From Pro Mountain Biker to B2B SaaS: How to Design Your Career Around Your Life | Angie Parkhouse (Qualia)

Carter (00:01.411)
Hey Angie, give the people a quick intro. Who are you? What do you do now? That sort of thing.

Angie Parkhouse (00:07.136)
Awesome, happy to. Well, I am I'm currently living in Texas and I work for a company called Qualia, which is a real estate transaction management software tool. I've got two little kiddos, three and five, and just really spend currently my time working and moming. Although I'd rather not rather. There's a lot of things I want to be doing, but.

Parenthood has really taken the front seat at this season in my life.

Carter (00:42.157)
Yeah, I'm sure that makes a lot of sense. You've been intentional about designing your career around your life. How did you get from medical devices to biotech to racing mountain bikes to now SAS? That's a crazy, I was looking at your LinkedIn and that, yeah, that was like, that's a crazy, crazy career.

Angie Parkhouse (00:45.165)
Yeah.

Angie Parkhouse (00:58.53)
Yeah. Well I appreciate you actually paying attention because I do feel like in my in my 20s and 30s I was living a really super fun action packed life. And to give you just a little bit of background I started my career in my mid mid 20s got into medical device sales. I was originally just in business to business sales and realized that

You know, I had heard that pharma was the way to go and now looking back, I don't know if I would have made that decision due to the corruption that I've seen in the healthcare system. That's a whole different story. But medical device sales to me was something that allowed me to make some pretty good money and that was really the main reason that I...

sort of went that direction, but I set a vision. I was selling copiers, you know, and I was like, this is not what I want to do with my life and wanted to reach for something a little bit bigger. So I set out to, I read a book on how do I get into medical device sales and really put forth the effort, put out my resume and got a job actually pretty quickly. And then I ended up doing medical device sales for about

13 years and that really afforded me a pretty good nest egg to be able to do a lot of traveling and just had a lot of fun in those years. One thing that sort of kind of had me concerned about the future of my life was that when you're in medical device sales you are stuck to...

a city you're stuck to a metroplex with with hospitals and I am a nature person and I'm an action sports person and I did not want to be stuck in a in a city for the rest of my life. So I thought you know how can I how can I make this this move. Now outside of my job I was a mountain biker. I think I started mountain biking in like 2003 and I always rode with with men. My partner at the time I would always ride with him and.

Angie Parkhouse (03:10.535)
all the other guy friends that we have that would ride. And I guess I got pretty good. So at that point, I started racing in like 2017.

and started winning all of these races and I really couldn't believe that I was as good as I was because I was just riding for fun up to that point. So I raced for two years locally in the Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas region and was winning all the races. So I thought, you know what? So in 2018, I was ready to build my life where I could live in the mountains and I knew that medical devices was not going to allow me to live in the mountains where I could do the action sports like snowboarding and mountain biking and all the things I really

really wanted to do. I told myself that I wanted to take a year long sabbatical to go race mountain bikes professionally, but I needed, I needed a plan. In the kind of racing that I do, when you go to races, you have to, you have to buy hotel rooms or you camp in your car at the campsite or you're always, you know, camping with tents. So I thought, you know, I need an adventure van. So I built a,

a proposal to an adventure van company called Van Duet out of Kansas City Missouri and I wrote them and I said hey I've been in business to business sales for my entire career. Here's what I want to do. I want you to sponsor me in my mountain bike endeavor my race endeavor and I will sell your vans for you and I will represent you as if I work for the company. They came back about an hour later and said absolutely. So the very next day I quit my medical device job and two weeks later I was at

their factory building out my adventure van and got on the road. And so the year of 2018, I spent that entire year being a van nomad and racing and ended up working at a back country helicopter and cat ski operation in the winter time. And it was just a really.

Angie Parkhouse (05:08.222)
amazing adventure for me. The problem is I broke my shoulder at the very beginning of it so that kind of killed the race portion. So when I got done with my sabbatical I actually needed to figure out like what my next career move was going to be. And at the time this was right before COVID. The thing that made the most sense to me was software because I knew that I could work from home and of course this was before we all went remote. So I ended up having a contact at Qualia.

Carter (05:17.678)
Yeah.

