Sales Management Podcast
Cory Bray, 8x author and co-founder of CoachCRM, digs into hot sales management topics.
Sales Management Podcast
91. Challenging the Traditional Path to Account Executive with Mike Ebbers
What paths are available for entering the tech sales profession? Check out this discussion with two guys who did not do it the traditional way. It might inspire you for your own career, or help you think about recruiting in a new way.
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. Today's another debate episode, but instead of having a guest on here to debate against, I couldn't find somebody that could really hold this position down. I just found somebody else that agrees with me. We're going to debate against the world. We're going to yell at the lawn. We're going to yell at the clouds. I think that's what Homer Simpson's dad used to do back in the day on the Simpsons. So I've got Mike Evers here and we're going to talk about this topic of. Does somebody have to have sales development experience to become a salesperson?
Speaker 2:And we're going to go beyond that, because there's some other roles that I think are really interesting here. Mike, good to see you, good to see you as well, and very, very excited to be yelling from the porch at kids on my lawn with you.
Speaker 1:Get off my lawn, you skateboarders. That's it All right. There's this preconceived notion out there that in tech sales well, I hate doing intros. 15 second intro.
Speaker 1:In tech sales there are typically specialized positions. There's people that prospect. We call them sales development reps or business development reps, maybe SDRs or BDRs for those of you that are into brevity. Then there's people that sell stuff, close deals, talk to prospects, do discovery, do demos, presentations, proofs of concepts, things like that. We call them account executives, aes, and once they close the deal, they'll hand it off to a customer success manager or an account manager. We love you all, folks, but sorry, we're not talking about you today. We're talking about the sales development rep, the SDR, the AE. Do you have to have done the sales development job in order to have a successful career as an account executive? So, mike, where were you a sales development rep at Zero places, corey, zero places, we have something in common. Okay, right before we hit record, you brought up an interesting point. I want to hammer back on that. So why do people think that folks need to have sales development experience to become an account executive? Was that family feud? What's number one up there, mike?
Speaker 2:I think it's because we create these arbitrary high barrier to entry hoops and jumps that people need to go through to prove that they're ready for the SaaS world, and we don't just do this with account executive positions, it's just to be in SaaS companies in the SaaS world because it's special.
Speaker 2:Exactly, yeah, and we treat it very snowflakey, and so I think what people want. So there's a couple aspects of this. The first is people want to make sure that people they're bringing in hiring managers, bring in account executives who know the company culture, can get acclimated to how to sell SaaS uniquely. It might be different from what they would have been selling before, and so they think the only way in many cases to kind of nix that risk, if you will up front, is just go hammer the phones and spam people's inboxes for a year plus in order to hopefully, through some process of osmosis, understand how to sell just by rubbing shoulders with account executives, even though there's typically a painfully lacking enablement program to develop those skills that are, in my argument, very different from what it takes to be a successful SDR. But that's the first part is just creating a silo for people to go through, you know, a year of the grind just to eventually earn that position as an AE.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and there's not much shoulder rubbing if you're remote right, a hundred percent, great, oh man, now. Now he's hitting on all the buttons, okay. So I want to hit on this first. This is great. We're going to go down so many rabbit holes today, but they're going to be fun rabbit holes, and if anybody doesn't like catching rabbits then you know, hit fast forward, whatever. The first one is how to sell SaaS uniquely. So SaaS software as a service. There's. There's two things there there's software and there's service. So software has been around since the 50s, maybe earlier. Ibm, ross Perot had his quote in what 10 days in 1954. That was a famous story. And then service service just means that it's recurring. You don't pay for it one time, you pay for it on an ongoing basis. That's been around since the beginning of time. I imagine people got their lawns cut back in the Middle Ages. So what's so unique?
Speaker 2:It's a great question. I don't have a great answer. I mean, you're selling stuff, it's. You know there are playbooks. I think where the uniqueness comes in is there are a lot of playbooks and a lot of opinions and a lot of perspectives that SaaS is so unique that you need to adhere to how people specifically have been selling since. Saas solutions have been around in the market Since, like, for example, Salesforce right, who kind of reinvented the market in that way, but no In 1999, so 25 years.
Speaker 1:There you go. Perfect, yeah, okay. So this is interesting. So maybe there's a hangover from 2007, 2008, where, hey, you've got this very unique new thing and people aren't used to it. So they've got on-premises software. So they've got a server that's stored somewhere onsite at their company it's usually between the janitorial closet and the women's bathroom with some kind of master padlock on it which apparently, according to Instagram, you can undo with a magnet if you want to. So you know not not giving breaking and entering instructions out here, but it's wild how easy it is to get into those things.
Speaker 1:So that's what the world used to be like. And people would install it on there. They'd pay for annual maintenance, maybe up to 30% of the license cost. They do five-year terms on that and then come in Oracle person show up with a briefcase show. That was a jump different way of doing things. But now I think everybody's got SaaS on their phone the iPhone store, anything that you've got on a personal basis up to personal business software such as TurboTax, for example, and then anything that you use at your company. It's all around us, it's not new anymore.
