Pablo Dominguez: Agility: The Real Competitive Edge

All right, before we get started on today's podcast discussion, I got to do a little promo here and this one's a big one. So HubSpot's annual inbound conference is coming up September 5th through the 8th here in Boston. And it's right in my backyard. I go to it every single year. It's one of the marquee events that I absolutely put on my calendar. And even if I didn't live here in Boston, I'd come to this one because this gets some of the best and brightest across sales, marketing, customer success together to talk about what's happening in the industry and share best practices, tactics, and all sorts of different things about where the industry is headed and what we need to do to drive results in this crazy big world that we're all living in right now.

And with inbound, they get some super cool guests on this and speakers. I mean, including this year is going to be Reese Witherspoon. We got Derek Jeter coming up and I know he's a Yankee, but we'll let him come to Boston because he's actually one of the Yankees I like. And then we got people like Sam Jacobs, a good friend of mine who's going to be speaking. And myself, I got a speaking engagement, so they accepted my speaking engagement at this event. It's about sales-ready messaging, where I'm going to be talking about a specific equation that we use to create sales-ready messaging that aligns sales, marketing, and CS, and you can use to implement into some of these AI tools to really drive some pretty impressive results.

So if nothing else, you're going to get some free training from me if you come to this thing. Now, there's two types of passes. You can get the general admission pass that gets you all the speakers, trainings, and programs, and then the VIP pass, which is limited availability and gives you VIP lounge access, exclusive welcome parties, and access to some of the speakers that you might not have otherwise. So you've got to come to this one again, September 5th through the 8th here in Boston. Sign up at www.inbound.com to get your ticket today. Let's make it happen. 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.

And this was a super fun conversation with Pablo Dominguez. Now, Pablo is the operating partner over at Insight Partners, where he partners with a deep set of portfolio companies to help them build and scale effective commercial teams through the application of proven and repeatable go-to market and operational best practices. And he's a Gen Xer just like me, graduated right around the same time, so we had a lot in common here and we share a lot of the same mentality. Now, a big part of this conversation revolved around the new book that he put out, which is called What a Unicorn Knows, How Leading Entrepreneurs Use Lean Principles to Drive Sustainable Growth. And this falls right in line with my whole thesis about how agility is the number one competitive advantage that all of us need to have right now and how we need to treat everything as an experiment.

And that's what we dove into. You know, one of my first questions was how this book compares to the well-known book, Good to Great, and how you build sustainable businesses, and how we look back at Good to Great, and a lot of those quote-unquote great companies that they mentioned are actually failures today. So what's the difference between what a unicorn knows and how we build grit and sustainable growth in today's market compared to how it was? And then we go into everything about how to execute in a strategy and how strategy is not anymore a year-long strategic plan. It's different because strategic planning is different than a strategy, and we dive into the difference there. And we talk all about ChatGBT and how the benefits and the negative of that and what that impact is having on us as an organization and as a business and as people, and also what's happening with sales reps today and how we've lost sight of the fundamentals and what we need to do about it as an organization and how leadership needs to really lean in on creating in a culture and environment of continuous improvement and supporting failure and encouraging failure so we can learn.

So we took a lot of different paths on this conversation, but I thought all of it was really, really relevant to today's market and what's happening right now. So I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did, and let's make it happen. Pablo, welcome to the Make It Happen Monday podcast, my friend. Thanks for joining us here. John, thanks so much. Appreciate it. And we were prepping for this. And again, congrats for your kid getting into Virginia Tech. I know that's a proud moment for you. Yeah, for my first kid, I went to Texas. He actually enjoys the cold and wanted to stay closer to the Northeast. We're super excited. There you go. Love it, man. Well, look, I've been looking forward to this as I was prepping for this.

I've been looking forward to this conversation because I think it really aligns with a lot of the things that I've been talking about and feeling about agility and what's happening in this market right now and how crazy things are. But before we get into that, Pablo, could you just give us some background? Tell us how you got to here and some insights that we'll be able to gain from that as well. Yeah, absolutely. So Pablo Dominguez, obviously, I work at Insight Partners, a venture capital, a private equity firm, focuses on growth. We only invest in software B2B companies. I've been here a little under five years and I've spent my entire career really in go-to-market effectiveness. Started in management consulting at the Alexander Group, did two stints at public companies, so got to see what air quotes good looks like because public companies have just as many issues as everybody thinks once you go public, it's like, oh, I hit the promised land.

Things are easy. No, they're not. They're probably worse. And I spent five years at a startup in New York, helping them scale from 40 million to 400 million and product-led tech founder, so learned a lot there. And yeah, really enjoying my time at Insight, working with our portfolio companies. We have over 500 companies and my team focuses on really helping them scale, go to market, right? Focusing on sales, post-sales, effectiveness. Love it. Did you, you know, growing up, you said you grew up in Texas, right? Yeah. Talk to me a little bit about your childhood, if you don't mind, as far as growing up, because I'm always curious where that entrepreneurial spirit comes from and that type of thing.

Did you, yeah, just walk me through kind of like growing up, where did you come from? Yeah, absolutely. Now, let me take you back. I was actually born in Mexico. So I was born in Mexico, grew up in a town called Guadalajara, which is the second largest city in Mexico and moved to the States when I was about seven, grew up in El Paso, Texas, which is about as West as you can get. We could walk to New Mexico or walk to Mexico, take your pick. That's, we were literally on the, on the bubble there. And, uh, mom was a teacher, was a teacher for 30 years. Uh, my father was an economist, worked in Mexico city, flew Monday morning out, came back Friday for 30 years, right? So he was, uh, the epitome of grit and, uh, we, uh, by no means had a lot of stuff, but my parents made sure that education and opportunities were plentiful to us, uh, what they could.

