Leading by example, transitioning from bootstrapped to venture-backed, and the importance of scripts with Zack Yurch (Head of Revenue at Semsee)

Zack Yurch 00:01
You're listening to That Worked, a show that breaks down the careers of top founders and executives and pulls out those key items that led to their success. I'm your host, Callan Harrington, founder of Flashgrowth, and I couldn't be more excited that you're here. All right,

Callan Harrington 00:21
Everybody. Our guest today is Zack Yurch. Zack is the head of revenue at Semsee. Semsee is an InsurTech player. I'm gonna have Zack break that down a little bit more, but first, Zack, welcome to the show.

Zack Yurch 00:36
Thanks, Callan, thanks for having me. I'm excited for this one. For our listeners, Zack was the first person that I hired, and there's an interesting story on that one. Just in general. But Zack, in your own words, what are you doing at Semsee? And what is Semsee?

Zack Yurch 00:50
Sure, yeah. So I'm head of revenue at Semsee, right? So I run partnerships, a sales team, conferences, basically anything that generates revenue for the company. Semsee started out as a commercial lines insurance rater, right? So from an insurance agent's standpoint, in the past, agents have had to go from carrier to carrier to get multiple rates. It takes 20, 30, 40 minutes for each carrier, and you're entering the same information, right? So Semsee is actually a take on an old acronym where it's S, E, M, C, I—it was single entry, multiple company interface. And what we've done is we've just taken that, and the input that you have with Semsee, as far as the commercial rater goes, is you're answering one question, it sends it to multiple places that are asking the same question, right? So you're essentially saving the agent time. Now where we've gone with that is we've gone further than just getting the rate—we're actually a marketplace now where we can actually give you access to commercial carriers, right? So you might have access to certain markets, but you get one piece of business that is outside of your appetite, and now Semsee is going to have a carrier that you can place that with, right? And you don't have to go through the entire appointment process just for that one piece of business. You can just place it with Semsee.

Callan Harrington 02:05
Okay, so for any of the listeners that maybe are not in the InsurTech space or insurance world, the challenge is that the model is typically very archaic, and you have to go to each individual insurance carrier to get a rate that can take upwards to almost an hour. So using this product, one of the features is that you can get multiple rates back very quickly, right? And in addition to that, a big challenge within insurance agencies is actually getting the ability to sell a particular carrier, correct? And they can go through you, which takes away that pain point, right?

Zack Yurch 02:42
Yeah, sorry. I assume that every podcast I do is based on insurance, so there's like a base level of knowledge. When it comes to that marketplace side of things, an insurance agency actually needs a certain amount of business to get appointed with a carrier as well. So if they just have a one-off piece of business, it's not going to be enough to get that appointment. They require minimums, typically. So that's why we offer that, and that's why it's a good value add.

Callan Harrington 03:01
That makes total sense. So prior to this, where did this all start? Where did your career start out, just in general?

Zack Yurch 03:08
So out of college, I started out selling plastics to retail stores, right? And at the time, my title was outdoor, or outside, outdoor, outside sales rep, so when I handed them my card, they knew they were gonna get sold. There was no account executive or, you know, SDR was just straight up, I'm here to close you up, yeah, but yeah, I was out of Cleveland. It was the first job that would take me, because I had to start paying student loans, you know, so, and I would have to compete with China on plastic prices, and we were about five times as much. So it wasn't a terrible job. It wasn't a good fit for me, because I'm not the typical, like old school, like, you know, wear a suit to work, pound on the door, you know, I'd like to find different ways to go about things typically. And that was it was just too old school, like the CEO, the VP, they'd all been there for 30-40 years, and I was like, the first sales rep that they brought in outside of that. So it ended up being, well, why are we doing this? Well, this is because this is the way we've always done it. And that made me kind of pissed off. I'm not gonna lie, but I did learn. I don't want to, like, throw out all of the old, you know, sales stuff, because I learned so much valuable information just from like the CEO, he would come with me on a couple of sales calls, and that's where I learned how to ask questions, like how to read people in person. A lot of that stuff still applies today, even over like zoom calls and things like that.

Callan Harrington 04:33
I agree, and I think the fundamentals in general, especially in sales, right? I'm sure it applies to every position, but in sales, in particular, a lot of those fundamentals are still there, and learning those are important, but you bring up a really good point in that it's when those unwritten rules can't be changed, right? And it sounds like that's where the frustrating part came in.

Zack Yurch 04:55
Yeah. I mean, we didn't have a CRM. I was calling off of literally a printed out spreadsheet and an old-school, like, dial the actual number phone, and then I had to run my own quotes myself. It was rough, you know? And that was kind of what made me make my switch to, well, it was, what was it at the time, Ally digital marketing solution?

Callan Harrington 05:18
Well, it was the shipyard, yeah, yeah.

