Intro

0:00:18 – (Bob Woods): Welcome to the Making Sales Social podcast featuring the top voices in sales, marketing, and business. Join Brynne Tillman, and me, Bob Woods, as we each bring you the best tips and strategies our guests teach their clients so you can leverage them for your own virtual and social selling. This episode of the Making Sales Social podcast is brought to you by Social Sales Link, the company that helps you start more trust-based conversations without being salesy through the power of LinkedIn and AI. Start your journey for free by joining our resource library. Welcome to the show.

00:00:45:04 – (Brynne Tillman): Welcome back to Making Sales Social. I’m really looking forward to interviewing Nirvano Brans today. He is a visionary revenue and sales leader with a decade of experience steering high-performance global revenue operations across diverse sectors like fintech, HR Tech, and professional services. He’s worked in payroll, accounting, legal industries, and beyond. Nirvano was intrical in, propelling growth space and papia.

00:01:15:06 – (Brynne Tillman): I think I may be saying that the wrong global from start-up to major players in Hr and financial technologies spaces managing their assets from 1 million to a staggering 100 million in revenue with a strong background and building robust sales and marketing frameworks. Nirvano’s leadership has been pivotal in securing over 500 million in funding and crafting strategies that markedly increase efficiency and revenue growth.

00:01:44:10 – (Brynne Tillman): He brings a unique blend of integrity, analytical prowess, and resilience to each role, making him a sought-after leader in hypergrowth business environments. Nirvano, welcome to the program.

00:02:00:34 – (Nirvano Brans): Thank you so much for having me. I couldn’t have said any better. 

00:02:03:08 – (Brynne Tillman): Well, I could have probably said it a little bit better. I got slightly tongue-tied, but you know, we’re all good.

00:02:09:23 – (Brynne Tillman): It is the way of the world. Either way, you bring an enormous amount of experience, and I’m really excited to dive into your expertise. But before we do, we ask all of our guests the first question, which is what does making sales social mean to you?

00:02:25:25 – (Nirvano Brans): Ultimately, it all comes down to relationships, right? So relationship with your buyers, relationship with maybe partners or referral partners for that matter, a relationship with colleagues or direct reports or peers within the organization.

00:02:39:06 – (Nirvano Brans): And I think that in too many situations, particularly if you’re looking at a lot of the sales methodology, it takes a little bit too much of a scientific approach to selling and building that out. And I think at the end of the day, it really just comes down to building our trust and surrounding yourself with people that you want to surround yourself with on a daily basis.

00:02:56:06 – (Nirvano Brans): I think one of the things they always mention to folks that I’m hiring for or interviewing for new roles is, listen, you know, I have a wife and three kids. I love to spend a lot of time with my wife and three kids, and yet I decided to spend a lot more time with my colleagues. And my customers are my peers.

00:03:10:22 – (Nirvano Brans): And the only way for me to do that if I actually have fun in doing so, so surrounding yourself with, you know, not necessarily like-minded folks, but just folks you want to spend time with, you want to be successful with. That’s ultimately what it comes down to. 

00:03:24:27 – (Brynne Tillman): I love that answer. In fact, it’s probably one I haven’t heard.

00:03:26:27 – (Brynne Tillman): And we’ve done this for almost 350 episodes, so pretty good. To give us a new one. Yeah. Wonderful. Well, I absolutely love that. So let’s dive into kind of your brilliance and I really want to talk about or start with strategy development. Could you share any of your approaches to developing a go-to-market strategy for a new market or product?

00:03:50:26 – (Nirvano Brans): Great question. Yeah. So I’ve worked now for, I think seven or eight different organizations where I joined relatively early on or sometimes maybe even a little bit further along in their journey. And I think the starting point really to just really just go back to basics,

00:04:05:21 – (Nirvano Brans): particularly if an organization has been around for maybe a couple of years and has seen some initial success already,

00:04:10:22 – (Nirvano Brans): there’s oftentimes so many preconceived notions or assumptions that are part of their go-to-market strategy that is completely false, but they’re just based on, you know, maybe this one-off situation or an outlier situation or a simple hunch or a gut feel.

