Tech Sales is for Hustlers Podcast

Episode 67: Christina Ierullo – Be Your Own Boss

If you’re going to talk the talk, you better walk the walk. Christina Ierullo lives that mantra with an unapologetic style dedicated to elevating her team.

Being the Director of Sales Development at Apty never stops Christina from getting her hands dirty and jumping into the sales trenches alongside her team. There’s no better way to earn respect than leading by example. From her running start at memoryBlue, where she booked three meetings in her first day, to her commitment to building a productive and diverse team, Christina is an undeniable force.

In the final episode of the Tech Sales is for Hustlers Austin Series, Christina reveals the inner motivations fueling her journey into sales, the steps she takes to build credibility as a leader, and why she’s passionate about creating a diverse team.

Guest-At-A-Glance

Name: Christina Ierullo

What she does: Director of Sales Development 

Company: Apty

Noteworthy: Christina booked three meetings on her first day at memoryBlue.

Where to find Christina: LinkedIn

Key Insights

⚡ Technology doesn’t always make things more efficient. There are certain times when a workflow is impeded by technology. Sometimes processes are straightforward and more flexible when you aren’t limited to the capabilities of tech tools.

⚡ Hard work will never go unnoticed. If you’re not progressing as quickly as you’d like, you may just not be ready yet, and that’s completely okay. Don’t compare your path to anyone else’s or make baseless assumptions. Hang in and keep pushing. Your success reflects the success of the manager and the team; they’re rooting for you.

⚡Diverse perspectives produce better outcomes. People of all backgrounds and with varying experiences make up the market. If you want to reach the most people and get the best results, you need to get as many different points of view at the table as possible.

Episode Highlights

Putting Inspiration to Practice 

“I grew up in Chicago. I had two salespeople as parents. […] And I remember my mom sitting at the kitchen table, talking to people and telling them why to do things and where they have to go, negotiating things on a daily basis. 

I saw her getting aggressive. It’s a side of her. She’s a killer. And I thought that wherever I go, I’m going to be like that. I’m going to be unapologetic.

[…] I’m the Director of Sales Development. I’m building the sales program, building all the workflows, designing, figuring out what tech stack we need to be successful, what the messaging is going to be, who’s the ideal persona; all of that’s pretty much brand new. 

Right now, I’m figuring out what the talk tracks are, how many touches we need to engage with them, how to react to inbound leads, and everything along the way.”

Independence is Paramount

“Independence is absolutely everything to me. I want to be everything I am for myself. I never want to rely on anybody. I want to go places. I want to go to nice dinners. I want to buy nice things. And I’m never going to be sitting around waiting for somebody to be like, ‘Oh, here you go. Here’s this money for this or this and that.’ And that’s how I thought when I was 16 and went to go get my first job at Cold Stone Creamery. And I was like, ‘I’m going to get my own check. And I’m not going to ask my dad for $20 for the movies.’ And not because he wasn’t going to hand me the $20, but because I didn’t want to walk downstairs to his office and ask him. I just wanted to go. I just wanted to leave and walk out the door. And that’s how I was about everything.”

Walk the Walk Before You Talk the Talk 

“My first experience ever managing anyone was learning to walk a line between being close with them and the understanding that I’m on their team, but also being able to guide them in a way that you have credibility in what you’re saying. 

I always wanted to gain credibility with my team, and I did that by cold calling along their side, which I do today. And people are always shocked when I say that, but how can you say you’re somebody to trust if you don’t do it yourself. And I always wanted to put together really great training for them. I’m always on LinkedIn, reading posts. I’m always on websites, getting information, looking at YouTube and things that are being released because you have to read it every day with SDR stuff. It changes so frequently. 

So, I think giving a lot of those training to my team, as well as going and calling on their accounts with them when they were in a rut, gave me the credibility to be able to guide them and coach them.” 

Big Companies Aren’t Necessarily Better

“Working at a big company is great for some things; we fly business class. It’s great having a process and procedure set out for everything. For example, I’m booking a trip; I know where to go, everything’s logged in, and it goes on a corporate card. It gets expensed, paid automatically. 

The reason I ultimately left is that you are just a little brick in the wall of this giant organization. They don’t really care about you. You’re a line item on an Excel spreadsheet. They are quick to fire somebody right off the bat because it doesn’t fit into their economic plan this year. I have no problem working nights or weekends, or even when I’m on holiday if a message comes through that I need to answer. But why am I doing that for somebody who would be so quick to turn their back on me and wouldn’t care to invest in me in general?”

I Want a Diverse Team

“I want women and men on my team. I am hiring for my job right now, and for every 20 applicants, 19 are from men and only 1 is from a woman. I don’t look for people who are open to sales jobs. I look for people who are open to work, and I tell them why sales could be for them. And I tell them, ‘Do you want to be somebody who runs circles around the business? Do you want to be somebody who runs your day? Do you want to be the CEO of your desk?’ And that’s how I’ve been able to get a lot of women applicants. I also made a commitment to myself and my company that for every man I hire, I will hire a woman. So, I will never hire two men if I am not hiring two women along with them. And that’s something that I would like a lot of businesses to go out there and pledge.”

Transcript: 

[00:00:11] Marc Gonyea: Christina Ierullo in the house. 

[00:00:14] Christina Ierullo: Hello, welcome. Glad to be here. 

[00:00:16] Chris Corcoran: Christina, I’m so happy to see you again. 

[00:00:18] Christina Ierullo: Yes, and likewise. I mean, it has been a long time. I walked in the place, had the same energy, looked the same and it just, all the feels. 

[00:00:26] Marc Gonyea: All the feels. It’s not the same now that you’re not here anymore, but it’ll never be the same as the day you walked in. 

[00:00:33] Christina Ierullo: No, I saw some killers when I walked in, the girl in the second aisle, one of the DMs here, she looked at me when she walked in and I just knew that stare in her eyes, this calls it sales. I didn’t even have to say hi to her. 

[00:00:50] Marc Gonyea: So, before we get into it, take us down a little, give us a little quick bio or out of bio on yourself, where you’re from, where you grew up a little bit, talk a little bit about that, then tell them one of my favorite all-time stories at memoryBlue. Right from the start.

[00:01:06] Christina Ierullo: All right. So, I grew up in Chicago. I had two salespeople as parents. Everything in my life is sales. It still is, like, when we go anywhere, like, the way that they talk to me, the way they interact with people, when people meet them, like, they’re, like, “Okay, like, that makes sense. Everything makes sense.”

[00:01:20] So, I had them my whole life. I actually wanted to go into law. Not, I think it was, like, the, the negotiating on the argument aspect of it, I like to find contrast in things. So, I went to school with that perspective, got in school, like, had a lot of fun and didn’t really like the school part of it, and I was like, “Where can I just go, like, get started, get, you know, my teeth cut, and have a good time?” And, I was like, “Hey, sales seems obvious, right?” I’m, like, bartender, hospitality life. I’ve been in hotels, fast food industry, pretty much everything. 

[00:01:51] Marc Gonyea: Hold on a second. Let’s go back for a second. So, Chinatown, Chinatown. Like, first of all, your are parents in Florida? 

[00:01:59] Christina Ierullo: They are in Florida, yeah. 

[00:02:00] Marc Gonyea: Talk a little bit about your parents. I want to meet them.

[00:02:03] Christina Ierullo: They’re killers. Yeah. 

[00:02:04] Marc Gonyea: Back in the day, I would, I would, like, Microsoft? 

[00:02:06] Christina Ierullo: Yeah, yeah. Both at Microsoft 15 and 10 years a piece, so they’ve been there a while and they are, like, just golden childs there, you know, big President Club trips and whatnot, and, just seeing that stuff, like, “Oh yeah, we’re going on a trip, stop and get to me luggage on the way.” I’m like, “I want to be in sales.”

[00:02:24] Marc Gonyea: So, but when was that? Was that, like, when was the earliest you remember? I think I kind of went through mom and dad, not because, honestly to me, two luggage is awesome, but, like, your personality, did you always know that or? I mean, how serious was it? “I wanna be a lawyer?”

[00:02:38] Christina Ierullo: Yeah, no, my mom went back to school or back to work, to sales, specifically, like, tech sales when I was in eighth grade, 2008. When she went back, she predominantly worked from home, whereas my dad never did, you know. Back in the day, well, work from home wasn’t really a thing so I didn’t know what he did. I don’t even know what sales he is, I just know he travels everywhere, right? And then, my mom goes back to work. She’s sitting at the kitchen table, like, and she’s talking to people and she’s just, you know, telling them why to do things, telling them where they have to go, negotiating things on a daily basis.

