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Today’s show featured an interview with Bryan Jenkins, Vice President of Sales, RunSignup.
Find Bryan on LinkedIn.
BRYAN’S TIP: “Just because someone says no doesn’t mean it’s over. In our world, ‘no’ usually means ‘not today.’ Great reps circle back, stay patient, and win when the time is right.”
THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE
Fred Diamond: We got Bryan Jenkins, and I’m excited to talk to you today. You’re with RunSignup and you also have a couple other brands, GiveSignup and another one as well. It’s a niche play, and one thing that we’re interested in talking about is focus. That’s something that becomes a big topic when we interface with sales leaders, is getting very, very focused on who the customer is so that you can create true value for them and really provide the right messaging to get them to do what you need them to do. Give us a little bit of an introduction. I’m also interested in some of your main sales mantras, some of the things that keep you going, and let’s get started with the conversation.
Bryan Jenkins: Thanks for having me, Fred. RunSignup is definitely a niche website. I’ve never met anyone else that does what I do. Typically, if you’re at a dinner party, there isn’t anybody else that is there that does what I do. I think it might be helpful to just start with an overview of RunSignup and our typical customer.
RunSignup last year worked with over 30,000 events, which is mind blowing that there’s that many running, walks, triathlon, cycling events happening across the United States. We are not international, so we’re only working with clients in the United States. The average client that we work with, the best example I like to give is a PTA 5K. If anybody has been on a PTA, they’re looking for ways to raise money in a 5K, sometimes comes up as a fundraiser similar to a car wash or a bake sale did in the past. 5Ks have become the fundraiser of choice.
Typically, someone who has some background in running or walking is the person that’s assigned the duty of figuring this out. That’s typically where we come in. We have a ton of content around first-time races and how to put on races and how do you market your race. People end up spending quite a bit of time on our website clicking around, getting comfortable with the idea of doing business with RunSignup. At that point, this is where our business is interesting.
We are self-serve quite a bit. That PTA 5K, there’s no setup fee, there’s no monthly fee, no subscription. We let them get started for free. They go through the process. We’re having the race on April 1st. It’s at such and such place. They put in their description, they put in all the information necessary for their event, and we have a wizard that takes them through that process that makes it easy. The only step that is challenging is how do you get paid? This is mutual for both us and then the customer.
They then put in their tax ID, which is typically a nonprofit tax ID. They put in their bank account information. We do some fraud checking to make sure they’re a real person, a real entity. At that point they agree to our terms of service and we charge a processing fee. When someone registers, they pay a processing fee, and that’s how we get paid. That’s also how the organizer gets paid.
This time of year, in January, it’s not unusual for us to have 300 to 400 new races a week that we’re processing. That creates a lot of opportunities for our sales team. Some are very, very small and we have an onboarding team that focuses on that. Then some are a little bit larger and they want to go through a demo, they want to ask for references. They have specific needs and questions that they want to get answered, and that’s where the sales team gets inserted.
Our sales team is very, very active. It’s not unusual for us to have, especially in the busy parts of the year, 10 booked calls and people actually in line waiting to try to talk to someone because it’s like, “Hey, it’s January. The calendar’s flipped over, it’s time to get my event going.” We are a very active sales team, is probably the best way to put it. Whereas other groups are hoping for a phone call, we’ve got phone calls stacked up.
Fred Diamond: You’re the VP of Sales, which is why we invited you to be on the show. I was excited to talk to you because it is a niche, it is something different. We’ve never covered this before. Typically, we interview VPs of Sales at companies like Amazon and Oracle and Salesforce, et cetera. What do you do as a VP of sales for this company?
Bryan Jenkins: I’m a little bit of a unicorn in the position that I’m in, in that I’ve been a sales rep at this company. When I joined there were 4 or 5 people at the company and now we’re over 75 people. I’ve grown with the company and with my role. It’s a very organic process where I understand exactly what I asked my reps to do and the processes that we’ve built because these are processes that I did. My day-to-day is spent, I still have a fairly large book of business that I’m looking to hand off more of each year to my reps as they get more comfortable being able to manage more sophisticated deals.
