Pipeline saves lives

[0:04] This is the Full Funnel Freedom Podcast, supporting sales leaders and managers to improve their sales funnels from people to prospects. I'm Hamish Knox. In this show, you'll learn how you can improve your results, lead a great team, and hit more targets with Full Funnel Freedom.

[0:21] Welcome to the Full Funnel Freedom Podcast. I'm your host, Hamish Knox. Today, we will be getting ideas and insights from Kyle Norton, who's a very successful leader in the SaaS space around vertically integrated teams and how that can create full funnel freedom in your organization. The Full Funnel Freedom Podcast is brought to you by Sandler Calgary. Are you tired of having consultants and coaches tell you what you need to do to scale your business, but don't stick around and help you with the how to do it? Sandler has the what's and we stick around and help you out with the hows, go to hamish.sandler.com for more details on how we might be able to support you and your organization.

[0:59] So, hailing from Toronto, Canada, Kyle has been building and rebuilding SaaS revenue organizations for the last six years at Vision Critical, League, and most recently, Shopify.

[1:11] He spent his first 18 months at Shopify building their POS revenue teams and now leads sales, technical services, and customer success for Canada across

[1:21] all Shopify product lines and segments. Fun fact, in his younger days, Kyle lived in Brazil for three months to train with mixed martial arts with multiple UFC champions.

[1:31] He now plays golf and rides a Peloton occasionally. Kyle, welcome to Full Funnel of Freedom. Thanks for having me, Hamish. Excited to dig in. So the audience has got a quick overview of you, but dive deep. Give us the deep dive into who Kyle is and what we're going to hear from you today. Okay. Yeah. So, uh, being in sales, my entire career fell into it. Like, uh, many of us did, uh, there was an info session at the business school I went to and the pitch was, if you're the type of person that everybody hates after playing board games and you're, you've got that type of overly competitive spirit, you're probably good for sales. And that spoke to me and the, the meritocratic nature and, uh, the reward based nature of, of sales was, uh, was a draw. So I stuck my toe in the water coming out of school and have stuck ever since. So I spent four years at an events company, pretty nondescript. Product wasn't great, company was whatever, but it was a boiler room and smile and dial type of place and really built the sharp sales skills that have been a great platform for success.

[2:41] So I was a rep there for a year and a bit, then was managing teams. Teams my teams did well so they gave me more teams and and uh i when i left i had three or four teams about 30 folks under me and um was really grateful right place right time small company coming out of the recession getting to rebuild and so uh there was tons of opportunity i've been in the sas space for seven years i guess now so vision critical i joined to rebuild their global BDR function.

[3:12] Harkening back to my boiler room days, I got that job out of a cold call. I cold called the EVP of sales and a guy who I actually work for today at Shopify. And Mark Bergen took a shot on me and had a great run at Vision Critical. Then went into early stage, went to a series A startup called League, was salesperson number one, built the sales org basically from scratch there was no sas arr when i started and we grew to uh 20 25 million bucks over that first three years cool and that was canada us bunch of teams we went from zero to maybe 45 folks and then made the leap to shopify so that same guy who took a shot on uh shot shot on me at vision critical is the head of revenue at shopify now they were looking to build out a revenue organization for their point of sale products, separate to their existing Rev.org. And so Mark introduced me to my boss, Ian, who I worked for for two and a half years.

[4:13] And Ian and I built that thing over 18 months. And the team went from like six to 65 folks. And, 18 months, crazy revenue growth. Not sure what I can share publicly, but we were really successful and had a blast doing it. We re-org the entire company. And then instead of a product-centric leadership role, then now I have a regional role. So I run sales, technical services, which is solutions, engineering, and launch, and customer success in Canada across a bunch of products. And the full funnel freedom global exclusive for today is actually that it's my last day at Shopify. I'm leaving after three years. Wow. And going back early stage. So I've had an amazing run at Shopify. I was not eager to leave. It was a super hard decision, but got in touch with what I think is a really special company. It's called Owner.

