Brooks Van Norman 0:02
Hey everyone, Brooks Van Norman here. And today I've got Tracy Ragan CEO and founder of deploy hub. And Tracy's got an awesome story working in the micro services space. So Tracy, welcome. Thanks for joining me today. Thank you for having me. It's my pleasure. Awesome. So let's get a little background on you. Could you briefly describe your business who you help, how long you've been doing it and the unique value that you and deploy have bring to your market?

Tracy Ragan 0:27
Sure. So I'm a, I'm sort of a rock star in this, what we call the software configuration management business. And that has to do with how we assemble software, from getting it created into what's called a binary format and pushing it all the way out to a production environment. And there's a lot of steps that go into that process. But the software configuration management process sort of sits on kind of, it's a kind of like, the best way to describe it, to a layman is think about putting a puzzle together, you buy it, you buy a box, it's got the picture on the top of it, and you lose the top of the box and you have all these little pieces. How do you figure out what you're actually creating? And all those little pieces are all the pieces of the software assembly? What we do in software configuration management is make sure that the top of the box of the puzzle is always available.

Brooks Van Norman 1:22
God, that's a great analogy. I haven't heard that one before. All right. Awesome. Thank you. So let's start from the beginning. Before we we got working together, what what were you doing to create business? Before we got engaged? Like what was the job you were trying to do for customer acquisition? Or, like, what were you trying? And what were some of your frustrations.

Tracy Ragan 1:48
So in, in most software, enterprise software companies, we go after what's called the enterprise market, which requires an enterprise salesperson and I have, I've had companies I have a company that just based on that kind of a model, it's a very, very difficult model. It's it's expensive, it's hard. Then there's another model, that's often times referred to as velocity selling, whereby you create a in SAS models allow us to do this, create a SaaS offering, and people can automatically sign up and then, and then upgrade to a commercial version. So you have a free version, that's kind of the freemium and then you have a low cost upgrade. And then from there, you can expand into that enterprise deal. So that's what we were, that's what we continue to work on to build. And what we were struggling with was having a conversation, just having a conversation with people. I didn't I don't care what what level, they are in the software business, I wanted to have a conversation. And that's what we were struggling with was having a conversation.

Brooks Van Norman 3:00
Okay, and what were you doing at the time, like before we started working together in terms of your activities, or your strategy to have those conversations,

Tracy Ragan 3:09
really very traditional, we would do webinars, we'd pay for webinars, we'd get list of people's names, and then we would put them through a standard email cadence. Maybe as you know, maybe a seven, touch point, email cadence for those people that who came to our webinars, we may do a trade show, scan badges, just those traditional ways of getting, you know, emails, and then trying to have conversations through email.

Brooks Van Norman 3:39
Yeah, got it. Okay. So, now that we've been working together for a while, what what kind of results have you achieved? And like, how, how have areas of the business improved, and if you can share any metrics by how much?

Tracy Ragan 3:56
So before we started working together, we were running these email campaigns. And as I said, we were not having a conversation. And what we kept thinking was, is we need to have somebody do cold calling.

Tracy Ragan 4:10
And cold calling doesn't really work in our industry, software developers are not someone who's going to pick up the phone and chat with anybody. Technically. So that was another I want to bring that up, because that was another issue we were having, we realized that cold calling was not

Tracy Ragan 4:28
what it should be. It's it's not what it was or what it used to be. It's it's just not people don't want to talk that way. They just don't want to have that conversation. So what was the question you just asked me? So So what were some of the areas of the business that improved and like that? That did. So we went from having, literally I would be I would get really excited if we had to two discovery calls in a single

Tracy Ragan 5:00
A week. If we did eight a month, I would be like, whoa, whoa, we did eight this month. That's awesome. Yeah, we went from getting excited about doing eight a month, to me doing five to eight a day.

Tracy Ragan 5:14
So I don't know what that is, you know, how, I don't know the what the percentage growth is. But we, it, it, it astounded me, it astounded me when I started getting, having, having that conversation. And it was I was having that conversation, you know, through the link through through LinkedIn, with people that I would love to have met at a trade show and, you know, dropped, you know, $15,000 to be at the trade show and spent money traveling and sitting there at a booth, begging to scan somebody.

Tracy Ragan 5:50
So even a trade show doesn't create the kinds of conversation that I had had.

