Welcome to Pay Attention, where Attention's CEO and Founder, Anis Bennaceur, interviews some of the smartest minds in sales, growth, and product leadership.
Jane Van Sickle (00:14.64)
I'm good, how are you?
Anis Bennaceur (00:15.246)
Jane, how are you doing?
I'm great, thank you. Very excited to have you here. So for everyone who's listening, Jane has been leading sales teams at companies like Unbounce, Trulio, and today, Bucketlist. But Jane, I'll let you introduce yourself real quick.
Jane Van Sickle (00:22.576)
Yeah, I'm really glad to be here.
Jane Van Sickle (00:41.648)
Thank you. Hi, I'm Jane Van Stuckel. I consider myself my sweet spot to be working with companies that are startups that are about to take off or taking off. I really love solving the problems and being creative and being part of that growth. And excited to talk about some of those experiences today.
Anis Bennaceur (01:06.094)
excited to. So my first question to you is I would love to know about the three pivotal moments in your career that got you to where and who you are today.
Jane Van Sickle (01:19.92)
I'd say the first one, I worked in parks and recreation, doing recreation programming, and I wanted to move into tech. So I found myself a job and I moved across the country by myself to do that. I moved to Vancouver, not knowing anybody. So that was a pretty big risk for me, both personally and professionally, and that really launched my career in tech. So I look at that as the first moment.
the second moment was when I was working in customer success. I did support and implementation and I moved into sales and that was a, a big decision, that I had taken because I really didn't understand sales and what it meant to be good in that. And then after I moved, I was like, this fits me in like a glove and I've never looked back since. And then the third one I would say is I'd say moving into and working at Trulio, that was in the.
the very start of COVID. So it was volatile, but it was jumping on a company that was about to rocket ship. And I went there to build out their sales team. And that was just a really great experience to not only build out the team, but also in a company that became a unicorn during that time and grew rapidly.
Anis Bennaceur (02:38.638)
So anyone who's listening to this is probably wondering how was Jane able to identify a company that was then going to become a rocket ship, right? It seems like the job of any early employee is even tougher than the one of a VC because you have to properly identify a company that you want to work for that is going to take off and be something huge, right? How were you able to identify Trilio at that moment in time?
Jane Van Sickle (03:10.032)
well, I, I had some people who worked there, so I was recruited. so I, I think it's having people that, you know, you can do that research. The company was also at the point where the founders had stepped aside and they had hired, a CEO who was experienced and had gone through this pattern a number of times before. So.
I felt like he was a key differentiator for the company and in growing. And then just looking, what's that company doing? Are they being disruptive? What are they doing that's different? And does it put themselves in the position to grow really fast?
Anis Bennaceur (03:52.238)
Were there any metrics that you're trying to focus on in addition to that new CEO being someone that you had high trust in?
Jane Van Sickle (04:04.592)
I would say not like, not specifically with Trulio because it was like, things were just going crazy with COVID. So it was just this, you know, unrealistic or not unrealistic, but just this, this crazy time. So nothing other than the typical sales metrics that I would look at, for any, any company.
Anis Bennaceur (04:26.958)
Got it. And earlier in your journey you said that you went from support to sales. How has that transitioned?
Jane Van Sickle (04:35.76)
well, I was in this role where I was project managing. So any new business that the sales sold, I would speak to that customer, assign the information. So I just naturally started to do some upsell and, the president of the company wanted me to move over to sales. I didn't want to do it because I didn't think I'd be good at it. And he, he basically kind of forced my hand because he started making me do the quotes and I wasn't getting any commission off of it. And I just got to the point where I was like,
What do I have to lose? I'm, I'm, I'm, and obviously there's more to selling than just that, but I decided it was the right time for me to make that jump and take that risk. And if it didn't work out, I was at, I was at peace with that. So, it was like, it was very exciting and I just took the plunge.
Anis Bennaceur (05:23.79)
Were there a lot of things that you had to unlearn?
