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Revenue Builders
The Leadership Capacity Issue That Slows Growth
00:11:05
Today’s minisode features Carlos Delatorre as he shares two hard-earned leadership lessons that every sales leader scaling an organization needs to hear.
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- [00:10]
A
Welcome to the Revenue Builders podcast with John McMahon and John Kaplan. In today's short episode, Carlos De la Torre shares two hard earned leadership lessons that every sales leader scaling an organization needs to hear. He reflects on an early moment in his career when he learned the difference between being a top performing rep and becoming a true manager, and why doing the work for your team might feel helpful in the moment, but ultimately, break scale. If you're a manager trying to transition into leadership or a CRO navigating rapid growth and wondering whether your leadership bench is ready to scale, this clip's for you. Let's dive in.
- [00:51]
B
What are some of the top lessons that you think you've, you've learned along the way?
- [00:55]
C
Maybe two come to mind. One, my early part of my manager career and then, and then another one later. So my first time as a, as a manager was at, was at Parametric Technology. And my boss was, was this guy John True, who, you know, and I was very impressed with John True. I was, I was, frankly, I was, I was intimidated by him. He's so smart and he was just, he was just one of those guys that was always thinking 10 moves ahead of everybody else. So, and he wasn't particularly effusive, so I didn't really know if he thought I was doing a good job or not a good job. And so he'd been my manager for about 90 days and he pulls me into his office one day and he says, Carlos, you interested to know how I think you're doing? And like, my knees are probably shaking under the table. I said, yes, yes, John, I am. And he gets up to the whiteboard and he grabs a marker and, and he draws a star on the mark on the whiteboard. I thought, oh, this is good, this is good. He says, yeah, look, you start the week in Dallas and then you go to Lubbock and then you go to El Paso and then you go to somewhere else and somewhere else. And, and, and so the reason you're doing that is because you're doing all the meetings for the rep, you're doing the job. And I didn't pay you to come in and be a rep. I'm paying you to be a manager. So you either become a manager or I'll make you a rep. Any questions? No, John, no questions. It was a five minute meeting and I remember it well. And it was such a good, such a good lesson. And it was, I think it's a, it's a mistake that a lot of first time managers make, which is they're good at doing the job of the rep and so they just go in and, and do it over and over and over and I was running myself ragged and the reps were just basically, you know, letting me do their job for them. And, and of course it doesn't scale. So that was an important lesson that as a manager your job is to make the sales reps self sufficient. And so if there's a problem in a deal, even if it takes twice as long or the problem gets solved half as well, you're better off solving it through the reps so that you build that skill and build that muscle. And that was, that was the lesson that John was trying to teach me and it was a really good one.
- [03:25]
B
Yeah, you see that a lot where just get promoted think they have to like prove themselves. So they have to prove themselves to the team that they're super sales reps and that's why they got promoted when in reality like you said, when they back up and they get separate themselves from their ego and their insecurities, they can understand that the only way I'm gonna get anywhere is if I could make my team really, really well at what I, I've learned to do. So yeah, great.
- [03:54]
C
Really good point, John. If I'm honest that that was going on too. Scott Armstrong had done a fantastic job with this region or this district before me and he got promoted and like several of the reps had done a lot more revenue than I had done as a rep. And and so I absolutely wanted to prove myself and I was probably a little bit insecure.
- [04:17]
B
Yeah, well, yeah, that's. But I think it's really normal. I don't know that that's just Carlos Delatori coming up through the ranks. I think that's, that's what happens to lots of people. Right. And because no one's truly sat them down like John true did such that why are you really a leader? What are you really supposed to be doing? And it's really about developing your people. Right. So any other lessons that come to mind?
