there was times where I chose the manager route because I really believed in myself to be the SDR manager that I think I could be.
[00:33:37] So, there was times where, you know, I dug out of my pocket to make sure that I proved myself as a manager.
[00:33:44] Marc Gonyea: That sounds like a safe bet, right? Corporate. I know you say this, always bet on yourself, right? Like, you decided that you wanted to be a manager and your realized, “I was going to be more happy, especially make more money as the manager, so I’m gonna bet on myself.
[00:33:58] Become a manager, not the take the, maybe the lower-hanging fruit.”
[00:34:02] Stephen Labay: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You have to be confident if this is the direction you want to go. And, there was plenty of times where, you know, you’re sitting in bed, you know, two o’clock in the morning, thinking, you know, what’s the best route? And, yawn, and you really don’t know, you don’t have that experience,
[00:34:17] you don’t really have, like, nobody else was doing what I was trying to do at the time. I didn’t really see anybody else being called managers besides the DMs of memoryBlue and there was a clear path to that one. This was a whole new territory in Couchbase. Nobody’s done it before. So, besides my predecessor, my peer annum, who was in EMEA, but she was here for a long time,
[00:34:40] and she had the support of Niki and learning a lot, where I was sink-or-swim kind of moment, so really, I had to take, definitely, hours of just lying in bed thinking about it, “Is this is what I want to do?” but I knew at the end of the day, you know, what made me happy. Was it the SDR work and really getting the commission or was it teaching these SDRs,
[00:35:00] and these were my fellow peers, you know, the best processes that I’ve learned? And it was teaching them, I really enjoyed it, and I figured this opportunity wasn’t going to come across all the time. So, I decided to stick with it, became a manager and that happened. So, when Adam joined, it was a lot of, “Hey, we have to build from the ground up. We have to put in a lot of processes, we have to build out decks and tradings and all of that.”
And, you knew my end goal was to become a manager. And, so, and I knew it from his standpoint, I mean, I never proved myself as a manager, right? So, if there’s an oppor, if there’s an opportunity for an SDR, SDR manager, and they have the head count for it, there’s a huge chance that they’re going to hire for somebody from outside, so, I had to make sure for myself, that, no matter who they’re interviewing, I have to get as much on my resume and as much experience as possible, and just prove to them that, “Hey, I know Couchbase, I know this team, I would be the best fit.” So, it was a lot of one-on-ones, “Hey, this is what I’ve been doing,
[00:36:06] this is, you know, the time and effort I put into this, and this is the success that we’re seeing out of it.” And, it was a lot of just learning from Adam at that time. It was really just taking and being a sponge because he’s one of the best that I’ve ever seen in the industry, and he really does come in with so much value.
[00:36:25] I mean, there was a reason why our CRO hired them, right? So, I need to learn from the best of the best. And, so, you take every, everything that he says to you and you write it down and you review it and you just prove yourself every time, and if there’s a deadline, you get that deadline done no matter what it takes.
[00:36:43] So, there was a lot of months like that. Okay. And, then.
[00:36:45] Chris Corcoran: How long did this go on before he finally said, “All right, you win, we wanna move you up?”
[00:36:50] Stephen Labay: It’s probably about six months, six months, six months of still being a team lead.
[00:36:55] Chris Corcoran: And, was he in California or was he in Austin?
[00:36:57] Stephen Labay: He was in California.
[00:36:57] Chris Corcoran: So, what was that like, [00:37:00] having an audition halfway across the country?
[00:37:02] Stephen Labay: Yeah, it was a lot of Zoom conferences.
[00:37:05] Chris Corcoran: A lot before Zoom was popular, right?
[00:37:08] Stephen Labay: Yeah. So, I mean, yeah, before anybody really hopped on these kinds of things, I had to adapt real quick and be, “Hey, do you have time?” I, every time that I could, if I ever finished anything, any time on your calendar and I would find whatever I could on his calendar,
[00:37:23] I mean, he’s a VP of Sales Ops, he’s completely busy all the time. So, especially being new, he’s meeting with everybody, but he also hired the Director of Inside Sales, Kris Semb, you know, the combo of those two are incredible. I mean, they feed off of each other, you sit in a room and you’re like, “Wow.”
[00:37:39] You know, like, so, it was, when they were hiring him, you know, I proved myself with Kris Semb and at the same time that he was becoming a director and onboarding, I was becoming a manager. So, it was kind of, they were moving, two moving parts at the same time. Hiring him and moving me up, as I say. But, I think, really, the value part of it was, I knew this team.