[00:03:08] I see her getting, like, aggressive, like, it’s a side of her I don’t know. I’m like, “Wow, she’s a killer.” And, I thought, like, myself, wherever I went, I didn’t know sales at this point, but I was like, “Wherever I go, I’m going to be like that. I’m going to be unapologetically where I want to go and take myself there.”

[00:03:25] And then, I think once I was in the hospitality realm, like, sales started sinking in for like, “Oh, there’s up-sells, there’s cross-sells.” I was, pretty much my first job in college, like, I’ve always worked since I was 16, never needed a job and always had one. Yeah. Yeah. I went to OMS for school.

[00:03:41] Marc Gonyea: How did all that happen? The girl from Chicago going to OMS? 

[00:03:44] Christina Ierullo: Yeah, no, that was kind of random. And, people always ask me this question, but I just was, like, “I want to go far away where I can be my own person,” like, independence is, like, a huge thing for me. And, I was like, “I want to be far away where my parents aren’t just driving in, stopping in.

[00:03:57] I want to be kind of somewhere new and somewhere I [00:04:00] had no idea what anything was about,” which was the South. I’d never really been in the South. We don’t, we don’t classify Florida as the South bit of Florida, but had never been in the South, like, I don’t know what the food was, didn’t really need to hear the accents never before, so I was like, “I want to go there.” I was like, I just think it was going to be fun. It wasn’t, like, out of the country or anything, but as far enough for me to feel like I was really on my own. There was one, but not that we knew each other, we had just found out, like, once we got there and we had lunch and that was kind of the end of it.

[00:04:30] Marc Gonyea: And, you said independence is a big thing for you? What was it? 

[00:04:33] Christina Ierullo: Since two, yeah. 

[00:04:35] Marc Gonyea: How did that equip you as a young adult?

[00:04:38] Christina Ierullo: Like, independent, yeah, independence to me is absolutely everything. Like, I want to be everything I am for myself. I never want to rely on anybody. And, I like a lot. Like, I’ll be the first to admit, like, I want to go places,

[00:04:50] I want to go to nice dinners, I want to buy nice things, and I’m never going to be sitting around waiting for somebody to be like, “Oh yeah, here you go. Here’s this money for this or this, that.” And, that’s how I thought when I was [00:05:00] 16 and went to go get my first job at Coldstone Creamery, shout-out. And, I was like, “I’m going to get my own check, and I’m not going to ask my dad for $20 for the movies.” And, not because he wasn’t going to hand me the $20, because I didn’t want to walk downstairs to his office and ask him, I just wanted to go. I just wanted to leave and walk out the door, and that’s how I, like, that’s how I was at everything, and I just, I was excited to just go to OMS and be on my own.

[00:05:26] So, I first started at a pizza restaurant and I started as a hostess, went to server, then bartender at the end, moved over to a more high-volume kind of bar thing, like, a typical bar. No, I went from place to place. So, I was a year and a half at my first place, and that’s where I moved from hostess, to server, to bartender, and then the second place I was at for a year, and then, there was a new hotel opening up in town, it was supposed to be the most glamorous hotel you ever heard of. It was, they put, bought pajamas for your dogs, if you brought your dog, they had all these, you know, crazy things. This is in downtown Oxford, which is where OMS is.

[00:06:03] No, you have to, it’s fun. It’s a fun time. Just plan it in advance if you’re going for a game day ’cause it’s crazy there. And, so, when I heard about this crazy new hotel opening up, I was like, “I really want to work.” Like, “I want to be in a very refined atmosphere where I’m learning to make these drinks that I’ve never made before,” and things like that.

[00:06:21] So, that was the last place I joined and I stayed there until I started here, until I got hired here. 

[00:06:26] Marc Gonyea: And, what was that like? I’m looking at the, like, political science. 

[00:06:33] Christina Ierullo: Yeah.  It’s what we call pre-law because they didn’t have pre-law. So, it was political science and government.

[00:06:41] I think it was something around sophomore or junior year when I started deciding, like, that the classes I was taking I wasn’t that invested in, and I didn’t see a world where I was invested in reading a book because I’m a learn-by-doing person, and, like, if you’re going into the medical field or the law field,  you have to be somebody who enjoys just learning, reading a book, sitting in class, taking tests

[00:07:05] whereas I just, like, couldn’t really be motivated to do my homework, like, never really cared about being, like, the straight-A student or anything like that. I would put more time in my bar job, staying there till two o’clock in the morning, making everything perfect, scrubbing the floor with a toothbrush versus doing a homework assignment at school.

[00:07:23] And, like, how could that translate to somebody going to law school? 

[00:07:27] Marc Gonyea: Yeah. You did it. It was the absolute right thing to do. All right. So, you, how did you end up with us? 

[00:07:33] Christina Ierullo: Yeah, I, I applied it a lot. No. I knew I was going to move to Austin, I had visited here a couple of times, obviously, gorgeous city. I came here once my sophomore year, once my junior year, it was a friend of a friend who was like, “Hey, you can stay with us,” never met him before,

[00:07:51] and just, we went to Blues On The Green, which is some free concerts here. We went and did really cool Austin things. Oh yeah. Hey, if you need something. Yeah. If you need a good restaurant, you need a date night, you need the best, coolest, hippest, craziest most secret place to go, pick me up, I have a list for it.

[00:08:08] So, I, I knew I was moving to Austin, so, I was looking at everything in Austin, and you guys don’t even know I’ve applied to over a hundred jobs at, like, I was just sitting there applying, apply. Nobody’s really gives us the time of day, and mostly they don’t give us the time of day because they don’t have the means to train people and they don’t believe in their training process, so they’re like, “Why would I hire somebody I don’t know anything about? Or, even interview them?” So, finally I spoke with you guys and spoke with Tiana or, actually. 

[00:08:32] Chris Corcoran: TKO? 

[00:08:34] Christina Ierullo: Yep. She was the first person to talk to me. So, I spoke with her and then we had a great conversation, and she had kind of gotten me in the mix. I talked with Nimit after that and ended up flying in here for my, my last final interview, the role-play interview, which was just, you guys, I was up ’till, I don’t even know what, maybe 3:00 AM the night before, reading the script,

[00:08:58] I had no idea what a script was. I’m reading it in the mirror. My parents couldn’t help me because they didn’t make cold calls for, like, yeah, Microsoft. Exactly. They don’t do that. They’re, it’s just, like, they’ve never done a cold call, and if they did, it was 25 years ago when it was a different, even, thing. So, no, I had nobody to help me.

[00:09:14] I’m just, like, watching these YouTube videos. I’m shaking in my boots. I come in here so nervous and I sit in the conference room that used to be where the kitchen was because we’d knocked down that wall. Yeah, and I give this thing and the spiel and then it comes in and was like, “Wow, that was really good.” And, I was like, “Okay, I’m where I need to be.”

[00:09:35] Marc Gonyea: So, when you start, I’ll interrupt you real quick, once you go up here, what was it, what do you remember from starting? 

[00:09:42] Christina Ierullo: Starting. I will be honest. I remember that I was confused starting because there was, it was before we had the trainer here, so it was a couple of videos and I did, exactly, right, yeah, “Here’s a shot of whiskey and a headset,” so it was, it was two days of, like, listening to a tape and there was, like, some random miscellaneous categories, tapes, and it was day three that I was on the phones and, mind you, booking a meeting, nonetheless.

[00:10:21] Marc Gonyea: You got three days of training, and then they fly back to their office. 

[00:10:24] Christina Ierullo: And, it’s great for camaraderie, too. It’s everything. I mean, it’s like, “Oh my God, my new company’s taking me to DC.” I feel like, “Wow, that’s awesome. That sounds really cool.” 

[00:10:32] Marc Gonyea: You’re, you’re in a team they put together. So, in memoryBlue, like, in the history of the Austin office, one of the pivotal times we had this was our biggest client, new in the history of the company, it was Motorola, and we had a team of six on maybe, and the team was good, but they could have done more. And, we knew they could, they could do more.

They knew they could do better. They knew they could do more than the SDRs, but the client didn’t know. Yeah. And, they didn’t, you know, and this is balanced, you want the SDRs to be happy, but you also have to uphold the integrity of our delivery with the client. So, we went to the folks, we do it to the clients today, “Hey, we’re going to increase the quotas,” of all these guys, because we know they can do more. We went to the guys and the guys got really upset and it was like a, it was a newbie, right? We want newbies because they all end up leaving and they swore they couldn’t do it. No one could, no one could do these numbers. This is, it’s never going to happen, it’s possible, and we took a big risk by, like, doing it ’cause even the client said, “What, you’re doing what?”

[00:11:39] Christina Ierullo: We were happy with three meetings. 

[00:11:41] Marc Gonyea: We replaced every single person on the team and you were one of them. And, by the way, that client, the VP, just came back two weeks ago. Nice. So nice. Nice. And, you came in and, like, got more than double, I think, the, the numbers, the six guys who left, who said, “We could never get those meetings, like, in our first month.”

