Transforming IT Buying: Authentic Matches With Tonya Turrell
- Quik! News Team
- 60 minutes ago
- 27 min read
Tonya Turrell is the Founder and CEO of TechnologyMatch, a buyer-first platform that connects IT leaders with technology providers through AI-powered matchmaking and demand generation. A three-time founder with two successful exits, she is known for challenging traditional lead-generation models and creating trust-based alternatives that prioritize buyer intent. Tonya has earned Inc. recognition on both the Inc. 5000 and Female Founders 250 for leadership and innovation. She also hosts the Between Fires and Futures podcast, where she explores IT leaders’ changing role amid AI’s growing influence.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
[2:22] Tonya Turrell discusses TechnologyMatch’s buyer-first marketplace connecting IT buyers and technology vendors
[6:02] How vendors pay for buyer-driven leads and appointments
[9:56] Building an IT buyer community around technology needs and challenges
[12:10] TechnologyMatch’s role in improving customer experience and sales outcomes
[15:05] Tonya explains why sales reps fail to convert qualified opportunities
[17:51] A lost $50,000 opportunity that became a multimillion-dollar customer relationship
[23:28] AI-driven pre-sales intelligence for more personalized buyer conversations
[31:50] Leadership lessons from fintech founders and mentors
In this episode…
Technology buyers today are inundated with sales outreach, making it harder to identify the vendors and solutions best suited for their business needs. At the same time, technology providers struggle to reach qualified prospects, and many sales teams miss opportunities by prioritizing the pitch over a deeper understanding of customer challenges. How can buyers and sellers create more meaningful connections that lead to better outcomes for everyone involved?
Tonya Turrell, a technology marketplace innovator and demand-generation expert, explains how buyer-driven matchmaking can eliminate noise and streamline the technology purchasing process. She shares why authentic alignment between buyer needs and vendor solutions leads to higher conversion rates, how analyzing thousands of sales conversations revealed critical gaps in sales execution, and why customer experience should remain the priority throughout the buying journey. Tonya also discusses using AI-powered pre-sales intelligence, personalized research, and sales coaching tools to help representatives better understand prospects, build trust, and create long-term customer relationships.
In this episode of The Customer Wins, Richard Walker interviews Tonya Turrell, Founder and CEO of TechnologyMatch, about transforming B2B technology buying through buyer-driven connections and AI. Tonya discusses building an IT buyer community, lessons learned from analyzing more than 30,000 sales calls, and leadership insights on transitioning from founder to CEO while scaling a growing business.
Resources Mentioned in this episode
"[Emerging Tech] Human Stories Triumph Over AI With Dan Lievens" on The Customer Wins
"[Emerging Tech] How AI Copilots Are Transforming Wealth Management With Jagdeesh Prakasam" on The Customer Wins
"[Emerging Tech] How To Transform Enterprise Data Into Insights With Suvrat Bansal" on The Customer Wins
Quotable Moments:
“The idea is demand is already there. We're just matching demand that organically exists to the provider.”
“We built our marketplace to eliminate the noise. So it's buyer driven, really inspired by Bumble.”
“Anything they need, we go out and source it. We connect them, and hopefully they get their needs met.”
“Those sales reps who are not converting, they're not considering the customer experience, they're pushing their agenda.”
“I think it just flips that partnership dynamic and shows that you are interested in partnering with me.”
Action Steps:
Build buyer-driven engagement models: Giving buyers control over when and how they connect with vendors reduces unwanted outreach, increases trust, and creates higher-quality opportunities because interested buyers are more likely to engage in meaningful conversations.
Prioritize customer needs over sales agendas: Training sales teams to understand customer challenges before recommending solutions improves conversion rates and strengthens relationships because prospects feel supported rather than pressured.
Use AI to prepare for sales conversations: Leveraging AI-powered research and pre-sales intelligence helps sales representatives personalize discussions and deliver value more effectively by understanding prospects' goals and business context in advance.
