We dig into the life of a frontline sales leader who is charged with managing multiple teams with different functions. In growing orgs, this role often appears and there is no clear-cut roadmap. Andrew walks us through his approach and how he's found success.
We dig into the life of a frontline sales leader who is charged with managing multiple teams with different functions. In growing orgs, this role often appears and there is no clear-cut roadmap. Andrew walks us through his approach and how he's found success.
Welcome to the sales management podcast, your source for actionable sales management strategies and tactics. I'm your host, Coach, CRM co-founder, Corey Gray. No long intros, no long ads, let's go. All right, everybody. We've got Andrew Sweet here. We're going to be talking about managing multiple teams within a revenue organization. It's an interesting topic. It's one of these things where, a lot of times, there's a different person that's managing each team. They have to work together, or maybe they have to politic against each other, depending on what the culture of the business is. Or in some cases, you've got one person that can oversee multiple teams. There's pros, there's cons. We're going to dig into them more. Andrew, how are you? Good? Thanks for having me, Corey. Yeah well, we've known each other for a long time too. What year did we meet?
Speaker 2:2006.
Speaker 1:2006, see people working. They must have known each other since, like COVID start or something, no 2006. Back in the day, here we are, let's go All right. What teams do you?
Speaker 2:oversee Currently. I oversee essentially account executive team and also our BDR organization as well.
Speaker 1:Why is that a good thing?
Speaker 2:It's a good thing because you can align everybody towards the same North Star metrics, driving your team towards the same goals. You can mediate tension or issues between sort of that BDR AE dynamic much, much easier and ultimately everybody is using the same methodology, same approach. So you get a little bit more standardization and process as well. I think those are probably the biggest benefits. What's the downside? I think the downside is twofold. One, it's hard to properly manage everybody's different career development needs. I think also you have this dynamic where sometimes messages from leadership need to be nuanced.
Speaker 2:I'll give you an example. So we recently went through a new ICP defining exercise to try to get a little bit more targeted and focused in our outbound efforts. And one of the challenges there is what generates the most meetings is not necessarily what generates the most quality. So you kind of have this conflict. So you might have the parts out of message like hey, we've been loving the work that the BDR teams do in generating meetings, but they're actually not the right meetings with the right people. So those messages become a little bit more challenging when you're playing both sides.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's interesting. So in this example, was it not the right people but in the right companies, or the companies were a little outside of the target?
Speaker 2:I think it's a mix of both. In this specific example, we had pivoted essentially into a new product direction and needed to get a little bit more targeted in the types of organizations we were reaching out to. But we didn't quite know what that looked like yet. So the first quarter was experimental, so it was a little bit more retroactive. It wasn't like, hey, you did a bad job turning the wrong people, it was more we learned from this. Here's the results. We had a way higher conversion rate moving people through the funnel with X, y and Z specific targeted ICP. So we needed to adjust in that direction. So do things a little bit differently than you were doing. The dynamic and we could talk all about that the dynamic about who you're reaching out to at the organization's huge as well, but I think this was more of the company-wide who we're targeting.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, it's interesting because this happens a lot. It happens with new product launches, where you're testing out what happens. It might happen with market shifts. So, for example, ai is a new thing and a year ago people weren't competing against other folks that had AI. They didn't have it in their own products and now they do. And people have to be able to adapt to markets. Markets aren't going to be at markets like the tide. It's like the ocean. You can't fight it. Horizon, it's all ships and the sinking tide can beat you temporarily, but it's going to go back around something because the business cycle always does. How do you manage the team psychologically when things like that happen, when there's change, there's experimentation and they're just trying to pay their rent and pay their car off?
Speaker 2:I think a degree of level setting by explaining that dynamic of the changing market tides is really helpful. I think a lot of sales leaders make the mistake of assuming that providing too much context is confusing or more than necessary for sales people to do their job. But I think when you're in a complex sales environment, understanding the broader market conditions is something that will enable you to do a better job with discovery, with negotiation, a whole bunch of different things. So to me, I think, actually having that type of conversation, my team would laugh. I always tend to do these big, corny historical analogies, but they tend to work pretty well because you can display a lot of really great analogies that way, but I think that's important.
Speaker 2:I bet you would hear a different answer from other leaders around keeping teams really focused on what's right in front of them, but I think it's important to have a high level context of what's going on in the market.
