How to Double Your Sales Team Performance: Why 78% Miss Target with Matt Milligan

"78% of salespeople miss their sales targets. That means your entire revenue forecast is riding on just 22% of your team."

That's the brutal reality Matt Milligan discovered after spending years in go-to-market transformation – and it's what drove him to build Uhubs, a company that's now helping teams achieve 83% increases in revenue per head.

In today's episode, I'm joined by Matt Milligan, CEO and Co-founder of Uhubs, Forbes 30 Under 30 honouree, and former professional golfer. After playing on the IGT tour in South Africa, Matt moved into consulting at EY, where he built their startup network and observed the massive gaps in how companies hire, enable, and manage their sales teams. His solution? Combine quantitative data, qualitative assessments, and call recording analysis to identify what actually separates high performers from the rest – then use AI to create roadmaps that close the gap.

Together we unpack:

• Why relying on Salesforce dashboards alone misses the human component driving performance
• How first-time managers are the single greatest point of failure in most organisations
• Why managers spend all their time with underperformers (and how that kills your A players)
• The three data sources you need to truly understand what makes your best sellers great
• Why gut-feel hiring is killing your growth (and what to do instead)

👆 If you're a founder struggling to scale your GTM team, wondering why most of your sellers underperform, or trying to figure out where to invest your training budget, this conversation will give you a framework for driving real performance improvement.

About Matt Milligan

Matt Milligan is the CEO and Co-founder of Uhubs, a company helping revenue leaders identify and close performance gaps in their go-to-market teams. After a season as a professional golfer on the IGT tour in South Africa, Matt moved into consulting at EY where he built their startup network and cut his teeth on sales and go-to-market transformation. Recognised in Forbes 30 Under 30 and with Uhubs named Rising Star at London Tech Week, Matt has spent five years proving that you can use data and assessment to help companies achieve up to 83% increases in revenue per head.

Connect with Matt Milligan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-milligan/

More from James:

Connect with James on LinkedIn or at peer-effect.com 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

So when we when we were doing the research that we found out that you were actually a professional golfer. Let's start there.

SPEAKER_04 0:05

Played a season on the IGT tour in South Africa. Yeah, I was fortunate I had an alternative path. Whereas a lot of those guys that I played with on the tour, they didn't have a backup plan, which when you when you're building a business, I think is actually a good thing. Yeah, all in, burn the boats.

SPEAKER_00 0:20

Sounds like a more brutal version of running a startup.

SPEAKER_04 0:22

It sounds like way more brutal. Yeah, yeah. My experience of working in a corporate, they're not meritocracies, they're the complete opposite. It's basically all about who can kiss the most ars.

SPEAKER_00 0:32

Mass has been super helpful. I've having run sales teams, I can feel the problem. All the stuff you're talking about, in terms of like I'm sort of going back and wish wish I had some of this data before. Yeah. Because that identification, the benchmarking, what stuff is is so helpful.

SPEAKER_04 0:49

We we couldn't have done what we're doing 10 years ago, to be fair. But that's why I think this is the best time to be building a business.

SPEAKER_00 1:05

Hi, I'm James Johnson, founder and CEO coach, and this is the Pure Effect podcast where you'll learn how to 10X your business. Lots of founders that I work with have questions about their GTM team, how to maximize it, how to separate good to great performers, and they would love the idea of doubling the performance. It's why I'm delighted to have Matt Milligan on the show today. His business, UHubs, helps you identify really what's driving those hidden capabilities to get true performance. So Matt Personly's been recognized in the Forbes 30 under 30, and UHubs was recognised as the rising star at London Tech Week this year. I'm delighted to welcome Matt to the show. Welcome Matt.

SPEAKER_04 1:46

Thank you, James. I appreciate you having me on and uh looking forward to the chat today.

SPEAKER_00 1:51

Oh well, don't say that too early.

SPEAKER_04 1:53

I'm not sure what you've got in store for me yet. So um ask me that question at the end and I'll give you a more honest answer.

SPEAKER_00 2:00

So when we when we were doing the research, I should found out that you were actually a professional golfer. Let's start there.

SPEAKER_04 2:05

Yeah. I I'll just kind of caveat this by saying that the golf game is nowhere near what it was today. So I I think I've played two rounds of golf this year, which is not a lot of golf.

SPEAKER_00 2:17

For for your investors listening.

SPEAKER_04 2:19

Yes, yeah, yeah. There's just not a lot of time to spend on the golf course. But yeah, I played um I played a season on the IGT tour in South Africa. So that's a feeder tour for the Sunshine Tour, which is the main African tour. And um lived a dream, absolutely loved it. Yeah. Um got to play with some amazing players. Um, yeah, like absolutely was golf mad growing up. Yeah, the sport taught me a lot about life and business. Played with some some great players, some of whom are now um literally traveling around on private jets playing for millions every week. I wasn't ever at that level. Yeah. In terms of there's there is a big gap between being good and being one of the best in the world. Uh, but it was a great experience. Um had a lot of good times in the golf course for sure.

SPEAKER_00 3:12

Any any any regrets from shifting away from it?

