Episode 77: Andy Gager – Organize, Process, and Plan
Think big picture and never underestimate the basics. Andy Gager says the most successful reps he’s seen always prioritize cold-calling outreach.
Now a Sr. Commercial Account Manager at Ivanti, Andy recounts strategies he adopted throughout his career maximize his time and drive results. When things don’t go according to plan, Andy notes the importance of leaning on knowledgeable and trustworthy leadership that returns the loyalty they receive while developing your career.
In this episode of Tech Sales is for Hustlers, Andy discusses how to take a proactive approach to your daily goals and career development, why investments in relationships are the best kind you can make, and why you should prioritize learning at every stage of your career.
Guest-At-A-Glance
Name: Andy Gager
What he does: Andy is a Sr. Commercial Account Manager at Ivanti.
Company: Ivanti
Noteworthy: Andy got his first summer job when he was 16 and, from that moment on, he knew that his work would be a significant part of his life. Although he considered becoming a lawyer, life led him to sales.
Where to find Andy: LinkedIn
Key Insights
⚡ Cold calling is not dead. As the industry evolves, many wonder whether cold calling in sales is not as effective as it used to be. However, as Andy says, cold calling is here to stay. ”Cold calling or cold outreach is not dead. I never stopped doing it. It will make you very successful if you continue to do it.”
⚡ Don’t hesitate to ask questions. Whether you are an early stage SDR or want to advance and become an AE one day, do yourself a favor and learn from your colleagues. Talk to experienced ones and watch how they communicate with clients. ”If you’re an SDR and you want to become an AE, the best way to learn how to be an AE is to listen to what the AEs are doing and don’t be afraid to ask them questions.”
⚡ Success comes with organization. Sales, in general, is a pretty exciting occupation. But, without proper planning, it can be pretty stressful and overwhelming. That’s why time management and prioritization are key to becoming a successful salesperson. ”You have to prioritize. If you’re closing 80 transactions, you can’t focus on the $20 deal when you have a $20,000 deal sitting there, too. So you have to learn how to prioritize your actions throughout the day.”
Episode Highlights
At memoryBlue: A Team in Which Everyone Learns from Each Other
”I tried my best to learn from everybody. Everybody has a different style and a different cadence. They asked different questions, and I tried to adopt from other people in the room what would work for my cadence.
And I don’t think there was anybody that I didn’t try to spend some time with to pick their brain or even listen on a call just to pick up what they were doing. So all of my coworkers were good when I was at memoryBlue.”
An Advocate of an Account-Based Approach
I wasn’t saying anything off-script; I wasn’t doing anything magical. My secret sauce or what set me apart and made me successful was that I learned how to take an account or take a set of accounts and focus specifically on those and figure out a way to get in.
And if, for whatever reason, that’s not an account that we’re going to be able to do business with, make sure that we understand why, that we’re logging the reason, and that we understand what is going to be the best time for us to reattach this.”
Time Management Is Critical When You Are an AE
”One of the things that I was told before getting this role was that the minute you get your accounts, you are going to be 10 feet underwater. You need to figure out a way to swim back to the surface, so you don’t feel like you’re drowning.
It was a trial by fire like, ‘Get in there, figure out what works for you, talk to other people and see what that does. But, at the end of the day, you’re going to have to figure out a way to manage your accounts and your opportunities, so you are actively working deals and meeting your number.”’
Transcript:
[00:00:22] Chris Corcoran: Andy Gager
[00:00:46] live and
[00:00:46] direct.
[00:00:47] Andy Gager: And you guys?
[00:00:49] Chris Corcoran: Doing great, Andy. How about yourself?
[00:00:51] Andy Gager: I am doing fantastic. Excited to be here talking with you guys. It’s been a while since we last caught up so I’m looking forward to spend some time talking about the past, the present and a little bit of the future.
[00:01:04] Marc Gonyea: I’ll
[00:01:04] tell
[00:01:04] you one thing before we get into it. One of the best calls I’ve ever gotten from people in business, and I, I mean this is, when someone I used to work with a long time ago who became a client and referred us work and the first people, hadn’t heard from him in a little while,
[00:01:20] his name is Jeremy Reesie. He called me and he told me, “This guy, Andy Gager, this guy’s awesome. He’s good,” and didn’t you win some, an award when you were, guys, were working together?
[00:01:29] Andy Gager: Yeah, yeah. Reesie. He was for time my vice president of the commercial sales and that was the year that I won Commercial Salesman of the Year which was a new, it was a new award as far as I’m concerned, or as far as I know, right, which was exciting. I did, I think I ended at, like, 125% of my annual quota
[00:01:54] and I think the executives and CEO were like, ” I think that warrants, think that warrants a medal and we can put in a new category of a Commercial Salesman of the Year,” and that was I think what he was referring to.
[00:02:06] Marc Gonyea: So, he called me to
[00:02:07] tell me you won that award. Yeah, first of all, I wasn’t surprised, but second of all, I was so happy for you ’cause I remember when you got started. Being an SDR is not easy and more importantly, like, when Chris and I started the business and when we pivoted the model to have people kind of convert and leave, this is what we wanted to happen,
[00:02:25] people who started at the company. I mean, we had a small piece to do with it, right, but, like, people who we can associate with who worked here, who are going on to companies like Mobile Iron, a public-traded company at the time and independently owned, whatever, and the guy won
[00:02:42] Commercial Rep of the Year.
[00:02:43] So awesome.
[00:02:44] Andy Gager: Yeah, I was pretty proud of that. That’s one of the, you know, I’m not one to get hung up on the awards and accolades. I like to do my job. I like to do my job well, but that one was one that indulged in a little bit. I was very, very happy, very humbled
[00:02:59] and that gets you that much ramped up for the next year and hit it again the next year, wasn’t at 120% but I did get clubbed in extra. The only downside of it was, the two times that I won president’s club were during the era of COVID, so I’ve qualified twice now for president’s club but I’ve never been to the beach, an exotic location
[00:03:22] which is kind of a bummer, but it’s only more motivation to keep at it,
[00:03:25] and once we get back out into the world, my goal is to be right there.
[00:03:29] Marc Gonyea: All right. Well, I want to get
[00:03:30] going, I want to lead off of that ’cause that was a great, very cool experience for me personally. Let’s keep going back. We need the people who listen the, get to know you a little bit, right? And even the people who know you, who maybe worked with you, who might listen to this thing to catch up what’s going on with Andy.
