Episode 72: Brandon Gip – Family Businesses Build You
Watching your parents sleep in a car and make unbelievable sacrifices to build a successful donut shop business leaves a powerful imprint on your professional DNA. Brandon Gip didn’t have to look far to find ideal role models for his future.
Now a successful Account Executive at Canary Technologies, Brandon brings a work ethic and a hate-to-lose mentality to everything he does in professional sales. Whether you’re selling donuts or closing deals in the tech space, you’re dealing with people. Brandon’s focus on active listening and prioritizing the human element of sales creates the edge he needs to accomplish his goals.
In the latest episode of the Tech Sales is for Hustlers – Silicon Valley Series, Brandon digs into the best way to tackle larger goals, compares and contrasts the SDR and AE roles, and highlights why patience can pay off when considering your next sales career move.
Guest-At-A-Glance
Name: Brandon Gip
What he does: Account Executive
Company: Canary Technologies
Noteworthy: Brandon’s family owns a donut shop, which is where he mastered the art of delivering a stellar customer experience and understood that every customer is different.
Where to find Brandon: LinkedIn
Key Insights
⚡ Every person you talk to is different. According to Brandon, every customer is different and has different goals. Therefore, salespeople and SDRs must adapt their approaches to a customer’s behavior and the conversation flow. “Every person you talk to is different, whether it’s their title, where they’re from, their gender, or how old they are.No one likes to be sold to, but people like to buy. So I would have a conversation and be able to pivot. Have a script and memorize it, but also be able to shift back and forth depending on how the conversation goes.”
⚡ You can’t close every person you call. Brandon believes that it’s impossible to close every person we talk to, no matter how good we are as salespeople. “You can’t close every person you call, you have to accept that. […] You need to have the personality to understand that it’s not always a sales call, but a conversation and you’re not selling the product.”
⚡ The biggest thing in sales is listening. The biggest thing in sales, according to Brandon, is active listening. “I think one of the biggest things is listening. And it’s hard to practice listening as an SDR because there’s the two-second rule that’s hard to apply. Everyone does it the first week and always forgets it because they want to fill in and talk. But listening to the prospect and what they say, how they say it, and instead of just hearing it, listening, responding, and pivoting are very important.”
Episode Highlights
Translating Work Ethic from Donut Shop to Tech Sales
“I knew I was going to be in business or sales. Ever since I was tall enough to reach the registers, I was talking to people, and I wasn’t talking to people of my age. I was talking to adults who would come in and bring their kids and buy donuts either for work or themselves or families at home, and [I was] building some sort of customer relationship. […] So, I was always speaking to the older crowd. I think that helped me mature a little bit.”
Canary Technologies: Mastering Tech Sales in the Hospitality Industry
“They [Canary] started off as a hotel technology where if a company wants to pay for somebody else’s room or their workers who have to stay at a hotel, hotels will email a PDF or send a fax of a paper where the company will write the credit card numbers and email, or send it back. So, Canary digitizes that to make sure it’s secure and runs through fraud detection because there’s a lot of fraud in the hospitality industry. Once the pandemic hit, there was a lot going on — less business travel, less corporate travel — and one of my customers said, ‘We send everybody this link where they check-in because we don’t want them to stop by the front desk.’ So, a light bulb went off, and we said, ‘Let’s do this.’ A month or two later — maybe even less — we had the first model of our contact list check-in. We had a pool of customers that used us for the first tool. […] Two years later, we have a contact list check-in where you can provide your credit card ID and registration form from your cell phone before you even get to the hotel, and you can text the hotel if you have any requests. You can buy things from the hotel on your cell phone, and then you can even let the hotel know. […] So, we’re utilizing technology to have less human interaction because of COVID.”
You’re Not Always Going to Be the Best
“Deals don’t always take one day or two days. Some deals take two or three months. Ask yourself what you need to do. If you need more demos and more meetings, you have to be able to communicate that to your SDR, your manager, and their marketing. So, identifying what the problem is, and then at some point, knowing that you’re not the best AE, but knowing that you can still get help from other people, is really important.”
Nobody is Going to Give You a Promotion Unless You Deserve It
“[People in tech sales move around] because of the growth opportunity that a lot of people promise. Everyone says, ‘Oh, you’ll be promoted within six months or a year.’ And some people do. A lot of people don’t. People want to find the place that’s going to guarantee that. And I think it goes both ways. A company should promise that if they can do it. But probably the reason you weren’t promoted in six months or a year is that you didn’t work your bu*t hard enough to get to that point. If they know you’re good enough, there’s no reason why they wouldn’t [promote you] unless there’s some internal issue.
But the biggest reason why I stayed is that I was not told that I would be promoted in X amount of months, but that if I’m able to achieve XYZ, I would be promoted. There was a path to get there. It wasn’t just, ‘You’re going to get it no matter what.’ They don’t tell everybody.”
Tips and Tricks for SDRs
“One thing to be a successful SDR is to understand that there’s a script to start with, but get away from that script as quickly as possible. And the way you talk, the way you cold call is going to be completely different from the person who’s sitting right next to you. It’s easy to hear everyone’s calls because you’re sitting behind and around them, and you want to take in their information and what they do, and you want to spit it out the same way they did. But they’re on a different client. They have a different pitch, they have a different everything, and you’re also a completely different person.
memoryBlue and any company you go to train SDRs, not robots. Just find your own way of doing it. And I think it’s okay for people to understand that your script will change as you become better. But let that script marinate. Get really good at it before you change it, and before you have to pivot to change anything.”
Transcript:
[00:00:21] Marc Gonyea: Brandon Gip, what’s up, man?
[00:01:11] Brandon Gip: What’s going on? Great to see you, it feels like a lifetime ago.
[00:01:17] Marc Gonyea: It does, doesn’t it? But it was very memorable, but in a good way. That’s what tech sales would do to you. Mr. Gip is, like, kinda, like, it’s all good, right? ‘Cause we have the outplacement model. He’s, like, one of the ones that got away. Tried to keep him there, and I think I would have thought the wrong way, but it’s all for the better, right?
[00:01:36] Brandon Gip: Everything happens for a reason. I live by that.
[00:01:38] Marc Gonyea: Exactly, right? Well, let’s get into it. So, you know how it is when you’re SDR at memoryBlue. We got SDRs at work here and they want to know, “How can I get to a closing?”
[00:01:47] Well, not all of them, at least half of them, 52% of them. How you took closing role? And you’re there and you kind of used us as a way to kind of get there, right? So, we’re gonna want to talk about that because they’re more interested in hearing about that from someone like you than from, like, old schoolers like Chris and myself or other alums.
[00:02:04] So, we’ll get into that. But, before we get into that, let’s let the folks kind of get to know you a little bit. So, like, break it, break down a little bit kind of who you are, where you’re from, where you grew up, a little background.
[00:02:15] Brandon Gip: Yeah. So, I was born in Long Beach, California. I moved up here when I was very young, maybe 2, 3, 4 years old.
[00:02:22] Biggest reason why I moved here was my parents actually opened up a donut shop when I was about one years old. So, I spent a lot of my childhood, a few years, living with my grandparents as my parents were sleeping in their van, driving an hour, trying find a place to crash while they’d open up the donut shop.
[00:02:37] So, once I was old enough, started school, I was able to move up here, played a lot of sports, like, with a lot of most sales, tech sales people do. What’s your favorite sport? Depends what time of life, but I’d say football. At one point track, at one point basketball, right now golf, you know, it depends whatever I’m good at at the time.
[00:02:55] Marc Gonyea: Who was better at golf, you or Anton?
[00:02:56] Brandon Gip: I might, I’m going to have to say me.
[00:02:58] Marc Gonyea: It’s on. Didn’t ask him. What were you like in high school? So, well, let’s talk about, you kind of went quick, casually parents open up a donut shop, sleeping in the van, where they’re, talk about that.
