Today we've got a great guest. What he's doing today is pretty hard. He's selling new technology into established kind of hard, you know, old school businesses, real estate, office buildings. And when you're listening to this interview, because you're not going to see him, he's holding up a little device that can count the number of people that are in that particular area.

And this is very helpful for people who manage office space and are trying to get a sense of how occupied it is.

But what you're really going to get out of this interview is thinking.

Thinking like a customer.

Now, we get into it at the very end.

I'll sum it up after the interview,

but if you can start doing this, really analyzing your prospects,

who's most likely to buy, most likely to be interested, most likely to take action?

Because there's a lot of people that are curious, some are even interested, but if they don't buy, it's just a waste of time.

Or it's an education. It's practice, I guess, but there's better ways to practice. Let's get

into the interview. I'll sum it up at the end. And if you happen to be a sales leader, I've got a

podcast for you, the sales leadership

show. Check it out. Here we go. Hey, Chris, thanks for joining us today. As we're getting started,

gives a little background on yourself. Yeah, sure. So my name's Chris Keene. I'm currently head of channel sales at VergeSense, which is an IoT hardware company where we sell occupancy detection devices. So it counts how many people are in a room or how many are at a pot of desks. But prior to this, really, I started out in sales when I got out of college selling

planners, day planners, to colleges and universities. So printing industry, we were actually

doing something unique. We were buying and printing all the books in China, and then we were

importing them in and undercutting the competition

for a significant amount and taking a pretty big margin too. So that was kind of my foray

into dialing for dollars, you know? But quickly I started to realize, you know what,

technology might be a better path. So I eventually got reached out to by a recruiters

who said, hey, we sell this software called Integrated Workplace Management Solutions.

And we want you to come and help us break into the higher ed market because you have higher

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