How to Gamify Sales Productivity w/ Jeremy Boudinet [Episode 319]

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Among the many topics that Jeremy and I discuss are the origins of Ambition, the transparency and accountability that gamification provides in sales, what kinds of sales organizations are a good fit for gamification, and how Ambition implements gamification to help improve sales productivity.

Joining me on this episode of Accelerate! is my guest Jeremy Boudinet. Jeremy is Director of Marketing at Ambition, a sales productivity platform that drives people and process with goals, scorecards, contests, and analytics.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• The Ambition co-founders had started Access America Transport, which became the 12th biggest third-party-logistics company in North America.
• Access had logistics protocols and they had sales — and they ended up doing ‘fantasy football’ for sales — running intense competitions, and scoring people based on closing deals, getting revenue, making calls, etc.
• Ambition created gamification software that scores people, gives opportunities for recognition, and turns work into a fun, collaborative experience.
• What brought the Ambition to the attention of Harvard Business Review?
• What are some of the transparencies Ambition provides to an organization?
• What kinds of teams, and processes, does the Ambition paradigm fit very well?
• The more people in the process, the better the success, and the that more transparency, recognition, and energy matter to your team, the better it works as well.
• For managers, it’s about transparency. For reps, it’s about competition and collaboration. They find accountability.
• What is at the heart of the Ambition paradigm?
• What is an Activity Quadrant and how does it capture an individual’s sales productivity?
• How does the Activity Quadrant help prepare the manager for better one-on-one coaching, and help them evaluate processes, metrics, and behaviors?

MORE ABOUT JEREMY BOUDINET

What’s your most powerful sales attribute?

Starting the conversation and earning trust.

Who is your sales role model?

My Dad.

What’s one book that every salesperson should read?

The Sales Acceleration Formula, by Mark Roberge,

also, Sales Management Simplified, by Mike Weinberg.

What music is on your playlist right now?

New Wave, and The Hotel Year (now The Hotelier), Rap, Wu Tang Clan, Dirty South Rap.

Episode Transcript:

Andy Paul

It’s time to accelerate! Hi, I’m your host, Andy Paul. Join me as I host conversations with the leading experts in sales, marketing, sales automation, sales process, leadership, management, training, coaching, any resource that I believe to help you accelerate the growth of your sales, your business and most importantly, you. 

 

Hello, and welcome to Accelerate. Joining me today is Jeremy Boudinet. He’s Director of Marketing at Ambition, an employee productivity platform that drives people in process with goals, scorecards, contests and analytics. Jeremy, welcome to Accelerate. 

 

Jeremy Boudinet

Hey, Andy. Thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure to be on. 

 

Andy Paul

So take a minute, introduce yourself. Maybe tell us how you ended up at Ambition.

 

Jeremy Boudinet

Yeah, I’m Jeremy Boudinet, Director of Marketing here at Ambition. I’ve been with them for two and a half years. Very unorthodox path to this role.

 

Andy Paul

Graduated with a law degree, right? 

 

Jeremy Boudinet

Yeah, I’ve got a GAD that I do not use, never plan on using ever hopefully. 

 

Andy Paul

So what was the drive to go to law school?

 

Jeremy Boudinet

So I always thought growing up that I wanted to go to law school. I’ve always loved writing, and reading, and debating, all that sort of stuff. And those have been my strengths, really. I graduated with a Poli-Sci degree from UT Knoxville. 

 

Andy Paul

University of Tennessee for those who–

 

Jeremy Boudinet

Yeah, University of Tennessee. And when you do that, Andy, you leave yourself very few options.

 

Andy Paul

I was a history major. So I identify 100%.

 

Jeremy Boudinet

Yeah. And so went up to Pittsburgh, graduated with a law degree. Was very unhappy with the job prospects and hated law school, hated law, and did not really study probably as hard as I should have for the Bar.

 

Andy Paul

So the reading and the writing part weren’t as fun at that point?

