The Power of Empathy and Humility in Sales - Tyler Carey

For Tyler Carey, Chief Revenue Officer at Westchester Publishing Services, being a good sales leader means understanding other perspectives. On this episode of Sales Lead Dog, Tyler talks with host Chris Smith about the power of empathy and humility, and the reality that “There’s really no task that’s beneath you as a sales rep.”

Tyler has held jobs at a variety of companies, including early startups, and he implemented the CRM at Westchester Publishing Services, a leading provider of digital and print services for publishers around the world. But despite his head for data, Tyler is all about connection, and his biggest lesson as a sales rep and sales leader was learning how to let other people share their experience.

Tune in this week for thoughtful commentary on the power of listening, the surprising benefits of working the registration table at a conference, and the best way to track your failures — so even when you lose, you are learning how to win.

Watch or listen to this episode:

Transcript:

Fri, 1/15 11:59AM • 48:12

SUMMARY KEYWORDS
sales, people, data, crm, losses, rep, crm system, mentor, customer, year, helping, deal, company, westchester, career, services, track, industry, products, started

Speakers of the discussion about the power of empathy and humility

Tyler Carey, Christopher Smith

Intro
Welcome to the Sales Lead Dog Podcast hosted by CRM technology and sales process expert Christopher Smith, talking with sales leaders that have separated themselves from the rest of the pack. Listen to find out how the best of the best achieve success with their team and CRM technology. And remember, unless you are the lead dog, the view never changes.

Christopher Smith
Welcome to Sales Lead Dog. Today we have joining us Tyler Carey. Tyler, welcome to Sales Lead Dog.

Tyler Carey
Thanks, Christopher.

Christopher Smith
Tyler, tell us about your current role and your company.

Tyler Carey
Sure, I’m the Chief Revenue Officer at Westchester Publishing Services, which is a US employee-owned company, we’re over 50 years old. We have offices here in the States, two offices in India, one office in the UK, staff and freelancers spread all over the world. And we help publishers make books, essentially we act as the content developers, editors, and typesetters on books, ebooks, digital learning products, and anything that you can put in your hands and read, whether it’s on paper or on a device.

Christopher Smith
I love that I, one of the things that I really have strived to do with this podcast is have a really wide array of companies on here,so as you know as we talked before, I’m very excited to have a publishing company on here. So, welcome to the show. I’m really excited to talk with you. Thinking back over your career, what are the three things that have really contributed to your success?

Tyler Carey
I mean, lots of things. I’ve been very fortunate in a lot of regards to have some exceptional mentors. The three kind of traits that I think have been really successful that I’ve been trying to pursue more during my career are certainly the power of empathy with my customers my staff, humility, knowing that there’s always going to be somebody far smarter than me in the room. I’ve certainly seen many sales calls go awry where somebody comes in to be the expert and then finds out that who they’re talking to knows a lot more about these products or services than they do. And you know I think that the third thing really is kind of like I referenced a little bit ago is just trying to find the right mentors and the right people to learn from, so being able to say you know I want to learn more and I want to be better and I want to get to understand more aspects of my industry even outside what I do and, you know, kind of finding the right people to support you there so I’ve been very fortunate to work in a number of companies where folks kind of took me under their wing and helped me expand

Christopher Smith
Mentorship comes up a lot when I ask that question. Are, is that something that you actively participate in now?

Tyler Carey
Yeah, I think there’s. I mean, certainly in a lot of different ways. I tried to volunteer so maybe more than mentorship, but I try to get involved in the industry, join committees and nonprofits associated the industry, join the boards of organizations, and try to give back. But yeah, certainly when I’m even working with my own staff or even sometimes the vendors that work with me you know if I have a sales rep really trying hard, you know they’re using all the wrong phrases, like I need this to hit my number, you know, I try to work with him to say, you know, here’s what’s going to help me get a deal over the line for you, but it’s you know here’s the things that won’t. You know, so without trying to be patronizing about it I try to, you know, share what I’ve learned in a way that hopefully is helping some other folks too.

