Guest Perspectives

Our first four Surf & Sales events exceeded every expectation - big thanks to everyone who attended for sharing their knowledge, passion, and stories! Check out some video highlights here, plus excerpts from transcripts of a few guest interviews conducted on the final day of the Summit.

CLAIRE MORRIS
VP Operations @ Homeward, S&S 2018 Participant

"I can't tell you how many conferences I've been to where, not until maybe the last five minutes of that 45 minute session did I get anything that was even remotely applicable to my life or had any sort of substance to it. There's a lot of pandering. There's a lot of pitching.
This experience had none of that, in every single session I am walking away with something that I can apply to my business.

I think what's impressive about that is I'm a VP of customer success. There are sales account executives here, there are CEO's, there are founders, and everyone is walking away with something applicable from every single session. I don't think that's easy to do, but through a great group of people, through well curated content, and a desire to create real value here for every single person attending. I think they've nailed it.

Some of the things that I've learned and that have crystallized for me this week are I have a huge opportunity to get out of the spotlight, and start to create and enable heroes on my team, rather than me being the hero. And looking for opportunities to coach up and develop all of the folks that I have the pleasure of working with. That's going to be something that's a big focus of mine coming out of this week.

Another thing that was really rewarding to learn about is, I got to workshop with the group today, a current challenge that I'm trying to solve for around customer usage, and getting to hear ideas that are totally out of the box from people that aren't in the industry got me thinking a lot more creatively and we ended up coming up with this just laundry list of ideas, things that I can try, and I'm kind of itching to get back and implement them."
 

IAN MAGRUDER
HOUSING SOLUTIONS LEAD, Landed - San Francisco, CA

"I think it's really fun to combine surfing and sales together. It's awesome to have an opportunity to get some exercise, be out in nature, and also be thinking about really pragmatic, tangible career steps and tools and insights. It's too often that we separate those things.

One of my key takeaways is just reinforcing that getting yourself out of your day to day is so important. We're all in this grind, working on the things we're working on, running on the treadmill, and pulling yourself out of that can be a really helpful way to reset, think about what you're doing, think about what makes sense, what doesn't, and do some bigger picture strategic thinking. And that's been really helpful for me the last few days.

I think the other thing that I'll take away is the value of coaching and connecting with people who you can learn from. I think at various times in my career I've had mentors or I could have used some more mentorship and I feel like this is a place where that is encouraged and embraced in a really meaningful way. I'm going to, not only through this group of people that I've gotten to know in the last few days but even in my own organization and my day to day, I'm going to try to build more opportunities for regular coaching as a part of my own learning and professional development."

MARY GROTHE
CEO, Sales BQ - Denver, CO

"Typically, I always want to make sure that any place that I am allocating time is going to have a return. And for me, it was difficult to justify taking a week to come to Costa Rica and take this time away from my clients, from my team, my business, my family. And I'm really proud of myself that I was able to come to this week with such as open mind to say, "There are brilliant people here. I'm going to just allow myself to learn from them.

I have found a new way, thanks to Scott, to build my online presence through growing connections on LinkedIn. Scott's method was so effective, that within 10 minutes of starting the exercise, I got an inbound lead from a CEO right in my backyard, in the Denver market. Got an ROI in 10 minutes. That opportunity will pay for this entire trip."