Lavender Pioneers
In episode 10 we sit down with Will Allred to talk about hiring sellers, the future of selling, and the role of AI in sales.
All right, guys.
Let's huddle up.
All right, guys.
Very excited to--
well, I would say introduce, but technically,
Will, you're like the mastermind behind this podcast.
So--
Oh, this is yours.
Right.
So if you don't know, Will.
Will, Allred, co-founder, CEO of Lavender.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Hey, hey.
I appreciate the promotion.
I, uh, you know, now it's just technically the CEO.
Yeah.
I think after I said CEO, I was thinking about him like,
wait, actually, he's not CEO, but he's founder.
All right.
I'm one of them.
Wait, can we explain the difference, then,
between, like, being a founder and a CEO?
Because I kind of correlate the two.
Yeah.
I'm happy to.
I think that's a question that a lot of people have asked.
So it's pretty simple.
I focus primarily on go-to-market.
Balance is focused across go-to-market,
but more so on product.
So if you think about how we divvy up the roles
across the three founders, it's really
around like a specialty of focus.
So when you look at my role on go-to-market,
it's evolved pretty much constantly
from the early days being demand generation slash,
like, marketing, because it was just the three of us,
where I just post on LinkedIn, create demos,
and then we'll go give ed demos and then go close them.
So you were like in the SDR?
Yeah.
I was effectively in the SDR.
This sent a lot of cold emails for sure.
The fun thing about being a founder
is there's no one role that you get pigeoned into.
It's more of you look across the org,
you look to see where there's gaps within the organization,
and then you go in and fill them.
And then you do the role until you kind of figure out
document, systematize what it is that needs to be done
within this area.
And then you find somebody to bring into that specific function.
Or maybe you find it's not that effective,
and then you stop doing it.
You handle more operate, like your COO, right?
Yeah.
But even the COO role, we brought out
a guy on the back end, Elliot, to handle more
of the back end operations of the company.
It's my dad's name.
My dad's actually moving away from some of that stuff as well.
If you guys don't know, everyone who founded this company
is named Will pretty much.
So they're going to go buy their last names.
Lyla and I go buy Will one, Will two.
Yeah.
Yeah, if you didn't know, Will, you're one.
Balance is two.
The third, we'll get into that.
I don't even--
I don't think there is--
I actually don't think there is.
I don't think there is.
The third anymore.
We do have a third.
Will, Akken?
Will Howard, he's an account executive.
No, that's four.
I'm talking about founder-wise.
Oh, founder-wise now.
So Casey is our third founder.
Right, right, right.
So maybe Will number one.
Just kidding.
Will balance.
You can also be number one.
I feel like when we say Will number one and Will number two,
it's like--
Well, just because we met this one first, this one.
That's fair.
Well, maybe you can talk about-- because I
think the story behind how you guys founded Lavender
is really cute.
It's like you guys were in your basement.
I don't know.
But maybe you can just share your story.
And the name.
The name they were in the shower.
And the name.
And the Y behind it.
I met Balance at Hackathon in Atlanta back in 2018.
I-- time was working consulting.
He was working on an edtech startup.
And he pitched this idea for a MarTech product that
would take B2C customer list.
So if you're an e-commerce store,
take the customer list, organize it by personality traits.
Let's say, extra version versus introversion.
And then the idea was that we would deliver advertisements,
customer communications, even web experiences, long term,
to meet the needs of those psychological traits.
Because if you think about how segmentation's done today,
it's OK, you've got middle 30s woman in--
I live in Brooklyn, so I live in Brooklyn--
who is interested in the following things
and has bought things in the past.
It's very demographic and behavior focused.
And so adding that extra lens, what we were finding
was you could be about 40% more effective,
particularly in advertising.
So we had some customers like Yamaha, Gravity Blankets,
COVID forced us to pivot that business.
Classic.
It worked out, though.
I think we found much stronger product market fit post
pivot.
