In part 7 we covered reaching out to ex-employees and ex-founders of companies in your industry for mentorship.

What would you ask in a mentorship session?

I try to ask mentors about their experience, what they did, I’ll get really specific

I try not to ask them to solve my problems or to provide opinions on problems that my business is facing because they don’t have the context

For Santosh, who had helped build the product at ZoomInfo.

I was asking things like, how do you source phone number data for the USA?

Did you source data from companies like PIPL, PDL, Spokeo, People Finders, consumer data companies?

How accurate was this? What are some other sources? Can we get data off of LinkedIn? Is there intent data? Very specific questions.

One method that ZoomInfo got data from was community contribution.

When you sign up as a salesperson, you share your inbox and then you share the contacts.

Another example with Doug Hall who was the first sales hire at Glassdoor and VP sales at Entelo.

So I was asking specific questions around:

What sales collateral and training materials did you create? Can you show me examples?

How did you train the new reps? Show me the sales scripts. How did you source the new reps to hire? What questions did you ask in an interview?

How many meetings do you have with the team? What performance metrics to track?

What were the compensation plans?

And whenever Doug gave an answer, I would dig deeper into it.