Speaker 1:Well, it helps them understand what game they're playing and what role they're playing in the game, right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2:Also just in terms of what our company needs to do for additional investment or to grow long term. Those types of details people want to know, so they feel like they're contributing to those goals. So I think it's a mistake to not take the time to provide that context. It's great we're on an offset fiscal, so we just ended our last quarter, we're moving to the next quarter Great time to do that. First couple of weeks you kind of a reset talk a little bit about high level where the business is. So we actually had a very similar conversation on Tuesday.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because they're part of it.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:If they don't know where they're going, then it's like my favorite quote from Yogi Berra If you don't know where you're going, you might end up someplace else.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly there you go, and they're a little spin on whatever they're doing.
Speaker 1:Might be a little off, and that might a little off from everybody. Might take the whole team away off. Yeah absolutely. Well, you mentioned end of quarter. Let's talk about this in the context of someone that manages both BDR and sales teams.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Seasonality end of quarter push yeah, booking meetings. End of quarter important Closing deals. Much more important how do you manage your time as a leader across the teams, depending on what time of the month or what time of the quarter it is?
Speaker 2:It's a really great question. To me, it's important to make sure that the BDRs feel like they're part of that end of quarter push. I think it's good for morale, I think it's good for actual productivity. So I do a first thing in the morning end of quarter sink the last two weeks of the quarter. That essentially where's all of our deals? What's progressed, what's moved or happened the last day? What are we doing today to move it forward so that the BDRs feel invested in terms of them seeing what their ultimate role and position might be? I'll start looping them into the forecast calls just so they can get a sense of what that looks like. But it's definitely challenging because I'm not able to give the same degree of face-to-face one-on-one time as you can at a different period in the quarter. Trying to customer conversations come up with a variety of different priorities.
Speaker 2:But I think that's what I found has worked pretty successfully is make sure everybody's looped in to that energy and end of quarter which, by the way, has become much more challenging, I think, post-covid distributed world. Because I remember back at previous roles when we were all in person, the end of the quarter energy was really an infectious thing. So trying to figure out ways to back, when I was thinking back to when I was in SDR a decade ago, I just remember, even though I was doing the same job on a daily basis, it felt like you were contributing more as you're seeing people close deals and reach those goals. So I think that's an important part of maybe more the team morale and team building, that it is productivity that week, but long term I think it's worth doing.
Speaker 1:Well, banging the gong and giving someone a high five has a much different effect than seeing an emoji on Slack.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. And then also, once you start having deals that were sourced by BDR closing, then it's really full circle. So I think it's important to get them involved.
Speaker 1:Yeah, totally so. You've got everybody remote right now. Pretty much, yes, how often do you get together?
Speaker 2:We're hoping to get together. Well, what's generally occurred so far is we've gotten together. When we go to a big industry event, we have a conference presence booth, something like that. The goal, moving forward, is going to be probably like a biannual kickoff first half, second half type kickoff. We have a couple of folks located here in the Bay Area, but then for the most part we're distributed across the country.
Speaker 2:It's easier to hire when your talent pools everybody right, it's true, yeah, I mean there's a ton of benefits to it. I think that's just where we are at this point. But it's tough from a team building perspective. I mean I think everybody could admit that that recreating that energy is a different challenge.
Speaker 1:What do you have right now in terms of management to help support you? Do you have managers? Do you have team leads?
Speaker 2:We essentially have team lead functions at this point, the business, which helps because you can still have revenue producing production, revenue producing production.
Speaker 1:But I can call them assets. You can't because you're the manager. I can call them assets. There you go.
Speaker 2:But then you still have folks that in some cases I mean I'm fortunate enough to have at least two people on my team in AE functions that were previous leaders, which helps because you can rely on some of their instincts and experiences there. I think that's a big unlock if you can find folks like that Well, because it's not a step backwards.
Speaker 1:I think that's what folks need to realize that there's this situation that happens and when you get your first job, you get promoted in six months and then you get promoted to something else and they're always fake promotions. You get a little bit more money, maybe, and you get a different title, as like a two or a three after it, whatever and then by the time you get into a job where you're closing deals with companies, you don't necessarily need to get a new title every six months or nine months or whatever it is. You don't have to be in management. I think the best salespeople usually make way more money than managers that's definitely true. And so you get a spot where you almost have to unlearn.
