Tech Sales is for Hustlers Podcast

Episode 82: Aaron Aggen – A Continuous Learning Mindset

Let rejection roll off your back and keep things moving. When Aaron Aggen hears the word “no,” he sees an opportunity to gather more information, build rapport, and expand his network.

Don’t be fooled by his easy-going demeanor; back as a Direct Hire Account Executive at memoryBlue, Aaron sets high standards for himself and makes no excuses.

In this episode of Tech Sales is for Hustlers, Aaron talks about why professional training should never stop, the impact of self-accountability, and the power of recruiting for our top Rising Stars talent.

Guest-At-A-Glance

Name: Aaron Aggen

What he does: He is an Account Executive – Direct Hire at memoryBlue.

Company: memoryBlue

Noteworthy: Aaron is an experienced account executive and recruiter with a knack for building personal relationships with his clients, exceeding expectations, and filling roles. He has a history of working in multiple verticals across the technology industry. As a child, he showed a talent for sales, and although his father advised him to get into sales, he wanted to get into psychology and be a professional athlete. It turns out that his father was right.

Where to find Aaron: LinkedIn

Key Insights

⚡ You should not be afraid of change and rejection. If you work in sales, the last thing you want is for someone to turn you down — especially if you work on a percentage basis or your bonuses depend on monthly sales. Aaron notes that people don’t enjoy feeling like they’ve let someone down or being rejected and recommends looking at it differently. “The way I looked at it was, ‘Am I actually getting rejected, or is the company? Is the product or the offering getting rejected?’ Because they’re not rejecting me. There’s probably something that I could provide this person that they would still buy, that they would take. […] At the end of the day, I may never see this person or talk to this person again. And why am I going to let someone that is not close to me in life dictate my job, my feelings, and how I go about certain situations?”

⚡ Constant training is crucial. When Aaron started working at memoryBlue as a senior sales development representative, he didn’t know anything about the job. So he went through a lot of training. Today, he is an account executive and believes training should never stop. “One-on-ones with your mentor or manager provide enough practice to really get you up to speed quickly. At some companies, it can take a bit longer to get up to speed, whereas here we’ve got people booking. I remember someone booked a meeting on their very first dial ever, and it’s because of the training provided and the importance given to it here.”

⚡ There’s nothing tragic about accepting ‘no’ for an answer. According to Aaron, his superpowers are his questioning mind and the fact that hearing ‘no’ never bothers him. “You have to tell me ‘no’ five or six times before I hang up the phone. I’m never going to get to talk to you again, so why would I take the first ‘no’ as a ‘no’? I’m not afraid to take a ‘no.’ I think another superpower was just curiosity. Very curious, asking questions, diving deeper into it, but curious as to how to be better at my job.”

Episode Highlights

The Best Part About Being an SDR 

“When you get to an account executive, you only have so many large deals. I remember running a couple that were in the hundreds of thousands, which was five times a monthly quota. There are only a couple of those. But, as an SDR, there are multiple. You’ve got how many contacts you can call. And the other best thing is that this is where you shape your future. This is where you dictate what type of salesperson you’re going to be. If you’re not going to hustle on the SDR chair, you’re surely not going to hustle on the account executive chair. And if you hustle here, you’ll hustle there because it’s a lot more fun there, but it takes time. It takes patience. And this is where you shape that. This is where you learn the most. When you get to an account executive, you’ve got so many things going on. Training becomes secondary. Training is primary here.”

Evaluate Every Client’s Offer

“The biggest thing is to look at the value that you’ve provided your client. There’s a reason they gave you an offer in the first place. The clients aren’t going to give offers to SDRs that are not performing. They’re going to give them to the top performers because now you’re working for them. They have to pay you now. And so, if you’ve provided value and you’re getting an offer, they still want you at the end of the day. Unless you’re going to take something else and you’re completely done with sales for some reason, they’re not going anywhere. They want you. They’re still going to want to work with you at the end of the day. And evaluate things — what’s the training like? Ask the hard questions.”

Recruiting Gives You the Opportunity to Change People’s Lives

“Best part, hands down, is when you tell somebody they’re getting an offer. I remember there are moments when I’ve told people they’re getting an offer, and you can almost just hear them break down like, ‘This is a life-changing moment. I’ve been out of a job, or I’m getting out of a very toxic workplace.’ It makes you want to get the next one. And it makes you realize you’re making a difference in someone’s life. […]

We don’t know what tomorrow holds, and times change. Not judging a book by its cover — not just the people but also the client side. Looking at reviews online and what people have said is great, and you should do that, but take it with a grain of salt. If you’re judging them because they have a high rating or low rate, that’s judging the company by their cover.”

Transcript: 

[00:00:40] Aaron Aggen: Aaron Aggen.

[00:00:41] Marc Gonyea: Aaron Aggen. That’s right. I’ve never had a guest leave 

[00:00:43] with Aaron, their first and last name before, but I like it. What’s up, man? 

[00:00:47] Aaron Aggen: Now much. Happy to be here. Excited. Enjoying being back at the company and growing this team and seeing the company’s growth from when I originally left, you know, year and a half, two years, came back and see what you guys have done with it.

[00:01:00] Chris Corcoran: Boomerang. It’s great to have someone who started 

[00:01:03] with us, went out into the industry and then came back home. So, welcome home. 

[00:01:08] Aaron Aggen: Thank you. Happy to be here. 

[00:01:10] Marc Gonyea: Let’s get you going, man, for the folks listening. They don’t know you. Some of them might, but they may not know you as well, where I get to know you right now. Tell us a little bit about where you’re from,

[00:01:21] where you grew up, 

[00:01:22] what you were like as a 

[00:01:22] kid? Take us through that, like up until through high school and the college.

[00:01:28] Aaron Aggen: Yep. Yeah. So, grew up right in our HQ area, grew up in south, five minutes from the office and Falls Church, Virginia, went to George Marshall high school and did that for, was there for three years and then transferred out to Fairfax or Trinity Christian

[00:01:42] and I was always the athlete, that’s, I grew up playing sports, playing every single season there was some sports that I was playing. 

[00:01:49] Chris Corcoran: Siblings real quick before sports?

[00:01:51] Aaron Aggen: I got two younger sisters. 

[00:01:52] Marc Gonyea: Okay. You’re the eldest? 

[00:01:53] Aaron Aggen: Yep. I’m the oldest, kind of set the standard for them. They couldn’t get as much trouble as I did,

[00:01:59] which is why I think I’m good at sales. I think it plays a part in it. 

[00:02:02] Marc Gonyea: Anyone in sales, in your family, related? 

[00:02:05] Aaron Aggen: No, really nobody. Closest thing to sales would have been my uncle in Chicago. He used to sell a software for schools. 

[00:02:13] Marc Gonyea: Okay. Got it. All right. All right. So you was, you were an athlete?

[00:02:16] Aaron Aggen: Yep. Sports was my game growing up. Everything I did was sports. There was nothing else that I did. I remember growing up, we were never inside, my mom would have to come find me at 10 o’clock at night ’cause I was still on the basketball court, always running around, just that’s how I, I burned off my energy and just enjoyed life.

[00:02:35] Marc Gonyea: What, uh, did you have a favorite sport? 

[00:02:38] Aaron Aggen: Favorite sport growing up was baseball, shifted to football in high school. So, I did that for four years and tried to pursue the college football route, but ultimately decided that wasn’t for me and kind of pursued other options. 

[00:02:52] Marc Gonyea: Was there any inkling of this, the salesman, the salesman shift,

[00:02:57] sales craft, then at any point, kind of growing up? 

[00:03:00] Aaron Aggen: My dad always mentioned my entire life, “You should get into sales.” I remember anytime we did fund raising or we had to go stand on the corner of Giant off of Broad Street to get money for our sports teams, I somehow always ended up with the most donations and I don’t think it’s because I knew sales,

[00:03:18] I just wasn’t afraid to talk to anybody. I remember doing a, I had to go on a missions trip in high school and I did door-to-door. We went to South, Johannesburg, South Africa. We went door-to-door to raise funds and most people would go door-to-doors and come back with 20 bucks.

[00:03:34] I remember I got over a thousand dollars and paid for my trip and someone else’s and I was 15 at the time, 14 at the time, just going door-to-door, asking for donations to go on this and that’s when my dad started dropping hints of, you know, “You should get into sales, you should get into sales,” and I was like, “No, I’m going to, I want to get into psychology,

[00:03:54] I want to be a professional athlete. I want to make that happen,” and he just always dropped the hand, “Get into sales, get into sales.” 

[00:04:01] Marc Gonyea: Wow. Okay. All right. So, you kind of owe him a shout-out. 

[00:04:04] Aaron Aggen: Yeah, I guess I should have listened. I guess it’s one of those stores I look back and go, “All right, dad, I should’ve listened to you.

