Building an Effective Outbound Enterprise-Grade Sales Strategy with Kevin Warner | Increase Sales

What's good, everybody? My guest today is Kevin Warner. He's the founder and CEO at Lydium, which provides dedicated sales resources who acquire targeted prospects, design account-based sales campaigns, and convert prospects into qualified sales appointments. Kevin, welcome to the Goats of Growth.

Jay: It is great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Absolutely. Let's just start with what I just ended with. Um, tell me a little bit more about Lydium and uh, the value proposition that you offer your customers.

Yeah, Lydium is in this fast-growing space of sales development agencies. It wasn't as fast-growing when we started in 2014, so we've definitely been a long-standing player in the space. But essentially, more and more companies understand the advantage of top-of-funnel and how sales can lead to, uh, you know, instant activity; getting in front of your decision-makers and your ideal accounts quickly. Not necessarily waiting for marketing to pick them up in their orbit, but actually just picking up a phone, sending an email, and communicating in real time. So that SDR function is one we're becoming more and more normalized in the B2B space. And companies like ourselves said, "Hey, what we're able to do is we understand the channel really well. We understand strategy and segmentation. We understand where data exists and how to best utilize it. We understand that copy matters; the types of messaging, the types of phone calls, scripting, as well as the actual SDR activity itself." So we're kind of coming in as a full-service agency to say, "Let us focus on driving the pipeline; let you focus on closing that pipeline and to realize revenue," and we can kind of become an agency of record. So we can stay at the forefront of, you know, strategies of deliverability, which is becoming more and more of a behemoth, and all of that, which takes a lot of financial resources and a lot of financial risk for a company to run internally. We can take that risk off of their shoulders and kind of provide a full encompass suite of services.

Let me ask you because you started off by alluding to the crowded space. Right? Obviously, when you started, maybe not as crowded. How do you then, frankly, as a pro at this, right, differentiate yourself? Because you mentioned, you know, writing the copy and scripting and that type of stuff. So as you're putting your own messages together for Lydium, um, in a in a crowded space, what are you doing to help you, you know, stand out and acquire new customers for Lydium?

Yeah, it's a great question, and I'll answer it in two parts. One is we've been very fortunate that we have never had to do outbound ourselves, and it's weird that we're an outbound agency and we just don't have to do it ourselves. And I think that's just a, um, uh, it leads to how long we've been doing it, our reputation in the space, our size in the space that a lot of companies come and seek us out. Now that doesn't mean that we can't win a deal because it is a crowded market. A lot of companies are prospecting, are selling appointment-setting services, our undercutting pricing. The way we stand out a bit differently is: one, we approach outbound very strategically. So when we're selling into a company, we have to understand what is out. This is not just setting appointments, and while that seems very simplistic, we have to stay true to: how are we, what's the strategy, how are we optimizing that, how are we looking at the analytics, how are we testing different messaging? Most companies don't have a good idea on what go-to-market messaging works or doesn't work. So before I ever pitch an idea of "we're going to set an appointment," what we say is, "Look, we're going to build an enterprise-grade SDR, you know, outbound program. If you do have a good product-market fit and you do solve the problems that you say exist in the market, then you will get appointments from it. Appointments are a byproduct of all the other work." So we never sell appointments; we sell the strategy, we sell the consistency, and you have to have a purposeful, kind of ideologic thinking on what is outbound, how does it work, and and kind of how do you approach it that you really pitch to clients. And from that, I think what you end up doing is you get them to trust, which we're an agency, so oftentimes we're selling on trust. You get them to trust that, "Hey, you know what you're doing."

And we trust that that brings up another question because frankly, that's how I often have to sell as well. I'm not, I'm providing a service; nobody's downloading any demo or, you know, anything like that, right? And so I do sell on trust. So I guess maybe this is a selfish question, but when you start and when you engage with a new prospect and you aren't tying it to appointment setting but you're really selling a strategy in a program, yeah, if you will, right, how do you, how do you inspire trust in that? What are some of the things that you're thinking about and going through?