SPEAKER_04 3:17

No, I you know, I had a couple of moments when I was playing in South Africa. Yeah. I played with a guy called Anton Haig, um, who any sort of golf uh fans will will know of. So he he was um he was the youngest ever winner of the Johnny Walker Classic. I think he won it when it was like 17 or 18, and he was touted as the next Ernie Else. Yeah. And then he kind of had a big fall from Grace, and I sort of played quite a lot of golf with him when he was trying to rediscover his golf game, but he had all of these crazy stories. Um, but playing golf with Anton made me realize the levels in the game. The guy had more talent in one finger than the rest of us put together, it's just unbelievable. Um, so you know, I I recognized that I was fortunate to have like other uh attributes that I could apply to the world of business and always enjoyed, as I'm sure we'll talk about a little bit today. I've always enjoyed selling stuff and building building businesses. So yeah, I was fortunate I had an alternative path. Whereas a lot of those guys that I played with on the tour, they didn't have a plan, they didn't have a backup plan. Yeah. No plan B. Um, which when you when you're building a business, I think is actually a good thing. Yeah, all in, burn the boats. All in, yeah, burn the boats, exactly. But um, when you're going for professional golf, it's I mean it's brutal. Like those guys are you know, they're trying to get sponsors together to pay. It's expensive as well. You've got to have good backing financially, and if you miss the cut, you not only are you not getting paid, but you're losing money on the caddy, the hotel, the practice rounds. Wow, you've got a high cost base. So it's kind of like running a startup in a way.

SPEAKER_00 4:59

Sounds like a more brutal version of running a startup, it sounds like way more brutal, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 5:04

And your mistakes are like massively magnified. Yeah. Whereas I feel like in business you can make mistakes and very quickly move on. Whereas if you hit three out of bounds on the 10th T, you're you're done. Your tournament's done. Yeah. So yeah. A game of very fine margins. Do you play yourself?

SPEAKER_00 5:22

Uh I I have played, which I think is a very different thing. Uh it wasn't that rugby that stopped me, it was more the fact that I was really bad at it. Yeah. Um, I enjoyed it. Uh, when I was working in the Philippines, I enjoyed it playing out there, like when sort of you're on lovely courses, it's very sunny, and you have a caddy who's really good and is like pointing out pointing out which clubs to use and how to hit your putt. I remember actually when I came back to UK and it was wet and I didn't have that advantage, my my golf game fell off a cliff. So I was probably like sort of 12 shots more around. So you're a fair weather golfer, fair weather and significant help golfer.

SPEAKER_04 6:02

It's a beautiful way to spend a Saturday afternoon if you've got the time. Yeah. Unfortunately, it does require a lot of time. Yeah. So it's not super conducive as a sport to uh to to building a business.

SPEAKER_00 6:13

Yeah. So what's what's your origin story then? So you've kind of you you you did golf, you then doing it for a year. What what got you to to where you are now?

SPEAKER_04 6:24

Yeah, I I'll I'll try not to um try not to make it too long. Yeah. But um I I grew up in the UK to South African parents. So I was sort of like um, in a way, kind of first generation, although my grandparents on my dad's side were British, right? Swedish on my mum's side. And um always enjoyed building stuff, always had a little bit of kind of creative spark. And the school I went to, there's a few of us that are very entrepreneurial and have gone on to run businesses of our own. I was actually in San Francisco last week with one of my oldest schoolmates who's interesting enough running a recruitment business.

SPEAKER_00 6:57

Amazing.

SPEAKER_04 6:58

Um, and we've been mates since we were like 12, 13 years old. So, so we we we we came from we didn't come from much, you know, we went to a pretty sort of uh tough all-boys school um in a place called Wokingham, which is about 45 minutes outside London. Um yeah, we had to kind of get creative to figure out ways to to fund um fund our lifestyles, you know, fund partying and doing uh chasing girls when we were teenagers. Um I got a job caddying at Sunningdale Golf Club when I was 13 years old. So that was my entrance to the to the workforce. And um on weekends and some sort of school holidays, I'd get the train from from Wokingham to Sunningdale um really early early in the morning, and then I would uh rock up at the caddy's office, Vince, um, and try and get a bag for the day. And um that experience of working those shifts at Sunningdale, young age, carrying a bag for oftentimes very successful business people on you know either corporate golf days or even getting to know some of the members pretty well, that was very formative. So I had basically a business education at a really young age, just listening.

SPEAKER_00 8:15

Amazing.