Speaker 1:It's funny. It's like life is just all about unlearning what you learned before. When you're in sales, you have to unlearn what you learned before. Which is, oh, the best student's? The one that answers all the questions, cool, well, the salespeople that answer all the questions aren't very good at sales, because they're just sitting there answering the questions and then you go from over. You're getting promoted every two seconds, and then you're like wait a second, am I a failure because I haven't got promoted in five years. No, you're just printing cash and doing a very good job.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and learning, developing your skill set. I actually did that myself. I was in leadership roles for a while, took the move back into a year role when I went to Airtable, partially because I saw a huge opportunity there, partially because I was making sort of a. It's a really powerful way too if you want to get into different space or different vertical or different focus. I was more in that marketing ad tech world decided I wanted to make a little bit of a change there, and that's the way to do it in a lot of cases Get back on the ground, sell yourself and then, if you can move into leadership role from a place you've already sold from, your credibility is way higher than when you're an outside leader brought in. So that's a second out of benefit.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you got to burst the bubble. They're like oh, who's this guy? Yep, Yep.
Speaker 2:Which is challenging, it's challenging and it's also. It's challenging externally and it's also challenging internally because I think a lot of folks deal with some degree of imposter syndrome If you're in a brand new cell and you're trying to essentially coach and help people and you haven't actually done it yourself in that particular space or whatever you're selling.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, I'll tell you, as a guy who is currently a product manager and an engineering manager, I've never written production quality code and I've certainly never designed anything. I got kicked out of art class in high school. If you want to get good grades, you should probably not be in art class. There you go, but now I'm the guy that manages, the guy that makes the designs for the software product, and I think the imposter syndrome. To me it's really interesting. It's like, ok, well, sure, if that's how you feel.
Speaker 1:The question is, what are you going to do about it? And it's less of how you feel about it, more about what are you going to do about it. Just grab the bull by the horns and figure out what you're going to do. Yeah, absolutely, there's so much knowledge out there. I was just talking to a guy on the last show who everyone will see where we talk about practice, and his old thing was yeah, there's knowledge, and then there's the application of the knowledge. So bridge that gap between knowing the thing and doing the thing, and you get so good so fast If you focus on that. Yeah, if you don't focus, then it's probably not going to happen. Yeah, that's true. Ok, so let's talk about this. So you've got team leads on each function. How do you develop a team lead in a way that takes pressure off of you and doesn't create more work for yourself?
Speaker 2:I think the first step is clearly outlining what sort of additional responsibilities or scopes associated with that team lead.
Speaker 2:I think the worst thing to do is kind of a in name only level promotion.
Speaker 2:That happens at some organizations because you want to keep somebody in some sort of position, like there has to actually be some functional difference in the role, whether that. I'll give you an example I was just thinking to my last role when I went out on paternity leave. I had our team lead essentially run and submit the forecast of the chain to our CRL and that was a huge experience game for him, even though his day-to-day role didn't change that much. The current function, like our BDR team lead runs a variety of different. He runs a meeting that we have between him and the AEs about sort of collaboration, what's working, what's not, that sort of thing. He'll go and help us on sort of the operational side, developing dashboards, things like that, areas of specific skill ideally something that you would work through with them that's important to them and their development but also is important to the business and something that's adding value, all those things. If you can find kind of the perfect cross section there, that's ideal.
Speaker 1:So you're one of the guys that has the guts to let go and let them run with it. How'd you get it? Were you always there? Was this something you got nudged into? How'd that work?
Speaker 2:I would say I've always been there. I've always leaned a lot more towards delegation, which at times doesn't work, but I think for the most part, if you put a lot of trust in folks to be professional and want to develop their skills, you'll see the best results. I think the only time that becomes challenging is when you have something that truly requires a skill set that hasn't been developed yet. So, for example, there's a couple of BDRs in my team that I'm essentially trying to train to move into an AE role and I sort of subdivide that process, the sales process, into three chunks. There's the initial demand generation piece, outbound. What's your pitch, what's your hook? The discovery call, getting through the point in which you have developed some sort of champion. You're trying to actually now cultivate a deal structure.
Speaker 2:And that's when you move to the second phase, which is more around organizational navigation, bringing in multiple stakeholders, getting executive level relationships. That whole part. There's no way, there's no part of the BDR job that you have touches that. So it's very hard to have them actually train on that. You can have them do things in the first part. And then the third part's around procurement, legal, the sort of like bureaucratic checkmarks, the other additional stakeholders that are involved in the process that you have to sort of project manage. That part is way down the road and you can't see that until you actually experience it yourself. So I think what I'm getting at is you need to keep folks in a realm that they have at least had some experience and exposure to. If you immediately threw them into, hey, we want you managing our legal negotiation framework or something, they're not going to be in a position 60. And that's where you can't really delegate.