Tracy Ragan 5:56
That you've you've delivered to me through your portal through your platform. There. I've never had any kinds of this level of where I say, Hey, I'm working on this particular kind of project. And somebody says, Yeah, I'll talk to you. I I'm astounded by it. Why do you think that this is happening? Like, what, what would you think is the reason that you're having this level of success with my system? Well, first of all, I'll give myself credit, I spent a quite a bit of time understanding that I needed to brand myself. And I, because I thought that would help get the conversations. So I worked on branding, branding, not just the company, as you see, I got assigned back here, I brand everywhere I can. But I branded me. And I wanted people to get to know me. So I got on some open source boards, I am pretty active in the community. I started doing a lot of writing blogs, pushing that into out into social media. And I started to get recognition from from my peers. Now, what I didn't understand and what you helped me with is creating a profile on LinkedIn that that reflected the work that I had done in my branding. So that

Tracy Ragan 7:14
that helped tremendously. I think that that's one of the reasons why this process has been has worked so well. So I did do a lot of the front, the work up front, I had that profile that you were able to really expand on. So you were able to say you're not selling yourself on your profile on LinkedIn, let's do a better job of that. Because I didn't realize how often people would look at that profile.

Brooks Van Norman 7:39
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And you know, we've talked about this is that the LinkedIn profile is no longer a historical entry of the employment activities you've had up until this point. It's that paradigm shift. We talked about that. your LinkedIn profile is now a landing page in the Exactly. Yeah, exactly.

Tracy Ragan 7:59
And when I when you told me when you when you kind of brought that to my attention, I was like, oh, oh,

Tracy Ragan 8:06
of course. That makes sense. It's my it's my private web page. my LinkedIn profile is my private webpage.

Brooks Van Norman 8:13
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So speaking of web page, and web traffic, and like the the results, not just the calls in the pipeline, and the opportunity that you're creating for deploy hub, but what have been some of the other impacts that you have seen in the business in terms of maybe things that you expected, or you didn't expect to happen? The funnel? Yeah.

Tracy Ragan 8:37
So now we are, you know, instead of having a funnel that we had, you know, we had eight calls a month, and one went into the funnel,

Tracy Ragan 8:45
which is not a bad average, right. You know, you've discovery calls, you never know, I was speaking to somebody today about discovery calls. And they said, they created a great analogy. They said, Sometimes when you talk to somebody, you're talking from the neck up, meaning that this is something that they're imagining or this is theoretical, and they may understand it, it to use something in the future. The other one is from the neck down sort of the gut impact. And what I what I learned through all of these calls that I have done is how to stay out of the neck up and find the gut impact. Whoo, I love that. Yeah.

Tracy Ragan 9:27
And it took me a while it took me some calls, but I would have never had that much experience in short, Sprint's of time I mean, literally, I was able to pivot with having that many calls to do in a day. I was able to pivot every single day, to the point where I got to now I can get them to a disk. Now I get them. I get them to a demo almost immediately. I'm like, Can we do a demo? They're like, Okay, let's do that. Where do you have time on your calendar?

Brooks Van Norman 9:55
Yeah, and that is such a beautiful thing for anybody listening to this to me.

Brooks Van Norman 10:00
Brace and that is that what you're really saying is you now know your market so intimately because of the volume of calls you've had, yes, that you probably know your market better than all of your competitors, just because you've had so many of these conversations. But when people use sentences, like know your market or know your buyer persona, what you really just said is, you know, the deep needs of your market and the pains they really struggle with. And you can get to that immediately. And that creates trust and credibility that moves the sale faster through the funnel.

Tracy Ragan 10:32
Now, I've always known that this is the way I mean, I actually participate in an accelerator program, I was a mentor and watched how my mentee was directed to get to do a lot of discovery calls to really adjust and try to pivot. But I never had the opportunity to do it for myself. Yeah, because I wasn't having those really critical conversations with a with a broad background from you know, people in testing people from an SRP standpoint, from a developer standpoint, from a cloud architects standpoint. So being able to have all these different conversations, I could see the problem for many different directions. And I was able to start pivoting and hitting that gut instead of, you know, having this neck up conversation.

Brooks Van Norman 11:18
I love that I love that neck up and neck down. That's beautiful. Yeah, it really is beautiful. I mean, that is the essence of selling is to be able to connect with another human being help them create trust, and then solve that problem for them in a way that everybody wins. So I really do truly love that. So let's go back to the sort of the beginning of pre working together, how did you hear about me? And what was it that really piqued your interest? Because you did exactly what I wanted to be doing?