SPEAKER_04 8:16

So uh they are that I mean there's a bunch of stories around that experience, but but that taught me uh what's possible. And I think the other thing that it taught me is that although environments like that have a reputation for being kind of snobby, quite a lot of the members that I got to sort of become a regular caddy for, they come from really deprived backgrounds and they had really built businesses and used business as a way to for social mobility to create amazing lifestyles for themselves, to be able to provide for their families. So that was really an inspiring moment. And I think also my background, like coming from a bit of a family of entrepreneurs, my dad had his own business, my dad's dad had his own business and businesses in South Africa, did all kinds of stuff from sort of logistics through to property. I kind of always knew it was going to be the path that I would go into. And I think just the final thing I learned about myself pretty early on is that I'm I'm pretty bad at being told what to do. Um, so sort of autonomy is a very important value for me personally, and that's probably why I didn't do amazingly well at school or university. Um I just really didn't like the kind of confinement of being treated exactly the same, no matter what your needs or or unique strengths are. Um, so so did you know, did a bunch of stuff, um lots of different kind of side hustles growing up, everything from sort of selling tickets for under 18 nights in Reading through to some e-commerce businesses and buying and selling sports equipment. So lots of different stuff. Uh went to university in Birmingham, graduated. I ended up going back to South Africa, and that's when I did my year on IGT. Uh, mum got married, had to come back to the UK for the wedding, and uh she basically said, you know, you've got to get a proper job. And it was at that point that I went into the world of consulting.

SPEAKER_00 10:15

So um Wow, that that feels going slightly back into like sort of a school university structure.

SPEAKER_04 10:24

Yeah, yeah, but I I I remember there was a letter from the university. Um I basically figured out pretty quick, so lecture attendance wasn't mandatory. So I worked out that I could get a full-time job. So I actually ended up getting a full-time job in retail working for a clothing store called Hollister. Um, and it was a really exciting time. They were a US company that came over to the UK. I didn't really love the work, but I loved the people that I was working with. And we set up a new Hollister store. So I started off in the ball ring, if you know the shopping centre, um, and then got kind of recruited to be part of the kind of expansion team to open a new store in Solihull. That was awesome because I was like building stuff, you know, and we were launching this thing from scratch, and we had the opportunity to input into you know everything from the launch event and the party. And um, so I worked full-time for my first and second year of uni. I think I went to maybe less than 10 lectures, and then the letter came in the post in my second year saying, if you don't start coming, we're gonna kick you out. And I basically had to do the degree pretty much in the final year, yeah, which um I owe to a good, very good friend of mine. He's a he's a genius. He went on to do his master's at Cambridge, and he's um a good friend of mine today. I actually said that to him on his wedding day a couple years ago. I said, I would never have made it through uni if it wasn't for you because he basically gave me a private tutoring experience and taught me what I needed to know to get through uni. So I went, I didn't really fit in at uni, and then I didn't fit in in the corporate world either. So very quickly, like going into EY, I was joining like all of these graduates from top universities around the country, and within about six months, I basically come up with a business idea within EY, which ended up becoming the startup network, which was our offering for startups and scale-ups in the UK. Um, yeah, and I basically sort of built that as a business inside of EY, which um Wow, which was quite an interesting experience.

SPEAKER_00 12:28

I mean, how how how welcoming to entrepreneurship was EY? Because you think from external bit, you think, oh, probably probably quite disciplined, like follow this process. It must have been quite a thing to for them to allow you to persuade them to do that.

SPEAKER_04 12:42

Yeah, so I'd say I'd answer that question two ways. There was one or two partners who absolutely loved it and they got behind me and they gave me backing, and they did they protect me from resourcing, so I didn't have to go and climb projects and I could focus on building this thing. One of whom is actually an angel investor in my current business. And he's a guy called Mark Hutchinson, he's a legend. I would say the other 99.9% of the organization absolutely hated me. Um, because I was just basically breaking rules. Um, and it even got down to things like promotions, and they were refusing to promote me into a manager role because I didn't tick basically any of the boxes that I needed to tick. So you start to realise pretty quickly that the my experience of working in a corporate and also working with other corporates is that they're not meritocracies, they're the complete opposite. And it's basically all about political games, who can kiss the most arsed. And that for me was just the complete opposite to what I'm about personally. And I obviously come from like a sporting background where it is everything is merit-based. It's like you work hard, you achieve, and then you get the just rewards. Yeah, and that kind of conflicted with my core values, so I just knew very within six months that I wasn't going to be a long-term place for me. But that said, I ended up building that the startup program and they secondered me over to a new business they had acquired called SEREN here in Shoritch, around the corner, actually. So I ended up sticking there for like four and a half, five years and learned loads, built a network, and learned how to build a business within the confines of a big company. Yeah. Which was quite uh an unorthodox way to kind of cut your teeth, I guess.

SPEAKER_00 14:34

It's really good. It's sort of power, sort of bit from my experience of like Jardines essentially is you you were building small businesses or running small businesses in a big conglomerate. So it's kind of like they they sort of allocated people and cash to a series of businesses, and you had to grow them, turn them around to the code. A little bit. I mean, they they they owned so they owned the stuff, they tend to joint ventures. Um, they've been around for like almost 200 years, so they'd still have this collection of very random businesses in very random places. Um they've been through quite a lot of rationalization to try and make it make sense over the last 20 years. But like there was a period of kind of like business you wouldn't even have thought of really that that kind of existed. But that was what was quite cool about it, to have that opportunity of sort of you get all the training and benefits as a as a young sort of employee and a and a support system that maybe you don't appreciate. You feel like it's blocking you or things, but actually it's probably quite valuable while being given freedom to go and cut your teeth. So I mean it's sounds like we're quite similar we're quite similarly lucky in that experience. I mean I I I got I took a lot from it, although I fought against it quite a lot of the time. Some of the structures and like the oh, they progress, you can't progress unless they progress mentality. Yes.

