David Dulany, Founder of Tenbound
[00:00:00]
Carrie Richardson: Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Carrie Richardson, and I am the host of the WIN podcast, where we ask an important question.
What's important now?
With me today is David Dulany, who is the founder of TenBound. And a little blast from the past. David was one of the primary reasons that my business succeeded way back in the day. He worked for an organization called Open DNS and they exited to Cisco, and they were one of our very first clients.
So David, thanks for taking some time as always to spend some time with me today.
David Dulany: Oh, my gosh, pleasure is all mine. One of my favorite people in the world. I'm so happy to be on this and chop it up with you. I know that you're doing amazing things and anything that I can do to help the audience. I'm excited.
Carrie Richardson: So tell us a little bit about how Tenbound came to be.
David Dulany: Oh my gosh. When we met, I was [00:01:00] running a sales development team which is, they call them SDRs, BDRs, et cetera, at OpenDNS. And we needed appointments. We had an in house team, but it wasn't, enough for the ever thirsty salespeople that needed appointments, right?
And especially in the MSP world we were, I think, just Getting into that area. Andrew Kaiser was running the MSP team at open DNS. We're going to be dropping a lot of names on this podcast. Okay. And he came and was like, Hey, can we position the SDR team to try to get us some meetings in the MSP world?
And your name came up immediately. As the queen of MSP prospecting. And it's still that we started working together and I can say that I was managing probably three or four different outsourced SDR agencies going direct or. You are the only MSP specialty and none of those could perform [00:02:00] and I can name names, but none of those outsourced agencies performed well.
But every time MSP managed sales pros, they were delivering really high quality appointments, week after week and everybody loved you. And that is how we met initially.
Carrie Richardson: I'm definitely taking that quote and repurposing that one for sure.
David Dulany: Sure. Okay.
Carrie Richardson: Tell me about Tenbound .
David Dulany: Absolutely. Tenbound is a research and advisory firm that works primarily in the B2B go to market tech space. And so what that means is we study the market.
We find best practices, best technology, what cutting edge sales teams are using, and then we offer advice in that area. So what should you do now in order to build your business? Pipeline and revenue, and then at the same time people are really interested in sales technology. That's what we hear the most from our audience.
And so we've developed a database of the top sales [00:03:00] technology vendors, and we're starting to build up that as a really great way to research sales technology solutions, read reviews get information and then be able to make better decisions. So that's Tenbound.
Carrie Richardson: You also host a conference every year, correct?
David Dulany: Yes, we do. We are known for the conference. We've done them in San Francisco, in Austin, and we're doing them online this year as virtual conferences. And we, bring together the "Carrie's" of the world to teach us about how to deliver go to market strategies. And and then we bring the sales technology vendors to the conversation as well so that they can get in front of the audience.
Carrie Richardson: Yeah I never get invited back to any conference. I speak at in San Francisco. It's what are you doing? You don't need that. You don't need that either. And you also don't need that. Although now I'm recognizing that. Had I made [00:04:00] an investment in some different sales technology with managed sales pros. Even if that had meant, one, two, three more appointments per client per month, our retention would have been significantly better. We could have charged a lot more, so it likely would have paid off. I was just very against having this enormous bloated technology stack for outbound calling.
You need a phone, you need a computer. You something to track who you're calling. What's the most interesting product you've seen in sales technology in the last couple of years?
When you came to the conference and when we were working together there, there was a lot of sales technology developed all at the same time. And I think in sales is really hard and people are looking for what's the next, silver bullet that I can just plug in and nirvana of sales.
David Dulany: And, I hate to throw a bucket of [00:05:00] water on the whole thing, but there is no silver bullet. Hopefully everybody knows there's no thing like one thing that you can plug in and solve all of your sales problems. Your tech stack back in the day probably could have used like a couple of, things to juice it up a little bit, but you don't need a hundred different tools definitely.
And the way that people manage the technology is problematic and that now sales reps can just go on and start taking free trials and, doing like Freemium products without even telling you so you might have ten or twenty different sales tech tools plugged in on your team and not even realize what all of them do or what they are.
There's a thought process of saying, OK, what is our sales process and where do we have pieces missing that we could potentially plug something in?
Not just. Oh, that looks like a really cool thing. Let me just plug it in. I don't even know, how it [00:06:00] helps in the big picture.