Yeah, it's a great question, and we've gone through our iterations over the last eight years. Do we scale up, scale down, scale? Where are people as a service business? So I remember 2015, talking to an investor when you, you built the company hoping, "Hey, maybe we'll get investment," and you watch the tech company and what you quickly realize in an agency is, "No, no, that's not the same game that you're going to be playing." And I remember one investment conversation, they said, "If I bring you a hundred customers tomorrow, what do you do?" And the answer was, "We'll take five of them because all we can support today is five of them." And he said, "Well, that's not a very good, that's not a very investable business if I can't scale my bottom line with you guys by by adding fuel to the fire. What do you need an investor for?" And that was kind of our aha moment of, "Hey, we're we're in this for the long run, and we, that's how a lot of agencies are built and functioned." We kind of model ourselves very closely to, you know, how a top marketing agency might do client relationships and execution, etc. But that was always at the forefront. So we have tried to push the limits and scale, and you know, revenue is a goal, and that's just bringing in more revenue because we're a sales business. What we realized through that was we're successful with as much expertise and experience that we can provide each client. Meaning if we're building outbound campaigns, we need to understand different products, different product industries and market fits, and you know, we have a pharmaceutical client, and then we have a tech startup that's dealing with HR to, you know, other startups. Those are, you know, categorically different ICPs and different markets. But how do we as an agency understand the mechanics of both of them so that we can provide, you know, a great service? That takes a skill set, and that skill set in sales, which is the unfortunate thing, is hard to hire for because if you're good at sales and if you're good at pipeline creation, you're usually wanting to do sales, and you usually want to be an account executive, and you're getting paid good money to do it. And as an agency, we can afford you because it messes up our margins. So what we've decided to focus on is: let's be boutique, even though we are a big player in the space, even though we've been here for so long, let's stay small, let's stay founder-led sales, let's stay boutique, let's stay where our client experience, you're managed by a partner and a founder of the business. That limits us to how much growth we can have, but we've kind of shifted our goals as an agency, and we say we're not, we're not chasing 20 million dollars in in annual revenue; we're chasing five. And at five, that's a great lifestyle company where we have great relationships, great results, and we can be still at the forefront of everything we do. So we had to have that kind of fundamental shift of who do we want to be and how are we going to get there, and that's just how we've gone about a little bit differently.

Is that so? Linking it back to the trust then, what I'm hearing is is that, you know, obviously you're not, let's say I hate to use this word, but you're not, let's just use the word delegating; you're not delegating it out to, you know, someone who you know, or at least who's managing the account to someone who might just be just out of school or maybe doesn't necessarily have the knowledge and expertise or or care that you do or one of the other partners in the business. Is that fair to say in terms of just where, where you're building your trust initially on those, in those initial meetings?

That is fair to say. One is, you're probably going to clip this part, but I'm going to stand up, and for the sake of whoever is editing, we'll clip this. Let me motion-sensor my office light. Okay.

Yeah, fair enough. Okay. Most people will hear this; most people will be listening to this anyway, not seeing it. So exactly. Exactly. It's a little motion sensor on those lights for the sake of it. Um, it might happen again, but that's exactly right. So how we're getting trust is we're not delegating the parts that we can't delegate. I am joining any second sales call where we think is a good client fit; I am joining it. My one of my business partners is managing most of the strategy, especially in the early months. So without delegating it, we limit the capacity that we can bring in, which is what we like; is that boutique approach. But you're also trusting that, "Hey, I'm dealing with not only business owners because you could start a new agency pretty quickly and still be doing founder-led sales, but business owners that have a track record, have been doing this for almost a decade now, have a good brand behind them, who decidedly made it a boutique agency, and I'm dealing directly with them." So this isn't a fly-by-night type of operation; we kind of have a name and prestige behind it. And for us, we do it one more layer besides that, and very early on we wanted to focus on brand. And so we also, in every aspect of your relationship with us, from sales to execution, we have it modeled as well. We want to be the Deloitte of the space, and essentially what that means to us is there's a certain, there's a certain atmosphere. We come to meetings dressed right; we have our briefcases, we have our presentations; there's a certain decorum in our meetings and, you know, strategy and outline and communication after the meetings. So you know that you're actually doing business with a buttoned-up, well-put-together company, which just instills trust when comparing other options in the market.

I wonder, most of my companies are my clients are, you know, technology companies, um, often venture-backed technology companies who, um, aren't that way, right? In other words, they don't come to the meetings necessarily or wouldn't expect people to be buttoned up, um, or is that something that you find? Because you mentioned one's a pharmaceutical company, one can be HR tech. I know with, with as I just alluded to, do I focus only on one, you know, industry at large, right? High-type of growth technology companies, and I made that choice as a service provider because it, for me, it's very difficult to get deep knowledge and understanding of multiple industries, right? And to the point what you were just saying about scale, it's very hard to forget about industry knowledge but to pivot and go towards and focus your brain on another industry and another person's problem where I'm much better at saying, "Okay, or you need an account executive or an HR tech company. Yeah, that's fantastic; we just did six of those yesterday," right? So it's like, it's easier for us to do that.

