Matt Buchalski: The Four Essential Skills Sales Reps Need in the AI Era

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And today's conversation is with Matthew Buchowski. Now, Matt and I go back quite a ways. Actually, back in 2018, we started working together at one of his companies, and now he is the VP of Sales at RealPage and the co-founder and managing member of Take Flight Properties. And we started talking about kind of the state of sales and where things are right now as it relates to AI and everything else. And we share a very similar mindset of what sales reps need to be focusing on right now. And one of the ones that he really highlights is critical thinking. And so that's where we started on this one. We started on, you know, getting reps and how do we get reps to get back to critical thinking because the robots are doing a lot of this work and we have to be really at the next level when it comes to empathy, critical thinking, business acumen, and all that.

So we walked through all that and talked about how to identify it, how to help develop reps in that way. And he comes from really cool questions from a coaching standpoint that he outlines in the conversation. And then we talked about one of my favorite things, which is the give a shit factor, right? And how do you get people to give a shit? We also talked about how we're moving way away from quantity and how marketing is pretty much taking that over. And we got to do quality of sales professionals. And where does sales fit with AI? So specifically the SDR role. So this one, a little bit all over the place as far as sales and thought process and techniques and mentality, but I thought it was a really fun and good conversation.

So I hope you enjoyed as much as I did. Let's make it happen. Matt, welcome to the Make It Happen Monday podcast, my friend. How are you doing today? I'm good, Sean. How are you doing, man? A long time. This is a, I feel like a long time listener, first time caller right now. I think, you know, you and I connected back in like 2018 and you came in to, to meet with my team and I think I've digested more episodes of your show than I can remember. That's good, man. I appreciate the support. And yeah, it has been a while. It's funny these days. It's almost like, you know, COVID created this time warp where I really don't know how long it's been. You know what I mean? It could have been 15 years.

It could have been two years. I don't know. It's just so time is so weird right now, but yeah, definitely. It's been a while since, you know, five years as far as knowing each other. Six years at this point is actually a long time in this world, right? Exactly. Exactly. Awesome. I tell my team all the time, I refer back, I think there was an episode, you have so many great shows, but I think there was one specifically with Ian Konyak years ago talking about just the importance of selling to the business and not necessarily needing to know the technical, just understand, ask great questions, right? Understand the business and I still share that episode with my team today. I think that was probably four years ago.

Love it. Yeah. Ian's killing it now. He's got his own show. He's got his own coaching program now and he's absolutely crushing it right now. So I like he did. I did a lot with him to get, you know, get him into it. Like he asked a lot of questions. Now he's like leapfrogged. I'm like, all right, dude, now I need some advice from you. So how the tables turn when we get to be our age, right, John? Yeah, exactly. I'm like, damn it. All right. So anyways, but look, Matt, we're going to get into stuff about where we see things going right now, where you see things going and especially with all AI and critical thinking, we're going to tap into all that. But why don't we give the audience a little background of where you're coming from?

So do me a favor, like instead of like the work back, well, in addition to the work background, back me all the way up, right? Back me all the way up to where you grew up, you know, family, that type of stuff. Because I always love hearing people's origin stories to see kind of where that, where that bug for sales came or, you know, and how they were influenced. So you mind just taking a little step back more than usual? Yeah, sure. Cool. So I was born in New York City and grew up there for the vast majority of my life. I relocated down to Texas about nine years ago. Grew up blue collar family. Mom was a stay at home mom for, I don't know, till I was 10 or 11. And my dad was a kind of a jack of all trades, master of none, doing a lot of odd jobs and working the night shift at the airport and never really kind of got it going professionally for himself.

I was always a good, good student, you know, and went to school and where it came to sales was I was in economics class in high school and this dude comes in to economics class and he's got fancy shoes on and diamond cuff links and he had his monogram shirt on. This is like 1996, right? And he talks to us about being a stockbroker and how he makes $10,000 a day. And I was just like, teach me. And so I grabbed this card, I waited for him outside of class, grabbed this card and he worked at one of these Long Island stockbroker firms that they made a lot of movies about. And I called him every day for a month until we answered the phone. And like four days after I graduated high school, I was in there for an interview and I started the next week and I just, I literally started cold calling and it just turned into a significant, like a huge life changing love for sales.

And I've never looked back. Uh, I think part of it was not just the allure of what he was doing, but it was also, I was, I was at an age that I was looking at my parents and where they were. My father had just left a year or two before that, but I was like, I don't want to be their age and struggle like they have, you know, my mom was working, started working in schools and then at restaurants and it's sometimes both and wasn't home. And I was like, if, if I'm going to go, as I grow up, I'm not going to go follow in those footsteps and I'm going to go, I'm going to go try something different for me. That was sets. Love it, man. That's awesome. It's funny how many people that happens to where it's like, they're just doing their thing.

They're going through what they were, you know, whatever they thought they were supposed to be doing. And then all of a sudden they were on an airplane and they were sitting next to somebody and they struck up a conversation and that person was talking about how much money they made or where they were doing or what they were traveling. And they were like, what the hell do you do? And it was like, oh, I'm in sales. And they're like, holy shit. And that literally like, they dropped almost everything that they were doing before and it said, fuck it, I'm doing this. And so it's, it's interesting. That's why I have like, I'm encouraged now that sales is a, you know, you can actually get your degree in sales.