Angie Parkhouse (05:38.096)
and went to their open house and took my resume, my brag book, and I said, I want to work for you, and they hired me the next week. that's how I sort of curated my career to fulfill my dreams.

Carter (05:56.186)
That's very interesting. And I know you were talking about being the deliberate creator of your own experiences. I was wondering, because you said on LinkedIn that you did look into SaaS because it is remote and like for the reasons again, like you had just said, have you had to turn down opportunities that looked great on paper but didn't fit the life that you were building?

Angie Parkhouse (06:02.446)
Mm-hmm.

Angie Parkhouse (06:07.906)
Mm-hmm.

Angie Parkhouse (06:16.364)
Well, thankfully I haven't had to deal with that too much because I've been with Qualia the whole time. So there was one little stint where, you know, was kind of a little bit political, but I wanted to go into leadership on the sales team that I was on at the time. And there was sort of, saw a ceiling at that time. And so I went to another company to...

see if I could move my way up into leadership there and then quickly realized. And I think this plays well into this conversation that I think it's really important for people that want to be in SAS to focus on products that are in an industry vertical. Like for instance, I'm in real estate tech, right? And I call on one type of customer, which is title companies.

So those title companies have to answer their phones. So as an outbounding salesperson in SaaS, if you are trying to call on people that don't answer their phones, like HR people, IT people, it's really hard to be an outbounding new business AE. And that's what I found when I went out to this other company was like, I might have made 500 calls and got two people on the phone. Now, granted, this was also during COVID. So people were certainly not answering their phones, but

I ended up coming back to Qualia because I just really loved our customer base. And so I do think it's so important for anybody that wants to be in SaaS to try to really find those niche companies that have a very niche target audience. Not the most important thing, but it's important to me.

Carter (08:00.389)
That's really interesting though. So you would say choose a vertical where people have to pick up their phone. Cause you're right, real estate people have to be on like at all times for the most part. So yeah, that actually makes a lot of sense.

Angie Parkhouse (08:08.364)
Yeah.

Yeah I mean the title company can't let their phones ring. They are are a 100 percent service oriented company. And I know that there's companies like Fractal who might the founder of Qualia who is Nate Baker. He's part owner in a company called Fractal who specifically specializes in industry vertical type type companies or software for for those types of companies. So I just think it would be you know for people trying to

transition into SAS, that would definitely be something I would look into first. Now you have to do a little research, obviously, to figure out who the target audience is. But yeah.

Carter (08:48.633)
Yeah. That's, well, that's kind of in the same vein of this next question. A lot of people are trying to transition into B2B SaaS like you did. I know you said you knew somebody at Qualia. Is there any other besides choosing a certain vertical? Is there any other advice you would give?

Angie Parkhouse (08:56.59)
and

Angie Parkhouse (09:06.892)
Yeah I mean my my entire career like when I was in medical device sales every job I got in that tenure which was probably like six different companies because I really loved startups. It was all about the network. I feel like you have to be really really strong at building your your network and it's I know LinkedIn is you know a very important part of networking right now. But I also think it might be getting a little bit.

saturated with people trying to network with each other. I this is a tough question for me to answer because I haven't had to go out and find a new job. But my husband is about to. So we're going to figure out what that looks like here coming up. But I would definitely say just in my older school sort of experience I would say you know finding people that you know at companies or you know just yeah really using your network.

Carter (09:48.891)
okay.

Carter (10:03.705)
Yeah, that makes sense. to switch it a little bit to more sale, more tactical sales type stuff. Now, right now you're leading the old Republic transition at Qualia. How do you sell this someone who didn't ask to talk to you and doesn't want to change? Cause it seems like a big, you know, quite the transition. So yeah, how do you, how do you deal with that?

Angie Parkhouse (10:08.792)
Sure.

Angie Parkhouse (10:21.312)
Yeah, so thankfully in our industry, most of our title companies that we sell to know who we are and they either have a distaste for us because of the amount of outbounding that we've done in the past

versus people that like know who we are and just don't want to make the software switch but are thinking you know one day I'll move to quality and just not right now because switching software probably for any company is it's a really big decision to make. So I think for our AEs that are doing reach out to these companies it's so so so important to be able to.

when they cold call to be able to ask very, very thoughtful discovery questions that get right immediately to the pain of their everyday process and not to pitch. I am a firm believer that you should never pitch without pain. And so a lot of, think a lot of AEs, the...

