Transcript:

[00:00:00] Just be upfront and honest that you’re here to learn and you wanna learn, and that’s, people want to teach, you know? That’s one of the things I learned is that people in this industry really wanna be able to teach you.​

[00:00:09] Marc Gonyea: Collin Nuschy paying us a visit. It’s been, it’s been a while, Collin.

[00:00:32] Collin Nuschy: Yeah, it has been. It’s been about, uh, five, six years, I think. Lot, lot has changed around here since then. 

[00:00:37] Chris Corcoran: Oh, I bet. 

[00:00:39] Collin Nuschy: Yeah. It’s, uh. 

[00:00:40] How many SDRs do you guys have now? I think when I was here, it was only in, like, the 20s or so. 

[00:00:44] Chris Corcoran: In, so in California? 

[00:00:46] Collin Nuschy: Yeah. 

[00:00:47] Chris Corcoran: 40 or 50. 

[00:00:47] Collin Nuschy: Wow, that’s, that’s crazy. Very big changes.

[00:00:51] But I love the new office. Everything looks a lot nicer compared to when I was here. 

[00:00:56] Chris Corcoran: I like the old office, but everyone, all the, all the folks that work in that office, like, “This office is better,” so. 

[00:01:00] Collin Nuschy: Ah, it’s bigger. It’s got more things. I definitely like the view from that stuff. 

[00:01:03] Chris Corcoran: Yeah. 

[00:01:05] Marc Gonyea: Parking’s better here.

[00:01:08] Collin Nuschy: Parking there was, don’t get me started on that. 

[00:01:10] Marc Gonyea: That’s what everyone says. All right. Well, Collin, let’s get into it, man. Uh, this is gonna be interesting ’cause you’re doing some, some things that I think a lot of people think about doing, but they don’t ever get to talk to people who are doing it when they’re early in their career here at memoryBlue,

[00:01:23] so we’ll get to that from the sales ops, the sales enablement, sales program perspective, but before we do that, just tell us, Chris and I and also just for people listening, where you grew up, tell us a little bit about yourself. 

[00:01:34] Collin Nuschy: Okay. 

[00:01:35] Can do. So, yeah, I mean, I’ve pretty much lived in California most of my life. Been in the Bay Area for about the last eight or nine years or so, but I originally grew up and born and raised in San Diego. So, growing up there, I mean, I could say there’s probably few better places to grow up as a kid, just ’cause you’re, you’re right on the beach, the weather’s always perfect.

[00:01:54] Honestly, couldn’t have asked for better place to be. But growing up for me it was mostly, you know, I was an only child, and it was, uh, me and my mom most of the time. She was a single mom, so she was doing a lot of working. She’s amazing. I mean, she did a lot to really help make sure I had everything that I needed in my life and make sure that I was prepared for school, for college, everything and whatnot.

[00:02:17] But, you know, given that she was working so much, I think as a kid, I spent quite a bit of time kind of like on my own, which kind of led to me, I think, having a bit of more of an independent personality, tend to like to spend a lot of more time by myself. I’m kind of more just like a lone wolf, I guess, in that sort of way.

[00:02:32] And the thing about that too is being on my own, I kind of love to develop this curious personality of, you know, I like to try out a lot of different things, kind of narrow before I narrow my focus onto the one thing that I kind of do want to do. And I think that’s kind of a theme that kind of goes throughout most of my earlier years until after even, uh, from when I graduated college, I would say.

[00:02:53] Talk more about that later, obviously. 

[00:02:55] Marc Gonyea: Yeah, how did that manifest itself, like in where you decided to go to school? Like, did you want to and what you majored in? 

[00:03:02] Collin Nuschy: So, that’s the funnier story, is that, so I think the way I kind of took approaching college a little bit more in an unorthodox way than other people did,

[00:03:09] I think usually I see one of two choices that people make when it comes to picking a college. It’s either a, you go, you know what you kind of want to do, you have an idea of that career path, and you pick a college based on one that really matches that, or b, you kind of go with a college that you really like, whether it’s in a good location, maybe it’s a really good school that you just want to go to.

[00:03:29] I kind of chose the former, and I think for people who typically take that approach, they usually have historical precedent of, “I’ve done this, I know I want to do this, it’s there.” But I didn’t really, I didn’t really have that. I was the first person in my family to go to college, so there wasn’t a lot of experience for me to draw on with this.

[00:03:47] So, in kind of trying to choose what I really wanted to, to do, and this is kind of like, I kind of developed this, like, bullheaded personality of like, if I pick something, I’m just gonna stick to it until I decide I don’t want to. For me, I actually chose, I wanted to go with, uh, game design as my original major.

[00:04:03] Chris Corcoran: Okay. 

[00:04:04] Collin Nuschy: I was a really big gamer at the time, you know, I loved video games, I loved the different concepts and games. I thought I could really see myself trying to build things like this growing up, so that led to, uh, the decision for me to only apply to one college. 

[00:04:18] Chris Corcoran: I’m all in baby. 

[00:04:20] Collin Nuschy: Yeah. Exactly. And, uh, looking back, I probably, I wish I had kind of taken people’s advice to not do that, but, uh, you know, it worked out in the end.

[00:04:29] I, so UC Santa Cruz was the only school, I wanted to stay in California, it was the only school that really had a reputable game design program. And I ended up picking that one, and my backup option was really, if that didn’t work out, I figured I’ll go to junior college for a couple years, save up some money, save some money on loans, which would’ve been nice. But, you know, luckily, I ended up getting in, ended up going into the game design program, and dropped out in the first year. 

[00:04:56] Chris Corcoran: The first year? 

[00:04:56] Collin Nuschy: Yeah, in the first year. 

[00:04:57] Chris Corcoran: Wow. Why? 

[00:04:59] Collin Nuschy: So, this is where I think, you know, when you’re trying to choose a career path based on something you wanna do, historical press, it helps.

[00:05:04] I hadn’t done coding, which is a lot of what game design entails. It’s either that or there’s an artistic path where you try and develop like the, the look and feel of the game. And uh, personally, I, I’ve never been an artist. I’m horrible at drawing. So, the coding was kind of the option I kind of took.

[00:05:20] And I think in doing it, I kind of realized it’s not something that I really want to be doing. I don’t wanna be sitting there writing out code all every day. And I think there’s people who love to do that, and that’s great for them, it just wasn’t for me. So, after I kind of picked that and realized it wasn’t what I wanted to do, I kind of pushed gears a bit.

[00:05:38] I had choices between either I was gonna think biology, psych, or business management as my three options. And ended up picking bio as my next major. I stuck in that for about a year. That really kind of appealed to me because I liked the idea of being able to help people. A lot of my friends who were in bio were gonna do, like, medical research, kind of really intrigued me a bit, but again, not something that I really saw myself long-term in.