[5:08] That's Shopify for restaurants is the easiest way to say it. And I'm taking a bet on what I believe to be a generational founder, a generational exec team, an amazing product, super exciting growth metrics. And so joining there as the SVP of sales and partnerships, we're going to build, build again, build from where we're at now to hopefully a massively successful generational company. Oh, I'm excited. I'm excited to celebrate that success with you. And it sounds like an amazing opportunity. Like you said, generational founder, generational exec team, and lots of great metrics. So what I'm hearing, Kyle, you're a builder. Yeah. You're a builder. You got lots of great, you know, you get in on the ground floor. And then obviously, as you've shared with us, massive scalability through your efforts, not only your own, but also creating success through people. So glad to have you on the show. Thank you very much for the exclusive. Appreciate the insight. And we'll be celebrating your success at Owner as well. And maybe have you come back and talk about jumping back into the early stage and then growing that up sometime in the future. So, Kyle.

[6:18] If we look at the idea of full funnel freedom or a full pipeline,

[6:20] things like that, how do you define it? And then from a leadership perspective, what does that do for you? If you can trust that your pipeline is going to be consistently reliably full, what does that do for you? So the way that I say it, I think I stole this from Melissa Madian, who's an awesome enablement leader here in Canada, is pipeline saves lives. So the concept of full frontal freedom, to me, is all about optionality and the ability to make good decisions. If you have a thin pipeline, you're operating from a mindset of scarcity.

[6:59] You're scratching and clawing, you're probably chasing things you shouldn't. If you operate with a full funnel, if you have a great pipeline, and that comes from good prospecting habits, you can operate from a position of abundance and make good decisions. You don't have to chase mediocre deals. You can be choiceful with where you spend your time as a sales rep, as an organization.

[7:22] And it also unlocks the ability to have really honest, transparent conversations with your prospects. If you're not desperate because you have a thin funnel, then you can have really open conversations with your prospects without the fear that they're going to opt out. And this shows up in a bunch of places in your win rates, in your time to win, time to lose. And I think the biggest advantage is you're able to have really open conversations about trade-offs with customers. This is what's great about our platform. This is who does really well on our product. This is who it's not a great fit for. And this is what you need to be ready to do in order to get the value out of our product. And if you're not, no big deal. Not the right time. We can talk later. But it's hard to do that with a sense of conviction without a full funnel. So pipeline saves lives. Absolutely.

[8:11] Pipeline saves lives. Love it. Love it. That may be the title of the episode. So how challenging is that, though, when you're coaching your reps? Because you get it. You were, as you said, salesperson number one at League. So you get that intrinsically as a rep. But as a leader, how challenging is that to actually impart that wisdom on a group of individuals who all have different beliefs and worldviews and outlooks and all those kinds of things? Give us an insight into some of those challenging conversations you had and maybe some of the easier ones that you had as you've been in your leadership role. And so is the question, how do I inspire individual contributors to operate with a pipeline first mentality? Yeah, because because.

[8:53] You know, salespeople can sometimes just think, well, hey, boss, I'm doing a lot of stuff. Leave me alone. The deals will come. And it's like, well, that's awesome. But I got to report

[9:00] upwards and I actually have to deliver the deals that you tell me are coming. Yeah. So this starts with the first line sales manager and not to get off track because there's a big rant on my views on the first line manager. But that is the single most important role in an entire rev org, in my opinion. It is one of the most challenging, one of the most thankless, for sure. But in terms of pure return on investment, investing in your first line sales managers is incredibly productive.

[9:29] And as a rep, especially in an SMB environment or a mid-market environment where folks haven't gotten the reps to see the benefits and dangers of large and small funnels, that's the role that the manager has to play. They have to have a sharp eye for it and we have to equip them with the tools to be able to do that. So what's the what is the framework that you can give to your first line managers to on a weekly basis, keep the cadence with their teams so that we're doing the right we've got the right habits. So my framework to think about reps is do we have the right habits? Do we have the right skills? And then what are the metrics? What are the outputs? Perfect. And so, and that has to be the sales managers. You can't expect first, second, third year sales reps to really have that acumen like, you know, the rare ones do and that's amazing, but that's not how we can build our like a scalable system. But your sales managers have to be able to do that. They have to on a weekly basis, being able to say, all right, are we doing the things.

