Championing Sales Enablement with Todd Busler from Champify

Full episode transcript

Alper Yurder: Today in the therapy chair, I have Todd Bustler. He was one of the first to join Square's Account Exact team. Then first hired at Heap, growing from six to 300 employees, from 300K to 40 million. Quite impressive there. He's now the CEO and co-founder of Champify. He is now, you know, a first-time founder, just like myself, and he's on a mission to refine outbound selling for the good. We will talk about Champify and we will talk about his experiences. In summary, we'll talk about his success, the joy, the pain, and the journey, as usual. Welcome to Sales Therapy Todd. How are you feeling today?

Todd Busler: I'm doing really well. Alper, thanks for having me. I'm excited to chat with you. I'm doing really well.

Alper Yurder: My pleasure. First of all, let's talk about your background, which I absolutely love. Tell us where you are dialing in from today.

Todd Busler: I'm dialing from South Jersey, like two hours south of New York City. Um, this is where I grew up. It's a small little beach town, uh, near Atlantic city, New Jersey. That's really a bad reputation, but there's all, but there's like, in reality, uh, awesome little beach town community. It's a little barrier island where, um, you know, in the winter, it's a little gray and slow, but in the summer, spring, early fall, it's a great place to be. Um, you know, COVID happened. I kind of set up shop back at home and now I'm back and forth between here and the city.

Alper Yurder: Love it. Is it a bad reputation for it? I mean, not everybody knows the US probably. Is that from the gambling or the Jersey show? What's the bad reputation from? Atlantic City.

Todd Busler: Yeah, I think it's a combination of like, people's experience of New Jersey is Newark Airport and the Sopranos. And yeah, I think that doesn't help. And then Jersey Shore got really popular. That also didn't help. A lot of things are fighting us.

Alper Yurder: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, to be honest, okay, I think I might be in that gang because I worked when I was at Bain, I worked for a year in the New York office, believe it or not, I worked at Times Square, which was ridiculous, but I was always flying to New Jersey, Newark, right? But I loved it because it was emptier than every other airport. So my perception of New Jersey is not bad for me personally.

Todd Busler: Easy to get to the city, could be way worse.

Alper Yurder: Exactly. So Any Good Therapy starts with childhood and growing up. In this first section, I always like to talk a little bit about your growing up experience. And you already mentioned, you know, were you a surfer? Like, how was the growing up experience for you? And how do you think it shaped the values that you have today in the business world?

Todd Busler: Yeah, I had an awesome childhood. I mean, I'm close to my brother and my sister. I have tons of good friends that I grew up with. Most of the people where I grew up were teachers, firefighters, working in restaurants, people that worked in casinos. That was kind of what you got exposed to growing up. My mom worked at a restaurant. My dad is a professor. Very much the thing, the only thing my dad cared about as a kid was getting good grades. And I was like, aside from that, he's like, kind of do what you want, have fun, explore, get in trouble, whatever it is, and just make sure you're getting good grades and do them well in sport. Um, but growing up in a small community, everyone serves, everyone fishes, people have boats, everyone knows everyone. Everyone's on bikes. It's a really cool place to grow up. I think I didn't really get exposed to a lot of other parts of the world and what people were doing and starting companies and finance and all of the tech stuff. Like I didn't really get exposed to any of that until I got to college. But growing up, everyone is working multiple jobs in the summer. You could come from a tourist town, so there's kind of an influx of people coming here and everyone trying to say, all right, how do I make the most money in these couple months while having fun as well? So I think you start getting exposed, like for me, I started selling ice cream on the beach for a couple of years. I worked in parking lots at fancy restaurants. I worked at restaurants. I worked in bars. It's just like get exposed to a lot of different things, which I think...

Alper Yurder: Thank you.

Todd Busler: are a lot of good skill sets to get you into sales, get you into sales leadership, management in general. So I'm really happy I had the chance to grow up the way I did. And one day I hope my kids have the opportunity to do something very similar.

Alper Yurder: Okay, I love that. That sounds like a very, you know, how should I say, quite a good childhood without too much trouble and, you know, without too many lowlights. Good for you.

