Owning the Pipeline Like a CEO with Leslie Venetz

curiosity like active listening or like empathy are not things that you just have or don't have they are skill set it may not come as easily to you as it does for other people but that doesn't mean that you cannot practice it and teach yourself to have something like curiosity as a core strength hey everyone welcome back to make it happen mondays where we talk about sales business entrepreneurship personal growth mental health and everything in between with guests who i truly respect and i think make a positive impact on the world around us now today's conversation is with leslie bennett she is one of the most influential voices in sales specializing in how to earn the attention of your customer she's been featured in the wall street journal and her online content has been viewed over a hundred million times she's a sought-after public speaker and the author of a top 50 usa today best-selling book profit generating pipeline and i have known leslie for a little while now and we share a very similar perspective and approach to sales so this was a lot of the uh me too oh yeah like you'll find a lot of that in this episode because we agree on a lot of things as far as our approach and everything else and so we start obviously with the background story of hers coming from montana as a matter of fact and she has a really interesting perspective about how her growing up in montana actually helped her relate to a lot of different people in a lot of different regions and a lot of different regions of the united states and also of other countries which i found actually interesting and then dove into the the main topic i mean she's got nine steps in her book that walk you through how to create really an efficient pipeline and have it be consistent but honed in a little bit on territory planning because i don't think it's something that people talk about enough and we kind of compared notes on the differences between the ideal customer profile and territory planning and then broke into a lot of the other things about just having that ceo mindset of your territory and really owning it and how you can really you know focus your efforts in certain areas and why it's so important to have that mindset and then a lot of tips and tactics along the way so this was a very sales driven episode and like i said you're going to hear a lot of oh yeah me too and you know here's another example i actually even feel bad to a certain degree because i did talk over her sometimes uh which i hate doing uh but i think it was just because i was in such agreement with her uh that i i kept uh jumping on top of it with one of my stories so i apologized for after a little while after doing that but uh she appreciated it so anyways i hope you enjoy this conversation as much as i did let's make it happen leslie vanette's welcome to the make it happen monday podcast my friend how are you i'm great uh it's so nice to see you again in such rapid succession because we were just together live making i don't know if it's a spoiler but we made some tiktok videos together yeah this is what talking right before we got on here of like the world of content right and sponsors and all that fun stuff and the boring ones versus the fun ones and yeah the the fun ones when we get to get together and you know go to a content house and record some stuff those are a blast and you know i'm interested to see what they come back with uh or for some of those guys seen a couple of the clips and i'm like all right i can work with these same i just got my first set of clips back and i'm actually i'm going to post one tomorrow and it's fire it's so good i don't have any other conversation with you and sarah and i yet but some of my like solo content i have back so yeah makes it a lot more fun love it awesome well we are going to dive in for the audience listening here we're going to kind of focus on both leslie and i are sales practitioners trainers coaches all the fun stuff and so there's going to be a very sales driven conversation um and we're going to get into mostly territory and account planning because i don't think that's something i know i haven't talked about enough on this and i think it's insanely important because most people take a terrible approach to it like it's is it step one in your nine steps of your book or yeah like like the first three steps i kind of think of as the first module and the goal is at the end of it you have a super tight list and you know exactly what to say to them that's going to matter to them so i think yeah like the the it's the foundation that's for sure all right perfect so but as my audience always knows would love to take a step back and learn a little bit more about leslie who you are where you're coming from your parents where'd you get the itch for sales and entrepreneurship and all that fun stuff that we cannot read on linkedin so how'd you grow up tell me all the fun stuff yeah gosh i put i put so much on linkedin like what what do i not put on linkedin um well so i'm a native montanan which not everybody knows about me but it's like something that's so so so core to my identity um and i grew up in montana and then i went to school in montana so i had not lived out of state until i moved to chicago and you know moved without a job from a city of like 60 000 to a city of 6 million quite quite a jump but you know like you've you've said your parents and i think about this so often that people are like oh you're so courageous which i am like that that is a courageous move but i also grew up with this huge family with my grandma's the italian matriarch and i very much knew that i had a soft place to land and so a lot of the courage that allowed me to take this big risk on myself of moving to chicago without a job and then like taking my my first sales job that i took begrudgingly had an 18k base oof nice like i was hungry i was like literally skipping meals like i didn't have the like 225 to ride the train so in like august in chicago i was walking home because i could only afford to ride one like it was it was tough but i i'm not sure i would have taken those risks if i didn't have so much support and such a safe place to land like worst case scenario i had to move back to montana and it was sucked and i would have been disappointed in myself and i would have felt like i let myself down but like that's kind of a best case scenario worst case scenario situation um so yeah coming from montana was is like so core to my identity and i think my ability to relate with people and understand folks that have maybe a slightly different background than like a lot of people in b2b sales or a lot of the people that we're selling to so i'm very i'm very grateful have so when you say it helped you relate to people it's interesting because montana is very different than most right as far as you know i'm from the east coast boston all in you know chicago and new york and in philly and then san francisco right so so how did how did montana help you relate to to those outside of montana just out of curiosity like where'd that come from yeah well i think it's a lot of like in chicago chicago is the same that's where i live now um that it's very like salt of the earth people and i i think one of the most important lessons that montana told that montana continues to teach me maybe particularly like in the current political climate um is that people are so much more than they may appear to be at face value and so it has made me this like deeply deeply curious person and i mean you and i both know that that is such a highly transferable skill in sales hey i hope you're enjoying the conversation so far i want to take a quick minute to share with you what i'm working on