Analyze sales conversations for improvement opportunities: Reviewing call recordings and customer interactions reveals patterns that impact conversion rates and customer satisfaction, enabling teams to identify coaching opportunities and improve performance.
Invest in long-term relationship building: Continuing to serve prospects even when a sale does not close immediately can lead to future opportunities, referrals, and long-term partnerships that generate significantly greater value over time.
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Episode Transcript:
Intro: 00:02
Welcome to The Customer Wins podcast, where business leaders discuss their secrets and techniques for helping their customers succeed and, in turn, grow their business.
Richard Walker: 00:16
Hi, I'm Rich Walker, the host of The Customer Wins, where I talk to business leaders about how they help their customers win and how their focus on customer experience leads to growth. Some of my past guests have included Dan Lievens of Share One, Jagdeesh Prakasam of Qdeck, and Suvrat Bansal of Clarista. Today, I'm speaking with Tonya Turrell, the founder and CEO of technologymatch.com. And today's episode is brought to you by Quik!, the leader in enterprise forms processing. When your business relies upon processing forms, don't waste your team's valuable time manually reviewing the forms.
Instead, get Quik! using Quik!. you'll be able to generate completed forms and get back clean. Context-rich data that reduces manual reviews to only one out of 1000 submissions. Visit quickforms.com to get started. All right, I'm excited to introduce my guest.
Tonya Turrell is a three-time founder and CEO of TechnologyMatch.com, a buyer-first platform transforming how IT leaders discover and engage with technology partners. With two successful exits and recognition on the Inc. 5000 and the Inc female founders 250 she's known for challenging outdated demand generation models and building trust-driven alternatives that reflect how modern buyers actually make decisions. Tonya's work sits at the intersection of AI, human-centered leadership and go-to-market innovation, where she champions alignment over noise and connection over conversion. She also hosts her own podcast, which I've been a guest on. So thank you.
It's called Between Fires and Futures, exploring the evolving role of IT leaders in an AI-driven world. Tonya, welcome to The Customer Wins.
Tonya Turrell: 01:59
Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Richard Walker: 02:01
I'm excited to have you today. You're going to give us a totally different perspective. So for those who haven't heard this podcast before, I talked with business leaders about what they're doing to help their customers win, how they built and deliver a great customer experience, and the challenges to growing their own company. So, Tonya, I want to understand your business a lot better. How does your company help people?
Tonya Turrell: 02:22
So we, we actually help in a couple of different ways because we have two audiences, right? Like we are a two sided marketplace connecting it buyers to sellers that are aligned to whatever it is that they're buying in technology. And so that means, you know, we've got the IT buyer audience who we serve and the way that we serve them is, you know, slightly different than the way we serve the tech companies that we that we essentially match make leads to. So for the IT buyer who has been. The IT buyer, the IT leader has been our primary ICP, so we've built everything to date for that IT buyer because it's this space B2B technology, lead generation specifically, has been.
It's really been a space that hasn't evolved all that much in the 25-plus years that I've been in it. And it's a space that, you know, that IT leader, that person who has that purchasing power to make multi-million dollar tech buying decisions is a target like a huge target for sales spam. So they are inundated with unwanted sales outreach, email, text, phone, like LinkedIn everywhere. And there's so much noise that it's really, really hard to get to the provider. That's a perfect fit for whatever those tech needs are.
So we serve that audience by matching them to like understanding their criteria, understanding their current environment, understanding their needs and their business objectives and their technology goals, and then matching them to providers who are aligned to whatever it is they're trying to achieve, whatever it is they need to purchase. And then for from the, the, and let me just add one more thing there, because I think this is really important. We built our marketplace to eliminate the noise. So it's buyer driven, really inspired by Bumble where women are the drivers of the connections. Female founder of Bumble was really sick of the male-to-female matching ratio of Tinder.
She was a former founder of Tinder, so she created Bumble, where women are the drivers of the connection. So we just adopted that model where IT buyers are the drivers of the connections. Vendors can't see them, can't spam them unless they want to make a match. And what that does for the vendor audience, the tech companies that we serve, and we serve them from a demand generation perspective. We drive them leads.