Well, me and Casey were up in New York City early 2020.
Oh, that's like prime nasty COVID in the city.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Prime nasty COVID in the city.
How does dirt and COVID is what that is?
I was playing with moving up.
My wife Lara came up with me.
At the time, she was still my girlfriend.
I proposed to her while we were up here looking
for apartments together.
Of course, she then caught COVID.
[LAUGHTER]
So--
That's when it was like taboo, though.
Like people were like taping the door shut.
Our friends didn't like hang out with us
for like a solid three and a half months.
It was-- it was tossed.
She had OG COVID.
I can't even imagine what the--
The OG.
I remember I had-- because, you know,
we're trapped in this like 700 square foot apartment
that Lana Lara was trying to like get through work calls
and would have to like catch her breath.
It was-- it was OG.
Oh, gosh.
Four years later, here I am in New York, so.
You made it.
I realize I didn't even like finish the transition story.
Yeah, I was going to say, wait, wait.
We were dealing with Yamaha as your customer.
Then COVID hit.
The thing that we kept running into is--
yeah, Delilah, if I give you a list of introverts
versus extroverts, do you know how to design an advertisement
to meet the needs of those individuals?
No, probably not.
I got to think-- well, I mean, one I'd make more bubbly
than the other.
I don't know.
Yeah, but when you start to get into traits like conscientiousness,
openness, and like, neuroticism, it just
starts to like, fall off.
So I would give these lists.
They'd be like, I don't really know what to do with them.
So we gave like, one sheet of what to do with it.
And then still people are like, no.
So they were like, can you just build tools that tell me,
like, content tools, content analytics tools?
And that is effectively the core root of what McCain Lavender
was we were building this content machine that would like,
help you craft to these personality traits.
We had a customer that was like, personality's cool.
Can you just take all these content tools
and attach it back to return on ad spend?
Because that's what I get measured on,
and that's what I care about.
And so we looked at that and we're like, give us like a weekend,
and let's see what we can do.
I'm like, hacked together.
Report based off of some pretty rudimentary data science.
And I will say it was not my CTO that it was me.
And so the math was very wrong.
As I'm like, clapping.
Yeah, I was about to say, he's not only CEO, COO,
he's now CTO.
But the math is very wrong because I came back
to the report and I was like, OK,
it looks like you can boost return on ad spend by about 20%.
You're wasting about one and every $5.
So they say, cool.
Design the ads.
So it was like, OK, give me a few more days.
We did.
And then we ended up five-exing the return on ad spend.
And so we were like, oh, we got something.
Didn't COVID happened.
And then we were getting call after call.
We had a pretty interesting customer base
in the co-working space, which, as you can imagine,
co-working at COVID was nonexistent.
It was basically all of our revenue was leaving.
Any pipeline was calling us as well
and being like, hey, we're putting this on the hold.
And so it was a, what do we do?
And balance, I swear, he is the most serendipitous human
of all time.
And he goes, hey, check out this article.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator had shut down support for Gmail users.
And so he's like, we could build that, launch it on product
time, and probably build enough cash off of that to stay alive.
Damn.
And that was the basis of what became Lavender,
was a little side panel that would tell you who you're emailing
and give you information on them.
And then we were like, well, let's
strap the content analytics tools in the back end of that
to tell you if it's a good email or not.
At the time, we thought it would be a fun marketing trick
to bring people back to the marketing product.
And then we quickly realized, oh, wait,
this is a much better product, and people really like it.
How would you say the product has evolved since you started?
Are you drinking straight up black coffee with no ice?
Yeah.
It's straight out of the fridge, so it's not--
OK, so it's cold.
I'm still nothing but kind.
And I was like, no straw, nothing just straight.
No straw, no cream.
I mean, I've had black coffee, whatever.
As you can see, our 80D is off the roof today.
How would you say that-- and by hour, I'm in line.
I won't throw you under the bust of Lila.
No, I'm right there.