Jane Van Sickle (05:27.12)
Yes, because coming from a support or implementation perspective, you're a subject matter expert on the product, right? And when people come to you and they, and you're in a sales perspective, but they, you need to learn how to, become the trusted business advisor and be able to work with them with your understanding of business and the software. But if it comes to a support issue, you need to let the support people deal with that at that point.
Anis Bennaceur (05:55.598)
Yeah. Everyone's talking today about how so many sales reps are actually trying to sell the features, the product, instead of selling benefits and become actual sales experts. I assume, especially when you're coming from support, knowing, as you said, the product's so well and the feature's so well, it must be an extremely difficult job, right?
Jane Van Sickle (05:55.6)
It's hard to let go, but you have to make that transition.
Anis Bennaceur (06:24.27)
in a very difficult transition. So that probably gives you today the ability to, when you're seeing reps selling the features, to help them kind of transition into better strategic sellers overall, right?
Jane Van Sickle (06:32.816)
Yes, yes, I firmly believe that you need to train your reps in a sales methodology that's going to focus on them being the trusted business advisor. You're absolutely right. People just go to features and when you get into that and you're talking to competitors,
product's a product. It's really about how that person becomes the trusted business advisor and the experience that they, the sales experience they provide for that, that company who's looking for a solution that's going to meet their needs.
Anis Bennaceur (07:17.71)
And when it comes to, you just mentioned frameworks, sales methodologies. Was there anything that you really learned over your career that has been having a tremendous impact on your teams? Was it kind of like a mix and match of different methodologies? How do you think about that?
Jane Van Sickle (07:38.544)
I've had the privilege to go through a number of different sales trainings over my career. I started off with Franklin Covey. and I've done that one a number of times with my teams. It's my, it's my favorite. I've done Sandler, I've done Miller Hyman. So I've pulled a lot of those and also solution selling. So I've pulled a lot of those together, to create the strategy and roll that out. I also like the challenger sale. I often will do that as a book club with my teams.
and have them read through that and figure out what can we pull in and use with our team. But we're going through this process right now of doing these trainings because I'm doing exactly what you said is getting our account executives off the feature sale and really understanding what are the top issues for the customer and how can we solve them if we can solve them.
Anis Bennaceur (08:33.614)
I love that. That's one of the things that I say every single day, just step away from the features and just focus on the why and the impact for your client. So one of the things that you mentioned as well is that you walked into Trilio during the pandemic. Everyone was working remote. It was an exceptional time to be building or growing a sales team.
Jane Van Sickle (08:54.064)
The number one thing is communication.
Anis Bennaceur (09:03.182)
So on your end, you've done a great job at building high energy, high performance teams. It can be a challenge for some leaders to do this with their teams being dispersed geographically and across time zones. So I'd love to know what's your secret.
Jane Van Sickle (09:23.728)
feel like you're over communicating. When are the last time that you heard somebody say, complain about being over communicated to it doesn't, it doesn't happen. Right. And most times we're not communicating enough. So I say that is the, that's the number one thing is to be very intentional about your communication. Anytime you're bringing about change, people will have a reaction to that. And so it's really important to think about.
What am I communicating? When am I communicating it and how I'm going to communicate it? And when you start to think about those things and you create your plan, you can be really intentional. I also think when you're in a habit of communicating, it allows you as a leader to be your, your real self. I hesitate to use the word authentic because I think everybody uses it now, but I think you do. People feel comfortable approaching you. So you're bringing your team along for your journey.
It's okay that you don't have all the answers, but as you communicate, you can get feedback. And that's how I get people to buy into things, right? It's really about communicating.
Anis Bennaceur (10:32.896)
And so within the way how you communicate, do you have any specific mental models, frameworks, however we can call it, to specifically choose the words, the vocabulary that you're going to communicate? I think that's something that a lot of people struggle with today.