Zack Yurch 05:20
So that's where I met Callan and I. What's the story? What's your side of the story of me getting hired at the shipyard? Let's hear that.

Callan Harrington 05:29
Let's see when, so you were my first hire that I ever made. I inherited a team when I got promoted into taking just more in a leadership position again. I had the title. The title was just, I was a VP running enterprise sales, but I didn't have any reports or anything like that. But then I moved into kind of the VP of sales, as opposed to just kind of the enterprise side, and then took over a team for the first time, and we were going to expand that team. And there I remember interviewing a bunch of people, and the person in HR was like, "Hey, this one's pretty good, your internal referral." And I remember speaking to you, and I was like, okay, he's pretty good. Let's get him in here. And my favorite part was, it was a done deal, and then you started negotiating, and it wasn't even like, I want to say it was like, at the time, like, super trivial. I mean, we're talking like the difference between,

Zack Yurch 06:28
Like, 1000 bucks, hey. Man, I was moving from Cleveland to Columbus, you know, I had to sleep on my buddy's floor for a little while because, you know, I was making, what, 12 bucks an hour, or something like that at the time. Man, I can't remember exactly what it was, and I hated that we had to put it in hourly, which is one of the most, that was one of the most frustrating things.

Callan Harrington 06:50
Oh, I loved it because I just worked super late, and you never reviewed overtime. So it was great. Come in early, work late. It's awesome.

Zack Yurch 06:56
Well, here's the deal, if you were doing work, yeah, and you're just, well, actually, anyway, yeah, we played ping pong for two hours. We did. We got very good at ping pong. Well, I did.

Callan Harrington 07:06
Well, that's okay. You got in one you had one good stretch where I still probably owe you about 150 lunch. 100 50s aggressive. Yeah, 10 to 20 is probably realistic. But so anyway, you were a first hire, and you ended up coming on and, I mean, I was fortunate. You crushed it immediately, like you had an immediate impact on the team. It helped set the tone. And I think about this a lot, and I think about this a lot when I've been in other companies as well, is that, you know, sometimes you come in as kind of like a college football coach or a pro football coach, right? And they come on and they bring their staff, and they're they're recruiting, right, people into their system. You fit right into the mold that, like the culture that we were looking to build. Oh yeah, you worked really hard, very aggressive on the phone, probably too aggressive, but it was, it was just totally different. We had such a you helped to build and add to that culture. So the other people that were there on that team that wanted to be a part of that was like, All right, let's go. So that's something I can't talk about enough when you think about the culture of the team. But what about you? I mean, what was it like for you? Coming into there,

Zack Yurch 08:23
It was refreshing, because it was a, I would say, like technology-forward sales role, and that was where it was just like, okay, I was already making probably 100 calls a day by hand, right? And I was literally reading the number off of a spreadsheet, right, and then trying to set an in-person appointment with somebody two hours away. And then I had to, at the time, I had to set appointments Tuesday through Thursday. I was expected to be out of the office, right? And then I stepped into this role where it was just like, okay, I can call 100 people before lunch and set six demos and then the rest of the day is just gravy, and I'll do, I could do the same thing in the afternoon if I had enough leads, right? And it wasn't even nearly as hard, right? So, and we had all this stuff, like email templates, click to dial this stuff came along later, but it was just a game changer. So when that happened, and I saw everybody else kind of doing their thing, I was just like, aren't you guys doing more? Like, you know what I mean, it's just okay. I found over my career, it's a lot harder to tell someone to do something than it is just for you to do it and then to see you doing it and then follow along, right? It was tough because I had a script at first, but the script was so good that we had almost every question covered. So, I mean, that's one of the biggest things in sales is having a great script for new people. Because I still remember you basically took me into the conference room and you drew, like, this skeleton. You're like, okay, refer back to the skeleton. If you ever get lost in the call, refer back to the skeleton of the script. Like, which portion were you on? And then I just had the script in front of me, and it was good to go, right? I and that was, yeah, that was a game changer.

Callan Harrington 10:02
Why do you think those scripts are so important for new people?

Zack Yurch 10:04
I mean, you just need to know sales is a very repeatable and scalable process, right? So if you're selling the same thing over and over again, especially like from a SaaS standpoint, you're going to get the same questions. So why would you let that person go through like trying to figure out the answers to these questions on their own right when you already have something that you know works really well? And I start people off with the script, and I say, stick to the script. Do not deviate from the script for probably, like, your first month at least. And then after that, once you get your own style, then you can deviate from it, but stick to what works right. If you want to come in, you want to make money, stick to the script. We know it works. We know it's going to equal a demo this percent of the time, or every 30 calls or whatever, and just come in and all you have to do is make the dials. Yeah,