[00:04:10] You were right on this one.” You know, but I think everything happens for a reason and that planted the seed, and then I remember after high school working at Sports Authority, which is where I think my sales career officially kicked off, retail. They had insurance policies

[00:04:26] we could sell on certain products. Treadmill, you could serve, sell a warranty, baseball glove, shoes, you could sell warranties on these and that was essentially our quota, was anytime you sell it, you get, you got extra commission on those that you sold. But when a mom comes in to buy their 10-year-old son a baseball glove, they don’t want to put a commit, an insurance on it. Kids going to outgrow it in six months, she’s going to lose it,

[00:04:50] I’m never going to get to do it. So, I really had to talk to them and just understand what they were looking for, what they needed, why not get this, your kid’s probably going to throw it in the dirt at his first time in the baseball diamond, might put some protection on it, and I just remember my first day selling two of those

[00:05:06] and they were just like, they were like, they just were like, “All right, let’s see what happens,” and just throughout time, I, I was like, this is extra money I get to put in my pocket. It doesn’t cost me anything, so face the very high-rejection environments with people there did that for a while, where then I got promoted to senior cash register and then sales manager just ’cause I ended up knowing how to sell those and what

[00:05:28] people wanted and having the sports background I think played into it ’cause I’d be like; I remember having these batting gloves and after three swings the threading rips. Instead of paying 25 bucks for a new one, why don’t you pay $3 and get a brand new one in two weeks if it breaks anyways, right? 

[00:05:45] Marc Gonyea: Let’s go back to some of the, for a second.

[00:05:47] So, you mentioned psychology and you mentioned that you were, how 

[00:05:49] old were you when you, when you could get, create commission on these insurance, these warranties 

[00:05:55] Aaron Aggen: Fresh out of high school? I was 18. 

[00:05:55] Marc Gonyea: So, you were 18 and there’s a lot of rejection involved, but you also said, “Well, I’ll put some money in my pocket, but it doesn’t cost 

[00:06:02] me anything.”

[00:06:05] Why don’t 

[00:06:06] people view it that way you think? ‘Cause it’s hard. I’m not, I’m not trying to minimize, like, the rejection piece, but why do you think, or how did you rationalize in your mind that the rejection wasn’t, I mean, I’m sure you still have some cognitive dissonance, it was a big deal, but it was, you pushed through it,

[00:06:23] right? Yeah, walk us through that. 

[00:06:26] Aaron Aggen: The way I view it is the two scariest things for people in life are change and rejection. No one hates to get rejected, which is why Chris Voss always talks about, in his book or with the, 

[00:06:37] Marc Gonyea: He doesn’t like to get rejected? Is that what you mean?

[00:06:39] Aaron Aggen: No, he talks about in there that people hate to feel like they’ve let people down or to feel rejected,

[00:06:45] and so, but the way I looked at it was, am I actually getting rejected or is the company, is the product getting rejected? 

[00:06:54] Marc Gonyea: The offering.

[00:06:55] Aaron Aggen: The offering because they’re not rejecting me, there’s probably something that I could provide this person that they would still buy, that they would take, or, hey, I just sold them a baseball glove,

[00:07:04] they accepted something for me, they just rejected part of it and my other thing was, I’m not going to see this person again, right, at the end of the day, I may not see this person again, or I may never talk to this person again and why am I going to let someone that is not close to me in life

[00:07:21] dictate my job, dictate my feelings and how I go about certain situations? And so, I was just like, “Oh, all right. What’s a no? It’s one step closer to a yes.” Or, “All right. Why did I get told no? Let’s figure this out, what didn’t work? What worked?” 

[00:07:36] Marc Gonyea: How do you think, what’d you kind of learn that line of thought because you didn’t read Chris Voss’s 

[00:07:39] book when you were 18? 

[00:07:40] Aaron Aggen: No, I did not. 

[00:07:41] Marc Gonyea: So, how did you pick that up or where?

[00:07:44] Aaron Aggen: I think that just comes down to my childhood. My mom always, she always comes out on me and makes sure, because, “The thing that annoys me the most about you, Aaron, is nothing affects you. Nothing stresses you out. Nothing comes down to bother you. You don’t let it happen.” I mean, we can get in, you know, there’s multiple things to talk about, but

[00:08:06] later in life during COVID, I was one of those people that got let go, but didn’t let it affect me, rejection from how many schools, because I did not apply myself in high school, so I went through 20 rejections to get one and to go to community college to get that one, but not letting that dictate my life.

[00:08:22] I think it was just something that, like, hey, don’t let it bother me and I think I grew up playing sports was part of it, you know, you have to be challenged there, you have to be coached or you’re never going to be perfect. I think that was just part of, you know, growing up just didn’t let things affect me. It’s, I remember, I remember, Chris, when I was getting my senior SDR presentation, talked about the whole locus of control, external versus internal,

[00:08:44] so, there’s actually, the locus of control is what affects you on a day-to-day basis. Something happens to you or use someone as an internal that takes the woe is me attitude, and oh, I didn’t hit quota or I, I just couldn’t make it on time because of traffic and it’s, it’s never your fault. The external person accepts blame or says, “Hey, something happened,” but they look at what they can do to do different.

[00:09:09] “Hey, I didn’t hit quota yet this week, what happened? I only made 30 phone calls. Why didn’t I make 60?” “Well, nobody picked up,” is what the internal would say. The external guy, “Nobody picked up. That gives me how many more minutes to make extra dials?” And I think that was it, that I just was willing to figure out.

[00:09:26] I, I view life as, like, a puzzle in a game. You have to figure out what you’re doing and just like, “All right, I’m here. This happened, what can I do to make it better?” 

[00:09:35] Marc Gonyea: Love it. Okay. All right. So, let’s talk about that. So, you went out of high school, what’d you do for the first year, you got through your first semester or two years?

[00:09:44] Aaron Aggen: Yeah, so, right out of high school decided not to go to college, grades weren’t where I wanted them to be and so I didn’t get into the schools that I wanted to go, or where they were, they were just frankly too expensive for me to go upset and have scholarships and so, I decided to get a job, walked into Sports Authority, got a job at Sports Authority and worked there for two years.

[00:10:07] About a year and a half after starting there, went and started classes at community college. I said education is important, you know, it was, I was working full time, working 40, 50, 60-hour weeks, taking classes, you know, on my off days, working weekends and started the education.

[00:10:26] Chris Corcoran: And how long did you do that?

[00:10:27] Aaron Aggen: So, went to community college for about two, two and a half years and then finally, once I had enough credits that I didn’t have to do a ton of gen-ed classes, went to Liberty University and started the psychology path there. 

[00:10:42] Chris Corcoran: Okay. And then where did you go? 

[00:10:44] Aaron Aggen: From there my last year or my second to last year there, I was older than everybody,

[00:10:50] so I hung out with the juniors and seniors when I was technically a freshman and sophomore and I was working for the university full-time at the registrar office, so originally was there working as an internal ref and then switched over to the career center where I edited resumes and did interview preps for thousands of students.

[00:11:08] I think at one point I edited, like, 2000 resumes in three months or something like that. Oh, I mean, so, switched over working at the registrar office, answering calls for them nine to five and then did online classes at night, and after everybody graduated, I was the only one left there and as a college student working full-time and taking classes at night it’s very difficult to meet new people, especially in a college town where they get a hangout 24/7 almost,

[00:11:33] and so I said, “Based off of the money I’m paying in rent, the money I’m making would it be better for me because I’m online anyways, to go home, finish up online and get a job and pay to my degree was done,” and I was just like, “Oh, I’ll just get a job at a dental place, filing papers, doing admin work for them and finish my degree.”

[00:11:54] Chris Corcoran: And so, where were you 

[00:11:55] hoping this whole degree was going to take you? Did you want to be a psychologist? 

[00:11:59] Aaron Aggen: Originally, I did. I remember going to counseling and talking to just going like, “This is, this is what I want to do.” I was talking to people, getting to know them, I would love to get into this business

[00:12:09] and as I went down the school path, I quickly realized that another 12 years of school to get a doctorate was not for me, but I could still use the psychology elsewhere. Switched my major over to business and sales, went home, remember sitting at my kitchen table, applying to 50, 60 different jobs, I looked up sales,

[00:12:28] I had no idea what a sales development representative was, I don’t know what an account executive was, I was just, anything with sales in the title and I’ll kind of go from there and figure it out and applied to memoryBlue, is I guess one of my last ones that I applied to, if I remember correctly, left out the door of the day, left the, left out the door to go to softball

[00:12:51] and as I’m leaving the, the street, I would get a call from the recruiter saying, “Hey, we’d love to put you through process,” so took the, the assessment test after I got home and went through process and was lucky enough to get blessed with a job. 

