Creating a Brand and Executing on Ideas with Troy Barter

[00:00:00] Brad Seaman: Well, cool man. Well, Troy, thanks for coming on. I’m pumped glad that you were able to say yes and able to hop on here. So I’m super, I’m excited to talk to you and hear about your background. And so you’re, I think I saw you’re in Florida is that

[00:00:12] Troy Barter: I am I’m I’m about 40 minutes out of, out of Tampa when we went remote.

Last year we, we really went remote I’m in, in Dade city, which is a. I’m about a mile away from where I, where I went to high school for, for half the time in Florida, I was also in Massachusetts for, for half of my high school. And it’s rural there’s cows and the, our neighbors. There’s a good, good 20 cows and right behind my backyard and a couple acres.

And if you’ve been to Florida, there’s not many Hills and there’s a couple, a couple of Hills out here. It’s nice. It’s it’s a good change of pace. It’s a kind of the, the great thing about being remote is the kids being able. You know, have a little less city life and a little more, more rural, you know, we we like it so far.

[00:00:53] Brad Seaman: That’s awesome. I did a spring break trip in college and we drove down from Illinois. We drove all the way to Florida through the keys, but you get into the central Florida and you get it’s really rural. And you think about it as being Disney kind of Disneyland, but it’s kind of it’s contrary when you get, yeah.

[00:01:09] Troy Barter: Florida is actually not the south in the, like, until you get to the. The closer you get to the beach. It’s no longer the south. It’s honestly what it is, but it’s not the south for sure. But yeah, the middle of the state is a, is a different world for sure. It gets pretty rural. Yeah. Now Dade

[00:01:25] Brad Seaman: county, has that put you in Southern, does that put you in Southern Florida Dade city and not Dade county?

[00:01:30] Troy Barter: Dade county is where Miami is Dade city. It’s it’s like Northeast of Tampa by about 40 minutes, so,

[00:01:36] Brad Seaman: okay. That’s what was confusing me cause they Dade counties, Miami Dade cities. Okay. That makes, that makes sense. Well, cool. Well, so I, I saw that you had been I’ll let you just go ahead. And once you tell us kind of how you got to where you at.

I saw you were paying the dock and you mentioned Hills, I saw you went to Hillsborough community college. I’m assuming that’s probably a Mass, Massachusetts.

[00:01:57] Troy Barter: So Hillsborough community college in Tampa. And I actually just got that associate’s like three years ago, you know, I typical sales well, maybe not so typical, but I guess for me, I started right out of college, right out of high school, going to college and Started sales a little bit and realized, oh wow, this is going to pay substantially more than being a history teacher.

So I’ll learn to teach sales at some point, and we’ll just we’ll rock with this. And didn’t look back for a good 13 years or so until I went back to to get that degree. And yeah, as far as getting into sales I started in oh six in, in car sales. Cause I thought that was the old. Type of sale when I was in my early twenties, like I wanted to do sales.

All right. Well, you sell cars, right? That’s it. So got into that and and did that for a couple of years. Definitely learned a good amount. I mean, everything is pretty much warm, right? There’s not much cold outreach when it comes to car sales. When I left that, I actually left that. An outsource sales company that was positioned as a marketing company, but it was it was direct marketing, which is a hundred percent commission door to door commercial, you know, business to business sales.

And that was in about 2008. And that’s where I got started in. And business to business and door to door sales and did that for a pretty good amount of time in until 2012 and then got into in the SaaS. When I was in door to door, I started at the bottom. I made it all the way up to a national director of sales.

I think I had an org of about 60 to 70 people managed orgs in Chicago. I think we had one in Nevada, and then we had one based out of Tampa where we were, and. Moving into SaaS, even though I knew the person that I was going to be working for, we came up together and door to door sales. Having that that door to door experience didn’t necessarily translate.

I was going to walk in the door as a director of sales, you know, or anything close to it. I started as a, as an SDR. And I think what served me really well in, in sales to kind of get to where I am is that everywhere that I’m at, I really tried. Continue to learn and apply the things that have made me a success in one spot to the next.