[00:06:02] So, as after that, I kind of honed in on, “Okay, I’m gonna stick with econ business management. This is what I want to do.” That was kind of my second choice when I was picking majors previously. And in terms of all three majors, that was definitely the one that I think I understood the language of that the most.

[00:06:19] It just made sense to me, I think. It had a lot of options and opportunities in terms of, like, I didn’t really know specifically what I wanted to do in this field, but it definitely gave me the wo, widest range of options. So, you know, I graduate, get through all of that and start going out into the world to work and.

[00:06:39] The biggest thing that kind of happened with that is my first job outta college, I was working as an account manager at a home healthcare company, and that was, actually, I think probably the best. 

[00:06:48] Marc Gonyea: Sales role? 

[00:06:49] Chris Corcoran: That sales job? 

[00:06:50] Collin Nuschy: Yep, yep. Oh yeah. 

[00:06:51] Marc Gonyea: Tell us about it. 

[00:06:52] And how’d you get the job? Coming outta school was business degree.

[00:06:56] Right? And then, did you kind of look at that? Did you, was sales even something you considered? 

[00:07:01] Was, you know, obviously it wasn’t growing up. 

[00:07:03] Collin Nuschy: Yeah, it wasn’t something I was looking at growing up. I think, so for me, it was, uh, it was definitely within the realm of options. I had a kind of, like, a set of options that I was kind of looking at.

[00:07:11] It was either sales, there was customer success roles, there was recruiting. Those were kind of the three that seemed to have the peak point interest the most. So, I find this job, and this job was kind of perfect. It was a jack-of-all-trades role where what you were doing at the company essentially was you were trying to match caregivers that we hired and brought onto our company, and we were trying to sell our services to families where they had maybe, uh, grandparent or maybe somebody with a disability who just maybe needed some help around the home just doing regular daily tasks.

[00:07:43] And we were trying to match them with the right person to take care of that and part of our job was to pitch and sell those services. But on top of that, we were also doing, you know, customer success where we were essentially trying to make sure that all the customers were happy with our services and can continue using it.

[00:08:00] We’re paying their services on time. We were in charge of recruiting. We had to bring in new caregivers and make sure that they were the right fit for the company. So, got experience into all of these. But, you know, sales, above all else really stood out the most to me. And I think it was because one, you know, as a kid growing up, I played a couple of different sports, but I really centered in on golf.

[00:08:20] And I think that was because it’s an independent sport. You’re only dependent on yourself. Your hard work and determination really determines how far you’ll go with that. And I think the same thing kind of held true in the sales role of I really liked being able to control my own destiny a bit. I could determine how successful I was.

[00:08:38] I had a few quarters there where I was the, in the top three or five sales reps across the whole company and. 

[00:08:44] Chris Corcoran: How many people? How many, how many salespeople in this company? 

[00:08:46] Collin Nuschy: Uh, I think there was 60 or 70. 

[00:08:48] Marc Gonyea: Wow. I’m crushing it. 

[00:08:50] Collin Nuschy: Yeah. 

[00:08:50] Chris Corcoran: Decent size company. 

[00:08:51] Collin Nuschy: Yeah. Yeah. It was good. And the fun thing about it was, you know, you’re, you’re constantly learning, right?

[00:08:56] You’re trying to figure out what can you do better, what things can you really improve upon. And that, I think, was really what started to help instill or help me show, like, what I could really do in this type of career path, helped me show my work ethic, you know? I had doubts and confidence problems, I think going out, coming into school, and I think coming out of it, and going into this job really helped build all that up.

[00:09:17] So, you know, I’ve been there about two years now. Didn’t really see quite the upward mobility that I was really looking for. At the time, I actually lived with Joe Reeves and John Adams, who were working at memoryBlue. 

[00:09:28] Marc Gonyea: Oh, nice. 

[00:09:28] Chris Corcoran: Do you guys, did you meet them at, uh, in college Santa Cruz? 

[00:09:31] Collin Nuschy: Yep. 

[00:09:32] Chris Corcoran: Okay. 

[00:09:32] Collin Nuschy: Joe Reeves has actually, uh, met him day one of Welcome Week and known him ever since.

[00:09:36] Marc Gonyea: Uh, wow. He said that. That’s right, this podcast. 

[00:09:39] Collin Nuschy: Yep. Yep. He and I have been together for a long time. But yeah, so I live with them. I was telling them about, you know, my frustrations with the job I was in. They talked about tech sales, memoryBlue and all these great things. I mean, I would, I would always come home and see them going out to all these fun events like, you know, first Fridays and talk about call evals and all the different trainings that they would go through.

[00:09:58] And I was just thinking like, “Man, this sounds like a, a great place to work.” So, talk to them, they end up getting me referred there. Interviewed with Joe. 

[00:10:06] Chris Corcoran: Nice. 

[00:10:07] Collin Nuschy: And actually interviewed with Jeanne Bell too. 

[00:10:09] Marc Gonyea: Roommate. Jay Ball. 

[00:10:10] Collin Nuschy: Yeah. I think Jeanne actually knew that I was living with Joe, so when I came for my interview, I think she purposefully tried to throw me some curve balls and get a little harder on me.

[00:10:19] It’s like, “I’m not letting this guy in just ’cause he is friends with Joe.” So, I’ve kind of blocked out there in my interview with her, honestly. But yeah. 

[00:10:27] Marc Gonyea: But you had good experience. I mean, you’ve had. 

[00:10:29] Chris Corcoran: Great experience. 

[00:10:29] Marc Gonyea: Great corporate experience in a sales role, not tech. And like you said, you grow sales roles, you grow a lot personally as well as professionally. Something, like, for you, it was part of that. So, you got the job. 

[00:10:42] Collin Nuschy: Yep. Right. 

[00:10:43] Marc Gonyea: And what, what was it like making that transition? Because from, you know, what you were doing before in healthcare, working on, like, outbound for a tech company. 

[00:10:51] Collin Nuschy: So, a lot of the same skills, I think applied, but there was definitely a new learning curve to it in the sense that, so we, in my last, our first company, we got a lot of inbound leads

[00:11:02] so, you know, we had partners that we were working with that send us people that were looking for these services, and we would be still competing with, like, five or six different vendors to get this business. But, you know, it’s a lot different when you have the, the lead coming to you, they already know that they need this, so you’re not trying to convince them that this is something that they need.

[00:11:19] You’re just trying to convince you a better company. But in this job, it was a lot more outbound prospecting. So, you’re trying to get on the phone, you’re grinding through these dials, and you’re trying to, get on the phone trying to get, convince someone that they need to A, talk to you and not just hang up on you,

[00:11:33] but B, also, like, get them to understand, “Hey, this is something that, you know, based on what you’re doing, I think could be really valuable to you.” So, that was a bit of a tough learning curve. I think that was where I was really grateful for the different resources and culture that memoryBlue had, where, you know, I could go into scene calls with senior, more senior SDRs, ask ’em questions, they’d be able to kind of bounce stuff off of them.

