Carolyn Betts:

I think you either have the DNA to be the top person and you care about that, or you don't. 

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Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro):

You just rocked a lot of people's minds and worlds. They can be taught! They can be, they can, they can grow them. 

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Pouyan Salehi:

I didn't want to open that door, but I'm glad. That's why we have Ross here. 

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Ross:

We can turn B players into A players. 

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*Beyond Quota Intro* 

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Pouyan:

We're back after a little break. I'm Pouyan, the CEO and Co-Founder at Scratchpad here with my... I don't know what word to use. I'll use amazing long-missed co-host here, Ross. 

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Ross:

Generous but thank you. The guy known as Corp Bro to some. 

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Pouyan:

Yeah I'm really excited for today's session to be with Carolyn. There is so much that I think we can learn from you, but also some interesting stories I know that you have to share. I think it's just a matter of which ones we can get. Yeah. I would love an intro from you. 

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Carolyn:

Well, I'm Carolyn Betts, Founder and CEO of Betts. And yeah, I founded the company back in - how many times can I say Betts on this intro.

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Pouyan:

We'll have a counter. 

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Carolyn:

No, I founded the company back at the end of '09. So we've been around quite some time. I'm a Bay Area Native and have tons of love for sales and recruiting in this industry in general. So I appreciate you guys having me and I'm excited to be here. 

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Ross:

I personally don't know much about your life pre-Betts recruiting so I would love to hear where the sales come up was? How did you get started? Was it that you had no hard-skills like every other salesperson who found their way there? What mistakes were made? 

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Carolyn:

It's funny, right? Because when I think about my skills growing up like sales was one of them. Campfire candy out the gate with my wagon going door to door always won. And I went to college and did some bartending jobs, worked in retail, etc. My first job, I sold Yellow Page ads not online like Google or Yelp or anything like that. No, no. In the book. Mind you it was also a 100% commission. Like that wasn't bad enough it was all commission. So, but I did really well. 

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Ross:

Well, what did you sell? Are you trying to get people to put their number, their contact in it?

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Carolyn:

To advertise. Like, you know, how people - 

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Ross:

Oh, okay. Just advertising. Print advertising is what you're selling. Got it. Got it. 

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Carolyn:

Print advertising in the Yellow Pages specifically. Long story short, I fell into recruiting. I saw an ad on Craigslist and it said 100K with all kinds of pluses after it, like high-base. And I was like, ooo base! That sounds good. I had no idea what the job was or what I was going to be selling. Mail in in my resume. They called me, went in for an interview, and it was a recruiting company. It was pretty much like a 2 to 3 interview process, but generally 2 in person. So I worked there for four years. Also top performer pretty much the entire time I was there. 

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Pouyan:

What do you see as the equivalent of the Yellow Pages today? That that entry point. 

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Ross:

Yelp. 

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Pouyan:

I knew Ross was going to say that I should've muted him out. But, no is it like is it your traditional SDR role? Because I think the way you described it is you just had to figure it out. 

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Ross:

Just grinded. 

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Pouyan:

It's not like there was some internal go-to-market-operations-SDR-lead team that's setting all the stuff up for you and setting guardrails. Does that still exist? Does it not? I'm just curious to hear your thoughts on the equivalent today. If if there is even is one. 

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Carolyn:

I'd say it's a couple things like let's just stick with tech. So like Ross was saying, Yelp, OpenTable, Toast, Union. P.O.S. A lot of these where you're selling to small business at a low account value, but you're closing deals right away. That would probably be the closest. 

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Pouyan:

You have an interesting story because you were always the top performer, but you're also seeing a lot of salespeople come in and go places through Betts. I'm just curious to hear your thoughts on like what are you seeing is making folks like the top performers today? 

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Carolyn:

I think you either have the DNA to be the top person and you care about that or you don't. And there's a lot of people that are perfectly happy, like being in the middle and that's okay. Like those people are really great too, but the people that want to be at the top aren't going to do anything to stop them from being there. 

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Pouyan:

How do you feel about - 

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Ross:

You just rocked a lot of people's minds and worlds. They can be taught! They can be - we can grow them! 

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Pouyan:

I didn't want to open that door, but that's why we have Ross here to do that. 

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Ross:

We can turn B players into A players! 

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Pouyan:

I know there are some folks that are very vocal about no commission for sales and there are other folks that have been 100% commission like you and have crushed it. What were what are your thoughts on it? 