Todd Busler: Yeah, I mean, everyone has some down parts, but like, yeah, I'm super fortunate, you know, to be born in the place I was and the parents I have and the family I have. So yeah, it was an awesome experience.

Alper Yurder: Excellent. So when you were growing up what you were planning to be then you ended up where you ended up but

Todd Busler: Yeah, you know what? I didn't really know. I remember thinking as I got like 16, 17, 18, like, okay, what am I going to do here? What do people think about this? My logic was just like, all right, try to go to a good school, get exposed to a lot of things. I knew I didn't know what was out there. But I was never like, hey, I'm going to do this from the day one I started. For me, it was like, okay, I'm going to do something sales oriented. I studied real estate in college. I thought I was going to be a real estate developer actually.

Todd Busler: Um, and then I did a couple of internships. Uh, no, I don't. Um, I don't, I don't know. I think like, Hey, I still do some real estate stuff on the side and I have, you know, ever since, since I've been 20 years old or so, um, but the problem I had was. I worked for a couple of big developers and I would sit there and, you know, you put together deals and you don't have the pro forma and you're deep in Excel. And

Alper Yurder: Do you regret it? Do you regret not being a real estate developer?

Todd Busler: We would do all of this work and then nothing would happen. You know, a lot of the deals wouldn't happen or they would take too long or take six to nine months, my internship is over. So I never felt like I was getting the closure or the win. So like, sure, if I got into that long-term, like I'm sure I would have got some of that, but what drew me to sales is, okay, you know, I played football growing up and the team environment and every week you're prepping really hard and practicing and you kind of have an outcome. And that part about sales I really love, you know, it might not be a week long sales cycle like it is between two football games,

Todd Busler: Um, you know, at the end there's strategy, there's team camaraderie, there's learning from mistakes, there's trying to get better. Um, there's this constant improvement that ends with an outcome, a win or a loss, a win or a chance to learn. And that part of sales has really drawn me, um, to really like what I do. And then I think the second part of it is like building the teams around and showing how you can enable and train people is something I get really excited about.

Alper Yurder: The letter is actually very interesting. And I want to talk about that, like developing teams, because I think I love sales and I had the bug, I guess, from very early ages, helping my dad's business, blah, blah. But once you're an IC, that's a different story. Then you start becoming a manager. Then you're a leader, which I think is a word that is so overused these days. So you enjoy the managing, the coaching, the training, the leading bits as well.

Todd Busler: Definitely. So I remember actually when I was at HEAP, you know, super early employee there rep, had some successes in early AE. There were a couple of us starting to really figure it out. I remember as we started to scale, I had a conversation with the CEO and I said, you know what, I like selling. We're getting into bigger deals. I think I'm the one of the best at it here. I know the product inside and out. I know the space. Well, maybe I should just keep going and push the market. He goes, yeah, that's great. Or

Todd Busler: You can try to 10 X your output by making other people as good as you. And that really just stood out with me. Right. Yeah. He was a good leader and pushed for sure. And, and you know what? I really debated at the time of like, you know, there's something appealing. I have a lot of my friends that are enterprise reps and they're on an island and they seem to be coughing a lot and making money. They're really good at it. But there was something that was kept pulling at me to say, you know,

Alper Yurder: Oh, he was a good leader. He was basically encouraging you to do the hard job. Big checks.

Todd Busler: building the team, building the systems, all of that I got excited about. I don't think I'm the best individual seller. I think I'm good at training and enablement and thinking through problems and unblocking things. And I think it goes back to my early days, just, you know, I played football, I was always a quarterback, I was always a leader type of profile. And there's so many similarities, you know, there's so many similarities. And I think I slowly got more and more drawn to that.

‍Alper Yurder: Okay, now that I hear the story, it makes sense. Like early on, join, figure out the playbook, then train the others. And you've done it a couple of times. So let's start with the career journey. Your first job was in sales, right? Was it Square?

