Make 'The Selling Factory' Make Your Sales, Brad Gamble

Wes Schaeffer: [00:00:02] Bradley Gamble, all the way from Gainesville, Florida, co-founder of The Selling Factory, welcome to The Sales Podcast, man. How the heck are you?

Bradley Gamble: [00:00:12] I'm fantastic, Wes. How are you?

Wes Schaeffer: [00:00:14] I'm good, man. Hey, before this ends, I'm going to have you say Geaux Tigers, okay? And I'm going to have you say it and mean it. All right? I'm going to say it just to get off the call. All right? But I digress. 

[00:00:27] Man, so what is this? Outsourcing sales teams for sales development, representative work. Are you telling me that you can train a pampered college graduate to be in sales? Is that possible?

Bradley Gamble: [00:00:44] It is.

Wes Schaeffer: [00:00:46] Oh, my gosh. You got some voodoo, you got some strange, like swamp voodoo going on? What are you doing, you're sacrificing like some nutria rats. I don't know, man; how are you doing this? [chuckles]

Bradley Gamble: [00:00:59] Well, it starts with unbelievably talented college students that want to learn, that are driven, and perform at a very high level like nothing I've ever seen. Being in sales for 20 years, leading huge sales teams everywhere from 20 years old to 60 years old, Gen Z is pretty amazing.

Wes Schaeffer: [00:01:24] Interesting. You know that flies in the face of conventional wisdom these days.

Bradley Gamble: [00:01:32] It does, yes, and we talk a lot about that. We talk about how when you hear some of the folks our age saying "kids these days" kind of deal. Well, we look at it and say, my gosh, you would not believe the kids these days. I don't know if it's because they grew up during the Great Recession and they've seen their parents work so hard, their families work hard. They're very competitive. I mean, we're out here in Gainesville, Florida, University of Florida, number six school in the country. So if you're getting into UF, you're competitive, you're smart, and they realize that they need the skills to be able to get a job upon graduation. And having The Selling Factory on their LinkedIn profile and on their resume goes a long way.

Wes Schaeffer: [00:02:26] So what are you doing then? Aren't you hiring them as employees and then it's like an inside sales team that you are outsourcing, or are you training them and then sending them out on their own?

Bradley Gamble: [00:02:43] So we bring students in all as W-2 employees. They're all part-time employees working anywhere from 10 to 15 hours a week because they're full-time students.

Wes Schaeffer: [00:02:54] Oh, while they're in college.

Bradley Gamble: [00:02:55] Yep. All three semesters, spring, summer, fall. We bring them in. We put them through about a three- to four-week training program that we've developed here, really just introducing the early stages and aspects of being a sales development rep or a business development rep. So we teach them about scripts, about cadences, about who's a decision maker, what's an objection; how to handle rejection. These are all things that we go over -- how to sell yourself. These are all things that we go over the first three to four weeks that they're on our team.

[00:03:33] And then once they get through that initial training, they're placed on a client campaign where we have SAAS companies, consumer goods companies, all types of different companies that have chosen to outsource those SDR job functions to our teams of students, which really helps our client companies, because hiring is a huge challenge right now. Turnover is a huge challenge right now; burnout, complacency that sets in on those sales development rep teams. We're here is an alternative for that.

Wes Schaeffer: [00:04:09] Nice. How are you enticing these students? Are they self-motivated. Because typically they they want to waiter, waitress and make some easy money, some free meals. I mean, selling can be hard, right? It's got -- at least it's got some misnomers about it. Right? And they're in college -- "go to college, get a good job." Get a degree, get you a good job; be a doctor or an attorney, not a sales puke. Salespeople are pushy and greedy and moneygrubbing. Seems like you're overcoming that.

Bradley Gamble: [00:05:01] Well, so first off, yes, that can be the case. What we've done, though, is we've really made sure that companies that we're working with, they have a role that we can accomplish. We're not closing deals for enterprise $100,000 software packages or things like that. That's not what we're doing. We're not doing long-term relationship building, six to nine month, 12 month sales cycle kind of stuff. We're there as the tip of the spear. Our teams are researching leads, qualifying leads, setting up meetings for our clients' account executive teams, or they are actually closing deals for companies if it is a more transactional type of sale.

