Ep 172: Frank Sondors
SALES special: Why drug dealers (sometimes) make great B2B sales people, reaching $1M ARR with 4 people team, how to adapt your style to the buyer, cold emails & AI, interview questions to hire sales sharks
Frank Sondors is a seasoned sales expert and the Founder and CEO of Salesforge. With over a decade of experience in the sales industry, Frank has honed his skills in helping businesses navigate the complex landscape of sales and distribution. Frank’s company, Salesforge, is at the forefront of this innovation, helping businesses streamline their sales processes and improve their email outreach. Salesforge is also one of the truly most Baltic startups - a company based in Estonia with founders from Latvia and Lithuania. They recently secured half a million in pre-seed funding, but even before that have managed to build their ARR to $1M with a team of just 4 people.
On this episode we talk about:
Sales and B2B Strategies That Work
Leveraging AI in Sales
Hiring and Evaluating Salespeople
What makes a Successful Salesperson
Ethics in Sales Tactics
Navigating the Evolving Sales Landscape
We are on YouTube and Linkedin as well
Watch select full-length episodes on our YouTube channel > https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCP6ueaLnjS-CQfrMCm2EoTA
Connect with us on Linkedin > https://www.linkedin.com/company/pursuit-of-scrappiness/
Read the full episode transcript below
Janis (00:03.032)
Hello friends, we're back with another episode of Pursuit of Scrappiness podcast. We're building a business, running a team or just starting out in your career. We're here to bring you scrappy and actionable insights to help you become more productive. My name is Janis Zeps, with me here, my co -host, Mr. Uldis Teraudkalns. Hey.
Uldis (00:21.681)
You don't sound too excited that I'm your co -host.
Janis (00:26.352)
You know who is always excited? Like AI, how they always in transcript, which are your name. Mine as well, but yours is more interesting. Jan, yeah. Tearout counts. We'll have to publish those at some point, the best AI takes.
Uldis (00:34.503)
Jan? Yeah, yeah.
Janis (00:43.887)
But before we start, a quick reminder to follow on Spotify and Apple podcasts. Our podcast helps more than you know. In exchange for that, you'll find 170 episodes now already covering all sorts of topics you need to become scrappier and better version of yourself in life and business and the relationship, maybe. I don't know. There's plenty to explore if this is your first episode. By following us, you'll also be the first one to know when a new episode comes out every Tuesday. Super important thing to know every Tuesday as well.
open your Spotify and Apple podcasts and click the follow button. If you have done that, then well, let's just dive into today's topic. And I'll start with a quote, actually one of the previous guests brought in, it's like super good quote. Nothing happens until someone sells something. This is an old wisdom that's probably one of the very few things that will hold true also in the age of AI and you're one of the fundamental truths of this world.
We've discussed sales in multiple episodes so far and it's so crucial part of any business and just generally life and success that we're back at the same topic again. We talk about how do B2B companies break through the noise? How can AI help to level the playing field? Will AI help to do that new entrance entry to market or maybe we'll create more noise and pollution and make it harder? Who knows? And we're about to find out today. To answer these questions, we have invited a true
sales veteran and founder and CEO of Salesforge. Frank Sondors today with us.
Frank Sondors (02:12.391)
Hey, Janice. Hey, all this. How's it going? Yeah, so I think it's a good quote. I typically say there's only two things that a startup does, like super simple. One is you build stuff, and the second one is you sell stuff. And I typically argue selling is a lot more important because you could
sell a bad product. And so distribution matters a lot more, especially in the early days. And then the product can definitely catch up. So yeah, I've been touching sales for over a decade, working for a bunch of places, but yeah, happy to be here.
Janis (02:45.378)
Awesome, exactly. mean, like there are so many stories of products that are good and great, but never get the attention that they could. And without some kind of distribution tactics, mean, we all want to believe the story that if you're truly great, you will go viral and everything will happen, but you need some kind of movement
Frank Sondors (02:53.8)
Yes.
Janis (03:06.666)
even if you're the one percent of the products and most likely you're not. So sales is the crucial part of the strategy, I think, for any startup. Interestingly, we discussed with Salesforge, they are called Baltic Sandwich, a company that is based in Estonia. They are also in Lithuania, founders are also from Latvia, so all three nations represented. They recently secured half a million in pre -seed funding as well. And before
doing that they manage already to build an ARR of 1 million with a team of I guess just four people right. Pretty impressive stuff as well and obviously today we'll dive into sales, what are the principles that remain unchanged in the age of AI but what is AI maybe bringing to the field, know what role email still plays as well and also a bit how to build a sales team of high -performance. think recruitment and sales is also one of the most
Frank Sondors (03:40.829)
Yeah. Yeah.
Janis (04:03.182)
challenges that startup founders often face. With that out of the way, let's start with a warm -up question. I just thought, I have heard these phrases myself, even though I don't work in the industry, but you must hear them as well. Things like, email is dying or dead, or cold email doesn't work, and things like that. Do you hear them, and how do you answer to them, knowing your experience in your business?
Frank Sondors (04:33.983)
I mean, I guess if you just scroll through a LinkedIn feed, you will always hear things like, cold email is dead. Sometimes you see that SEO is dead because of AI. You see things like cold calling is dead. But essentially, there's always somebody calling something dead because something else is trending potentially, or they have observed personally because it doesn't work in their business.