To your question, some of the most promising things that I've seen is there's technologies that are coming out that can actually identify who is on your website. From a like contact level perspective. And to be honest, I don't even know if these things are legal and it might come out that they're not, but it's absolutely game changing for especially a small business owner like me where, I can have a theory about who my customers are and, who might be interested in looking at Tenbound but being able to actually see who they are on a contact level. It's changed my whole marketing approach and the company itself.
So that's really promising.
Carrie Richardson: I love the spyware. When I look at the intent data, when I make the phone call, I'm like, Hey, my spy software said you were looking at our [00:07:00] website and you were interested in buying whatever, is that true?
It can be an interesting way to start a phone call, right?
David Dulany: I mean, I've gotten a few of those and I realized now that they, people can tell that it's David Dulany looking at their website pricing page.
And if you think about that, it's very creepy on one hand, but on the other hand, it's If you're at a retail store and somebody walks in you're face to face and they're looking around and you can talk to them, and you don't know what their name is and stuff like that.
But it's no different than being online.
Carrie Richardson: Do you shop, In retail stores?
David Dulany: I do. Yeah, I do. I like going into stores and seeing, it's nice experience. San Francisco is challenged right now based on a lot of the stuff that's happening.
But yeah, I like it.
Carrie Richardson: I miss having small variety, like just different stores that you can wander in and out of. [00:08:00] During the pandemic a lot of them closed here and they did not reopen. So it's tragic that brick and mortar is going the way of the dodo. But I also have an enormous box of crap that I'm never going to send back to Amazon.
David Dulany: It's funny, my wife would laugh because I love returning things, like in the boxes. I love putting them in the boxes. I don't know what it is. It's got some weird thing, but taping it up, getting it all ready, driving it over to the UPS. Store returning it and then ding, it comes back on our credit card.
And it's yes, I really feel accomplished when I do that. But real quick, one thing I do have to say, going back to the software if you're using that contact level identification software on your website, I would be really careful. Hey, Carrie, I saw you're on my website, in that creepy, almost, stalker ish way.
I would definitely work on your messaging.
Carrie Richardson: That's why [00:09:00] it's not working.
David Dulany: Somebody eventually- the FCC or somebody is going to come along and go, you can't do this anymore. And they're going to shut down all these companies, but in the meantime I, all I do is I go, I look at the company and then I look at the person and I might follow them on LinkedIn and just start to enter into their orbit.
And if they post something about, they need help with their sales strategy or or they're confused about sales technology. Maybe I'll go on and make a comment that like, Hey, that's what we do. And give me a call. I would just treat it carefully.
I wouldn't go straight after them like that. Like some people have done that to me and I find it to be super creepy.
Carrie Richardson: When your phone rings while you're still on the website. Can you give me five minutes to even see what you do?
I might have ended up there accidentally for all you know.
David Dulany: Nobody wants to train their SDRs right now and in this environment, and I understand that. [00:10:00] SDRs are a huge expense and now you're going to spend a bunch of money training them. I understand that, but you really should.
And if you're listening to this and you need to train your salespeople, give me a call.
Say you spend all this money and that a great prospect is on your website, you see them, you have their phone number. You call. Now you've spent all this money to forge that conversation.
Don't blow it, say something interesting that piques their interest and gets them talking versus, Hey, I saw that you were on my website and we're the producer of MSP solution. It's just terrible. You got to train your people.
Carrie Richardson: If you're starting with cold lists.
You don't ship that off to Fiverr. You don't give it to your overseas call center because if the contact answers the phone and the only thing you do is ask them how to spell their [00:11:00] name and what their email address is. And if this is still their phone number, you probably lost the opportunity to ever connect with them again.
The first person that you're ever going to interact with should be the best person that you're going to interact with, not your third string $4 an hour player.
David Dulany: Totally. And, honestly, like my phone rings off the hook all day and I can tell you if it's from an outside area code I've never heard of, I'm not answering it.
And I'll send it to voicemail. You can leave me a voicemail. Maybe it is if it's in my area code and I'm expecting a call, like my dog is at the vet. Or I'm waiting for some medical, results to come back. I might answer it, but I can tell you if you're Bob from XYZ MSP, and you're talking to me about my telecom solutions, I'm going to hang up.
There's all these debates about is cold calling still viable? It probably is for a lot of industries. I can tell you for the [00:12:00] Tenbound, research person answering this. It doesn't work for me.
Carrie Richardson: It's still working for me. I don't know if it's just persistence or having an unconventional style or just being unafraid of rejection or whatever.