[00:12:02] It was, “Thank you, God.” 

[00:12:05] Chris Corcoran: Thank you, Jesus. 

[00:12:06] Marc Gonyea: Right, Christina? Talk, let’s talk about that, when you first started. 

[00:12:10] Christina Ierullo: So, when I, when I came in it, you know, when I first made, the first day, so, I called the first day and I booked three meetings and everybody was like, “Wow, this is crazy.” And, I thought I did good because, and I made a lot of calls ’cause I moved fast and I don’t have to be the smartest in the room or know the most,

[00:12:27] but I do know I can move faster than almost everybody that I’m put next to, so I knew I could do that and I knew I could move fast. And, it was, after that day that, you know, they were, like, coming around to the, size me up or maybe have this conversation and they’re like, “Yeah, well, we could, we could be booking that many meetings, but we choose not to, because it’s better this way, to, you know, make sure that you’re not always increasing your goals and your targets.”

[00:12:53] And, I’m just thinking, “Who are these losers who are saying, why would you say that about yourself?” Isn’t that the [00:13:00] saddest thing you could imagine? “Oh, I’m not going to work hard because then I might have to work harder or be better or move up in the company, that’s scary. I’m going to stay in this corner, and nobody’s going to know who I am.”

[00:13:11] And, of course, within a couple of weeks, that all plays itself out and they’re all gone.

[00:13:18] Half of them had left and then there was a couple who were still there and, you know, whatever. 

[00:13:23] Marc Gonyea: A hundred percent turnover, you know that. You’re there for that. So, like, you confirmed our hunch. So, they came back around after and said, “What you doing?” 

[00:13:32] Christina Ierullo: Yeah. 

[00:13:34] And, like, like, I was ruining their life or something and I’m just like, “Sorry, this isn’t going to be that way.”

[00:13:39] Like, you should be proud, be proud of your job. You know, like, it’s a good job. You’re entering into a giant world where you can be anything in a company when you start your, ’cause you’re learning the product, you’re learning how to talk to people, you’re learning all of these great skills, so be proud of that.

[00:13:54] Don’t be the person who’s, like, “Oh, well, I’m just going to do this and fly under the radar for as long as possible until I [00:14:00] get a better gig or something.”” It’s like, “Okay.” 

[00:14:04] Marc Gonyea: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And, so, what else do you remember from back then? 

[00:14:07] Christina Ierullo: Yeah, after that team had turned on, I think, like, we started to kind of get, like, almost a whole new team dynamic at that point, like, a lot of new people were coming in and also the culture in the office started to shift where people were getting a lot closer with each other.

When I first joined in, I, like, I don’t think it was, like, the warmest welcome, you know, it was, like, a lot of different, like, discombobulated groups, and, like, shortly after that is when, like, not only people were taking more pride in what they were doing because people wanted to book meetings and work the hardest they could, and they were, like, excited to shout it from the rooftops, but they were also getting really friendly and familiar with each other, which I think is just the absolute best thing to do, like, not only as a business leader to, like, want your team to be like that, but also, as a new person into the company, to, like, make yourself vulnerable and trying to, like, meet people and educate people.

[00:14:53] So, it was, like, this huge influx of new customers at that time. I’m not sure if you guys, like, add it to the sales team at that point or something, but it was just, like, all of a sudden out of nowhere, like, all these new clients were coming in, and, like, I wasn’t on Motorola for that long, maybe only, like, five or six months, and during that time we had joined, like, had so many new people coming in and, like, it was just nice to work with them and get them excited, and, like, you could tell people in the company were, you know, just acting differently than when I first started. 

[00:15:22] Marc Gonyea: Yeah, you were doing well, and I remember we just had Deionte in here and we did podcast, and Deionte, yeah, I think Meredith Davis, you remember from working area and he said, this is for the podcast, “Christina, she came in here, like, like, she’s been doing this all her life. We couldn’t even believe that she was new at this. That’s, like, she was just talking to these people and she knew all that.”

[00:15:50] So, you know, we gave you our version of training, then. You have, you know, you were new at it. How did you develop? ‘Cause there’s still, I don’t even look through the first day, [00:16:00] but were you truly, just, role in your own personality out or, like, what was kind of  your superpower?

[00:16:05] Christina Ierullo: Yeah, I listened to a lot of call recordings. I think that was great. I made recording calls, is obviously just, like, you have to do it if you’re an SDR function, because it’s the best way to learn,

[00:16:14] so I listened to a lot of them and I think I just kind of took what I liked, and I just went in there as aggressive as I could, and I think it worked really well for who I was dialing. So, I really want to caveat that because a lot of times, if you’re calling into a certain industry, it’s not great to be aggressive.

[00:16:29] I’ve listened to a lot of amazing phone recordings with calling into HR professionals where you use the dad jokes and you kind of come in, they’re funny, they were like, ’cause they’re people, people. So, for me, I was like, I’m calling into these chief police officers, they’re no BS-type people. I want to go in there and I want to tell them why they need to use us,

[00:16:46] and then I started getting creative with these, like, meetups or whatever that I called them, as, like, oh, “We’re scheduling a, a conference with similar departments in your area,” which was completely true because I was getting them all on the phone call together, and we were [00:17:00] going to talk best practices of crime analytics and reporting.

[00:17:03] So, it was completely true. It wasn’t a false at all, but it really inclined them because they wanted to hear about what other people in their state or neighboring states were doing. Yeah. FOMO. Exactly. They were going to buy because of FOMO, they didn’t want to be the only person without crime reports.

[00:17:16] Marc Gonyea: Let’s talk about, one of her hallmarks as a manager, or at least as working here, ’cause she comes up with great ideas and ways to excuse things, I think. The meetups, we’ll talk about what you did for Booz and all those awesome things you did, but let’s talk about, so, you’re, you’re an SDR for eight months.

[00:17:37] Christina Ierullo: Yeah. I actually got lucky that you guys needed someone on the talent team, so I got to train under Meredith on the talent team, yeah, and learn all of that, which helped me so much in the role I have right now. So, I did that for a month or two months because we weren’t ready for another DM, and, like, we were done with Motorola,

[00:17:56] so, I got so lucky. I learned all these ropes of a field I would have had [00:18:00] zero knowledge about, and then I went into the delivery manager and I loved that I got to start off slow. So, I had, like, one employee, one joined a week later, a couple later, and then, before you knew it, I had a team of 15. 

[00:18:11] Marc Gonyea: 15 people.

[00:18:13] So, you know, who did you have on your team? So, this is when you’re interviewing, hiring. So you learn that, so whatever reason, but, fortunate or not, you’ve worked with Meredith a little bit, and then pace, put you into the DM role, and you’re interviewing people. What’s that, like, learn how to interview and learn how to?

[00:18:31] Christina Ierullo: Yeah. I mean, it was great, like, learning what to message people and, like, what to say to them that’s gonna increase their response rate, how to pick out different flaws, characteristics, how to hone in on something they say without feeling like you’re striking a spotlight in their phase, and things like that were really helpful,

[00:18:48] what to look for resumes, how to, like, get all that out in a mass quantity, talking with them, following up. It’s, it’s, we treat it like sales, obviously I’m most recruited straight to, like, sales, but there are a lot of nuances to it that are different from sales. So, it was [00:19:00] really helpful to know. 

[00:19:01] Marc Gonyea: Will put you on the spot here, but who are some of your best hires?

[00:19:04] Christina Ierullo: Brandyn Rochelle, actually, just, Couchbase, just ran into him at the airport, actually, yeah. He goes, “Christina,” and I was like, “Is that, who’s that? Is that Brandyn?” So, he was fantastic. Another one, Sam Ott. Oh gosh, I gotta love Sam Ott. I want him to work for me. I’m like, “Where are you Sam?” He’s one of the smartest students.  

[00:19:23] Marc Gonyea: That you ever met?

[00:19:26] Christina Ierullo: Yeah. He is fantastic. Yeah, no, he’s, he’s a great guy all around. Who else did I, yeah, yeah, he was great, and Brandyn was one of mine, I’m trying to think towards, I love Jace, loved working with Jace, he was fantastic, he’s DM here? Yeah, of course he’s crushing it. He was just, oh my Gosh, that bubbly energy,

[00:19:43] I loved working with him. I would say those three are probably some of my favorite, I might be missing some, so anybody, yeah, and then, I had, I had some great people on the team. Oh, Chelsea McKay, she was on Community Brands, that, did some, some work for them and she was great with them.

[00:19:58] Yeah.

[00:19:59] Marc Gonyea: What did [00:20:00] you learn as a manager? Like, so, I mean, maybe met people at the hotel or along the way somewhere, but, like, what was some of the muscles that you developed? 