The thing that they do is they have, you know, they have commission breath. You know, they get somebody on the phone and they get all excited and they just want to try to sell the product rather than asking about their, you know, their pains that we know that we can solve with our product. And just being a human, I think humanizing this process right now in the world of AI where, you know, executives and leaders are getting absolutely bombarded.

with AI with AI sales outreach. I think personally it's actually hurting the sales world and I don't I absolutely do not think AI is going to take over sales people's people's job because it's not at this well at least at this moment I don't think it's human enough.

Angie Parkhouse (12:17.11)
Because they if you if you look in your LinkedIn spam when as soon as I became a manager my LinkedIn box became a just an absolute pit of AI spam that is clear that these they're making it look like I'm an AE and I'm but they're all the same message from all these different companies but it's like.

Carter (12:28.486)
I'm sure that, yeah, that doesn't surprise me.

Angie Parkhouse (12:39.214)
It's like copy and pasted messages that are all just so sterile and lacking that I think the more people can really just get back to the basics of humanizing the sale. I think that's really what the world is craving right now especially people that are selling and somebody that needs a human to guide them through the sales process. know mean nobody wants to be guided through a sales process by a robot.

Carter (13:03.269)
Yeah.

Angie Parkhouse (13:07.31)
I mean, that's just my personal opinion. And I use AI a lot. I'm not anti-AI, but I know a lot of people are scared about AI kind of killing in the sales world, killing their jobs. And I don't know that that's going to happen.

Carter (13:20.965)
That's funny, I feel the same way because at Rocket Mortgage, you could, I've done a loan where I didn't talk to the person and they can go through the whole, it's very rare, but you can go through the entire process and not talk to a person, but you lose so many people that way. Yeah, people always have questions, so when they can't ask you questions, you'll never hear, you can't get that person on the phone again. So yeah, I totally see what you're, for sure, yeah.

Angie Parkhouse (13:27.95)
Mm-hmm.

Angie Parkhouse (13:34.894)
Mm-hmm.

Angie Parkhouse (13:38.942)
yeah.

Angie Parkhouse (13:42.604)
Yeah, I'll just hang up. Like, no, not talking to a bot. Not today.

Carter (13:47.405)
Yeah, so that makes a lot of sense. Well, you know, would you have tips there on how to per on how to Yeah, be a little bit more personal. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly

Angie Parkhouse (13:54.35)
pick the phone. People want to talk to another person. I mean you can do.

You know, obviously there were like, I don't know, maybe five years ago, there was this real big push to humanize, you know, to humanize the, personalize rather, email outreach. you know, going on to LinkedIn and seeing some things that they might be interested in and just trying to figure out ways you can be like, hey, John, I, you know, I saw that you're the Kansas City Chiefs fan. So am I, I was at the game last, you know, whatever, trying to like personalize that outreach. that can also be very, very time consuming.

Carter (14:25.24)
Right.

Angie Parkhouse (14:32.122)
But I think a lot of people are just really scared to pick up the phone. And to my point earlier, it is sometimes difficult when your target audience literally never picks up the phone. So.

You know, I know that there's probably some new sales techniques out there right now that, you know, people that don't have an industry vertical, vertical specifically might be having success with. But I cannot really only speak to my industry right now because I know that our people pick up the phone. So that's what my team does. They pick up the phone and they call. not doing, you know, we are doing email outreach. But if you, if you really want to connect with somebody, it's, it's got to be through person to person interaction.

Carter (15:15.669)
You know, and I know you said a lot of people already know, well, people that you're calling already know of Qualia. So there's already some level of trust there. What objections are coming up when your team is calling and how are you guys getting around those?

Angie Parkhouse (15:20.802)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Angie Parkhouse (15:28.448)
Yeah, interesting, interesting question because we've been around for 10 years and when we first started our industry is a very, very antiquated industry, very, very paper heavy, very.

an insane amount of duplicative data entry and just manual work that's not revenue generating. And so, you know, are the people that have been doing title work have done it for 25 years and they're, you know, older people that don't want to change. Now granted, it's becoming younger. Obviously, the more we go, the more like millennials are coming into the title industry. But.