And, uh, yeah, always wanted to follow my father's footsteps and sort of do business things. And, uh, that's sort of, you know, what, then what's college, the university of Texas, uh, and graduated at the peak of the.com bubble. Um, so a lot to learn there in terms of like, I, I graduated at the, literally the apex when things were great and then right when things crash. So a lot to learn. Yeah. Welcome to business. Yeah. I don't remember. So when, when was that? When did you actually graduate? 99. Yeah. So I was going to say, cause I graduated in 98 and that was a fun, like, I remember we, I started my first company in 2000. It was a just straight up train wreck. It was, it was a fun fact, uh, cause I was in consulting.

I consulted, uh, I designed the sales compensation plans at Enron before, uh, before Enron. Not that my plans were the reason for Enron crashing, but, uh, we had some questions on their business model. Let's just say that. So, well, and it's funny, you know, we've learned, don't learn from history apparently. Right. Cause we're, we're at a, I don't want to say a.com crash right now, but we're in a pretty heavy crash in this, in the tech space. And I'm sure you're feeling it just like everybody else. It's, it's pretty painful right now. Yeah. I mean, everybody's, you know, there's a lot of headwinds, right? Obviously with what's going on economic wise. And I think, I think it'll be a little bit different than the.com bubble because the.com bubble, I think there were companies that were vaporware, right?

Versus here you've got, you know, businesses that are actually producing something, right? Some sort of solution. It's just the resilient will survive. And those that have, you know, solid product market fit and aren't just features. Um, I think we'll have one jet longevity. So we'll see. Yeah. I think it's interesting to watch. I was actually just did a post on this about how I think the, the past 10 years in SAS specifically is, is, I don't want to say it's been easy, but because of how frothy the market has been and how, uh, how grow it all costs, but it, you know, the, the overlap of the, well, the, the sprouting up of all of these point solutions, right? These feature type solutions, it was tolerated for the past 10 years because it was like, ah, what, yeah, we need that.

We need that too. And so the overlap didn't matter. ROI wasn't as important, but now that we're in a down economy, the retraction and going back to platform plays of everything on one platform. I think a lot of these point solutions are in a lot of trouble. Um, if there isn't that product market fit or they don't really. Make a true difference, you know, and if they're only like 10 to 20% better than the platform's version of what that thing is, they're screwed. Yeah. And I think, I think we're going to see consolidation, John, right? I think, which is good for the market, right? I think the, the point solutions that are gray will get gobbled up by other players that are building out true platforms.

And I think ultimately the users win because you'll have a platform that solves 10 of your issues versus having to deal with 10 different independent things that are just okay. Um, obviously that's not always good news for people that are working. Those companies, right? But, um, I think we're in for a lot of change, which I think will disrupt in a good way. The ecosystem. Yeah, I hope so. It's, it's, it's, it's interesting to pay attention to because it's like expand, retract, expand, retract. It's almost like if you think of computers, right? Like we, we started with mainframes and then we went to personal computers and we went to the cloud. And now we're actually oddly enough, I'm hearing that a lot of these companies are bringing, uh, you know, their computing power back on site on-prem because they need such high computing rates, you know, to, to be able to do what they want to do.

And it's the same thing with point solution platform, point solution platform, point solution platform. Everything's a cycle. Yeah. And if I could predict it better, I'd be a lot richer than I am right now, but, well, let's talk about unicorns, right? Cause you wrote this book, um, it was what, what a unicorn knows, right? That's the new book that you guys have coming out. Yeah. Yeah. Matt May and I, uh, wrote a book called what a unicorn knows, uh, taking, you know, about 11 years of experience working with public companies. Um, cause again, a unicorn is technically anything valued over a billion. I think in today's terms, it's used more for private companies that are valued at a billion less so public, um, and really just showcasing what makes a true unicorn sustainable.

Right. And I think it's relevant in today's economic environment in terms of, instead of growth at all costs, like how do you drive sustainable growth so you can continue to survive even through times of, uh, uh, you know, hardship versus just the boom. Every, every, you know, booms, a rising tide lifts all boats. Right. And so, uh, the greatest companies, uh, know how to continue to sort of drive that efficiency innovation during all times. I'm going to maybe before we dive into the details here, curious, cause it sounds so I'd haven't, you know, I've read the clip notes of the book. I haven't read the full thing. So, uh, but, so bear with me, but help me understand the difference between this and like good to great, for instance.

Right. Cause, cause great, good to great to me was an interesting book back when I said, I was like, okay, it's not about like Lee Iacocca and the guy, right. It's about a, a process and creating sustainable. But if you look back at all those companies that they referenced in good to great, they're all pretty much junk right now. Right. Exactly. They're way off their top. So, so why was, what, what's the difference like fundamentally between the good to great philosophy that, that, that had that versus what you're talking about here with unicorns? Yeah, no, it's a good point. Uh, and it's funny you referenced that cause we actually talked about that when we were writing the book, right? It's like, there's all these references sometimes in books that, you know, 20 years later, you're like, wait a second, like these companies, these are, didn't make it, et cetera.

So what we've, what we've done with the book is really tried to take lean principles, right? And so lean usually gets attributed to manufacturing product development, right? And we've flipped that to go to market, which no one really has. And so the principles in the book are focused on things that companies should be doing, right? Um, like strategy, right? Having a very clear strategy, which in today's environment is so critical, right? Um, if I've got less cash, um, if I have, you know, less runway potentially, and I, you know, we've read the news about, uh, you know, riffs and stuff in terms of companies laying off people, right? So I have less people, I should do the work. I've got to be really focused on how to execute my strategy to hit my numbers, uh, to make sure the company survives, but also maybe not just survives, right?