SPEAKER_03 15:52

Like how long did you last in that environment?

SPEAKER_00 15:55

Six years.

SPEAKER_03 15:56

Yeah, so sort of similar.

SPEAKER_02 15:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:58

But it sounds like we both went into it thinking that it was a means to an end as opposed to an end in itself.

SPEAKER_04 16:04

I'd agree. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:05

It's more of a question like when rather than if.

SPEAKER_04 16:07

Yeah. Are you still in touch with many of the works with uh yeah? Yeah. Any of them still in that world?

SPEAKER_00 16:14

Some. Yeah. Not not many. But I think to do that sort of program, you do need to in itself be a little bit entrepreneurial, and therefore there's a sort of a clash between like your entrepreneurial drive and that sort of the that freedom and control thing versus the sort of the they do put a series of nice bigger and bigger challenges and opportunities in front of you. But within I I think that that sense of lack of control would get a true entrepreneur at the end.

SPEAKER_04 16:47

Yeah. I my experience was that they try to almost institutionalize. I don't know if they try to institutionalize you, maybe that's like a clickbait way of saying it. Um you get the sense that there is this people do get institutionalized. You know, once they've been there for like five, ten years, it's like they the saying was like you bleed yellow. Yeah. Um, I think my experience was that the partners in that firm looked at me and they were like, There's no way this guy's going to be institutionalized, like he just doesn't fit the mold in any way. I was like the only guy that didn't go to Oxford, Cambridge, or Durham, pretty much. And I think I was like one of three that didn't go to a uh private school.

SPEAKER_02 17:32

Wow.

SPEAKER_04 17:33

So kind of tells you what you need to know.

SPEAKER_02 17:35

Good diversity.

SPEAKER_04 17:36

Yeah. Well, apparently, yeah. Um the numbers were like really, really low. Yeah. Um, I always remember that.

SPEAKER_00 17:45

It's well, how how did you then end up doing what you're doing now then? So you've kind of spent five years doing that, you've done some really cool stuff, you're kind of maybe fighting into some little bits. Yeah. How did how did you make the jump from that to this?

SPEAKER_04 18:01

Yeah, so a couple of things. The startup network was an amazing um experience to build my network. And I was basically, I think at one point I was going to like three events, maybe four events a week in London's startup scene. And obviously, this was pre-Brexit. So the whole concept of silicon roundabout, and you know, like Google had just relocated its offices into Europe and was investing a lot in the ecosystem, and you had Google Campus on Worship Street. Um, it it was alive. Yeah, like there was something happening, and it was a really exciting time. And you had great companies like City Mapper and all coming to fruition, and they were like British businesses, and you're like, wow, like we can actually build a legitimate alternative to the Bay Area here. And building out that network, I basically got the opportunity to work with some awesome founders as clients. So I got like a front row seat, and then occasionally got into some board meetings with those founders. And we were providing things like tax compliance, RD tax credits. Um we had an M MA division, so we were helping them with series A, series B, and beyond. And um that experience taught me that there's uh there's a an amazingly exciting path in tech. If you can surround yourself with the right people, the right team, and some funding, you can build you can build sustainable products that scale. Um so I had a bit of like a kind of mini MBA, I guess. The other thing that happened was when I got seconded to SAREN, I ended up being the kind of sole BD guy. So I was initially reporting to the BD director. BD director lost his job. I ended up reporting to the CEO of SEREN, who was a is today a mentor of mine, Richard Sedley. So I then cut my teeth on sales and ended up doing quite a lot of go-to-market transformation projects. So whether that was like CRM implementations, you know, implementing Salesforce, got into that space and observed the huge problems that existed in the go-to-market side of things. I think just the final thing that happened in that period was through my startup um network experience. I met my today co-founder Ash. So Ash was early team at Just E, first marketing director. He had had a couple of businesses since then. He just exited a business in Dubai, had a bit of a soft landing, had lost his t-shirt quite a few times, engine investing, and had was working on his current then project, which was his book. So he he wrote a book called The Unfair Advantage. And I was like really inspired by the book. And I was like, this is a really cool concept. And what Ash is basically documenting his book is kind of all the things that I believe in, which is that we all have strengths, we all have unfair advantages, but many of us lack the self-awareness to really understand what those are and how we double down on them to realise our potential. So Ash and I just kind of kept I have this kind of rule that if something happens three times, you've got to act on it. So Ash and I bumped into each other like at a random networking event, we bumped bumped each other into each other at a dinner, and then we randomly bumped into each other at uh box park in Shoreditch, which I don't even know. Is that still there? I think so. I thought I thought I heard they were gonna take it. Oh yeah. And at that moment, I was like, that's so the universe is so sort of trying to tell me something here. I think I need to lean into this relationship with Ash and see where it's going. And then he he came to me with the idea for UHubs, and he was like, and he I always remember he created a pitch deck and he had like five team members on this pitch deck with like avatar faces, but he had um me and him as co-founders, and he was like, I've got this idea for this business that I want to build, aligns with the books thing of the unfair advantage, and I think you'd be a great co founder. And then I brought in that experience of the work I'd be doing in. Go-to-market transformation. I was like, this, you know, if we're going to focus on a specific niche for helping people realize their potential, go to market is the place to do it because they've got problems. And that was the kind of coming together of how the business came to be.