So no matter what the system is, I’ve done so many things in sales that I’ve probably got something that’ll help apply to it. And when I interviewed in SaaS, it was for a company called Fleetmatics GPS tracking company. And in 2013, they’d start to give an idea of how they did things and it all kind of applied to other stuff that I had done in the past.

I always say it kind of felt like. You ever watched the movie Slumdog millionaire where? Yeah, so like he just happens to be in the chair to win a million dollars. In every question, he just happened to live through something where he could apply it and it worked for him. I think that works in sales too.

If you keep learning as you’re going, like eventually it’s like, someone’s got a problem. It’s already in the mental Rolodex from an experience that you have, if you digest it and keep it with you. So they said, you know, Hey yeah, we, the way that we pitch people is we just say, you know, Hey, you know, I’ve been working with a lot of folks in your area and it’s like, okay, social proof, right.

Jones. Whatever you want to call it, you’re leveraging that you might name, drop somebody. If you want to be specific, you know, helping them track their fleet accompany on vehicles, helping them out with saving money on fuel, et cetera. And I believe you guys handle something like that over there. Right?

Or I believe that you’re the person that would handle, you know, the fleet management or I believe that you have five or more vehicles, whatever that standard question is is let’s going to guarantee you a yes. Just a soft question. So you’re not steamrolling somebody in your opening pitch. It’s like you did the same thing door to door.

Yeah. You want to ask a question? So the. And then they would just do an option close. Alright, great. What I normally do is schedule a short online demonstration show. You live fleet in the area that has, you know, all of the live maps, vehicles, everything that we can take care of for you guys. When’s the best time for you to take a look at something like that would later today work for you or do you think tomorrow is going to be better?

And I was like, oh yeah, it’s option close. It’s great. I did the same thing in the car business. 48 months, 60 months, 72 months, which one’s best. All right, cool. Hold on one second. I’ll go get it approved. Just sign right here. Like there is no option for now, you know, and it had door to door and. Home security, you know, Hey, you know, we’re, we’re from the marketing team.

We’re here to help out, you know, and I, I believe I can see your your touchpad from, from, from back there is that the, the touch pad that was existing with the house. All right, cool. I just need to take a look at that real quick. You want me to take my shoes off? There’s no option for me to not go into the house though.

I’m either taking my shoes off or leaving them on, but that’s the next step in the process. So that’s what we’re going to go with next. And they weren’t even really applying it, even though it was in their script. So it kind of helped me move up quickly. I embraced everything that they were doing all in, even things that didn’t jive with my existing process, they were doing a lot better than I was at the time.

You know, in fact, when I started in SaaS, even though it was a national director of sales, like things don’t always go great at the place that you’re at, it might not be the most honest. I remember asking, like when the check was, cause I needed to have the gas to get out there. And you know, I went in there even things that didn’t jive with, what I, you know, was my process.

I’d be like, all right, you guys are doing better than me. I’m all in I’ll, I’ll, I’ll adapt. They’ll change to whatever it is. And I think because I moved so quickly with that and jumped in, I was able to have success quickly. I went from a SDR and within a month and a half, I was in. And then a month and a half.

That’s cool. That’s quick. So it’s kind of unfair, right? There’s two different things that I think, oh three that are why I moved up so quickly. Cause I know like I made a post about SDRs moving up fast and everything like that. Number one, I was a personal recruit. The guy that brought me in knew that I was really, really good ahead of time.

There wasn’t much of a vetting process. They already had known what, what made me successful would probably make me successful here. Number two, there was a mass. The week that I came in, they lost about half of their AEs. One of the founders of that office started something else and a large amount of AEs and SDRs left.

So there was this chasm that they needed to fill, and there was only so many people that would make sense to do that. And the third one. You know, I kicked ass and that first month, you know, they probably had about 30 or 40 SDRs there by the end of the month, that was ranked third. And that wasn’t third in pipeline.

It was third and closed one revenue and it was all cold because no one trusted to give me an inbound yet. So, you know, my first month I think I did, I sat 14. I forget what I booked, but it was seven deals and I was ready to go, you know, and I was ready to put the work in to learn. So. Definitely not a natural progression.

