Get my ultimate guide to boosting conversions and customer engagement delivered straight to your inbox.
Get my ultimate guide to boosting conversions and customer engagement delivered straight to your inbox.
“Sales doesn’t break because people aren’t working hard. It breaks because the process isn’t clear.”
– Dustin Collins
In this episode of The Chat, Terry sits down with Dustin Collins, a sales leader who has built and scaled B2B sales teams in environments where process, discipline, and execution actually matter.
Dustin’s journey is not theory-driven. He has gone from early sales roles to leading revenue teams by building sales processes from the ground up, aligning sales strategy with real buyer behavior, and developing teams that perform under pressure. Along the way, he has learned what breaks first when sales teams grow and how strong leaders prevent those breakdowns before they stall revenue.
This conversation dives into practical lessons on building a sales team, tightening the sales process, and creating marketing ideas that support B2B sales instead of working against them. Dustin shares how consistent execution beats clever tactics, why most sales strategies fail as teams scale, and what experienced leaders do differently when the number truly matters.
Growth does not fail because of effort; it fails because of unclear process and weak ownership.
If you are responsible for revenue, pipeline, or performance, this is a conversation worth your time. Listen in and rethink how you build sales teams that last.
03:45 – Dustin explains how his early work in health coaching shaped his sales leadership mindset and why behavior change matters more than scripts in B2B sales.
06:20 – The story of joining a startup as employee #3 and what it really takes to build a sales team from zero without shortcuts.
09:30 – A clear breakdown of what actually breaks first when sales teams scale and why effort is rarely the real problem.
13:10 – Dustin’s take on why unclear sales process kills performance faster than bad talent or weak motivation.
16:45 – A sharp insight on why more activity does not equal more revenue and how leaders confuse motion with progress.
20:50 – Lessons from selling complex, high-stakes B2B deals and why mistakes get more expensive as deal size grows.
27:30 – Where sales and marketing alignment usually fails and what marketing ideas must do to actually support the sales team.
34:40 – A leadership moment on managing performance without burning out teams and why clarity beats motivation every time.
42:15 – Final advice for sales and marketing leaders on what truly matters when the number is on the line and growth pressure is real.
Podcast Title – What Breaks First When Sales Teams Scale
Host: Terry Wilson, Founder and CEO of Chatmetrics and Zotly
Guest: Dustin Collins, Vice President of Sales at VisibleThread
Episode Summary
In this episode, Terry sits down with Dustin Collins to unpack what really breaks as sales teams grow and why most scaling problems are rooted in sales process, clarity, and leadership, not effort. Drawing from Dustin’s experience building B2B sales teams from the ground up, this conversation explores sales strategy, team structure, and how marketing ideas must support execution.
[01:00] – From Early Roles to Sales Leadership
[04:30] – Building a Sales Team From Zero
[09:20] – What Breaks First When Sales Teams Scale
[15:10] – Sales Process Over Activity
[21:40] – Enterprise Sales and High-Stakes Deals
[28:30] – Marketing Ideas That Support Sales
[35:45] – Leadership, Performance, and Team Health
[43:20] – Lessons for Sales and Marketing Leaders
Stats & Insights
Useful For
Links & Resources- Connect with Dustin Collins on LinkedIn
Learn more at: www.visiblethread.com
00:00- Intro:
Welcome to the chat. Come behind the inbound scenes of some of the world’s fastest growing companies. For the past 10 years as chat metrics, we’ve had an exclusive inside view of how these industry leaders are revolutionizing inbound marketing and sales across diverse sectors. Each week we bring you conversations with top minds in marketing and sales who share insider secrets and strategies.
00:34- Intro:
For driving inbound success, join us on the chat, your front row seat to the future of inbound.
00:49- Terry:
from helping truck drivers get healthy to building eight figure revenue engines inside SaaS companies. Today’s guest has done it all. My guest today is Dusty Collins, VP of Sales of Visible Thread, a SaaS leader in the GovCon space. He’s a proven builder, having led sales teams from scratch to smashing quota, scaled enterprise sales, and implemented repeatable systems across some of the most complex and compliance driven industries.
01:13- Terry:
But Dusty isn’t just a sales leader. He’s also a dad of three, A guy who uses AI to plan dinner and build discipline, and someone who’s not afraid to talk openly about where AI overlaps. In this episode, we’re diving into how we builds high performing sales teams and how to use AI as a force multiplier without burning your market and what happens when you stay relentlessly human in a tech-driven world.
01:35- Terry:
Dusty, welcome to the chat.
01:36- Dustin Collins:
Thanks for having me, Terry. Appreciate it.
01:38- Terry:
Let’s jump straight into it. Look, you’ve built some sales teams from zero to quota crushing machines multiple times. What’s the first 90 days of building a repeatable sales engine look like in your world?
01:50- Dustin Collins:
Yeah. So for me, first 90 days is a lot about getting up to speed, and recognizing and understanding market, what you’re selling, who you’re selling to, the personas, that type of thing. So it’s, for me, first 90 days is all about getting in. Getting knowledge, understanding what you’re selling, who you’re selling to, and then course you gotta get to know the team as well.
02:12- Dustin Collins:
You gotta know their strengths and weaknesses. You gotta kinda understand what you’re, walking into, the personalities, the skills, the unique characteristics that each rep has. and then kind of build a plan and go forward. So for me, first 90 days is a lot about learning and, trying to wrap your head around, the people, what exists today, and then look at optimizing processes. You’re gonna pull data for that. You’re gonna do a lot of, Analyzing Salesforce reports, you know, you’re gonna run a lot of Salesforce reports and, try and draw some conclusions from that, see what’s been successful in the past and understand where are we going wrong, when we’re going wrong, when things go well, what does that look like? just to be able to do some pattern recognition, and then implement sort of the successful fundamentals. and that’s like, for me, that’s huge is the fundamentals. the really, really boring, repeatable, very James clear atomic habits type stuff. But then just bringing that into the business context, like what are the really, really boring things that we can do over and over and over again and, have them multiply for us.
03:11- Terry:
Is there any time where you’ve discovered something in that first 90 days that has caused you to act quickly and with it, as opposed to keep continuing on through your analytic process and discovery process, and then build something bigger Beyond that is, have you seen things that you’ve just, you know, been off track that you’ve had to deal with straight?
03:31- Dustin Collins:
I mean there plenty of times. Yeah, there’s often enough where you come in and you sort of wrap your head around the team that you have and try and make sure the fit, the personalities are gonna be a fit for the type of, leader that you are and the type of organization that they are, and if they’re a fit for the sales role.
03:47- Dustin Collins:
I think especially nowadays too, you’ve had a lot of people who’ve sold through really good times and then now the times aren’t quite as simple and easy and you need some people that are pretty hardcore and committed to being salespeople longer term. And so you need to make some assessments pretty quickly when you get in. are these folks fit for purpose in the role that they’re in? So you have to make some quick. Personnel decisions sometimes.
04:10- Terry:
Okay.
04:10- Dustin Collins:
And those are always open conversations. of course there’s always like data stuff that you have to look into and targeting and industry and I think a few times in examples of mine where you come in and there’s all these rules around who owns, what accounts, or it’s maybe really stratified based on verticals or things like that, and you’re like, man, think this is overcomplicating it.
04:30- Dustin Collins:
We need to simplify and we need to, we can have books of business, we can have account ownership, but we need to make sure that everybody is comfortable going out and finding and just creating a culture where people are rewarded for being aggressive, in finding new accounts and prospecting and trying to like get things started again.
04:47- Dustin Collins:
So you can sort of light that prospecting fire.
04:50- Terry:
Okay, so I think you might’ve shed a little bit of light on my next question I’m gonna ask here then. So what is it that you’re looking in people that would cause you to act in that first 90 days that says perhaps they’re not the right for that job.
05:02- Dustin Collins:
Yeah, I’d say yeah, certainly commitment, desire,energy, excitement, that you can’t necessarily put a measuring stick on, but that you, when you know it, you see it. but that’s great when you have it, but when it’s lacking, it really sticks out, right? So then those are the times we have to have a discussion and kind of really get in there.
05:24- Dustin Collins:
So then that doesn’t lead to immediate decision. Hey, you look like, you seem like you’ve got a lot of scar tissue here with this company. You’ve been through a lot. I get it. Tell me about where things are at. What do you see as your future here within the company? Sometimes those are really good conversations to have upfront because you can then potentially save that situation if it’s a really bad situation. But sometimes if you’re coming into a situation in transition, you’ll find people have opinions about how things should be done or how they felt they’ve been done wrong by the company. And you just need to have the honest conversation of, do you wanna be here? I mean, is this where you see yourself long-term?
06:00- Dustin Collins:
Is this really what you want? doesn’t strike me that, that this is where you want to be and that you’ve got a long-term future here in your own mind. So why don’t we just find a way to both move on and get ourselves both in better situations? you’ll find that sometimes, and sometimes you can recover those and just having the conversation, you’re like, oh, thank God.
06:15- Dustin Collins:
I’m glad you asked me because I was, frustrated. Nobody ever listens to me here. Okay, cool. Let’s dig in and try and wrap our head around why, and let’s get you, let’s get this situation figured out. So like when, things are really lacking, they really stick out.
06:29- Terry:
You know, it’s fascinating to me that when people are unhappy, sometimes they’re stuck. They’re just really stuck. They can’t prompt the conversation to start with or their families in a situation. I remember very, very early on in my career, I was a very new manager at the time, and in the steel industry you have forklift operators, you know, fork truck operators, driving, moving the steel around.
06:50- Terry:
This guy was damaging a lot of product, damaging the buildings. He was on a third and final, warning. We brought him in and, had to sit down and have the termination conversation with him. Now, look, I’m not a small bloke. I’m six foot one. This guy stood four inches over me and about a foot wider on each shoulder than I did.
07:07- Terry:
He was a monster of guy, just to put some context on this. And we’re sitting in the office and, you know, had the conversation and said, look, you know, unfortunately your behavior’s not performing. We’re gonna have to let you go. And I watched this guy crumble, you know, he was sort of big and expecting an a, argument.
07:21- Terry:
I watched this guy crumble and actually, shed tears and thank me because he’d wanted to be a chef. And yet he felt like he was stuck in this role because he had to provide for his family. Now he was, now that he doesn’t have this role anymore, he’s gonna go and become an apprentice chef. And I just went, my God, you know, I didn’t ask the right questions in the beginning.