these days with my new jb sales membership it includes live monthly training delivered by me on my two signature courses which are filling the funnel and driving a close that cover all aspects of the sales process it also includes monthly workshops that'll be running on specific sales skills and different tech skills like chat gvt and how to leverage ai throughout the entire sales process finally the membership gives you access to my entire online catalog with every course and every tip i've ever done and as an exclusive offer to my podcast listeners if you go to jbarrows.com click on the individual membership link and use coupon code podcast at checkout you'll get 25 off now let's get back to the conversation yeah and i think that the curiosity i always ask you know is is curiosity nature and nurture right are you are you born genuinely curious or or can you develop it i'm curious what you're i know i think i know what my answer is but what's what's your thoughts on curiosity uh i think it's both i think that there are folks that have their brains wired to generally be more curious like i would consider myself from a very young age as like a high input person i like to learn a lot of new things though i don't particularly have that much fun going super super super deep on just like sort of i don't know book book learning um but then i know there's a lot of people that will like rabbit hole down really really deep and that's like how they get their dopamine hit so i think like some people are wired in different ways towards different styles of learning and curiosity but here's what i absolutely and unequivocally unequivocally know to be true is that curiosity like active listening or like empathy are not things that you just have or don't have they are skill sets and for whatever reason if i tell somebody they need to learn how to like shoot a three-pointer learn to code they know that that's a skill that they have to practice that they have to teach themselves but that logic doesn't transfer over to soft skills in the same way so sure it may not come as easily to you as it does for other people but that doesn't mean that you cannot practice it and teach yourself to have something like curiosity as a core strength yeah i love that is that how you feel what do you think pretty much i think i think genuine natural like genuine curiosity of just being somebody i don't mean like you have to go deep either i mean just being like huh i don't know everything and let me let me ask i think that is a a major thing i do think that certain people are born with those skills or at least that that mindset but i do believe you can get people to be curious and the way you do that is by getting people to care about stuff right so because if you care about something you're curious you end up being curious about it i want to learn more about this but if you don't give a shit about it i don't care i'll just read it just so i can read it and pass the test for instance and so i think that's where you know you we can we can practice it um but you have to specifically with softer skills i think you have to be intentional with the practice like empathy is like you have to put yourselves in situations to understand what empathy even is and without being proactively conscious about it it's very hard to develop that muscle it's very hard to to refine that muscle it's the same thing i look at sales in general you know people talk about natural born sales professionals my personal belief on this is i think maybe maybe five percent of our population are are actually natural born and i mean it not like my mentor jeff hoffman he's one of like just the ability to read people know exactly what to say when to say it like yeah understand where to focus their time and energy and and all this like i i watch him and i'm like holy shit man like i could fucking never do what you do because that is art like that is beautiful i'm more of a scientist you know that that kind of breaks that down into a process and a structure that i can follow and then i evolve with my art form right but i think sales just like you said you know people say all you know i'm not a seller anybody can sell everybody is in sales and any everybody can be taught to sell in some way shape or form depending on what your definition of sales is and if you as long as you take the negative perception out of the way i think you're you can teach anybody how to sell i think that's so true i feel like i'm i'm more in your ballpark but i love like the strategy and the creation of repeatable processes and those things that are deeply measurable but all of it is very much benched for me in behavioral psychology and so i'm so obsessed with trying to figure out how our buyers brains work and what they're responding to and things like how we can be deliberate in our practice of soft skills to be more buyer-centric so i love that mesh of like yes these things like curiosity are so important i wouldn't put that in the science bucket but like how can we create a bit of a process to bring more of that into our sales practice love it so let's talk you first of all you wrote a book uh and i think all of us uh you know at some point in this world are like okay i should write a book but um but then very few of us actually go through the process first of all why did you want to write a book and then we'll get into it but what what drove you to write this and what's the name what's the title just uh remind everybody sorry yeah profit generating pipeline it debuted uh as the number two business like usa today best-selling business book in the nation which is unreal it was literally like mel robbins and then my book number 50 overall all genres yeah jazz so uh go get it profit generating pipeline a proven formula to earn trust and drive revenue um i wanted to write it for a few reasons i think initially i just wanted to write it as a calling card like i am obsessed with books i host a monthly business book club and i've been doing that for over four years like i'm a voracious reader and there was something very appealing to me of having like the credibility associated with the hardcover book so that was certainly a reason right like let's call a spade a spade like i i wanted the credibility that comes with doing it um part of it was that it was a lifelong dream but it wasn't like i wasn't a kid being like oh i can't wait to write a b2b sales book i just i don't know i thought i would write i don't know a murder mystery or like a cookbook or i don't know i knew i would write a book i never thought it would be this book but it was like a little you know a little goal in the back of my brain since childhood and then what really sparked it like what really got the the you know the ball rolling down the hill is andy paul who's a three-time best-selling author himself uh he's one of my mentors has been for years and he asked me why i hadn't written a book and i said well hasn't everything already been written about and that man just gave me a lesson like a lesson that literally changed my life um and it changed the way that i approach my content the way i approach the like the frameworks i create and teach customers like the way it changed everything because he was like yeah leslie like everything has been written to some extent but nothing has been written from your point of view with your lived experience and with your expertise and then he added a layer on top of that that was like a real punch in the gut john um because i at the time my my desk was on this wall so my bookshelves were behind me and he was and i think it's especially important for women to write sales books because there are so few and i was like whatever and certainly at the time like really fancied myself like an