Jane Van Sickle (10:50.16)
Mm hmm. I always think about with them what's in it for me. So from a salesperson perspective, why am I, why do I want to be on board with this? So it's, I think it's, it's, it's that it's why is the company doing this? And how are we going to benefit from it? And if you think there might be some roadblocks along the way, call those out and get feedback at different stages.
Anis Bennaceur (11:17.87)
So I'd love to know when was a time when you communicate something and you realize, shoot, I should have said things differently and how you kind of remember that lesson for the future.
Jane Van Sickle (11:33.008)
that's a great one.
Jane Van Sickle (11:40.304)
I'm going to go with a comp plan rollout that we did a couple of years ago. And I think this, it gets into, have you done all the data research that you need to? Can you show the reps how they're going to get paid? Can you show them how they're going to get paid compared to their last plan? And if you don't have all that research and everything prepared, there's going to be tons of questions.
that you can't answer at that time and then things start to go off the rails. And I think that's really important to make sure you've got all of your prep done and you're ready to answer all those questions.
Anis Bennaceur (12:22.734)
That's really interesting. Paul Graham tends to say that the best way to communicate certain things is to write about them, because when you write, you actually think about all the critics that could come to you. And so you end up choosing the right vocabulary. That was something that we, you know, and that's why a company like Amazon today will push people to always try to write. No, I think it's Stripe actually. Stripe will push.
all their employees to have everything overriding to make sure that they articulate things the right way. So, one of the, you know, another thing that you're great at is making sure that there are no silos between teams. Sales, marketing, customer success, and any other teams. So, you know, today on LinkedIn, kind of on...
Jane Van Sickle (12:58.352)
you
Jane Van Sickle (13:06.008)
you
Anis Bennaceur (13:17.134)
professional and social networks, removing silos is a hot topic right now. Can you share how you've managed to accomplish that, especially across remote teams?
Jane Van Sickle (13:29.164)
So as you mentioned, the silos often exist at the intersection of where two teams are coming together. So marketing, the sales, SDRs, DAEs, over to CS. And what I've seen work the best is to have sub teams, right? So we now have a growth team at Bucket List, which is marketing and sales. We meet every single week.
And not only are we meeting, but we also have created alignments by having OKRs for the specific team. So we have goals that we're achieving, we're working together every week. And so it's not this us versus them or the typical things that you would see. So I think it's really important to create these cross sub teams and give them goals that they're working towards together.
Anis Bennaceur (14:24.334)
I see, and do they all report into the same person? How do you kind of structure that from an org perspective?
Jane Van Sickle (14:31.824)
Well, they're there. So it's a sub team. They're still so some of my teams on it, some of the marketing teams on it, the CEO actually sits in on the call as well. So it's not like a, you know, it's a it's a cross team coming together and working together. The the reporting structure is still the same within their teams.
Anis Bennaceur (14:53.582)
So it's kind of like a pod that kind of has people from those different teams. And so what's an OKR that you are able to put in place between both of those teams, for instance?
Jane Van Sickle (14:56.784)
Yeah. Yeah.
Jane Van Sickle (15:08.08)
Our OKR for this quarter is pipeline building for Q3. So we've got some pretty lofty goals of where we want to get to. And so we have that number and then we've broken it down by marketing is going to bring in this many leads, the SDRs will bring in this many leads, our partnerships will bring in this many leads. So we have a common goal. And then within that, we have our own responsibilities that we come together and discuss every week and move ahead.
Anis Bennaceur (15:39.086)
And have you seen any sorts of conflicts ever emerge between those within that pod for instance?
Jane Van Sickle (15:47.024)
Nothing that's not healthy. I think you always want to have like some level of, of, of healthy friction. And, this is, I've never seen it work so well as what we're doing at bucket list. Like I've seen it, you know, okay. I've seen it bad. and I think the reason why it works so well is because we have common goal. We meet every single week and it's just created this environment where people can ask their questions and we have.
really productive conversation.
Anis Bennaceur (16:19.758)
It's interesting. So when you're focusing on the leads that this team is or sub team is generating, how difficult is it to assess the value or the quality of the leads? Are you able to kind of break it down the right way, especially when you have multi -touch attribution? Who's taking ownership, specific ownership of the leads? How do you do that overall?