OK.
How would you say that the product has evolved
since you guys started?
And until now, because I know you guys just
released new features as well.
We had a lot of features road mapped out
that we've been releasing.
And so the vision for the product
is more or less coming to life, as we've imagined it over time.
We've obviously responded to what the market has asked for
and what we see within the competitive landscape.
Less interested in being a me too product
and more interested in diverting away from anything
we really see become norm.
What I mean by that is a lot of AI for email workflow
tools are effectively a giant CMS platform where
content management system, where you've
got a list of persona and a list of triggers,
and you can go in and manage what the prompts are
on the back end and centralize control.
What we find interesting about that
is it doesn't actually get at the root of the problem.
It's just another way to create a new sales engagement
platform, which is if I wanted to create templates
and different sequences, I would just
do that within a sequencing platform
versus what I think our goal and our envision
should be to be a place of deeper understanding for why
email works as a whole.
So everybody's treating email as an action layer
and not as an insight layer.
So I look at a company like Gong as a huge inspiration
for where we go, not in the sense
that we're going down the same exact path,
but the path that they took was extremely different
in that they looked at phone calls.
And I have to be careful on how I see this,
because obviously Gong does email now, right?
But they do email in an action-oriented way.
Our focus in this is similar to how
they approached phone calls in the early days of saying,
OK, you have got this information layer of phone calls
to happen, and it's a black box.
Email effectively is a black box.
And it's only gotten to be more of a black box,
especially as rise of personalization
has become mainstream again, because it used to be the norm.
And then we figured, oh, we can blast all these templates.
And then everybody did it, so now it doesn't work anymore.
And so now it's like, OK, we have to go back to personalizing.
The problem with personalization is
templates all of a sudden become meaningless,
because Victoria, Delilah, you could both
send the same template, but you could get different results.
I think the bigger problem is not trying
to centralize control against that I can have a feeling of confidence
that I know what's going out the door every time.
It's more of how do I give the black box that is email
a clear system of understanding and insight?
Well, we've talked about this.
People saying email is dead, or call calling is dead,
or outbound is dead.
What's your take on that?
Nothing's dead.
It's just a tire take.
Social media hates nuance.
And so everybody tends to jump on the most extreme position
in order to gain visibility and traction.
That's the way social's always been.
Doesn't like middle of the road.
It likes black or white, not gray.
And so it's not that something is dead.
It's that a particular format style approach is overplayed
and thusly out of favor when it comes to driving results.
So example of this would be back in 2020, 2021.
Kyle Coleman was positioning this concept of how
to run personalization, look for a personal hobby.
So it'd be like, I don't fly fishing.
Victoria, let's say in the most strange turn of events,
you are the most avid fly fisher woman of all time.
Sure.
You didn't know?
Honestly, I just went fly fishing the other week.
What do you mean?
Caught my own fish too.
Just brought it home.
For dinner.
Right back to the Upper East.
I love it.
Now people know where I live.
Straight out of the Hudson.
So let's say in a wild turn of events, it's a Mason Junior.
Victoria, saw your bag in the fly fishing
as your fly fishing and trying to present the fly.
It's no different than sending cold email.
And then you go into this diatribe about what you do.
It was really effective back then because no one was doing it.
And then everyone started doing it.
So what happened was it became like, oh, I know what's happening.
It's this, right?
It's like if somebody sends me an email and the CTA is,
would you be opposed to whatever it is?
I know I'm being crisp-bossed.
As soon as something becomes mainstream,
it becomes ineffective.
That's so true.
And that line I like.
Like as soon as something becomes mainstream,
it's ineffective because it's no longer creative in a sense.
Right.
This is one of my bigger fears with all of these AI
personalization tools that people aren't necessarily seeing is,
it's no different than, hey, I see that you are a senior leader
of sales development at LivePerson.
That used to be magical.
And now it's like, that's so not effective.
