Inside Episode #3 of Bearchats by Bearworks with Callan Harrington
Success in startups isn’t just about the wins—it’s about knowing how to take the punch and still swing back. The best founders don’t wait for perfect conditions—they create them.
That’s exactly what Callan Harrington, founder of Flash Growth, has done throughout his career. In the latest episode of Bearchats by Bearworks, Albert Wang and Joshua Sts sit down with Callan to unpack the unfiltered reality behind startup success, sales struggles, and strategic risk-taking.
Here’s what makes Callan’s story stand out:
He’s been through six startups—three that ended in successful exits and three that completely flopped. And while most people would hide their failures, Callan embraces them as the lessons that paved the way for his wins.
“I’ve never been strategic about my career… everything happened because I jumped in, got uncomfortable, and figured it out.”
— Callan Harrington
In this episode, you’ll hear why sometimes burning the boats—quitting your job with no backup plan—is the push you need to finally make it work.
Key Highlights From the Episode:
- The Power of Pressure:
Callan shares how he manufactures pressure to stay motivated—intentionally putting himself in tough situations where he has to either sink or swim. - The Truth About Startup Sales:
Many founders hire salespeople too soon. Callan explains why you should be selling your product until you’ve proven repeatability—and exactly when it’s finally time to bring in your first sales hire. - From Squash Courts to Sales Floors:
When a deal fell through, Callan didn’t sulk—he became obsessed with squash, playing multiple times a day. His takeaway? Founders need healthy obsessions to channel their energy between business highs and lows. - Culture as a Sales Advantage:
He shares the genius of “open house” hiring events—turning recruitment into a funnel-like process that mirrors great sales strategies. - The Cold Call Hall of Fame:
You’ll hear hilarious (and slightly painful) cold calling stories, including one about repeatedly getting transferred… straight to the police.
Key Takeaways You Can Apply:
- Burn the Boats (If You Have To):
Sometimes you can’t build something on the side. If you keep burning out trying, it may be time for an all-in leap. - Sales First, Hiring Later:
Don’t hire sales too early—founders should close the first million (or more) in ARR themselves to truly understand the process. - Pattern Over Pitch:
When hiring sales reps, ignore flashy interviews. Look for consistent patterns across their career, not just clever answers. - Engineer Pressure to Grow:
Success often comes from creating situations where you’re forced to act. Whether it’s financial investment, public commitments, or personal goals, pressure can be a powerful motivator. - Fail Fast, But Learn Faster:
Every founder faces setbacks. The ones who win are those who embrace failure, laugh about it later, and get back in the game stronger.
If you’ve ever wondered when it’s time to really bet on yourself—this episode is a must-listen.
👉 Listen to Episode #3 of Bearchats by Bearworks now and get ready to rethink risk.
──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
welcome to the sales leaders pathway presented by Bearworks i'm your
moderator SARAH: let's meet your hosts hi
I'm ALBERT: co-founder and CEO of
Bearworks and I'm JOSHUA: partner at
ST's Media and head of marketing and
platform for Parameter Ventures today
we're here with CALLAN: founder
and CEO of Flash Growth a consulting and fractional executive company that helps
startups and scaleups unlock their next level of growth so without further ado
let's dive in hey CALLAN how are you i'm
doing well i'm excited to be here we're
excited to have you where are you today i am in Columbus Ohio oh my gosh do you
live there what brings you to Columbus i
do live here and it's actually sunny
outside we have more cloudy days than Seattle which you're probably thinking
why would you live there if you have more cloudy days in Seattle and it's not
New York LA or Chicago or some other city like that i love that stat because
I feel like it's only places with those like cloudy weathers that really hang
their hat on that fact i'm over in Ireland and everyone's like "We never
see the sun." So it's like the one thing that people from those places can say oh
very cool well we're very happy to have you perfect well I guess CALLAN if you
want to kick us off I guess give us a little bit of a background tell us a
little bit more about yourself yeah um
yeah I've been in the startup space i
mean I think I always kind of say that the funny thing about my career is I've
been part of six startups been fortunate that three of those had exit events and
three of those completely flopped and the things that I learned in those ones
that completely flopped helped along that path to successful exits i can tell
I'm curious like how you got on the startup kind of path did you think you
were going to be a startup person when you started this journey or kind of kind
of how did you develop that itch you
know I wish I can I didn't even until
you actually just asked that question i don't think I've ever been strategic in
my career one time and that's a horrible thing to admit but I got into sales by
complete accident my best friend was interviewing for a position and they
asked him "Who else do you think would be good at this job?" And I was the only
phone number that he had memorized so that's how I got my first sales job um
and then startups was almost the exact same thing i wanted to move on and do
something different and it just happened to be there i got into it this is before
it was insure tech or fintech or anything like that i just thought this
online financial services was cool and I wanted to do things a different way and
I stumbled on starting my own digital agency online so almost throughout my
whole career including my most recent business that happened as a result of I