Jane Van Sickle (16:49.136)
Well, I think data is the key there, right? And making sure you have that in place. A lot of startups don't have that together or they're growing really quickly. And so it's making sure that whatever your goals are, you can actually track that. And so that's part of what we've done is we know like, okay, this segment, the ACV might be lower because it's going to be inbound SMB.
So we have different ACV values depending on the team or partnerships. We know it's going to be higher because just because of the nature of who we're partnering with. So we've looked at all of that when we've set those goals and not just the number of leads we want coming in, but also assigned a pipeline against those.
Anis Bennaceur (17:36.814)
Okay, that's very clear. When we're thinking about teams, and especially growing them, I would love to speak about how to grow a team. I think we're both aligned on the idea that growing a team doesn't necessarily mean increasing headcount. So I would love to know a story about a time when you've grown a team without necessarily focusing on hiring.
Jane Van Sickle (17:58.32)
Yeah, well, I can, I can talk about what I'm doing on bucket list, right now. So we, by the end of this quarter, we'll double our leads from where we were in Q4. And the only net new hire that I've made is a director of sales development. so part of that was looking at, I'd say the first thing is, is.
What's your resourcing? So all account executives were taking leads, no matter the size, no matter what stage they were at, your account executives are your most expensive resource. And so really you want them to be working on qualified opportunities that are in your ICP. So we made some transitions towards our SDR team, taking more of those leads that were coming in to qualify them before.
moving them over to an SDR. And then on top of that, it's your technology. So we weren't doing any lead attribution or lead scoring. So those are really important to put in in place. So we understand what's the experience you want. You want every type of company that's coming in to have a delightful experience, but what should that experience be? So you're, and then in comes lead routing, right? So.
You're really looking at the technology that can take over some of the work that humans are doing. And then it's about looking at the resources that you have and are you using them in the most efficient way.
Anis Bennaceur (19:39.022)
So yeah, I would love to know kind of how specifically you score the leads, what technology you're using to properly route those leads based maybe on the scores or based on how you're assessing them. Feel free to plug in any company that you like there. But yeah, I'd love to get to know more.
Jane Van Sickle (19:56.272)
Okay.
Yeah. So the first thing we had to do is set our ICP because the company had not done that yet. So once you understand your ideal customer profile, then you can start to look at your lead attribution and your lead scoring. Because it's like, does this customer fit within our ICP? Let's score them this way. If they don't, then that falls outside of our ICP and we want to make sure that we're focusing.
Anis Bennaceur (20:03.246)
your station has time.
Jane Van Sickle (20:28.464)
So we're looking at the industry, the size, like what's the buyer persona, who's coming in, what material did they attend a webinar, what material did they interact with, and then score those accordingly.
Anis Bennaceur (20:44.686)
Interesting. And does that happen in real time or does all the information come in and then the reps reach out, the right reps reach out to those prospects or those leads afterwards?
Jane Van Sickle (20:57.488)
So we're still implementing that right now, but I have implemented that in the past. And yes, but ideally you have that happening all real time. I would say we're still in a state of not, but that's what we're working towards.
Anis Bennaceur (21:10.926)
That's really interesting. I've been thinking a lot about this actually and seeing that they're very, I haven't seen any really good tool in lead routing, right? Think about now with AI, all the possibilities of things that you can do, right? Just scraping the LinkedIn profile of that person in real time, understanding that they're very much into sports. They worked at XYZ company, they went to that school. Maybe you can match them best with a rep who has...
Jane Van Sickle (21:26.736)
you
Anis Bennaceur (21:37.934)
those same attributes, right? Those same passions, and that might have a huge impact on the way you're closing deals. And yeah, it is something that is extremely hard to do in real time from what we're seeing today, especially given the latency at which you're getting the data and processing it. Great. So, you know, today, how do you assess when a team...
