How Do You Manage a Mountain of Inbound Leads? with Dan Wardle from Vidyard

I'm your host Hamish Knox. Today. We are getting ideas and insights from Dan Wardle from Vidyard on how do you create full funnel freedom. Dan is currently the head of sales at Vidyard responsible for all areas of revenue, including the enterprise SMB and self-serve segments. In previous roles. Dan led the growth department@videomsmbsalesatsalesforce.com and channel sales management at Blackberry.

Dan. Welcome to the full funnel.

Dan Wardle: Thank you so much for having me. This is going to be great. Yeah. I'm

Hamish Knox: really excited. So expand on the intro. Give us the 90 seconds on you and your history and what got you to where you are at vidyard today..

Dan Wardle: Yeah. Well, when I joined, before you asked me, you know, how did a bachelor of geography get into sales?

And it, it starts right from then because my first job was at Blackberry, right during school, got to map out their demographics and figure out how to go after the retail market, when they still had, you know, the black and whites. And soon after we had the color screen and it was an amazing journey, just kind of learning sales, but it was different, you know, you're traveling all over the country.

I managed to at T and T. So, you know, in Canada, managing ATMC in the states, flying back and forth to every state down there, we had people everywhere and then, you know, things weren't going so hot. Uh, Uh, seven years later and that's not, you know, I've got to start seeing what some of these startups are doing.

Like a ton of people have left Blackberry and created this ecosystem of startups called Communitech here in Kitchener Waterloo. And so I started to poke around and talking to different business leaders that had started companies. And I met Michael and Devin, who are the founders of vineyard very early.

They were still in a house, five people building out a video platform sounded super interesting. I understood the value prop, but it was like $10. Because it was more of like a Vimeo competitor. And I was like, that doesn't make sense. I can't sell that. That's not. And so I went to Salesforce and learned how to do sales properly.

You know, they are the defacto sales trainer. Basically, you go there, you learn how to be in direct sales. And, uh, it was a great experience for a year. I kept in touch with Michael and Devin. And as soon as they found that product market fit and enterprise. Uh, I just like kept begging them to join. So they started doing integrations and everything, and I just got it.

There were so many people, but I saw how it could help. And, uh, yeah, almost nine years ago I joined vid yard. We were still in a house that they owned, that they just kind of tore the walls off and built some plywood desks, looking back, like people ask me all the time. What made you leave Salesforce to go there?

And like, I actually don't know. I think it was the, the allure of being able to build something, but now we're 300 plus employees. Uh, fortunate enough to, to lead the revenue teams. So it's been the right choice. It was really exciting time.

Hamish Knox: What an amazing journey is as you reflect back on those nine years, cause you went from, you know, a few people paying you 10 bucks a month or whatever to where you are now.

Like what has been the greatest change over those nine years in how you've gone to market and how you've created fulfilling.

Dan Wardle: Yeah, well, there's, there's been a huge, huge change for our business. So we had this explosive growth in the beginning, B2B video marketing, tied to Marketo Eloqua, Pardot, and Salesforce and HubSpot.

And then that just became the de facto. Like if you're a marketing person in B2B, you need to use video. Sure. But there's only so many B2B marketers in the world. And then one of my salespeople and SDR started making videos and quick time uploading them to video card, grabbing the thumbnail, putting it in his email and sending it.

It was like a big process. And our CTO is like, I can build that using a Chrome extension. Why don't we just build something and you can use it. And then it became a big product. And now it represents over 80% of our. And so the transition went from B2B marketing sales. You have to be a demand gen marketer as a salesperson.

You have to be teaching these marketers how to do demand gen better. It has a very difficult thing to teach a salesperson. And now we've moved to having a sales product and a sales product is easy to sell because you use it every day. But then the big transition, the real transition and go to market happened when we decided let's make it a free product, let's make it so that everyone can use it for.

With limitations and with branding and the idea becomes, you know, make it organic growth so that you get hundreds of users at a large enterprise and then the it team needs to control it and they buy it for everybody. It's the LinkedIn model, right? Everybody has LinkedIn and then eventually, you know, they want to control your InMail.

So they buy LinkedIn sales nav for you. So that was a huge transition. The sales team was used to selling top down and now it's saying no, no. Give them product for free. You know, in hindsight, it's like, yeah, of course we're going to do that. But then the team did not think that was a good idea. And so there was a lot of change management to really change the funnel from being a traditional marketing funnel to now being a combined funnel of, you know, when we say leads, we're talking about a video, either a free signup or somebody who attends a webinar, those are the same needs.