[00:37:59] I knew, I knew not only the SDRs, but I knew the field sales and I worked with a lot of, there was one point in my career where I was on five-to-one, I was working with five enterprise aids. So, you know, I knew a lot of them, they knew how much I wanted to see their success because their success was my success,
[00:38:16] so, yeah, right, and I mean, there was times where, you know, you feed as many as you can, but you try to balance it all and it being stressful, but, you get excited when you book everybody a meeting. That’s that’s a good week, so.
[00:38:29] Chris Corcoran: Everyone eats.
[00:38:30] Stephen Labay: Everybody ate, and there were times where some people didn’t, so I felt bad and you take it to heart.
[00:38:37] I took it to heart. If I wasn’t getting a meeting for my AE, how were they feeding their family? Like, it really, I’m not feeding myself and I’m not feeding, these kids, so, we got to really work together and be the most successful.
[00:38:48] Marc Gonyea: So, to answer your question, so, you’re doing this and you’re seeing success within Couchbase, right?
[00:38:52] You see it through folks. We also see in other people didn’t leave Couchbase, you’re seeing memoryBlue people leave and go work for a client or, you know, you’re staying in the course, right? So, what, how did you stay focused on that and not get distracted by some sign, shiny, “You have to come over here,” or start off with a 10K higher base or, like, something going on over here,
[00:39:13] maybe, maybe, you know, one of those meetings with Adam or didn’t go the way you wanted it to go or maybe they hired somebody for a role that you thought you could have had? How did you stay focused?
[00:39:21] Stephen Labay: Like you said, you have to be really confident in yourself. And, starting off early in a career, it’s not about the money at that point.
[00:39:28] It really is, learning from the most amount of mentors you can. Some of those mentors are your peers, some of them are your coworkers and other are just friends from life. And, so, you know, Ruben was sticking the course, Blake was sticking the course, but then you get a lot of other people looking at the shiny objects and you really have to take into account, you know, those shiny objects.
[00:39:53] How long do they last? How many times am I going to have to move around? How many times am I going to have to find that unicorn company that you think is, and then it doesn’t end up being it, and you also have to look at yourself and feel confident in yourself that, at some point in your career, you’ll be making, what, you know, what you really think you can make, but sometimes you have to make sacrifices,
[00:40:17] and, you know, like I said, I was rather doing the management role than hitting the commission and that was my sacrifice. And, there was plenty of other companies that were reaching out to me, especially as a team lead saying, “Hey, become an SDR. You’d be making more as an SDR than as a team lead,” but the end goal wasn’t for me to go back to an SDR role, it was to become a manager,
[00:40:38] and if there’s that opportunity within your organization, at some point, that you can see yourself be in that role, there’s no reason to veer off for the shiny stuff. There’s going to be plenty of other shiny opportunities, and there’s plenty of other startups, there’s plenty of other teams being created,
[00:40:56] and, at some point, you can take that if you think it’s your right time to move and you’ve learned as much as you possibly could, but at that time in my life and still to this day, I feel like there’s still so much for me to learn, and there’s no reason for me to leave a company or leave a career if I haven’t learned everything I possibly could.
[00:41:17] So, as long as you’re learning, stick with it.
[00:41:20] Chris Corcoran: There’s wisdom right there.
[00:41:22] Marc Gonyea: So, you can tell this, about being a manager, right? Especially so early in your career, like, Chris and I were managers, so we started from memoryBlue, we’ve been doing it, I mean, you’re a team lead super early, what, well, so, tell us what you’re doing now,
[00:41:37] and let’s talk a little bit about, ’cause you’re helping people get where they want to go. Like, I’m just cruising through here, there are, well, there are many people, some people in the sales ops, you help, you get people to kind of where they want to go, why helping Couchbase fill the pipeline, talk a little bit about what you’re doing now with this?
[00:41:52] Stephen Labay: Yeah. So, right now I’m the manager of America West. At one point I was a manager of [00:42:00] all of America and Asia Pacific. So I, so that was long days and long nights, for sure, because, you know, as soon as you’re done in the America territory, it’s the Asia territory.
[00:42:11] Chris Corcoran: Where were the SDRs?
[00:42:12] Stephen Labay: One was in Japan and one was in Australia.
[00:42:16] Chris Corcoran: And they would report to you?
