hey everyone welcome back to my channel it is so good to have you here this is the spotlight series and in the spotlight series i cover resources in my network who are open to work and who i think have really interesting stories and might be a great fit at your company and today i'm honored to have my good friend jonathan lent jonathan welcome to the show hey man thank you for having me it's gonna be fun all right cool so why don't you just give a short story of who jonathan is where are you from and what are you looking to do yeah my name is jonathan lentz i'm here in pennsylvania i have a little bit of an unconventional you know round of my past career but a lot of it has very transferable sales skills i'm really excited to apply to the sas area as i look to get into either an sdr or bdr position hopefully with the with the end goal of becoming an ae for those of us who maybe don't roll in the sales world and also for those who do roll in the sales world and want to make sure they know that you know what you're talking about tell us what an sdr and bdr is and does that's a fair question you know what does this guy does this guy know what he's getting into um as an sdr or as a bdr my expectation was would be that i show up to work i am going to be doing a good number of cold calls anywhere from 30 to 100. a lot of those phone calls are gonna go straight to voicemail so we're gonna have you know a couple really good scripts for that voicemail to get people's interest but for like the five to ten percent of people that actually pick up my goal is going to be to you know get their interest by talking about pain points and get them interested enough to and invest enough to eventually get to that disco call where we find out whether or not they are in fact an icp and we want to actually bring them in or if we're just going to disqualify them because we're not going to solve their problem and we're also going to be doing cold emails and we're going to have a good i'm going to have a good relationship with the ae so we can open up that pipeline for whatever company i work for and this is why i i really want to dive into your unconventional background because i really feel like there's some transferable skills there so why don't you tell the audience uh what you were doing at your last job and why that would matter or why you've kind of fought in the same trenches that an sdr would have had to fight in at my last job i integrated appliances for customers i consider that to be like the very end of the sale right the sale is not done the sales cycle isn't done until that product is at the customer's fingertips and they're happy they they you've onboarded them and everyone's copacetic right things are always coming along down the pipeline but that's where that that main cycle ends and that's where i was and as far as that applies to the sdr every morning i would be talking with anyone from 10 to 20 people that i had never talked to before instantly working to get them to like me to trust me because in this case i was doing you know in-person interactions so it's not just hey let's talk on phone calls hey i'm going to be at your house and i want you to be comfortable and so that soft skill of building rapport building trust transfers right into an sdr role and what about actual sales experience in terms of actual sales experience one of my first jobs at adis which was a very early tech startup company i actually worked with the owner of the company to get our very first sale so obviously this isn't just we already have a product it's like a viral product where as an sdr and ae you basically take orders no this is all right we're going to convince you we know this is a new product we don't have a whole bunch of testimonials but this is the nuclear option we were selling an emr for physical therapists that was the next generation of you're not gonna have to spend you know three hours at your computer every single day doing data entry we got that first sale and we got that first customer in even though it was the most expensive product on the market at the time fast forward a little bit to my time in advanced auto where i ended up working with anywhere from 15 to 20 commercial accounts on a day-to-day day-to-day that was they were anywhere from 50 to 100 000 ar so it wasn't just little b to c it was b to b and with customers where they could turn their business right down the road if they decided they didn't like it so although i don't have direct software experience i do have experience dealing with people and helping them solve their pain points which at the end of the day every sale is maybe one way we can crash test you why don't you tell the audience what the value prop of servicenow is based off of discussions you've had with me just by our casual conversations so one of the big problems with the corporations that as it gets bigger and bigger and bigger a lot of the information tends to and the work tends to like fall into invisible areas where that company can bleed money and just have poorly planned resources and no one knows the whole idea behind servicenow is is you make that work visible you let the company decide what rules they want to set around it so they can govern it and finally automate the parts of that work that they can so they can make that company much more efficient and get the job done that they need to do it it really helps if you can feel that pain as well right if you have some kind of like resonance with those problems so maybe you could showcase how the value propositions of servicenow make work visible governed and automated how you've seen that in your own personal work life and you can understand why those things are are big value props absolutely so i have a lot of experience in logistics with my last job and even a little bit farther beyond that one of the big issues was miscommunication and what you would have is product traveling between warehouses and warehouses that had no method of getting information back and forth the issue was so bad that i've had days that should have been an eight-hour day a 12-hour day turn into a 16-hour day because of a single phone number that wasn't available to me until i had already gotten onto the road and that lack of transparency probably could have been fixed with a single problem with a single integration that just needed to be done all right so part of the art of the deal is overcoming objections right and since we led with you're having an unconventional background probably one of the first objections that's gonna come up is well you don't have you don't have any like legit sas experience how do you overcome that objection so let's say i'm in a conversation with a hiring manager or bdr manager and i get that challenge of you know what i'm still not sure whether or not you have the relevant sas experience my response that is is like all right then let's find out numbers on a paper words on a paper are great but when it comes down to it is do you have the skill or not if we're in a conversation and you're not sure i will sell you your own product outline the pain points outline why would be a good purchase into who and you can be the judge of whether or not you think that i can if i can hack it as a salesperson and if you think i'm coachable enough where we can you know do this thing together because at the end of the day my motivation is i want to be able to take care of my family and so for that i am prepared to go the extra mile to make sure that whatever sas sales job that i have whether it be sdr bdr or eventually ae that i am crushing the quota to a level that is just extraordinary okay and are you open to travel and relocation no i'm primarily interested in a remote role but there are a good number of states i've happily moved to greater parts of texas tennessee north carolina florida basically the only states that are like a hard note for me right now are new york and california so if it's not those two states let's talk and find out what we can work out all right folks thanks for watching an episode of spotlight the special guest today has been jonathan lent if you're looking to expand your sales team with sdrs and bdrs and you're thinking long term and want somebody who can take that position crush it and grow into an ae reach out to the email it's going to be on the screen below and we are going to get you in contact with him thanks so much for watching and we'll see you on the next one if you're a servicenow expert looking for better opportunities but maybe your resume or linkedin profile isn't doing you justice reach out to me via linkedin or the email pictured here as i offer both career coaching and recruitment services and if you're a servicenow customer or partner you heard that right robert fedoric now does servicenow recruiting with a 1500 subscriber youtube channel and mailing list and thousands of linkedin followers let's make sure your open positions can first go with the prodigious pool of servicenow resources reach out via the emailed picture here