But when those leads are buyer-driven, those are inherently more closable opportunities. So our clients are closing our leads at a much higher rate than traditional lead generation because it's buyer driven.
Richard Walker: 05:09
Yeah. Well, so I love this because I'm in B2B and it is so hard because B2B is often very boring. My customers, yeah, they care about my product a lot. They care about my service even more in terms of our quality of service, but forms. Who wants to talk about forms?
It's often a very boring, like, oh, by the way, we have a form to fill out. We got to do it. It's just part of the business. So yeah, how would I tedious. But you've made it less tedious.
Well we have yeah, but from a marketing and demand generation, it's not like I can go viral with some cool video on forms. Well, maybe. Maybe if I got creative enough. But my brain doesn't work that way. And it's not like the new, I don't know, flavor of something that somebody just falls in love with and it just goes crazy.
So yeah, it's really hard as a vendor to get your name out there. Yeah. How are you guys making money in this? Who? Who's paying what.
Tonya Turrell: 06:02
So the vendors pay us. It's for. It's free for IT buyers. And and, you know, I sort of alluded to this. Up until this point in the journey.
So we're, you know, six years in the IT buyer has been our primary audience. But the service is free to them. Vendors pay for the leads. So they're, you know, they're paying for presence on the marketplace and for leads to be driven to them. So every match that we make, if we set a, a warm handoff appointment where we're, we're connecting the client and the IT buyer live on a phone call, we get paid for those appointments as well.
And we are making the shift to more consciously, intentionally serve the vendor audience. Because what we found is, you know, everything that we've built was to make these authentic matches so that we don't have to generate demand. Like the idea is demand is already there. We're just matching demand that organically exists to the provider. And so everything we've built up until this year has just been in service to the IT buyer.
This year, we're building a lot of tools and tech to enable the vendor, the sales rep to serve the IT buyer better. So sales enablement tools, pre-sales call intelligence tools so that they can understand the buyer better and serve them better on that first call, hopefully to have a higher conversion rate.
Richard Walker: 07:33
Yeah, no that's good. I want to hear more about that. I'm also thinking about, you know, how does the buyer know about the product even existing? How do they know they need certain types of solutions? You know, it's one thing if you're like, oh, I need a messaging service.
Well, there's lots to choose from, right? But there's so many new things coming out, especially with AI-driven solutions. You don't know you need these things. So how do you help buyers become aware of vendors and opportunities to see new products?
Tonya Turrell: 07:59
Yeah. I mean, our process is a little different in that we've built, we've built an IT buyer community. And so we're just constantly bringing IT leaders into that community and having really broad stroke conversations about what are your business objectives over the next 12 to 18 months? You know, what are you what are what are your technology objectives? What are your business objectives?
What are your pains, your challenges? What do you need? And then, you know, we capture that on the marketplace itself. We're beginning to capture it with agents through, you know, these different agents that we're building and launching over the next couple of quarters. But, but the idea is build a community and then constantly interact with them about what they need.
And very quickly, I mean, we build loyalty with that audience because anything they need, we go out and source it. We connect them and hopefully, they get their needs met. Right. If not, we we go back to the drawing board and bring other, other partners to, to the, to the meeting. But yeah, I think it's focuses on making that authentic connection based on needs and what a provider provides.
And so everything we've built has been about ensuring that that is a good match on both sides.
Richard Walker: 09:24
Yeah. And you're not necessarily charging the vendor to have a listing. It's more about the transaction. If the transaction happens, then you're participating, but getting them the visibility to begin with is not necessarily a high cost. Right?
Tonya Turrell: 09:36
Correct. Yeah. Yeah. They're paying for the actual matches.
Richard Walker: 09:40
Yeah. No, I love that. And so are you. I know, like your podcast is a great way for vendors to get exposure. Are you part of your community?