Right. But it, I, and I would have been willing to wait longer for sure. I was pretty hyped up about it, but they needed to fill the role. And I was like, cool, let’s go. I’m I’m down. Moved into the AAE role. And by the time I had moved to director, I was in the top three in the company, which was a pretty big global company on the ag side of things.

And moved into the director role took over for a historically underperforming. I was able to turn that around. Company at Fleetmatics eventually got acquired by Verizon for $2.4 billion was pretty awesome headstock in the company, which is why I waited another couple of years before leaving after that.

And you know, it’s kind of a natural progression, I guess. And eventually moved over to to Panadol two years ago in October of 2019. Because. You know, I, I was looking to progress my career out of the role that I had been in for such a long time. You know, I, I kinda like kept it director once Verizon acquired Fleetmatics.

They didn’t really have like a traditional, you know, regional vice-president or anything like that. And. I I saw where they had a need where I could have an impact which was going outbound. They wanted to start to go outbound. It’s something that I’ve done my whole career. I think I’ve had a, a good amount of success with, and I saw where there were some spots on the ag side that I could assist with as well.

I feel like I’m talking a significant amount without stopping, which I can tend to do. You know Okay. Anything on your side?

[00:09:31] Brad Seaman: I partake in what I like to call aggressive, listen, or like aggressive listening. My wife says that my best friend and I she’s like you guys get on the phone, you talk and nobody, you guys just talk over each other and I’m like, yeah, it’s an active listening.

We’re aggressive listeners. So you’re a no, I’m just trying to be a good, I’m trying to be a good listener. So no, you’re, you’re doing, you’re doing a great job. So you mentioned that fleet fleet. That you had taken over a team and then you turn that team around prior to the sale. W what was the state of the team when you got it?

And then what were some of the things that you did to turn it around?

[00:10:03] Troy Barter: So before I was an AE on, there was two teams in the Southeast region. There was a, the team that I, I started with as an SDR and as an AE. And then there was a the other team and the team that I was on would usually hit target halfway through the.

And we’d win a fishing trip or something like that. And we’d be getting up and leaving and you know, the other team would watch us leave and it’s probably a pretty demoralizing that happens over and over again. And usually the second half we were trying to make up for what was going to be an inevitable miss on the other team, knowing that they were, you know, out of the four regions in the United States, that usually it was one of the last ones.

And There was a couple of different ways that then I was able to, to turn it around. I think the largest thing was they already had some of the best account executives. They had some of the best closers, but the pipeline just wasn’t there. The folks that they were bringing in a few, it was real obvious.

Like you’re just not doing anything. And they were very direct. Company there wasn’t a lot of like, well, we’re going to multi-thread with email and LinkedIn. It kind of wasn’t that wasn’t the approach. It was pretty old school. And the fact that you’ve got a literal phone and we’re we’re dialing, we have clicked a dial.

It was pretty good. You got that on Salesforce. But outside of that, it’s old school. We’re pounding the phones. You know, sometimes there’d even be paper lists that we were going after. So a lot of guys, the phone book. I loved it, man gore. So this was a lot more sophisticated. I’m not in a suit in August in Tampa having to walk to the next Plaza to pitch when someone tells me no, you know, so this is already a, a leap in technology compared to my my other experience in hitting a, you know, stuff cold on a daily basis.

I think one thing that helped us on the pipeline side was recognizing that option closed. That was in the pitch that I was talking about a little bit earlier and what I like to do, and I would say this definitely isn’t the gospel. And I don’t necessarily think it works for absolutely every org based on how they position things.

But we would front-load that option closed before qualifying. So what I mean by that we knew the ponds that we were fishing in were going to bear fruit. It’s GPS tracking. So if you have a company that has 10 vehicles, there’s a pretty good chance that you can save money on fuel. If they’re routed the right way, there’s a pretty good chance that some of that overtime that’s getting.

May not necessarily have actually happen. There’s a pretty good chance that you can make them more effective, where they could pick another job or two up in the day. This goes for anyone that’s not tracking. So we know if we’re calling them that we can be pretty assumptive and we can be pretty know presumptuous with it.