Yeah, yeah. How do you sort of assimilate when you are going from, you know, pharmaceutical to, um, to high-tech and, you know, briefcase or or not?

Yeah, this is where that expertise comes in handy. So what we say is how we see outbound; this is an acquisition channel, and probably an acquisition channel that should sit under marketing as of 2023. I remember back in the day in 2020 or 2016, 2017, that was the big talk: is outbound sales a marketing function or a sales function? And at the time, everyone says sales function. I think it's developed into a marketing function. So when you think about outbound sales, you have email, phone, and LinkedIn. The average prospect today engages with those three channels very differently from one prospect to the next. Meaning you might be somebody highly involved in email; somebody else enjoys cold calls because maybe it's a, you know, an older age bracket, maybe a certain industry or a certain persona within a company that prefers phone calls. That you got to look at every one of those pieces, much like marketing does when you're running a Facebook ad; you're segmenting down not just the demographic you're targeting, but also what are they like, what are their dislikes, where are they located? If they're located in, you know, Southern California, you might be showing, you know, um, you know, LeBron shoe ads versus in Boston, you're going to be showing somebody else's. That so you're looking at all those different, you know, analytic traits as well. We see outbound very much the same; you have email, phone, and LinkedIn. Email, phone, and LinkedIn is the same structure for every company, whether it's you, me, I'm a multi-billion-dollar company; email, phone, and LinkedIn function the same. So now you got to look at, well, what's changing? The end-users are changing, and the value propositions are changing, but all the mechanics stay the same. Where Lydium does really well is, "Look, we know the mechanics of outbound; we know how to engage and get impressions with your customers based on the value propositions you're saying you have." I don't need to be an expert in your space because, by all means, email is three sentences; I don't need to be an expert to write three great sentences. I need to understand how email is absorbed and kind of responded to. Same with phone; with phone, you get two minutes, a minute; you get an opener; you know what, what's your go-to, what's your call to action? You gotta hope that you get that long. If you look at phone analytics, you know, probably a five percent connect rate. So if you're calling 100 people, you're connecting with five, and you might get one of them who has the time of day to give you a conversation. So you don't need to have a pitch that's a minute long; you need to understand the mechanics of the pitch again; what's the hook? You still have to solve a problem; I can't do that for you if you're a company. I have to know that what you're bringing to the table is a solution or a product that solves a problem that's actively being, you know, felt by the market you're selling into. If you don't categorically do that, you're never going to create pipeline. So for us, we're able to shift from one industry to the next and be very agnostic because we understand the fundamentals of outbound, and it's the same way a marketing agency can create a Facebook or an Instagram or a TikTok ad for you without needing to know in-depth product knowledge or market fit. It's because, "Hey, there's a headline, a byline, a call to action, and a graphic. We need to segment that as much as possible so that we increase the conversion rates, and if we don't segment it, that's the worst." So you have to understand that. So I think that expertise that we're bringing allows us to kind of go from one to the next.

You mentioned enterprise. Thank you for explaining that. You mentioned enterprise-grade SDR program; unpack that for me. What does that mean?

Yeah, so if you're thinking about enterprise-grade today, that means what are you putting into it? So it's not just hiring an SDR and saying, "Go and hope it works," like maybe a lot of small, medium-sized businesses are confronted with: do we hire an SDR or do we hire an agency? It's not just hiring an SDR; it's what's their tech stack, what's their training? A lot of SDRs are entry-level; that's just the reality of it. If you're getting a non-entry-level SDR, they're then they're most likely not joining your company; they might be joining a different type of company. So most are entry-level who don't have a lot of sales expertise or experience; there's, you know, call reluctance when it comes to phone calling. So not only are you hiring an SDR, you need to ramp them pretty quickly because an average tenure of an SDR, according to the Bridge Group, is 11 to 13 months. I think they also say it takes about three months to fully ramp a rep, so you get seven to ten months of productivity, but that's if you have a good management and system in place. Imagine if you don't have a good system. So not only do we come in and we say, "Hey, we can build the strategy of who are we targeting; we can break down your ICP and segment it further to best utilize outbound as a channel and be as personalized as possible based on your segments; we can source the data," but also that person who's doing the activity, we're gonna, we, we kind of hire specialized resources. So we have SDRs who handle email, SDRs handle phone, and SDRs who handle LinkedIn because we see those as three different skill sets. And so we focus on one person becoming an expert at phone, and typically if you like cold calling, you like cold calling; you don't want to do email and try to figure out that game; you just want to be calling. So we pro, we specialize our resources, and in the end what a company has felt is a high-quality activity; email, phone, LinkedIn driven by an experienced SDR rep who's managed and trained daily and weekly and kind of continues to push the the bounds of their knowledge; great campaigns, great validated data that's becoming more and more readily available but still expensive; on great enterprise tech, you know, a tech stack. We use Apollo.io internally, Apollo Outreach, SalesLoft; that's an enterprise-level tool. So we take on all of that cost and all of that kind of deliverable to drive what you would ideally build internally but takes a lot of time, a lot of resources, and a lot of human capital as well.

