Charles Needham on using math to sell better

Adam Sockel (00:00.982)
You're listening to Bold Calling, a podcast presented by Orem where every episode we're bringing out the biggest and brightest minds in the tech and sales industries for a discussion about their biggest challenges and the unique ways they're working to solve them. I'm your host, Adam Sokol, and today I'm joined by Charles Needham, Manager of Revenue Operations and Business Development at Fetch. First off, Charles, thank you so much for joining me today.

Charles Needham (00:23.716)
Pleasure. Thanks for having me, Adam.

Adam Sockel (00:25.836)
Yeah, so we're going to dive into, you have a really, really unique background and unique approach to sales development that I want to dive into. But before we get into that, I would love for you to give our listeners a little bit of information on your background, of how got into sales, and then what you're currently doing at Fetch.

Charles Needham (00:42.466)
Yeah, absolutely. So I listened to a fair amount of these podcasts and I'm always struck by the number of people who, you know, came out of the womb selling lemonade stand, like hustled in high school, boy scout, girl scout, whatever. I myself was a very quiet child. spent a lot of time with books and so sales are something I came into a little bit later in life. I went to the college of William and Mary down in Virginia, got a degree in economics and thought my life was going to be in finance. So I went from there

This is sort of after the great financial crisis and I was very fascinated by mortgage backed securities. So I was spending a lot of time in that sector doing a lot of analytical work, like underlying on these big mortgage bonds, basically just sitting in a cubicle and not talking to people all day. And I went from there, got a job on Wall Street, did that whole thing, did private equity. And it just wasn't a great fit for me. I didn't enjoy it a

Adam Sockel (01:29.622)
I'm

Charles Needham (01:40.44)
But I didn't really know what I was missing out on. then as fate would have it, pandemic occurred, work from home the first time. One of my buddies was running a fitness company, selling online coursework, needed a sales guy, thought I might be a good fit. So he brought me in, took to it pretty quickly, went from, guess, what you would call an SDR in a few months to an AE. From there, started running the team

You know, I was mostly doing fairly linear transaction type sales, like one call, two call close. As a by -product, they're trying to learn more about sales and get better. I picked up a lot of B2B sales books and then went way overboard, like building sequences, technology, like all that stuff to basically sell online fitness coursework to women in their forties. So like there was naturally some constraints there.

And then I got hooked up with a gentleman by name of Christian Reddick over at Revenue Drivers, just a great, great mind in the business development and B2B sales space, and started doing B2B, know, multi -threading, understanding organizational structures, really bringing in that economics background for the first time in sales and marrying the two. And then I had an opportunity when Revenue Drivers at the time merged with Apex Revenue,

to come in and join essentially the most badass, can I swear on here? Okay, the most badass cold calling outfit really essentially in the world. So, let my wife know that after a year in Austin where we moved from New York when we were working in finance to Austin, that we were then gonna be packing up and heading for Knoxville, Tennessee. She's very gracious about that. It was tough to explain to her that I was moving for a connect rate. So I had to have that whole conversation.

Adam Sockel (03:01.953)
Absolutely.

Charles Needham (03:25.356)
But moved down here, spent, I guess, what is it, like seven, eight months with the Apex crew, and now running business development over at Fetch Package. So that's the Cliff Notes version for

Adam Sockel (03:40.15)
I need you to know, I was listening to all of that intently, but I really was thinking about what the tech stack would be for selling like seven minute abs. The whole thing, I was just sitting there being like, I love the idea of being like, all right, I really gotta get someone on a Peloton this week, so I need outreach and I need Apollo and I hubs.

Charles Needham (03:58.599)
yes.

Charles Needham (04:03.022)
So I'll do you even one better. I was tracking everything out of spreadsheets, right? And then I had this sort of like manic idea where I was like, wait, what if there was a software where I could track all my customers and reference it by my sales reps and keep stats on them? And I wrote out this like whole notepad and I went to my boss and she was like, have you heard of HubSpot or Salesforce before? And I was like, no, what's that? She's like,

call the CRM. So I like invented in my own mind a CRM and was just like feverishly sketching out on notepads. But I actually got started in a program called Go High Level, which I know is not super popular among the, I would say like the tech snobs, but was sort of like an all in one platform where you could basically do anything you want. So like GDPR, throw it out the window.