[00:20:11] Christina Ierullo: Yeah. So, it was actually my first experience ever managing anyone, and it was, it was kind of learning to walk a line between being close with them and, the, understanding that I’m on your team, but also being able to guide them in a way that you have credibility in what you’re saying. I always wanted to gain credibility with my team and I did that by cold-calling along their side, which I do today.

Yeah, and people are always shocked when I say that, but it’s, like, how can you say you’re good at this, or say you’re somebody to trust if you don’t do it yourself? So, I thought, that one was, it was really helpful and I always wanted to put together really great trainings for them that also made them feel like I was actively in the space. I’m always on LinkedIn reading posts, I’m always on websites, getting information, looking at YouTube and things that are being released, ’cause you have to read it every day with SDR stuff, it changes so frequently.

So, I think, giving a lot of those trainings to my [00:21:00] team, as well as, like, going and calling on their accounts with them when they were in a rut gave me the credibility to be able to, like, guide them and coach them without them, you know, some people are a little they’re resistant to coaching, it’s natural, you know, you’re telling somebody they’re doing something wrong, so you want to give them a reason to believe what you’re saying. And, then, of course, with here, it’s the work hard, play hard, which, like, I will never work somewhere that doesn’t believe in that mantra.

[00:21:21] Like, here, I just remember it being a Friday at the end of the month, everyone was doing great, and being able to just, like, bring beers in the office, have a good time, you know, like, be, be ready to enjoy yourself and celebrate the wins and celebrate things that people are doing well. And you guys have even better ways of doing it now.

[00:21:38] I mean, I see you in Costa Rica. 

[00:21:42] Chris Corcoran: Yeah. 

[00:21:43] Christina Ierullo: I think it was, yeah, it was right, as I was, right as I was leaving, I had them. I, yeah. T Rich had gone.

[00:21:51] Marc Gonyea: We’d love to have you on those. But, you do the best memoryBlue holiday party, Taylor, you’d seen him put that thing on?

[00:22:05] Christina Ierullo: It was, it was a real, it was a really good party and that, like, everything just worked out perfectly with that bar there and the food and everything was a good time. 

[00:22:14] Obviously, that’s important to you.

[00:22:15] Oh, it’s huge. It’s huge. Like, I’m like, I will not join a company unless I know what our culture budget is.

[00:22:20] Like, I need to have fun. Great. 

[00:22:23] Marc Gonyea: So, let’s talk about your piece de resistance, I think it’s Booz. Would you agree? 

[00:22:29] Christina Ierullo: Absolutely. 

[00:22:31] Marc Gonyea: You have, you bring your own style and your style, you innovate, you’re an innovator. There’s no doubt about it, and I remember always pushed back on some, I was like, “Just make sure they’re making calls, Christina make sure that they have phone calls,” because she’s like, “Marc, you’re very patient with me when I would come down every quarter,” or whatever it was and be like, “Can we make more phone calls please? With all these meetings?” What does that come from? ‘Cause it’s, it’s a, it’s an incredible strength of yours. 

[00:22:55] Christina Ierullo: Yeah. And I know that you guys, on memoryBlue, it’s in your onboarding playbook, the early chasm adopters and things like that from the start with the why, and, like, when I saw that, for the first time I saw that YouTube clip from the Ted Talk, I was like, “I’m an early chasm adopter. Like, I need to be, like, before everyone else, like there’s a new piece of technology out there, I don’t even want it, but I have to have it ’cause I need to review it and know, like, what it is.”

[00:23:18] If there’s a new strategy out there, I want to be the first to AB-test it. So, like I mentioned, I was developing all these trainings and a lot of them were on highly targeted, targeted, hyper-personalized Outreach, and with that is an omni-channel approach, I truly believe in an omni-channel and I’m sure you guys are doing it now, where it follows in the emails, the LinkedIn, you know, get the social selling as well as a phone call, but when you’re doing that and increasing the personalized aspect of it and creating all the questions around what that person does and what you found out about them online, then it’s gonna bring the calls down a little bit. So, my team right now makes 50 cold calls a day.

Here, that’s doing half of a day’s worth of work, and the way that they’re structured is to spend a lot more time on customizing what every [00:24:00] phone call is going to be about and every email, and that’s kind of where I wanted to take the Booz route of, like, being able to create these really custom experience for people, especially in a saturated market, like, cybersecurity. CSOs.

[00:24:13] Marc Gonyea: You were going after the small guys. Who’s, who’s legitimate of blue blood, right? Because there’s a company that’s trying to get in this endless peace space. 

[00:24:23] Christina Ierullo: Bran needed them.

[00:24:24] Marc Gonyea: And Jace, ’cause I remember you working on those things, Jace was kind of, like, your star people. 

[00:24:30] Christina Ierullo: Great. Yeah. He was great, he takes direction very well. He’s really eager to do turns into us. I personally am a very change-oriented person. I like to shake things up, it’s exciting to me. So, when I did direct people, there was the people who were afraid of change, and there was people like Jace who were ready to say, “Okay, let’s do these things now.”

[00:24:49] And a lot of them new guys have touched on before, like, circle of leverage, where you came here and did a big study on it. And, like, you’ve touched on, like, a lot of the personalization, like, I remember you were giving a presentation about a LinkedIn [00:25:00] character and you’re, like, “Look, he’s in Minnesota, he’s got a fishing rod here, like, you know, he does this,” like, yeah, exactly. You’re going through it, writing all the notes. So, like, a lot of it was there and, like, I was just kind of elongating the idea of making a true omni-channel approach, where we had a specific cadence, and this was before, like, Outreach was even on our radar, so we were papering sequences, writing them down, when to add them on LinkedIn, when to follow up with the message on there, and it works. 

[00:25:27] Marc Gonyea: Spreadsheets, so, you took that new way of executing it and they were executed.

[00:25:32] Chris Corcoran: So, my big argument would be, Christina, your approach without a tool would be a poor approach with Outreach.

[00:25:42] The manual, because it’s always, it’s more about the approach and then you’re going to execute it in the technology. 

[00:25:48] Christina Ierullo: Absolutely. You can do anything without the technology. It’s adopting the workflow that’s harder at scale without the technology. I kind of force my SDRs hand since they use Outreach to follow my exact workflow and they really don’t have an option around them, like, you’re going to do my tasks, so I’ll see if you did it.

But, if you have a team, a small team and it’s easy for you to say, “Here’s the process, let’s follow it to a T,” it’s probably just as good, if not better to use it without the tool, because then you have flexibility to add in things because there is no one-size-fits-all for people.

[00:26:19] Marc Gonyea: Well, what’s your take on this? So, the beauty of that approach and Christina’s approach when she was here is that it forces the SDR to learn so much about the space, about the persona, about the people, right in the nuance of it. So, when you do reach out to them, and if you ever do get him on the phone, you’re just so much more comfortable.

[00:26:41] You feel like you know them. You feel like you know them. Oh, I’ve been, I’ve been waiting for a call, right? Clearly. So, that’s why, like, if you put the time in to do the research and that’s really going to help you as you go down your career, you do those things anyways, so it’s such a great feeling, I think, to have that confidence.

[00:26:56] Christina Ierullo: No, it’s definitely great.

[00:26:57] You get them on the phone after you’ve read an annual report, [00:27:00] you’ve read, like, a panel that they sat on a discussion, you know, not only him, but you know three other people that he works with, who’s above and who’s below him, and you’re ready, like, he’s finally answered the phone, I’m ready to wow

[00:27:11] him with my credibility, my opening value statement isn’t bland and generic, it’s directly targeted to who you are, and I know you’re not gonna say I’m not the right person. I know you’re not going to say, “I’m not interested,” because this is exactly what I read that you’re interested in, and I know that you’re going to talk to me.

[00:27:25] Marc Gonyea: Yup. Yup. So, you’re doing your thing, you’re building these teams. I wrote down in our pre-call notes, less than, we saw SDRs that leave for 5k. 

[00:27:40] Christina Ierullo: Yeah, no, I was just saying there’s a lot of people in my network, some were here, and a lot of them are here and then some are out elsewhere and not even memoryBlue-related and they would get these LinkedIn messages, just like we all do just like every SDR on the floor does,

[00:27:55] and it would say, “2K base higher,” you know, “$5,000 base higher,” or whatever, [00:28:00] and they were so excited to jump ship for this opportunity. Do they spend any time reading up on the company? What the growth trajectory is, doing research on the leadership board? No, they say, “$5,000 a year, that’s $125 more per paycheck, you know, whatever I’m going to take this and it’s going to change my life,” right? Like, a hundred dollars a paycheck is just going to be make or break, and what ends up happening is they go to this new company and they end up having to spend even more time as an SDR because they want to give everyone the same fair opportunity, so now they’re, they spent five months here, they have to go spend an additional 12, to 15, to 18 months at this new role, and now we see them, they’ve been at three different places all as an SDR, three plus years have gone by and they’re like, “When’s my AE job coming?”