[00:13:07] Chris Corcoran: Excellent. Tell us about that. 

[00:13:11] Aaron Aggen: Yeah. So, went through process, got a job

[00:13:14] and I remember looking at the contract and everything and kind of being like, “I went to school for psychology. I don’t know any of this business lingo,” so I had a friend of mine or my dad looked at it just to make sure there was nothing that I wasn’t understanding, signed it two minutes after that and came in a week later and never looked back, walked in those doors,

[00:13:37] I remember walking in for my first interview, just going like, “This place is something different.” It reminded me of, I remember telling Lee Loss and Jelly Plash, Andrew Palmer and Stacy Skewedmaker in my interview, when I was sitting in those chairs as a 20, 23, 24-year-old who’d never been in a corporate America setting

[00:14:03] and 20 people would come up to me within two minutes. “Hey, how are you doing? More coffee? Do you want water?” You know, I’m thinking, “Oh, one or two people asking and that’ll be it.” It was just constantly. I was just like, “That’s, that’s an awesome environment.” That’s the customer service that we talked about at Sports Authority

[00:14:18] now turn business to invite people in, show what the culture is like and really create a warming environment. 

[00:14:25] Marc Gonyea: So, you’re in, 

[00:14:26] so you got hired and you’re still going to school? Okay. Got it. Who 

[00:14:31] was your DM? 

[00:14:31] Aaron Aggen: Um, DM right out the gate with Stacy Skewedmaker. Stacey Skew was my DM for about three weeks before she had her first child

[00:14:41] and that was when Kyle Gross, who was working the exact same campaign that I was at the time, yup, he had BlueTech, he ended up getting promoted, joined his team, ran BlueTech for a little bit while I was with him and then when he got a new client, switched over to that. 

[00:14:57] Marc Gonyea: And what was that like learning 

[00:14:58] the job?

[00:15:00] Aaron Aggen: It was fast, it was drinking from a fire hose, but it was, it was good. One of the things that I’ve learned is training is constant and I think professional athletes would say that, even Tom Brady would say he’s still learning to critique things and training should never stop, the constant weekly Wednesday trainings with the entire company, one-on-ones with your mentee, your mentor or manager just provided enough practice to really get you up to speed quickly

[00:15:33] where I think at some companies it can take a little bit longer to get up to speed, whereas here we’ve got people booking, I remember someone booked a, booked a meeting on their very first dial ever, not even, not even for a C-web which what very first dial and it’s, it’s because of the training that’s provided and just the constant surrounding of importance of it here.

[00:15:56] Chris Corcoran: What was the, uh, the biggest surprise as being as an SDR, you thought what it was going to be and then you came in with something, it wasn’t exactly what you thought, 

[00:16:03] what was the biggest surprise? 

[00:16:05] Aaron Aggen: I think the biggest surprise is how many avenues of path you can take to be good at your job. 

[00:16:10] Chris Corcoran: Talk more about that.

[00:16:12] Aaron Aggen: In sales, I don’t think there’s a one-size-fits-all shoe and I think that’s where I’ve kind of taken that to be my approach with any company that I ended up with. The last four companies that I’ve been with was finding what works for multiple people. I could go to Kyle and ask him, “How would you handle this objection?” And the way that he says or gets around it,

[00:16:34] I tried on the phone and I’m going to fail 10 out of 10 times, but if I go to another manager and say, “How would you do this?” They might have a different approach for it and that approach works for me and I think it’s just unique. If there was a one-size-fits-all shoe, we wouldn’t have thousands of books written on sales methodologies,

[00:16:53] it would just be one book and here’s how you do it, and so I think finding the craft that works for you and “Hey, here’s the guideline, we’re giving you the path to walk on in the footing, but you’ve got to figure out what works best for you, and, hey, you might be able to venture off a little bit, figure out if this works, you can try another method,

[00:17:11] you could try this, but, hey, here’s the baseline. Here’s what we know works. Take it and make it your own.”

[00:17:16] Marc Gonyea: How, so, who is, who 

[00:17:18] was part of the crew? Who is, like, your SDR, a little posse when you started? 

[00:17:24] Aaron Aggen: SDR possie when I started was Kyle Gross, Ben Campfire, Kellen Robinson, Turkell, we had Kelly on the team and the last one was Abby Curtis.

[00:17:38] Those are the ones that we, that was our little SDR posse. We, we grew a couple here and there, but that was, who was on the team kind of by my first day. 

[00:17:47] Marc Gonyea: The nucleus. Who is the best of that group such as yourself? 

[00:17:53] Aaron Aggen: When I first started, I think it was Kellen. It was Kellen when I first started. He was the one, he was my mentor when I started

[00:18:01] and but I think best on the phones was Turkell. Best person to talk on the phone and pull pain and get information was Turkell. 

[00:18:11] Marc Gonyea: What did he do?

[00:18:13] Aaron Aggen: The way he just talked to people, he would keep people on the phone for 30 minutes, within five minutes he knew he wasn’t going to get a book. He would keep them on for 30 minutes,

[00:18:22] take that ammunition, call the next person to book the next person based upon the ammunition, based upon what he had. Just the questions he asked, the depth of what he asked, the depth of a knowledge he had on the client and the industry just provided him with the ability to talk on the phone and pull a lot of pain and turn a lot of NOs into YESes.

[00:18:42] Chris Corcoran: What about you? What was your supervisor? Well, what’s your signature move? 

[00:18:46] Aaron Aggen: I think my superpower was, NOs didn’t faze me. I mean, going back to it, you got to tell me no five or six times before I hang up the phone. I’m never going to get to talk to you again. I’m not going to talk to you again, so why would I take the first

[00:19:01] no, right, as a no? So, it’s, you know, I’m not afraid to take a no. I think another superpower was just curiosity. Very curious, asking questions, diving deeper into it, but curious into how to be better at my job. I remember, within the first two months, I think I spoke to everybody on the account executive team about them.

[00:19:25] I was. 

[00:19:25] Marc Gonyea: The internal memoryBlue sales team?

[00:19:26] Aaron Aggen: Yes. The internal memoryBlue sales team. I was connecting with everybody on there, just tips, tricks, “Hey, how would you get promoted internally? How would you talk to this?” I remember speaking with multiple senior SDRs, there was not a person that I didn’t want to talk to,

[00:19:43] I don’t care if it was your first day on the job, I wanted to talk to you, see what’s working for you. I remember someone gave a presentation on emails. I wasn’t incorporating emails within, like, my third month, put that on and alone I hit quota just off of the email box, wow, from it and I would’ve never done that

[00:20:00] had I not and gone over and talked to them, right, and just kind of figured out what works for them. 

[00:20:07] Marc Gonyea: Okay. Wow. Okay. So, you did all those things and what was it like working on Stacy’s team? She had reputation of running a tight ship. 

[00:20:14] Aaron Aggen: She ran a tight ship. Stacy, someone, Stacy’s the person you want in your corner.

[00:20:19] So, I’ll never go to, no one will go to bat more than the Stacey will for you, but I think that tight ship worked, especially with me. I needed to be held on a tight ship, my mom would tell you that from as a kid, but, but it, it works. It’s, it’s a tight ship, but it’s not a rude-type ship. “Hey, this is the standard I’m going to hold you to

[00:20:41] and this is what I expect and have fun, do what you got to do, get the job done, but this is what I expect of you,” and I think being held to that high standard, put a high standard of, “This is what I have to do.” You know, I think I’ve had some managers in the past or previous companies where sometimes the standard is low

[00:21:02] and so you set a low bar yourself. I like to always set a higher bar than what’s given to me by a company and my managers and if a bar has been set low, my bar is going to be low, and so I think Stacy running that tight ship she had high expectations and I remember my quota being an eight in the first month on the job,

[00:21:22] high expectations. I said, “All right, I’m going to get 10,” that time. So, set high expectations. I think that tight ship was what made it happen. For our listeners, what’s the, in your opinion, what’s the best part about being 

[00:21:33] Marc Gonyea: For our listeners, what’s the, in your opinion, what’s the best part about being an SDR?

[00:21:35] There’s, I mean, there’s always another one. When you get to an account executive, you only have so many large deals. Yeah. I remember running a couple that were in the hundreds of thousands, which was five times a monthly quota. There’s only a couple of those. As an SDR, there’s multiple.

[00:21:54] Aaron Aggen: You’ve got how many ops, how many contacts that you can call, it, and I think this is, the other best thing I would say is, this is where you shape your future, this is where you dictate what type of salesperson you’re going to be. If you’re not going to hustle in the SDR chair, you’re for sure not going to hustle at the account executive chair. That’s for sure.

[00:22:12] And, if you hustle here, you’ll hustle there because it’s a lot more fun there, but it takes time. It takes patience and this is where you shape. This is where you learn the most. When you get to an account executive, you’ve got so many things going on, training becomes secondary. Training is primary here.