advocate for inclusion and like a champion of women and he said fine go to your bookshelves and pull off all of your books that are are you know non-fiction books written just by women i don't mean women as a co-author written just by women i pulled them all off and it's hundreds of books and it was like a handful that were women and it was this real moment of realization that like he was so right that a lot of things have been written about but certainly not from my perspective and then he reframed it as like why my perspective is especially needed in the space and like the book has nothing to do about with me being a woman like i'm not good at sales because i'm a woman i'm good at sales because i'm an absolute badass at selling but it was a it was a compelling enough reason for me to reconsider the importance of the goal and prioritize it love it yeah i mean it's kind of like the whole representation too right like if you don't see it you can't be it and i think that's a big part of i i was quite embarrassed i i see i'm the opposite i i am a i'm not a reader i don't read a lot of books i'm a blog post kid you know what i mean this is how i learn um and and so you know i i kind of always joke i drank my way through four years of college i probably read five books in my life and i was i was called to task one time when i was doing a training because i made that joke and then i was kind of referencing a couple of books and one of the women in the training raised her hand she's like do you know any female authors and i i literally i was like huh and at the time this was probably 10 years ago i know plenty now obviously you and a bunch of other you know women who have uh written books recently and and but back then i was like shit i don't i go now mind you we're talking a very small sample set here like i am not a reader so please you know take that into consideration but it really got me thinking and um and i and i think to your point that's why or tandy's point that's why it's important is because it's like there's there's this uh i have this tattoo it says when you're accustomed to privilege equality feels like oppression like you have that as a tattoo yeah it's my uh it's like one of my favorite quotes oh really i comment that a lot on tiktok wow no my when my dad passed away this was uh his handwriting uh he had a little note on his uh billboard and it said when you're accustomed to privilege equality feels like oppression so i thought it was powerful and i put it right there on my arm it's incredibly powerful and and that the point is is like you know privileges in you know silver spoon any of that stuff and that's why as a white male um you know i'm trying to change the word privilege to advantaged because privilege you tell somebody like me i'm privileged i'm gonna go tell you to fuck yourself because i worked my ass off for everything that i got like i wasn't given anything right just in that traditional sense of the world but that's not what privilege is privileges is when i think about books i don't even think about the fact that women haven't written too many in this sales industry privilege is you know i use the other examples of when i get up in the morning i don't worry about what i dress like so i don't get sexually harassed like it's not even something that crosses my my lens even though i think i'm a rather empathetic man and i try to think of you know everybody else but there's just certain things i'm blind to because of the way i was raised because of being a white six foot male in the united states of america and so i think that's why those type of things writing books uh even though it's not because you're a woman that you're successful it's it's so that other women who might not have that perspective can look at and be like oh shit she wrote a book like wow like there's shining one out of the you know out of all the male sameness there so i commend you for doing yeah as our friend laurie richardson reminds us hashtag see it see it be it so that that was definitely a bit of the calling that i was like oh i i literally do have like the expertise and the experience to share something that could hopefully be a source of inspiration for others but certainly like the the last reason is that i am a solopreneur i'm a solopreneur by choice i do not want to scale which means i don't work with very many clients and i also have very high price points and so there was a part of me that was like oh my gosh like i'm seeing the impact that this you know proven formula i'm seeing the impact that this knowledge is having on my clients but i don't want to like make a course i don't want to sell b to c like how can i do like i think part of my sacred calling is knowledge and like sharing knowledge knowledge transfer so i was like how can i lean more into that sacred calling of sharing this knowledge without abandoning what i know is right for me which is like the solopreneur freedom-based lifestyle and the book really you know scratch that itch there you go i love it so so let's dive into it a little bit again there's nine steps that i was looking through uh and it's funny because you know i'm like yep yep yep so if you broke down my training i have productized it right so i do the corporate stuff but you know i got the courses the on-demand stuff and and you know fill the funnel driving a close and they combine and i'm pretty sure if i broke down the core right it would fit directly into your nine steps and the but the one that i miss the one that i miss is uh territory planning and and account planning and and i think mainly because i've never really been in enterprise sales uh i i've very rarely been in a job where i was told here's your territory good luck you know i the wall was not that i drove around new england was my territory my job was to drive around and give away free construction like tools to construction workers like a job site so that was there's no territory planning it was like go find a construction site xerox given a territory major you know 80 of it was existing accounts 20 that knew not in only a year and a half there thrive networks was massachusetts and it was very basic icp stuff and then you know from now that i'm a solopreneur do my own thing it's similar like i know my icp and but it's not a territory so i don't have to worry about bumping into other people i don't even need to worry about oh i got an sdr calling in and who do i need to call into so let's unpack this a little bit why do you start with territory planning and and and how do you frame it first of all before we get into the nitty-gritty of the details why is it the first step and and how do you frame it from a from a perception standpoint yeah i think the the brass tacks of why territory planning has to be the first step as you're building an outbound engine is that if you do not know who you are talking to how could you possibly know what to say to them and where to say it so i think like that is why it is such a foundational skill and like where folks are ultimately going if they follow my my you know nine nine step formula is to use micro campaigns i i hate to use the term personalized at scale because i think it has just been like it's been poisoned right so like it is tapping into a little bit of that like personalization at scale and where it comes from for me john is that i i think we have long been sold in sales this dichotomy that you either have to take a quality approach or a quantity approach and so the quantity approach is that like spam the tam like we're contacting everybody whoo um or quality which is like oh as a rep i guess i need to spend an hour researching every single contact before i pick up the phone and it like the the dichotomy has created kind of a broken