[00:05:51] So think about a small manufacturer, doesn't have a sales team. They might be a consumer packaged goods company. They're a manufacturer. They don't have a sales team. They might have some distributors that they work with. Well, our teams can go through and build the list of retailers that would sell their product, reach out to those retailers, get them interested in the product, make that first purchase order, follow up with their recurring purchases that they'll be doing as they sell through the product. So that's stuff that our team can do and do well; and more importantly, a part-time person can do that.

Wes Schaeffer: [00:06:26] Cool. So how long does it take to get them up to speed? How long before they are competent? And when you bring them on, is it just for one job -- like, they're only going to be selling for this one company or are they covering the phones for multiple entities?

Bradley Gamble: [00:06:49] Yes. So when they come on board, they're assigned to a campaign team, and we could have anywhere from 10 to 15 to 18 different client campaigns running at any given time. They start out on one campaign. If they're doing well and they enjoy it, they're hitting the numbers that they're expected to hit, they're showing up on time, they're doing what they say they're going to do, then we'll keep them on there and we'll just keep rolling with it. If it turns out that it might not be a good fit, they're not converting at the same rate as others on that team, we might move to a different team. And we've seen a lot of instances where somebody just doesn't connect with a company well, we move them to another client campaign and they start killing it.

[00:07:31] So a lot of it is just based on what's a good fit for them, what they're passionate about. And really, they really see this as a necessary learning experience. When they go to the the career fairs that they have at the big universities and these gigantic companies come in -- and now it's been virtual recently -- but even pre-COVID these companies recruiters are coming in and saying, you really got to have some kind of sales experience. You got to have some experience communicating with others, even if it's working in retail, whatever it might be.

[00:08:04] So our students are going, well, I can actually make some money, make a decent wage at The Selling Factory, get ridiculously good experience, hone my craft, become more confident so that when those companies like Oracle or CDW or Chuy or some of these big -- Amazon -- that recruit at a University of Florida, they look at that resume and go, wow, you set up a hundred appointments for this tech company that you're working with, or you close $200,000 in sales for this consumer goods company while you were in school while you're working at The Selling Factory? That resume, so to speak, goes in the really good pile at those career fairs. And they don't have that -- if they don't have that to share with the recruiters, oftentimes that's when they come back and say, hey, I just went to career fair. I have got to get some experience. I'm an incoming junior. I got a year and a half to figure this out before I start job hunting.

Wes Schaeffer: [00:09:00] Are there things that you look for or are you are you testing -- DISC, Myers-Briggs, things like that, or have you found some commonality or is a good attitude enough to to make anybody successful in sales?

Bradley Gamble: [00:09:19] So we have three values that we talk about with our students when they come on board. First one is show up on time. Second one is do what you say you're going to do. And the third one is bring your best each day. So those three sound super-simple. Of course, as you probably know, it's tougher in practice, but we share those really early on, even at the interview stage with our students.

[00:09:40] Now, what's been fantastic is, yes, we recruit a lot of students from the College of Business at University of Florida, but we also get a lot of athletes in here. We get liberal arts and sciences. We get public relations, communications, advertising school. So we have a bunch of different majors of students that come in here. I mean, we've even had some pre-med come in here as well. Maybe you want somebody who wants to be a pharmaceutical rep or be in bio sales. They're not going to go to med school, but they're a chemistry major kind of thing. They definitely come in realizing that when they leave here, they're going to be much better communicators than when they came in.

Wes Schaeffer: [00:10:17] Nice. Are you paying commission or is it just straight salary?

Bradley Gamble: [00:10:22] Straight hourly rate. We're an hourly shop. We don't do any pay for performance or shared revenues or anything like that. It's very straightforward. I've been in the performance-based pay world for a long time and we chose to keep it clean, keep it honest, and we get paid on an hourly or monthly basis from our clients. We pay our teams the same way.