You want to send 10 ,000 emails, no problem. The automations were linked to absolutely everything with no safeguards. So imagine like 10 ,000 emails going out from like a single root domain to cold B2C. So hopefully the FTC is not listening right now, but you know, we learned somehow.

Adam Sockel (05:20.174)
Yeah, think that's amazing. So I want to ask about like the like you said, the background you had in economics, we had a previous conversation that was not recorded that really interested me. And like, I want to I want to understand how that has led to you approaching sales development, maybe outside of the box. like, from my from my perspective, I I am similar to you. I spent 11 years.

in the library and book industries. I worked for a company called Overdrive, which I've talked about a little bit on here. same thing, not in sales at all. I in marketing. was in B2C marketing. But before that, my dad owned an insurance agency. And I did life insurance and financial planning stuff for him. But it was just such a different approach, because it really was. It's interesting that this was 15 years ago. he really was successful because he was a relationship builder. These people would come in and do

you know, they would like look at all the assets and the different policies they had with him and they'd be in his office for like two hours just like shooting the shit. And I was like, my God, and these people stayed with him for years and years. And now we've kind of gotten back to like, that's sort of what people, you know, it's always been like you buy from who you trust, but it's even more so I feel like now, I feel like every single LinkedIn post you see is like, hey, who should I be purchasing this software from? And then it's all this like network based sales. And so like to me, that's how we approach what we do here at Orem is we try to...

build relationships and that's how we've found success. But for you, how has approaching sales development from an economics background, how do you think that's helped differentiate your role as a leader and helped you be successful?

Charles Needham (07:04.4)
Yeah, that's an amazing question. So I'll back up because we were talking a little bit about books. One of my favorite books ever is Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, a very famous like philosophical tone, the Emperor's Diary, dealing with life and sort of his perspective on everything. And one of the concepts in that book is the interconnectedness of everything.

Adam Sockel (07:15.779)
Mm -hmm.

Charles Needham (07:28.206)
so, you know, when it comes to sales development, I noticed that there's a very narrow focus around what I think are a set of static conditions. Like people are like, okay, this channel doesn't work right now, whatever doesn't work means. And so I started looking more broadly at what, you know, in with the economics background to your point, what the sets of conditions are that correlate with these attitudes. And so if I look at what you're describing there with network based selling relationship based selling.

To me, that's a bit of a red herring. What I think it fundamentally is, is attitudes around risk, right? So you go with your network, you look for relationships because cognitively and otherwise, you're attempting to minimize risk. I .e. if you, Adam, recommend me a vendor, I now have a higher degree of certainty, a lower level of risk in associating with that vendor. And so if you look at risk economically,

What is that tied to? In most cases, if you look to a single indicator, it's interest rates. Because when you have higher interest rates, your opportunity cost of capital is higher, which is to say the capital you have, which you typically borrow, right? So it's kind of like this downstream network effecting where investors have to get a higher rate of return on their capital, which means that their expectations when they give them to founders,

are going to be a very different thing than during low interest rate periods. And so you see these fluctuations where during low interest rate periods, there is more appetite for risk. And as a function for a higher appetite for risk, people are willing to spend more. They're less sensitive to the profitability of that spending because there's a lower barrier to clear. And so when I think of the business development, I think in terms of these cycles of interest rate sensitivity,

which is when you have buyers who have a higher, have a lower risk tolerance as a function of interest rates, fundamentally, if you go all the way back because of the expectations that are set by founders, that are set by investors, then you have a very different set of conditions you're working with. You're talking about minimizing risk versus when you have lower interest rate periods, there's more appetite for that growth. Investors are looking for yield. The investors understand that by extension of having lower interest rates and safer assets, they have to take more

Charles Needham (09:53.294)
They're also willing to stomach more loss. So fundamentally, you go from an environment with low interest rates where there's more demand capture. You basically want the biggest boat, as many fish will jump in as possible, to now you actually have to go out and be strategic and build a case. So I would say that's the biggest one that I see, I would say, in larger macroeconomic cycles, relatives just looking at as a sales exercise.

