Amy Volas:
The second stop of the Hard No Tour, which is our event that's coming up. It is in Miramar Beach, Florida and I have rented like a party pontoon boat so I'm going to be captaining the ship with some yacht rock. And it's 12 people on a boat with me just hanging out. 

Ross Pomerantz (Corporate Bro):
Is that what we call cocaine now?

Amy:
No. Not down. Never have been down. Won't be down, but no, it's bad. The Yacht Rock, I'm sorry that's what I'm there for. Hall & Oates on ten? Yeah. Yes. Yes.

Ross:
Oh, like, rock and roll! Oh, my God! I was, like, you’re bringing some yacht rocks on here. Okay, alright. 

Amy:
Crack rocks?! What are you - what is going on with you?

Ross:
I don't know, but I'm into it! I was down. I'll do anything once.


*Beyond Quota Intro*


Pouyan Salehi:
I'm Pouyan from Scratchpad. We've got Corp. Good ol' Corp.

Ross:
Good old Corp of corp stuff.

Pouyan:
And we've thought about making derivatives of Corp. We'll talk about that later. But for now, we'll just go with Corp. And today we've got Amy with us who I feel like needs no introduction. But apart from just being a complete bad-ass in sales and Amy we're so excited you're here.

Amy:
Thank you, thank you.

Pouyan:
You've done a lot. You've done sales. You've recruited. You are now helping sales or recruit for salespeople at companies. I'm interested to hear maybe right off the bat what's some crazy shit that you see from founders that are coming to you?

Amy:
Yeah, I think we can all agree that the market is super frothy. So I have a bunch of founders that come my way from one way, shape or form and I'm picky. I only work with a handful of clients at a time. I run an executive search firm. It's all VP plus for sales and CS. The thing I think that made me really successful in my own sales career is the fact that I celebrate the power of discovery. So just because you got a round of funding and you're excited and it's time to grow and all this stuff, I need to make sure that there's actual meat on that bone. And so I hear a lot of things. I think one of the craziest things is we got is... We're really excited. We're the next rocketship. Like this is all verbatim we're the next rocketship.

Pouyan:
Team of Ninjas I bet?

Amy:
Look for rockstars, not the ninjas.

Ross:
Rockstars, rockstars, right, right, right. 

Amy:
Yacht Rock, rock star. This is a theme now.

Ross:
I'm in!

Pouyan:
Don't get Ross started again on the Yacht Rock.

Amy:
The rhetoric. The jargon. Where it's like rocketship, scaling, high-growth. It's go-time. And they talk about the funding. So I got in literally this number was $5 million. And so my question to that is, well, where are you ARR wise? And they're like, we're like 150. I'm like, million? Like, what are we? No, thousand.

Ross:
We're pretty product.

Amy:
Per month? No, year. And I need a sales leader because I don't have time. No salesperson, no sales function, no repeatable, any sort of anything process and no product market fit. And that is the stuff. That I deem is crazy where it's like, I don't know what VC gave you the five mil, but what I do know is you have a real rocky ride ahead where you're just taking that money to validate. That's not growth that's validation. And those are very different things. And I will not touch anything with a ten foot pole unless it's been validated. So that's one of the craziest things where I'm like, you can't build what you haven't validated. Like, I don't care what you think. I don't care who tells you what. You just can't do that. So that's one of the crazy things.

Ross:
Just make them walk the plank. Learn the hard way.

Amy:
There are plenty of other recruiters out there that will happily take your business.

Ross:
You should have told him to find time to sell. Just go find time and sell yourself. Like, why aren't they selling?

Amy:
I talk about the power of founder-led sales, but by that time and if you have that money, when you have that pressure, you don't want to hear from me. You don't care what I have to say. You just have to go now.

Ross:
So we should just invest in the companies you choose to work with.

Amy:
I mean, please do.

Pouyan:
Yes.