was never going to start a business unless I just quit and and started
without having a product service pipeline and just went all in so yeah
that I guess I strategically fell into the right positions i think we're going
to have a lot of people who are definitely interested in that that route
right like was it something that you you know I don't know maybe in college or in
high school you're like I want to be my own boss i want to do my own business or
like you know there's I get this question a lot you know how do you just
kind of leap in and just take the plunge or do you kind of slowly set up a
consulting thing do you do it you know part-time or full-time because we've
actually got four entrepreneurs on today's you know everyone everyone here
is their own boss and so I think I think um everyone's journey is so unique and
so different uh there's definitely something we could very curious about
yeah I mean I will say for me I tried I tried to build something on the side I
think for those that can do it if you can build a business on the side and get
it to the point where it can replace your current income at your position
like more power to you i would I I would love to have gone that route and I tried
multiple times but I burned out every time I tried to do that and I couldn't
do it so for me it was more like all right burn the boats jump into the deep
end see if you could swim i'm curious
was that how did that feel like oh my
gosh you know you got to worry about your savings health care customers what
was your I don't know first 3 to nine months like when you kind of took that
plunge off the deep end i think we lost Albert but I'll fill him in there what
was your um mode of thinking what got you to kind of launch and and jump off
yeah so I with my career it was very I was very very opportunistic throughout
my career and I was very fortunate in the companies that I had joined and when
one position kind of led to its natural progression the next good opportunity
came up and I would join at that next good opportunity but that was I always
knew I wanted to found something but it was I just didn't I I again I tried to
do this on the side i tried to build these things up and try to come up with
the perfect idea and I just never could do it so for me I needed to manufacture
the pressure to move me into motion and that's what it was so that's when um
when my last company had sold Bold Penguin I helped transition over for
that business for about six months and then said "All right if I'm ever going
to do this like now's the time to do it i need to leave i need to just jump in
here and figure it out." And that's exactly what happened cool okay CALLAN I
really liked what you had to say around manufacturing the pressure is that do
you think what has been the catalyst for you moving from place to place like what
does the pressure look like for you is that fear of not taking advantage of an
opportunity or is it just knowing what you want your next step to be yeah it's
a great question for me I have found that I have to put myself into positions
that I don't personally believe I'm ready for could be imposttor syndrome
whatever it might be but I know when I get into a situation and I feel that
I've mastered it uh like my performance will go down i'll start putting my time
and energy i'll give a good example um we we had a company and we were going to
exit to a private equity company and that at the 25th hour one person on the
investment panel at the private equity company said no and of course like I was
just working the past 45 days essentially two jobs if you've ever gone
through that due diligence process it's horrible um and we were not prepared for
it whatsoever so it was even harder um so I was pretty dejected and the other
ch the other thing about that was I had already uh like there was nothing there
wasn't another mountain to climb we had got it to that point and it was more in
that maintenance mode so I picked up playing squash and just went all in on
that i mean I'm play like going to the squash courts like multiple times a day
uh I had never played in my entire life like well let's see if I can't make the
senior tour in this um like I have to like go towards something or I will end
up wasting my time on XYZ other things um that company did ultimately sell but
I learned like I just I need to force myself into these things I'm not ready
for because that's when I'm most activated what a great thing to know
interesting you you you kind of like like crave that fight orflight mentality
and that's that's what kind of powers you some there that's exactly right
that's exactly right and I will say that even and sometimes this is a challenge
as a founder because your back's not always against the wall and the reality
is you can go 500 different ways if something else if you're a naturally
curious person which I I totally am I could go into a new idea get really
excited about it bored and then move on to the next one so sometimes I'll have
to put forcing functions in place like invest in a particular area that I know
is going to to strap me for for a little while because it's going to force me to
act and move in that direction so on that note I'm curious your take on
being prepared right so so let's say I don't know 23-year-old Kellen was told
you're going to be doing your own startup someday right a lot of a lot of
questions I get asked is "Well I want to do a startup but I'm not ready yet right
i gotta learn this i gotta learn that i got to learn sales i got to learn
marketing i gotta learn finance should I work at a big company to learn
this should I work at a small company?" Right and you're what I'm kind of
hearing from you is that like well if you're forced to do it you'll figure it
out right i guess I guess kind of looking back on this what do you think
what would you recommend to to other folks i think about this a lot right i