Adam Sockel (10:17.134)
So how do you take those concepts and either express them or present them to higher up leaders and people because I'm thinking about the fact that we just got back our data from what will become our 2024 state of sales development. we saw, this was expected, but we saw customer acquisition costs are up, quotas are up, daily KPI requirements for SDRs, AEs, and everybody on the sales org.

are up, people are purchasing less. it's like, it's this whole, especially in like SaaS and like startups, if you're not thriving, people assume you're dying. if you're not three, like forget like growing by 10 or 15%, if you're not three X in your ARR every single year, people panic. And so, you know, and this is, and a lot of it comes from like these numbers that sellers have to hit come from expectations from investors, from your private equity and everything.

Charles Needham (10:49.32)
Yep.

Adam Sockel (11:15.896)
How do you, it's one thing if you're the top of mountain and you're telling your sellers, okay, I'm running CharlesNeedham .com and we understand the economic events that are going on, so we are going to approach this quarter differently. How do you take all this knowledge that you have and formulate a plan for the people under you while also explaining it to the people maybe above you, like hey, this is the reality of what we're looking at

Charles Needham (11:44.362)
So one of the reports I really enjoy looking at every single year is the the bridge report survey of AEs and SDRs. So I'm sure you're familiar Trish Bredouzi, the bridge group godfather, godmother, I guess, of the the SDR business development world. One of the most interesting trends I see year over year is the increase in volume of activities that SDRs are doing and AEs are doing.

has been met with a commensurate decline in response rates. So like that's very interesting, right? Like we're doing more of something, but getting less of an outcome. And I think to the point about people being stuck in static paradigms, the answer that we're seeing across a wide variety of applications is do more stuff, which is interesting because it seems in a lot of ways that that stuff is actually leading to diminished outcomes. And so when you look thematically,

you're looking at a perspective that has to do with like drive top line growth, 3X, do whatever it takes, not so much focused around profitability, around that volume. But when you're in a sort of risk, like risk sensitive environment, you have to start looking more around efficiency and profitability. So, you know, does it make sense anymore to have 10 SDRs driving volume, maybe not necessarily being super efficient and knowing that, you

Maybe you'll pay it back later while interest rates are low, not so much. It becomes more about how much incremental per unit output can you get? How profitable can you make these functions? And by building an engine more around profitability versus top line growth, you have a better chance, I think, in these environments. And also, interestingly enough, I think you scale better when the cycle inevitably turns and there's more demand in the market. Being profitable and being efficient is going to

to be popular again. You also see this in the sense of bull markets and bear markets and the stock market. When interest rates are high, this is the previously boring or not sexy enough. All of a sudden people are like, wait a minute, I'd like to invest in that again. But during bull markets, that's not growing 200%. I'm out, I'm out. But now everyone's going back to utility stocks and stuff like that. it's just navigating these overall economic cycles that I think is

Adam Sockel (14:08.704)
Yeah, listen, at end of the day, think you should just put your money into buying a car wash because those things are just basically, you put a little bit of money in them and then they're self -sustainable. I jest, please don't do that everybody.

Charles Needham (14:17.55)
One of the conversations I always relate is I was getting my haircut back when I lived in New York City. And this was like at the height of the bull market, know, like NFTs were ripping at this time. And my barber was asking me like, if you had to buy crypto, what would you do? I was like, would probably just, you know, dollar cost average into Bitcoin and Ethereum and the market leaders and just leave it alone, right?

And you said, those are, those are the slow growth ones. And I remember pulling up a chart and it had grown like 50 % in the past six months. I was like, what do you mean? He's like, yeah, but those are one of the slow ones. And I realized, I was like, man, expectations of, of yield and return during these times get absolutely blown out. And to tie it back to business development, you get like 15 SDRs. And honestly, one of my more unpopular takes is I wonder to what extent the paradigms of

actually we succeeded in spite of them. So I'm sure we've all had that experience where we go to buy a product that we want anyway, and we have discovery meetings with SDRs, and then we're passed off to somebody else who takes a week to respond to the email, and we put up with it because we have the capital and we want to buy the solution anyway. But in some ways, I wonder how much of this edifice has been built in spite of itself.

Like how much of that capital was ready to be deployed anyway relative to these methods being efficient?

Adam Sockel (15:47.938)
Yeah, to keep looping books into our conversation, I feel like a lot of the sales development is very Kafka -esque. Like it's the trial. It's just constant loop and not really knowing, and there's red tape. You know, the elephant in the room for us, like honestly, from a sales development standpoint is, you know, we're a seat -based platform. Obviously there are organizations who purchase hundreds of seats of ORM for their hundreds and hundreds of SDRs. You know, whether those are like OSPs who are dialing on behalf of other places, that's one thing, but

The elephant in the room is like, our platform is designed to make your sellers much, much, much more efficient and better at their jobs in less time. so it's here. And it's also, you know, if you give five people an AI powered dialer like Oram and a tool like clay to do all the research and, you know, a follow -up tool and they kind of have this small.