[00:10:47] We also don't want to get in a situation where if certain companies have additional spiffs or something might be more alluring to others that we might have students want to jump around the different campaigns because all of our campaigns are very important.

Wes Schaeffer: [00:11:02] Interesting. Then can I assume it's more than just minimum wage? Because I mean -- or maybe it is, and it's just the experience that they're looking for. I mean, is it a little bit of both?

Bradley Gamble: [00:11:18] Yeah. Well, it was above minimum wage until the state of Florida passed the increased minimum wage; it'll start going up now over the next few years. But what we do is we bring students in at a very modest hourly rate and we actually have a career pathing for part-time students. So every every time they reach another milestone in terms of hours worked here, say it's 250 hours, 500 hours, 750 hours, they get raises in their pay because the longer that somebody is with us, they become incredibly valuable, once they really understand what we're doin, and we're rewarded that we reward them for that and we want to keep that longevity.

[00:11:56] And look, we realize that we're going to have a student anywhere from second semester sophomore to probably first or second semester senior, so we got about that two-year window. And once they go to graduate, they might have a they might have an opportunity with The Selling Factory if we have some full-time management positions available. But more than anything, we want to help them find a great job and be happy and take the skills and what they've learned here and apply it to whatever their next adventure is going to be.

Wes Schaeffer: [00:12:26] Well, that's good for you to sprinkle some alumni around because they'll call you later if they need help.

Bradley Gamble: [00:12:35] It is. It is planting seeds when that happens. And we stay in touch with our alumni. We have a LinkedIn group for our alumni. So once they graduate from school, they enter the LinkedIn group. We keep tabs on them, check in with it. I mean, we love these students. They're incredible. And we build really strong relationships with them and and definitely stay in touch -- we bring them back as speakers to our students if they spend two or three years and career, most of the time telling our current students, just do the work because it's going to get a lot harder when you graduate. There's these things called mega-quotas and expectations and then you throw on mortgage payments and families and everything on top of that. So just absorb all you can while you're at The Selling Factory.

Wes Schaeffer: [00:13:21] Yeah. And so this is -- it's all B2B, right?

Bradley Gamble: [00:13:29] So the vast majority of what we do is B2B. We do have a couple of pretty good-sized clients of ours that are in the B2C space, but it's more of handling inbound traffic and responding to form fills or website forms that are filled out. We don't do -- we strictly do not do any cold residential telemarketing or anything like that. We want to stay away from that world. I'd say we're probably 70 to 80 percent B2B and 20 to 30 percent inbound B2C.

Wes Schaeffer: [00:14:08] Is is anyone too small for you can any size business outsource to you?

Bradley Gamble: [00:14:17] So four years ago, there was no company too small to work with us. When we launched the company, we're going, hey, we just got to get clients in the door, get some revenue in the door. Now, since then, we've become a lot more disciplined and realized that a company needs -- what we look for with companies, a company that has revenue, they are selling their product, service or platform, preferably have a sales team unless we are going to be their sales team. So if we're going to act in an SDR capacity and they have an account executive team, that's ideal. If they have the budget and the funds to to want to invest in a team at The Selling Factory and hopefully on a long-term basis, that's what we look for as well.

[00:15:00] We used to work with a lot of early-stage start-ups, startup companies, and in Gainesville itself as a has a fantastic startup tech community here. But even Tampa, Atlanta, Orlando, a lot of the cities that we that we spent a lot of time networking in, if the company is too small, we typically say, look, let's talk when you get a little more inbound coming in, a little more revenue, for a few reasons. One is patience. Oftentimes, startups don't have patience, which is completely understandable. And there have been times when we have been setting appointments, setting meetings for these account executive teams, and they just get overwhelmed and they have to say, okay, let's hit pause for a while, we got to catch up on -- we got to hire some more account executives or whatever it might be.

[00:15:51] So we don't want either to be the case. We want to be able to make sure that we're growing alongside them and putting the right amount of resources on a team to make sure that it's controlled growth.