think about if I was to do this over again would I do it the same way and I
very much went through you know I joined a lot of startups i had a lot of startup
experience i had a really good network and I had really good savings before
starting a business um and I actually don't believe if I didn't have those
things that I would have had success in starting my own business personally so I
think about that and it's like if I would have started this a lot earlier i
think a couple things one I think we'll surprise ourselves when we take that
leap you know I think a lot of times we go into it thinking I don't have this I
don't have that whatever that might be or I'll do it when I get XYZ that's when
I'll know is the is the right time to do it i definitely think I waited too long
but the caveat to that was I got really good experience um and actually in the
business that I started without having that experience and network it would
have been a lot harder to get off to a good start i'm curious too just to dive
back into your previous sales experience could you tell us a little bit more
about how that's impacted you as a founder how have those tools that you've
taken from selling come into your work today yeah I mean I think especially at
the early stages you know the founder is the salesperson um and very often we see
what happens when you hire salespeople too quickly before you know there's
product market fit before that things are really rolling um and you hire a
salesperson in the founder ends up becoming too distant from what's
actually going on so those skills help me immensely i didn't have to you know
one of the big challenges that I see with zero to one founders that are
largely a tech background is um they have the network you know typically
they've been in this area for a long time so they can actually get to the
decision makers because they're often friends or you know there's one degree
of separation away but they don't know how to turn a conversation into a
customer looking at that you know differently really diagnosing somebody's
situation understanding their pains how our product can impact their situation
being able to know that before going into it I think was immensely helpful
and so on that note like I know you work with you know you advise a lot of
different companies both you know large and small do you have any suggestions
on you know your point was was well said which is don't scale that GTM team too
early right it's it's premature if you if you're you know don't have a product
or your founders aren't ready do you have any suggestions on how far along
they should be when it's time to start bringing in you know that early sales
hire that first head of VP of sales like what is what do you what is like a pre
good precondition or how should other founders be prepared to start scaling
out um you know their go to market teams yeah so typically right if you look at
the life cycle of a company like an early stage company right the first
thing is you're trying to get problem market fit does is there a problem in
this market for a product or service to even be built for so that's number one
the second thing that you're looking for right is product market fit so we've got
a product to solve for this problem and multiple people see that this product
can solve that problem so that's really when you're starting to think about
salespeople right and there's some traditional metrics that are out there
you know founders should be leading sales till you get to a million in ARR
some people say as high as 3 million ARR and it's it's that I think also depends
right i because if you've got one enterprise client at a million ARR is
that a good sign of repeatability i don't personally think so and I think if
you start hiring salespeople that quickly
it's so easy to say well these are just bad salespeople i hear this all the time
it's like well we've got a couple salespeople they're just not good maybe
and I'm not saying that like every salesperson that early stage company has
is great um but they just the product might not be there yet so I think
getting a couple of those right showing some some repeatability getting getting
some of those clients that are outside of the founders exact network uh that's
showing some more repeatability now let's bring on uh two salespeople and
and use this process to start to bring this on a little bit more and once those
two salespeople start hitting quota now let's think about a sales leader because
once we've got product market fit now we want to establish go to market fit and
go to market fit is when we take this early signs of repeatability and we
start to iron that out right because you're going to go like the roller
coaster is going to go up and down up and down how do we smooth that out so
that's when I start to think about now start to throw fuel on the fire because
if you do that too early especially if you hire like the number one thing is
like if you hire a VP of sales too early they're going to spin their wheels
because in my eyes a VP of sales is a great catalyst but they're not going to
be a savior for the growth and revenue of the business
now how do you the early days I find for a lot of founders and and I have you've
had this conversation many times over with colleagues friends clients um it
can be sometimes the hardest hire I feel like for a founder to make is that first
sales rep you know either because a obviously like sales reps are selling
you so that's it's difficult to identify but then you know you might you can kind
of make a choice you can hire someone that looks like they're a really good
sales rep they understand the problem they understand the industry they're you
know likable they're a real go-getter uh but do you f or do you hire someone that
has some of those soft skills but also comes with like a good rolodex and
network of your ICP that you're targeting but maybe they don't have much