[00:22:29] Aaron Aggen: I think the, the ability that there’s always another one and the ability to shape your future based off of how you do it now, it’s the same as college. It’s where you shape your career with your job, what you’re going to do, same thing is in the SDR chair, you reshape everything. 

[00:22:44] Marc Gonyea: Building the right habits?

[00:22:45] Marc Gonyea: Speaking of college,

[00:22:48] so when did the college process, so you were man finished? Right? 

[00:22:54] Aaron Aggen: Yep. Correct. 

[00:22:54] Marc Gonyea: How did that happen? 

[00:22:56] Aaron Aggen: Yeah, you know, so my intention, when I started memoryBlue and I remember telling everybody like, “Hey, I’m going to be taking online classes, aren’t trying to hide anything,” and got the job and said, “All right, I’m gonna go to work.

[00:23:09] I’m gonna come home. I’m going to do my homework. I’m going to graduate.” I remember going through work three, four months and just learning a lot, learning a lot more than what my sales-specific classes were and some of my classes were accounting and finance, and I’m like, “I don’t use this in my world.

[00:23:27] I’ve got Excel if I need to do some sort of accounting or QuickBooks.” And I remember one time in college in a class, we were, we had a test and it was a role-play, sales role-play, sales role-play, mock-SDR sales call where the professor, I’d been at memoryBlue for about four months and we had a mock sales call based off of what the professor taught everybody,

[00:23:51] and now, most of these people are juniors and seniors in college, never been in the real world so they’re going off of what the professor teaches them and a couple of students go and then a student goes and has a conversation for about 10 minutes and the professor ends it, the book, the, the professor answered and was like, “Bravo, Bravo,” one of the best role-plays I’ve ever had

[00:24:13] and I sat there confused based off of how many calls I’ve done, Kali vows going, he booked the meeting, he got the job done, but in terms of it being a good one, I don’t know if it was a great one, asked a lot of close-ended questions, things like that, but what threw me off is he would ask, “Have you ever had a cybersecurity attack

[00:24:33] your company?” Professor would say yes and then would dive into, “We had a Trojan horse, ransomware costs us this much money and we lost this many clients,” just feud all this information and I’m sitting there going, “I think I’ve made close to 20,000 phone calls at this time and had a couple thousand c-webs give or take

[00:24:57] and not one of those gave me the amount of information that he gave and I was just like, what am I doing? But what, what are we teaching? And so, I kind of pushed back on him and was just like, “Hey, like, as someone who’s an SDR currently in this job day-to-day at a company that I value training and what they’re doing, the numbers speak for themselves, that call has never happened

[00:25:22] and I can provide hundreds of thousands of phone calls over the course of our last 16 years at that time to say not once has a prospect ever given this much information, let alone on close-ended questions,” right? Well, the professor came back and was like, “Well, I’m the professor. You don’t know what you’re talking about.

[00:25:44] I don’t think you could look me.” I was like, “I don’t think you could look at me if I was a prospect.” So, we wrote, we switched role plays, he gave a role play to me as an SDR in front of the class, in front of the classroom, was not able to book me, asked a lot of close-ended questions and then, so, you know, he was very frustrated and said, “Let’s reverse this and I’m going to be the worst prospect you’ve ever talked to you.”

[00:26:06] I was like, “All right, let’s go.” Opened it up, spoke for about seven, eight minutes, ended up booking him in the end because of the pain that I polled based off of the questions that I was taught here and he was giving me nothing. He would answer one to three words, one sentence at most even on very open-ended questions,

[00:26:25] so it’s just very short, but just being curious and going after that, I was still able to book him and after that situation, that class, I kind of sat back and I was like, “Okay, where am I going?” I got another year and a half, two years of this where I’m going to work nine to five and then I’m going to go home and study for another two hours

[00:26:44] and I’ve got things I want to do after work. I want to hang out with the company, I want to go play softball. I want to do things and I said, “Well, what is memoryBlue going, or what is Liberty University and the school going to teach me that memoryBlue can’t teach me or hasn’t already taught me that I can’t instead of studying accounting for two hours, why don’t I go home and read a sales book for 20 minutes, get an extra hour, 40 in my day?”

[00:27:14] And that’s something I can actually use on a day-to-day basis, right, and so that was when I decided to drop out of college and put full-force effort into, to memoryBlue and sales. 

[00:27:25] Chris Corcoran: How’d that go with mom and dad?

[00:27:27] Aaron Aggen: They were all for it. They were all for their thing was, “You can’t be on our couch forever.”

[00:27:36] I was paying rent while I was living at home. My mom prepped me for the real world. She was like, “Hey, you know, we’re going to prep you, 25% of your base salary goes to rent with us. We’re going to prep you for it,” and she was like, “Hey, if you, from the center, you can always go back. It, see this through, put the full energy into it,”

[00:27:54] and it’s, having looked back and, you know, I always, I think I was the underdog, you know, a lot of people are like, “Oh, you don’t have a degree.” I’m like, “Yeah, you know, you don’t need one.” You want to be a doctor, psychologist, nurse, go to school. You can’t learn that on your own. You can’t learn that in a job.

[00:28:12] I wouldn’t want a surgeon to come out to me and say, “Hey, uh, never performed surgery before, but it seems cool.” You know, I want to know this in practice. Salespeople, you learn most on the job. 

[00:28:22] Chris Corcoran: You’re paying a 

[00:28:23] school, a college tens of thousands of dollars to teach you something that you don’t think is effective versus your employer is paying you tens of thousand dollars to teach you something that is effective.

[00:28:35] Aaron Aggen: Correct. 

[00:28:36] Chris Corcoran: So, interesting. 

[00:28:38] Marc Gonyea: It’s refreshing 

[00:28:40] For sure, right? Yeah. I mean, I would argue to you learn as much, you learned a ton 

[00:28:46] working full-time at Sports 

[00:28:48] Authority and going to community college for a little while. I mean, it changes your hope, your whole perspective on things. I think 

[00:28:53] having to work. 

[00:28:54] Aaron Aggen: Yeah.

[00:30:00] It’s, it’s been disciplined. It’s organizing your day and having to do this and it was something I had to learn, I mean, growing up AC, ADHD off the charts, I mean, I remember the doctor going, “I’ve never seen someone score this high before,” to my mom. ADHD off the charge, I could not sit still, my mom’s trying to do memory verses with me in middle school to learn

[00:30:23] full paragraph that I have to give in English class and I’m walking around the room, hiding in the closet while doing this, just couldn’t sit still and I think I had to go through that to understand, “Here’s work, here’s school. You gotta be disciplined, gotta lay out your day, schedule and block it off,”

[00:30:41] and I’ve, I’ve carried that with me through the rest of my career. 

[00:30:45] Chris Corcoran: Sure. Talk a little bit about, we talked about kind of what, when you started here as an SDR in the squad and there’s, there’s are just gonna be names to most of our listeners, but those were top-producing SDRs. They’ve all gone on to do some amazing things.

[00:30:58] How important was being on the sales floor physically with those folks within earshot and your development? 

[00:31:05] Aaron Aggen: I wouldn’t be where I am today if I wasn’t on the sales floor. Would not be where I am today. If I was, if I started remote would not be where I am today and I think that’s because I remember having calls where I got off the phone and I go, “I never heard that before. Kyle,

[00:31:23] what would you say? Kellen, what would you do?” Or, I’m listening to Kellen behind me because no one’s picking up for me, I’m listening to Kellen talk to this prospect and I know he’s got an email objection based off of what he’s saying and I’m like, “You know what? I’m going to try that,” right? And I think being on the floor and seeing the TVs with the leaderboards, I’m competitive.

[00:31:43] If you’re not competitive and in sales, God bless your heart because it’s difficult. I don’t want to be anywhere near that, but the near to the top of the leaderboard, right, if not number one. I’m gonna do whatever it takes to get there. Yeah, and so, I think being there, seeing that leaderboard, having access to it when you just turn around or it’s right in front of you and the energy of your neighbor booking a meeting makes you want to do it,

[00:32:07] and when you hear, I mean, I remember we had bells, we have a gong, we have all these different things that when each team booked a meeting, they got to ring the bell or squeeze the stuffed animal that said congratulations and that you just heard those going throughout the room and it’s like, “I have to be next.

[00:32:24] I can’t be the only one in here that doesn’t do this.” FOMO. It is. It’s FOMO. It’s, it’s, you know, I don’t want to be the person that goes home and it’s like, “Man, I was one of 10 out of 400 that didn’t do it today.” I want to be, I want to go home, go on, “I, I was, I was number one today. I did it.” But I think, you know, outside of the competition, the coaching part of it and just the comradery and being with people and getting that feedback on a live basis when it’s fresh is the best thing you can do.