I spend a lot of time with my reps, so when they get larger demos, I’m coming in helping them with those demos. I also help with our Salesforce administration. We have a very tightly-integrated Salesforce instance. Our platform, the RunSignup platform, if you create a race, it creates an opportunity in Salesforce, and then it moves that opportunity through the stages as you move your event along those stages. I spend time with various parts of our sales organization trying to understand where are our drop off points? Where are people hitting snags? How should we be communicating? Should we be revising when we’re intervening, and things like that? Because when you’re dealing with 300 to 400 smaller opportunities a week, we want to hit a certain level, which we’re trying to get 80% of them through the finish line. Because some of them are just not legitimate or some of them aren’t fits for us. My time is divided between that organic business that we win, as well as the business that our sales team operates, and then all the processes that try to help us make sure that we’re not dropping those 300 to 400 opportunities.
Fred Diamond: Give us an insight. We’re doing today’s interview in January. A lot of organizations are planning their runs probably sometime in the spring, I guess, maybe in the fall. They’re getting in touch with you to get their site up and all those things that RunSignup does. What percentage of your sales interactions are the phone call comes in or the lead comes through the site that your reps now follow up with versus prospecting? Does your team have to do any outbound? Do you call the company or the organizations that used your site last year? Or do they automatically resign if they had a good experience this year?
Bryan Jenkins: Our business is closer to 70/30 inbound to outbound. We have a tremendous amount of inbound activity. Being in a niche business is not as effective, because they know who we are. We have over 50% market share. It really comes down to are they ready to have that conversation? Some of our large opportunities, we’re only touching them once or twice a year because you don’t want to be too forward with them. Because it’s like, “Hey, I’m under a contract for the next three years. Get out of here.” It’s light touches. It says, “Hey, we just added this new volunteer feature you might be interested in. We just updated our photo platform.”
We have to keep good notes on our large accounts to ensure that we’re doing light touches two to three, maybe four times a year, about those things that they care about. When their contract comes up, we’ve probably interacted with them the appropriate amount, not too much, not too little. When they’re ready to go back through that buying cycle, we’ve had those appropriate touch points.
Probably the other thing that’s a little bit interesting about a niche business like this is referrals and introductions that we get are when you come down to actual opportunities we close, it’s probably 75%, 80%. Let’s say I worked with you, Fred, you were very happy with what I did. You talked to Sally. Sally’s not super happy with their current provider. You say, “Hey, you should talk to Bryan.” We get that a lot. It speaks volumes to what we do and the processes we have.
We spend more money in our company on product development than we do on any other department. We spend very little on marketing. We spend less on sales than we do on product development. You mentioned about retention. We are not a contract company. You can come and go anytime that you want. Clients renew with us because they want to. The way we measure churn is there’s a lot of events that don’t happen because they just don’t want to do it anymore. Our churn rate is typically between 1% and 1.5%. We’re really happy about that.
Fred Diamond: Tell me a little bit about what makes a great sales rep for you. Without mentioning the person, but demographically or characteristically, maybe that’s a better way to think about it, characteristically, how would someone in sales succeed at a company like RunSignup?
Bryan Jenkins: The first thing is, is being active. Like I said, we have so many calls that we already have lined up. You have to be open to working on the phone and be very patient as well, because some of our customers don’t get it, and it may take them a few minutes to get the concept. But once they get the concept okay, “I’m ready to get going.” You need to be studious and curious. Our platform grows all the time. If you just don’t pay attention to our product updates and use the platform and you just rely on the account management team to do all the support and things, you can get behind. That’s going to hurt your ability to answer customer’s questions or prospect’s questions.
If you stay curious and continue to read what we put out, watch our videos, use the platform, our customers are pretty easy to understand. Very, very few of our customers do this as a full-time job. The majority of them, this is something that they’re doing during lunch. This is something they’re doing before work or after work. They want to be efficient in their interactions. They don’t want to spend two hours on a demo. If they can get their questions answered in 15, 20 minutes and they feel confident that they’ve got their questions answered, and if they don’t, they know what to do and can get the support they need, that’s a really unusual thing in sales, is to have people who want to get off the phone, but they just want the answers to their questions.