[10:31] That we know are reliably going to get us to a full funnel? Do we have an account plan? Do we, do we control our day and do we have good time blocking and time management? Am I putting in the work to prospect? Do I have smart prospecting structures? So can I view my book and think about mini campaigns? Okay. Well, I want to do a bit like for us, uh, black Friday, cyber Monday is a, is like a big anchor point in the year. So six months ahead, like what's, what are the types of conversations I want to start having now? What are the prospects? Like, do I have a strat, a prospect and strategy? Absolutely. And that has to come from your first line managers, in my opinion. Absolutely. Well, and it's that idea of being proactive, right? It's not like, oh crap, it's October. Maybe we should start talking about Black Friday stuff. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And in an enterprise environment, even more so because the timelines are so long and oftentimes it's more of a team effort to make sure that those enterprise reps have sufficient pipeline to get to the number. And so it's just all about trying to have a view months, quarters, sometimes years in certain environments ahead.

[11:41] And that's got to come from the first line manager. That's really the pivot point. So do we have a good framework for them to understand the habits that they need to drive with their reps? How do we teach them to assess skills, pick the right things to work on? And then what are the dashboards and reporting that we equip them with to understand their business. Brilliant. Brilliant. I'd love to hear a bit of this rant that you teased us with a few minutes ago, because we're also really big believers. I'm a really big believer in giving the tools to that frontline manager, because a lot of times it's, hey, Kyle, you're the top sales rep. Now you're the top, you know, you're the sales manager, make a bunch of little use. And it's like, well, but you get no training, no resources, no guidance. And the skills that made you successful as a rep are not the ones that are going to make you successful as a frontline manager. So if you've got a rant that you're comfortable sharing a little bit with us, please dive in, man. So I agree with everything you said. For sure, we under-equip people transitioning into management roles.

[12:37] At Shopify, we have a dedicated role for sales leadership enablement. A woman, Sweeney, who worked for me previously, is doing that. And we're laser focused on giving our first-line managers the skills they need. So one, we under-equip them. And so building the right basics to teach people how to step into that role. And if you don't have the resources of Shopify, which few companies do to have team working on that type of stuff, like what are my workarounds? For me, it's always books. Like here's my reading list. Start with these things.

[13:13] Read The Coaching Habit by Michael Bungie Stanger. Read The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle. Like I have no really great insightful ideas. I just paraphrase things that smart people have said and you'd be both. Yeah. And so equipping them, however you can with whatever limited resources you can is super essential. So one, we under equip them to, we tend to put the wrong people in those seats. We take the best rep. Not only, you know, you said the skills that make a great rep don't necessarily translate. In fact, a lot of the time, the skills that make you greater as a rep are going to make you bad as a manager yeah they're like inversely correlated so true are you incredibly competitive and laser focused on your own uh outputs are you just like a hard-working grinder like there there are certain things that can make you a high-performing rep that will actually be a detrimental as a manager as opposed to you know having having an ability to be like thoughtful and calm and introspective and being a great listener. Some of those things don't show up in reps. They are more so today.

[14:24] So oftentimes, we promote the wrong people as opposed to... I like the... I can't remember where I got this, but... Oh, it's a Simon Sinek thing. It's like, if you want to know who the best natural leader is, just go ask everybody on the team, like, hey, when you're really in a jam and you need help, answering a question, You got a deal that's stuck. Like, where do you go? And most of the time, that answer is not going to be the very top rep. It's going to be somebody else. And they may not be the very top performer. But that person's probably who should be in that leadership seat. So we under-equip them. We promote the wrong people. And then the level of importance of the manager is also the important thing to stay here.