 

Jeremy Boudinet

No, and when you’re reading a super archaic court decision from the Third District of Pennsylvania and working for an attorney and spending 10 hours in Westlaw researching, trying to find a case that matches what your argument is can get pretty demoralizing. So, I ended up turning to a recruiter, actually, for the legal industry. 

 

I lived in Fort Lauderdale, and I was colleagues from college with the co-founders of Ambition. And they were the first company, first startup out of Tennessee to get into Y Combinator. Graduated from Y Combinator, which is a startup accelerator program in Silicon Valley. In 2014, got a bunch of venture capital backing and hired me as their first business team member to do marketing, to do content, to try to help spread the word on Ambition and and what we’re solving for.

 

Andy Paul

So they were banking on your in depth experience with content creation and so on as a lawyer?

 

Jeremy Boudinet

Yeah. And I mean, between you, me, and your listeners, I might have had a mini entrepreneurial thing going on in college back in the day where I had helped people with papers, writing and stuff like that. And yeah, I’ve always been willing to write stuff. I just love to get my thoughts down on paper, and I love to help people. And immediately when they told me the job description, I was like this is so perfect for me. I have to take this. I dropped out. I was studying for the Florida Bar. I pretty much bailed on that, just moved up here. And that was in May of 2014. 

 

Andy Paul

Well, there you go. So what was the impetus to start Ambition? What was the problem they were trying to solve? 

 

Jeremy Boudinet

So they are three co-founders and we had a fourth co-founder as well. They basically got out of college and knew they wanted to get into tech and be entrepreneurs. They’re all business guys. Started two previous companies, one was called Reticker, another was called Fireplug. 

 

We were based out of Chattanooga, they were in the Lamp Post Group, which is the major investment group there. And the first two ideas were good, but they were B2C. They weren’t really growing as fast. And they end up getting inspiration from actually where Lamp Post Group’s founders came from. They started a company called Access America Transport, which ended up being like the 12th biggest third party logistics company in North America. 

 

Got bought by Coyote Logistics. Got bought by UPS. And so what they did access, they have all these logistics brokers doing all these calls, and they create a way to start doing fantasy football for sales, if you will, and ran these really intense competitions. They were scoring people. Just like a fantasy football player gets points for scoring a touchdown or catching a pass or whatever, they create a way to score people for closing deals, getting revenue, making calls, etc. 

 

And so our guys were talking to them. And they were like, why don’t we try to create a software version of this that really is around scoring people and turning work into a more fun, collaborative experience, give more opportunities for recognition, and really appeal to this very millennial idea of gamifying things or keeping a score of some sort. So that was a couple years ago, and since then we’ve grown Ambition into this really just total sales performance platform. 

 

It started out with the team sales contest, and we got featured in Harvard Business Review. We had all these great accolades, and they kept adding onto the product. And now we have employee goals. Any employee can track their goals on Ambition. And what ambition does, really, I should say is that it takes all your metrics from all of your data systems. It can be Salesforce, could be a phone system, could be a system like PeopleSoft, or just manually uploaded. And it tracks them in real time. 

 

And so you can essentially, if you’re a manager, track all your metrics from any data source and apply them to your reps, have benchmarks that your reps are supposed to hit, broadcast leaders on the use of those metrics, and have a way to have transparency and recognition for different parts of your organization. So a lot of people, mostly sales teams, still use us. But we have account management teams, client success teams, even some marketing teams to use this as well. So really excited to be a part of it. It’s a fun mission to be a part of.

 

Andy Paul 8:00

So is it being used mostly by this role that activity intensive tasks or roles like SDRs, for instance, and not so much for  field reps or account execs? I mean, how does that mix work out with your customers?

 

Jeremy Boudinet 8:18

Yeah, that’s a great question. I think I’ve seen the most success with inside sales teams or even call center teams who are mainly on the support side, the people who have a very repeatable process and all that. But we also have field sales reps who, the purpose of it with them sometimes is to have them have visibility. They’re out in the field. They’re not connected to the office, not all in the office together. And it gives visibility into what they’re doing, and they get visibility into what everyone else is doing. Just have the whole team on the same page. 