[00:03:45] Let’s start off with, tell us a bit about yourself, where you grew up, what you were like as a kid, that sort of thing, family.
[00:03:50] Andy Gager: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So, I grew up in Cupertino, California, right in the heart of the Silicon Valley, headquarters of Apple, Apple’s infinite loop, headquarters. Was walking distance from where I grew up. You know, as a kid, and I had a lot of energy, I played sports, you know, I was raised in a household where trying new things and getting involved in what is interesting was a big part of how I was raised,
[00:04:15] so I learned music very from a very young age, went through some of the best schools, right? I was very, very fortunate to grow up in the Silicon Valley in Cupertino where there’s really strong schools and went to Arizona State for college
[00:04:30] and
[00:04:31] had a great…
[00:04:32] Marc Gonyea: What kind
[00:04:32] of kid were you growing up? What’d you do, like, in high school? Did you do sports, what sports did you do?
[00:04:38] Andy Gager: Would say that probably what sets me apart from most high schoolers is, I got a job at 16 and almost, it was the summer of my sophomore year and my mom gave me a choice, she was like, “You can go to summer school, you can find some sort of other extracurricular curricular activity or you can get a job but you’re not sitting around,
[00:05:00] you’re not sitting around and hanging out all summer, you’re going to be productive.” So that was the options and I was fortunate enough to have an opportunity where I knew a manager at Starbucks that was around the corner. So at age 16 I was behind the bar and I was making lattes, doing transactions
[00:05:17] and that stands out to me as something where when I look back on what kind of kid and what kind of young man I was, is, I found the value of work at a very young age. I liked having money in my pocket, right, I like being, that sense of independence and Starbucks is a really great place, I think, to have a first job ’cause you learn customer service is the most important part of what they try and do at Starbucks.
[00:05:45] You see a lot of interesting different people, and I stuck with that through high school, took it to college, took a break in freshman year, but I worked for Starbucks for, I think, about six years coming in.
[00:05:57] Chris Corcoran: Hey Andy, so, the Starbucks to Arizona State connection, was that something that was, did you take advantage of that benefit from Starbucks?
[00:06:06] Andy Gager: It’s funny that you asked that. That benefit was put into place the year I graduated, so I miss that
[00:06:13] cut-off, and when I heard about it, right, you can imagine my reaction was like, “Oh my goodness, that would have been fantastic, only four years ago,” but now I miss that Arizona’s, Arizona State Starbucks Union that they put together,
[00:06:30] but was proud to see it.
[00:06:32] Chris Corcoran: So, you’ve got somewhat of a timing problem, it
[00:06:33] sounds like. This Arizona State Starbucks thing and then, and then these two clubs during COVID,
[00:06:40] wow.
[00:06:41] Andy Gager: Come on, man.
[00:06:41] I tell you what, man, one thing I’m not is overly lucky, and so, yeah, timing doesn’t always work out in my favor but
[00:06:49] eventually it will.
[00:06:50] Do the best with what you’re given,
[00:06:52] but eventually it will. That’s what I keep telling myself, right, eventually it will.
[00:06:56] Marc Gonyea: You know
[00:06:57] what? There’s
[00:06:57] a lot to be said for that, because I see that with my oldest, she got her first job, she was 15 and I can see, like, the maturity in the mental, in her mind cognitively, how she thinks about earning her own money and having money and actually being, she’s will, will, very aware of it,
[00:07:13] and she has learned that from playing sports, she’s living that all from having a job.
[00:07:16] Andy Gager: Yeah, exactly, and I played sports, I mean, my freshman year I was in baseball, I was playing football, I wasn’t the biggest, most athletic kid and I enjoyed sports and my friends play sports, but, like you said, I wanted to have that independence, that freedom, that money in my pocket
[00:07:31] and I really, really enjoyed it. I really enjoyed my time working there and really glad that that was the path that I took was, working path, and I worked hard, I worked, I was doing, like, 30 hours a week in high school.
[00:07:45] Chris Corcoran: Wow. Wow. So, Andy, so you’re going to high school, you’re working at Starbucks, you ultimately decide to go to college to Arizona State. If we would’ve talked to you the Starbucks when you were working back when you were in high school and we would’ve asked you, “Hey, Andy, what do you want to do when you’re done with high school and done with college?” What would we have heard from you back then?
[00:08:02] Andy Gager: You would have heard the same thing that you would have asked me if I was probably eight years old, which is, “I wanted to be a lawyer.” Wanted to study law, I’ve always been fascinated with law, that was the goal. My major at Arizona State was business. At Arizona State you had to have a concentration.
[00:08:20] My concentration was in legal studies. I took a number of pre-law classes, poli sci minor and that was the focus for the majority of college to win when I got to some of those higher-level law classes where I think for me what happened was via lore of what the career was,
[00:08:42] was different from what the reality of the career was, right? I have thought of myself as doing fantastic, standing up in a courtroom, mahogany, like, what you see out of the movies, right, I could see myself as a litigator, right, that’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to be in front of a jury, pitching a case, knowing the law
[00:09:02] and what I quickly found was a lot of being a lawyer is doing a lot of paperwork. The litigation part is a very small amount. The rest is a lot of reading, a lot of paperwork and more school, which at the time when I was at the end of college, another three years wasn’t really in the cards for me.
[00:09:21] I wanted to jump straight into a career when I got my undergraduate degree.
[00:09:25] Chris Corcoran: So something just hit me like a bolt of lightening, Andy, and it’s hilarious, at least I
[00:09:29] think, is that the legal profession and being a lawyer is, like, romanticized on TV, kids growing up, they all want to be lawyers and at the same time sales is almost vilified and looked down upon, but yet being a lawyer is not as great as it sounds,
[00:09:48] but being in sales is better than it sounds.
[00:09:50] Andy Gager: Opposite.
[00:09:51] Chris Corcoran: Yeah. It’s weird.
[00:09:52] Andy Gager: It’s exactly right. That’s exactly right, right? I mean, you know, I remember the first time that I put the pieces of the puzzle together and this is how I landed, I think, with sales was, when I had finally come to the conclusion that legal career was not in the cards at least for me now, I’ve never taken it off the table,
[00:10:14] it’s still an aspiration of mine to go to law school and pass a bar exam at some point in my life, but when you grow up thinking that you’re going to go in a certain career or do a certain job and all of a sudden you realize that that’s not what you want to do,
[00:10:31] it’s a very altering situation, right? You kind of look at yourself and you say, ” Okay, so now what?” Right? And what I asked myself is, “Okay, so what am I good at? Well, what are the things that I’m good at?” I think I’m pretty good at customer service. I enjoy customer service. I enjoy the act of working with people, helping with people.