Let me zoom all the way back out and get to know you a little bit, Kevin, um, from the beginning, if you will. In other words, yeah, how did you get to Lydium? Let's just start there; give me that, give me the journey.

No, it's a great question. So I was always a political science guy out of college. I worked on Capitol Hill for two years and campaign finance for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, and very quickly realized politics is not where if you want to be because, um, you know, it's a dog-eat-dog. I think what we know today, which was not as evident back then, is, "Hey, this is all about money," um, you know, it's all about campaign financing, it's all about cold calling, believe it or not, as much outbound as I know today, it's all started there with call lists and senators calling for dollars. Um, that led to the tech world. So that was 2011-12. I happened to get picked up in a very, you know, growing mobile app development tech world back then in New York and San Francisco. I was always on the product development and success side of those tech startups, though. After a couple failed—one listed on NASDAQ, and we went out of business two years later—I realized, "Hey, who cares how good your product is, and who cares about the client services end of it if you don't have sales? You don't have revenue. If you don't have revenue, you don't have a company." Even if sales outpaces product, which most of the time it does, you have to have sales; that kind of defines everything. So that was just the perfect timing in 2014-15 when sales tech was exploding. I met a few co-founders; we founded a company today called Science Technology, which is still a competitor today. We exited myself and a couple co-founders from there; we exited in 2016 to start Lydium just because we wanted a little bit more boutique; we wanted just as much consultative as execution, which is very different than uh, the machine we built at Science. So we exited Science and then started Lydium, and ever since then it really, that pivotal moment of "sell the product, not just focus on building it," since I was always on the building side, really led into perfect timing with this explosion of sales technology and really what we found when we started our first company was we're not techies, well, you know, where we don't know how to code, we don't know how to take advantage of this exploding sales market, but what we do know is how can we use all of this tech to kind of bring an advantage to a company who might not know how to use all this tech or that this tech even exists, and that's kind of the space we play in still to this day.

What was the, what was your challenge with Science's business model because, you know, you said that you wanted to do it in a different way? What was, why did you put it there?

We, when we started Science, our whiteboard, kind of how we want to build it, is kind of like the McDonald's in the market. So we were still very early in, and we said we want, we want to be big; that's created to be the McDonald's. And the idea was you have to have a conveyor belt, so every client in, here's the service you get, no matter if you're this or that client, here's the service. So we still have that today, and I argue that that works, and and uh, I have a lot of love for what we built at Science, um, uh, and it still works. I still argue that as much as people think that McDonald's isn't a good hamburger, it is still eaten by hundreds of, you know, millions of people on an annual basis; like it is still a globally recognized hamburger place. And while you might not like it, it is great, like a lot of people do love it, and that doesn't mean it's good, good or it's bad; that just means it, for some people, it works really well. For a lot of companies, that conveyor belt kind of structure, what we said was we don't want to go too far from it; we're not kind of revolutionizing it. When we started Lydium, we said we just want to be the Five Guys or the In-N-Out; we just want to be a better quality. We still have to follow a lot of the processes that we built when we were there, and those fundamentals of, "Hey, you do need structure on how do you onboard a client, how do you activate tech stacks, how do you deactivate them if a client leaves, how do you optimize the process of launching," we just want to be a little bit better product with a little bit better outputs. So we just kind of, that's where we left and created kind of that Five Guys aspect; maybe eaten by less people for sure. Understood. Um, maybe has a, you know, a whatever, however you want to compare it; that's kind of how, why we left and what we built there. I love those examples, by the way. I'm, every first Monday of every month, we eat McDonald's here, so it works, right? And that's what we loved about that system was, "Hey, outbound was growing so quickly; when it works, it works, and you're not going to cancel it when it does; you're going to cancel fast, but the market's so big that who cares, just move on," um, and that's still true today even with what we're doing; "Hey, the market is so fast; when it works, it works," but we just wanted to focus on, "Hey, who's launching the campaigns? We don't want to just launch a, we hope to, well, that's a hope and prayer that it works type of campaign; we want to launch the best campaign we think is possible day one, which increases the potential odds of renewal um, for each client." So we don't want it just to be that you have a good product-market fit and it doesn't matter what emails you send is what retains you as a customer; we wanted it to be a byproduct of kind of the expertise that was going into the campaigns.