[15:01] You can give a bunch of mediocre reps or a bunch of average reps to an incredible manager. And that team will rip. That team will do well. But conversely, you can give an A-plus team to a mediocre manager. All of those people will do worse. You'll see a bunch of attrition because they don't think that this person knows what they're doing. And that team will largely collapse. And if the ICs are really bringing in the actual dollars, the thing that drives it is, are they getting great coaching? Do they feel trust and connectivity to their team and to the organization that comes through the manager? Are they working on the right skills? Do they have somebody who cares about their development?

[15:42] And the the first line manager is, Somewhere where we need to continue to just like triple down on and invest in, pay more, add more in terms of enablement, really put them, like prioritize them in terms of how we assign resources. It doesn't mean elevating their status to some like artificial level because great managers should be in the background. You know, the accolades shouldn't be theirs, but then just in terms of how they equip them, it's massively important. Absolutely. I had a sales rep come to me once for some coaching because they've been offered a manager role. And I said, well, really, you have to answer the question, do you want to create success through yourself or success through others? The answer, neither is good or bad. You know, pick one. But if you want to create success for yourself, don't become a manager. Because as you identified, that's what a great rep does. They're super competitive, etc, etc. But if you want to create success through others, that indicates that maybe you want to be a manager. And the other thing that I find, and maybe not as much in the SaaS world, but is the manager who gets promoted, but they still have to carry a quota. And it's like, well, now you've got the player coach, and no one does well in that role.

[16:51] It's a recipe for disaster. And like you said, attrition. Yeah. Player coach just means that an organization can't make a hard decision, and they want the best of both worlds, which never really goes all that great.

[17:02] Right. No, never, never at all. So one thing that you and I talked about when we first got together was this idea of, of vertically integrated teams, right? So, so the, everything from the first contact all the way through delivery and customer care and all that. And I, I'd love to dive deeper into that for the audience, because that is something that I got really excited about because I've heard it from clients. I've experienced it myself where I theoretically have one company that I'm working with, but I have 17 people at that organization that I'm I'm supposed to talk to. And it's really frustrating. So would you share a little bit more about this idea of vertically integrated teams and what your experience has been as it relates to creating that consistently reliable full pipeline? Yeah. So- Some of Shopify's values have driven a bunch of this. So one of their values is merchant obsession. And we talk a lot about closing the distance from the front line. So getting people who are making decisions and setting strategy, making sure they're close to the merchant. So the merchant centricity is number one. And this idea of like a hundred-year company is another big sort of pillar of Shopify's values. And so if you think about how to translate that into great go-to-market outcomes.

[18:11] Shopify is a lot less concerned with the top line sales number than most places. They think a lot more holistically. And the question is often, yeah, we're a publicly traded SaaS company. Growth matters a lot. But growth has to come with great merchant outcomes. And growth can never be at the detriment of our customers. And a lot of companies say this. I've been in organizations who have said they're customer-centric and were anything. But Shopify walks that talk like crazy. And it's a lesson I'm going to take with me for the rest of my career. And so when we think about a customer centricity, a distance to the front line, and this idea of thinking more holistically about a business than just what the top line number is, but actually building sustainable revenue with customers that are going to do great on the platform and ensuring they're massively successful,

[19:02] what we've done is we've built these regional teams in North America that are full stack. So I come from a sales background. I still have a sales team in my org, but I also have our solutions engineering team, our onboarding function, and then customer success. So it's one throat to choke. If my reps are bringing in questionable deals or deals that are hard to onboard, then I hear that from launch.

[19:26] I'm personally motivated to fix that. And my number, the number that people care about when it comes to my performance is like, what is the overall revenue of the entire org? Our existing book of business, how are we growing it? What are we adding that new? And so it forces a much more holistic approach.

[19:43] Management of of my teams and so we've spent a ton of time thinking about how do we make our customers more successful because if they're if our customers are growing faster we're growing faster because there's totally they're using our payments products so there's a direct monetization on the total amount of revenue that our merchants are doing and we're driving product adoption in our existing base and that's not like a side project that's not like oh yes cs you know get people to use more of our products. That is an organizational priority of all of the most senior people. And oftentimes you don't see that in a lot of places, like sales drowns out a lot more. So just structurally, that's really important. Then the other piece of thinking more holistically about go-to-market and one of the tools that we've used to drive this alignment is this idea of pods that you were just mentioning. So we originally piloted this in my retail team, like two, two and a half years ago because the sales onboarding alignment was not very good. We had a bunch of reps dumping deals. We were a very new org. It was completely understandable.