Speaker 1:Right. Well, even when it's an account executive, they're not necessarily handling it. Someone, they're falling. If it's straightforward, they can do some things. But yeah, yeah, that's great.
Speaker 2:I love it At that point, at least they still understand that their primary function there is about project management, making sure things are happening in parallel, knowing when they're just having an innate sense of hey, this is something I need to step in and sort of own versus hey, this is something that's going to go to somebody else. You just don't know that until you have the actual reps. I think that's a big challenge.
Speaker 1:Yeah, just takes time, takes repetition. I love it. Okay, so we compartmentalized these into three different functions. And that first function of discovery and just customer stories, managing objections, competitive questions, things like that. You can practice all of that as a BDR. You don't have to earn the promotion to do that.
Speaker 2:Exactly, and in some cases maybe, depending on your business model, you might have an environment where you can even let the BDR run with a certain subsect of like maybe very small SMV deals or something to get that exposure. But there's ways they can actually sit on the discovery calls. They can be involved in that process as long as it's not eating into their productivity with their core function. But then once you get later in the process, that's just that doesn't become something that's scalable or realistic.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so that first phase where they're they're able to train on the job, are you delegating the development to the team lead in this case?
Speaker 2:No, I'm still. I'm high touch with that.
Speaker 1:So this is your okay. So you're vetting them. You're like all right, your expectations. Here's what we're trying to figure out, and if you can show that you can do a good job on this, you're at least eligible. Yeah, one of the future AES slots.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and as everybody you know I mean sure you've heard it, everybody hears this in their career Promotions are a combination of readiness and opportunity that come up because there's additional headcount, there's somebody moves on from the business. So my message to everybody I mean BDR is most specifically in this case you want to have that skill set so that there's no question about your ability or qualification to get promoted the day that they open up that role. You don't want that to be just the start of kind of proving yourself.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and be ready, but don't be overly anxious. Have you in your career? You ever quit prematurely because there wasn't the opportunity. They left and the opportunity opened up and somebody else got all the time, but it still happens all the time.
Speaker 2:I would say actually, though it's been interesting in this economic environment, I think it's happening a little bit less frequently.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we're in 2023. Now it's, people aren't as anxious to move around, but a year and a half ago, two years ago, people were like I don't, if I don't get promoted tomorrow, I'm on a quit.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, which is is never good, I will say, though I don't know what the percentages are, but there are times when that that is necessary for somebody to make that decision, but the majority of the time it's premature.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I agree with that.
Speaker 1:If there's, if it's one of those roles where there's only one spot to go to and the person isn't going anywhere, yeah, sure. So like, if you're the COO and you want to be the president or the CEO the CEO is the child of the founder then, yeah, you should probably go do something else.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. I think it's also depends on your high level of understanding of the trajectory of the business.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I've always felt it's really important to go to places and job opportunities where the company's growing. It sounds extremely obvious on its face, but if you really dive into a lot of circumstances, if you're going somewhere, that's kind of plateauing. All of a sudden there can be a lot of promises made that can't necessarily be kept and it's nobody's fault, but it's just the reality of the situation. So, I think you know having a perception of what's going on big picture is important too.
Speaker 1:It's interesting that you say that, because I think there's there's two ways to look at it. One is if the company is growing really fast, some could perceive that as risky, true. Or some other people could perceive that as, oh, that's a much bigger opportunity. So the opportunity for the more frequent promotion, yeah, but we all see these cases where people grow too fast and they have to scale back. Or are they going to outgrow me? Yeah, we've seen lots of people that go for in that job. They take the VP job and the company triples and they're like wait, I'm not suited to do this job, I'm going to go.
Speaker 2:That's true. Or like back again to my SDR experiences, where you had six people producing X meetings a week and then all of a sudden, you quadruple that number of SDRs expecting the same production and, as we all know, there's a decreasing element there as well. No, that's all true. I think it's not necessarily. Hey, is it growing? It's, do you have confidence that it's growing in a way that's thoughtful? And are you not diving into a situation where there's a high degree of uncertainty about what's happening, about whether or not they're actually going to be able to follow through on commitments? Anyway, that all goes back to. I think you're right. In most cases, people prematurely leave organizations, and I think we probably have all been guilty of it at least once in our career.
Speaker 1:Yeah, maybe I have.
Speaker 2:But I'm sure that I'm sure most people, particularly in sales, have felt that before there's always a grasses greener thing. It's kind of a natural part of being in this type of role. You're always sort of assuming there's easier situations elsewhere and there's a lot of times where that's not the case.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly. It's like oh, my territory sucks, it's Arkansas and Louisiana and Texas. You're like, okay, cool, so you go to the next company and you have New York city between 42nd and 58th street.