[00:32:53] Marc Gonyea: Very good, and you went to the first TOPS, very first TOPS, first Costa Rica, December of 

[00:32:58] 2018, Costa Rica. Yeah. 

[00:33:00] Chris Corcoran: TOPS for our listeners is a, the president club, sure, we’re top, the top performers get to go to the Caribbean North. The first one we went to was in Costa 

[00:33:07] Rica. 

[00:33:09] Marc Gonyea: Well, one first 

[00:33:10] and only so far.

[00:33:10] Chris Corcoran: Yeah.

[00:33:11] 

[00:33:11] Marc Gonyea: We do that twice a year, so, all right, Aaron, you’re 

[00:33:14] doing your thing. I definitely remember you at top of the leader 

[00:33:16] boards, and was, “What’s this guy 

[00:33:18] kind of want to do next?” 

[00:33:19] So, w what did you think you want to do? Because you get exposed to 

[00:33:23] things when you’re in the role, right? Your clients, your clients’ reps, you see people 

[00:33:29] leaving, people going into new jobs, going out on Rising Stars, which is our program for outplacing people.

[00:33:36] I mean, 

[00:33:36] people being hired 

[00:33:37] by 

[00:33:37] clients, people 

[00:33:38] staying internal, I’ll stop repeating myself, 

[00:33:41] but 

[00:33:41] what did you think you would kind of sort of formulate in your mind where you wanted to go? 

[00:33:45] Aaron Aggen: Originally, I think, as many people at memoryBlue I wanted to get hired out. That was my original option. Three months into the job

[00:33:52] that’s what I wanted. I think it was month five or six I said I want to get to the internal sales team and work for Tommy. That’s what I wanted and I got an offer from my client in January. 

[00:34:03] Chris Corcoran: Before we move on to that, what, why, how did that shift, why did that shift from, “I want to in the industry,” to “I wanna go work on the internal sales team,”

[00:34:11] If we’re going to close for Tom Gasman? 

[00:34:13] Aaron Aggen: I follow my own path. I think those first couple of months I came in and you soak up everything as a sponge, not just in sales, but the path people take and everybody’s getting hired out, or everybody wants to go work for their client and so that’s the first thing you’re introduced to.

[00:34:28] Yep. Nobody thinks about Rising Stars on day one. It’s 15 months out, right? Nobody thinks about that. Nobody could think, 15 months of making a hundred phone calls a day feels like 15 years, so nobody thinks Rising Star. I would say, a lot of people here, they don’t think to go recruiting when they get here because they don’t know recruiting,

[00:34:45] they don’t know the aspects of the ins and outs and how recruiting is sales, and so I think you get here and it’s, you know, getting hired out, so the most popular option and that’s what everybody talks about, fastest way to get on with your career, your life, and so I think that’s what it was

[00:35:02] and then when I started evaluating where I was going in, in one-on-ones with Kyle Gross, just started realizing I want to close. I want to close and remember having conversations with Kyle saying, “You need to be prepped for it. You need to learn how to, you’ve learned one 10th of the sales cycle. You need to learn the other nine tenths of it.”

[00:35:23] And, I remember how important training was to me and seeing the type of training that Tommy gave to everybody was like, “I want to go work for this guy. He’s, he’s really good at what he does. He’s a self-starter and kind of created that division himself and led it to what it is today and help grow the company,”

[00:35:41] and that’s someone I want to learn from whether it was going to be a year or whatever happens or was going to be 10 years down the road, that’s where I wanted to go and I knew that if I went to him as an account executive, I would never have to worry about closing for the rest of my life because I would know what to do.

[00:35:59] So, I remember evaluating what type of training is my client going to offer me when I got hired out and it was product, it was industry, right, there was no sales training. And so, I remember Tommy talking, I almost, I think I met with him biweekly for five or six months, picking his brain on sales and SDR tactics and AEs and just staying on his radar to get to the team

[00:36:24] and realizing that if I’m going to get trained an account executive, I should learn the fundamentals of it. If you know how to sell, you can sell anything once you learn the product in the industry.

[00:36:34] Chris Corcoran: Right, right. Interesting. Okay. Very good. 

[00:36:36] Chris Corcoran: And how did that evolve though? Like, you ended up going to work for the client? 

[00:36:39] Aaron Aggen: So, it kind of just evolved over time of where I was at in my tenure, where the company was at and where promotions are able to be handed out. I remember, you know, there was one in California, in Austin at the time, there was one in Virginia and my tenure was up and I said, “Hey, you know, I got a good offer in front of me,

[00:36:55] let’s see where this takes me.” And so, kinda, kind of took that, took that offer from my client, moved on down to Dallas and started working for them and they’re, really founded HQ. 

[00:37:07] Chris Corcoran: Before we move on to that and then just looking back at your time as an SDR, what was the best resource that you found to help you get good at being an SDR, not provided by the company that you yourself found?

[00:37:22] Aaron Aggen: I think the best one that I found was podcasts and books. 

[00:37:29] Chris Corcoran: Wow. Is there a, is there a specific podcast or book that jumps out? 

[00:37:32] Aaron Aggen: I remember, yeah, I remember sitting every day when I list-built. I remember putting on Sales Gravy, Jebeline. I remember listening to him and what I liked about him is a lot of podcasts are 30, 45, 60 minutes, an hour and a half, but he would do five, six minutes segments on email objectionably or, “Hey, they hit you with budget right out the gate.”

[00:37:57] And, they’re just certain little tactics and things like that and that’s what I loved about him, was he, it was short, it was sweet at times, and so I remember listening to him and then I just got curious, pull up sales podcasts. I would Google, while I was sitting at the desk, google “top sales podcasts to listen to for SDRs”

[00:38:17] and we just throw one on. 

[00:38:19] Chris Corcoran: And you did that while you were doing your list-build?

[00:38:21] Aaron Aggen: Listen to that while I’m doing list building instead of music, you know, why not hone the craft a little bit better? I remember reading some books, I remember reading Fanatical Prospecting by Jeb Blount, you know, there’s a number of them out there,

[00:38:31] so it’s podcasts and books, finding what works for people, remembering Gap Selling when I became an AE by Keenan, Challenger Sale, Spin Selling, I remember we did a number of trainings on those and so I think it was just seeing what else is out there and trying it out and seeing what works. 

[00:38:50] Chris Corcoran: That’s great.

[00:38:51] Marc Gonyea: So, let’s talk about the journey 

[00:38:52] to working for the client because that, some of it, all this stuff is shaping what you’re doing now, we’ll get to what you’re doing now, but talk, talk about that process. 

[00:39:03] Aaron Aggen: Yeah. So, they originally gave me an offer in January of 2019. At that point I was still looking to get on time, it seems still under a year of my tenure here,

[00:39:13] so I ended up turning that down to kind of see everything through and then when things didn’t fall the road, the dominance and fall the right way, just in terms of where everything was going, started renegotiating communication with them regarding that, so they ended up giving me, they were bringing it internal,

[00:39:27] it kind of worked out perfectly that I knew VP of sales to bring in the SDR team internal, and so took the offer, moved from Virginia down to Dallas in September of 2019 and started kind of working there and providing them meetings now as a full-time employee. 

[00:39:44] Chris Corcoran: Let me make sure I get the timing

[00:39:45] right and there’s some things I want to talk about here. So, you originally received an offer from your client and how long were you an SDR?

[00:39:52] Aaron Aggen: I was an SDR for about six months. 

[00:39:54] Chris Corcoran: Six months, and you turned it down but continued to work with them? 

[00:39:58] Aaron Aggen: Correct. 

[00:39:58] Chris Corcoran: Okay, and then you eventually ended up getting an offer with that client after 

[00:40:02] how long as an SDR?

[00:40:03] Aaron Aggen: Uh, another 

[00:40:04] eight months. 

[00:40:05] Chris Corcoran: So, total, what was the total time 

[00:40:08] as an SDR? 

[00:40:08] Aaron Aggen: Total time as an SDR was 14 months. 

[00:40:10] Fourteen months. Okay, 

[00:40:11] Chris Corcoran: because a lot of times SDRs I feel when they get an offer from a client, they feel like it’s now or never and if I don’t take it, I’ll never get another offer again. 

[00:40:20] 

[00:40:20] Marc Gonyea: We say have to accept it, there’s no external pressure from the company.

[00:40:24] No, no, no. They just kinda, they, there’s something about 

[00:40:29] that, that, that process and we still 

[00:40:33] haven’t figured out why they feel like they have to take him. 

[00:40:37] Chris Corcoran: Yeah. So, what, what advice would you give to an SDR who, there, call it six months in, they get an offer from their client and they’re not a hundred percent convinced that that’s what they should do.

[00:40:48] What advice would you give to them? SDR. 