All right, I have several follow-up questions here, trying to think which one to ask next. Just so you're interesting to me because you're not a sales guy, right? It didn't come from sales, but yeah, here you are running Lydium, which is general, which is ultimately lead generation. Exactly. So I guess what gave you the gumption, I guess if...

You will go from product to, oh yeah, sure, I can be on the front lines and sell this stuff to, frankly, sales people. But then I'm also—I guess I'll add this to the question—which is I'm trying to figure out how you actually think and process information. I could imagine you have your own internal playbook, if you will, yeah, or structure, or the operating system at Lydium. Frankly, as a service provider, I would love to see that. So just take me inside that; I'm sure a lot of it has to do with your product brain, but just sort of marry those two for me.

Yeah, uh, we often say that it's a love-hate relationship we now have with sales because it's almost like Groundhog Day. We're stuck in this top-of-funnel nightmare that a lot of companies are in. You know, we need appointments; we need appointments. It's the process; it's the process that's the nightmare we live, uh, which is a great nightmare. We happen to be really good at it, so it's hard to then argue against it. It also creates a great life for us, so it's hard to complain about.

Um, it is weird because I wasn't from sales. I never got into sales; never been an account executive before we owned our own business. We started sales at the kind of onslaught of becoming an SDR for one business, and then two businesses, and then three businesses. And what we learned really well was how to be an SDR. Now, inherently through that, you learn then how do you do founder-led sales so that you can continue to close counts, which inherently you become an account executive. But our 10 years of experience in account executive is selling for ourselves, even though we wish we could sell for clients because a lot of them have issues with their account executives. Um, but yeah, it is that weird world of we do so many sales for so many different clients that puts us into this weird mindscape of, man, we've worked with over 750 companies just at Lydia Malone, not including what we did at Science. Some great experiences; some of that experience is some great product-market fits, some bad product-market fits; some of the largest enterprise businesses that you can think of, from Microsoft engaging agencies to small tech companies. So that interesting dichotomy, I think, is what just gets us excited because as founders and entrepreneurs, what we didn't like, I think, leading into our first company was this—the static of you're doing one product or you're selling one company. And if we couldn't create our own tech company, then at least we can invigorate our minds by trying to solve a lot of different problems, and problems that are changing every day, still to this point.

Having the product background has definitely helped with what is the process that we have to put in place, because that's where you inherently win as an agency—know that you can't sign every client; know that, I mean, just last month, after four weeks with a client, we had to give a refund and say, hey, we're parting ways because your expectation of what we're going to deliver is not in path with what we're going to deliver. And yes, we could service you just fine; however, it doesn't follow our process. You're asking for communication processes that go outside of what we do; you're asking for this. And what we've learned really well is that distraction or disruption actually hurts everything else. It's that conveyor belt mindset of as soon as you ask for a custom burger, we don't make it. Who's gonna do it? What's the next part or the next piece? Who's going to put it together? Does that take that resource away from what they're doing? So having that productized customer success mind allowed us to focus on the client experience, how we like—how we perceive the client experience, knowing that we're not always going to deliver a pipeline. How does a customer leave saying, hey, you did everything you could have potentially done; it just didn't work in the constraints that we had within this agency relationship? So it's this weird world we definitely live in, which is sales all day every day. We've gotten really good at what we do as well, which is an advantage and disadvantage because it means that we're stuck in this sales world we created as well.