So it's not the default profession or it's not like the, oh, I, let me go do that because I don't like what I'm doing now. Because I think in a lot of ways that breeds a lot of, um, you know, the shortcuts and those type of things because they think it's get rich quick type of stuff. Right. Whereas I, now, if we can educate kids early, we could actually level up all of us. So I'm encouraged to see it, but I always love those origin stories about where you got the bug. Yeah. You know, I, I heard a lot about those stories too. And I think that a lot of people I know, I don't want to say everybody, but a lot of people I know have that like in intrinsic drive and that intrinsic competitive button.

And when you're sitting in close proximity to someone that says they're all successful and you can kind of see it on them, you're like, I can't that be me. Right. Exactly. Wow. I can go do that. And, and a lot of people try it and you know, fewer of them become successful. You gotta, you gotta still gotta do the work. Yeah. Well, that's the thing. Like people ask me all the time, like, Hey John, what's the secret to success? I'm like, uh, working your ass off. That's it. Like I'm not the brightest kid. I went to state school, drank my way through four years of college, you know, whatever, but I'll work you. And, and, you know, I, I, unfortunately I think I do things a little bit too much of the hard way.

Right. I don't, I don't, I rarely work smart. I usually just work hard, but yeah, uh, but yeah, you gotta put in the work these days. And I think that's a good transition to where, you know, what we want to talk about today, because, you know, we talked as we were prepping for this, um, you know, obviously I think we're right now going through a massive transition in sales. I think the past 10 years we've gotten over frothy, you know, uh, cash was free, basically grow at all costs. And we over, we've over-engineered the sales process, thrown way too much tech at it. And we've forgotten a lot of the, the fundamentals and at least teaching the fundamentals. And now that sales is hard again, at least in the SaaS space, you know, a lot of these reps don't have the tools and skills to, to survive.

Right. And you add AI on top of all this and you got this perfect storm of shit right now that for those people who are, or were going through the motions, they're absolutely getting hacked off right now. So what are you seeing out there? I mean, you said your team's killing it right now is from an outbound standpoint. We'll get into that, but where, what do you see as what we've lost and what we need to refocus on now here in sales? Yeah. Good question. Uh, I'm kind of a blunt instrument. I've been doing this a long time, but I think we're starting to come full circle to your point where there's not necessarily an app for that. There might be, right? But I think we've got to take a step back and really focus on core fundamentals, uh, closing techniques, critical thinking, a viable and repeatable sales process, right?

Uh, and, and really refocus and, and resharpen, uh, those tools I I've seen. So before I joined ThoughtSpot in 2018, I hadn't heard of outreach. I hadn't heard of sales loft. I was like a Salesforce guy and I was proud that I knew it as well as I did. And then I joined ThoughtSpot. I was like, what is all this tech that we're using? Right. And it was, what's the perfect cadence? And, uh, what, you know, what, how do we, how do we loft this? And don't get me wrong. Outreach and sales off are great tools and they serve a great purpose in the market, but it's almost like we took the thinking out of it and, and, and we stopped training reps on the core fundamentals about how to have effective conversations, effective interactions, create the right types of impressions with prospects.

We were just more focused on engineering the tool to help us more efficiently. And we forgot how to train reps to be effective before becoming efficient. And I think that is really starting to come full circle where you're vying for attention out of an executive's inbox that probably got a hundred emails that day. And as much as a lot of folks want to admit that they're personalizing, it's not right. How old do you know the business? How old do you know the buyer? How old do you know the vertical? And are you keeping up with those types of market trend and real data and, and, and being able to have an effective engagement? I think the concept of critical thinking and, and helping reps understand kind of their own mental decision tree is a lost art form and we have to bring that back.

Otherwise, if we don't, the text is going to take off. Yeah. I mean, it's already, I mean, my whole thing is to keep saying, you know, we've turned these reps into robots and now they're getting replaced by robots. And it's so evident. And, and look, I'm not going to place blame on, on either side. I'm going to place blame on both sides. Like we've over-engineered it as a sales, as a sales leadership. And we've turned them into this because we've like grow, grow, grow, grow, grow. But they've also gotten lazy and stopped working in a lot of ways. Right? Like now there's this weird entitlement factor that they should be making this much money and they don't have to work that hard because it's been so over bloated for the past 10 years.

It's been, I mean, you know, there's kids coming out of school these days, making over a hundred G's a year just to, you know, cram out a hundred cadences a day to get three meetings a month at best that usually don't convert. So it's like, are you shitting me right now? So that's why we're seeing this. I think we are coming back to full cycle, right? We're coming back to, you know, lean. I'm actually interested to see, really interested to see where the SDR role ultimately ends up because it's one of those roles that, you know, you can quite frankly now, I'm the same with you. Like when, when sales loft and outreach, I used to get in arguments with Kyle Porter and I'd be like, could you please stop with this personalization at scale bullshit?

You know, just because somebody, you know, changed the name, the title in the industry on an email does not make that email personalized, but yet, you know, reps keep doing it. And so I think we're in this transition phase, but it's the, it's the reps who aren't paying attention that I'm most worried about. So, so from a leadership standpoint, you talk about critical thinking, how do you, how do you reverse engineer and teach critical thinking to a kid who's now out of college and, and has been indoctrinated into this, right? Like I, I'm having a hard time because I always say like, I think reps right now, it's, it's critical thinking, it's business acumen, it's, it's curiosity and EQ, right?

Like those four things I think are what, what computers can't do. Right. Um, and with some context around it, but, and I think business acumen, I can figure out how to train that. Curiosity has always been one where I've been like, okay, like I can kind of put you in a position to be curious, but I can't make you because you gotta be curious. You gotta be fundamentally curious. Yeah. Um, and EQ, I think, you know, reading signs and that's, but critical thinking is kind of this black box here of how do you get somebody to, who, who doesn't think of themselves as a critical thinker or doesn't even really know what it means to be a critical thinker. Yeah. So great question. I can go in a number of ways.