[00:11:55] They would help me learn things that I maybe didn’t know, propose things that I hadn’t tried yet. It was a really great environment. I loved it. I loved being able to learn from everybody there. And I also loved, just, like, the culture of comradery. You know, I mean, just looking at the board here, you’ve got events for Fed’s March just for this office.

[00:12:11] We had a lot of that. And that was kind of also, I appreciated because at my first company, you know, we were a small, tight-knit group of, like, six people. So, really close. And I think coming here, I think I was incredibly fortunate to have my first two jobs kind of both have that aspect. Because the bigger the company you go and even just, like, the more wide it is, the less that kind of exists, I think.

[00:12:31] So, I was super grateful for that. And also just having great people that helped build up the culture. But after that, unfortunately, mine was a little bit short-lived. I kind of, part of me kind of wishes I had stuck around a little longer just ’cause I think I could have learned a lot more.

[00:12:45] Marc Gonyea: Three months. 

[00:12:46] Collin Nuschy: Yeah, three months. 

[00:12:47] Chris Corcoran: Three now, baby. 

[00:12:49] Marc Gonyea: Wow. 

[00:12:50] Collin Nuschy: I was lucky because my first clients, Evident.io, they actually hired Mike Mishler as their, uh, director of sales development at the time. So, he was just building out a brand new SDR team. We had been on the client, I think, for, like, four months, well, three, four months at the time.

[00:13:06] And he was looking to, you know, obviously hire out a few of us. So fortunately enough, three other people that were on the team with me also got hired out. We knew we were gonna be starting from scratch, obviously, which kind of as somebody who was still kind of getting his bearings was a little bit scary for me,

[00:13:21] but I think I had some confidence that, you know, Mike came from here. He knew the culture, he knew how we trained. I think he could do the same things that I could be offered here, and there was some opportunity there that I think would’ve been great for me, so I decided to take it.

[00:13:34] Mike’s got a great eye for talent too. That’s a compliment. 

[00:13:37] Marc Gonyea: Yeah. That he, he saw you were so new at memoryBlue. So, you know, you didn’t get, I mean, you were into the program. You, like you said, you didn’t get to the full experience, but what you did before certainly helped you from a business professional standpoint.

[00:13:50] Who was with you that got converted? 

[00:13:52] Collin Nuschy: So, there was, uh, Taylor Moore. 

[00:13:54] Marc Gonyea: T Moore. 

[00:13:55] Collin Nuschy: Yep. Caleb, Caleb Mills, and, uh, Melanie Stewart. 

[00:14:00] Marc Gonyea: Melanie, yep. Those are all strong people. 

[00:14:02] Chris Corcoran: Yeah. Yeah. 

[00:14:02] Collin Nuschy: Super strong team. 

[00:14:03] Marc Gonyea: Along with you. 

[00:14:04] Collin Nuschy: Yeah, and that was kind of the nice, the, the fun thing about it was that because Evident was still very startup stage,

[00:14:10] we were the first of, I think there was one or two other SDRs that were actually at the company. We were the first ones. So, we were really figuring out, you know, “How do we sell this product? How do we get people’s attention?” We had to try and determine our own prospects, our own personas we were trying to target,

[00:14:24] so it was a fun experience. We all got to experiment. It was definitely a lot of learning that came out of that, but I loved it. But get hired, Evident. So, we’re starting there. I stayed there for about a year, and I loved working there. I think it was a great place to kind of grow, but I think the more I kind of got into sales, and I really, you know, I found a lot of success there.

[00:14:45] But I think at the same time, I realized maybe this wasn’t a hundred percent the job that I wanted to do long-term. And I think for me, that realization kind of came in the form of, you know, people love the, the competitiveness. I love the competitiveness. But I think the difference between what I was doing at my, my previous job in here was that we didn’t have a quota,

[00:15:02] that we were necessarily trying to keep to the entire time. And I think that, honestly, I think that stress kind of was what wore me down a little bit over time. I think some people probably handle it better than I did, but as I kind of came towards the end of my one year there, I kind of started to think like, “What are some things that maybe I could do that would maybe not cause me as much stress and I could still enjoy as much as I’m loving this?”

[00:15:22] So, sales, somebody there actually, who was a good friend of mine at the time, was talking about. 

[00:15:25] Marc Gonyea: Who? 

[00:15:26] Collin Nuschy: His name was Akiel, he was working at, but he, um, 

[00:15:29] Marc Gonyea: He worked with you in Evident? 

[00:15:29] Collin Nuschy: Yeah. He worked at Evident. He suggested, you know, “Hey man, you’re super logical. You love to be very strategic about how you attack things. I think you’d be good at sales operations.”

[00:15:38] And I hadn’t even heard of sales ops at the time. We just hired one person for sales ops there too. So, I kind of started exploring that a little bit. I actually asked the guy who was our director of sales ops about what that is, and he kind of gave me the rundown of, like, sales operations. It kind of is broken into, you know, three, I would say, main pathways that you can take about it.

[00:15:59] There are more traditional and regional sales operations, which is, like, you’re working directly with AEs and AE managers. You’re doing forecasting, planning and performance, quota planning, territory planning, all of those things. You’re very much like a direct partner to sales operations and or to the sales team and I think you are in all of these roles, but I think that’s, like, the to be working the most closely with them. The other one is more sales enablement and training. You’re trying to develop curriculum, you help onboard new reps. That was another pathway. The third one, which you kind of didn’t mention, this is one that I kind of learned about later is, it’s kinda like program development

[00:16:33] because this is all about how do you help the sales team sell more effectively. Because effectively, you know, there could be sales reps that are spending 10, 20 hours a week on entering stuff in the CRM maybe, or they have to spend it on another tool, grinding out all these different documents and stuff like that.

[00:16:50] We wanna try and save them as much time as possible ’cause they need to be out there selling to customers. We don’t want them to be develop, doing it on things that may be automated, taken care of with a tool, or maybe we could hire another team that takes care of that. So, those were the three options I kind of looked at.

[00:17:04] Marc Gonyea: Hold on. This is Grace B. I like how well-prepared you are. So, it’s great you’re reading from your notes. This is amazing. Most people don’t prepare. That’s by what you got outta sales. 

[00:17:14] So, but you’re, why you’re, all this happening too, like, you’re a high-performing SDR. Right? And for the folks listening out there, people who are considering getting in the other paths, we’re gonna talk more about sales ops. 

[00:17:28] How important do you think it was for you to be an SDR and be good at it for you to have these conversations with somebody in, in a company who already worked by doing something else? 

[00:17:36] Collin Nuschy: Oh, it’s incredibly important. I mean, the thing about sales operations is that you have to know how the sales process works.