How do you—this is going to get like in the weeds, but I love getting in the weeds—but how do you put together your own conveyor belt, in other words, that operating system that you just alluded to, your blueprint, your standard operating procedures? Like, is it—you get into Notion or Google Doc and you're like, okay, yeah, or you're wireframing it out and you're saying, okay, this is the first thing that happens, this is the next thing that happens, and you know all that? This is where one—having a good partner team works really well. So I am a product guy, so one—we spend so much money on R&D, you can't imagine it. So if you think about how many sales tools do you test? How many licenses have you activated, everyone? If there's a sales tool that exists, we've tested it in one way or another just to see what does it do? How does it—can it help our system or hurt our system? Can we put it in? Because again, we're not developing our own tools. We need to stay at the forefront of outbound; we need to be cognizant of what tools exist and analyze them in a way of, does it help really drive what the goal we're working towards? Can it optimize what we're currently doing? So we spend a lot on R&D because I come—I personally come from a product mindset, and I was on the product development teams of certain products in the past, at early-stage tech companies. I can process those very quickly, so that's my advantage. One of my co-founders, he's great when it comes with outbound strategy, and that's what he's—the world he plays in. He doesn't understand the API calls and connecting this system to that system; he understands how to put a value proposition together, how to engage an end-user on the phone, how to analyze open rates, response rates, call connect rates in order to determine what we need to optimize. But having a product mindset really lets us break down the tools. Having that R&D mindset also allows you to realize, hey, in the last two to three years, there's so many open APIs from all of these tech companies that you can build your own workflows and your own systems all within the APIs of the tools, so that you never actually have to log into that tool. You can access their APIs and build out your own custom workflows, whether it be in a Google Sheets, whether it be in a ClickUp; you know, you can use multiple tools and drive one data center. And for us, the way we operate is, how do we do that for 60, 70, if it's 120 customers? How do you build a single workflow using a single set of APIs and tools so that you can actually improve your internal processes to maximize time? So if you think—let's just use a round number—if you have 50 clients, I can't spend all day logging into 50 instances of Outreach or Apollo or SalesLoft. But how do I then feed it into a single system? How do I manage emails? You know, how do I manage cold calling across clients? Then how do I do reporting? So that constant R&D allows you to really understand, hey, what are the—what are the apps, what are the functions, you know, what's the new tools that we might be able to leverage? And there's a lot of times—and we're at the size now where—and to your point on the last question—we've been doing this for so long, we're almost like the old grumpy people in the room where it's, hey, we just created this awesome new sales tool, and we can break it down and say like, hey, I would love to have it, just not worth our time. I think the amount of lift it might be able to drive isn't worth the amount of effort as an agency to try to optimize that across or integrate that across all of our tech stack that we do internally. It also means that we have to have really good partnerships with the products that we do use. I think in outbound, I think we're going back to this mindset of growth hacking, and you probably see it at a lot of early-stage agencies where it's like, hey, let's just growth hack. You know, Apollo gives you unlimited data; just scrape all the data. Yeah, that goes against the T's and C's. A lot of what you do on LinkedIn goes against the T's and C's. I'm not going to ruin our clients' experience because I get blocked because of one client, so we won't go against T's and C's. And you know, we do—we won't create fake personas on LinkedIn because we believe in the value of that network. So there's a lot of things that we stand by now, just having built this program as well.

Tell me how your business is either helped or impacted by this when things get slow, when the—when, you know, when the economy is the way it currently is right now, as we are March 21st, 2023. It's an unfortunate reality; when the economy goes bad, our business goes up. So do we cheer for a bad economy? No. Um, do I think it's—it's an interesting—do I think that the SDR space or the sales development space was overinflated? Yes, I think it was well overinflated. I think an entry-level, a one-year-out-of-college person making eighty thousand dollars OTE in sales is absolutely absurd because you don't have a clear value on what that ROI is on the business, so you're kind of hiring to keep up. Um, it's almost like the housing market; I just need to buy it because it's, you know, it's going up and up and up; I just need to get in now, which keeps pushing the pricing up. Um, so it was overinflated for so long, especially in the SDR space, that you just see—yeah, there are layoffs now, especially in sales, but I think it's just coming back down to reality. For us, our business does well because what a company needs inherently is revenue to operate; you need business; you need sales. You now have to understand the risk of, hey, you have X amount of finances available; where do you put it, and what's the most chances to get revenue with the least amount of risk? So you're doing risk management mitigation. We essentially allow you to unlock a lot from tech to data to outbound activity at a fraction of the cost of just a resource, not necessarily all the additionals. So we technically do well in down periods because one thing doesn't change: you need business; you need sales; you need leads to drive sales, and it just becomes harder to do with an internal team. So for us, it's oftentimes an increase in demand in sales, but it's also become such a competitive market after the past eight years. We haven't seen a decrease in our own pipeline. I think it's only what's happening now is it's spreading outside of the industries you might first think about. Tech is the easiest one; we think we live in this tech bubble a lot of times. Our best clients are untraditional B2B companies, you know, pharmaceutical, where it's notoriously B2B, but a great product-market fit; there's a demand that's always built in; it's a transactional community even with high-ticket values, but a lot of times it's outdated with how they do B2B and the strategies they do B2B. So if you think outside of the tech bubble, ninety percent of B2B businesses are small, medium-sized businesses not in tech, and they don't even know what an SDR is, but they have a good product-market fit; they just need leads, and they wouldn't even think about hiring an account executive; they might still be doing founder-led sales. So I think, you know, it's leading into a bigger market for us as well.