One of my favorite coaching questions is what do you think? There you go. Yep. What do you think? Right. And I, I, I at least want to get that mental gear started and start to understand how my, my reps and my teams think so that I, I know I have a little bit of context about their perspective and then I can help guide them from there. Right. But even taking a further step back, I interview every single SDR that comes into our team. Right. Uh, and I tell them straight out, if, if you want this job and you want to be Johnny or Susie speeds and feeds and integrations and this and that, I'm going to tell you, I'm not, that's not how I'm going to train you. Right. I'm going to train you on the business and the, and, and, and the, the business conditions and the business pains and the current business environment of the people and the markets that we sell into first so that you can ultimately have that conversation and we can retrofit a potential solution in downstream.

There you go. Right. I want to know that a multifamily owner operator or PMC is struggling with marketing conversion or putting heads in beds and, and, and, and, and driving to their occupancy goals. I want to understand that they have huge loss to lease on their T12 and they're looking for additional revenue gains before we start thinking about any potential solution. And we've gotten much, much better at that. We still have plenty of upside upside and opportunity. I'm not saying that we're perfect, but by understanding the, the market dynamics, the personas, their pains and the business outcomes they're looking for, you can start to feed the critical thinking thing. Okay. So you do have a marketing problem.

Where do you think that's coming from? Where is the breakdown? And you walk them down that decision train over the course of time, they start to think much like their prospects do. Yep. And that allows us to, to create higher potential, uh, opportunities with higher potential to close. And I think doing that so methodically, and we've put tons of training together, work, playbooks, workbooks, workshops. We brought a bunch of trainers in and we do that repeatedly. And it really kind of helps drive the thought process of the team. Hey, I want to take a quick minute to share with you what I'm working on these days with my new JV sales membership. It includes live monthly training delivered by me on my two signature courses, filling the funnel and driving to close.

It also includes monthly workshops that I'll be running on specific skills and different tech like ChatGPT and how to leverage it in the sales process. And it gives you access to my entire online catalog with every course and every tip I've ever done. You get all of this for $420 a year as an individual or $5,000 for teams. And as an exclusive offer to my podcast listeners, if you go to www.jbarrows.com and click on the individual or team membership and use code podcast, you'll get 20% off. Let's make this happen together. Love that. And by the way, just as you outlined all that, that included business acumen, curiosity, and so the way you describe critical thinking was empathy, curiosity, and business acumen as far as how you train it.

And to me, like, that's the thing. It's, you know, I, and people on the podcast, you probably heard it too. You know, I call it the give a shit factor, right? Like, you got to give a shit. And, and, and I'll tell the story again and again, because it highlights the point, like Morgan came to me, uh, when he started, started working with me and he said, Hey, John, you know, and we were working on cadences and did a great job and, you know, getting pretty good results. And then they flattened off or they leveled out. And he, and he was like, John, I feel like I'm doing all the right things, but I'm just not getting the results that I would expect. And he's like, you know, what do I need to do here?

And I was like, well, Morgan, your results aren't going to change until something does. He's like, what? I was like, until you start giving a shit. Yeah. And he was like, what? I was like, look, I know you get it. I know you give a shit about the company. I know you give a shit about your job here, but it's still, you actually start genuinely caring about the person and thinking about them as a person, not a phone number, not an email address, not a persona, but a person who wakes up in the morning, has issues, probably has kids, dropped them off at school, is getting yelled at by their boss, is dealing with other priorities. Like until you really think of them that way, results aren't going to change.

And I think that's the part that we've lost is that connection because we've over-processed this entire sales process and we're now all remote and digital and everything else that we've lost that human factor of the connection of who gives a shit? Like, do you actually care? And that's, even with these AI emails, I don't know if you're getting them, but I'm getting inundated by them. And yeah, they're actually kind of personalized. They do a good job, but I can tell there's no soul in them. There's literally no soul in them. I'm like, nope, this kid doesn't care. Even if this was a kid, they're just going through the motions, making the connections here. But if it's an AI bot, there's just something missing about it.

And I can tell they don't give a shit. This is just part, step three of a fucking cadence that I'm on. Yeah. And you know what's so funny is, look, I know that there's a, when you're writing an email to an executive, you want it to be perfect, right? But a lot of the stuff that's coming out now is too perfect. I almost want to see the occasional spelling error or the occasional run-on sentence just to know there's a human on the other end of that LinkedIn message, right? Totally agree. And that's why I talk about video, too, because people are doing video at scale now. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. The point of video is to show that you are an actual person. Yes. And so I always guide people to say, look, one cut.

I don't give a fuck how bad it is. One cut. And almost make fun of yourself. Be like, hey, Matt, what's going on, man? This is John Barrow's legit. And I'm just doing the, oh, shit, man. I'm sorry. I'm a little nervous right now. It's like one of the first videos I've done. I just want to let you know. I've really been following you for a while. I'm really impressed. Like, this is what we do. If you'd be open to a call, man, just let me know. And like, I'm sorry. And like, hang up. Like, I would respond to that kid. You know what I mean? If that kid was a train wreck on the video and kind of made fun of themselves and whatever it was and messed up a few times, I would respond to that kid a thousand times over than the robot perfect video that I can't tell anymore if it's AI or not.