Wes Schaeffer: [00:16:01] Right. So a client comes to you, you're the SDR team, they're in commercial construction, will they give you a list and say, hey, here's you know, here's 500 entities, go get them. Are you supposed to do the research? Like how does that work?

Bradley Gamble: [00:16:23] It really depends on how established the company is and how big their marketing engine is. We have -- I'd say the majority of our companies nowadays are providing us with the lists where they'll say, okay, you're going to plug into our CRM; we've got 5000 or 10000 leads in there that your team's going to start going after. We do, though, have a team, a team within a team here at The Selling Factory that does build lists. So we'll be able to scrape databases and do some website searches, search through LinkedIn, try to find opportunities that we can start doing some list building for. But there are so many tools out there nowadays, whether it's ZoomInfo or other big companies like that that can provide data. We certainly prefer it when the client can say, here's the data and now get after it.

Wes Schaeffer: [00:17:13] Yeah. And does the client provide the script or do you provide it?

Bradley Gamble: [00:17:20] If they have a built-out team -- we have a client right now that has 15 SDR seats, so they have 15 seats there. And what they've done is they've issued us, say, four or five of those 15 seats. We're filling those seats with our part-time students. It's about four students is about the equivalent -- one full-time equivalent in terms of hours worked. If that's the case, they're handing us their playbook and they're saying, okay, here's a script that works. Here's the cadence. Here's where you jump in. Here's the CRM access; we'll build out the SOP for it, train on it, and then we do a lot of training off what they've already built.

[00:18:00] If it's a company that is a little earlier stage, maybe just building a sales team for the first time, we definitely work with them and collaborate on writing scripts, building out call to actions, cadences, email and phone, because we've done that now for so many companies, we can apply some of the best practices that we've learned to that and then build it out that way.

Wes Schaeffer: [00:18:24] So if it's four people, though, to equal one, like does the client have to buy four additional seats on their CRM or can like one person, can they all share one log in? But then how do you track each of those activities?

Bradley Gamble: [00:18:44] Sure, that's a great question. Usually they'll have to issue more licenses from the CRM. We want to make sure everything we're doing is fits in whatever the rules and guidelines are, whether it's Salesforce or HubSpot or SharpSpring or whichever it may be. So, yeah, usually they're issuing a new license for each person. 

Wes Schaeffer: [00:19:08] What do you do when the client gives you crap? I mean, like a script. So many are so bad. I mean, I would say the majority are bad. It's like I think they survive just on brute force and name recognition or the salesperson's talented and just kind of adjust on the fly. How do you balance -- like, okay, what we'll do what you say versus oh man, would you mind if I tweak it a little bit because it's not very good? Like how do you balance that?

Bradley Gamble: [00:19:42] Well, one thing we do is we adjust quickly as we're doing our outreach and getting our team up and going. So if we're making outbound calls, say, for a two or three weeks and we're getting nothing, we'll quickly go back to the clients and say we got to change something here. If they have -- and we do a lot of what's working and what's not working on your current team. So if you have a company that does have an SDR team and we get -- we roll our sleeves up and we go through our onboarding and we say, okay, show us the good, but show us the bad, too. Show us what's not working so that we can try to stay away from that. And if they give us something, we know that we have the talent that can do the work and get them trained up on that.

[00:20:20] So if it's working on their end, it's going to work on our end. The challenge becomes if if it's a smaller company that we're having to do that build-out with, there is some testing and tuning with that. We may start one, though -- the message we start with might not be the message we end with two or three months later.

Wes Schaeffer: [00:20:36] Right. And are you getting your business by eating your own dog food? Do you have -- are you hiring some of these kids to do outreach for you or is it more SEO, PPC, things like that?

Bradley Gamble: [00:20:52] Definitely the latter. The challenge with our business is we have to -- when we grow, we do it very methodically and it's very controlled. We can't just sign up 10 new clients in a month and go to town. So we're bringing on one, maybe two new clients per month because we're an extension of their team. And we really want to make sure it's as much of a fit for them working with us as it is with with us working with them.