Fred Diamond: It’s interesting, we talk a lot on the Sales Game Changers Podcast about how sales professionals to be successful in today’s world need to bring a lot of value to the customer. In a lot of cases, that means understanding the industry, understanding the customer’s industry, especially in highly-technical fields, and highly-important type of customer bases. We interview a lot of sales VPs and leaders who manage teams that sell products to the government or to hospitality, or to financial services, or to the healthcare industry, education marketplace.
Speak about value for a second. Is the value that your sales reps bring is quickly getting the customer to understand, here’s how the product is going to solve your problems? For example, you mentioned your classic cases, the PTA 5K. Do you train your people on the changing world of the PTA or is that something that the customers really care about, or do they really care about, “I have to hold this event?” Like you just said, maybe they’re doing it during lunch. Is it like, “I just need to have this up and running, well efficient, so everything that I need to be taking care of and that I might not even know to ask?” I’m answering the question for you, but I’m just curious, what’s the value that your salespeople bring to be as effective as possible?
Bryan Jenkins: I’ll be bold and claim we have overwhelming value. We’re not asking for you to sign a contract. We’re not asking you to put a credit card down. If you use our system and say it’s a 50-person race, I can guarantee you we are spending more money on that customer than we’re making. Now, we need the larger customers. Our average customer size is around 450 people, but we have 60,000, 70,000-person events as well. The value ranges based on the client. The most interesting thing about our businesses is that every single client, I feel is getting more value from us than we get from them. We like it that way because it means that we are focused on their problems, so much so that we’re putting a lot of our efforts into their problems.
Just to give you a couple examples is that we allow clients to map a domain to our software. You could buy bryanpta5k.com from GoDaddy and map that to our servers. Now when you type that in, that website is powered by us, but at completely no charge. You also can send emails out of our platform completely at no charge. If you’re an entity, and this is actually becoming a bigger and bigger deal, is we automatically calculate, collect, and remit sales tax. A lot of times people think nonprofits don’t need that, but certain things that you sell in certain states, you do need to collect sales tax. We do all these things on behalf of our customers, and sometimes because we’re legally obligated to, but if you go to Shopify, you’re not getting that. You can get that stuff, but it’s typically, “You need to upgrade to premium. You need to buy this package.”
That’s one of the things that a client really appreciates when they dig into ours, is I’ve heard thousands of times, “You guys have thought of everything.” It’s true, because when you’re in a niche, I’m not going to say we’ve thought of everything, but we’ve thought of a lot. It allows us to serve those customers really, really well. It gets to that net of the churn, why it’s so low, is that we’ve focused on an industry. We put a lot of money into R&D and then just keep reinvesting and reinvesting as things change, as we all know, they will. That sales tax one, it’s a really big example because it costs us an enormous amount of money to manage sales tax on behalf of our clients.
Fred Diamond: Do your salespeople need to be runners? Does that make a difference if they participate in 5Ks? Is your best sales rep a guy or lady who runs every week in some type of 5K, or does it really not matter?
Bryan Jenkins: It matters from an interest standpoint, but it doesn’t matter from a skills standpoint. The reason is, is just like anything, if you were selling music software, if you don’t know anything about music, it just takes you a little bit longer to learn the terminology. That’s really the biggest hurdle, is the terminology. When you learn that, a hundred percent. Because if you go and work at events, the problems become obvious. The solutions that we provide to those problems become even more obvious. Many of our people are former runners. We have people that were very, very talented runners. Is that a hiring criteria? No.
Fred Diamond: Give us one or two of your sales leadership mantras. Something that if I were to go to one of your sales reps and say, “What does Bryan constantly remind you of?” that they would bring up. What are one or two of your go-to sales leadership mantras?