Christopher Smith
Right. So if I’m a young salesperson, and I don’t have a mentor, I want to find the right mentor, how should they go about finding that, that, that mentor?

Tyler Carey
Yeah, I mean I think a lot of industries, you know are doing more and more especially during the pandemic to try to foster that. So I’m involved with a lot of industry groups in the publishing space where there’s in some cases even like kind of scholarships or sponsorships you know, so when we all were getting together for in-person conferences, you know, an example in the publishing space is the Society for Scholarly Publishing. They actively, you know, put out that they want to put out scholarships for people who are younger in the industry to come and attend. From a sales standpoint, I think definitely looking at if you’re on LinkedIn and looking at the organizations that your clients are members of, you know, figure out which ones you feel you might be able to do something for. I, there was a rep I worked with early on in my career, and he would take any volunteer activity that he could within a group. You know so he’d be the guy sitting there at the registration table at the conference signing people in as one of the vendors. And he probably met more people at the registration desk, you know, than anybody actually actively working our booth at the conference, you know, so I think there’s kind of comes to the power of empathy and humility thing. There’s really no task that’s kind of beneath you as a sales rep, you know, it’s, it’s kind of like if, if it’s great, I can help short envelopes, you know, and get to meet 20 other people in the industry, as we’re doing mailings you know at a nonprofit that’s associated with our industry, then it’s time well spent. If you’re getting to meet people and learn more about their aspect of the industry, it helps you sell better.

Christopher Smith
That’s great advice, because you’re also, you’re, you’re contributing, you’re putting stuff out into the universe and when you do that, I’m a big believer that good stuff comes back your way.

Tyler Carey
Exactly, yeah.

Christopher Smith
So I think that’s a great idea. Thinking back to when you got your start in sales, I love asking this question, when you get your start in sales, what do you wish you had been taught then?

Tyler Carey
Um, I think, you know, the first job I had in sales I was, I think I was 16, and I walked into a computer store on Long Island. And I just asked, “Do you have any summer jobs?” And the guy who owns the computer shop was just like wow you got the guts to just walk in and ask for a job, you know, it’s future for you and sales young man, you know. So I started answering the phone and then he launched a website business, and the next thing it was, “Hey once you go just drop all these things off at local businesses, all these little flyers,” and people started asking me questions and I had to learn what it was that a website was because this is the early 90s and not everybody knew. So, you know I kind of learned just, you know, kind of shoe leather sales you know which I mean like the fuller brush man cutter. You know, which is very different than what I do now, but I think the thing that I picked up pretty quickly, but I wished I’d been given more formal training, I took until I was in, you know, kind of proper sales jobs after college, you know, selling services and learning how to be more collaborative that there’s a knack for anyone in sales, you have a comfort zone to talk about what you offer, and so it’s just tempting just to kind of, you know, keep talking about here’s another feature, here’s how somebody else uses it, here’s a use case. So I think there is a temptation there just to tell. And so really for me that the thing that did help really turn my career in a very positive direction was just learning to not talk and just you know ask a lot of questions, and let people tell you how they’re using their current products, how they’re using their services, where their problems are, because there’s a big temptation just to ask a lot of very pointed probing questions that just help the sales rep advance their own you know mission and narrative, whereas if sometimes, if you can just sit and take notes and just be really patient and see what people want to say, that’s that’s a lot more important.

Christopher Smith
Yeah. Do you remember the first big deal you ever closed?

Tyler Carey
Yeah, yeah. The first kind of big deal I remember being really proud of a software sale that I did about almost 20 years ago. And that was definitely one of those learning lessons just because it was a very complex sale, a lot of stakeholders, a lot of stakeholders on our side internally as well. Yes, absolutely. I wouldn’t be, your first victory and your first big failure always stick with you, absolutely.

Christopher Smith
We’ll get to the failure.

Tyler Carey
I got plenty of those, so.

Christopher Smith
Tell me about your transition from salesperson into sales leadership, what drove you to pursue sales leadership.