So I would say go through your elevator pitch, ask a question, just to qualify. I believe you guys run a fleet of five or more vehicles. Is that right? Right after that, we’re going to the. You know, when’s the best time for you to take a look at something like this with later today, real quick, you think tomorrow is going to be better for that.

And I’d say it’s like, be super assumptive. It’s this or that. And you want to sound positive and assumptive when you’re going through that part of the option close. When I was an SDR, I would circle it. And the whole goal of the call was for me to get to this part. If I get into this part, that the balls in the air, I’m going to dunk it when I get into this part and that my goal is to get here, you know, and afterwards I’m going to qualify and I viewed it like it, you know, obviously there’s a lot of sports stuff.

Like a S like a sports reference would be the option closes a swing of the bat. A lot of people get on the phone, they qualify build rapport, man. I had a great conversation with them in 20 minutes. I was talking to him. Awesome. Did you book it and to know, did you ask for a time? No, I didn’t. I didn’t. I didn’t ask for one.

So they just stood in the batter’s. And they watch the pitches go by and they didn’t even swing. They never had an opportunity. So we would front load that close just from a numbers game perspective that if we swing the bat more than the other team, even if they’re more skilled than us, we’re probably going to get more hits than.

After they book, once they commit to that time, then we’ll circle the wagon and we’ll qualify them. But goal one is for us to try to get them to say

yes to an

appointment. Yeah. Go swing the bat more often and try to swing it better. Be positive and assumptive. And then when they would go to qualify, they’d realize.

You get better qualification out of them, you would get better answers because the wall isn’t up anymore. They’re like, well, I already said, I’m going to look at this. I might as well tell them everything. And all of a sudden they’re more open and the discovery goes better, you know? And that was a real helpful way.

Cause I knew we had good closers. We had great closers, you know, it was just, how do I pipeline and how do I do it in an easy way? That’s like so simple. Even a caveman can do it. And it’s like, Hey, just, just say that. And say it often and, and, and get after it. And that work, you know? Yeah. So not everyone adopted it and not everyone adopted, you know, I didn’t hold them to a specific dollar number, but it’s like, let’s get after it, you know?

And if they did it, you know, obviously you’re going to have turnover on an underperforming team, but for the most part, you know, I don’t think we ever really turned over someone that we didn’t, you know, feel like we had to, you know, we didn’t lose top talent.

[00:14:58] Brad Seaman: So were you able to get those guys out of the.

Underperforming status. So when you take over this team, it sounds like you come in and get you. I’m going to guess you probably got a script you together for them based on what you, you put. You probably laid out some kind of goal for them that you want them to hit. And then you went out and find the right people to fit into that.

[00:15:19] Troy Barter: Those two steps. Yeah, I didn’t change the script that was already there. I like, again, I was, I crushed it as an SDR. I didn’t change the script. It was already working. It was more identifying the mechanics that existed in the script that they weren’t calling out as sales process. I think it’s a good difference between like solid sales leaders and people that can be leaders and not are the ones like, you know, you’ll talk to a top and there’ll be like, yeah, I just get after it every.

Like they don’t, they can’t break down their process and tell you why it’s working for them. They can’t really repeat it yet because they haven’t identified the steps and the different parts of it. I identified like, oh, this is heavy option close. We leverage social proof at the start. We might even name, drop someone that’s close by.

We have the ability of doing that in Salesforce and that does help. It helps, you know what, what’s outbound sales. It’s reducing skepticism. And then from there, like it’s, we’re going on the option close. We’re gonna, we’re just gonna, you know, we’re gonna rock with what got us to here and we’re going to ride it until the wheels fall off.

Alright. Okay.

[00:16:19] Brad Seaman: So here’s what, here’s what I love about this. I would say this is highly controversial in very different. I’m going to come up with some controversial topics here. So this is like the direct opposite of like a Josh Braun. Who’s going to take a lot of stuff from Chris Voss. So. Not being afraid, you know, like, no, historically, you know, no is kind of a negative word.

You brought that up. Like, Hey, we want to get into yeses. So give me your thoughts on that.

[00:16:48] Troy Barter: So, I mean, I’ll be candid, man. Like I don’t really have much of a background on their philosophy to, to, to counteract it. But I was thinking about this the other day. Like as far as like, I don’t believe that cold calling is dead.