Jane Van Sickle (22:00.784)
Thank you.
Anis Bennaceur (22:06.574)
is ready to scale in terms of head count and especially after you've grown the team without hiring.
Jane Van Sickle (22:15.504)
I look at a number of things and I look at them on a regular, on a monthly basis. So a few metrics that I look at is how many new opportunities does an AE need to have in their pipeline per month? And so I look at that by what's their quota divided by our ACV divided by 12 months and then how much pipeline you need to have. So what's your win rate? If your win rate's
like 20%, then you need five times your pipeline. So I look at that on a monthly basis to monitor how many new opportunities the AEs are getting. I also look at how many meaningful conversations that they're having per month. So generally, I think that's about 50. And you think about discovery calls and demos and pricing conversations and all of those. I look at active ops that they have. So with
We have a 90 day sales cycle. I find that the active ops are about 25. So those are the ones they're actually talking to. It's not a email every other week of, Hey, you want to start talking about this again? They're actually working those. and then, I also look at, so we talked about that, the growth team. So we look at pipeline creation per week and demos per week. so a lot of factors, but I think that that's really important. And then the last one I will add is payback.
Anis Bennaceur (23:34.67)
Mm -hmm.
Jane Van Sickle (23:42.256)
So you want to look at what's the cost to sell the business and then how fast do you make that back? And so I'm looking for a year and a half timeline on that.
Anis Bennaceur (23:56.078)
Got it. So would you say that kind of growth proceeds sales in the sense that you'll start investing more into growth, see until at a certain point when the reps are kind of saturating in terms of opportunities and at that point if things are kind of hitting some local maximum, then at that point you can start adding more reps without necessarily impacting the...
the close rates, the cacks, everything else that is happening within the team, right?
Jane Van Sickle (24:29.36)
Yes, because I think if you, if you do it the other way, then it's kind of a bit of a pipe dream. Like, here's our goal. Let's get to it. And you're just hiring people. But if you don't have actually have that business, then you, you're end up like, those are people's lives in there and it's the business. And so you need to make data driven decisions.
Anis Bennaceur (24:49.582)
And when it comes to generating pipeline, how do you try to make sure that the reps themselves, the VAs are generating their own pipeline in addition to everything that they're getting from the growth team?
Jane Van Sickle (25:03.344)
So you, the first thing that is having a purposeful outbound strategy. So is that, is that what you mean by outbound or regenerating? Yeah. So, you need to make sure your team is trained on how to do outbound. I think a lot of people just think that salespeople can go out and do outbound, but it's a whole program and it's a whole skillset. So you need to make sure that you've got the, the ICP and your lists of target accounts and.
who's going after those target accounts. I like to segment it by market. So AE1 has market one. So they become a subject matter expert there. And so you really, you need to train them. You need to give them the tools and then you need to give them expectations on what they're doing per week and, and targets. I like a pipeline growth target because otherwise it's just this thing that balloons out of control and nothing gets done.
Anis Bennaceur (25:59.918)
How about referrals, right? So once an AE closes an account. So today over at Bucket List, do the AEs also work full cycle as account managers, or do you have that played out? And then once they start, the team starts working with an existing customer, how do you make sure that you can maximize referrals from your most satisfied customers?
Jane Van Sickle (26:23.952)
So we have our acquisition AEs, which are dealing with new business only. We have our customer success managers, which deal with our existing customers. And we've also just started a team of expansion account managers. So they are the ones who are responsible for doing upsell. So that's a new area of growth for us that we're entering. So.
referrals can come from a few different places. We've actually just started experimenting with an automatic referral email that goes out at different points of the cycle. And we're starting to see a little bit of success. It's too early, but I find any company that I've worked with, like, kind of executives, there's very few people who are good at getting referrals and ask, because they don't ask for them.
Right? So we were trying this automatic process to see if maybe that can, maybe that can solve that problem.
Anis Bennaceur (27:26.862)
It is a real talent to have. It's very hard. You have to kind of check in with your client, make sure that they're satisfied, and know when to make the ask at the right moment. It is as much.