Amy:
I mean, one of my favorite stories is the Theranos story. You can be an amazing storyteller and you can go and get money from some of the biggest and best, as they say, and that story's magnetic and nobody's quantifying or qualifying anything.

Ross:
Well, the lesson of Theranos is it just shows you how far sales will take you before anything else. 

Amy:
Yeah. And that's everything that's wrong in sales.

Pouyan:
Well, tell us a little bit about your journey. How did you get here? Because you have you've I mean, you've done some pretty incredible things. You've carried a bag yourself. I mean I'll let you guide us, but tell us about that.

Amy:
I have no idea. I just ended up. No I'm kidding. Never thought that I would be in sales. Truly, I didn't think that I would be. I thought I was going to be James Bond. And that's what I wanted to do and that's what I studied. And so I spent a lot of time thinking about like, okay, well, what do I like to do? And I get huge energy out of the real human connection. There was this really cool dot com. I go that far back where the word startup did not exist, and I worked for this company as a tech recruiter. That company was phenomenal. Some of the people that are the closest in my life to this day came from that. But here's the deal. They put all their eggs in one basket. 9/11 happened. The market crashed a bit, and a big part of that business just went away overnight. And I survived a bunch of layoffs and had the sit down of there's nothing to recruit for. And if you want to continue to work here, you have to sell. And I was like what? Eww. But I loved them and I was like, I don't want to go away. And the market was weird. So I was thrown into the deep end of enterprise sales. I come from the old school of full cycle. You do all the things, which is a gift. I consider that a gift in my life. And I never looked back. I was bitten by the bug and the rest is history. And so that led me. I sold services before I sold products and I think that certainly contributes to my success because you have to be able to tell a story that is powerful and take people on a visualized journey and not just rely on a deck or a demo or a feature or benefit. And in 2015 I started ATP and not that I ever thought that I wanted to be a search firm owner, because if you look at my tagline, we take the cringe out of recruiting. It's cringe worthy. There are a lot of broken bits and pieces so I identify more with the community that I serve than the role that I play. And I want to leave this place better than when I entered into it. And with so much churn in our industry, I crack the code on how to fix it with all my experience. Turns out sales and recruiting aren't dissimilar and so all the stuff that may be really successful, I apply it to my business and here we are.

Ross:
People always ask me if recruiting is sales. And the answer is yes. It is. I mean they're all held to numbers. They're just selling dreams, you know? I want to hear about the cringe. Can we talk about the cringe? Like, what do you see, though at like the top level that would be different since you're doing executives and so forth versus your standard sales rep or is it very similar like in terms of the messaging, the cringe piece?

Amy:
Oh, it might be fancier because it's more expensive. The cringe is still the same. So look, the bots have not taken over and maybe I'm Pollyanna this way, but especially at the executive level, these are really big decisions. And even at the rep level, this is your life, it's your career. That's a big deal. In your business, this decision that you make, this person that you hire, it's either going to catapult you forward in a major way or it's going to set you way back to the tune of like a seven figure problem. The horror stories that I hear and have heard throughout my entire career at the executive level of how people are treated, how they are discounted, how they are ignored. I think it's just that let me throw enough spaghetti up against the wall and hope that it sticks. And at the executive search level, that's an expensive proposition. So, one, if you were hiring a new retainer, you're going to pay a lot of money to do that. Why are you paying me for something that ultimately you're going to do yourself? And that's the problem. It's like if you're hiring a search partner, I don't care if it's contingent, if it's executive, it's because they're meant to save you time to find people that you otherwise don't have the time, the resources, the reach to speak to. And it's not just about ticking boxes. It's about confirming or denying qualifying and quantifying. Does it make sense?

Pouyan:
The cringe, I think, is on both sides the founder, company or startup perspective, but I think it certainly exists on the sales side as well. 

Amy:
Ughh 1000% yes.

Ross:
Yeah, it does. It really does.

Pouyan:
Talk to us about that a little bit.