But I can tell you that cold emails is well in life, but it's morphing and there's essentially a lot more challenges that are coming into play. And simple challenges, you know, the fact that if you look at a macro level, then there's more and more emails being sent in the world. There's more and startups, more and more software and blah, blah, And everybody's sending more and more emails and they're sending typically to the same buyers. So that means on average, a buyer keeps on seeing more and more emails being delivered into their mailbox.
And that results typically in email fatigue, right? and the dilemma with generally with all these emails is that is that you typically get a template so you know that when you look at an email typically you know that it's a template it has not been necessarily addressed to you as an individual to your challenges that you're currently working on your company etc. And that's the email fatigue you look at that and and typically you either ignore that some people don't even open emails anymore and then some people click on the spam button and
Yeah, so there's definitely a dilemma, not just with email, but also in other channels, when you call prospects and stuff like that. And as a result, what happens in the world of email generally, so the email world is dominated by Gmail and Outlook, the two main email service providers. So they see these mega trends of more and more emails being sent. And in order to essentially improve the user experience, what they do is they introduce more and more restrictions. And that just means that
A, it really impacts the bad guys in the email ecosystem. So we're here about companies or bad actors that send ransomware to enterprise companies. It's definitely a big cybersecurity threat, essentially. So they're trying to stop these type of actors. But also at the same time, it impacts the good guys, just normal companies that used to reach out maybe five years ago to another business and everything used to work back in those days. And today, the same tactics, the tech setup or the emails that they're sending, it doesn't work anymore.
Frank Sondors (06:55.815)
So essentially email is just morphing, but the way I look at it, just generally at a channel like email, so Slack tried to kill email as a communication channel and it just added another channel of communication these days, having Slack. But nothing I think can kill email because this is the default channel how you would reach out to any business out there.
It's not typically that you would think, okay, will by default call call people or by default, I would send a message on LinkedIn because there's a lot of people that are not available on LinkedIn whatsoever. So email is alive and well, but it will definitely morph. And I think we're headed, especially with everything that's happening on the AI front, we're heading a bit more to what I call a bit more of a world of programmatic essentially, just like this programmatic advertising as a concept.
I do also see that emails will be more targeted, more relevant slash personalized and will be sent in a timely fashion. Whereas the old days is like you just send and hope for the best, right? So essentially the companies that will morph to this sort of smarter approach of executing their emails, they will still see better results. But I think what will definitely be dying is
static communication or templating of essentially of communication with the users in the future. And that's all enabled by large language models, by having better data on prospects and many other things. So we're going to see that transformation, I say, in the next few years. And there's a lot of tech companies that are just popping up right now out there, including us, that are looking to solve sort of this dilemma of bad emails.
Janis (08:37.895)
Yeah, I mean it sounds like Like there are more companies wanting to sell their products I mean everybody has a startup these days compared to maybe ten years ago Then there is like bad actors then there's AI and LLMs What's the overall volume of any kind of promotion or emails in the world? Do you know like in last ten years has it like? quadrupled or is there any kind of stats that that that that show you how
how much of this communication has increased. Even on LinkedIn, think, two, three years ago, you didn't get these chains of promotional emails. Now you do quite regularly.
Frank Sondors (09:15.867)
Yes. So, so every, you know, every channel just becomes more and more saturated. And I think one channel that doesn't become saturated, funny enough, is as much is the calling channel. But yeah, everywhere you will see saturation. So LinkedIn used to have less sort of automations by companies back in the day. Same with emails. So emails used to be just, you know, you would just use the emails a challenge just to send out emails.
as a sort of as part of a major campaign. But right now, a lot of lot of sort of email communication with prospects is a lot sort of automated or smart essentially based on what's called typically triggers. So let's say if somebody changed a job in a company and you would track that, let's say through LinkedIn. So LinkedIn, you can see that, you know, a CMO of a company has changed to another company. So that triggers something in a lot of systems out
And then automatically this person will receive a brand new email saying, hey, congrats on your new job. Are you looking into, say, a new CRM, right? Or a new whatever tooling, right? So that's where the communication is headed, and that's where we are right now.
Janis (10:26.08)
or one of the easiest ways to get these changes is like put this I'm hiring and all the recruiters in the world will start approaching you, but not the candidate.
Frank Sondors (10:34.099)
Yes. Yes. So that's an example. So I also put on LinkedIn, hey, I'm hiring for, for example, right now I'm hiring for a head of growth at Salesforce. And guess what happens? I get like, you know, within 24 hours, I get at least three to five emails from different recruiters. And this really depends on location as well. Naturally, a lot of these recruiters, let's say targeting the UK or US, cetera. arguably, you're, let's say, if you're in the US, you'll get a ton more emails.
because there's a lot more automation and saturation, et cetera. So this is also the difference between, I would say, you being, say, in Baltics and how many emails you receive in Baltics versus US. In US, arguably receive 3 to 5x more emails than being in Baltics, because the companies just don't target other companies in Baltics as aggressively as the ones in the US. So also, there's a huge difference.
on any of the topics that we touch upon. The difference how things are done in the US or the saturation levels or how many emails are being sent versus Europe and then versus like a region like Baltics. So yeah, and we see that. So we see also our customers, right? So when we talk to them, most of them only want to send, for example, an email to the US or call call the US. They don't want to call call Europe as an example. And that has to do with simple things like
Americans, for example, believe that when they invest, let's say, into a piece of tech or software, that's like an investment. And essentially, you put a dollar in and you get $3 out, you know, And whereas in Europe, you have to typically justify every single euro that you're investing into something. And it will go through buying committee. And for example, I'm speaking to a company here in Baltics and it's a huge company. And guess what? This is not even a big deal. It's a $50 MRR deal.