SPEAKER_00 22:14

And so what is the problem fundamentally that that you're solving then with it?

SPEAKER_04 22:20

The problem is that scaling an effective sales team or go-to-market team is really bloody hard. So the current data, there was a piece of research that was done by Salesforce in Q1 of this year, found that 78% of salespeople missed their sales targets.

SPEAKER_02 22:38

Wow.

SPEAKER_04 22:39

So if you think about like the return on investment of those organizations that are literally investing billions of dollars in salespeople, the reliance is on it's on the 22%. Like it's such a small pool of individuals that are basically carrying the load. So we've recognized that that model is broken, and there's kind of just this acceptance that it's a power law, it's the way it's always been. But that's nuts. Like it doesn't have to be that way. Like there is a better way that we can solve that problem. Um so what we do at UHubs is we use data and assessment and benchmarking to help revenue leaders identify what great looks like in each of the roles in their go-to-market team. And then we use some AI to help them formulate a roadmap of initiatives that they can implement that can help them close that gap and improve the performance and ultimately the efficiency of their go-to-market teams.

SPEAKER_00 23:42

So you can you can really dive and analyze at quite a root cause level what's causing uh people to be behind target?

SPEAKER_04 23:50

Correct. So the the kind of rule of thumb or logic up until this point has been sales is a is a numbers game, it's binary. You either hit your quota or you don't. And I have all of this data inside of Salesforce that tells me why my sales reps are hitting target. But what the numbers fail to appreciate is the human component that's that's completely missing. When you look at a Salesforce dashboard, it doesn't tell you someone's deep-rooted beliefs, uh, it doesn't tell you their motivation levels, it doesn't tell you the level of support that they're getting from the line manager or not. There's all of these variables that make up high performance that are kind of being missed. And the traditional thinking is that, well, it's just that stuff's kind of ineffable, like we can't we can't actually measure it. Actually, what we we've proven in recent years is that you can and you you can use a framework and you can use a process to start to help you get much more data driven about what great looks like. Um and so that in simple terms, the way that we do it is we we do look at the numbers, so we do look at the quantitative side, yeah, but then we also add a qualitative component. So we have a 360 assessment that we deploy through our technology, which we call the pulse. Um, and what that does is it benchmarks your team members versus a set of capabilities. Um, so it's an assessment format. And then the final input is we also layer in call recording data.

SPEAKER_00 25:33

Nice.

SPEAKER_04 25:34

So we get those kind of that that triple threat of quantitative plus the assessment and the qualitative of what's actually happening in sales conversations. And you combine those three things together and you can get a much richer picture of what separates your high performance from the rest.

SPEAKER_00 25:49

Yeah, I suppose if you're sitting there analyzing your sales team, homework say homework recruiting business, you can see that go, okay. Well, a lot of your data is lagging. You can maybe see some activity stats in the round trip. The qualitative bit, you're kind of dependent on the manager of that team. And you're you're seeing, I mean, it rings a bell, the sense like you've got you're quite reliant on a your sort of top tranche of performers, and you've got quite a lot of underperformers, and then your juniors coming through. It's like it's quite an expensive team to run.

SPEAKER_04 26:16

It's it's wild.

SPEAKER_00 26:18

So I can imagine that the value and being able to like deep dive properly. From from what from what you've seen though, like if we're saying like 78 to 22 is kind of like the starting ratio, where do you feel with data and support you can get that balance to?

SPEAKER_04 26:34

One of the metrics that we focus on heavily is revenue per head. So we we do a lot of work with private equity firms. So oftentimes, you know, their portfolios are sitting kind of in that 10 to 200 million revenue range, oftentimes. And trying to fix this broken distribution problem of like how do we get more revenue per head? And how do we do more revenue with maybe the same headcount or slightly fewer headcount? Um, we've been able to see as much as 83% increases in revenue per head, um, which is significant. So kind of almost doubling, yeah, almost doubling revenue per head, which um private equity boards kind of really appreciate because obviously this is helping them drive higher valuations of their port codes. Um but I I think just the final piece I'll kind of mention that's really important in the the approach is that a lot of leadership teams stop at the quantitative metrics, you know, so they will look and they'll say, Yeah, we know, you know, our high performers, their win rate is much higher than our lower performers, and they have more pipeline. But they'll stop there. And and in our view, those those KPIs are very much lagging. You know, you'll you don't know what your win rate is until the end of the month, until the end of the quarter. The process we provide shines a light on the leading indicators. It's like, what are the capabilities and the level of process adoption that's driving those KPIs that then result in revenue? And that really is the kind of secret source. That's that when you can get much more clarity around that, you can start to make, you know, way better decisions around hiring profile. Like which type of individual individuals do we need to bring into the team based on what we know is already working. Where do we invest our training budgets instead of just doing a tick box? Yeah, let's invest you know hundreds of thousands with this training provider and give the same to everyone. Whoa, let's think strategically like there's no point dragging your high performer through a piece of generic training, it's just gonna piss them off. They're not gonna feel invested in.