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Carolyn:

I am a firm believer in this market. If you are on 100% commission, that is super weird. And you should run the other way. Like nobody does that. And we coach our clients and there is a minimum base that will even make you competitive to get talent. And I believe that in terms of top and mid-level talent, you know, the top 50% of the sales org that makes they say 80, 20, whatever these things. But I don't believe in this no commission. I don't get that. For me it makes zero sense and I'd love to sit down with somebody who really believes in it and we can duke it out. But I think that if people are not incentivized to sell more, they are going to hit their quota, and that's it. Which means they're probably going to miss their quota a lot of the time, because if you're only aiming to hit this goal and something falls through, you know, like I always, like love it or love it. I find it very fascinating when a deal falls through and they don't hit their quota, "but if I close that deal, I wouldv'e hit it!" It's like, well, like if you had five others that were that far along, you would have exceeded it, right? So we all have to think about how that works. So I'm a firm believer in commission and uncapped plans and I'm also a believer in evaluating and reiterating on plans. And people hate reiterations of comp plans. They generally end up being in the better favor of the company to the employee when people re-do them. That's not how we've done it at Betts. We actually continue to make our plans better and better and better for our employees as much as possible to really motivate them. Because what we've seen is a huge increase in the efficiency of our employees and we have not really changed our comp plans because we want to retain top talent and we want to be competitive in a highly competitive field. 

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Ross:

How and why did you start Betts Recruiting? Like what triggered you to say, okay, I can do this on my own and build this into a multimillion dollar business? 

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Carolyn:

So I mentioned I love my job on the Andiamo! - was the name of the company. Loved the person I worked for. We obviously butted heads a little bit, but we were making tons of money together and it was so fun. And because I love recruiting so much at Andiamo! and I'd been so successful, I was like, You know what? I should just start my own thing. 

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Ross:

Had you basically built up a repository of relationships and was like, okay, I can go start my own recruiting thing. I've helped so many people get placed here, etc. Like recruiting to me is just entirely a relationship game, as most of sales is, but perhaps even more so in recruiting than SAAS or something like that. Like what was day one? 

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Carolyn:

The answer was no, because I was adamant that when I started Betts, I was not going to go to Andiamo! and take all their customers and bring them over. Salesforce was in my patch at the time and so they were not a customer. I was trying to get in there. Never did. The guy in charge, his sister in law or some relative worked at Monster. So he had family ties to Monster. I can't believe I still remember that this far down the road, but it was Dreamforce. So I got a pass to Dreamforce because they were in my patch and I went, I walked into the room, I went to every single booth over the three days of that and I walked up to everyone. I said, What do you guys do? Tell me, what do you do? I work at CareerBuilder right now, but I'm starting my own recruitment company focused on recruiting salespeople for growth stage companies. I walked out of that place with a stack this high of business cards, and I would actually cross off CareerBuilder. I didn't have business cards yet, so I crossed it off and I would write like - do you know how many times I wrote - Carolyn@BettsRecruiting.com like it's really long!  

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Ross:

Yeah. 

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Carolyn:

And so I did that and then passed them all out and followed up with everybody. And I had tons of clients pretty much out the gate. 

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Ross:

Well, how did you get the salespeople, though? Because, I mean, everybody's trying to hire salespeople. So finding that side of the market is is not too difficult. Even, you know, especially today, there's like 700,000 open sales jobs. But how did you get the salespeople?

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Pouyan:

 And you brought up a really interesting point I want to make sure we come back to that. Did you have any salespeople lined up before this or was this your first entry point? 

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Carolyn:

So at on the Andiamo! I did do sales recruiting. So we did sales and we did admin and we did finance. And so admin and finance always had bigger fees, but sales had more volume. And I liked dealing with the sales leaders far more than whoever you sent the admin or finance people too. And I was never really an account manager and I didn't really bring on any business at Andiamo! so what I had, the relationships I had, which really I owned because I found in whatever market we can get into, but basically about because I had used so much of my own network back then that it made the most sense. 

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Pouyan:

The story you just shared though, is why I think folks who have a sales background or are doing sales now can actually be such great founders and entrepreneurs. Because what I heard you just say is, listen, I went out there and I generated the demand before going in and building up all this other infrastructure. And I guess in the software world, it's the equivalent of you did sales before you actually built the product. Whereas a lot of folks will start and say, right, I'm going to spend all this time and years building product. And I've said this before on other episodes, but I think it's so powerful if you can actually go out there and prospect. Maybe you can't actually close the deal, but can you get anyone that cares? Can you get anyone that leans in, is interested? And you learn so much about that and I'm sure you probably did too. And, and following up with them, like what's not working with your current sales recruiting. But back to Ross's question, which I derailed a little bit ago, how did you get the salespeople? 

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Carolyn:

My ex-fiance worked at - through my CareerBuilder connections he was looking for a new job and I went around the floor and said, Hey, anyone’s clients hiring? Back when I worked there and a guy from LinkedIn had called into the CareerBuilder Salesforce. LinkedIn, this is so funny. You're going to die. I was like, LinkedIn that's going to be a good company. And I got the guy's number like they didn't even have salespeople yet. Nobody even knew -  it was like just a free tool. So I wrote down his number and I called my ex was like, Hey, LinkedIn's hiring. I think it's going to be good company. You should go work there. So we got the job. So I got a friends and family discount on LinkedIn Recruiter right when it came out. People didn't even really know that LinkedIn recruiter existed and it was not nearly as - like it was so quiet. People weren't getting hit up all the time and I was one of the first people using it. And so I would I mean, I wrote, I messaged everyone at Salesforce. Salesforce, good company. My response rate was so high because back then people - so I used LinkedIn, I used my network. I posted, you know, hey, starting recruiting company. I also exported all my contacts from LinkedIn, put it into email, you used to be able to do that. 