I have no problem picking up the phone. I don't need a script. I don't need any of it. But I also do start conversations like, Hey, I noticed you were on our website. What do you want?
David Dulany: I'm talking about receiving cold calls and you're talking about making cold calls.
Carrie Richardson: Someone has to answer them, David.
David Dulany: I know. I'm sure that, now you can sales technology. Okay. Let's talk about parallel dialers. That I think is a piece of technology that could have made you a lot of money at managed sales pros,
There's this whole new crop that have come out and people are just absolutely bonkers over these tools because they, I don't know.
How they do it, but they apply some sort of algorithm to millions of phone numbers and they're just pinging [00:13:00] back to all these different phone numbers. And then they'll connect and then deliver their call back to you. So there's a live person on there, which is what, connect and sell used to do.
But now it's all computerized. You can have one SDR with a computer making 500 phone calls a day
After all that I would argue that if someone's plugging in a parallel dialer to their SDR team, they don't give a shit about their brand.
Dude, we're, we have three months of cash left. We need to sell some stuff like right now, like here's a parallel dialer, Mr. SDR, who's 22 years old, what they're doing go dial 500 people and see if you could sell some of this stuff. I think that's probably, I don't know.
I maybe that's what the mentality is, but they seem at least from my perspective, these parallel dialers, are constantly promoting themselves on LinkedIn and they're talking about how what, how great [00:14:00] everything is. They must be working, I think for somebody.
Carrie Richardson: If you have a larger center with a lot of agents where there's always someone available, a large outsource call center, for example, where you've got like 50 agents working on 1 project on behalf of 1 client. A dialer there makes sense, right? Like you've, you got a lot of people and they got to be busy all day.
You've only got three people. They can probably figure out what phone number to call next. But I also find it's a fine line between a pleasant work environment and a sweatshop and the idea that i'm just going to be force fed calls all day long until it's time to go to the bathroom like i can't work in that environment like i need a couple of minutes to diffuse after a really bad call and i need a couple of minutes to pat myself on the back and strut around the office after a good call.
So that dialer thing is yeah, I guess you [00:15:00] can hang it up, but I guarantee you there's somebody in the back room administratively pulling the numbers to see how many times you turned off the dialer today.
David Dulany: Yeah, that's true. And it depends on the company too, because a lot of people that I'm talking to, it's like they have remote
teams and they're distributed across the world, and so they're plugging in these things in a big office environment and a big call center environment. They probably. Have stuff like this already plugged in. But I agree. I don't know it's it seems pretty dehumanizing to, to work like that.
Carrie Richardson: I don't think it's changed much from like my first $8 an hour telemarketing job, where it was just like an enormous cubicle farm,
a
headset and a computer. Although the computers are probably better. And there'd be like a little like, blinky light. And then you'd know that the call connected when the light stopped blinking, but they cut off them [00:16:00] saying hello.
So you had to assume that they'd answered the phone and you just start talking. The minute you clicked to hang up the phone or they disconnected the call the thing just started again. You'd go all day. It was exhausting.
David Dulany: Yeah. I'll take you so far back.
In one of my first jobs, they would hand us like the stack of the cards, like the little post that people mailed in for information and it was like the Glen Gary leads, only certain people, but they weren't going Gary leads. They were just like you can win a trip to Las Vegas or something if you fill in this thing and put it in.
So then I, we would sit down at a dummy terminal that was just a black screen with a name and start calling these people. And yeah, I was pretty happy to have a job. And so that it was pretty cool.
Carrie Richardson: You've definitely come a long way from index cards and Pens.
David Dulany: Yeah. Now it's you saddle up plug in your parallel dialer, work for two [00:17:00] hours and then go to the pool and relax by the side and hope that your Slack thing doesn't pop up with your boss wondering where you are.
Carrie Richardson: I feel like all our kids are going to have to do is think about the person they want to call.
David Dulany: Yeah.
Carrie Richardson: And then think about the conversation they want to have. It'll be all sci fi.
David Dulany: I'm hoping that we get to the point where you can just ask Alexa for Alexa, please connect me with the head of marketing at IBM.
Bing! There he is. He pops up.
Carrie Richardson: That sounds like a dream. Although, I won't even, like, when we bought this house, I made Ian disconnect the Nest thermostat and the Ring doorbell, I refuse to have any of that stuff in my house.
David Dulany: You're off the grid there.
Carrie Richardson: And I'm never wrong, I'm never wrong. Ring is having to refund billions of dollars to customers.