Callan Harrington 10:57
I agree. And you talked about kind of the skeleton, and the skeleton, to me, is nice to teach, right? Like the script. Script is great. I agree. I use it in the same fashion that you do, like you have a script that you can lean on. Your goal is to make this your own. But use the script at first to get you to that point. If you try to recreate the wheel too early, you end up rambling, you end up lost, and you end up just sounding like a complete idiot. I'm not gonna lie. I mean, we've recorded those calls and they are bad. Yeah. I mean, March of Dimes, you know, it's

Zack Yurch 11:32
Sorry, we gotta give some context on it. Yeah. So we had a, I won't say his name, although he'll probably be on here at some point, but in a phenomenal salesperson, oh yeah, best I've ever been around. And he had this line where he talked about, he showed a page that it was a website page on the March of Dimes. And the person says, "Hey, what's the March of Dimes?" He had no idea. I wouldn't have known. He had said this probably 1000 times at that point and pointed out, oh, March of Dimes. You know, you know, you know what that is? That was part of his sales process. And normally everybody would say, oh, yeah, March of Dimes. This guy paused him, "What's the March of Dimes?" So you can hear this said sales rep typing in the background rapidly googling March of Dimes. And he's just like, "It's a walk for... it's babies, walking, walk for healthy babies." It was so bad. But that's, I mean, that's, he was on script, but someone threw him off his script.

Callan Harrington 12:29
That's exactly right. That's exactly it. You gotta find. It's gotta be pressure tested. Now, in fairness, that happened one time. He had probably said that 1000 times, 1000 times, right? Yeah, but I agree with you. I think that's such a good point with sales training in particular, is understand the basics and move on. So you had that, and you mentioned kind of that process, so, and then you started to move up pretty quickly within, at that point, the shipyard, before we had spun out, take us through that, just in general.

Zack Yurch 13:00
I mean, so in general, I hate when things are outside of my control. It's a, I guess, a blessing and a curse that I think that I can always do something better than somebody else is doing it right. So I was scheduling these demos, and I would be listening to the account executive or whatever, take demo at the time like you're saying this wrong. You're saying this at the wrong time, right? And so I was just like, all right, I pressed you to, okay, When can I start taking my own demos, right? And that was a big, like, bump up. I think we did, like, what was the process we had to schedule and close our own or certain amount, or something like that, which I think still works to this day, because that helps people to not sacrifice other people's deals. But that was the big thing, is I wanted to be in control of the entire sales cycle and close everything I could, because I thought that I could close a higher percentage, right? And I go off script a lot, but it's based off of knowledge, right? So I think that's an important thing for salespeople. Is like, learn as much as you can about the industry that you're in, and then you don't really need to do a ton of research. Like, if you already know what's going on, you should be able to have a conversation. You shouldn't be on script. So I've had sales reps that are great on script, but then as soon as someone asks them a weird question, they get thrown way off. The goal should be to get off script, but still to use that as, like your foundation, kind of get lost in the question there.

Callan Harrington 14:24
Well, you brought up another great point, though, and I talked about this before on LinkedIn, and I said, if you're in a niche industry, yeah, it is so important that daily, you're understanding what's going on in your industry. You know the trends. You know how that impacts your clients. You know how, what kind of fears and challenges these different changes have on your prospects, and you'll separate yourself out immediately. I mean, just being able to talk in their vernacular, right? Is a big difference. It builds trust, like if you can use the same lingo through. Especially in insurance, because if you don't know any of that, I've seen people just get shot down. Oh yeah, no, it was

Zack Yurch 15:05
the same. And I've been able to through, you know, just different positions that I had, and then, especially in consulting, because you see all sorts of different things, it's the same if you're selling into a niche, if it's more of a generalist, it's a little bit different. But if you're selling into an industry, into a niche, knowing that, because it's, I think the thing that I probably hear more than anything is, well, our industry is a little different, and it is that's 100% accurate. It's up to us. We have to know the differences for that industry. I love that. I think that's such a like goes back to like, what was it the Challenger sale kind of like knowing someone's business better than they know it themselves, almost, so that you can understand what problems they're going to face and solve it before they even know it's a problem, right? Yes.

Callan Harrington 15:51
Okay, so you're, you're at Smart Harbor, and move up there, and then what did you do after Smart Harbor?

Zack Yurch 15:58
Well, there was nowhere for me to go up at Smart Harbor, because this person sitting across the desk from me, Callan, was there. It's probably a tough time for Callan. Tough time for me, too. But one of our competitors had a national sales manager opening, and I saw it, I applied. Honestly, didn't know that I would even get it or not, but I knew the product was really good, and they didn't have any salespeople, right? So I applied, answered a few questions, and then I switched and moved over to a company called Forge3, super small company at the time, I think I was the third employee. I was the CEO, the COO, and then me so and then we just started selling it. And at that time, we were sending PDFs, having people sign them and bring them back before we switched to DocuSign or Panda Doc. Didn't have a CRM, so that was my biggest learning moment, was I had to build this whole thing from scratch. And how do I do it without, like, you know, having, like, a Salesforce admin, right? Or having, like, Yeah, I mean, or Salesforce intern, or Sure, yeah, I mean, any of that stuff. And that's when I switched to HubSpot. I mean, I have not switched back, but that was the next role, and I really wasn't a manager until about a year or so in. I was doing it solo, and then I moved to like, kind of like a player coach role, where I was a manager and I was still taking demos.