You don't need to tell me my job title is I'm well aware that
you can see our own fields into an email.
You start to run into people's ability to pattern match.
So the concept is you've got like a mental spam filter.
If you think about how people go through their inbox,
they're going to spend about nine seconds on average
reading the email.
And most of them are going to get deleted
within the first three seconds.
That three second, nine second window, the amount of words
that you're reading in that time span, it's about 37.5.
Most emails are not 37.5 words.
And so what's the disconnect is people don't read email.
They skim it.
They are categorizing.
They're not reading to understand.
They're reading to say, what is this thing?
So that I can decide whether or not it's worth my time.
You look at the formatting.
You look at overall use of language.
You look at patterns.
And human beings have evolved for millions of years
to identify patterns.
Whether it's those stripes and the grass
look like a tiger that's going to murder me.
Or this really, really bad sales email
is a waste of my time.
So what is your go-to framework for personalization?
Because we touched on obviously not just looking
at their title on LinkedIn.
Not even going deep into finding a hobby
because that's become mainstream.
So how do you go about personalizing
that's not super common?
- There's a few things I'm doing now more than ever.
Which is if I only have one called observation,
trigger point, it's probably not enough.
I'm thinking about what I'm pulling in during my research.
Let me back up a bit to understand
the process that I'm going through.
Yeah, I was just going to ask what the process is.
- Let's say I'm going to reach out to Victoria, right?
What I'm going to do is I'm going to go through
a series of information sources
and try to build a point of view on Victoria.
Victoria's role, Victoria's company
and the market that Victoria operates with them.
And I can do that pretty fast today.
I use our own product to do it, right?
I can see LinkedIn posts.
I can see past job history.
I can dig into news and events around the company.
I can pull in the financials.
I can quickly gather what industry analysis of said.
Like financials are.
I can look at job openings across the company.
Personality traits of Victoria in this case.
I can also go straight to a chat GPT modal
and then ask questions about the industry
that live person's in, who's the competitive landscape?
What are future features in that space
that are really important?
And then I think about it through the lens
of what we sell and what we do
and how it comes to life in their life.
I think a good example of this was
the coaching session I did with the live person team, right?
I think the sequence you all sent over
was to IT leaders, right?
And the question is like,
if you're reaching out to a technical persona,
effectively new persona for you,
there's a new field that needs to be brought in,
which is, well, what are they building?
What are they trying to put into place?
And then, yeah, I like my Delta example, right?
'Cause it's my favorite way to conceptualize
what live person does because.
- Isn't it amazing?
- Yeah.
- It's the best experience out there.
And thank you, live person for me.
- You heard it from him first.
- Oh, hell yeah.
- We'll just clip this and then run it all over LinkedIn.
- That's right.
You think about that experience
and you think about reaching out to an IT
or an engineer at someone at United,
who they also got an app,
but do they have the same experience on the backend?
Do they want to provide that experience?
That's where it becomes concrete within the user's mind
of like, oh, okay, that's where that plays in.
That's what that gets me to.
We don't just like, buy tech because it's cool.
We buy tech to help us accomplish something.
I think it's become pretty common
to sort of refer to 2020 to like 2021 as like a zerba era
where like we almost like forgot that like engineers
can like build a bare bones version
of something that we've built.
And so it's like, yeah, you could do something in house, right?
You could try to build a lavender in house.
It's not the most effective use of time.
That's why we buy software like CRM.
We don't build our own CRM
because the amount of time will take to maintain it.
But like bringing in what live person does
into that developer stack, right?
It's like, all of a sudden they're like, okay,
here's what I'm trying to achieve.
Here's where that comes in.
Here's what that helps me accomplish.
Okay, I can concretely understand
where this comes into play.
The job within the email is to weave in
all of these different like observations
and to create like a clear perspective or point of view
and just start a conversation around those initiatives
that they're trying to go after.
The Victoria is not just a secret.