00:04:24:15 – (Nirvano Brans): So really, going back to the basics and defining, you know, what is it that we’re looking to achieve here and who are we looking to marketers to think is a key starting point there?

00:04:34:03 – (Nirvano Brans): One framework I’ve used with the majority of the organizations I’ve either worked for or worked with is Simon Sinek starting with the WHY or the Golden Circle methodology.

00:04:43:02 – (Nirvano Brans): I’m not sure how familiar you are with that. Very, but yeah. So it really just comes down to starting with the WHY. So really understanding like, well, why are we here? Like, why did we find the organization in the first place? What makes us tick? What makes us wake up in the morning to do this? And that’s not solely or generally, it’s just not about making money and being successful in that space.

00:05:03:27 – (Nirvano Brans): It’s because there’s some underlying intrinsic motivation that leads companies to go to market with something new and it’s not about disrupting, but it’s about something deeper, something underlying that organizations are looking to solve for. And I think if you get to that, which oftentimes takes hours and hours of back and forth and brainstorming, oftentimes, you know, much to the secret of a lot of the founders I work with, ultimately you get to something really kind of unique.

00:05:28:07 – (Nirvano Brans): And I think if you have that and you can build your narrative and your messaging about that, that’s where you can start thinking about like, well, where we marketing, that’s true then. And then sometimes you’ll see that some of those assumptions as to, you know, what our ideal customer looks like in terms of buyer or industry or company size.

00:05:43:23 – (Nirvano Brans): A lot of those notions might be false or partially complete simply because you didn’t really get to the truth in the first place. So I think getting back to the basics is one.

00:05:51:22 – (Nirvano Brans): I think secondarily in terms of building out go-to-market strategies, just keep it simple and stay focused. So too many early-stage organizations have this idea that they’re that their solution is going to be appealing and interesting to effectively any organization worldwide, across any industry of any size.

00:06:10:19 – (Nirvano Brans): And there might be some truth to that. But I think at the end of the day, you really need to focus on where you want to put your efforts in those first couple of months with those first couple of years.

00:06:17:25 – (Nirvano Brans): And it comes down to maybe an industry focus, maybe it comes down to a company size, it might even come down to a relatively small geography where we say, well, rather than selling it to the US. market, let’s only focus on, you know, the Northeast and focus on the New York and Boston markets only, so to speak.

00:06:32:07 – (Nirvano Brans): So, yeah, I think focus and really going back to the basics.

00:06:35:25 – (Nirvano Brans): Every single organization I’ve worked with before, that’s always been the starting point of what we’ve done. 

00:06:41:05 – (Brynne Tillman): So I love that I’m just going to share because I am a huge Simon Sinek fan. I have a prompt that we use with our clients, which is to act as Simon Sinek interviews me one question at a time to help me articulate my WHY, and it’s a very simple prompt that’s really career-changing.

00:07:04:06 – (Brynne Tillman): The other thing is I want to identify my clients WHY. Right. So because I want to sell into their WHY not their HOW or you know, their WHAT. So I love that you brought that out. I so resonate with that. 

00:07:21:43 – (Nirvano Brans): So on that note, too, sorry to interrupt you, but I think I don’t know too the one thing I’ve seen too, is that some organizations new to a space, they try to differentiate themselves with what I would refer to as like the bare minimum entry requirements to actually operate in that space.

00:07:34:22 –  (Nirvano Brans): Right? So I spend a lot of time in the payroll and

00:07:37:03 –  (Nirvano Brans): payment processing domain. A lot of organizations that are new to that space don’t necessarily come from the industry. They talk about, you know, compliance, where they talk about timely payments, or they talk about, you know, accuracy of payments. And I’m trying to help them understand is like, well, that’s not a unique selling point.

00:07:53:26 –  (Nirvano Brans): That’s the bare minimum entry requirement. If you’re not going to be able to pay people compliantly accurately and timely, you shouldn’t even want to consider being in this space in the first place. So get that out of the way and actually think about like what value beyond your entry-level requirements can you actually offer to your customer as well.