It's interesting; I'm certainly in that tech bubble bubble because when you were talking about the tech stack and not knowing, you know, what tools are—should be in the tech stack and going, who doesn't know what needs to be in the tech stack? I'm like, these are high-tech companies; of course they do. But you're right, when you talk about more traditional B2B sales motions, they don't—they're not—they're not thinking that way. A lot of these folks, frankly, are part of the tech stack I grew up in Orange County, California, and I thought it's oftentimes like the Orange County bubble, and I got out when I went to college. And it's oftentimes like, oh, you got out of the bubble because it is—a lot of times you grow up there, you go to school there, you raise a family there, and it is its own, like, Laguna Beach bubble, very much. And if you can get out, the problem becomes you keep surrounding yourself with people in that bubble. So in the tech space, which we're all just so accustomed to, and it's all you see on LinkedIn, well, it's because it's all of your connections on LinkedIn. Why would you be connecting with people outside of the space that you sell into and your peer group? So you can't step back and realize, wait a second, with the millions of B2B businesses that there are, they're not in the tech space, even though that gets a lot of times the PR and the publicity and this and that. Um, it's the small, medium-sized businesses that do so much. I mean, think about how many companies are selling advertising to your local lawn company, or your pool cleaner might be trying to find a Google review partner to help them increase their SEO on Google reviews locally; they might be engaging somebody locally in your—in your region for marketing services; they don't even know what LinkedIn is a lot of times. We have a lot of clients who their ICP doesn't even exist on LinkedIn, so what do you do there? And so that bubble, a lot of times, is—well, you don't even realize that there's this whole other, you know, larger market that exists outside of what we live in.

Yeah, for sure, for sure. And you also confirm—I asked that question about help or impact negatively because I candidly have a friend who is a chief marketing officer at one of your competitors, and, um, you know, we see each other at our kids' soccer games; we coach basketball together, and that's exactly what he just said too: you know, when things get slow out there, we get really, really busy. So, so yeah, that—that—that corroborates that for sure; he wasn't just BSing me.

Yeah, yeah, saying, and for us, like that's where we love where we play because for us we do month-to-month agreements, and we don't do monthly agreements because we need a sale. We believe, hey, we're a sales team at our heart, at our core, and you might have sales quarterly goals, biannual, monthly goals; you might—this might be an initiative now that changes next month; you might not have a close—one revenue to attribute to the cost we're putting in. So for us it becomes, are you realizing value from it? If the answer is yes, you're getting more value than the cost; you would never shut us down. I'm confident in what we can do in month to month, so that again, that's a low risk, and hey, the down market, we need X pipeline; how can I engage something that drives the best chance to generate pipeline with the least amount of risk? And in a down market, you're trying to mitigate that long-term risk.

Yep, for sure, that makes sense. Ready to get into the rapid fire five? Yes, let's do it. All right, all right, all right, all right. Let's see; hold on now, I have to find them. Oh, yeah, first question: What motivates you? Yeah, now that's a great question, rapid fire. Um, oddly enough, and this is probably not the best answer, but for myself and my co-founder, we share this: We just want to be the best in the industry we're in; we want to be seen as that leader, and that's probably our primary motivation.

Name a big goal you have right now, and when you would like to accomplish it. Yeah, I'll do one personal and one business. One personal: It's getting back into the housing market. So we sold our family home, you know, when the market was at its height this past summer, and now it's—how do we get back into it? Uh, you know, all the stuff that we work towards, what is it going towards? And then, uh, in terms of business, you know, we want to analyze the potential of a strategic sale to a PE firm and what that might look like and what additional resources could be unlocked for our clients if we can become a part of a larger family. When is that? We'll put it—can you put a date on that? Oh, that's within 12. I mean, ideally within 12 months.

Okay, what's your most preferred way to learn new information to stay sharp? Yeah, mine is absorbing in real time, so whether that's reading, whether that's activating licenses to tech tools, I am a visual, doer learner, so, um, you know, I can't necessarily sit back and read or absorb on pot; I need to be doing to, um, kind of get that best learning. I am right there with you.

Interesting. How many hours of sleep do you average per night? Myself, I'm at eight to nine now that I'm getting older and older. I would say that when we started the company, I was probably on the four-to-five track, but now that we've just become a little more established, I luckily get eight to nine, and sometimes that doesn't feel like enough. That's not like me.