outside of that right they've just been like a you know enterprise or mid-market
hit person and they can kind of bring in and sell to those same customers over
and over again kind of which uh which path do you like to to lean in this you
know trick question scenario i was going
to say there's not a perfect answer what
you know uh so a couple things one I'm always a huge proponent of knowing what
you're looking for before you go looking for that position right so what are
those characteristics that you want within your salesperson like what are
those hard skills and what are the things that make a good culture fit
within your startup just in general have that scorecard prepared ahead of time
weight those different attributes based on how important they are to the success
of the actual position and be crystal clear on what this position will be
doing that's that's step one step two you know you talked about this on a a
slightly below average salesperson is going to be a rock star in an interview
they're going to interview well they're going to be confident um and they're
going to be prepared for likely all of the one-off questions that you're going
to ask and you're going to think that this person is going to come in here and
just just absolutely take off um and if they're average they're going to be
they're going to be 100 times better than that person that was just slightly
below average so I am a huge believer in looking for patterns in an interview as
opposed to how they answer any one question um and I use I like to use the
who method for this where you're going uh up their resume asking the same exact
set of questions what were you hired on to do what were the low points in this
role what were the achievements that you were most proud of who did you report to
what was it like working with them uh what would they say your strengths are
what would they say your areas for improvement are and you're asking that
same exact thing at every position that they've had and you know a common uh
objection to this is well you know I'm hiring a lot of people right out of
college in my experience if I ask them about the part-time job that they had at
McDonald's those same patterns still show up um so it's not necessarily about
their their experience so when I look at that based on a pattern perspective I'll
see if they're going to be a good fit in my environment so like that's how I
assess salespeople as a whole now you brought up another good question u do
you go out and hire the person with a rolodex potentially if if this is a
enterprise very complex sale right so let's say you're selling space tech or
something like that you need somebody with a level of knowledge that can speak
that to the customer somebody coming right out of college it's probably
pretty doubtful they'll be able to to to do that you probably need some
experience in that to that point if they come in here I don't care how good their
rolodex is if you know they're just not motivated to get the deals done they're
going to be a high cost asset that you're probably going to have to part
with uh if they're not if they're not producing unfortunately it it is like
that for all those reasons that's why it is one of the trickiest positions to to
hire an early stage so true i mean it's
uh it's funny i mean it's uh you get
that rolodex maybe they they hit it out of the park free for a little bit but
then they've they've done their trick you know they've they've they've lit
their sparklers they've twirled them around and now you're just kind of left
some smoke in the air but uh it's always always kind of interesting to hear
everyone's thoughts on that with that I have kind of one other question for you
what is your favorite sales stat that you like just like live and breathe off
of with your sales team with your clients like or you know maybe you have
a couple of them but like what's your favorite sales stat that you look at
that and you're like I feel like if these KPIs are being hit that we're
going to be on target as an organization hell of a question it's going to depend
on the motion like SMB is going to be very different than enterprise you know
enterprise for me is much more about pipeline velocity right are we are we
moving deals through the pipeline at an adequate rate but whether it's SMB or I
will say that like the things that I'm looking at are what are my conversion
rate by stage how much time am I spending in each one of these stages and
what's my volume in each one of these stages and what I mean by stages is of
course there's the actual sales stages but you know how many MQLs are turning
into SQLs how many SQLs are turning into customers how many customers are growing
if I know those numbers my goal is to improve within the margins of every
single one of those because that's how you're going to hit exponential growth
love it so maybe love to switch gears um
towards your career path right so you
have been a leader for a while um but kind of curious how you kind of moved
into that leadership position you know was it a conscious choice to become a
kind of sales leader or was it kind of a natural progression kind of curious how
you made that leap and um your kind of thought process there yeah so I um I've
done it's funny i I started out doing um from a sales perspective just speaking
purely from a sales perspective BTOC face to face so as an outside rep
outside field rep doing B toC face to face i have switched to doing BTOC in an
inside sales motion selling 100% over the phone i went to a B2B enterprise
motion as an individual contributor um and then took on SMB as well and then
moved into leadership well they should say like I moved into SMB after
enterprise um and took my first leadership role and I knew that I wanted
to be in a leadership role i knew I wanted to to have a team i was just in
the right place at the right time to be placed into that position and I I knew
almost instantly like that was the best fit for me um I just got so much more