I completely agree. And I think that kind of falls into the concept of authenticity, right? And I think that authenticity is more important now than ever, right? With the amount of noise out there, I want to know that the other, the person at the other end of the phone, either someone that's prospecting into me or that I'm trying to sell into is authentic and that I can have a good conversation with them and they can have a good conversation with me. It's not just the obligatory 60 seconds of small talk. Right. Well, hey, thanks for joining the call. We're here to talk about blah, blah, blah. Like, I, people buy from people they like, right? And I know that's a debatable subject, but I personally, as a buyer, I really like to do that.

You either got to be somebody I like or someone who really knows their stuff and hopefully both, right? I think authenticity is underrated right now. And because we've just gotten so automated and so cadence focused and so kind of repetitive about it, we need to bring some of that back. Yeah. I think that that's the thing. It's like, I, you know, the debate on whether liked or not, I, what I've started to come around on is it, I don't, if I don't like you, I absolutely will not buy from you. Right. But I don't have to really like you, like you. What I need to do is I need to trust you. And to me, I buy from people who I trust and trust comes with authenticity. Yeah. If you are authentic and you are genuine and you show you did your homework and you actually give a shit and you're not trying to sell me on every corner, but you're actually making potential recommendations for my, for your competitors, right?

Like all of these little nuanced things, like how much do you actually care that you are selling me the right solution versus selling me a solution? Right. And, you know, and if I can get that authenticity from a kid who's out that other, I will give them far more, uh, you know, rope to go than the rep who's just going to show up and throw up and tell me how awesome their stuff is right now. You know, I think there, there was an, uh, gong had this nexus and I, and I agree with it too, which is moving forward. It has nothing to do with what you sell. It has everything to do with how you sell. Yes. Cause we're all in this feature function, function race, function race. If you're going to, that's a race to the bottom, right?

Because you're going to be on a spreadsheet and it's going to be check boxes and all these different things. Your solution does this, mine doesn't, whatever. That's not selling. You know what I mean? That, that, that's like, I don't understand what the point is on that. So it's that empathy. It's that give a shit factor. It's the stuff that we got to get back to, but I guess, how do you, so let's talk about the give a shit factor, right? I think critical thinking, yeah, we can, you know, I love the, you know, what do you think question so that you can at least get a, get that spark going. But what about the give a shit factor, right? Like so many kids right now, I think took jobs because tech was hot and it was cool and they could, they couldn't care less what the actual product is.

You know what I mean? They're just out there trying to sell and they're barely scraping by type of stuff, but they don't like genuinely have a passion for it. And I tell people all the time, like, I, I personally believe you cannot be successful in sales unless you genuinely believe that what you're doing makes a difference. And it doesn't have to make a difference for everybody. You genuinely have to believe that it makes a difference for the right client. So how do we reignite that where, with a whole bunch of reps, I think, who are just super apathetic about what they're doing. They're bouncing from company to company because they're staring at the same damn screen, selling this solution versus that solution.

If that solution is going to give me, you know, 10, 20, $30,000 more of my base salary, I'll sell that solution. Right. So how do we get back to that? You know, I, I think it varies based on the business that, that the sellers are in, right? At least in our business, right? Where we sell largely into, where we sell all totally into multifamily owners and property management companies. There's a set of economics that we can break down, right? And it's not ROI on the solution. It's literally how much can we save them? How much can we make them? And how much risk can we help them avoid? And how did we help the reps understand the waterfall of that economic impact? And, and when we show them that, yeah, because it's formulas, it's calculus based, the whole thing, when we show them that they have a light bulb moment and it's not, if you buy this solution, you're going to see a three X return on it.

If you buy the solution, we can deliver X amount of millions of dollars in equity on your balance sheet or, you know, your revenue, we can expect your loss to lease to burn off and your revenue grow by X, Y, or Z. And it's, it's almost like helping them begin with the end in mind. Yeah. Right. So when we help them understand the end game, once you understand the end game, you can kind of back into it. So the give a shit factor boils down to asking the right questions, truly caring about the outcome and then helping the customer or articulating the outcome to the customer. And I think if you were able to do that and you do that consistently and you enable the team to do that, uh, the give a shit factor goes up.

I think it's very hard to do that in companies that sell horizontally. It's very difficult in my opinion to train an early in career salesperson to call into the CIO of a telecom company. And then the CIO of a life sciences company. And then the CIO of a fin serve company in the same day and understand enough about those verticals, the magnitude of their business, the economic conditions that they're facing their own and, and be effective. Yeah. You can have somebody that cares and gives a shit all day long, but those are three wildly different conversations. Yeah. I think there's a huge difference, especially in today's market, selling horizontally versus selling vertically, where you can really understand the market.

You can really understand the personas that you're calling into and delivering messaging to and understand the outcomes that they're looking for. Yeah. Yeah. I love that because I think that's where that, that generalist approach comes from. I actually have the same talk track when I tell reps from a cold call standpoint, right? Most reps, you know, they still, you know, they'll, they'll sprinkle phone calls throughout the day. And I think that's a waste of time. Right. So I obviously hear power hours, like all, you know, but the problem with power hours is reps come with their list and they just call anybody and everybody's on that list. And I say the same thing. Like, I I'm sorry, I tell them I'm not bright enough to have a relevant, good conversation with a CIO in the healthcare industry, a director of IT in the manufacturing industry.

You know, I have to be generic with that approach. Right. I have to say stuff like, tell me about your business. I have to say, tell me about your priorities. Whereas if I'm vertically focused, I can go to work, right? Because I can get to know that deep. And I think that leads to, you know, this, thankfully, I mean, I think based on what happened, I always look at green lights, right? With the, with the collapse of the SaaS market and interest rates now, money isn't free anymore. You know, it's, it's now, hopefully everybody's realizing quality over quantity. Right. And that quality actually matters. And that almost the quantity game has to be given up completely to marketing, like literally completely to marketing.