[00:17:42] How to target customers, what people do in their day-to-day jobs, which of these things are considered important tasks for them to do versus not? Because a lot of what you do in sales ops, too, is about you have to ask the sales team to do more for you too. We work with a lot with data, data influences our decisions.

[00:17:59] We get that data from the sales team. But you have to ask yourself, you know, if I’m asking the sales team to enter these data points, is it worthwhile for me to do that? Is it ’cause it’s gonna take a lot of their time away? Do I want to do that to them? Is it gonna help benefit the company? Is it gonna benefit me?

[00:18:12] So, having that understanding of this is what salespeople do, this is what’s most important to them, kind of helps me have a unique perspective in terms of when I’m talking with my other colleagues, and they want to do something, I can actually offer up a perspective that they may not even know. A lot of times, we go to the sales reps for that perspective, and now I can kind of offer it myself.

[00:18:30] Marc Gonyea: Yeah, yeah, and I think when you made that transition, talk to us about how you made the transition. So, we’ll talk, we’ll get back to the subject matter, but so you’re an SDR, you, memoryBlue for a quarter, then you’re Evident, and Evident got acquired, right? 

[00:18:44] By PaloAlto? 

[00:18:46] Collin Nuschy: That’s right. 

[00:18:46] Marc Gonyea: Were you there for that?

[00:18:47] And what was that like? What was that, what was that experience like? 

[00:18:50] Collin Nuschy: I was, so that was, uh, it was a definitely a tough kind of experience, I would say. So, typically as part of an acquisition, there’s a bit of reduction in force. So, I was, unfortunately, one of the people who was let go as part of that acquisition.

[00:19:02] And it was definitely, looking back on it, a big growing point for me. But I think there were definitely a lot of low points, I think, after that. You know, you kind of, you’re building up your confidence as a new person, fresh outta college or starting to get into the workforce, you know? You’re starting to learn what you can be good at, what you can’t be good at.

[00:19:19] And then boom, like, all that stuff that you did, all that work you did is kind of gone. And not say, not to say it’s a bad thing, of course, but. 

[00:19:25] Marc Gonyea: Maybe that’s how you feel the time. Right? But that’s not how it turned out. 

[00:19:29] Collin Nuschy: Yeah. Obviously, and kind of, I think it, the blessing in disguise there was, there was, the thing with sales operations is that the bigger the company the more you need sales ops.

[00:19:38] But at Evident size, there was only enough real need for one person, and that person was never gonna hire a second person. And I don’t think they would’ve hired someone as junior as me at the time to do that anyway. 

[00:19:49] Marc Gonyea: So, they kind of knew you were gonna, you had a wandering eye incident, right? You wanted to make the move in the sales ops? So, tell us how, how you made that happen. 

[00:19:57] Acquisition, like Collin there. My guess is, oh, Collin’s really good at his job or could be good, really great at his job, but we know he doesn’t want stick to this. Right? So, you said, “Okay, I’m gonna go find my way.” 

[00:20:08] Collin Nuschy: Yep, yep. I’m gonna go find my way, I’m gonna venture out.

[00:20:10] So, started out, I mean, I was lucky that I was able to get some time at Evident before acquisition happened where the director, our director of sales ops gave me some good first tips on what we had to focus on. So, I spent a lot of my time, free time while I was still working there, even after I let go.

[00:20:27] So, the three things that he kind of emphasized was sales ops is a lot of data manipulation, so Excel skills are an absolute must. There’s plenty of courses out there for that. I took a couple of those to kind of get myself more familiar with doing data manipulation. I actually had a really good friend of mine who was in ops as well.

[00:20:43] He and I spent, like, two or three days just going through all the basics. He taught me pretty much a lot of skills that I still use today in sales ops. So, I kind of reached out to my network a lot, used them to try and help influence like what they do with data, what they do in operations that I can kind of help focus on.

[00:21:00] The other thing that I kind of learned is Salesforce is a very very unique and very needed for this. So, I’m talking less about, like, entering leads or creating opportunities, but more about, like how do you set up a Salesforce platform? How do you create reports and dashboards to get to the data that you want?

[00:21:15] Collin Nuschy: How do you understand the requirements for the sales team and then get that data out of the system for them? And then the third thing is backend sales processes and terminology. This, a lot of this stuff kind of came from being an SDR, but I think if you’re an account executive, you get a bit more of that.

[00:21:31] So, I kind of reached out to my network too and tried to talk with some AEs to really understand, like, just a little bit more of that, and I think that was the biggest determination of success for me because when I was going into these interviews for sales ops jobs, you know, having sales experience obviously helps a bit, but what they really look for is, like, while you’re making this transition, why are you making this transition?

[00:21:53] You’re a sales rep, obviously, that’s great, but we need different skills than that, and having that, spent that extra time to really learn those skills in Excel, in Salesforce and whatnot, that really kind of helped me get through to people that I was not just doing this on a web, like, “Hey, I’m really invested in this.”

[00:22:10] Chris Corcoran: So, who, who paid for these courses? 

[00:22:12] Collin Nuschy: Yeah, I paid for them myself. 

[00:22:14] Chris Corcoran: For and these were Excel courses and Salesforce forces? 

[00:22:17] Collin Nuschy: Yeah, they were all online. I did a couple of Coursera courses, Udemy, wherever I could find them. There’s plenty of great resources out there today, which is really helpful for that, but yeah, that was most of how I kind of funded it myself. 

[00:22:28] Chris Corcoran: Yeah. So, I think that speaks a lot about, uh, someone who’s committed to making a change. Many people wanna make a change, but they don’t want to invest in themselves. They want their employer to do that. Right? 

[00:22:41] Here you are, taking your time, your money, and you’re making that investment, and that sends a signal that that’s what you want to do and that you’re willing to invest in yourself. 

[00:22:51] Collin Nuschy: Yeah, a hundred percent. And that was kind of the message that I was conveying in all of my interviews was, you know, “I’m really dedicated to this. I’m really trying.” Obviously, I kind of come with the caveat of, “Hey, I’m, I’m junior at this.

[00:23:02] I do need some training and some coaching, but if you’re willing to invest in me, I promise you’ll get everything I’ve got.” So, I kind of piggyback off of like, “Hey, I’ve, I’ve shown success in what I’ve done before. I, sure I believe I can do this here too. 

[00:23:12] Marc Gonyea: Yeah. I mean, it’s not, being an SDR is not an easy thing to do, do. It’s a difficult job in a different kind of way.

[00:23:18] I like how you really leverage your network too. 

[00:23:20] Collin Nuschy: Yeah, yeah. 

[00:23:21] Marc Gonyea: Right? So, you went out, and you found people who were doing the roles at other companies or, or people who are, uh, adjacent to the role. Like, your AE people, you knew who were AEs, maybe AEs you were booking meetings for. Right? And you got a lot of knowledge, and you go on interview, you talk about investing in yourself, the classes and programs, and then all this organic grass war, grassroots material since you’re serious about it and you can talk more fluently in an interview. 