Bryan Jenkins: In the business that we’re in, when I hear no, I just hear not today. We have been very successful, because I’ve been with this company for over 11 years, in circling back. Being patient and circling back on deals. One of the things that we really spend a lot of time on, and I talk about it every month, is revisit your closed/lost deals. I can’t tell you how many really high-dollar services I’ve canceled as a leader of a company and never heard from that company again. I think those companies deserve what they get. I worked with Zoho prior to Salesforce. I haven’t heard from Zoho ever again. I’d love to hear from them. I’d love to talk to them. I’d love to tell them about what I like about Salesforce today and why we left Zoho and how they might be able to earn my business back in the future. But that’s one of my biggest, it’s actually a life takeaway, is if you tell me no, a lot of times it’s just no for today.
Fred Diamond: That’s a great one. Bryan Jenkins, I want to thank you for giving us some insights today. It’s a cold day in January in Northern Virginia as we’re doing today’s interview. I don’t see too many people outside running today but I’m sure people are going to be thinking about it. By the way, when are most of the 5Ks? Are they typically in the spring or early fall, or what do you typically see?
Bryan Jenkins: We call our business a tilted seagull. There’s a bump in the spring, a dip in the summer, and then a bigger bump in the fall. It’s probably more like 60% fall, 40% spring.
Fred Diamond: Do you run as well?
Bryan Jenkins: I did. I just walk and do calisthenics now. I’ve got a few too many injuries, but if I could run, I would.
Fred Diamond: I did a couple 5Ks last year. To be honest with people listening, I didn’t run. I walked them, but people were cool with that.
Bryan Jenkins: There’s no problem with that. Probably the biggest misnomer about our business is that we’re in the running business. We are much more in the entertainment business. Some of our biggest events are really about entertainment and getting people together to have fun. If there’s a 5K on the calendar and you do it with your friends or your family, it’s something to look forward to. A lot of our events have beer, so people like a party with beer and I’ll feel a little better after I run. I’ll give you a pop quiz. What do you think is our busiest running day of the year?
Fred Diamond: St. Patrick’s Day.
Bryan Jenkins: Thanksgiving Day, and it’s not even close.
Fred Diamond: Thanksgiving Day. Yep. There’s all those Turkey Trots and things like that.
Bryan Jenkins: Exactly.
Fred Diamond: Yeah, that makes sense. By the way, you talked about people think you’re a running company. The product in the company we’re talking about is called RunSignup, but you’re right, you want people to come, if they’re fundraisers. As a lot of our listeners know, I also host a podcast on Lyme disease awareness. There’s an organization called Lyme Warrior that runs a whole bunch of 5Ks. I should get you to connect with some of their people right there. It’s all about raising money for Lyme disease. I’m sure there’s probably a couple of people who take it real seriously and hope to win the race, but for most people, it’s like, “Hey, I am devoting time and energy to helping this great organization of Lyme Warrior raise some funds and awareness about tick-borne diseases.”
Bryan Jenkins: Believe it or not, they actually use RunSignup.
Fred Diamond: Very good. In 2024, I attended one of them down in Wilmington, North Carolina, and I hope to attend a couple others. That’s nice. I’m friends with the people who run that. I’m glad to see that they organize this.
This has been educational, Bryan. Thank you so much for being on today’s Sales Game Changers Podcast. Give us an action step, something specific. You’ve given us a lot of great ideas, but give us something specific sales professionals should do right now to take their sales career to the next level.
Bryan Jenkins: Find a mentor. Find someone who cares about you, who will help invest in you, and then find a way to return the favor. When someone invests in you and you reach your next level in your career, you need to return the favor and invest in someone else’s career and help them get to the next level.
Fred Diamond: Did you have someone? Is there a mentor you’re still working with that triggered that?
Bryan Jenkins: My mentor actually retired, but she gave me a lot of encouragement and tips and also just telling me to be patient over time. You’ll get where you want to be, but you’re not going to get there today.
Fred Diamond: Once again, I want to thank Bryan Jenkins. My name is Fred Diamond.