00:08:12:03 – (Brynne Tillman): I love that. I think that’s really a fantastic perspective on this. So just to finish off strategy a little bit. One of the biggest obstacles companies face, especially in the early funded startup, right, as they’re entering the market. What are some strategy slash tactics that you have implemented that have really helped companies scale quickly in terms of the scaling of the sales organization or scaling in terms of revenue growth?

00:08:45:04 – (Brynne Tillman): I’ll take both.

00:08:46:61 – (Nirvano Brans): Okay. Very good. I think as it relates to revenue growth, it all comes down to data. Right. So you do something and you either fail quickly or you succeed quickly. If you succeed quickly, then you have to find out why you end up succeeding and how can replicate that skill.

00:09:01:25 – (Nirvano Brans): If you fail quickly, that’s fine too. But then you have to replace and pivot rapidly.

00:09:05:29 – (Nirvano Brans): I’ve seen too many situations. Again, sometimes based on maybe assumptions or preconceived notions where something doesn’t work and you keep on being a better person and you just keep on going in that same vicious cycle of something that doesn’t work. Ultimately, two years later, you come to the conclusion that we wasted two years focusing on whether it’s a geography or a buyer or an industry or whatever it may be, that’s just not a good fit.

00:09:27:27 – (Nirvano Brans): Secondarily, what I’ve also seen is that if you do see something that succeeds, that’s in some organization that leads to a trigger where we want to double down on what works. And in some organizations that leads to a trigger where they don’t want to explore other ways in which, you know, things can work as well. And that ladder is a good approach if you get the skill.

00:09:47:28 – (Nirvano Brans): So once you’re a little bit bigger and you know something that works, then you want to start diversifying and finding other ways to grow in scale as well. If you’re really in that early stage, you want you don’t want to expect yourself too thin by doing that. If you find something that works, even if it’s as simple as a very specific buyer within a specific industry, just go after that.

00:10:05:01 – (Nirvano Brans): Full code press exhausts all of your resources or the majority of what you can do on that to make sure you get all of it out of it as possible, and then start thinking about where we want to scale differently. And I think it’s also kind of a segue into hiring strategy, particularly in the last decade. You know, a lot of technology companies were heavily funded.

00:10:23:06 – (Nirvano Brans): Oftentimes funding rounds were associated with just hiring a ton of people and then afterward thinking about where you’re going to be dealing with those folks. I think hiring is very similar in that sense, like being mindful and cautious of where you actually want to scale. And it’s a false narrative to think that if you hire ten sellers and you slap a $2 million quota on them, then all of a sudden you’re going to create $20 million worth of revenue like it doesn’t work that way.

00:10:46:01 – (Nirvano Brans): So I’ve always worked off the premise that I’d much rather drown my sellers in Pipeline and then start thinking about how can we scale rather than already start scaling and not necessarily having the pipeline or the time to support that. And at the end of the day, you know, sellers are and I can still say this because I’m a sales guy.

00:11:07:22 – (Nirvano Brans): Sellers are, you know, they’re simple folks like, did you want to get paid a lot of money and they want to have fun and they want to do that in an organization where they, you know, believe in the product. But at the end of the day, it still very much comes down to them being coin-operated and being successful in that sense and putting them into an environment where they’re not able to thrive from that point of view.

00:11:28:06 – (Nirvano Brans): That’s just not setting them up for success there. So I’m hoping that answering your question, but those are a couple of I think we learned in the last years. 

00:11:36:75 – (Brynne Tillman): It’s going to take me in a different direction than I expected. But I don’t know if you’re familiar with Jeb Blunt and Sales Gravy and all this he has amazing books.

00:11:45:29 – (Brynne Tillman): I think he has 16 books. One of his majors like Phrases is pipe is life, right? Without the pipeline, there’s no business. So share a little bit about what you said you know drown them in the pipeline. I would say the biggest challenge I see and one of the ones we help change is that pipelines are weaker than they’ve ever been before.

00:12:10:17 – (Brynne Tillman): So if and I know you’re doing a lot of consulting now, so if a company came to you and said, hey, we need we’ve got this funded start-up, you know, we’ve got a great product, but we’re not starting conversations with the right people. What are some of the things that you would recommend to them to build that very strong pipeline?