[00:23:45] Collin Nuschy: Yep. 

[00:23:46] Marc Gonyea: How’d you end up at Forescout? 

[00:24:50] So, that was actually another example of leveraging my network, so there was a person at my last company that I was really close with.

[00:24:57] She was, uh, an executive, and she reached out to me after the acquisition and said like, “Hey, I would love to help you and see if I can find any roles for you.” I let her know, “Yeah, that’d be great. I’m looking at sales operations roles.” She had a contact at Fork, actually, who was on the team that I, or she was the manager to my manager that I actually ended up working for, and she referred me to her,

[00:25:18] so basically got me into the role there. And thank God for that because, truthfully, in that role, there was two other people that I was competing with, both were internal candidates, both had apparently high-level executive backing as well, so I don’t think without that. 

[00:25:32] Marc Gonyea: Within the company? 

[00:25:33] Collin Nuschy: Yeah, within the company.

[00:25:34] Yeah. So, I don’t think without that referral, I would’ve had as good of a chance, you know? It’s hard to compete against that when you’ve already got somebody who’s within their backing you up, so that was super helpful. 

[00:25:43] Marc Gonyea: Interviewed really well. 

[00:25:45] Collin Nuschy: Yeah. 

[00:25:45] Marc Gonyea: Must have been well prepared by this podcast. 

[00:25:48] Collin Nuschy: Yep, yep.

[00:25:48] I definitely had to make sure I came very well prepared. The interview process was it wasn’t as technical as I was expecting it to be. They took, focused a lot more on just wanting to make sure the, that the person I was was the person they were looking for in terms of work ethic.

[00:26:02] Because my manager, she was very, uh, he was very much more about, “I don’t need people who think that they already know how to do things. I’d rather show them how to do things my way.” And I think that really kind of melded well with me ’cause I was looking to learn, and she was looking to teach. 

[00:26:14] Marc Gonyea: Wow. Got it. All right.

[00:26:16] So, tell us about the role. Tell us about your first role. I mean, this is the first time ever in the podcast, I could be, if I’m forgetting someone, please apologize ’cause we have over a hundred people on it. What was your first sales operations job, and what were you doing? I mean, I worked with sales op people at memoryBlue, but, 

[00:26:32] you know. 

[00:26:32] Collin Nuschy: Yeah, yeah.

[00:26:33] I mean it was a, it was an interesting role. So, there was two programs that they were looking to launch. One of them was for kinda like an internal concierge service that. 

[00:26:43] Chris Corcoran: You said white glove service? 

[00:26:44] Collin Nuschy: Yep. White glove service that basically helps get sales reps the information that they need we build internal process sites and processes that would help basically get them to the info that they need. ‘Cause a lot of, I guess a lot of the problems that they were having was all the info that sales reps needs is not documented anywhere and there’s no concise way to get it to them, so that was kinda like a delivery me, mechanism and delivery service that way.

[00:27:08] And then the second one was we were trying to develop an RFP program. Uh, been for people who don’t know what RFPs are, it’s basically called request for proposal. So, you’re a company, you know, we wanna, we were a cybersecurity company, so you want a cybersecurity tool. We’re gonna send out this document that’s a questionnaire to, you know, 30 vendors.

[00:27:25] We want you to answer the questions as best you can and send it back to us, and we’ll narrow down the list of contenders to 5 based on your responses. So, obviously, you gotta come with your best game packed and ready to go. The way you answer those questions determines whether or not you can get the business. Right now

[00:27:40] we were having everybody answer those RFPs kind of on their own. It was like the Wild, Wild West. Some people obviously who were very tenured were very good at this and didn’t really need any help, but then there were people who were much more junior, who didn’t know how to answer the questions well, and there was like a whole business case built around, I guess this one RFP where the C-suite executive who were working with, basically got back to them and said like, “Your responses were not great and that’s why we’re not picking you.”

[00:28:06] So, they built the program based off of that, and they wanted me to be the person that developed it and delivered it to the company. 

[00:28:13] Marc Gonyea: So, Forescout’s got RFP opportunities, to make sure I understand this, and RFPs were answered varying degrees of quality, right? Based upon the tenure of the rep and the company’s losing business.

[00:28:24] ‘Cause they’re losing out on RFPs because you get Junior AEs who don’t know how to answer these RFPs. So, they’re like sales ops guy. This is a huge impact on the organization, come in and what you have to do, automate the process or, like, what, what is, so how, how does that happen? 

[00:28:41] Collin Nuschy: So, it’s about basically building a program that can both scale and you can operationalize really easily.

[00:28:46] So, we started out by first person. 

[00:28:48] Marc Gonyea: Can you say for people who are listening, they say some in scale, some people don’t know what that means. What does, what does that mean? 

[00:28:53] Collin Nuschy: Yeah, that’s fair. Uh, so by scale, it’s like as the company grows, the program can grow with it easily without having to invest in more people, more products, more money.

[00:29:02] You want to basically get an upfront program that’s gonna be able to grow as your company grows. 

[00:29:05] Marc Gonyea: Okay. Okay. 

[00:29:06] Got it. And so, the company wants someone that could skip grow is, with the RF, number of RFPs that are coming in. Or you can do it across all, all the reps, maybe start with 10 and do it across a thousand or whatever the number is. 

[00:29:18] Collin Nuschy: Yeah. 

[00:29:18] Marc Gonyea: And then automate it? Is that or? 

[00:29:21] Collin Nuschy: Automation was eventually the future goal. We kind of started out with a bit more manual until we got there, but basically, you have to start with, uh, you have blank slate, and we had to start building up this database of question and answers that would basically be able to be reused.

[00:29:34] Because if you look at RFPs in most industries, the questions kind of get recycled. They might be worded differently, but they’re essentially the same question. So, you can really get, you wanna get the best of your best answers, put those into a database and then use, reuse those out for the rest of the company.

[00:29:49] And that, basically, that’s how we started out with it. We had bought a tool that was able to do that, and I helped build the database, worked with sales reps to make sure we got the best responses, and then from there I kind of worked as like a, this is where the white glove service bar kind of comes in.

[00:30:01] Basically helped them to find the right answers for all their RFPs, make sure we develop, work with them to develop the correct answers, and then kind of draft it up. ‘Cause these come in different forms. There’s questionnaires, there’s designs essay responses, so we were basically drafting and putting out maybe a co, like, a hundred RFPs a year or so, I think was like the peak of what we were doing.

[00:30:20] And I think in total company influence, I think we were built bringing in, helping bring in number 50 million a year or something. 

[00:30:27] Marc Gonyea: Yeah, you wouldn’t, those RFPs can be significant wins. 

[00:30:30] Collin Nuschy: Yeah. Yeah. ‘Cause some of these are Fortune 500 companies that would eventually purchase, you know, six or seven-figure deals from you based off that opportunity.