[00:10:51] I’m not afraid of public speaking which I know that that’s not common for a lot of people. I want to work in business and I want something that’s fast-pace, right, I’m a fast-paced person. I have a lot of energy and I looked at that and I researched it and career that just kept coming back to me was sales,
[00:11:09] right, and I did an internship with Bridgestone Firestone, the tire manufacturing company. It was a leadership internship where it was a great opportunity that I was able to be fortunate enough to participate in. We were put into certain firestone locations, right,
[00:11:26] and so in Arizona, I was put in the location that was doing, we were 13 out of all of the US locations in terms of gross profit, so we were very busy, right? We were very busy and part of this internship was, there’s 10% that kind of make it to the end where you can have job opportunities and that sort of thing,
[00:11:51] right? So that was the goal. It was, I think, a 10-week internship. We worked in the store. We had to do a marketing campaign. We had to learn P&L, P&L work, inventory, right? It was a very intensive learning experience, but a big part of it was also sales, right? They looked at how many tires you were selling,
[00:12:10] how you can build a certain work order to have more money and bring more money into the shop and I was taught by a lot of really, really good people, right? I mean, one of the top salesman in all of the company and in the retail locations works at the shop that I worked with and he gave me a lot of really, really good advice,
[00:12:29] and he was one of my kind of early mentors on how you sell, why you sell and just the first time, I’ll never forget this, the first time I saw him close a really big tire sale, he was just slapping his hands, running around the shop and I could just tell that he was just electrified by this,
[00:12:48] and I was like, “Man, I need some of that. I want some of that. I want to experience what that feeling is like.” And to make a long story short, I made it to that 10% and made it through the internship, stayed on with the shop until I was done with college
[00:13:02] ’cause I really enjoyed, it was such an interesting experience working in an auto shop, right, you learn things that most people don’t get to learn, like, how to take care of a car or how to change oil, how to check your battery, and that was a great learning experience both from a career perspective as well as a personal perspective,
[00:13:20] right, and I very much enjoyed that.
[00:13:22] Marc Gonyea: So you wanted to capture the electricity of the salesman selling a set of tires, so what’d you think you’re going to do then? You didn’t stay on after you got out of school, what was next? Where’d
[00:13:35] you want to go?
[00:13:36] Andy Gager: Yeah. So, that’s a good question. So, Arizona State had a really, really strong alumni organization to where we had basically a online career fair where you could log in all across the country, places, people would post jobs on this site, and I found one for Intuit, the platform Intuit, TurboTax, Rocket Mortgage and I applied for this job.
[00:14:03] It was based out of San Francisco. I went out there before I graduated to interview, high-rise building, downtown San Francisco, beautiful open space office, right, it was really, really appealing. I interviewed and I actually got the role prior to graduating, right, so through that college platform that helped to connect employers with new graduates I went straight into that job pretty much right after graduating.
[00:14:31] I mean, I think I started in the summer right after I, I had moved back from college.
[00:14:36] Chris Corcoran: Yeah.
[00:14:37] Andy Gager: We called it an LDR, a lead development representative, but it was essentially an SDR role, and that was it. I was in.
[00:14:45] Marc Gonyea: And what was that gig like? ‘Cause then you did that for a little bit but then you ended up with us, but I don’t remember how it happened.
[00:14:50] Andy Gager: Yeah. So, to describe what the culture was like, the culture was very interesting, right? It was, to give kind of a funny, funny comparison. If you’ve ever seen the movie Wolf of Wall Street, when they go on a IPO day, when they’re doing, I think it was the, the Madden shoes or something where everybody is standing, everybody’s on the phone, there’s music playing,
[00:15:13] right, keep the R-rated stuff out of it, right, that wasn’t there, but it was just this environment like I’ve never seen before, right? I was like, “How do you guys talk on the phone when you have the speaker blaring music all day?” And they’re like, “Oh no, we have noise-canceling headphones.
[00:15:27] They can’t hear us. It’s to get us pumped up.” Standing, right, we were always, always standing, right? The only time you sat down was pretty much lunch or if you were doing admin work and that was a high-paced, fast-paced environment and I enjoyed that for a time, right, I really dug into it. They had good sales training.
[00:15:45] I learned a lot, but after about, I think it was nine months, it wasn’t just short of a year. We went through, we went through an acquisition, so Intuit had sold, I’ll leave the company’s name out of it, but I worked for a company that was sold by Intuit and bought by a different one,
[00:16:01] and so I experienced for the first time in my career, this would happen again later, but I experienced the first time of what in acquisition kind of
[00:16:09] went
[00:16:09] through, and that was a lot, right, that was a lot to handle but it was an interesting learning experience. But, really where, there, I think there was
[00:16:16] two things primarily that got me looking at memoryBlue, right? So, if you’re familiar with the Bay area, San Francisco is about an hour drive away from San Jose, right, and I lived 10 minutes away from the memoryBlue office. I was commuting by train every single day. I would take the train. I would take the train to San Francisco,
[00:16:36] I would walk a mile uphill to get to work, and I would do that day after day, after day, and it was a lot of a commute, right, and it started to take a toll. That was the convenience part of it, but the bigger, the bigger part of it was, I didn’t see what I was looking for even that early in a career which was a lot of people wanting upward mobility,
[00:16:59] right? The only real step up for us in that position was, you could be an AE, but other than that I saw a lot of AEs for years and years and years and I kept asking, ” What are the next levels?” Right? I was always, always thinking, “Okay, so if you’re a successful LDR, you’d be a successful AE,”
[00:17:18] and the responses I got were just people that were, didn’t seem interested in having that conversation or even kind of thinking about it. That didn’t mesh well with me, right, and it got to a point where I just, I just said, “You know what, I’m going to put the feelers out there, right, and see what other options are,”
[00:17:38] right? And so, I came down to the memoryBlue office, the one before, the ones that you guys are in there now, it was this tiny little, I dunno if you guys remember this, but it was this tiny little office, I think it had, like, one window, there was, like, 8 or 10 people in there, super small, but when I interviewed with my, what would be my manager, Jeanne Ball, her energy, loved memoryBlue idea,
[00:18:00] right? And she sold me, she was a great interviewer and I really enjoyed what she was saying. It seemed like you said earlier in the call, right? The ideal model of memoryBlue at that time was, “We’re going to bring you in. We’re going to get you trained to where you’re a solid SDR.