[20:50] And not because anybody was doing a bad job or lacked care, but it was just not... We hadn't seen it because those teams were run separately. So there was an issue. My team was closing some not great deals. The onboarding team was disconnected from whatever. So we rolled that launch team into my org, which made it my problem, which, which helps. And then we actually, instead of, instead of saying, okay, here's a process and an intake form, and here are the things you need to do to hand off a customer and like building a massive checklist that reps and people hate. We said, okay, well, people don't like process. Process is a necessary evil. So how do we, how do we solve this problem another way? So we basically said in every segment, there's going to be two or three reps. There's going to be one onboarding specialist and then one solutions engineer. And that's your pod. And any issues that come out of the deals closed or the customers that are launched in that pod, it comes back to your pod. And there's a bunch of really interesting effects. One is it drives a personal accountability. So if you're my launch engineer, when I close a bad deal, it's not just like, oh, I'm throwing this bad deal into the abyss. Hamish has to deal with it. And I have to talk to Hamish every day. And I really like Hamish. and I don't want to do that to this person that I feel this individual accountability and trust with. So instead of a big cumbersome process, the teams were able to...

[22:16] Iterate more easily with one another to say like oh you close this customer and then they told me they needed to do this thing which is a feature we don't really support so like now it's an issue and so now the salesperson way more often was like okay like i'll jump in and help like let me talk to them right i can you know because oftentimes it's a miscommunication or a customer like thought something for a reason that we don't totally understand yeah so there was personal accountability. And then these pods also were these little innovation hubs. So they came up with their own ideas to solve these problems. We collected those things, we shared them, and it was great. And everything got better. The sales onboarding relationship, all of our onboarding metrics. So the number of customers that were slow to onboard or never onboarded got significantly better. And a lot of credit to Adam Jarzin, who ran that launch group,

[23:09] launching solutions engineering for me. I think he built the pod strategy. So we've now brought back that concept into Team Canada, and we're going to roll it out globally. And a woman who runs one of my CS teams, Mel Sinclair, was really running point on it. And we have sales, a solutions engineer, the launch folks, and merchant success managers in their segments. So the segments are pods. And one of the concepts that's really important is the number of people to which you can feel personal accountability for. So there's Dunbar's number, which is like 150.

[23:45] So you can know individually 150 people, but then there's a smaller number on camera where it's from, but like 15 people is the number of folks in a group that operates really well. And so we try to keep the segment groups, these pods to under 15 people and it works great. And you see way better collaboration in terms of cross-sell. So merchant success managers, identifying opportunities in their business and the relationship with sales is way better. Launch is really nicely integrated. So it's been super successful and I encourage people to test it in their business if they've got some of these issues. Totally. And like you said, it's that personal accountability. It's those relationships where it's like, I like Kyle, I'm going to do right by him on this launch because, you know, he brought this good deal to me and it's all well set up. And it's that clarity of expectations.

[24:35] I talked yesterday in my leadership group about a leader's number one job is to create clarity. And if we can create clarity and then have our team members create clarity with each other around what does is a good deal look like for launch? What is an opportunity identification look like coming from merchant success, flipping it back over to sales if sales has got to go close it. And then that way, we are just much more efficient. Like you said, we get to innovate and iterate on opportunities that grow the business and are focused on that ultimate outcome. As a good friend of mine, Marcus Koki says, we're all client centric until month end or quarter end. I love that. Yeah. So So this just reinforces that corporate value of we are, you know, merchant focused and giving your people the tools to do it without you. I would imagine you don't have to sit on their shoulders and say, Hey guys, are you doing this? Cause they're all doing it together. Cause they all like each other. Is that fair? Yeah, for sure. And this doesn't mean we have no process. We don't want process. You want to build things that are useful, but at as lightweight as possible. It's a people-centric process. If it's super helpful for the reps and the team members, great. It's, you know, it's a good guideline to have. But as soon as you've got things that people, you know, grumble about and you're like, oh man, well, then that's a good indicator that you've built something that's, you know, not productive and we should think about it a different way. Absolutely. The movie Office Space comes to mind when you start talking about but over-aggressive policies and processes.