[00:30:38] Marc Gonyea: And then what was that pro, so what was it like learning that job, though? ‘Cause you, so you had no experience doing it, you were basically in two sales roles before. 

[00:30:44] Collin Nuschy: Yeah. 

[00:30:44] Marc Gonyea: Kind of self-taught sales op guy, and you’re thrown into a project that has some impact. 

[00:30:49] Collin Nuschy: Yeah. It’s definitely a mind shift or a shift in the kind of the way you think.

[00:30:54] So in, in sales, I mean obviously you’re, it’s much more about, like, you’re, you’re grinding it out, you have to continually make sure it’s much more action-focused. Like, don’t think about it, just get on the phone, start calling people, make sure you know what you want to say when you get on the phone with somebody, and don’t get discouraged if you get shut down.

[00:31:10] This is a little bit less about, it’s less about taking action and more about thinking about this. Like, strategize how you’re going to do these things and then do it. Because, and I think that that was a bit of a mind shift for me, was I was just used to getting something and then just trying to do something about it immediately

[00:31:25] but I had to kind of learn to take a step back, blow myself down a bit and think, “Okay, what’s really the best way to go about this?” And that’s honestly something that I still do to this day. I’ll sometimes get a task and then immediately just do something about it and then realize, “I did that wrong.”

[00:31:40] Marc Gonyea: Yeah. Yeah. That’s good. It happens quite a bit. 

[00:31:42] Chris Corcoran: More cerebral. 

[00:31:43] Marc Gonyea: Yeah. I did that this morning, you know? 

[00:31:46] So, alright. Did you make some mistakes along the way? Did you learn, have some learning opportunities? 

[00:31:52] What’s, like, a takeaway, big takeaway from that first job? What was you just, what you just told me, was it something else? 

[00:31:57] Collin Nuschy: Biggest takeaway, I would say, is, well, one, be patient because I think the, that was one of the biggest things, is I would get really impatient with getting something and then having to be, like you said, be more cerebral about it. Take time to think about this. I just wanted to start doing things.

[00:32:12] I wanted to be action-based, that was what I was always taught. That was the last two or three years of my life. And working and patience, I think really helped me get through that, learning to slow myself down a bit. And then also not being afraid to ask for help. I think me, I only knew so much from my previous experience.

[00:32:30] A lot of what you do in sales operations, I will say, you learn on the job and that’s okay. But I think it’s about being comfortable asking for help with that. And I think that’s something that I kind of struggled with a bit because one of the things that I think after the acquisition at Evident, one of the things I kind of struggled with a bit was like imposter syndrome.

[00:32:47] Thinking that, you know, my success up until this point wasn’t really earned. It was kind of luck. And I think going into this first job, I kind of had that same mentality. So, I, I had a hard time at first asking for help. I thought to myself like, “I’m just lucky to be here. Why am I gonna, I shouldn’t ask these people for help.

[00:33:01] I don’t want ’em to think I’m a fraud or something.” Once I kind of got past that and started to ask for help, things got a lot easier. And I think we all kind of deal with imposter syndrome in some way, shape, or form throughout our career. But it’s about, like, learning to quiet that inner critic and kind of talking to yourself in a more positive way. 

[00:33:18] Marc Gonyea: Yeah. Sounds like it. So, how did you kind of, how does it work? So, when you’re in sales ops, you’re, you execute on this program, you then maintain that program, then you take on other tasks, the organization? 

[00:33:30] Collin Nuschy: Yeah. 

[00:33:30] Marc Gonyea: And then, and then where do you go? Like, what’s the goal? When you’re in that role, you know, SDRs want to get promoted, right? And learn how to close. So, when you’re in sales ops, how do you kind of develop and, and what do you go after? Like, how, how do you look at that? 

[00:33:46] Collin Nuschy: So, yeah, so it, it really depends. I think sales ops is a, is a bit unique in the sense that you kind of have to continue, you kind of sometimes have to look for your own work.

[00:33:55] It’s really about, what would I call this? It’s kinda like your, your analysis skills really get tested. Like, you’re gonna get a lot of inside views into how the company works, how these processes work, and I think a lot of your success will kind of be built off of your ability to look at the situation,

[00:34:12] identify where there might be some gaps or maybe some issues that could potentially be made better, and then you kind of go to your, your manager about that, and you say, “Hey, I, I’ve noticed this. I think this could be good, improved if we were to do X.” And that’s the way that I’ve kind of been taught that really determines how you can move up in the company.

[00:34:30] Being able to propose these things and identify these things, that’s what leadership is kind of looking for, and that’s what your job is as sales ops. You want to find the things that are causing problems, identify them and then solve them. So, really being able to develop that analytical skill set,

[00:34:45] it’ll happen through time if you’re, as you’re working through the job, but that’s something I really, it took me a while to kind of realize that’s what you have to do. And if there was one thing I wish I could tell my younger self is to start out with that mentality. 

[00:34:56] Marc Gonyea: Yeah. But it’s hard, right? So, you gotta get the experience.

[00:34:59] But what are some examples of one of the things you’ve worked on that have impacted the business when you were at Forescout? 

[00:35:04] Collin Nuschy: So, the ben, the nice thing about it was that working at a smaller company like that, you kind of, you kind of still are in a jack of all trades kind of role where you wear a lot of different hats, so I got to work on a bunch of different programs. Like, I handled our new hire onboarding program. I developed curriculum for making sure that they had all the resources necessary to succeed or at least onboard and understand the products. I was able to help with developing new training programs for them.

[00:35:29] We eventually started, and this is kind of what segue ways into what I do today is towards the end of my last six to eight months there, I got to work in a bit more of like a tools-focus job where we were kind of looking at, “Okay, what are some of the problems that we’re having as a company that we can potentially solve by purchasing a tool for?”

[00:35:47] And obviously, this has to go through a lot of scrutiny ’cause you’re, you’re spending the company’s money. But one of the things that we were trying to solve for at the time was we had a lot of resources out there, right? We had data sheets, white papers, all these things that talked about, like, what our product does.

[00:36:01] It was a super technical product. So, you have all these resources, too many, honestly, to really memorize for any sales rep. We wanted a way to kind of track, like, “What of these resources that we’re sending out are either a, catching on with customers, what information really resonates with them?”

[00:36:16] And then, you know, “Which of the personas that we’re sending this to, whether it’s like a C-level of VP, a director, what are those things really helps them close a deal? What caused their interest?” So, we purchased a tool to kind of help us do that. And I was responsible for identifying the two tools that we were evaluating and implementing the tool before I ended up leaving.

[00:36:37] Marc Gonyea: What tools are these, like, so people understand. Like, so you’re, and you’re talking to the mind of an of an S, SDR, a lot about sales ops, what type types of technology? So, Salesforce, we know about Salesforce, CRM, but what else? 