[00:18:17] You’re going to be matched up with a client which you’re going to be doing that sales development work, and the goal is to do so well and where your client hires you to be a full-time employee.” And I was like, “That sounds fantastic. Right? That sounds fantastic.” And so, on my very first day of memoryBlue, Jeanne told me,
[00:18:38] “Okay, we’re going to meet the Mobile Iron folks today.” Very first day on the job.
[00:18:43] Chris Corcoran: Right. It’s old school.
[00:18:44] Andy Gager: We were going to memoryBlue offices, or, I’m sorry, not memoryBlue,
[00:18:47] Mobile Iron, our first client.
[00:18:50] Marc Gonyea: Let me get you a quote, hip hop on that, but you’re from Cupertino and, you know, into it was dated all sorts of stuff, but it was not classic tech, did you be like, “Hey, I need to get into the tech. I’m from, like, the birthplace of Apple,” or was
[00:19:03] that more
[00:19:03] Andy Gager: Yeah, that’s a good question.
[00:19:05] Marc Gonyea: sales?
[00:19:06] Andy Gager: No, I think you’re right. Once I decided that I wanted to be in sales, right, you have to pick an industry in which to sell, right, and tech was the obvious choice. I think it’s partially growing up in the Silicon Valley, it wasn’t till I was older to where I look back and kind of realize this, but I liken it to people who grew up in Detroit.
[00:19:26] Everybody works for the auto industry in Detroit.
[00:19:29] Chris Corcoran: Yeah.
[00:19:29] Andy Gager: Or, Pennsylvania, or, West Virginia, right? It’s a community of people that are all working in the same industry, a lot of them working for the same company, right? Most of my people that I went to school with, their parents worked at Apple or Google,
[00:19:44] right, and that was not something we really thought about. It was just normal, right, it was the normal experience, so I think it was kind of baked in but it wasn’t realized until I was actually in a career to where I was like, “Oh, well I did end up in tech after all that.”
[00:20:01] It makes sense, right? And that was kind of the experience of growing up in the heart of tech, was, you don’t notice it until you kind of take a step back and then realize, “Oh, well, you know, this has been pretty much my entire life.
[00:20:14] I think I can do pretty well here.”
[00:20:15]
[00:20:15] Andy Gager: Dad was in tech too, so, you know, it was kind of a easy move.
[00:20:20] Chris Corcoran: Andy, so you talked a little bit, I think our listeners really would want to listen to or get your take on this. So, you went through an acquisition.
[00:20:28] Could you, can you share with the listeners a little
[00:20:30] bit about what happened and what you learned through that initial acquisition when you were no longer part of Intuit?
[00:20:37] Andy Gager: Yeah, exactly. So, it was a divestment and also acquisition at the same time, so they announced to the sales force after all the ink was dry, the transition plan was built out and it was a very seamless transition, right? None of us, there was no layoffs, which was good for all of us,
[00:20:58] right, because when you go through an acquisition at the company that you’re at, it’s always a possibility, right, that there will be downsizing. They assured us that there would be no downsizing, which there wasn’t and what I really liked about it was, I got a retention bonus, which was fantastic, which was basically, “It’s going to take us about six months for us to complete this process.
[00:21:21] During that six months, we want everybody to stay, so we’ll incentivize you by offering a retention bonus. So, if you don’t quit, we will pay you 100% of your OT, your commissionable earnings,” which was great. That was fantastic, and it truly was really seamless. When the new company came in, they didn’t change anything about the culture,
[00:21:47] one of the early things they said was, “What you guys are doing is working. This is just one company selling this company to another one, right, but your day-to-day is not going to change.” That was a very seamless and beneficial transition to go through that I first experienced very, very early on, was everything was planned out prior to letting the employees know, which I think gave us a lot of confidence and as well as security,
[00:22:17] right, ’cause it’s
[00:22:18]
[00:22:18] Andy Gager: a scary time,
[00:22:19]
[00:22:19] Andy Gager: bit intimidating.
[00:22:20] Marc Gonyea: First shot right out of school.
[00:22:22] Chris Corcoran: Yeah. I’m sure it was intimidating going through the first job out of school.
[00:22:26] Marc Gonyea: All right, so then, yeah,
[00:22:29] so let’s go back to, you’re back to memoryBlue, day one, she’s taking the Mobile Iron. She took you to their office or did they come to our office?
[00:22:38] Andy Gager: Oh,
[00:22:38] yeah.
[00:22:40] Oh,
[00:22:40] yeah. No, we went to the office, we met director and the VP that were over us and had a meeting and learned a little bit about Mobile Iron and learned a little bit about what we were going to do there, and yeah, that was day one, and so, towards the end of my very first day.
[00:22:56] Marc Gonyea: Were you the first
[00:22:57] person on a Mobile?
[00:22:58] Andy Gager: Yeah, it was me.
[00:22:59] Marc Gonyea: Wow.
[00:23:00] Andy Gager: Yes, me. It was myself, Kaitlyn Garish, Brandon Pack, and I think it
[00:23:08] was
[00:23:08] Jennae Cambra as well.
[00:23:10] Marc Gonyea: Yep.
[00:23:11] Andy Gager: I think it was that original four, and as you guys know, once we’ve started to get in there and worked, we expanded that quite broadly. So, I’ve worked with a number of MB alum that came through Mobile Iron channel,
[00:23:24] but that was pretty much my one and only client the whole time that I was at memoryBlue. Yeah.
[00:23:29] Marc Gonyea: It’s funny how kind of the world works sometimes. You had this other experience at Bridgestone, then internship calls job and then working for Intuit, and now here you are, day one right in front of the client. So, Jeanne had no problems rolling you out. What was it like
[00:23:44] learning the SDR job?
[00:23:45] Andy Gager: Yeah, so it was good, right? I mean, I had the prior experience coming in to memoryBlue, which I think was helpful. I know a lot of people that come into memoryBlue don’t have a lot of experience, but, as we all know, one of the great things about working for memoryBlue is a very solid instructor training plan,
[00:24:03] right, and the company that I had worked for before, we had something similar where training and role plays and really working with your peers to constantly get better, was something that we practice there, and so when I came to memoryBlue and saw that same model of enablement, took to it, right, because you can never stop learning,
[00:24:24] right? I mean, one thing that has always kept me going through my careers is don’t stop learning even if you think you’re the best at it. You’re not. There is still things to learn. And so, that transition was real easy for me. I, I felt real comfortable at memoryBlue real quick.