[00:03:13] Brandon Gip: Yeah. I mean, these are stories that slowly come out of their shell.
[00:03:15] It’s not something they tell me as I’m, like, six, seven years old and try to brag about it. It didn’t mean anything to me at the time until now, looking back at it. I’m telling them, like, I remember when we used to close at 4:00 PM, ’cause right now we close at two, they’re like, “Oh, we used to close, like, 9 or 10 o’clock and then open the shop at 4:00 AM.”
[00:03:30] I’m like, “Did you win?” She’s like, “Well, we used to live in Vallejo.” My mom said, well, they used to live in Vallejo and drive to San Francisco, about 50 minutes, without traffic, 45 minutes without traffic, and then they would open the shop at four in the morning, sometimes sleep in the car overnight instead of going back and forth, and then keep the shop open. Sometimes they would have to bake the donuts at night because our baker wouldn’t be able to work. So, just adapting to the lifestyle and it was something that they had to do because it was kind of a big risk. They came from LA, my grandpa helped them out.
[00:03:58] Brandon Gip: We knew one person that, or my dad’s friend, who had a donut shop. So, they just kind of want to follow the footsteps. The norm of Cambodians owning donut shops is pretty normal, like any other stereotypical Asian work-culture force. But, my auntie actually had a donut shop in San Francisco at the time, and my other auntie had a donut shop in Alameda, which is East Bay, and we, they actually all eventually lived in the same house for a few years at one point. So, three families, one house, three donut shops with kids, so there was about 11 of us sleeping in one house.
[00:04:29] Marc Gonyea: Where’s the house?
[00:04:30] Brandon Gip: In Westborough, which is right by San Francisco airport.
[00:04:33] Marc Gonyea: Okay. And you’re a sibling, right? What you got, got a brother?
[00:04:36] Brandon Gip: I got one brother, yeah, younger brother.
[00:04:38] Marc Gonyea: So, your parents kinda, like, so when did you kind of know your parents had, in my mind, bad asses?
Brandon Gip: To be honest, not maybe ’till I was, like, middle school, eighth grade, when I was deciding what high school to go to and there’s two high schools in my city and it was either South San Francisco high school or El Camino high school, and then, you have to get district transfers and do all this stuff, and I’ll say everything on there, but yeah, there’s a lot of strings that can be pulled out of private schools versus this school or going to this school of playing this board and who you want to go to and just knowing, like, all the people we knew, mayor, city council, board directors, and stuff like that. I was like, “Oh, wow, they’re actually good parents.
[00:05:14] Marc Gonyea: Yeah. And then you’ve, you said this earlier, the donut shop’s still, still a thing, right?
[00:05:20] Brandon Gip: Very much so.
[00:05:21] Marc Gonyea: You spend some time there?
[00:05:22] Brandon Gip: Every weekend I’m in town, I’m working there at least six days, six to seven hours on the weekends.
[00:05:28] One of those days, or sometimes both of those days would start at, I would have to be there by 3:45, I live about 30 minutes away, so I’m up at three o’clock at least once a week, twice a week sometimes. But yeah, it’s things that I’m not forced to do, like, to say, forced to do, but things like, I feel like I owe my parents for it.
[00:05:44] You know, it’s not like I get a paycheck for doing it. It’s for all the sports I got to play, it’s for all the college tuitions and, you know, rent-free and meals that were cooked. I think that’s just the way I was raised, and not saying that’s, like, the right way to be raised, but that’s just the way I was raised and I’m going to do it until the doors are closed, which doesn’t seem like anytime soon.
[00:06:03] Marc Gonyea: And they don’t close very often.
[00:06:04] Brandon Gip: So, I was just telling you, right? Like, ever since the doors opened back in ’97, it has never closed on any holiday. New Year’s, Thanksgiving, Christmas, it’s never closed. So, that actually pulls,
[00:06:16] Marc Gonyea: Fourth of July? 25 years in a row?
[00:06:17] Brandon Gip: Twenty five years in a row. I would spend most of my Christmases in Los Angeles with my family and not with my parents, or, we would have to switch off, like, this year my parents, my mom went to LA a week before Christmas to spend with her family. Me and my brother drove down for a week during Christmas and facetimed my parents to say Merry Christmas, right? Yeah. It’s a lot of sacrifices, a lot of family vacations we weren’t able to go on or go together on, but luckily we have other family members who know how to run a donut shop, they would help out or fly down, or that are retired, that can help us out now. But other than that, we only have two workers at our donut shop that aren’t my family. One person named Mona, she works Monday to Friday and our baker who is actually a really hard worker too. He works seven days a week and he’s, like, 62 years old. So, that is my, me and my brother and my mom.
[00:07:02] Marc Gonyea: They showed up for three days. For the listeners, what’s the name of the donut shop and where can they find it?
[00:07:07] Brandon Gip: It’s, a, Royal Pin Donuts in South San Francisco.
[00:07:10] Marc Gonyea: Royal Pin Donuts in South San Francisco.
[00:07:12] Brandon Gip: There’s a tractor too, which is the cool part. I know East Coast, you guys have Dunkin Donuts and drinks and stuff, but over here, it’s pretty rare.
[00:07:19] Marc Gonyea: No, I got to ask, do you like eating donuts?
[00:07:22] Brandon Gip: I do. Every shift selling it or making it I’m having at least two or three.
[00:07:28] Marc Gonyea: Okay. Love it. That’s great. But they’re closed for three days, right? So, the question is, when you close something that’s been open for 25 years, what do you do?
[00:07:38] Brandon Gip: We went to Las Vegas.
[00:07:42] Marc Gonyea: Yeah, that’s great. Doing it right. All right. Before we get a little bit, come back to you getting grown up a little bit, but you got to just share it with us. So, how does that work ethic translate into what you’re doing now as a tech sales professional? And, even when you started. Sorry.
[00:07:58] Brandon Gip: No, I think, whether I liked it or not, I kind of knew I was going to be in business or in sales, which is when I was applying to college,
[00:08:04] I put business management just to be the broadest of everything, and ever since I was tall enough to reach the registers, I was talking to people and I wasn’t talking to people my age. I was talking to adults who would come in and bring their kids and buy donuts for either their work or for themselves or families at home and just building some sort of customer relationship
[00:08:21] and people seen me grow up, and people say, “Wow, I remember when you were, like, five years old or four years old and look at you now.” So I was always speaking a little bit to the older crowd, I think that helped me mature it a little bit, right? Absolutely. And then, I actually never told you how I got hired at memoryBlue, it must be the first time you’re hearing it,
[00:08:37] but right when I graduated in May, one of my buddies from San Jose State, Colby, I think, and some other folks here, some other folks here actually mentioned, like, “Oh yeah, I work at a company called memoryBlue. We’re in San Jose, right down the street from you.” I’m like, “Sure. Why not work at a place where I know familiar faces?”
[00:08:55] I’ve had an internship at Aerotek and other companies before. Nerve-wracking going into a position not knowing anyone. So, I was like, “Sure, let’s do it.” So, I came in to get interviewed, Dan Yorkey interviewed me and he’s like, “So, like, what do you know about being an SDR?” I was like, “I don’t know anything about SDRs, I have no idea what an SDR is.” You didn’t learn that in college. I don’t know if they teach right now at college. The management, and, so yeah, I learned about other things. I didn’t know what an SDR was, so, once I found out, I was like, “Sure, like, I got to start somewhere.” I don’t know what else I would do. Do I want to be an entrepreneur like my parents? So, I want to, I’m not going to do accounting ’cause I’m terrible at numbers. I was like, “Oh, I’m going to start here.” And yeah, that’s my journey of how I got to memoryBlue.
[00:09:34] Marc Gonyea: What did you think you’re signing up for?
[00:09:36] Brandon Gip: I don’t know. I knew it was a little bit of cold-calling, but I didn’t really know, like, no one really knew what company you’re cold calling for, the tech industry,
[00:09:43] what about tech industries? The first company I worked for was dealing with multifactor authentication. I didn’t really know what that was at the time. Do you remember the show card?