Tracy Ragan 11:51
You did you did exactly what I wanted to be doing. I was like, Okay, I look, I went through the whole process like you came you came across on my LinkedIn, I looked at your profile. And I looked to see what you were doing. It was like, I want to be doing what you are doing. So how did you do that? And that's why I called you because I wanted to know how you just found me knowing that I mean, that's exactly what I wanted, that what you did was precisely what I wanted to be able to do. And that's how it happened. Awesome. I love that use the word process, which is exactly what it is. It's the messaging. It's the positioning, it's the timing. It's the channel right? No cold, I didn't cold call, you know, you did not cold call me. You did not even so if you have I made because I was looking for a way to start conversations. But I love the way that it came through in a non invasive way in into my LinkedIn chat. I saw it come through I read it. And I was like, I want he exactly what he's doing is what I need to be able to do if I want to have more than eight conversations a month. And so that's why I reached out precisely why I reached out. I love it. I love it. So can you describe what it's been like working together? I think it would be really helpful for people to hear. Well, you've been great. The setup process you held my hand. So well. Like I said earlier, would you explain how that my LinkedIn profile needed to look more like a website than a resume? That was enlightening and your wordsmithing and being able to show me exactly what I needed was because I have worked on it. I just didn't know how to work on it. And your your ability to to hone that in on your own was pretty amazing. We're in a very technical space. And I thought you did a really good job of figuring out how to position that technical space, even though I know you're not into Kubernetes, and Microsoft.

Tracy Ragan 13:49
So kudos to you. And you've just been totally kind and and super supportive through the whole process. And I have really appreciated the honest to god from my heart, I have totally appreciated the effort that you've put in to help me get to where I'm at. It's made a huge, it's really made me an amazing difference.

Tracy Ragan 14:08
Thank you. That's great. Well, as we've talked offline, we're really just getting started with scaling your business and

Tracy Ragan 14:14
I cannot wait to see what you have in your bag of tricks.

Brooks Van Norman 14:19
We've got some more we definitely have some more the foundation is laid, that's for sure. So for anybody who's listening to this, that struggling to get calls, that knows they have an offer that the market needs. Why should somebody in that position take action now and not wait?

Tracy Ragan 14:39
You know, if you're, you know, we're

Tracy Ragan 14:43
as a as a small startup.

Tracy Ragan 14:46
My goal has always been to shift myself into a selling role as opposed to a managing role. Because I know as the CEO I need to be selling

Tracy Ragan 14:58
I did not know how to do that.

Tracy Ragan 15:00
That? Yeah, it was, it was much easier for me to go, I can, I'm really great at marketing, I'm super good at bizdev

Tracy Ragan 15:09
I'm really good at, you know, product development and, and product, you know, Product Marketing and product management. So it's super easy to fall back into the things that are that you're comfortable with.

Tracy Ragan 15:24
That your process and your platform makes it easy for somebody to shift from a, your where it's comfortable to where it's not, not so comfortable and to learn that.

Tracy Ragan 15:38
So the sooner you do that, the better off you're going to be in the long run because you as some as a CEO, to as a small company that didn't know how to sell, I needed this platform to help me get into that rhythm of talking to people. And now I all I want to do is look at LinkedIn.

Tracy Ragan 15:58
That's all I want to do is talk to people, I don't want to do any of the other things. So start that sooner than later. The other stuff will come. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And have you had success with other channels through working together as well? Has there been anything outside of the social platforms?

Brooks Van Norman 16:15
You mean?

Tracy Ragan 16:17
Like, like, email or anything like that, that we Yes, yes. So as we your email, the when they don't contact when they don't, when you send out an email, what I have discovered is that I begin having a conversation with this person who's you know, hiding behind their email, but they're more willing to have a more just more more of a discourse. So like, this morning, I don't know why this morning, it happened. But I had four different emails that they wanted more detailed information, they didn't want to talk to me. And I don't think even two of them I don't even think except accepted me on LinkedIn. But now I've had just today I've had two or three conversations with them. And I'm trying to get find time on our calendars to get a demo. And so it's been a different experience from if I was to have sent down an email in in a regular cadence, like sending out a regular you'd have to try to get them to come to my website or download a white paper and then we follow up from that. Just a simple. Hey, how's it going? This is what I do. Would you like to talk? that email?

Tracy Ragan 17:28
For some reason works better? I don't know why. I can't tell you why. Cuz I didn't create the magic you did. But all I can tell you is that those those email conversations are are their conversations. I'm not having a monologue. I'm having a dialogue. That's the difference. Oh, I love I love that a dialogue, not a monologue. Awesome. Well, Tracy, this has been terrific.

Brooks Van Norman 17:52
I really appreciate you making the time to chat with me today and participate in this interview. If anybody wants to learn more about you, and what you're doing with deploy hub, where are some of the places that people can find you? deploy hub.com You can find me there. I'm on Twitter at at Tracy Reagan. No ease in the first or last name. Okay, great. Awesome. Tracy, thank you so much. You're welcome.

Tracy Ragan 18:21
Bye bye.