It's all one lead that then flows down to the sales. And we're fortunate enough that the marketing team controls that whole funnel working really closely with product and everything else to make sure that it's coming into the right spot at the right. Very cool.

Hamish Knox: And I actually remember quick time, I made a Goss reference at a university talk when I was 30 and I felt old for the very first time because none of the students are like, they're looking at me, like, what are you talking about?

Uh, so tell me a bit more about that because we look at the integration of sales and marketing, and sometimes we say, you know, marketing's from Venus and sales is from Mars. And if. All leads are the same now from a sales person's perspective, that can sound terrifying from a sales perspective. That can also sound terrifying cause it's kind of wheat from chaff, right?

Like I, an individual who signs up on a free platform. Hey, that's great. But when is that actually going to turn into MRR? So how do you make sure that that works and you can actually report properly without confusing things as terms of what's actually in the pipeline in terms of dollars?

Dan Wardle: Yeah. I can tell you, I grew up on the Prairie.

You know, when we say leads, that's not something we're sending to the sales team. We then go through a very careful funneling of those leads down to either an MQA or an MQL. Okay. So MQA is an account. So there's five users. One of them is a power user. Plus somebody attended a webinar. The account score says like this is an account to go off of.

There's a lot of firmographic filters on that too, to make sure we're sending the right size and. And then there's a traditional MQL, which is the same thing, except as other companies, you know, they've attended a bunch of webinars been on the side of the. But it's also, are they a user? How many views have they got on their videos?

So they've seen the valley. Like, it's not how many videos they've made. You make a hundred videos and don't get a view. You're pretty demoralized. And I'm probably not going to call you. But if you got a hundred views, you've seen the value of video, you've got the view notification saying, you know, Hamish watched your video and you're like, yes, I'm going to call him.

Like, that's not the value. So that's when we then trigger an MQL to the. We actually segment our MQL as well into those ones, which we call NADAC now. So it's still call them within a day. We try to do it within five hours, but they haven't asked you to call them. So be aware of that and look at the sense of being personal.

And then an act now is somebody who's on our chat, on our website requesting demo, that kind of thing. And that's like five minute response time, traditional funnel.

Hamish Knox: Wow. And I can imagine with that kind of response time, people are probably kind of surprised like that you're that quick.

Dan Wardle: Yeah, and this year has been tough.

Cause we, we grew so fast that we weren't keeping up on that time. So now we're getting back to it. And especially we're seeing over 50% of our leads come from outside of our time zone. So we had to adjust, hire some people on the west coast, hire some people in, uh, Israel and, uh, England just to manage the more time zones.

We now have somebody in Australia, but uh, not an STR. I doubt he was getting a full five minute response time, but, uh, he trusts

Hamish Knox: as long as he's got a target to shoot for. Right. So as you, as you look back on your career and where you are now, what, what are you struggling with in terms of keeping that funnel consistently reliably full looking like a funnel?

Dan Wardle: Yeah. Well, the biggest thing that we experienced this year is just the volume of it. And then constantly adjusting to your question earlier. Like a lead is not. Right. So you've gotta be really careful that as this huge amount of free users blew up during the pandemic, right. We were sending ones that weren't fully qualified.

Some had to really ratchet up what qualification means and constantly monitoring that to keep our conversion rates. Well, not, you know, missing out on some good opportunities as well. So there's always that balance.

Hamish Knox: And what's the, what's the pushback from the sales team when, because yeah, you get those leads where it's like, why did you bother wasting my time?

So how did you manage the messaging and the expectations with the sales team? Cause that could be something leaders really struggle with and their salespeople can get really easily

Dan Wardle: de-motivated yeah. Yeah. I would say the one thing we do is our SDRs are on a team. Okay, so that when they get five bad leads in a row, they're not being demoralized because their partner in crime has just created a bunch of, of opportunities that made on ease.

On the other hand, they, they get their customer MQL and it can be a waste of their time. And so we're really careful with customer MQL that, you know, it's not, if there are, if the person is, are, uh, is one of the users in the platform. They have an extremely high bar before they qualify because they they're already users.

That's why they're on our site. That's why they're using the product. So it's like, that is not a lead we want to send, we want to send somebody, who's not a user that seems to be very active at a customer account. So that's a cross sell opportunity to a whole new department. So we're like really trying to filter to the right people to send to the account executives on customer.

Hamish Knox: Very cool. So where did the whole partnership strategy come from? Because we are a partner of Vidyard. I'm a huge fan of vid yard. So how did the whole channel strategy come to fruition? Because it seems like you've got a really good direct sales model already.