[00:09:52] Marc Gonyea: Okay. Okay. Yeah.
[00:09:54] Brandon Gip: So, yeah, everything kind of built on and on and I would do it again, blindly, if I could.
[00:09:59] Marc Gonyea: What was it like then?
[00:10:00] So, you got going, how did you learn how to do it?
[00:10:03] Brandon Gip: This question I ask in my interviews when I interview other people. I live by this and I think about this every day, is, do you love to win or do you hate to lose? And it’s kind of, everyone has a nature of both, but for myself, I’m definitely hate-to-lose that person,
[00:10:17] and if I’m in a pack, I want to be the first one. I want to be number one. And Austin Kroll, which is a former memoryBlue member was with me here. So, it was just me and him just pushing, and works at Canary with me now, yeah. We would push each other, right? Like, we were on different clients and we were always trying to be better than one another and it made me better,
[00:10:35] and hopefully it made him better too. But, I also didn’t want to kind of categorize myself as one of the new hires, right? I, took somebody that started a month or two before me, and wanted to be better than them and be better than the other person, and eventually, be number one in the company. And I did that once.
[00:10:52] Marc Gonyea: You did. That’s huge. Whoa, yeah, and you went to Costa Rica.
[00:10:56] Brandon Gip: Costa Rica was a blast.
[00:10:59] Marc Gonyea: That was a blast, was the first one, our first TOPs trip. Let’s get back, right, so you started, who will you learn from in the office? Like, who was a big dog when you rolled in?
[00:11:07] Brandon Gip: Yeah. I feel like a lot of them were pretty senior vets. I know Omar and Colby took some time with me, Wen Rie was one of them. He was in the same fraternity as me, too.
[00:11:18] Marc Gonyea: Drop in, we had to tap back into that fraternity. Yeah. What fraternity is it?
[00:11:22] Brandon Gip: Sigma Nu, San Jose State, San Jose State.
[00:11:26] Marc Gonyea: You were an officer or anything in that thing?
[00:11:28] Brandon Gip: I was, like, a sports commissioner. That’s all I really wanted to do, but, yeah, there were other folks that are, Morgan Blehm, a big help here for me,
[00:11:37] and then, as we went along, there was people we started the trainee program or the trainer, mentor program, and that taught me a lot from learning from people who came from different industries. There was people like Nick Jones, he was a P.E. teacher for 6 years and came over here, and there was Kevin Tu, and all these people,
[00:11:55] yeah, and then you mentioned Christian Carrillo, like, even though I might’ve started after them, I still had a lot to learn from them. So, it’s a big collaboration, and, of course, Joe and Dan taking time and spending time off the books working with them, listening to calls, reviewing it, was really important to learning how to cold call,
[00:12:13] and I think it’s really important too ’cause, like, everyone can learn how to cold call, but learning how to cold call for your specific client, and, at the time, where I’m working at now, Canary, they didn’t have this. It was just the two co-founders. So, it wasn’t just cold calling, it wasn’t like some of the clients. Now they’re like, “Here’s a script, follow the script, we want you to do.”
[00:12:28] It’s like, “Hey, here’s what we think a script is like, can you kind of figure it out for us, and kind of work with us to help make the script? Yeah. So, I think that, that’s what made it a little bit more fun too and gave me a little more flexibility to think outside the box instead of just falling a piece of paper the whole time.
[00:12:42] Marc Gonyea: Yeah. Yeah. So, let me back up real quick. So, you’re saying Jose State, what’d you make, you mentioned business management, what did you think you’re going to do when you came out? Did you have any idea? You kind of said it, but, like, did you know, like, did you know about tech sales as an industry? So, I’m always fascinated with people who kind of grew up around here, or is it not, ’cause that wasn’t, like, your window either, right?
[00:13:00] Brandon Gip: Yeah. It wasn’t, and I knew what tech sales was. I just didn’t know how to get there. And it’s not, I mean, maybe four years ago there wasn’t a lot of research of, like, yeah, this is like a YouTube video of how to start here and get there,
[00:13:13] and I always had the opportunity to be, like, entrepreneur, don’t have to own my own business, but seeing how hard my parents work, I saw, like, how many hours it takes to get there, I was like, I’m going to just help them out on that and kind of do my own thing. Yeah. I always thought I might’ve been doing recruiting at one point because of the internship.
[00:13:30] Marc Gonyea: I saw it, like, so I remember you did Aerotek kind of early,
[00:13:34] and then once you think of that, was it just not your cup of tea or was it your, you hit it kind of early in college, right?
[00:13:41] Brandon Gip: I liked it. I think, maybe if I did it in a different industry. So, at Aerotek, my team specifically recruited for, like, warehouse workers and HVAC workers, drivers, et cetera, like, industrial, like, industrial,
[00:13:52] yeah, exactly. And then, there were other parts where they’re, like, hiring for engineers and salespeople and more of the tech industry, which I didn’t really get my toes in. So, maybe that’s why I wasn’t too familiar with it. So, I knew I gave recruiting a chance and I had a chance to go back there. They wanted me to come back, Wesley and all the guys I used to know, of course,
[00:14:08] and then, I was like, “You know, I tried this, why don’t I try something else? And then after six months or so, I can kind of decide, like, I had six months there, I had six months here, which one do I like better?”
[00:14:17] Marc Gonyea: And yeah, you also wait a table, so.
[00:14:19] Brandon Gip: I did, I was a server at Black Angus too.
[00:14:21] Marc Gonyea: And what did you learn from that?
[00:14:23] Brandon Gip: Just customer, customer experience.
[00:14:25] It was nothing new, but it was more so just to help pay the bills and buy alcohol in college.
[00:14:33] Marc Gonyea: All right, Sigma Nu, there you go. So, all right. So, you’ve got into memoryBlue, you’re doing your thing. What was your, what did you get good at? Like, what was your superpower?
[00:14:43] What was your, what we call it, Chris, your signature move, your dream shake, your dream shake, ’cause you would never do the assurance job before you ever interned, but that was a little while ago. It was different. Yeah. So, you look, if, you got, your work with all these people, you got some mixed, some older guys from your fraternity, not that much older.
[00:14:59] And you’re like, “Okay, I want to be a top performer.” Like, what was it that you did well?
[00:15:04] Brandon Gip: I think I was able to pivot pretty well. A lot of people think that because there’s a script and you make a script, you’ve got to stick by it the whole time. But, one thing I learned early on is, every person you talk to is different,
[00:15:15] whether it’s their title, where they’re from, their gender, how old they are, and everyone, no one likes to be sold to, but people like to buy. So, I would just have a conversation that would be able to pivot and kind of have a script, memorize it, but also be able to kind of shift back and forth depending on how the conversation goes,
[00:15:31] and then one thing I also learned too early on was, like, you can’t close every person you call, you just got to accept that. As a person who hates to lose it was hard for me to accept that, right? So, exactly, and there were some people I would hang on to, like, people who always want to reschedule, reschedule, reschedule, and just having the personality type to, to understand, like, it’s not always a sales call, it’s just a conversation, and you’re not selling the product.
[00:15:53] Oh, say that again. Say that last part again.
[00:15:57] Just having a conversation and not selling the product, but to sell the meeting. I tell any SDR I talk to, that’s my biggest piece of advice, is, don’t try to get too deep into the product knowledge, about how the tool works and the functions of it, sell the meeting and get them interested enough to close the meeting.
[00:16:12] Because one day you will be selling the product, but that’s when they willingly give you 30 minutes or an hour of their day to learn about it, but on SDR calls and cold calls. Sell the meeting.
[00:16:22] Marc Gonyea: So, being able to pivot. That has to be experience gained from the donut shop, from serving tables because every customer is different and you gotta be able to kind of read the room.