David Dulany: I'm sure that it's watching me and, taking down all the details of [00:18:00] my life, but it's nice to know, there's somebody at the front door and who they are.
Carrie Richardson: It's the Amazon guy. That's the only guy that comes to my house.
David Dulany: One thing I learned working at OpenDNS, I was in the cybersecurity industry for two years and I just, you learn from day one that all of your information is out on the dark web.
You're completely owned. You're completely vulnerable at all times to hackers. And it's freeing because they know everything about me.
Carrie Richardson: There goes my next guest. I may as well cancel that podcast.
David Dulany: Just a side note. I went to the RSA conference recently and you come down the escalator into the Moscone Center, which is the biggest, convention center in San Francisco.
And there's over 500 vendors and the big boys have the end caps with the giant displays and everything. But then there's 100 cybersecurity vendors over there. And the [00:19:00] first thing I thought was, if I'm a CISO, how the hell do I know even where to start? With talking to all these vendors and then as a marketer, I'm, I was walking around talking to all the SDRs who were working at the booths, and just seeing what their sales pitch was like and what they were doing to engage the audience.
It's a cool industry and it's a lot of, there's a lot of money changing hands for sure. And the hackers are never going to go away. So it's got a big future.
Carrie Richardson: So at, you worked with open DNS, you moved on to found Tenbound.
Tell me about what you've learned about being an entrepreneur.
David Dulany: Get a very understanding spouse before you start. That's a very important decision and it's not to be taken lightly on either side.
I wrote a blog about this, the seven things I learned running Tenbound for seven years which was last year.
But [00:20:00] let's see, finding product market fit is everything, whether it's product market fit or service. Is everything. And I tell you this because I came from a sales background and a marketing background. And when I first started the company, I thought that sales cures everything.
And all you have to do is be a great marketer and you'll get them in the door. But the problem is if you don't have. That fit of what the market needs and what they're looking for. And you can't deliver on, the value that the customers are looking for. Then you're basically filling an empty bucket.
And I used to scoff at like the really product led founders who just talked about the product all the time and how great it was. But actually they're onto something because any advice I would give people is start with a great product or service
that's incredibly high quality and people are [00:21:00] remarking on and then build your sales engine off of that. You can't go the other way.
Carrie Richardson: What was the most surprising thing about being an entrepreneur?
David Dulany: Oh I think that being an entrepreneur, it forces you to really look in the mirror and it kills your ego in the way that you could think that you're the smartest person and you've got the best ideas and the market's going to love, everything about you, but you're dealing in reality and you have to be able to put your ego aside and listen to the market and what it's telling you and and adjust based on what you're hearing and what's working and what's selling.
I think that somebody said, if you're finding yourself as the smartest person in the room, then you're in the wrong room. Because you gotta be able to surround yourself with people who will disagree with you and push you and cause you to move [00:22:00] forward and not just be right all the time about everything.
Carrie Richardson: What was the task you were happiest to hand off to someone else when you could finally afford to bring on employees?
David Dulany: Oh my God. Anything organization related. I worked with a bunch of different executive assistant like online executive assistants, and then an actual company that is associated with E. O. S. I can't remember the name of the company now, but they it's an executive, assistant, almost like a chief of staff company, and they work very well with crazy visionary entrepreneurs who are completely disorganized and need,
Carrie Richardson: I'm going to need that name.
David Dulany: It's knowing your strengths and weaknesses they're on full display at all times because you don't have to be fake. As an entrepreneur, you have to understand what you're good at and what you're not and and offload the stuff that you're not good at as [00:23:00] soon as you can afford it.
That's my recommendation.
Carrie Richardson: Oh, that was accounting.
David Dulany: Yes. Yeah. Oh, my God. I'm terrible at that too. Delegate solutions, they're called delegate solutions. And they are highly recommended.
Carrie Richardson: All right, I'll reach out to the CEO
David Dulany: Her name's Emily.
And she would be great on the podcast.
Carrie Richardson: So we've got a couple of more minutes before we have to say goodbye. Tell me about what you think is going to happen in sales technology in the next five years, what's going to be the big trend or, what would you lean towards if you were going to build a sales development team?
Now? What products are you exploring? What AI makes sense? And where should you avoid it?
David Dulany: Oh my gosh, great answer. So if you're just starting out, I would say do not hire SDR's. I would say hire a great sales operations person in that case [00:24:00] and have the sales operations person design your tech stack properly based on your sales process.