Ross:
Well, it's shocking how many people still do it. It feels like common sense, but there's so much stupid shit that reps do who are trying to get jobs and then the companies do trying to get good reps.

Pouyan:
I think you'd be surprised how often it happens at even the exec level.

Amy:
I have a manifesto and it speaks to the cringe. If I care more about scaling your business than you do or I care more about your career than you do, we have a problem. And so what do I see on the sales executive side or the VP of CS executive side? I don't deal with window shoppers. So when you show up and it's like, what's the money? Who's the company? That's all the shiny object stuff. I'm not here to talk about that. The number one question I ask when I first get started with people. What's important to you? People can't answer it. You don't even know what you are all about. And if you don't know what you're all about, if you're not clear, how in the hell do you expect anybody else around you to be clear? So I just talked to a gentleman today. He has some things that are intriguing. We spent an hour together I'm willing to spend - remember I only work with a handful of clients at a time. They pay me well. It's worth my time to be thorough. So I spent an hour with this person. My head of recruiting spent an hour with him before, she's on spring break so that's why I'm here now. And at the end, he's like, so what's next? And I said, What's next is I'm murky on these three things. You couldn't answer these three things for me, and I'm all about giving people the benefit of the doubt. I'm willing to spend some more time because I like these five other things. But if you can't help me get clear, we're not doing this. So you have to let me know if you'd like to continue talking or not. And he was like, Can you do me a favor? And I said, Yes. And he said, Will you send me an email about those three things? Because I want to make sure that I'm prepared and I'm thoughtful about it. And I said, I'll know if you go to a community and ask them to answer the question for you versus you doing it. Sure, I'll send you that. But it has to be the context of why you did it, what you did, how you did it, and what the outcomes were. And you're not going to be able to fake that. And he was like, Thank you for shooting me straight. Nobody else has challenged me that way. So I'm not for everybody, right? I'm going to get to the - so the cringe isn't like that somebody was a jerk to me. The cringe is I'll give you an example that makes me hyper. And it happens at Thursday Night Sales a lot. And this is where when I say I'm going to give you some peace and love, I'm about to shoot you really, really straight. Somebody is like it's two people in particular, right at the top of my head. I'm a head of sales, yet I can't find a job. What's the matter with all these founders? I'm like, Because you haven't done the job yet. Because your perception is not reality. Just because you had a title with a startup that had no idea what they were doing and they gave you that title does not mean that you are equipped to lead. 

Ross:
Yeah, the title thing is hilarious to me.

Pouyan:
Yeah I mean, I'm... I'm at a loss for words for how often I've seen that.

Amy:
Every day. And then because - So there's a reason. Taryn is my head of recruiting. We've known each other since college. She, too, likes Yacht Rock. Not in the way that you think about it, Ross, but in the general.

Ross:
Right, right, right. Yeah, I know.

Pouyan:
That's just Ross.

Ross:
To each their own Yacht Rock alright?

Amy:
She is like the kinder, gentler, thoughtful version. And when people meet her, they want her to be like Dear Abby. And people will go to her all the time and say, why can't I get this job? Why can't I get this job? And she will say, Because you haven't done the work. And yet then they come to me and they're like, Why can't I get this? I'm like, You haven't. So it's it's like this weird thing of, we're telling you what's missing, and it does not compute. And I don't know if it's because when you go to LinkedIn, all of these influencers that haven't mastered jack except for how to write a posting that pops because they bought somebody's playbook. I don't know if it's that bad advice or if it's something else, but you can't skip the line, as Scott would say, right? You can't skip the line for something that you haven't mastered when it comes to leadership. And while people will challenge me and say, you have to start somewhere, you do have to start somewhere. But being a vice president of sales is not where that starts. You know where it starts? You work under a really strong CRO and you learn from the best and they care about promote ability and helping you get to where you want to get. That's how you do that. You don't just say, Well, I should because I'm entitled, because the LinkedIn told me to. No! and for anybody that's watching this, it sounds like I'm yelling it at you all. I'm not mad. This is the stuff that, like, I'm meant to do. I care about this. I want to help people get out of their own way. But this whole thing - there was a gentleman that showed up and he's like, I need to find an ignorant founder with a cradle start up. That I can go in. And I had four months of growth and finding predictability. And everybody has to start somewhere why shouldn't I be a sales leader? I'm like... Are you on the Yacht Rock? Like, what's going on here?