You know, if you're going to send out blast out, templated emails, cadences and stuff like that, God, why are we paying reps to do that? I have no clue why we're paying reps to do like templated cadences that send out a hundred a month. So from a quality standpoint, right? How, how are you coaching your reps on quality over quantity? And how do you balance that as a leader? Because obviously, you know, there's downward pressures from business and, you know, VCs or whoever's out there to, to, to grow, grow, grow still. But how do you balance that? I would love it if every, every rep had, you know, an hour to prospect and get strategic over every call before they made it, but that's just not reality here.

So as a leader, how do you balance that quality and quality with your team? Yeah. Um, I think there's a, there's a, there's a few ways, right? Is it, it's all about the conversion ratios and the metrics. And look, I, I came from an environment early in my career where it was super high volume, 300 phone calls a day. You took 20 minutes for lunch and you got back on the phone. And you know, those days are, those days are long, long done. Right. And yeah, thank God. Exactly. Um, today it, it, it, it, it's absolutely personalization, but legitimate, honest and curious, authentic, right. Personalization. Um, I think it's coaching, right? So luckily the frontline leaders of our SDR team, they were all former SDRs, right?

And, uh, they have done the job, they've done the job better than others have done it, which is how they got to where they are today. And, and they can coach to not just the conversion metrics and the ratios, but the effectiveness. And I'm one of the things I would love to do and figure out is, is kind of an effectiveness quotient or some way to measure true effectiveness. Um, I struggle with that a little bit, but, uh, you know, it, it, if you have a rep that is doing the work and not getting the results to me, that's a sign that it's not that the, the work output is more rapid fire and not well thought out. Right. If you have a rep that's doing not so much activity and the results are through the roof, first thing I ask is how do you get, how do you get that rep to do more?

Right. Um, so I think I'm going a little bit off, off, offline here, but I think the point is you've got to, from the moment that rep starts with the company, you've got to let them know that yes, it's a call number, but ultimately we're driving for the end results. I don't care. I care about call numbers, but I don't care if you're not hitting your call numbers, you're blowing it out because you found the messaging and the, and the, and the approach that works. Um, but I also don't think we're an environment anymore. We're 70 or a hundred phone calls a day. Rapid fire style is going to yield the results that anybody's looking for. So it's funny. Cause I, I just had a training yesterday where I was talking about this.

Cause a lot of the reps were bitching about the quality, you know, the quantity like, oh, we got to make all these calls. Right. And I told him, I go, hold on a second. I go, look, let me give you my perspective on this. There's two levers that I need to pull as a manager to be able to help you out quality or quantity. Right. I got, first of all, I got to figure out, can you do the job? Do you have grit? Can you make the calls just purely to stick with this job in as brutal as it is? You know what I mean? Because grit is a part of this that I get work ethic and all those things. I can't train that, that that's something I have to, I have to see, right? I mean, I can hire for it, but I can't train that.

And so for me, my philosophy has always been, look, I'm going to give you some information. I'm going to give you enough to be dangerous. And then I'm going to let you go. And I'm going to tell you to make $50 a day. I'm going to tell you to hit the bricks and I'm going to give you some scripts or whatever it is to play around with. And at the end of the month, because based on my equation, I know if you do these, you should see this output, right? But at the end of that month or first month or second month, whatever it is, if you've hit those numbers and you're still not hitting the conversion ratios, now I know it's not a quantity issue. Now I know it's a quality issue and now I can start to coach you.

But if I can't figure out, if I can't knock that one off, then I don't know whether it's the fact that you're not, you're just not working hard enough at this point. Right. And so for me, I have to cross one of those off. And that's why I tell reps, yeah, guess what? Your first two to three months are going to suck like hard and you're not going to love it. But who loves every aspect of their job? There's a means to an end here. And then I can coach you. And you brought up something with coaching, which is, which is actually, I think this, and I'd love your approach because it sounds like you have great SDR coaches who coach on the job. But I think coaching is the, I know coaching is the thing that does not happen the most in organizations, because just like you mentioned, it's usually the best rep who gets promoted to be the manager.

And that rep is a lot of times the artist. They're not the scientists. They don't know how to coach towards stuff. They just are who they are. And then we're basically in, I guess, on the AE side of the house to become deal chasers, as opposed to coaches and doing what's right, because their pressure is to close the quarter, hit the number, whatever, because if they don't, now they're screwed. So I actually think this is where AI is going to have a huge impact because it's going to be able to analyze and coach in line at the moment with objective criteria. It's not going to be personal because it's like, oh, my boss doesn't like me giving me bad feedback. But where do you see the human component of coaching the human?

And how do you, I don't want to say scale that, but how do you do that effectively these days? So that if you got one manager to 10 reps, that they're actually coaching, not just based on their opinion, not just based on what they did, but they're coaching on real shit that is actually making improvements. Yeah. We can have a whole afternoon show about this, but coaching, coaching, in my opinion, is a lost art. And something that you said inspired me on this, right? I was having a conversation with a very high powered sales executive a couple of years ago, and he was like, you know, we're going to go with a super rep model. Like, what does that mean? We're going to hire a frontline management team full of expert sellers, and they're just going to travel a lot with their team and help close all the deals.