[00:36:50] Collin Nuschy: I don’t remember what the specific tool was called, to be honest. 

[00:36:53] Marc Gonyea: What areas is it?

[00:36:55] Collin Nuschy: It’s kind of like, it’s kinda like marketing, I would say. Like, it’s a, I think one of the tools was called Six Sense. But it’s, uh, essentially a tool that it’s gonna be, it’s, you know how SDR prospecting tools can track emails that are sent to customers and which ones they’re read, how many times they’re read? It essentially does that, but for marketing information. So, all the data sheets, wide papers you send out to a customer, this tool is able to track, “Hey, they read this one for two hours? The rest of ’em, they read for, like, 10 minutes. Okay. Dive into that one. Which pages did they read the longest?” So, that gives you insight into this person’s really interested in X, essentially, so it can help the sales rep be more effective, and when they go to the next conversation, they’re armed with more information. 

[00:37:34] Marc Gonyea: Is there a piece of, like, all these things you’re doing that appeals to you the most? 

[00:37:38] Collin Nuschy: Yeah. So, that was where, I was working with systems and tools, getting to implement them, kind of developing a strategy for how we were gonna use it.

[00:37:46] That really piqued my interest. 

[00:37:47] Marc Gonyea: And then systems and tools that the Salesforce used? Systems and tools that Sales Ops used to help Salesforce? 

[00:37:54] Collin Nuschy: Both. 

[00:37:54] Marc Gonyea: Both. Okay. Yeah. 

[00:37:55] Collin Nuschy: So, really anything along that ’cause it’s really about just making the company more effective, helping drive revenue, all of those things.

[00:38:03] The, at the time with Forescout, we were kind of going through our own acquisition, like, this hadn’t affected me in any way, but I think budgets were getting cut. There was, um, you know, not as much upward mobility as I might, so I was looking into other jobs, and I found this job at LinkedIn that looked perfect. It was exactly what I was looking for, was specifically around systems and tools, and I applied for that. And mind you, I think throughout my entire job, I had applied to LinkedIn like 10 or 15 times. I really wanted to work there ’cause I like great things about it, and I never got past the bots.

[00:38:39] It’s, uh, that was a tough one. But this time, you know, I was confident. I had some experience. I knew more about packet past those bots, so I put a lot of effort into this. I’ve made sure I drafted, like, three different resumes, I think, for this one until I finally found one that I liked, submitted it, gotten to the interviews.

[00:38:57] And I think this one overall was definitely one of the tougher interviews I think that I’ve ever been through, ’cause LinkedIn, you know, this. 

[00:39:04] Marc Gonyea: Yeah. 

[00:39:04] Go. Yeah. Tell us about LinkedIn. Like, why was LinkedIn such an important place for you to work it? 

[00:39:09] Collin Nuschy: So, for that it was, I’d had friends and friends and friends that had worked there, and they just raved about the culture, they raved about, you know, the benefits, the emphasis on, like, teamwork, collaboration. And the other thing was coaching. Like, I think in looking for something that I had, had in both memoryBlue and my first job, this was gonna be the closest thing that I’ve ever gotten it from a sales-ops perspective

[00:39:31] and the coaching thing really spoke to me because I was really interested in going into this field, but at the same time, like sales office, there’s so much that you can do, right? So, I wanted to kind of explore that more. But that was what it really interested me. But every job at LinkedIn I’m looking at is, like, a hundred plus applicants, and I’m just like, “I don’t know how the heck I’m ever gonna get past this.”

[00:39:48] Marc Gonyea: Yeah. 

[00:39:48] Collin Nuschy: So.

[00:39:50] Marc Gonyea: So, you figure out a way to get past it. 

[00:39:52] Collin Nuschy: Figure out a way to get past it. 

[00:39:53] Marc Gonyea: And tell you were taught, you jumped into your first interview or your first opportunity at LinkedIn? 

[00:39:58] Collin Nuschy: Yep. Yep. The interviews there, the whole process is a lot more strenuous. They do, you know, case interviews on the spot, questions where they want you to be able to solve a very particular situation.

[00:40:08] They sent you with a take-home case study where you have to develop a whole slide deck presented to a panel of people. Definitely a lot more than, than I had done in previous interviews, which was challenging, but also, I guess, kind of fun in some ways. 

[00:40:20] Marc Gonyea: And what, tell us about the role. 

[00:40:22] Collin Nuschy: So, this role is specifically, there’s a, it’s a team that specifically is devoted to helping the sales org with systems and tools rollouts.

[00:40:30] And this is kind of the difference between working at a company of LinkedIn size, where I think we’re at, like, 16,000 employees. Versus Forescout, which was, you know, sub a 1000. There’s, this team basically has to oversee, you know, dozens of tools, and we’re constantly releasing new tools.

[00:40:46] We’re constantly implementing new tools, we’re releasing new enhancements for these tools, so you have a whole team that’s essentially in charge of the strategy of how do we define which of these enhancements are the most important for us? Which enhancements do we need to solve business problems? How do we work with engineering to get those into the roadmap?

[00:41:03] All of these different things. So, that’s kind of along the lines of what I do. And the nice thing about it is that I specifically support the SDR team. 

[00:41:10] Marc Gonyea: Oh wow. 

[00:41:11] Chris Corcoran: Wow. 

[00:41:11] Marc Gonyea: Okay. 

[00:41:12] Yeah. That’s nice. 

[00:41:13] Chris Corcoran: And so, what kind of tools are you looking at to arm your SDRs with? 

[00:41:16] Collin Nuschy: So, it’s more of the interesting thing about LinkedIn is that we, a lot of companies, purchase tools externally and bring them in.

[00:41:23] LinkedIn is all about building their own rules. 

[00:41:25] Chris Corcoran: Oh, I see. 

[00:41:26] Collin Nuschy: So, a lot of the stuff we use, with the exception of a few things, like, we have our own outreach tools that we buy from other companies and whatnot. But the interesting fact about that is that we have a lot more input into the strategy. So, if you ever have a comp, a product that you buy from another company, you can’t go to that company and say, “Hey, I want you to build this feature.”

[00:41:43] Because they have thousands of other customers that have other things. But with us, we can go to the team, engineering team, and say, “Hey, we would really love this.” And they’ll say, “Okay, build a business case for it. Define why it’s important. What’s the return on investment if we were to do this?” So, it’s a lot more, you have a lot more input into what you want to do with these tools, what you think is good for the tools, and what’s good for the SDRs, essentially.

[00:42:04] Chris Corcoran: So, what, what are the SDRs trying? Like, what are you trying to, like, what are they struggling with that you’re trying to solve for the SDRs? 

[00:42:10] Collin Nuschy: So, it’s a lot of different, it’s kind of what I said at the beginning, right? With sales ops, you’re trying to identify where they’re spending the most time that doesn’t involve selling.

