94: Scott Crawford - Coaching and Scaling

good afternoon everybody this is john barrels make it happen mondays hopefully all doing well had a good time over the weekend got to relax a bit and recharged for the week i'm very excited to introduce my guest today scott crawford scott why don't you introduce yourself and tell everybody where you're coming from maybe get a little background of how we know each other here absolutely thank you john great to be here i appreciate it and we got to know each other through a gentleman by the name of jeff hoffman i'll get to that in a second so my background is the last four years i've been doing consulting and that's gone everything from sales strategy down to the nitty-gritty operations and how do you execute on the email john barrow style and before that i've been working in uh technology sales for 25 years i've done it here in the u.s i've done it in asia i've done it in europe um started out selling what are now old and dusty ibm mainframes the latest uh pass and sats platforms so i pretty much have seen the evolution of technologies and with that all the different iterations of um of sales models um and with that all the different techniques to to train i remember when i started out my first sales job in ibm i had the big floppy discs i put in and they had these role plays that you would do by yourself in the formal it certainly evolved uh over the years to a much more collaborative uh type of approaches and there's a specific case that i'll get to where uh your approach in specific was of particular um use and very valuable love it that that particular one um just finished up worked with them for well over a year and we can we can do a deep dive on on that and how it applies to ramping a team and leveraging an enablement to get them to that point of productivity yeah so let's talk about that because i think i think that you know one of the things i've always done you know i don't know whether it's because growing up in boston or whatever but you know east coast west coast stuff you know startups and all that stuff on the west coast and you know i i still to this day cringe about how much money is being dumped into some of these startups who are in these evaluations and of all this other stuff and so a lot of times you know a lot of these tech companies that i work with they they're they're shitting money you know what i mean they're literally like yep we just got a hundred million in funding how do we spend it type of scenario so they got no problems investing in all these whatever which is a whole different story right but but what i i've always been focused on is is is is doing way more with way less right like how can i do basically because there's so much information out there right now that if you just gave a shit and if you just spent some time you could actually put together something for free i mean i always use the analogy that you could literally today go get a harvard education for free a hundred percent you could get educated on the exact same things that that people spend fifty thousand dollars a year on or more or whatever there's charging these days you could get it for free now you're not going to get the degree but you could get the same exact education if you took a couple of minutes to actually sit down and and go through the content so with that with the the kind of the umbrella conversation today is say you are a company that's growing like a weed right now but you don't have funding maybe you're self-funded you know you don't have resources how do you scale higher scale and on board sales reps specifically um and the do's and don'ts of that approach so can you kind of give us you know your thought process around when you come in you consulted with a bunch of companies you've worked with a bunch of companies when you come into a scenario you you you're on a rocket ship right now how do you build while people riding that rocket ship without wasting a shitload of time money and energy uh along the way yeah great question and in fact this company um was i'll just say i can't tell you what where they were in terms of ar but let's just say they're well into the eight figures of ar and growing at a decent clip before really investing much in sales and marketing great product market fit and it was the best rocket fuel that you could find but they eventually got to a point where they needed to put in the infrastructure for marketing infrastructure for sales and while they have the resources of terms of being a profitable company and having the uh the money resources very very short on all the other constraints and in this particular case if you take i'm going to go from five reps to 25 reps in a matter of two months and i'm going to go from one inbound sdr to five outbound or five in the five inbound sdrs eight outbound bdrs in that same period of time you're going to have all of the same challenges that you would have in the u.s this particular company had that team in mumbai so here i am wearing a vp of sales hat in san francisco and being able to spend maybe one third of my time in mumbai and then we'll get into these challenges but typically when you're doing sales enablement of any flavor it's relatively easy to put that skill into place and get a certification done the magic happens when you leave and if you leave on an emirates flight that takes you as you know you did shumai with fresh works recently just getting there and back kills a lot of time but then that gap in between you come back it'll look like nothing ever happened unless you put something in place to uh to make it happen and so i learned really actually i should say i relearned some really good lessons about what happens in really good enablement but more importantly how do you make it stick and how do you make it stick in this case when they're half a world away and then with all that hiring they didn't we didn't think in advance of putting in an effective management layer and as you well know it ultimately comes down the first line manager job to make that enablement happen every single day and then ultimately see the results of why you made that investment so i'll back up a little bit i met jeff uh last time i had a real job as a vp of sales and jeff came through one of his um seminars in san francisco one of the public ones where he's got 30 40 people in the room and he does his magic and i was a bit skeptical but it looked like it was on point to help my team really focus on how to do prospecting and so wrote him and said hey i'm going to send 13 people in here you mind if i sit in the back and just observe and make sure my team's sitting up front asking questions raising their hand at least getting that first part done and it was great it i fell in love with jeff's approaches and subsequently i had him i think at every qbr and sales kickoff