SPEAKER_02 28:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 28:37

So, you know, it's it's kind of solving these key strategic decisions and performance management. You know, who do we double down on? Who do we look to actually transition to a different role in the org? Yeah. So these are the types of outcomes that we enable. And historically, the only way you can do that is by hiring a team of consultants who will charge you a fortune and give you a hundred-page slide deck.

SPEAKER_02 28:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 28:59

So we we deliver that in a much more elegant technology-enabled way.

SPEAKER_00 29:05

So, I mean, I don't think I know a single founder who would go, oh, my GTM team's killing it. I don't want to make them better. Um, or I don't want to know more about what's what's going on. It feels like a pretty universal problem with people I coach. Like, so the thing that's interesting for me is like if you had when you're coming to the analysis, are you having to set that up on a company by company basis? Or are you finding there are certain sort of like what good looks like, what great looks like is fairly universal?

SPEAKER_04 29:37

It's a great question. We do it on a company by company basis, so we're very consultative. You know, I kind of describe us more as a tech-enabled service rather than a pure technology. That's that being said, we have a bunch of industry benchmarking data. I've done this for five years now. So we will provide a lot of support at the front end of the process, setting it up to say, you know, you might already have some stuff in a spreadsheet around types of attributes that you want your business development managers to possess. That's great. We'll leverage that. But actually, here's a recommended profile. Like this is what we're seeing the types of capabilities look like for businesses of your size, your stage of growth, your types of deal sizes. So it's it's it's kind of a little bit of both. We'll, you know, we'll kind of leverage any pre-existing work they've done, but we'll bring our industry benchmarks and insights into the process. And then we'll also help on an ongoing basis with external benchmarking. Right. So you might think that the hires that you've made are capable and great and are going to be amazing. It's just a matter of time. But actually, like we we can provide some benchmarks to show you that actually, you know, your your aid, you know, those account executives that you hired are taking way longer to ramp. They're way behind what we're typically seeing as a high performer profile in the industry. You might want to rethink your onboarding program. You might want to actually look at maybe considering rehiring.

SPEAKER_00 31:12

Um in my experience, it's kind of like when you when you do a CRM implementation the first time, you go, Oh, that's really great. I'm going to customize this to like we're so unique. We do this such a unique way, we're going to customize it to and you after a while, like the best way to do a CRM program is basically to implement it out of the box and then iterate as you can. I imagine it's probably the same with people. You go, like, oh, my culture's so different, my way of doing things so different. We're we're totally unique. But actually, if you started using pretty standard profiling, you'd have a very good thing, you'd be you'd be so much better off than than without without having Yeah, we do we do see a lot of that.

SPEAKER_04 31:48

We we see it to be honest with you, we find that the customer teams we work with get more hung up on things like wording. So they want, you know, they they might not want uh negotiation used as a capability description because internally they call it problem identification, or it's it's kind of very semantic stuff that we find customers get hung up on. And actually, what we find is for the initial baseline, we really advocate for let's start off with an initial capability profile for each role. Yeah. Once we've put the team through the process once, we'll get a ton of insights that we can then use to iterate and improve moving forwards. And we find that that approach works works a lot better.

SPEAKER_00 32:30

And what's the difference, let's say good to great? I mean, I work with clients like this idea of like identifying A, B's, and C's within your teams. And I would say like an A is like 10 to 10x of a B, like it's it's really transformational. From what you're seeing, like getting people from that to say, from good to great, is there that sort of level of quantum of difference and outcome?

SPEAKER_04 32:52

I d I think a couple of things on this point. Oftentimes we I think can delude ourselves by thinking that we can make every B player or C player into an A player. I think there's a little bit of expectation management that needs to be done up front, which is to say, to use a sports analogy, you know, you might have one or two, you might have a Ronaldo or a Messi in your team. But trying to set the expectation in the benchmark that you're going to bring the rest of the team up to that exact level, I think can cause a few problems in terms of motivation and for the teams as well. Um, so I think there's just a bit of expectation management. What we advocate for is that the client starts to think about some acceptable benchmarks. So, like, what are some performance benchmarks that you want to get your B and C players up to that aren't perhaps at the exact level of your highest performance, but they will mean that you will comfortably exceed all of your revenue growth aspirations. So maybe your A player has a conversion rate of 45%, you know, the rest of the team averaging a 25%. Yeah. That's a huge delta. Yeah. Like to make a 20% uplift across the board and win rate across a team of sometimes, you know, our customers have hundreds, if not thousands, of sales reps. It's just unreasonable. But actually, what if we thought about a 30% threshold? So that's a 5% improvement on average across this cohort of reps. And actually, you multiply that out across the current close one revenue. What does that mean? You can quantify it. Like, what does it mean for the business? Well, actually, that would mean X million per quarter in the incremental revenue gain. What would that mean for your revenue forecast? Oh, it'd be huge. So, you know, we we recommend customers set some internal expected benchmarks for KPIs and performance levels. And then we aim on, and the same thing goes for capabilities, and then we aim on driving B and C players up to those levels rather than the kind of unrealistic expectations of the Lionel Messies that everyone has. You know, most sales teams has one or two. I think that's one thing that's that's really important. I think just the final uh another key kind of um critical point of failure that we see is at the frontline manager level. We see a lot of pain around that those frontline managers in today's market. A lot of managers have been promoted very quickly. You know, we've been through a crazy period of economic growth with zero interest rates for five years. People that maybe entered their, started their working careers in 2020, 2021 had a very deluded view of what a career looked like. And they maybe got promoted within two years into a manager role. We've now got this generation of frontline sales managers who've never been enabled and coached on how to be a manager, and basically what we were have observed for the last couple of years in the market is that there's they're kind of trying to be super reps where they're just like closing their team members' deals on their behalf, and they think that's what a good manager does. It's a huge, huge problem, and it's hindering the growth of the junior sales reps that are now coming through. Yeah. Um, and the other thing that we're observing is that what ends up happening is these managers get dragged into spending most of their time with the underperformers because they're the ones that aren't delivering anything. And then that becomes a huge attrition risk because then your high performers, and we see it in our own data, they're scoring their manager support levels really low. They're like, well, my manager doesn't really do anything for me, they just kind of get in the way.