I believe in confirmation bias. In other words, I can find a stat that will support my argument no matter what my argument is. And if we live in a world where most people don’t want to cold call, I don’t think it’s that they’re not good at cold calling. Anyone can get good at cold calling. If you work at it hard enough.

I genuinely think that, but they don’t want to, or they were afraid to, and they never got over it. Then you, and you know that probably a large amount of your audience on a place like LinkedIn or anywhere would love for someone to tell you, Hey, you don’t have to cold call. It’s actually dead. Perfect.

Awesome. That’s what we wanted to hear anyways. Right? Here’s the stats that back it up, but then why is it that all of these top SDRs and AEs that still prospect are whipping ass? Like, why is that? Why does it work for them? But you have all of these numbers that say that it doesn’t work anymore. It’s it seems like, well, maybe both work, but like, how about you never really executed?

Like you never really went all the way on getting as good as you could be at. It is what, what I would challenge it.

[00:18:04] Brad Seaman: So when I think about marketing channels, I always think about this story of a friend of mine. Who’s got a blinds company and he gets a group of guys. He has a local blinds company. He gets a kind of a round table group of guys across the country.

I think eight of these guys flew in, they all have prac businesses about the same size they get in a hotel room and they sit and they start talking about what they did to grow their blinds. And are there, I guess not a practice, it’s a business, right? So the blinds company, so what he tells me is he said, I was shocked to hear that each person in the group he’s like there was a guy that we had built his business on a video, on or on commercials.

There was a guy that built his business on pay-per-click or paid ads. There’s a guy that built. Business on a billboards. He’s like I built my business by go into all of the homebuilders and I’d knock on the door. And I had a little lady from my church that would go up and she’d knock on the door and say, Hey you know, XYZ, Cindy, whatever her name was.

And she get a relationship built with these guys. And then they would eventually, when somebody came in and built a house, they’d say, Hey, if you go to do your blinds, you need to talk to, to, to this company. And he said that every single person in that round table had tried. One of these other channels and that nobody could get another channel to work.

And I think it just comes down to what you said. There is like, you got to go all in. You got to come.

[00:19:30] Troy Barter: Yeah. It’s even like with like the multi-level marketing, what do they like? Which, you know, it’s a little bit, not really the case, but like, oh, it w the plan works if you work it right. Like, that’s like kind of the thing.

And it’s, that’s what I don’t like on a. What I don’t like, particularly on LinkedIn. I’ll see a lot of people that’ll say that their, their content is catered around what doesn’t work or what you shouldn’t do. And it’s like, how about this worked for me? If you want to give it a try, like see if it works for you.

Like maybe it won’t, maybe it will, but a lot of it is like, oh, this doesn’t work anymore. No, it just doesn’t work for you. You never wanted it to work. No, no one will ever bring up something that they actually wanted to work out for them and say it doesn’t work. It’s always the thing that’s the hardest to do.

Or the thing that doesn’t work for their personality. Or something that they just weren’t motivated to do. And it’s like, that’s horrible advice because you might talk to someone who is like the goat of outbound sales and doesn’t know it yet. And then they never take the, the chance

[00:20:31] Brad Seaman: now I think that’s, I think that, I think that’s great.

I think that’s great insight. I think the other thing too is we have a T so I’m seeing a lot of this, you know, prospects don’t like this or prospects don’t like that. I think you need to be respectful to the pro to the, to the prospects for. Yeah, but we also do a lot of stuff. We don’t like, you know, I’d re I, I would just because I don’t like, it doesn’t mean it’s not a good channel, but to, to try to get ahold of me.

[00:20:59] Troy Barter: Yeah. It’s, I’ll tell you what prospects don’t like. They don’t like hearing somebody that hates their job on the phone. They don’t sound scared. They don’t like someone that clearly doesn’t want to be on the line. So it’s like prospects. Don’t like outbound calling. All right. So let’s consider the source, the person who didn’t like to do it, things, prospects don’t like it.