after that and after i left they continued to leverage jeff so fast forward to this company i'm looking at the same challenge and i'm thinking you know i can do this type of enablement by myself i know how to teach them how to do an email and i did um i knew how to teach them how to make the phone call and i did um part of the problem was the consistency of hearing that message and i think i shared this story with you before the other part was i was doing so much enablement across the board i mean the sales book that i had to build and train with everything from the overall market to the product down to how to use sales force to the sound skills that whole thing so it was a huge load and so i needed every little bit of help i could along the way to not only do more effective coaching on specific areas but to reinforce it time and again so i wrote to jeff and i said hey do you do anything like come to india or do you have any kind of online and he said no i don't but i know this guy john um and i again i was skeptical i was like okay you know this guy john but is does he do what you do and it turns out you guys are twins and uh i'll get to the yeah i'll just i'll give you the punchline now the online training was just fantastic um but but one of the keys was um this happened with jeff um uh at uh one of my other clients before i got to this one we were doing uh i was doing email training and i would teach them here the three sections of the email here's your sales trigger make it relevant to them and then make it relevant to your company and here's the who do i talk to how do i get on your calendar and i did that over and over and i would go and say hey you're not using this we finally had jeff come through san francisco and i just sent them to this and all of a sudden i was in a one-on-one with this one rep the manager and she's like i'm using this new sales uh this new email technique it's working great and i said i taught that to you two months and go i'm saying no i don't think you did pulled up my uh my lunch and learn it's like here it is right here it's just like well it just sounded better when jeff said just having a different voice say the same thing goes a long way and so that was one of the elements of being able to leverage um not just the expertise but somebody you have the passion that you have somebody that does it over and over and over again and somebody that isn't the same screeching voice to say do an email this way do your sales force this way do your other components every single day yeah it's like being a parent right it's like you can tell your kids until you're blue in the face and then all of a sudden their friend or their friend's mother says something and they're like oh yeah that sounds like a great idea and you're like what the whatever just as long as you get it i don't really give a shit right so exactly you have all the credit in the world yeah so yeah just a lot of built-in constraints that you would normally have going at that breakneck speed and getting folks up to a productive uh level of selling and um and then the other part i mentioned was just having brand new managers and it wasn't that they were new to the role it was the first time they ever managed so i'm mentoring them also on the basics the abcs of how to be a good sales manager ultimately a sales leader and then coaching them on on how to put things in place and um you know as well as anybody we'll go back to the point of okay we did the barrows training and i was amazed by the way how many times i i had to go back and tell them to hey this is on your calendar get it done one difference between having you and or somebody like jeff show up it's easy to get the button to see participate with the online training i think it's almost too convenient yeah it's sitting there for a three-day period and it's like hey guys you're on hour number 70 and you've got two hours left let's get it done and you have to light that fire so i had to go through those kind of motions with some of the reps but the good thing is you have a platform and other platforms work like this in sales enablement where you've got the stats you've got the metrics and ultimately you can collaborate around that as well so there's a lot of benefits that that override that uh that convenience factor really could sit on it and um but back to the managers uh getting them to coach and some of the techniques that we use that were really well which is very good basic blocking and tackling that you should do anyways i had them do a daily stand-up as a team so i had three different managers three different teams of sales one inbound team one outbound team and at the end of every day maybe get together and just talk about what's working well what isn't and i made sure part of that was okay you just had this uh training on how to write an email let's talk about how that's working how many did you get out let's pull up a couple of examples what's working what's not and that probably more than anything really helped drive home and emphasize the need to do it because it was um it was difficult to get it to stick and it wasn't anything particular about this team it really didn't have anything to do with lumbi this is just the classic you need to be consistent set expectations and hold people accountable and there's no magic to it you just have to sit down and some people call it micromanaging i call it coaching and it's part if you take it to heart it's actually a fun part of the job and where you really see the fun come out is when i left um this engagement um i don't want to over exaggerate but i'd say probably half of the reps put time on my calendar for about five minutes simply to thank me for taking the time to to to be that jerk at times you know to really push them and say no you got to get this done get this done and then they started to ultimately see the results i'll take a breath there to see if you have a lot um how how do you because i think everybody inherently understands that the number one thing you can do as a manager is coach right like the number one thing to increase both short-term and long-term results is coaching okay but it's still the least it's it's still the smallest portion of any manager's time that they spend doing most managers spend you know our deal chasers right they they hop in on deals they try to close deals because ultimately that's what they know how to do right they were nine times out of ten you know the sad state of affairs of where we are right now is that sales we get limited education there's very few universities that teach sales so we get out it's the default profession but there's a lot of training around how to do sales and techniques and whatever it is great but then that sales rep excels and usually they you know the ones that excel excel because they have that kind of i don't say