Todd Busler: I started actually as a sales engineer at SAP. I didn't even know what that was. I like it, because where I grew up, everyone always wanted to get internships and get out of where they were in the summer. But for me, it was the opposite. I really loved where I was in the summer. So I was doing everything possible to not get a real internship and stay close to home so I could enjoy the time with my friends on the beach. However,

Alper Yurder: Oh really? Okay.

Todd Busler: Uh, someone, one of my best friends, he's a year older than me. He's an engineer and he started working at SAP. I didn't even know what this was, you know, at the time it's like a 60, 70,000 person company and he goes, Oh, they have a career. Giant complex beast. For sure. I'll tell you what though. Um, so I went to a career fair or something and I met someone and they're like, Hey, we have this early training development program. Uh, I thought I was going to.

Alper Yurder: Hmm and come on SAP. Such a giant and complex and like SAP to me. It gives me anxiety, you know

Todd Busler: go right into sales. And I was like, okay, this sounds good. They're selling big deals. It seems like people are doing well there. It seems like a good place to learn. I didn't realize I actually started as it was for sales engineering, which I had no idea what it was. And I was like, okay, the more I learned about it, I was like, okay, you'll teach me how to learn how businesses operate and figure out how, how their products fit and deliver benefits and go through this corporate training, which at the time I was like, is this a waste of time? And looking back, I'm really happy I did it. They did us in nine months.

Alper Yurder: Ah, okay, fine.

Todd Busler: training program, extremely, extremely regimented and structured. And you're getting recorded on presentations and doing mock discoveries and going out and visiting customers. And I just learned a lot about how big companies operate, um, both internally and externally, but I quickly realized that, okay, to be successful there, especially at the time, like it wasn't built for 23-year-old kids. It's built for these wraps that have been around for a long time. They have a lot more gray hair. They're doing big deals and owning accounts for years. And I quickly realized that I didn't want to be the SC. I wanted to be the AE and that probably wasn't the best place to do it at that time in my life. So I had the chance to join Square, which felt like a startup, startup. I was going from like 50, 60, 70,000. I don't even know how many employees there were at the time. Square had 800 employees, but they were just building their true first sales team.

Todd Busler: because this is like 2014 when Square was in farmers markets. That was really it, right? And now they were trying to figure out, hey, how do we sell to multi-location quick service restaurants and someone that has a hundred coffee shops or whatever that may be. So I was part of the early team there that went from like six or eight of us to like 60 in a year. Really smart team, people that are now, yeah.

Alper Yurder: Pause. I'm going to pause you there because I want to talk about that a bit more structured. But something that you mentioned, which is really interesting, is I don't come across leaders like you that much and me who are kind of like mid 30s who had that six to nine months training at an SAP. And when you told me that, which is a huge privilege because people today, they're just thrown into jobs, zero training. I mean that might be a midway, but the last time I heard somebody telling me like I was at the SAP on Oracle and I had the six month training was someone who is an ex-guest of mine and I think he's in his fifties and he like, that's why like his methodology, the way he talks about sales is consultative. It's his, it's advisory. It's not like just eight demos a day, ridiculous shit that started, I don't know, at some point like to the moon startups, but that's such a privilege and wonderful thing that you've had there. Don't you agree?

Todd Busler: I couldn't agree more. And again, I have some younger cousins or I'll talk to some good friends, little brother and sister that's trying to get into tech. And I think startups are sexy and people wanna jump in, but there's something to be said for a structured program where you can really learn from professionals. And people's career journeys, their career arcs are long. You don't have to rush into this thing. I'm very grateful looking back that I had that type of training. So when I get thrown into something, I actually like, okay.

Todd Busler: I know what good looks like at a large scale. Okay, sure, I need to learn how this works at a small company with no rules and no rigor, no structure. However, I'm really grateful for that opportunity. I think it's undervalued today.

Alper Yurder: Yeah. And you talk about, you know, what it means to be a good salesperson, how to crack enterprise sales, et cetera, on your LinkedIn, and I follow those advice and I agree with a lot of them. Do you have a top three or whatever that sticks with you to this date that, you know, you could share with our audience? Like to, you know, to be a good salesperson, what does it mean? Or to close complex deals, what do you need to do? What did you learn from those training days or SAP days that still are with you?