system because there are very very very few price points that would justify doing an hour worth of research before every single call uh but also the quantity approach is just spam and that's marketing i don't understand i did it's it's marketing it's not even marketing it's bad marketing yeah exactly right yep um and so the the book is an answer of how we can meet in the middle and i call it personalization at scale because i i don't think that we necessarily have a better way to frame it for like the masses to easily comprehend um but the goal is that you know your audience so well you can ultimately run micro campaigns where you don't have to do contact level personalization hey i see you went to cabo in 2017 how was swimming with the sharks anyway here's my widget but you're like 99 sure that what you are saying is very relevant to them and it it comes from a couple of things one is an understanding that we don't just have all icp like that's very marketing coded that does not transfer to sales you have multiple icps they are ideal for reasons that are specific to them not because of us and like those those reasons are going to change and i think the other thing that is like really important to remember is like i like i don't know just a lot of the personalization that folks are using right now is very disingenuous and something that you and i both talk about is the importance of a trust-based sales process or like rooting sales as a profession in trust and so i think as we lean more into signal based selling or you know the artist formerly known as intent or the artist formerly known as triggers google alerts but as we lean more into that because we have more access to data and more of it can be automated i think we need to be really careful about using it because we are transitioning from a product focused sort of outreach sequence to a problem focused outreach sequence um not to be like creepy or boring or give like false platitudes because that just doesn't work yeah i i think that's yeah that's why i kind of i think we're talking the same language i i start with ideal customer profile and really getting into the nuances and tearing it out right so you got tier one tier two tier three great average and crap and and that to me is time management that that to me is the foundation of time management because the tier ones the ones who fit that holy shit this is perfect um yeah those are the ones worth it spending time doing the research being super hyper thoughtful tier twos you know just you can't just spray and pray but you you mentioned the word which i think is actually more important than personalization which is relevance i i you know i always joke around like just because you know i went to university of maryland or cabo and whatever i'd like i don't give a shit you know but i still get those hey john so you went to maryland go terps and then same thing hard cuts to some dipshit value proposition that would be nowhere near something i would be interested in so talk to me a little bit about how you walk your clients through how to get into the details of your ideal customer profile because i think so many of them take the very lazy approach of going into zoom info or whatever and saying uh this many employees between this and this these industries and these regions and literally just those criteria alone those three criteria region number of employees and you know yeah whatever so like but super in industry super basic shit what's your approach to really digging into the details to find out like the true core nucleus of this is your fucking icp this is who you should go after yeah oh my gosh i wish i could give you an easy straightforward silver bullet answer oh i can't uh it's why there's an entire chapter of the book and then like most of another chapter dedicated this just to this topic um so one thing that i think bears repeating is that folks do not have a icp they have many icps and they are ideal for different reasons and so where i suggest folks start is making sure that they are always using at least five filters when they are creating a list like i think that's a good baseline if you go through and you audit the list you're building and you aren't using at least five like psychographic technographic technographic firmographic filters you simply don't have enough and one of the filters always needs to be a demographic filter based on title and i know this might sound so basic to some of the folks listening but one of the easiest changes that i've helped organizations make that get immediate results is switching from finance executives like you to cfo or to director of internal audit like just the clarity that comes from using a specific title and then asking yourself hey how would a cfo think about this problem differently than a director of internal audit like that right there is a huge unlock so that is that's step one make sure you're using a minimum of five filters and make sure that you are clear not just about the account but about the specific person that you are talking to and then write only to that person i love that yeah so yeah and actually i don't have a silver bullet but i have a i have a an approach that i recommend highly it's like when i'm not in the room right we go through my go through my process of getting into the details but an inch and i think now you can do with ai even better um you take take the the top 10 clients that you're that you have as customers right now and the ones who are doing really really well in this economy and are getting a shitload of value out of your solution so those two criteria have to be in place okay you have the top 10 doesn't have to be the top revenue generators right just the ones that fit that mold and then you go through an exercise with the team and you dissect the shit out of them you look at every aspect of their business you look at what they were doing before now what are they doing now you look at the size of the department that you know you work with you look at the stage of the business series a b c d whatever and and you try to like figure out where are all the commonalities of these 10 clients and then whatever the commonalities are there's your core and that's when you can start to cert you know safe searches and all that fun stuff on linkedin to find those so it's not a silver bullet but it's a fun exercise to go through no i think it's a brilliant exercise actually of a section in the book where we talk about like i don't know what it's titled maybe non-traditional or no it's non non-obvious reasons a client might be ideal and tell me if you've seen this as well as well that you go in to help a client you ask them what their like dream list is their key account list is and it's just like the 10 biggest logos in the industry for sure like the hardest accounts to penetrate the biggest logos and so there's a section that i carved out that just pleads with people to think about like hey go into your historical data which industry has the shortest sales cycle like which industry closes at the highest price point with no negotiation where do you have the strongest use cases and case studies which industry renews at i was gonna say who's the longest lasting customers right totally and so it allows you to use all this historical data to your point than to say like okay what can i learn about those types of companies that are buying faster buying at higher price points are renewing quickly so that i can create a list that matches that and then i can use what i know about those organizations to build sales messaging i mean there's your case studies that's hyper relevant 100 yeah yeah that's why i think it's it's it's foolish for most like if i was coming into a new organization as a sales leader it'd