[00:24:40] Marc Gonyea: That’s
[00:24:40] good, and it showed from what I remember. So, when you were working on Mobile Iron, were you in our office, were you in their office and who you learned from? You learned from your posse, people on the
[00:24:52] campaign?
[00:24:54] Andy Gager: Yeah, so Mobile Iron, they really took us under their wing. We were directly aligned with individual reps at Mobile Iron which was very helpful for us because we could learn what they needed from an SDR, right, what they considered a qualified meeting, right? You can talk to 10 AEs about what’s a qualified opportunity and I’m pretty confident
[00:25:14] you’d probably get 8, 9, maybe even 10 different answers. And so, they really took us under their wing to get us involved originally one time a week, and I think we moved that up to two eventually ’cause they wanted us in the office. They wanted us not to just work with the sales team but the cross-functional teams, marketing, product and sit in the all-hands with us,
[00:25:36] so they really took us, they took us in, right? We did not feel like this outside entity. They made us really feel like a part of the team, which was great, right? Because it made us comfortable. It made us really want to work and make this client successful, and we got to learn from them on what this business needs
[00:25:55] and so we could deliver for them.
[00:25:57] Marc Gonyea: And how did it go
[00:25:57] with your team, like who, from your team did you learn from as well? Like, I’m sure you were doing your thing, but they’re probably, I think part of the value of working at memoryBlue is you get to learn from the folks who you’re working with, so of that crew, who are you kind of vibing with the most?
[00:26:12] Andy Gager: So, Timmy stands out, Brandon had been there a little bit longer than me, Kyle McDowell taught me a lot,
[00:27:18] Yorkie was there and he had been there for a while and he had shown success, so I tried my best to learn from everybody, right? Everybody has a different style.
[00:27:29] Everybody has a different cadence. They ask different questions and I try to adopt from other people in the room what would work for my cadence and I don’t think there was anybody that I didn’t try to at least spend some time with, to pick their brain or even listen on a call just to pick up what they were doing,
[00:27:49] so all of my coworkers were really, really good when I was at memoryBlue.
[00:27:54] Marc Gonyea: What was your thing you were good at?
[00:27:56] What was your signature move?
[00:27:57] Andy Gager: I think my signature move was, I learned very quickly that we were chasing large enterprise accounts, right, and so I had a knack for, instead of going through a list and just trying to get as many calls in as a day, I took a more account-based approach, and this was not just my idea, right?
[00:28:22] I mean, one of the things that my reps, that I was supporting at Mobile Iron told me was, “This is our white space. I need you to go find out and get us a meeting in that white space.” So I learned how to get higher in an organization. I learned that if you don’t know anybody, call the front desk, let them know why you’re calling and ask, ” Would you mind patching me through?” Right?
[00:28:44] Send emails. And so, I think what my secret sauce was, I wasn’t saying anything off-script that wasn’t doing anything magical. I think what set me apart, what made me successful was, I learned how to take an account or taking a set of accounts and focus specifically on those and figure out a way to get in,
[00:29:05] and if for whatever reason that’s not an account that we’re going to be able to do business with, understand why, make sure we’re logging why and make sure we understand what is going to be the best time for us to reattack this, and throughout my time of doing that, all the reps I supported spoke very, very highly of me because I was able to produce and they’d be able to say, “Okay, what’s going on with Raytheon?”
[00:29:28] “Well, we spoke with them in September, they’re through another one and a half year in their current solution. We can attack them at this date, right, we can start having conversations with them three months prior. I talked to Steve, who’s the director of their IT.” And that has made me in an AE role very successful when I have to go out and prospect, is I take that account-based, focused approach and just hit it as hard as you can consistently.
[00:29:56] Marc Gonyea: Yeah. So you’re still,
[00:29:58] and this is kind of a myth too, like that outbound thing never really goes away, even when you’re an established rep.
[00:30:03] Andy Gager: Nope. Nope. I see these polls on LinkedIn, “Was cold-calling dead?” It’s like, are we still debating whether it’s dead? I think the people who think it’s dead either aren’t good at it or they’re just not doing it. I mean, I’ll share a little story on that.
[00:30:20] One of the deals that I closed, I think this was last year, was a furniture company that was local to me down here in, in Los Angeles, and I walked into their furniture store and I had been searching a couple of different furniture stores, and what I noticed was a bunch of furniture stores were doing their business on a tablet,
[00:30:38] right, and for those that don’t know, for the listeners, Mobile Iron was a mobile device management and security company, and so the product that we sold was a way for companies to utilize iOS and Android devices in their business, because prior to that, we were in a laptop and desktop world only, right?
[00:30:58] Once smartphones really came out Mobile Iron said, ” We should probably look at this and we should probably enable organizations as opposed to scare them off, right? Nothing on your phone, nothing on your phone, that’s a security risk. We don’t want that.” So that was Mobile Iron’s position in the market.
[00:31:15] Back to my kind of cold-calling, strategy, right, I walked into this furniture store and nobody was using any tablets, and I was chatting up the sales guy, I was talking about a couch and I casually asked him, I go, “Hey man, have you ever thought about using, using a tablet to write up a quote or notes on me as a customer?”
[00:31:34] And I mean, it was like, I just told this guy I have a time machine. He was like, “That would make my job so much more easier. Everybody in this store would agree.” And so, I called the corporate line and I found my way to the IT director and I shared that story with him. You know, I got through him through a cold-call, right,
[00:31:56] I called my way up and found this guy and say, “Hey, you know, I’m a customer, but I also work for this company and I’d love to have a talk about your company’s strategy around Mobile,” and we ended up closing the deal. And so, now more furniture in Southern California. There’s a certified Mobile Iron, now Avanti customer in there,
[00:32:14] now I go in there and they’re using their tablets and they’re happy about it. I talked to the same sales guy about six months after we closed the deal and he was like, “That was fantastic, man.” So, cold-calling, cold outreach is never dead, never stopped doing it. It will make you very successful at if you continue to do it. I’ve seen the reps that are the most successful
[00:32:36] are the ones that are prospecting is top-three on their list of things that they do, is they do not stop prospecting.