Like it's a tiny deal and they had to go through it took them three months to sign off this tiny tiny deal. And you guys somebody will pull out a credit card. Well then it's a deal it had to go through legal hoops and then I had somebody from legal reaching out asking us to change our some of the things on our end and it was just a 50 dollar amount of deal. They're still not paying more than that.
Uldis (12:33.007)
Is that even considered a deal? That sounds like credit card details.
Frank Sondors (12:54.323)
So this is why also companies in Europe arguably don't want to do business with other European companies because of stuff like that. And you're much better off going to the US where I don't know a 10 people company can pull out a credit card and give you 10 K within a week.
Janis (13:14.086)
This is actually a good maybe point. Like I mentioned, you built a pretty decent already flow of recurring revenue. Can you walk us through where your clients based? Are they US mainly or are you targeting Europe?
Frank Sondors (13:28.755)
Yeah, so this is why I have a very good insight. So we are targeting the US predominantly. But, you know, I would typically describe the English speaking markets like US, Canada, UK, US in particular, because about, yeah, I would say 60, 70 % of the revenue is US. So we're a typical sales tech company where majority of revenue is typically based in the US. And that's very similar across our competitors or other just, you know, general companies. And so we see these differences between
essentially selling into Europe versus selling into the US. And also the deal cycles, the ticket sizes, so how big the deals are, how many leads you get from the US, what's the conversion rates of those? So all of that you can track in your CRM and you can see the difference. So it's like a no brainer becomes that you should focus on the US. Now the challenges come with that and actually the
If you're based in Europe, have to work typically evenings. So I'll go to market team, for example, does work evenings predominantly to cover the US. So there's the upside and the downside with a market like US and being based here in
Janis (14:40.898)
We basically had this quote Aldwin like about email dying and like the rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated. think Mark Twain or somebody said that. So we established that email is alive and companies they know they can make use of it somehow but they probably don't know maybe exactly how in this day and age with all the volumes flowing around, right? What do you advise except for
know, buying your product, of course, but like in terms of principles, like how would a B2B SaaS company that is starting out, how would they even start thinking about cold emails as part of their strategy? What is important? Like should founder just start blasting from his Gmail, like 100 mails a day? How would you set it up if you were a B2B SaaS company these days?
Frank Sondors (15:31.987)
So the thing with email, or Gijon, today, it became as complex as running Google Ads campaigns. So if you just think about that, hey, do you know how to run Google Ads campaign? If the answer is no, then trust me, it's the same sort of level of complexity. The difference is that if you're going to fail in cold email, it's not going to cost you as much as in Google Ads, because Google Ads is pretty much a bottomless.
Uldis (15:33.446)
if you were.
Frank Sondors (16:01.331)
bit of money that you can kind of push through. And funny enough, I used to work at Google as well myself. So I know pretty much the difference between the two softwares. And we are kind of building also kind of similar to how Google Ads products have been built. But you have to think through, yes, there has to be sort of a strategy, not just around tech stack, but around sort of messaging, targeting, etc. But typically it boils down into four pillars of success.
to be really, just generally successful in reaching out to other businesses. So one is what's called infrastructure. So these days you need email infrastructure to reach out to other businesses because if you're be sending from your primary domain, so your primary business domain, your website, you're gonna be sending emails at scale, you are at risk of ruining the domain of your reputation. And it happens to a lot of people, which is the reason why they're reaching out to us because it's too late. So essentially sending emails these days at scale.
any scale really, is a really bad idea. So, and I think a lot of companies are waking up to that and typically they wake up too late because they already have a burn -day domain. Then you typically need to use some sort of software that specializes in what's called email availability, meaning that more of your emails land in the primary mailbox than rather than landing in spam. And there's a lot of things that need to be done on that topic. So that's what I call Pillar 2, so choosing the right piece of software that actually sends emails that's designed for cold emailing and that's also designed for availability.
Number three is the copy. And actually, this is one of the things that is not looked into from a kind of the ability standpoint. But the fact that you're sending this template, that's this piece of sort of static communication, it actually harms your ability. Because the way that it works is when you're sending, for example, a lot of emails, let's say to Gmail users, and then some of these Gmail users will report your emails spam, then Google essentially learns from that and trains from that. So when they see that the same copy
So the content is pretty much the same, most of it, apart from changing the name or maybe some other variable in the email, it understands that it's being sent at mass. And because a of users, percentage have reported that email as spam, then your email start lining as spam, not because of your domain, not because of your IP address, but simply because of the content that's within the email that has been reported as spam multiple times by the previous users. So that means that, you
Frank Sondors (18:20.037)
Again, what I saying about the world of programmatic, we're essentially moving to the world where every email has to be uniquely crafted to that individual. A, to help you with your ability, but B, to really improve the response rates because of the fatigue that you're seeing in the world of email. And then the final kind of so that's the fourth pillar, is the targeting. So of course you could have a great infrastructure, could have a great sort of software to send emails and the best possible email copy.