[00:42:17] Stephen Labay: And they would report to me.
[00:42:18] And, so, you know, that’s a whole piece of its own because I never had to call into that. I’ve called it into, as an SDR, all over America, never had to call into any type of Asia Pacific countries. So, actually, Ruben was fortunate enough to have done that a few different times as an SDR, so that was really cool, but, you know, having them underneath me, you have to make sure that they feel supported and not on an island, because I mean, we’re all in the same office together in America, or most of us are. When they were, you know, hired, they knew that they were going to be on an island, but I didn’t want them to feel like they were on an island,
[00:42:55] right? So, you have to get the team kind of, “Hey, SDRs that are [00:43:00] working West Coast, we’re going to have a, a, a meeting a little bit later on and get some of the Asia, Asia Pacific team to hop on a little bit early that day and, you know, get a team call together, so they feel like they have some support.”
[00:43:12] And, luckily enough, Brittany Buckley who worked for memoryBlue, she was, yeah, she was yes, yeah, she was a team lead actually for me, ’cause I needed the help with that, means a team lead, so him and Brett Page, who was also at memoryBlue, yep, they both became team leads. Brittany was helping me out, right, because I was working from 8:00 AM to 08:00 or 9:00 PM.
[00:43:34] And, so she was helping me out be that support if I needed a break one day or anything. So, luckily enough, I had her and Brett just kind of working with the America team. During that time there was plenty of people to, to help with, and we had a lot of new SDRs at the time too, so I really leaned on them,
[00:43:50] and they’ve proven themselves, you know, so far. So, but right now I’m just managing America West at this point, which has been nice, it’s been great, [00:44:00] but, you know, we’re also trying to help them grow their career because, you know, 90%, 99% of the time an SDR doesn’t want to stay an SDR.
[00:44:08] So, Adam, when he started, and Chris, when he started, both of them had philosophy of, “Hey, SDR managers are not here to just manage, but to help grow their, their career.” And, I’ve always been one to, I want to see people be successful around you. So, you know, I will do anything and everything I can to make sure that I can get these SDRs in a role that they want to do.
[00:44:29] So, at the end of every quarter, we have our SDRs do quarterly booking reports, so it should be ours, and at the last slide, you, the slide is, “Where do you want to be? Right, you know, where do you see yourself and what are your goals for this quarter?” And, you see newer SDRs pick one thing, and by the time they become a veteran, they might get something completely different.
[00:44:50] I mean, the amount of times I’ve seen an SDR go in and say, “Hey, I want to be a closer, that’s what I want to do,” because that’s what they thought they could only do as an SDR. [00:45:00] You become a closer after SDR world, and then they start seeing, “Oh, well, you know, one of the SDRs became a sales ops, and, so, now he works in sales ops.
[00:45:11] Chris Corcoran: That is awesome.
[00:45:12] Stephen Labay: Yeah, I was also happy it worked for him. We had an SDR that was a Couchbase SDR who went to Sales Enablement, and I got to see him grow that way. We have Huy Nguyen, who was also on the podcast.
[00:45:24] Chris Corcoran: Huy. Huy wants to go into marketing and lead generation, so, right now, he’s working with the marketing team two hours, three hours a week, and, you know, building up his resume.
[00:45:35] Stephen Labay: So he’s familiar with the tools, he’s working with their tools, so he can have the, be the best opportunity when you get the head count, you know, pretty opens up.
[00:45:43] Marc Gonyea: He’s a, he’d be a dream to work for for a lot of SDRs because a lot of the SDRs, like, we recruit people with the premise of getting into high-tech sales, right, primarily. Well, you can do other things too, and that’s memoryBlue’s growth that’s happened, but there are other folks who say, “I want to go do ops, sales ops, or I want to be, like, a marketing data analysis person, or I want to go do this,” things that we do not offer, we can offer, but what we tell them is, “Go in as an SDR, prove you can do that, and you’ll have the opportunity to knock on these other doors, it’s the biggest experience because those SDR skills are so valuable to the organization, and then you can acquire those skills to get into that role.
[00:46:20] Stephen Labay: I mean, every single one of those roles that we just mentioned, including recruiter, every single one of those roles require you to be a great SDR. If you want to be a closer, there’s an obvious right there, right, you have less time to prospect,
[00:46:35] so you need to be the best-prospecting machine when you’re leaving as an SDR to become a closer, because you don’t have the full time as an SDR. What, so, that’s an obvious one. With sales ops you need to truly learn what worked, what didn’t as an SDR? What made you successful? How can we roll that out to the team and how can I make sales operations as a whole, which is better [00:47:00] for the sales organization, including the SDRs, for sales enablement?