fulfillment out of building a process and really coaching and leading a team
like that was that drove a lot of fulfillment for me and I knew almost
instantly uh I didn't want to go back to individual contributing and I say all
the time there's nothing wrong with that i've had a lot of friends that have went
into leadership and went back to individual contributing and you know
because typically the the the best sales rep in the company is making more than
the CEO so from a financial perspective and autonomy perspective there's really
nothing better than being the top sales rep in my opinion i'm not saying that's
easy but you get a lot of perks that come with that but for me leadership was
it and I knew almost instantly once I got into that and so maybe let's say you
know you mentioned kind of advising other people who are in that IC position
who want to move up right so I'm I'm we work with a lot of startups um at
Bearworks and uh you know a lot of times where uh you know you might have been an
early AE and early SDR and they're trying to figure out their career path
do you have any kind of guidance suggestions for how they can kind of
develop their role and kind of position themselves uh you know to both either
figure out where they want to go career-wise but also kind of position
themselves the best to kind of advance if you're early on in a sales role i
mean the one thing and this is no different than my opinion than any role
what it may be the best roles are not going to be the ones that you're
applying for through LinkedIn like you're going to find those roles from
networking so never stop doing that i don't care how much you love your
company i don't care if you think that uh you feel like you're doing something
wrong uh like by your company if you're going out and and meeting with sales
leaders and and groups from other people you have to be doing that that
constantly one of the things I always talk about on this like make no mistake
the business will and has to do what's best for the business in the event that
there's a market downturn they will release you and and they have to do that
for the business to survive you have to do the exact same thing for yourself
don't like there's Yeah do the best job that you absolutely can like that's
number one if you're not producing and you're out networking it doesn't really
matter um like you got to be good at what your job is but do the best job
that you can and meet as many people as possible and then take some shots um I
promise you if you go into an SDR manager role or if you go into a just
any sales manager role and it totally flops and you hate it you'll be able to
go back to an individual cons contributing sales role if you were good
at it like no one's going to say "Well they sucked as a manager i don't think I
want them as a sales rep anymore." That will never you'll never hear those words
ever uh because it's such a valuable and hard to do position so those would be my
two things do the best job that you absolutely can at your current job and
always be out there meeting people because you just don't know when that
opportunity is going to come and when it does come like go for it go like put
yourself make yourself uncomfortable and take that position super interesting
makes a lot of sense and I'm kind of curious as you're out there meeting
people have you how do you think about the dimensions of a sales culture and
and the culture of the team right so you know at a super high level there's like
product and engineering driven companies and there's sales driven companies and
you know not it's not like one is better or wrong but but sometimes you hear
people who are too product engineering focused like oh my gosh we're just not
commercial focused we're not we're not trying to drive the business forward but
then you see the flip side I've talked to sales people who come from a sales
driven culture they're like oh my gosh like I'm not building something they
want to feel closer to the to the customer I'm kind of curious like what
are aspects of culture that you know sales people should think about as they
as they look and you know what what should be a good fit for for their
personality or or whatnot good question really really really good
question i look at it like this um I've been in
both i've been in a very pro salesdriven tech like within a tech company i mean I
think that's kind of a key thing right because service businesses and things
like that you're always g sales is always going to be super super super
important um but in a tech company there's not as many salesdriven tech
companies uh but I've been in part of that culture and it's of course it's
awesome right if you're the sales leader in a salesdriven tech company and sales
are good you can't do any wrong uh you can murder somebody and you're not going
to get fired because you're absolutely crushing it on the flip side of that
I've been in um very nearing companies um and sales isn't the main thing that's
always celebrated a lot of it is the the the product developments uh the
technologies that are being um unlocked and things like that and of those two I
don't believe that one's better than the other because uh and the sales driven
culture were all like we we had a really good sales team we had a great customer
success team so we could bring customers on and we could retain them the
challenge was is we started to lose our competitive edge so our job became much
harder out in the market because we just weren't innovating as fast as our
competitors were um when I flipped and was with somebody that was with a
company that was much more um engineering and product uh the culture
was more engineering and productled I would tell you how amazing it was when
we had a feature request and that feature request made sense it was very
quickly that that was getting implemented as a sales leader I only
care like I care about hitting the number at the end of the day that's all
