Clip from Episode 31: SalesLoft’s Top AE – Kevin Walkup – Leverage Your Network:
SalesLoft was growing again I was 16th employee and we got to 50 employees I was thinking to myself was like wow we’re at 50 employees I could have lunch with a different person at my company once a week every day for a year or every week for a year. So I started thinking alright I’m going to start doing this. I sent out a doc hey sign up and I’ll take somebody’s lunch every Wednesday a different person. And doing that was probably one of the best decisions I ever did. In sales you kind of get stuck in your little sales silo in your corner you know with your sales team. He talked to the sales team. I wanted to know more about other people my organization. Taking an engineer out to lunch somebody that would typically not reach out to you and you know to have a conversation and have lunch with. And I’ve made more great relationships by doing that over the last three years than I could ever imagine. And it’s really helped especially when I’m in a deal cycle and I have a very unique question I can go to one of these people that I’ve now known for three years that maybe other people in the sales team don’t know that well I go and ask hey here is a really technical question how would you answer this or what would what would be our answer from an infrastructure perspective. You know since we have that relationship they’re really are always more than willing to help. So it’s been very impactful for me and I love getting to know other people especially outside of the sales world and learning about them and not even talking about work talking about how they got to SalesLoft or you know where they come from. When they grew up or what did they do what they do outside of work. It’s it’s been awesome to be able to be part of that that culture and be involved in you know people’s lives outside of just the sales team. That’s that’s huge. And you know I think at some level sure you can be the the lone wolf and you can try and take this all on your shoulders and you can go do it. But when you get to a certain point and I’m thinking of my interview with Trong Nguyen who was managing a $50 million book of business for Microsoft. He’s like you can’t begin to do that by yourself and it takes a lot of other people and those relationships are really important and it reminds me of literally the best thing I’ve ever read on networking in my career and I’ve I’ve read a fair amount about networking for a variety of reasons. There was a Harvard Business Review article and again we’ll find the link for this and we’ll put it up at top1sales.wpengine.com/kevin. I’m pretty sure the article is called “Better Sales Networks.”
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