[00:47:03] I mean, you’re literally enabling and training these SDRs, so you need to be the best SDR recruiter. You need to know what to look for and if you’re the best SDR, what better way to look for somebody than somebody like you? When you find somebody like you, it’s really easy.
[00:47:19] Marc Gonyea: You better talk track down, ’cause that’s what you need to say, and that’s what people need to hear.
[00:47:25] Stephen Labay: Yes. Yeah. I mean, even in marketing, you think, okay, well, marketing sales, marketing and sales are cut at any organization, are constantly working with each other. You have marketing sending you leads and now it’s sales job to make those leads an opportunity, and you as best as you possibly can.
[00:47:42] So, if you’re noticing leads coming in that could be better, or you’re thinking of new opportunities for marketing to be utilizing, especially during COVID, right, like, “Hey, we should be doing these types of webinars,” or “I’m seeing, you know, our competitors do this and it looks successful.” You have to [00:48:00] have your SDR mindset, even in the marketing role, because ever, all of your efforts are for the SDRs.
[00:48:06] Marc Gonyea: Right.
[00:48:06] Stephen Labay: So, yeah.
[00:48:08] Marc Gonyea: I know this is important to you, so, you know, when you started at Couchbase, there were a lot, not nearly as large as they are now, right, Couchbase went public end of July, what’s that been like, working at a company where you kind of came in early, right? You’ve been there for over four years.
[00:48:23] They went public three months ago. So, tell us about the journey.
[00:48:27] Stephen Labay: Oh, there’s ups and downs in being in startups, for sure. And, you think the end goal is, “We’re going to be public.” That’s the, and really up until July, I was expecting, “That’s my end goal,” I really wanted to just, you know, being a part of an organization that goes public,
[00:48:43] it’s not every day that every organization can. And, seeing that, I not only was, you know, an individual contributor, but I was able to be a part of building teams and building the pipeline healthy enough to go public and spreading the word out of, “Hey, this is what Couchbase’s [00:49:00] capabilities are. This is why we’re the best at what we do.”
[00:49:03] And going public is proving that we are the best at what we do is such an achievement and not whole day of just the whole IPO is great. And, then, reality checks in then, and you realize that’s not the end goal, and now you have to prove yourselves to the whole world. I mean, I have friends who bought Couchbase stock, you know, when you have your, your financial report come out, they’re calling you up saying, “Hey, sell more, make the pipeline better. I need my stock going up.” So, for me, I, if we have a bad financial report or, you know, our stock goes down, I take it to heart because I truly believe in Couchbase and I truly believe in our product, and if other people don’t think that, and they’re not buying our stuff, I’m taking it to heart, like, “What’s wrong? Like, why do you not see what I see?” So, you know, as soon as, anytime I see stock down and I have to ticker [00:50:00] up constantly, and as soon as I see it down, it lights a little fire in you to realize, “Hey, IPO wasn’t the angle.”
[00:50:06] It’s proving ourselves to become the best in our industry and seeing our stocks just keep going up and people wanting to buy into Couchbase, people wanting to hear what our capabilities are and wanting to understand why are so many people interested in Couchbase and why do we, they have so many great customers.
[00:50:22] Chris Corcoran: So, so, you’re an SDR leader, what makes a good SDR?
[00:50:29] Stephen Labay: There’s a few things, but I really think the main thing about being a good SDR is finding that “no” and not being afraid of it, and having the will to drive. I mean, everybody says an, an SDR has to be an entrepreneurial base, I mean, that was my whole concept.
[00:50:49] but I have plenty of other SDRs who, they never went that route. Some of them, even computer science, some of them, you know, communications, but [00:51:00] if you find somebody or you are an SDR who takes things personally and wants to see yourself succeed, that’s what’s going to make you succeed. You can’t just think, “Oh, somebody’s going to hand me a “yes”,
[00:51:13] or, “Somebody’s going to hand me an opportunity to grow my career.” You have to be the one to create your own destiny at that point. You have to be the one to strive, and if that’s you just being the best at what you do, then, as an SDR, that’s booking the most amount of meetings, getting those qualified leads that, you know, you’re talking to VPs or you’re talking to directors and having those qualified meetings and setting your field rep up for success and going into those first initial calls and taking pride that, “Hey, this is the person that I sent you,
[00:51:50] it’s the best person I could find, and I’m proud to send this to you.” So, it’s really being confident in yourself, trying to take every opportunity as you [00:52:00] can, and, you know, really having the dedication and belief in yourself, and taking pride in your work. I mean, the SDR role is hard, but you can take pride in every day.