Callan Harrington 17:20
What were some of those times in those early stages, you bring up a great point in those early stages, you don't have all the resources in the world. How did you make those selections? How did you decide what was important, what wasn't important, and and ultimately, pick what you did.

Zack Yurch 17:40
We just went as cheap as possible to say the truth, but it was, I just wanted to make sure that we had tracking that was so important was like email tracking, you know, I wanted to be able to make calls from the CRM. I wanted to basically live out of the CRM and be able to track every interaction I had with a client, and also see when they were interacting with the stuff that I sent them right. And HubSpot had that for, like, I think it was free at first.

Callan Harrington 18:07
The free version is pretty good. Yeah, I usually recommend a company starting there and then,

Zack Yurch 18:11
and then you can bump up to, like, maybe 50 bucks a month or something like that. I think sales professional gets you five seats at $500 a month too, which gets you everything, and it was automated. They had sequences, all that stuff. And we started out as, like, mostly inbound. I wasn't making many outbound calls or anything like that. But outbound is where I live, really. I inbound. It's kind of, you know, I view that as like, lower on the team.

Callan Harrington 18:34
So let's talk about that. How come?

Zack Yurch 18:38
I love inbound, but I set this like standard of like purity of sales and outbound is such a greater feeling when you go out and you hunt someone down, you bring them in and you close that business, right? Rather than someone coming to you saying, hey, I want this. I view that more it is sales to a certain point, but it's also kind of like order taking a little bit, you know, especially in the companies I've been at where it really wasn't like you had to tailor a solution. It was like, okay, hey, I heard about you at Forge3. I want a website. Okay, here's what we've got, Sign, sign on the dotted line, right? So

Callan Harrington 19:13
in your eyes, it's when you've got a lot of inbound coming in for a product that is not a huge that Salesforce, right? You're not having to do tons of solution engineering, and you gotta bring in a sales engineer, and you've gotta bring in all sorts of different pieces. If you've got a pretty simple product, then inbound is more order taking than it is.

Zack Yurch 19:36
Yeah, it's more, I would say, order taking and just like setting expectations, like you're not really like showing them a need that needs to be fulfilled with your product, because they already know, right? If they've come to you, for the most part, from what I experienced, they already know what they need. They know you have a good product. It's just really setting the expectation of the process and what they're going to get out of us going forward. That was my biggest mistake with inbound. Was if somebody came in. They were like, I just want to sign up. And I did that a couple times, and it was a huge mistake, because they probably were the fastest to cancel because they just didn't know the process. So every person that was in inbound I made sure they took a demo and at least walked through the platform, even if it was quickly, just understand what they're going to get, how fast it was going to be built, and how much it was going to cost.

Callan Harrington 20:23
Yeah, I think, and a lot of that is dependent on the customer and how much your product cost to be able to put if you can put a salesperson on that, in my opinion. But I know what you're saying your customer, your customer needed to be set expectations, right? So that makes sense. I got you there.

Zack Yurch 20:44
And the problem is, the person that makes a quick decision to join, also makes a quick decision to leave. That's what I've found, in general.

Callan Harrington 20:50
Interesting, yeah, why do you think that is?

Zack Yurch 20:51
That's like, shiny object syndrome, you know, where people are just like, wow, that's cool and new. That's great. And then they get into it. And especially if they hadn't heard the actual demo, they might not even know everything that is included. So they're like, well, this wasn't what I thought it was going to be. It's like, well, you came up with this picture in your head of what you thought my product was going to be when I was trying to tell you the whole time, this is what it is, and this is what you're going to get out of it.

Callan Harrington 21:19
Especially if you don't have a free trial, yeah? Where you know companies like Slack and Asana and Trello nine times out of 10, and that's kind of the whole theory of not theory that's product-led growth. In a nutshell is, I've used this. Let's build this for the end user. So when the end user goes to the next company, right? Just like what you did at HubSpot, right? You didn't need to demo HubSpot the next time, you can go straight to it. But when you're selling either a zero to one product, something brand new, that's never been out there, or that you're doing something different, because I definitely have found there are times when I've got a lot of inbound and I mean, for me, like, there's nothing better, like,

Zack Yurch 21:57
It's awesome. It's awesome. I just, I don't know there's just, like, this thing in my head, this glory of outbound right, where it's just, I feel better when you hunt it down. It's harder, so it's more gratifying. I'll say that. Yeah,

Callan Harrington 22:09
So you're growing Forge3. What were some of the challenges that you came across as you were growing that?