Todd Busler: For sure. Yeah, it's a great question. I thought a lot about this. So I think there's three things. The first thing is just like the true best reps there. They were pros, like super buttoned up, multiple dry runs for every meeting, knew the business inside and out, like just very, very professional. If you own one or two accounts, then now you're going to prep versus an SMB sales rep at some hot startup. Like it's just night and day, right? So just, I think that's wrong with me. How does this business make money? What do they care about? What are their investors thinking about? Like that level of thinking and prep, and ask anyone that I've worked with or they've worked for me. They know that's always what I'm talking about and always what I'm thinking about. The second part is like, I had this vision in my head of the good looking sales guy that's the schmoozer and just taking people out. And when you saw these best reps, they were like, many of them were ex consultants.

Alper Yurder: I'm sorry.

Todd Busler: like extremely knowledgeable in finance and accounting and supply chain logistics, like just like very different levels of thinking. And I really like, you know, dispelled the myth I had on what those individuals look like. So that was it. And then the third part was just like really deeply understanding how big organizations operate. I heard a quote.

Alper Yurder: Yours truly. Yours truly is one of them.

‍Todd Busler: on a podcast recently from the VP of Sales or CRO from SalesLoft. And he was like, you're selling SMB deals, and mid-market, you're selling to operators. And the enterprise, it's like selling to politicians. And it's so true. And you watch these enterprise reps. And I'll never forget, I was like 23, and we were doing some demo in some big company in Minneapolis or something. And I'm watching this individual after the meeting, what's happening in the hallways. And I was like… Yeah, they prepped for the demo. They understood who was talking, where they mapped different contacts, the exact details, sure, but like so much of the deal movement was happening in the hallways and I was like, wow, this person understands exactly who you need to get to who actually mattered. What was happening internally? Like that open mind is like, holy shit, this thing's complex. And it's really about deeply understanding people, their motivations, what their comp is, all that type of stuff which again is not just, wow, I can give a sexy presentation and that's what you're gonna buy from me. So, there are three things.

Alper Yurder: Yeah, who cares? Yeah. You just have to understand the psychology, the intent, the relations, you know, schmooze, not for the sake of schmooze, but show a genuine interest in schmoozing and know what to schmooze by. I mean, Todd, this conversation is amazing, but I know we have a hard stop in 20 minutes or so, so I'm going to have to rush through some of the sections, which I like to take a little bit more slowly generally, but

Todd Busler: For sure.

Alper Yurder: So I'm going to move on to the next section. If you can give us a, I stopped you at the square experience. If you can give us a little download of, you know, the way from that first role at Square to, you know, your leadership journey at a heap, maybe a few again, like these learnings and tips you shared are amazing. Like at every stage, what did you feel like you added on top of your existing knowledge and experience? Maybe you can talk us through that.

Todd Busler: For sure. So this, my experience was that SAP was ready to go because I wanted to be the rep and I didn't think that was the place to do it. So my sister was up in the Bay area at the time and she's like, look, if you want to get in this tech world, come up here. There's so much happening. So I started to look around to jobs, randomly applied to Square. I didn't know anyone there. And they took a shot on me, you know, someone as a sales engineer without quote experience. And the hardest part of that was

Todd Busler: convincing them they should take a shot on some of that, quote unquote, hasn't carried a bag in the traditional sense yet. And I'll remember, actually, for the interview, I knew that was gonna be an issue. So what I did, I actually went and befriended someone who used Square in my neighborhood. And I was like, can I just come sit with you for four or five hours? I wanna learn how you use this product, what you're doing, more about your business. This is a guy who had an empanada chain in San Diego. I was living in San Diego at the time. And I just really learned about that. And then in that interview, I told that story, and everyone's like,

Alper Yurder: Thank you.