It becomes one of these unicorns or, you know, a public company at some point. And so we go into these elements, um, that focus on lean, which have never been used in sales, never been used in marketing to demonstrate that those principles have a way to drive sustainable growth. Right. And I think, I don't know, maybe in 20 years, we, we, we haven't really called out when we call it some companies like Netflix to show that how they got to Netflix, you know, Netflix success has been based on lean, some of the lean principles. We're not saying they're going to live, you know, yeah, indefinitely, but we all know that Netflix was a disruptor, right? They completely changed the market. Um, and so I think hopefully people can use these to sort of change their mindset on how they're approaching, uh, managing their companies or sales teams.

Let's talk about strategy though. Cause I, I've been on this, uh, talk track and, and I'm, I believe it, you know, I think strategy is an, I'd, I'd love to introduce you to understand like your perspective of, of strategy, right? Cause I think right now strategy is hard because things are moving so fast. Right. And I don't, quite frankly, I don't know too many leaders out there right now that can tell me for certain what's going to happen in Q3, for instance. Right. Yep. So, so how would you define strategy in today's market? Because it's no longer, we're going to sit down in the beginning, at the end of the year, we're going to map out our plans for next year, and we're going to put a stake in the ground as far as there's our revenue.

And then yay, let's go. Right. Because things are moving so fast and going back to agile and you have to be able to adjust. Yeah. So how did strategy fit into this, this world of chaos that we're in right now? Yeah. I love that you brought that up because we actually talk about that in chapter one of the book. Okay. Strategy is not the strategic plan that people go through and go, oh my God, it's September. Let's get the board together. Let's put together all these financial models. How much are we going to grow? How much is coming from EMEA, the US, from product A, from product B? Let's run scenarios and like, all right, let's pick one that makes sense. We have a strategy. That's not strategy, right?

That's strategic planning. And it's part of the budgeting process. And it is necessary to run a company. I'll quote Porter, who's the grandfather of strategy, right? Strategy is the essence of strategy, he says, is choosing what not to do. And the framework that we've applied from Roger Martin is the play to win framework, right? Which basically says, from a strategy perspective, where will you play and where will you not play? And strategy is not a calendar event, right? To your point around how to be agile, you are constantly evaluating your strategy if you're thinking about strategy and effectively. So, to answer it a different way also, in terms of knowing where to play and not to play, all these headwinds are in front of us.

So, do I launch these three new products that my strategic plan said I should? Do I go into France and the UK if I'm going into EMEA for the first time? Do I focus on my core or do I try to do too many things, right? The companies that are struggling right now, they're spreading themselves too thin, right? And there's this notion that, okay, I've got to do more with less, right? Because I've let go of people. So, like, how can I do all these things? Strategically, you should revisit it and go, where can we most effectively grow? Let's just focus on our core market. We talk about this also, Netflix. Netflix had the opportunity to go into Canada early on. And it was going to add, I think, 10 points of growth to their growth.

And it was a sound strategy, but then someone said it's going to require product development, language changes, because they do speak French up in Canada, right? And someone had the sage advice to say, no, let's just focus on the U.S. Let's just double down there. And they doubled down and they got twice the growth out of the U.S. versus going into Canada. At the moment, you might have said, I don't know, we're not capturing new shares. Someone's going to get Canada. Ultimately, they did, right? So, important strategic decision there. And that's the advice we're giving, you know, our portfolio companies, but also, you know, people I talk to in the market is, figure out what you're good at now.

Double down on that. It doesn't mean you can't do some light experiments other places. This is not the time to be, you know, putting your chips on every single number at the roulette table, right? Well, that's a bad analogy, because there's not, like, one number you could pick that would be a good strategy. But you can't spread yourself too thin, right? Because there's not enough money. But, um, so that, that's what we mean by strategy is being choosing exactly what not to do and focusing on what you should do and iterate, right? John, you talked about agility. That might change next quarter, especially given the, the environment, right? So, you've got to be, you can't be like, well, let's wait for the strategic planning process in October.

Like, you've got to be quick and nimble. And that's why I think, you know, I look at strategy, you know, and I think people have misperceptions of it, right? And they kind of surface level. But I, I look at experimentation as strategy. Like, I, you know, here at our organization, we, we treat everything as an experiment at this point because, you know, we, we, and yes, there's a bigger picture involved here, right? Of what we're trying to accomplish. But it's fail fast, right? Like, let's put a, let's come up with a hypothesis of how this aligns with what we're trying to accomplish. Let's put a beginning and an end to it, how we're going to measure this, a little bit of a, whatever the budget is, and let's go.

And let's track the data. Let's try to figure out what's working and what's not as fast as we possibly can and fail fast. And, and it's not a failure as long as you're learning from it, but then, you know, try something different. And, you know, as you trickle that down to the organization, you can, you can actually do that at the front lines as well, right? We, we train sales reps to test messaging, to test questions, to test approaches, to test cadences, right? And that mentality actually breeds a lot of, um, first of all, personal growth, but also retention because now it's actually interesting as opposed to just going through route movements. Do you see that a lot with the companies that work?