[26:03] And I read, there's a book called Tech-Powered Sales that uses the phrase AFL, which the A is another and L is login. The audience can probably figure out what the F stands for when it comes to giving reps more tech stack. And it's like, oh, I got to log into this thing now. Is it actually supporting the reps or is it just, hey, the sales leader saw a shiny thing at a trade show and decided to impose it on their reps and actually not grow the business? Yeah, yes, I'm very much aligned with that. So Kyle, we're getting to the end of our time together. I want to be respectful of yours.

[26:36] So you had already mentioned The Talent Code and The Coaching Habit are two books that you recommend. There was another book by General Stanley McChrystal. I can't remember. Yeah, Team of Teams. Team of Teams that we'll put in the show notes. But what else are you listening to, watching, reading right now that the audience might want to check out as well for personal development? Yeah. So I actually published my reading list. So when folks come to me and say, ah, I want to be in leadership, one of the first things I do is say, great, here's the list, pick a book and just start chipping through it. And every time you read a book, let's have a conversation about what you learned, how you think it can be applied. And it's a great way for me to sort of scale what I would like to teach people. And they're learning it from the source where I've borrowed from over the years.

[27:26] So I published that on my LinkedIn and we can put it in the show notes. Put it in the show notes. Yeah. And it's, you know, a leadership reading list. I've got my basics reading list in there. So Challenger, Made to Stick, Influenced by Shaldini.

[27:38] That's like a, I want every person that joins any of my teams to sort of read some of these things. So the reading list we can plug in the show notes. In terms of podcasts, I'm addicted to podcasts. I get made fun of it all the time because I'm always mentioning something.

[27:53] The Knowledge Project is one that I listen to a ton. Google Talks is another great one. It's their internal speaker series, a bunch of cool guests. podcasts individually, like for non-work stuff, the Huberman labs podcast. So it's all about health and longevity and the science behind it. I've, you know, I'm moving in a direction. I'm trying to move in a direction these days where I'm spending more and more time teaching team members to be, be high performance humans and not just like good reps because everything starts with like, if you can have good sleep hygiene and your diet's pretty decent and you're getting some exercise, like, you know, work becomes a lot more manageable and a lot easier for taking care of mental and physical health. So like Huberman labs is, was one that I recommend constantly daily stoic by Ryan holidays is, uh, it's on the common Lord and bingo card. Uh, as people tease, I wrote a podcast list internally. This will be a good prompt for me to, uh, get that list into public, uh, a public facing doc and I'll put it on my LinkedIn and we can toss it in the show notes too. Cool. That, that sounds awesome. Uh, thank you for sharing all that with us. Look forward to, uh, seeing those links as well. It sounds like you and I read a lot of the same books. Yeah. Yeah. And I'll like, I'll quickly plug for anybody who wants to have like unique and outsized career outcomes. If you really want to do something special with your career.

[29:21] Everything starts with learning. Like growth is the only thing that matters. and reading is the, is the way to supercharge your development. Like I remember early in my career, I read, you know, it was in that boiler room environment and I was learning to manage teams.

[29:37] And reading some of the basic texts, like how to win friends and influence people and good to great, like the basics, those books at that time were like magic spells to me. I was like, Oh my God. Like, and then I tried to apply them. Then, you know, the team would respond well. And my, my, uh, organizations performance would improve. Like just read if you want, if you want to supercharge your results or your career or anything, just like find a great reading list and start chipping through it and, and learn to love that piece of your development because everything else gets easier. It's the single most important thing that has helped me in my career that I see in, uh, in others that have done really well. So this is my plug.