Charles Needham (16:27.662)
You

Adam Sockel (16:42.958)
but very efficient tech stack, they can get much, much more done. And to your point, it's also much more sustainable because the shelf life, quote unquote, of a STR is like six to 18 months. And if you're going to have to keep replacing people, you want to replace four of them instead of replacing 20 of them if they can be just as efficient. So I do think you're right to like. It's not about volume, and it's also not about volume.

of outbound, we're seeing more and more like the data in this report that we're gonna release. like, it's less about, hey, can you make 500 phone calls today? It's, can you have 10 great conversations with really, really potentially impactful accounts that maybe they're strategic, but regardless, they are really, really strong accounts with big potential.

Charles Needham (17:28.078)
you

Adam Sockel (17:38.222)
that's much more important than like, I call 500 people? like, you know, for you, what are the things that you're constantly evaluating and trying to understand like moving forward about how to drive that efficiency for your team?

Charles Needham (17:55.384)
That's a great question. So I think there's there's two ends in that one is the enablement and then the other is going to be a training as a byproduct of the enablement. So for example, I'm a huge believer in channel validated outreach. So in other words, if we're looking at the phone, for example, I'm not giving a list to an SDR unless I know for fact that the people who are on that list pick up the phone at that number. Why? I think there are a couple generational trends

I think are going to be hard to ignore going forward. So if we take a couple of facts together, one, SDRs on the whole tend to be younger. Fact one. Fact two, we see all kinds of data to suggest that young people today, resounding like an old man yelling at clouds here, right? But are less comfortable having conversations on the phone. They prefer other methods of communication, which at least so far are not ones that really we've tapped into as a

But if that is the case, then it's imperative that those reps upskill as quickly as possible. And the only way to do that is for them to have as many phone calls as possible. And so because of that, it's critical to me that they're dialing on lists where they're going to get into as many conversations as possible. So a North Star for me is I want my reps getting into as many conversations per hour as possible. Everything else is

But if they're doing that, they're building a skill set, they're surveying the market, they're uncovering current and future buying opportunities, and then the rest just becomes about optimizing the message, about optimizing the targeting. But everything is on the bedrock of those conversations. keeping in mind the role of financial allocation, it's imperative that I have those conversations on as low a cost basis as possible. So essentially, if I can combine those two things,

I know I'm headed in the right direction because I'm generating outcomes, I'm upskilling my reps, and I'm also identifying current and future buying opportunities.

Adam Sockel (20:01.496)
thinking about the financial aspect, are you having people build out those lists on behalf of your reps or are you relying on them to also do that prospecting and that list building before they would start dialing or social selling, whatever it is that they are using to reach out to prospects? Are you having them build those lists or are having other people do

Charles Needham (20:22.904)
Sure, so I'm a huge believer that at least at the SDR level, reps should not be responsible for building those lists. Why? If you look at the nature of the SDR role, it's a very junior position and it's a very execution -based position. I .e. my job as an SDR is to have as many conversations with prospective buyers as possible. It does not include identifying who those prospective buyers might be.

And I'd be very worried about any organization that trusts a 23 year old SDR to determine who their ideal buyer is from a number of different vantage points. And so to me, identifying who to talk to and the strategic elements of business development sit far upstream of SDRs and BDRs. Also, number two, if you consider that a lot of young people are less comfortable on the phones today than maybe their predecessors or people who are more senior, giving them those tasks to

presents a very easy avenue with which to procrastinate the hard

rather than putting them in a position to have as many conversations as possible, streamlining to allow for that, and getting the most value that way. Because if you think about it, they're overpaid to build lists, essentially, and they're underpaid to have conversations. So if you're able to meet that gap somewhere in the middle, that's to me the benchmark of a successful program.

Adam Sockel (21:51.818)
Yeah, it's always been pretty wild to me to watch organizations onboard people who almost certainly are in their first sales role, or if not one of their first sales roles, and they're like, all right, you've been in our organization for three weeks. We expect you to have complete working knowledge of our brand voice, what we represent, our ideal ICP, what their needs and interests are, and how you can provide a value there and in the middle.