Well, it’s not going to come to you because you had no loyalty somewhere to sit and wait and learn the ropes.

[00:28:53] If you’re not getting promoted, it’s not because your boss hates you or because they don’t have head count, like, they would be excited to promote [00:29:00] somebody who had earned their stripes and who did amazing at this job, and they would be ready to hand it to you on a silver platter, but you weren’t ready yet, and you need to, you need to know that you’re not underappreciated. Like, you are on the path that you need to be on. 

[00:29:14] Marc Gonyea: Yep. So, you were rocking the path of us and you left. Scrape. Talk to us about that next. 

[00:29:23] Chris Corcoran: So, how long were you an SDR before you moved up to be a DM? 

[00:29:25] Christina Ierullo: It was pretty quick, actually. I was, I think, just eight months. 

[00:29:29] Marc Gonyea: And she was a DM for a year and eight months.

[00:29:33] She’s great. Good, good, short duty with us. We were very fortunate to have you down here. So, then we’ll lose your, so I was curious about, there are a couple things I want to chat about, but let’s talk about how you size up opportunities because you’re in a new company now which we’ll get to, I wanna hear all about that, but, when, when you left, or when you had your, with Dun & Bradstreet, right? What inspired you to go there? And, talk to us about, tell us what [00:30:00] you did there, and how you furthered your career, you know, Christina incorporated. 

[00:30:04] Christina Ierullo: Yeah. So, when I was leaving here, I was looking for a larger company, like, enterprise size, 5,000 employees plus, because I wanted to learn some of the traits around, you know, mapping within a company and working cross-collaboratively with different teams and being able to work in that giant organization and have those kinds of experience under my belt. So, that’s what I was looking for, period. I came across a bunch of different places and the reason that I went with Dun & Bradstreet is, I wanted to expand on my own personal growth, and one of the biggest reasons that I left here is because I wanted to be able to, you know, spend a little bit more time working on tools and digital tech stacks for the MarTech and sales tech world, so I went into the digital side of the house there and I’ve got to expand my horizons on things, focusing on demand generation, not only just lead generation, but also that more top of the funnel of driving people to your website with, like, SEO keywords, paid search terms, understanding intent, [00:31:00] understanding prospect engagement on things that are going out, and a lot of it was coming to fruition when I was here at memoryBlue because I was moving into some sort of marketing consulting role with a lot of our clients, because they were just naturally inquisitive about it.

So, I wouldn’t go off and learn because they would come to me with questions and topics and I would go off and learn, and I would find a lot of areas of interest in that where I wanted to kind of grow that bubble a little bit. So, moving into Dun & Bradstreet, I got to focus on, not only just sales consulting, but also that marketing-consulting side of the house, and querying up ideal customer profiles and how to target people based on, you know, your total addressable market.

[00:31:37] Marc Gonyea: We went over this, because you’re, so, this is now what we want to do more of, right, is to have these conversations with clients, but sort of the work, how many leads we get are really down to call, with insights, but also, like, we worked so hard and do so well, it would be valuable for them to have conversations about other things, and we’ve started doing some of those other things, the [00:32:00] innovation, the innovation part of it we focus, so basically, which is good, but you know, that was a really good, natural move for you, right, just based upon how inquisitive you are.

[00:32:12] Christina Ierullo: Right. I was very focused on the data here and looking at all these connect rates, what time of day was the best one?

[00:32:18] What type of persona were we talking to and getting the best phone calls out of? And, I wanted to go a more data-centric route, and they just, Dun & Bradstreet has a giant, you know, sales tech stack and MarTech stack, so I was delivering those solutions to customers and consulting them on how to utilize them within their own, you know, whatever they had going on their map with their CRM, with, you know, if they’re launching the Facebook Ads, Google Ads or whatever may be.

[00:32:42] Marc Gonyea: Awesome. And, then, of course, I know from looking at, like, when you were there, you were doing your thing for a year and a half, then you got promoted?

[00:32:53] Christina Ierullo: Yeah. So, I moved into the Director of Digital Customer Success, and what that role really entails is I did go back to management, which [00:33:00] was nice, so I had a team of customer success managers under me, and also you’re more of an escalation point, so I’m mostly focused on renewals, and for the largest target accounts, I’ll come in and do some main strategy, like, maybe I am organizing all of the attributes that they have, like, focusing on what tech install would somebody have to be a good customer for you and kind of serving up those large ideas about how we’re going to target and then move into the background, and then come renewal time, I would do on specific lift analysis to determine what tools were getting the most ROI, what campaigns we were driving that were producing the most revenue, how they were converting to customer as, you know, likelihood to up sell, cross, sell with them and things like that.

[00:33:46] Chris Corcoran: Strategic account management. 

[00:33:47] Christina Ierullo: Yeah, exactly. And, I had, I was on the enterprise team, so, mostly enterprise, I had Office Depot, Citrix, US Foods, Gordon Foods, tons of people there. Well, we have Henkel, just a bunch [00:34:00] of, just, large organizations that needed to make some sense of all of the pieces of data that they had ’cause they’re fine-to-buy things, right, they love buying all these things and then they’re, don’t really know how to put into action. 

[00:34:12] Marc Gonyea: Wow. So, what was that like, we’re going to have a bigger company for, like, some people that simple, this might be, we’re going to. 

[00:34:18] Chris Corcoran: I hope our friends on LinkedIn are listening to this because this is the kind of shit that we need for them.

[00:34:23] Christina Ierullo: Yeah. Yeah. Working, working at a big company, it is, it’s great for some things. So, we fly business class, you know. That’s fantastic. It’s great having a process and procedure set out for everything. I’m booking travel, I know where to go. Everything’s logged in and it goes in a corporate card. It gets expenses paid automatically.

[00:34:44] If I have a problem with HR, things aren’t delivered on target, I need a customer use case from a person in this thing. We have it, it’s already spun up. Everything is laid out. Where it starts, where, and the reason I ultimately left is because you are just a [00:35:00] little brick in the wall of this giant organization.

[00:35:02] They don’t really care about you. You’re a line item on an Excel spreadsheet, you know? They are so quick to just fire somebody right off the bat because it doesn’t fit into their economic plan this year, you know? They decided we can do without this job and they have no problem. And, that happened to my boss and I think that’s when a lot of people on my team were like, “Where am I working?” Like, “Geez, I love this guy. He knew how to do everything. Why would you ever have a reason to let this guy go?” Right? So, there’s, there’s not this familial flavor to it like there is at a company like this or where I’m currently working, and it’s like, “Why would I work myself to the ground?

[00:35:38] I have no problem working nights or weekends, or even when I’m on holiday, if a message comes through that I need to answer. Why am I doing that for somebody who would be so quick to turn their back on me and wouldn’t even really care to invest in me in general?” 

[00:35:53] Marc Gonyea: I don’t know. 

[00:35:55] Chris Corcoran: You got a lot of experience with exposure.

[00:35:57] Christina Ierullo: Exactly. 

[00:35:58] Chris Corcoran: It’s a good tour. [00:36:00] It’s a good tour, for sure. 

[00:36:01] Marc Gonyea: It, it, now that it makes sense about mixing the horses to be as to what you did while you were out there. Because, like, you’re very consultative and you’re super smart to learn. 

[00:36:13] Christina Ierullo: Yeah. Yeah. I do love to learn. I, if somebody says something I don’t know, I’m like, immediately, like, I’ll buy every book and its name and I need to figure this out.

[00:36:21] Marc Gonyea: The other thing I think, which kind of led you to where you are now will be, you guys spoke, we talked about the networking, the networking factor at memoryBlue, you know, you come to Austin, you don’t know that many people and you meet all these people at memoryBlue, right? People you buy houses with, or people you do all sorts of stuff with, right?

[00:36:36] Good friends, but you’re also a very, good people. So, what’s your approach to that as, as a manager, just as a person? 

[00:36:44] Christina Ierullo: Yeah, I, in terms of networking?

[00:36:46] Marc Gonyea: Yeah, just in terms of, you enjoyed the people you’ve worked with, you enjoyed the deal with these folks, and you, you managed a lot of people by this point. 

[00:36:52] Christina Ierullo: Yeah. I, yeah, I think coming off the bat, like, getting culture started up and ready, like, the way that you are going to interact with people and the [00:37:00] way that it’s going to be what’s tolerated and what’s not. Good culture isn’t just going out to dinners and having good events, it’s being really proud of the work that you do. It’s congratulating the person next to you when they have a big win. It’s not being afraid to turn around to everybody on your team and be like, “Hey, can you read this email really quick ’cause I don’t know if this first line looks good or not?”