[00:32:45] That is how you become a successful AE, at least from what I’ve seen.
[00:32:48] Marc Gonyea: Yeah. The people who are talking about it, not working or being dead it’s because it’s easier to talk about it than it is to actually do it. Talk about it being dead than actually do it and make it work. So, it’s kind of like a refuge. I see that stuff on the Internet, on LinkedIn, on, I want to, like, light those people up but we got better things to do than that,
[00:33:07] right?
[00:33:08] Andy Gager: I agree. Have the same way. I see it, I vote no, cold-calling is dead and just think to myself, “Well, I dunno, I’ll call your customers. I’ll get their business.”
[00:33:19] Marc Gonyea: That’s
[00:33:19] right. So, you’re doing your thing for us, working on Mobile Iron, what’d you think you wanted to do? Like, where’d you see yourself going? ‘Cause about our model, but, like, you got to impress them and you don’t know if they really want to hire the folks so on,
[00:33:31] and so forth.
[00:33:33] Andy Gager: Yeah, I was very focused on getting hired by this company. I really liked Mobile Iron. I really liked the product. I felt like I figured it out and learned it. I had built relationships with the people that had worked with this company, right? So, my singular focus and I let Jeanne and I let Mike know, “I want to get hired out by this company.
[00:33:52] Right? That is my goal and I would like whatever we can do to make that happen. That is what I want to do. I want to be a full-time badged Mobile Iron employee,” and as you guys both know, and as the listeners will now know, that is what happened. They hired me and a couple other of us, Kaitlyn Garish was another one of us, Jennae Cambra,
[00:34:10] they hired us and it was fantastic, right? It was really great. It felt like a big success of memoryBlue, right? memoryBlue got me to an exciting technology company that was publicly traded, which was fantastic, right, it’s never bad to get stock options, and when I did get that offer letter, I mean, and all of us got the offer letter, I kind of this, it was like a Friday afternoon and we were just ecstatic. I was really excited. I’m glad that that was always the kind of singular focus, right? And I had worked on other clients and other options had been thrown my way, but I just kept going back, “You know what, I think I can make this work. I think I can do really well here.
[00:34:53] I’d like to work there.” Right? And I told Mobile Iron and I told memoryBlue and both of those management teams advocated on my behalf for that which I’m eternally grateful for it.
[00:35:03] Marc Gonyea: Yeah, we had Kendra Vu, right, and who is the team at Mobile Iron?
[00:35:07] Andy Gager: Yeah.
[00:35:08] So, at the time our inside sales manager was Omar, Varario, and so I worked under him as an inside sales rep. When I first got hired full-time, I was an Enterprise Inside Sales Representative and it was about half SDR, half support, field support which was interesting because I got to continue to practice and do what I had been doing, which is outbound SDR work,
[00:35:31] but I also got exposed to sales cycles, right? I was lucky enough to be aligned with reps who would bring me on their calls, who would say, “Talk to Andy, he’s going to help you out with whatever it is, quotes, a lot of administrative stuff,” but they again took me under their wing and I got to experience what it was like to be an AE, right,
[00:35:53] which was a very, very useful experience. So, for any listeners listening, I think one of the pieces of advice that I would give is, if you have an opportunity, whether it’s a client of yours at memoryBlue, or if you go on to other roles as an SDR, or even as an AE and you have an opportunity to shadow people that have been there for a while, take that opportunity every single time,
[00:36:19] right, especially if you’re an SDR and you want to be an AE, the best way to learn how to be an AE is, listen to what the AEs are doing, right? Shadow AEs, learn from them, ask them questions, right, don’t be afraid to ask them questions. I was fortunate enough to have that experience
[00:36:38] and over the course of the years the enterprise reps would filter out, right, but I remained in this territory, and so these customers, these really big customers of ours started to just know me as their point of contact, and it got to a place at Mobile Iron where I was still in
[00:36:54] this
[00:36:55] enterprise inside role
[00:36:57] but I was closing deals, right, you know, I wasn’t closing massive million-dollar deals, right? Like, don’t get me wrong, right, I wasn’t an enterprise rep, but I was processing orders. I was helping out, these customers out, and that was noticed, right? My ability to kind of step into that and not miss a beat was noticed by upper management,
[00:37:17] and that was a big part of why I eventually was able to be elevated into the account executive role, was what I stood on was, I have experience, right, I have experience of seeing what this is like and I’d like to have a patch of my own, and I basically just went to the hiring manager at the time and said, “I think I have the experience, that I’m ready.
[00:37:40] I’d like to be considered for the role.” And I didn’t immediately get it. Another memoryBlue alum got it from me, and this is another valuable lesson I learned in sales. Four of us were interviewing for one position. I was up on my high horse, you know, I had closed a couple of these enterprise deals,
[00:37:57] I was hitting my number, and I thought to myself, “Andy, you got this man. It is a lot.” And Jessica Hollinger who I still keep up with and is a fantastic person, she ended up getting the role and I was happy for her, like, don’t get me wrong. I was very happy for her. She was a friend and a colleague, but I was like, “Oh my God, I
[00:38:19] was
[00:38:19] defeated.
[00:38:20] I was deflated,” because I was just like, ” What?” It didn’t make sense to me. And so, I went to Tom who was the hiring manager and I sat him down and I said, “Look, I respect your decision. I hope that I’m still in consideration, but I have to know. I have to know why I wasn’t the pick.” And he was like, “It’s very easy,
[00:38:39] Andy. Jessica followed up with me
[00:38:42] every
[00:38:43] single day after her interview. She came over to my desk and say, “Tom, have you made a decision yet?” She would email me, “Hey Tom, when do you think you’re going to make a decision on that AE role?”” And he said, “You followed up once or twice. She followed up more.” And I kind of thought about that for a second,
[00:38:59] and I was like, “Well, would think that we were being evaluated on merit and other things,” and he goes, “Sales is about following up, man. You have to close the deal. This job was the deal and you didn’t close me.” And I was just, I sat back in my chair and I was like, “Whoa,” it would just felt like, I was just knocked over, but it was such a powerful lesson, not just in interviewing, but in the sales industry as well, is if you are applying for a sales role you are selling yourself and the buyer
[00:39:33] is who you are interviewing with. So, follow up, make sure that you treat that like a sales cycle because I did not do that and I did not get that role. Now, on the second time around I did. My next opportunity I learned from that mistake and was elevated, but that was a very strong lesson, both in humility and nature of sales interviewing, which is, you are the product, you were the salesman and this job is the customer and you have to close this job.