Tyler Carey
You know, again, that was a mentoring thing I think I hadn’t even seen it coming. You know, I had a mentor actually at this company where we sold software. And you know I specialized in one of our products, selling it. And the other sales reps ultimately picked up the ability to sell that product, or that service offering to their suite of clients, we kind of widened which verticals we’re gonna sell that to. So I found myself having a targeted territory and selling this, this offering. But then I also found myself being kind of brought in as like the sales engineer to help these other folks, these other like 20 odd reps close this work in their space. And the thing I think that I hadn’t even seen it as like a sales management thing I just was kind of like their little you know Gilligan, their little buddy kind of coming along and helping them on the sales call, you know, but you know I had a mentor and he really saw what I was doing to help. Not just show up and talk about this product but also I’ve tried to help my colleagues, you know get these deals over the line, strategize with them, and so he put me in a management role. And I’ll totally admit I was not well trained for it, I was not really well prepared for it. And I learned a lot of stuff by kind of making mistakes in managing people initially and I had some very patient people that I was fortunate enough to manage, and a lot of them were pretty good at managing up and saying you know here’s, here’s what’s really going to help us here you know internally. So I was lucky to have a great team that I was asked to manage early on in my career and I’m still in touch with many of them to this day.

Christopher Smith
Let’s talk about some of those mistakes because I think there are some very common ones that are made when people transition into a management or leadership role. What were some of the mistakes you made and what did you take away or learn from that?

Tyler Carey
Sure. Well, I think that the biggest one is that, you know, because something works well for you You think it’s gonna work well for everybody else, or even worse you think that’s the way it should be done, you know, so I think there was a lot of learning that I had to do there that the verbiage I use around, you know something the questions I’m gonna ask a customer, the way I follow up it’s gonna be very different than other people. And it’s something I still kind of slap my own wrist about to these days. You know there’s certain methods that I have right now with working with our market to better understand it and engage with people that work really well for me, and they might be geared towards my personality or my approach. But you know I’m very lucky to have a very talented sales team working for me at West Chester and everybody kind of does things a little different, which is something I really embrace now, but early on in my career, I didn’t get that as well and so I found myself probably annoying people by saying, “Well, why didn’t you word it this way,” or, you know, that kind of stuff which is the micromanaging stuff that doesn’t help people advance things rather than the strategic stuff that does.

Christopher Smith
Right, right. For someone who’s considering making the same switch, what advice do you have for them?

Tyler Carey
Um, you know I found myself engaged in, you know, kind of training or programming around advancing management, after the fact. And you know, I think, even if it’s just a matter of signing up for like a single MBA course, even if you’re not going to pursue a full MBA or something like that, there’s a lot of good content especially that’s available now through digital learning where, you know, it kind of ties back to that humility thing and it’s okay to say I need to know what I’m really, what skills I’m gonna really need to do to be successful and what I need to know interpersonally to kind of work with people where they’re gonna want to, you know, kind of embrace what I’m suggesting. So I think certainly, you know, if I had more training I think earlier on, that probably would have helped me and it’s something where you know I was fortunate as I said to have mentors who taught me that stuff but I think there’s certainly a lot to be said for kind of formalized training on on just how to be a better manager.

Christopher Smith
Right, right. What’s the first thing a person, stepping into a sales leadership role should do?

Tyler Carey
You know, the more typical times, I’d say take each of your reps to lunch and learn a little bit more about them. It’s harder doing that via zoom and, and we have added staff at Westchester over the past year, so you know a lot of the ways we get to know people, you know, it’s, it’s more like this, rather than you know kind of the, you know, come into the office for a week and meet everybody kind of stuff that you typically would do. I think the thing that I typically try to do is ask a lot of questions to find out what, what ways people approach things, so that what tools they’re used to using, how they use those tools, so that anything I’m suggesting is essentially something where I understand kind of where they’re coming from rather than telling them how to do it. So, yeah, I think really getting to understand not just who the people are and you know tell me about your family and that kind of stuff but more the, you know, tell me how you do what you do and what you know why you find these methods successful. What’s really worked well for you before. You know, trying to find out people’s strengths, so that you can help them play to that.

Christopher Smith
Right, expanding on that a little bit with this next question, what do you think really makes a successful sales leader?