[00:52:10] Chris Corcoran: Yeah. So, when you’re, when you’re interviewing, like, what do you describe it’s kind of hard to screen for, right? So, how, what do you, what do you look for in an interview?
[00:52:18] Stephen Labay: So, my favorite question is, “What are your ways?” Or “What were your ways?” Right? Because, every SDR is going to have that one way, and if you don’t have it yet, it’s sure going to be kind of coming around the corner.
[00:52:29] So, for me, I have countless ones that I love to talk about. And, but when I asked that question, “Hey, what’s a win that you love to talk about?” And I can see, you know, their eyes light up, a big smile on their face, that’s what I know that they’re proud of what they did, and they, they’re hooked. They have already got that one win, they want eight more of those wins.
[00:52:52] Chris Corcoran: They have pride.
[00:52:53] Stephen Labay: Yeah. You have to, if you don’t love what you do as an SDR, you’re not going to love [00:53:00] what you do anything outside of the SDR world. So, if you can love and take pride in the SDR work, then you’re going to love everything after this.
[00:53:11] Marc Gonyea: But, what about networking? Your foster naval type agreements that you want ’cause you’re, you’re, you like to meet people, you like to get out there, but you also like to burn bridges, right?
[00:53:22] Stephen Labay: Yeah. That’s, burning bridges is almost like a pet peeve of mine. I burned a bridge. I’m extremely disappointed in myself because I’ve, I did something wrong, right? And maybe it’s not always me, but you, if you can avoid at all costs burning bridges,
[00:53:37] I would highly recommend that, especially being an SDR, right? Some of my best friends in Austin are ones that I’ve met in the SDR roles. Some of my SDRs that I’ve hired were when I was an SDR, and they’ve left maybe memoryBlue or they left, you know, that recruiting company actually for, for example, Tony Rodriguez who worked for memoryBlue at one point, we worked with.
[00:54:00] Stephen Labay: And so, him and I actually worked at the recruiting company together. And, so, yeah, so I came here and, you know, who knows, I, you know, I didn’t leave a sour taste in anybody’s mouth, I think, at memoryBlue previously. And, I came to Couchbase and, I mean to memoryBlue, I’m working for Couchbase and I love memoryBlue, and I saw that he was, like, looking around, I actually saw him out at a bar one time and I was like, “What are you doing?” And he’s, “I’m still at the recruiting company.” I’m like, “Well, you looking around? Because, I have a great company for you to work for it.”
Eventually applied, he came onto the memoryBlue field, and worked here for 15 months, and then got married later on, and he, eventually, you know, I think he left memoryBlue to work for another company that actually, he was an SDR for one of my friends who was a, Cam, who was working here as an SDR and left, and he was ISR at that point, and so, she was his SDR, and, so, but, you know, that company, [00:55:00] they were both kind of leaving,
[00:55:01] and, so, I figured, “Hey, let’s come back to, let’s, why don’t you come to Couchbase, SDR for me? You know, it’ll be a great time.” And if Tony burned any, if I burned a bridge with Tony when I left it, left a sour taste for him not to trust me, he would have never gone to memoryBlue or maybe that company, or even at Couchbase,
[00:55:19] and if he left a sour taste leaving memoryBlue or leaving that company, and he left a sour taste with Cam who he didn’t even know, I knew him, and if he left a sour taste and burned bridges, then I wouldn’t have probably hired him for counseling. So, it’s really, you don’t know who knows who, and you don’t know who the people you do know, where they’re going to go,
[00:55:39] so if you can avoid burning any type of bridge, I would highly recommend.
[00:55:44] Chris Corcoran: Yeah, me too. The meter is always running. You never know what’s going to happen.
[00:55:48] Stephen Labay: So many salespeople love to network, right? They love, salespeople move around and, you know, the turnover at some companies are crazy where you’ll see people try to hire their friends because you want to work with your friends,
[00:56:00] and if you’re in sales, you have a lot of friends, probably. So, you don’t know who knows who, and especially in Austin with the tech company, you know how it is, it’s so many sales people, I mean, I have friends working all over the place who are also working with a, with some of my friends who, they didn’t even know that they would be friends with them.