it factor but there's something a little bit different about their view and how they approach things right and a lot of it has to do with work ethic and and and and relatability and those type of things like those are the ones that really excel so what happens there is most companies look at those managers or those those uh reps that are excelling and they say okay great now you're going to become a manager now go teach everybody how to do what you do and the challenge there and you know the whole diagram of like you start when you start with something you're unconsciously incompetent and then you move to consciously incompetent and consciously no yeah no unconsciously incompetent consciously incompetent conscious consciously competent and then unconsciously competent right so the unconsciously competent those are the ones that are just like the natural born sales professionals and a lot of people promote those people to be managers now those i find tend to be the worst managers because they can't tell you how they did what they did they just are what they are and for them to replicate that it's it's really hard to do i want the manager that's consciously competent the one who knows exactly they might not be the a plus sales rep but they were maybe the a minus b plus sales rep but they could articulate their process their structure how they did what they did and they know their metrics and their numbers right but the problem is is that rarely happens you really get the a rep that becomes the manager and now you're told go manage and so they go to do what they do which is they coach towards deals they jump on deals they save the deal that type of stuff how do you almost how do you force coaching right and and i think there's a whole discussion about the numbers that we're pushing people towards monthly quotas and all that other stuff that i think is a much broader discussion here but what are some things that you can do to almost to your point not micromanage but but force the the the coaching component of what is so important in sales and in management yeah that's that's great i think the first component you don't really control you just do your best to filter for it and you know use the sports um analogy if you can't coach speed yeah some people have a built-in um level of empathy for other people and want them to do better i think one of the tribute attributes i should say of the salesperson you were describing and this is not a knock on that type of person i know some of my best friends for years are the best sales people i know and they even make crappy managers but part of it is they don't have that level of empathy for other people to get them to that same level and that's fine keep keep making your you know your quote like you do every year and money is there a test for that just profile myers-briggs is there or is there an indicator that we could look for of the of the people that give a shit versus the people that are just hey i am what i am and like you know what i mean is there a give a shit uh uh thing there you're the first person who's ever used the gas quotient on me the give a shit quotient i i use that all the time and when i use that i make people try to get no one's ever guessed what that that acronym means i'm just i'm laughing over here that's the first thing i look for is the give a shit quotient and there to me there's no test it's if you've got somebody in your organization already by observation and giving them some trial um experiences you you should be able to tell if that person's got at least that level of empathy and um that interest level of going down that path that's no guarantee in that one if they're coming in from outside the organization um do your best in the interview but i'm such a firm believer in finding people that are one degree of separation from you and finding somebody you trust like yeah they've got that dna built into them i haven't seen any quantitative tests yet it's like yep this is going to nail it um the other part of that component john and this is probably the most important is leading by example and in this example of this customer out of the 26 reps i took on as much as i could it was it was too much frankly but i did it anyways i took on eight reps each quarter and did their one-on-one reviews and those run-on-one reviews were pipeline opportunity forecast and the enablement and every week we would pull up emails and it would take about four iterations before i got them to believe that this was the right approach part of it was um some of them were freshers it was their first in indian term for first job ever so it was a clean slate and it's kind of like my golf game if i had taken golf lessons my first time out i would have been a much different golfer i think a better golfer versus waiting to my 30s and taking the first lessons which were unwinding all my bad habits before i got to this so it's things that actually came in that had some lessons um some of them were good some of them were bad and some of them the the the more experienced ones sometimes they just stuck to no i need to have this 10 paragraph email because this is what i learned and it took a while to unwind that habit and prove it out and this is where the amputee comes like in place it's like okay i'll tell you what because we're using a really cool tool we'll let you a b test you use yours and we'll use you know john's right and after 100 iterations let's start looking at some statistics and i hadn't seen one yet that you know proved wrong the other challenge in this is in a good way in a bad way everybody in sales is now an expert and you can put out a blog or a vlog or youtube and i can't tell you the number of times that i got a gimmicky email it's like this is getting a 60 response rate we need to use it i was like well i can put you on the street right now in front of the building with a spinning sign and you're gonna get a lot of attention you're not gonna sell a damn thing so go ahead and put your gimmick email on that a b test and we're gonna have fun with it well and i think that's the one thing that i've always you know so it's funny i i came up with this because i knew i you know as a trainer if you will i i knew i didn't have the answer for every for every question right i mean how could you so so i always and i you know i would try to do my thing as far as hey this is data you know here's back by data whatever it is um but then inevitably people well what about this approach what about that approach what about this approach my my genuine is i don't know i haven't tried it so so split testing became my go-to answer for almost anything right because i'm not saying you're wrong you know i mean the only time some the only time i ever tell somebody not to try something not to do something is when it's unethical or when it's like super sleazy