Also go ahead and spend a lot of time finding all those people. You should be comfortable talking to them from day one. yeah, to have, to not have some sort of ops, spending time building those lists so that people can just focus on getting good at the one thing that is all, this isn't even a question. This is just like me agreeing with you.

Charles Needham (22:18.766)
Yeah, it's ridiculous. And then also, if you think about it, there's all kinds of sub -proficiencies that are not only hard to train, but at the end of the day,

Training doesn't help the SDR do their main job of having more conversations, right? So I mean, if I'm a brand new SDR and somebody gives me an Apollo login and says, go call down this list, I've really given them no intelligent prioritization as to who they should be calling in what channel. So I'm really just sitting there hoping that a fresh college grad is going to be able to somehow by osmosis figure all these things out when the reality is if I'm doing that, I probably don't know either.

So this goes back to the, while we were talking about the paradigm with the low interest, zero interest rate period and demand being out there, right? Which is if there's enough demand out there, you can accidentally hit pay dirt pretty frequently, but it doesn't necessarily mean this is the best way to go about it. And so I'm a huge believer that by, you know, hat tip to Adam Smith, specialization, putting people, clearly defining what people's roles are, minimizing outside distractions,

you get the most efficiency per unit of time, which is ultimately what we're all looking to

Adam Sockel (23:49.922)
Yeah. I'm curious, you seem to be very comfortable with all of the different aspects of approaching sales development and leadership. What is something that, what is the thing that's the biggest stressor for you currently, other than having just recently started a new role, which I imagine involves lots of stressors? What is something that is stressing you out the most right now and how are you working to resolve

Charles Needham (24:21.632)
What is stressing me out the most? Let's see. You know, that's tough for me to answer because I don't, I try not to stress about things. I come at it from more of like a productive perspective. Like it doesn't really help me to stress. I will say one of the things, yeah, please.

Adam Sockel (24:36.27)
Let me frame it a different way. I'll frame it a different way. What is the biggest roadblock to productivity for your team currently that you're working to

Charles Needham (24:48.066)
Biggest roadblock to productivity. So I would say.

Charles Needham (25:00.11)
I guess the fact that it's taken me this long to answer it means I'm pretty happy with how things are going, which is all right. I would say that the thing that I spend the most time thinking about, I'll go there, is going to be the handoff between the SDR and the AE, as well as appropriate expectations either way. Because I think there's a lot of variables there to consider.

Adam Sockel (25:03.234)
That's honestly, that's a good answer too.

Charles Needham (25:27.084)
that only once you've generated enough data can you look back and find the right answer. So like the easiest one for me to think of, for example, is who's responsible for the show rate. Because if you have a handoff, then you have a place where you could argue either way that somebody is responsible for the show rate, but ultimately deciding who is will impact what happens next. So if the AE is responsible,

you have the potential that SDRs will then hand off opportunities that aren't necessarily as qualified as they should be, knowing that AEs are responsible. But if AEs aren't responsible, then you reduce the probability that the necessary activities to get that meeting to show up will take place. And so that's one of those dynamic things that varies situation to situation. I don't know that there is a right answer, but there is a right answer for any given situation. But again, being relatively new in the function, the meetings I've scheduled have

come to pass yet. That's still a big unknown for me. So I spend a lot of time thinking about how KPIs impact incentive structures, which then impact activities. So I would say that's the biggest one for me is how do you successfully manage that handoff from SDR to AE? What are the trade -offs between having an SDR manage more of that relative to prospecting net new versus how much should the AE do as

Adam Sockel (26:31.38)
Mm -hmm.

Charles Needham (26:49.4)
So I would say that's probably the biggest thing I spend a lot of time thinking about, because I don't know that there's any one right answer.

Adam Sockel (26:55.574)
Yeah, I will say getting back to one of the initial points we're talking about is like why we've heard we have so many customers of Oram who tell us like that, you know, all things being equal between different platforms because so many platforms are so close. They choose us because of our people. And I think we think a lot about that handoff from SDR to AE and then AE to CSM and like kind of keeping how often do you keep people involved in the conversation and how do you streamline and

eloquently do it in a way, like you said, where your SDRs can get back to the thing that maybe they're supposed to be doing versus, you know, AEs. It's, it's a big question. I think, and I think you're right about it's always going to vary from customer to customer, prospect to prospect, deal to deal. I think it's, it's interesting to try to approach it. Is there, is there a framework you've thought through as

as you're just kind of ramping up these conversations with your team that you're leaning towards or are you still very much evaluating like if it'll be the same in this role as it was in previous organizations?