[00:16:33] So, you’re essentially reading the conversation and pivoting. Wow. Let’s go back into the hate-to-loose thing. Why do you hate to loose so much?
[00:16:41] I think there’s this, I call it mam, everyone calls it a “Mamba mentality”, right? And young cats? West Coast.
[00:16:51] Chris Corcoran: No, that’s just that they all like Colby.
[00:16:54] Brandon Gip: What would you call it if they’re…
[00:16:56] Chris Corcoran: He and I are from a different generation. We like it. We’re Jordan. We like it.
[00:17:07] Brandon Gip: But, in my mind, in my mind, you know, as, as a sales person, as an athlete, as a competitor, you do everything you can, you practice, practice, practice so that when you play a game, you’re there to win. And that, some might say, that’s the reason why you love to win, but in my opinion, if you practice hard enough and if you do, if you work hard enough and you end up losing,
[00:17:27] it just hurts that much more, you know, you’re expected to win in every situation, if you prepare and you think you’d be that good, but if you’re short of the goal, if you’re not first, you’re last, that’s my mentality. If you’re second, you’re the first loser, so.
[00:17:41] Marc Gonyea: All right. Okay. So you were here. Who else was good in the office besides yourself?
[00:17:47] Well, who’s your competition, at least in California, if you can remember?
[00:17:50] Brandon Gip: Yeah, I mean, off the top of my head, I don’t know because I talked to these guys or because they were role models at the time, but Omar and Colby.
[00:17:58] Marc Gonyea: Yeah, those guys had a down, both that covered about hour rights, golden generation, Sigma Nus, we let them know.
[00:18:05] Brandon Gip: They weren’t Sigma Nus. They were in ATO. At one point they were a rival fraternities, but I was very close to joining them at one point, when I was rushing.
[00:18:14] Marc Gonyea: Okay. All right. So, those guys problem. That then, there’s, okay. All right. So, you’re here doing your thing, and were you on Canary full-time?
[00:18:24] Brandon Gip: So, I was actually on Canary halftime. So, the other one was show card. And then, that was going on for, like, four or five months, and then I was maybe on Canary full-time maybe for, like, only a month or two.
[00:18:34] Marc Gonyea: Yeah. When you were here, were you attracted to any certain type of technology or, you know, was it?
[00:18:41] Brandon Gip: I think I was attracted to Canary a little bit more.
[00:18:44] It was kind of a blessing that Austin did so well that they wanted to hire another half-time, but running through the numbers and going through the daily, what do you call it again? DHR. DHR. Yeah, yeah, Daily header report. I always found that my numbers are, I mean, Austin’s numbers were a little bit higher and partially I like to think is because we were doing well.
[00:19:02] I also was really interested in the hospitality-technology side, because you’re not calling Directors of ITs for a security network where they don’t have their number saved, you’re calling it to hotels where they have to answer your call because they get calls from people you don’t know. So, the conversations you’re getting, the meetings that you’re trying to set are more likely because they have to answer the phone.
[00:19:25] So, I think that’s, comparing it to, you know, some other folks who had companies that were doing, you know, cameras for certain parts of the body, I don’t know if you remember some of those. It was much harder, like AI, robotics, construction companies, I didn’t see them being able to talk to people as much,
[00:19:40] so I really enjoyed having conversations everyday. I can guarantee, if I made 20 phone calls or 10 phone calls, I will talk to somebody, compared to others who go a hundred dials a day and not talk to anybody, except for leaving a voicemail. So, this one actually attracted me the most.
[00:19:55] Marc Gonyea: When’d you figured out that you’re good?
[00:19:56] ‘Cause you get good at it pretty quick. I think you hit, hit his number, like, every eight in the nine months or eight of eight months. Something like that, there you go, I don’t even remember. So, did you realize all that, “I kind of found a career for myself. It’s, like, tech sales is what I want to do,” or, like, “I’m here. This is perfect,” or did you have other doubts about it at any point or you more think about something else?
[00:20:18] Brandon Gip: No. Once I felt comfortable doing what I was doing, and once I had that reassurance from Dan and Joe other folks and seeing myself try to slowly climb on the leaderboard, I knew this was something that I could be successful in.
[00:20:30] I just kinda wanted to spend a little bit more time seeing it. It’s something that I love doing, because being successful at one thing and loving what you’re doing can always go opposite directions sometimes, but so far, loving it.
[00:20:40] Marc Gonyea: Excellent. You still talk to those guys you worked with where you were here?
[00:20:44] Brandon Gip: Yeah. I golf with Colby once in a while. Kristian Carrillo, I had dinner with for the New Year’s. Austin, I still work with.
[00:20:53] Marc Gonyea: Anton, you didn’t even know each other worked there.
[00:20:55] Brandon Gip: Yeah. And then, a year or two after he left, actually, it’s crazy.
[00:20:59] Marc Gonyea: So, our peeps at Canary recognize greatness of you and Austin. They’re like, “Hey, come on board,” right? Is that kind of how they go down?
[00:21:08] Brandon Gip: Yeah. I want to say it was maybe January, closer to February. We went through the numbers and they were hiring more people, said they want us full-time as the first ever full-time SDRs at Canary. So yeah, and then, that time, you wanna tell your side of the story?
[00:21:22] Marc Gonyea: We were slow-moving. I mean, you were crushing it. Well, listen, like, the business models orchestrated to have people go work for the client, if that’s what they want to do. And I don’t know if Omar and Colby left before you. Yeah, we were like, “Man, all these guys are really great. We got to keep them with the company longer.”
[00:21:43] And I just, we didn’t move as quickly as we wanted. So, we try to get you to stick around as a DM, but it’s quite clear that you pick the right calling and you’re gonna be a great manager when and if you really want to full-time manage people. So, yeah. So, we were like, “Hey, let’s just try and get, get them to stay.
[00:21:56] And, we made an offer, right? It’s all good, right? You then go and work for those guys, which is amazing because you went in there and what, you were SDR for a little while longer and in much respect to Canary for recognized, for Harman, for recognizing the talent that you and Austin got, ’cause you guys, how many years have you been there? 2019 is when I got there full-time. So, about three, almost four years now.
[00:22:19] Marc Gonyea: That’s not as common. We don’t see that a lot. So, that means that you picked the right client. You guys go work for.
[00:22:25] Chris Corcoran: Brandon, for the listeners, when most listeners are hearing Canary, they think of a perfectly, what, what does the technology do?
[00:22:30] Like, what are you selling? Whom do you sell to?
[00:22:31] Brandon Gip: Yeah. So, just to kind of pivot two different routes of Canary, we started off our business model or they started off the business model as a hotel technology where, typically, if a company wants to pay for somebody else’s room or their workers who have to stay at a hotel,
[00:22:45] hotels will actually email a PDF or send a fax of a paper where the company will then write in credit card numbers and email or send it back. So, Canary digitizes that to make sure it’s secure, runs through fraud detection, because there’s a lot of fraud in the hospitality industry. And then, once the pandemic hit, kind of there’s a lot going on, less business travel, less corporate travel,
[00:23:05] so we had to pivot, and one of my customers I was just talking to, they were like, “Oh yeah, we send everybody this link where they check in, because we don’t want them to stop by the front desk.” So, a light bulb went off and we’re like, “Let’s make contactless check-in. Let’s do this, ’cause we thought about in the past, but there was no reason to, so, at that time, engineering team full sprint ahead a month or two, maybe even less,
[00:23:26] later we had, like, the first model of our contactless check-in. We had a pool of customers that use us for the first tool. So, we said, “Hey, please try this out. Let us know how you like it.” And fast forward two years later, we have contactless check-in where you can provide your credit card, ID, registration form from your cell phone before you even get to the hotel,
[00:23:46] and you can text the hotel if you have any requests, you can buy things on your cell phone from the hotel, and then you can even let the hotel know. I plan on checking out at, like, 9:00 AM where I wanna pay $20 to check out late at two o’clock without having to stop by the front desk. We’re just utilizing technology to have a little bit less of the human interaction, at least giving people that option to that rather not the human interaction, because COVID, right?