Todd Busler: Wow, that's what you did. Like that's an awesome way to prepare for this. So that's what I did to get the job. Once I got there, what was interesting is like I said, there were probably less than 10 of us when I started from a sales rep perspective, right? And that went from like, I think like eight people to 60 in 12 months, like very, very crazy growth building out like the first sales org. And there were some really sharp people I worked for, some like X sales force ops type of leadership. What I learned in this situation is first, I just did a lot of deals. So I remember the first day I was like, I wasn't making cold calls in front of people when I was at SAP, I was prepping for demos in a suit and tie, it was very different. But I remember the first day being like, oh, I'm a little nervous making calls here, what's happening? And then all of a sudden, you get used to it, but I think what I learned there was a high number of just closes, like just doing a lot of deals got me really comfortable asking for people's business, understanding those really objections, and understanding what people are motivated by.

Todd Busler: I think more of the experience at Square that I'm extremely grateful for is on what the structure looks like to go from eight people to 60 in a year. So like I just at SAP, whether some of that was happening, but I wasn't super close to it was, okay, how do you hire? What does the interview process look like? What's the persona? How will we go about putting, getting the best talent? So that was something I learned. How are we enabling people and training them? Really, really.

Todd Busler: You know, you had S and B deals at Square. You couldn't train people for six to nine months. So in two weeks, how do you get these people up to speed so they can be productive in month two, month three? And then on the op side, just like dates, a really complex like.

Alper Yurder: So how do you, somebody going through that kind of crazy growth, how do you train people in two weeks? How do you make it happen?

Todd Busler: Yeah, they had it. So first, yeah, so first they had a big investment in enablement early, like size of the enablement team relative to sales early on, because they knew like, Hey, we're going to be scaling this thing out. And it was an extremely regimented program, right? So in the first two weeks, you had a buddy and you're doing my cold call and you're understanding the persona, you're learning the different products, you're in a bunch of different meetings, you're, you know, going over your pitch, you're, you're doing the Salesforce and tooling training. And it was just extremely structured. So by the end of that two weeks, you're like, okay, I know what I need to say. I know who I need to say it to. I know how to use all the systems. I know how I can make money. Here's the plan. Sure, you know, you had different territories or whatever it was, people had different segments, but by the end of that two weeks, which was really a combination of learning, but mostly putting people on the spot and making sure they were doing the work. That's a big thing I took away. Like, yeah, you can sit here and train a 24 year old SDR or AEA to say, read this doc and listen to this don't call. But at the end of the day, you have to put them in the game.

Alper Yurder: And what happens when that person is not comfortable being put on the spot? What happens?

Todd Busler: I mean, that's great, I was nervous, I remember, and I'm not the most nervous type, but again, it was new for me. I don't think there's any way to get around it. Like you're going to be a little nervous in the beginning, it's normal. What I always do, and I do this today, a chance to buy is, hey, we're doing mock cold calling, we're doing mock objection handling, we're running our first meeting. I'm gonna make it way harder than it's probably gonna be for the customer, and we're gonna do it, and you're gonna make mistakes, and then I'm gonna do it in front of you, and I'm gonna make mistakes, and we're gonna learn from it together. No one's attacking anyone.

Alper Yurder: Do you think you're employees?

Todd Busler: And then you do that two, three, four times and people get better.

Alper Yurder: Do you think your employees allow you the first time you do it? Or do they learn to appreciate you more in time?

‍Todd Busler: I mean, we used to do this at Heap. We used to do this at Heap at the end of your first week, you had to do a demo of the product to the CEO. And I'll tell you what, when you put that type of pressure on people, they're gonna go and learn what they have to do. Did it go great? Absolutely not. But now they know like, okay, I just did the hardest one. Here's what I need to do. And I think there's a balance to that, right? Without intimidating people. But I tend to believe that you learn by doing, you don't learn by seeing and listening, and you just have to start doing it to get the reps like anything else.

Alper Yurder: Okay, excellent. Since we started talking about Champify a little bit, let's come to the third section, which is I generally say, what brought you to therapy today? How dare I be the therapist to solve your problems? But I'm just curious about what you are trying to solve? And actually what I wanna do, if you don't mind, because you're so eloquent and you put the answers so well together, maybe let's do a few rapid fire questions, if you don't mind. Where, yeah, where, because I wanna get.