Jane Van Sickle (27:38.48)
Yeah, I've seen the probably the rep that I've had that was the best at it would ask for referrals before she even closed the business.
Anis Bennaceur (27:48.878)
Interesting. That is very hard to pull. I love that. And so, given your experience with sales teams in the early stages, I'm sure you've had great experience honing in on ICPs. Can you walk me through the process you take to find the correct ideal customer profile for each of your teams to target?
Jane Van Sickle (28:04.112)
Yes, I think most of the companies that I've started with have had either no or a small degree of identifying what their ICP is. I think a lot of the times it's because a startup doesn't necessarily have product marketing at that point.
So it's coming in and leading some of that process. So the way I look at it is look at your customer base. Who do you have success selling to? What's the conversion rate on the leads? What is your ACB on those clients? What's the churn that's happening there? And then dividing them into key markets. And so you buy industry, also looking at the size of the business that's most successful. So.
what, and what's the acceptable turn on, on each of those. I also recommend that you interview all of your, your internal stakeholders. So CS has a different perspective on what's ICP. You want to talk to product. So really understanding, all of those and then bringing it together into, a summary of these are this, this is our sweet spot and this is what we're going to go after. And then from there, everybody needs to agree.
This is our ideal customer profile and this is how we're going to prioritize our work. And this is how we're going to make decisions because you can do all that ICP work. And if your company is not on board with it, then it's not going to be successful.
Anis Bennaceur (29:44.462)
And how have you seen that impact growth rates later on once it's properly defined?
Jane Van Sickle (29:52.016)
Well, I think you start to see people if they're committed to doing work that focuses on those markets. So you're creating the features for those markets. And then as a trusted business advisor, you're, you can go out and talk about solving those problems. Your marketing team is creating that content. So then you start to see the leads that are coming in falling within your, within your ICP. Your churn levels should go down because you're bringing in customers with your ICP.
So you really should see that across the organization.
Anis Bennaceur (30:23.47)
That makes a ton of sense. And so it can be a big change for sales teams focusing on inbound who want to start making a shift to outbound. What else does a team need besides an ICP to start doing outbound? And yeah, maybe also some of the signs that a team may not want to do outbound in some of the cases.
Jane Van Sickle (30:52.432)
Like it goes back to a couple of communication. but outbound is, like I said, people underestimate what it takes to do outbound. I know that because I underestimated it and, and quickly learned, this is, this is going to take us a lot longer. So I think you need to, like you said, you need to have your ICP and then you need to be really, purposeful and provide your AEs and your SDRs with the support that they need. So there's.
technology. So our rev ops team has created all of the target lists of the accounts. And, and then so marketing creates content because you have to arm your, your sales team with the content that they need that's that speaks to those markets. And then you need to have the right tech, right? Whether it's like the navigator or clear, but or Apollo, those are, those are the ones that some of the ones that I've used that we're using now, but.
you have to train your team on how to use it and, and then how to write a sequence, right? Like there's just, there's so many, like I'd say training your team is about a 25 hour process to get them ready to go outbound. And that's once you've got your lists all uploaded into your CRM and you've got your marketing content ready to go. so I think.
there's the training part. And then as far as people who don't want to do outbound, it goes back to the communication of this is why it's good for you. So with, with inbound, you're casting a big net and you're capturing whatever you get. With outbound, you're being really specific. Your sales are going to be larger and you're going to bring on customers who are really going to thrive with the company.
Anis Bennaceur (32:35.054)
and then your deal cycles are going to be longer, but that's okay because of the size of the ACV. When it comes to outbound, one of the big things is all about iteration, running as many experiments as you can, and you have to be okay with the fact that maybe 70 % of your experiments are going to fail. Speaking of failures, I think that...
Jane Van Sickle (32:41.776)
Yeah, exactly.
Anis Bennaceur (33:02.19)
Some of the biggest learning opportunities come from those. Can you share the failure that's impacted you the most and what you've learned from it?