And I was like, that sounds like an okay fix for the next six, nine, 12 months until everybody's burnt out. Yeah. But if we're not training and coaching the team to do it themselves, we're never going to scale. Yeah. Right. And sure enough, I mean, it didn't last too long. And I continue to hear about it throughout the course of my network. And I would just say that, you know, the super rep model is, it's okay, potentially for the short term, if you're trying to close a gap. But I don't think it sustains long term, because all the people that you ultimately end up promoting after they get the club or hit 100%, they're probably set up to fail on the next role, because if that next manager is not a super rep, they actually got to go figure out how to hunt and kill for themselves for the first time.

Right. But back to your original question that the my my four SDR managers are fantastic. I have three different businesses, but I have four managers on the on the SDR side. They have their combination of empathy, data and action. And they meet with their team, every one of their direct reports every week. And those discussions are built around what we're seeing in Salesforce and sales loft. Right. What are the metrics telling us about your productivity, the outcome of your meetings? Right. What were what kind of soft feedback we're getting from our cross-functional teams? Right. And ultimately, how they're performing against quota. And based on each individual in each individual and how those conversations go, they know where to tap in and start asking hard questions.

And and Gruder was just we were on a book club call earlier today and and a rep asked a question and wrote it was like, well, what do you think? I'm like, I love you, dude. Right. If we if we we've got to ask questions and hold them accountable for a thought process rather than just giving them the answer. That's the way we're going to grow. Like even before the show, you and I were talking about the kid that you can tell don't touch the stove when it's hot, but you almost kind of got to let them do it. I look forward to the call or the the one on one with a with someone three or four months in and they're like, I'm not getting the commission checks I want, but I'm making the calls. Well, if you notice your comp plan that says zero about calls, you have a set of metrics and deliverables that you need to achieve.

So if you're worried about your your check, let's look what's on that piece of paper that you signed versus you just saying you're doing the activity. And one of the one of the hardest things to to to acknowledge as a manager is that the folks that we hire and train don't know the same volume of stuff that we do early on and sometimes you have to help create that connective tissue. Yeah, I find that a lot, too. It's like I'll be talking about stuff like it's like no shit. You know what I mean? Like because I've been doing it for however many years and I forget that when I was 22, I had no idea that that was the case. I didn't know about business. I didn't know about all these things. I did what I was supposed to do.

I did what I was told to do. And if I did it, I was supposed to get paid. You know what I mean? So it's but I think it goes back to critical thinking, right? Like being able to take a step back and be like, wait a minute here. You know, let me let me look at this from a broader perspective as opposed to just the nuanced thing of what I'm supposed to do on a day to day basis. And I think that's where not enough people are. I don't know. I'm worried, man. I'm not going to lie. I am worried for this profession here in the next couple of years because I am seeing some shit with AI that is I mean, absolutely mind blowing. And when you can get more value out of going into ChatGPT and asking me about your business, like I can literally take your website, put it into ChatGPT and say, tell me everything I need to know about this business and how it relates to what I do.

Hey, I'm about to call Matt. You know, could you do a role play with me? So I can, you know what I mean? Like there's, there's so many tools out there right now that are really seeing some significant real impact. So where do you see the human factor? What do you see right now in the next, you know, with all the tech, right? And I think you and I are on the same page as far as I would rather burn everything to the ground and start non-tech, teach the fundamentals and then add tech to reps as they master that fundamental, right? But that's not realistic with where most of these companies are. where do you see things evolving to of where the sales professional still fits and still adds value and how much technology is going to do for us?

Yeah. You know, I was thinking about this before our show and, and there's, I think there's a scene in Iron Man, right? Where, uh, Rhodey is talking to a group of pilots. He's like, you know, we can nothing, there'll be, there'll never be a computer that can outsmart someone in the cockpit whether to make split decisions. And I'm like, maybe not. Yeah. So I think like, personally, I think that we, in addition to everything that we've talked about, specialization is going to be key. There will probably be transactional, and we're, I think we're seeing this already, but there will probably be transactional products and short sales cycle products that can be completely originated and closed through AI in the next 18 to 24 months, right?

Uh, where through either through order portals or just, uh, literally you log on, you'd go to a live chat and, and, and the, the, the sales process is so prescriptive. It just walks right through it. Yeah. Right. But I, I, I think that the approach of being a generalist is going to fade out over time. Uh, in the last 10 months or so, we, we had been generalists for the last two and a half years, and we've started to introduce more and more specialization this year, uh, because of the markets that we support and some strategic acquisitions that we made. And we've seen that pay off and I want to do more of that. Right. So I think we, we, we have to start thinking about sales as more micro go to market motions and figure out which need to be, you know, fully salesperson led salesperson assist or full front to back, you know, transactional AI driven and, and, and start to bifurcate that way.

I agree. It's a, and so, but this is what I'm kind of struggling with a little bit. Cause I, I think, you know, you add a few factors together here, right? You got the PLG product life, the product led growth. So bottom up, right. You got customers, um, not wanting, I think there was a Gartner report that I saw that was, you know, 43% of people want to rep free experience. Um, you got all these factors coming together here and I agree that, you know, us, let me, I guess this is what I'm getting at. How much does a sales rep need to know? So, and my point is this, the reason I ask, you know, sales engineers are sales engineers for a reason. They're not sales reps because sales engineers solve problems and they will go down that rabbit hole and give away as much free consulting until a sales rep tells them to stop.

You know what I mean? It's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Right. And, and, you know, and I've always said that you don't need to know every single thing about the product because that actually gets in the way of you being curious and that type of stuff. So I guess with what you're talking about as far as specialization, which I agree with the industry, I should know the personas in that industry. I should be very educated about what's happening here and therefore be able to understand my product and how it aligns with that industry. So where's the line for you as far as how much a rep needs to know to add value into the equation. And then I'm going to add one more piece to this, which is, I think specialization is going away in the sales role in a lot of ways, because the sales role needs to now be the generalist.