Dan Wardle: Yeah. Direct sales model is also helped tremendously by the partner channel.

Back when I was mentioning why I interviewed at vineyard, uh, they've built these partnerships and integrations with Marquetto and, and Salesforce and Pardot and everybody. And that was the really early days of partners back then. And we worked with a lot of video agencies, people who are making videos, that kind of thing.

Then it transitioned to all the sales tech. So sales, loft, outreach, high-velocity sales. Grooves Mixmax vanilla sauce. There's hundreds of them. And we built a partner app that we just gave to all of these partners to embed wherever they wanted in their products. So now their products had video embedded for free for their customers to use.

And now we're seeing those are the highest converting users. And so then the next evolution was the one you're mentioning around partners like yourself. It's like, well, who else do sales leaders listen to? Like who would get value from our. And it's sales trainers. It's the consultancies, anybody who is trying to help, especially in the last two years, help companies reinvent their sales cycle in a remote way.

And so then we give, as, you know, you know, as much content as we can, like training materials, PowerPoints, whatever our partners need to be able to train selling. No at that level, we don't even care. It's selling with vid yard. We want selling with video to become the norm. And then hopefully, you know, we are the Kleenex.

It's, you're sending a video card, you're not sending a video, sending an asynchronous video, you're sending a video. Uh, and so that's really the goal of our partner program is how do we make sure that all sales leaders, no matter what tech they're using. So, you know, now we're talking to folks like gong and seismic and others, like any sales.

Needs to have big yard in it. So they need to be using video. They can use video.

Hamish Knox: Brilliant. So then looking into the future, how do you see continuing to keep that funnel consistently reliably full? Because you have scaled so rapidly, you have got so many leads and, you know, eventually doubling over doubling over doubling kind of becomes unsustainable.

So how, how are you guiding your sales team to keep that funnel consistently full with real qualified leads? So you can continue scaling in the manner that.

Dan Wardle: Yeah, there's kind of two, two aspects of this. So we had huge explosion of user growth, but when you dug into it, it's like how many of them are business domains?

So now we're focusing on doubling the business domain signups, you know, educators, students, Gmails Hotmails. We love when they use our free product. It creates vitality, don't mind at all, but those aren't the leads we care about. We care about your domains of businesses. And so now this year we focused on doubling that and we easily did it because once you actually filter down this huge pie, There's, you know, we're at the last time we did a Tam analysis, we were at 0.0, zero 2% of salespeople use video.

So we're like just scratching the surface still. And so there's, you know, to your point, eventually we'll run out of that double, double, double. It's going to be a while though. So we're spending a ton of effort on virality, digital spend and geo expansion into Europe and APAC and Australia. So just get as wide as we can.

And then in north America now focusing on verticals like financial services and healthcare over the next few years. So there's tons of that expansion on the, so that's kind of user funnel expansion, right? Then the AEs, you know, they're still responsible for 50 to 60% of their own pipeline. A lot of that they'll be, you know, looking at reports of M QA.

You know, accounts that have lots of users, that's the easy pickings, but they still need to think about, okay, you know, I just closed this financial services company. They've told me they aren't allowed to solve. So why don't I look at their five competitors and do a traditional sales funnel and keeping that funnel full of, of the big, high value ones, because inbound as normal, you get a lot of the smaller deals.

We do see some really big deals come through our inbound. We're really fortunate that way, but a lot of these enterprises block you from using Chrome extensions and things. So we also need to do a traditional top-down. Based on our ICP to really get into all these companies. So then we measure things like traditional salespeople would, how many people have you reached out to how much activity what's your cadence look like?

You know, all the metrics there, which from an AE perspective, you know, we don't really have to crack a whip on our team. Then they can see the conversion rates are so good here. It's when they're not producing enough to have that full funnel that we're saying, okay, let's go back to basics. How many SALs did you do this week?

How many accounts are you targeting? Uh, you know, what are the accounts? Yeah, it's that

Hamish Knox: proactivity, not just, you know, aggressively waiting for the phone to ring or the email that pop up saying, Hey, can I have another 25 seats? Cause this is really.

Dan Wardle: Exactly. Yeah.

Hamish Knox: So it sounds like with the enterprise strategy, it's kind of like almost both sides to the middle, right?

You've got this basic users who are using the free extension, if they're allowed to, based on firewalls and then going upstairs and saying, Hey, did you know that? And, and really, almost. For lack of a better term squeezing, which sounds really horrible and aggressive, but you know, just getting that push into say, your people are already using this.