[00:40:04] You have to close it out.
[00:40:05] Chris Corcoran: That’s great. Andy, So,
[00:40:07] Jessica got the role and then you ultimately got elevated too. How long
[00:40:12] of a time span between the two?
[00:40:15] Andy Gager: Wasn’t long. I think it was, like, three months, maybe a quarter, I think, ’cause I remember Jessica hadn’t been doing it for that long when we got elevated, we expanded our team, and so a number of positions opened up, some people left, so all the kind of cards kind of came out on the table, really kind of at the same time.
[00:40:32] I will be perfectly honest with you guys, right? I mean, it was tough sitting on the next row over, listening to Jessica have a patch, forecast her number, close these deals on our calls and I’m just sitting there and I’m just thinking to myself, “Man, I wish I was doing that.”
[00:40:48] It was an inflection point, right? I could have chose to be bitter about it. I could have chose to say, “You know what, these guys don’t know what they’re doing. They passed up on me. I’m better than this. I can go get an AE role at another place.” That was one path I could have taken,
[00:41:04] right? The other path was, ” Double down, dude. Double down. Show Tom through your actions, through your performance, through your office, how you present yourself in the office. Show him that he may have made a mistake,” right? Nothing against Jessica but I took that as an opportunity to say, prove that I was, that I am the right choice for this role.
[00:41:28] And so I doubled down on making sure that that was, that I was going to get there by any means necessary, right, as opposed to just saying, “You know what? They got it wrong. I’m better than that.” I said, “Nope, I got it wrong. I messed up on the interview. I need to figure out a way to get this job.” And luckily, the cards, the cards fell in my direction and been doing it ever since, still in pretty much the exact same role that I was put in.
[00:41:55] I mean, change it around, did different territories here and there, but been primarily covering the Southern California mid-market for Mobile Iron, now Avanti for about five years.
[00:42:05] Chris Corcoran: Tell us about that role.
[00:42:07] Andy Gager: So, it’s a great role. I love the role that I’m in. Like I said, I’ve had experience watching the enterprise role, the large enterprise role, but what I found that I really liked about an SMB or mid-market role is it’s a lot of transactions, right? They’re smaller-dollar size, but there’s a lot more transactions,
[00:42:26] right. And so, it was go, go, go, go, go. There was a point, guys, where I was doing four or five, six demos a day, hour-long demos, pitching the product, trying to close on the call. There was days where I would come home and I would have lost my voice from talking on the phone all day, but it was what I really like and why I’ve stepped, kept this role.
[00:42:48] There have been opportunities for me to take a step up into an enterprise position, but I have continued to want to stay and help expand at the company that I’m at the idea that the small and medium businesses of today are the enterprises of tomorrow, and if you know anything about technology, it’s a lot easier to sell to a company who doesn’t have any,
[00:43:14] right? It doesn’t have a solution and lock your solution in, than it is to go into someone and rip and replace, right? Rip and replace will always be harder than selling to a customer that does not have an existing solution. And so, I saw this opportunity to where I was working these companies, where they were growing, I was able to get our technology in there,
[00:43:37] right, get our stack of solutions embedded in these companies with the hopes that they would go on and be our enterprise customers someday, and I loved as many transactions. I mean, I was doing, at that year I did 120%, I think I was averaging around 80 closed opportunities a quarter, probably about 30 to 40% of those were net-new logos
[00:44:01] so I was doing a lot, was a bit overwhelming but
[00:44:05] you have to kind of learn, learn how to manage your time. Time management is a very important part when you’re an AE.
[00:44:11] Well, that’s closing more than a deal a day. Yeah, yeah. Some days I would close a couple, some days not so much, but yeah, it was a lot, right? One of the things that I was told before getting this role was, “The minute that you get your accounts you are going to be 10 feet underwater,” right? And so, you need to figure out a way to swim to the top of the surface
[00:44:31] so you’re not feeling like you’re drowning, right? And that was a trial-by-fire lesson, right? That was a, “Get in there, figure out what works for you, talk to other people and see what that does but at the end of the day you’re going to have to figure out a way that you manage your accounts and you manage your opportunities to where you are
[00:44:49] actively working deals, right, and you’re meeting your number.” Right? And I very much enjoy that. I’m still very happy with the position that I’m in and going into 2022, I’m excited for another year of growth.
[00:45:02] Marc Gonyea: You said time management is important. How do you manage your time?
[00:45:07] Andy Gager: So, the way I manage time is, I have to prioritize the tasks of the day. And so, what I mean by that is, early in the morning I respond to the emails. I try to get to my desk a little bit earlier than business hours, right,
[00:45:21] quote-unquote, business hours, make sure that I’m getting, responding to the emails of the day, but then I also set up my day, right? I am one of those people where my calendar is my personal calendar, my work calendar, my extracurricular calendar, and I manage my calendar and I manage my time,
[00:45:39] I’m almost down to the minute, right, almost down to the minute. Some of the other things that I learned is, you have to prioritize, right? If you’re closing 80 transactions, you can’t focus on the $20 deal when you have a $20,000 deal sitting there too, right? And so, you have to learn how to prioritize the actions that you do throughout the day.
[00:46:00] And like I said, the other thing that I did that I think has made me really successful is twice a week, from 3 to 5:00 PM I get cold-call, outreach, account map, I do competitive learning, I do my own learning on our technology, right? I take time out of my week and out of my day prospect and learn,
[00:46:24] and I think that that’s, it takes discipline, right? Because you have to turn off your email, right? If you’re banging out cold-calls, get yourself a list, but turn your email off, turn your Slack or your Teams or whatever your chatting is, turn that off. Focus very hyperactive almost on the task that you’re doing,
[00:46:44] especially when it’s something like outbound, right? Because there’s so many different distractions that can come into the day that can throw you off, right? And so, if you block off time for emails, you block off time for demos, you block off time for quoting and admin work, you block off time for prospecting, you’re, you are being proactive as opposed to reactive. As soon as you’re in a position where you’re reacting to all these emails coming in and this customer is a support problem,
[00:47:10] they need a quote by the end of the day, you can get overwhelmed very quickly. And so, you really have to be disciplined with how you break out your day and you have to prioritize what you’re doing in that day that’s going to make the week or the month or the quarter or the year, right? I break things down all the way to an annual level.