Ross:
What Yacht Rocks are you smoking son?! I think a lot of people just assume that that's where you're supposed to - you're supposed to go into leadership as if everybody's equipped or will be good enough to be  - or have that skill set. Not good enough, but have the skill set to be a leader. A lot of good reps, shitty leaders.

Amy:
Oh Ross, you're speaking my love language and here's why. I just had a conversation with a leader, and I said, Why are we talking? What's going on? And he's like, My reps are making more money than I am. And I'm like, That's how it should be. That's the reality of the role, right? You also get a lot more equity than they do. So quit the crying. How about that one? So just it's interesting. Thank you for bringing that up because that is, you know, Pouyan back to you of like what's the cringe factor? It's like the expectation versus the reality of what the role is really all about.

Pouyan:
Knowing how you want to grow. I mean, that's a question I ask in a lot of interviews is, what do you want? How how do you want to grow? What challenges do you want to face and why? To see if that's then aligned with what we can even offer as a company. And I think that just says a lot about and some people don't know, and I think that's fine. But I think the more clarity you get on that or at least go on a journey to find that. To your point, Amy, I think that's what then helps you find those opportunities and once you find them, just land them, get them right? Because they just start clicking.

Amy:
Like attracts like. And it's the biggest thing that I preach is this power of a scorecard. And I have a methodology and I've written about it and I share it for free. It's just like this lesson that I learned that I don't want other people to have to learn because it sucked. It's okay if you don't have all the answers, but what's not okay is when you don't know. Not the answer of what do I want to be when I grow up? But in the here and now, if I'm on that journey, then to get real clear about, well, what's the work that I like to do? What kind of leadership do I like to work with and for? What don't I like? What kicks my rear end where I rather be doing everything but that? And it's those questions and it's funny I just had this conversation today. Most people that I meet haven't done that work and we have the answers for ourselves. We don't need anybody else. We just have to listen to ourselves. And so there's two things that I do. I journal and not like a Dear Amy free form, like deep thoughts with Amy. How do I really feel about myself? And yeah, I have a part of that, but I ask myself the same five questions every day that are super tactical and I look for themes. And funny how when I don't look back day over day, but I look back after a month. I'm like, oh, my God. Wait, what? It's all inside of us. We just have to listen to ourselves. And I think so many times it's like we just want to shortcut it to have everybody else tell us what we should do. Because I want to be like Ross when I grow up. I actually I want to be like this - 

Pouyan:
This Ross?

Ross:
Me?!.

Amy:
Corporate Bro. Everybody wants to be like Corporate Bro.

Pouyan:
I just wanted to make sure we're talking about the same Ross.

Ross:
Okay. Example we're going to say the same name as me. Fine, Go on.

Amy:
I mean I want that in my life. What are you talking about? And so it's like. But for you to do that, like, there's no way that I chuckle. It is amazing comedic relief. I would never do that. And you get paid for it, which is awesome. But just because that was good for you and that was your journey, I might take a page out of that in my own way, shape or form by being a fear factor host from time to time. But like, here's the thing is that's your journey. You found that for yourself. That works for you. Same thing with what you're doing Pouyan. And it's just like, that's the weird thing about this world today that I didn't grow up in. I didn't have social, I didn't have all this noise. I just had to do the damn work. And so that's a really big theme of what I talk about. Just do the work.