00:12:35:17 – (Nirvano Brans): Great question. So before I answer that question, I think one starting point that they oftentimes have is say, well, what do we already have in place currently? If you already have a pipeline but it doesn’t convert into revenue, then what’s the problem with that existing pipeline is that maybe and it’s the problem maybe that you have the pipeline, you convert them well, but the deal size is smaller than you want it to be?

00:12:55:28 – (Nirvano Brans): Is the problem is you don’t have any pipeline to begin with. The pipeline is actually the problem that is actually not converting. So kind of getting to the truth, on the existing pipeline is a big deal there. And oftentimes the pipeline is a lot bigger and healthier than a lot of folks think initially. But there’s an opportunity to get more out of that existing pipeline.

00:13:14:05 – (Nirvano Brans): And if it’s an issue that relates to the conversion rate, then it might have to do with, you know, empowering and enabling your sellers to do better. So what works and what is a proven go-to-market strategy and how can we replicate that at scale if it’s a situation where that might not necessarily help and you’re just talking to the wrong folks and it’s like, Well, if we know who the wrong folks are, then we also should know to some extent who the right folks are.

00:13:36:27 – (Nirvano Brans): So how can we focus on that?

00:13:38:17 – (Nirvano Brans): Sometimes it might be a problem related to, you know, the way the pipeline is treated by the seller. So, you know, the thing I said earlier, well, you want to drown people in the pipeline, sometimes drowning people in the pipeline also impacts your conversion rates negatively. So you also want to see what are my sellers or SDRs or whoever is slipping potentially.

00:13:58:18 – (Nirvano Brans): And why is that? Is that because of volume? Is it because of quality? Is it because of their ability to handle pipe? So I think there’s a lot of good causes you want to look at outside of just thinking about how can we shove more into that funnel? And then secondarily, I think with those learnings, if that’s really where you want and then want to think about like, well, how can we get in front of those prospective buyers more effectively?

00:14:18:19 – (Nirvano Brans): And it really depends on. I think the industry, it really depends on what you’re looking to sell. You know, I spent a lot of time in the learning and development space. You oftentimes see that organizations are maybe not actively shopping for any solution because they don’t necessarily know what’s out there. So then there’s an educational component to it that you need to get in front of.

00:14:38:04 – (Nirvano Brans): And how do you do that? More likely through referrals or by, you know, getting exposure in more intimate event settings where you get in front of your ICP and you actually give an opportunity to shine and they all of a sudden become aware of something that they didn’t even know existed beforehand. I’ve only spent a lot of time in the apparel space where people are typically actively buying because you’re looking for a payroll solution, you’re not shopping for payroll or you’re not looking at buying payroll.

00:15:02:08 – (Nirvano Brans): So it’s not that sexy of an industry for the most part. So in that particular case, what takes that buying decision is that maybe because they just newly expanded into new markets, which drives them to hire more people, which drives them to find a payroll solution, is that maybe because they’re using a particular competitor that over the last couple of years started flipping.

00:15:20:22 – (Nirvano Brans): So finding critical events, finding, you know, whether or not you need to find them at a critical event or understanding whether or not you need to educate them. I think those are all elements of where you want to drive your pipeline rather than just be saying, hey, we just need to shop more part of my French crap into the top of the funnel and pray to God that’s going to translate.

00:15:40:29 – (Brynne Tillman): You know, I love this idea and I have I will probably be quoting you in future podcasts, but I’m not sure if you’re familiar with David Newman, who is Do It Marketing, Do It Speaking.

00:15:52:04 – (Brynne Tillman): He was actually my very first mentor once I went out on my own  and he taught me something that you kind of just talked about that leads into this, which is what are these folks doing before they know they need you?

00:16:07:08 – (Brynne Tillman): What are they searching for? What are they looking for? And the people that educate first are the ones that typically will win the deal. So I absolutely love that you’re saying that. Right. But one of the things just sticks with me, and I probably this was 12 or 13 years ago that I worked with him. I totally missed.