Tyler Carey
I think the successful sales leaders are the ones who can ask the right questions of their staff where senior leadership is getting the information that they need to know. Yeah, I think there can be especially in the world of CRM where you know there’s, you know, up to the minute data that’s in a system, senior leadership at some companies I’ve worked at have been up to their sleeves in that, you know, data constantly and wanting to, you know, see did this deal move yesterday and that kind of thing. So I think one of the things that, you know, can be beneficial in leadership and working with your team is just being able to help them understand what’s being tracked so that they can you know monitor it and keep it up to date. But then beyond that, you know, helping them kind of navigate the morale piece of it. I the, one of the best managers I’ve ever had used the phrase you know don’t let the highs get too high, don’t let the lows get too low, and that’s one I still use with folks now. So you know it’s almost like the victories are great, but it’s how you navigate those losses sometimes. And as a sales leader I think that’s something that, you know, there will be losses of course, and you know, you know kind of helping folks not get discouraged on that. If there are learning lessons, great but if not, don’t beat yourself up trying to find them you know.

Christopher Smith
Yeah. Do you have just a funny crazy sales story you can share with us?

Tyler Carey
Sure yeah I mean, you know, like, anybody in sales we’ve all got tons of crazy stories, right? You know the the one that sticks to mind for me was there was a had to be at least a year long sales cycle we had a RFP for contract for services. This is several companies ago. The company’s not even in business anymore so I can tell the story. But we participated in an RFP and with a customer, was a very demanding customer, they asked a lot of great questions during the sales process. We were awarded the bid, and then there was a pretty long lag between when the bid was awarded and when the project got kicked off to get started. And I went to the kickoff meeting as the sales lead. And as I got about, actually so, I went up the night before, and I got a question from the customer, they said, “Oh, you know, when did your flight get in?” I said, “I drove, it’s like an hour and a half from our office,” they’re like, “Oh, I thought you were out, you know, somewhere else you know like Chicago or whatever,” it’s like no, nearby, you know. And then the next morning, because I stayed over a hotel, just because we had a very early meeting, next morning I get to the meeting and the customer says, you know, “Here’s the stuff we want to cover in our agenda. I forgot to tell you the specific points,” and they start rattling a bunch of specific points, which weren’t about what we sold at all. I mean, it wasn’t like anywhere close it wasn’t like oh, well we do that a little differently with our product, it was totally different stuff. So we got about six hours into this kickoff meeting when it finally dawned on me that they had intended to award this to somebody else and obviously something went wrong with the procurement process. So there I am having like pull aside this person say, “This is really embarrassing I think for all of us, but I don’t think you wanted me to come here today I think you wanted this person from Chicago.”

Christopher Smith
Yeah.

Tyler Carey
So that you know to their credit they said well you know, I think almost it was like, well, you know, procurement, right you know it’s too late now, but to their credit they you know we took step back, did a gap analysis, said well these are the things that we really need and we were able to focus on those core competencies. But yeah, kind of having that whole mistaken identity thing at dinner and it didn’t dawn on me, I get there in the morning, and then takes me several hours to finally go you know I don’t think you meant hire us you know for this very large contract you know. So yes I mean I think, you know, certainly there’s always the, the other wacky just road stories traveling around and all that but I mean, that kind of thing just always sticks with me. So.

Christopher Smith
That is, that’s a crazy sales story. Holy cow. I’m glad you were able to spin it back though, and keep things moving, that’s awesome. Let’s transition a little bit to the sad part of sales rejection.

Tyler Carey
Sure.

Christopher Smith
What’s the deal that you lost that just you thought you had it, and you lost it and it just hurt?