But if you're sending to the wrong people, then nothing will happen. So these are like four pillars, infrastructure, sending software, copy, and then targeting. Now on the copy front, there's two ways to sort of solve that. So one is what's called you need to randomize the content within the email. And the second way to solve that is leveraging AI, where you're doing computations essentially within the email. And essentially the better the computations or the better the emails, the better your ability, the better the results.
So that typically means in the world that we're in and what's available on the market, not just with us, a bunch of other tools out there, is you need to leverage publicly available data about your prospect. So in real time, you have to be accessing at least their website, their LinkedIn profile, maybe other data sets that are particularly important to your industry and leveraging essentially these data sources that are available on the web to everybody programmatically to then do computations against that. And by doing so, and if you do that really well, through some sort of engine, let's say,
this is where you get the best possible emails and that's essentially the future that we're going into. Now, this sort of better emails does unlock essentially the ability to send more and maybe greater emails. So I think where we've headed with the world that we're in, because I do expect more more emails being sent out. So we're talking about billions of emails and it has accelerated massively over the last few years.
Now there are some third party sources that will say one or the other about the emails, but we're talking about billions and billions of emails per day. There's a lot of emails. It doesn't matter what the number is, but it's just growing. But because essentially buyers will be getting more emails on average over the coming years, we're also probably going to see tech on the buyer side to help them process those emails. Because let's say you as a human, get 10 emails, let's say in an hour, you don't really have time to review every single one of those emails. So we're going to get to see tech on the buyer side to help them process
Frank Sondors (20:44.723)
the emails, only show the relevant emails to the user based on the preferences, based on the business challenges, many other things. So this is how we're going to see sort of world sort of morphing. And ultimately we get to probably going to get to a point where you're going to have an AI agent on the seller side talking to another AI agent on the buyer side. That's ultimately where we headed. The AI will be buying from another AI and we were going to be buying programmatically in the future in B2B.
Janis (21:04.473)
That's crazy,
Frank Sondors (21:11.449)
And that is much better than leaving it up to the humans to engage with each other. So I guess that's the world we're headed
Janis (21:11.757)
Yeah, yeah.
Janis (21:19.794)
It is crazy, you use AI, even now, sometimes you use AI to help you craft a message that you send, not as a promotional outreach, but to another person, and that other person maybe uses AI to shorten it because he receives tons of emails. If we arrived at this topic, AI, next question I wanted to ask, how is it changing the game? And from your end, you mentioned already a few use cases.
Any other things how this will impact sales, landscaping next, in short term next, I know three, two, three years, how do you envision
Frank Sondors (21:55.699)
Yeah. So what we will see, and it's already happening and particularly in the U S where companies are just faster at innovating and introducing stuff. So instead of having a larger sales team, so let's say, don't know, a sales team is about 10 to 20 as a sales development reps that are just prospecting the building pipeline. You will actually see, we'll see reduction in head count because of the possible, because of the possibility that the software does, for example, the personalization
builds you less than many other things. So essentially we're moving away from having the cost within the labor workforce over to passing over the cost to the software where the software does a lot of the legwork when it comes to pipeline building and does so at fraction of the cost. If you compare that to the salaries that you would be paying to a typical rep.
So you will see essentially a leaner and meaner teams exactly what the world of VCs wants. want to have, want to, especially these days, you want to make sure you're running a company very lean and mean. And we're the example of that, you know, so we got to a million bucks with a team of four. We got to 2 million bucks in ARR without a single salesperson in the team. So we're going to see more companies being able to produce more revenue per.
per employee and that's the ultimate really measure that you're looking at. But to achieve that, all the tech, using the AI capabilities that are out there, is trying to figure out in every department, whether that's sales or other departments, how do you use the current tech to minimize actually the head count? And it's just going after the repetitive tasks. like crafting an email, building lists of contacts, sending those out.
processing replies, booking into meetings. All of that can be done by what's called the agentic software out there. And agentic software means there's some sort of bot essentially, agent, AISDI, whatever that is. So we're heading into a world where also humans, they're still gonna be operating. So there's no way to get rid of humans, but there is definitely a way to reduce the head count. So we're gonna see essentially companies having their sales web operating in a software, just like they are today.
Frank Sondors (24:16.371)
But in tandem, we're going to see these autonomous capabilities in big and small companies that will be able to execute a particular sales motion. let's say you have a particular segment in a big company that it just doesn't make sense to apply sales rep. It's just too expensive. And then maybe a cheaper option, essentially, is to apply AI agents that is typically much, much cheaper to operate and can be operated also 24 -7.