Is it building like webinars? Are you bringing people together in person ever? Or is it, you know.
Tonya Turrell: 09:56
Bringing people together in person is on my wish list? We haven't done it yet. We've been so busy, busy building the software, that's just not something I've been ready to chew on yet. But it is like it's a vision of mine, I think. I think especially now when everything is so virtual, there's sort of a hunger to come back together and do things in person.
So that's it's definitely on the wish list. But for right now, it really is about, you know, building a community, understanding their needs and making those matches and building the portfolio of vendors based on the demand. So, you know, we're constantly building that portfolio of solutions. And like, like you said, with AI, there's new providers all the time. And what these tools and solutions can do is constantly evolving that it makes my head spin.
We can't really keep up with it. There's so much. And so just ensuring that we are listening to the IT buyer community and sourcing the solutions that they demand has been, you know, that's kind of been a full-time gig.
Richard Walker: 11:00
Yeah. I was on a round table yesterday with a former guest, Tracy Lee. She's with This Dot Labs, and she ran this really great CXO community conversation with leaders in various tech companies. And guess what? Nobody even at the top levels like Microsoft, etc. nobody can keep up with all the AI stuff going on.
Tonya Turrell: 11:19
I know, I know, it's crazy. It's just a nonstop, which is why I think like our approach with the IT buyer, you know, your previous question, like, how do we, how do we know what they need? How, how do they learn about us? And our approach very much has to be really open-ended, casting a wide net. And our team has to be really skilled at having the conversations about anything, like the conversation could go anywhere to any area of tech.
And so that's, of course, that's been hard to scale because I've got a really, really seasoned team. And so we're scaling those skill sets through Agent Tech now.
Richard Walker: 11:54
Yeah. All right. So I want to bring this back to the topic of The Customer Wins in a way, because customer experience is from pre-sale all the way to service, and you are playing a role in that. How do you view your role of impacting customer experience?
Tonya Turrell: 12:10
Yeah, that's such a good question. And I'm in the middle of that shifting and pivoting a little bit. Now when, when I started this business, the vision was to create a matchmaking platform modeled after a dating site that authentically connects needs to providers. And we built that. And the, the theory, the theory was if we are making authentic matches based on real needs and we're making good matches, then those are.
Those leads should be highly closable. They should close at a much higher rate. They inherently should be more closable. Right? Yeah.
Right. And that has been true for a good chunk of our clients. But what's been really surprising is that it's not true everywhere. So, you know, we get feedback from clients, from the vendors that these are the best leads we've ever received. It's such a great fit.
We're converting higher than we've ever converted before. And we also get these are the worst leads we've ever received. Nothing's converting. I don't know what we're doing wrong. And so that part didn't prove my theory.
So we went back and looked at what was happening on those sales calls. Like why, why, why are they not converting? Because that's not a good experience for the IT buyer, because that means we didn't make a good match or there's something going on in the sales motion that is not serving that buyer. So we did a deep dive. We've done 30,000 plus sales calls for clients and IT buyers over the last 5 or 6 years.
So we had a lot of recordings to go through. And with AI, we were able to listen to them, you know, very quickly. And it became really clear that those who are not converting have a sales issue. There's, you know, a sales rep. Ten years are getting shorter and shorter and shorter. When I started in this field, you know, 25-plus years ago, sales reps had longer tenure and they were very specialized.
They sold a handful of products and they were experts at those products. So think of a Ferrari dealership and a Ferrari sales rep versus today we've got CarMax, right? Yeah. Selling hundreds of SKUs, you know, potentially many, many different brands, suppliers. And so it's hard to be an expert in any one of those.
And so there's that sales gap. And then just the average tenure of a sales rep is, I'm probably going to botch this because my memory around numbers is really bad, but I want to say it's 18 months now. And I can, I can shoot you an email with the actual because I wrote a brief about it. It's very, very low.
Richard Walker: 14:57
Compared to the past because most salespeople don't last six months. Yeah. You know, they fail out fast and, and. Yeah. Yeah.