 

So the sales process, as a lot of the industry is getting more segmented, it’s a good way to ensure there’s no silos that end up being created, stuff like that. But yeah, the more people in the process, I would say, definitely the better the success. And the more transparency and recognition and energy matters to your team, the better as well.

 

Andy Paul 9:17

So is the gamification something that’s really– I’m always fascinated by this. I mean, we see a lot of gamification elements in products that are put out. Is it being used?

 

Jeremy Boudinet 9:31

Great question. By the way, just a quick aside on gamification, I’ve always really struggled with that term myself as the marketing director. Because you could say creating a score for someone is gamification. You could say having a leaderboard of any kind is gamification. Really all we’re doing–  it’s funny how people characterize it.

 

Andy Paul 9:59

Well, to me the gamification is–  you have a scorecard that can be individual and private. But once you start broadcasting it, everybody’s in comparison, then competition starts up whether you want to call it gamification or not. But let’s call it competition.

 

Jeremy Boudinet 10:15

Yeah, that’s a great way to look at. It’s all about competition. So saying all that, you’re right. There’s internal metrics and measures that maybe only your reps or senior manager are only looking at every end of week. There’s a spreadsheet you’re pouring through which we all hate. And you’re publicizing it all, and it inherently creates competition whether that’s your main focus or not. Your main focus might just be to have visibility and transparency. It’s funny, Mark Kosoglow, Outreach VP of Sales who uses us. He’s gone on the record as being– it’s all about transparency. He doesn’t even think about competition or anything like that. He just wants to transparency.

 

Andy Paul 11:02

Well, but he doesn’t have to think about the competition. Because who thinks about it are the reps themselves.

 

Jeremy Boudinet 11:06

That’s true. That’s a good point.

 

Andy Paul 11:08

As a manager, you can say, I don’t care about the competition part. But as soon as you put out a scoreboard that has 10 people on it and what their metrics are or their scorecards, trust me, it’s like saying that the kids at a youth football or youth youth soccer game, they’re not keeping score. Oh yeah, they are.

 

Jeremy Boudinet 11:26

Yeah, absolutely. And I think every rep, every person in sales is in competition to beat quota. It’s you versus quota, right? Or whatever your version of quota is. 

 

Andy Paul 11:43

It is that, but my experience has been, like I said over years and years of doing it, yeah, I want to beat quota. But I always wanted to beat everybody else as well.

 

Jeremy Boudinet 11:50

Yeah, exactly. So this now takes that and brings it to your entire sales force. And it’s funny how people respond to it. They interviewed Clayton Homes, Fortune 1000. Homebuilder was using a 60 person team in Knoxville, and they talked to all the reps. And it’s funny, they see it as competition. But they also see it as collaboration. They see it as we’re working together and everyone else is working, too, if that makes sense. 

 

Andy Paul 12:30

It’s group accountability you’re talking about.

 

Jeremy Boudinet 12:33

Yeah, exactly. So it brings group accountability to the forefront, too. And this is great because you can structure it to where you’re only publicizing leaders. Maybe you’re not publicizing people who are struggling. Or maybe you are if you want to do that. But it’s really able to basically make whatever part of your data you want public, made public and clear and build ways to motivate your reps around it in a perpetual way that you don’t have to fuss with. And you don’t have to go and pour through reports or look at Salesforce reports and be like, oh, great jobs. It’s just automatically happening.

 

Andy Paul 13:19

So it sounds like one of the key features, and just make sure people are listening and understanding, is at the heart of it the scorecard. And let’s say for SDRs, they have to make so many calls and send so many emails and maybe some social touches and follow ups and so on. And as I understand, you assign a point value to each of those activities. And then people have to achieve a certain point value to be meeting their goals.

 

Jeremy Boudinet 13:49

Yeah, exactly.

 

Andy Paul 13:50

The thing I like about it and that is fascinating that you’ve automated that is that I used that methodology for years with the reps that I managed and professionals I managed. If they really don’t understand what they’re getting things done– I had a boss that introduced this to me. I’m not taking credit for it. But we call it a box score. But it’s a similar type thing. It was a little scorecard where you had a certain point value for each of these different types of activities. And I had point goals for the days of the week. And at the end of the week, I looked at my point total more so than each of the individual activities.