Absolutely. And that's, I know, I know you mentioned you, you looked at the book briefly. That's the second chapter is constant experimentation, right? Like we, we, we have that in there on purpose because again, the best companies are testing things. And you said if like, from a sales perspective, I'll add examples, um, additional examples to yours. So maybe I choose not to go into Europe, right? Cause I'm going to focus on the U S but maybe I, maybe I leverage channels in Europe. So I don't have to deploy resources. Like the channels are already there. It's less costly. Let's, let's see if it works. And if it doesn't cool, it's easier to cut off the channel than I just opened up an office and an entity, et cetera.

Right. Um, do we go to dedicated BDRs for enterprise reps versus pool? I don't know. Let's test it in the Southeast region versus everywhere else. And if it works, then go across the whole U S right. So you contain it and you, like you said, rapid development of experimentation, then go broader. Um, absolutely aligned to that. Yeah. I think that's the, uh, and I think P giving people the right to fail. I think that's the challenge that I'm seeing right now, especially with some of the younger generation is that they're super afraid to fail. They're there. They're the feedback loop is not like, it's not accepted. And it's, I think it's because of a lot of the fear of what happens if I fail. And, and I think it from a leadership standpoint, you, you have to create a culture where failure is actually encouraged in a lot of ways.

I mean, obviously not continue with failure, but, but how do you, how do you create that culture within the organization? So say you've been an organization that has kind of been going, I don't want to say going through the motions, but been, you know, pretty good over the past 10 years because of the economy and everything else. And now you're in a situation where you're like, holy shit, you know, I gotta, like, we gotta do something different here, but our culture is not aligned to this experimentation, agile stuff. Like where, how do you even start changing the org outside of being forced to, cause you know, market conditions, but how do you change the culture around this? Yeah, I mean, I'll give you, I'm going to give you an honest answer that you may not like, or the listeners may not like, but if you're an individual contributor, a first line manager, a second line manager, and your CEO and C-suite do not have the mindset and culture that failure is okay.

I hate to say it. There's nothing you can do. Like you're screwed. I'm sorry. Um, can you make some inroads and chip away a little bit? Sure. But the organizations, like it all starts at the top, John, right? Like if the CEO is enforcing it, if your CRO is CPO, you know, choose your CXO, then yeah, they're going to do it. But if they don't like you're, you're barking up the wrong tree and that's, that's unfortunate, right? Because everybody talks about like, yeah, it'd be nice to fail, but you've got to find the right organization. Now you might have more latitude, right? Your leader, so again, maybe my CEO doesn't support it, but if your first line manager has latitude to allow you to try things and let you fail and shield you from like, well, hey, why is that rep underperforming?

Because I tried something different with them, et cetera. They don't suck, right? Like we did X, Y, Z, then that works, right? But if you're thinking you're going to change the culture of your company or of a larger unit when that culture doesn't exist at the top, good luck. But if your smaller unit, if your platoon can do it, I think that's okay, right? I think that's where you just got to make sure your leader, your teammates are willing to do that because I agree. That's where some of the best innovation comes from. Totally. Yeah. And that's why I tell reps, you know, even if they are in an organization that maybe doesn't encourage that and they're being told to do stuff that they might not like or think is good, right?

So, you know, let's take the easy examples of, oh, you know, make $50 a day, send out your hundred cadences or whatever it is and do the volume game, right? There's a lot of people, there are a lot of reps who are like, oh, this is bullshit. And it's like, okay, well, look, don't not do what your boss is telling you to do. Do what your boss is telling you to do, but measure the shit out of those results. And then my recommendation is pick, you know, everybody's got a side hustle these days. Make your side hustle your existing job. And think about, you know, if you think, for instance, super high quality and very personalized outreach is the better way of doing it than the volume play, right?

Well, fine, go for your nine to five, do your volume play, do what your boss is asking you to do. But heaven forbid, maybe from five to six or five to seven, you know, when you go home, pick a few accounts that you want to get into and be super thoughtful and be very, and then for over a month, measure the two sets of results and then come to your manager with data. Because I always get frustrated with reps who are like, oh, this is bullshit. I don't want to do this. It's like, well, you're going to do it because I'm going to tell them, right? Prove it out. But if you come to me with data and say, John, I did it your way and this is my results and I did it my way and this was the results and your way is better.

If I, as a manager, don't let you now lean more into what is working, then yeah, absolutely get out of it. Like go find it. Yeah. I love that suggestion, John, like test out different things, right? Maybe your manager's thing is okay, but if you did something a little different, it got better, right? It doesn't have to be completely different, right? You might learn that if you change the messaging a little bit or I don't know, you add pictures or video, it increases the conversion rate. I think sometimes people think I got orders. Like this isn't the military, right? Where people die, right? Like you get orders, you follow them in sales, but you can deviate a little bit. And the best reps, let's face it, right?

Some of the best reps are lone wolves for a reason, right? You don't need to completely be a lone wolf, but there's an element of why the lone wolf is successful sometimes, right? So, because they go and try very different things. Obviously, you can't replicate that, but yeah, I love that. Yeah, I think it's this, and I think it's also necessary just from a generational component too, because I got this whole thing where, you know, you and I grew up obviously similar age, right? I don't know about you, but when we were, when I was growing up, when I was bored in the house, my mom would just kick me out of the house, right? Get the fuck out, you know, just be home by dinner, you know, don't kill anybody, right?

Yeah. And we had to figure this out. We had to go break things. And we were latchkey kids, and, you know, parents were at home after school. But now kids, you know, and I know this with my daughter, she's 12, every moment of every kid's life is structured, right? They go from school to this hour to this hour. They have soccer practice for this, you know, for two hours, and they have the iPad for 30 minutes, and they have homework for two hours. And they're all taught to the test, right? So now it's MCAS over anything else. And no critical thinking. And so then these kids get out into the real world, and guys like you and me say, hey, figure it out. And they're like, what are you talking about?