right like if you're gonna lie to get that thing then absolutely not i don't give a shit how successful it is don't do it okay but as long as it's ethical as long as it's it's it's you know you know above the line if you will give it a shot but test it right and test it thoughtfully so you have to have a baseline so whatever your approach is let's use it use it use it use it i use about a hundred as the benchmark like you said there because that's you know first of all it makes the math easy second of all it's it's a it's a nice number to kind of say okay we tried it a hundred times now let's compare it to something else and let's try that and let's see who wins yeah i mean that's really it and that's the whole idea of agile training which i can you know which we're we're kind of umbrella discussion here is how do you do more with less well if you turn your team into a split testing machine where any like you pick up something new and you plug it into this equation and you and you test it against something you know works you you actually don't need to invest in training you don't need to have some jackass like me stand up in front of a room for you know for a full day and say rah rah rah you can maybe use that as a baseline to kick things off but afterwards like you know i i'm a like it's funny you know i'm doing a lot of thought on this on gong right the gong uh blog post they have this one of selling to the c-suite and it's this whole the concept is you start with your nexus right when you start with your nexus of what do you believe that is polarizing in the sense of you know people either yes they agree with it based on your vision or absolutely not right so i've been thinking like what's the j barrow's nexus like what do we believe in and there's a few but like one of them i come down to is i think methodology is a bullshit right and the whole idea that because there are some people who are methodology driven right like i'm a miller hyman guy i'm a taz guy and those type of things and look i think those are those are great programs right for the right clients but i'm just i'm an agile sales guy i i believe that it doesn't matter what you're doing if if you if you are too locked into what you're doing then you're going to get passed up pretty quick right so the whole idea of like iteration right how do you iterate and that also saves you a bunch of money because then you you develop that core you know with the team and and you use the team from a trading standpoint so what are some of the ways that you've been able to create that that learning environment if you will with your teams without having to go spend a bunch of money because i think people try to throw technology and solutions at a lot of these problems and that's not that no matter what if you don't have a good learning environment already in place then none of that stuff is going to make a difference it's actually probably going to confuse the situation yeah and this is where i had the advantage of the india culture um which is a very collaborative culture a very sharing culture um you've experienced but for those of you who haven't it's a it's just a really warm engendering culture in general and it carries over to the business and certainly the sales environment so i had a lot to leverage right there but what a technique that i learned from a friend probably five years ago is like you mentioned like i'm constantly getting up there doing these weekly lunch and learns trying to shove all of my knowledge and wisdom down your throat on a weekly basis again with the same voice and what she told me she had um i think she had the brilliant idea on her own put it in place is have the lunch and learns but have your team do it on a weekly basis and as long as the subject matter was sales related anything was fair game and what i mean by that you can have something as specific as a win review a loss review um how here's the best email i ever wrote but the best one i ever saw somebody would do actually was how do you handle stress and sales that's presentational in sales i think i've ever seen and um so you turn your team loose and uh taking out your qbr and in the quarter close let's say you get 12 lunch and learns during each quarter so you get roughly 50 now not quite but high 40 opportunities for other voices in your organization to give something that is a different perspective than your own and what was really interesting this time was it was a competitive environment and that each time somebody did one i kicked it off i just said i'm going to set the bar next person try to do just a little bit better and each time it literally got better and better and better and by the end of that last one what was really interesting the guy did a lunch and learn on here's what i've learned on how to prospect and without any coaching for me he had the the perfect email written out and how it worked he's like this is the call i made this is how i answered the call i was like john thank you for taking my call the other moment great we we don't know each other this is scott from one window partners and the reason for my call and boom i mean just perfect to a t and that's where i didn't want to say yeah my job is over here technically it was but i was like i got them to that level now where they're on their own and they're going to be able to be productive with it and that that lunch and learn approach is one great example of doing it this next approach actually did leverage technology but it was brilliant and i'll do it because tomorrow is the next round for the march madness elevator pitch contest and it just worked out we had 64 people participating so the jackets worked out perfectly and as we went through each round so i pitted one person against the other and what this is where the technology comes in you can collaborate and people vote and who did the best elevator pitch and move to the next round and then i had a second round so people could at least do it twice so if you didn't win the first round you went to the second bracket and you competed and then the winner of that bracket and the top three of the first bracket did a final four and each one of those rounds that got this fever pitch higher and higher and higher each time to the point where once somebody recorded everybody got in the room and listened to it and they would talk about it and what they loved about it and then they would go score it and then it finally came down to the best four and lo and behold the guy had been there the longest ultimately won all freshers in there as well it's just a great collaborative environment so if you get the opportunity to use that matchup type of environment you get multiple iterations everybody gets to see multiple pitches by multiple people and that's another great way to pull everybody in together and build that level of