They're already demanding it. Uh, your competitors are already in that space. Why don't you get on the train? Is that really the play when you start to get into these big enterprise spaces?

Dan Wardle: I, the thing, yeah, we see a ton of, you know, business development manager. Asking for it, but at a large company, they just don't have that pole.

And so then you help them elevate themselves, you know, do an executive outreach and then you actually work with them, which is a bit different in our industry. She's like the salespeople want to use the tool and I'm sure nobody's saying like, oh yeah, can I please have that sales enablement tool that I have to like, do all this training on, but for us it's like, can you please buy me video cards so that I get a better conversion rate?

And so we, we leverage our free users and even just people we connect with. And then we work with them to elevate them to the right level, uh, whether it's through board connections or executive connections, wherever

Hamish Knox: amazing. And so from a leadership standpoint, from a, you know, getting the best out of your team, what are the, some of the things that you've been implementing over the past little while, since COVID started, especially in your team has grown and it's all over the place.

How are you making sure that you're staying in touch with your people and that they're motivated, uh, in growing the way that you want?

Dan Wardle: Yeah. There's so many things I'll try to summarize, like, you know, the first one was, we just did grassroots enablement before and because we had a smaller team, you know, As soon as we started to grow, you know, the A's were having a bad experience.

They weren't getting enabled fully. And so we hired out an enablement team and they do full onboarding. Now, bootcamp traditional style. They're doing a great job of building it per team as well. So it's different for everybody. My partner folks like James get onboarded differently than an a and an enterprise.

They have different needs and different understandings. So that's been going great. Then there was the enablement of, you know, getting them the data they need. So how do we get all that usage data into Salesforce so they can. How do we automatically create accounts when a new user signs up, all that stuff.

This is something that is just kind of coming to fruition. Now it takes a long time to get that big data stuff. Really rolling. That was a big one. And then how do we keep in touch with them? All, some teams do a daily huddle just to keep in touch with one another, because we're fully remote. Now we just had our sales all hands.

We do a monthly, you know, all a hundred people in the sales org. Each sales leader will talk about how last month went and what are the big things coming up this month? I'll be due Tuesday, stand up for the whole company, same structure every Tuesday. So there's just like tons of way we're keeping in touch.

And then the biggest thing is the managers are enforcing. Like if you see that, you know, James is connected to somebody or Dan's connected to somebody, or Michael's connected to somebody like send them an email and say, Hey, could you connect me with this person? Like they're completely open back in the office.

It made sense. I was sitting in the middle of the sales floor. People would just walk up. Yeah. Now it feels like they're bothering me when they messaged me and it's like, they're not. So you have to purposely reach out. So another way I actually, this is like a really tactical thing, but every Monday I looked through anyone who signed up for our pro accounts, kind of our individual user paid version.

Right. And I go through and I look at the domains and I'll pick ones out that are good-looking prospect accounts and I'll send them to the AEs manually. So let's go into slack and be like, Hey James, you should go after this account. They signed up for. So that they see that like I'm open to that kind of communication.

And then I co-work a lot of deals, mostly in the enterprise space, but try to spread my time around. Very cool.

Hamish Knox: Very cool. So you're really encouraging the team to cross-refer. So if I know you and James one is prospecting your organization, do that warm introduction, lower the friction, potentially shorten the sales

Dan Wardle: cycle.

Hamish Knox: What a great strategy to, uh, to, to create more rapport to internally with the team, right? Because if I help James out, then James is probably gonna feel a little bit warmer and more connected to me, and more likely to support each other going forward. What a, what

Dan Wardle: a brilliant idea, Dan and I love that they do on their own too.

They sometimes they won't invite leaders just because they want it to be more cross collaboration. Of course, they'll be war rooms. Like, Hey, let's pick apart this deal and give me suggestions on what to do next because it's stalled easy. So, you know, I'll get invited occasionally, but a lot of the times they just do it on.

Hamish Knox: Then that's really indicative of a motivation, right? With the culture, you set up those, like we're all in this together. Let's all support each other. Let's all grow together. That's, that's what I'm

Dan Wardle: hearing. Exactly. So

Hamish Knox: if we, if we look at, you know, cause not all of your salespeople are hitting their targets, right.

Just like any sales organization. So it doesn't mean they're not great. People just. Like any sales organization, you know, not everyone's on top of things. What are some of those early warning signs that you as a leader look for when a sales person's funnel is maybe going to go on a bit of a crash diet and is going to shrivel up and you can maybe head them off a little bit or get a sense that maybe they're just not a good fit for the organization.