 

Jeremy Boudinet 14:29

Yeah, no, 100%. It’s funny. What you just described, we’ve had a lot of clients who were doing that before Ambition. I think that predates what we are. But it’s just a simple way to understand and contextualize what your data means and what it means to you and see how you’re doing really in four ways: you versus your goals, your benchmarks, you versus your peers, your team versus another team, and you versus your past performance. Which is another kind of cool thing about it, we let you very easily see how you’re doing this week as opposed to last week or the week before and across all kinds of different metrics. 

 

So, yeah, I think it’s important. I think there’s so much research out there that really just hammers home the need to use competition, use accountability, and use proper recognition standards and have it all fit well within your process. And when you start doing that, then that’s the ultimate form of management. Because you can have people start becoming self accountable, accountable to their own success. And you don’t have to worry about going over, making sure everyone’s doing what they need to be doing. People are holding themselves accountable, they’re holding each other accountable, which is the ideal for a VP of Sales.

 

Andy Paul 16:02

Right. I think going back to an earlier point about the scoring system, again for people listening, one of the real values whether you’re doing it manually or using a system like Ambition is that not all activities are weighted equally. So having the ability to assign different point values to different types of activities, at the end of the week, it’s the score, it’s not the absolute number of activities. 

 

And this is a subtle distinction for some people that I think they really need to think about. Because if you’re saying everything’s worth one point, an outbound call, responding, following up to an inbound lead, sending email touches, you look at it, they’re not all the same. What do you value? And at the end, if the mix comes up to that score that you want to have, then that’s more important than the absolute number of activities. So it’s really important that people understand that, and it’s something I know that you support with your system.

 

Jeremy Boudinet 16:57

Yeah, no, you nailed it. That’s really the reason things like us need to exist. Because like you said, not all activities are created equally. Things matter more to different roles. And a phone call might matter less than the ability to remember prospects touched. I mean, depending on what kind of structure there is your sales process, there’s going to be some disparities in terms of what matters. So yeah, we really just want to be clear to everyone, the reps, the managers, how they’re doing, what matters, and all that sort of stuff.

 

Andy Paul 17:37

Yeah. And I think the reinforcement you talked about, research is showing that it’s oftentimes not the commission, the ultimate reinforcement for behavior that really drives and motivates people. A lot of times it’s that small daily thing, right? I did great today on this dimension, or I did better than everybody else on this. And the manager sends a little note saying, hey, great job today. And if you have that ability, that visibility to see it at that level, that mac micro level, that can oftentimes be more motivating than at the end of the month, hey, you hit your goal.

 

Jeremy Boudinet 18:14

Yeah, 100%. I mean, you’re exactly right. And what people have always said is that reps are loyal to managers, not companies. Now as a manager, if you’re giving out that soft recognition, and it’s personalized and it’s timely, and it’s public or private– But if it was public, too, it’s even better. 

 

And as a manager, if you’re able to get those notifications coming to you, that’s one of our big features is we let a manager set notifications for first person to hit a certain metric, maybe it’s 50 calls a day or hit a certain amount of revenue or whatever it is. They get an email notification telling them. So they don’t have to be on top of it. They can set all these up just to automatically go out and go out at real time or go out at the end of each day, whenever they want. 

 

And then the other cool thing for us, Andy, is we’ve got another part of the product called the productivity quadrant, which maps reps based on how they’re performing on a grid. It’s basically a matrix with four different quadrants in it. The X axis is hustle or productivity metrics, phone calls, emails, whatever, daily activity stuff. And then the Y axis is your objectives. 

 

And that’s another key thing about Ambition, too, is we segment your scoring into activities and objectives. So you’re basically measured on your daily activity, how much you’re doing, all that sort of stuff. But then you’ll have a separate score that’s -maybe you’re an SDR – how many qualified leads did you set today or how many meetings did you set or stuff like that. They’re the more goal attainment, the ultimate goal of what you’re trying to do. 