And so if.
Tonya Turrell: 15:05
That's the case, we know that those sales reps are not serving the IT buyers that we're connecting them to. And so we've been, since Q3 of last year, been really busy. Like we had this realization about this time last year. And so we've been really busy building the tools that enable those sales reps to serve that IT buyer better. And it's, you know, it really comes down to do they have a sales methodology that really is understanding the needs and aiming to serve the needs of the prospective customer in front of them, because that's really where it breaks down.
What we've found is that those sales reps who are not converting, they're not considering the customer experience, they're pushing their agenda. They're pushing what they are most highly compensated to sell versus listening to what the customer needs. Or, you know, it's a number of those things. So the tools that we have created and are launching over the next July enable a sales rep to, first of all, cultivate the skills and get coached on the skills to better serve the audience in front of them, to listen to those needs and to position their solution as a solution to the, you know, those particular needs. So it's giving them coaching and pre-sales intelligence so that when they get on that sales call, they already understand the customer better.
So, you know, yeah, I mean.
Richard Walker: 16:32
What's funny about this, in an ironic way, is you, you, you did this based on a dating site Bumble for dating, and you're playing out the dating game. Like, yes, it.
Tonya Turrell: 16:44
It is a date.
Richard Walker: 16:45
Game on paper, but he doesn't bathe or she looked great, but no, no chemistry or or right. The guy's like, hey, I'm taking you out for a steak dinner and you're a vegan, right? Yes.
Tonya Turrell: 16:56
That's exactly it.
Richard Walker: 16:57
It. Didn't understand the need, didn't understand the customer. But, you know, you can't control those things. You can't control whether the person's a good sales person, whether they have a great product, whether they have good pricing and terms, because that's part of the negotiation. That's part of deciding, are we a fit for each other?
But I love that you're trying. I love that you're saying, hey, how can we give you better insights so you're more prepared for the call? Yeah. How do we do a better matching kind of criteria about what it is you're looking for? And look, there's another side to this too, which we didn't talk about.
Not all buyers are ready. They're looky looks. That's true right. They're there, just surfing around saying, what's out there? What should I consider?
And it's really hard, I think, in the sales process to know if the customer is still on the ground on the plane waiting to take off or are they in the air? Are they on landing? And they've already made four decisions and they just need one more validation to reject to say, yes, we did our rejections.
Tonya Turrell: 17:51
Yeah. And I'll share a little story with you too. Because, you know, I think sales reps tend to, if it's not going to convert right then and there, and they're not ready to sign a deal within the next 30 days, they just kind of let those go. They don't do the follow up that's necessary to nurture. But when I started this company six years ago, one of the first things I did was reach out to former clients and let them know, you know, we're back. We're doing this a little bit differently this time. And one of the first clients that I got on the phone with was Hitachi, Hitachi Vantara.
Now, I think when I worked with them years ago, they were Hitachi Data Systems. And, you know, there are huge data governance and storage companies. And they were a client in the previous business that I sold. And so this is like five years after the sale of the last business that I'm learning about. But, but the my client walked me through his name is Dan Walk, walked me through some of the, the work that we had done previously, you know, five, ten, ten years before and told me the story that blew my mind, which I feel like, you know, we're definitely going to write a case study about this because I feel like this happens more often than not.
We sent them a lead. Nothing that they got excited about. It was like a $50,000 opportunity for data governance. It did not convert. So they didn't win that deal.
It went to someone else. I don't remember who, but they really focused on serving the customer through that sales process. And although they didn't win that deal, the customer. Their prospective customer remembered how they served them, like what that customer experience was. And so when they had a new initiative, a quarter or two later, they reached back out to my client, Dan, and let him know, you know, we're going down this path now.
And I think that you might be a fit for that. Why don't you pitch us on that? So they did. They won that deal. So they lost that first 5050 deal to one another.
But over the last I want to say it's been about 11 years. It has led to something. This is where my brain and numbers are so bad.