Like we use live person for our writing assessment
when we are trying to ascertain whether or not
if somebody's gonna be a good SDR or AE here.
And so when somebody goes to write an email,
we basically say live person's account.
Who would you target?
Why would you target them?
Why are you even reaching out to live person in the first place?
There's like a secret answer,
which is they're already a customer.
Why would I reach out to them?
And like, I don't know why no one has figured that one out.
- If you're interviewing at Lavender,
didn't you do this before we even became a customer?
- Right before.
- So, and the reason we did it was because we had a clear,
like your account executive has their metric scorecard
filled out.
Like we had like all the pieces of information
so we'd be very objective about what they were pulling in.
So yes, like the secret answer was not the secret answer
before but now it is the like very obvious answer
because I always laugh when somebody's like,
Victoria is on a podcast with Delilah called Huddled Up
and I'm like,
where do you watch said that?
- There's a podcast.
- Fascinating.
- Wait, did it actually not realize?
Like, I don't know.
It'll be funny now that I'm on the podcast.
So it'll be a--
- It's literally on Lavender land.
- Like literally.
- That's why we're more on.
- You don't say down the line though,
we have to go through these emails.
- That would be a fun follow-up episode for sure.
- For sure, we will.
Effectively set up now a follow-up step in the process
where I'm like, talk me through your thinking here
because what I wanna see is how they connect the dots
as they did their research
to really understand do they understand it?
And obviously I don't expect everyone
like no Lavender's world and like how we operate.
Yeah, I think the biggest branding lesson
we've learned out of this is people know our extension
but they don't know that we have like a whole team's product.
- Right.
- Interesting and a lot of friends.
But the thing that I'm looking for them to do
is to weave in aspects of what's happening at the company
with like where your past experience might have lied
Victoria, like, oh, being in an SDRC,
having like both of you all having like risen up
within the organization quickly
but also at the same time taking the realities
of like what's happening within the company.
And marrying the two to create a perspective.
Yeah, Victoria, clearly into coaching,
having been in the trenches in the SDRC,
you're always thinking of ways that you can level up
and enable your reps to rise to the ranks just like you did.
I'm doing some of the fly so.
- No, I could tell but it's good.
- As why you do what you do.
- Right.
- That's why you're the expert.
- You work at the live person tech stack
and think about the pipeline goals set out in front of you
by Josh.
So obviously pulling in other individuals
within the account to work a full perspective.
If you don't know who I'm referencing,
Josh Dixon is the VP of sales development.
Is that correct?
- Yep.
- So as you seek out to, yeah,
accomplish the pipeline goals set up by Josh,
do you feel like your SDRC tech stack
is setting you up for success within that?
We've built a tool that can help with email
but wanna make sure that's a focus and set.
- Boom, it's a good one.
Make drop.
Something I was thinking about is when people,
like some people, they know to get the 10Ks,
they know to look up the interviews,
they know how to look at the financials
but they don't know what to do with it.
And they don't know, like they know the process,
obviously you can like Google like a 10K report
but then once you look through the 10,
it's like 150 page doc, what are you actually looking for?
So maybe you can like give some tips on like,
when you pull all these resources in,
they can get super overwhelming.
So how do you pull out the gold stuff?
- I imagine there's like 101, 201 and like 301, right?
And like 301 is you're looking at like the financial lines
and you're like, marketing spend has, you know,
actually gone down yet at the same time
you're still seeing revenue grow,
where's that coming from?
But the reality is like, most people you reach out to,
that's not gonna be something that they like hear you talk about
and be like, oh, that's a brilliant email.
This guy's really in the weeds, right?
How do you look through and try to identify
what the initiatives across the company are
that they're typically telegraphing these things, right?
Like if you look at the live person, like financials,
all about going up market and like building that like
enterprise go to market machine.
I can't imagine there's any initiative internally
other than let's go start conversations
with the largest companies on the planet
so that they can implement live person
into how they communicate with customers.