[00:21:19] I am the lead salesperson for the company, but we have several of our leadership team here that can be an ambassador of the company. We do engage in some targeted email outreach to particular segments if we see something that's really interesting to us. But other than that, I'd say the vast majority of the business we get is through referral inbound or they find us on a Google search and say, wow, that's an interesting concept, I want to learn more, and then we schedule a meeting.

Wes Schaeffer: [00:21:49] You know, if you hired some LSU folks, you could -- probably one could probably replace four but I mean, we can talk about that offline. You know, it's a recommendation. I've seen from the outside.

Bradley Gamble: [00:22:02] [chuckles]

Wes Schaeffer: [00:22:02] So what is working on outbound? I mean, with COVID it's harder to reach -- well, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I've seen some -- some say it's easier, some say it's harder that they're not at the office. Are you calling cell phones or are calls being routed? Is there still an executive assistant or a receptionist answering and routing calls? Like what have you seen over the last 18 months and how is it progressing?

Bradley Gamble: [00:22:35] Well, luckily, the target markets that we're going after on behalf of our clients are ones that have that never closed or they're small to meet their Sundays. And most likely, if the business is not if people are not showing up at the business and it's going it's getting forwarded to phone somewhere else, that seems to be the case as well. But we haven't seen -- we haven't seen a big drop-off in contact rates because of COVID. 

[00:23:05] What we did see was a very large change in our customer base. We did have about a year ago, a little longer, several of our clients had to hit pause with us because they're focused on the trade show industry or the convention industry or the hospitality industry, which all just got hit so hard. But then on the flip side, we had a bunch of companies reaching out to us saying, I can't find people. You're making remote work somehow with your team, with your team being 100 percent remote -- and this is going back a few months -- but we got to get some outreach going because we don't know how to make remote work. We don't know how to have a distributed team. And you guys have figured it out. So what was very scary about a year ago, 14 months ago, has actually turned into a boon for us. So thankfully, we've been on the winning side of this really crazy, crazy year we've had.

Wes Schaeffer: [00:24:00] So are all of your people still remote or they coming into the office?

Bradley Gamble: [00:24:05] We're starting to bring students back into the office now, our leadership team started coming back in. We have about 75 students. We almost hit 80 students this past spring semester, and we really took a lot of direction from the University of Florida. So University of Florida went fully remote March 12th of last year. We went fully remote right after that. We went to 100 percent in-person to 100 percent remote, and it took a couple of weeks. But thankfully, our students are so darn tech savvy and just caught on super-fast working out of Zoom and Slack. Our project management tools CRMs, our voice over IP system has a calling app; all of that was actually pretty good.

[00:24:47] And so now we're at a point where University of Florida is bringing students back for summer semester and heading into fall and we're starting to do that as well. It's still been a little different. I mean, we wish more students were coming into the office, but a lot of them got used to working remotely and going to school remotely. And you can go to class from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., switch off one Zoom meeting, go to the next one at 1:00 and start your shift at The Selling Factory without having any commute time in there. So that is something -- we do realize that we want to bring our students back in; the experience that they have us coaching them, working with them, and really the camaraderie that they build with the others on the team is just spectacular. And so our goal heading into the fall semester is to get at least the majority of our team back in the office.

Wes Schaeffer: [00:25:38] Yeah. I was going to ask, like, where do they get quiet places? But I guess if they have a quiet place to attend a Zoom meeting for a lecture, like that place is probably quite enough to make outbound calls.

Bradley Gamble: [00:25:54] Yeah. They all have a bedroom, whether it's in a dorm or a fraternity or sorority house or an off-campus apartment or a house off-campus, they typically have their own bedroom. And as long as they have, --that's been the biggest thing, is if they don't have good Wi-Fi, good signal that and I'd say probably five percent of the time that's been an issue, where they just have bad service for some reason, so they'll have to make other arrangements.

[00:26:21] What'll be interesting is when we get back to some normalcy this fall and in comes football games and tailgating and all the sorority and fraternity events and that'll be interesting to see how that now works in a remote environment, which is why we really want to bring students back in the office come fall.