And that means that whatever the tool is, whatever the new fancy, silver bullet coming out, there's an infrastructure in place that makes sense and is cost effective and and, creates the opportunities for the sales team. So start with the sales operations, have them map it out, and then start to build the team based on that success.
The reason I say that is because the landscape is changing and new tools are constantly coming out that can help support salespeople and SDRs. And you can't just I say it's like a, there's this thing called a Rube Goldberg machine where it's just all these parts and things put together and they're not really talking to each other and it doesn't work well.
And it's just, it's a waste of time. And [00:25:00] money and that's just something that we right now, we really need to focus on.
Carrie Richardson: How are SDRs using software independently of the companies that are paying them. How does that even happen? You worked in security.
I've worked with dozens of security companies. There is a 0 percent chance anyone could have downloaded anything onto their computers.
David Dulany: Yeah, that's a good place to start make sure that you know exactly what's happening on everybody's computers. And, it's one tab away to go in and basically run your own company.
Another thing is a lot of SDRs and salespeople have side hustles where they're, running a whole other company on the side not even be knowns to the company that they work for because they're working at home, so that they can, I even heard of people who have 2 to 3 other jobs and they're working other jobs at the same time while they're working at your company.
So you [00:26:00] think that you're paying them for 8 hours a day and there you're actually getting 2 hours a day. Okay. And they're splitting it with other things, it's happening right now. It's super easy for people to do this, and a lot of times you don't even have to download anything. You just run it off of your browser and put it in a VPN and
in a private, browser and your company might not even ever find out that you're doing it
Carrie Richardson: Just imagining the rage I'd be experiencing upon discovering that my my sales rep had two other jobs at the same time.
I suppose if they can do their job in two hours. Why not just pay them for eight? Who cares? They're getting the same results as the eight hour guy. Does it really matter?
David Dulany: No, not really. But it's just that, what happens with salespeople is they're doing really well for a while and then they start struggling.
A month goes by. They're going downhill. They're getting training. They're getting a performance improvement [00:27:00] plan. Two months go by. Now we're into the third month and they're just like flatline.
They have no pipeline. And so finally somebody has to fire them. And then, Oh lo and behold, they've been working at two other jobs for the last three months. I don't know. From a small business perspective, where every penny counts, for me, that feels like theft, but that's just me.
I guess big corporations are, they're not as upset about it.
Carrie Richardson: I don't know. I guess in sales, if my quota is X. And I can hit it in two hours. It's one of the reasons I became an entrepreneur, right? If I can hit my quota telemarketing in two hours and it takes everyone else eight, why are you penalizing me?
Why can't I just go home? I did exactly what you wanted. I've achieved my goal for the day. Just give me my check and let me walk out the door. And finally I was like, nah, if I can do this in two hours, I'm going to do it for myself.
David Dulany: Totally. Yeah. I more power to you. I would encourage everybody to do [00:28:00] that.
I think only 4 percent of the population is entrepreneurial or something like that. It's a very small. Percentage. Most people need to go to work and get paid every two weeks. And, they want to. Barbecue on the weekends and stuff. I don't know. It's just depends. There's nothing wrong with that.
Carrie Richardson: Once a quarter I consider doing that for at least five minutes. Like what the hell are you doing with your life? Why don't you just go get a job? How much money did you actually make last year? When I first started Managed Sales Pros, I don't think a month went by where I wasn't like, I'm just going to get a job.
This is terrible.
David Dulany: Totally. I feel like that every 2 weeks and I look at the bank and there's nothing in there, but it's chasing chase. Everybody's got different I, I would love to make a boat loads of money and be able to float off, and down in Mexico on a boat, but there's also the freedom aspect and just not having to put up with a lot of.
BS all the time, which was really [00:29:00] grating. It was definitely not an open DNS, but Toward the end of my career. I was just like I just one time very quickly. I found myself at a Dave and busters in roseville, california, you know with a bunch of fellow 40 somethings wearing acid wash jeans and trying to pretend to have fun, at a corporate offsite.
And I was just thinking, what the hell am I doing with my life? Like, why am I at Dave and Buster's right now with a bunch of people that I'm not particularly fond of?
I look back at that moment and it would be great to just like jettison and get out.
I can't think of a better place to stop than that.
And I have never been to a Dave Buster's and I guess I've made a good choice there.
You are a lucky woman.
Carrie Richardson: Thank you as always, David, for joining me, and I will look forward to chatting with you again soon.
David Dulany: Yeah, that was a lot of fun. T