And I don't mean from a product standpoint, I mean, from a full cycle sales standpoint, right? We specialize, we went SDR, BDR, AE, CS, and then we, and we just, we specialize that. But I actually think that's going back to, okay, SDRs, BDRs are going to roll up under marketing, give back to full cycle sales and give them a dashboard where they're actually being engaged full cycle. Right? So with that aside, how much does that rep need to know in the moving forward here about the product, about the cycle, about the engagement process? If we're worried about AI replacing the people, we need to be more people focused than ever. Okay. Okay. So the AE, the quarterback of the deal who may have solution strategists or SEs or solution reps that surround them, that person needs to know the high level business pains and business outcomes that the solution solves, some basic technical knowledge, right?

And how to own and manage the relationship with that, those, the prospect customers and that company, right? The other piece of this, John, and I think this has become a kind of a lost art is in my opinion, an SE should be the technical relationship owner in that account. Okay. And there's a myriad of metrics that say how many decision makers, how many people are involved in decisions inside of companies over a certain dollar amount. If we have, if we take the technical relationship equity out of an equation that the SE or the SR solution strategist should be out there that we're cultivating, then I think we end up even more single-threaded than we are. Right. And I think single-threadedness in today's environment is one of the single biggest red flags in a sales process.

When you have an AE that swears he or she's in touch with the person, they said they can handle all this. And there's five other people in the room on, on, on vote day. We don't know who those people are, how we're going to vote. Yeah. That's when people go dark. Right. And so I think that the teams that surround us in a complex sales cycle, the, the, the teams that are, are working on that account, there's got to be role definition. There's going to be, there's got to be relationship deposits and there's got to be true relationships to kind of keep the, the person to personal component, the human selling component to be very genuine and very articulate. So how do you, let's, let's get super specific with this, with your team, um, because I think this is the biggest frustration part and why I see things moving the way that they are from a customer standpoint.

I always said that because the, the predictable revenue model I've always said is not customer centric in any way, shape or form. Nobody likes to be handed off five times before they actually talk to somebody who knows what they're talking about. And it's usually the SE, right? So the problem is by the time I get to the SE, I've been qualified five times. And now I'm actually pretty annoyed at the only person that can actually help me really. It's like when I always make the analogy, like when you call into Verizon or whatever, you're at your, you know, it support, right? Or cable, right? And you're like, Hey, you know, you've already rebooted the box, whatever. And you get some junior kid who's like, Oh, have you rebooted?

And you go 30, 45 minutes into the conversation. Then they get to the point where, sorry, you know, we're going to have to escalate this to, you know, a technical support. And then that technical support person comes on and says, so how can I help you? And you're like, please tell me that kid took fucking notes. Please tell me that kid took notes. And now you're wicked annoyed because you have to go through that whole process again with this person. So with the SDR, the typical, what I see out there is the typical SDR relationship between AE is broken because the SDR calls and does whatever qualification they do. They then set up the meeting and then the AE takes it almost like a blind meeting and has to re-qualify in a way.

So how do you, in that very, that, that handoff phase, because you say your SDRs are killing it right now. You guys have got a great, you know, net new revenue number that you're working. So what's the special sauce for you to make sure that that transition is smooth and not frustrating and keeps the people component as part of it? Yeah. Uh, so one of the first things that we did when I started with, with real page three and a half years ago was completely overall how we were structured. Right. Uh, today, largely it's a 75, 80% of the team is aligned by market segment, team and ARs. Right. So account reps. Yep. So each one of our kind of core conventional SDRs has between two and four ARs that they support.

Okay. And they know each other and they talk to each other all the time and they've gone over mutual expectations. The AR has told the SDR what they expect before a meeting is set up. Right. The SDR knows that and, and, and executes. We're not infallible. Nobody ever is. Right. But there were certain times where, you know, we've after nine months of calling into our account and you get the CEO on the phone, we're going to go get that meeting. And, you know, maybe we don't have quite as much information as we want to be, but we just got in touch with, with one of our target accounts. If we're calling into a VP of marketing, we, we are very prescriptive when we know the questions to ask and we know how to identify a call that the, that's worth the ARs time to take.

So I think there's the teaming component, the partnership component, the expectation setting, and then the execution. How much value does the SDR add in that initial call? So then, and I'm going to talk about my frustrations. Now I get a, I get a call from an SDR. Right. And they actually somehow like strike gold with whatever they say is actually kind of interesting to me. And I'm like, oh, all right. Yeah. Let's chat. And inevitably it's okay. Well, let me sit with an AE. I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Like I, like you, you caught me, like I'm curious now. And, and you, you know, you schedule this meeting next week, man. And I might not be interested anymore. So help me understand a little bit more.

Well, I can't really, you know, and then I'm like, all right, fine, whatever. And nine times at a time, I cancel that meeting, you know, when it's scheduled. Cause I don't even remember what it was about. I got no value from this engagement. And especially when it comes to executives, if you are, if this conversation is not valuable, I will cut this conversation so short, so fast because I have no talk. People have zero tolerance for zero value interactions at this point. So for you and your team, what level of value does the SDR bring to that initial conversation so that it's not like the, okay, cool. But now you got to go talk to this person. Like, is it a, is it a scale where when they start, they don't do much, but then they grow into adding value.