SPEAKER_02 36:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 36:40

And sooner or later, a high performer is not going to be inspired to come to work every day if they feel like they've got a manager that just spends all the time with the underperformers and just kind of ignores them. So these are like massive risks to businesses. And I think leadership, the work we do in shining a light on some of these data points, which the leadership team may not have visibility on, um, it's really powerful.

SPEAKER_00 37:05

It's strange because I have a thing called No Excuses Framework, which looks at like management capability and like A, B's, and C's. And one of the messages I always say to people, I think this management issue is not related just to go to market. I mean, management is an issue since I've begun my career. Like this idea of you spend your time on your urgent problems as a manager, which are your C's, rather than spending your time with your A's because they're actually the ones that are going to get racial return, it's such an important mindset shift and what and like what that means or how you manage. But I think fundamentally people are badly trained at management or certainly don't aren't, they very long the right mindset for management. It's something you sort of management is something you fall into rather than something you specialise in.

SPEAKER_04 37:46

And we've completely forgotten the managers. Yeah. If you think about like all of the budgets that get signed off for training for so long, it's all about the individual contributors.

SPEAKER_02 37:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 37:57

But how like how many managers have actually been? I remember when I when I made manager at EY, we got sent off to Amsterdam and did like a proper manager course. I did one other leadership course when I was starting to build U-Hubs, and those are like the only two things, but it's like there's not a ton of investment going to our managers. They're like the forgotten, the forgotten population.

SPEAKER_02 38:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 38:24

And and they are arguably way more influential in terms of driving behavior change and outcomes than the individual contributors.

SPEAKER_00 38:34

Yeah. I think so that first-time management, they're your most junior managers, your most inexperienced, and they impact all of your frontline people directly. Probably have to say in hiring them as well. And actually they're your they're your worst managers, which is and they're also kind of swamped trying to do the day job as well. It's bonkers. It is bonkers, it is a it is probably the single greatest point of failure in organizations. 100%.

SPEAKER_04 38:54

And we we pretty exclusively advocate for starting with the manager group. Yeah. So when we're setting up a capability benchmarking process, we start with the managers first. Let's get an understanding of what great looks like across this manager group. Yeah. And then we replicate the process across the reps. And you know, because that is again, you could you can have the greatest approach to to hiring, enabling your individual contributors, but if you've got a toxic manager group that just have no capabilities, yeah, you're going to be running into loads of headwinds when you're trying to hit your growth goals.

SPEAKER_00 39:33

Oh, I could talk. I could you're just I could talk about this for hours. Like you've gone straight into my favourite pain point. Welcome to your one. Yeah. Um, well, what what is what is one thing like for I mean, this go-to-market team stuff is I mean, so critical founders. What is like one practical thing that you would say to founders with the data that you have and your experience over the last five years? What's like one thing they should really they can go back in the business today and go, do this?

SPEAKER_04 40:01

I think I think it's really important to uh think about a stage of company because like hiring your first salesperson um it's a very different sport to thinking about how you're gonna improve a team of 50 in your go-to-market function if you're sort of post-Series B C. Um so it's difficult to kind of provide like a kind of generic um one size fits all principle. I think I think hiring is where we see just the most challenges, right? And there's not, I don't think there's enough intention of intentionality around how hiring is conducted, and I think that is common across the board. Um, it's actually maybe even worse so at the later stages because hiring has then kind of got a little bit less out of the control and influence of the founding team, and it's really difficult to scale hiring quality in our experience, because you're then reliant on the frontline managers that you've hired to then continue bringing in high caliber talent.