Uh, what, what would you, what do you look for as a

Dan Wardle: leader? Yeah, we, uh, our deal cycles even in enterprise are very quick, uh, on the SMB side. On the enterprise side still only 70 or 80 days. So very quick. Wow. So we're constantly monitoring weekly, created pipeline by rep. Got it. It doesn't mean they self sourced it.

They could've got it from marketing, whatever, but you can't go for a few weeks without creating something. Cause then when you do close a bunch of deals, you're not gonna have anything left. Uh, it's much more rapid than, than some companies. And so we're monitoring that. You know, uh, I think we mentioned this earlier, the proactivity it's like, if we see those results, we don't dig in any further, like for a job, what do you need help with?

How can I make it better? Absolutely. If it's not there, then we say, okay, well, which accounts are you going to target? How many people in each account, who are they, who they have their connections with? And then start measuring activity. If it gets really bad, because then it just comes down to personal motivation.

If you're not doing it for yourself, then I can't really help you. Like, especially if I'm now asking for these numbers and you still don't. I don't know what's left here. And, uh, you know, for myself, whenever a rep asked me, like what makes a great rep versus a normal rep? It's like when you have that two hour break between demos, you know, one to three o'clock you have this break in your calendar, what do you do?

Well, if you answered, get a coffee and reply to emails, you're not going to be the great rep. A great rep would say, I'm going to be able to do 20 videos to 20 new accounts in that two hours. And, uh, I had this situation recently, I commuted with one of my two. Into the office, uh, cause he lives on my way and I live far away.

So I thought I'd spend some time with one of the reps. Cool. And then it's all bad because at the end of the day I was stuck in a meeting much like, uh, I was late to this podcast and said, I'm so sorry, I'm going to be 20 minutes late hope that's okay. And he's like, no problem. That'll give me some time to send out some more prospecting emails then, which is, you know, he was probably just doing that cause I'm the boss.

But then when I messaged him to say, okay, I'm good to go. Can I have another 20 minutes I'm not quite done. Alright. Yeah. Like

Hamish Knox: please stop filling your funnel.

Dan Wardle: I hate that. And that's why, you know, he's one of the top performing reps on the team and it has always been that way. Uh, if anything, you know, a lot of the time we're coaching him kind of balanced work-life balance and making sure that he's, you know, keeping up with, uh, with himself as well as.

Hamish Knox: That's the flip side is, is sometimes you get the high performer who is so focused on the business, half of their person, they forget the other half of their person, and that is not sustainable. Eventually they're going to burn out and, you know, that hurts them obviously, but also the company, because we've kind of got used to that level of performance and all of a sudden it's gone for a period of.

Yeah, that'd be a day, could be forever. Um, so I love to hear that you're focusing on them as a whole human being, um, and, and really supporting them and making sure that they're taking care of themselves as a person and not just our role in the organization.

Dan Wardle: Yeah. And it's, you know, it's so tough in this virtual world.

Like, you've got a block in your lunches. If you've got a, you know, if you've got kids like blocked some days to be taking them to school, like whatever. You need to take care of that stuff. And it's the easiest thing to be like, oh, I'll just delete that invite because somebody invited me to a call these guys can't, you've got to actually at Salesforce going back to them being the best sales trainer.

I remember them always saying when a customer suggests the time always say, oh, sorry, I have another customer call them. What about Friday creates that like.

Hamish Knox: Create the expectation we coach our clients that same sort of thing. Like your calendar could just be an ocean of white space, but you still have to have the appearance that you're important.

And if you just accept whatever comes your way from a client or prospect, you're a vendor. You are not a trusted advisor.

Dan Wardle: Yeah. Yeah. Love it. It's always the toughest one to do, especially when your calendar is no. Very

Hamish Knox: very, very true. So Dan, going back to your younger self and thinking about that young, young sales leader that you were, if you, if you had a magic wand and could go back to your younger self, what would you coach you to do as a young leader, a young salesperson to keep that funnel consistently full.

So maybe you have a little less scar tissue than you do.

Dan Wardle: Yeah. Yeah. Let's say I always had that habit of a break in calendar, like let's prospect. So I at least had that motivation, but what I could have done better at is maximizing deals. You know, especially early days, vid yard, we were a small company, small number of customers, just all about landing the next one.