Richard Walker: 20:15
To make a big number up.
Tonya Turrell: 20:16
Yes, yes. Well, my client first told me the story, and then I captured it. Then I called him back and captured it on film so that I could have it as the beginning of the case study. I want to say at the beginning, he said that they. It converted to something like $7 million a year and they were still customers to this day. Like.
So yeah, what lost the first deal but found an opportunity to serve, and that customer remembered it, that customer experience impacted that customer. And you know, that customer brought him the next big deal. They won that. And, you know, I want to say now that's been like a 60, $70 million relationship over the last ten, 11, 12 years.
Richard Walker: 21:01
I love these stories, Tonya. I really, really love these stories because in the sales process, I always feel like I'm going to be a good citizen. I'm going to help the customer no matter what, even if it's to tell them, no, I'm not the right fit or go somewhere else. Right. And that's hard in the sales process, right?
You're thinking about, I want to win, I want to win. And I try so hard just to encourage everybody to say, let the customer win, let them win on their terms, whatever that is. Because if you serve them well, they're going to like you and come back at some point and they're.
Tonya Turrell: 21:29
Going.
Richard Walker: 21:29
To remember it. I wish I could say I had a $5000 loss become a $7 million deal, but I've had the same experience where I didn't win the customer on the first pass, but they liked us so well. They did come back and even well, I've set up quickly this way where we have many resellers. So even if I don't win and they go to one of my resale partners, I still win.
Tonya Turrell: 21:48
You still win? Yeah.
Richard Walker: 21:49
And they still like us. And they wanted to work with us because of that. So I think that's fantastic. You know, you're but you are in that intersection of trying to create a better customer experience with this. Yeah.
And I think going back to the first thing you started with, I cannot even describe how much noise I get in my inbox or LinkedIn inbox, people trying to sell me services, etc. and I don't want to pay attention to any of that, you know, but I.
Tonya Turrell: 22:16
I, you knowI feel terrible if anybody reaches out to me on LinkedIn now, I completely miss it because I don't even check it. I don't even check my voicemail anymore because it's 20 spam voicemails at the end of the day. So. You're gonna have to text me if you want to reach me because I can't. Everything, every inbox, every, you know, voicemail box, they're all inundated with just a ridiculous amount of noise.
Richard Walker: 22:42
Yeah. I'm finding that the only people who can break through to me have created very bespoke messages that make me feel like I'm heard, that I'm seen. And I don't know if they're using AI to do that. I've heard of people using AI to do that and very successfully, without making it feel like it's AI. They've infused their voice, their style, their quirks, misspellings, whatever.
But it is that kind of feeling when somebody's like, Rich man, I read your book or I've watched 14 episodes of your podcast, I've looked at everything on your website. I really, really want to meet you. I'm more interested in that versus, hey, I got something to sell you, right? So I want to switch this a little bit to AI because I know you're really heavy into it, I know you love AI. What are you guys doing at TechnologyMatch with AI, and how is it going to change the experience or or make it better?
Tonya Turrell: 23:28
Oh my gosh, we are we're so I shared with you before we started recording that, you know, I onboarded our COO about six weeks ago and thank God for her because we have so many ideas and there are too many visionaries here. Definitely. Like we have so many ideas and we want to run all of them at full speed and make them all happen now. And so when you ask me that question, my brain goes off on like the ten different things that we're, we're working on. And thank God for her because she is prioritizing and making us focus on one thing at a time, or maybe two things at a time.
So the next, you know, two tools that we're really excited about. We just met for half a day yesterday . It's literally on my agenda today and tomorrow to name these things because we don't have names for them yet. Which is a bummer. I'd love to say the names right now. But two tools.
One is a pre-sales intelligence tool. So a sales rep, before getting on a call with a prospect, will put the contact's name in and the company URL in and maybe their LinkedIn profile, or it can go grab their LinkedIn profile. And it gives them this full brief about both the contact and the company and the intersection of that contact and you, the sales rep and the intersection of that company and the company that the sales rep works for and how all those pieces fit. And so like the, the brief initially provides them with the kind of information you said, right? Like, Rich, I listen to, you know, 17 of your podcasts and specifically the one about X, Y, Z impacted me in this way.