[00:24:08] Chris Corcoran: And so, you worked directly for the co-founders? Talk about that.
[00:24:13] Brandon Gip: Yeah. So, even at memoryBlue, Harman and SJ, it was just themselves and shortly, a few months before bringing on memoryBlue, we were knocking on doors and walking into hotels with forms trying to talk to people,
[00:24:25] and then they brought memoryBlue on. My colleague, Austin, their colleague was doing so well, we, they brought me on as well. So, it was a team of four plus Stan, five, so let’s say we’re trying to backside every call, kind of learn the industry. We weren’t preferred, we weren’t partners with any of the major brands at this point,
[00:24:41] like, every call we had, no one really knew who we were. So, trying to figure that out and then getting hired full-time at working with Harman and a DJ, who’s the VP of Sales, in office, collaborating with them instead of just one call a week. It really changed everything and there wasn’t a Salesforce for Canary at that time.
We were just working off Excel Sheets and Google Docs. Once we got there full-time is when we started to kind of figure out the flow of Salesforce and having a dialer didn’t have to list-build anymore, which was phenomenal. So, getting that real-time feedback and learning from someone like that, having a one-on-one with them one or two times a week versus now where the company has grown six times, having one-on-ones and more, like, once a month really made me cherish those moments,
[00:25:25] and going to lunches, walking around the block, just getting fresh air versus now we’re all working from home and even still hard to find time to talk to somebody. But it was great learning. You have an interview, you, you interview with people, right, for a job, and they interview everybody to this day, even with 60 something plus people at the company, they even interview SDRs.
[00:25:45] Every SDR that comes in, they’re being interviewed by co-founders and you have 30 minutes to kind of get to know the co-founder, hone into their beliefs and what they want to do with you and where they want to take you, and I had a good year, year and a half to do that, and just learning, backing them up of their morals, their beliefs, and where they want to take the company and how they really treat people.
[00:26:03] So, I learned a lot about them before I was able to be…
[00:26:07] Chris Corcoran: That’s great. And so, who do you sell to, are you selling to like individual hotels or are you going after Marriott, Hilton? It’s huge for all their properties.
[00:26:18] Brandon Gip: Yeah, learned a lot about the hotel industry and there’s independent properties where they have no franchise tech to them, which I do sell to,
[00:27:22] and then we also do have, like, the Hilton’s, Marriott’s, Holiday Inns and Holiday Inns, where some of them are brand-associated, where they’re owned by their brand and some are owned by other companies too. So, there’s so many different levels to it, but, you know, I’m on the mid-market level where I’m not selling to an entire brand, but I am selling to hotels within the brand that we already have relationships with.
[00:27:44] Chris Corcoran: Sure, and who do you sell to?
[00:27:46] Brandon Gip: It depends, right? If there’s, like, a management company that owns, let’s say, 10, 20 hotels it can be from Director of Operations, CTOs, CFOs, ’cause, you know, there’s a credit card information involved,
[00:27:56] so, accounting, controllers, and then if it’s just a regular small little La Quinta, I can just sell it to the general manager and sometimes the owner too, because a lot of this is a family-owned businesses too.
[00:28:08] Marc Gonyea: Wow. So, you went there as an SDR and then how long were you an SDR with them before you started moving into?
[00:28:14] Brandon Gip: So, I was an SDR here at memoryBlue with Canary for about six months,
[00:28:18] and then I was with them again, full-time Canary SDR for another six months. I got transitioned into an Inside Sales role, so I was cold-calling, setting meetings for myself and then, do the demos myself and closing myself.
[00:28:31] Marc Gonyea: Okay. How much does this stuff cost? Like, if I’m, finding a hotel, and you call me up and I’m like, “How much do I…?” What’s the average sale price at the balk part?
[00:28:42] Brandon Gip: Yeah. I mean, to this day, in 2022 now, it could be anywhere between $99 a month to 4 or $500 a month. It depends on the size of the property, which tools, we have so many now, it’s really helped me in terms of driving revenue and my profile, because we offer all these different products compared to the one or two that we had before the pandemic.
[00:29:02] Marc Gonyea: Wow. And so, you, did you have a territory at all? Was it green field?
[00:29:06] Brandon Gip: It was this green, there was just not a lot of us and there’s millions and millions of hotels. It’s hard to kind of divide who gets what territory. So, at one point it was a little, I would have 10 demos a day back to back, to back, to back.
[00:29:18] Not all of them show up, right? There’s a lot of no-shows, but wherever we can, however we can, we were just doing it.
[00:29:23] Chris Corcoran: Wow. Wow. So, do you remember your first deal?
[00:29:27] Brandon Gip: I do.
[00:29:27] Chris Corcoran: We got to hear the story.
[00:29:29] Brandon Gip: Yeah. I have two first deals. Okay. So, what, my first deal, technically, the first one, technically, my cousin and his family own a hotel in Las Vegas. So, I don’t I count that as my first, but my actual first deal, I was still an SDR. I was at a conference called HI-TECH.
[00:29:46] Marc Gonyea: Here or there?
[00:29:47] Brandon Gip: At Canary. I was at a conference in hi-tech in Minneapolis and we were SDRs, so we’re just pitching the product. I was talking to the Director of Operations for, I think it’s called the Setai, I think 4 or 500-room property in Florida and talking to him, trying to pitch him a demo at the next meeting and I was able to just try to show a demo myself ’cause I’ve seen it, heard at enough,
[00:30:05] so I did it at the conference, and then, I’m on vacation, an email from him and said, “Hey, send me the contract.” So, I ran back to my hotel, put the contract together, asked my as DJ, like, “How do I put this together?” So, he sent me a template, I filled in all the stuff, sent it back and it came in. Wow. I wasn’t even supposed to sell at that point,
[00:30:23] right, like, I didn’t have a quote or anything for it. So, it was just fun to see a deal come in when it wasn’t supposed to.
[00:30:28] Marc Gonyea: What did DJ say?
[00:30:31] Brandon Gip: I don’t remember, actually, what’s next. Yeah. Yeah. And then, two months later, that’s when I, that’s when I started getting trained to close.
[00:30:39] Marc Gonyea: What were the skills? So, we’ll take a pause fast, so if you’re talking to people who are memoryBlue SDRs right now, what are some of the skills that they need to kind of work on as an SDR that will help them in their closing work?
[00:30:53] Brandon Gip: There’s so many, but I think
[00:30:56] Marc Gonyea: I was like, “I’m ready to do it now.” “Yeah, dude, you know them for three months.
[00:31:00] You’re not ready yet.” “I know everything, I’m in six months. I know everything I need to know.”
[00:31:03] Brandon Gip: I thought I was ready too, right, like, cold-calling for six months and going in there full-time and like, “I’m ready to go. Like, I’ve heard this demo millions of times. I’m ready to do it.” And once I actually did my first, i did like, “Okay.
[00:31:13] Show me how ready you are.” So I did one and we do, like, a rating, like, one-to-five scale or one-to-ten scale and I, I basically failed really bad, and I was like, “Oh, you’re just saying that ’cause you don’t want to see me succeed,” right? So, she went through all the bullet points of selling and I was like, “Wow, there’s a lot into selling that I had no idea.
[00:31:30] The psychology behind of selling is amazing.” But, as a SDR looking to become an AE, I think one of the biggest things is listening, right? And it’s hard to practice listening as an SDR because you’re constantly trying to find time to fill in those operative grabs, right? There’s that two-second rule
[00:31:51] that’s really hard to apply. Everyone does it the first week and always forgets it because they want to fill in and talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, but just listening to the prospect and what they say, how they say it, and instead of just hearing it, but really listening and responding and pivoting, right, it’s really important
[00:32:06] so that way you can’t get shut down too quickly, right? You know what words that they want to hear and you know how to say it, but I think active listening is really important.
