Sarah Brazier

You know, that's one of those things that you just got to do. A lot of SDRs, they just go get a prescription for Adderall... And I was like, oh...I don't think I need that. “Some people do cocaine, but you know, it's really up to you. You could just put your headphones in if you wanted to.”

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Ross Pomerantz (aka Corporate Bro)

That's where you and I differ, I think. I think we're similar in a lot of ways, but…

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Ben Gould

Ross had the same manager actually and that's what turned it all around for him.

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*Beyond Quota Intro*

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Ben

Welcome to another episode of Beyond Quota. I'm Ben. We have Corp, Ross Pomerantz, here. We have a very, very special guest, sales celebrity, gong afficianado and salesperson, Sarah Brazier here on the call with us, Sarah, welcome to Beyond Quota. 

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Sarah  

Thanks. It's great to be here. I'm excited. I think we prepped for this like a month ago, and then it never happened. So I don't remember what we're going to talk about.

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Ross  

Everything.

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Sarah  

Everything.

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Ben  

I was thinking we would start back in the early days of Sarah Brazier, when you were in speech and debate and actually had a pretty successful career there as a... dramatic interpreter? National runner up in dramatic interpretation?

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Sarah  

I think what you're referencing is me in high school. That's when I got national runner up in dramatic interpretation. 

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Ben  

National runner up. That's pretty good. 

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Sarah  

Thank you. Yeah, didn't win. And in sales, it's all about winning. But that's where it really hit me like, I need to win. 

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Ben  

How do you think it prepared you for a life in sales?

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Sarah  

The first is that you get really comfortable with rejection, and negative feedback. Because on top of that score between one and six, you also get a ballot, with someone's candid feedback about why they gave you that score. I think when you're doing something like speech and debate, these are topics that you're interested in. These are speeches that you're putting together, this is like your work and it's really a passion project of the student. Whereas in sales, I'm selling someone else's product, I didn't build it, I didn't make it and come up with the dream. It doesn't hurt my feelings as much because I'm doing this job to make money versus speech and debate which is something I'm doing for fun. So when someone sends me unsubscribe, or is mean to me on a cold call, or doesn't buy, I did have emotional responses at first as an SDR. But I don't think it was nearly as big or as painful [as it was] for some people.

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Ben  

Something that you and Ross have to deal with on LinkedIn is creating these social posts and creating content. I know, for Ross, he can speak to it, but getting negative feedback on that content that you're making that maybe has to do with the company that you're working for, but it's also about you, and it's more personal. Do you feel like that's different? When you get random criticism versus not closing a deal?

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Sarah  

For me it is. I want to hear what Ross says and then I'll say what I think.

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Ross  

I mean, kind of like Sarah said. When it's your content, you put some piece of yourself into it. And so that rejection can be a little bit more personal. Ben you know everyday you're talking me off the ledge of just like shutting it all down, deleting everything and just moving to the mountains, which still sounds amazing right now. I would not move to the mountains but I would move to a golf course somewhere I don't care where it is it just be on a golf course somewhere. You know, people are like rejection, if you start getting rejection, you're going in the right direction. You know, it's like you're getting big enough that you're gonna get outside your bubble to people who maybe don't have context, maybe just flat out don't agree. It hurts me more when there's a semblance of truth, or at least that I believe there's a semblance of truth to it. You know, if you're like going through a rut of creative and people like it's this isn't that good. You're like, I fucking know it's not that good.

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Sarah  

Yeah, I think I had the benefit that my income stream is not based so much around having a presence on LinkedIn, although that does help bring credibility to some conversations that I have. It's a good feeling when - for example I got on a call with somebody a couple days ago and he said that he had followed my content since I was an SDR and he'd used it to coach some of his reps. And he clearly indicated one of the one of the helping reasons he took the meeting with my SDR is because he knew who I was. So it wasn't so much of a random person reaching out and being like, hey, come look at our software. But instead he's like, oh, okay, I have familiarity and context and I'm familiar with Sarah. There are people who are mean on the internet. And it is totally different sensation-wise for me than getting rejected on a deal. Because most of the time, I mean, prospects can be jerks, but most of the time they're not. And most of the time, they'll either just stop responding to you or they'll tell you they bought a competitor, and you're like, oh, man, like, I wish you would have told me that earlier. Because then either wouldn't have spent my time doing this or I could have provided you with different information or I feel disappointed you weren't honest with me. And most of the the bullying that I've experienced, or the people being mean, are anonymous. So they're on some kind of forum where I don't know their real name and I really just want to be like, Hey, can you share a little bit more about what bothers you so much about me? I want to know, I want to know why you don't like me so much. And I'm just really curious about the psychology of online behavior in anonymous places and why people feel like they can be so malicious or feel entitled to that.