[00:37:18] So, that’s the type of stuff you want to, like, instill really early on by doing it yourself and being vulnerable, and doing things and saying, “Do you guys like this? I just set out this new procedure and I really like part A and part B, like, what, do you think parts C would go good in action?” Like, being that person that’s willing to open themselves up and talk to people is a great way to build the culture, and it’s just being human, you know?

I didn’t have that at Dun & Bradstreet where people were human with each other. It was just like, “Here’s the result. And, like, it’s, you know, on a, on a boat.” If it’s your internal people, it’s family, we can talk to them. We can be silly. We can also be, you know, vulnerable or tell them we need help or ask whatever, so it’s huge to, you know, have that, that aspect of.

[00:38:01] I called Sally today. No, she’s not there. It’s just, yeah, just Tyler Cassett. 

[00:38:09] Marc Gonyea: Did you hire him?

[00:38:11] Christina Ierullo: I hired him knowing that I was, I was leaving, that I wanted to get him in before I had left, so I was like, “Hey, here’s the good, here’s the bad, here’s the ugly, if you want in, you know, it’s a great place to learn things, kind of start getting networking with new customers and building this kind of great relationships.”

[00:38:27] So, he took that and I never got to work with him ’cause I left, like, right before his start date was, but we talk every day about whatever he’s doing or what customer he’s on.

[00:38:35] Marc Gonyea: I mean, you’re good at building these relationships with people too. This is wonderful. Then you told me about how you ended up in this new place, it’s the same sort of thing, right? What were you looking for when you were leaving Dun and Bradstreet?

[00:38:45] Christina Ierullo: So, I actually wasn’t looking, which is, like, why, you know, you can’t be looking for a relationship when you find the best one, you can’t be looking. So, I wasn’t looking. I was just, got a random LinkedIn message asking if I wanted to be, so, he asked if I was interested in a Customer Success [00:39:00] Manager position, which was my title, but my title did, didn’t really encompass what I did because I was much more on marketing and sales consulting, so, I just let them know that, and I was like, “Hey, I’m actually really interested in marketing and sales consulting,

[00:39:11] and that’s why I’m in this space, love working products.” But, I know Austin really well. He’s moving his headquarters here. He doesn’t live here, he’s in Boston. And I was like, “So, why don’t you give me a call? I know tons of people. I, you know, I know where things are, where you need to get your office at and things like that, so let’s talk.” So, we talked for a long time, we talked for an hour.

[00:39:30] So we talked for an hour ago, you know, just kind of shooting the shit and stuff and you know, nothing comes from it. I’m like, “Hey, have a great day.” He’s like, a couple of weeks later he’s like, “Let’s talk again. I have a couple more things, let’s talk on Zoom.”

And he’s like, “You know, we were going to have our director of enablement start our SDR team, but, you know, now we’re thinking there’s way too much work and he’s not going to be able to handle, so, you know, maybe that’s something that you would be interested in since you’ve been there before and like it?” And, I was just kinda like, “You know, where I’m at, so good. They pay me good. I just, I know what I’m doing and I don’t really think that I would leave or do anything.” He’s like, “That’s fine.” We still started talking. We were talking to more people in the company, and he ended up coming to town here with the CEO, COO, some sales engineers were here and just a great, great group of people that were, like, ready to take this company to the next level.

[00:40:17] So, we all got dinner and I just like, it was like, I knew these people forever, right? I’m, like, sitting on a table and laughing with them already. A laugh with the, like, with a coworker? That hasn’t happened to me since I worked at memoryBlue, right? So, I’m like, “This is crazy to be with these people that I’m so comfortable with and they should.”

Yes. I want to have an impact. I want to feel like what I’m doing matters and is truly going to make or break a company. So, after we had talked for a while, I, and they kind of asked me again, I was like, “Okay, you know what? I’m really open to hearing about this.” You know, they are on, like, on, obviously the goal is going public and whatnot, and just kind of thinking about being able to either aid in that, or be a part of, that was really exciting, it’s an exciting journey.

So, you know,  that kind of persuaded me more. Then we started talking strategy and what their marketing strategy was and how I would strategize my team. Seemed like we were on the same page for everything, and it was kind of, like, a no brainer after that, that I was like, “Let’s, let’s do this thing. Where do I sign?” What are you doing now? I’m the Director of Sales Development now. So, I’m building the sales program, building all the workflows, designing, you know, what tech stack we need to be successful, what the messaging is going to be, who’s the ideal persona. All of that’s pretty much brand new right now. Figuring out, you know, what the talk tracks are, how many touches we need to engage with them, how to react to inbound leads, and everything along those lines. Wow. 

[00:41:35] Chris Corcoran: Right up your wheelhouse. And then, the headquarter’s here? We gotta know where’s the best place in the Austin to have an office. 

[00:41:42] Christina Ierullo: Yeah, so it’s right south of the river, it’s overlooking the entire downtown. It’s on Barton Springs,

[00:41:48] so it’s on the street that Zilker is on it. Is it just the absolute best views in the world. There are pets allowed in there, that makes it even better, this cute little dogs and whatnot running around, and then cold brew on tap, which, come on. [00:42:00] Oh please. Absolutely. So, it’s a digital adoption platform, so it sits on top of software to guide users on how to use it against, like, intended workflows.

[00:42:09] So, it’s kind of about thinking about how I would want my reps to behave within all my pieces of technology. They don’t have to sit through live trainings anymore. They don’t have to watch recordings. They know what they’re doing and how to do it. And then, it also has data validation, data cleanliness, so end-of-the-months, if you’re pestering Jackson to pull some reports and he’s realizing people haven’t marked things as meeting occurred, next time they log into Salesforce, it would automatically force them to go to that location, update the record.

[00:42:37] So, without people having to bug people, or, you know, “Hey, update this, is everything clean in here?” That utilizes its own tools to make sure it does that. 

[00:42:45] Chris Corcoran: Are you going to sell this to the end user or to the software companies or both? 

[00:42:50] Christina Ierullo: So, right now we’re focusing on the end user for an internal use case.

[00:42:53] So, my team’s focusing on enterprise, so 2000 users and above is what we’re looking at, or 2000 employees and above,  and it’s for their internal use cases of utilizing their own tech stack. We, yeah, we do have a partnerships and channel side that’s happy to, you know, kind of use it as more of a, a company-licensed application, but it’s not where our focus is because we really want to kind of hone in on this internal use case.

[00:43:17] Chris Corcoran: If I’m at Boeing and I decide I need this, I buy it from you guys, can I use this on all of my software technology? 

[00:43:25] Christina Ierullo: Yeah, so it is software-agnostic, it’s just web-based applications. We are working on getting some, like, you know, downloaded apps and, you know, on-premise applications situated and that’s on the roadmap, but right now it’s all web-based applications.

[00:43:38] It can be homegrown, it can be absolutely anything, and it’ll have, you know, everything in them that they want them to abide by. 

[00:43:44] Chris Corcoran: That’s great. What’s TINA Tech Stack look like nowadays? 

[00:43:47] Christina Ierullo: It’s not crazy. It really isn’t. So, it’s LinkedIn as, yeah.

[00:43:52] So, Salesforce is our CRM. We have LinkedIn for social selling. We have Outreach as our, as our email platform and then [00:44:00] Zoom info as our data platform. And those, I mean, that’s really all you need. Sure, if you’re gonna go out there and if you have budget for it, there’s a lot of things out there that’s going to make your lives easier, but I think, to get started, that’s absolutely what you need to get off the ground running. 

[00:44:15] Marc Gonyea: I’ve got a question for you. So, actually, what was the goal of that team you want to build, build the team? 

[00:44:20] Christina Ierullo: Yeah, I want to build the team by the end of the year, you know. I’d like to have at least 10 SDRs by early next year, have another SDR manager who’s, you know, bringing on some other team members and kind of build and expand from there so I can move away from some of the day-to-day aspects of, you know, training, coaching, which I love to do, but moving into more of, like, the big picture of, you know, strategic account planning and, you know, ideology around who we’re going to target. 

[00:44:43] Chris Corcoran: Yeah, there’s so much stuff you can deal with. Is the company headquartered now in Austin, or they relocated from Boston down here?

[00:44:49] Christina Ierullo: Yeah, it was actually Frisco, but a lot of people that work here live in Boston, just because it was like, “Hey, I’m working here. Let me hire my friend. Oh, this guy I know is really good.” And they all happen to be kind of [00:45:00] clumped in Boston, but they just moved from Frisco to Austin within Frisco, Texas, yeah, within, like, the past three months. 

[00:45:06] Marc Gonyea: Okay. That’s great. You’re in the right place to utilize your town. 