Tyler Carey
Yeah, I mean there was one. We had a customer who flew to meet with us many times at our headquarters. We were getting all the right buying signals. I even, I nearly bought a car based on the projected commission, you know, nothing fancy but I was like I needed a new car and I was like well I’m gonna be able to get down payment, this is great went to the showroom took a test drive. Thankfully, you know my dad raised me to always wait until you actually have the check in your hand before you spend it, you know. But yeah, this was a, a huge, huge, huge contract, which yeah at the last minute they said oh, we went in another way, and that was one where you know wasn’t just me that was duped as the sales rep kind of putting on my happy ears and wanting to hear the good stuff and not hear the bad stuff. This, everybody on our management team had heard the same things, you know the fact that they kept coming out and doing all these meetings, telling us was down to us and this other vendor, here’s why we like you best, you know all that kind of stuff. And ultimately was something it was a decision that we didn’t have the right, even though they were senior in their own organization, they weren’t they didn’t have the right buying you know permissions to just make it happen on their own and so they ended up having like anybody you know be beholden to somebody else on something and you know that the deal went the other way. But but yeah, I mean those kinds of ones really, you know they’re kind of a gut punch. You know they take the wind out of your sails, especially when everybody else was counting on it, you know, it’s, it’s definitely one of those things that um you know sticks with you. So it’s not one that wakes me up in the middle of the night, but certainly if there’s a regret, that’s an easy one to look back on.

Christopher Smith
Yeah. So, when you’re mentoring and coaching your team, and they’re dealing with rejection, do you draw upon those experiences when you’re, or how do you draw on those experiences when you talk with them?

Tyler Carey
Yeah, well I mean, don’t let the highs get too high thing, right. You know I quote that one a lot. And that’s just for pithy Maxim’s but it’s it’s true you know I think we, in sales, the thing that I try to track metrically with each rep is what our typical batting average looks like, you know. How many conversations we have with with companies that need their content edited, typeset, created, where we lose is if people want to keep the work in-house you know because they have a greater level of trust there, is that that there’s other competitors, they’re cheaper? Isn’t that a project just doesn’t happen, you know? And so what I try to do is just be objective with folks and say well, why did we lose, what are the things that we could have done differently, if any, but more often than not it’s really just a matter of kind of looking at those losses and just saying well of course. Like anything in sales it’s a numbers game. We’re gonna talk to 100 publishers across their sales team in a given week and if we closed 100 deals a week well, you know, we’d be millionaires and that’d be great, you know, but, you know, the fact the matter is just part of the job is just having these conversations and finding when people are finally at the position where they need our services and we’re happy to help. But if they don’t need our services, that’s okay too and, you know, hopefully we take something good away from each conversation and can revisit those folks later.

Christopher Smith
Do you do that as part of every like a retrospective as soon as you lose that deal, or is that a more of a periodic thing where like every quarter you do it?

Tyler Carey
There’s a three things, really. So as we do each loss I certainly catch up with the rep to see what’s going on, if there’s anything we can take away, you know the samples from this other company were more in line with what’s customers thinking of, that kind of thing. Is there anything objective that they shared, that’s helpful to know. As far as you know kind of longer term processes, yeah I do pull up each quarter, usually not with each individual rep but just looking at the losses and just seeing, are we off the pace and if so, is it because we were, you know, we had so many opportunities in the pipeline? You know, is there, you know some other cause? But every year at the end of the year, between Christmas and New Year’s I sit down and I kind of run what I call our baseball card, you know and it’s just kind of every stat that we have based on the KPIs in the system. You know, how many opportunities did we create, how many did we close, how many are stagnant. You know, and reasons why and we do in our CRM, and I know we’ll talk a little bit more about CRM in a minute, but in our CRM system we do track each loss we track a bunch of data points on each loss, you know, the causes, the reasons, if there was a competitive loss with this competitor and why. So there’s a bunch of stuff that’s textboxes that are a little harder to put into a baseball card. But there’s also a lot of stuff that is just data points we can extract in a spreadsheet and put into a dashboard essentially to look at, you know how we’re doing.

Christopher Smith
If you’re listening, if you’re if you’re hearing this, you’re listening to the podcast, but if you’re wondering how to track losses, what he just described, that’s how you track your losses. That is spot on. When, you know, when we work with people when we come in, a lot of times, we don’t see that a lot of times people don’t want to worry about the losses. But you’re missing a huge opportunity I think if you’re not doing that. So when it comes to CRM technology, do you love it, or do you hate it?