This AI is going to give that sales rep in their 30s or less all of that information. It'll take them definitely more than 30s to read this detailed brief, but it's just going to give them a high level of information that is available on the internet right now across the spectrum of, you know, do they have a podcast? Do they, you know, what's at the top of their LinkedIn? What are they posting about? What are they passionate about?
What does the company do? What do we know about their install in terms of like the data that we're pulling in? And then how does our solution fit to that? And so that is the thing that I'm most excited about because all of this information is available, but it takes a sales rep a lot of time to do the research, to be able to show up to a call and reference the things that are most relevant. You know, there's a lot like our team that they used to do it manually where they spend the time, you know, 30, 40 minutes before a call researching, and now we're building the tools that are going to give them that information real time, right?
You know, ten minutes before the call, 20 minutes before the call, where they can get up to date relevant information that is going to set them up head and shoulders above the competition. If the competition is not doing that.
Richard Walker: 26:44
How, how much of that is coming from the buyer themselves? Like, or do they have input? Can they say, hey, share this with a sales person or with this company I'm interested in? Here's some other things we care about. Whatever.
Tonya Turrell: 26:53
Yeah. I mean, when my team is involved, we're, we're obviously going to launch the tool for those who don't use our services, but for the clients who use our services and my team is involved. They're of course, doing that deep dive conversation needs analysis. And so that gets provided along with that pre-sales intelligence. But that's I mean, when I see the kind of information we ran a test yesterday where if somebody was selling to me, what kind of information would come up, and if somebody was selling to me and said the things that showed up on that brief, I'd be locked in right away because it proves that you, as a sales rep, are interested in serving me.
You're interested in what's going on in my world, what I'm challenged with, what I'm passionate about, and you are meeting me where I am as a seller versus your agenda as a seller. So I think it just flips the partnership dynamic and shows that you are interested in partnering with me to help me solve my problems.
Richard Walker: 27:50
Do you think there's an opportunity, or maybe you already do this to do the opposite for the buyer, to get a brief on the sales person and the team they're going to talk to, so they have an understanding of who's coming to the call.
Tonya Turrell: 28:00
Yeah, we've talked about that. I mean, up until very recently, like I said, for the last five and a half, six years, everything has been for the buyer. And now we are trying to provide tools to the seller so that they show up better and serve the buyer better. But everything that we're developing from, you know, from a sales enablement perspective, it would be really interesting to provide to the buyer. So yeah, I mean, we're surveying now to see if that would even be of interest.
Richard Walker: 28:31
The thing I'm thinking about is that a lot of deals happen in B2B because of existing relationships. You know, if I want to buy a car, I might call a friend who bought from that dealer or that brand and say, do you have a sales guy that you really trust and he'll refer to that person? Now I've got a warm introduction versus just walking on the sales lot and finding some random person. And I think a lot of business is happening that way. So I'm kind of feeling like if you're giving this the, the vendor this brief on the buyer, so they have some insights.
Could you do that for the buyer? So they have insights and make it feel more like a warm introduction. Or maybe further, could you go through the whole community and say, who is bought from this vendor and wants to refer this buyer to the to make the introduction more warm.
Tonya Turrell: 29:14
Yeah. You're like giving me the whole wish list that we've been, you know, whiteboarding over the last 5 or 6 years. Like, yes, I want all of those things. Like I envision, I really envision TechnologyMatch becoming a destination site. I, you know, I hesitate to call it like a social media site for IT leaders because, but like LinkedIn's original intention around professionals that before it became the spam engine that it is today that is what I would love for this thing to be is just a destination site for IT professionals.
And if they're challenged with something, they can go to their peer group within the platform and ask those questions. If they have used a vendor before, they can talk about that, or if somebody is considering, you know, three vendors and wants to know if the community has worked with them and what that experience was, we want that available to them. So yeah, those are all things that are on the wish list. But. All right.