Todd Busler: Let's do it. All good.

Alper Yurder: all the juice I can get from you in as much, you know, possible. So I have one specific question. Let's start with the Champify journey. Why Champify? Why now? What triggered you to build it? Let's start from there.

Todd Busler: Cool, so after Square, before Champ, I spent six years at Heat. That's where I really learned about startups. That's where I really learned, okay, going from raising a little bit of money, five engineers, hiring the first go-to-market person, that's where I got exposed to it. So I was there for six years, zero to 40 million. First rep, first manager, DPS sales, opened a New York office, all that type of stuff. Made every mistake under the sun, learned from some really smart and great people. But what we started to see is like we were a company that was never great at marketing. Like they never had a CMO and seed for more than 18 months. Primarily outbound driven pipeline gen and customer acquisition strategy. We got really good at that. And I think in the early days, now you're going back like 2015, 16, 17, it was like if you were using outreach and clear bid and zoom info like...

Todd Busler: you're an early adopter and you could do some really amazing things. You didn't have to be worried about email deliverability and all this type of stuff. And I think we were just early adopters of a lot of that and got good at that really quickly. And then what you started to see was a couple of things, markets getting really crowded. So like the influx of VC funding, everyone going after the same size pie in a lot of ways is a pie that's growing slower than a lot of these VCs wanted to grow. Um, and secondly, an influx in the outreaches and the sales loss of the world, which meant that

Todd Busler: You know, people are playing from a level playing field. And it's also meant that people are getting just bombarded with outbound email. And what we've started to see is the efficacy of that going down significantly, right? So at HEAP, we had a realization that we could fill a US football stadium, fill Wembley almost with the amount of people using the product and that we would have really good experiences.

Todd Busler: And many of them were turning over two to 3% per month, moving in from customers to really good prospect accounts. Right. So we just started to spend way more time there versus banging on the doors of people that have never heard of us. And we were, you know, it was working. Right. So that was, that was the initial idea of a kind of bad version of it at our previous company. And then as time, you know, kept moving on, it was me essentially saying, Hey, this problem is going to continue.

Todd Busler: I think AI is actually making the problem worse because now it's just easy to bombard a bunch of people. And thinking back to the early SAP days, relationships matter. That's never going to change. And companies have spent, and we have customers that have been around for 25 years, delivering amazing experiences to their customers, sales, marketing, success, product, and there's a lot to tap in there.

Alper Yurder: Yeah, complex sales, enterprises, long educational sales cycles. They teach you it's not just like ABC always being closed, bam, bam. It's relationship building. It's convincing a lot of people. It's building champions every stage. And with Flowla, we try to enable people to build champions as well. I guess the name, ChampionsFi, is really cool. And I'm very curious, like you from your experience, like how does one build internal champions? Like what are the crucial things about building champions internally to sell more.

Todd Busler: I'm a mentor of mine, he's the CRO at ThoughtSpot, and he's been at AppDynamics, and he always talks about, your job as a seller is to help someone make an informed decision, right? And I very much agree with that. Your job is to, and it's not just to help them be informed, it's to help them make an informed decision. Your job as a seller is to make sure you're getting them to think about things they haven't thought about, helping them formalize and structure their thinking, helping them make...

Alper Yurder: Yes, wonderful. Yeah.

‍Todd Busler: the best decision for their business. Hopefully that aligns with what you're selling. Sometimes it will, sometimes it won't. And then you're also helping them actually make a decision. Now a decision could be do nothing, but what you're really, your job as the seller is to help them actually get to the end point, right? To make a decision, go deploy this thing, right? And that's what I think selling today is. There's more data out there, there's more reviews, there's more demos, there's all this stuff out there that it's your job to educate the buyer and guide them through that process.

Alper Yurder: Yeah, yeah, I love it. Absolutely. Yeah.

Todd Busler: And again, ideally through that, and I think this is my belief is that as products and spaces get more and more crowded, you can differentiate on the sales process. You can differentiate on go to market and people that can be looked at as a trusted advisor are going to see better wind rates. They're going to see better growth. So it's your job to enable them in my opinion.