Figure it out. Like, tell me what to do. And I think the general reaction is, okay, you don't know what to do. I'm going to tell you exactly what to do. Here's a script. Here's a template. Here's a pitch deck, whatever. And they act like robots, because that's what they're taught to do. But I think the answer a lot is what leads to this book, and I want to go through these five principles here, is structure. I love that you brought that up, because there's one of the core values I teach my team that are my personal values, right, is to always go above and beyond, and I call it the A plus B plus C plus D formula, right? So A is, and it goes backwards in terms of logic, because A should be the highest thing, but it's not.

It's where you start. So I ask you to do something, right? You come back and you give me A, and you did it really well. You would think like, hey, I got 100%, like, that's awesome. Yeah, but that's average, right? I can pay anybody to go do and give me back exactly what I asked. So the challenge of sort of like the generation thing is like, think about B. I asked you for this analysis, right? As a sales rep, think about which accounts you're going to go after, right? These five. B would be these five, or I prioritize them based on opportunity size, et cetera, right? A plus B plus C would be now you came back a whole different element that maybe ops didn't give you some data, and you went and researched some stuff on your own, and you said, now I've done it by geography, and I also added in, I don't know, like industry and whatever, right?

And D might be, you actually gave me this territory, A, right? And I actually think I could double the size if you gave me this additional responsibility. So I'm thinking outside the box now, right? I came back with a totally different framework. So I tell the team, like, don't do what you're asked. Come back with additional elements that change the game, show that you're thinking outside the box that drive additional value, right? And easier said than done if you're not trained and ingrained in the way that we were raised, right? But again, as leaders, that's your job to get people to think differently and to challenge the status quo. And I think that's where we, because I don't know about you, you put structure on me and I try to break it.

I'm like, I don't like this. You know, this doesn't feel right. There's got to be a different way, right? Yeah. But I love building structure. I'm exactly like you, man. I've been in ops most of my life, and I love putting process and streamlining, but you put it on me, and I'm like, no. Yes, right? Like, there's got to be a better way. But kids, you know, or young professionals coming into the workforce, like, they need that structure. And the cool thing is, is they'll execute within that structure better than you and I ever would, right? And so they can thrive in a different way than you and I would. But I think it's really important right now to recognize the need for structure, which then leads to agility, which then leads to experimentation, right?

All those pieces, and it's really not that complicated when you really frame it out that way. Because when you look at it as everything is an experiment with some guardrails, okay, cool, right? It's kind of like bowling, right? When the kid's bowling and they put those things up in the gutters, it's like the ball's going to kind of bounce around. It's eventually going to get down to the end, you know? And then, you know, once you get there, I'll be able to take those guardrails off because now you get it. Now you get the play. Yeah. And ultimately, I just need to teach you to bowl, you know, the ball down the alley versus like trying to get it in the gutters. But yeah, I think it's a balance, right?

I think different people, you need structure, right? But structure needs to be able to bend to be agile to win, right? Because structure without agility, and they're sort of competing forces, but that's what makes them awesome, right? Structure without agility, I think, is just failure. So let's talk about scale, right? So you got this five point, you got strategic speed. What is this related to? Talk about those five points and what are they related to? And then let's dive into each one of them because I'm curious. So we try to make it simple in terms of the framework on lean principles for people, right? And so we created a scale. So strategic speed, constant experimentation, you know, accelerated value, the lean process.

And then the linchpin that sort of links everything together is the esprit de corps, right? Which is group spirit, right? Yeah. It's like it's the culture of the company because without the culture, we're talking about before, a lot of this isn't going to work, right? And so the one element I'll share is neither of the five elements is the most important. Sometimes, you know, people have asked like, well, hey, which one should I focus on, right? And the whole premise of what a unicorn knows is that they know how to leverage each principle at the right time and in what order to be successful. Neither of these is like, well, strategy is the most important. I've got to do that. A lot of our work with, you know, with companies the last 11 years has been focused on optimizing process, right?

Sales process, marketing process, post-sales process, really reducing time to value anywhere from 20 to 60%, right? Which is as a sales rep, I want my customers to get value quickly and I want time to revenue so I can get paid more and customers buy more stuff and I make more money, right? And so that process, eliminating as much of the waste that hampers down a rep from doing their job of selling and not doing administrative work or unnecessary follow-up, there's so much waste in the system that I think, you know, companies can streamline, which is great. Yeah. I mean, there's some statistic, I think it's, you know, it varies, but it's like something like only 37% of a sales rep's time is actually spent selling and the rest of it is on administrative crap.

Yeah, and I think a lot of it has to do with the tech, you know, as we started this conversation, the tech overload that we've forced on, you know, I'm really concerned right now that, you know, we have a whole generation of sales professionals who have entered into a very growth-oriented market where we threw people and technology at the problem and ignore the fundamentals and now that's all coming to roost because now that it's hard to sell, the fundamentals aren't there and they're falling apart and it's hard to watch because a lot of this wasted effort, you know, we think throwing technology, it's actually made us less productive with all this technology and there's tons of data that supports that.

I completely agree. Yeah, and I'm concerned about, so I love the chat GPT AI innovation, but I'm very concerned that it's going to make people lazy and people are not going to be able to think on their feet because something else is doing the work for them, which we think is like, oh, they're going to be more productive and it's like, are they or are they going to become less productive because now they're just relying on something else and not doing the homework that really strong salespeople and sales leaders used to do to be the best, right? Oh, 100%. That's what I'm concerned about. I'm super concerned about that because, you know, an example I use is, you know, I saw some kid on TikTok and he was, you know, he must have been 16, 17 years old, right?