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Ross:

So it was just basically grind. It sounds like you just found, I mean, you were an early adopter of something that turned out to be super useful. And as much as I like to shit on LinkedIn and I do like to shit on LinkedIn. It was a very useful tool there. So was it that one year mark when that guy came back where that was your I've made it moment? Or was there a point where you were like, Wow, I need to hire people? Like one of the things I struggle with personally, especially in like my own business, is relinquishing and trusting other people to handle stuff. How and when did you decide, Hey, I need a team, I need to build a whole company here. I'm going to do stuff. 

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Carolyn:

It's such a great comment, Ross, because like your Corporate Bro, right? And so you've branded yourself, you know, and it was hard. And that was another piece of advice that that same guy gave me. He's like, Don't name your company Betts. I should've listened to that one for sure by the way. Even my introduction [on this episode], I'm like Oh my God, okay. But it's too late, too late now. But we've scaled. A lot of people don't even realize that I'm a person anymore, which is great. I love it when people don't know that because the company really become something so much bigger than me, which is what you want in a scalable situation. But yeah, no. I mean, I have more business than I can handle, so nothing's standing out right now in terms of an I made it moment. 

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Pouyan:

You know, another interesting point, though, that that you brought up, Carolyn, or I guess just in in what you did is like, listen, even as you had your business, you prospected. And it just reminded me of a lot of founders that have never done sales, like they almost have to back into learning how to be an SDR at some point. And how cool is it for the folks that get to start out as that in their career and learn like how to actually prospect, how to position something, how to find somebody's info, how to hunt down, how to message just to get a response. Because that's something that honestly, I'm - I've [started] a few companies - that I'm still doing and it's such a valuable skillset that. It's cool to hear that you're you're doing it, too. Maybe maybe not so much now anymore, but we still got to.

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Carolyn:

I hope other companies do it too, right? Before this today I had a meeting where I advise CoSell, and I think you guys might be in love that too. And Pete came over to my house and he was walking through the whole deck. But like now there's so many easier ways, like Cosell, for example. And I might be biased because it's my friend and I'm an adviser, but I literally after my meeting today with him, I was like, We need to Betts on this. This has come a really long way since I started working with you. Because founders can see who else they know and who they know. And you just type the companies in and you're like, Oh, hey, that was a person I met at SaaStr that I hit it off with, let's say, if they can make a warm introduction. And that was the same process that I used to do my on my own that took a lot more heavy lifting than what they have today. So, you know, yes, you still have to do it. But I think it's a lot not to be like, I worked so hard!

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Pouyan:

Yeah, yeah. 

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Ross:

I mean…

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Carolyn:

It's so much, so much easier today than it was even six months ago, year ago. And the way tech is going is pretty crazy. 

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Pouyan:

Well, I think it's easier to get, you know, the effort you have to put in to find the person or maybe get connected with them is becoming easier. But because it's become easier, then there's just more noise in the system. And so I think that's where like what you did or the way Ross is saying, hey, your message landed is what becomes even more important then, right? Because let's say I'm getting all of these requests for connections. Well, it has to stand out a little bit more for me to actually pay attention or care. 

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Ross:

Okay. Well, we've got a few minutes left here and Pouyan we have a custom that I'll let you say. We basically have a couple of questions. They're not like crazy questions that's for episode 2 with us. Pouyan, I'll let you take it away. 

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Pouyan:

We're we're building a playlist of two things. Number one, your hype song. You're walking into Dreamforce the first time you're about to bring Betts to the world. What is it you're listening to? Even then or now to get you hyped up? 

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Carolyn:

All right. Two songs came to mind. You Shook Me All Night Long, but the real one for business type song is Style by Taylor Swift. 

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Ross:

How about the opposite side, though? Like a sad, worst day ever. Just lost some clients. That dope candidate turned down the offer that you can't believe they turned down. What are we listening to? 

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Carolyn:

I am not a depressing music person. Like, I literally can't do it. 

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Pouyan:

Then what's your recovery? Let's say that. How do you recover from something like that? Maybe it's another hype song. 

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Carolyn:

Oh, like I need to get outside, get fresh air, listen to music, walk, breathe, look around, change my situation. Like if it happened in here, I need to leave here. I need to leave my house. I need to go and just change my situation. 

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Pouyan:

We'll do a soundtrack of the sounds of nature. How about that? Thanks so much for spending some time with us. 

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Carolyn:

My pleasure. So good to see you guys. Thanks for having me. 

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Ross:

Of course.

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