- I think our go to for that is like
kind of what you were saying speaking to their role
and what they're trying to solve for.
So to navigate a huge doc like their financial statements,
we command F what they would be interested in
and what live person could solve for
to help us like navigate it,
find our good content that way.
And then me personally, I put all my thoughts on to a doc
or email and then lavender it up, send it out.
Lavender, so they didn't even know that we say that
'cause I said it the other day with them
and I was like, let's lavender it up.
And then I think it was Ashley who was like,
oh my God, I love that.
I'm gonna take that and use that with my customers.
I'm like, hell yeah, whatever gets you up else.
We're literally about to go through
all of our sequences again.
And we always say like we gotta lavender it up.
We gotta put it through lavender.
- As a founder, have you ever heard the trope of like,
you've made it when you become a verb?
- No, but I wanna become a verb.
- Oh yeah, that's funny.
(both laughing)
- Like you don't like, oh, let me make sure I call an Uber.
Right, it's like, oh, Uber there.
- Oh.
- That's like a whole lavender.
That's one of the, you could argue it's a fault of the word
'cause it is a word, it's hard to like verb it.
In the sense of like, I'm gonna lavender this email.
- It's just quite fun.
- Yeah, wait, is that also like where you think of products
as the brand name?
So like some people will be like,
can you pass me a Kleenex and they just mean a tissue?
Or like do you have a clue tip?
Like they don't say a cotton swab,
like they're saying you tip.
- Yeah, you don't say I'm gonna lift there.
Right, you say I'm gonna Uber there.
- Yeah.
- Oh my God, that's marketing.
Okay, well, we like to go through some rapid fire questions.
- Let them read.
- All of these have been in prep view and beforehand,
but looking forward to your answers,
considering you can make up anything on the fly.
If, and I mean that in a good way.
If you could make a law that everyone had to follow,
what would it be?
- That's tough 'cause like,
I'm sure whatever law I'd talk with
would be hypocritical in some way, shape or form.
So the, yeah, I'm like,
- Okay, I'm like,
- No one has to know.
Drink your coffee black.
- Drink your coffee black.
- That would be criminal.
No, everyone be running to the bathroom.
(laughing)
- No, I'd probably lean on something like,
something cheesy, like listen before you speak kind of thing.
- Oh, I like that.
Good one.
I think cheesy ones are the best.
Tiffany Haddish's law is everyone has to give someone a hug
every day.
- Oh, that's a good one.
- I'm still debating how I feel about that one.
- That's a lie, look, don't you feel better
when you like hug someone?
- All right, you know what my law is?
If you think of something to do,
or if somebody asks you to do something
and you recognize that it will take less than two minutes,
you have to do it than it now.
- Oh, I actually really like that.
- Interesting.
- 'Cause otherwise it's gonna eat more
bit like mental bandwidth than it actually is worth.
And you should just get it done then.
- Love.
- I like both.
I think listen before you speak is really big.
- That one's huge.
- My other one would be respecting people's calendar blocks.
(laughing)
- Now you're just creating a lot of laws here.
- Now we're making the 10 commandments here.
- That's right, that's right.
You gave me too much time.
I was like, wait a minute.
- Let's jump into the next one
before we have a declaration of an independent gun.
This one's probably really hard to think of on the fly,
so if you want to skip, you can use a skip.
- Yeah, I think we could do it.
(laughing)
- What's your favorite quote or mantra you live by?
- Just pick one.
- You act like there's a million.
I don't even know one right now.
- I know, it's like, if I had come in thinking about this,
I would probably have one.
- I know yours.
- What is it?
- This two shall pass.
- Yeah, I do love that one.
- It's more, but I do have another one
that my mom always says that I love, but anyways, what?
- Mine's more of a personal mantra,
which is figure it out.
- Love that.
- Particularly thinking about right now,
everybody is looking for AI
to kind of outsource their brain in a lot of ways.
And there's a positive in the friction, right?