Tyler Carey
Oh I love it, I love it, I am you know, the earliest sales jobs I had, actually real, real quick anecdote. One of the first sales jobs I had out of college was at a .com. And I was, you know, kind of big beard hippie, you know, and here I am trying to wear a suit and blend in, you know, and everybody at the .com was kind of, who’s this guy in a suit with huge beard, you know. So the first day of the job, I was there just as like the Office Admin, it was just a job I took out of college so I could get my career going kind of thing. And the guy who was the sales manager, he said, “Come here,” and he brought me into a room that had just like office supplies scattered all over. And he said could you organize the office supplies, he said, and then I want you to write down on a notepad, every office supply that we have, and how many pencils, he said don’t count the individual paperclips just how many boxes of paperclips. He said, “Just write up an inventory.” So I said, okay, you know, so I did this on a legal pad. He says, “Great, go put this in Excel.” And so I went put it in Excel, and he was like, “Great, you’re working with me now.” And so I became a sales coordinator, and he was a great mentor who really brought me into the mix, but what he told me after the fact was that was an exercise to see if I had an attention to detail where if I was going to help him on projects, would I be able to keep it up to date in the system that he had. And I think we’re using Goldmine at the time this is like, you know, 2000, 1999, something like that. And yeah, it was all for, so like that he really helped mentor me and I’m still in touch with him, he’s a good friend. And he really taught me the power and the value of CRM. And that basically is like if you have any piece of information that goes in there, and you know here’s the important stuff that you want to track, though you know because you could otherwise it turns into a shoebox full of receipts, you know. So he really guided me on how he was using Goldmine for this small .com startup. He ended up leaving three months later, and because it was the .com era in the late 90s, and I followed him to another startup. And, you know, same thing there, we built a CRM system and in that case we were able to actually buy a list of all the clients in this one particular market and that was really the first time I had a full CRM that I could slice and dice. And so, since then I mean even at Westchester you know my first thing on the job was setting up a CRM system for us you know before we even started picking up the phone and calling customers when I, you know, joined the company about seven years ago. So it’s it’s definitely, for me it’s an organizing principle that helps me better understand the market, but to your point, helps understand where we’re winning and where we’re losing.

Christopher Smith
Yep. So when you were thinking back when you started at Westchester, you said the first thing you did was or one of the first things was implement CRM. What was your definition of success for that CRM implementation?

Tyler Carey
The definition of success I had was that I wanted the senior team, both in kind of executive management as well as in, you know, operational management and kind of mid-management to be able to see what we were looking at as far as new potential business. So my definition of success was when we finally got to the point, and it took a lot of iterations, because this was the way the company had tracked stuff before was in more siloed compartments of data,

Christopher Smith
Right.

Tyler Carey
And so by putting everything into one big box where all of a sudden we could pull a report and look at it on the wall in the conference room, it opened up a lot of discussions about you know let’s look at what our batting average is in this market. Why are we not winning more business here? And so the success there was, and it took probably a good year before we had enough data to make it actionable because you can create the skeleton and fill in the back data that the company had from its decades of existence, but it took us a while until we had enough opportunities in the mix where we were tracking where we won, where we lost, how many people we were talking to who just went stagnant, where we start to understand what those trends are and it’s different from market to market. In publishing, there’s always a level of interest in talking about different ways of doing things. And there’s also different times where that’s going to be better to put into effect than others. So the fact that we had stagnant opportunities didn’t necessarily mean that these were individual buying inflection moments that we missed, it was just kind of well, it’s a good thing we spoke with this publisher, because when they are ready now, we’re able to kind of put that into play. So there were a lot of those kinds of things where once we were able to have that cross department dialogue to help fuel the direction of the services we could offer and getting everybody at the table on those discussions, rather than just kind of here’s the spreadsheet, take a look, which is you know what initially started it because we didn’t have enough data, once we had people actually slicing and dicing that information, that that made me feel like we had a success in place.

Christopher Smith
Was there anything through that process that was harder than the rest that was more of a struggle?