- [04:43]
C
Yeah. You know, later, later in my career and you'll, you know, you'll, you might remember this and I think you probably do is at Mongo db So the business was doing really well and the team was growing. Everything was up and to the right from an outsider's perspective. But the reality is I had hired a lot of great first line managers and some great second line managers. I had not hired really senior leaders who were capable of scaling and it was, it was, it was okay at that moment. But based on the way the team was growing, six, nine months later, it was going to be a problem. I was going to not have the leadership capacity, the senior leadership capacity that I needed in place. And, and I let that, and I let that get, get ahead of me because, you know, for a senior, for a really strong senior leader, it could easily take six months them, and another three months to ramp them. And so if I need that person six or nine months from now and I'm not recruiting and I don't have a pipeline, I'm already very, very late. And so that was, that was a problem that, that I got into it and it, and it, it caused us to be. There was one year at MongoDB where by Q4 we were, we were probably 10 heads behind plan, maybe 12 AES behind plan. And it was one of those Q4s where we had a few big deals and we did all kinds of heroics and just like everybody was working like dogs and we, we did some of these big deals and we just made the number. And the reality is it should have been a celebration. We should have done 120% of the number and we needed these heroics to just get over the finish line. And, and that was because I was late on the leadership six months. Six months prior.
- [06:40]
B
Right. So let's dive into that a little bit because you see that problem a lot too. So what, what you're really referring to here, if I can make an assumption, is that there's different. As a company starts to scale, some people can actually, as leaders can actually adapt to the new environment and what they, what demands the scaling puts on them and their teams and others can't. And in, in a lot of cases it's only, it's a minority that actually can make those moves consistently year after year as a company scaling 100% a year. And what you saw was, ah, you know, maybe I waited too long to start to, you know, go outside and look for new leaders because I can already see that some of the leaders that I have aren't making the jump. They're not meeting the demands, you know, that this new business environment is putting on them. With respect to scaling, is that, is that what you're referring to?
- [07:39]
C
Yeah, yeah. The only thing, yeah, 100. The only thing I would add to that is I think a lot of people develop in spurts or they develop at an irregular pace. And so sometimes people just need to sit in a role for a while to mature, to connect the dots. And then other times you can See somebody getting promoted like once a year. It's happened in my own career career. You know, there have been periods four or five years where I got promoted. Like at ptc, I was getting promoted once a year and I kind of did okay. And then there were other times where I just needed to really be in a role for two or three years for the lessons for the skills required for that role to really sink in. And so, yeah, when the organization is growing really fast, it's unlikely that people are just going to be able to keep stepping up into the next role. And, and so that, that's what I missed at MongoDB at that period.
- [08:33]
B
Yeah, but you know, that's where you also need to, to put pressure on your leaders to understand where their leaders are. Like if you're a third line person or fourth line, you know, what are your third line and second line people doing with the first line and the second line? What are they doing to develop those people? Because like you said, that's part of making the judgment call on, on people is that some people learn and adapt at different levels than, and speeds than other people do. So as a leader, you can't just say, oh, this guy's never gonna or girl's never gonna make the jump. The reality is maybe they will make the jump and maybe they'll even be more successful than people that have already made the jump. It's just that it takes them a little bit longer to make that jump. That's right. And the thing that I found that I've always had to look for is I had to see some sort of tangible change in their behaviors, in their leadership, to know that eventually they're going to get there. If I can't consistently see these little changes, measurable changes, then I really am thinking I don't know if they're ever going to make it.
- [09:38]
C
Yeah. You know, another thing that related to this that was, that was a challenge for me at MongoDB is that was the first time that I was, I was in the head of sales role scaling a large org. And so I didn't have perspective for how complicated things were about to get. And so there were phenomenal leaders and I had seen those leaders like deliver some, some of them had, you know, I'd worked with in the past and I had seen where, hey, every challenge they've ever faced, they rose to the challenge. And I didn't have the perspective for how much more complicated things were going to get and how quickly. I think at trip actions I had the benefit of having scaled MongoDB. And so I, I had a better, I had a better sense for whether people were going to be able to take that next step or whether they needed to to sit tight in in their current role for a little while.
- [10:36]
B
Yeah.
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A
Thanks for listening to today's episode. If you enjoy the content, please subscribe, rate and review the show to help us reach more people. This show is brought to you by Force Management, where we help companies improve sales performance, executing the growth strategy at the point of sale. Check out forcemanagement.com for more information.