The act of figuring it out,
the act of going through the hard part
in order to get better at something
is not a bug, it's a feature.
And so it's okay if it takes you a little bit
of time the first time, it doesn't mean that you need to,
oh, we should have an AID that.
It's like, no, no, no, there's actual good things
that come out of that.
So particularly in looking at email
or I look at a lot of STRs right now
in the world of technology
where there's so many silver bolts in front of them,
I see wraps do this all the time,
but they'll waste countless hours not doing the work
and trying to figure out ways to outsmart the work.
And the ones that do the work consistently,
they're the ones that excel, exceed quota
and build the skills for the long haul
that lead to their ultimate success.
- I love that.
Challenge has always lead to opportunities.
I would honestly say that that's definitely
one of my favorite mantras is figuring it out
'cause my dad would all,
like anytime I would ask something,
be like, figure it out, figure it out.
- That's what, we all have to figure it out.
I figured it out. (laughs)
- They do the hardship.
- What's the legacy you hope to leave behind?
- Cool.
- Aren't these great?
- Yeah, these are tough questions 'cause--
- The next one's easy, don't worry.
- It was like damn, it was like,
I feel like--
- What's your deepest, darkest year okay?
Keep playing. (laughs)
- Legacy, I mean, like I would hope to have a great family
that I spend time with and that loves me back, right?
But the work related one,
I think that's probably what people are more interested in,
is the whatever you want.
- Fairly.
- Well, I mean, both can be true.
- Yeah.
- The work legacy that I'm gonna leave behind is,
and I don't think it'll be obvious in the short term,
but the long term is that like,
FIO that, you know, figure it out of--
- FIO.
- There's power in figuring things out yourself
and like AI can be an assistive tool and can help you,
but the full replacement,
the new like concept that we're gonna automate out the SDR role,
I hate that concept.
- Same.
- Stupid.
- I view the,
'cause I view the SDR role as,
on a lot of ways like the modern American like dreams,
where if you don't need a college education
to go be a sales development rep somewhere, right?
- Real.
- Sure.
- I got some of my like,
I would go hire this guy today.
There was at the time it was bad timing.
He's now going and building something,
but he was literally--
- I'm just gonna say send him over.
- Yeah.
- He's two weeks out of high school,
and he cold emailed me to go get an SDR role,
and like, he put together the best writing assessment,
was one of the best interviewers I ever like,
put through, in the timing was just off.
I set him up for like several interviews,
and he was like, I wanna work with y'all,
and I was like, damn thing.
But like, you know, the kind of person where like Victoria,
if you were like, I wanna talk to him,
I'd be like, I'd connect y'all,
and the first thing he would do is pick up the phone call you.
I was like, this guy was built for sales.
- Oh, I love that.
- What's he doing now?
- He took the next two weeks,
decided he wanted to go become an engineer,
and then like, is building his own thing.
His like, his parents were both entrepreneurial.
I still think that's guy.
'Cause I'm just like, you think about,
you put in the hardware,
like, you can make a lot of money really fast.
Like, you can do that being an electrician,
but there's obviously like a cap in where that goes.
But I think in this world where everybody views,
like the American dream is like dying or anything,
I don't think that's true.
I think it's just shifting the goalposts
of where you can find that role and enter into,
and create that path for yourself.
Because sales is cool like that.
That's one of the, yeah, I spent too much time
working with marketers.
I found pivoting over to sales.
Pivoted the company.
It's really fun.
- This has become so wholesome, I love it.
Okay, easy one.
What's your favorite way to unwind and relax?
- Ooh, let's see.
My like, number one thing,
it's a non-negotiable that I find every time
I get away from it, like, my life is worse.
It's just like going and running.
And it's just like the best way for me to clear my head
and mind.
- I wish I could be a runner.
- Then I would say like right there
and that list would be like going for a walk
with my wife and the dog.
And then, yeah, let's be like top.
- Great, great ways.