Zack Yurch 22:14
So we were a super small company, and we were completely bootstrapped, right? So we were living off of the revenue that we had generated. There was no funding. There was nothing like that. So we did, had to pay people less, and it was hard to find good people that were willing to take less money, or that were willing to rely more heavily on commission, right? And that's becoming a thing now, where these sales reps are expecting these like, huge bases, and then they're okay with, like, a capped commission. And I totally get it, I understand. But again, that's just not how I came up through the world. So I that's a hard thing to swallow, right? To, like, pay a, like new rep, like 70-80k base, it's just, or even more, like, it just doesn't jive with the way I think so. At the time, we were paying like, 30 to 40 grand, and then over half of like, you would almost double that in commission. But you just have to find the right people that are willing to take that leap, that aren't just taking it for the base, right? And I did find some people that were actually willing to take a cut in base because they believed in the product, and they made the switch, and it worked out for them, which was great.

Callan Harrington 23:23
How did you do that? How did you find those people?

Zack Yurch 23:25
So I rely heavily on my network, right? So Ed Porter, he introduced me to someone on my team, Kenny, and he was great. Did a great job. I value other people's opinions, and then I get my own read on people. It's kind of like a sixth sense a little bit, right? Just after you've experienced enough people that you can tell who actually has the drive to go get it done, and then who's just in it for just a nine to five, right? And I never hire people that just want to stay in their current position, because I don't want that for them either, right? I mean, if I'm hiring you to be an account executive, I want to know that you want to take my job in a few years, right? And not everybody's going to be able to do it, but if you go somewhere else and take a job that's the same as mine, that's a victory for me, right? I hate to see people leave, but it's good for them, and then they're gonna go on and kill it, and then it's gonna say, Okay, it's like, coaching in the NFL. Like, you see all these coaching trees, or, like, Okay, how many people studied under Bill Belichick? And then, okay, you get somebody that has, you know, trained under Callan or train under Zack, and you know, they're gonna be good, you start to build a reputation for that, right? And I've been kind of blessed that I've only had to hire a small team, so I haven't had to hire like 20 people at once, because that's almost impossible to do that, right? It's hard, yeah, for sure, or at least, to find all those people to start at once, but that I really relied on the network heavily, interviewed them, and I give them, like a slight test. I would like send them the script and just be like, All right. I. Gonna give you one day study it, then we're gonna go through it. I'm just see how you do. I expect them to be perfect, but I'm expecting them to know some of it, right?

Callan Harrington 24:55
What are you looking for in that?

Zack Yurch 24:56
Thoroughness, too, because I would ask them to send me, like a follow-up email and just little things like, I would provide them with resources. And if they just sent me, like, the full link to the resource that was, like, basically a point against them. But if they would hyperlink it and say, like, click here for this link. It's just little things like that that, I think, set you apart. From a sales standpoint. I don't want to see spelling mistakes. I don't want to see any of that, right? It's not just on the phones. It's just attention to detail in general, yeah, because

Callan Harrington 25:37
I'm assuming that just aligns more with kind of your core values and what you're trying to build, yeah, so I think that's an important piece. Is one of the best stories I ever heard. And I and you were there as well when we were touring, and they were telling us about Zappos and the culture that Zappos had built. And somebody that was late at Zappos, somebody from the from the it was a large enterprise company that wanted to understand their culture, and they said, and the person was like, Hey, you guys are all late. They're like, is timeliness in your core values? Like, no, it's not our core values. Like, if it's that important to you, you put it in your core values. It is not a part of ours extreme example. But I do think that it's important. And I think a lot of times I see, you know, it's like, here's the standard that you need to look for in a salesperson. I don't know that. I agree with that. I think it's more, here's what fits our culture. And you brought this up earlier, right? Whether it's kind of like this inbound mindset, outbound mindset, because they're very different, yeah. And what does that person have for some people, you know, it might be a you're here from nine to five, and that's it, and that's okay. And a lot of times, when you think of the work-life balance that a very large company can provide, and in startups, it is harder, it's harder to I can't promise anybody great work-life balance. I will try the best that I can. But if you're in a really early stage startup, especially from one of the first couple reps, like, it's just, it's hard, it's very hard.