[00:32:16] Marc Gonyea: That’s excellent. Anything else?
[00:32:17] Brandon Gip: I think that’s all I can think of right now.
[00:32:19] Marc Gonyea: And when you transitioned to this closing role with new muscles you had to build, to work on?
[00:32:24] Brandon Gip: I think it was a
[00:32:26] Marc Gonyea: Set couple of goals, keep going.
[00:32:27] Brandon Gip: Yeah. There was a lot that changed throughout your day-to-day basis. You’re used to calling and following a script the entire time. Now you’re kind of doing the same thing, but the script is much longer and there’s much more different directions that the call can go to,
[00:32:40] especially since you’re going through the entire product and not selling meeting. So, also trying to balance the lifestyle of cold-calling and closing the deals was something that I had to adjust to, as well.
[00:32:49] Marc Gonyea: Lifestyle. The lifestyle of right into the leads and then closing the work.
[00:32:54] Brandon Gip: Exactly. I think an SDR, an AE role is very similar to where you have a script. You learn it, you get really good at it, you can answer questions, but just on a bigger scale and a much longer scale. All this separate admin work of having all your meetings in, your opportunities, creating contracts, going through legal,
[00:33:10] but now you just have the person’s time of day. So, not a lot of changes. I think just maturing yourself, having that conversation with yourself knowing that it’s not a dial every day, you don’t have a hundred demos a day, you don’t make a hundred cold calls. You have two, sometimes three or more calls a day where you have that much time to do the demo,
[00:33:29] and it’s that one time you get. Sometimes you don’t get a second try.
[00:33:32] Marc Gonyea: Nope. Nope. And what about the highs and lows? How do you manage those? What advice do you have?
[00:33:39] Brandon Gip: Yeah, the highs are great. I think, AE or for an SDR becoming AE, even for an SDR, ride the highs and don’t get complacent. A lot of companies that have uncapped commissions and it’s really easy where you’re at 120, 130% to say,
[00:33:52] “All right, I’m good. There’s a week left. I’m just gonna relax this week and not do anything,” but, really, that’s where the money’s made, that last week because there’s accelerators and things like that.
[00:34:00] Marc Gonyea: What about the lows?
[00:34:01] Brandon Gip: The lows. There’s been lows, let me tell you that. The lows you just got to understand, and I think, for anything you just have to identify, why was this month a low?
[00:34:10] Being quickly able to identify. And, I remember, one of the ones that I did, really hard on myself. I was asking myself why, and as an AE, pipeline is really, really important. Same with list building, right? And, like, you have reschedules for the next month that you can drop call and book meetings with, but as an AE, really, your quota isn’t attained on that month,
[00:34:29] your quota is attainted the month before. Having all the pipeline in there ready to close, because deals don’t always take one day, two days. Some deals take two, three months and asking yourself what you need to do, if you need more demos, more meetings, you have to be able to communicate that to your SDR, to your manager, how to get their marketing.
[00:34:45] So, identifying the problem, what it is, and then, at some points, our demos are constantly changing because we’re coming out with different products. So, knowing that you’re not the best AE, you might be the first AE there, one of the, one of the first ones still around, but knowing that you can still get help from other people is really important,
[00:35:03] as good as I think I am, or as I want to be, just taking a step back realizing like, “Wow, I’m not, always going to be the best here.” For example, we have a new product called “Upsells” that we’ve started a month, two, three months ago, and another guy ended up selling more than I did. I was like,
[00:35:17] “Okay Send me your calls. I would love to hear your calls,” and he did this morning, literally sent me some calls and I haven’t had time to listen to them today, but identifying that it’s not always you, too, you can always improve, but taking orders from other people that could be, started six months ago, it’s fine too.
[00:35:35] Chris Corcoran: So, we talked about your big, your first deal. We also talked about how you hate losing. What’s, is there a deal that you lost that just haunts you?
[00:35:47] Brandon Gip: Yeah, there’s one that comes to mind.
[00:35:51] Chris Corcoran: If people hate to lose, there’ll be one that haunts them.
[00:35:55] Brandon Gip: And there’s probably one other one or two other ones that I can probably, if I take time, but off the bat, you want me to go into details. So, it was, I think October. Yeah, I think it was October.
[00:36:09] It was an inbound client that came in for one out of five tools that we have. So I, pitched them that one, they really liked it, getting into approval process. “Oh, can you please demo the owner and GM?” So I was like, “Sure, of course, he’s the decision maker. I’ll do that.”
[00:36:21] And then the owner, the GM’s on the call and he’s like, “Yeah, this is great. I love this tool. But, what do these other tools do?” And ended up selling him on all five. I’m like, “I love it. This is great.” And then he noticed, there’s, like, a little hidden Easter egg in our demo account, it’s called the Statler Hotel, which people who go to Cornell for school of business or for hospitality know, ’cause Harman went there, so he kind of put that in there. So, we identified that, he’s like, the GM was like, “Oh, did somebody go to Cornell that works there?” They’re like, “Yeah, actually, one of our co-founders did and we ended up kind of talking back and forth, so I messaged Harman as I’m on the call, “Hey, I need you to hop on and, like, give this guy a free month or just tell him this, this is coming from you,
[00:36:57] not from me because it would mean so much more.” So, Harman gets on, and he’s like, “Yeah, this taco truck and this place, this bar is now this,” and just talking, he’s like, “Yeah, man. John, if you could assign by the end of the month, I want to give, like, extended, Cornell discount to you to give you the first month,
[00:37:10] and we’ll waive the set of fees for you, just help Brandon get to, get pass his end-of-the-month goal.” So, he’s like, “You got it. Send me the agreement.” And then, a week goes by, end of the month, nothing. I’m like, dude, what’s going on, and now, at this point, there’s, like, four people involved and he’s a decision maker and,
[00:37:26] and another week goes by, nothing. I’m kind of wondering like, “Hey, did this guy ghost me? Is he all kind of just talk and just all ayho about Cornell?” So, then I, yeah, and I’m sending emails, like, the other people trying to get in, calling them and reaching out to them, and finally someone’s like, “We ended up using somebody else’s,” first product that they were sold, “We ended up using somebody else’s.”
[00:37:47] I was like, “Oh, interesting. That’s fine. That’s, one of our cheaper ones. How about the other ones? I don’t want the big money,” right? So, and he said, “It’s too expensive. Not right now.” And then, I’m going back to myself saying like, “What could I have done?” Like, I don’t know if it was a me-thing, I don’t know if it’s a him-thing or maybe I just set my standards too high thinking that the deal was going to close because he was a Cornell graduate, but
[00:38:09] I haven’t closed-lost him yet. I still got time.
[00:38:16] Marc Gonyea: Did you say that you missed it out, like, if you had, if you had not brought up that Cornell thing, which really asked questions that might’ve revealed things that would have not?
[00:38:25] Brandon Gip: Are you saying, like, if I could go back what I’d do?
[00:38:27] Marc Gonyea: Well, yeah, I’m saying, do you think, had you not gone down the path of, like, the Cornell road, would it have been possible, maybe you would have found out the things you normally would find out? Because sometimes stuff like that comes up, but I wonder, like, what do you regret about it? Or, just, the fact that it got away or do you really think you did something?
[00:38:44] Brandon Gip: I think so. If I can go back and change one thing, and this could be even a few deals, because we don’t want all of them, the fact that they were 100%, and the whole entire team was sold on one product, start off with that one product, built that, put that product and Canaries name into the hotel, into their system, so they see it every day, they trust it, they know it works really well, and then slowly expand on each tool after that. Land and expand..
[00:39:06] Yeah. it’s something that I’m, I’m adjusting to because we had one part and then we have five more. So, just gotta be able to kind of catch the date before you catch the big shark.