And he had this little business that he was doing and he said, oh, check this out. I automated my customer support, right? So every time somebody sends me an email, chat GPT does this and it fires them off the perfect answer and I'm like, you don't know what customer service is. Like you, you've, you've never really, you've never customer served anybody. So how, how can you automate something when you have no true understanding of what it is? Now, don't get me wrong. I think the computers in so many cases will do it better than a lot of people who even have been in those roles, but without context, we're, we're playing a dangerous game here because now nobody's what, what I'm big, my biggest fear of chat GPT is nobody's questioning chat GPT.

They're just accepting whatever that thing sends back to them as true. Right. And that is frightening. That's dangerous. Yeah. Frightening. That is dangerous. Like I'd rather, let's stay on the customer support topic, right? Yeah. I see value if, you know, I get a thousand support tickets come in. If it's summarized and was able to say, Hey, I'm seeing a trend here before I get, before I open up my queue, right? 600 of your tickets that came in, all have these similar issues, et cetera. I've categorized them for you. Here's some talking points, but you should review them. That's high value. Add you to save me some time. Right. Versus this thing just responded magically. I was supposed to, like you said, I was supposed to trust it.

Um, all right. Maybe it is right. Maybe it isn't, but who knows? Right. Maybe in 10 years it is. I just don't know if it is right now. And I, I mean, I don't know. It, maybe it's the old school in me. It's just not having the baseline. And that's why I go back to the sales fundamentals is like, we've, I think regardless of chat TBT, we've skipped a lot of those teaching, you know, and also COVID has, has not done anybody any, any favors either, because you, you go into sales coming out of school and you go immediately into a remote world of selling. You do not get the fundamentals. Like I hate to sound old school, but sitting in the bullpen and getting my ass handed to me with other 10 reps around me and listening in on them and, you know, going and drinking afterwards and talking about how, you know, shitty the day was and that type of stuff like that matters.

Or even going into somebody's office and, and, you know, meeting with them literally face to face as, as opposed to, you know, this is right. Well, now here's the thing, here's the thing too, John, like think about it this way. I'm in COVID. I'm on a sales call with a CEO or CIO, whoever the buyer is right on zoom. I have the luxury of having multiple monitors with notes and I can look around and, you know, maybe my eyes move, but who cares? So yeah, I'm prepared. You throw me now into a live meeting and I haven't been trained to role play with my manager. And I'm like, crap, where, where's my monitor to help me out? It's like, now I'm not prepared. Right. And now you're actually interacting with people and you've got to get up, use the whiteboard.

Um, and I think some companies forgot to retrain their reps, what it was like to go have human interactions to drive that sales process versus relying purely on tech. Right. Which is, I don't know. You can't, there's a benefit to, to remote, but you can't forget the fundamentals. Like you said. All right. We're going to take a quick break here to highlight the HubSpot podcast network, the audio destination for business professionals. And I love listening to the podcast on this network and specifically another bite hosted by John Dick, Jory Monroe, and Arielle Bosworth. And the reason I love this one is because they focus on one of my favorite shows on television, which is Shark Tank. And what's cool about it is they take the episodes and they break them down and talk about how they can apply to our own businesses and real world application of it.

You know, a lot of us, you can look at it for entertainment for that show, but what they do with another bite, they talk about how it applies to us, which I absolutely love. And one of the episodes that they had recently was called when community is more valuable than unit economics. And this was with the magic five spike ball and your kayak. And they talk about magic five's value and human data and problems to scale. Uh, spike balls, community building tactics and targeting issues, and also your kayak social proof problem and missing customer acquisition costs. So again, all super applicable to all of us in the startup world. And I absolutely love listening to their analysis and dissection of these shows.

So listen to another bite wherever you get your podcasts and keep supporting the HubSpot podcast network. Now let's get back to the conversation. Uh, and that's why I, like, I feel extremely fortunate that I grew up without all this stuff in sales. You know what I mean? That I didn't even LinkedIn, I was having this conversation recently where, you know, I was member, where's the number? 36,541 on LinkedIn. Like I was a super early adopter, but I, I, when it hit, I had been doing so much networking before LinkedIn came out. So like my first five years of my career was just all about going out, meeting people, shaking hands, kissing babies. I understood the fundamentals of networking and how it worked.

And so when I saw LinkedIn, I was like, oh, this is great. Cause now I know how to leverage this tool versus somebody who just gets that tool without having to have that background. Now they're just using it as, okay, could you make the introduction for me, Pablo? I see you when connected to so-and-so it's like, yeah, I hate, I hate that. I've seen your post sometimes on that. When you die, like, I hate when I get that. I'm like, who are you? Yeah. Like, so. And, and, and the fact that you feel like you can do that is insulting to me, right? The fact that you feel that somehow you, you and I connected, I don't know, five years ago, whatever, for some stupid thing. Cause you saw a post that I did.

And now you think that you have the right to ask me for a referral to somebody else. Yeah. When I don't even know you, I have no relationship and there's no trust, but you're putting my job on the line, referring you to somebody potentially that, you know, is things that I'm bringing them to somebody good. I don't even know you. Right. So, or like a recommendation for a job. I get that one too. Like, Hey John, cause you refer me for, to this company for, I'm like, who the fuck are you? I'm like, what did I train you five years ago? Like wax murderer for all I know. I have no clue. And, and I don't think people really, truly genuinely understand the value of somebody's real network. You know what I mean?