be the first thing i would do i would be like let's stop all this right now let's take a step back and let's really get honed in on who we actually work with and and quite and another thing this is what saved actually this is what saved me personally um the icp exercise was back in 2023 when the hit the fan and i went you know down to zero basically um and i had to rebuild and i was in sass i mean sass is my industry period and i had so many people telling me oh john you got to get outside of sass it's too volatile like it's just you got and i'm like like first of all all those other industries are kind of boring to me like in a lot of ways and second of all like i don't really have a presence i don't have a brand over there so i have to rebuild completely if i decide to get out of sass i'm like so how do i how do i stay in sass without getting fucking destroyed by sass yeah and what i started doing was i looked at not just my icp but my icp's icp and i and i and i noticed sass companies if you looked at and all i had to do was look at their website all the logos on their website if a sass company was selling to sass companies and all their logos on their website were sass i didn't even bother i was like i'm not even going to try to call you i don't give it because you are getting slaughtered just like everybody else but if you were a sass company and your logos were outside of sass financial services retail you know all those other industries that were doing okay you were doing pretty good and so with this small shift to look at my clients icps icp right i was like okay now i can get back on track here because these people are spending money they're doing okay they're not getting crushed and it just ended and it was like okay i'm back on track now so it's an interesting exercise to go through that i don't think enough do no they don't you know i i know we're deep diving territory management but one of my discovery prep questions that like really is a bit of a career defining question for me particularly in my last job when i was selling to like fortune 500 chief procurement officers is what's going on with your customers customers because that really changed how i was approaching conversations not even from just like a like a relevance perspective but to understand what their risk appetite might be it like i so i i love that i love that and you know it it brought up something else because i know i think at the beginning of the the conversation we were talking about origin stories and part of my my origin stories for why i'm so passionate about territory management today is that the first job that i ever had out of college cold calling and like i you know we've talked about this i've made over a quarter of a million i know that's ridiculous my teams have made over 10 million cold calls like i have i have smashed the phone and in that very first job where i was making like 200 calls a day without a dialer the way that we did territory management john you're gonna die you're gonna die uh the way that we did territory management is that we all had a national territory and you could call any account you wanted and then when you reach somebody you would write the company name and the area code of the person that you've reached on a sheet of paper on a sheet of paper and that's how everything was tracked and then the sales manager at the end of the day was responsible for like updating the paper with anybody that was reached and you had three days it was a very transactional sale you had three days after you put it on the sheet of paper to close the account or you lost like your hold on it uh the what a shit show can you even imagine no i can unfortunately unfortunately unfortunately i can't imagine and that's and that and i think that's you know the the grind that that put us through right you and i through i think gave us all perspective on why quality matters and and why quantity first of all yeah you might trip over a couple of opportunities but it's talk about a fucking boring ass light existence like people who are just hammering the phones with a generic pitch and just try like i just the burnout factor of that alone is just almost impossible to contemplate because i'd like nobody wants to do that for more than a couple of months at the end of the day i mean nobody wants to do that in general but for those of us that stick with it it's just so give me help me understand that point right quality over quantity to your point i think if it was up if it was up to me and you probably we'd all have an hour to do research on every account that we wanted to get into and be super thoughtful and do all our homework that's not reality um and the other thing is is like so say we go through this icp exercise and we tear out our accounts we've got the good ones average ones right you can't just go after the whales you can't because you missed the whales you you got nothing so you the baseball analogy like you got to have some singles and doubles here and then yes and hopefully you get the big one every once in a while so how would you even one of the challenges i always have is you know those those accounts like there's the the different icps have different acvs right so average contract values like these ones look great these ones look okay and these loans are probably pretty shitty so what's my mix what should i have like and some reps are really comfortable with the little tiny ones so they got just do a ton of individual stuff others are like no i'm a strategic seller i'm not going to do any of that little pebbly little shit i'm only going to work with these big ones but in reality you have to be able to balance all of them and figure out how you can so how do you approach that from your perspective yeah uh two two different ways because i think that there is like the sales leader approach to that and i spent you know 15 years as a sales leader like creating territories and then teaching reps how to manage them and then like i think that that's a bigger conversation around comp and like title structure and how people move through organizations right anymore because i want nothing to do with that shit like nope i don't want comp anything leave me alone gross yeah like so so i think we could go really deep on that but one of the ways that i approach it in the book is a call for sales leaders to help their reps develop a ceo of territory mindset so that whatever leads they're given and also as an aside it will shock you maybe it won't maybe it will shock our listeners how few organizations actually have defined territories like how many of them operate in that like crazy like call everybody hope it works out like claim them when you reach them it's kind of a shit show but for those uh reps that are getting given a set of accounts that they are being asked to work my call to sales leaders is to empower them to develop a ceo of territory mindset and what what you are really doing is teaching them how to go through some of those exercises that we described today right where they're looking at their say 400 accounts and they're asking themselves questions like which are my best fit accounts why are they my best fit accounts uh who is most likely to meet with me now why would they want to meet with me now and so you're empowering them to do um maybe i mean the tiers are probably already going to be in their crm but a little bit of extra work within the the tiers and i have a story to tell you and then i will give folks some like some very specific tips of how they can start being more strategic about the way they manage the accounts that are given to them um but like one of the stories that i tell in the book is i uh joined an organization and i was their first sales higher in the u.s like i was