[00:42:18] And then how can you possibly improve that? So, one of the issues that we were having was, um, so for context, we were doing this big CRM migration. There’s, you know, changes that are going in left and right. We have new tools that are being integrated in. So, they’re trying to understand like, they have all these processes that are spending like 10 or 20 hours a week on

[00:42:38] maybe creating new accounts that don’t exist in the system. They have to get those accounts verified. How do we possibly automate that? How do we possibly make that easier for them? So, I have to work with other teams that are in charge of creating the accounts, or they fill the systems for that and identify areas where we can potentially improve upon that.

[00:42:55] Chris Corcoran: Interesting. It sounds like a well-oiled machine over there. 

[00:42:58] Collin Nuschy: Yeah. Yeah, it can be. It’s definitely, the nice thing about it is because of the scale of the company, it allows you to be much more specialized. So, that is where I love my SDR experience. It gives me such a unique insight into what these guys do.

[00:43:12] I’ll be in calls with people, and they’ll try and make assumptions about SDRs, and I’m like, “No, that’s not, that’s not how they’re to do that.” So, it’s definitely been a, it’s a, it was a nice kind of coming boomerang kind of situation where all the experience I kind of got really has pulled together super well, and I’m, I’m loving what I get to do today.

[00:43:29] Marc Gonyea: It’s awesome that you’re at the company where you want to work in the function of business you wanna work, and kind of what, sounds like what got you in was, your part of it was your 

[00:43:39] SR experience. Right? Because there can be as many people with that type of experience that you’re competing with. 

[00:43:45] Collin Nuschy: Yeah.

[00:43:45] Marc Gonyea: With everything else that we talked about from the beginning, the ability or the, the drive to invest in yourself, use, use the network, and you had a good run at Forescout. You’re there for near, near over three and a half years, so you’ve probably got to see and do a bunch of different things, which, “This person’s committed to the cause.”

[00:44:03] and then you can get into an interview and take the technical ops experience you learned at Forescout, and you just kind of mentioned it, that stuff sounds like capturing or analyzing where sales ops are, where you can impact the business. That’s really key in LinkedIn. And you just described the process they have. “Do you want an enhancement or a tweak or something to an internal system? You gotta build a business case.” 

[00:44:24] Collin Nuschy: Yeah. 

[00:44:25] Marc Gonyea: Lots, lots of analysis, right? Around. 

[00:44:28] It does. Yeah. And the, the one thing I would say if, if I was explaining what I did today to the person I was back at being an SDR and trying to connect those two dots, I think the per, person to me in the past would be very, feel very daunted by that.

[00:44:42] And the one thing I’ll say to, you know, anybody who’s maybe considering a sales ops career path and listening to me and thinking, “This sounds really complicated,” don’t think about it too much. Everything that I can talk about today, I learned in the last year. I think a lot of the experience I had from my first job definitely poured it over to that, but it’s not so much that it’s not so much to overcome that it’s impossible, and it’s not even that hard. Just be upfront and honest that you’re here to learn, and you wanna learn, and that’s, people want to teach, you know? That’s one of the things I learned is that people in this industry really wanna be able to teach you.

[00:45:12] So, it definitely helps a lot. 

[00:45:15] Chris Corcoran: And how technical are you? 

[00:45:17] Collin Nuschy: I wouldn’t say I’m super technical if I’m being honest. I think there’s a lot of questions that I have. I go to people who are technical. You’re not expected to be super in-depth, knowledgeable about anything technical in this role. It’s much more about just the way you think. The way you think is all that determines your success here. Being more strategy-focused, being more cerebral, more analytical, that’s all that it’s about. And you, you develop those skills as you kind of grow more into the role. So, you don’t have to have a technical background or any sort of technical knowledge, I think to be successful.

[00:45:49] Chris Corcoran: More process-oriented, though. 

[00:45:51] Collin Nuschy: Yes, definitely more process-oriented. Interesting. 

[00:45:53] Chris Corcoran: So, what advice would you give the SDR who’s like, “You know what? This is a great foot in the door for the industry. Don’t wanna be an SDR, don’t wanna be an SDR leader. Don’t wanna be an AE. I, I just like the ops.

[00:46:04] I’m, I’m interested in operations.” How do you make that leap? 

[00:46:08] What advice would you give? 

[00:46:09] Collin Nuschy: So, I think the same ex, advice that I kind of got in when I was first starting out, and it was super helpful is, one data analysis is very important. I think no matter what job I’ve been in, Excel has been a very big part of that.

[00:46:21] So, learn your basics, learn your formulas, learn your hotkeys, how to use that. There’s a lot of courses out there that will teach you all that, and it’s not that hard. Spend your time learning that. Salesforce is super integral to almost all companies unless you’re LinkedIn and your Microsoft.

[00:46:35] Learn Salesforce. If you have it, you need to go get a Salesforce admin certification. There’s free courses out there that you can take that will teach you all of the stuff. And that’ll, that’s a job instantly. There are careers out there that are just built around Salesforce. If you wanna do that, that’s super helpful too.

[00:46:50] And then leverage your network as an SDR with AEs. The thing about being an AE is it’s easy to port into being sales apps ’cause you work so closely with them at that level. SDRs, you don’t really get as much of that. So, learn as much about what AEs do as you can because that experience also really helps in just being able to make that leap into that role.

[00:47:11] And I think those three things, if you have that and you just have the gritty, keep the gritty attitude of being an SDR, people will be chomping at the bid to hire you. 

[00:47:20] Marc Gonyea: Where do you go from here? 

[00:47:21] Collin Nuschy: Oh, that’s a great question. I think, I’m loving what I’m doing right now. I definitely wanna stick it out for a bit.

[00:47:27] That’s the benefit about working at LinkedIn that I really love, is that people love to jump teams, get a bunch of different experience there, and I think that fits my personality really well. I can stay there for a few years, work on four or five different teams, and kind of take all that experience together and then see where I wanna go next.

[00:47:43] Chris Corcoran: That’s great. 

[00:47:44] Very good. 

[00:47:45] Marc Gonyea: Collin. You’ve been fascinating. 

[00:47:47] Chris Corcoran: Yeah. A whole new world, sales ops. 

[00:47:51] Collin Nuschy: Yeah. Thank you, guys. It’s been great having to be on here. I appreciate you inviting me to join. 

[00:47:55] Chris Corcoran: Absolutely. And for the listeners, as of, you know, we’re a hundred plus alums into this podcast. Right now, you have the title of most prepared.

[00:48:03] So, we, we appreciate the prep work that you, you put into coming on. 

[00:48:07] Collin Nuschy: Hey, being prepared is definitely part of the job where I come from, so. 

[00:48:10] Chris Corcoran: Awesome. Very good. Well, thank you. 

[00:48:11] Marc Gonyea: Thanks, Collin. 

[00:48:12] Collin Nuschy: Thank you, guys.