I'm going to be judged by i don't care about all the accolades i don't care
about anything else i care about do I hit that number or do I not and if
engineers are getting the product that helps me hit my number that's all I care
about now from a sales rep perspective I think it's so important that you
understand what the culture of that team is do you like the people that you're
working with i always had we had the company culture and then I always built
a separate culture for the actual team and those and and what's interesting is
I'll give you an example we would do open houses and um we we would get you
know maybe 50 people to an openhouse and we built such a strong culture and I
give the team all the credit for this it was really built from within we'd have
40 of those people for the inside sales team which is ridiculous like it's like
looking at SDR and account executive positions because it was just known as
such a good culture i think you got to really look like from the sales rep
perspective look at your team look at your boss look at the leadership within
that sales organization when making that decision got it and sorry open houses
are just kind of uh for prospects to to come in and see team or what we're no
this or well uh candidates okay it's
like a sell like a cell weekend sell
event exactly that is such an
interesting concept the open house like
that's something that I can't I know for you know previous sales experiences you
go in and there's you shadow someone maybe and then you have your interviews
so you get a little bit of the sales floor experience in the interview but to
have an event or an open house I think is really interesting I guess had you
seen that before was that new within your company and you guys because of the
culture made that a possibility or where did that come from yeah so we were um
that company a SAS company spun out of an advertising agency in the advertising
agency space this is pretty pretty common because usually they're uh before
tech offices were really awesome advertising agencies always had the best
offices they had the coolest stuff they had everything was open before everybody
else um and they always had really really really cool spaces that's where I
originally got that that was common place for them and then we started uh
tagging along and and doing the same thing that is so cool did you notice if
that impacted the sales reps or like the interviewees experience at all like did
that help you convert you know best fit I guess reps for your team in a way that
hadn't previously without doing something like that could you repeat
that question sorry I I think you cut out just a little bit
no no you're okay i'm just curious like did you notice a difference between
having something like And we don't need to sit on this question for too long
either i'm just purely curious but did you notice a difference between the
experience of those people you were interviewing doing an openhouse as in
like did they convert better because of the interview experience and the culture
that was demonstrated in that type of environment so it's a great question a
couple things so one we were and I'm a huge huge huge believer in this if
you're a sales leader you need to be recruiting all of the time that job
absolutely never stops you're not only recruiting when you have open positions
uh you're recruiting all the time because especially at a high growth
startup like you're going to lose people my I mean what I told people in every
interview was like at some point you you are going to grow faster we're going to
develop you to grow faster than what your position is going to be able to
handle and when that time comes ideally we you're going to get promoted here but
if you do not we expect you to take that position somewhere else and it's the
sales leader's job to make sure that machine keeps cranking so for me these
were excellent places right to have these fairly often and we would do happy
hours outside of it and do different events and invite all of the recruits
there but we knew we were nurturing people that were really really really
solid and they and they got to see firsthand you know are they a good
culture fit and I would tell you we had this very dialed down like we knew which
person on the team was going to meet which people when they got to the door
they were going to give them the tour if they kind of passed that initial test
then they would get uh introduced to the to the manager um and then if they
passed that they would get introduced to me or whomever that might be so they had
multiple layers that they went through they had no idea that this was going
well maybe they did if they would have talked about it but um but we had all
this so yeah by the time they went through all those layers that went into
the interview process like we pretty much knew the ones that we were going to
take i love that it's like a whole
orchestrated interview that's amazing
very cool thank you yeah absolutely it's
funny i think this is a comment that
this is how you can tell Kal is such a phenomenal salesperson because because
um I've been learning also with with recruiting and and marketing you know
these concepts of of you know making sure you're aware of the funnel and kind
of constantly pushing leads down the down the funnel all these basic
principles can be applied to so many aspects right not just closing
candidates but also for recruiting fundraising everything it's a phenomenal
skill set that just applied for cross domains
100% and like just using those three theory right like your your actual
getting customers your fundraising and recruits it's all about like how do we
get in front of the the best people regardless of what that is uh how do we
make sure that we're showing value and how are we nurturing those over the time
because not all of those are going to be a good fit for us right now but they
