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Transcript8 lines
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Foreign.
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Welcome to the Revenue Builders podcast with John McMahon and John Kaplan. This podcast is brought to you by the team at Force Management. Forces Solutions help companies meet the revenue goals that drive funding and higher valuations. Today, a segment from our conversation with Frederic Maris, a CRO at ATAS Software. Here they talk about interviewing and assessing eq.
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Yeah, let's talk a little bit about recruiting. So when you're trying to scale an enterprise sales team, you know, what qualities are you looking for when you're hiring some or to try to hire top performing reps? Frederick, are there any certain qualities or questions you're asking during an interview to uncover some key qualities that you want in these people?
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Yeah, like I said, I mean I did. This is something I learned from Jeremy and it's not going to be a surprise, but the ICE criteria, intelligence, character, coachability, experience. And even during an interview you can start, you can check how somebody scores against quite a few of those where like one of the most basic things for somebody to come to an interview is they need to understand what I'm looking for. And if they don't ask those questions, then how in the hell are they going to go to a customer to understand what their issues are and what their criteria are if they're actually looking for something? Because in this case it's very clear I'm looking for people. Right. I'm buying. I mean, it's not a question. If there's a latent need or anything like that, I'm buying. Right, that's, that's clear. The question is, am I going to buy them or somebody else? Right. You need to understand how they're being compared. And going back to, for instance, I think it's one of the great books, Spin selling. I mean, I'm using your book to train my team now, but Spin selling written what, 30 something years ago? Almost 40 years ago, I think. 30 years ago, buddy. Yeah, 40 years ago. 1985. Scary. There's four stages in every successful sales meeting. The first one is your preliminaries. You want to build a bit of warmth because that's where you, let's say you set the agenda and you check how much time somebody has and can we do this? And you earn the right to ask questions. In the second one, you want to ask those questions. You want to understand the situation problem, you don't want to ask too much about, but you want to understand what the implications are on the need payoff if you get it right, what it would mean for them. So that in the third, which is where they need to understand my criteria. And in the third, that's where you prove your value. So there they explain why they're actually a really good fit towards those criteria or potentially, which is good too. If my criteria are way out and they're not interested in those criteria, then at least they can disqualify that very quickly. Because for them to join a wrong company is not good either. It's only going to cause them pain and a lost waste of time and everything. Those things are incredibly important from an intelligence perspective. It's clock speed on one side, but it's also the ability to eq, the ability to build champions to get people to do things for you. And that's valid for customers because you need to build champions there. But it's also valid internally because if legal puts you on the bottom of the pile, then you know you're going to struggle closing your deal on time. From a, from a character perspective, um, I'm always looking for people that want to find a way to get things done, that want to win and that are not going to give up. I'm looking for people that they have to be very competitive, but they have to be team players as well. I'm just not interested in the people that don't give a about anybody except for themselves. I look at people glass half full versus half empty positive mindset and there's a whole science behind that, what that brings Happiness Advantage is a. Is a really interesting book that, that basically describes that science. I'm looking for the self awareness, for the accountability, for curiosity because that's super important. And then I'm looking for honesty, integrity and the people that do what's right for the customer, for the partner, for the company. And I always say it's a bit naive but you know, I think we should also do something that's good for the world. We're not here to only drive in a nice car, to live in a fancy house. I think we've got a responsibility towards, you know, our children or whoever comes after us to try to leave this place in a better way than we found it. And then your, your coachability because you're probably going to be changing things and you're going to be implementing new things. So for people to be open to those things. But then at the same time the experience is important because they have to have a minimum level of, you know, whether it's sales experience or prospecting experience or fast growth experience or, you know, SaaS or whatever it is that you're doing or Customer base. If you're putting somebody on one big account, there's a limited amount of experience that you need to, to, to have with people for them to be able to become successful. And, and then I, probably, because I was always young and did quite well without the experience these days, it's a different story. But you know, I, I, I usually take people that are very high intelligence, character and then coachability as well over the, over the experience because those people are going to grow quickly. Experience is only a matter of, could be days, could be weeks, could be months. All the other stuff, and especially the first two you have or you don't have.
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C
Yeah, those are really good things. Competitive team player, positive mindset, self awareness. Curious. How do you test for eq? How do you probe for someone's eq? How do you do that? I think you ask a certain observations you're making.
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It's definitely has to do with observations and it's, it's, it's like how does that person behave in the meeting? I mean, some people are just, they're cold, they're, you know, you just, it's difficult to, to have a conversation with people. It's just, they don't, that's something you can feel pretty clearly. And I think I've learned to feel a lot of things as well. Because, yes, you want to be able to look at the numbers and write something down, but I think that triangulation with gut feel is super important as well because we are still human beings, right? So if, if somebody come in and quickly bond, whether it's with your secretary or pa, that's bringing the people into the room or yourself or maybe somebody else they speak to somewhere else, those are things that are, that they're important. And then the other part, which is incredibly important as well, because even though you might have gotten quite good at interviewing, you're still, you know, you're dealing with salespeople, right? You're dealing with people that they're, they're there to present themselves and they're not, they're not stupid, they're not idiots. None of them is. So you checking references and not the reference that they give to you because they'd be incredibly stupid if they give you a bad reference. But checking with people that you know, that know them or somehow, you know, you trust to really tell you how they are and, and what the good things are and what the bad things are, because everybody has those things, right? That's just incredibly important.
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So sometimes what I like to ask is, especially for salespeople especially for self awareness. How do you think you're doing in this interview? I love that question because they now have to give me how they perceive that they're doing and what they perceive, you know, my reactions to their answers and, and their questions are. And it tells me a lot about how they feel that situation's going. Because at the end of the day, that's what we do as salespeople. Sure, there's a science behind it and the questions we're going to ask and how prepared we are, but when you're sitting in front of a customer, don't you always ask yourself, I do. Like I wonder how I'm doing right now. And it's great to get to understand how they perceive that situation. And I'm not saying that there's a right answer or a wrong answer, but the way in which they lay it out to me about how they think they're doing and how, how they think I'm reacting to it really is an amazing. It's an amazing question and response.
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And that is a great question. Test it out yourself. Be sure to catch the whole episode with Frederic. It's linked in the show notes. Make it a great week.