Alper Yurder: Okay. Absolutely. And I love that. I completely agree with that. I have two rapid fire questions for you before we go into closing remarks. And those come from, you know, what you preach on LinkedIn on a daily basis. The first one is going to be and I love this one. Here are the six biggest mistakes first-time enterprise sellers make. You don't have to give us all six, but can you give us what mistakes people make and how can they avoid those?

Todd Busler: Yeah, I think there's a bunch. So I don't remember the exact six I wrote. I think there's a lot more than six, but for LinkedIn posts, you have to make catchy, catchy lists like that.

Alper Yurder: Probably, yeah. Yeah, you do it well.

Todd Busler: I know the big thing is, the big things I think about are, A, first, like, there's this myth that like, oh, as I get senior enough, I'm not going to have to prospect. The best reps I know, enterprise reps, big companies, wherever it is, they're constantly prospecting. I think that's the first thing. I think the second thing, they really know how to sell as a team, right? They know how to bring in the right people, how to bring in the right people, where to connect the right folks from.

Todd Busler: exec teams to product experts, the subject matter experts, the customer references. That's really what the best reps are. They're matching personas and they have really good EQ to make that happen. And I think the third one goes back to what we talked about earlier, which is just really high business sense. Like, sure, you can say someone has a problem with XYZ and you can have a narrow solution, but when you can zoom out and actually understand what this business cares about.

Todd Busler: what you're hearing, but what's the problem behind the problem and how that affects the bottom line of the top line or growth or risk or whatever that may be. I think those three things are most important. Um, and then lastly, it's just like time management. Like it's so easy as a rep at an enterprise company to be like, where do I even start? What should I do? But these reps, whether they know it or not, are extremely good at understanding. What is the potentially biggest ROI thing I can do with a unit of time that I have? And they're really good at spending that time on the right thing.

Alper Yurder: Yeah, I just love it when my guests are just saying things in my mind and I don't have to even like, isn't it really great when you have the question and you're answering it and the person is like, yes, because it's a shared experience. I think the shared experience and that common knowledge, it's kind of like common best practice, which could be good salespeople have in their mind. So thanks for sharing those. My last question. Yeah, yeah, don't because I think.

Todd Busler: Yeah, a lot of people know this though, and a lot of people don't do it though, right? A lot of people know this thing, but it's a skill, right? It's a skill.

Alper Yurder: We also, like even if you're the best in the blah blah, you forget things. You have to be constantly reminded, which is why I think with sales therapy, that's what I try to do. You need a nudge. You know, you shouldn't be talking more than whatever percent asking the right questions on a sales call, but you do anyway because you forget or you go into your automatic mode. So these nudges are good. You also talk about the eight hardest lessons you learned about startup sales. Again, can you share a few of them with us? Maybe what was your biggest mistake and how you learned from that?

Todd Busler: I think the biggest mistake I had was not investing in ops and enablement early. We started to scale and we're like, okay, we'll just get smart reps and we'll figure this out. You need systems. You can think that what you're selling is so unique and, no, we can't have a discovery checklist or we can't have a guideline for the deals. It's not true. Every company can just more investment into systems from an operational and enable perspective. I think that's the number one thing. And I think the second thing is like we were really focused. This was kind of like growing as fast as you can mode and Silicon Valley is very different from the last two years where it was just like getting new logos, getting new logos, getting new logos. And if we had spent more time.

Todd Busler: with early customers, really understanding what they were doing, really getting more feedback, really understanding the value behind this, I think it would have sped us up a lot faster.

Alper Yurder: It's super hard though. Like that's actually one of my biggest changes other than the team and like running against time and myself, blah, blah. I think about what's in the mind of the customer. How can I help them better? What do they think? That's I think the hardest thing. And with our head of content every day, we're like, okay, how can we solve this puzzle better, better. And I, and I love that you mentioned it. Excellent. So.

