Salem Stanley

I am very interested in working for Yammer this summer as a product intern. They gave me some homework to work on and this is my deliverable. Let me know what you think!

I spent 2 years as an outbound marketer. I changed my ways and spent the last 18 months as an inbound marketer.

At iQ for Business I took the company from bringing in a paltry 4 leads a month from cold calling to a robust 30 leads a month from numerous inbound marketing methods. I had to fight tooth and nail for every dollar, so its made me a very frugal marketer.

I also rocked the Inbound Marketing Certification exam with a 94%.

Certification Achievements

“Do not confuse motion and progress. A rocking horse keeps moving but does not make any progress.” - Alfred A. Montapert

Top ten most effective things I have done in my career:

1. Started 4 “real” companies (business license, paid taxes, etc). 2 before receiving my undergrad degree.
2. Achieved 625% growth of total monthly leads over 2 years with iQ for Business.
3. 63% year over year total organic traffic growth; resulting in 1000% increase in organic leads with iQ for Business.
4. 288% year over year total organic web traffic growth from primary keyword with iQ for Business.
5. Migrated website to WordPress from custom CMS through outsourcing at 90% below industry standard with iQ for Business.
6. 425% increase in number of active deals through complete overhaul of sales operations processes with iQ for Business.
7. Reduced tradeshow follow up time by 4 weeks through a complete redesign of lead capture and processing with iQ for Business.
8. Closed a contract in first 30 days; fastest first sale in company history with Sageworks.
9. Helped turn a struggling triathlon profitable, then helped enable a successful exit within 3 years. St George triathlon.
10. I slept two nights at the office preparing for our two biggest trade shows of the year at iQ for Business. Everything went off perfectly.

Top ten most effective things I have done in my life:

1. Met, engaged and married my wife all within 8 months. (Love at first sight, FTW!)
2. Eagle Scout at 15 years old.
3. Paid for college myself. Mostly on academic and athletic scholarship
4. I have been to 42 states.
5. Learned to surf, snowboard, wakeboard, snow ski and water ski.
6. Completed 3 sprint triathlons.
7. Made a list of 50 rad things to in San Diego while we lived there. Did 35 of them.
8. Visited 5 national parks in 2011.
9. I learned how to juggle. I can juggle under my leg and behind my back.
10. I studied for only 4 weeks after work and on Saturdays and scored 710 on the GMAT.

I am constantly changing. Smaller companies attract me because it is much tougher to get stuck in any kind of rut. In the past 10 years I have:

1. Lived in 4 different time zones and two countries
2. Moved houses 14 times
3. Worked as a missionary, paint salesman, waiter, convenience store cashier, hotel desk clerk, investment banker, software salesman, and inbound marketer
4. Invested time and money into starting 8 different companies, including 2 different sno cone companies.
5. Attended 3 different Universities.

When I find myself doing something awesome, I tend to stick with it. When I get stuck doing the same thing for too long however, I get kind of antsy.

I am always looking for the next thing, and embrace change.

Thinking Scale comes very natural to me. It makes very little sense to develop a system, or pursue an idea that cannot be replicated and scaled by anyone. The idea reminds me of the concepts I read about in E-Myth 10 years ago.

I can best illustrate how I think scale by my performance at my last job. I was hired to sell $100,000 server software, and was told I needed to cold call all day everyday. My boss actually got upset with me when I used time to send an email follow up to a voicemail. At the time time were only getting 4-6 demos per month.

I knew this was not a long term strategy to success, and that it would not scale.

While my boss was focused on building out a team of cold callers, I started working on what I have learned is called Inbound Marketing.

• I started with a basic SEO strategy that began delivering organic demos from 1 per quarter to 10 per quarter.
• I began exploring our partner channel and saw it was the most effective but was absolutely neglected. This observance lead to a 4x increase in leads from partners. (These leads closed 3x faster and cost 50% less to close and sold for 50% more on average.)
• I figured out a way to leave 1000 voicemails in a day. This helped us book 30 demos from 300 leads within 30 days of a major tradeshow. The previous year it took us 12 months to book the same number of leads.

With regards to most things, especially work, I am a pretty transparent guy. I like giving input and coming up with new and better ways to do things.