experience i love that yeah i mean i i actually did something similar early in my career and this is kind of similar scenario in the sense that you know my first startup we had no money like we were a hundred percent self-funded right and so i mean you know when trainers would come in and tell me that training was going to cost twenty thousand ten twenty i would legitimately laugh them out of my office i'd be like dude i have ten dollars for training this year okay so thanks for coming in but so i what i actually used to do is i actually used to bring sales trainers in and have them give me their pitch and really like dig and ask questions about their philosophy and their approaches and their techniques and ask them to give me examples and i mean you'd be like a million questions because what i was trying to do is extract what their training was and then i'd be like okay thanks yes why don't you send me a proposal on that one and all i would do is i'd go back on my whiteboard i'd be like all right well what components of that can i steal and bake into mine right and so you know there's by the way and for those of you out there listening sales trainers will literally tell you exactly what their approach is on a qual call all you have to do is ask them and dig deeper and ask layering questions and they will literally give you the training during the discovery call and you just got to have half a brain on your shoulders to be able to take that and then think about how to implement it right so that's one tip of how to do things cheap the other one is is what i did was similar to you i didn't do a lunch and learn but i did this on my monday morning sales team meetings where we and this kind of lines up with a bunch of stuff that you're talking about here which is i would start with all right what's the challenge we're trying to address this week everybody like what's something we're getting our ass kicked on right and somebody would raise their hand be like uh you know john we're getting crushed on the pricing objection like every time i like that we're just way more expensive than everybody else so blah right and i only had about six reps reporting to me so what i would say is all right who wants to own this to your point who wants to own this delegate right one of them what you know some rep would all right i got it and this wasn't like a huge thing that they had to do this was literally light up your laptop do a google search on whatever that thing is right so how to handle pricing objection when you're selling a premium product blah right and there'd be like you know five or six blog posts or you know something from some train or somebody like me talking or whatever and their goal was to go to research that for like an hour come back to the team pick something that they thought was good okay like an approach that was that was appropriate bring it back to the team tell us about it do a little role play on it so we kind of got the kinks worked out or whatever and then that week everybody kept a notepad next to their desk when when on my team and we would all write that week we would write down at the top of the list challenge equals pricing objection approach equals and then whatever that approach was like and write it out right and then it was a t-bar situation where it was a plus minus so every single time that a rep would ask a question i'm sorry i what i would tell them is like look whatever happens this week with everything else just do whatever you're going to do but when that thing happens you have to i want you to use that approach okay and then just add plus minus it worked it didn't work it worked it didn't work it worked it didn't work and then what i would do is i would collect all the pieces of paper at the end of the week and i would say oh i'm sorry i would have the person who owned it collect the papers at the end of the week and then do a little report on how it worked and then present to the team the next monday okay everybody we made 200 phone we we hit the pricing objection 200 times or whatever like say 100 times last week and we got uh 50 or like 35 positives and 65 negatives like that's actually not a bad conversion ratio for that objection so good next week what do you want to focus on and what it did was by delegating i gave them some structure of how i wanted the format of how the of what they had to do how they're going to present and what the results but i didn't tell them exactly how to do it and and so i give them some guidance and what it did was first of all it created this continuous learning environment because every week we were iterating we were picking something else right to compare it to but also it showed me going back to your empathy um the people that owned it that week you could tell what their approach was you could tell if they gave a shit in the sense that did they just do a quick they find the first thing on google pump it in there and tell everybody good luck and at the end of the week or did they learn it did they really try to help us coach us towards using it and then how active were they throughout the week and working with the other reps to make sure that that approach was being applied the right way and then what type of insight did they gain at the end right those people it was it was a it was actually multi-purpose for me doing that first of all delegated so i didn't have to do everything second of all it was iterative so we kept improving tertiary was it got me to see which of my reps were management material because there were some reps that were just like whatever man and they were like they just did it because they told them to do it and then they would but they would crush their numbers but i i could tell right up there those are not going to be good coaches those are not going to be good managers whereas other reps who might not be as strong as far as their results they gave a shit they cared they worked with the other reps to figure out exactly how to do it i'm like yep all right you're going to be my rock star a rep and i'm just going to give you a commission plan and tell you to go you're going to be my next manager right there so it was an easy way with no money to create an environment learn create an environment drive results and figure out management without even trying that hard and back to that original question where do you find the managers and how do you uh you know on the chief get uh additional support we put in a mentorship program so the five reps that were experienced all of them uh got the opportunity to be mentors uh but the ones that particularly that expressed an interest to move up and particularly into management this was their chance to prove themselves and then through that was able to see the empathy did they uh you know did they understand the content themselves can they relate it to others