[30:22] Love it. Very cool. Yes. Uh, mine as well. I'm a, I'm a very passionate reader and I'm sure we will have a lot of, a lot of offline chats about, about books to read and podcasts to listen to and things like that. So a couple of closing questions, Kyle, first one would be if you could go back and talk to younger Kyle. So the one who first got inspired by the, Hey, if you're the one who everyone hates, uh, after board games are over, you might want to be in sales and you could go Go back and say, hey, younger Kyle, you're going to end up in this spot, but here's a bit of advice that's maybe going to make that path a little bit less rocky.

[30:56] What would you say to your younger self? Yeah. Learn to debate and argue in a way that is more positive sum than zero sum. Early in my career, you know, when we were, when I was passionate about an idea or had a difference of opinions, like I would often go into debate mode and you can go read, think again by Adam Grant. This is the best version of what I wish I had given myself that I wish that book had existed when I was like 19. Get out of prosecutor mode and learn to influence in a more gentle way because I'm a competitor and I love to debate ideas. And so oftentimes people felt like choosing my solution meant they had to lose the debate. And I was creating that environment, which I came to learn through an executive coach who was incredibly helpful. So I would say that is the biggest one. And don't optimize for money as much early in my career and be a little more open minded.

[31:56] Like I turned down a role at Salesforce when I was ending my time at World Trade Group. But I was a second line leader running AE teams. And the role that I got offered at Salesforce was an enterprise BDR team. I was like, I'm a second line salesman. I'm a second line sales leader. I'm not going to run a BDR team like a total moron, like because it was Salesforce and it would have been this would have been like 10 more than 10 years ago. Like that would have been an incredible accelerant. And instead, I chased money and took a role that was like shinier because it was I was felt like it was I was more important. Is done, like, or especially early, early in your career, optimized for learning, optimized for something that's a little more holistic, optimized for learning. I love that, that that is a great, great takeaway for the audience as well. So last question, your closing thought, something to plug something to share with the audience that leave leave us with with a with some more wisdom from Kyle and certainly love to have you back on sometime in the future once you're settled into your new role and owner. Yeah.

[33:02] I mean, I was sort of plugging the book thing. So I'm going to stay on that theme. Growth is the only thing that matters. Build yourself a growth mindset, figure out how to really be a beginner every day and just like be laser focused on improving yourself and the folks around you, the folks on your team. Because no matter your starting position, maybe you're like incredibly talented and gifted at a role, or maybe you're in a place you feel really comfortable with. If you're getting 1% better every single day, that compounds like crazy over the longterm. And if you can just consistently keep a growth mindset and consistently invest in yourself, whether it's books, podcasts, courses.

[33:44] Mentorship, whatever it is, no matter where you are, no matter if you've had like a rocky first few years of your career and you're not really getting the results and you don't feel like you've built an awesome resume, none of it matters. Just today, start committing to yourself that you're going to learn and you're going to be obsessed with learning and you can basically accomplish anything. Growth is truly the only thing that matters and just invest in yourself and great things will happen. Brilliant. Well, Kyle, thank you very much for being a guest on the Full Funnel Freedom podcast. I've learned a ton and I'm excited to have you back at some point in the future. Appreciate you having me. Thanks so much, Amish.

[34:21] You've been listening to the Full Funnel Freedom podcast. Today, we've been getting some ideas and insights from Kyle Norton around many, many things from pipeline saves lives to how to support your frontline sales managers to this idea of holistic pods to support our clients in a client-focused manner. The Full Funnel Freedom podcast is brought to you by Sandler in Calgary. If you're tired of getting told what you need to do to scale your business but aren't getting any support on how to do it, go to www.hamish.sandler.com to start discovering if we might be a good fit to work with you. Thanks for listening. Find us on Spotify, Apple, Google Play, and Amazon. Leave us a rating and review. Check us out on Instagram, Sandler underscore YYC. Until we connect with you on the next episode, go create full funnel freedom.

[35:14] Thank you for listening to Full Funnel Freedom with Hamish Knox. If you want to increase your sales with ease, go to fullfunnelfreedom.com.

[35:25] Music.