[00:56:16] Chris Corcoran: Smaller, smaller than you think. And what I’ll also share is that, years down the road, these things will still come into play. I’ll give you an example. My very first sales job, my boss’s boss, I saw that, we were talking to somebody, memoryBlue was talking to somebody who I saw on LinkedIn, that he went to school and was part of a fraternity,
[00:56:37] I’ll say, “You know what? I bet he knows him.” I backdoor referenced him, right? And, I hadn’t talked to this guy in, like, a decade, but you always want to check, you always want to check out, and, so, what you do and how you carry yourself is going to either be your greatest asset or potentially your greatest liability.
[00:56:59] Stephen Labay: [00:57:00] Exactly, exactly. I mean, we talk about what makes an SDR be the best and it’s really being proud of what you do. You have to be also aware of how you carry yourself and, you know, if you burn bridges, even with your peers, that’s, you know, that can hurt you in the long run because they may become a director,
[00:57:19] and, you know, I’ve seen, working with a lot of the field teams where people become directors, and you get some people who wanted to go that route, and some people who just love the individual contributor part, and they want to work for that person, right? You never know at the time that this person might be, like, especially as an SDR, this person could become a director at a time,
[00:57:39] if I leave a sour taste in their mouth right now, they’re never going to hire me.
[00:57:45] Marc Gonyea: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you can definitely see, like, top reps get promoted in the manager roles. If memoryBlue could do it for themselves, to be a top producer and they can manufacture that for their team, you want to go work for that person?[00:58:00]
[00:58:00] You know, you have to conduct yourself the right way. Doesn’t mean you’re going to love everybody, but it means you gotta, like, do the right things most of the time.
[00:58:06] Stephen Labay: Yeah. And if you don’t love everybody, you know, there’s times where you’re by yourself and you can vet by yourself, you know, talk to yourself, go surf.
[00:58:15] Marc Gonyea: Think about the less positive way.
[00:58:18] Stephen Labay: Exactly. But, you know, when it’s, comes through your career and, you know, all salespeople love money and they love their careers hopefully, and, you know, you need to do what’s best for you and that’s not burning bridges.
[00:58:29] Chris Corcoran: All right, Labay. What’s next for you?
[00:58:34] Stephen Labay: Building out my team more.
[00:58:36] Chris Corcoran: Okay, so you, you, right now, you’re on, you’re overseeing the West, and how many SDRs are currently by your side? What do you want to build it to?
[00:58:43] Stephen Labay: I’d like to build it for at least two more, so, get up to 11, 12. That’s where I have a team lead, who’s Brittany still, who have come, come to help with that. I’d like to become a director at some point, and, you know, seeing Kris, who’s my boss, he’s not only a director of SDRs, but also Inside Sales.
[00:59:04] Chris Corcoran: Oh, interesting.
[00:59:05] Stephen Labay: I’d like to hit that path at some point and work my way up from there. Maybe, I’ve recently we’ve been hiring these great field directors. I’ve learned a lot from all of them and I work with a, an amazing VP of Sales as well for the West,
[00:59:22] and, you know, being a manager, you get to have Face Time with them. You get to know their philosophies and their experiences from other companies and you come in together and it’s just, and it just comes in and it really, it really, you learn a lot from them. And, I’d love to see if I could get to that point in my career.
[00:59:40] And, you know, people bring in CROs for certain reasons, and our CRO brought us to IPO, so they picked the right person.
[00:59:48] Chris Corcoran: What I love about it, your attitude is, like, you’re, you’re really trying to learn something from everybody that you interact with.
[00:59:54] Yeah, yeah. There’s no, I mean, if I can learn, I learned from my SDR. I can, I hire SDRs to learn from them, you know, and I hope they learn from me, obviously, but, you know, I’d love to hear different processes that they did at other companies.
[01:00:08] And, we, as soon as I find out we hire a new ESR, I’m the one reaching out, “Hey, can I get a one-on-one with you? What did you do at this company?” You know, if you don’t take the opportunity to learn from each other, then you’re not going to go anywhere.
[01:00:21] Marc Gonyea: This guy is an example, so when moves to Austin we go after him.
[01:00:27] Stephen Labay: This is good shit. Thank you guys for having me here. I really appreciate it.
[01:00:31] Chris Corcoran: Thank you very much.