Ross:
I friggin love that. There's a lot of people who are gonna listen to this that are kind of early in their career, middle of their careers, and they're trying to think about... Maybe they do kind of understand what their "why" or "want" is and they want to look at some of these startups that you're trying to hire leaders for and they're trying to identify those companies. And similar to you, you say who I want to work with, who I don't. And in theory, you want to work with what will be good companies. How would you as a rep in those positions, what are the things that you would look for in evaluating what I would consider to be a high risk jump? You could be at Oracle and safe and fine and blah blah blah. Or you could go to that hopeful rocketship, that recent series A, Series B, like, how should reps look inside to say, this is what I should want? And then how should they look for those companies?

Amy:
Don't look until you know. So just because the great resignation rhetoric or your friends are jumping around and they're getting 10K extra or whatever it is, doesn't mean that's your reality. So I just had this conversation with somebody last week where they were like, my boss left and on the way out they were like, You should leave this company and they refused to tell her why. I'm like, That's horrible leadership. That's their stuff that they're projecting onto you. And you were really cool until he told you that. And now after he told you that, you start interviewing. You just told me you should have never started interviewing. You jumped too fast. And now you have three offers and you're really confused. Don't do something if you're good. Because the grass is always greener on the other side and we all have bad days and weeks and things that happen. So I think like to figure it out. If you're going to leave, what are you going to that helps you get better beyond the dollars and cents. Because if you just jump for the money and I've done this. If all the other nonsense is broken, you're screwed. Because you'll never make that money if product market fit isn't there, if leadership isn't there, if your territory isn't there. So how do you do this as a rep? You know what you do? You actually spend some time doing some research. So there's a little thing called LinkedIn Sales Navigator or LinkedIn Premium Search. You put a little search in there. You find out how many people are leaving that company. It's really easy to do a search like that. To find out, is sales a revolving door? What is the rhetoric of the founder online or anywhere else? You could go to a bunch of different startup podcasts and the founders there and they're talking about their thesis of hiring of sales. If it's all about engineering, engineering, engineering, PLG, PLG, PLG and then you hear them snarl when they say the word sales. That's going to be an interesting thing because I've also been in that abusive relationship of sales versus the world and it's a necessary evil. And the last time I checked, you don't have a business without a customer and you don't have a customer without somebody speaking to them. And nine times out of ten the people that are speaking to them, it would be your sales team and your CS team. Why do you treat them like they're a necessary evil? So salespeople, if you're listening, look for the signals. Find those little breadcrumbs. It's not fast. It's precise. Kind of like if you're in enterprise sales and you have to break down an account and look for all the different clues and all the different people that are involved. The same thing. And it's not just the founder rhetoric of the video that you did a drive by on their website for 3 seconds and they're talking about what a great place it is to work here because we have Beer Fridays. It's what's actually happening? What's the turnover? Who did they get money from? What's that track record? Oh, by the way, does this founder have a track record of success, even if they're a first time founder in any of their other career? Do they have perspective? What is that perspective? Am I going to be thrown out to the wolves? I mean, I can't tell you how many people come my way and they're like this company has like a $500 billion valuation and everybody works there. I'm like, Yeah and do you realize that if you don't do your job for a month and something happens because you have a crappy territory, you're going to be on a PIP and you're out after a month? And then it's like, No, I didn't. Do your research. You'll find that paper trail.

Ross:
People often ask me what's your biggest regret in sales? And mine was shockingly leaving Oracle. Which blows a lot of people's minds, but when I left I was super successful and I had ten different teams trying to hire me to their like - managers trying to hire me. But I left because I was going to get a title promotion and make a lot more money. And I went to a company that I would later learn was the third best of three. The other two you have heard of the one I went to is no longer in existence and I regretted that enormously. Like I thought I was stepping up. I actually followed a manager out who was the guy who hired me and it wasn't like a malicious thing. I had a recruiter telling me I should go to this place and I was like, Yeah, this should be fine. I can sell. I've proven I can sell. Sometimes you need a product that's pretty good too. Especially when you're evaluating a highly technical product against other ones that are just better. And I lasted there about nine months before I decided my mental health was worth something and I took a then 40% pay cut to go to a better company in a better situation. So that was nine miserable months of my life, all because I thought, you know, I got this figured out and I didn't go do enough technical research to understand where the company sat in the ecosystem.

