Mastering the Sales Conversations with Patrick Trümpi

Full episode transcript

Alper Yurder: So today in the therapy chair, we have Patrick Trümpi, Chief Sales Officer at Unique. Patrick is a season sales leader with the knack of turning startups into success stories. He's been doing it for over and over a few times. Who knows? Maybe in the future, he does some other things around that too.

Patrick Trümpi: Sounds good.

Alper Yurder: We'll talk about his success, the joy, the pain and the journey. Welcome to Sales Therapy. How are you feeling today, Patrick?

Patrick Trümpi: Great, thanks Alper for the invitation. Well done pronouncing my name. It's not an easy one for people outside Switzerland, even outside the Swiss German part of Switzerland.

Alper Yurder: Really? Okay, yes. I have a neck for languages. I speak six of them actually and German is my actually half, five and a half. How many do you speak? You're in Switzerland, right? You're based in Switzerland.

Patrick Trümpi: Ha ha. Oh wow! Three I would say in or like French and English and German that's it. You can't call Swiss German a language otherwise I could say four but doesn't count doesn't count.

Alper Yurder: ah no no is is is Helvetic or Helvetian a language what is it

Patrick Trümpi: No, no, no, Helvetik or Helvetia is a Latin name, I think, for Switzerland, basically. But it's not a... No, there's no Latin name. No, that's not...

Alper Yurder: Ah, that's it. Okay, so there's no language there. All right. Okay. Okay. So welcome to sales therapy. Been doing this now for three months. You are one of my very initial invitees. In the meantime, life happened. You have a second job, which is an even more important job, being a dad. So we'll talk about all of that. But how was life? How are you feeling in general?

Patrick Trümpi: Hey, in general, super good because especially that second job, I expected it to be much tougher, less sleep, you know, not just, and it's going really well. It's going really well. The small one is really cute. It's very nice. It's, it's, yeah, it's more, more attached to them. I mean, I'm very attached, you know, it didn't imagine that, or it's hard to like imagine how that is going to be.

Alper Yurder: Really?

Patrick Trümpi: Sleeping still my 7 -8 hours, not straight through, but in total I'm getting that and I need it.

Alper Yurder: You sleep seven, eight hours a day. That's really I've never heard. Yeah, I don't know what you would do with your life. I've I've never heard a parent who sleeps seven or eight like all my best friends are popping out children right, left and center. And nobody tells me that nobody tells me seven, eight hours a day. What's your secret? Share it on the podcast.

Patrick Trümpi: During the night of course, but not... Yes, just kidding!

Yeah. Hey, I go. Well, there's no secrets. That's one thing that I want to say. I mean, with children, you get what you get. You have no power over what's going to happen. I feel like there's so much variation out there and you think you that's one good way, one good way to.

We do that in sales as well, right? We want to recognize every individual for their individual strengths for what they can, right? When we are a leader, we want to highlight the strengths of everybody. And ideally, I mean, it's some strengths that you use for the job. If not, obviously it might not work. But it's the same with kids. I think you know that. And it's the same with kids. It's a really good way to learn that. If your child cries, my best friend is...

Alper Yurder: Yeah, if not then bye bye.

Patrick Trümpi: …kid is crying for two hours every evening from two to 10 to midnight. Luckily we don't have that yet. Maybe it's his seven weeks now, but you know, there's you have no power. Every day is a bit different. Sometimes it's a bit harder, sometimes a bit less, but usually I take care of him from seven in the evening to 10. So that my wife, my wife slept yesterday from, I had him from eight to midnight. So he slept.

Alper Yurder: Hmm.

Patrick Trümpi: She could sleep for like three, three and a half hours and then she took over. But she feeds him. He goes to bed. Usually yesterday was a bit harder. He went to bed an hour later again. And then he wakes up again at four. I don't really realize it. I sleep and then at seven, at seven.

Alper Yurder: wonderful! Great!

Alper Yurder: Well done. Good. Don't jinx it. I'm going to put some evil eyes to this conversation. Don't jinx it. Knock on wood. Knock on your teeth. I think the title of the show will be best fathering tips from Patrick rather than anything salesy. I love that.

Patrick Trümpi: Yeah, exactly, true. Who can give, I need to feel like I have expertise in the field so that I can actually give some tips and I'm not an expert in that area at all so don't listen to me.

Alper Yurder: Not yet. Okay. We will. We will. Generally in the first section of sales therapy, because it's therapy, I like to talk about childhood and how the growing up years, the growing experience shapes the person that we are. And now that you have one of your own, does that bring flashbacks? Do you have like flashbacks, memories of your own childhood, of, you know, being a kid yourself? That's a different way of me transitioning into that section than usual.

Patrick Trümpi: I like the topic. I like the topic, especially in connection to sales. I do have, I mean, flashbacks. I'm thinking a lot in general about, um, childhood. Uh, I think, you know, I'm really interested in psychology in my personal, if when you do personal development, when you think a lot about.

What you are, who you are today, what your weaknesses are, where you don't like yourself, basically what you struggle with behaviors that you have yourself. Yeah, exactly. If you think about that a lot, I think also you will have to at some point go back to your childhood and think about why I'm like this. That's one way to cope with it, obviously. It's just one. Not to deter, that's the deterministic way, but I think it's still important to think about it.

Alper Yurder: Yep. Yeah, awareness. No.

Patrick Trümpi: Uh, because you know, a lot of us having some traumas from childhood, uh, struggled with certain things and, and the same with me, you know, I, uh, I know certain things I'm not very, uh, amazed about, uh, what happened in childhood. So I have some tougher memories, I'd say, um, that also explain some part of my personality today. Um, actually one thing that I always find interesting.

Alper Yurder: Hmm. Mm -hmm.

Patrick Trümpi: is kind of, I was always thinking where is ambition coming from? You know, like being very overly ambitious, wanting to achieve a lot. Um, and for me, it was, I realized, okay, it's a, it's a substitute for, or it's in translation, it's, I want to be loved by others. And if I reach achieve goals, I'm being more loved. And I realized in my childhood, I did.

Alper Yurder: Hmm, yeah, yeah achieve do more. Yeah Yeah?

Somebody has been to therapy. I love that. Somebody has been to therapy.

Patrick Trümpi: I did to go, but not enough actually. I did stop rather quickly again, but I read so many books about therapy. It's, it's, that's probably where more where it's coming from. So, you know, like if you have parents who never, who don't show love, like just unconditionally, just like that in any moment, but only when you were the best at the sports, come, the sports contest, that's where it could come from.

Alper Yurder: Yeah. Okay. Okay, okay.

Patrick Trümpi: So you get love when you realize you get love when you achieve something or when you have a good yeah. And that's I think that's one thing I was thinking about definitely where I think about my post.

Alper Yurder: Yeah. Yeah, there's a, there's definitely an interplay of, and I mean, it's such a common trait. It's funny. Like we all are very individual and like very unique, but at the same time, like we're all human and some things work for all of us, like in the same ways. And I love that you mentioned like the relationship between like success and love and value. Like, how do you perceive yourself value? You know, endless achieving, endless success. I have to do more and more and more. And there's definitely an interplay between how you were shown unconditional love or not. And it's not always because you're like, it's not that your parents didn't love you. It's just they didn't know how to show that love or their way of showing love was that like my parents way of showing me love now, of course, at the age of 38, after lots of therapy, I realized they were cooking me every food that that

Patrick Trümpi: Thank you. Yeah.

Alper Yurder: they wanted as a child, they were buying me everything that they didn't have as a child, but I was looking for some other recognition, you know? So this resonates a lot what you're saying with me.

Patrick Trümpi: Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm.

Yeah, definitely. That's a very important one in this. I think it's very important not to blame your parents because of anything that happened because we are all not perfect. You know, I'll make my mistakes with Nathan, the little boy. I will. And certain things that we do now, the generation in 30 years will think, wow, were you damn stupid? And that's what we think now, you know, like...

Alper Yurder: Yeah. Oh yeah, you will. Yeah, exactly.

Patrick Trümpi: Sometimes, right? Showing love is not something that our parents and grandparents' generation were really good at, were they? I mean, I feel like...

Alper Yurder: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So I'm not gonna boil the ocean, but we already get the sense that, you know, the self value and how you perceive love that had an impact on the person that you are today because you wanted to achieve more, you want to be successful. Obviously, intellectual capacity, this that plays a role, but that drive that motivation, there's a bit of that.

I like that that connection of self -worth and value and how it ties to success and a lot of successful people. I think I hear that it's not the first time I'm hearing. I'll probably be hearing it another 50 times in 50 episodes. But that brings me to the to the next section, which is success is not achieved easily. So you of course you want to be successful. You want to be a leader. Did you always want to be a leader? Did you always have a passion for, you know?

Being a leader, being a big guy in a business, running a team, achieving great things, millions of dollars? How did that work for you?

Patrick Trümpi: Good question. I think I didn't think of, I mean, leader, yes, probably because I, yeah, as I just said, I do have this hidden ambition kind of to need to achieve things from long time ago. So automatically, leadership is the path through that. That's the only path that I would see back then, you know, that solopreneurship like Justin Welsh didn't exist back then even though I see that as a path as well. But I probably was thinking of it as something that has to happen. I didn't necessarily... Yeah, I probably thought always it's something that I have to do and I will do.

Alper Yurder: I was going to say or a very ridiculously high earning individual contributor or now there's this fractional something as well like the world is changing and the understanding of leadership also changes. But when I think of myself, for example, my journey.

I did a sabbatical three years ago and I said, I'm never going to be an entrepreneur. I'm just very happy being a very high-paid sales leader. And then three years later, things happen and look at me like I'm now doing this journey. So some things we plan, some things we don't.

Patrick Trümpi: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. That's also something I realized only when I started and got employed after a certain time. I also realized also my personality. I don't think I'm the ideal employee kind of to person to just hire and not own parts of the company. I also need my independence. I need my own way of thinking. I'm very much a...

Alper Yurder: Nah. Yeah.

Patrick Trümpi: You know, you give me a goal and I'll go for it with whatever resources I have without much of like, okay, can you help me with this? Can you help me with this? So I just go for it. I'm a quite independent person.

Alper Yurder: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm.

Patrick Trümpi: Also there, I realized, hey, yeah, I need to, I also want to start my own thing. I knew I gonna start my own thing at some point. How that's gonna be, you never know, right? You join an early-stage startup as a co-founder or as a late co-founder, or you really start like you from scratch, you know, whatever it's going to be. But I know that that's what I want and have to do. I already did it once with Larry, the company we sold half a year ago.

Alper Yurder: Hmm.

Patrick Trümpi: that I worked before Unique. So we sold that successfully. That was the first kind of nice, good, good story. And that Unique, I didn't, I didn't have a, you know, these ASOP programs, I'm not a fan of these. So yeah, I don't feel that ownership really. So I know, look, that's, that I know that I realized also at some point, I didn't know that entrepreneurship and so on. I,

Alper Yurder: Mm -hmm. Mm. Yeah.

Patrick Trümpi: I didn't think about that when I was studying, you know, went through the normal kind of university thing. And then that's not the first thing that comes to mind.

Alper Yurder: Hmm. Did you have a... Was your family a bit of a middle-class family? Like mine was a middle-class family and like entrepreneurship and all that we had in the family and there were also bankruptcies. So for me, it's always been a risky, scary thing. So now doing this for me in this time of my life, to be honest, if I didn't go through three, four years of therapy and figure out things about myself, I would probably still not be doing this because it's not my comfort zone really to be an entrepreneur.

Patrick Trümpi: Thank you. Interesting. Yeah. But you had your contacts then you threw like successes or even or not. Okay. Yeah.

Alper Yurder: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. For me, stars were aligned. But like, I mean, it was it was a lot of stars. So sometimes I bring people into the show and like, actually, yesterday I was interviewing somebody for a role for a founding hero. And he was like, yeah, I want to be a founder. And I'm like, OK, and he's only like four years into his career and etc. Like I didn't have that because I never thought I could have that, you know, like there were lots of risks, money, financial risk.

Patrick Trümpi: Mm -hmm.

Alper Yurder: I'm a Turkish citizen without a UK citizenship. So if I lose my job, I get kicked out of the country. So I can't be a founder of this that now at the age of 38. And we have a great idea. My my my co-founder, my friends for 15 years, this that like stars aligned so much pushed me, pushed me, pushed me. And I'm like, OK, I'll do it because if not now when. But I didn't have that. Oh, I want to be an entrepreneur thing.

Patrick Trümpi: Yeah. No, I haven't. I didn't have it either, but for me it was more like because it was never, I didn't think about, and I didn't have any connection with it. My parents and that I think is good. My parents never gave me the feeling of Patrick, you have to do this. You have to do this. Not even they didn't say you have to go to university. Uh, actually quite the opposite, uh, because not even the opposite. They didn't say, yeah, we want you to work from when you're 16, but I have three sisters. My family is lower middle -class. I would say my parents were struggling.

Alper Yurder: No. Hmm.

Patrick Trümpi: Uh, with money in certain stages of our lives. When I started university, um, you know, Switzerland, universities for free, but still, uh, I went to, uh, far away. One of my other sister study as well. The other two luckily were working. My parents could not have afforded four kids to go to university. So I was one of the, one of the lucky ones or the others couldn't go either. It wasn't a topic for them, but that was good because I cost you still 2000 per month.

Alper Yurder: Yeah.

Patrick Trümpi: something like that for a kid to go to university apartment and or train tickets and so on. So it is still costly and my parents could not have afforded this. But my parents would also not keep you know they wouldn't tell me what they want for me. They had no vision of me which is good. Parents I feel like shouldn't have. What we hear a lot in the US I want to parents want to…

Alper Yurder: Oh yeah, wow. Yeah. Yeah.

Patrick Trümpi: …kids to become doctors or lawyers or anything stupid. They shouldn't decide what their kids want to become. That's up to their kids, not to them what they should become. And that's a big thing, I think. But luckily, and I'm really grateful for that. My parents didn't do that, but they also had no connection to entrepreneurship. I didn't know what it is, you know, until I was 20, 21.

Alper Yurder: To be honest, with entrepreneurship, one thing I realized is, especially in our industries like sales, SaaS, technology, this, that, obviously there's going to be the odd guy who is like the underdog who made it big blah. But honestly, you need a certain level of safety. You need a certain network.

To be honest, being an entrepreneur is a very privileged place in our industry. I don't think it's for everyone and anyone, you know. I only get to do it at the age of 38 after checking all the other boxes that, you know, and I have a partner who can, you know, take care of things and this, that, you know. I don't think it's very difficult for people to be an entrepreneur. Anyway, that wasn't the whole point. Crazy difficult. I'm going to move on to another topic, which is about, you know, success again and...

Patrick Trümpi: Hahaha. Absolutely crazy, crazy difficult.

Alper Yurder: For example, I've known you for just over a year or so from the LinkedIn world that I have been involved in the last two, three years very much. And I'm like, okay, this guy, everything he writes resonates. Like he talks about his leadership journey. He talks about specific things with clients. And I look at it, wow, this guy is really cool, smart and humble and this, that. A, I want to write like him. B, he seems to be...

finding his way around tech, B2B SaaS, sales world in a good way. So my question to you after that long segue.

Patrick Trümpi: Hehehehe.

Alper Yurder: Give us the last 10 years of your career, like the short little summary, and where do you feel like you are today in your life? Are you in a place where you want to be in terms of your career?

Patrick Trümpi: I think yes, I mean, I'm really very happy where I am, honestly, because I found something, I found something, and I see that a lot. I answered that question first before we go through the story, but I found something that I'm, you know, I feel I'm competent now after 10 years. When I started writing on LinkedIn two and a half years ago, that's where I started to feel really comfortable about it. And I...

Alper Yurder: Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. Hahaha.

Patrick Trümpi: learned even faster on the way because of writing. So I feel comfortable. I like the job. I, yeah, I really enjoy it. I really enjoy the upside of it. I enjoy the, how the transferability to private life, you know, being able to ask good questions. I feel like it's the best skill you can learn in life. Honestly, I still feel like it's the best skill you can learn in life. It made me much happier. Yeah. Also your wife.

Alper Yurder: asking good questions. How did you learn that?

Patrick Trümpi: Yeah. Hey, through, through, so the year four or five of my sales career, we had a, we had a sales trainer team that trained the team that I was in back then. And they really taught us, I was so impressed. The questions they came up on it's like the questions they'd asked the prospects. And I didn't dare to ask these kinds of questions.

Alper Yurder: Hmm.

Patrick Trümpi: I also thought, how do you come up with these questions? I mean, why do you exactly know what to ask? It's really hard. It's much easier to pitch. You know, I know what to talk about. And that's what I did. So my first, my journey, actually that's my journey first for three years, I was, Hey, we had a slides, but not on PC. We, we, we printed the slides and we went to C level meetings like that. We just talked about.

Our tech didn't ask a single question, tried to push things forward. We still sold some stuff like this, but you know, the potential would have been so much bigger. I didn't have anyone who understood sales. Back then it was 2014 in Switzerland, not many sales companies here. And the first three years were a mess.

Alper Yurder: Hmm. You make it sound like it was Heidi and a few goats. But yeah, I see what you mean. Like 2014.

Patrick Trümpi: You can imagine it is exactly a few goals and that's it. That's it. No, no, no, it wasn't exactly. I mean, it feels like that. I don't even know. Probably also we didn't really realize now you on LinkedIn, you feel like I know what is going on, right? You might have also that feeling in the sales tech space. You know what's going on because you feel like I see those people all day, but.

Alper Yurder: But I see what you mean. It wasn't this crazy ridiculous overly crowded noisy place that we live in today. Yeah, I get it. Yeah. Yeah.

I know too much.

Patrick Trümpi: Yeah, but the world is actually much bigger than that and what we see that's usually in the bubble we are. But, um, so yeah, those first three years were, were, were tough. I mean, were tough. What I did from the start and that helped me from the beginning is the prospecting part. I enjoyed the prospecting part. I was good at it almost from, from the beginning, not necessarily cold calling, but mostly, I mean, outreach in general, um, cold calling. I didn't do for the first two years. There was one of the...

things that I would change again if I could, because people said Patrick doesn't work in B2B. You can only do call calling in B2C, but B2B forget it. And I know nobody who could tell me how to do it. You know, as I said, sales trainer that we didn't have a P person who understood sales. That was the first three, four years. And then Max and Mike came to the sales trainers. They were awesome. I really, I enjoyed that a lot. I learned so much. We changed the whole sales process. We did the workshops the first time we did.

the discovery demo workshop and qualification and everything like a proper sales process that we went through. And I saw the change. I also saw how resistant I was to that change at the beginning, but then I saw the change and what it did. You know, I enjoyed the professional so much more. It was so much more fun to, to, uh, because yeah, asking questions so much more challenging and it's nice that the job is challenging. That's probably something.

Alper Yurder: Mm. Mm.

Yeah, asking questions is difficult and it's not only so I'm an ex consultant my career like I was an ex consultant, Bain extension, this that so I was trained in asking questions, trained in consulting and this that so for me when I had my first quota carrying sales job it was still very eye opening. I had that moment with a coach who was it was a very difficult relationship, but I learned so much from them.

Patrick Trümpi: Amazing. Yeah.

Alper Yurder: guided discovery, like having the right to ask the questions. And I just talked about it like a few days ago. What's a discovery call? How do you do it? No, no, no. Like it's not like a list of 10 questions just to like throw at people. It is a guided journey. It's a conversation. But it it it it takes time and training and you learn also you build your confidence to be able to ask the questions.

Patrick Trümpi: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Alper Yurder: Do you have any specific tips for anybody who is going through that journey, who's trying to be better at their discovery, better presence with buyers, clients? Like, what can they do?

Patrick Trümpi: Hey, it's a good question. What can speed up that process? Right. Because we all went through the process you were just mentioning. I mean, I also, the first time I, I did it was we also had 10 questions and, um, and, and, and we went through the 10 questions and then you realized. Client is not very happy with this. I mean, if they didn't already say, yeah, get off the phone or they would say, Patrick, show me the product. Come on. They don't like, I'm not, I'm not. So.

Alper Yurder: Yeah, no, they just want to get off the phone! Yeah, yeah, yeah, let's move.

Patrick Trümpi: My tip is to as soon as possible, be very aware, ask your first question and make it a challenge for yourself not to ask a question afterwards that is unrelated to what the person said. So you ask a question, the person's talking and you as a challenge, you ask a question about something the person was talking, nothing prepared, you ask a question like that.

Alper Yurder: Oh, I love it.

Patrick Trümpi: That's how you train to listen and not to have your questions ready. So you have to come up with a question that you didn't have ready because you don't know what the person is going to talk about. That's the scary thing with asking questions. You don't know what the person is going to talk about, but I would do that challenge that helps you because yeah, I see a lot of people, they don't listen and then they ask their question and it's always.

Alper Yurder: Absolutely. Because you can always you can always bring it back to the conversation. But this happens in time. Like now, for example, in front of me, I have a script, I have a million questions and I'm not asking any of them actually to you. But at some point I need to bring the question back to this. But this is great anyway, because I'm taking the other things and if there's something I'm going to be able to bring that.

Patrick Trümpi: Yeah. It is. It is.

Alper Yurder: but it's just a junior, senior experience thing, I think then, and the personality shines through as you make the mistakes, you grow from them, and then you start enjoying sales. Like sales becomes like relations, you know?

Patrick Trümpi: Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. And start with it in small talk, you know, as you just said, you can start easy actually. So if somebody said, yeah, look, the weather is bad here. You know, like these weird starters anyway, maybe hopefully you have a better one. But if that's so, then you ask, okay, okay. See?

Alper Yurder: Mm -hmm. Oh, it's only every conversation in the UK we have. It's only every conversation for us, you know. Yeah.

Patrick Trümpi: Yeah, it's very often here as well. And then you ask a follow up question on that. You see like, okay, what would you do if you was good weather today? Did you plan anything? That's already a question based on what the person said about weather, you know, and, and you can train it with this as well. And that will help for sure.

Alper Yurder: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I just mentioned there's a few questions that I want to go through. I mean with you I could probably have like a monthly pod but some things that I think is good for our audience. I'm gonna go on with them. What are you currently working on at the moment? Like some of the current issues by the way. What is your current role right now for people who don't know you? What are you doing? How is your day today? What is top of mind?

Patrick Trümpi: Yeah, so I'm a chief sales officer at Unique. We are a two and a half year old startup scale up basically grew quite quickly. So founded two and a half years ago and I joined two and a half years ago, basically two months after founding, got the first client in, build a sales team of 27 people. We had to change strategy heavily from tech company as our ICP to financial services, banks and insurances.

So medium size to enterprise sales. I had to lay off a lot of my stuff, actually more than two thirds. And also in the process a few people didn't mend.

Alper Yurder: It, it, if I may, it also sounds like out of your echo chamber, the one you just mentioned, like the little tech world that we always talk on every day on LinkedIn. It sounds a bit like outside of that world, your buyers or not.

Patrick Trümpi: Yeah. Absolutely outside of that world. Definitely. Definitely. Yes. And, um, yeah. So I am, and then my day to day changed a bit honestly also because, uh, you know, having 27 people in the team, I had four team leads. So basically I was working with the team leads to, uh, mainly quickly onboard people, coaching people. Uh, I was mainly working with my, my team leads to get.

Alper Yurder: No, sorry, sorry, I can't. Mm

Patrick Trümpi: people, SDRs to quota quickly and AEs and so on. So build processes, everything we already had implemented tech. I did everything from the start. So it was quite easy to do. But then we had to change and with the change also my role changed a bit. I went much more back to selling myself as well because I also had to prove it kind of, you know, you change ICP, you don't have any clients and so on. So I sales sold heavily again, I'm still selling.

Alper Yurder: Mm -hmm. You close.

Patrick Trümpi: I mean, my next client is going to sign next week. So, so still selling to banks like the enterprise deals and with my team, which is now all of them are more than two years in the company. So coaching is not, you know, I'm still coaching, but not heavily anymore because everybody is on a really, really good level. And we're struggling with, well, our biggest struggle at the moment is the expansion in other countries because our tech, you know, we are two and a half years old.

Alper Yurder: Good. Mm.

Patrick Trümpi: moved to a different ICP one and a half years ago. So you can imagine our tech is not a deep tech product that has a huge USP where we differentiate ourselves easily, which is fine if you work on your home market like Dock, but going into other markets, very likely things happened already there at the same time as well. We do stuff with LLMs, OpenAI, GDP, GPT and so on.

Alper Yurder: Mm -hmm.

Patrick Trümpi: And stuff happened there as well. And if we don't have the name and the clients, everybody knows our clients in the top market, but nobody knows our clients in the UK, for instance, in the U S no way in Singapore. No way. Nobody knows any of them.

Alper Yurder: Mm. Mm. How do you stand out in that environment? Like one thing that I realized as an entrepreneur and tech founder and this tech, actually this is not I realized, somebody told me, man, you can differentiate almost in nothing anymore. Like the tech can be copied, the product can be copied, the features can be built, the price can be copied. But the way you sell, the way you provide a service, the way you go to market, that is something where you can bring a bit of uniqueness. I've been told. Would you agree with that?

Patrick Trümpi: Yeah. Thank you.

You can, I think, yeah, you can bring uniqueness with the way you sell. Um, in many ways, uh, the way I'm thinking of when you bring uniqueness is also one thing that we have done really well is, um, onboarding investors that have massive networks, like really massive networks. They're very famous in the market. So they help us getting intros and these intros are really, you know, we, we've, we've all been there. We've all.

worked with investors who didn't give even a single intro that was worth anything. But that one, that is, we pushed them really, really hard. And that is one thing. So we always talk to C level in these big banks. That's one of the, that's also differentiator. If you can do that, if you can win investors who bring you into go to market something as huge, that was one of my eye openers in the last two years, to be honest, that's big. That's big.

Alper Yurder: Yeah, of course. So you differentiate in the way you go to market. I mean, and it doesn't have to be a million emails to everybody. It's just a couple, like if it's a high intent market, get the right connections in the right places. If it's a different market, go to events where you can meet those people. I mean, that's the beauty of sales. It's very varied, but there's no one size fits all.

Patrick Trümpi: Absolutely, absolutely. That's one thing. And I think if you differentiate...

That's right. That's right. And I think the, if you, uh, coming back to having a good and like well-defined ICP, the good thing about that is at some point you are going to build very specifically for that industry. Uh, that's what we are working on right now, right? Every feature that is coming out is really, really tailored and specific to the industry. So at some point, uh, we will be able, right now we don't have really anything that is quite specific.

Alper Yurder: Yeah. Yeah. Hmm.

Patrick Trümpi: sellers and whatever, but not many differentiators, but that's going to happen anyway. If you really focus on one market, that's the issue. If you want to solve everything for everybody, then you never will build a feature that is deep enough there. And that's one thing.

Alper Yurder: Yeah. No.

And I think it's even more, it is now more true than ever because the last three, four years it was growth, growth, growth. Everybody buys every product, throw money, na, na, na. Now it's like go narrow, go deep, just solve something very specific for somebody. In the last five minutes of our chat, what I want to do is a bit of a rapid fire because obviously you share a lot of good wisdom on LinkedIn world with people. So I'm going to ask you a few like practical tips, tools, experiences that you can share with the audience. Does that work?

Patrick Trümpi: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Alper Yurder: Okay, absolutely good. So first one is, as I say, I look up to your profile and I think what you share is it resonates so well with me, with my experience as a sales leader and my experience as a seller and all of those things. How do you, how did you come up with writing? What is your way to writing? How did you become so good at it?

Patrick Trümpi: Thank you. No way. I have a good question. I mean, practice probably. I didn't do, I just started. I think the thing is just start, which is toughest thing to do because the first three months is the toughest thing. The first month, I'd say the first 30 days, basically the first post and the first 30 days because first post is like, Whoa, weird guys posting, starting to post on LinkedIn, you know, back then two and a half years ago. I mean, now it's maybe we feel a bit more. I don't care about it at all anymore. After 30 days, that's gone, right? The fear is completely gone. You don't think I don't even put a thought into, Oh, what do people think when I post it? I mean, yeah. So that's that fear is gone. But then it was really difficult to come up with topics in the first 30 days. Luckily, at the same time, I started running again. So while I was running, I had all these ideas about writing because I put my thoughts to what should I write? Then you come up with ideas automatically, and then you just write and write and realize, okay,

Alper Yurder: Mmm.

Patrick Trümpi: That's a weird way to start. For instance, I realized it's a dumb way to start a post about a thought. It's weird to say it's not really, it's hard to express into words, but with a claim, with a weird claim that is not a story kind of claim. If you start with a story claim, then it's okay. But if there are some claims like,

Alper Yurder: you Mm. Mm.

Patrick Trümpi: Do I have an example? I would probably need to go back like two and a half years to my posts because I had some very bad examples and then you realize what's...

Alper Yurder: Hmm. I think I feel I feel what you mean. I still claim, by the way, it sounds very you're translating that from German, I feel like. But I but I have a feeling I know what you mean, which is like, don't just say some BS to be just for the sake of it. But like maybe tell it from your own experience, like an actual, genuine, authentic thing that makes sense to people, I guess.

Patrick Trümpi: Yeah, probably. Yeah.

That's definitely, that's, that's, yeah, for sure.

Alper Yurder: And the reason I can I can say it so easily is because I feel that and I and I fall into the same problem sometimes. I'm like, OK, people want to hear about this. Let me write about that. But sometimes I don't come from my own story. And then it feels weird. Like then you're like trying to put some thought leadership to the world. You weren't asked for, you know, or anyway. Sorry, I caught you there. Apologies.

Patrick Trümpi: No, no, that's exactly right. You're good. And I see that with some people who start as well, who put in those claims and it doesn't work. Yeah. And I don't mean claims like cold calling is that, okay, that might still work, but yeah, they are meant to provocate. I mean, that's clear, but there are some...

Alper Yurder: Yeah. Well, that's the, that's the algorithm. I am what I saw once was you were sharing something around your journaling experience, like writing day to day. And that makes so much sense to me because like, how did you take up this habit and how long has it been going for you? I think that's something everybody wants to be successful in their career should do. And I only, I do it sometimes I get interrupted. And when I saw you doing it, it was like, it clicked. It makes sense. This guy, the way he writes.

Patrick Trümpi: Mm -hmm. Yep.

Alper Yurder: It's because he's recording this every day. Like, can you tell about journaling a little?

Patrick Trümpi: Yeah, absolutely. And so my, uh, Larry, uh, the CEO is Eddie, one of my best friends. And, uh, he always said, Patrick, you have to start journaling. I tried, I, you know, I had these, these black.

Alper Yurder: Mm. Moleskine.

Patrick Trümpi: Exactly, exactly. A few of these. I started five times with, yeah, I started five times with these books, never made it more than 20 days. So I discovered back then a tool that was very similar to Notion, Workflowy was the tool, very similar to Notion. You just go in.

Alper Yurder: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, fancy books. Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm.

Patrick Trümpi: You start writing no for no for me format formatting. Uh, like with word, I hate word because you're formatting. How do you write it bold and blah, blah, blah. You know, all this weird that's annoying for my eyes. So I, I used workflow. I started to write and then I realized, Hey, amazing. Because when I do it on the computer, which a lot of people don't think works, I don't know for many people, it doesn't work. Interestingly for me, it was that game changer because I.

Alper Yurder: Meh. Thank you.

Patrick Trümpi: Get up I start and then I start working anyway So I do open my computer at 7 in the morning anyway and start to and then and then I start to write You know, I write for half an hour almost nowadays. It's quite heavily quite a lot. So usually one one word page even more sometimes And then he clicked and it worked because I was wearing covered by the way every day, I mean

Alper Yurder: So do you keep it? Do you do it every day? Well done.

Patrick Trümpi: Obviously, I have some days that I don't do it. Sometimes over the weekend, we go on a holiday and I don't do it. And then I catch up, yeah. But certainly, I do it for, let's say, 23, 4, 5 days a month, I'd say. I miss maybe 5 to 7 days a month.

Alper Yurder: Mm, mm, you catch up. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

What has been the best thing about journaling? What's the best impact in your life that it had?

Patrick Trümpi: Yeah, the best thing is, so you're writing, you know, I had a fight with my wife yesterday, let's imagine, and then I start to write about that fight. And then I also realize the way I write about it. So I can see myself, okay, that's your perspective. Now what's the other perspective? So while you are writing, you're doing some thinking as well. But Patrick, why actually is that important? Why actually do you want this? Why are you actually?

You know, so emotional about this topic. So you think about it a bit. You ask one why or two why questions more, and then you really get to the stuff. And that's what you have to do with yourself, with sales, with everything. So that was the most impactful. You, you, you don't just write about how you felt yesterday, but you write how you felt. And then you think about how you felt, uh, and, and you know, you're still.

Alper Yurder: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, I love that. That's basically you're doing self -suit, self -therapy. And I'm saying to my team, if you can't do the journaling, then like at the end of every week, spend 30 minutes on a Friday writing the highs and lows and the learnings of the week. Because otherwise that's the best gift you can give yourself on that week because time flies. We do like a million things a second. We forget, but then recognition, all the good things you achieved. What did you really learn? What are you going to avoid doing next week?

Like that's how you build good habits.

Patrick Trümpi: Absolutely, absolutely.

Alper Yurder: Love that. All right, as we're coming to the end of our show, any closing remarks Patrick, any questions I should have asked you and I didn't.

Patrick Trümpi: No, no, no, that was amazing. Very unusual. I didn't prepare for it, but it was a...flow conversation…

Alper Yurder: Well, Flowla. In brand with Flowla, everything here is flowing easy breezy. Love that. Well, thank you so much for.

Patrick Trümpi: I enjoyed it a lot. Flowla, really yeah, it's flowing.

It is actually slower. That's great. No, I don't have it. I it was good. Well done.

Alper Yurder: Excellent. So thank you very much for joining me on this episode today. And maybe I'll see you in another episode at some point in new journeys as your fathering journey also flourishes. And I'll be following everybody. Give a follow to Patrick because it will definitely teach you a few things that you didn't know before. And otherwise, see you in the next episode.

Patrick Trümpi: Thank you, Alper. See you in the next.

Alper Yurder: Excellent. All right. 

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