Zack Yurch 27:04
The people that you hire have to fit together, right? Because I've experienced that where you'd have one person that is making 80 calls, right, and they might schedule two or three demos, then you got one person that's gonna make 20 or 30 calls, and they've scheduled two or three demos, right? So if that person that's making the 20 to 30 calls is only willing to make that amount of calls, it's hard, from a manager standpoint, to say, like, well, you're booking demos. You're not making enough calls. The issue is, then the rest of the team gets mad, or, like, sees you as, like, babying them, basically, like, they're not hitting your activity goals, but they're hitting their demo goals. So you have to choose, like, are you going to focus on activity and the good of the team? Are you going to focus on that one, sort of like, All-Star, I guess? And personally, I always focus on the team. I try to get that person to up their activity. I wouldn't necessarily like fire them or let them go, but I'm not going to praise them for not meeting the minimums of activity, I would say, yeah.

Callan Harrington 28:02
Yeah. I mean, especially if in this is a huge debate, yeah, this is probably one of the most debated things I've ever seen in sales, in particular, in general, is activity versus results, right? And the question is, if somebody's hitting results, do you care if they make one call or 100 calls, and vice versa. If somebody's making 100 calls but are getting no results, right? You know, what does that look like? It's a tough question to answer. Yeah.

Zack Yurch 28:30
I mean, my thing is, if you're making 100 calls, I can work with you to make sure that you're improving, like your call to demo ratio. If you're not willing to make more than 20 or 30 calls and you're still scheduling, there's going to be a time where you hit a cold streak and you're not able to do that, and you don't have the drive to make that activity to get you through that slump. And that's the problem that I've seen people run into, is they think that that's going to work for them all the time. Maybe it does. Maybe it does, but it goes back to the thing like, Okay, well, if you're making 20 calls, what do you do on the rest of the day, right? And maybe you're researching stuff and going super in depth, but still, 20 calls through eight hours. It's four, you know, one call every 15 minutes. And I mean that, I always do that math and just say, okay, yeah, you're you could be booking six demos, right? And making twice as much money as that. What you want to do? I don't know it's a tough debate, but you have to think about it this way. Yeah, that person might be booking two or three demos, but if you are demoralizing, the rest of the team, maybe have five or six other reps that you're demoralizing that are now starting to book less and less demos, it's costing you more than it's gaining from those two or three.

Callan Harrington 29:36
It gets to what you just said, like, I can't let this person you know you could sometimes give the benefit of the doubt, because you can typically see improvement in typically see improvement in something that's working really hard, but that person's like, Ah, man, this is tough. It puts you in a really hard situation.

Zack Yurch 29:48
It does because you know that they have it in them, and it's just you have to want it. And I don't know how you coach that, and that is, I've seen people go on cold streaks that are so. Good, their conversion rates are so high, and then they don't know what's going on, but then they get so mad, because I don't want to say it was easy, but it just came so naturally to them that they really didn't have to work at it. And then they get frustrated, and they sort of shut down, right? So I'll take somebody that can repeat the process over and over again, that's coachable, that has the drive to have the activity. I'll take those people over a sales prodigy any day. Agreed, right?

Callan Harrington 30:25
I totally agree with that. Because typically you're gonna, they're gonna The sky's the limit for somebody that that has that, that kind of work ethic and and humility to be able to to improve, right? The so you guys grew Forge3 really quickly, walk us through that. What ended up happening? How did that go?

Zack Yurch 30:42
Where do you want me to start? So, from the very beginning, or?

Callan Harrington 30:45
Well, at this point, right? You started to bring on sales reps, right? You got all the kind of the foundation in place. You brought on sales reps. What happened from there?

Zack Yurch 30:53
Yeah. So we basically found just lists of prospects to call based on certain criteria that made them a good fit. I mean, you have to find out, like, who is your ideal client. At this time we had so insurance agents have certain carriers that will actually pay for part of their marketing budgets. So we found all of those agencies and just started calling all those agencies right to sell them on this. And that's really how we found the ideal candidates. And so we started doing more and more outbound the inbound continued, which was great, and then we just developed more partnerships, right? So we would work agencies to talk to the carriers, and then we'd also be working the top end of the carriers as well. So then we'd end up meeting in the middle, because the leadership from and carriers, I would consider, like, almost like enterprise or partnerships, or whatever, channel partners. Yeah, channel partners, way to look at it in this scenario. And so you'd be working those guys top down, and then you'd be getting these agents to talk to their territory managers and things like that. So that when I go in and I say, hey, I want to meet with you, let's say Nationwide Insurance, they're gonna say, Wait, who's Zack at Forge3? Oh, we've heard from 20 agents that we need to talk to Forge3, so it just gives you a lot more credibility. And then once we knew that, we just started just hitting the phones as hard, as hard as we could, hitting conferences, doing webinars were important, but just massive activity and automation with a personal touch was probably key. I see so many people that get mad at, like, automated emails. Like, dude, you know, yeah, you might be one person that gets mad. But if I send 300 and I get 10 people that respond and I get one person that's mad, that's a big win. You know what I mean? Like, I might close five people out of the 10 and you're over here mad because you got an email on your spam folder. Like, I don't care. Or like these guys on LinkedIn, right, the LinkedIn everybody's like, "Oh, everybody's giving me a sales pitch on LinkedIn. You shouldn't be doing that. You should learn more and more about each company you're reaching out to from an enterprise standpoint, sure, but I got 38,000 insurance agencies to reach out to, so I'm not going to learn about every single one, and most of them fit within this bucket. So if you send 200 messages and again, you get 10% response rate or something like that. You get 20 people to reach out to you, and you get one person that's mad. I don't care, right? Everybody's trying to preach, like, oh, you need to learn more about your prospects. Like, No, you need massive action.