[00:45:10] Chris Corcoran: How long have you been there?

Christina Ierullo: I started in mid-July, so just a couple months now. And then, the first people that I hired on my team started in the beginning of September, so most of, you know, who’s in the office right now is pretty new to the company.

[00:45:22] Chris Corcoran: So, what do you look for when you hire people? 

[00:45:24] Christina Ierullo: Yeah, so I don’t care what the background is, can be recent graduate, can be anything. I am looking for somebody who has a real interest in sales. Why do you want to be in sales? What’s, you know, very much drawing you to it? Do they have that natural warm personality where they light up a room? You know, I want them to come to the office, meet me.

[00:45:41] Are they that person that can kind of talk to a wall there, you know, don’t take themselves too seriously. I do, of course, the role play. I want to hear how they are on the phone. I want them to utilize their, all the types of resources that they can to develop a script. I don’t really give them much information going into the role play.

[00:45:57] I just tell them who I am, who they’re calling and who they’re supposed to [00:46:00] be, and I want to see, you know, how they’ve developed it themselves. Like, organization, do they get nervous? Are they confident? How do they, yeah, did they prep? That’s one question I always ask them interview, how did you prepare for this call?

[00:46:11] And I want to know, you know, exactly.

[00:46:14] Chris Corcoran: It’s a memoryBlue original.

[00:46:16] Christina Ierullo: Yeah. It’s a great, no, it’s a great question. It is. And I want to know, “What did you do? What did you research on me? You know, what did you research on other people in the carbonate?” Yeah. And then I want to know what they know about Apty, you know, “Tell me, tell me, that’s another memoryBlue, tell me everything you know about memoryBlue and what we do here.”

That’s a question that I like to ask, you know, “And I want to know, if we were to offer you, what would make you want to decide between us and another company in Austin? Even if the salary was the same, what would speak to you? Are you somebody who’s just checking off interviews or are you actually really looking at these companies and deciding what’s best for you?” So, I think as long as you come in confident, you come in ready to build, like, you have that grit-building character G, you can tell. You can talk to them, you can ask them questions, you know, what their life has been like up until this moment, what they want to do to be [00:47:00] successful, to know if there’s somebody who’s just ready to come in, you know, put their head down and get to work until they’re good.

[00:47:05] Marc Gonyea: Question. You talked about this, you know, the number one request is variable to clients. Can I have a female on my campaign? How do we give more, what’s it like being a female on a campaign or running a campaign? We are in the room and then how do we get more of a men to the game? Because I always answered the question.

[00:47:24] I said, “I mean, sure. I’m working on it,” but it’s very, it’s hard. 

[00:47:28] Christina Ierullo: Yeah. So, when I walked in here first day of the job at memoryBlue, I was one of two women in the entire office, and I want to say there was maybe 40 or so people in the office. I mean, yeah, my heart sunk a little bit. I walk in and I’m like, “There’s no girls, I’m very much a female person.”

[00:47:43] You know, I’m a girl’s girl. I love women. So, I walk in and I see that and I’m like, “Okay, this is just how it’s going to be in life.” And, people have warned me up until this moment, most of my business calls here when talking with clients, it was me with a bunch of men, you know? It’s just very, you’re very aware that that’s the way that the business world is right now.

[00:47:59] It’s [00:48:00] heavily skewed towards the male perspective. The reason people are asking for women on their campaign is not only because women are killers, but also because we bring a different perspective to the table, and it’s nice to have that. I don’t want a carbon copy of everyone on my team. I want people from different backgrounds.

[00:48:13] I want female and males. Yeah, hiring for my job right now, I would say, and for every 20 applicants, I get one female applicants. I have 19 male applicants coming in one female applicant coming in. I have to go on the offense, to find my females, and I don’t look for people who are open to sales jobs, I just look for people who are open to work and I tell them why sales could be for them, and I tell them, you know, “Do you want to be somebody who runs, circle the business? Do you want to be somebody who runs your day? Do you want to be the CEO of your desk? Because that’s what sales is. Like, if you are independent and you want to be, like, this breakout person, then come here.

[00:48:47] Let me tell you about it.” And, that’s how I’ve been able to get a lot of female applicants. I also made a commitment to myself and my company that for every male I hire, I will hire a female co-part. [00:49:00] Yeah. So, I will never hire two males if I am not hiring two females along with it, and that’s something that I would like, you know, a lot of businesses go out there and pledge, like, they’re willing to say they want more women in their company, but are they willing to say “I won’t hire another person until we get a female there?”

[00:49:14] What would that mean to you recruiters? They would say, “Okay, well, I’m not going to get paid unless I find a female.” So, it’s all about driving behavior through whatever incentives that you guys have and promote. And, that can be for any company out there, like, “Go find a women for every male that you find, otherwise, I’m not going to write your bonus check. You’re not, it’s, we’re going to act like you didn’t even hire this person.”

And, that’s how you can start bringing in women because it’s going to change the behavior of the recruiters, and when women are more fulfilled within this business role, and we see them more represented, then we’re going to get more applicants because mothers, teachers, brothers, neighbors, brothers, neighbors, you know, every sisters, they’re going to be in the business world and it’s going to be more normal for them, like it was normal for me having my mom at the kitchen table closing deals like a HBIC. [00:50:00] 

[00:50:00] Chris Corcoran: Drop the HBIC.

[00:50:04] Marc Gonyea: You know, we’ve been working on it. I think. 

[00:50:09] Christina Ierullo: Yeah, I can already tell. 

[00:50:10] Marc Gonyea: It is. It’s a never-before-seen high right now. 

[00:50:14] We have a lot because I think once you get the street going, it’s easy to keep it. Well, easier. Yeah. Well, Christina, this is, like, way back when we had one office, we were probably, like, 15 or so. At one point, it was always a very small number of females

[00:50:29] but at one point, just because of the turnover within the business, it was, we were 15 or so, we had zero females and you know how hard it was to get that one female. And the reason, the main reason would be, would be if we had a female come onsite to interview, the SDRs acted like the buffoons. Like, “Guys, behave yourself. This is, this is a joke.” 

[00:50:54] But, then we would, fortunately, get one who loved it, but she wanted to be the queen bee. And, all the roost, and she did, and then we started getting more and more and more. And then, the more that you have success, the more.

[00:51:10] Kristen. Yeah. She’s, she’s, she’s, you know, she works on that and we all work on it. We want the different views and you also want to give people equal access to the opportunity, right? So, for some reason it’s better now, but sales was, it looked at as, like, the highest or most noble profession out there.

[00:51:28] Some people might be like, “I don’t want my daughter to grow up to be in sales,” but why not? Let’s talk about that. It’s more prevalent now than even when you get out of school.

[00:51:37] Chris Corcoran: I mean, my prediction is, if you just follow what’s happening in higher education, like, the females blown past the guys. Blown past the guys. The guys, the guys are busy, I don’t know, living in the basement, with the parents blanket. 

[00:51:49] Marc Gonyea: Putting on sports online, doing all that stuff. 

[00:51:52] Chris Corcoran: The women are just taking care of business. And so, that’s, that’s, that’s coming to over America. 

[00:51:57] Marc Gonyea: Yeah. 

[00:51:57] Christina Ierullo: We do mature faster than men, that’s just been, like, studied. 

[00:52:01] Marc Gonyea: I have three daughters. 

[00:52:02] Chris Corcoran: I’ve got a daughter and a son, live and breathe it every day. Yeah. 

[00:52:06] Christina Ierullo: So, I think with, like, the aspect of, like, maturing a little bit faster than them, like, when we come to work, we are ready to work. So, I think that, like, sure, there are still parents out there that are like, “My daughter doesn’t need to be in sales.” You also still see a lot of parents saying, “Oh, mary rich, honey,” you know?

[00:52:23] And like, things like that, where they don’t know that they can be their own rich, they’re just, like, waiting for Mr. Right. Like, be your own Mr. Right, and just go on here and kill it and then find whoever you want after that. So, I think there’s just a lot of that. It’s like, the way that we talk to women and the way we say everything, and it’s, it’s these little, you know, microaggressions that are here and there that people aren’t even aware of.

[00:52:42] It’s even, like, the aspect of, you know, right now my boyfriend and I have been dating for quite a while and everyone’s like, “Oh, when is he going to propose?” And, like, acting like he’s going to just, like, lose out on the world if that weren’t to happen, and it’s like, do you think, like, do you think that that’s a one-sided opinion or something like that?

[00:52:59] I’m not, like, I, I’m just waiting around for the day that I can, like, drop my last name? And, that’s like, that’s just like, that’s the way people, like, talk to women a lot of the times and nobody’s like, “Oh, this is going to be the little business woman of the world,” like, that’s not really what people are saying to women,

[00:53:14] so they don’t really know what they’re capable of unless they’ve seen it before. But once they are guided in that direction, with that emotional maturity and just that overall maturity that they have above men, they come in here and they realize, “I can do this. I can do this and I can crush it and I can be amazing.”