Wes Schaeffer: [00:26:47] Yeah. So, like, what doesn't work? Like, when it comes to scripting? I mean, what are some like no-no's our listeners can jot down when when using the phone, trying to grow their business?

Bradley Gamble: [00:27:04] So we really emphasize being short, to the point, courteous, empathetic and transparent, any of those nice words that you want to think of. When we see scripting with a lot of the just kind of sleazy questions that are in there, sometimes we get this from clients that say, hey, this we think this script would work and it's -- any sentence that starts out with "what if I told you" type of situation we're going, no, we're not going to go with the "what if I told you that today and today only I can get you 20 percent off this first order?" No, we're not doing that. So we keep it very -- and that's the nice thing about our students, is the fact that they don't have a lot of sales experience, they don't have bad habits.

[00:27:52] And I dealt with this for years in the energy industry where we had a huge-- we ran a very large inside sales team and you get people in with some pretty bad habits that you have to unwind. And that hasn't been the case with our students, which is great. But, yeah, we just try to keep it "How do I want to be pitched to"? If a vendor sends me an email or happens to get me on the phone and they're courteous, they get to the point, they realize that they're bugging me right now and taking time out of my day, I usually give them a few minutes. But  if it's sleazy in any way or like you're trying to trick them into something, that's where we have to -- we got to stop it there.

Wes Schaeffer: [00:28:39] Yeah. What are you seeing just economically? Like, are things picking up? Are people optimistic? The S&P -- the stock markets keep hitting new highs, but others are like, I can't get any supply. I saw a thing -- Starbucks said, it was one location, but they're saying you got to only use our drive thru in the morning; they don't have enough people to staff. Some are saying they can't get cups, can't get sugar at a Starbucks. So, I mean, is there -- are people optimistic or are they cautiously optimistic? Do they think we're reaching a top and they're kind of starting to plan for the worst? What do you seeing as far as the temperature?

Bradley Gamble: [00:29:23] I would say that -- yeah, I would say that they're cautious as a whole. I would probably put them in the bucket of cautiously optimistic. But from our clients and the other companies that we speak with all the time, the biggest issue they have is finding people. That is the biggest issue. It's not just a fast food restaurant or an hourly retail or restaurant, hotel, restaurant issue. I mean, it's rampant. It's everywhere. I mean, we have companies we work with that, I mean, they've raised one hundred million dollars in funding and they've got a two hundred person company and they cannot find people for these entry level roles.

[00:30:01] And so that's what I hear the most trepidation about is what's going to happen with the labor market. Is it going to come back? Are people going to want to take these entry-level jobs again at the rate at which we need them? Because you've gone from the economy being shut down to now it's like the Wild Wild West and it's like labor is trying to keep up with it. And so we'll see. Thankfully, we're kind of shielded from that because our labor force are students that are at a university so it's like having a captive audience. But we recognize that that could affect us as well. They could be a time when, gosh, if a restaurant starts paying $22/hour for a wait staff job, well, that's, that's going to be an issue for us. Luckily that's not the case right now, but I'd say labor is really the biggest thing that we're seeing, the most fear around.

Wes Schaeffer: [00:30:58] Right. So how long do you say it takes for one of these new students to get up to speed and be confident on the phone?

Bradley Gamble: [00:31:10] It probably takes as a whole, I would say, probably two weeks of them actively doing the work to start feeling comfortable with it. We have our outliers. We have some that just for some reason, it just isn't sticking and we do some extra coaching with them. We have some that it's like they were fired out of a cannon the first and second day on a campaign and they're killing it. So we've seen both sides. But I would say it's probably an average about two weeks before they are feeling comfortable and producing.

Wes Schaeffer: [00:31:39] Two weeks of 10 to 15 hours a week or two full weeks like 80 hours?

Bradley Gamble: [00:31:46] No. I'd say two weeks of 10 to 15 hours a week, because keep in mind, too, it's very -- we have everything laid out in terms of the SOP, the scripts; we do role playing and training on the script before they even enter a client's campaign. So we are doing some prep work on that. And as I mentioned earlier in the call, we're not going super-deep into into the selling cycle for a company; just kind of skimming the surface, a lot of volume. And so that lends itself to a quick ramp-up.