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Ross  

Half the time I respond to people, and they're like, oh, shit, dude didn't realize you're gonna respond like sorry, I actually really love your stuff. And I'm like after what you just wrote? That whole thing? And now I'm calling you out for it and now you're back going back. Like, what? What the hell?

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Sarah  

I remember this goes back to speech and debate. When I was in college, I put together a speech that was about gun violence in the United States... still a hot topic. Although, yeah, yeah. Anyway, there had been yet another mass shooting, and my speech coach had put a recording of my practice session online, because he felt like it was timely. And I was like, Sure, that's fine. Well, a bunch of like, white supremacist men found it and wrote some articles about it on these like neo Nazi websites -

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Ben  

And this was when you were in college?

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Sarah  

I just graduated from college. So it's the summer after I graduated. And they found my Facebook profile. And they found about where I live, which I didn't have on Facebook, I don't actually know how they found out where I live. But they found out where I lived, where I went to school. And they wrote it all in this like, article, neo Nazi blog post, and then they started messaging me about all the ways that I should die.

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Ben  

Oh, my God. 

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Sarah  

And they were way, way too graphic to repeat even if we weren't recorded.

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Ben  

I mean, if that happened to me, I would not care at all what anyone said about my LinkedIn posts or sales calls that don't go well. I mean, that really puts it into perspective. On a more positive note, you started your career... This is actually not on a more positive note. But you you started your career -

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Ross  

On a different note.

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Ben  

in sales you had a pretty negative first experience as an SDR before you found yourself at Gong. What made you keep going? 

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Sarah  

I was just like, I'm a 13th time national finalist in a competition that is literally about communication. I have a degree in broadcast journalism. I graduated with honors, I'm not stupid. And I don't know not how to talk to people. I think that maybe the problem is not me, but it's where I am. And I also talked to my brother about it who had been working in technology for a really long time. He was in product, he is in product. And I just described to him some of the things that had happened at work, like...

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Ben  

Yes...

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Ross  

Go on, go on!

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Ben  

That's what we're here for.

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Sarah  

I had a conversation with a manager where I had shared that I was having a hard time prospecting, like just finding accounts to reach out to in my territory because we separated our territory by state. So I just said, you know, I'm having a hard time finding appropriate accounts to reach out to. Could you help me with that? Because they had prefaced this conversation with how can I help you be successful in your role? And I said, can we sit down together and go through how I'm using ZoomInfo today, and make sure that I'm like not crazy. And the response was, you know, that's one of those things that you just got to do. A lot of SDRS, they just go get a prescription for Adderall. And I was like, Oh, I don't think I need that. Some people do cocaine, but you know, it's really up to you. You could just put your headphones in if you wanted to do that.

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Ross  

That's where you and I differ, I think. I think we're similar in a lot of ways. That's where, you know...

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Ben  

Ross had the same manager. And that's what turned it all around for him.

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Ross  

And we were super close!

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Sarah  

But I was just like, huh. And then they went, no need to go to HR about it. 

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Ross  

Yep, same manager.

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Sarah  

And I was like I've been watching Corporate Bro, I actually didn't know Corporate Bro. It was after I saw Corporate Bro skits after that and I was like, see? That's why I thought that was [normal]. Because my brain was like, Well, I guess this is just tech, you know? I guess this is my new life in sales. And a couple of weeks later, I was at a barbecue at my brother's house. He was like, so how's your job going Sarah? And I was like, Yeah, this really weird thing happened the other day. I think my manager told me I should, like do coke or like, get Addy prescription. And he was like, you know, Sarah, that's, that's illegal.

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Ross  

Sarah, you've come to the right place. Pops bottle. Here you go. Glad to you came to the barbecue, here you go.

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Sarah  

That's like a microcosm of some of the problems I think existed. The more time I spend in sales and the more distance I have from it, I think that the company itself made the mistake that we're seeing a lot of companies make right now, which is growth at all costs, they scaled their sales team before they had an ICP before they knew how to sell what they had built, before a lot of things. And nobody at that company was hitting quota. Because they didn't... they didn't really know... exactly what they were doing. 

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Ben  

They were just giving people drugs and saying hit it.

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Ross  

Giving people addictions.

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Sarah  

When I started at the company, there's maybe like, 15, SDRs. I didn't even stay there for a full year and I think they had like 60 or 70 SDRs when I left.

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Ben  

What brought you to Gong? Were you attracted to the company culture? Did you really believe in the product? And then what made you feel like you're thriving, once you got there?

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Sarah  

You mostly need to be able to understand the problem that your product solves. And be able to understand why someone would buy it. And you can use like the jobs to be done framework, what is the job to be done? And what are the challenges in doing that job? And what are the different ways that you could solve for it? And what does doing that job X way? How is that better than doing it Y way. And know your know your limitations and not sell something that you shouldn't. Because sales is a long game, not just... I'm gonna be gone for now, but I'm probably going to move companies at some point in my life. And

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Ben  

Breaking news? Breaking news?! 