For a recent leadership project I solicited feedback from 12 people that know me well regarding what my strengths are. I took the most used words and created this word cloud. After my name the most used word to describe me was ideas. I like sharing ideas and creative problem solving.

I’ll going to be Totally Transparent here and say I sometime struggle being Respectfully Humble. I’m not a full-fledged A**hole but I do at times struggle with Pride.

Its a weakness I take very seriously. One of my all time favorite speeches is entirely devoted to the concept of what Pride is. You can read the entirety here and I’ll highlight a few of my favorite parts below.

The proud make every man their adversary by pitting their intellects, opinions, works, wealth, talents, or any other worldly measuring device against others. In the words of C. S. Lewis: “Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man. … It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest. Once the element of competition has gone, pride has gone.”

Some prideful people are not so concerned as to whether their wages meet their needs as they are that their wages are more than someone else’s. Their reward is being a cut above the rest. This is the enmity of pride.

Pride is a sin that can readily be seen in others but is rarely admitted in ourselves. Most of us consider pride to be a sin of those on the top, such as the rich and the learned, looking down at the rest of us. There is, however, a far more common ailment among us—and that is pride from the bottom looking up. It is manifest in so many ways, such as faultfinding, gossiping, backbiting, murmuring, living beyond our means, envying, coveting, withholding gratitude and praise that might lift another, and being unforgiving and jealous.

Selfishness is one of the more common faces of pride. “How everything affects me” is the center of all that matters—self-conceit, self-pity, worldly self-fulfillment, self-gratification, and self-seeking.

The proud depend upon the world to tell them whether they have value or not. Their self-esteem is determined by where they are judged to be on the ladders of worldly success. They feel worthwhile as individuals if the numbers beneath them in achievement, talent, beauty, or intellect are large enough. Pride is ugly. It says, “If you succeed, I am a failure.”

For a recent assignment in a Leadership course I received feedback from others with regards to some of my strengths. Below is a notable one from my brother:

One of Salem’s greatest strengths is:

His ability to take accept new or different idea and not take it personally.

For example:
Salem stands up for his ideas and what he cares about but not to a fault.  Often times when we work on projects Salem has a very definite idea of how things should work or the direction we should move.  If i disagree we will often have spirited discussions about why we believe we are correct.  Though Salem doesn’t just give in and go along with a new idea, I always feel like he will at least listen to a differing opinion and consider it.  If he finds the new idea has merit and I can convince him its better than his original plan his ego is never an issue in letting him change his mind and shifting his excitement and energy to the new plan.  If he believes his idea is the correct one he will continue to defend it but tries to convince me and make his case, not just angrily demand I agree.

I am not perfect, but I really am a nice person to work with.

I worked on a few pieces on content at my last job. You can see them below.

1. Come Together with iQ for Business

I worked on this prezi for a couple tradeshows to have going on while we were at the booth. It did not work great for that, but it made for a decent video. It was a challenge explaining the complexity of what we sold in a simple video. I create 100% of this from storyboard to completion.

The prezi can be found here.

2. Whitepaper – 5 Questions to ask before selecting a BI vendor

We partnered with a MSDynamicsworld.com for lead generation. This whitepaper was written specifically to be downloaded by those with a Microsoft ERP system(our target). The title is targeted towards someone who was exploring BI vendors. We did generate some good leads here, but for the price the return was not there.

Read the whitepaper here.

3.  Whitepaper – Top 10 trends for BI in 2011

This was written specifically as download bait on our Google ads campaign. The quality of leads was suspect. Too many students and non potential clients, too few companies looking for BI.

Read the whitepaper here.

4. Blog Post – Food Safety

Our inside sales team wanted to call on companies regarding some new legislation so wrote up a post they could refer to, and that we could link to in an email. We had a strong client base in the Food industry so this made sense. We didn’t post regularly. We knew we needed to be blogging, but we did not understand it fully and it was not a priority for management.

Read the post here.

5. Other Blog – Cats in the Cradle

I started this blog. I still like the idea, but got caught up in other things. I plan to get it going again soon.

Well, this has got to be my weakest area in DARC. I’m early in my career, as I become more expert and do more interesting and visible things, my reach will grow.

As nerdy as Klout is, it gives a good estimate of my reach. You can see my profile in more detail to the right, just by clicking on the Klout widget.