They ain’t like you fam that’s who they did. They didn’t like how he was down, did some positive and assumptive and like you belong. And that you’re a little exciting, you’re worth the conversation. And all of a sudden they like it. Wow. Th th nothing’s changed except for the fact that I wanted to call them and I was excited to get on the phone with them, you know, and I will say I made a post about this too.

Like, I really love outbound. I think that it makes you Bulletproof. But, I mean, don’t get it twisted. Inbound is better, right? Like if you have an inbound lead, you better call that way before you think about going out value, you know, especially in SaaS, like the only, the only value that outbound has is that if you don’t have enough inbound for the engine that you’ve built, or if you want to go up market and outbound, there’s, there’s compelling evidence that outbound is going to provide you with larger deals and the juice is worth the squeeze of deal size versus Villa.

Right. Like, if, if it, if the ROI is there, then you go after it. Like, I think like, I, I talk probably too much about outbound because I, it does. I feel like it’s just, everyone is constantly talking it down and it’s like, this still works. It still works in a big way. But that being said, if you’ve got inbounds that are hot, like you should be making the most out of your inbound engine before you ever consider picking up the phone for an outlet.

Yeah, no, I,

[00:22:35] Brad Seaman: I, I agree. I think we have a tendency to want to put stuff in camps. The reality is you to be doing all the things that drives that drive, that drives in business, you know, it’s going to be inbound. It’s going to be outbound it’s podcast, blog, cast. This that, I mean, you got to do all the things.

Sale sales is hard and you gotta do all this stuff that it takes to drive

[00:22:56] Troy Barter: revenue. Yeah, you should always be thinking about, I say this to my, my AEs, but when it comes to like what you mentioned, LinkedIn podcasts, posting, email, phone, call, everything that possibly could be out there, like lay all that on the floor and look at it and ask yourself, honestly, what do I suck at that?

And that ought to be, you know, there’s a lot of Patriots stuff behind me and they, they try to exploit the other team’s weakness. They don’t try to play to their positive. They try to play to the other team’s weakness. You know, you should be looking at where your weak point is and all right, well, that’s what I’m going to work on and getting better at, because I definitely can pull this lever and see impact because that’s what I’m.

Am I going to pull the lever on what I’m strongest at and necessarily see big growth. I mean, not necessarily, you know, and all of it works. So like I always, and I don’t think it always works for everybody. Right. You may not have, or may not want to do part of it and you don’t have to do all of it to get good, but like, if you can try to do as, as well as you can on every avenue that produces, you know, value, you’re putting yourself in a way better position.

[00:24:08] Brad Seaman: I agree. I, so I, I think I so I’m experiencing a little bit a little bit of brain fog here this afternoon. I think I had a little too much caffeine, but you, you got into one of my, my favorite quotes, which is, and I may misquote him here is by rot, Roger Penske. So the famous race car owner and entrepreneur, he says.

Effort equals results. And I think what he means from that is very rarely do you have, do you not folk very rarely. If you do not focus on something, do you not get the results? I mean, all those usually if you go, w and I’m not saying that there’s not some people that work hard and build get the results, because that does occasionally happen but happen.

But typically when you go back and you look at why something is not working, it’s usually because of a lack of. Yup or focus,

[00:25:02] Troy Barter: are you, are you doing everything you can, you know, like if it’s something that you really want, then you should be doing everything that you can to get it. You know? And I think a lot of times, like people just, I just did a post about this.

Today, like I started, I started that LinkedIn everyone’s doing the LinkedIn newsletter. I was like, all right, cool. Let me hop on that. Let me tell you something. It’s pretty awesome. Like it’s a, it sends out and you can grow an audience pretty quickly on, on something like that. But I, I used to run a meeting on it of let’s say that, you know, I came in here as your sales manager with a briefcase and I opened it up and I’ve got a hundred thousand dollars cash in here.

And what I’m going to challenge you to is you need to at least meet your best day. If it’s an SDR, most amount of bookings you’ve ever. If it’s an AA, most amount of closed one revenue that you’ve ever done, most amount of deals, whatever you want to call it. And if you do that at the end of the day, if you do it by close of business, I’m going to hand you this briefcase of a hundred thousand dollars at the end of the day.