A lot of times people are anti-Qualia because of the amount of cold calling that we have done to them over the years where they're you know they just weren't willing to make a change. But our our new business division is very persistent. And I think that you know they also brought in some SDRs and I think sometimes SDRs.

don't have as much product knowledge or industry knowledge and they can come across as just sleazy, not I don't want to say sleazy, but salespeople that don't really know how to engage in a really good.

thoughtful pain invoking conversation. And so they tend to just like push for the demo, push for the next step when that person isn't quite ready for that because you haven't uncovered any pain. You've not uncovered any reason why they need to have a demo. And so, you know, the more that reach out happens and they keep saying, no, they keep saying, no, they have this image in their head of the type of company that we are when really that first layer of sales has nothing to do with the customer experience or

Angie Parkhouse (17:16.058)
what you know how the how the software is going to perform for them. So I think that's the first thing that we have to get over is when they do finally get us give us a chance. And my my specific team right now.

Carter (17:20.494)
Right.

Angie Parkhouse (17:30.13)
is our customers are came from an acquisition. So last year we purchased two of our competitors. And so my team I lead the team that is helping those customers transition from those softwares that are going to be sun setting.

And we're helping them transition over to Qualia. Now they don't have to come to Qualia. They can go to another competitor. So when we get them on the phone the initial conversation is we're talking to them about what the sun setting looks like. So there we have an active audience but it doesn't guarantee the sale. So they're there to listen. And the first question we ask is what are your thoughts on the Qualia acquisition of this software. And.

probably 50 percent of the time they're extremely upset about it because of the reputation. Well just because of the reputation that they that they had with people calling them over the years. And also just because you know when we first started 10 years ago we were the our founders were you know.

Carter (18:17.427)
really? Interesting, okay.

Yeah.

Angie Parkhouse (18:35.296)
Silicon Valley you know new grads right out of college and wanting to come into an industry that has been doing the same thing for 25 years and they don't want to change. So kind of had some images of these cocky Silicon Valley guys coming in trying to trying to like upset the industry and and we have but it's taken a lot longer or not upset but you know.

revolutionized the industry. But it's taken 10 years to do it. It didn't happen near as fast as our founders thought it would. So a lot of times people just have this image of Qualia as you know this like Silicon Valley mega corporation and we are absolutely not. If anything our founder Nate has done a really great job of blend her of accepting the fact that we didn't know everything when we came in.

and they've hired people from the title industry. And so now we provide a stellar experience for our customers. And so when these people that are hesitant are anti-qualia, the first thing we do is let them vent.

Carter (19:46.021)
Mm-hmm.

Angie Parkhouse (19:46.338)
Be empathetic to it. Let them say whatever they want. And then just uncut you know help like get over those objections that they have about their feelings of qualia. And then as we move through the sales process they see that you know we are good people. We're being very consultative and helping them through this process. So it's really just a matter of in my opinion I think the number one thing in customer service is is.

empathy and letting people talk, letting them say their piece.

and being empathetic to the fact that they feel that way. And I think that just that really goes a long way to build trust. And so that they feel like they have somebody to vent to because all these years they've had these feelings or maybe they went through the acqui- you know they heard about the acquisition and they had these feelings and they didn't have anybody to complain to. And now that we're on the phone with them they're able to just let it all out and we're going okay we understand totally get it. Other people have felt that way too. And then they start to relax and then they see then we get them on the demo and they're like

Carter (20:35.136)
Yeah.

Angie Parkhouse (20:47.758)
okay, now we see why you guys bought the company, because our product is just absolutely amazing with the AI integrations that we have added and really revolutionizing the industry. It's pretty amazing.

Carter (21:06.039)
Yeah, that that makes a lot of sense. That is that is crazy. A lot come in. So, yeah, like 50 percent are upset. Yeah, that that makes a lot of sense. That's an interesting that's an interesting sale.

Angie Parkhouse (21:09.271)
Yeah.

Angie Parkhouse (21:15.884)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Carter (21:20.133)
Alright, well think we got some good stuff. I will end it here.

Angie Parkhouse (21:24.206)
Cool. Well, so tell me about your.