bringing the brand over to the u.s um they already had a huge footprint in europe and a pretty good footprint in apac and what they knew is that organizations like pharma and cpg did really really well so the account tiering structure was based on that historical data of what had done well in other markets and so i am obviously on the ground here like trying to make a name for myself like yay we're penetrating this new market um and so i was calling they were a b c d so i was calling my like tier a accounts and it was just not happening for me like i was getting beat up from the feed up and so i started calling on financial services accounts and like to like banks general like pretty much anybody in the financial industry because i knew from previous jobs that i sell really really well into the northeast yeah and they had a lot of those which is really interesting coming from uh somebody from uh from montana because usually people outside of new england or the new northeast get their ass handed to them when they come to the northeast because it's such a different culture of fuck you what do you want get out of my face if you don't get anything of value whereas pretty much everywhere else in the country is like a little bit more open to having a conversation so the fact that you came from montana and were successful in the northeast blows me away but good for you why did wait i love it we'll pause for a second why why do you think that it was do you think it's because of that deep understanding that we talked about earlier of montana or was it just like you just liked the the vibe of the northeast no well i think i'm a bit of a chameleon because in the the the first two portfolios i owned when i was working for that you know business intelligence company ages ago were uh energy and finance and so i would spend half of my day having you know myself and having my team call on like fortune 500 cfos during the great recession and then the other half of my day would be calling like power plant managers in the deep south really interesting so i do think that i'm a bit of a chameleon but when it when it comes to like uh the the type of personality that is easiest and most natural for me to deal with it's definitely a super direct communication style like get to the point make it matter to me or you're dead here like one of the biggest compliments somebody can give me is being like are you from jersey and i'm like oh my god like thank you it was because i default to a very direct communication style and so it it worked out well for me to call on firms in the northeast so like in in the scope of territory management they were not my my a or my tier one accounts they were like my tier b and c accounts but i knew that i'm really good talking to that type of persona i figured out who was in the northeast i prioritized financial services accounts and i cleaned up like i closed some big big big logos i wouldn't have done that if i didn't have the ceo of territory mindset right like if i just had my accounts and i said okay i have 400 accounts i'm going to start at one and dial through to 400 and i'm going to dump all of them into this like generic product-centric sequence i wouldn't get results and i'd be the person banging on about how like cold outreach doesn't work cold calling doesn't work instead i took a more strategic more intentional more creative approach and i got crazy crazy results so off of that like there are three ways that i think folks should start looking at their territory if they want to take a more strategic approach one we've already talked about it certainly like going into your crm and just seeing what you can learn from historical data but one is that like personal passion angle and so like calling on grumpy folks in the northeast i wouldn't necessarily say that's like a personal passion for me but i right but i like i know that it is a good mesh for my communication style but something i've had a lot of success with working with teams is helping them figure out like oh they're really passionate about sustainability okay so like go find a bunch of corporations that have a sustainability charter or have like a sustainable focus grant or like they're really into cars or like automotive in general okay then the first list that you're going to want to build is going to be focused on the automotive industry because you're going to be super excited to research super excited about your outreach so it's i think that's maybe not the normal way that folks think about managing their territory but as we instill that ceo of territory mindset it has to be how can you make your territory matter to you the rep so you just nailed my favorite approach to well at least what i used to do with my team right we would go through the the demographics from a graphics all that stuff right and we'd get down and every rep would have to come up with their top 25 right and again not just the logos here but like why right they got to fit these criteria and so we'd go through the prize say all right go find it and based on this criteria blah blah blah and then they'd come back here and be like here's my list it'd be great before you can prospect into this list though i need you to go and look at each one of those so i reverse engineer a little bit with what you did um because i i said grab those 25 and then before you can prospect into them i want you to go to come back and tell me why you personally want to work with that business yeah why do you like what's the connection here is it you know and it's not necessarily cars or those type of things and they all fit that bucket but it's like you go to their website and they just have in like their core values just absolutely resonate with you or their product is cool as shit or like their leadership is is just inspirational or sustainability they give back so much or that you know charity like what is it that you can make that connection to because when you make that connection your messaging is so much more authentic and going back to what we talked about earlier curiosity if you can make that connection you become interested and if you become interested you can be curious and therefore that comes across in spades when it comes to having conversations so i absolutely love the fact that you do that talk to me like i do want to back up a little bit though to define this because i think some people i think this goes to you know getting back to a little bit of the basics on ceo mindset because i i used to tell my team like i i need you to think more strategically like i just need to be more strategic thinkers and they'd look at me like sideways like john what do you mean be more straight i don't i don't even know how to be that and i would demystify it for them i'm like all right let me demystify strategic thinking here for you all it is is outlining a process and figuring out like whatever you're trying to do outlining the process and then figuring out the what what's the weakest link of this process pulling that that small piece down figuring out a solution for that a better way of doing it plugging it back in and seeing how it works like there's your way of of evolving and strategic thinking but could you break down what what you think as the ceo mindset so that so that listeners here can say oh i don't have to be a ceo i don't have to have the experience of a ceo to have a ceo mindset it's this is what it's comprised of yeah i think like it's quite the opposite we don't want you to be a ceo because we don't want you showing up on calls and pretending like you know it all challenger sale like i'm smarter than you piss off so i'm i'm the smartest person here like oh did you spend like 30 years as a ceo oh you didn't no you've had two years of experience