could be a good fit for us in time so having a really really really good
nurturing program which is just relationship building right um so yeah I
totally agree with that it's in all aspects cool i'm going to turn off this
low data mode i'm going to turn on So it's going to turn off your videos just
as a side note to see if this works but um it's still recording but uh see if
this changes the difference uh Sarah do you want to switch to lightning round
i was about to say I think we're we're coming up on time here
yeah I can still see my video should I not have my video you can see yourself
you won't you won't see anybody else it's just so like Oh interesting yeah
I'm trying this out back off here we can see each other good
it's just uh I don't know no no it's f
it's fine either way uh I was just
wanted to make sure I was like Yeah yeah
i'm trying these buttons or something
cool no you're all good cool amazing well Colin we have a couple questions
for our lightning round if you're ready um ideally one to two word answers we'll
fly through these so very excited to hear what you have to say you ready okay
yep cool all right what is your favorite
bear bear necessities
nice nice that is an original answer and I love it
um what's one sales tool that you can't live without hubspot or Salesforce
favorite answer i like the HubSpot came first if you could sum up your sales
philosophy in one word what would it be in one word
or two or Yeah we could we could let
this one run a little bit longer this
This is a fair question yeah and okay um to scale you need the right
people executing the right process and supported by the right systems i love
that perfect last question what piece of advice this can be more than one word
what piece of advice do you make sure to pass on to new reps that you come across
similar what I mentioned earlier but I think the number one thing is when that
opportunity comes go for it don't wait until things are perfect just go for it
cool i love that yeah those are all great answers so thank you so much
really appreciate it do we Yeah thank
you just out of curiosity um for podcast
purposes so like pause are we wrapping
up or continuing interview what's next
up here for like three more minutes four
more minutes i think we've got we've got
we've got plenty of material content i
think we've got all the all the good
solid content yeah this is fantastic
obviously cool but but I want to keep
the momentum going okay um let's go to a fun one let's go to fun anecdotes maybe
okay uh do you have one you want to ask Albert sure it's okay if if there's
nothing great but Kellen any unusual or particularly memorable sales experiences
as you reflect on this fantastic career and journey you've had and there's I I
was thinking about this and which ones to use and there's just like so many
ridiculous ones i mean one of the one of my reps was calling into a place um and
I this person must have got a ton of cold calls i don't know but every time
he'd call in he transferred them to the police station and of course he would
call back and he'd say like he's like "Hey I think we got you know I think we
got disconnected or got transferred to the wrong one transferred him right back
to the Boston Police Station i mean over and over again and it was fantastic so
wait so what happened like did the BPD get like pissed off or like Well we just
stopped we stopped asking after a couple times like "All right this is all right
you know fool me one shame on me fool me one shame on you or whatever." Brutal i
mean that's that's like worse than just like the you know being reported to the
DNC list that's just that's a real blocker yeah for sure i'll give you my
favorite story i you could cut this if you want but in this is I was listening
live to a rep on the phone and this guy is lights out he was our top rep over
and over and over again we had we were selling uh uh websites and SEO services
to insurance agencies and he always showed this charitable giving page and
in particular it was on uh it was on a a charity called the March of Dimes which
is a great great organization and he had his script down to the tea
and nobody ever really asked questions like that threw him off but one day they
finally asked him like I've heard of the March of Dimes what do they do and he
just shortcircuits he has no idea idea how to respond to this he just starts
going "What the they do it's a babies dying dying babies." I'm like "No not
good." Just full meltdown um and then somehow scrambles out of it and the
whole time I'm listening to this live as the manager and I'm in absolute tears as
he's giving this uh example um but anyway it's my favorite we put all of
these in what we called our cold call hall of fame and then after the first
week of new reps starting we played our our cold call hall of fame so when they
it instantly said you know because they're getting punched in the face
right and getting shot down left and right so during that first call it's
like look all the best people started there like don't try to look at where
they're at and think that you're going to immediately get there like they have
felt on their face just as bad or worse than what you did today it's a good
example did he Did he close a deal was he able to save it yeah he 100% closed
it he was just so good he was so good so
you could even just stumble in saying
babies dead babies and dead babies dead
babies that's the sound bite that's
probably going to be the sound bite for this show for sure oh my gosh that's
very good well look thank you so much Kellen for joining us today it was so
wonderful learning more about your experience and what motivates you and
what's gotten you from one step to the next so we really appreciate your time
and look forward to learning more on your podcast and watching you continue
to grow your business i appreciate it
this has been a ton of fun
absolutely take care
Turn Calls into Deals
with Bearworks
Ready to get started? Book a demo: