B (3:57)

Can you talk about those five different mechanisms that you alluded to?

D (4:04)

Yeah. So what we did, actually, it came after some inspiration when we were in this cyber security company where you and I were John, in Cyber Reason with Andy. And it was pretty remarkable there because we were super fortunate to have some incredible growth. And I remember when I left the company, I was really trying to look at pattern recognition for why did some reps become very, very successful in that company and we didn't have a huge team at the time. And I was sitting on the beach. True story. I was sitting on the beach reflecting what I wanted to do with my life and what the next gig was going to be. And I was pretty worn out, but it kind of like dawned, dawned at me one day where we realized, you know, Nay, he's a great seller at the time. He's now a leader. You remember Nay. And I remember Nay, he basically went to South Africa on an airplane every day for two years, and he took South Africa from 0 to 5.5 million in 12 months.

B (5:00)

All by himself, by the way. Just by himself.

D (5:02)

Yeah, exactly. And we were trying to figure out, or I was trying to figure out, what was it Nay really did really, really well. He had also Bern Marline in Germany. He did an amazing job closing the German government in a cyber security contract in. In literally like a two months period in terms of paper process. And basically what we did is I put pen to paper and we model out what are those five Things that the most successful rep started with pipeline generation. But the second thing they did really, really well was it started to build the channel early by depositing those deals that they PG'd into into their ideal partner profile. And, and if you think about it, you know, back in the day we didn't really call it the ideal partner profile, but we realized that there's skill, scale and will in the partners. Some someone might be very willing to partner with you because they and they are two man shop and they have a very few set of customers. But if they don't have the scale, you're putting your eggs in the wrong basket. But the channel was the second, second kind of like cylinder we had to build. The third one is around upsell, you know, from net dollar retention, etc. The fourth one was really where nay really shown and that was building a community. So if you think about what we learned from that story that I tell to reps now and leaders in the, in the previous companies has been how do you take a new product into new marketplace when all you have is. And you can pg, you can do it the hard way or you can maybe be a little bit more creative and smart around it. So what we did there is that we said what was it that we actually did when we took that we had one customer in Europe which was a very famous investment company from South Africa. They were paying $36,000 ACV and basically what Nate did together with a bunch of other people was to start to build a community around these very influential people. So when you think about the deals and the champions and deals, we looked at the market from a medpic perspective, almost like what are the champions that have power and influence over everyone in this specific region? How can we add value to these people and build them up so that when you are a sole warrior trying to PG and trying to build a case, now everyone starts to talk about you. So we were trying to emulate kind of like a PLG or an open source model where you start with the groundswell to build up whilst we pg from top down and from top down. And it really worked really well. And, and we did the same in trip actions as well when we came there with Carlos. But just to kind of like stay on the topic, the last cylinder is really feel marketing. So what can you do with field marketing to be a little bit smart around the events that you're doing? It's not only about the steakhouse and a fancy dinner, but it's about combining those cylinders where you think about what the champions that you pg into, who's the partner ecosystem that has the trust from these champions you're trying to sell to? How can we get them all in a room with field marketing and the marketing team in general to go and really build a community around, you know, our value proposition?

B (8:12)

Yeah, so that was in the community. What I think you're doing is you're also looking for referrals.

C (8:17)

Right.

B (8:18)

So then you have. You're essentially building up these potential or champions where you have sold, looking for referrals to other champions inside that same community. Right?

D (8:30)

Exactly, exactly.

B (8:32)

And then the other part one of the second. John, one other thing that I hear is on the field marketing, you're not only marketing to the community that you have tried to establish or are establishing, but you're also doing the old abm. You're probably targeting some of those specific accounts with marketing to say, you know, here's five people in that community that we've been referred to. Let's go target those five accounts with our marketing resources and our sales resources. Is that right?

D (9:06)

Correct. And I think the mistake that I have done, and maybe others have done it too, is to kind of like look at sales and marketing as an isolated. We talk about going to market teams these days, but I am the first to raise my hand that we probably did a little bit siloed approach sales and marketing, but we weren't jointed. And I found that when you do, you create a mission statement where we're going after the same objective together and salespeople make it simpler for the marketing folks to say, hey, here is a list of the top 10 we want to do ABM or we want to do, you know, different field marketing events, it becomes we can own it together. Instead of pointing fingers at, hey, I don't have the pipeline, etc. Etc. So I felt like, you know, as we kind of like move from company to the other, having learned from that mistake has been super helpful in partnering up with the marketing folks on the other side.

C (10:00)

Chris, on this topic of channel readiness and channel push, I wrote down as your second pillar, can you give the audience. Because I think people are listening and they're going, well, is this for emerging markets? If I'm, if I'm like international, if I'm opening up South Africa and you know, tell us a little bit more about was there like a hub in the United States that was, you know, moving up and having, you know, maybe moving into the enterprise so there are some things to learn or is this a mo and can it work in both or is this a model specific to early stage? Very few reps, very few revenue, very few resources. Give us some context around these five pillars. Do the five pillars scale?

D (10:54)

Yeah, there's a lot of questions of nuances to the question there but I think if I start from when, when would I apply the five cylinder blueprint? I would say it kind of like depends on how the market is buying. If you think about cyber security in in this case they typically buy from trusted partners. So you have to win those partners and relationships really really fast. If you look at navon or trip actions it was different. That was more of a direct motion and you didn't really have a big channel but the channel in that respective was a different channel. And again if you think about what is the objective, the objective is that multiple champions, we called it the power of three in my previous company leapwork where we said imagine if you have a triangle and you have both case we had Microsoft singing the song of Leap work, you had the rep singing it and you had a trusted partner. Now you have the power of three that's advocating for your value proposition. Again it, it makes you appear as a much bigger force even though it might be only a skeleton crew. So I think the first part is it can work in early stages too if you have to mimic size in lack of a big big team. So that is one I think the other point that we learned was if you don't have a channel manager, which you might not do in the early stages as a startup, it's a salesperson, it's the CEO, it's someone that has to do to wear multiple hats. I think it's really hard to focus on the channel per se. So in those cases, when we looked at scale, skill and will we figure out that this small boutique partner might be a better fit in this Geo whilst in North America might have a relationship with the Accenture of the big fours, we know that that's going to require much more executive alignment, much more quarterly reviews etc so I think it can work. But it comes down to the GEO specific requirements and maturity and go to markets.

C (12:57)

Yeah, understood. Great answer. Thank you.

B (12:59)

One of the partners that I always like to link into were other sales reps that sold software that didn't compete with mine but they sold to the same Persona that I was trying to sell to and I found that when I attached myself to them and could trade lead information with them like in this account abc, here's the person I know can get it done for you what do you have for me? And you basically are bartering or even, you know, partnering on. On lead generation into those different accounts based upon the knowledge that each one of you have found that that was pretty powerful in the early days too.

D (13:43)

100%. And one of the. One of the new emotions that we had to learn from a. If you think about PG Tuesday or PG Monday, whatever day you decide to generate Pipeline, we started playing around in the UK specifically we started playing around. If you looked at the. The current state back in the day we had maybe softcat, we had one or two other different channel partners. How can we get scale and start to drive it? Pipeline generation program where you're teaching the channel to pg. Now that is a new motion because they typically have a lot of very strong relationships. But again, if you think about the basics of how I look at PG and probably others too. As long as you can enable the reps or whoever's going to drive pipeline to be effective. What are you going to call and what are you going to say? What's your storytelling? Objection. Handling. It's pretty basic and we try to dumb that down so that the channel partners. We almost did 95% of the heavy lifting. Here is a veto. Here's exactly what you're going to say. Here are some stories. And we came on site on PG Tuesdays and we started to build some pipeline that way with a channel as well. So I think PG can be super creative. And I learned a lot around PG from Carlos. He was pretty diligent on PG Tuesday and the program he ran. But what we found or what I've learned that was different from maybe how we ran it in the past with other people that worked for you. John. And John was. It was a non negotiable. It happens every single week. So we kind of like took that approach and said, you know, some weeks the team will probably be fatigued. Then we maybe put everyone in a room and we talk about why it's not working to kind of like resurrect it. And very often when we ask people is it. Is it because you don't know how to do it or is it because you don't want to do it? The good old skill and will.

B (15:33)

Yeah.

D (15:34)

And typically people don't want to do it because they don't know how to do it.

B (15:37)

Yeah.

D (15:38)

So we try to kind of like solve that first. And if they couldn't do it after we train them on how to do it, then they probably weren't the right fit for the company.

B (15:46)

What are some of the top two or three reasons why they can't do it?

D (15:53)

I think it's, for me, preparation. What we found is that people don't prepare. Right. And that's why I go back to the, the rigid program. If people are prepared and you, you enable them and you show them from the front how, how you do it, I think that's the key. And there are many other reasons, but I would say that's probably the reason why they're not prepared. And that could be many things. For example, they actually don't know who to call. So they might have, you know, said, hey, on Thursday night, I'm going to declare my accounts. But if you are the first line leaders or whoever was leading them didn't actually inspect and give them some value add, hey, I think this is a bad account because it's not really in the ICP or the reps hadn't really had, had sat down with the channel partners to figure out, do you have any relationship in this account? So when we came on Monday morning and people weren't prepared, it was just a Hail Mary. If you're gonna get the right number on PG Tuesday and call someone and because you weren't prepared for it already, yeah, I think that's.

B (16:56)

Preparation typically leads to attitude. If you're really prepared, you have a better attitude. If you're not, if you', prepared, you typically can't have a great attitude about picking the phone up and, you know, bombing the number of calls to, to potential customers.

D (17:11)

That has the thing.

C (17:12)

I think, I think you like. I see people that get committed to this, like, event, they don't treat it like a process. And you know, that preparation piece. I think I became a big fan a long time ago of this concept of like call sheets, sheets. And you're, you're preparing with your manager, with your ecosystem, and in this case, you know, with your channel partners, whatever that ecosystem looks like. And you're writing down like purpose, process, payoff, like, what's the reason why we're calling this? What is the purpose of this first, you know, like you said, Chris, does it fit into our icp? That's like step one, are we calling people that are fitting into our icp and then, you know, what are we going to ask them to do with us? So purpose, process, payoff. And then, you know, what's in it for them? And I find what's in it for the customer to engage in a conversation with us just at that level of a preparation of a call sheet. Reason why I'm calling this person. What I'm going to ask them to do and what's in it for them is just massive. I think you just totally improve your, improve your ability to be successful. But it does take a lot of effort. It's not like, hey, we're gonna do, we're gonna do everybody show up. We're gonna do, you know, PG Monday or whatever and everybody show up. We'll talk to get people fired up in the morning, feed them, you know, and then go crazy on the phones, talk about what went well, what didn't go well. I mean, that doesn't. Today, in today's environment, that doesn't help people that much. It might get them fired up, but by the end of the day, they ain't fired up. They're, they're, they're bummed out.

D (18:55)

I'll tell you a quick story on preparation that I, that I actually often refer to because I think it's PG is like, you ask, why don't people do it? Like one is the will part, but it's typically linked to skill. So then I say, then I thought a lot about how, how did I enjoy PG when I was a rep? And I remember it really well. I dreaded the AM sheets, you know, back in the day and, you know, P days and Hammersmith, et cetera, et cetera. But you know what? When you reflect and you take a step back and you think about what you did, it's actually quite amazing because I remember I was trying to figure out, how can I make pipeline generation actually fun? So the first question I ask people is, what is really pg? Where if you think about the actual planning and the actual execution of pg, what takes the most amount of time, and it's typically 90 to 95%, is the planning and preparation. So then I say, okay, if that is. Most of the time, no one tells you how to do the planning. So I've always had what I call the cappuccino moment. And people that work with me, they will know exactly what I mean. Because I remember when I was a rep, I used to have the cappuccino moment every Sunday. I told my wife, I need two hours on my own. On a Sunday, I went downstairs to Starbucks and I sat on the pavement and I was listening to music and watching the world go by. But actually what I was doing was account research in order to create a yu yu now so I could fire it off in a Sunday. And this is way beyond before automation happened. And I remember it because I was telling reps I don't care how you do the account research, and I think the call sheet is a great idea, but we try to dumb it down even more. You know, if you think about value pyramids and all these things that you're asking reps to do, we said to the reps, there's only like a couple of things you need to know in order to have effective PG preparation. Number one, you have to understand what the company does and the industry that they operate in. What are they selling and what's the kind of like climate of where they sell. Number two is how does this company actually make money? So if you follow the money and you can, you can solve those chains that are broken and how they, they make money or how you can help them, how they lose money, maybe bad customer experience, etc. That's step two and this. And then third step is what is the customer user experience? So we would look at reviews from what are the customers complaining about to try to find a hypothesis for pain. And if you're thinking about, if you're targeting a retailer and you understand, okay, they have an omnichannel strategy, stores, a little bit of online, et cetera, et cetera, step one, step two is how do they make money? Well, they typically make money through these campaigns. And we know that the cyclical moments of Valentine's Day, et cetera, are really important for them. And then when you look at step three, the customer user experience, people are always complaining that I put my goods in the basket and then when I was checking out, it reset everything. Now we know that something is broken and I have strong conviction that I should PG as high as I can into that account. And I think that is the thing that we try to teach our reps. At least as long as you have conviction, and you can only get conviction if you have knowledge, there is no reason why you shouldn't be very, very bullish when you cold call or you try to establish contact. And the second component is the role play piece. So we demanded the reps come prepared with those three, four steps. And when you role play it, we try to really make it real time. Where did you get my number? F off? Like, I never want to see you again. Because if you have conviction as a seller, it doesn't matter what they scream or shout. And we start to see a big improvement in how the reps were performing pg. And that was part one of the skill development that we put in place to, to kind of change that PG culture.

B (22:49)

Yeah, but it sounds like the skill development is Essent. It's all preparation. The more prepared you are, the more skillful you are, is really what you're saying, right?

D (22:58)

Exactly. Exactly.

C (22:59)

What I like about what we're talking about too, though, it's like, it's almost like humanizing the problem and humanizing like the individual. Because when you talk about conviction is you don't have conviction unless you have knowledge. I love what you just said because I always felt like as a leader, I had to look in the eyes of my people and make sure they understood what they do matters. Like, to really understand why does what you do matter. And people, I think, get conviction, they get passion because there's evidence, and evidence comes from the knowledge of the problem. And once you understand that, to unlock that knowledge of the problem, you have to ask some questions. You prepare, but you're emotionally ready and you're emotionally committed to getting close to the problem because you know that no matter what, even if the person tells me to, you know, go stick my head in the sand, go away, there's a high probability that that problem exists. And that gives me confidence and conviction. I feel like a lot of companies don't do the work to help their people get in that position. To know what they do matters. It's, it's, it's crucial.

D (24:24)

Yes. And, and one, one part on that, and maybe it's a. You know, we're probably going to talk about recruitment later on. And I think one of the hard things to do when you are kind of like, I'm talking to a lot of founders these days and they asked me, should I pg? PG is dead. Kind of like where we started the conversation today, John.

B (24:42)

Yeah.

D (24:43)

And I said, I don't, I don't think PG is dead. You just have to do it the right way. And the reason why, at least I think most leaders don't drive a good pipeline generation problem program is that it actually requires a hell of a lot, excuse my French. But it, it really requires so much from you as a leader. Every week you have to inspect them, you have to inspire them, you have to do these things and you're in the with them. Is that easy or hard? I think you guys said it really well. You summarize it really well. The playbook that you guys invented, you know, a couple of years ago is very easy to understand, but it's hard to live and execute by every day. And I think that is, that is what I, I see that, you know, people give up because it's hard, but it doesn't change overnight. Neither so you have to be consistent on up.

B (25:32)

Yeah.

C (25:33)

And you got to be willing to, like you just said, I call it getting in the pit.

D (25:37)

Yes.

C (25:38)

The, the, the. If, if you're not in the pit with the reps, meaning the bullpens wherever you are, and, or, you know, they can't see you doing it, they're going to see you make mistakes, they're going to see you have people tell you, hey, we're not interested, pack sand or whatever. Your job as the leader is to help people get unstuck. If you can't prove that you can help people get unstuck at that kind of moment of truth in that three foot conversation, then you can't coach and develop that, that aspect of the game, which is critical. And sometimes people aren't honest with themselves. Like, well, yeah, I did PG back in the day. I know how to do pg. And then they take on a new role and it's going to need this, you know, it's going to need this effort. And it's been a long time since they were in the pit. It, you have to be really, really honest with yourself about, you know, where you're at with that skill set, if that makes sense.

D (26:32)

And then not, not to mention, when you become a leader and you're supposed to build a team, I think there is a tendency that a lot of leaders rely too heavily on the HR department or an external headhunter. And, and I think I was listening to your previous podcast and I think the gentleman you had on said it really, really well. Why would you trust. If you're building the Olympic team, why would you solely trust someone else to build a team for you would like to, to kind of like handpick your players. And I think if you think about PG in that topic, I think the best reps and the best reps to become leaders that I've seen is they, they drive pipeline generation, whatever day you're constantly PGing for candidates. Because I remember, I remember really, really well. I don't know if you remember it, John, but the first time I met you was in Cyber Reason like an official. And I had an interview with you and I remember really well because I was pacing up and down the hallway. All this was on a Sunday, actually. And my wife looked at me and she said, you looked really nervous. You don't really seem this nervous. What's going on? You seem very agitated. And I told her, well, I have this interview this afternoon with the Godfather to tell you that, you know, his eyes are so blue, they stare into Your soul. His name is John McMahon and, and John, you get on the call and I was, I was, I don't know if you could tell, but I was really, really nervous. And, and I asked Andy, hey Andy, how should I prepare for this guy? He's like, just be yourself. Just, just have a chat. Okay, that's helpful. So we jump on the call and we chit chat a little bit around Denmark. You have some experience from Europe. And then, then you leaned into the camera and you asked me one question and I remembered really, really well. And you said, you asked me, hey Chris, how are you going to recruit people that are far better than you when you're going to build a team as a new, highly inexperienced leader? And you kind of like land back in your chair. And I remember the answer I gave you because it's something that I've used ever since and I was lucky. And I kind of said something that resonated, but I said something along the lines that when you are an unknown entity and you might not have the CV and the experience that these people that you're trying to hire have, your job is really to make them super successful. So recruiting as a team sport is step one. You have to include the CFO and the CEO and the mrc. The requirement that I was trying to influence in that process is to say to the candidates that I might not be here tomorrow, but you shouldn't only join this company just because I am here. I would strongly recommend you to vet, you know, the rest of the executive team and the C level in particular. Particular and in that process, hopefully show the strength of the rest of the team so that we recruit and we stand united. And it's a topic that I often hear from founders too. How am I, how am I supposed, you know, a small little company from Europe in our case, how are we supposed to recruit these a players that doesn't even consider joining a small little company like ours? And I think we had to go through that pain as well. I actually labeled that in the interview process and I said to them, look, there's probably two questions in your mind right now and I just wanted to start upfront with that. Number one is why would you join a small little company from Copenhagen that the world has never heard about? And number two, why on earth would you be excited about joining a company that does quality assurance and test automation? And they kind of like chuckled, but, but it's really important to label it because you know that those two objections will hit you down in the, in the recruitment process and I think the team sport of recruiting is really important but it also starts with you pipeline generating into these different individuals that you want to build your dream team around. And, and, and I think that is probably one thing that I see a lot of people are missing that they, they offshore it or outsource it to someone else to do that job.

C (30:40)

Yeah, I love that too.

B (30:42)

Go ahead Johnny.

C (30:44)

This, it's so deep because it's, it's totally related to pg. It's totally related to, related to a leader helping their leaders or helping their people. And I love what you just said. Like I want second line leaders to really think about this. And, and one, one of the greatest way to help a first line leader I used to say to people is that same question, why abc? Why us? Why us? When you're recruiting and they go wait, are you talking about a customer you're talking about? I said it's the same thing for me. So like you either believe what you do matters or you don't. And it's amazing what we used to do. We might have done it with you and Cedric back in the day. I just pop managers up during the day and I'd say hey you know you're, I'm a, I'm a recruit Y ABC company go. And people would step up and they're not audible ready. And I used to say to them if you don't believe, why should I? And that's that part of like outsourcing to recruiting or outsourcing to Ace R whatever. People are going to join an A player that's going to join a company or even think about joining a company is going to hear that emotional connection to what you do matters, matters. And it's just as important as when you're dealing with a customer is if you're dealing with a recruit. And I think I know we're going to get to that, we're going to talk about recruiting. But if you don't have that, if you don't, if you don't have that in your bones and if you don't believe it, why should anybody else? And I've never really had on the first try anybody really stand up and nail it. Which means we got work to do.

D (32:21)

Yeah. Yeah.

B (32:23)

Well a lot of times I've found that I'll ask the question what other companies are you looking at? And then they tell me SAP ServiceNow and Salesforce and I'm like, well why, why are you talking to me like yes, I'm not in the same zip code. I'M not in the same stratosphere as those guys. You know, it's a completely different sale, completely different everything compared to what you're gonna have to do in a startup.

D (32:49)

Startup.

B (32:50)

Right, so exactly. Hey, let's stay on the PG just for a little bit because we, we look like we're transitioning into like recruiting, which is a great subject. But what about some of the tools that you use in these days? Is anything you want to talk about there, Chris, as far as like AI agents or outreach, sales, love, you know, social tools that you're using? Is there anything that you've seen, you know, come around that, that you feel is pretty useful?

D (33:18)

Yeah, I think on the, you know, if you think about those four things we looked for how to make money, understand the company, etc, I think AI, there are many tools we just use chat, GPT and we basically said typically, you know, the research was like, hey, I'm going into this company here, what are some of the strategic initiatives, etc. Etc. And I would boil it down so that that's pretty easy and I think table stakes.

B (33:41)

There are tools that can help you build the value pyramid pretty quickly.

D (33:44)

Yes, exactly, exactly. So at least you understand the company. We use that, we use all of the.

B (33:50)

Just on that, just on that. It can also help you target the Persona that you're trying to get to because a lot of times those people might have talked on panels or gave speeches or wrote articles and chatgpt can go out and, you know, aggregate that information from you so you have a lot more insight into the Persona you're going to call.

D (34:09)

Exactly. I think just because it's related to PG and, and the tools, if you think about those five cylinders, talked about one of the ways that I found reps, when you enter a new technology space that you don't really know, in our case it was trip actions, it was travel. We, we didn't really know any of the buying Personas or we didn't really have a name in industry. But what we figured out then, and a little trick that we teach the reps, is how do you find the people that have the most amount of influence for the buying Personas that you're trying to PG into? So what we did in that case, and probably works in every other sector, is to look at what are the number one trade event that these people go to and who are the main core speakers. Okay, so now we know that everyone listens to these people, what they have to say. And the step two for us would be how do we get associated with these people. Again, how does this person make money while they typically sell books? And we did that a couple of times. When we know that the primary model for revenue is selling books for some thought leader, then we would PG in there and say, hey, we are going to have a sales kickoff, or we're going to have a QBR. I would like to purchase 100 of your books in return. I would love to. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And what we found then is that once you start to become really close to these people, you learn so much from these people about the industry. So when you talk about assimilating yourself into becoming experts, I use the analogy of, like, cheating. When you're. When you're walking in the street and you hear a house party, PG is kind of like the way that PG typically happens is that you knock on a random door. Hey, this is Chris. Can I come in? And they will. Who the heck are you? No, thank you. And they slam the door. But if you come to that house party with someone everyone knows, then by default, they have kind of, like, vetted for you and the door opens for you. And I look at PG the same way when I know that this highly influential person is now becoming one of my, you know. You know, someone that I'm building as a champion because I'm adding value to this person. That person can probably introduce me to some other people so that we have that situational swagger when we meet with a buying Persona, whether it's through PG or through a warm introduction.