Later down the.
Richard Walker: 30:15
Line, here's the idea I'm going to leave you with. It's time to do crowdfunding with your community, both buyers and sellers who want the same thing. I want to help you build this. I do, I want to see this happen because you're right. It's hard on LinkedIn to say, I'm focused on this market or this type of person and want to communicate with those types of people because it's hard to figure out who they are, and they all share different titles.
It's not always the same title, right? If they were naturally attracted to a single group and I could be part of that and have community with them, oh my gosh, that would make things so much better. So you got my vote.
Tonya Turrell: 30:51
Awesome. You've got our invitation then.
Richard Walker: 30:55
All right, I have to wrap this up. And before I get to my really last question, what is the best way for people to find and connect with you?
Tonya Turrell: 31:03
Probably, probably LinkedIn. I've been badmouthing LinkedIn, but it is LinkedIn.
Richard Walker: 31:07
But don't send her a message. She won't read it.
Tonya Turrell: 31:09
Don't send me a message on LinkedIn if you want to message me. My email is tonya@technologymatch.com. That's how it's going to get to me. I'll never respond to a LinkedIn message. But yes, I mean, you know, we post on LinkedIn under my name, Tonya Turrell and TechnologyMatch.
I'm pretty active on Instagram too. Tonya Cox Turrell. And then of course, technologymatch.com is the platform and it is getting ready to go through a new iteration with the launch of these tools in July.
Richard Walker: 31:38
Nice. Congratulations. All right, here's my last question. It's one of my favorite questions. Who has had the biggest impact on your leadership style and how you approach your role today?
Tonya Turrell: 31:50
So there's a couple of different ways I can answer this question. But you know, I'm really going to name one of my mentors now, Sunera Madani. She's a fintech founder. She's starting her next or has just started her second fintech company. Now, several years ago, she had a huge exit.
She built it for north of $1 billion. So she's, you know, one of, I don't know, 20 something female unicorns in the US. She's Orlando based where I am, you know, she's one of Orlando's only unicorns and she is a mentor of mine. She's my coach because she has obviously gone down the path that, you know, anything that could save me from having to learn the hard way, I'm going to listen to her. And I think probably my biggest takeaway from her most recently is really beginning to look at the founder seat separately from the CEO seat and to get to the point of scale, to move from founder to CEO.
And so, you know, that's a transition that I have been in this year with the onboarding of the COO. I think as founders we like to be in the weeds, we have our hands in everything. We have the finger on the pulse of every department, everything going on in the business. And at some point you just become the bottleneck as the founder. And that's where we got like, I have become the bottleneck.
And so to be coached on, you know, what does it look like to take that founder hat off and put the CEO hat on? And what does that role look like? And so she's just been instrumental this year in helping me see my role very differently and kind of backing out of that founder seat and taking that CEO seat so that we can get to that next level of scale. So I'm going to say that's probably the biggest impact, you know, top of mind most recently.
Richard Walker: 33:54
Oh, I love it, I love it. I, I won't tell you it's easy. I've been going through that transition for 18 months. There's a lot of battle scars, but oh my gosh, is it worth it? It is so much better.
So I wish you a lot of success on that journey. And that transformation and what your vision is for your business, I love it. All right. I gotta wrap this up. So I want to give a huge thank you to Tonya Turrell, three time founder and CEO of TechnologyMatch.com, for being on this episode of The Customer Wins.
Go check out Tonya's website at technologymatch.com. Go buy something from technologymatch.com. And don't forget to check out Quik! at quickforms.com, where we make processing forms easier. I hope you enjoyed this discussion. We'll click the like button, share this with someone, and subscribe to our channels for future episodes of The Customer Wins.
Tonya, thank you so much for joining me today.
Tonya Turrell: 34:43
Thank you Rich. It's always fun to chat with you.
Outro: 34:46
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