And what I tell people is close your eyes. Think about it. If that actually happened, what would you do differently today than what you would’ve done before we talked about it? What are you, what, what, what would you change in SDRs? It’s like, ah, doll, the 4,310. I would, I wouldn’t take no for an answer. I would, instead of getting one objection, I would get four.

Before I get off the phone, I would leverage all of my follow-ups and call them at the right time. I would take, you know, one last coffee break or something like that, or, you know, whatever, you know, and it’s all right. Well, the people that view their finish line of the next a hundred thousand dollars like that every single day and hit it with that level of excitement and effort are way closer to.

And are going to get to that next $100,000 way faster than someone who doesn’t, it’s tough when you’re in sales and your inner growth to really put the effort in and execute every single day. The people that I think do it the best are the ones that have a goal, whether it’s long-term or short-term and every day feels like the finish line is at the end of.

And they approach it that way and they run that way and they do, they, they do it in a way where yeah, you might be working more, but they make sure that they don’t get burnt out and you’d be surprised how much work you can put in. And the satisfaction of knowing that you’re seeing results kind of prevents you from burning out a little bit.

You know, but I, I think that it is like, it is effort for sure. It’s how do you do that effort every day? You know, you gotta have the right mindset at the start of every day or else eventually you’re going to fall into a funk, you know? And that’s why I, I think there’s like a negative around like, well, I could run, I see a lot of Patrick, but David even said this, some other folks were like, yeah, like I try not to do motivational stuff because motivation is temporary.

And it’s like, yeah, but so is, so is your hustle. You’re also as temporary too, if you don’t keep motivated. And there was no

[00:27:56] Brad Seaman: Ziglar quote about that, and he’s like, you know, some about taking a bath, he’s like, you know, they say motivation is temporary, but you know, so it was a bath, but you do it every day.

[00:28:05] Troy Barter: Yeah, exactly. You know? Yeah, I think that, that, that shouldn’t really be like a negative I’ve seen where it’s like, if you need, if you need motivation like this to get going every day, Then you’re not, you’re not putting yourself in a position to have success. And it’s like, well, wait that’s. And I hate when people say easy for you to say, but it’s kind of like, all right, well, you’re intrinsically motivated because you can come up with the content that you’re, that you’re laying out.

So if someone isn’t necessarily like a creative person, like you’re faulting them from going out there and looking for ways to get more. I mean Brady’s behind me. Brady finds ways to get motivated. Jordan found ways to get motivated. They make up, you brought up a really

[00:28:46] Brad Seaman: good point. The people that don’t like phone prospecting, have a tendency to talk about that and talk about it being.

And the thing that I think you said was, of course he didn’t like it. Cause you had a, you had a bad attitude. It makes me think about the difference between going to taco bell and going to Chick-fil-A. Nobody does. I mean, Chick-fil-A has a great drive through experience. I don’t know if you guys got chicken lays down in Tampa, but up here, you know, the, the, the wrapped around the buildings they’re causing havoc on everybody’s parking lot.

Everybody has a great, you know, you go through there. They say my pleasure, they smile. They’re happy. In fact, the Chick-fil-A I bought my house. There’s a kid that didn’t seem to be so happy. And I felt like you know, you feel like it’s your Chick-fil-A way. And you, you feel like you got to say something like, Hey man, everybody here is having a great time.

And they’re, you know, they’re doing an excellent job and then you got one person that’s like standing out, but they’ve created a brand around people that while doing their job and know the point of the story. Nobody hates go into the Chick-fil-A outside of it being trapped on a traffic. Right. But you don’t have a bad

[00:29:49] Troy Barter: experience at Chick-fil-A that’s their brand.

Yeah, it’s a, yeah, we have, we, we actually just got a Chick-fil-A out here in the middle of nowhere, which is pretty exciting. So and the drive-through experiences is top-notch for sure. It’s it’s like Publix for us to hear. I don’t know. I don’t know where you’re at, but we’ve got public supermarkets and like that’s the.