Callan Harrington 33:29
You laid down really good process, yeah, and that's what it is. It's processes, and then being able to scale those up and just looking at the results right? And that's really it, like you can't you look at open rates, you click, click rates, response rates. And if those are working, keep doing what you're doing right. And we would hit people with the same sequences multiple times. They'd open it up, and then sometimes they would respond right. And then every once in a while we'd see the numbers dip, and we would change up the sequences of emails that we were sending. But I mean, overall, the best subject line that we ever had was, when is a better time? That's it. Are you available for a call? Yep, and everybody hates on it. But look at the numbers, highest open rates, when is a better time?

Zack Yurch 34:10
I can't tell you how many times I switched out. For me. It was, and what, you know, we started it back years ago, but it was, Are you available for a call? And when I've changed it with something more, and I would just go back to it, yeah,

Callan Harrington 34:33
Everybody tries to get cute. Everybody tries to like, you know, think they're going to be the Savant of emails. And it's never sustainable, right? Unless you have a full team against it. And I've seen, I've seen some people that do, like serious email marketing and but like they have, it's just a whole nother world, right? All the systems they have in place, the research that got behind it, yeah.

Zack Yurch 34:56
I mean, that's not like transactional, these are completely transactional emails where you're sending the same thing to everybody, right? So it has to work for 1000s and 1000s of people, right? So it's basically finding the lowest common denominator of what is the highest percentage of people that are going to open this and that are going to relate to this email without us having to change it for every person? Yeah. How do you save time, but have the largest effect?

Callan Harrington 35:11
So I want to fast forward a little bit. You grew Forge3 like crazy. Then you made the leap over to Semsee, a venture-backed company, so a different world than kind of what you had been in. How were those changes for you? And why'd you do it?

Zack Yurch 35:31
So I love Forge3, great leadership. Jeff, the CEO, did a fantastic job with the company. He really set the tone for, like, the culture was great. It was like, kind of everybody worked hard. They were working remote before, remote was the thing, and everybody loved the customers, right? Which was amazing, which makes it so easy to sell. The problem was it just begun to the point where I get antsy if I'm not continuously growing or continuously changing. And I think actually, in my initial interview with him, I told him that I probably wouldn't be there in five years. I literally, I think, I told him that I do believe, yeah, because I just it's not in my DNA to be stagnant. And it got to the point where, like, okay, we're hitting the same numbers. Basically, every month we've talked to just about everybody out there. So we were getting diminished returns on what we were doing, and we weren't really willing to, like, again, take massive action to scale up right, to, like, get, like, 15-20 reps to start to play with, sort of the big boys in these spaces. And it's because we didn't have the venture capital backing. So that was kind of attractive to me about Semsee, was they're very well backed. But with that comes strings, right? So I left because it was exciting, right? And I was like, Okay, this is cool. I'm going to be able to do what I want to do right away. I can get out of the player-coach role. I can really build the system that I want to build and the team that I want to build, and it's awesome. But it comes with strings. It comes with, I would say, unwanted pressures.

Callan Harrington 37:11
Give me an example.

Zack Yurch 37:12
You have to always keep your board happy, but still give realistic goals, right? So we were talking about usage, and I never had to worry about usage before with the website at all. So I'm like, okay, not only now do I have to worry about selling the thing and keeping these customers on, but how do we get these people to use this thing, right? And it's a completely understandable thing, but then also an unwanted pressure, not saying we're doing this at Semsee, but a lot of these other companies that are all over the place, are laying people off simply because these VCs want more runway, right? They want you to have 24 months in the bank of your payroll, right? Or something like that. And I mean, I get it because it's an investment, right? You can't look at it as it's people. But I told this before, I like control, and I don't like people telling me what to do, right? So when you do that, it gives a signal that, like, you're not believing in your company, or that you're not going to be where you want to be within the next year. And so they have to, like, weigh the risk, whereas I would just be all in, because I believe in myself, I believe in my team. I know we're going to get it done, but that sort of takes that decision out of your hands. When you talk about, like, backing and things like that.