C (36:29)

So I. I love that. You know, I think that's also another lost component here for most people. Like, you got to help your people. If you're a leader out there, you got to help your people make those conversations warm. And I love your analogy of go knock on the door where you hear music, or go knock on the door with somebody that when they open the door, they're going to recognize them. And it's amazing. The simple. Why would you know, when you pick up the phone, what makes something warm for you?

D (37:01)

Well.

C (37:01)

Well, they either know somebody. They're like, I'm calling because Christopher Vick suggested that I call. If that somebody called me, you're gonna. I'm gonna say, okay, I'm gonna have a conversation. Doesn't mean I'm gonna stay on the phone with you. But whether or not I'm gonna, you know, proceed, I'm probably gonna proceed, because that's just human nature. And, you know, other things about. Well, I know there's music played here, or I know there, you know, something about me or you know, something about it, us. I, I think that, that as part of that preparation and that like call sheet process or whatever you're doing, the cappuccino moment or whatever you're doing, how are you going to make it warm? It's, it's a fundamental principle and I.

D (37:46)

Also think another in lack of all of those things, you don't have any relationships, you don't have anyone that you can be associated with and you're starting there. So wrap on the ground and you're starting with hardcore pg. Picking up the phone, sending veto. At least my style is that I've always wanted to be a seller that had some kind of credibility. I think you guys coined the, you know, character competency and character, right? So when I PG'd into someone, as long as I had conviction, I wouldn't be afraid of picking up the phone because I know that whatever they say, I'm gonna help them. So what we had to do in, in, you know, in the previous company, when we looked at pg, as we started to mature and we started to really circle in on a much better ICP around ERP migrations and implementations, we knew that our ICP on a lifecycle was someone that has gone through one or two implementation in terms of one site. It could be a multi country, multi legal entity rollout. But we knew that there was guaranteed pain in the first or the second rollout, at least in our world. So when we picked up the phone and we replicated a lot of the same PEG effort in the first meeting and the second meeting and throughout the sales campaign as well, which is another reason why PEG should really be a part of it. Because you do the heavy lifting up front and if you do all the value pyramids and you understand the hypothesis for the case for change, it's so much easier to reuse the asset as you go through the sales motion. But what we found is that when we were on that very first call, I don't know if other reps or other people are struggling with this as well. Our reps was really struggling to ask discovery questions because it was the classic, well, who the hell are you? Just tell me what you do. And we were trying first to educate the reps on, well, open ended questions, bring Ted to the meeting, but it wasn't good enough. So what we did is that we actually looked at it and said, RPG program isn't really working like this, so how can we be more effective on pg? And we looked at what is it that we know. And what is that? What is the challenger piece of information that we can bring to the table that's going to show the prospect that we actually are, you know, we are actually professionals at solving this problem. So we pivoted slightly and said, you know, the reason why I'm calling you is that I understand that you've been going through one or two, you know, multi site, multi country rollouts. Microsoft has basically told us about the most strategic projects that they're rolling out and your company is on the list. And if you're anything like any of the other implementation that's going on now, you're probably struggling with X, Y and Z. This is how we do it and this is how we do it better, blah, blah, blah. Tell me if that's highly irrelevant for you guys to discuss right now. And then we just ask the reps to shut up. And by using a much more tailored challenger approach where you actually show a little bit of domain expertise, we start to book much more meetings. And I think that is repeatable into any company by basically having a hypothesis for why you're calling them where you truly, truly understand the pain that they're going through. Because once we came across that hurdle where they say, okay, fair enough, yeah, yeah, true, I acknowledge that. Then what we did in that first meeting is that we actually showed them a little bit of the work we're doing and we had a little bit more of a consultant approach to it and said, look, like today I'm going to show you a little bit around what we do. I'm mostly interested in understanding where you guys are and where you want to take it. But just as an example, we start to flash some of the assets where we showed some of the complexity and exactly the risk areas and how we were solving these bottlenecks for the companies. And we made it very clear that the reason why we're going to ask you some questions later is that we do this piece of work, this advisory we do for free in the initial phases. So it's really important for our team, we're a small team, that we're spending time where there is some challenges and some pain and where there is executive buy in to solve it as well. Because we knew that in the last two, three years it's been really hard to get to the economic buyer. So we were really constantly trying to figure out how do we get to the EB early solving a problem that the sea level has never really cared about and make it a sea level problem problem. And we only did that through trying to get to champions and EBs very early on. But we only did it because we earned the right through expertise in the very first or the second call.

B (42:25)

Absolutely love it. You basically, you know, differentiating yourself as a sales rep and letting them know that you're an expert, almost consultant. And you've seen this problem many times with other customers, and you're leading the witness by saying, you know, if you're anything like any of the other customers that we've had, here's three major issues that, you know, we see all the time. Have you ever experienced anything like that? That right there lets them know that you're different than anyone else that they've been speaking to. Love that.

C (42:59)

I like that, Johnny. It's like what you guys are talking about, how in these moments, moments, how you sell can be just as important as what you sell. So, like, they, you know, somebody picking up the phone, somebody reading something that you're sending them, how you are addressing them, how you are interacting with them can be just as important in the beginning stages as. As what you're. What you're trying to sell or what you're trying to interact with. I think that's really, really, really, really good for us.

B (43:30)

Now, Chris, let's transition a little bit. Whether that's on the phone or when you get in person, how do you simplify the opening in your pitch to personalize it to them, their company, their value? Is that part of what you were just touching on, or is there a little bit more once you start to pitch?