Speaker 2:Yeah, true, that's true. And also in that first scenario you had Walmart.
Speaker 1:Yeah, right, and I think there's more Fortune 500 companies in Dallas than there is anywhere else. Oh, wow, interesting. Dallas is nuts. Yeah, because there's no state income tax. Come here, true, they've been campaigning for these for the last 25 years. Crazy, all paying off, paying off. And then Austin, where I am temporarily shacked up at, is now becoming quite the tech town. Lots of early stage. It's crazy. There's events every night. Yeah, absolutely, ai. I went to this Bitcoin meetup the other day. I didn't really want to go, but I was at this other event and this dude was like hey, when I go to this Bitcoin meetup, they have really good food. And I was like, well, I'm hungry, sure, whatever. So we go over there. And they had this really good Mediterranean food. And I listened to this guy talk for 15 minutes. I have no idea what he said.
Speaker 1:I was gonna say I didn't know that Bitcoin folks were known for their food, but yeah, I think they just have a lot of money and so they bought food from some really good Mediterranean place. They were talking about how to use programming language and physics to split Bitcoin securely and transfer them across country lines legally Interesting. I was like I don't know what this means. I'm gonna go somewhere else, so I went and shop pool.
Speaker 2:There you go yeah the awesome thing's been interesting.
Speaker 2:I've worked at a couple of organizations where we extended I guess I would call it like down market teams there BDR organizations, smb, ae organizations, those types of things. Yeah, you know, that was the quote unquote low cost option from New York or San Francisco like five or six years ago. Obviously that dynamic changed. I think a lot of those same sort of teams are going to like Denver, arizona, wherever else. But it was interesting because there's kind of a generation of Austin tech people now that have kind of grown up into these bigger roles elsewhere.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. Well, I think that's why San Francisco still is such a hub, because if you need a VP of customer success, they're not in Kansas City, because that position doesn't exist there, but there's lots of them in San Francisco.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's really interesting. What's the vibe over there these days for the tech world I haven't been for since last fall.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's super interesting. So, with the exception of two years in New York, I've lived here since college in different parts of the Bay, the vibe. I just read an article the other day. A lot of the actual fun of the large language model companies themselves, along with a lot of the AI adjacent companies, are actually back in the city getting off this space there. But what's interesting is the more traditional. I don't know what we're calling. It is still Web 2.5 maybe or something, not necessarily crypto. More of the traditional stuff.
Speaker 1:We took half a step back to be safe.
Speaker 2:A lot of those companies are in that weird tweener of do we keep our office space? Do we broaden out more distributed? That's still going on in a big way. But in general it feels like this AI move is going to be really significant and making sure San Francisco stays at its reputational level as it relates to the tech industry. So that's where I at least feel it at this point.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's good, and the art of the store.
Speaker 2:With some strange exceptions. The artist formerly known as Twitter.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we used to work at Twitter, right.
Speaker 2:I did, yeah, for about four to five years. Very different company at that point. Yeah, seems like Not as though as anybody who ends up listening to this that's a ex-Twitter person, though the great thing about a company that's been through so many different generations of turmoil is we have a really powerful, impressive and helpful network that's everywhere Now, especially after the most recent kind of exit, sort of last year or two. I mean, everybody has moved on to other companies where I think, if you compare it to you know, google or maybe not so much with Facebook recently, but in the past everybody just stays there for 10 years, yeah, you don't have the network because everybody's still at Google. So that's actually been like a really surprising benefit because, I mean, the Twitter network's been huge. My career, oh that's incredible.
Speaker 1:So the mass exodus led to just a better network of people at everywhere.
Speaker 2:Yeah, not only a better network but people that are more leaned into it because they feel more, almost more of a almost like a school pride type dynamic to it. But I don't know if you get a whole lot of other places. Yeah, that's really interesting, Us against the world kind of dynamic.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah well, I saw an interview the other day and it looks like he's really going against the world. Gonna build a banking product and compete against JP Morgan. Talk about going against the world.
Speaker 2:Yeah well, none of that. Also Apple I just saw some article about it. I mean, let alone Apple pay, but now they have everybody's savings account. Yeah, that seems. I mean it's ambitious. That's how he does. We'll see that's what China's done.
Speaker 1:Have you spent much time in China or in Asia? I?