[00:40:50] Aaron Aggen: Really sit down and evaluate it and I think the biggest thing is, look at the value that you’ve provided your client. There’s a reason they gave you an offer in the first place. The clients aren’t going to give offers to SDRs that are not performing, they’re going to give them to the top performers because now you’re working for them,

[00:41:07] they have to pay you now, and so if you’ve provided value and you’re getting an offer, they still want you at the end of the day. So, unless you’re going to take something else and you’re just completely done with sales for some reason, they’re not going anywhere, right? They’re not going to go anywhere.

[00:41:26] They want you. They’re still going to want to work with you at the end of the day and evaluate things. What’s the training like? Ask the hard questions. I remember when I got hired out, there was no training in my company. We were an eight-person startup in the US, company who was based out of Israel. It was me, VP of sales, one other SDR who had been, who we called inside sales reps,

[00:41:50] he had been an ISR for the last 40 years, 40, 40 years, he was, he was very good at his craft, and then we had six enterprise account executives and they were all over the country. It was me, the VP of sales, our HR lady and the other ISR, four people in a space’s office. There was no training.

[00:42:11] They didn’t have time to, to provide company training. It was, learn on your own. There was no, “Hey, I got this objection. How do I handle it?” You’re stuck Googling it. So, really evaluate, what are your going for? What’s this going to provide? Anytime an SDR becomes an SDR, personally, I think they reset their timeline.

[00:42:32] Marc Gonyea: The timeline. Talk, talk about what you mean by that. 

[00:42:34] Aaron Aggen: So, there’s a statistic, a Trish Bertuzzi, you talked about in the Sales Development Playbook, where SDRs that get promoted to the account executive after 0 to 6 months fail, it was 63% of the time and somewhere around that number, give or take.

[00:42:49] If you get promoted between 7 and 14 months, you fail, like, 40% of the time. If you get promoted after 15 months, you fail as an AE 3% of the time, right? And companies know this. That’s who I talked to on the daily now on the direct hire team and these companies understand this, and so when they bring people in, you reset your timeline, you go to this company, you reset your timeline to now a year to 18 months as an SDR at that company.

[00:43:16] Well, if you’ve been an SDR for 11 months and now you’re going to go there at a brand-new company, you’ve reset your timeline. So, evaluate everything, evaluate the options that are ahead of you. I remember when I got hired out, I didn’t ask what are the growth options. It was an SDR and enterprise IE. I shouldn’t be an enterprise AE fresh off 15 months of cold-calling, slinging to million-dollar deals to Deloitte and Raphael.

[00:43:44] I’m like, “That’s not what I should be doing. I, I would fail.” So, what are the growth paths? What are the training that comes with each growth path that’s provided for you? I think those are the things that people really need to look at, is, what’s the culture like? Remember those cultures, not everywhere, you know, see what the culture is like. I was on an island, it wasn’t their fault,

[00:44:06] it’s just where they were at the company, we were an eight-person startup in the US, you know, so evaluate all those questions that you love about memoryBlue, the training, the growth options, the culture, the professionalism, the exposure to multiple environments and companies, really evaluate those

[00:44:23] and you don’t have to take the first option. I mean, memoryBlue has shown time over time, you have multiple options. It’s not, you don’t take this offer while you’re out of the company. No, the company is going to keep you, we’re going to keep you here for as long as you want. It provides you with the resources to be successful.

[00:44:41] Chris Corcoran: Very good. 

[00:44:41] Marc Gonyea: Very good. So, you, you went to the client, how to 

[00:44:47] take us from the journey from there to kind of where we’re now, so I want to spend some time talking about what you’re doing now. 

[00:44:52] Aaron Aggen: Yeah. So, kind of journey from there. Did that for about seven months, was working with them, running what we called Sockathons,

[00:45:00] we were, it was a cybersecurity training platform and so we would go to schools or we would host companies to perform scenario test, provide a winner whoever cybersecurity team was the best, it was a training solution, so it was doing that, was setting up meetings, going to see clients in the office, communicate with them.

[00:45:19] So, while I was a startup, I got exposure to what it was like to be an account executive and a VP of sales from the hands-on floor, so that was a great aspect. That opened my eyes up to a lot. I really got to see what it took to soul to those environments and when people say it’s a 12 to 18-month sales process and you’re like, why does it take that long?

[00:45:37] I now understand based off of my time there. And so, did that for about seven months and then unfortunately COVID hit and was one of those unfortunate people that got laid off because of COVID. Remember that being April 1st. Company was fantastic, gave me a heads-up, let me stay on for another two weeks to solely interview, not even work for them, was fortunate enough to land a job as an account executive, somehow landed a promotion in that timeframe at a company called RealPage down in Dallas.

[00:46:09] I remember the moment the phone call came in, yeah, so worked there as account executive.

[00:46:14] Chris Corcoran: What were you selling?

[00:46:15] Aaron Aggen: Property management software. So, we had about 97 different solutions, very complicated. It’s, they’re essentially a VAR, with just the solutions that they have and how they work with everything,

[00:46:26] but with 97 different solutions that we could sell, and so it was working in their SMB department. 

[00:46:32] Chris Corcoran: Okay. And then, you’re there and then, what happened there? 

[00:46:36] Aaron Aggen: Yeah, I 

[00:46:36] worked there for a year, found success there and really enjoyed the remote work-life balance. Obviously with COVID we were remote. They have a big whole office

[00:46:46] that’s like three football lengths in, in downtown or up in Plano, in Dallas area and we were fully remote. Didn’t have to go into the office. I started work in the morning. I was able to do what I needed to do in the mornings. Didn’t have to rush and sit in 45 minutes of traffic, at five o’clock, I was off at five o’clock,

[00:47:07] didn’t have to get home at six, was able to kind of enjoy myself and felt that, that work-life balance was, was special, but I felt that it was earned at that point because I’d gone through the SDR and I don’t think the SDR chair can efficiently be done remote, I think it needs to be done in office.

[00:47:23] There’s an AE, you’re kind of on an island yourself anyways, so it can be done remote and I just, I truly enjoyed the remote aspect of it and we were getting ready to go back into the office full-time and I absolutely loved them and didn’t really have intentions of leaving, But I remember just kind of thinking, like, maybe, maybe I could find a huge promotion, pay raise, fully remote that I can’t turn down,

[00:47:47] but if anything is just that equal lateral move, I’m not going to take it. Messaged Tommy Aspen, asked him, you know, I had no idea what he was doing at the time, I thought he was still running the sales team and just said, “Hey, do you got 30 minutes to connect sometime in the next week, want to see if you know of any companies that potentially were hiring remotely,” and hit me up, immediately wrote back and said, “Yeah, let’s chat.”

[00:48:11] So, we spoke on Friday, talked to him at about 10 in the morning with the intention of showing me some companies, ’cause he was now running the Direct Hire program, so introduced me to everything and he said, “Before I, you know, I say all of this, what we’re doing and how it’s working to say, what’d you think about, you know, potentially coming back here?”

[00:48:28] And, my eyes lit off when he said that. I didn’t even message him to go back to work for him, it was just, I knew the connections that he had and everything, and so, we got to conversing about that and remember, remember him, said he’ll call me back, you know, we have a 45-minute conversation, call me back at about two o’clock and he was like, “Hey, if you want it it’s yours.”

[00:48:49] Aaron Aggen: I was like, “I, I’ll accept, but can I have the weekend to think about it real quick?” So, just remember taking the weekend, thinking about it thought long and hard because I loved my time at RealPage and yet my manager there, she’s absolutely fantastic, she kind of molded me into who I am today, and, you know, having looked back, came back to the company and enjoyed it.

[00:49:10] Marc Gonyea: When you came back, you crushed it.

[00:49:13] Aaron Aggen: Came back and I don’t think it was accident. I think it was the way I went about that first month. I remember as my time as an SDR, I reached out to everybody and anybody at memoryBlue. When I went to RealPage, I had never done a full-cycle sales myself, so I was reaching out,

[00:49:31] I looked at the leaderboard and saw who were the top 10 in every department and I messaged every single one of them, “Hey, can I sit on a demo of yours? Can I have 30 minutes of your time to talk to you, pick your brain?” And I think I spoke to, like, 150 people within the first two weeks just learning, you know, “What works for you?

[00:49:47] What does, and what are tips, advice? What would you tell yourself when you first started that you know now?” And, I think that made me successful there and first thing I did when I came back to memoryBlue was, I threw 30 minutes on every recruiter’s calendar twice a week for the first two weeks

[00:50:05] and just talk to them about what worked, what didn’t work, what were you seeing? I never, I never recruited before, right? They were the, they were the professionals. They were the experts. I was the newbie, the rookie, and so I had to learn. I just remember throwing time on everybody’s calendars and really learning and picking their brains,

[00:50:23] diving into everything and then kind of taking all that and crafting it and making it my own and keeping it as sales versus truly being a recruiter. 