[00:39:16] Marc Gonyea: Yeah. Wow. Good. So, you got all these buddies in the game and you’ve been at Canary for awhile. What’s kept you there in the sense that, let me back up, why do you think people move around so much?
[00:39:31] Brandon Gip: In this industry?
[00:39:32] Marc Gonyea: Yeah, especially out here. Why haven’t you?
[00:39:35] Brandon Gip: I think it was the growth opportunity that a lot of people promise. Everyone says, “Oh, you’ll be promoted within six months or a year,” and some people do, lot of people don’t and people want to find that place that’s going to guarantee that. And, I think it goes both ways. Like, one, a company shouldn’t promised that if they can do it, but, two, the, probably the reason why you weren’t promoted in six months or years, because you didn’t work your butt hard enough to get to that point. If they know you’re good enough, there’s no reason why they wouldn’t, unless there’s some internal issue,
[00:40:04] but the biggest reason why I think I stayed is, is because I was told not that I would be promoted within X amount of months, I was told, if I’m able to achieve XYZ, I would be promoted, right? Like, there was a path to how to get there. It wasn’t just, ” You’re going to get it no matter what,” they don’t tell everybody that. And then, continuously, having one-on-ones with your managers, whether it’s at memoryBlue or at the company you’re at is, constantly talking about where you want to get to and what you want to do,
[00:40:31] because, you know, at this point, DJ, for example, even said, ” I know you wanted to be an SDR manager at one point, and now that you know how to sell, is that something that you might want to do in the future, is to manage a team of AEs? Or, do you want to do enterprise sales?” And we just have these conversations, right?
[00:40:46] Like, it’s important to, whether it’s purposeful or not, it keeps me on my toes thinking about my day to day, ” Hmm, what makes me happy?” And, at that point, I think that’s why I was very close to staying here as a DM, just ’cause I told Dan and I talked to Dan and Joe so many times, like, I love coaching,
[00:41:02] I love helping them, helping roll out and helping all the people that were after me and, like, spending that time to see people succeed, it was really fun, it was really fun, but now, in a closing role, I’m like, “Man, this is so much fun. I’m gonna close, $2 million next year, I’m gonna watch a team close half a million dollars because I helped them get to that point, you know? So, yeah, that’s, the biggest reason why I’m staying is because there’s opportunity. There’s real opportunity. There’s not just an opportunity that’s on a piece of paper.
[00:41:29] Marc Gonyea: Yeah. It just seems, especially here, it’s hard just to keep your eye on the prize because companies raise money and they’ll come running to you with a higher base or promises of gold, gold and riches, but a lot of people aren’t able to ignore it.
[00:41:44] Brandon Gip: Yeah. And fulfill it too.
[00:41:46] Marc Gonyea: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, I look, and I see on LinkedIn, people would bounce around, it’s no fault of their own sometimes, but you’ve been able to kind of ignore those things, which is good. Same with Anton. Stay with.
[00:41:57] Brandon Gip: Hard to ignore, but.
[00:41:59] Marc Gonyea: It is hard to ignore. So, what advice would you have for yourself, like, the night before you started at memoryBlue?
[00:42:05] Brandon Gip: Wow. I remember that night. I couldn’t sleep. I was so excited. I was like, had my clothes laid out, which I haven’t done since that first day. I think, just go into it with an open mind.
[00:42:15] Don’t be afraid. Don’t be intimidated. Go with the open book. Just be a sponge. I think that’s where it, just, any company, but specifically memoryBlue. This was, technically memoryBlue was the first company I had, like, a really start date with, like, a hire date, ’cause I have, I’ve only been here and Canary, but just be a sponge, and take in all the information,
[00:42:31] and then your first few weeks in, you know, you’re training and learning from other people, they tell you, “Do this, don’t do this,” and then your manager is like, “Do this, don’t do this.” There’s not much of what not to do, it’s what to do. Take the good from everybody and then ignore the bad. It’s hard to acknowledge what’s good and bad because you’re learning so, so new, but just take everything with a grain of salt.
[00:42:51] Marc Gonyea: And when people are looking, so, when you’re an SDR, so, the way memoryBlue works now is, I mean, same thing. You get hired by your client. You can stick around and go through a closing role, you go to delivery, you can go work on an academy team,
[00:43:04] ’cause we fly everybody now to Virginia and they can do training for three days or they can go work on an entire business, but then also we have a more refined, we had it when you were here, but it’s more of a mature now, rising stars. So, we outplaced them in California since 12 months. We outplaced you.
[00:43:21] If you’re an SDR and you’re a good SDR, and for whatever reason haven’t been hired by your client before, whatever it is, you don’t want to stick around, what should they be looking for in their next gig, if, assuming they want to get to a closing role? Yeah, it was the most important, like, the two or three most important things.
[00:43:36] Brandon Gip: For it to go from an SDR into AE role?
[00:43:38] Marc Gonyea: So I’m, I’m, you know, I’m Brandon Gip. I have, I’m out interviewing, I’m interviewing five to nine different places. Everyone sounds kind of good. Let’s say half of them sound really good. Like, what should they be looking at? What should be important to them to try and get?
[00:43:52] Brandon Gip: I think, the biggest thing when interviewing at multiple companies and trying to figure out the direction to be going to is who your direct boss or manager would be. I think it’s important to not just get along with them, but also kind of look at their work history. Like, you should also look at someone’s LinkedIn and their resume before you get interviewed by them, because you’re going to be learning from them. And my boss, DJ, he’s young and I’ve learned so much from him.
[00:44:17] I think he’s the reason why I’m able to hit all my numbers and get to where I am at this age because him and I have a very, an adaptive lifestyle. I think that goes two ways too. If you don’t find somebody that, if out of, let’s say, five people you’re interviewing, you don’t like any of the managers, maybe it’s a you-thing.
[00:44:31] Maybe you need to loosen up and kind of just be a sponge and be open and be the person that’s easy to talk to, give and receive feedback the same way. But, I think your direct manager will and can play a huge part in your success.
[00:44:45] Marc Gonyea: And that trumps most things in your mind. That’s interesting case to ask people.
[00:44:50] Brandon Gip: The money will come. The money will come. Money will always come.
[00:44:53] Marc Gonyea: Yeah. Yeah. Okay, and what does the future kind of, so you talk about it, where do you think you may want to go, like, five years from now and what you could be doing?
[00:45:00] Brandon Gip: Five years from now? think I do want to be, yeah, I want to be running my own sales team. Yeah. I want to be able to kind of spread my knowledge and
[00:45:09] be able to tap into different industries, too. As much as I love Canary, I don’t think I’m gonna be there for entire lifetime, that’d be great, but I don’t want to kind of be stuck in this one place where I only know how to do hotel tech sales. I mean, if, if it makes me good money, it keeps me throughout my life,
[00:45:24] sure, sure, but I also do want to be able to master different crafts in different industries. But, yeah, maybe a startup and building a sales team from scratch. That’d be fun.
[00:45:33] Marc Gonyea: What do you do to stay sharp?
[00:45:34] Brandon Gip: Hmm. I don’t know.
[00:45:36] Marc Gonyea: It’s just doing your gig and you, like, you read stuff, you listen to stuff, or you’re too busy to closing work?
[00:45:42] Brandon Gip: I’m not a reader. I actually, actually, I want to be. A lot of people talk about books and things they read. I did read Sandler’s Training, which is a great book to read.
[00:45:50] Marc Gonyea: Which one?
[00:45:50] Brandon Gip: No, I think it was, like, the basic Sandler’s training, the bicycle one.
[00:45:55] Marc Gonyea: A lot of the memoryBlue principles are based off of.
[00:46:00] Brandon Gip: I don’t listen to enough podcasts. I did at one point, I honestly don’t know. I think just paying attention to people who succeed.
[00:46:06] Chris Corcoran: Okay. Yeah. That’s what it sounds like. You asked that guy for his calls. You’re going break it down and that’s what you do to stay sharp.