 

So what you can do with this quadrant is you can see where you stand in terms of both hustle. And if you’re a manager, have your whole team on there and see where you stand in terms of both hustle and goal attainment. So the top left quadrant, those people are working very efficiently. And they may not make as many phone calls or emails, but they’re hitting whatever their weekly quota, whatever you have better than other people. 

 

And then the bottom right would be the opposite, the people who are working really hard and really trying to hustle and get something, but they’re not getting a lot of good results. And so if you’re a manager, you can see that, and you can go and say, okay, maybe this guy needs coaching. He’s been really working hard the last month, but he’s not succeeding for whatever reason. 

 

And it’s data backed. It’s basically a data backed way to also have better one on ones and better coaching as well. So there’s all those components to it, but it’s meant to really just make everyone be on the same page and have everything be data backed and real time and very simple to see and understand.

 

Andy Paul 21:08

Yeah, and as I was looking at that quadrant, what struck me is that it would really be cool to see that. So if you could drill down, you get that data, as you said, somebody’s in the upper left hand quadrant there. Or maybe either quadrant, upper left, lower right, you then dig into an inside square. So you can really see it on a deal by deal basis. Why is this behavior reflected this way, right? 

 

Well, let’s say this person, gosh, what they’re doing is they’re leading with a proposal quickly and they’re flushing out the unqualified prospects. And they’ve got a higher close rate. Maybe they’re working with fewer prospects and a higher close rate. Is that a behavior that might be worthwhile for people in the lower right? To me it’s a good screen to work through.

 

Jeremy Boudinet 21:55

Yeah, 100%. And the other thing that you’re basically going to is if you have everyone mapped, ideally you want people almost like a straight diagonal line up through the quadrant. That would show you your process is really being ideal. Because it’s tied to the activity and the objective. There’s like a one to one ratio at each level. The ones doing more activities are the ones getting the most goal attainment. And the ones doing less activities are getting less goal payment. 

 

So you can also assess the quality of your benchmarks of the metrics you’re measuring of what your entire process is and find out if there’s disparities. Go to people who are the outliers and say, hey, what are you doing that’s different, all that sort of stuff. So yeah, that’s more like– we call it gamification sometimes. And it’s funny because this is like a score based or really is like a gamification foundation for a way to see all this stuff. 

 

But you don’t have to have the scoring even for it. You can see metric by metric. You could see calls to deals or stuff like that. So it’s almost just a business intelligence tool. But it’s very sales oriented. I don’t know if there’s a lot of other professions that it’s that well suited for as much as sales.

 

Andy Paul 23:13

Certainly, for salespeople it’s always been the plus and minus, right? It’s always about just what you do. And the minus side, it’s just about what you do. So who’s the ideal client profile for Ambition?

 

Jeremy Boudinet 23:25

Great question. And as the Marketing Director, by the way, this has been just a fun, very challenging two and a half years of working with that. Because we have a myriad of ICPs based on the industry as a lot of SaaS companies do I feel like. We work really well with larger teams. I’d say if you have 20 or more reps, that’s better. You get more value out of us. 

 

If you’re a big inside sales team, and you really are having a rhythmic daily thing you’ve got going on, we’re really great for that. But we’re also great for segmented teams. You have SDRs, you have account executives, maybe you have sales engineers. And you’re able to go and have transparency throughout all your different roles. So I’d say the smaller teams, you probably don’t necessarily need something like this as much. And we’re also kind of pricey, so you might not–

 

Andy Paul 24:25

Good qualifying statement. There you go.

 

Jeremy Boudinet 24:28

Yeah. But I think anyone who has a process that’s down and is activity driven is going to get really good results from us. And you don’t have to be a Salesforce user with us, too. It’s nice. That’s another differentiator with us. You can have multiple systems, you can have just one other different system. We have a big client, West Corporation. They use PeopleSoft with us. And so we just have an API plug in with that, and they’re a call center.