Charles Needham (28:07.396)
So the only first principles perspective that I'm coming at this from is that you want to incentivize the behavior you want as close to its occurrence as possible. To think almost kind of

in a Pavlovian sense. So you present the food, you ring the bell, like the two are related. And so I would say that as close to a meeting being as accepted as possible, you want to reinforce that, either AE or SDR, again, situation dependent. But speed to reinforcement of behavior, I think, is really the only logical way to start from a first principles perspective.

And I think building in a couple of those feedback loops prior to a meeting is the best way to go about that. Almost like a gamification on the part of the prospect.

Adam Sockel (28:59.394)
Yeah, and I mean, I think that makes sense, like you said, ultimately, people can, I don't wanna speak for the masses, but people can say they're motivated by enjoying the people that they work with, and that's great. I love the people I work with. If you ask me, the thing I'm motivated by is watching my paycheck grow.

And so if I know this thing gets me more money, like you said, is very Pavlovian, it's like, I'm going to focus on that thing. So I think that's, that's probably the best, like good path to go down. I think that'll set you up for success.

Charles Needham (29:31.212)
Yeah, I think it's Warren Buffett that said you actually was Charlie Munger, RIP to a real one, who said, you show me that you show me the incentives, I'll show you the outcome. And he was a pretty smart dude. So hard to go wrong with

Adam Sockel (29:37.655)
Mm -hmm.

Adam Sockel (29:43.078)
Mm hmm. Yeah, Yeah, I don't think I don't think the jury is still out on that. think they I think they know what they're talking about when it comes to successful businesses. Yeah. All right. I want to I want to have a little bit of fun. I'm actually really interested. I have a bunch of kind of like lighthearted questions for the for the end here. I'm really interested in this. What was your first job? Well, this could have been like when you were a kid. I know we talked about the lemonade stand stuff like, do you remember what your first job was?

Charles Needham (29:56.066)
Yeah, no question.

Charles Needham (30:14.222)
So actually, my first job was actually an internship. So I was a reporter. I was born and raised in Thailand. So my first job actually was as a reporter for the Bangkok Post. So I, yeah, it actually pretty cool. So I did a lot of like, interviewing people for the magazine, writing op -eds, doing book reviews and stuff like that. So it's the major English language newspaper.

based out of Bangkok, so that was a really cool experience.

Adam Sockel (30:48.024)
My first internship, I went to, I talked about this in a previous episode, I went to graduate school for sports marketing, I'm clearly, sports marketing and sports management, which I'm clearly using here, helping sell a sales platform. But I was working for the University of Northern Kentucky, and they had just put in this, they were division two college, but they had just put in this ridiculously nice basketball arena.

And so they needed to fill that space and justify the cost of this. And so they were bringing in like monster truck rallies and like Reba McIntyre concerts. And my job was to like package up content for those things and then like send them to local like sports talk radio places. Anytime you would hear like a sports talk radio and they'd be like, we got four tickets to this weekend's monster. Like that was the stuff I was putting together. Yeah. So your internship sounds a lot more fun than mine.

Charles Needham (31:22.111)
-huh. -huh.

Charles Needham (31:31.383)
boy.

Charles Needham (31:44.012)
I'll see you.

Charles Needham (31:48.174)
That's hilarious. It's funny how they do that out of order, right? Where it's like, all right, we're going to build this like gigantic stadium and now we're going to figure out how to fill it. You're like, that doesn't seem like the right order of events.

Adam Sockel (32:00.078)
Yeah, I know. I think it worked out. I think they became a division one and I think they're like I think they've made it to the NCAA tournament now. But like yeah, it was I remember Northern Kentucky middle of nowhere. I went to school at Xavier, which is in Cincinnati So it's just kind of north of the Cincinnati border or the Ohio border But I remember like getting this job and then driving 20 minutes in the middle of nowhere to Kentucky and then all of sudden There's just this like palatial basketball arena. I was like, why is this here? But you know

Charles Needham (32:13.41)
Yeah.