[00:50:33] Chris Corcoran: All the answers are on the test. They’re right out there for you. You just got to go and get it.

[00:50:38] Aaron Aggen: This isn’t college where you got to study the tests and, or, you know, you’re sitting there trying to take the test,

[00:50:43] remember it, it’s it’s all right there, it’s with your people and, you know, the only thing I love about memoryBlue and I loved about RealPage is everybody wanted everybody to succeed. Sure. There’s not a single person in here that doesn’t want to see you succeed. They want to see you at number one. They might be frustrated and they’re going to come for that position,

[00:51:00] right, but they still want to see you succeed and I think that goes a long way to building a company that’s got a lot of high performers is, I can message anybody in the company say, “Hey, you got 10 minutes, pick your brain about something? Answer’s yes. It might take a little while to get on the calendar, but

[00:51:17] the answer is still yes. 

[00:51:19] Chris Corcoran: So, it’d be helpful for the listeners, for you to explain a little bit about what you do when you say recruiting, because that means different things. Absolutely. When you were a college student, if you said recruiter, you would, would you, would you coupling wouldn’t think the job would be what you’re doing?

[00:51:33] Aaron Aggen: Correct. 

[00:51:34] Chris Corcoran: To explain to the listeners. 

[00:51:35] Aaron Aggen: When I came in, my initial thought of recruiting was when you apply for a job on LinkedIn, Indeed, Last Door, wherever the company’s website, someone calls you and says, “Hey, we’d like to interview you, which counter looked like tomorrow to come in.” You go in, they don’t do anything for you.

[00:51:52] You go in and they call you afterwards to either say, “Hey, you’re going on to the next rounds,” or, “Hey, we’re not moving or do you never hear from them again?” And that was my viewpoint of recruiting was more so just an admin to schedule time and get people through process. Quickly realize that recruiting is an extension of sales, multiple aspects of sales.

[00:52:19] so now, you know, I think the easiest term to kind of put it as we’re, we’re a little bit of head hunters, we get the company what they’re looking for, and I’m going to go out, I’m going to cold call the account executives or the SDRs at these companies that you’re wanting to hire. I’m going to message them on LinkedIn, a set of time to talk with them.

[00:52:37] Aaron Aggen: I’m going to interview them first, talk with them, get their highlights or statistics, their achievements what they’re looking for. And then get it over to the clients. And I think a lot of people say, “Well, recruiting just ends there.” No, I gotta communicate with that candidate on a daily basis. “How are you feeling? Where else are you interviewing?

[00:52:56] What do you know about the company? I got to prep you, you know, make sure your environment is professional behind you. Be well dressed. Don’t take the interview from your bed.” 

[00:53:05] Chris Corcoran: And you tell people that?

[00:53:07] Aaron Aggen: You’d be shocked at the things we, uh, we have to tell people. And so, it’s… 

[00:53:13] Marc Gonyea: From your bed. 

[00:53:17] Aaron Aggen: Oh, the, the feedback I get from a lot of clients at times, is it half the time I go, I don’t think I ever would have to tell somebody don’t do this and it never shocks me anymore.

[00:53:31] You know, I’m prepping them. If they have a role-play coming up. If they’ve got an email exercise, helping them with that and making sure they’re confident going to being a coach more than anything and making this person feel like I truly care about them and I want what’s best for them. No matter what that is, I want them to know.

[00:53:48] Aaron Aggen: I feel it’s best for them. And so, you’ve got to always be selling the client. Every time they talk to the client, you got to get back on the phone with them and make sure the person they spoke with wasn’t having a bad day and made the culture look horrible and always just be selling the client to them, to where, “Hey, if they’re interviewing at five places, they’re still gonna sign with yours because all the other recruiters are just scheduling them and letting them go off on their own.

[00:54:13] But you’re, you’re feeding into it. You’re providing them the best, best response or the best service you possibly can.” 

[00:54:22] Chris Corcoran: So just, just for clarification, you’re not at a internal talent acquisition recruiter that would say recruit SDRs to come to work for memoryBlue. What you do is you work with memoryBlue clients, these software companies, you find out what 

[00:54:35] talent they need, and then you scalp the marketplace, 

[00:54:37] identify it, attract it, qualify, deliver it. Am I getting that right?

[00:54:41] Aaron Aggen: That’s exactly right? Yeah. I don’t. Don’t recruit internally for Marine Blue. That’s a separate division of us. So, I focus strictly on some clients that are using us on the SDS side. and then some that are just building out a team of a hundred SDRs. They say, here’s what we’re looking for.

[00:54:58] Here’s the profile we want. I can go out, find these people, talk to them, kind of as the first interview line, to make sure this person’s qualified for a sales job. They understand how to hold a conversation and then start putting them through process. 

[00:55:13] Chris Corcoran: What’s the best part of that role? 

[00:55:16] Aaron Aggen: Best part hands down is when you tell somebody they’re getting an offer.

[00:55:20] I, I remember there are moments when I’ve told people they’re getting an offer and you can almost just hear them break down like, “This is a life-changing moment. I’ve been out of a job or I’m getting out of a very toxic workplace.” It makes you want to get the next one. Right. And it makes you realize you’re making a difference in someone’s life.

[00:55:41] And that’s what I love about recruiting is I’ve got the ability to change lives. 

[00:55:45] Chris Corcoran: Yes. 

[00:55:46] Aaron Aggen: And that, that gets me up every single morning, knowing I could change one person’s life every single day, by getting them their dream job that they would never have if I didn’t cold call them or send them a LinkedIn message.

[00:56:00] Marc Gonyea: Maybe some people don’t see the light that they’re not familiar with the space for the technology, or they may not think it’s a good potential opportunity. 

[00:56:08] You’ve got to kind of educate them on that and juxtapose 

[00:56:11] Marc Gonyea: what they’re doing now, where they’re going to go. And I mean, it’s a very personal type of sale.

[00:56:17] You’re you’re, you’re directing people, you’re guiding 

[00:56:19] Marc Gonyea: people into where they’re going to spend most of their waking hours, maybe not. They were promoted. 

[00:56:25] Aaron Aggen: Third of their life.

[00:56:28] Marc Gonyea: Third of their life. And how happy people are at work dictate how happy they are at home. So, it’s a valuable, I want to say a service it’s a valuable, valuable offering 

[00:56:40] Marc Gonyea: that you guys are fulfilling in this space.

[00:56:44] Marc Gonyea: And the beautiful thing about it is it takes a ton of a ton of hard work. 

[00:56:46] Aaron Aggen: To very taxing. I mean there, there are days where I’m so work and it’s seven o’clock and it’s, but it’s, it’s worth it. At the end of the day. It doesn’t feel like work. It feels like something I enjoy. I mean, I remember I was on PTO one day on a golf course with some friends and Canada calls me.

[00:57:05] Marc Gonyea: Yup. 

[00:57:06] Aaron Aggen: I remember talking to him for the next two holes, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s something that just constantly is going, and understanding where people are in life, what strengths they have to really be able to coach them up because not only am I just going to put you through processing, I must send you off to the walls.

[00:57:23] I’m going to coach you up. I’m going to give you feedback, coaching. ‘Cause I get feedback from the clients and if the candidate gets feedback to me and I give it to the candidate and the next interview, they have the same feedback. It tells me that you didn’t take the coaching. They didn’t take the feedback.

[00:57:40] And that’s a red flag to clients is this candidate is not coachable when he was coached up on things. But it also gives me ammunition to go and say, “Hey, this isn’t over. We’re going to try again. I got other places to put you. Let’s work on this. Let’s get you coached up. And just, I mean, Schumann nature, but just being told thanks.

[00:58:00] Chris Corcoran: What’s the biggest thing you’ve learned in the role? 

[00:58:05] Aaron Aggen: Biggest thing I’ve learned in the role probably would be to really understand where people are in life. Okay. So, everybody’s situation is different. and I think understanding where they are in life, but not judging a book by its cover. And we look at a resume and we see that they’ve had four jobs in five years and you’re like, job hoppy.

[00:58:25] Nope. I’m out. Don’t even want to have a conversation and he’s going to leave me in six months. When we really dive into it, there, there are people at the end of the day, and yeah, there are those people that just, they get hit up on LinkedIn and they’re gone. But then there are other people that got affected by certain things.

[00:58:40] I think we learned three years ago we don’t know what tomorrow holds and times change. And so, I think not judging a book by its cover, on the people, but also the client side, you know, looking at reviews online and what people have said is great and all you, you should do that, but take it with a grain of salt if, if you’re judging them because they have a high rating or low rating that’s judging the company by their cover. And I think that’s just kind of taken it as like, you know, got some people that aren’t the greatest Glassdoor reviews or they’re fantastic reviews and it’s not always true, at the end of the day. And so I think that it’s just, don’t judge a book by its cover have an understanding, have a conversation and come in with an open mind.