D (43:52)

Yeah, so this was on the PG part, Right. So we were on the phone, we said these things. Yeah, that's relevant. Let's go and meet. And we will always try to push for. For in person. I think there is a tendency that people want to do it in, you know, on a zoom call, which is probably fine for the first or second, but we would always try to find an opportunity to come on site, and we would. And the objection that you meet? Well, I tried to get on them, but they didn't want to meet because they're scattered all over the place. That's a typical thing you hear. Yes. And you guys know more than anyone that building champions and relationships, you have to meet people. And it's. It's all the little things by the coffee machine in the hal always. So we would say things like, it's probably much easier if I can whiteboard out. Exactly. You know, your current state and your desired state and some of the key requirements that other companies that have Solved this are looking for. Would it be impossible for us to meet on site? Doesn't need to be next week, but maybe the week after. When do you guys get together? But anyway, let's say that we managed to get on site and we would always prefer to come on site. We would regurgitate part of how we got into the meeting and we would actually use, you know, the three piece. What's the, what's the purpose of the call? Here are the things we're going to go through and here is what you're going to get out of it. Mr. And Mrs. Customer. And so we would start there but we would start with, you know, the reason why we're in the call just to get everyone on the same page. But we, but we always had this mindset of, of what is it really that we want to get out of the meeting. And I'm always surprised when you ask a sales rep or a leader, what is it that you're trying to get out of this meeting? Well, and sometimes it's not even thought about. So if you think about the process, who's the champion that you've identified that you really want to get to? Because you might not have a champion in the first meeting, might be a coach. So what's the purpose? What is the payoff for you? And we started to really make people very conscientious around. If you think about medpic from a simple perspective, perspective, who's the champion? What's the decision criteria we're going to try to influence here and what's, what's the next step? So we knew that in the closing of the meeting it was really important for us to have enough time to do, to do the summary. You guys taught us that many, many a time, at least 10, 15 minutes to summarize the meeting to talk about the next steps. But one of the things that we started to play around with with fairly good success was something that we picked up from a book called Flip the Script Script. You probably read the book how to pitch anything from Oren Clough. This is the second book and he talks about this really scary concept of creating an invisible fence which means that no one really likes to be told what to do. So as a rep, I remember when I was a rep, you try to come, okay, here's what I propose in terms of the engagement model. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And then the champion would basically say yeah, what ever. So we were trying to kind of like embrace it from a different angle. How do we get the prospect to embrace the content that we just gave, so they're willing to convert and they propose the next step. Meaning, hey, you can go and do whatever you want as long as you are within this invisible fence. And we found that in this very first meeting, if we are credible and we show them something that they are aware of and something that they aren't aware of to show them credibility and competency, we didn't even have to ask for the next step. So what we did, we flashed the asset. This is what other companies are doing. This is typically how we would work. And then we would just simply ask them, what do you guys propose from here? And if we did it the right way, meaning they felt that we could solve the problem. They would typically say, well, we probably need some other people on this. We already knew from our preparation that the champion was probably this and this Persona. So we would stare the witness slightly as well and say, well, if they say, well, I think we need to bring more people into it. Yeah. What about John and John, do you think this is highly irrelevant or will they touch the decision making at some point? Yeah, they will probably be a part of it. Okay. Do you think it's a bad idea to bring them in early on? Because what we found is that we've spent three, four months doing great discovery, everyone's on board, and then the CFO comes and said there is no budget. So I think the point I'm trying to make here for are for the audience is how can we get to the EB as fast as possible in a cell cycle? How do we get this on the radar for a coach or champion that that person needs to be a part of the process at some point. And because if you think about where most reps are struggling, it's always around, you know, you didn't have a champion, so you lost the deal or the deal is stalling and it was never winnable in the first place. We have done all of those mistakes as well. And we had to go through the pain. Even though we knew the theory, we had to go through the pain as well to identify why are our reps not winning and why are not converting from the different stages. And I think that is a, for me, that was a super intellectual, very stimulating exercise to do because it starts with PG Personas, icp, the partner channel into that very first meeting and the second meeting. So when you show the reps and they see that everything is connected and it starts from pg, that's when you start to get this motion that, you know what I start to see what you meant when you talk about PG is everything and it can change our lives, et cetera, et cetera.

B (49:24)

I love how you tied it all together.

C (49:27)

Because for me, these are not separate things. Like, like you just said, Chris, you put everything back together. It's like Johnny asked the question, how do you get the attention? How are you helping them, you know, get to the right people? How are you opening up conversations? And then, okay, then what? Let's say you get past that. Now you have to. You're in a process, and the customer has to feel like they're in that it's going somewhere with you, like we're going somewhere together. I always say, like, everybody loves to be led, provided you can take me to a place I can't get to on my own. The minute I think I can get to a place that you're trying to take me to on my own own, I'm going to peace out. I'm going to kind of move away from it. But you just brought two important things together. You brought message, you brought icp, PG icp. You brought messaging together, and now you brought sales and engagement and process together. Like, if you're listening to this as a company and you don't have all those things connected, then you're going to have just haphazard conversations and a bunch of deals that are different. You don't own what stages they're at because you don't have them defined. I thought that was really good, Chris. Well done.

B (50:45)

But he also talked about getting a champion, which is the number one mistake most reps make. They don't get a champion. They wind up with a coach and, you know, the deal fizzles out. Or they get a really small amount of money because the coach has some money and they give you some money to go away. And then it doesn't renew next year. It just turns out. But from pg, the way Chris has described it all the way through, that's what helps you get a champion in the first place. You've done all the prep work up front in the meetings. You show that you're different. You're not just any ordinary sales rep. You know about their business, you know about their pains. You have other customers that have done the same thing and you solve their problem. That's the way you start to attract the champion early in the sales process.

D (51:30)

Yes.

C (51:31)

And I think back around, because now you have a proof point and how you sold to them, what you sold to them becomes your testimonial. And that's the probably one of the stages of your pg, Chris, that you're trying to make it warm as you're saying, you know, these number of people that have used our product, it's a full. It's a full cycle.