Charles Needham (32:28.206)
I guess it's not that similar from sales teams, right? They're like, all right, we're going to hire 10 SDRs to drive growth. And you're like, how? They're like, well, there's 10 of them. Like, no, I understand that there's 10 of them. How are you going to have them execute? What's the plan? And they're like, well, there's 10 of them. Something's going to happen. Something's going to happen.

Adam Sockel (32:43.342)
There's 10 of them. didn't you just hear us? Yeah, didn't you just hear us? There's 10. Meetings done. Let's go to lunch. What was, do you remember, you don't have to name organizational names. What was your worst

Charles Needham (32:57.87)
So I always reframe it, right? Because to me, worst suggests that there is nothing that you got out of it. Whereas to me, would say learning is a huge value. So being brand new to sales, being at an organization that was a startup, I realized that there was a lot of questions that people didn't think to ask before going into the market that would probably be helpful

right? Like lot of people have businesses that are based off of referrals, word of mouth, and then suddenly they start scaling a team and they find themselves in a position where that referral and that word of mouth base has necessarily dried up. You only know so many people. But at this point, it's much too late to figure out, do we actually have a market for this cold outbound? But once you already have all the infrastructure built up, that's a tough question to

And so I would say that I've learned the hard way to evaluate that on the front end. Like, Hey, do you have actual product market fit? Is this a business that was built with large scale growth intended to begin with? Is this an environment that makes sense to have salespeople in? And I think a lot of people look at sales from, you know, like this kind of black box in which you get an output rather than a component of a well thought out

They think they can just bring salespeople in and then as a byproduct of having salespeople on staff, you'll have sales. There's a lot that goes into that, right? So I would say that there have been situations where I have learned that firsthand, which have allowed me to be more effective down

Adam Sockel (34:44.686)
All that being said, I worked at a foundry when I was 16, pouring concrete in an internal space where they were pouring liquid metal through stuff and it was like 120 degrees and we had to wear long sleeves. that taught me that I, it was awesome. But it taught me I did not want to do that for my entire life. There's a good

Charles Needham (34:48.558)
Okay.

Charles Needham (34:59.32)
This sounds kind of awesome.

Charles Needham (35:08.014)
That's a valuable lesson. think to some extent, as somebody who's always worked mostly desk jobs and stuff like that, there's some part of me that's like, what if I just left it all behind and became a blacksmith?

Adam Sockel (35:20.502)
Yeah, think mine for that is park ranger. Like I think I left it all behind and just like what spent my time walking through nature picking up garbage. I would enjoy

Charles Needham (35:28.044)
Yeah, that sounds pretty chill. What was that movie? think Brendan Fraser did it. was like, I might be totally wrong about this. was like a Canadian mountain ranger or something.

Adam Sockel (35:41.014)
I have, I know what you're talking about, but I don't remember the name. was admittedly, was thinking Dudley. he said Dudley Durant. I was admittedly thinking Parks and Recreation where Ron Swanson ends up doing that at the end if you've watched Parks and Recreation. Yeah. Same thing. I think Park Ranger for me. Yeah. Do you have an app or a platform or a tool that you, that's your favorite for productivity, like monday .com or Slack or a tool that you use that helps you be more productive?

Charles Needham (35:43.79)
Dudley Do -Right.

on.

Charles Needham (35:52.247)
I can't say I have, but yeah, park ranger for you,

Charles Needham (36:10.88)
Yeah, so I would say like, have you ever seen those bell curve memes? I think are pretty awesome. Where it's like on the left, it's like notepad. And then in the middle, it's like, no, I have Notion automatically integrated with my Excel to do sheet, which is also linked to my calendar, which I built an app that sends me push notifications before, before I have anything to do. then on the right, it's like to do list.

Adam Sockel (36:14.562)
Mm -hmm.

Adam Sockel (36:37.965)
Yeah.

Charles Needham (36:39.246)
So I would say that I fall more in line with that. I have a tendency to look for elaborate. I would say that something that I've noticed is it's very easy to convince yourself you're doing productive work and finding all these elaborate tools to do it. But at the end of the day, streamlining all that clutter into such a way that allows you to just focus on what matters most, which I think is part of how I look at business development is you have the list.

You call the list, you follow up. That's really pretty much it. But that being said, I have been getting really into Obsidian lately. Have you ever used Obsidian?

Adam Sockel (37:18.413)
I have not.