So we're gonna see that blend essentially that we're heading into right now. But the other way I look at it, know, and why it's necessary to do this is because typically, you know, I used to have a sales team of about 15, my previous gig prior to launching Salesforce. So I used to hire, you know, hundreds of salespeople and also fired a lot of them. And you would typically say that for every 10 salespeople that you hire, one is natural.
about three to four people can be trained up to be somewhat good as the person that's really natural. And then 60 % is typically dead wood. So that 60 % dead wood is exactly what a lot of softwares out there are looking to get rid of. So that you only have 40 % of the individuals in sales, but you then with all the LLM capabilities, you're just increasing the output of the 40%. That's exactly the world we're headed in. So we will see lean and mean it seems, but we're just gonna see
much higher output per rep in sales. So
Uldis (25:42.877)
How big are the kind of knowledge barriers of entry to go into this mode by a company and a sales team? Does it take a lot of tech savviness to figure it out or we are already there where it's a lot of plug and play and very simple kind of interfaces and ways to set those things
Frank Sondors (26:08.179)
So this whole space exists less than 12 months, meaning the plug and play kind of approach. There are companies that already are doing that out there. We're gonna be launching our own version in the next couple of months, where we're gonna be provisioning essential autonomous capabilities. But it's essentially dumping everything that you know about your company, whether that's pricing, product, how things are done, what's the availability, blah, blah, into a database, essentially. Think of it this way.
you know, dumping everything that you know about a company, how things should be run, your sales play with stuff like that, let's say into a software, right? Just like you're training a rep. And then the software will use that knowledge to essentially give you the best possible results. So essentially you're training of that data, you're training of other local customers data to then execute the best possible emails. And it's...
Uldis (27:00.605)
So then it will be a game of who can provide the best quality data to train them.
Frank Sondors (27:06.839)
That is one, so that's the first party data, yes. So it's super important. The more data you're gonna plow into the software, so that's kind of your brain. And then of course there's some learnings that's gonna be built on top of that. So because it's not gonna be perfect on day zero, but essentially the more emails you'll send, the better they'll become. Or the more sort of instructions that you'll provide over time, the better the output of every email or essentially any activity that you're doing in that software. Yeah, so that first party data is like super important.
but we're also headed into the world of third party data. So because let's say your company may not have enough data, you're not sending enough emails, whatever, for machine learning purposes or general AI purposes. So the smartest companies out there, what they will do is they will combine the first party data with third party data. So actually look alike companies. And you call that what we call the cluster approach. A cluster approach meaning you are combining, let's say companies from the same industry into a cluster.
and you have a lot of data and you're stripping out PII data from that cluster. And then you can essentially crunch, let's say, email data within that cluster. And essentially, then it gives you a lot more data to work with and then help everybody in that industry to write the best possible emails. So what we're not seeing in the world of sales, and we're definitely seeing that world of martech, like with Google and Facebook, Facebook and Google uses a lot of data to help their advertisers to become more profitable.
Right, so, and they're essentially using multiple clients' they're stripping out PI data, leveraging ML models and stuff like that. And that's exactly what we're gonna see also in the world of sales. So, but yeah, first priority is first party data, so your own data and leveraging that. But really, to maximize efficiencies, third party data is necessary. And that's exactly, I think, the world that we're building and we're heading into as well.
Janis (29:03.608)
It's a, I remember like my first exposure to like AI tools and this was like five years already. There was like a plugin, LinkedIn plugin, think Synthesia it was called, where you could like plug in somebody's profile and it will give you like, basically I had a meeting, I wanted to prepare well and I found this thing and I plugged it to the person I was meeting with and it gave this psychological profile, how you should talk and gave like pointers and five years even like ago and said like, this guy, no bullshit, give him brief stuff, don't like,
And I went to the meeting and it's like exactly exactly what the tool said and And I thought wow that was there anything like in terms of yeah tools that you can see that people who don't use email but but but they'd still in sales or they're doing business they're doing deals any any other tools AI tools you have used yourself maybe or or any other founders can use to to prepare for like I know meetings or to convert better
Frank Sondors (30:02.237)
Yeah, so I
Uldis (30:02.341)
Wait, did you say people who don't use email?
Frank Sondors (30:05.085)
Hahaha
Janis (30:06.167)
as an outreach. Well, to be honest, mean, how, but like how actually I use it, of course, but actually it's dropped a lot in recent years. Anyway, yeah, as any other tools that you have seen that are like interesting to check
Uldis (30:08.147)
okay.
Frank Sondors (30:22.641)
Yeah, so I mean, I wouldn't maybe promote a particular tool, but I would say if you just search on Google disk profiling, so disk, D -I -S -C profile, that's exactly what you're saying. So there are tools out there that build this profile. So essentially this profile is exactly what you're saying, is like, know, this person is more direct or prefers this type of communication and that side of communication. And there are companies that are literally crunching.
people's data on LinkedIn or any other available data to then profile them so that you have, you're essentially changing your style of communication, right? So, and there are quite a few tools that do that and you can plug them into your CRM and kind of such a, yeah, prepare better for the meeting so that you're not the same person. I always say you have to be in sales like a chameleon. You have to adjust to the style of communication. for example, when I talk to somebody in the US versus UK, I use different.
words even or pronounced differently. So for example, the word niche in the UK is niche, but in the US it's niche. So you need to also adapt in English much better to the US audience and you don't talk about, in the US about soccer, you talk about football in the UK and stuff like that. You need to adjust and become a chameleon. So it kind of goes also just beyond the profiling. It's
You need to understand these differences and that's something you need to be trained on and no tool will be able to help you on that front. It just comes from an experience. Yeah, I've knacked as well.