[00:53:31] Marc Gonyea: Yeah. Yeah. 

[00:53:32] One day we’ll have precaution in how we work with guys in sales, maybe.

[00:53:39] Chris Corcoran: How do we get more guys to be more ambitious? 

[00:53:41] Marc Gonyea: Speaking of your boyfriend, where did you meet your boyfriend?

[00:53:45] Christina Ierullo: Oh, I met my boyfriend, let’s see, he walked into this office and I looked up and I see him walking by and I, you know, it’s like, “That looks good, that looks good. Yeah.” Talk to us about it. That’s a great way to put it. So, I went back to my desk [00:54:00] and then Joey Sorenson was doing an interview with him in here and I was just promoted,

[00:54:05] like, maybe that day, it was my first day as Delivery Manager and he goes, “Why don’t you go in there and just, you know, give him your little spiel or whatever?” So, we have our little conversation. Then he comes to start a couple of weeks later, Joey was, his manager was out of town, he was like, “Why don’t you take him out to lunch?”

[00:54:19] So, we go get lunch and like, I’m not joking, we must’ve gotten lunch every single day, like, after that until, you know, whatnot. And then he’s at Couchbase sell, so he was SDR here, got hired out within, like, 90 days. Chris. Oh, yes. My boyfriend, Chris. The lovely, handsome Chris, if you’re listening. So, yeah, he got hired out within a quick three months, got promoted to an AE there within, like, a year or so after that. And then, they just went public, so that was really exciting for him.

[00:54:45] Marc Gonyea: I’ll tell you, now it’s your turn. I only bring this up because, like, Chris and I are flattered that you worked here. It left such a lasting impact, right? And, it tickles my heart to know that you’ve met somebody, you know, while you worked here too.

[00:54:59] So, we’re doing some things right, right? We’re always working to make it better. 

[00:55:03] Christina Ierullo: Building some good relationships. 

[00:55:03] Marc Gonyea: Building, we’re doing a lot of good things, get a lot of people going and for the rest of my career they’ll say that you and Chris, and a lot of those people. 

[00:55:10] Christina Ierullo: There’s lots that started relationships here. Nick Foley and Cath Meyer, they started here too. They were both Couchbase reps, now they’re happily living together. And, there was lots of flings that fizzled out along the way so. That’s fine. 

[00:55:26] That’s okay. You just, you know, you have a good time. But there’s also great long friendships. I mean, just a couple of weeks ago, we had our memoryBlue reunion at Easy Tiger. There was 12, 13 of us at that table, all memoryBlue at some point, Josh Harris was in town and I think he was doing the podcast.

[00:55:41] Great. Oh my God. Such a, yeah, it was just great. And, he had his girl, his dog. Oh my God, who was this disgusting dog with these stringy hair who I had to watch, it was that smell from the high heavens. When, the day he got back in town, the minute you land, I was like, “Take this dog,” I [00:56:00] thought it was a dog person, but, “Take this dog back.” I can’t remember its name though, but boy was it an interesting character.

[00:56:05] Perfect dog for him, though.

[00:56:07] Marc Gonyea: Tina, what advice would you have for yourself, like, the night before you worked at memoryBlue, to your younger-self? 

[00:56:15] Christina Ierullo: Yeah, I would have said to come here and probably learn a little bit more from those around me and, like, listen to those calls because I was on a campaign that was very specific to I’m calling into police departments.

[00:56:31] And, I’ll label it as an easier campaign just because they don’t get a lot of cold calls, so our quotas were way higher, but, you know, a lot of people were much more willing to talk to us. And, when I graduated from that role, I had to learn cold calling, like, all over again because what I was doing only really worked for when I was on, I wish I picked up more PPMs and, like, spent some more time calling on different agencies and, you know, listening to other people in here. I think I just had my blinders on ’cause I just wanted to focus on what my job description was. But, like, go above your job description, like, just go in and go about, if you have some extra time, if you have an hour left in your day, don’t sit on your phone, go talk to that kid in the corner you’ve never met before, and like, you know, see what’s up, what’s he dialing on, what works for him.

I think that would have, you know, really, like, taken me to the next level and I would’ve made more money too ’cause I would’ve been dialing on PPMs and getting some, you know, bonuses there, too. 

[00:57:21] Marc Gonyea: Yeah. Maybe we should put you on the show, it’s for the clients, and I give you a choice. You’re doing so well. It would have killed us.

[00:57:29] Chris Corcoran: It wasn’t that long before she got promoted. It goes by a lot faster. Think it will. 

[00:57:35] Christina Ierullo: It did go by fast. 

[00:57:37] Chris Corcoran: But, when you’re doing it, it’s going by slow. 

[00:57:39] Christina Ierullo: Yeah, you’re like, “When am I going to be done with this?” Yeah. Yeah. It’s hard. It’s hard. You get, like, getting hung up on, but, like, it’s, like, the depth that we read in the book.

[00:57:50] I mean, there’s only few people at the end of the finish line because everybody gives up. Don’t be one of the people give up along the way. Don’t be the person who says, “I’m going to do this half kick and give up.” Don’t be the person who says, “I’m going [00:58:00] to be a millionaire,” but then decides, you know, it’s too hard.

[00:58:02] Don’t be the person who says, “I want to be, you know, a great account executive,” and you know, stops out at poor dial.

[00:58:11] Chris Corcoran: That’s right. That’s hilarious. 

[00:58:14] Marc Gonyea: Well, I think that’s it. I mean, that’s great. I was rocking Christina and Tina, I only heard Tina, like, if you were here for, like, six months. People still calling you Tina? 

[00:58:21] Christina Ierullo: Oh, everybody in my life calls me Tina. It was started here. I think it was, yeah, it was George who was on Motorola, when, he called me Latina, and it was almost like a mocking thing because like, they would always tease me every day, “Oh, Latina has to be on the phones. Latina has to get her calls in,” and I’m like, “Yeah, it’s the job first of all.”

[00:58:45] Yeah. And then, it just caught on from there. Dot started calling it, you know, in our, in our end-of-day huddles. 

[00:58:51] Marc Gonyea: He said, “Tina,” I said, “Who’s Tina, we don’t have a Tina that works here?” Nobody started calling her Tina. I said, “Did anybody ask for her permission? We don’t have enough women that work here.

[00:58:58] We can’t start calling [00:59:00] them names and they don’t ask for.” 

[00:59:02] Christina Ierullo: Oh, I love it. Now, everybody in my life calls me Tina. It’s the craziest thing. I’d never been called Tina before. My parents were, like, “Who’s Tina?” And then, they start catching on, ’cause they hear Chris call me Tina and they want to be a part of the fun.

[00:59:16] Then they start calling me Tina and I’m like, “Oh my God, no.”

[00:59:20] Marc Gonyea: I started with Christina. I said, “Okay, now we can go a little more informal.”

[00:59:24] Chris Corcoran: It’s different.

[00:59:26] Marc Gonyea: I mean, I tell you, I’m so happy, though. So, I’m happy that everybody worked here, but it’s. 

[00:59:32] Christina Ierullo: Yeah, lots of great people. And for ev, I mean, everyone, people who left to go be killer salespeople, people who left to go into marketing, people who left to go into customer success, people left to go to recruiting, people left to go all over the world and they’re all, I mean, they’re all great people to keep in touch with. They’re all just loving, loving people. 

[00:59:50] Chris Corcoran: Definitely. Very good. This is so fantastic. 

[00:59:54] Christina Ierullo: Yeah, it was, it was great coming in here. I have to jump in into your new office, once again. 

[00:59:58] Chris Corcoran: Supposedly, like, December 1st. 

[01:00:00] Christina Ierullo: I’ll be there.

[01:00:01] Marc Gonyea: So, we would have a big thing.

[01:00:02] Chris Corcoran: Come by then for sure. But we’re going to try to organize some event. 

[01:00:07] Christina Ierullo: Yeah. That’s great for networking. 

[01:00:07] Chris Corcoran: Again, everybody. It’ll be awesome. 

[01:00:14] Marc Gonyea: It, it’d be nice ’cause everybody who worked in it played a part in it. This was the first office so people took a big chance on us, coming to work here. I’m not, you know, people, everyone has options. Yeah. Right? So, we do appreciate them and everyone can make a contribution.

[01:00:29] Christina Ierullo: Yeah, no, it’s a good choice, you know, a great place to learn everything. 

[01:00:33] Marc Gonyea: Very good. Well, thank you so much. 

[01:00:34] Christina Ierullo: Thank you guys.