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Ross  

No, that was going to be my next question. What is next in the life of Sarah Brazier, because you, like, you're a Gong icon, but you're more just like done a really good job of just being your own icon, and you've got your own brand. And, you know, you do a lot of different things outside of just being an AE for Gong.

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Sarah  

I don't think I'm done selling as an individual contributor right now, I think it is interesting to me, and I'm having plenty of success in it. So I'm making good money. And one of the things that probably gets talked about, but I just haven't read it on LinkedIn recently is that there's a really big difference between selling commercial and selling enterprise. The way that the sales cycle works and the conversations that you have. And I think that selling commercial is really fun, but it's super fast paced, and it is not a long term strategy for a salesperson, or if, if you're doing it and you're good at it, like you've just got more energy than me. But it moves so quickly that you don't have any time to really think. And I think that for me, it would be really beneficial to spend some time closing larger deals and learning like the nuances of what that looks like. And actually have some brain space to think about closing big deals.

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Ross  

Right. 

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Sarah  

So I moved into a mid-market role at Gong. Instead of closing 10 deals a month, I'm going to be closing 10 deals a year. And that's great. I tell this to people who are an SDR they're like, do I wait to get promoted at my current company? Or do I just go be an SDR somewhere else where the promotion path is shorter? And to me, it's like, well, if you're really close, and you already know this product really well and you know how to prospect into it, you know how to have the conversations, then why don't you just learn how to be an AE without having to also learn a whole new product on top of that. That's kind of how I feel about learning up-market sales motion. I know Gong really well. So I should definitely continue to sell this product that's doing really well, I think will do well in. In a recession, or in some kind of "economic uncertain" times. It did really well, during COVID. Because it's a game changer. It's critical. It's whatever it is. But it's really, really important if your focus is efficiency and you have to do a lot more with a lot less resources. So moral of the story is I want to keep selling, I want to sell big deals. That's what I'm working on right now at Gong. And then after that, I don't know exactly what the path is in front of me. Do I keep closing bigger deals? And just do that until it gets boring? And then move into management? Or do I go do my own thing or start something? I'm not sure. I like to open doors and walk into them and just like, see if I like the room and then go open another door. But I like the room I'm in right now so. And I just moved and I've got a dog now and you know

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Ross  

Gong management's like *massive sigh of relief* Woo! Yeah let us know if you want us to decorate the room at all.

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Sarah  

Yeah, maybe they'll let me you know, maybe if I say I want to go manage. They'll just give me a team and I'll be fine. But what if I just skipped the whole manager part and just went straight to a director? You know?

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Ross  

I mean, why not?! I see you got to ask for it. I think you're ready.

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Sarah  

I did, I did. I asked our VP of sales. Like, well, you know, if you ever want to make me a director, I'm here. 

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Ross  

You don't get what you don't ask for. You know, you got to ask for the deal.

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Sarah  

Yeah, I feel like I just keep positioning it on podcasts and webinars like...

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Ben  

Exactly, exactly. We want to give you a chance to shout out where people can find you. Where can they follow you? What do you got working on right now?

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Sarah  

They can find me on LinkedIn. Unlike Ross, I don't use any other form of social media because I think it's poisoning the American mind.

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Ross  

You're completely right and I'm fully poisoned. And I hate it.

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Sarah  

Yeah, I just can't deal with the internet anymore. But LinkedIn is like It's like one of those things. It's like a slow drip of morphine. I have to do it. But I will die from it eventually. So yeah, so I'm on LinkedIn. What have I got going on? I mean, I'm selling mid-market deals now. So if you want to buy Gong, you can always reach out to me on LinkedIn or you know, on LinkedIn. My email my Gong email Sarah.Brazier@gong.io. And then I'm working with Sales Impact Academy. I'm gonna do a call blitz after this.

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Ben  

Sick.

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Sarah  

Woo!

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Ross  

God that sounds fun! 

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Sarah  

Talking to Ben and Corp! Great times and then I'm gonna like...

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Ross  

Then you're gonna get jacked up and go rip some dials. There's one more thing after that I think it's... over/under Gong puts me in their next Super Bowl ad. 

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Sarah  

They're not gonna put you in their Super Bowl Ad.

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Ross  

What?!

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Ben  

Smash the under.

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Ross  

I'm smashing the under too.

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Sarah  

Maybe you could be like a background character? But you know, you could like they might show your ear? Like the side of your face maybe.

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Ross  

My ears are pretty small so they might have to really punch in with some 4k. But we can make that work. All I got to do is find the ad agency they're working with.

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