Tyler Carey
Yeah, I think, getting to the right level of information for everybody, because different stakeholders are going to have different levels of detail that they want to have on a deal, that they want to have on a customer, that they want to have on in reports. So it took a lot of calibrating around to put together, kind of like a report that we still produce every week of the pipeline, and what information was important to have in there, because it took a lot of calibration so that everybody was happy with that report, and we weren’t having to create separate versions for different departments’ needs, you know. So it, and it’s still something we calibrate we, you know, typically once a year we kind of take a step back, look at what we’re doing in this year in our CRM system and revise it.

Christopher Smith
Right. So, I’m gonna ask you to stretch here a little bit, because you’ve been through this. For people that are going to be in your shoes and they’re like, hey, I’m coming to this place I know they don’t have a CRM, what should be their keys for success? What should they be worried about?

Tyler Carey
The first piece I think is always knowing what their own strengths and weaknesses are on implementing a CRM, so there’s a reason there are so many people who are CRM consultants you know, that these systems can be as simple or as complex as you like. So I think kind of just first off, knowing what your, your own capabilities are. Is this something you can handle? And I was fortunate enough just trial by fire over my career having had to do so much with CRM systems that I could implement one when I came to Westchester. If I was coming into a company 10 times our size, there was no way I would have been able to accomplish what we needed. You know if it’s something that was gonna have 100 plus licenses or something like that. So, you know, I think, knowing one’s own limitations, knowing what resources are out there to help, but also the other key piece that I think anybody coming into a new operation which is going to really kind of embrace CRM or relaunch serum is supporting data. So I mean we’re big fans of certain products that are, you know, you know, kind of like databases online where we can look up businesses and live there and find them, you know there’s tons of good ones out there. And, you know, we’re big fans of trying to make sure we understand the universe of prospects there, so that we can you know kind of know whatever data we can back load on to our existing data. If we can get data about revenue, number of employees, that kind of thing, that, that’s the kind of stuff where it starts to help you find the trends of who are the people who are our customers, who are the accounts we don’t ever seem to win. You know, so I think kind of adding data that’s externally sourced, you know is very helpful out of the gate when you’re trying to start to analyze things because you won’t have enough data yet from your own wins and losses to analyze what’s working and what’s not.

Christopher Smith
Yeah, that’s great advice because that’s something we talked about with our clients and prospects is that, you know, it’s expensive to have someone send their keynote all this data. Take advantage of this, it’s, there’s so much out there, like you said, and it’s so easy these days to build those integrations to get that data coming in, and really augment and flush out that data set so it becomes really actionable. That’s terrific advice. Tyler, if people want to reach out, we’re coming to our end here of Sales Lead Dog, if people want to reach out and connect with you, what’s the best way for them to connect and maybe learn more about your firm?

Tyler Carey
Sure. Well the firm itself, Westchesterpublishingservices.com, they can feel free to browse around there, it includes links to our subsidiary in the UK, our subsidiary that focuses on education services. So if anybody’s looking for somebody to help them create, edit, or typeset or digitally produce content, they can certainly learn about that there. If anybody’s interested in connecting with me personally just for a follow-up on any of these points here, I’m on LinkedIn and I know you’ll, you’ll have the link in the, the podcast notes, always happy to connect with folks and learn more about their aspects of the industry.

Christopher Smith
That’s awesome. Thank you again for coming on Sales Lead Dog. It has been terrific talking with you and listening to you.

Tyler Carey
Oh, my pleasure Christopher, enjoy the podcast and I’m grateful for the opportunity to participate. Thanks a lot.

Christopher Smith
Awesome. Thank you again.

Tyler Carey
Alright.

Outro
As we end this discussion on Sales Lead Dog, be sure to subscribe to catch all our episodes on social media. Follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. Watch the videos on YouTube, and you can also find our episodes on our website at Empellorcrm.com/salesleaddog. Sales Lead Dog is supported by Empellor CRM, delivering objectively better CRM for business guaranteed.

Quotes:

“There’s really no task that’s beneath you as a sales rep.” (17:16-17:19)
“Just because something works well for you, doesn’t mean it’ll work well for everybody else.” (22:12-22:17)