07:39- Terry:
I didn’t ask why he was doing the damage. I mean, that was the whole point, you know, he didn’t really wanna be there. We could have helped him. We did help him in the long run. We actually didn’t terminate him. We helped him, secure an apprenticeship before we let him go. it was a very interesting situation, but a good learning for me.
07:53- Terry:
Dusty, I think, you know, you’ve got it nailed in terms of the right way to handle that. For sure. You spoke about the James Cleary, you know, habits, the simple things. What are those basic, fundamental, core, activities or behaviors or habits that you need to build to, you know, for, to be the foundation of a good GDM?
08:11- Dustin Collins:
Yeah, for, well, for sure you have to have a prospecting culture, and especially in 2025. I think that’s, of course, it’s something that nobody wants to do. or I shouldn’t say nobody, but there is, it’s a certain mold of person who is willing and capable of doing what it takes to be successful. picking up the phone in 2025, because a lot of these other systems and people have been able to survive on email or LinkedIn or just kind of skirting the hard work, which I think is picking the phone up or going and knocking doors in person really is the hard work.
08:44- Dustin Collins:
But that’s human to human interaction still matters, still matters a lot age of ai. It means even more in my opinion. and you have to do it. So it’s finding accounts, it’s doing the prospecting, it’s consistency, showing up and just trying to get a little bit better each day at what you’re doing. Whether it’s practicing your talk tracks in the mirror to yourself, or cold calling in a remote environment with, a coworker and you’re just both on a teams call and you know, one person’s calling, one person’s on mute listening, and you’re just going back and forth. But just being disciplined and committed to the things that actually move the needle makes a huge difference. That’s really, really difficult to find in people, and when you do find it, you really need to kind of cling to it and build a culture around it as much as you can. But it’s a constant challenge it’s something that you can lose pretty easily. one guy, you know, maybe one guy at the company goes and he’s booking a lot more meetings than everybody else, and he’s, oh, I don’t even do cold calling.
09:40- Dustin Collins:
And so now the narrative can become, oh, cold calling’s dead. Now we’re emailing. Well, then Google and Microsoft changed their email deliverability, and you can’t get, you know, more than 10% of your emails read. Well, what are you gonna do LinkedIn? Hey, I’m getting, I’m spamming people on LinkedIn. Nobody will respond. What are you gonna do? Just pick up the phone. Pick up the phone, go see people. a human interaction. You need to be able to do those things. So to me, that’s one of the core fundamentals. there’s all sorts of stuff. Meeting prep, prepping before you go into a meeting. Stupid, simple, easy to do. So many people don’t do it. I don’t have the time to do it, man. You run a lot better meeting when you do. You know, it’s so hard.
10:19- Terry:
you get a much better result, you go in and you say, these are the two or three objectives I need to make sure that we cover. If you do that and you get outta that meeting, you’re gonna have a successful meeting. And you’re, and if you have your fallbacks planned too, like there’s just so many like really, really basic things like that, that I just don’t think, there certainly don’t sell. and they don’t get people excited. but if you can see those things or if you can, find those things in people, those are things that multiply over time and that you’ll get a big return on. And I think they’re super important,and they’re huge priorities for me, but those would be my examples that just pop to mind off the top of my head.
10:53- Terry:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, look, I, the meeting prep one’s really interesting, isn’t it? I think, not prepping properly for a meeting shows an enormous amount of disrespect for the person that you are in there for because they’re there for value as well. You know, your mind should be towards them, not towards, you know, what you’re gonna get out of it, you know?
11:09- Terry:
Great, great. How do you approach building A GDM strategy for compliance heavy industries like GovCon, you know, versus SaaS in general? There’s, there’s a huge difference. I know once you’re dealing, you know, with government organizations.
11:22- Dustin Collins:
Yeah, you just really have to know the industry as well as you can so you don’t come across looking like a fool. I think underestimated what it was gonna take, making the transition from a logistics SaaS, was a pretty, it was a simple, not easy sale, but it was simple. You didn’t have to explain a lot, you didn’t have to know a lot of acronyms.
11:41- Dustin Collins:
You didn’t have to know verbiage specific processes that don’t exist anywhere else in the SaaS space. know, there’s so much in the government contracting, and you have to be credible. have to be, people have to feel like you actually understand what you’re talking about. Because what we see in our industry now, tons of new VC backed companies are hiring, you know. AE 23-year-old AEs that are coming straight outta college and trying to sling SaaS, and they think they can go in there and then they step into a conversation with a proposal manager, capture manager, BD manager, these people that have really specific jobs that you can’t just say, oh, I’m gonna make you, you know, I’m gonna make you 90% more efficient.
12:22- Dustin Collins:
Okay? I don’t care about efficiency if I lose quality because I can lose a $3 billion bid on a lack of compliance. So now your efficiency gain that you gave me is completely worthless, and now I’ve damaged my reputation with the federal government with a specific government agency. It’s huge consequences to that. you as an AE go in and you think, ah, I’m gonna go in there and I’m gonna sling some software. Well, really can’t do that. You really shouldn’t do that. You gotta know this industry, and you gotta make sure that you the prospect and make the most of your time and make the most of their time. Our people are the people that we sell into. Extremely, extremely busy people, put under really, really tight deadlines that need someone to show up and not just be another, idiot salesman trying to get ’em to buy their software. You know, that’s what some of these industries can become when you just dump money at the problem, you know?
13:13- Terry:
What is the problem that you solve?
13:15- Dustin Collins:
So we help find more business from the federal government using, our SaaS. but it’s also of managing pursuit because these teams, they spend, you know, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars in staff costs to pursue these multi-billion dollar bids, for them to even decide to go after. A specific RFP that might take ’em several months. They might have known about this RFP or the possibility that this RFP could happen for a year or two years in advance. They’ve got a team full of people over here trying to work with go people inside the US government as the need is being made more and more apparent as they’re clarifying what that need is, shaping what the RFP eventually will be. then meeting with talking with nurturing that opportunity. You know, these are really, really long pursuits. so from that perspective, we’re gonna try and help them connect. Once those pursuits become a little bit more clear, how do I find those opportunities? Where should I, what, where should I bid on these things? how should I bid? What are we saying that the customer needs from us? Are we replying in a way that is compliant with all the contractual obligations? The legal obligations, the quality, are we providing evidence that we’ve propo performed this type of work? You, so you can see that’s just the tip of the iceberg of what we help with. but you can see how quickly that becomes really, really detailed work involves a lot of different people that the people that we sell to primarily now in BD proposals, within the GovCon space, they have to sort of manage all of that and they’ve gotta project manage it. And they’ve gotta shepherd all these other people into getting their parts of the project done. and the result is they can win more, they can be compliant, which helps them win more in the future because they don’t do reputational damage. but also they don’t get DQ on an opportunity, but they’ve been working for nine months because they missed one little piece. Hey, it needs to be in this font. I mean that, if that’s is minimal a thing that can disqualify me, man, I better be a hundred percent accurate. So we help with that. so that’s probably like a little bit of a long-winded way to say it, but that would be just sort of a tip of the iceberg, what visible thread helps with. but it’s a, another place.
15:32- Dustin Collins:
Again, it’s where AI can potentially go wrong, is a hundred percent compliant, repeatable, and do I know how the AI even got the answers that it’s giving me and are they accurate? So good luck with that. I don’t know. It’s a
15:46- Terry:
Yeah,
15:46- Dustin Collins:
right now.
15:47- Terry:
It is. It is. But you’ve, spoken about playbooks and process a lot in your career history. What’s a non-obvious sales process or tactic that’s made a measurable difference?
15:58- Dustin Collins:
That’s a good question. I specialize in the obvious, I guess. I think that’s my philosophy
16:03- Terry:
Hmm.
16:03- Dustin Collins:
specializes in the obvious and just hammer those until, we are as, consistent and repeatable with that. the unique stuff I usually will find. So I’ve done this, I can’t think of what it’s called.
16:15- Dustin Collins:
There’s a strengths finders thing. It’s not StrengthsFinders, but there’s another test that you can do. I’m horrible with ideation and creation. That’s not a strength of mine. But I do have, people around me and I’ve had people around me, in the past, especially my SDR leaders that have worked with me. Christina, Alina and Christopher Robin, specifically come out, come to mind as people that are insanely creative and really good at coming up with creative forms of outreach or, you know, maybe they’re doing writing for executives at our company that put content out there and book meetings in that way.
16:45- Dustin Collins:
So there’s, some creative things that they’ve done and they’ve really, gone gorilla mode at times to, to help me. But that’s not, that part isn’t my strength. I’m definitely just a more fundamental white bread, right down the middle type of guy.
16:58- Terry:
Gonna make an observation. I think that in itself is a pretty unique approach these days because I speak with so many people that are trying to look for that next white shiny object and find the, you know, the thing, the new thing. and I think my philosophy is very, very based on the keep it Simple process and those fundamentals, you know, human psychology hasn’t changed much in the last 200 years.
17:22- Terry:
A hell probably not much in the last 2000 years, quite frankly. So, you know, I think when you talking about getting people to do stuff, to deliver outcomes and interacting with people. You know, there’s not too much new stuff that I’ve seen in the last, well, I could show my age here, but let’s say throughout my career that, really is a very different approach to what I was doing in my very first sales role.
17:48- Terry:
There’s nothing new. There’s different names and there’s different frameworks and there’s different ways to throw it around, but it’s all doing the same thing, quite frankly.
17:56- Dustin Collins:
Yeah, I think one of the, and may, this will give you an insight into my mind a little bit. One of my favorite things to do and. I’ve done since I was a little kid. I’ve always, I was raised Christian, always have been a Christian, and the book of Proverbs in the Bible is one that has wisdom. And I feel like, I do consume a lot of content around personal improvement. read all the books, you know, I do all that stuff. I love it. But like, if you just read the book of Proverbs, it’s all there already. We’re just redoing the exact same things over and over again. And so I feel like that concept alone, that I’m reading an entire book that’s based on, you know, something that this tiny little verse in Proverbs said thousands of years ago. it’s already there. Like we have all the answers. They already exist. We just have to package them up in a way that helps our brains understand them. That’s sort of like. through my career and, the way I think about sales and fundamentals and what’s gonna, whether it’s health and fitness or sales, I feel like it’s the same.
18:56- Dustin Collins:
Like those we know really old problems, have really, really old solutions wanna get healthier, eat one ingredient foods, you know, help you go a long way, you know, so that’s to me that’s like almost more of a life philosophy than anything.
19:11- Terry:
Yeah. Excellent, excellent. And I look, it proves the point, not too much has changed in the, in the last couple of thousand years.
19:17- Dustin Collins:
Yeah.
19:18- Terry:
Excuse me. What do you think most companies get wrong when hiring or onboarding sales reps?
19:24- Dustin Collins:
certainly there’s the fallacy around logos and that people that come from big logos, can walk into a completely different company and do the same thing that they were doing at that previous company. You can see all the same numbers and sizes of business and industry, and they could be wildly different levels of success depending on the company. So I think there’s a lot around logos and resume and what an employee looks like on paper relative to what the real output that you’re gonna get is. that’s based on certainly logos and size of the business, but also just even from one startup to the other. Like, it, they’re complete, they have to math.
20:03- Dustin Collins:
my opinion is that the sales cycle has to be similar and the level of technicality within the sales cycle has to be similar for you to be able to be, take what their successes at one place and translate it into success at another place.
20:15- Terry:
And sales process. I’d imagine if they’re used to working with inbound leads, then it needs to be a solid, you know, demand gen play to have those inbound leads. You take someone that’s worked at one of the big brands and pop ’em into a startup where all of a sudden they’re going from being a farmer to being a hunter, and it’s a completely different world.
20:32- Dustin Collins:
Yeah. Or being, being like the big name in the space and they can make a cold call and say, Hey, you know, I work for Amazon. You ever heard of us? And it’s like, yeah, waiting. I’ve been waiting for you to call. You know, it’s like, okay, that doesn’t translate to a startup. That’s bat that’s, that’s going against Amazon.
20:47- Dustin Collins:
You know?
20:48- Terry:
That’s, I’ve actually done that a couple of times. Hey, have you heard of Google? Yeah. Well, I’m not from them. Can we have a chat anyway?
20:53- Dustin Collins:
I like it.
20:54- Terry:
It’s a bit of a laugh.
20:55- Dustin Collins:
Yeah. There you go. It’s a pattern.
20:57- Terry:
do you, so if that’s the case, then what are the, how do you judge that? I mean, you, what somebody’s got on paper and the brand that they’ve worked for. You see a certain amount of visibility in terms of what the sales process might look like in that other organization. But how do you really judge that through, through the recruitment process then?
21:14- Dustin Collins:
It is, hands-on. You gotta have the conversations and you gotta have a couple conversations with people, and dig deep and really make sure that you get the answers that you need in those interviews. So I try to go as deep as I can. Be as transparent as I can about our sale and what it’s gonna take and who you’re gonna need to talk to and how you’re gonna need to to organize yourself.
21:36- Dustin Collins:
But first I’m gonna ask them if they can articulate what they’re doing. So I want to know their level of depth within the sales cycle. Are you really running this? Or you, you know, you worked at this vendor here who, had somebody running all your demos, you had an SDR book in all your meetings, you had, all this other support and you’re, you know, quarterbacking the deal. That’s a lot different than somebody that I need to go book your own stuff, run the process
22:01- Terry:
Mm.
22:02- Dustin Collins:
do the demos, take the notes, do all the follow up. so, and not saying that that’s exactly the way that it is where I’m at now, but you gotta match that as much as you possibly can. And you’ve gotta ask really in depth questions and specific questions to get the answers that you want.
22:18- Dustin Collins:
Specific questions, get specific answers. And so, in my opinion, it takes more than one call to get there. And I personally need to have multiple calls with an account exec before I’m willing to hire them. ’cause I need to make sure that I know that for myself.
22:32- Terry:
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. is there any particular testing, psychometric or otherwise that you’ve used in, in your career that you think is good or.
22:39- Dustin Collins:
No, I haven’t, found anything that I think really does anything there because I, and part of it is a belief that I think that, anybody can do our job. I do think that it, like all different, I used to think before I knew anything about sales that extroverts are the best salespeople. And then, you know, I’ve met many introverts who are the best salespeople I’ve ever met.
23:01- Dustin Collins:
And so I just don’t think that there’s a specific, know, MBTI or any type of personality quiz that gets you there. I know there are some companies that heavily rely on that and say, you’ll be successful if you can, if you are this, persona. I just, I don’t know. I’ve seen too many outliers and all the best people that I’ve ever met have been outliers that are, you know, they got their own quirks to ’em.
23:22- Dustin Collins:
So, I don’t know.
23:24- Terry:
Yeah. Yeah.
23:24- Dustin Collins:
I can’t fit people in, a box that closely. I haven’t found a formula that works.
23:28- Terry:
There’s, there is one that I’ve used over the years that I’ve found to be successful. It’s, I found it in a book called Learned Optimism by Martin Salman. And in the insurance industry in the US they had a horrific turnover of door to door, salespeople, horrific turnover, and it was a huge cost to the organization.
23:53- Terry:
And so they tried to work out what was the problem, why was there such a staff turnover? And fundamentally it came down to. You needed in that hard cold sales environment where you’re gonna get a lot of rejection, you needed to have a level of resilience to be able to accept rejection. And they’ve built, a very, very, Detailed. I think it, well, it’s not that detailed. I think there’s 40 or 50 questions, which gives you scores in a whole host of different aspects around. And it’s not just optimism. It’s how big you catastrophize, you know, whether you blame things externally or whether you take responsibility yourself.
24:30- Terry:
All of these things. And what it does, it gives you a hope score. And they found that people with the Higher Hope score actually make better salespeople because salespeople, are gonna get rejection, and it’s the ones that can handle and and manage that rejection. so I’ve seen that work quite successfully in teams where there’s been some churn and there’s been a lower level of success that, using this to try and help ’em select people with a higher hope score is actually particularly where it’s been a, I was about to say, a harder sales environment.
24:57- Terry:
Is there a harder sales environment? All sales is hard, I guess unless you, unless you’re Apple or Google.
25:02- Dustin Collins:
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I think there is, harder and easier, but usually you’re compensated, relatively to how hard or
25:10- Terry:
Yeah,
25:10- Dustin Collins:
cycle is.
25:11- Terry:
That’s right. That’s right. So how do you align sales and marketing when the stakes are high and the cycles are long? And you’ve spoken about cycles? potentially that could be years in what you’ve described earlier, particularly, you know, with bigger, bigger government jobs. In terms of that very early stages, preparation and helping to, you know, shape the, the RFP, is there any rituals or frameworks that really work?
25:33- Dustin Collins:
not that I’m aware of. I work really closely with my VP of marketing, and he does a fantastic job for us. I’d say it’s, certainly the best relationship I’ve had with anybody in marketing in my career. and he’s just, I think we’re both. We are both pragmatic leaders who care about getting the job done.
25:50- Dustin Collins:
And so the fact that we mesh from that perspective, we can get whatever done that we need to. and he’s willing to support me in any way possible, and I try and support him in any way possible. So, process-wise, I don’t really have anything, but I think personality-wise, it makes a really big difference to have somebody that I just implicitly trust on that side of the house.
26:08- Terry:
Mm-hmm. And communicate with, by the sound of it, you’ve gotta have that relationship and be involved.
26:14- Dustin Collins:
Yeah. I mean, we we’re comminicating
26:15- Terry:
Mm-hmm.
26:15- Dustin Collins:
multiple times a week, if not daily. so we’re, working together really, really closely and that just makes all the difference in the world.
26:22- Terry:
Is there particular formal, set times of get together where you’ll go through and review things together or, you know, is there any involvement in the sales meetings or you in the marketing meetings, for instance, is there anything along those lines that you do formally or it just works?
26:37- Dustin Collins:
Yeah, we have leadership calls for sure that we’re both involved in. We’ve got one-to-one catchups that we have, every week. And then in be in the meantime, in between time, we’re always kind of working together. Hey, we’ve got this webinar coming up. We need a speaker, or we need this to happen. Can you help coordinate with the person that owns that account?
26:56- Dustin Collins:
Can you do Yes, of course. So it’s project
26:59- Terry:
Yeah.
26:59- Dustin Collins:
specific. but we do have regular recurring one-on-ones that we hold every single week, religiously and just make sure that it never gets missed. And if we do miss, you know, we’re finding a way to catch up and make it happen.
27:10- Terry:
So across, across the organizations that you’ve worked with, I get a sense that there’s been a, variation of marketing led and sales led, you know, I won’t say product led, but marketing led and in inbound, you know, lead generation or demand generation, and then, you know, more of a focus on that outbound from sales.
27:29- Terry:
How important do you think a combination of both of those are? Or is it a case by case?
27:35- Dustin Collins:
I think it depends on the business that you’re in, and the stage of the business that you’re in. Obviously early on you’ve gotta be pretty outbound focused and you gotta go preach the gospel of whatever it is that you’re selling and you gotta make, you gotta find some awareness, get some awareness.
27:47- Dustin Collins:
then as you progress through the business and you have more of a reputation and you have more of a marketing engine that’s built up in Hubing, I know, because that can take some time to get that going. It matters more later. depending on industry reputation, business, where you’re at within the business. it just, it varies quite a bit. at dispatch, you know, we started out with just sales, knocking doors daily. We were out in the field you know, we were stopping 6,000 places a day pulling up to business parks and Eden Prairie, Minnesota, or, you know, the Minneapolis suburbs and me, and me and Ryan McIntosh just knocking doors, handing out pamphlets, trying to raise awareness and win some business.
28:28- Dustin Collins:
and that’s what we did for that time. And then as the business got bigger and bigger, you know, very, very few people were even doing that at all. We were working our existing business, that that business was growing like crazy. We were raising rounds of funding. The marketing machine got up and running and got going better and better and better.
28:44- Dustin Collins:
And so then we could do more farming. Then we had a lot more inbound. And then, of course we’re always growing outbound, but those became much, much larger and more important sources of business within our business was. Finding new locations, upselling, and handling the inbounds from the really big customers, or at least that was our focus.
29:04- Terry:
How much of a mix is there at the moment with where you are in beyond two outbound?
29:08- Dustin Collins:
I would say we’re not quite 50 50. we still do more outbound than we do inbound. we’re bootstrapped company too, so we’re, kind of playing a different game than a lot of people. our AEs do a fantastic job of prospecting and making the dials, and we’re working really hard to keep that as a part of our culture and continue to expand and grow that as a part of our culture. We do have some really big names in our space that work with us, that we love and that have worked with us for a long time. And so we still do. We’ve got a great customer success team that’s working on expanding those. and marketing’s continuing to get the, word out there, but it’s a smaller space or it’s a, space that wasn’t, it’s more niche, you know, than logistics and delivery that’s obviously just a monster. GovCon is not a small industry, but, some of the GovCon SaaS, it’s a little bit of a smaller pie, than logistics. but it’s still, growing. It’s growing and it’s growing pretty quickly. So there’s a lot of, work to be done there. But yeah, I’d say we’re still a little bit more outbound focused than inbound. but we get decent inbound too. and we run great events. Like we just had a webinar today. It went really well. It was, it was really well received. We had a lot of people attending it. so our marketing does a good job of pulling inbound leads for us. But,
30:17- Terry:
job.
30:18- Dustin Collins:
you can’t compare to such a huge industry like logistics.
30:21- Terry:
there’s a big differences in there between when you’re trying to create awareness and, and you’re outbound very targeted with individual organizations versus, you know, a Google keyword search that has 300,000 searches in your region every day, which is a, it’s a completely different.
30:35- Dustin Collins:
I think the industry, that we’re in now too, being a little bit more niche, but also being like super compliance focused, like we talked about, a more precise message is more important than blasting the market with our, a generic message. And so that’s like we are,
30:49- Terry:
Yep.
30:49- Dustin Collins:
fighting through how do we make sure that we do a really good job of showing people that we know them and we know their problems and their issues versus, you know, we’ve had a ton of VC money poured into the space.
31:01- Dustin Collins:
So we’ve had a bunch of competitors that have spawned in the last two years that are saying, you know, Hey, we’re here, we’re software for ai, or we’re AI software for GovCon. We’re here, we’re here, we’re here. And it’s like, man. They just got here and they’re just spamming a huge market or a smaller market. But I think what they don’t understand about is they don’t understand that they’re compromising sort of their reputation among those people because they’re not trying to really get to know it. They’re just saying, finding a couple buzzwords within chat GPT and putting some email blasting, email sequences, you know?
31:33- Terry:
You know, I’m still, really worried about any business that says, Hey, we’re a AI and we’re here. You know, at this point in time, I’ve still not seen too many that have the robust governance in place to make sure that their offering is actually secure and we’ll deliver what it promises deliver.
31:50- Terry:
But, we’ll talk about that in a minute. I’m really, I mean, look, we’re bootstrapped as well, so there’s a big difference between being in a funded business and a bootstrap business, isn’t there?
31:58- Dustin Collins:
Yep. Big.
31:59- Terry:
What are the main differences you see?
32:01- Dustin Collins:
Well, you certainly don’t just throw money at problems, you know, if you got something going sideways, you can’t just hire more people. You can’t just say, ah, we’ll pump up the Google ads for a couple weeks here and see if that, you know, throw some money at that, see if that’s better. so, and just strategic, like you really, really need to understand, justify and look at your spend and where it’s going.
32:22- Dustin Collins:
And are you getting the right ROI on on all your spend? do we need to do this event or is this event actually gonna be better? Like, you really just have to make like it’s your own, you know, personal spending money. Like, do I want this new mountain bike or do I need something else? Does the family need something else?
32:39- Dustin Collins:
You know, it’s, that’s like a, just a comparative, type of thing. When I think about it with my family, it’s like, okay, maybe I need to just like focus on what’s gonna move the needle here, but. it works for me. I’ve always been a very pragmatic person. And so in some ways, the VC spending, I never could understand it.
32:56- Dustin Collins:
There was one point in time where at one of the companies I was at, we raised a bunch of money and we decided to use that money to go fund one department. And I was like, man, all the money’s coming from this department and we’re spending money on that department. I don’t know, maybe we should spend it over here and maybe we don’t need to spend what we’re going to.
33:14- Dustin Collins:
Maybe I could use 10% of those resources over here and we would actually be much better off. that’s always been my mindset in the way I’ve thought about things. but it’s a,totally different environment and so the bootstrapped environment suits me. I wouldn’t mind having more resources, but at the same time, you know, you gotta do, gotta operate in the environment that you’re in.
33:31- Dustin Collins:
And so that’s kind of what I do
33:33- Terry:
Yep.
33:34- Dustin Collins:
I like it. I, I think our. I can identify with our founder and with the leadership team the decisions that we make because they are common sense, pragmatic people that care about just getting the job done. I think it helps focus the whole company on being more pragmatic when you’re bootstrapped company too.
33:50- Terry:
I think it’s one of, I mean, I enjoy it too. It’s very different. my career in career, I’ve been in huge brands, you know, with almost endless buckets of cash. but I enjoy it. I’ve always been pragmatic and I think one of the skills that makes you, if you are able to, you know, live to the philosophy, there’s always another way to skin a cat.
34:09- Terry:
You
34:10- Dustin Collins:
Yeah.
34:10- Terry:
know, you don’t need to throw dollars at everything. There’s always another way to, you know, whether it’s dip your toe in the water or find, you know, partners, et cetera. there’s always, another way than, than throwing cash. I mean, look, there’s no doubt that cash helps, but there’s a whole hope host of other things that come along with that as well when you’ve got investors.
34:27- Terry:
So, yeah. Yeah.
34:29- Dustin Collins:
No question about it.
34:30- Terry:
We’ll, move on quickly a little bit here. Changing topics. we’ve sort of touched on AI a couple of times here. you mentioned you use AI every day, and I love the conversation we’ve had so far about it. Can you walk us through your personal framework for knowing when AI is helping versus when it’s harming your outcomes?
34:48- Dustin Collins:
Yeah. so a lot of times, nowadays, and especially in the last two years, started using chat GPT when it came out in 2022 November. And I basically used it for a couple days and I thought, no, I don’t, I don’t. It doesn’t make any sense to me. I don’t really get it. it can come up with a bunch of written text, but it’s not very smart stuff, and I can Google search whatever. Over time, that has completely changed. Of course, as the product has gotten better, I’ve found more and more use cases for it. and I’ve also found, there are times when it really doesn’t make sense to do it. And a lot of times if I need something accurate or reliable, I really can’t use chat GPT. So, I had mentioned, to you before that I use it for cooking a lot and I would use it for,
35:34- Terry:
Hmm.
35:34- Dustin Collins:
it for cooking. use it for baking. You know, I think that’s a good example. Like baking is so much more. Scientific. So if I wanted to make a dessert or a pastry or something like that, you have to be so precise with those ingredients or you can botch the whole thing. But if I’m just coming up with recipe ideas or if I’m just grilling or cooking something, you know, very basic, very simple, very easy stuff, you can kind of play with it a little bit.
35:57- Dustin Collins:
But anytime you need precision AI is not gonna be the answer for you. It is gonna be maybe a starting point for you, but you just cannot rely on it. you couldn’t rely on putting your personal finances. I don’t think you, I wouldn’t do it. Put your personal finances in there and try and have it, give you an analysis and say, you should do this, that, and the other thing, like I know you’re kind of absolving yourself with personal responsibility.
36:19- Dustin Collins:
You’re compromising your own personal data. I know a lot of people that are doing stuff like that with ai. It’s crazy. it’s absolutely insane. And I think if you wouldn’t be comfortable putting something in a system, that is gonna get hacked and that something could get leaked and people would see your personal information on. Man, you really shouldn’t trust anybody in ai, any software in AI to help you do that. So you still gotta be pretty particular and pretty security focused even in your personal dealings with ai For sure.
36:49- Terry:
I love that analogy. You use it to get a recipe, but not, not.
36:53- Terry:
I haven’t counted in the last week, I’ve been noticing in the last week that my inbox is getting filled with, I’ll call it spam AI messages. I mean, look, I think if we weren’t in this environment of AI’s around and everybody’s aware of it, you know, the messagings that are coming in, I can, they’re trying, but they’re also trying, if that makes sense.
37:16- Terry:
It’s like I’m watching these messages come in and they’re drawing on stuff that’s ridiculous. And, you know, the mistakes with even simple things like names or names of organizations, you know, mistakes that are being made around that. I look at it and go, you know what? Somebody’s paid five grand a month for this.
37:32- Terry:
A-I-S-D-R. And I can tell you now, I’ll never deal with that company because of the mistakes that I saw in there. I just have zero trust. Zero trust. If they’re prepared to let something go out like that into the marketplace with those errors in it, then they’ve burnt me. I mean, sure. Maybe it’s not, they’re not doing it to their entire, market, but are they, yeah, that’s the question along the way.
37:52- Terry:
I mean, you mentioned it’s a good starting point. I think that’s a great way to look at it too. It’s a great starting point for a few ideas. but I love your framework that you throw across the top of it in terms of all your lens in terms of, Hey, stop and think about it. Does this really make sense?
38:07- Terry:
Is this a good idea? So yeah, I think that’s excellent. in, in your work at Visible Thread, how do you draw the line between AI doing the heavy lifting and humans making the judgment calls on not being.
38:19- Dustin Collins:
I think the judgment call is a good is, those are the perfect words. It is like, I can get an opinion from AI on certain things. You know, I’m gonna write an email in response to an email. Am I answering their question? Is it clear? Is the ask that I have at the end of this email, going to be their takeaway message?
38:38- Dustin Collins:
Or is there another takeaway message here? How can I reduce the number of words that I put into it? So having it be an editor and give me the feedback on how something’s being perceived, I think a huge area where it can really help communication, to organize your thoughts. Sometimes what I’ll do is I’ll, there’s a situation that I’ll encounter and I will get on the phone. On my app, I will press the microphone button and I will just brain dump into the microphone. It doesn’t a fantastic job of transcription. CHATT is unbelievable at transcription, but I’ll just say, I need you to help me organize my thoughts here because that’s really where I, I get into, sometimes I have a hard time just sort of getting all my thoughts out and then having it, need to understand what my thoughts are and if I don’t have somebody I can talk to about that specific issue, which sometimes as a VP at a company, I really can’t talk to other people about it. and I need to be able to have the conversation or understand how I should approach a situation. It’s great for that. It can organize my thoughts. It can say, this is what you’re thinking, this is, you know what, I assume you’re trying to get out of this, or, this is what this person needs to hear, or This is a good way to communicate this.
39:48- Dustin Collins:
And then I can refine, refine, refine from there. I wanna deliver this message. I wanna deliver it in a thoughtful way. I want them to feel heard and understood. I wanna also communicate clearly that this is what needs to be done. Help me repackage this. I think I use it a lot there. I, responding to emails, making sure there’s clarity and messaging that the point is getting across, that I’m not overly verbose in my response. that’s a big thing for me. Communication and how communication is perceived and received the other side in sales
40:21- Terry:
Mm
40:21- Dustin Collins:
of course, is one of the most important things in my opinion.
40:24- Terry:
Absolutely. Your comment about helping you, gather your thoughts and refine, have you find a time, a time where you’ve. Used it to gather your thoughts and it’s come back and said, this is what I’m assuming, or thinking that you are trying to get the message you get, or this is the problem you’re thinking about.
40:42- Terry:
This is the message you’re getting across, and it’s just been off track and it’s just, this hasn’t been, yeah.
40:47- Dustin Collins:
yeah. There’s, plenty of times. And then you have to refine it and add additional context. I found the context, you have to give it as much possible context as you can. And so again, if it’s sensitive stuff and you, and you, wouldn’t want someone querying your chat, like, I just envision future legal cases where they’re like, you know, here’s this guy and here’s all the chats he had with the chat GPT.
41:09- Dustin Collins:
And like, look at this guy. This guy is, mentally fit. Are you sure about that? You know, so I try not to put anything in there that makes me seem too crazy. but also, like, there’s plenty of times where I’m like, I just need to, contextualize this. And there’s a lot of times where it will misread something. or it will. take, let’s say we’re doing like a competitive bake off and I wanna clearly communicate and articulate our differentiators. It will often just sort of like blend the context that I feed into it and not understand it. Part of that is a me problem. I’m not giving it the context in a way that it couldn’t understand clearly. I need to edit that. I need to modify how I’m giving it that feedback, but it, not 50 50, but it’s not, 90 10 or 80 20 that it gets it right. You know, it’s probably 60 40, 70 30.
41:55- Terry:
Yeah, it’s really interesting that whole aspect about. reviewing your chat transcript. I remember when I was promoted first from a sales role to a management role, and my manager at the time took me aside and was giving me some sage advice. And, and mind you, I’d taken a big backward step in my career.
42:13- Terry:
I’m a qualified accountant. I was a state accountant running, you know, a big, big book of business in for this company. I mean, we were doing everything running effectively. It was what you’d call a commercial manager these days. It was a $30 million business running profit and loss and balance sheet.
42:28- Terry:
you know, we had putting money on the short term money market investing. It was a very, very commercially commercial job. And, so as you can imagine, there’s a level of, you know, ethics and, and to be part of the, Australian Institute of Accountants, et cetera, there’s a level of ethics that, you know, you have to be able to jump through to hold a role like that.
42:45- Terry:
And I remember him taking me aside one day and said. You know, Terry, moving into a management role now, it’s important that,you know, you think about the actions and decisions and you know, things that you say. And, you know, my advice to you is make sure that, anything you do or say if, think about, if you would be happy with that on the front page of the local newspaper tomorrow.
43:07- Dustin Collins:
Yeah. Yeah.
43:08- Terry:
and, you know, at the time I was thinking, okay, thank you. I sort of, I kind of get that I feel pretty comfortable with the decisions I make from that level, but it’s something that stuck with me and it really has, resurfaced in particular. I’m always mindful of it when it comes to anything on the internet.
43:20- Terry:
You know, you put something out there. I’m not a huge fan on social media. You put it out there, it’s out there forever. But even more so when, you know, you start talking about these large language models that are learning on everything that we put in there. Sure. They’ve got a policy that you’ve got a paid version.
43:35- Terry:
They don’t use your information for learning. Yeah. Really? Do I believe that? Come on. Like, I didn’t come down in the last Yeah, yeah. That’s right. That’s right. You know, three words change and then all of a sudden they’ve got access to everything. But that example you gave where you can imagine standing up in court and here’s the entire, you know, last three years, chat transcript.
43:54- Terry:
I wonder how many people out there listening to this would go, Hmm. I wonder what, would I, would I want my chat transcript to be published in the front page of the paper tomorrow morning?
44:02- Dustin Collins:
Yeah, and I like the things I really confirmed
44:03- Terry:
Crazy, crazy.
44:04- Dustin Collins:
with it, and I’ve gone, I’ve, you know, said some things or asked some questions that I’m like, man, I’m asking for a good reason. But if you just saw the question that I asked alone, you wouldn’t think that I was a very, you would question me a little bit, you know, where you’re just like,
44:19- Terry:
Yeah, yeah, yeah,
44:20- Dustin Collins:
know, especially like parenting, some parenting questions or you just want an answer to something, that you saw in a movie or something like that. like, man, this guy asks a lot of questions about vlade, paler. What is wrong? This, we need to do like a psychological report on this guy. What’s going on here?
44:35- Terry:
And it’s really interesting. About four or five weeks ago now, I changed, I’ve got a custom GPT that I use and I’ve, put it, it was always, oh, you’re so great, Terry. Yep, that’s a great idea. And it was very, confirming rather than challenging. And I’ve never liked that through my career. And I actually went to the stages of building in a prompt into it that said, look, I know don’t stop doing this, this, you need to, be a safety check.
45:03- Terry:
I want you to challenge me. I want you to question me, and that if I’m asking and talking about a concept, we really need to, you know, you need to be black hat here and dig down into why it won’t work. You know, you have to get me to convince you, man, I hate it. I’ve gone from loving this thing to hating this thing, but it is 10 times better.
45:21- Terry:
It’s making me think so much deeper than I’ve ever thought before. And it, has really changed. it’s changed a lot of my thought process and how I do get to outcomes and make decisions, quite frankly, just by building that prompt into it to say, you know, we’ve gotta dig deeper. I’ve gotta convince you, you know, you are on the opposite side.
45:42- Terry:
Instead of being supportive and confirming, you know, you need to challenge me, I need to convince you that it’s right. And it really has made me think at a much deeper, deeper level. So, I hate it, but I love it. I’ve got a love hate relationship with it at the moment. I’ve considered changing it a couple of times, but I’m not going to.
45:56- Dustin Collins:
I’ve seen the same thing. And I actually think this new model of g PT five has been even more, in chat GPT is, is even more confirming. And I’ve got prompts in there. and where I notice it sometimes too is I’ll be, you know, I’m using it for my health and fitness and be using, these are, this is my list of supplements. These are my goals, these are my macros. you know, me with it. What is missing? What about this is good? What about it is bad? And then later I’ll go in and I’ll say, Hey, you know what my current supplements are, what I want? Let’s think from first principles. What would I really want to do? And then the list of things that it sends me is all the things that I’m already doing and maybe one or two other things.
46:38- Dustin Collins:
And then I have to question it and say, okay, but no seriously, first principles go full black hat mode. Give me, I want the best of the best of the best. And then it will gimme something completely different. And I’m just like, okay, so was that all bs what? You just fed me with the first answer if I didn’t question you. And that’s when I have the prompt in there that says, just give me objective truth. Okay, sure. You know.
47:05- Terry:
You know, it was, a moment for me probably. I had, say a year ago now, maybe a little bit longer, where I’d done the same thing and challenged it. Is this really the best approach? Is this really the best outcome? And I just kept asking, do better, do better, do better. And the outcome where we finished after 30 minutes compared to where it started was completely different.
47:25- Terry:
And for me, that was the time where I thought, okay, I was starting to get in. You know, if you draw a scale on the AI hype scale, where one is, you’re the hype believer at the other end, you’re a skeptic. You know, I was starting to move, I’m always been in the mid range. I was starting to move up towards the, you know, believing the hype of this thing.
47:41- Terry:
It just seemed amazing. But that point just flipped me straight back to the middle again. Look. I’m not a skeptic, I’m not a hype. I’m think I’m pretty realistic in the middle that it’s a good tool, but it’s just like anything else. It’s, you know, garbage in, garbage out and you know, you need to be mindful and use your own brain.
47:57- Terry:
and what, you know, my biggest fear with ai, quite frankly, is that people stop using their own brains. And just to believe everything that comes out of and start using everything that comes out of. And like I said, you know, I’ll see so much of that even in my inbox, more recently, much more recently.
48:12- Terry:
it’s been that way probably for the last 12 or 18 months or so. But there seems in the last, well, let’s say couple of weeks, but maybe a month, it’s just, there’s AI rubbish coming from almost everywhere. It’s ridiculous. And anyway,
48:24- Dustin Collins:
I think another
48:24- Terry:
just to add on to that too is I don’t know if what it gave me in the end was actually better, and I don’t know if the first response that it
48:32- Terry:
trust.
48:33- Dustin Collins:
better. So now where am I? can, I don’t know, like, was it better? Which one was better? Which one was optimal?
48:40- Dustin Collins:
I don’t know. so you kinda end up in the same spot that you began where you’re like, I don’t think that’s right. And then you get to the end and you’re like, if that’s right. is that right? I don’t know. I could probably get, change his mind again,
48:51- Terry:
That’s trust, isn’t it? That’s just trust. You know, and that’s what happens when you vary your approach and vary your messaging. it’s trust and that, you know, goes beyond the LLMs. It goes for all of us. Well,
49:02- Dustin Collins:
exactly.
49:03- Terry:
what are some of the biggest risks that you’ve seen when teams over index on AI for sales and marketing?
49:09- Dustin Collins:
Yeah. Well, certainly the over-reliance on it that you mentioned can be an issue. and I, I saw it recently actually from a competitor that was distributing some materials about us and, you know, they were comparing the us versus visible thread, and these are the different
49:26- Terry:
Oh.
49:26- Dustin Collins:
and, which frankly great use case they’re using. they’re doing it well to an extent, but where it fell off is that this customer shared it with us, and it was like everything that it said was a deterrent. They were our strengths. And I was like, they just, okay, well, we can verify all these things that they just said were, our weaknesses and their strengths, that they’re actually our strengths and their weaknesses. But they didn’t it and say, oh, wow. Oh crap. This is, we’re sending them basically the visible thread talking points that they can evidence. And so if I present this to somebody on, I’m basically giving red meat to my competitor by doing that. So that for sure, the AI writes terrible emails.
50:10- Dustin Collins:
It’s always written, terrible emails. It hasn’t gotten much better. You can do styles, you can do prompting. You can try and get it to do it a certain way. You’ll get it slightly better. At the end of the day, it’s really not doing that much for you. I don’t think it’s gonna get any better. I don’t know how it could get, so good that it’s really that useful, but people aren’t checking it.
50:31- Dustin Collins:
It’s giving you things that, like you can do competitive analysis. But again, the inaccuracy, it really all comes down to the inaccuracy. Where is it getting this information?
50:40- Terry:
Yeah.
50:41- Dustin Collins:
Am asking for a market assessment on government SaaS or RFP solutions, I want a feature list. Gimme a feature list, gimme approximate pricing, all that stuff.
50:51- Dustin Collins:
I can get an answer for it. It’s complete bs, but I can get an answer for it and I can send it out. So I think there’s a lot of, just sort of that blind trust and faith or inexperienced people that don’t know the answers to the questions and they’re asking questions and getting answers and assuming that it’s correct. there’s all sorts of issues where you can run into it. We have, customers. And so, generation is a big piece of the, job of the people that we sell into writing content to respond to government RFPs. And might put in some things in those RFPs that are inaccurate. And, there’s a world, and I don’t know that it has happened with ai, but there is a world where you can say that you have a capability that you don’t have. You can win an RFP, you can win a giant contract, and then you are on the hook to deliver those services whatever cost. And cost overruns on a project are a real thing, and you can ruin your reputation or you can be on the hook for delivering that service. And then you’ve gotta contract it out, and now you’re just going way, way, way over on your costs for that project. So there are just so many ways in which it can go wrong without a human in the loop and still have to have that. I’m not sure. Maybe there will be a day where it’s a hundred percent accurate, repeatable, and you can discover where it’s even pulling the information from.
52:07- Dustin Collins:
But today, that doesn’t exist.
52:09- Terry:
and look, I think you’re right. Where does it get the information from, particularly when you’re doing market research on, competitors or even clients? You’ve gotta remember there’s a whole wall. there’s a wall. Where you’ve got public information, then you’ve got private information and sure, everything you’ve got on your website that’s visible, everybody knows about that.
52:26- Terry:
You know, 95% of the stuff you want your prospects to know about is generally on your website. There’ll only be 5% or something. That’s not the hidden that, that you draws them into that meeting to have that conversation. The reality is, when you are using ai, where do you think it’s getting that information from?
52:40- Terry:
It can only access public information. If there’s been no deep research study done on, you know, the specific features and, pricing, of your particular offering, or it’s not available publicly, then it’ll guess. It will guess. It’s always gonna guess, and that’s where I think you need to use your own to actually make a decision.
53:00- Terry:
Say okay, yeah, I’m not even gonna ask that question because I know it’s not gonna give me an accurate answer.
53:05- Dustin Collins:
Yeah. and it’ll even cite sources that have nothing to do. So in chat GPT right now, you can have it search the web and it will bring you a piece of evidence and cite a source, and then you click on that source and it has nothing to do with the answer that it gave you, or it’s completely misinterpreting what that is saying and presenting that as a fact to you.
53:27- Dustin Collins:
But if you don’t go in and do the investigation yourself, and that’s not just like sometimes that’s. Almost every time in chat, GPT, if you go like and you ask for, the sourcing of five different things, more than half of them I would guess are gonna be incorrect, have nothing to do with what it presented in that paragraph. So even
53:46- Terry:
Yeah.
53:46- Dustin Collins:
with the citing of sources, like they’re moving in that direction, but it’s still wrong.
53:49- Terry:
And you would think that with the amount of time they’ve been at it, and one of the biggest risks or failings of AI is this whole hallucination process and citing, you know, fake or irrelevant sources. You would think that by now they would put the guardrails in place to actually have eliminated that.
54:08- Terry:
But I think it just shows how far away we are from true, you know, true truthful AI and truthful learning, large learning models. I just think we’re a long, long way away from it. The fact that it even hallucinates in the first place. What is that? Why this, the thing that fascinates me is why would it even do it?
54:24- Terry:
There is some fundamental built into this thing that it is, has such a desire to please. And to be seen as credible that it has to give you or make up an answer rather than say, sorry. I don’t know that I would’ve trusted much more if I just said, I can’t access that information. It might be frustrating, but you know, these big businesses, they do everything they can to try and hook you in and keep you in there.
54:44- Terry:
So it’s like, they don’t want it to say, no, I can’t give you the answer, so you go away and try and find it somewhere else. I want you to stay in there using that. It’s, anyway, it, I think we’re just a long way away from being able to trust it to, to any real extent. You need to make sure you’re very sharp, you know, keeping a very sharp eye on what’s going on with it.
54:59- Terry:
is there a time in your experience where AI’s created a compliance or sales challenge in your world that, you’ve had to handle?
55:07- Dustin Collins:
not really be because we’ve been as thoughtful as we can about implementing AI and where we do it and where we don’t. that really comes from my CEO. He’s got a technical background. He understands how all this stuff works, and he’s been very, educational with us for the pitfalls of ai. I wouldn’t know about the differences, really.
55:28- Dustin Collins:
I mean, I’m sure by now I would’ve gotten there, but I got there pretty early on. The differences between deterministic software and generative ai, you know, and how much of a black box generative ai and how generative AI comes up with its answers, and how it was trained and all that stuff. So my CEO feral has done. A lot when it comes to educating us and other people in our field on how to use it. So we really don’t try to push the boundaries when we need factual information. We don’t really use it as much, and we try and limit what we put into those systems. Of course, from a work perspective, we’re super careful about that. and it really becomes a lot of like written content and me, like jamming on ideas, that more personal stuff, or like figuring out situations. But from a data perspective, we don’t use it that often. I’ll write email campaigns and stuff like that as a way to get some ideas, but to limit it as much as we can.
56:23- Terry:
Sure
56:24- Dustin Collins:
But to your point, and not to talk our book too much, but. Our software, we made the decision
56:29- Dustin Collins:
with our
56:29- Dustin Collins:
software so we have a, feature that, you know, you can use source documents and then you can say, Hey, I need some written content based on this past performance document or these past performance documents. if you are looking for something that doesn’t exist within those documents, it will say, didn’t find anything within those documents. And it is frustrating, but guess what? You didn’t just create content on something that you can’t do, and so you won’t have to try
56:53- Terry:
Mm-hmm.
56:54- Dustin Collins:
or be on the hook for that service.
56:56- Dustin Collins:
So think, that’s like a way in which, because of the place that I work, I’m a little bit more conscious of what AI can’t do and the limitations and where we shouldn’t use it and where we should use it, because that’s just been beaten into our heads. And I say that with, the most affection for things getting beaten into my head.
57:13- Dustin Collins:
I’m a big beater of things into my head. it’s certainly thick enough. It requires a beating from time to time. So.
57:17- Terry:
Very good, very good. it’s, he sounds like a great guy actually. I’d, like to meet him at some point in time,
57:22- Dustin Collins:
Yeah.
57:23- Terry:
So changing things up just a little bit. and look, I’ve gotta say, I am a on the skeptic to hype. I’m in the middle. but I am a lover of AI and I’m more optimistic about the future of it.
57:36- Terry:
And I use it all the time in all different places. But like, you would just have a high level of awareness. So this isn’t, you know, certainly not an a bash session. I think there’s some places where it is absolutely amazing. And I wanna get onto something a little bit more personal for you. Now, you’ve led teams and scaled functions and moved from startup to enterprise and now a bootstrap environment.
57:57- Terry:
What’s been the most humbling leadership lesson that you’ve learned along the way?
58:02- Dustin Collins:
I think. You can get to a point where you have some success in a role at a company or in several roles at a company, and you think, I’ve got it figured out. am the reason that these are successful. And sometimes that’s the case, but usually there’s a whole heck of a lot more that contributes to your success in those roles. and at that company. And there’s a whole heck of a lot of that. you go to something different and you just get smacked in the face by reality that things are different. It’s almost like the same thing that I said about AEs going from one company to another, and then it’s completely different and you’re just like, whoa, what, what is this?
58:41- Dustin Collins:
I’ve never had these problems before. I’m not this guy. I’m the guy that does this, this, this, and this. And we just crush and everything’s great all the time. And Perfect. And I can run teams and I can have no leadership problems and my people love me and blah, blah, blah. And then you get into situations where that’s not the case and you thought you were sort of the master of your domain, and then you’re like, oh my gosh, okay, well there’s a new game on the field.
59:05- Dustin Collins:
I gotta play the new game and I gotta learn and understand. So I think with leadership, you never have a problem. at least I’ve never had a problem getting, being humble because I’m constantly being humbled. depending on what day of the week it is, you know, I’m either on a mountaintop or I’m in, a valley low. that’s just life, certainly life and sales, but, certainly life in sales leadership too. So. In every possible way. I’ve been humbled, but, with people, issues with performance, issues, with hiring decisions, you know, you can kind of think like, oh, I’ve got it figured out and I’ve got a system that works. then all of a sudden you apply the system somewhere else and it’s like, goes to crap and you’re like, okay, time for a new system. Guess we gotta figure out what works differently here. And that’s like where I came up with the 90 day strategy is like learning what works in specific businesses and not coming into it with like, sure, you wanna have a plan and you wanna have like an agenda and sort of some rough ideas about philosophy, but you also then have to find what works at that particular place and optimize what that is, bring your own flavor to it. but the dynamics are so different. So never had a problem being humble because I’m just constantly getting smacked in the face by humility. I think situations all
01:00:20- Terry:
it’s interest. Interesting. It makes me think of a phrase, you know, it takes a village. I’ve worked in some organizations over the years where there’s been either departments or individuals that have thought that success was all on their shoulders. It was all because of them, you know, the sales department, leading revenue.
01:00:37- Terry:
There would be no business if it wasn’t for us, you know, the marketing department driving the brand awareness. There’d be no business. It wasn’t for us. And, and you know, I’ve been acutely aware and my first experience with that was actually at a, very young age, I’ve been acute, acutely aware of the fact that it takes a village.
01:00:53- Terry:
You know, if there’s one aspect of an organization that’s underperforming or not delivering on its area of responsibility, then it’s likely that the entire business will fail. And. What might’ve been working very well because everything’s humming along and there’s a great culture in place in one, get a slightly different change to that environment somewhere else.
01:01:11- Terry:
and all of a sudden, you know, customer success isn’t as, up to speed or there’s not as good a connection between production and customer success. And so there’s new features being dropped and all of a sudden the sales can’t understand why churns increased. It’s, there’s so many different aspects that come you know, involve the successful outcome of delivering a service and delivering value to a customer.
01:01:33- Terry:
It’s every touch point from the very first touch point that they see, whether it’s outbound from sales or, a billboard from marketing right through until when they’re paying their bills every month and how they interact with the accounts department. It’s, people don’t understand the importance and the impact it has on that relationship with the customer.
01:01:50- Terry:
So, you know, I think,Again, we talk about that environment of, an account executive moving from one to another, you know, managers moving from one to other. the biggest aspect that I see in that is that it takes a village and there’s no two villages that are alike, I guess is the message that I, you know, that I’ve seen.
01:02:05- Terry:
Every organization’s got its own little intricacies and nuances. That’s for sure. That’s for sure.
01:02:10- Dustin Collins:
People are unique and the people challenges are different everywhere you go because you got different people to deal with.
01:02:16- Terry:
Different people, different management styles, different cultures different, and it drives all of those things, different personalities, even across the customer, customer base or the market. you’ve also talked about keeping things human like date nights and routine. How does discipline in your personal life help shape your leadership style?
01:02:34- Dustin Collins:
Yeah, I think it’s,I can be pretty regimented in my personal life and rigid in my personal life. just because I need that security and stability outside of work where work can be crazy and then you’ve gotta just sort of have that. But, One of the best thing date night. so every Wednesday my wife and I do date night. it was something that we didn’t do for a long time. We got involved in a Bible study here, a few years ago, maybe three years ago. And we had done date night for a little while when we were a young couple with no kids. And it was really easy to do and we loved it and it was great. And then we got out of the habit of doing it and got dizzy.
01:03:11- Dustin Collins:
And then we had kids and things got crazy and it was just kind of like, man, I do, we know each other anymore. We’re doing the chore, we’re doing all this other stuff. And we got in this Bible study and the person who recommended, it’s like, well, we have a babysitter’s club at the church and you can, just hire them for four hours instead of two, and then you can have a date night with your wife every Wednesday before you go to Bible study.
01:03:32- Dustin Collins:
It’s like, that is a genius idea and we’ve done it every Wednesday that we can since, babysitter staffing issues notwithstanding, sometimes that happens, but. it’s, completely transformative to our marriage and super important. And that routine I find to be incredibly, it helps me keep my sanity and it helps me, just sort of like we’ve got something to look forward to.
01:03:56- Dustin Collins:
My wife and I every week when things are tough, we can kind of off Wednesdays come and we’re gonna be there soon, you know, so you’ve got a little bit of extra something to look forward to when you’re in those deeper moments of stress. So I think that would be one example. And then exercise and fitness are two other major pillars in the personal life that every single week we’re getting three workouts in, no matter what without fail.
01:04:21- Dustin Collins:
And that’s stress management as well. And that’s just to keep enough energy to deal with these three kids, you know, it’s 305 right now, so we’re in like kind of a difficult point. It’s a great, it’s a great phase of life. That consistency and just
01:04:35- Terry:
I call it.
01:04:36- Dustin Collins:
Yeah, it is, it certainly is. So it keeps you sane and it keeps you able to perform during the work week and sort of be able to handle and be more resilient. so the routine and consistency there, I need it. I love it. It’s also, you know, part of the only social life I have is doing those things, working out in a group class or with a personal trainer and then date night with the wife. Like, more important than that? But that
01:05:02- Terry:
Mm-hmm.
01:05:03- Dustin Collins:
level of, then you can shift from, okay, well that seems pretty regimented.
01:05:08- Dustin Collins:
That seems pretty That’s, you know, you’re just doing the same thing at the same time as every single week. and that’s where I use, AI to help me be more creative and add a little bit of, fun stuff here and there. What would be good things to do, and or, you know, maybe we’re at the dinner table, at, we’re out to eat with, the wife and I, and it’s, what’s a fun little activity for my wife and I to do?
01:05:30- Dustin Collins:
What are some questions we could ask each other just to kind of have a little bit of fun? And we can use AI to do that and come up with 15 questions
01:05:37- Terry:
Yeah,
01:05:37- Dustin Collins:
That we have to answer. We just bounce ’em back and forth. We have fun. You know, we just find ways to make it fun. And
01:05:42- Terry:
yeah,
01:05:43- Dustin Collins:
That way to make life a little bit more fun and human.
01:05:45- Dustin Collins:
And I like using ai. it works in serious situations, but I like using it for like, the little small things and the little joys of life. Like, coming up with new coffee recipes or, cooking a, getting dinner ideas or the date night thing. Like, it’s just, those are fun ways
01:05:59- Terry:
yeah.
01:05:59- Dustin Collins:
that I can humanize and bring it into my life and have a little bit more joy with it.
01:06:04- Dustin Collins:
That’s how it adds to my life, I guess.
01:06:06- Terry:
Look, you know, you talk about routine and, discipline, but I get a sense that there’s a rhythm. I think there’s a very, you’re talking about a rhythm to your life as well, you know, what’s your weekly rhythm as a VP of sales, and how do you structure your time to stay ahead without burning out?
01:06:21- Dustin Collins:
Yeah. It’s a good question. I think you’re just kind of in a constant phase of burning and you just, you try and you catch a few wins here and there. You get a little extra wind in the sails. You catch a couple bad weeks and you’re like, man, I don’t know. So, but I do have a pretty rigorous routine schedule, you know, where I, I load up like meeting days.
01:06:39- Dustin Collins:
So in the same way that I’m pretty rigorous with my, outta work schedule, of course my calendar at work is just absolutely stacked every, every week. but I’ve got regular recurring meetings with every single one of my AEs every single week. don’t miss it. It’s the most important thing that we do every week is have those calls. We’ve got revenue calls on Monday, so we’re talking through pipeline. We’re trying to understand where things are at, and then I’ve just got a load of one-on-ones back to back. And then on Tuesday morning I’m getting my one-on-ones again. And then I’ve got my a e team meeting where we get together as a group. sometimes we bring the SDRs in on that and we talk about what’s gonna happen, what do we need to do, strategic type meetings. Wednesday mornings leadership call. Right. So that’s me in the C-suite. and my, and my peer VPs we’re meeting, we’re talking through, you know, larger business structure Wednesdays, and then I get a lot of time, so my, the latter part of my week is fewer meetings, but it is more like things done time and project work time. And so I get a lot of energy at the beginning of the week. I wouldn’t say that I’m extroverted. I wouldn’t say that I’m introverted. I’m kind of in the middle.But I do need to deload midway through the week. I need to sort of like peel back on the people interaction. So I get a little bit more project work done and certainly in the afternoons I try and get the project work done, and sales ops stuff and all that stuff that I can just kind of zone in, do my thing.
01:07:57- Dustin Collins:
So I kind of tape, I kind of start heavy on the front side with people meetings and leadership meetings
01:08:02- Terry:
Mm-hmm.
01:08:02- Dustin Collins:
and then taper off on the back end of the week with fewer meetings, more project work, more this needs to get done. And then we’re right back into it on Monday getting sort of like the organizational, strategic and other meetings.
01:08:14- Terry:
How much of a split is there, in your business between remote and in office? Are you remote entirely or in the office? what’s the situation?
01:08:22- Dustin Collins:
Yeah, so I’m remote almost all the time. We’ll do like quarterly team get togethers, and sometimes a little bit more than quarterly, with the AE team, with the sales team, but also with my CEO, COO and other senior leadership members. So we’ll get together at least quarterly and we’ll usually pair those together around the same trips where we go somewhere and meet in person, to get the, group together.
01:08:45- Terry:
How did you make the transition from in-office to remote is and what changes has that made? In terms of, I’m listening to, in terms of the meetings and the one-on-ones you’re having, I mean, they’re obviously very scheduled and it’s all via Zoom or Teams.
01:08:58- Dustin Collins:
Yeah.
01:08:59- Terry:
how did you make that transition from in-office to remote
01:09:01- Dustin Collins:
That. So that happened in 2020 with COVID, when I was
01:09:05- Terry:
like it did for everybody? Ma mostly.
01:09:07- Dustin Collins:
it did for everybody. And then it just never went back for me. but during that time then I got really a lot more regimented and organized. prior to that I wasn’t as good at managing my time, in my in-office time. but I also could do things.
01:09:22- Dustin Collins:
It was easier to do things quicker, you know, so I was in the office, by seven and leaving the office most days at like six-ish. and I could get all, everything that I needed to get in. and there were definitely a lot more interactions with people, but less organized interactions with people. And so now I’m just a lot more with the meetings, tight with the prep. and then if we do that. That structure allows me to be casual if there’s, another meeting that needs to happen later in the week. but it’s just all about, it’s been all about time management and
01:09:53- Terry:
Yeah. It’s, interesting, my first, I’ll call it remote role. I’ve managed geographically dispersed businesses for a long time. my first role doing that was actually 1997. This shows my age. And so in terms of managing remote teams, you know, I’ve been, I’ve hardly ever through my corporate career, been in the same office as where my team was andyou know, this whole 2020, when it came.
01:10:18- Terry:
And then this business here with chat metrics. We’ve been a hundred percent remote since 2015. We’ve never had an office. you know, we’ve all, the whole team’s been remote. it was just felt like home for me. It was very natural. Yeah, we had some, problems because it’s very different. I mean, the steel industry in the distribution side of the business, so it’s like all the sales and front end into the market, you know, steel on trucks, and then they’ve got warehouses and distribution.
01:10:40- Terry:
So it was like I was running. Geographically dispersed teams, but I was the remote one more than they were remote, so to speak. in this business, dealing with remote individuals. You know, we had a few stumbles in the beginning. There’s a whole lot of challenges when people, you know, work from home and work in remote environments.
01:10:55- Terry:
I’ve always worked on the premise that I don’t care where you are, you can be dangling your toes in the lake as long as you’re doing your job, then that’s the main thing. And because for us running a 24 hour shift pattern, they have to turn up for their shift, they’ve gotta do their eight hours and then, you know, you can be off before and after, but you’ve gotta be available through that entire time.
01:11:15- Terry:
And, one of the things we did to solve that issue was, we now do have an office, but it’s a virtual office. Everyone just signs into a zoom room. they can be aware of it doesn’t matter where they are or what they look like. We, you know, we do chat. So it’s all via, the keyboard. there’s no, for our team, there’s no, face-to-face meetings at all.
01:11:30- Terry:
And so that’s for the operations team anyway, the chat operations team. And so for those guys, you know, they just signed in and out of a Zoom meeting and I found that the, big benefit for that was very quickly, the whole cultural culture of the business changed. They were much more collegiate, much more team environment than you know, feeling more separated and isolated.
01:11:47- Terry:
It’s been, yeah. Interesting. We had some challenges in the beginning. how, is there something in particular that you do in terms of, making sure or that you’re aware of the level of productivity and commitment from your team being remote?
01:12:01- Dustin:
Yeah. I think in sales it’s easy because it’s so metrics driven. and there’s so many like. Different proof points that people are doing, the work that they say that they’re doing. And the performative parts of the job are objective. You know, you’re closing business or you’re not closing business, you’re going to the meetings
01:12:20- Terry:
Yep.
01:12:20- Dustin Collins:
booked for you or you’re not doing that.
01:12:22- Dustin Collins:
And we use Gong, which is a meeting recordings, software. Love it. It’s great, but if you don’t show up for the meeting, I can tell if you’re not making your calls, they’re not logging in Salesforce, emails aren’t logging in Salesforce. I can tell you’re not doing your job. So I think it is a bit luxury
01:12:36- Terry:
Yep,
01:12:36- Dustin Collins:
that I have, other people probably have to manage a little bit more tightly.
01:12:40- Dustin Collins:
But that is important. and a, I’m a hound for metrics. I don’t live and die by them, but I know ’em all and I’m tracking everything that I can, just so I have as much context as possible.
01:12:51- Terry:
Yeah. Do you have what’s the structure? Do you have,I think you mentioned before, it’s not so much of a split of SDRs and, AEs. is it, do you have any that focus more on the meeting setting side of things versus the closing side of things?
01:13:03- Dustin Collins:
Yeah. We have three SDRs. currently, we have, seven account executives, one who’s sort of a player coach right now. we’ve got a good chunk of AEs. We’ve got a little bit fewer SDRs and their Primary focus really is just booking meetings as much as possible. And then we’ve got a customer success team, that’s a decently sizable one.
01:13:22- Dustin Collins:
I, off the top of my head, maybe six there. we’ve got a pretty robust customer facing team. yeah.
01:13:28- Terry:
Are your AI’s, do they, manage both inbound and outbound?
01:13:31- Dustin Collins:
Yep. Yep. They’ll do anything. And they’ll also do, work with existing customers as well. So the customer success team primarily owns the existing customers, but we don’t love you and Livia. we do, you know, if you sell the account, you’re gonna keep the account and work the account moving forward.
01:13:46- Dustin Collins:
If they need additional services and products and they’re on trainings, the accounting trainings, they’re helping, later stage, we’re trying to connect with other people. The organizations that we sell onto are really, really huge too. So we could sell into an organization
01:13:58- Dustin Collins:
and then sell into that same organization.
01:14:00- Terry:
And those two groups of people will have never, they don’t even know who each other is, or they know who each other is, but they don’t even know they’re both using our software. Yeah. Yeah, land and expand gives you an opportunity that, yeah, it gives you credibility to mention the same organization in different department. Yeah. Sometimes depends I guess, how much, divide there is and silo mentality there is in the business, whether you wanna mention that or not.
01:14:21- Dustin:
yeah. And you try and you hope, you know, your AEs know what the situation is. And, but there’s a lot of international companies too. So you might have somebody in, the Middle East and, the US and in EMEA,
01:14:32- Terry:
Yeah. dusty, you mentioned there’s one of your team that’s standing out. what do you look for in the next generation of sales leaders? You know, what does make someone stand out to you right now?
01:14:40- Dustin Collins:
I think it’s, you mentioned it before,
01:14:42- Dustin Collins:
and with that personality test, and I don’t remember the exact verbiage that you used, but I use agency as sort of like the, in control of my own destiny. I am this, I’m doing that. Bringing me, what if there’s a challenge, bringing me the challenge a proposed solution and saying, this is what I think I’m going to do.
01:15:00- Dustin Collins:
What do you think about that? Is that a good path forward or not? There are many employees or people that have worked for me in the past your whole one-on-one is just solving their problems for them. And you’re like, if you come and you say, Hey, I’ve got this issue. is my thought. here’s a clear explanation of what’s happening. Here’s the context, here’s what I think I should do. What do you think of that? And I can just say, good or let’s modify this part or tweak this or that. Like that really helps you stand out. I think doing that and then just trying to understand people’s motivations and where they strive strengths and weaknesses.
01:15:33- Dustin Collins:
Are you good with people? Do you really just wanna make as much money as possible? Well, I’m gonna push it on the IC track probably then. so come into play, but also sort of behaviors around. Then managing themselves
01:15:44- Terry:
Yep.
01:15:44- Dustin Collins:
and re manage them. Managing up, I guess, an agency. I’m in charge of
01:15:48- Dustin Collins:
my destiny. I’m the one who’s gonna make, or break myself. Not factors or competition or anything like that.
01:15:54- Terry:
Yep. Yep. Makes a lot of sense. And yeah, I’m very along with my thoughts on that as well, for sure. I’ve got another quick four questions to ask you before we finish up,
01:16:03- Dustin Collins:
what’s a book you’ve read in the last 12 months?
01:16:05- Terry:
Oh man. You know what I’ve been doing? I haven’t read, Any good nonfiction content in a while? let’s see. I’ve got my audible up here. You know what I’ve been reading a lot of though is, Jack Reacher books. So I love Jack Reacher, nonfiction or, fiction books. Mm-hmm.
01:16:20- Dustin Collins:
always have As a kid, I used to listen to a lot of fiction and so I’ve been doing that.
01:16:23- Dustin Collins:
But yeah, I’ve got a few I’ve downloaded, but nothing that I’ve really, that’s sticking out to me.
01:16:29- Terry:
Jack reaches good. It’s one of those things that, you know, it’s a release. it gets you away from reality and absorb yourself in a story. I love that. I love that. Yeah. Sorry, what was the business one you wanted to mention?
01:16:39- Dustin Collins:
The business one I was reading is, slow Productivity by Cal Newport, and I found it to be decent. I don’t love it. It’s decent. It’s about, and that’s a bit of a counter-cultural type book around Your best self and your best productivity may not come from just charging super hard into things. so that one’s been interesting. I’m about halfway through that one now. I like it. but. it’s not blowing me away, you know, I’m not in love with it, you know, but I, you know, not in the last 12 months, but one of the books that I really loved was a Robert Green book called Mastery. and that one was really good. And he goes through, the different phases of mastery that what people that he would deem as masters of their craft through. And he, in every phase of it, you know, this is a certain phase of mastery, call it apprenticeship. And this is what Beethoven was doing at this age. and this was his path. And he tells stories about each of these different masters that are really good. So I really love the Robert Green, the whole group, Robert Green Books. it’s got the 48 Laws of Power and then, I think 48 Laws of Human Nature or something like that. Those are all really good.
01:17:49- Dustin Collins:
And they follow the same format. Very, very fun books to read.
01:17:52- Terry:
I haven’t read the mastery one. I’ll have to get it out. It sounds great.
01:17:55- Dustin Collins:
Super
01:17:55- Terry:
what’s the sales advice? the worst sales advice you hear out in the wild?
01:18:00- Dustin Collins:
Hmm, that’s a great question. I think it’s anybody that gives sales advice that is prescriptive or that is, do this and this is what works. Anybody who’s being overly dogmatic in their sales advice. Yeah. many people and so many different types of sales. Influencers now think that they know sales. If anyone ever says, and this is maybe more of a pet peeve of mine, but you’re on X Twitter or LinkedIn and people are talking about quote unquote high ticket sales, that’s one of the ones that’s a trigger.
01:18:32- Dustin Collins:
High ticket is a trigger word for me because it just means there’s something like really expensive consumer products to people who you know and using pressure tactics to try. And I think it’s one of those things that just gives people a terrible people in sales a terrible name. it’s a high ticket sales, high ticket.
01:18:47- Dustin Collins:
This high ticket that this is the thing that’s gonna change the game for you. All that stuff immediately
01:18:53- Terry:
Yeah.
01:18:53- Dustin Collins:
Every red flag that I have as you know, whole philosophy is like the antithesis of that. So that really,
01:19:00- Terry:
Yeah.
01:19:00- Dustin Collins:
bothers me, but I try not
01:19:02- Terry:
Yeah.
01:19:02- Dustin Collins:
consume it as much as I can.
01:19:04- Terry:
What’s the one tool you can’t live without in your Sales stack?
01:19:08- Dustin Collins:
probably gong. I love gong. It’s so good. You can listen to the calls, you can get transcriptions, you can replay and learn. And as a sales leader, it’s great ’cause you can get visibility into what’s being talked about, how you’re presenting things, positioning, what people are saying about you, what they’re saying about your competition.
01:19:28- Dustin Collins:
Like, there’s just so many insights that you can get from that. and then obviously a CRM, you gotta have a CRM, but I would say, I’d say if it’s not like a really basic thing, it’s gotta be gone.
01:19:38- Terry:
Yeah. if you were in the office, if it was a full, on, in the office, would gong still be just as important, do you think?
01:19:44- Dustin Collins:
Oh, totally. Yeah, I think so, ’cause you’re, never gonna be able
01:19:46- Terry:
Yep.
01:19:47- Dustin Collins:
to get on all your team’s calls, regardless. And so if you’re in gong you can, you can literally get through every call. You can put it on one and a half x speed. So it just gives you so much more ability to understand what people are saying and how each individual rep is doing. There’s such a deep level
01:20:03- Terry:
Mm-hmm.
01:20:04- Dustin Collins:
of capability in that software too, that I just love it.
01:20:06- Terry:
Yep. Yeah. Okay. Good, good. And if you weren’t in sales, what would you be doing?
01:20:11- Dustin Collins:
That’s a great question. I was a health coach before I was in sales, and I did some personal training and I love working with, fitness and the body and, nutrition and the science. My degree is in health sciences, so I think I’d probably be doing something like that. my favorite job that I’ve ever had though is I was a Zipline tour guide. so I was, just was taking people on Zipline Tours in Dubuque, Iowa, at skytours
01:20:32- Terry:
Well.
01:20:33- Dustin Collins:
And it was just the most fun job ever. It was so fun. So, and you gotta stay super active. You were outside in the summer, so got a good sweat on every day, had a great tan. People were always there to have a great time.
01:20:45- Dustin Collins:
You know, you never encountered a group of people that were there that were bummed out. You know, you can’t be bummed out in zip lining at the same time, you know?
01:20:51- Terry:
Yeah, you are not gonna be bummed out. But there’ll be certainly a wide range of emotions from fear to, adulation, I’m sure.
01:20:57- Dustin Collins:
For sure. And I love taking people through that. I love seeing people go through the whole range of emotion, you know?
01:21:02- Terry:
Yeah. Yeah. Excellent, excellent. Well, dusty, I’ve gotta say. Yeah, it’s been an outstanding conversation today. I appreciate your time. I know it’s sort of on the surface. When I was putting these questions together, I thought, I hope this doesn’t come across like a bit of a grilling, but,I’ve really enjoyed the conversation.
01:21:16- Terry:
I hope you have, and I appreciate your time.
01:21:18- Dustin Collins:
No, the feeling’s mutual. Terry, I appreciate it. I appreciate you thinking of me and inviting me on.
01:21:22- Terry:
Thanks for joining us on the chat.
2026 © All rights reserved Chat Metrics
Made with ❤ in Melbourne, Australia