Wes Schaeffer: [00:32:26] Have you seen a a tendency towards male or female? Is it 50/50? Any variance in that?

Bradley Gamble: [00:32:37] So we went through and really looked in the mirror in terms of the makeup of our team and I would say probably late 2019, early 2020, we were predominantly male. We were -- I think we were probably 60/40, maybe 65/35 male-female, which made sense. You think a lot of business majors, they want to go into sales and a lot of it's a little more dominant or teetered on the male side. What we did though was we realized that we really needed to diversify and get more of the female population into The Selling Factory, so we did change our recruiting strategy. Come to find now that we are now probably 55 to 60 percent female and probably a little bit less that on the male side.

[00:33:33] What we found, though, was that the females have done an incredible job leading campaigns. I would say probably 75 to 80 percent of the top producers on our campaigns are female. We're still trying to figure out why. It's an incredible phenomenon. And so we are doing everything we can -- we actually wrote -- one of our students wrote a really good blog about this that's on our website and we posted on our LinkedIn page about women in sales and a lot of the hurdles that they've had to cross unnecessarily. So we are all-in on seeing if we can support as many females as possible entering this line of work because they're incredible.

Wes Schaeffer: [00:34:22] Very cool. Sales is a great -- people, man; we get a bad rap. To sell, you got to have your act together. You got to you got to read people, you got to listen, you got to think on your feet; there's a lot that goes into it. And so this is cool what you're doing. And you already mentioned, I mean, kind of a broad swath of majors. But I mean, is it still relatively narrowly focused? I mean, you don't have, like, mechanical engineers coming in saying they want to be in sales -- marketing, maybe journalism or pre-med, but knowing they want to get into sales, is that still somewhat narrow?

Bradley Gamble: [00:35:08] Yeah, I would say we've had -- we've probably had 300 students workforce in the last four years and I can probably count on probably two hands how many were engineering or pre-med. And it's not that they they want a job in sales; therefore, they're going to come to The Selling Factory. A lot of times it's I want to learn a new skill, I realized that if I'm going to be a surgeon, I have to know how to communicate with people. If I'm going to be an engineer, I know how I need to know how to communicate with a product designer or the customer potentially.

[00:35:08] So it's not just I'm going to go into the field of sales upon graduation. Many of them do. And I would say most business majors are going to enter the world of sales, whether you're finance or marketing or management or whatever it might be. If you're in journalism, advertising and communications, you might be more on the marketing side, social media side. But even there, a lot of those students are going to up in sales positions. 

Wes Schaeffer: [00:36:06] Very cool. And so companies from around the country can hire you?

Bradley Gamble: [00:36:12] Yeah. We have clients in Palo Alto to New York, to Chicago, to Miami, to Tampa, to Colorado. We are geographically agnostic. That's a nice thing about hiring an outsourced team, but having a team of students -- and one thing I had mentioned earlier is we are actually expanding to other schools now. So it's going to give us a little more maybe more regional type focus.

[00:36:45] We announced recently that we have now started recruiting from University of Georgia. You'd being an LSU guy, probably appreciate that. So University of Georgia, in Athens [chuckles] -- we also started we're going to start this fall recruiting from University of Wisconsin at Madison. So what we're looking for in terms of our expansion is how we can take the model that we've built in Gainesville and replicate that to other college towns with top universities throughout the country. So there's probably a dozen of those top 30, top 40 universities in college towns. You think College Station, Texas or Madison, Wisconsin; Athens, Georgia; just like Gainesville, Florida -- 100,000 to 200,000 people, very large, highly-ranked university, and really a captive audience for us to come in and build out a site if we find that it's a good fit and then be and really be able to tie into the alumni bases of those schools that are all business owners and executives at companies that could utilize that.