Callan Harrington 38:42
Gotcha. So with the added investors, it pulled away some of the autonomy, because the decisions that you are making are in order to because with VC, I mean, you have to set yourself up for the next round, right? Or you have to set yourself up to be cashflow positive, right, and continue to grow, which is usually the former. Usually you're setting up for your next round. And as you mentioned, you know, runways went from a traditional 18 months to 24 to 36 months, right? In order to give time for things to turn around, evaluations to come back, yeah? But you lose, you've lost that autonomy, right? You're saying

Zack Yurch 39:11
Yeah, in some cases, and it's just trying to think of more specific examples. But overall, it's not that bad, because they give you the money, and that's great. You can grow super fast, but then you have these crazy expectations, right, that you have to hit. Whereas, like at Forge3, okay, we would set these goals, and most of the time we hit the goals, but if we didn't hit the goals, it's not like the world comes crashing down, right? So, but with VC, it's like, okay, you don't hit your goals, you're done, right? Or we're gonna pull the funding. You're gonna you're gonna move somewhere else, right? Or we're not gonna provide your next round of funding. And at Semsee, thankfully, we don't have to worry about that too much, because we have some investors that have been with us since the beginning, that have bunch of money that are very well invested in what we want to do, and they want us to kind of complete that mission. But you just see, I see this happening across the board, but it also goes to, like, the way the economy's been the past few years. I mean, people's, like, the pay of people has gone way up, right? And it's become outlandish. I mean, we talked to somebody that was, like, wanted 110k base for, like, an AE roll. And like, Dude, we're selling a product that's $2,400 a year. Like, I'm not gonna Yeah, like a sales rep should make the company money, not be a net negative.

Callan Harrington 40:44
What have been some of the things that when you made that change where you're like, I love this aspect?

Zack Yurch 40:54
Having the money to spend was awesome. Our CEO is great. He's very hands off. For the most part, till you do something wrong. But just being able to invest in the areas you want to invest in, right? Like we want to get HubSpot, we get HubSpot enterprise done. Didn't even question this. Like, $30,000 bill that I handed to him. Was like, okay, cool. And he's like, why are you running this by me? I'm like, awesome. This is great. Also seeing how sales affects other parts of the business, right? Because with Forge3, we're just selling the website, it's like, Okay, $250 a month, that's it. That's all the revenue that we're getting off this person, right? Whereas if we sell an agency at Semsee, now we have sort of the market access piece where we can start to make more money. If they start running business through us. We can start making money off of carriers. We can start all kinds of different right ways to generate revenue for the company,

Callan Harrington 41:55
because you have a SaaS component, correct, and you have a usage-based component, yep, where that usage base can have an unlimited upside,

Zack Yurch 42:03
Exactly, exactly. So that was super exciting, because it just had more of an impact, right? And felt less just like a simple sales rep, and it was more and at Forge3, it's not like I just felt like a sales rep, but it's a larger company, and we have, I think, like 50 or more people now, so it's just you step into a bigger game. And what I liked was I actually was just able to figure it out pretty quickly, right? Which is great. I stumbled along the way, like there were things where it was like, we shouldn't be doing that. Okay, now we're just gonna pivot. But this was the first year anybody was selling Semsee, right? So that was tough. But the biggest thing was I got two reps that I started with, that I trusted that were the right people that really helped us take off running right. And that's incredibly important if you're starting a new team. And I think we already talked about this, but get the right people in there, first man, and get people that, if you can get people that you know, that you know, are going to be good, because if you get two people in and one of them doesn't work out, that's going to hamstring you for the rest of the process. Yeah,

Callan Harrington 43:09
It is. I think it's incredibly important. It's why you see a lot of times, right? People do ask, especially I see it across everywhere, but in sales, quite a bit. People, they expect you as an executive, that you got a handful of people that are probably also going to join, whether that sales managers, rev ops people, sales reps, whatever that may be that you've got a pretty Plug and Play team that you can bring in, because it not so you can't do without it. You definitely can, but it's going to be a huge catalyst, right, right? So this is awesome. I think there's so many you've hit so many points on this, the last thing that I want to ask, just in general, is, if you can go back and have a conversation with your younger self, age is open, what would That conversation be?

Zack Yurch 43:55
Don't sell AMC,

Callan Harrington 44:01
What else would you say in said conversation?

Zack Yurch 44:05
So be more grateful, I would say, and this is like everybody else is probably going to say, like, you know, make a change faster, or something like that. My problem is I'm always looking for a change. I'm always pressing right? And I like every time, every time, I'm always looking for more. And it's helped me a lot throughout my career, but it's hurt me in some ways, in that people maybe didn't know how much I appreciate them, right? And I think that's important. That builds more loyalty. I just move too fast at times, right? So if I could control that. I would say, do my best to control that in certain scenarios, right? But other than that, yeah, just do your thing, Young. Zack.

Callan Harrington 44:50
Zack, thanks for coming on the show, man. This was great.

Zack Yurch 44:53
Absolutely.