00:16:27:20 – (Brynne Tillman): I used to start with my solution and how I help in educating at that moment. But what he taught was that was too late already. Like, you’ve got to get start educating in step before. So I thought that was interesting

00:16:45:05 – (Nirvano Brans): if you’re in a space that’s disruptive, if you’re trying to go and disrupt an industry that’s been around for God knows how long, there’s a little bit of education that you need to do upfront before they realize that the space needed to be in disruptive in the first place, Yeah.

00:16:56:24 – (Brynne Tillman): I love that. Really, I do. So there are a few other questions that came out of what you were talking about, and I’m going to run through kind of almost rapid fire. But you know, you talked about kind of where the strengths or the weaknesses are of the SDR or, you know, making sure that we’ve got the right people in the pipeline.

00:17:20:03 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah, What are some metrics or KPIs that you look at that doesn’t encourage bad appointments? Right? Like, that’s what I’ve seen a lot of is, you know, SDRs are rewarded by how many appointments, but not necessarily how many good appointments. So what are some things that when you’re consulting with the business and you’re seeing that there’s a lot of bad appointments, what’s some tip or strategy that you offer that your clients?

00:17:48:25 – (Nirvano Brans): Yeah, I think the one thing I always like to do is look at metrics and KPIs, not

00:17:54:08 – (Nirvano Brans): in isolation, right? So if you’re talking about it as the routine, then you can measure an SDR success based on, you know, how many dollars in a place, how many emails do they send out, how many meetings they set up, how many opportunities or deals that they create from those meetings.

00:18:07:23 – (Nirvano Brans): But I think oftentimes those are kind of in isolation within what they can control of what they’re doing. But it does not necessarily look at what happens afterwards. So if you have an SDR that creates a ton of deals and opportunities, but ultimately now that converts into wins and revenue, then that could be a problem with your sales organization, which is a whole different story altogether.

00:18:27:07 – (Nirvano Brans): But there could also be a problem with what they’re actually creating and what they’re converting or why they are converting into in the first place.

00:18:34:24 – (Nirvano Brans): Because sometimes you see an organization that converts a little bit to easily, Hey, these people, they gave me 15 minutes of their time, so there must be something here.

00:18:42:21 – (Nirvano Brans): And I’ve worked with organizations where, you know, if they don’t sign on the dotted line by the end of discovery called and it’s a disqualified opportunity, you know, for the sake of argument.

00:18:50:05 – (Nirvano Brans): So finding the right balance and what is your definition of qualification is is key there. And I think in order for you to be able to define that, you need to look at your sales process and look at your top of funnel conversion, look at your mid funnel conversion and look at the length of the deal cycle.

00:19:05:06 – (Nirvano Brans): Look at the average deal cycle. Multithreading is a key element of that as well. I think one of the things I’ve particularly done in the last couple of years is inviting as the hours, for example, to not just solely focus on one individual within an organization, but multithreaded early on already and try to pull those people in early on rather than pulling them in, you know, two, three weeks into the sales cycle.

00:19:25:18 – (Nirvano Brans): So,

00:19:26:11 – (Nirvano Brans): yeah, like I said, in terms of metrics, I would like to put that a little bit broader. And I think that conversion rate is obviously a key metric. Like I said, deal size, dual duration are metrics that you could be looking at as well.

00:19:37:04 – (Nirvano Brans): It could also be tied to maybe more behavioral metrics on an SDR or on a side.

00:19:41:08 – (Nirvano Brans): So, you know, how long does it take for them to actually get back to a customer? How much time is there between the first call and the second call? Are they if you do your call listening, are they setting up meetings in the first call or are they keeping it open ended and then they follow up with the meeting?

00:19:55:21 – (Nirvano Brans): So looking at some of those behavioral metrics or behavioral aspects and then kind of which are sometimes are very quantifiable, sometimes, you know, you have to use a little bit of gut feel for that. I think that’s ultimately the way to look at metrics and caps. 

00:20:12:63 – (Brynne Tillman): So I love that. I’m just going to share something that I think is so essential for because I’m I teach LinkedIn, right, and for sales.