Help me understand that a little bit. Cause that's where I think a lot of companies fall down. Yeah. I mean, there's definitely a developmental component to it, but I think if I were to look at a, a scatter chart of the meetings of the team is setting, we've done either one of two things or, and hopefully both, right. We have found a business pain that they can relate to and told, and we've set a high level enough expectations about how a meeting with us could help them, uh, resolve such pain or be, be able to deliver a message about change and ultimately how that will impact NOI. And in the multifamily business, net operating income is the single most important metric because it justifies pretty much everything.

And, and if you can speak in that language and, and help a customer or prospect understand that by spending time with us, they can have X, X impact to their net operating income. Uh, and then the AE can swoop in and take that conversation further than that. Then, then those are meetings worth having, right? What we see very, very clearly in our business, John is the reps that are just getting meetings for the sake of getting meetings, right? They've tried the, what I like to call the takeout menu approach. Do you want this? No. Do you want this? No. Do you want this? No. Well, can you please just spend 15 minutes with us? And the customer says, yes, just cause they're afraid to say no. And then you get ghosted.

Yeah. Right. And, and I can literally look, you know, when I, when we, when we do our people reviews and I see a huge, uh, or, or a huge drop off rate from meeting set to meeting held. My first question is, are they doing a takeout menu approach and I have them pull sales off recordings and sure enough, that's what it is. Right. But when you speak in the terms of your prospect and you're relating it to a business pain or a business goal, the chances of that meeting happening are much, much higher. And the chances of them be that meeting being valuable to the customer are even higher. Love it. And again, that kind of goes back to the difference between selling selling horizontally versus selling vertically because it's hard to have that conversation with high level executives across a multitude of different verticals in the same day or a short period of time.

Yeah. I mean, I think it circles all the way back to the give a shit factor too. You know what I mean? Exactly. I mean, it is, you know, I hate to say it, but a lot of what we talk about is definitely very repetitive, but you got to do it, you know? And I think if we were able to like, just really instill, and I think this is the job of a good leader, really instill the curiosity quotient, the give a shit factor, whatever you want to call it, it changes a lot. And if you can really start training your team from the time you pick up the phone and if they buy, this is what the outcome to the customer is going to be, and this is how you speak to that, then I think the likelihood of SDRs going away is much less likely.

And frankly, the impact to the business and the incremental value at incremental revenue that a good SDR team can deliver goes up exponentially. Yeah, absolutely, man. Well, like you said, I think we could talk about this for ages. There's multiple different layers. We could go down this track, but we're up on that 45 minute link right here. So let's give the audience a little bit of like, where can they find out more information? What do you, what do you want to direct them to these days? You guys hire and talk to me a little bit. Yeah, we're, we're definitely hiring. Uh, you can check out real page.com. Uh, we have a bunch of opportunities, a bunch of positions open. Um, and, uh, you can find me on LinkedIn, Matt Buchowski, or I think it's Matthew Buchowski, but I think I'm the only Buchowski.

Thank you. Um, you know, one, one thing I, I just did want to touch on quick, John, I'm also on Instagram, Booch nasty. Um, you know, I, I think that this economic climate that we're in has made me super passionate about something. And, and I know, you know, you've, you've, you've talked a couple of times about reps, early in career reps, making a lot of money over the last few years. And now all of a sudden the times are starting to get hard and maybe those commission checks aren't quite as easy to come by. Uh, you know, it's the market cycle that's just that, that, that we're in. I think companies have spent an inordinate amount of money over the course of the last, however long training reps to be successful.

And in today's day and age, there's guys, great guys like you and Chris Orlov and Ian, the guys from 30 seconds, 30 minutes to president's club and a whole host. Like we're, we're teaching sellers how to be the best of the best, which is great. What I don't think we do enough of is teaching reps what to do after, right? How do you take all that money that you worked hard to make and save it and amplify it and put it to work, right? If you're lucky enough to work for one of these startups that ultimately has some sort of exit, do you go buy the Lambo or the Ferrari or the, you know, fancy purses and watches and all that stuff? Or do you, do you, do you take a step back and put that money to work and, and, and ultimately live off of that?

And that's something I'm super passionate about. Uh, and I would just challenge everybody and have everybody out there to think who's listening to this. Think about the fact that the gravy train stops at some point, you know, you know what you do with your money from the time you start earning it until then, uh, depend, it will ultimately define how you live the rest of your life. Yeah. I agree. I mean, think about how many former like sports stars are dead broke, you know, after making millions for four or five, six years, they're dead broke after 20 years. Right. So, yeah, agree with that. And again, I think that's a whole nother conversation, but we got to wrap it up now. So thanks Matt for coming on.

It's been awesome talking to you. It's been awesome catching up too, brother. I appreciate it. Awesome. John, thanks for having me, man. This was, this was great. Kind of surreal. So thanks very much for having me. Yeah. And everybody, I hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as I did. And look, like I always say every day, no matter how bad your day goes or how bad you think it's going, go out there and make somebody smile today, because if you do, uh, you know, you had a good day and the world needs a lot more of that right now. So thank you all very much. And I'll see you on the other side. I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did with your support and our incredible guests.

We're one of the top sales podcasts out there right now. And I can't thank you enough. Now to keep the momentum going, it would mean the world to me. If you could go and leave a five-star review on your favorite podcast platform and share some of your favorite episodes with your network. Also check out my new website, jbarrows.com. Well, you'll find even more ways to engage. There's a ton of free content, and you can also get trained from me directly as an individual or for your team. Look, I'm out there selling every day, just like you are. And I'm doing my best to stay on top of all the latest trends in sales and technology. So if you're looking to level up and you give a shit about this profession of sales, let's connect and make it happen together.