[00:59:25] Marc Gonyea: What what’s, what’s it like working with the hiring managers or the clients

[00:59:29] Aaron Aggen: It’s eye opening. You really get to see what goes into their process and understand. One thing I quickly learned was I could interview the exact same way with both of you. And one of you could leave going, “I will never hire this person,” and the other person’s going to leave going,

[00:59:48] “If we don’t get an offer letter to him in 30 seconds, like we, we failed.” And I think it’s really understanding who they are, what they look for, because, you know, it is why memoryBlue does a volume, you interview with multiple people. You’re not just interviewing with one person. And I think working with clients is it’s, it’s become a, sometimes a coaching moment to them.

[01:00:12] I remember this when I was at RealPage, my manager told me, he said, “You’re the professional in this industry. You’re the one who sees what’s happening day in and day out, whereas your clients don’t necessarily. Clients only have one viewpoint and it’s their viewpoint.” Well, I have 60 viewpoints of 60 companies I’m working with, “Hey, this company over here has been told 97 times, that’s the best interview process.

[01:00:39] Aaron Aggen: Why don’t we emulate that?” Or, “This company has been told that this interview process is not good, but let’s not emulate that.” And so, I think it’s interesting, but also I learned a lot from these hiring managers. I’ve got some people who have been in recruiting for 10, 20 years and I’ll, I’ll call them and I’ll say, “Hey, I got a candidate like this.

[01:01:00] Like, what would you do in this situation? Are there questions that I’m not asking that you would ask?” It is building a relationship and building trust that it’s, it’s, it’s not just me trying to play someone to take your money and say, “I want to give you the best person possible. What do you need from me?”

[01:01:14] You know, I wanna learn, I want to get better and hone my craft. And so, it’s, you know, they’re the ones that are hiring every single day. You know, doing, they’re doing the interviews, I’m just bringing the candidates. I see what’s working in the market. They’re the ones still interviewing. 

[01:01:33] Marc Gonyea: So, you’ve been back for, how long you’ve been back with us working in direct hire 

[01:01:33] Aaron Aggen: 11 months. 

[01:01:34] Marc Gonyea: 11 months. Where do you see it going? Like, what do you think you want to do? 

[01:01:40] Aaron Aggen: I came back for a reason. I didn’t come back to be here for another one or two years and then leave again and then come back three years later, I came back with the vision that Tommy sold me on of where we’re growing this team.

[01:01:53] And when I got brought on, I think we had seven or eight recruiters. Now we’ve got 20 plus, 24, I think it is 25. I want to see this team hit 50. We’ll see it at 60. I want to see it grow. I think it’s an extension of what we’re doing upstairs and he can work in conjunction, and really want to see, see it grow to become something that starts to taken over the industry.

[01:02:15] Just like we did on the sales development side. Why don’t we take over the game on the recruiting side of things? 

[01:02:24] Marc Gonyea: Why not? 

[01:02:25] Chris Corcoran: Let’s do it? 

[01:02:27] Marc Gonyea: Why not us? And what, what does that mean for you personally? What does I think that means in terms of your professional development?

[01:02:30] Aaron Aggen: I mean that outside of just having that built on a resume, which I think a lot of people are like, “Oh, well, it’s cool to have on the resume.”

[01:02:38] I think it provides a lot of intangibles, building a program from 8 to 20 and 20 to 50. And you guys did it back in the early days of growing a company and you have a lot of change. You almost have more change when it’s a lower company in terms of employees than when it’s a larger company, you’ve got a lot of standards and everything set at this point, the ability to adapt on the fly, be flexible, knowing that I could come in today, something could change and then tomorrow it changes again.

[01:03:08] And just really learning and seeing what growth takes. I don’t think people get to experience growth like this a lot, or the ability for it. So just being able to be kind of on the ground floor, be a catalyst for it is something I look forward to.

[01:03:19] Marc Gonyea: And you think you’re staying as individual contributor; would you like to become a manager?

[01:03:25] Aaron Aggen: I go back and forth. There are days I’m like, I will stay in individual contributors, the rest of my life. I don’t want to put my quota, so to speak, in other people’s hands. And then I go, “You know what? I want to be a manager. I want to help people see the success that was given to me by former managers and be that coach and that mentor.”

[01:03:44] So I go back and forth, you know, you ask me tomorrow, it might be manager. Right now, it is individual contributor. But really, it just goes back to, you know, I think that comes down to the ability to adapt and change. Where’s the program headed? They need me to step in as a manager. All right, let’s have that conversation.

[01:03:59] Aaron Aggen: Let’s make it happen. And just kind of being willing to do what’s needed for best of the department and helping it to grow to where we want it to and know it can grow to. 

[01:04:10] Chris Corcoran: Yeah, one of the question for our listeners, many of who have never worked with a recruiter before. So, what advice would you give to a candidate about how to best work with a recruiter so that they get the maximum 

[01:04:24] return on that experience?

[01:04:26] Aaron Aggen: Yeah, I think working with a recruiter is after being a recruiter is the only way to go. I remember when I was critiquing resumes at the career center at Liberty, we were taught you will apply online and if your keywords don’t match up with the keywords that are just in the computer search, you’re automatically getting an email back.

[01:04:46] Not to mention on average hiring managers and recruiters look at a resume for an average of four to six seconds. And there also was another statistic where if a hiring manager has a resume of our stack of a hundred resumes and he’s collecting 25, if you’re on the bottom, sorry. As soon as he hits 25, that he likes all the other ones get pushed off to the side.

[01:05:10] And so I think if, if you’re gonna apply online, make sure you look at the keywords and the job descriptions and put those into your resume, but more so work with the recruiter. You cut out that first step. I have direct communication with clients where I can just hand them your resume and say, “Hey, you have to interview this person.

[01:05:29] Aaron Aggen: He’s amazing.” They would never know that because your keywords didn’t match up with their keywords. And I think that’s one thing has always worked with it. But I think the biggest thing is just be open and honest. w we’re not here to screw you over. I work for you for free and only candidates realize that at the end of the day is I’m working with you for free.

[01:05:49] If I don’t place you, I don’t get paid. So I’m going to do whatever I can to place you. And if I don’t know where you’re at in the interview process, if I don’t know something that you’re trying to hide ‘cause then it’s probably going to get brought out in the interview process and I didn’t get ahead of it,

[01:06:06] it looks bad. And then you, you know, say something to me like, “Well, you should push back on them while I can’t.” You know, so just being honest and upfront, not trying to hide anything, we’ve got ways to make you look good. We know what they’re looking for. We’re going to ask you those questions. If a company doesn’t care about your quota, I’m not going to ask you about your quota.

[01:06:29] But if a company cares about your, who you are as person, I’m going to dig into who you are, what have you done? What’s major decisions and things like that to better frame you. And keeping up with things that aren’t true is very difficult over the course of four to five conversations. I relay something to you guys.

[01:06:49] You interview him. He says the same thing to you, but to you, he says something different. We all now get together. The points, don’t line up, red flag, he’s lying in some form or fashion. We’re going to knock from process. And so, I think it’s just, it’s just being honest. There’s nobody I can’t work with.

[01:07:05] I can work with anybody regardless of who you are, regardless of which I resume or what’s happened in life. I can work with you. I can find you something, just be honest. 

[01:07:18] Marc Gonyea: Very good. I would like to work with you not right now, but you know, in a past life, I mean, Aaron, we’re thrilled and fortunate to have you return.

[01:07:24] I spent some time with you in Chicago at the AI ISP conference and you, stored it. And what I 

[01:07:31] Marc Gonyea: mean by that, like you represented yourself in the firm very professionally. You’re out there shaking and baking and talking to people and you were like paying shit. But, but, but it was, it was good to see the in, in a great way.

[01:07:44] So I think you’re repping the company and what you’re doing and you’re in pinning me as a professional, as far as I know, you know, it’s, it’s wonderful. And your journey’s fascinating and interesting and inspiring. 

[01:07:58] Aaron Aggen: That’s been a journey. I mean, I feel like I own memoryBlue a lot. It was one out of 70 companies that took a chance on a 25-year-old college dropout.

[01:08:08] You know, so I’m, I’m here. I’m repaying my dues, but getting repaid at the same time and you know, wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. 

[01:08:20] Chris Corcoran: So, very good. We wouldn’t want you anywhere else. 

[01:08:20] Marc Gonyea: There you go. 

[01:08:21] Chris Corcoran: So, very good. Thanks Aaron. We appreciate all the wisdom.

[01:08:23] Aaron Aggen: I appreciate you guys having me. 

[01:08:25] Chris Corcoran: Thanks.