 

Andy Paul 24:58

But you have APIs for CRMs other than Salesforce?

 

Jeremy Boudinet 25:02

Yeah. So really not so much maybe dynamics is probably– we can do all this stuff, but we don’t have a lot of client use cases with it. So I hesitate to really push that out there. But dialers, too, is another one where any phone dial– we have a one click integration with Cisco, all that stuff. So yeah, we’re able to be very versatile. That way we can get all your data.

 

Andy Paul 25:36

So basically what you’re saying is bring us a big enough opportunity, and we’ll see what we can do.

 

Jeremy Boudinet 25:41

Yeah, exactly, which is the standard for a SaaS.

 

Andy Paul 25:47

Standard for tech companies of any size. So speaking of which, are your customers primarily in the tech business?

 

Jeremy Boudinet 25:57

It’s funny how it works out. We have a lot of tech companies that use us. Some of our best longest users are like Mark Kosoglow and Dallas Hogensen. Those are examples of that. And then we also work with logistics, a massive logistics client for us. We really started out with logistics with them. 

 

But yeah, we also have a lot of e-commerce companies, too, though. Like MyWedding is a very successful company with us. By the way, MyWedding is 30, 35, and they’re all women. It’s interesting. So people think this is a fantasy sales macho guy only thing. That’s not been the case. But yeah, I’d say e-commerce companies like MyWedding. Peak is another one we’ve helped. We’ve done well with Foresight. There’s a ton of them. So it really spans industries. And chances are there’s people using it in whatever industry you’re in.

 

Andy Paul 27:04

Alright, good. So now we move to the last segment of the show where I’ve got standard questions I ask all my guests. It’s a very popular segment of the show. The first question is actually a hypothetical scenario that you, Jeremy, are the star of. And so in this case, you’ve just been hired as the VP of Sales by a company whose sales have stalled out. And CEO is anxious to get sales unstuck and back on track, so we’ve got to get a sales turnaround going. So your first week on the job, what two things could you do that would have the biggest impact?

 

Jeremy Boudinet 27:37

Dubious things. I would interview every single rep and go and talk to them anecdotally, get the anecdotal evidence about why things have stalled out and get all their thoughts on what the process is. Also, you can earn their trust a little bit that way. 

 

Second thing I would do is you’ve just got to dive into the data. Do a full audit and really looking at the process from, okay, how is marketing impacting this? Where’s the problem? Like is it something we can control? Is it something we can fix? Is it a seasonal thing? Basically whatever it is, use the data to find it. 

 

So I think it really depends on if I was VP of Sales– did you say it was a tech company? 

 

Andy Paul

It can be whatever company you want. 

 

Andy Paul

It can be whatever you want? Okay, yeah, so it would depend. But I’d say in my industry, that would that be my my full presh.

 

Andy Paul 28:42

So do you ever get a chance to go out and sell?

 

Jeremy Boudinet 28:46

I actually do. I go out and I’ve had some accounts I’ve worked on my end.

 

Andy Paul 28:54

Good. So here’s the question. So when you are out selling, you, Jeremy, are out selling, what’s your strongest most powerful sales attribute?

 

Jeremy Boudinet 29:04

I would say it’s the initial part. It’s getting in and having that initial conversation. I’m a terrible closer, Andy. I can come in, and I know how start the conversation and earn their trust and all that stuff. But I just have a hard time with the the closing aspect. But I think why I’m good at marketing is we’re able to go and figure out what people’s needs are very quickly. And instead of just selling them the product, figure out what the issue is, quickly see where we can add value. And I know how to pitch us based on what their role is, what their industry is, how they’ve interacted with us, what their relationship is with other technology, all the things T=that really should be informing your sales process.

 

Andy Paul 30:04

Give me a little bit of time. I can teach you how to be a good closer. And the way I teach people is by showing them that deals close themselves. So if you want to talk about that, we can talk about that off the air.

 

Jeremy Boudinet 30:20

It’s funny, by the way, my brother’s a presidents club account executive. He’s younger, he’s 26, presidents club account executive for a SaaS company in Austin. And he had the natural closer attributes I feel like.