Uldis (31:51.761)
Basically you need to become an actor.
Janis (31:55.961)
What was this TV show about the guy who in 90s could be anything like a pretender or something? Yeah, yeah, yeah, there was this 90s US show. Yeah, yeah, was like one every episode he was a, yeah, yeah.
Uldis (32:01.579)
emulator. In Latvian it was called emulator but I think in English it was a bit different term. Are you a doctor? I am today.
Frank Sondors (32:12.401)
Yes. But you know, this also comes down to, know, not just about profiling, but who are the best people just in sales, you know, that will be able to profile, you know, everybody in their own way, right, without a piece of tech. So, you know, when I hire people, and let's say they have, I'm hiring for, let's say, an SDR role, the typical things that I look at is when they have no sales experience, it's like what they have done in the past. So, for example, they've been a waiter is a fantastic signal for hiring.
Because in waitering you have to objection handle, you have to upsell in a lot of cases. If you provide a great service then you get tipped and stuff like that. that's the more lookalike and experience. And these people, like waiters, can also profile customers really well. So this is gonna be a grumpy guy or this is gonna be a grumpy guy, right? This is a person that may tip really well. it's a couple. Well, this guy probably wants to show off and is gonna tip properly, you know? So they do their own profiling, right, when they're in the restaurant.
Guess what? I used to be a waiter myself, so I could profile people, right? So I don't need these tools, right, to profile. But that's just an example of, okay, let's, you know, if you're hiring for a role, actually the probability of a person being successful in sales is because they've been a waiter in the past. Same with being a bartender. Then in other roles would be like things like, so if you've been an English language teacher, so just because of that, you are command
English is much more superior than an average person, even an English speaker, native English speaker, and then you really think about the words you pick in sales to communicate with another person. So what I've seen also in the past is that there's a huge success by hiring somebody that actually teaches English. Then other signals will be like, you know, if you've been abroad even, so it's a huge success rate if an individual, say from Baltics or from the central European landscape essentially,
when it goes to UK for like a decade and then comes back versus domestic individuals, there's a much higher success rate in sales. So things like that because you've been exposed to different cultures, let's say in the UK or Ireland, whatever that is, and you come back and your ability to be able to converse with different cultures and stuff like that is exactly also what you need in sales. So this is where...
Frank Sondors (34:30.611)
what people have done in life, they have the ability to profile based on the experience. So they don't need these tools, but yeah, of course it definitely helps. Especially if you have, let's say, never sold into the US. Let's say you're starting a startup and you've never sold to the US, then yeah, this profiling probably is a good way to go.
Uldis (34:48.867)
drug dealers that's only for the movies or that also helps.
Frank Sondors (34:52.401)
I actually hired a drug dealer. did not know the guy was a drug dealer, but yes, once. So you all types of individuals in sales, trust me. So there's a lot of stories about hiring people in sales. Because in sales, it's not about, hey, you have a degree in X and blah, blah. No, it's about your personality, right? And it's about your charisma in a lot of cases, about your ability to get stuff done.
Uldis (34:58.575)
Was he good?
Frank Sondors (35:18.803)
And yeah, it's not like you're gonna do background checks on people in sales. But yeah, there was even an experience a few years back that we hired a drug dealer. And there's a lot of these different sort of stories. And that's why it's quite always exciting what happens in the world of sales, whether that's hiring or just generally coworkers and yeah.
Uldis (35:46.103)
I he wasn't doing so well in drug dealing if he had to take a sales job. Usually margins are higher there.
Frank Sondors (35:51.111)
Yes, yeah, he even lost one. But yeah, I mean, there's a lot of funny stories. Yes, police can get frequently involved when it comes to sales and sales employees. But that's part of the game and that's part of the fun in the world of sales. You just get a lot of interesting
Janis (36:12.76)
So, yeah, mean, Wolfo was here, then that sense wasn't that wrong. A few episodes back we laughed that he recruited from his circle of drug -dealing friends and was successful, but like, turns out it works in real life as well. As we talk about this, like, yeah, it almost feels like we have too much information now, but like,
Frank Sondors (36:26.259)
Yes.
Janis (36:37.38)
Like I can check somebody out really well. can say like, hey, your daughter just turned three and I saw like, you can get creepy even like in the meeting, right? But like, is this border, is it natural or can you teach it? Like, you know, sometimes people know that like, hey, I know you like this football team, so I'll bring it up, but I'll do it in a non -intrusive way. At least for me, it's always like this, whether we feel it or not, but like, I think the capabilities to get really creepy, it's also there
Yeah, how do you control for that?
Uldis (37:07.827)
Okay, I noticed you just did a boob job. How does that feel or how is that working for you?