There’s like when you go there, everyone’s nice. Everyone’s on point. Everyone’s making it happen for you. Like, and yeah, it’s a little more than Winn-Dixie like in general. But you know, it’s, it’s a better experience when, if you’re out, if you’re going to have to go to the grocery store in a world where everything is ordered online, like Italy’s feel like you’re having a good experience in there.

I think I think there’s something to that for sure. Yeah, it’s it’s building a brand, you know, I think, I actually think that’s not discussed enough when it comes to salespeople in your sales career, as well as like you’re, you’re building a brand every single day. And even account executives where they think that everything is reflected based on.

Their number and whether or not they’re hitting target. What’s actually, when I tell my reps is hitting your number as a part of it, but what’s most important is building your brand every day. At the end of the day, is your brand stronger with yourself, your peers, you know, everybody that’s around you.

You’re you’re, you’re, you’re higher up. Or is it not if it’s stronger than you, you win over time? You know, that’s the real question not did I hit my number because you can hit your number and piss everybody off and you’re probably not going to move up. And you you’re, you’re a high value and you’re really high maintenance.

And when you stop being high value, you’re putting yourself in a rough spot. You know, how you are branded is really important for long-term success. Even if you’re an individual contributor, the importance of

[00:31:33] Brad Seaman: having. Really good having a good attitude, you know, having a plan, sticking to the plan, you know, working in the plan every day.

It’s so easy to get off track, to get in the clouds to, to forget that, Hey, look, this stuff works and it particularly works if you execute on it and it’s easy to get stuck in the fluff and get stuck in what people don’t like. Cause that’s what people talk about. And then you start, can you get in a feedback loop and you start convincing yourself.

It doesn’t mean. When I have yet to see conversations and in my experience, conversations are a great indication of revenue. If you’re having consistent conversations those will turn into revenue. I mean,

[00:32:13] Troy Barter: I think it’s, it is execution is really the word it’s less strategy and it’s more execution.

You know, I work in SaaS software. Everyone wants to come up with the next big brain strategy that we’ve got. Even a half-baked plan, if it’s executed to perfection and with enthusiasm probably is going to be the perfect strategy that is an executed, right? Like stop worrying about reinventing the wheel and start worrying about whether, like, how can you roll this wheel as fast as possible?

Like, it is really on execution, way more than strategy to me.

[00:32:49] Brad Seaman: I heard it. Vince Lombardi could talk about one play, but one play, they ran. Cause I basically ran one play for eight hours in exhaust. And uninterrupted. It didn’t have a, of there wasn’t, they didn’t have a fancy playbook. The green bay Packers, you know, they had one, they basically had one, one play that they ran, but it worked and it worked well because it comes down, it comes down to execution.

So so this was awesome, man. I, I I guess before we get off a couple of things before. Tell me a little bit about the business that you’re at today. Talk a little bit about higher,

[00:33:17] Troy Barter: so hired and I’m, I’m fairly new, right? I’ve been here actually for, for less than a month, but the best way of putting it with the hired is it’s a platform.

If you’re, if you’re looking to hire quality candidates and you’re looking to hire. No, within a, within a timeframe where you’d like to get response rates faster, you’d like to get better people in. And you’d like to potentially get somebody in with you know let’s say a decent level of urgency on certain candidates.

It’s, it’s a great platform. Another big thing that that hire does with a lot of companies particularly nowadays, and it’s a, it’s a great endeavor is they, they want to really focus on improving like diversity and underrepresented candidates. I hired partners with a wealth of different organizations that assist with that.

It also has tools within it where you can, you can filter and you can Stuart, and you can make sure that you’re putting yourself in the best position to meet those goals. But they’re also proactive about. Partnering with groups where they can put more underrepresented candidates that are well-qualified in front of, you know, the the customers that are on the platform that are looking to hire.

So it’s definitely a competitive advantage as far as the way that they do it. But you know, long story short, if you’re looking to hire, you’re having trouble finding the right people, you’re doing cold outreach maybe, and you’re not getting good responses. That’s an ideal candidate, particularly in software and the engineer space, some on the sales side as well, which is a new version.

[00:34:40] Brad Seaman: I tell you what man, fresh. I would say this was like fresh air. Just some really solid

[00:34:46] Troy Barter: just advice. I think it was good. Good conversation.