Jane Van Sickle (33:13.184)
Yeah, and we've talked about some of the things I've learned from it already, but I was working at a company where we were primarily in market and enterprise and we thought we can we can sell this to our SMB market, right? We can we can put a package together for that, which we did. And we were selling it like crazy. And it was like we built a team for it. We hired a bunch of people.
And the sales were successful, but what wasn't successful is they weren't implementing the software and going live. So when we talk about monitoring that payback, and the implementation was a long cycle. So it took us a while to figure that out. And we weren't measuring it as often as we should that payback. So we ended up exiting the small business market and having to lay off the people who.
were selling that. So that was, that's the most difficult moment that I've ever had in my, in my career. And I never wanted that to happen again. and so that's why I, I probably over measure maybe about when to hire a new person. and looking at those efficiencies and paying attention to that payback. I look at that every single week as bucket lists, as a company, we measure that every single week. And, so.
Anis Bennaceur (34:20.782)
Mm -hmm.
Jane Van Sickle (34:33.36)
My commitment is to ensure that I'm using data not only for what's coming up in the future, but the different things that you're doing right now.
Anis Bennaceur (34:45.102)
Yeah, that makes sense. I guess that the effort that you put in measuring all that data is going to be way less expensive than making the mistake to hire a full team and then have to let them go, which is then going to impact morale. And how were you able to kind of solve that whole situation later on when you had to let an entire team go because of that?
Jane Van Sickle (35:11.152)
the morale situation.
Anis Bennaceur (35:12.59)
Yeah.
Jane Van Sickle (35:14.992)
it takes a while, right? So I think the, the, the first thing is treating the people who are no longer with the company or who are going to be leaving with respect, right? When, when, you're creating that message and that tone that you're treating, you're creating, a situation where they can feel how they want to feel and ask questions and, that you treat them with respect. And regardless of those are the people who are leaving other people will.
will see that. I mean, I personally helped some of those people get jobs elsewhere because they're great employees. And I think like your team will see how you treat people. And so that's the first thing. And then the second thing is going back to that communication plan and communicate. Obviously you can only communicate so much, but is communicating with your team and don't stop, right? You don't have one meeting like that goes on for months the way that people feel. And so,
you need to communicate and give them space to feel and talk. And then also it's very much about the vision of how you're going to move forward. Right? So here's our vision. Here's the things that we're going to do. We understand that morale is going to be impacted with this and our commitment is to continue to work with you. We feel the same way. We're going to work together and we're going to build towards our new vision.
And that includes building back up the team morale.
Anis Bennaceur (36:45.838)
This is great. I've just learned so much in the last few sentences. Jane, this has been incredible. Maybe one last question for you is, who are three sales or growth leaders that you respect a lot and that you'd like to see as guests on this podcast?
Jane Van Sickle (37:06.352)
So I've got, yeah, I've got three and for different reasons. There's Tice Van Santen, who's a, he's a chief growth officer and advisor. I've had an opportunity to speak and work with him here at Bucket List. So I think he would be an interesting person. I think Kelly Lewis, who's a VP of revenue operations from Highspot would bring a perspective of talking about data and tracking that and the importance of that.
And then we've talked a lot about sales development and outbound. So I'm also going to say Amanda Wild, who's the director of global business development at Alita. She's someone that I've worked with in the past and highly respect her abilities to get teams going and successful.
Anis Bennaceur (37:54.606)
Awesome. And if you could just plug in bucket lists in one sentence, how would you describe it? How does it solve customer pain? And just sell it to the world here.
Jane Van Sickle (38:05.008)
Okay, thank you. At Bucket List, we're here to help companies retain their talent and build high performing teams through recognition. So that's employee engagement and retention. And those are all really important to the growth of companies.
Anis Bennaceur (38:24.014)
Awesome. Thank you so much, Jane. See ya. Bye.
Jane Van Sickle (38:26.704)
Thank you. Okay, take care.