Charles Needham (37:20.376)
So it's like a notion competitor, but basically what it allows you to do is cross -link notes that you make to each other. So it creates this kind of like cool looking web of ideas. And so I don't know about you, the reason I started using it is I'm a prolific note taker, but those notes end up like sitting on my Google Drive and then I do absolutely nothing with them. I don't build on them. They just end up stacking up and getting forgotten.

with the city and if you link your notes you increase the occurrence of going back and looking at them and then over time those relationships actually create new ideas so are you familiar with ryan holiday

Adam Sockel (38:02.755)
Yes.

Charles Needham (38:04.472)
So he uses something called a common place box, which I think is a concept that he got from Robert Green, where you actually have physical note cards. And whenever you're reading a book or an article or whatever, you take notes on these physical note cards and you store them all together. And then what you do as an exercise is you grab a few of them out of that box. And because you grab them at random, you're able to connect ideas you otherwise wouldn't, versus if they're a siloed in like different Google Docs, you never get that opportunity.

Obsidian is really just a super fancy way of doing that, but it's a very cool program. I highly recommend

Adam Sockel (38:41.026)
Yeah, I'm gonna check that out. How about for fun? Is there a favorite app or thing or tool you use for fun? could be a lot of people say, actually several people have said the chess .com app, which is not what I was expecting, which is interesting, but is there an app on your phone that you spend some time on when you just wanna kind of veg out?

Charles Needham (38:59.768)
Well, first of all, Lee chess gang Lee chess is infinitely superior to chess .com chess .com is like the commercialized version. So Lee chess is definitely the superior version. That said, I try to get as much of my recreation and fun away from apps as possible being that I spend my time in dialers and CRM and

The last thing I want is to like recreationally hang out in another app. So I spend a lot of time up there is where I keep all my sheet music. That's my classical guitar. The closest thing I have to something electronic here is a metronome, which clicks in time to the music and allows me to practice. But I joke with my wife that I actually want to get a typewriter so when I write, I don't even have to be on the computer. But analog fun is my answer to that

Adam Sockel (39:36.12)
Mm -hmm.

Adam Sockel (39:48.942)
I love it, honestly, perfect answer. All right, last question for you. What is a cold call opener that would get you to hear a pitch? Like what would someone have to say to, I won't put your phone number in the comments, so don't worry, but what is like an opener someone would have to use that you'd be like, all right, I will hear your pitch?

Charles Needham (40:11.118)
Honestly, I'm biased because I believe very strongly in karma to the extent that as a cold caller, it would be very strange of me to have all kinds of roadblocks to cold calling me. So long as somebody sounded friendly and confident, I don't particularly care what opener they use. If it was overly corny, I might make fun of them for it. But I'm more liable to give people a chance on the phone.

I also don't know that all the focus around openers is really, really warranted. So I think this is another thing that, you in an effort to sell eBooks and differentiate yourself as like a guru, people have created these, these elaborate concepts and people like, what's your dialer? What's your opener? When as a practical matter, most people have a sense of whether they're going to take the cold call or not. Somebody who doesn't like taking cold calls won't do it no matter how cool or fancy your opener

Adam Sockel (40:48.142)
Mm -hmm.

Charles Needham (41:10.434)
So at the end of the day, I think it's hard to go wrong being polite and just recognizing that some people just don't want to talk on the phone. So it's not a good channel for them. And I don't think your opener makes a huge difference in that regard. And I actually think efforts to like overly engineer that actually make it worse. You know what I mean?

Adam Sockel (41:29.795)
I may need to tweak this last question because I initially was like, I'm going to use this as a way to hear a bunch of different types of opening pitches. And all it's really been is I bring out a bunch of sales professionals and I am also in this space and we're all like, yeah, I'll take a cold call. I to hear you have to say it's like we're all just like so agreeable to it. I'll give you a chance. Yeah. And I'm not I'm always like, what dollar are you using? I heard there was a beep. What's going on over there?

Charles Needham (41:44.11)
I'm just curious. Yeah.

Adam Sockel (41:53.218)
Charles, this was an absolute blast. really, really appreciate you for taking so much time with me. Thank you for joining me today.

Charles Needham (41:53.227)
I dunno.

Charles Needham (42:01.057)
Thank you for having me. Always a pleasure.

Adam Sockel (42:05.336)
Give me