[00:37:54] So there's an emotional tie there, too. I mean, we're all pretty much all of us are Gators here. We do have an Ohio State guy who's a co-founder, but outside of that, we're all Gators. But the model can work with other university towns and top-ranked universities.

Wes Schaeffer: [00:38:12] And I guess -- I mean, the nice thing with college students, I mean, if they were bartending, they'd work till 2:00 a.m. So they don't mind working till 9:00 p.m. to support a West Coast company, calling until 5:00 or 6:00 p.m. Pacific. It's not that big a deal.

Bradley Gamble: [00:38:31] That is a huge benefit, is they -- their schedules are not like me. I'm a 43-year-old guy with a family. I have a nine-year-old daughter and it's very difficult for me to to to do outreach from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m.. But our students are equipped to do that. And we're actually open on weekends. We have students that work weekend shifts as well, which is very hard to staff for if you're looking for full-time support.

Wes Schaeffer: [00:38:59] Yeah. I've had two graduate college and two in college right now, and I'm like, hey, work. Work. I told my daughter yesterday, we're driving to dinner, she said, it's summer -- she's going to be a junior in high school -- I said, that means you can now do 60 and 80 hour work weeks now that school won't get in the way. You know, I get the eyeroll. No respect. 

Bradley Gamble: [00:39:23] It has to be their idea. They have to make it their idea somehow.

Wes Schaeffer: [00:39:29] [chuckles] Oh, man, very cool. So your website, so it's TheSellingFactory.com. You've got all types of resources there -- I'm on your homepage now -- where students learn, entrepreneurs grow and companies thrive. Very cool. Anything else? Anywhere else we should mention or just go there, start perusing and take it from there?

Bradley Gamble: [00:39:57] Yeah, I would encourage people to check out our website, you're right, at TheSellingFactory.com. We're very active on LinkedIn and on our LinkedIn company page for The Selling Factory. And you can also find myself, Bradley Gamble, on LinkedIn as well. And love, love, chatting with people even if we're not a good fit for somebody. I just love talking with other entrepreneurs and other leaders and people in the field of sales. We are extremely transparent, brutally transparent about what we're good at, what we're not good at, and whether or not we're a good fit for a company.

[00:40:30] So we've definitely had some great conversations with companies that we realize, hey, we're not going to be the best fit for you. You should maybe try this, this, or this instead; it'd be a better use of your money, which has been an incredible technique -- not even a technique; it's just the way we are to our core, super honest, super transparent -- but it's funny. Oftentimes clients or prospects will say, well, hold on, wait, I think I would be a good fit. Let me tell you why. Some are like -- no, no, hold on. You'd be much better off trying something else. Don't hire us. It almost makes you more attractive sometimes.

Wes Schaeffer: [00:41:06] No, no. I tell more people no than yes. A guy hit me up last week, he's in real estate and his CRM is dialed in, but it doesn't do a couple of things. So he's like, I am not going to switch. You know, we got to talking. And I was like, no, dude. He was in real estate. Like, basically you're telling me you have a three bedroom, two bath house and you want to move houses because it doesn't have the patio you like. I'm like, build a patio. I mean, you don't move for a patio. You know? 

[00:41:36] Like if you told me you're in a one bedroom condo and you're getting married and having a baby and your in-laws are moving in, okay, yeah, you got to move. That wasn't the problem. You know, he's like -- you can hear him pause, like, hey, man, you're the first one to tell me this. I'm like, dude, I don't want your money and then you start yelling and badmouthing me online because that'll never go away, you know?

Bradley Gamble: [00:42:02] Yeah. We have -- one of our values is never to burn a bridge. And even if we're not, it's not a good fit with a company, we do everything we can to help them with the transition to another alternative or something else and leave on very good terms because oftentimes downstream they end up referring another company to us. So never -- it only feeds that you go to burn a bridge. So we don't like to do that.

Wes Schaeffer: [00:42:29] Yeah. No kidding. All right. Bradley Gamble, The Selling Factory, all the way from Gainesville, man. Thanks for coming on the show. It's been great.

Bradley Gamble: [00:42:37] Wes, thanks so much for having me.