D (51:52)

And one of the things I learned from for my, my, my counterpart, my cmo, Mike Annan, he's a super smart guy. Like, I would strongly recommend you guys interview Mike. He's most intellectual and cerebral guys I've ever met. He was very different than me. Right. I'm a sales guy running fast. Like, let's solve it and run fast and you know, 2,000 miles. He is more of a systems thinker. And what I've learned from Mike, and Mike, you're probably listening to this at some point, hopefully. But what I've learned from Mike was very relevant in what we're talking about now. Because when you're trying to sell the vision to the reps, whether it's joining your company or why they should change their skills and how they operate, they need to understand why. What I've learned is that when you think about how all of these things that you're trying to do as isolated actions, champion, champion building, you know, training PG or building the bva, whatever it might be, as, as you look at the funnel, it's all connected. And when you can show the reps how the systems are connected throughout the entire motion and how that's going to help their career. Many and I have done that mistake many times as well. That it's all very independent things that you're teaching them and you forget to kind of like see the big picture of how it's all connected. And when they see that, that's when it really becomes. Something clicks inside most people's heads. And they take more joy and pride in building a PG culture because it's not a matter of just building a PG culture. It's a matter of doing the hard thing that no one else is bothering doing. And in the process, hopefully you win more and you do bigger deals and then you ultimately change the trajectory that you're on.

B (53:36)

Really good. And when you. Let's transition a little into the recruiting piece. So now you're trying to recruit reps that you think are going to buy into everything that we've already spoken about. Are there particular traits or previous skills that you're looking for in that rep to make sure that they can join the team and buy into this process that you're talking about?

D (53:58)

About. Yeah, I think I want to take it actually a step higher up. You guys have taught me and many others many a time that you know, parts of it you can change and somewhere you're born with and some things you cannot change. And that's correct. Exactly. And I, I've always had this philosophy that, that I, how can I simplify things so that it's dummy proof, like, you know, how can everyone understand it? And I, and I have this saying that we started to instigate in our recruitment process. One strap line which was how someone does anything tells you how they do everything. And if you just think about that for a second, whether that's how they pipeline generate, how they build champions, how they, how they partner up with the rest of the go to market team, I would ask things like give me an example that exemplifies how you do things because let's face it, this is an audition. I am trying to sell you the dream that this is the best company on the planet and you're trying to tell me that you're the best salesperson on the planet. But then there is Monday and then we all have bad days. I'm trying to figure out what your baseline is as an individual and as a human being. So throughout the process I would ask my leadership team to say, you know, you know, how much did they prepare? It's a small little things. Did they take notes? Did they send you a summary? How well do they know the value proposition? Do they understand the market? Do they? Because if people didn't take the time to qualify that this opportunity is worth their time, how would you then trust that they will start to qualify once they have the job? So you can apply that one sentence to many things, but then if you kind of like look at the tangibles or the intangibles, I think the mistake that I have done, because I think that is also highly relevant is we talk about a players and we talked about the tangibles and the intangibles and drive is always up there. But what I found is that if you haven't really assessed the ICP and how much, how, how big deals and how much complexity can the territory actually cater for right now, where you are as a life cycle of the company. When we started we were doing very small deals, but we did the mistake of like, well, someone that has drive, someone that has intelligence, you know, ice, etc. Etc. They're going to be successful, but they actually left us because they couldn't do these big deals that they were used to doing. So having the, the, the right player in the right position at the right time lens on everything. Whether they were successful in the past as a players and everyone wants to recruit them. It might not be the right profile at the time. And I think that is something that's highly relevant. If you're first time CRO, you're hiring someone because the knee jerk reaction is to lean on the network that already knows the playbook really. But it isn't always the right person at the right time for where you are. Yeah.

B (56:58)

And you know, I think what you're referring to there is the skill set. Right. They might have all the right traits, but the skills required to do what you do at your company at this specific time and growth of your company, that jump from where their current skill set is may be too much and it doesn't matter how driven they are, it's just going to take them way too long to develop, you know, a higher level of skills in order to function, you know, at your level.

C (57:26)

And the flip side to that, Johnny, is this is where I think people, I've got tripped up for this before. It's not, sometimes it's not whether or not people can do this, like they have the skill set to do this, but what I'm asking them to do in the job they might not want to do. Like it doesn't give them energy, like I can do this, that, but it doesn't give me energy. And a lot of times that does not show up on an interview. We get, we don't get past the. Well, they can do this. They've done it, they have the capacity to do it, but they're not excited about it, they're not energized about it. So that's the flip side of what you just talked about, Johnny. And I'm glad we got this conversation because one of the things you said earlier, John and Chris, that I want to bring back is you gave a very specific John shout out to what you used to do with the partners. And that was a very mature thought process. Who else calls on this Persona? They don't compete against me. That, that's a very mature thought process. If I'm not really thinking about exactly what I'm going to ask these people to do do, I won't dig deep enough for the evidence. And if that's what it takes and we're hiring this person, you know, at a junior stage to bang the phones and they've never had that mature relationship with a partner before, I just think this conversation is so great because it gets down to what do we act, what are we actually asking them to do, can they do it and are they going to get energy from it? It's crucial.

B (59:01)

Yeah. And going back to what Chris said, like the, you know, because it, this is where people do fail. So let's say they have again, all the right character traits. They actually have knowledge. They can walk through medpick, they can walk through a sales process. They know how to build the cost justification and everything. That's the knowledge piece. But we've all seen in sports where there's a certain position player, they're highly skilled at that position and they have all the knowledge of the game.

C (59:32)

Game.

B (59:32)

You move them to another position, they'll fail immediately.

C (59:35)

Why?

B (59:36)

Not because of the knowledge of the game, not because they don't have the traits, they don't have the skill set to be in that position and they fail immediately. And that's no different in sales. We have to really look at our own, you know, profile for what skills does this job demand and where is the skill set of the person that we're interviewing feeling and what's the gap? And then like I've always said is I've usually asked people, when they tell me they want to hire somebody, what's the risk? Because the person is not a unicorn. They don't have everything on our profile. So what is the risk and how do we cover the risks? Do we have a training program, you know, do we have a manager that has that skill set that can help develop that? And if we can't cover the, the risks, especially if you're in a smaller company, you can't hire them. And to Chris's point, maybe they'll be better two years from now and they'll fit in our company because it's a different company and the different processes and we have more training and those types of things and they'll gain more skills. But right now it's just not a good fit. It doesn't mean that they're a bad person. They're just not a good fit for us right now.