Speaker 2:have not, but I followed it closely because I think, like a lot of people, I thought, hey, invest in some of these major Chinese players early on and they'll be the next Google type investments, and then obviously the government's kind of created issues there. But the one thing that, before you get into this, though, that I think is way different is they sort of started without people already having a bunch of apps and current existing infrastructure that they use, whereas this is now well into, obviously, the whole internet app ecosystem. So I think it's a much bigger lift. But anyways, I cut you off.
Speaker 1:Well, they also didn't have a bunch of credit cards, yeah, and so that was with WeChat and WePay and things like that. I mean, I started going to so C-Ray and I went to Asia for three weeks for our 30th birthday party oh cool, and that was my first exposure to Asia, and Nicola with us too for a good chunk of it. It was fun. People were just paying with WePay. Yeah, it's like what the heck is that? And they're like oh, it's just starting. It's how you do everything. It's like you talk to people, you pay for things, everything. So it's basically what Elon started to build with the X and it exists in China. So it works. And it's amazing to just see you sit there and watch. Everybody pays for everything. They're talking to each other. It's just one thing, and I'm like huh, here's a credit card from Chase Bank, NA.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean there's definitely benefits to it. It's been interesting in general with all the spin text stuff. Like I never really understood how these buy now, pay later companies were getting these crazy inflated valuations. But even in places like I heard in Australia it's like impossible. I don't know if this is true, but it's really difficult to get credit there as well. So people are using those types of services that seem to me sort of frivolous here in the US because, like you said, it's so easy to get a credit card or whatever, but might make sense culturally. But that's why I think that the whole X thing is going to be such a big lift, just because everybody already had. I mean, even look at I think you and I, both from college, I'm sure you maybe still use Venmo because we had a time.
Speaker 1:Well, we didn't even have a smartphone in college, dude, those were out. The iPhone didn't come out. I was gone. But yeah, I mean, I use Venmo all the time. Do people not use Venmo anymore? Is that not cool? No, people still use.
Speaker 2:Venmo, but there's a ton of people using the Cash App. There's people using the variety of different options that the banks provide. So that's still a split up space, even now. To think that everybody's going to consolidate with a platform that at this point has become, for better or for worse, pretty polarized. I don't really see it. But who knows. I mean there's a whole bunch of things that we haven't seen before that Elon's made happen. So it's definitely a strange, unique time.
Speaker 1:It's like the world is turned into a movie and we can just tune into different channels and watch different things. For those of you tuning in the Sales Management Podcast, thank you so much. If you want a free copy of our how to Coach Sales People course, split me a note at freestuffitcoachcrmcom freestuffitcoachcrmcom and you can watch 90 more minutes of entertaining knowledge-driven information. Back to the show. Yeah, that's great. I said no long ads. I didn't say no ads, right? Yeah, no, that's fair. Yeah, no, that's great. Man, are you hiring people right now?
Speaker 2:We are trying to figure that out at the moment.
Speaker 1:I'm going to ask you the tough question you don't have to answer if you don't want to. So imagine you're hiring for an account executive role. No one on the BDR team's ready. How do you manage that?
Speaker 2:But but people in the BDR team think they're ready.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, well, yeah.
Speaker 2:They always think they're ready. I guess they always do.
Speaker 1:You know what the most hilarious thing I hear is? You're like man. That would have been helpful when I started like dude. You started three weeks ago.
Speaker 2:Well, I'd be curious real quick. Before I answer that, I'm going to flip it back on you a little bit. What do you think is the appropriate average tenor you'd expect for a BDR, before you're considering them for promotion?
Speaker 1:I think there's there's. There's two paths. I'm going to take this question. Everybody knows that I hate the word it depends, so I'm not going to say it depends. I'm going to say there's two paths. I'm going to answer both.
Speaker 1:Okay, I'm going to say the first one is that your company has something very well defined that it's abided by in the past, it's fair. And then the second one is I'm going to say you haven't done that. Yeah, and so the answer. The first one is whatever you've done, that you've defined, that's fair, that you've abided by in the past, put them down that road. And then the second one is basically, like, you got to get there to the point where you've got some ground rules, because what you don't want to do is have some arbitrary number and say you've got to be in the role for 16 months before movies should be on the show.