SPEAKER_02 41:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 41:14

So you can see why a lot of founders are really militant about owning the hiring process, even into like hundreds of employees. I totally get that. So that being said, I think I think that is a kind of just going into hiring decision based on gut feel, I think is really risky business, and not having any identification of what great looks like, and actually what are the things that you are that are mission critical for success in the role, and what are maybe the one or two things that you're willing to compromise on, whether it be kind of skills or knowledge which can be coached. So I would say, like, if you are if you have upcoming hires, you know, I would really start to think about how you can be more intentional about using some data in that hiring process rather than just get a feel of the interview and well, I like the person, I've got a good feeling.

unknown 42:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 42:16

I mean, an unstructured interview is like you might as well not do it in the first place. And I think we'd a lot of people like to think they've got a good sense of people. I've a I've got a good I've I've I'll I'll know whether I I felt in the first five seconds whether they were right. It's like those are very dangerous. But it sounds like you can provide them potentially the the capabilities to check against, but then you've still got to train your managers and your teams on how to run a good hiring process. And like so there's not a simple solution, but it does sound like very helpfully you can actually help modify what they should be looking for, which will lead to get the highest chance of getting high performance.

SPEAKER_04 42:52

Exactly right. Yeah. So we provide some tools, right? So we we generate things like tailored interview scorecards. So now instead of your frontline managers going into hiring uh interviews with their own kind of freestyle approach, every manager interviews differently, which is pretty wild. Um here's a consistent set of questions that align to capabilities that we know are really important within our business. That at least starts to raise the baseline of hiring quality. Yeah. To your point, for sure, there's still an initiative that needs to happen alongside that to enable that manager group on how to use the scorecards, and that's where the kind of service component comes alongside the technology. Tech can't do it all. You know, it'll be foolish of me to sit here and preach and say like we have the silver bullet solution to all of your go to market problems. It's just a disingenuous. Um but um but there are things that we can do that don't require a ton of time and investment and can make a huge difference in in sort of helping raise the raise the bar.

SPEAKER_00 43:58

Mass has been super helpful. I Having having run sales teams and like say I I I can feel the problem, all the stuff you're talking about in terms of like I'm sort of going back and wish wish I had some of this data before. Yeah. Because that identification, the benchmarking, all that stuff is is so helpful. Like w without it, you are guessing. And I like how you're bringing the three the three elements together. Like uh if you could just go back in time and just create this 10 years ago, that'd be that'd be great.

SPEAKER_04 44:31

Yeah, unfortunately. I mean, look, we're we're fortunate in that the time that we're building now as well is just like such an exciting time to be building. So that you know, the speed of development and some of the things that our product team are coming out with is very exciting. Um so I yeah, we we couldn't have done what we're doing 10 years ago, to be fair. Um but that's why I think this is the best time to be building a business. It's like I mentioned before we came on air that um you know I spent the last few months in San Francisco. It genuinely feels like a gold rush.

SPEAKER_02 45:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 45:10

Like it's like the best talent in the world has just all got up at once and decided we're going back, we're going back to San Francisco. Like we're gonna make this happen. Yeah. And obviously there's crazy unicorn stories about nine months to get to a hundred million in revenue with lovable and stuff, but those are like inspiring this next generation. And is it a bubble? I mean, yeah, but I think bubbles are a necessary part of progress. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 45:41

Yeah, the two the two are not in a sort of can still hold, like it can be a bubble, but it can still be the direction of travel. Um maybe that's a nice product. Go to San Francisco. Tip tip two, like one, look at your data, two, go to San Francisco.

SPEAKER_04 45:56

Yeah, I I literally I I I've been advocating to all of my founder network, like if you if you can lifestyle-wise, like if you can make it work, just go spend a month out there. You will I learn more from a particularly from a sort of a customer and product development standpoint. I feel like I could achieve more in a week than I can in a month, usually. Because it's you're so concentrated. You're you're having dinners two or three times a week with incredible people. Um, you're working from other founders' offices and getting free feedback and consulting from really smart people. And it's just like every day, it's the the talent density is so much so that you know it's like walking down the street one day and you you just bump into like you bump into people, which is really difficult. Uh to my other point, I felt like we've sort of had an opportunity to do that in in London, and then some things like Brexit didn't help, but um in San Francisco, it's a small place, it's like I think it's seven by seven miles, it's like it's a small grid of streets. Um so the kind of happenstance um uh meetings take place there. It's just the serendipity in that city is crazy.

SPEAKER_02 47:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 47:22

I'd I'd I'd encourage all founders at this moment, like just go and experience it, and you'll come back with at the worst, like a thousand, like a hundred to a thousand ideas for your business, you'll come up with a bunch of energy as well. Because the energy there is crazy right now.

SPEAKER_00 47:37

I can imagine. Yeah. Oh Matt, thank you so much for this. Great chat, and uh I think some very valuable takeaways for founders generally, but specifically with go-to-market teams. So uh thank you.

SPEAKER_04 47:51

Thanks for having me on. Yeah, hopefully, hopefully one or two insights in there were were useful for for the audience, but uh appreciate the time.

SPEAKER_00 47:59

So thanks for tuning in today. That was a longer episode than normal. Um, some really great takeaways around go to market and how to really drive performance in your sales teams. Uh we'll be back next week with more founder and post bag episodes. Tune in Monday and Wednesday. And as always, if any questions, drop them across to hello at peerffect.com. See you next week.