Amy
I love that you brought this up. I, too, have done the same thing. Three things that people need to think about before the money ever gets into the mix. One, it starts at the top. Leadership. If that leadership could care less about sales or their icky and icky can mean, Pouyan I'm sure you're going to be like, What does icky mean? We can talk about that on the next podcast, but they're icky or they're bad actors or whatever you want to say. One, it starts at the top. Two, product market fit. It doesn't matter how good I am. The market speaks the loudest. If the market doesn't want it and it's vaporware or if it's fluffy or it hasn't been validated, you're not going to be successful. And three, what is my opportunity here? What is my territory patch? How often does that change? Because again I could be great, if you give me North Dakota as my territory and I'm in enterprise accounts... There aren't a lot of enterprise accounts in North Dakota the last time I checked. So then if all those things click, then I start making money, right? And that's the thing that people don't think about. My story was this same as you worked at this great company. I won't even say who it is because it's still painful to this day. So the diary of a sad Amy. Literally bad day. It was a bad day because I had the sit down of, You're doing so well this quarter, you're top of the pile, we love you da-da-da, your number is going to go up by 4X and we're going to change the way we pay you. Guess who's not happy? This girl. So instead of, like, figuring out would that change actually ever even happened? Because guess what? It didn't. They were just brainstorming with me like dum dums at the time, but it never happened. I'm mad. Like guns-hot mad. What happens? A slime-guppy recruiter comes my way, ringa-linga-linga comes my way and is like hey! And totally appeals to my ego and the things that are upsetting me. And I'm a verbal processor. I know this is shocking for both of you, but I use my words. So I'm an open book and I'm telling this guy and he plays to it. Little did I know that he had a back end deal with the CRO that he was making a cut plus the CRO was making a cut for all of these hires. My role, my territory had churned 12 times in less than two years. What? And there's no way that I could find out, because it was a startup. You know what they did? They sent me gifts after every interview. So they heard me. They found out my favorite bottle of champagne. I got a magnum bottle in the mail. After the first interview, I was like, Oh, what? They understand me! They want me! As my company, that's paying me really well and I'm doing really great things and the world is my oyster. They're talking about changes and I'm already assuming that these are going to happen so now I'm upset. So now my ego's being fed over here. They gave me $50,000 extra in a base. It was a sweet cherry deal. Day one I start. I call my husband bawling and I'm not a crier. And I'm like, What in the H-E-double-hockey-sticks did I just do? That's where my scorecard methodology came from. I'm like, I'm never going to do this again to myself. And, you know, I can't call you Corp, I have to call you Ross like, this is just how this has to go. But like, I had that deep regret in my heart for a long time.

Pouyan:
We like to end these sessions with the same question of everyone we ask. So what's your hype song?

Amy:
I'm talking about George Michael Freedom! 90 is my hype song. Just sayin. That's how it goes. And that is how old I am. And I don't care. Freedom! 90. George Michael. Here for it. Love it.

Pouyan:
What's your recovery song?

Amy:
Besides Yacht Rock?

Ross:
Besides some some sad Yacht Rock.

Amy:
I am a big, big, big fan of Reiki. And I would go and get myself balanced. That's what I would do. And it's what I do now.

Ross:
Bridging the universe. The Reiki.

Pouyan:
Yes.

Amy:
The energy, the vibration. I don't know. Is that a song on Spotify? Probably. I don't know.

Ross:
I think the vibrations.

Pouyan:
We'll go with that.

Ross:
Thank you Amy.

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