And I, I wasn't there optimizing that next deal to expand to all the departments or do this. I, I still remember. I closed LinkedIn for 25,000, just like one small team in one. And, you know, now that account is worth well into the six figures. It's like, sure. I should've worked that account wider, used executive connections, like done all of those things because it's a lot easier to hit quota when you're doing bigger deals.

So that's the biggest thing I've learned over now that I've been leading the team and coaching the reps to do that and seeing the results of it and, you know, having price integrity and just putting it out there and not discounting right away. Like all of those things to maximize. Uh, is the biggest learning,

Hamish Knox: love it, love it.

Yeah. That we can, especially as startups. And I know I've coached several, uh, individuals and, and, and startup companies and they say, well, what should I, what should my price be? And I'm like, whatever you can get out of your. Like, is it worth a hundred dollars a month per user? Is it worth a thousand dollars a month per user?

I don't know, but if you can confidently say Dan, it's a thousand dollars a month, a user and someone goes, okay, here's a check. It's now worth a thousand dollars a month per user. Uh, so, so really having that confidence to say, this is what it is, this is what it's worth. And yeah, when you get into accounts like LinkedIn, maybe there's a little discounting that goes on on the backend, but initially.

We want to stand our ground and be that person who believes in their product and is not going to get pushed around. Yeah, exactly. So Dan, as we're wrapping up, what are you reading, listening to watching these days for your own professional and personal development that some of our listeners might want to catch up on?

Dan Wardle: For me, the biggest one I've had in the last a year isn't necessarily a sales book, but it's more about on the leadership side. It's called Daniel pink motivation. And it just talks about intrinsic motivation versus monetary. And it's tough to align the sales because we get paid so much on our sales that it doesn't perfectly aligned, but I still try to do a frame spiffs, things like that.

His mantra is like, if you announce it, you're going to get a momentary blip and then it's going to actually become worse than it was before. And so you need to do intrinsic motivation, spiffs, where you actually do the spiff after the result has been achieved. So they didn't do the result because you've said there was.

Yeah. It's like he's backwards feeling in it. So that one's really good. Uh, what was the one that I just read most recently? Uh, I don't remember the name of that one, but there's the, uh, the favorite on our team as well as radical prospecting and just like being able to hit the ground without the fear.

It's a numbers game. And then outside of that, you know, my, my podcast of choice right now has actually been a gambling podcast. Uh, it's just the. The math and the mindset behind gambling, which is just super interesting, nothing to do with work, but still super interesting. And then Mike Rowe from dirty jobs actually has a podcast that is it's called the way I heard it.

And it's the way he heard things. And so he'll tell a story at the beginning that you're never really sure what he's talking about until the end when it's like, this is the way I heard this story about this famous person in the world. And then he has really interesting guests and the reason I liked that.

In a work sense is he has a foundation that is a scholarship to send people to trade school. And the importance of, you know, working and working with your hands and that kind of thing. So I actually, I built the, the office here above the garage last year, and I'd like to always remind myself, like, you know, just because I work hard all day doesn't mean I should then just pay somebody to do everything for me.

It's like, I need to still be able to do these things and be self-sufficient. So, uh, he's just an interesting role model.

Hamish Knox: Love it. No, that's, that's great. And of course, uh, I remember watching dirty jobs and, uh, certainly we'll check out that podcast and we'll put the links in the show notes for that. So, uh, Dan, as we're wrapping up closing thoughts, what would you say to the sales leaders who are listening to this podcast who are looking to create that funnel?

That consistently looks like a fun one set of, uh, a pencil or an accordion?

Dan Wardle: Yeah. Stop asking your reps every day about their forecast for this quarter. That's not going to help you need to ask them what ops were created last week. And we've even now implemented a dashboard that shows what ops moved from stage three to four.

So you can show the mid funnel progression as well and celebrate that because getting to a stage four to stage five to proposals, it's something that you should celebrate almost as much as it's closing the deal, because there's a lot of cases where, right at the end, it's not your reps fault. They got, you know, they got them to where you need them to be.

And then the CFO said no. And so, you know, celebrate that. Love it very,

Hamish Knox: very cool. Well, Dan, very much appreciate you being here today. You've been listening to the full funnel of freedom podcast. I'm your host Hamish narcs. Today. We got ideas and insights from Dan Wartell. Head of sales at video card on how to keep your funnel consistently.

Connect with us on Instagram. We're at Sandler. Why? Why see until we see you on the next episode? Go create full funnel freedom. Thank you for listening to fall funnel freedom with Amish Knox. If you want to increase your sales with ease, go to full funnel, freedom.com.