Janis (37:11.29)
Yeah, in Turkey, yeah, yeah,
Frank Sondors (37:15.697)
I mean, there is a tool that popped up recently that comes into the topic. think it's called widebridge .ai and they literally scan everything that you can scan about an individual online. that's, yeah, and you can kind of surface any type of information about a particular person. And yes, some topics can become creepy, but I would say that never came up really.
And I mean, I don't touch family topics personally with an individual unless that individual brings up. So typically you wait for the prospect to bring up these topics and then I can chip in and share a similar world. So let's say if somebody talks about their kids, I will also talk about my kids, but I will never talk about my kids first. So you're kind of waiting for this. How you adjust in sales. You're waiting for the input from the prospect. And based on that input, you are like a chameleon. You adjust to that.
It's like when a random dude jumps on the call or a girl, you're waiting to understand what's the communication style on the call and then you quickly flip to that communication and you're mimicking your prospect in lot of ways. And these are the best salespeople that I've seen in my life. So if somebody wants to be direct, I can be also super direct and say nothing and no chit chat, nothing gets straight to the point. And this is where I see a lot
startup founders fail massively because they're exactly the same person in every call, particularly in our region. Like it's a big problem.
Uldis (38:45.423)
I think it is, I'm just thinking as we speak, I'm thinking a bit about myself as well. I did the kind of founder led sales. I've never been like a sales professional and I never thought about this in any of my sales talks or anything. I wouldn't even think of adjusting anything because, you know, I am, you know, the CEO of the company. I'm doing this myself. So I have so many things to worry about. I don't have time
profile to adjust and things like that. So I think it's very natural problem for founders to define themselves in first in terms of time. Second, in terms of also like, hey, you know, I'm a founder of a company. I'm talking to either another founder or maybe a senior employee or whatever. You know, we're the kind of equals or whatever peers. Like, why do I need to adjust myself to talk to them? Right. But then again, if you want to sell stuff.
Frank Sondors (39:44.637)
Well, mean, look at it this way. let's say you're speaking to a prospect and the prospect is evaluating three different tools and they're similar to each other. Then it down at the end, looking at the team. Which team do you bet on? Because when you say buy a piece of software, also, when you're paying for a subscription, you're also renting the team behind that. Which team do you believe in the most? And the team that you like the most is the one that's gonna win typically. So if I liked you from our conversation the most, you seem like a reasonable guy.
I really liked our chat. He seemed like knowledgeable. I'll do business with you over another dude that just gave me feature list of a software. So that's something that's not being, you know, it's very difficult to, you know, to evaluate that piece of part of your business. But if you're not likable to an individual, you're just neutral. Like then it doesn't spark any emotions, right? Essentially, if it sparks no emotions, like, you know, what will I lose by not working with Frank?
Let's say I will lose a lot. Like, because in our case, you know, we provide a lot of knowledge for free essentially to the customers and we jump on calls and we help them out and many other things. It's not something that other competitors will do because they are sort of building up, let's say walls between, you know, themselves and the customer through, let's say the support team or not being able, not being reachable and stuff like that. So for example, when I reach customers, when I automate, for example, some of the communication,
the email that they can reply to is my email, not somebody in my team, just to give you an idea. So you are being accessible as a founder, just even that, you know, makes people trust you more. So yeah, there's that sort of component, you know, I buy because of the founding team, not just purely because of the product, because even though the product may be slightly worse than the competitor's product,
I believe that this product is the one that I should invest because I really like the team that's building this. They know exactly what they're talking about. So my belief is that this piece of software will serve me much better than any other software because these guys know how to build it better and I can relate to them and stuff like that. So like the human component is still super important because at the end of the day, humans buy from other humans. I know they're buying a software.
Frank Sondors (42:08.733)
but you're buying typically from another human in lot of cases. This is why there's even a video of me on the website. If you go to the about page, there's a video. So you'll watch that video and people are like, yeah, that guy, I seen this face. And then people go into chat, are you the guy? I really liked that video. Like people relate to you. this is why, and if you look at things like on LinkedIn, for example, or let's say, let's bring up Tesla as an example.
Do people follow more Tesla as a brand or do people follow more Elon Musk? Well, they follow Elon Musk because they like the guy more arguably than anything that he's building. It's the guy. They believe in him. And that's exactly how, you know, my piece of advice, like position, not your brand out there, your piece of software. No, should, you should be the, the, the, the really the driving brand of a software is actually the founder or one of the founders.
Whoever that is, it just has to be one of the two or three founders, whatever that is typically. And that's how you go to market. And that's how you build trust, authority in the space, and it's gonna be much easier when it comes to sales. Because people will not be searching for the company name, they'll be searching for Frank Saunders. And then they'll bump into whatever he's selling. Because you build up the trust with that individual.
Janis (43:29.028)
Yeah, so really good advice, really. Let's say, for example, you hired these people, they matched the criteria, you gave them a chance, it's a waiter or a drug dealer, looks good, looks likable, works for a few months. How do you evaluate the performance? Sales is obviously the end metric, right? Like how much money they bring in, but like, there anything, if your pipeline just takes longer, for example, to close deals, any other things you look for to understand? Yeah.
Frank Sondors (43:58.077)
Yeah, good question. Very good question.
Janis (43:58.938)
What's your take on
Uldis (43:59.663)
Is this a killer or not?