[00:46:13] Marc Gonyea: Yeah, that’s a great answer. It’s funny. Oftentimes people are looking for answers for the questions in, like, far-off places, when the questions are really right in front of them.
[00:46:22] I don’t know if any of this in the podcast to go get the calls from the guy who just fucking.
[00:46:28] Brandon Gip: You just got to suck it up. You got to admit that you’re not always going to be the best.
[00:46:31] Sometimes you will be because the numbers show, but if you can’t kind of suck up your pride and say, “Hey, I would love to listen to your call because I think you’re doing great.”
[00:46:38] Marc Gonyea: I’m coming for you. Yes. Brandon had to practice that in the mirror.
[00:46:48] It’s interesting because sometimes it’s easier for people to go listen to something or rather than just suck it up and do it, right, which is, we’ve had people who worked here, that they’ve read a thousand books, but they can’t, like, apply. Can you just do your job? Right? Por favor? It’s interesting.
[00:47:08] So, what else, man? What else? What else? Give us some more tips and tricks. Here’s the full-blown hustler.
[00:47:13] Brandon Gip: I think, one thing to be successful SDR is to understand that there’s a script to start with, but get away from that script as much, as quickly as possible and the way you talk, the way you cold-call is going to be completely different from the person who’s sitting right next to you.
[00:47:27] It’s easy to hear everyone’s calls ’cause you’re in cubicle and you’re sitting behind and around somebody 360, and to take in their information here, what they do and want to spit it out the same way they did, but they’re on a different client, they have a different pitch, they have a different everything, and you’re also a completely different person.
[00:47:43] We’re here, memoryBlue and any company you go to is here to train SDRs, not robots. If they wanted to play a machine to say the exact words and they could, but just find your own way of doing it. And, I think it’s okay for people to understand that your script will change as you become better,
[00:48:00] but let that script marinate and get really good at it before you change it, before you have to pivot to change anything. Because some people are, like, give him, like, a day or two, or a week or two saying they don’t see any success in it, but then sometimes by week three or four is really when you get there.
[00:48:13] So, really give it time to marinate and get to that point before you call it quits and try something new.
[00:48:19] Marc Gonyea: How do we get more people like Brandon Gip into tech sales?
[00:48:22] Brandon Gip: Go to Black Angus and see who’s serving that. Or Sigma Nu, I don’t know. I think there’s a lot of people out there, they just haven’t, they don’t know enough about tech sales. And, if I knew about tech sales, maybe I wouldn’t have be here. I have no idea, right? If somebody here is cold-calling a 100 or 50 to a 100 dials a day, they’re like, “Oh, we don’t want to be that annoying sales person that gets hung up on all the time.”
[00:48:45] But, I think, trying to pitch a bit better or different image of what an SDR is to get people to be here is really important. And also, just doing podcasts like this, right? Like, having people who are interested in being an SDR learn about where it can take you, where you want to be, or you’re curious about, because this is truly a stepping stone that people need to take advantage of.
[00:49:06] Marc Gonyea: That, I appreciate you saying that.
[00:49:08] Brandon Gip: I don’t think you guys have been at career fairs, have you? At least not when I was here.
[00:49:12] Marc Gonyea: No.
[00:49:13] Chris Corcoran: Me too. That’s all cheating.
[00:49:16] Brandon Gip: The power of referrals is amazing.
[00:49:18] Marc Gonyea: Yeah, for sure. Especially that from an industry, right? Right? Yeah. We’d love to get, at the San Jose State that, most of the folks who worked here have been strong.
[00:49:27] I mean, not even, not even state colleges. I think, community college, city colleges are a great place for people who are risk-takers. You’re willing to take that leap of faith into themselves and do something like that.
[00:49:38] Marc Gonyea: We take chances on folks that software companies typically want no matter the size, ’cause they’re really scared, that’s why Canary worked with us in the beginning, right? Like, they kind of didn’t know what they’re doing and sometimes they’re not going to be able to hire somebody right out of San Jose State and put them on the phones. Maybe now, not when you were there, but we just got to figure out the way to tap into it.
[00:49:56] Plus, it’s good to get people who can hustle and then you get some diversity in the sales game.
[00:50:00] Brandon Gip: I mean, the reason why I came here was because of Omar, Colby, and those guys I am just cool with, and then, they’re the reason why I came here, and then Christian Carrillo is one of the reasons, I think, why he came here.
[00:50:10] And then I referred Luis Martinez, who’s actually in the office now, three years later, let’s do it. So, just because of hiring Colby, Wen Rie, you ended up getting, like, a little chain network flow.
[00:50:22] Marc Gonyea: If you guys have hated it here and not seeing any value you wouldn’t have recommended everyone to come, right?
[00:50:27] Brandon Gip: I think, the power referrals is, have referral sprint. One hour a day, for one day, for that week, whoever gets the most referrals or people who take a call with the recruiter gets a bonus.
[00:50:39] Marc Gonyea: Sometimes you don’t even listen to podcasts and read books. This guy’s full of ideas. What else, man? It’s quite valuable. Yeah. Well, you hit the nail on the head on everything.
[00:50:47] Chris Corcoran: Yeah.
[00:50:48] Brandon Gip: What else? I mean, gimme some things to talk about.
[00:50:51] Marc Gonyea: I mean, I think people want to know how you got to where you got and explained it, and I think your superpowers, you’ve just, you stuck with it and just losing wasn’t really ever going to be an option for you. Like, I always knew you were going to be successful, whether you left or whether you stayed, but he was going to make it work, one way or another.
[00:51:09] Brandon Gip: I think, one other piece of advice I usually tell folks who, like, ask me, like, “Oh, why do you think you got to where you age at an age or so quickly?” I think it’s setting goals. That, this is something I do well in my work life, not enough in my personal life, but setting goals, whether it’s, like, a yearly goal, monthly goal, a daily goal, and it all starts with your daily goal. Whether it’s making that 75 dials a day, right? Because, if you makes 75 dials a day, you’ll be able to book three or five meetings a week. If you can book five meetings a week, you’ll be able to occur 10 meetings a month, right? If you create 10 meetings a month, you’re hitting quota and making money.
[00:51:45] If you hit quota 12 months, you get hired out. If you get hired out, you do the same process over and over, then you become. It all starts at some place and it’s gotta be on a daily goal.
[00:51:55] Marc Gonyea: Where did you learn that?
[00:51:56] Brandon Gip: Trial and error.
[00:51:57] Marc Gonyea: Trial and error? Daily, week, monthly? Yeah, that’s good. More people need to think that way.
[00:52:02] Chris Corcoran: Well, you did, how you spend your days is how you spend your life, right? So, you gotta focus on the day. The urgency of now.
[00:52:09] Brandon Gip: Sometimes it works backwards. If your goal is to get a house by the time you’re 25, 30, what do you have to do? You have to make this amount, right? You have to do this every month, you have to do this every day. It goes back and forth.
[00:52:20] Marc Gonyea: Well, I would encourage anyone listening to hit this guy up on LinkedIn, right? Right. If you look in, tap into somebody’s power, you got some good game. Thank you, thank you for joining us. Definitely.
[00:52:31] Chris Corcoran: Brandon, this is lots of fun.
[00:52:34] Brandon Gip: Very fun.
[00:52:35] Marc Gonyea: We’re looking forward to tracking you rise. Let us know if we get to do anything for you.
[00:52:40] Brandon Gip: Likewise. I mean, I’m happy to come back and if anyone wants to add me on LinkedIn or come to the donut shop, Royal Pin Donuts.
[00:52:46] Chris Corcoran: Royal Pin Donuts, South San Francisco.
[00:52:48] Brandon Gip: Yes.
[00:52:50] Chris Corcoran: Very good. That’s it. Thanks Brandon.
[00:52:52] Brandon Gip: All right. Thank you.