Speaker 1:Cause, what if someone's awesome? What if they're phenomenal? Because we've got people I had JR Butler from the CEO, from the shift group on the other day. He's pulling people out of D1 college programs in the military. What if you've got somebody that was literally a major in the army, that couldn't get a tech sales job, and they hire him as a BDR, but he was managing 300 soldiers in war zone. Are you really going to say I'm sorry, bro, I got to wait 16 months before I can promote you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, that's it. I mean that's a fair way to nuance it. I think for me there's a little bit of a balance, though, where there's a certain just from a pure business planning and not spending your whole time interviewing people, backfield roles, all that sort of stuff that you have to have some kind of threshold. I also think being I mean you talked about this with some other guests at some point whether or not being a BDR is, quote, unquote, hard or not, it's a. It's a cognitively and emotionally demanding position, because you need to keep up an energy level on a daily basis. That is challenging to do for years on end.
Speaker 1:So I do think there's also a okay so you, the way you position, that was good. I agree with that. So you bought me.
Speaker 2:I think there's, there's a I don't know exactly where it's at, but there's a diminishing return on somebody's time and role as well. So I think there's there's a sweet spot there. But, like getting back to your question about how I would manage that if there's an outside, I think it depends a lot on whether or not there's ability to create sort of a tweener role or not. I remember back to keep going heartbreak back to my own SDR experience. But they had just recently made a move, kind of up market from the perspective, where the initial contracts were like close to a hundred K and there were more sort of I don't know what you want to call it upper, mid market enterprise types and the jump from a BDR to that role was unrealistic, regardless of who it was. So it kind of became this isn't really happening and a lot of people ended up having to leave or, do you know, go into different functions, business development or whatever.
Speaker 2:So I think it depends on whether or not the business I am of the the advantageous position right now where we can kind of create and carve out almost an SMB style role that can serve as a tweener. But I don't know. I think it depends. I think, like everything in management, a big part of it is understanding your people and what motivates them and why they're doing this job in the first place. And if it's somebody who wants to be an AE because they want to make a lot more money, and that's like the primary driver, versus there's somebody who wants to get in that role because it's stepped towards a much longer sort of arc of what they view their career and management or leadership or whatever Like. Those two situations are a lot different. I think I'm going to handle them very differently as well, cause there's there's, there's more, there's things outside of promotion you can do to make sure people are valued.
Speaker 1:Well, that's, that's great. I love that, and I think one of the things that you can do is you can help identify what the gaps are, yeah, and do a really clear assessment, because one of the ways that folks get in this position so if anybody listening is in a spot where you've got folks on your team and they want to promotion to whatever role, that is.
Speaker 1:I mean, even if you're a CEO and your VP sales wants to be CRO, same thing applies all the way down to whatever the office manager wants to get the sales. What is the competency matrix? Look like Yep or the future role and, like we've talked about today, what are the levels of competence across each one of those items? If anybody wants to check this out, I did a whole show on competency matrix early on, so go back in the episodes, check that out. Also, I can send you a competency matrix just to spreadsheet doc. Shoot free stuff at coach CRMcom, free stuff at coach CRMcom will flip that over to you. That's the whole thing, because a lot of times people don't have that diagnostic to really define where are you today and they think they're better than that because they don't have a data points compared to this.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a great point, and having some sort of standard there is really helpful. That can be challenging, though, if you're in a scenario where you're selling a new product or you're in a new space which which comes up at times as well like having that standard sort of framework for what skill sets and things like that are needed. Well, yeah, laying it out, and never it is.
Speaker 1:So, like a new product, there's, there's skill sets for that which is like, how do you say I don't know? Yeah, you know. Like send me two recordings of you saying I don't know. The questions that were hard. Yeah, that's, that's a thing. And if you're trying to do something new, you better be good at I don't know, because that's going to be a thing, that's going to happen. Great point, yeah, but this is it right, it's it's.
Speaker 1:And again, I'm saying all these things, I've done them a lot, I've done this hundreds of times go in the looking at companies and trying to figure out where are we at, where could we be and how can we get there without disrupting the business. Because that's the biggest thing without disrupting the business. In this example, where you're taking someone and evaluating them for a promotion versus somebody from the outside, there's multiple ways the business could be disrupted A you brought up, spending a bunch of time interviewing. B you promote somebody that's not ready yet. Or, c you tell them no and they quit. And now you lost one of your top performers and you still have this gap to fill. Great point, yeah.