00:20:22:18 – (Brynne Tillman): So you touch up Multi-Threading on LinkedIn, you can not only get the roles that you want to talk to, but the peoples names and the right. So when you have that champion, instead of saying who else should be involved in our next call? So typically, based on where we are now, Jane should be in the next call and Fred should be on the next call.

00:20:45:03 – (Brynne Tillman): And when you give them names, you know, do you have access to their calendar and that often they’re like, Oh! you’ve done your homework. You know who they are,

00:20:55:09 – (Brynne Tillman): that’s who’s on the next call. And then it just the conversion to Multi-Threading in the next conversation is much simpler than saying, who’s your cio? Who’s your HR Leader right.

00:21:07:27 – (Brynne Tillman): Go with the names. And that really helps. So I thought I’d just throw that in. 

00:21:11:21 – (Nirvano Brans): Oh that’s great. Yeah. And I also think that a lot of AEs that i have worked with they are hesitant to ask for more stakeholders because they somehow feel that they’re consulting where they’re working with. Whereas the reality is that as a buyer, if you are actually keen on buying the solution, you don’t want to buy it in a vacuum.

00:21:28:19 – (Nirvano Brans): You want other people to get equally excited about it A because you know, you want to kind of de-risk decision making and B, that, you know, let’s say that doesn’t work out and at least you’re the only one that can be held accountable for buying this. So I think it’s all about how you position it with your buyer, too, and helping them understand what’s in it for them to pull in their colleagues into the buying journey.

00:21:47:13 –  (Brynne Tillman): Yeah. And what we found is by simply saying typically these are the people that would be on the next call. It’s not personal. You know? Right. It’s not like, hey, you’re not good enough, but typically means, okay, I don’t mind being typical. All right. So so that’s just been our and another word I often use is typically the next step is to loop these folks in.

00:22:14:11 – (Brynne Tillman): Okay, I’m not saying, hey, they’re more important in the buying decision than you, but let’s loop them in and they go, we should loop them in. And it’s just a very different yeah, 100% couldn’t agree. So yeah. So I love this. I love this. So, you know, I have so many more things I’d love to talk to you about.

00:22:34:09 – (Brynne Tillman): Maybe we’ll do a part two at some point. But one of the biggest challenges I want to end with my question here and then I have to ask questions is but one of the biggest challenges that my clients face is hiring good people fast. And there’s a company called Closer Dot IO that’s very good at recruiting salespeople.

00:22:58:16 – (Brynne Tillman): But not all startups can afford to have a recruiting company working for them, right? So what are some of the things you recommend to these newly funded startups that you’re consulting with when it comes to hiring good people The first time? 

00:23:17:59 – (Nirvano Brans): That’s a great question. It’s a tough question too, because particularly hiring sales folks, I mean, that’s what they do for a living, right?

00:23:22:12 – (Nirvano Brans): Selling something.

00:23:23:08 – (Nirvano Brans): So selling themselves, if you find candidates that are not capable of selling themselves, then you know for a fact that they’re not going to work out. So it’s a very tricky one. I think if you are relatively early on in your journey or you’re newly founded or you’re really looking at scaling rapidly, I think one thing I have always found to be incredibly helpful is to find people that really that and I’m saying this like truly want to be part of the journey.

00:23:47:03 – (Nirvano Brans): They really believe in the solution. They believe in selling it. They believe in the success of the organization. They want to see it become successful and they’re able to somehow see themselves as a piece of that puzzle. But it’s not just about them. You know, I mentioned earlier, you know, salespeople are code operated and yes, they are. But the best salespeople I’ve worked with, they are coin operated.

00:24:08:11 – (Nirvano Brans): But that wasn’t the only reason why they stuck around. The reason why they stuck around is because they wanted to truly win as a company, as a team. They wanted to be part of that winning journey. They wanted to celebrate all of the all the competitors out there. So I think that is something that you can, to some extent detect as part of the sales process.