Todd Busler: The last one I'd add, Alper, is just, this is a little controversial, and I was a sales engineer, so I was pretty nerdy in the product, right? Like I always thought, I got hired at Heat because, hey, you had a sales engineer and some sales background, our product's pretty technical. I think deep, deep product knowledge is overrated for EPS. I think it actually can be detrimental in a lot of ways. Like sure, you need to know the product, but what's 10 times more important is understanding the persona deeply, understanding adjacent technology, understanding the competitive landscape and understanding the actual problems your product or solution is solving for and what those concrete benefits are in the customer's words. And we are a very engine product heavy company culture at Heap and we over-indexed on just knowing every little thing about the product and it actually doesn't matter that much. So that's something I feel pretty strongly about.

Alper Yurder: What was the buyer at Heap? I'm sorry, I'm not familiar. Like what's the buyer persona?

Todd Busler: It started as Eng, but it started as a lot of the Eng persona, and it moved over time to product. So we were selling mostly to product managers, CPOs, etc.

Alper Yurder: I mean, obviously. So then of course, you will be product and future driven and that's going to be the mindset. But then you discover it's actually about them. Like, what is the problem? What is the challenge? Are they trying to get promoted with your product? OK, that has been.

Todd Busler: Exactly, exactly, exactly. And hey, they can't do this. What does that mean? Exactly right.

Alper Yurder: Absolutely. You mentioned enable, I'm sorry, enablement there. What are your thoughts on our space by enablement, digital sales rooms, mutual action plans, what do you think about them? And do you think there's a future for those things?

Todd Busler: I do. First of all, I think the market's hot. There's a lot of people going after this and there's a reason for that. Whether you've been doing this in a Google Sheet, we're just 10 years ago in a Google Sheet. I think there's two things that are happening. The space that you're in, in my opinion, it's… You have two things. You have smart forward-looking reps that believe in consultative selling and wanna get their buyers on the same page. And really this is a mechanism to get on the same side of the table with their buyer, right? And I think that's great for individuals. I also think as the world is changing a lot where people wanna consume information async and avoid meetings where possible, something like what you offer is really powerful. Because wow, I can actually watch a five-minute demo video and put it into your system or something similar. And we can avoid meetings and advanced deals faster, right? I think that helps a lot. And then I think the second main value prop is for the leaders, especially at organizations that, um, you know, maybe you have more juniors, or more junior sellers that need more systems, right? To be able to understand, like, Hey, use the system so I can actually forecast so you understand what's really qualified if they're not engaging with this, tell you what, it's probably a bad sign for the enterprise. Yeah. Or the enterprise sellers.

Todd Busler: are doing really complex deals. There's multiple people involved. I think there's those two use cases, but the world is gonna continue to keep using more and more of this because the buying journey as the buyer has way more access to education and there's no, you know, the seller used to hold the keys and all the knowledge and that's just not the case now. Like if a buyer wants, they can get 90% of the seller, the knowledge the seller has before they even talk, right? So you need a way to get collaborative and kind of, like I said, it's like.

Todd Busler: metaphorically getting on the same side of the table with your buyer and this is a good tool to help you do that.

Alper Yurder: All right. Wow. This was like nonstop gold. No BS. Very clever, very smart, very engaging for me. I enjoyed this podcast a lot and I'm glad to meet you, Todd. I think you shared so much good stuff for our audience that I think resonates a lot with all of them. They do with me. Any closing remarks before we go?

Todd Busler: Uh, no closing remarks. I talked a lot about this stuff on LinkedIn. Follow me on just Todd Busser. Um, follow along, uh, Albert, great to meet you and thanks for having me on. I'm wishing you the best of luck.

Alper Yurder: Absolutely. Thank you so much for joining us today. Like any good therapist, I'm going to cut us on time, even shorter on time today than usual. I think my audience will be like, what the hell, why did you let him go? We wanted more and more, but maybe we have you back on the show one day. That would be amazing. If you enjoyed this episode of Sales Therapy, make sure to follow us. Make sure to follow Todd if you're not already following, and Champify, check it out. Otherwise, see you in the next episode. Bye, guys.