Transcript
John McMahon (0:00)
Foreign.
Podcast Host (0:05)
Welcome to the Revenue Builders podcast with John McMahon and John Kaplan. This podcast is brought to you by Force Management Forces Solutions help companies meet the revenue goals that drive funding, higher valuations and stockholder value. Today, a segment from our episode with Eric Erstin, longtime sales leader, currently the CRO of regscale. Here they talk about what top performers do.
Eric Erstin (0:29)
Yeah, so top performers are always focused. And that sounds so obvious, but lots of sales teams aren't focused. Focused on what they sell, focused on what their weekly metrics are supposed to be, their monthly metrics, quarterly metrics, and really focus just around what does success look like. So many teams get out there and we use that term unconsciously competent. So so many teams are really unconsciously competent. And when you find the, the one team. I remember acquiring a company back at RSA and you know, many of these guys because both of you gents have mentored many of these sellers. But boy, they were laser focused. They had their metrics, they had their process, they knew what good looked like and they knew where they, where to spend their time and where not to spend their time. And when you come from an organization that perhaps isn't that focused and then suddenly you, you look at one that is, it's a stark contrast.
John Kaplan (1:29)
Yeah. Talk a little bit about what really hit me in all the things you said, a number of them. But the one that really hit me the hardest was knowing where to spend your time and where not to spend your time. I know that goes to focus, but talk a little bit about some of the things that the productive teams spend their time on versus not spending their time on.
Eric Erstin (1:50)
Well, this is where I think that the old measure twice cut once approach to sales management is really important because in order to know how to qualify out, we've got to know what success is and what makes our deployments and our sales processes work really, really well. And there's some obvious ones that work in any sales cycle. We got to get to budget and we've got to understand time frame and pain and all of that stuff. But there are nuances. You know, the ends and the nuances really, really matter. So I think that, you know, as we look at qualifying out, we got to understand a lot more about the ideal company profile and then the ideal contact themselves. So the human and the Persona profile. And that's something that in my earlier years I think I just took for granted back to that unconscious competence thing. And I didn't really spend nearly enough time thinking about the role of the human. I thought, oh, if you get to an exec. I've been in cyber a long time, so if you get to the ciso, you're good. Well, maybe. And that's a pretty safe bet. It's. If you're going to bet on one Persona, that's a good one, but you sell insecurity. But there are a lot of different scopes of ciso. Sometimes the CISO doesn't own what you're selling. We sell a platform today that CISO sometimes owns but generally doesn't own exclusively. So they may not be able to ubiquitously just make a decision. They're often just a key stakeholder in a platform and they may not own the whole thing. So that level of understanding of the role of the Persona and how they fit into the company because different industries, it works differently as well. I don't think I appreciated that fully for many years.