and can they make that person successful so just putting in that mentorship help while we were grooming and growing the the management layer uh helped in many aspects including the enablement so there's a big uh tap on the shoulder environment i like it what are some of the foundational things you need to have like you come in you came into an organization that that was flying high you know no real sales process structure investment in sales at all and you had to start what are some of the like absolutes you would say that like say you do have some money right but we were talking before this to say you know i you know i personally believe that that people are throwing way too too much technology at a problem that is not really a technology problem it's a people problem um and they're trying not they're trying to fix it with technology which you can't do and and i i think you share the same mentality here but like if you had a few bucks to spend what would you to to grow a sales team before hiring 26 people before you know that type of stuff what what would those core things be so you know that something like salesforce is going to be obvious you need a system of record but um ancillary to that and this was mostly um outbound and so it really played to and i'll throw out two companies that we were using outreach but if you don't i don't want to be plugging a company so sales off but some system that allows you to build in that regular cadence and to our point about doing that split testing um being able to to leverage a platform that gives you that um that dynamic feedback and improve um not just get the emails out on a timely basis not just make the calls on a timely basis but gauge those results and improve the process i think that is absolutely critical and hand in hand to that you've got to have good data now i've been that i've been burned for 30 years by data providers claiming the world um but it has improved um two that i'll put out there that we analyzed were zoom info and lead iq yeah lead iq is one of our favorites yeah yeah and they both came in um very comparable i'll leave it at that and um and then you you wouldn't put this in necessarily right up front but i'd get it in pretty soon as you develop content and avoid the shoulder tapping is something like a guru um or high spot and those are sales asset management platforms so whether you're residing um in your web um salesforce or in slack instead of go tapping somebody on the shoulder hey how do you do this what is this where would i find it type it in there it is pops up makes you an expert um immediately and then i'm missing another uh component i wanted to mention so i have the outreach the data oh and then we've talked about for something like a work ramp or sales hood the sales enablement platform um that immediately extends your reach it makes it more collaborative it gets everybody participating and sets the expectation level that when we roll the next iteration out it's going to be at this level of participation and it really facilitates a faster onboarding and greater enablement over time um outside of that i'm with you i keep the sales stack as thin as possible yeah i i think those those four tech types of technology if you will are are definitely the the the four horsemen if you will um to then build off of after that but um you know and the reason i like some of those platforms too you know specifically you know i'm a sales loft fan um they actually have a lot of the technologies plugged into so i actually almost use um it's funny i use sales loft right now as my uh barometer for what other technologies i should look at because they have a much bigger team than i do and they go assess all the different technologies that plug into their platform and like once they identify i'm like oh let me go now took a look at that company see what they do right so it's like you guys are smarter than me i'm gonna go follow them follow them right um and you know the beauty is there's so many it's like once there's a if there's a paid tool out there there's almost always a free tool out there that does 75 of what that paid tool does you know what i mean so like i'll give you you know for looking for triggers stuff like that right i used to like be a huge proponent of inside view and one source and all those other which i still am but they're expensive you know what i mean like like i don't know you know so so owler like i love owler it's free and it gives you most of what they you know what i mean um you know there's there's data provided yes there's zoom and and all those other tools but then there's stuff that where you can get like five or ten free credits a day of you know direct line email addresses and those type of things and and so you can kind of cobble together but but really once you have the money if you have if you get to the point where you have a few bucks to spend stepping up and actually doing it the right way and i and sooner rather than later so you're not i mean you talk about reverse engineering uh sales rep skills right a lot of times once you get into a rat's nest of tech and and i actually have a a business model out there that i think could make millions which is a a a sas tech assessment of let's take your sales process let's figure out whatever your sales process is that's looks let's do an assessment of every technology that you've invested in and figure out where all the overlaps are and all that other stuff and then come in and give you a recommendation of okay you should get rid of these you should invest in these and it's going to save you you know 50 of what you're spending right now it's going to make you 10 times more productive like if somebody had like a tech stack assessment for sales teams i think they would print money i believe it um you know when i started this consultancy um i have a much smarter um partner and he's the one i've gone to literally for years if a new technology popped up i'd give him a call what is this do i need it i gotta say i gotta say i got a buddy of mine who's the same person for me i'd put him in front of a client for three weeks he'd spit out yep you don't need this this and this add these couple and you're good to go cool so how let's talk um the the the growth factor here like what do you how do you how do you maintain quality as you grow like so so and i and i'm when i and i position this as quality of reps quality of approach quality of message quality how do you maintain that as you scale a company right because the in the context here is you know it's kind of easy when you have a team of five six seven reps right because you can almost kind of force it right and whatever and everybody's usually bought in but then once you get to 20 30 40 50 reps you start losing control and that's where i see people misappropriate technology because what happens