 

Andy Paul 30:35

Yeah, I don’t believe there are such things. So anyway. The natural closer attributes are really just annoying to most customers. So alright, next question. So maybe you just answered the question, who’s your sales role model?

 

Jeremy Boudinet 30:48

Sales role model? Great question. I would say my dad for this. And it’s funny, he’s been VP of Sales. He actually has been in sales his whole life. He was the youngest sales director with Heinz. He was the VP of Sales for a company called Orzly. He came in and they had zero sales reps, and he grew them. He worked with them for several years and managed a massive sales team. 

 

And he’s a guy who everything he told me when he found out what Ambition was the first week about–  I basically just grilled him nonstop about sales management and sales in general. Everything he told me in the last two and a half years has only been reinforced. And it’s amazing, I think one of the first interviews I did at Ambition was with him. And I go back and read it. It’s like 10 questions, and it’s almost just stuff that everything that’s basically been repeated with every sales influencer series interview I’ve done. 

 

So yeah, he’s my role model with that. And that’s one of the things I’ve been fortunate with. I have family members I can call and talk to a couple times a week and get their insights about stuff.

 

Andy Paul 32:06

So what’s one book you would recommend every salesperson read?

 

Jeremy Boudinet 32:11

I love The Sales Acceleration Formula by Mark Roberge. He talks a lot about a lot of stuff we’ve discussed in here about even like scoring reps, and figuring out how to segment stuff, and marking his role in things, and having some very aligned process. And I think what he did at HubSpot was just excellent. And yeah, that’s the very scientific– everyone says it’s true. Sales is half art and half science. And he really, to me, set the bar high for how you can scientifically lead your sales team. I’d say another guy, I forget the book name, but Mike Weinberg. Sales Management Simplified. I love that book.

 

Andy Paul 33:03

Yeah, both those guys are good friends of the show and good friends. And Mark is now teaching at Harvard, Mark Roberge. Last question for you. What music’s on your playlist?

 

Jeremy Boudinet 33:16

Oh god. You don’t know this, Andy, but I’m a huge, huge music lover. I’m a guy who literally my two favorite things to read are about sports and about music history. I’ve got like 10 music history books at home actually. On my playlist right now I’ve been listening to a lot of new wave, a lot of 80s. And I listen to a lot of new bands that are like The Hotelier and all that stuff. But I also love rap. I’m a lifelong rap lover, and basically anything Wu Tang clan, anything dirty south rap if you will.

 

Andy Paul 34:02

Little old school on the hip hop, yeah.

 

Jeremy Boudinet 34:06

I can go old school and go new school. I’m a very flexible music listener. So it’s kind of a hard question for me to answer.

 

Andy Paul 34:16

Well, you gave me lots to choose from there. So that’s good. Well, Jeremy, I want to thank you for being on the show today. Tell folks how they can find out more about Ambition and connect with you.

 

Jeremy Boudinet 34:26

Ambition, Ambition.com. Go check it out. We’ve the number one category leader for GT crowd and sales performance management. That’s based on user reviews. We’re the AISP Gamification and Recognition top service provider for 2016 on the app exchange, too, as well. Follow us on Twitter @AmbitionSales. We’re also on LinkedIn. You can find me Jeremy.Boudinet@ambition.com. And check out the Ambition blog, as well and Sales Influencer Series where I’m usually on your side of things, asking guys what they’re doing. Yeah, thanks so much. It’s been great.

 

Andy Paul 35:05

My pleasure. And yeah, thanks for being on the show. And friends, remember, make it a part of your day every day to deliberately learn something new to help you accelerate your success. An easy way to do that is make this podcast, Accelerate, part of your daily routine. 

 

Listen on your commute, in the gym, or make it part of your morning sales meeting. That way you won’t miss any of my conversations with top business experts like my guest today, Jeremy Boudinet, who shared his expertise about how to accelerate the growth of your business. So thanks for joining me. Until next time, this is Andy Paul. Good selling, everyone.