Much better than mine.
Why what's yours?
TikTok.
Oh, I knew you were gonna say that.
(laughing)
- Right.
- I'm just gonna be baking sourdough.
Baking sourdough.
Delilah moved to the south and is now like a southern bell.
- Yes.
- Baking sourdough.
(laughing)
Wait, do you have a favorite sourdough starter?
Is there?
- I have a starter.
I named her, she's in the fridge.
We'll talk offline.
- It's like, well, why?
Tell the folks like me.
- What's the starters name?
- The starters name.
The starters name is Lev.
Long story.
- Why?
- Okay.
(laughing)
So my friend had a baby named her Lev
and she gave me some of her starter when she gave birth
'cause she was like, okay, like,
let's do something every Sunday where we bake together
and whatever I'll give her something to do
is like a new mom on the weekend and kind of get away.
And so I named my sourdough starter Lev
'cause she was feeding her baby.
I was feeding mine.
- Yep.
- So now I feed her, grow her, maintain her,
make bread every week.
- It's a whole thing.
- Wait, I thought you named her Lev
because her, I'm calling your starter her.
- It's a her.
- Okay.
I thought you named her Lev because of Lev and Bread.
- Yeah.
- No, that's what my brother made a joke about.
- Mm, right.
- So, Delilah, making bread,
have you found yourself making more friends as a byproduct
because you have like a bunch of extra bread
that you have to get rid of?
- With the maintenance people,
you--
- I was just about to say she needs her maintenance people.
- Ronald brings my bread home to his wife all the time
and they love it and it's like the greatest reward ever.
I give them bagels, bread, all this stuff.
Real friends, no, I'd have to like leave the house more.
But yeah.
(laughing)
- I like begged her 'cause she came to New York a few weeks ago
and I'm like, can you please bring some bread?
It goes, it's gonna get all soggy.
I'm like very hard to transport,
like a loaf of bread.
- Yeah, I was-- - Not a loaf,
but just like a piece.
- I'm just texturing like a backpack filled with bread,
but then like you just squish it.
- What's something that people often get wrong about you?
Like what's people's biggest misconception about you?
- I don't, maybe this is a lack of self-awareness.
I don't know what people's conception of me is.
(laughing)
- Okay.
- That's an interesting question.
- Yeah, I try to be pretty authentic in my interactions.
Like to don't sugarcoat or like leave things out.
So my goal is particularly in like being a public persona
and like writing on the internet every day,
which you think about like,
I post a LinkedIn every day since like 2020.
It's literally just me, I sit on the couch over there.
I'm like, have a cup of coffee
and we'll just write something out, right?
So like my goal is to not have misconceptions.
- Okay.
Comment below what you think the misconception is.
- No, why do you guys think of Will
and then now that you watch this?
- Let me find out where I've gone very wrong.
(laughing)
- Cool, well Will, it has been an absolute pleasure
having you on.
You know, we love to hear from you all the time
and your advice and our team has definitely learned a lot
from you, your product, everything.
So appreciate you, appreciate you coming on.
- Yeah, thank you.
And Delilah, I hope that somewhere out of this episode
an AI tries to write an email that compares sourdough starter
to like the core ingredient of their product.
- Listen, if the NSDR is watching this and has lavender,
I don't know how you wouldn't get an interview here
'cause you got the sourdough information
and the best writing tool ever, so.
- Victoria Donner, are y'all hiring right now?
- We're starting to have conversations.
So, I mean, we're technically like always having conversations
with SDRs because like, you know, we do promotions,
someone we, like it's just the nature of the game.
So if you're watching this and if you made it this far,
reach out to Delilah and send her some bread.
Reference this part of the podcast.
- Yeah, this is the secret ticket.
(laughing)
- Exactly.
(laughing)
- But then you did your research.
- Well, thank you Will, it was such a pleasure.
- Always, always. - Thank you.
- Bye. - Bye.
- Bye.
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