is they they want to control the message like so for instance they they invest in a sales loft or an outreach and then they take their templates and they give them to the reps and say okay literally push play i don't want no creativity here i want you and that's that's that's bad right so too much creativity for people and because that's unscalable um but full-blown templates and this is exactly what to say that that takes a human element and out of it and what's the point so how do you what's your approach to maintaining quality um while scaling without over uh generalizing or over automating the processes you mentioned one of them and it's messaging now that term is pretty broad so i'll make a distinction i'm not talking pure marketing messaging to go build branding and whatnot when i say messaging it's consistent approach to identify pain points why they're worth solving what a customer gets out of it from the product view from the market view marketing view and the sales point of view so that everything's consistent throughout and that's the first thing i did with this client we built out a framework um that you know frankly i'd picked up over the years and used other folks um to get to that point but it's a very simple straightforward framework where you identify the typical pain points or the opportunities why it sucks to have those pain points but if you get to a certain state what are the outcomes that are going to be good for that client and then what's required to get there and then that required uh world is hopefully where your differentiators line will set you apart from everybody else and if you take that and then you spread that into everything else you do from your prospecting all the way to the time you close that more than anything will help build consistency as you add numbers to your team um then beyond that i just use a simple model that uh i don't think these two gentlemen knew that they were mentoring me during my career but i use them as mentors just watch listen and learn and as different as they were in personality and styles they did five common things um to build and scale their teams that was higher the best you can find and afford enable the hell out of them on an ongoing basis motivate them mentor and retain them build reasonable but not bureaucratic processes a great sales culture and fit into a company culture and then i've done that north america asia europe again go through my whole background in sales leadership that model has worked for me time and time again and so those first two of hiring the best people you can find them forward invest all the time all the resources that you possibly can to get the best people in the door and minimize your mistakes in hiring because that's the most costly i know it goes without saying but nobody ever gets that perfect spending the time there and then really really thinking through your goals and objectives on your onboarding and your enablement program before you build them out you know what's really needed here and in this case again i needed soup to nuts i needed to teach them about the market they were selling into all of the product specifics and it was a technical sale so that was a long deep dive and then you boil it all the way down to skills again these are fresh kids i needed to spend an inordinate amount of time on the sales skills walking into that and then realizing it during the course of the process would have been a disaster stepping back and saying here's the profile of people that we have here's my starting point here's my end point and let me build out what i call a sales university to get there and then everything i need to support that that is a critical function um to get that enablement and then with that the messaging the right people and then that support structure to get them enabled and productive i think more than anything that'll give you the consistency and then of course you build in the processes and the technologies needed to enhance that so one of the last questions i have it kind of dovetails into that product knowledge right you had a very technical sale in those in this last company that you were working with um what's your thought process on on the onboarding as it relates to product knowledge and the reason i ask is because my philosophy or i've always said that almost the more you know the worse you're going to sell right because if you if you know too much like so what i see is so many companies they they focus on on boarding they focus on product knowledge right they focus on this is exactly what our product does this is and so when kids get out into like now they have to make some phone calls that that's what they have so that's what they do they just regurgitate what the presentation is they press play on the demos they tell you every feature function that they can because that's what they got badged on whereas i'm like look i could probably so i could prospect better than 95 of sales reps out there for any single solution that i could sell because all i got to do is maybe read a case study or two look at the website and come up with a value proposition to get somebody to say oh that's pretty interesting and then ask a few questions and say yeah you know what let me get out of the way put the smart kid in here to get the solutions engineer to talk you through this so how do you balance product knowledge which is necessary with the ability to sell effectively and keep it simple stupid yeah it's uh it's really tricky because i could give you multiple examples on a lot of the um i'll call them kids on this team had engineering backgrounds they could understand the product pretty quickly um but the handful that really excelled um on their own just had made ability to communicate with customers and we certainly were refining that capability once we put on all these structures but they just have that ability to understand there's a customer problem out there let me qualify if there's something we can do to help and go through a process where they'll invest in our solution and what i like about product training is like you said number one you have to get there but what i want more than anything is i want that level of confidence i want my reps to know that when they're on the phone they actually know more than the person on the other side of the phone not that you have to prove it but have that confidence when you get on the call you're not going to get tripped up and if you do happen to hit a roadblock it's okay say you know what that's something i haven't come across let me go find out for you well let me let me interrupt i'm sorry but but but but if you're selling to like if you're a sales rep selling to like i i work here's an example i work a lot of bi companies right where they sell a bi tool to analysts yeah those analysts that that sales rep will never know