Like these are chits. Like you, you, you, you cash these chits in and you have to be very thoughtful with cashing those chits in because if you cash too many of them in, you'll never be able to go back to those people and you have to give way more than you get so that one day when you need it, you can ask. Yeah. And that's, it's, it's, it comes back down to training, to training people. Right. I went on a business trip right after COVID and took a junior person with me and they're like, why are we going on this trip? This is going to be so inefficient. If we did this all remotely for a week, we could talk to 50 Porcos. We're only going to be able to talk to 20 portfolio companies. Portfolio companies are companies we invested.

And I was like, yeah, I guess. Right. Like, sure. We could probably do a hundred if it was all remote. And this person got hired during COVID. They had never had a human interaction. Right. And it was amazing to see their eyes open when they were like, wow, I can't believe that discussion happened at dinner. Wow, they walked us around the office and I got to meet people I thought I wasn't going to meet. I got to see the culture. And now I understand why marketing and sales are having some tension or wow, product like, so like it's, it's, you've got to, you've got to bring them along to show them there is a different and better way to do it. Not that the new way of Zoom isn't okay, but you've got to balance both and combine them to be able to sell effectively, to be able to talk to customers.

Because if you're not your customer, your competitor is going to be your customer, right? And they're going to build the rapport, the relationship. And guess what? Sales is about relationships and like trust, not just product. Yeah. And that's, by the way, that's an important distinction. A lot of people say that people buy from people they like and I disagree, but it's people buy from people they trust. Yeah, exactly. I don't, I might not like you a lot. Like you, you might not be my best friend, but if I trust you, I'm going to buy, I'll buy from you. And by the way, I will pay more if I trust you, if I feel like I'm getting, I mountain bike a lot and I am willing to take my bike to a shop that charges me significantly more because I trust it's going to get done well.

The customer service is great versus, I don't want to just say 50%, right? And so as you're thinking about, well, my solution is priced higher, like you're selling on value, right? And you're also selling on trust because I want to do business with someone that I can believe in that's going to take care of me if there's an issue, not just someone who's being transactional. Totally. So let me ask, as I was reading through, this might've been you or Matthew who said something about this that I thought was interesting. It's hard to get out of our own way when chaos is right happening, right? And I think he does, I saw one speech of Matthew where it talks about the, the rope exercise with the rope, um, the handcuffs, the handcuffs, right.

And how everybody kind of does this weird dance and they don't think about it, but he mentioned something or you mentioned something about the outsider effect. And I thought that was pretty cool where, where I think it was like, um, was it Albert Einstein or something like that? Like think of how somebody else would look at this situation as opposed to you in the moment. Yeah. Could you unpack that a little bit, like the unbiased view and self-distancing and that type of thing? Cause I think that's, yeah. Something I think a lot of people could benefit from, uh, in the moment, if you will. Yeah. And it's for those of you that are listening, there's an exercise that we do where two people are sort of interlocked.

They have handcuffs on, there's two strings, right. And there's a very elegant solution to remove the handcuffs. So you're not connected. But when you ask people to do it, literally they're like contortionists, right. They're jumping over each other and it's amazing. And when we do the exercise, like, let's say in a room of like 60 people, it takes about 20 minutes for one group only to figure it out. Right. Um, and the takeaway is we don't step back to think about like how the solution could potentially work. We go towards a bias of our mind of like, well, it's gotta be this way, right? Like if I'm intertwined, I've got to turn around, kneel down, jump around because that's because, because it's already intertwined, right.

Versus, well, what is the most simplest way to remove an obstacle? Right. And from a business perspective, it's also very similar, right. It ties very well to design thinking, right. Companies, sales professionals, uh, when you're selling to a customer, you know, we all have conscious and sub, you know, whether it's subconscious or conscious bias. Um, the easiest solution is not always the one that comes to us first, right? It's what we've been taught. It's maybe what I've seen other people do. Maybe I watch a video on LinkedIn and I'm like, oh, that's gotta be the way to do it. Um, and so we try to teach to step back and think about, is there a better way? Is there a different way? What's the most simplest way to do this?

Um, versus following on traditional norms. Yeah. And I think that's the, I think the Einstein quote is, you know, if I had an hour or whatever I'd spend, or, you know, I'd spend the majority of that hour taking a, like observing and figuring out what the right question is to ask, not trying to solve the problem. Exactly. Well, and that's the observation, right? When we do the exercise, no one stops to go, you know, two people are facing each other with the handcuffs and go, okay, how do we get here? Everyone goes straight into solution mode, right? You think about meetings also, like you have a meeting and that problem is presented and people go like, oh, let me go solve it versus, well, hold on.

Like, what are the actual issues? Uh, let's diagnose, right? Let's qualify the issue. Uh, almost like with a sales call, right? Like the best reps and BDRs ask a lot of questions upfront, right? To, to really understand like, what are the customer's pain points? Like, what's their story? Before I go, here's how I can solve your pain, right? I have something that helps you solve your pain. The worst reps start with, hey, I understand you have an issue. I've got a solution. Here's the price. Like what, what, who else are you talking to? Right? Like, eh, that, that doesn't do anybody any good. Right. And so it's stopping the thing and taking the time before jumping in to try and solution, um, is sort of what we try and focus on.

Curious. This is a very non HR question, but I'm going to ask it anyways. Uh, do you see a difference between men and women when it comes to this? And the reason I ask is because, you know, most men and, and look, I, I put myself in this category. We're problem solvers, right? Like my wife comes to me and, you know, she's upset about something. I immediately go into, well, have you tried this? Have you done that? Right. And I have, I have to train myself to say, John, shut the fuck up. She just wants to talk right now. She just wants to vent. She's not looking for a solution. Stop trying to fix this problem. It's not yours to fix. Right. I've had to learn that over the years. So do you see a difference between men and women?