Speaker 2:And hey, there's definitely huge benefits from somebody having domain and product expertise, from having done, you know, being the tip of the spear in terms of, uh, interact with customers for the past nine months or or year or whatever it is, so there's definitely there's huge benefits there. I mean, it's definitely one of those situations where you have to balance. There's got to be internal promotion paths for folks, but there's also times where you simply need a skill set that requires more experience.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, and you can always. This is another skill set for managers that you don't always get into, because sometimes you don't know this is available. Just go get discretionary budget to be able to do things like hey, here's a $10,000 retention bonus, I need you to stay in this role for another six months. Yeah, put another 10 K on their check how I'm sign a contract. So these is oil and gas all the time. So there's all these companies that have gone bankrupt for one reason or another because you know this, that, the other, whatever, and I got a bunch of friends that look at these retention bonuses. Some of them are, you know, six figures ridiculous. I met a guy one time that got one of those seven figures, and what they do is they give you the money in your bank account, you sign a contract and you say, if I leave, I'm going to give it back. Yeah, yeah, you ain't going nowhere. That's true. That's like being on parole. Yeah, exactly so. Then it's something that's significant enough to them.
Speaker 1:Five, 10, 15 K after taxes. They can do something nice and they're going to stick around. And how much is going to cost you? You're going to go pay. If you got somebody. Let's just use even numbers. A hundred thousand dollar base salary, 20% off, that's 20 K out the door. Okay, this person 10. It's cheaper and a better person. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:There's a lot of reason and there is significant team benefit to other seeing other people get promoted.
Speaker 1:Yeah, oh for sure, yeah, yeah, cause people want to be like other people and they're like, and then the negative the opposite happens if they don't right. Oh yeah, there was a role for that person. They left, therefore, there's no role for me. Yeah, that's true too, and there was someone's I don't know who this quote was from. I saw it the other day and it was somebody famous, maybe it was Steve Ballmer or somebody like that, and it was like, as the leader people, you, you remember one 10th of what people remember about their interactions with you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's, that's definitely true, they're watching.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they're taking notes and they have long memories. It's true, didn't even notice it.
Speaker 2:Cool, it's funny you brought up Steve Ballmer because I was thinking about how there's been this huge trend. We were talking earlier about people that have moved back into individually contributing roles for whatever reason. In the NBA, all the coaches now are former players in a way that wasn't happening before. There's always been a lot of players that are the coaches that some are the best in the league. They tend not to be the superstars, they tend to be the Steve Currs, and then others have really flamed out.
Speaker 1:that were you know some of the best players in the league at Larry Bird.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Larry Bird's a good example. I was Steve Nash, I think, had a tough situation, but you know another, another big example which I think you know. There's some parallels to sales leadership as as well. Some of the best sellers are not going to make the best managers.
Speaker 1:Yeah it's tough, but some might you know that goes back to the competency piece, just clearly defining what it is, because hold my beer and watch. This is not leadership. Yeah, absolutely, it's funny. Yeah, yeah, you gotta, you gotta say what? What is the competency required for this role? Where are they at when they need to be? And for folks that aren't where they need to be, are we okay with that? And if the person's a lone wolf and they're out there on their own and they're just going to blow off team meetings because of the prospect, that's that's. I think that's one of the biggest examples that I always see is that the person blows off team meetings because of the prospect or the customer. And if you're the manager, you're negligent because your job's not the deal, your job's the team. Yeah, so cool man. Well, we're almost at time. Anything you want to plug today? Any last words?
Speaker 2:Nothing to plug other than Pathlight. We're a if you're a customer support organization, come talk to us. We're essentially bringing generative AI to.
Speaker 2:So there's this thing right now where, if you, if you're getting customer support conversations, calls, texts, chat, whatever, however, you're interacting with your customers like at best, you might actually be analyzing, understanding like 5% of those conversations and overnight now with AI, you can get full report of what's trending in your business. What are your customers talking about? Are your support agents living up to the standard they need to? Are you reducing churn? Are you helping drive additional cross-sells to your organization? Because a lot of these customer support orgs now are basically extension of your sales team. So if you happen to be in that space, let me know. I'd love to talk to you.
Speaker 1:Hit him up, andrew Sweet. He's on the LinkedIn. I am Pathlight. All right, thanks, andrew. I'm Corey Bray. Check out CoachCRM. If your managers are struggling, get the most out of your teams. If you're one-on-ones aren't being productive, aren't driving forward, or the managers are just stuck down one path. They're either just focused on the deal or focused on the CRM, or just focused on the call, and they're coaching the play, not zooming out and coaching the player. Helping develop those folks so you can get them in the next role, help boost their career. If you're worried about any of that, shoot me a note, let's chat, but meantime I'm not going to charge you anything for the sales management podcast. We're coming at you at least twice a week. Try a Black Apple Spotify. We'll see you next time.