more about the technology than those analysts will so how do you how do you break that you know what i mean like when you're selling a super technical solution to a very technical buyer and you're a sales rep that did not go to school for that so let's take the engineers out of the equation here because i think if you're an engineer that's why sales engineers are sales engineers because they're sales engineers they're not sales reps right they need a sales rep to help them know when to shut up and actually sell something but when you're a sales rep coming into a situation where you you are selling to somebody who's way more knowledgeable about your products than you are how do you how do you combat that yeah i think part of it is targeting who you're going to prospect to for starters because if you get that kind of person if you get on with a hardcore developer number one they typically don't want to be sold to and you know that right up front and if you do get time from them they're probably going to play stump the chump and then just in this cycle that you're just completely wasting your time so you go through an assessment through the things that you teach is hey am i talking to somebody that can um point you to the right direction of somebody who cares about this specific problem by that i mean if you've got really good bi you're going to be able to impact your business in these manners who's the person who cares about that who should i be talking to can you sponsor me to talk to that person and i promise not to waste your time and pretend i know more than you in this specific realm um but when they do get to that person i do want that level of confidence that you know they know their solution is going to perform the way they're going to say it's going to perform it's going to achieve the results that it's going to and i've worked obviously with a lot of tech companies predominantly these ceos or the founders and their engineers and they will lean towards i want you to open a call with a demo and i absolutely refuse to go down that path and if that's the model it's like i'm not the right guy for you because if you're going in leading with the demo you're not asking good questions to understand if they have a problem can you solve the problem and if so what's that going to take and so in this case i said we're going to do demo certification but it's going to be done and i had my pre-sales manager lead this as i get them to the point where we're talking about business problems and value of solving then we'll show them what we've got right and so i think that in part answers your question get to the right person and then leverage the knowledge and then when you do have that stump the chump type of call and you need to pull them in get the pre-sales guy in there but only if it's qualified and the timing's right that's why i always say that that reps who rely to companies and reps who rely too early on demos or try to force the demo too early without the qualification they're they're just lazy and what they're saying there and like especially reps and any any rep who's listening out there if you are if your goal or your managers are telling you doesn't matter show them a demo as fast as possible what they are telling you and what you are telling yourself is that you don't matter as a sales professional you don't matter because if all your job is is if your product is that fucking cool that all the client has to do is see it and what you do is you press play on that demo for 30 minutes and they buy why in the world would i pay somebody 50 60 70 hundred thousand dollars a year all in to do that all you're saying that's it's the laziest way of selling i've i've seen and it's the most dangerous way of selling in my my opinion because like again what's the point like i'll just hire marketers to blast out demos to every one of our target audiences and hopefully you know and once they see it they're gonna love it and i'll just do free trials to every single person that fits that profile and linkedin and who cares you know what i mean like what's the point of selling yeah yeah exactly exactly and the other thing that i've found over the years is your a reps we use i'll throw a statistic out there but just to make a point they'll use about five percent of your pre-sales team your c reps are going to use about 90 of it all of it and that was me early in my career i when i when i didn't know what i was talking about i used engineers like the day is long i'd be like yep sure no problem and now i mean i don't sell an engineering type product but now it would be it would be after so qualified it it would have to be so far down the sales process for me to bring in an expert that that you know it would it would be a closing call basically yeah exactly awesome scott i think we i mean i think the the scale and growth of teams is a topic we could talk about forever but uh i know uh you got some you know some new things coming up here what what how can people follow you like what what's the best way to get in touch with you and what are some of the new challenges do you have coming up here that people should be paying attention to yeah i'm looking at a few things uh one actually would be going full-time for a particular company uh one is i we talked about before the call my wife's company she's ceo of a software company and starting a foundation that help um the workers that are displaced by technologies um that's been an interesting project and then uh you know i've been doing the consulting and if uh if and when can interesting opportunities come up um we'll take a look at that as well you can find me at scott at one window on even dot com and of course on linkedin so um if anybody's interested in this topic in general if you're interested in topic talking about um growing a sales team in india specifically got a lot of fresh muscles on that and i think the the um the ceiling is very high for that market and uh would love to talk about people if they have any interest there as well love it cool scott i appreciate you coming on board here and wish you luck in your your new endeavors here but definitely recommend anybody take a look at scott what he's doing because a lot of a lot of experience in this space and and like i said we could probably have this conversation for a day or two if you want it but uh anyways for those of you out there listening as always go make somebody smile today there's too much negativity out in today's world uh if there's nothing else you do if you can put a smile on somebody's face and you've done it you've had a great day so uh good luck out there let me know if you need any help feel free to get in touch and make it a great week all right make it happen everybody thanks scott thank you take care of it so you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you