We actually have not. Okay. Zero difference between gender, race, age, the human, the typical human goes straight into solution. And even when it's like women paired with women, men with men, and men are women, the typical person goes into like, let's just, let's just start moving around to solve. Um, we do another exercise. I don't know if people, people have done this also, the marshmallow exercise where you're given, uh, sticks of spaghetti, one marshmallow and some duct tape. And you have to, you have, um, I don't know if it's 10 or 15 minutes to build a freestanding structure of spaghetti with the marshmallow has to stand on top. And when you're done, you have to step away and whoever builds the highest one, um, wins, right.

It can't fall. And same thing. People immediately start just like, how do I build the biggest one, et cetera. The difference is, and this has been proving out scientifically, the people that do the worst are MBAs, like people with business degrees. Right. Um, and there's not that much difference, honestly, between CEOs, et cetera. You want to know the people who do the best, like, like significantly better children. Oh, of course, because if this goes back to your constant experimentation, the adults and the MBA is go straight to, all right, let me just build a tall structure and let me tape it. It's falling down, tape it down here. They maybe add something in the middle, the kids, cause they videotape them.

They experiment. They try something and it fails. And then, okay, that didn't work. Let's try something else. And they fail fast. Right. And then eventually they go, oh, this is working. So let's build off of this versus adults. Let's just go, I have an idea in my mind how it should look. And so we're just going to build that and figure out how to put the tape and the marshmallow on top, right? So it's, it's fascinating that kids are able to be more successful than CEOs, MBAs, et cetera. Well, it's, and I think that's a, you know, on us as a society, right? We beat the curiosity out of people. We beat creativity. I mean, kids are just born curious. I mean, that's like whatever you're, you know, around three years old.

That's why, why, why, why? Like every parent goes through that. It's like, shut the up. Like, stop asking why. Right. But it's the kids like, why, why, why? And, and, and creativity, like nothing's bad. Right. The art is, ah, this is cool. No matter what it is. And then we get conformed into this. Okay, no, that's good. And that's bad. And this is how you should do it versus this is how you shouldn't. Right. Right. Well, by the way, we talk about, there's a concept in lean called, that's attributed to lean called the five whys, right? That you should always ask why five times to get to the root cause. Right. So let's put it from a sales, sales perspective. Um, Johnny has the highest quota and the best performance at a company.

Right. Well, why? Um, he has a really good territory. Why? Right. You start to drill down and go, turns out that we've just consolidated a bunch of territories and never backfilled anybody because whatever. And so that territory really should be 10 territories, not one. So yeah, Johnny's doing well, but in theory that territory could be doing 10 times better if we hired some more people. Right. So always got to dig in and be curious to really understand are people as good as they are for certain reasons or as bad, right? Sometimes it's very easy to say, well, those reps are underperforming. Well, why? Right. Maybe they didn't get a balanced territory. Maybe the manager is not good. Maybe the product isn't ready for France.

And that's why France is struggling. Maybe there's three more competitors in France than every other country, but you don't know that if you just look at the top line number and go, something's performing well or not. Yeah. And maybe, you know, shit, maybe there's, there's something going on at home for crying out loud. Exactly. There's the personal all of that, right? Someone just got divorced or something with their kid or their parents, like you don't know, right? And so you've got to dig in to really understand how to support your team, your peers, right? The organization before you make rash decisions, especially now, right? As people are making decisions on, do I need this many people or do I reallocate people or elsewhere, make sure you are looking at more than just the data to make informed decisions.

Yeah. I think that's a lot that, you know, you can go too far on either side, right? You can go too far on gut, even just like, Hey, let's do this. And then too far on the data and letting that dictate. It goes back to what we talked about. It's got to be a balance of both. Yeah. The art, the science, if you will. Right. Yeah. Awesome, man. Well, look, I think we could keep talking for quite a while here, but in the interest of keeping it at the 45 minute mark here, let's, uh, let's try to wrap it up. No worries. Where can, where can people find out more information? I mean, about, you got the book, you got your, uh, your company. I'm a, I'm, I'm not a, I'm not a social expert guru like you or others on my team, but, um, I am, I am on LinkedIn.

If people want to reach out, uh, and again, per our guidance, like reach out with a purpose, not just for the sake of a dude, do me a solid, um, if they want to hear more information. We also post a lot of blogs at insight partners that are, you know, open to the public. If they want to learn about, you know, best practices on sales, et cetera. So, um, all that is available to everybody. So very cool. And again, if the book's called what a unicorn knows, what a unicorn knows. Yes, sir. And, uh, and then it's Pablo Dominguez, D O M I N G U E Z for those listening, uh, definitely check them out. And, and again, the, the company, right. Is inside, is it inside partners inside partners? Yep. Yeah.

Perfect. Very cool. Well, I, I, you know, look in preparing for this, I, I did really enjoy some of the videos that I saw, the kind of the Ted talk stuff and everything else. So you get a lot of cool resources out there for some companies. I encourage everybody to go check it out. So thanks for coming out, Pablo. I really enjoyed it. Thanks, John. Appreciate it. Absolutely. And good luck with your kid, uh, in college there. Thank you. Appreciate it. And, uh, everybody else. Thanks for listening. Look, and like I always say at the end of all these podcasts, look, go out, no matter how bad your day is, or you think it's going, go out there and make somebody smile today. Cause if you do, 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. 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 at www.johnm.com where 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 technology.

So if you're looking to level up and you give a shit about this profession of sales, let's connect and let's make this happen together.