[00:47:32] That helps me to make sure that I’m using my time to the best ability that I can.
[00:47:39] Marc Gonyea: That’s good feedback ’cause people, that’s a skill that you have to learn and develop. So, you got promoted, you’re in this closing role, you learn all sorts of new things. How long was it before Mobile Iron got acquired, what was that like?
[00:47:52] Andy Gager: So we got acquired in December of 2019, and the way that that worked was, so Mobile Iron was a publicly-traded company, and the stock price wasn’t performing, I think, as the investors probably wanted it to be. We were a little stagnant. We had promoted our CFO to the CEO role, and, really, he kind of positioned our company to be an attractive to a buyer,
[00:48:14] right, and Avanti, a company that I had never heard of before, was announced that we were going through this acquisition. The thing about this acquisition that was very different from the first acquisition was that Avanti bought Mobile Iron, Pulse Secure, which was a networking solution, and then they went on to buy two more companies over the, over 2021,
[00:48:41] I believe it was, right, over the last year. And so, all of a sudden we had all these sales force instances, all of these different operational processes, and so, really, this whole last year, the acquisition is still going on today, guys. The acquisition is still going on, and I say that is because when
[00:49:02] you consolidate multiple big companies there’s different processes, there’s different, everything that you do is different, and you have to find a way to make that work in a single environment, and so it was hectic, right? I’m not going to lie. It was a hectic experience, and what I came out of learning from it is, control what you can control because most of the stuff that you deal with is not in your control,
[00:49:27] right? And so, when there was confusion about operations or financing or commission issues, “Andy, you’re not in charge of that, you’re in charge of hitting your number. Go back to what you know. Go back to what you know.” So, the way I kind of made it through this acquisition, and taking it into this acquisition as we go into 2022 where we’re positioning all of these companies, all at once, right,
[00:49:54] we were kind of working, ramping our way up to bringing five different companies together to bring a solution to the marketplace. We’re there now, right? Our company is there now and now it’s time to execute on that vision, and I’m really looking forward to it. I won’t remiss in saying that it was stressful, right?
[00:50:12] It was stressful. There were layoffs. There were situations where people were not feeling like maybe this is the place to be, and, you know, I just kept coming back to, “A lot of this is not in my control. Most of this is not in my control,” right? Control what you can control, which is your day-to-day,
[00:50:29] and that’s kept me going through it and I’m glad that I did it because I think 2022 is going to be a really strong year for this company.
[00:50:38] Well, I mean, I won’t lie, I’ve explored other opportunities, explored in the sense of, you know, looked into it. When a lot of people left Mobile Iron and went on to other interesting companies and they had approached me and say, “Hey, we’d love to see you come over here,”
[00:50:51] but what I kept coming back to is, I believe in my manager, I believe in my vice president, they believe in me and I made a commitment to both of them when we got on board and we got acquired, because when we first got acquired I was not sure that this was the place for me, and I had a conversation with my vice president and my direct manager,
[00:51:11] and I said, “Guys, I don’t know about this,” and both of them were perfectly candid with me and said, “You know what, Andy? We don’t know about this either, and if you stick with us, right, if you stick with us and, and ride this out, we’re going to work to get you to where you want to be,” which is, I want to be in a position of management and leadership, right,
[00:51:32] that is my next career goal, is to step that up into a position of leadership and I have people that are above me that make those decisions who have entrusted me and have been candid with me and have developed a relationship with me where it’s hard to leave, right? When you have a good manager and you have a good vice-president that believe in you, that have your back, that will support you,
[00:51:58] hang on to that. I mean, hang on to that. It’s a good feeling when you know that you have, that the executives that you work for, they have your back on a professional and a personal level, right? And that’s, I think, the biggest thing of what kept me around is I trust the process.
[00:52:13] I trust the process. I trust the leaders, trust that they know what they’re doing and that they will make me successful, and I also trust that if that doesn’t pan out, that they will be candid about letting me know what the situation’s looking like, and I appreciate that.
[00:52:30] Kaitlyn Garish is a great example, right? I mean, we were in a position where we had a spot to fill and where I was talking to my manager about this and Kaitlyn was at a different company at the time and we really needed someone with outbound experience, right? One thing that we were seeing with our team was,
[00:52:48] we weren’t getting after our accounts and we weren’t getting after new accounts in a way that was going to make us successful, and my manager Jamie came to me and said, “What do you think about Kaitlyn Garish or Jennae Cambra?” That was the other one that she mentioned,
[00:53:02] right? And I said, “Well, I think both are good options. I don’t know where they are in their career right now, but I’ve kept up with them so I can reach out.” I reached out and we got Kaitlyn, right? So, that’s a direct example of why keeping up with colleagues just throughout your career is always really, really a good thing to do.
[00:53:17] I’ve kept up with other colleagues, you know, when I go to San Jose, I see some of the old people that I used to work with. I keep up with them on LinkedIn and it’s a matter of, we all kind of came from the starting place and as I’ve watched five years into this thing, now I’ve watched people go on and do really amazing things.
[00:53:33] Anton Cardenas is having great success. Me and him were really, really good friends, worked together for a really long time, and I think the leverage is just making sure that you’re building bridges, not burning them, right? You never know when there’s going to be a position where you need a job
[00:53:51] Andy Gager: and what I found in my career is people that know you, people that believe in you and people that you’ve worked with, that you’ve kept in contact with you, you give them a call and I’ve done this before, I’ve given a call and they say, “We’ve been waiting for you to call. What took you so long?”
[00:54:06] So, that’s one good thing about working with as many people as I did during my time at memoryBlue was continuing to build those bridges and maintain those bridges and never in your career, in, in any circumstance, I believe, is that you want to burn a bridge because you never know when, you never know when you could need a favor.
[00:54:23] The rigor in which I execute.
[00:54:25] Well, good. I’m glad. That’s the hope, is, I want to share, I’ve experienced a lot of things in my career and I hope that the short time that we had a time to speak together today here, guys, I appreciate you having me on the format and to all the sellers out there that hear this message, keep doing what you’re doing,
[00:54:44] right? Find out what works for you. Don’t stop hustling, right? Always keep learning, right? That’s the other thing that I’ve really stood on in my career is, don’t get complacent. Don’t ever feel like you got this on lock because you don’t, right?
[00:54:58] You gotta keep your edge. You gotta keep ahead of the game.