Frank Sondors (44:02.769)
Yeah, is it the shark or not a shark? So we operate what we call on the basis of a higher fast and fire fast. Not higher slow or whatever, no, higher very fast and fire very fast, if not faster. So typically in the first two to four weeks, irrespective of what the deal cycle is, you will observe the individual. What did they do? How did they behave? How did
talk about stuff, what are the excuses of not achieving something? There's always excuses in sales about something. And what those excuses are and how they think about and what they're gonna do about the problem that they have. So let's say that the problem is like pipeline building. So then, you know, in sales, it's not about, I have this problem. It's about, here's how I'm gonna solve this. I'm gonna do 100 calls tomorrow, you know, stuff like that. So you can see that progression in individuals very fast and you see that acceleration.
But typically what we're observing, so I always say there's kind of four main kind of things I look at in the individual. And I call that hunger essentially. Does the individual even has hunger for something? And the hunger is first of all for professional development. Like you're saying, becoming a better version of yourself. We're looking to see what a person in the first sort of week two, three, four actually develops and becomes a better version of themselves.
You can see that rapid acceleration in product knowledge, et cetera. Whereas with a lot of people, it's so slow, they still don't know what the product does in week four, that's like a red flag. You should fire them ASAP. Because really the best people are the ones that are just hungry to learn, and they just learn everything they can. They watch old videos, they jump on old calls, they're trying to ramp essentially. And there's that hunger. So you need to see that hunger. It's not about babysitting people in sales, it's about they're hungry, they're asking you questions, and they're asking you a lot of questions. Questions asked is a
green signal actually, very strong signal. No questions asked is typically a bad thing. So that professional development was one. Number two is success. So people are thinking about how can I hit my quota? What do I need to do? Frank, help me. Like, what do I need to do to hit 10 meetings in a month? How many dollars should I do, et cetera? So they're trying to figure out how to be successful generally. And then number three, typically in sales is just money.
Frank Sondors (46:25.575)
So people want to earn money, want to earn good money, and they will typically ask you questions on how commission structure is based, as detailed as possible, typically means they're very sophisticated and they want to earn a lot of money. And they're going to ask you a question, how much money can I earn? How can I earn more money? What can I do to earn more money? And these are the signals of top salespeople in world. Because top people, even though they maybe don't have that much of experience, the reason why they're joining sales, they want to earn a ton of money.
And if you don't want to earn a lot of money and there are people like that, by the way, there are people that join sales. They're not hungry for cash at all because guess what? They parents that can subsidize everything. Right. And for them, sales is just an experience and you don't want these people. This is not a university to go and get experience like not in our case, at least. So, for example, yesterday I jumped on the call with somebody and the person said, I just want to improve my communication skills.
So she just started applying job here and we stopped the call after five minutes. And I said, this is not a place to learn because we're not here to teach essentially like baseline things like, know, communication skills. Right. So, and he said, listen, this is not a fit. Let's just stop here. And that's it. So it's also important. Like you can figure these things out what the person wants. But then when it comes to evaluation, so people join the company. So this is how we hire, you know, we hire for hunger essentially.
essentially. So if the hunger is not there, nothing else will happen. You don't have motivation, right? And this is where I see actually the biggest struggle generally in this and in Europe, like hunger. Are you hungry? Like, do you have ambition? Do you want to achieve something in your life? What do you want to be in five years? So and then when it comes to evaluation, we typically evaluate when the person actually joins. Naturally, we want to see that hunger kind of evolve, right? But typically there's kind of four sort of pillars. One is one is what we call competence. Do we see competence improvement? So we see essentially, you know, that ramp of skill
that professional development. Number two is performance. Do we see people ramping up, let's say, activity and the output, let's say meetings or pipelines, et cetera, being built? Do we see that performance ramping up? Then number three is cultural fit or culture add. There's two words how you look at it, whether you add towards the culture or whether you're a fit. Both are okay. We're typically optimized for add. So that means other cultures or other ways of looking at things is actually better for the business.
Frank Sondors (48:50.899)
And then of course there are people that are toxic, that are just negative about life and they just, you you can also fire people literally because of culture issues. And then the last one is what's called commitment. So that's kind of more towards hunger. You can see that people are committed. They will stay, for example, for an extra 30 minutes or they'll come in early to accommodate something, et cetera, for a particular customer or prospect. So...
Yeah, so these are the four pillars. So commitment, competence, culture, and performance. So this is how you evaluate. And I would just use a very simple sort of traffic light system, whether you are green, yellow, or red. And ultimately within a month, one, two, and three, there cannot be any red across those pillars. Whereas green and yellow is
Janis (49:46.639)
Yeah, awesome insights. Take out your notebooks or we also publish transcript of these. You can use AI for this, but like it was a really good and insightful conversation, Frank. I think we learned a ton about sales and just how, you know, humans operate. Yeah, thanks a lot for this conversation and good time to close and good time to say to the listeners that we will be back
one week. Thanks Frank.
Uldis (50:19.847)
Thanks, man.
Frank Sondors (50:19.955)
Thanks, Janis. Thanks, Uldis.
Please note that the transcript text is AI-generated. We apologize for any potential errors or inaccuracies. Thank you for your understanding.
