Becoming a Thought Leader with Sanj Sanampudi

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. Each day, we welcome transformational executives to share their real world experiences and practical advice about scaling yourself, your team, and your business.

Matt Blumberg: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. I'm Matt Blumberg, the co- founder and CEO of Bolster, and I'm here today with Sanj Sanampudi. Sanj is the founder and CEO of Bardo. Previously founder and CEO of Concert. Worked with me and a number of our Bolster colleagues as our Head of FP& A at Return Path. Sanj, it's great to see you here.

Sanj Sanampudi: Good to see you again.

Matt Blumberg: One of the things that really impressed all of us when you started Concert was how aggressively, in a good way, and how quickly you developed your reputation as a thought leader in Concert's space, which I'm sort of broadly going to butcher as sales productivity, Salesforce management, sales productivity. You had come up through the ranks as the CFO, you hadn't written a book on it, and yet you found yourself pretty quickly with speaking gigs at some awesome conferences like SaaStr and WorldatWork and Stack Summit. So, my question to you is, how did you turn yourself into a thought leader so quickly and how can other founders do that as well?

Sanj Sanampudi: Yeah, a lot of becoming a thought leader is trial and error, but the first step I would say that you should take is ask the five whys. So, think about the problem that you want to talk about and keep digging down until you get to those sort of core assumptions that people have about the problem. So, in my previous space, it was around sales commissions relate to productivity. So the core assumption that we got to is people thought that more money led to better behavior, and that targets were really impactful. The next thing that I did was I just kept writing. I would post on LinkedIn, I would post blog posts about it. I would talk to anyone I could about this idea. And what happens when you're trying to reteach this idea is you sort of crystallize your storyline. It helps you organize your thoughts in a more meaningful way, and you get a lot of quick iterative testing on that.

Matt Blumberg: Absolutely. I've always said that about blogging, which I've been doing for 20 years now, that half the reason I blog is for myself to sort of sharpen what I'm thinking about a topic.

Sanj Sanampudi: Yeah, absolutely. And then the last thing I would say that was really impactful for these is, you can't keep your ideas to yourself or make them so precious. So, the more people who are thinking about the way that you introduce this topic, the more people you're talking to about it, the more opportunities tend to open up. So I spoke to a VC partner about one of these ideas, and then she took it to Jason Lemkin at SaaStr, and that's how we got that SaaStr gig. And then, the more people are kind of subscribing to your ideas, the more opportunities you'll naturally fund.

Matt Blumberg: Great suggestions for founders on becoming thought leaders, which, I didn't ask you the question of why should you bother becoming a thought leader? I assume that's pretty obvious. But if you are interested in becoming a thought leader, which I would encourage and I think Sanj would encourage.

Sanj Sanampudi: Absolutely.

Matt Blumberg: Your great suggestions for getting there. Thanks for being with me, Sanj.

Sanj Sanampudi: Thanks Matt.