D (60:50)

And I think what we've done and what I learned is if you take the time and Luca gave this advice, I remember Luca Lazaron is been on this show, is a fantastic, you know, super competent leader as well. I remember when we were infused together many years ago, he said, he said one thing that I lived by ever since, which was every time you jump on an interview, have the mindset that this is going to be the best interview you've ever had and you need to reflect first meeting excellence in front of this candidate too. So they feel it again. How you do anything tells you how you do everything. So if the candidate just in that very first meeting meets a highly prepared, has dug in and really are uber curious about the different steps. I understood you did these and these things, blah, blah, blah, that leaves a lasting impression on the candidate versus the other company. That's another maybe startup where the hiring manager literally just came off a call two minutes too late in and they start to grill the candidate. So if you think about this whole sell until they want to buy but come prepared, I think a lot of young leaders and you know, whatever, whoever is recruiting today, they take shortcuts and they don't prepare and they don't, they actually don't live by the values that they're trying to teach the reps downstream once they become a seller in that company.

B (62:09)

Well, to that point I've also seen it where when you do ask a leader, sell me on the opportunity, they actually cannot sell the opportunity. So they might be decent interviewers, viewers.

D (62:22)

Yes.

B (62:22)

But they're horrible at selling the opportunity.

C (62:26)

Horrible. And they come to the table, Johnny, without that 50. Like as Chris is saying, it's, it's 50. 50 man. Like 50 of it. I'm vetting you and 50% of it, Mr. Mrs. Candidate. I expect you to be vetting me and us.

B (62:41)

So actually it might be a little like, you know, just, it's a little bit of a nuance, Johnny, but I think as you go from the first line leader up the ranks, that percentage can change, you know.

C (62:52)

Yeah.

B (62:54)

Because that first line leader to Chris's point, that rep has to buy into that leader. They're buying the product, they're buying the company and they're buying the first line manager. That's the person that's going to steer their career. So they're buying that person. That person has to do a lot of selling not only on the product and the company, but on themselves. So that percentage can change. It may not even be 50, 50.

C (63:17)

In the first really good Johnny statistic out there that says, you know, people don't leave companies, they leave people.

B (63:24)

Yeah, absolutely. That's a good one.

D (63:27)

Yeah. I mean one, one of the things that I found that maybe could be helpful for others too was, and it's something that we started to do recently, which is I had to go through a lot of pain and introspection on, you know, you know, when you become a leader and you try to mold the people that you work with and. But you don't do it with Authenticity and all I've done all of the mistakes. So I'm probably like the best example of someone that's failed a lot there. But failure is good if you learn something from it. And one of the things that I learned through this process is I had a coach at one point and she asked me on the very first call, she asked me, what are your values? And I had never sat down and actually defined my values. And I said, why do you ask the question? She said, if you don't understand your own values is very hard for people to read and understand you if you can't articulate it. So one of the things that I've started doing that's been super helpful is that I actually start the process with, I would like to tell you about my own values that I stand for. Because if you understand the values, you will understand what it's like to work with me, to get together with any good days and the bad days. And I have two values in particular. I think sometimes they go a little, what does that mean? But one of them is excellence and the other is safe and sound. Sound. And when people ask me what does safe and sound mean, I said, it's very important for me to know that I know exactly where you stand in relationship to me and vice versa and the same up the chain of command as well. Because then we can call it what it is and we can move on. So if you came to a meeting and you didn't prepare well, and because of lack of preparation the meeting didn't go that well, then then let's talk about it. But at least you know where, where you stand in relationship to me and that safe and sound value you will always have. Excellence is pretty self explanatory that I never expect our people to be perfect or excellent, but we just have to strive to pursue excellence at everything we do. How you do everything tells you how they do everything and really force myself to live by that as well. Because when I look at myself in the mirror as a leader and you're trying to do so many things at the same time, and you have to be strategic, you have to be tactical, you have retention, you have to recruit and you have to forecast accurately. Again, it's been a, it's been super valuable for me when you go through some pain that at least I know what my own values are and I know I can sleep at night because I know I didn't violate my own values. And when I asked the rep, what are your values, then hopefully I think it serves them with, okay, this is a person that. That knows who he is and who he isn't. And typically, people haven't done the exercise of value def. But I typically ask them, what is two or three values that I will be surprised about? And how does that show up in work on a bad Monday? And it's amazing what you learn from people and. And you can go to such a depth in truly understanding where they come from and how the past has shaped them so that you can kind of like see what's coming in the future. And I think as a hiring manager, getting that emotional connection with your buyer, so to speak, or the recruit early in the process is a unique differentiator versus all the other competitors that's just trying to fill seats and get people to join the bus.

B (66:48)

Really powerful. Chris killed it. Love it.

D (66:51)

I don't know. It's a lot of pain. A lot of pain. Yeah, a lot of pain.

B (66:55)

And one of the things you talked about, excellence, it reminds me of this Vince Lombardi. He was a famous football coach in the United States. He said.

C (67:03)

Said what?

B (67:03)

What we're doing is we're chasing perfection. And if we chase perfection hard enough, we might just catch excellence. I thought that was pretty cool quote.

D (67:14)

Yeah, that's a really nice one.

B (67:15)

Well, Chris, Vic, man, we could have. Johnny, we could have Chris on for an. A couple hours.

C (67:21)

Great.

B (67:22)

It was a great discussion.

C (67:24)

You're. You're a beast. Well done.

D (67:27)

Well, it's a pleasure to be here, guys, and thank you so much for hosting me. I was actually not sure if I was going to join or not, because I. I am. I felt very humbled to be asked by this, but hopefully my. My lessons learned and failures can serve can help someone else not do the same mistake. So I really appreciate it.

B (67:43)

Have to have you back on because there's a number of things we wanted to speak about, but we didn't have the time. So thanks, thanks again and, you know, hopefully we can have you back on if you're. If you're up for it.

D (67:55)

Anytime, guys. Thank you so much. Have a good day.

B (67:58)

Thank you, Chris, Vic. Thank you, Johnny Kaplan, and thanks to everyone for listening to another episode of Revenue Builders podcast.

A (68:07)

Thanks for listening to today's episode. Be sure to check us out@force management.com.