Uh, what's your favorite thing to do when you aren't working? Uh, golf is right up there; anything sports-related, typically, whether it's basketball, golf, um, tennis, uh, watching sports, whether it be the Commanders or F1 and Mercedes. Uh, sports-related is usually my get-out. Outside of sports and obviously the family thing, which is always that answer, probably reality—I'm one of those reality TV buffs, whether it be, you know, Real Housewives or whatnot. And I think the reason for that is it takes me out of the reality of sales and like revenue and pipeline, and it's just this world of just drama, and it's just such a good change to remove yourself from business and revenue and projections to—let's see who—like, let's complain about how the steak wasn't cooked enough, and how is that even a complaint in today's world? Like, it's crazy.

Yeah, I hear—I hear you there, for sure, for sure. Um, one bonus question that comes from another guest, a previous guest, and then I'll ask you what question you would like to ask my next guest, which—who will, um, likely be a revenue leader in a tech company. Right, so just—but you can ask anything. I mean, people have asked, what's your walk-up song? If you could buy a sports franchise, what would it be? So you—anything, anything is—this question is, what's the best book you have read within the last year that you'd recommend? That is a great question. I have like the worst answers to these questions because I sadly do not read books. I know it's like the worst answer as like an educated, like, scene.

Well, the funny thing is, you—I kind of anticipated that because you just said that you're a doer learner, so to speak, and visual and that type of stuff. So all right, so let me ask you—let me tell you—what's the best piece of information you did learn, um, within the last year? No, that's good. And where did you learn it? I think in the last two months, I would probably say really when we start—when we analyze outbound and how this whole sales pipeline—it was Humantic. I have a good friend, uh, at Humanity today, a guy named Colin Mitchell, uh, who really got me in—you know, introduced to Humantic and AI personality data, which really opened my mind to, hey, of course, prospects in outbound and in sales, we're used to selling the same to everybody; send the same email to multiple personas within the same company, um, and you—you—we always thought about selling to the company and not the individual, even though you know sales is still very much a human-driven activity between two people. And I think realizing, hey, the psychology behind each person—and we consume text differently—we just went about how I don't necessarily, you know, read books to absorb knowledge, um, but how do you read text? How do you absorb it? If I were to write to you, uh, what personality trait—what style would you acknowledge? If I'm on the phone with you, should I be calling people who are more closely identified with my personality trait because there's a better chance that we can hold a conversation and I can pitch you? So why is a 22-year-old calling a 52-year-old CRO? Should I have somebody on my team who's maybe 45 who is like-minded, has like personality traits—maybe you're not on the same career trajectory, but you're at the same place in life and you can talk to each other and share those commonalities because sales is—sales is still that one-to-one human aspect. Having that understanding of like AI or—not AI, but just personality data and how that—that knowledge can actually increase your conversion rates and sales because it kind of puts a different tool in your hand was kind of eye-opening when you analyze it against, you know, what we do, which is pipeline generation, and wait a second, I don't think anyone's accounting for that right now, but you should be because it's no different than Nike tailoring an ad for an 18-year-old versus a 65-year-old; of course they are; of course it's a different demographic; of course they're changing everything about that ad, but in sales we haven't done that, and that was that aha moment of like, wait a second, why aren't we?

Yes, that's right; that's right. And I've got two minutes and then I have to get ready for my next call, so we're gonna—we're gonna—we're gonna squeeze these last two minutes in, which is—what question would you like me to ask my next guest? Yeah, it's a good question. I would ask, um, uh, why—why do you do what you do today? Like, what's the goal? Like, is there a purpose behind it, and what is that reason? And we get that a lot with—why did we start this company, and what do we want from it? So I'm always intrigued as—hey, eight years in, we still ask ourselves, what do we want from this company? What do we want to do? Where do we want to go? So it's an intriguing question to self-analyze.

I love it; that question of why is ever—ever present. For sure, why do you do what you do? For sure; matter of fact, I think I posted about something like that recently on LinkedIn. One last question, and most important question, um, for our listeners, which is—how can folks reach out to you to maybe ask you a question, follow up with you, say thank you, perhaps maybe even be a leading customer at some point? Yeah, our email, Lydium.com, is the easiest place to get a hold of us at Lydia. My email is Kevin@lydium.com as well. Uh, LinkedIn's probably the easiest place to get in front of me quickly and start to build that kind of professional relationship, which is just Kevin Warner on LinkedIn.

Yep, for sure. The Kevin Warner at Lydium. Kevin Warner, thank you for doing this and participating on the Goats of Growth. Yeah, thanks for having me. Bye everybody. I'm cueing the music.