00:24:26:03 – (Nirvano Brans): I mean, enthusiasm is difficult to fake. If people are genuinely enthusiastic and excited about something, then you’ll pick up on that quickly. And I think also just really understanding, well, what are they looking to achieve in the next couple of years to come? So where I’ve personally found to be most successful in hiring sellers or at ease in kind of that growth journey is those folks that are kind of at the cusp of wanting to move on to the new role, but into a new role, but aren’t sure that they’re not quite there yet.

00:24:53:25 – (Nirvano Brans): So SDRs are still a year away from being an SDR before they become an elite or senior age who are just one or two years away from becoming a team leader, a manager, or whatever it may be. Your managers want to become VPs, but know that they can’t quite do it yet, but they want to do that.

00:25:09:20 – (Nirvano Brans): And I think in in hypergrowth startup environments, the beauty is that you hire five people now and in five years you could be 90. So there’s tremendous growth opportunity there. So you want to hire those folks that want to be part of that growth journey, that want to become one of those VP and maybe three or four years from now.

00:25:26:01 – (Nirvano Brans): And I think for that matter, you can also start seeing that they will start producing. They’ll be engaged to be committed. They will want to be part of that.

00:25:32:19 – (Nirvano Brans): So I’m not saying it’s a foolproof method, but I think particularly in that startup skill up environment, the cultural aspects and the intrinsic motivation is is a big part of successful hiring.

00:25:44:10 – (Brynne Tillman): I love that. That’s awesome. Well, this has been absolutely phenomenal content and I know that our listeners that are in that hypergrowth startup mode, particularly, you know, newly funded, could probably benefit from talking with you. But before we get your information and how people can get in touch with you, my last question is what question did I not ask you that I should have?

00:26:15:19 – (Nirvano Brans): Great question. It’s a tough one. Let’s maybe do that as an extension of your last question. So your last question was more so about like hiring profiles and all that. So I’ve worked with a lot of, you know, great sellers, great sales leaders in the last 15 odd years. I’ve actually to this day, I’m still mentoring some of them here and there and just, you know, just catch up with people just to kind of give them some tips and tricks on what to do and what not to do.

00:26:41:27 – (Nirvano Brans): And, you know, it may or may not work, but whatever one thing I think that is an interesting question as a follow up to your letter, one is really around, well, I’m a successful seller or a successful senior AE. I have an opportunity to go into leadership. Should I take that? Or maybe alternatively, I have an opportunity to join other organization in a leadership role Should I make that move?

00:27:06:09 – (Nirvano Brans): I think that’s a question that a lot of people, myself included early on in my career,

00:27:11:23 – (Nirvano Brans): difficult time answering.

00:27:13:12 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah, so that’s interesting because I had that opportunity and I passed. So I stayed in sales for a long time and then ended up in sales training and I was the ride along and I was the sit with.

00:27:23:25 – (Brynne Tillman): Right. And, and so I ended up in the training realm, but I knew that I always had to be a producer. It was not in I never wanted to manage a team that I couldn’t control. Isn’t that crazy? But that was my path. So, you know, now that I own a company, I manage a team, but I actually have one person that manages my team.

00:27:48:24 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah. Because, you know, I’m still in I still love the producing and the training side. Not the leadership. So interesting. So I love that. So I’m sure I have people that are like, my gosh, that was Mic drop moments. I’ve got this start up We’re struggling to hire the right people were struggling to put the KPIs in place.

00:28:13:01 – (Brynne Tillman): We’re struggling with a strategy that can scale quickly and I really want to have a conversation in with Nirvano. How do they get in touch with you?

00:28:21:27 – (Nirvano Brans): Two ways. I would say LinkedIn. There’s, as far as I’m concerned, only one Nirvano Brans out there. So that makes it fairly easy to find me. LinkedIn connecting. I pretty much live and breathe on there.

00:28:33:22 – (Nirvano Brans): 24/7 So that’s a great way to do it. Email always works as well. So just [email protected]. First name, last name and email account. And I’m always able to connect with anyone really. 

00:28:43:82 – (Brynne Tillman): Well, this is fantastic. Thank you for your insights and to all our listeners, when you’re out and about, don’t forget to make your sales social.

Outro:

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