as an str yeah okay maybe take several seats and lead asking questions but what i do think it means is like having a a zest a passion for penetrating the list of accounts you're given in a way that it is about the buyer and not about you so like a lot of the sort of initial work that i'll often do with organizations when i'm going to come in and do like a full consulting thing is around mindset versus skill sets if we get to skill sets but it's like sellers and i love this profession but like sellers are selfish most of them yeah yeah and i i don't even think it's necessarily their fault john like often right like the the scripting they're given all of the training they're given is like so product focused and so company focused and i think sometimes they're like so excited about the thing that they're selling that they just can't wait to talk about it and we can often fail to realize that we are so often putting the spotlight on ourselves and what we care about what we want to talk about what we think is cool and so nobody cares i know the breast hacks is that we have simply not earned the right to ask these total strangers that we're reaching out to to care about us and our product and our company yeah but you know what they care about their problems and so the first thing that i'm going to ask people to do when they are adopting that ceo of territory mindset is ask themselves why would this matter to them like them being the prospect and to kind of like remove themselves from it a little bit like you've seen me uh we certainly see it in the book but you've seen me all over linkedin constantly using the earn the right hashtag it's like that basic litmus test of before i send this email make this phone call whatever it is what have i done to earn the right to ask for this prospect's attention let alone their time their consideration their business and so that's the first step in the ceo of territory mindset is like how can i make it matter to them the recipient of this outreach versus centering myself in the process and you might say hey leslie that sounds a bit counter to like building a part of your territory strategy based on personal passion but i promise you it isn't because when you have that personal passion it means you really really care about the outcomes of the person that you are reaching out to so you're much more likely to be curious to leave with questions to do the deep research to just you know seek those like mutually beneficial outcomes um so it's yeah it's just it's like hey why would this matter to them how can i earn the right to ask for their attention to ask for their time and that's already being strategic yeah yeah and it's like the business acumen associated with it and carry like like what we talked about earlier caring about their customers and how do they you know the perception they're maybe looking at some of their reviews and seeing how people are working with them and every and the difference that they make you know if you can talk to their them about their passions you watch people light up pretty easily um all right i got a curious question here to finish things up um okay on my well this is more it's it's super tactical but it's the one that i always just i don't know a great answer to and i'm wondering what your approach is and it's the whole sdr ae relationship as it goes to territory so you know i always feel so bad for sdrs and i again going back to mindset shift it always cracked me up that you put a 22 year old kid with almost no experience in business at all and and and then you pair them up with five aes so it's like a one to five ratio and those five aes all have different personalities they all like different things uh you know some of them will take a lead you know a meeting with anybody because their territory is shit they'll they'll talk to the janitor others will be like no i want this all the way banned qualified if they're not ready to buy i don't want to talk to them so go fuck yourself so you're putting this 22 year old kid in this impossible situation so let's look at it from kind of the macro standpoint of what is a good approach for an sdr ae relationship partnership here going and say say we're working together i'm your sdr you're my ae i know what your territory is we've broken down the icps we meet on a weekly basis what does that meeting look like what do i do the rest of the week how many cold calls do i like do i call top down bottom up like what's my yeah yeah i know there's so many variables involved here but i'm just curious kind of where you land with this relationship because it's such a disastrous relationship in most cases that it's painful to watch it sure can be it's like dear sdr welcome to corporate america you need to learn how to manage up manage down manage your territory management um you're ceo of you know what i mean like yeah i just graduated with my liberal arts degree here like what the okay um so i think i have a slightly different perspective on this for two reasons one i have spent a huge chunk of my career as a full cycle ae and managing full cycle ae okay i take uh personal offense when people are like the full cycle ae role check out this new role that like sass is just i guess finding for the first time and i'm like it never went away like it's always been here you're not inventing something new um so i think that like that is part of it um i also came to sass later in my career like i grew up in more traditional industries so i think i have like a right yeah i have a it's funny how many of like the big like really successful corporate sales trainers did not grow up in sass um i wonder yeah i was full cycle all right i had to do it all like yes yes it gives you it gives you some chops it gives you some chops and i really do think that like being in that uh role where you are responsible for managing the full cycle and where you are responsible for managing your meetings is really important like i don't think anybody should skip that skip that really important role um but to answer your question i don't think that as many companies that are using the sdr ae alignment like need it as are using it if that makes sense like i think that there's a lot of companies with price points and like length of sales cycles where they really just should have full full cycle ae if you're selling it just sorry if you're selling something that's under 15 000 and you have sdrs you're out of your fucking mind like you just just unnecessary i'm sorry it's it the cost of sale is off the charts you better keep that client for 50 years if your acv is anywhere near ten thousand dollars and you have the sdr ae probably vp of sales get involved se get involved and then then probably offer a discount like that they must you but they better stay within your organization for 50 years to make that money back there's no forever i actually i know so like that's yeah go on no i'm sorry i did this report i did this presentation at pavilion and one of the data points was that if your acv is ten thousand dollars okay here's this will blow your mind if your acv is ten the the cost of the sdr getting that meeting for that if if it closes by the way is six thousand dollars barf based on conversion ratios based on meeting it you know attainment of quota and all this other stuff six and that's revenue that's not profit so it costs six thousand dollars just from the sdr standpoint to get a ten thousand dollar a year customer that doesn't include the ae that doesn't include the se that doesn't include the tech stack that doesn't include like it doesn't so you are so massively unprofitable for the first year of a ten thousand dollar acv client if you introduce an sdr you're out of your mind if that's your model here and i'm sorry for those of you who are listening in sdr roles that sell under ten thousand acv but get out of that fucking role fast um because it's going to get replaced by ai if nothing else well but i think that's a whole nother no like a whole whole nother piece of this too john that there are roles that i don't think an a ae should be doing like simply if we look at like the comp structure like i'm not paying somebody like a six figure base to do list building so i think like there there is a relationship to be had where the ae is empowered to be more strategic and they do have a partner that can be more operationally focused like some of the the stuff that i love right now are folks bringing in like claygians yeah and so they have somebody that's just like dedicated to building the list or ai signals and like right right so like i i think that like i think that that might be more of the new role of the str um where that person will act more as a sales assistant more as a gtm engineer more as maybe like the manager of the ai agents so that the ae can be focused on research on connecting the dots on leading with relevance and insight on running a great cycle all of that because like like i don't think the ae should just be like smashing the phone all day long but if we go back to the beginning of the conversation right like that should never be necessary if they are starting by asking themselves who are my ideal customers why are they my ideal customers how can i build tight lists with at least five filters a clarity on the title of the person i'm reaching out to and what matters to them and if you're ready to go next level with it make sure that you are pulling in a signal like if if aes can be more responsible for that strategic approach or like you know the sales leadership can be more responsible for that strategic approach to enable the ae to run a really strong cycle and they can use the str role not maybe as it's it's currently manifesting today but more as that support to do the ai the clay workflows like the actual setting up the sequences all of that stuff that's a future i'm interested in seeing so you just nailed my presentation the so what i called it let you know where to send your commission right so i literally so this is it is is what's old is new again i think sdr as it's currently constructed is is painful um calling i'm calling it a gtm generalist role because if you think of any position in any organization any gtm role right sales marketing let's use the big threes rev ops sales and marketing okay marketing is the only one that you can actually really get a degree in and even that degree is meaningless i got my degree in marketing when i got into the real world as soon as i got into the real world i'm like oh everything i learned is total bullshit and so none of us get taught to do college doesn't even know what rev ops is and so let's stop like pretending like we're doing this and and and you know letting these kids choose which program that they want to go into with this you know okay sure the idea here is the the first two years of any reps existence is this role and what it does is it's basically to your point an assistant to the full cycle sales rep and so the first year they spend a day with sales and and their ae they spend a day in rev ops they spend a day with marketing they spend a day with customer success and then and they learn all those roles and they learn business acumen they learn use cases they learn how to run certain things and there's no commission by the way because my contention here is that sales and marketing has always had an issue ever since i've gotten into this profession and i wonder like okay well why does sales marketing always always conflict with each other well mainly because of attribution right like who gets credit for the fucking lead and who gives a shit well the reason that people give a shit is because of commission and if so if you take away commission and we don't have to double comp and worry about all that crap then you then you make it so that they can actually work together and so you maybe maybe raise the salaries a little bit right but first year is no commission you just in there second year you kind of pick a lane so you're like all right i like sales so you know what we're gonna put you in um you know we're gonna put you in a pod for instance you're gonna call low level and just get used to making calls and whatever if you're in marketing your mini campaigns into different territories rev ops you're gonna run reports whatever and and now maybe you're there's a bonus structure where once a quarter you get based on the team uh success you get a bonus right so there's your variable comp and then once you hit your third year then you pick then you pick your poison you're either sales rev ops or marketing right so that way we we build the business acumen of these kids coming in we teach them all aspects of of gtm we allow them to then choose we take these arbitrary metrics off of them like 50 dials a day 100 dials a day just because that's the easy thing to measure against and so the stress comes down there's a cost of sale is much more predictable because there's no commissions in that first you know in those first two years and my bet is is by taking this approach um employee satisfaction will go up uh tenure will go up they will stay with the company longer because the average sdr right now i did this report the average sdr stays in their company not in their role in their company for 1.6 years on less than a year and a half so all this idea of an sdr becoming your ae and and blah blah blah that's bullshit at this point so let's stop the whole presentation was effectively the emperor has no clothes and we're all looking at a naked emperor right now and none of us are admitting it's true and i'm just like fuck that this is a joke like why are we still doing this it was great for us the predictable revenue model was fantastic for us as businesses because it helped us scale back when money was free and grow at all costs it was never customer centric and it was never a true pipeline for real sales growth and development 100 it was never a durable business model but it was easy for a while instead of looking at like how can we tighten conversion metrics how can we make this more buyer centric to just be like more reps it doesn't matter if they're all at 40 of quota i'm sure it'll be fine where can people find out more about you leslie about the book about what you're doing uh because i think more people need to hear this uh this type of an approach yes well thank you this is a great conversation i was jazz i described conversations like that when it's mutual respect as like a bridge conversation where you're like so excited that you're just like oh i can't like i can't wait to agree with you so i love it um find me on linkedin i live there i'm a chronically online person folks can also get the book um at sales lead gtm.com book so grab the book and then find me on linkedin i post there daily love it leslie thank you so much for coming on i really appreciate it it's been a fun conversation this was great absolutely have a great day thanks everybody thanks and everybody thank you all very much for listening hopefully you enjoyed the conversation as much as i did and like i say at the all the end all these podcasts go out there and make somebody smile today because no matter how bad your day went or how bad you think it's going you make somebody smile 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 will see you on the other side hey everyone 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 i am super excited to be launching my new newsletter where i'll be sharing 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