Speaker 2:That's right. Yeah, exactly, those are all great points.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I don't think it's very unique. And if I'm selling uniforms to warehouse workers, I want to understand what's my target market? What are my personas? What discovery questions do I want to ask? What's my competition? What objections am I going to get? How do I present this? What's my pricing and packaging? What's my next step in my sales process? Given where I'm at right now, I don't see how that's any different whether you're selling salesforcecom or whether you're selling Centos uniforms to some guy in a warehouse.
Speaker 2:It's a good point, and one thing I'd say too, maybe to add some color, is there is uniqueness within SaaS tools, of course. So if you're used to selling to developers and CIOs, who are more technical, that probably does necessitate a little bit different skill set or perspective or familiarity than selling to sales leaders, for example. It's not fundamentally different in that the sales process still adheres to all the sales laws that you and I would say are important as account executives or sellers, but there is a unique perspective that you need to develop within that industry and that ICP that you sell to. But it doesn't necessarily necessitate making people go through an SDR program, because that doesn't always necessarily allow for the creation of that perspective just by cold calling and emailing people every single day.
Speaker 1:Yeah, dialing cold calls and sending emails isn't going to get you to the things that you need to know, because a lot of it. What's underlying your position is there's subject matter expertise that needs to be gained, and often when I go into companies like this, I'll ask the question. One of my favorite questions asked is I say okay, you say you're unique, somebody coming in from the outside that doesn't have experience in your business. How much new stuff do they need to learn? Is it 10 things, a hundred things, a thousand things, 10,000 things? What's the order of magnitude? And guess what response I almost always get? It's like one or 200. Hmm, okay, show me a high school biology book. There's way more than one or 200 things in there. You have to learn, and we all did it.
Speaker 2:Agreed, yep, exactly, yeah, exactly, yeah, it's insane, yeah, it's insane, yeah, and, and there's, and there's things too right, that are unique about the company, that people I think a hiring manager might justify like, hey, just again get to get to know our company specifically and just the way that we do things.
Speaker 2:But then it is is is that culture unnecessarily steeped in complexity. That doesn't need to be like. You know what I mean, because we, we, we tend to and I'm sure you've seen this before in in talking to all these different companies there's unnecessary steps or complexity in getting to know the customer or how to go about a pitch or do discovery or whatever. It's just like it's not actually focused on the core problem of understanding customers current state, helping them understand what their future state is, and then how do we actually get there and where our unique differentiators might help you do that, compared to other solutions or ways that you'd build it yourself. There's all these different facets that just don't matter. And so if you say, hey, come in and learn for a year and a half, two years by not learning those things, then hopefully by that point, if you book enough meetings, then we'll give you the chance to maybe start in a commercial and work your way up. Yeah, become a subject matter expert.
Speaker 1:Well, one of the things that really triggered me on this issue you know I'm a millennial so I can get triggered is I was talking to this guy years ago and he was coming out of the Marines and he was a captain Captain's pretty high it's not super high, but you know he's an officer leadership experience, college degree, 10 years work experience and he went to interview at some company I don't remember what it was, a SaaS company or whatever and they said the only position you're qualified for is an entry-level sales development rep.
Speaker 1:And I said that's fascinating. This guy is 30 something years old, has been a leader in the military and the only job that they're going to give him is a cold caller. And I said well, what were you trying to do? He said I was trying to be a salesperson, but they said that I don't have experience prospecting. So one of the things you said earlier was before we started recording was if somebody doesn't have pipeline generation experience, that could negatively impact their world as a salesperson, because part of the salesperson's job is to generate pipeline. So my question to you is how long if somebody comes, say they come in the Marine Corps and they're an officer and just super sharp human being. How long would it take them to actually learn how to prospect?
Speaker 2:A week, two weeks for a driven individual. Not long, not long at all A week or two weeks driven individual.
Speaker 1:Not long, not long at all Week or two weeks Cause at this point they've got tons of work experience. So we've solved for. Can they show up to work every day? Can they tuck their shirt in, you know? Can they all of those types of things that you learn in the, in the Marine Corps? How can you manage up, manage down, talk to people, be a good teammate? All that's solved for us. You're not teaching these basic work skills that are also part of the entry-level job, just regardless of what it is.
Speaker 2:Exactly, yeah, exactly yeah. The core discipline of staying on top of your tasks, for example. Or if you you know, like a set number of dials, set number of contacts that you want to add to your sequences or flows or cadences, or whatever. Make sure that you know you're somewhat comprehensible when you're, when you call somebody and you say, hey, this is what I do and getting their attention, I don't think that's overly complex. And to get back to your original prompt, to making that connection, it's like that is only one part of the sales journey that is important and that's why we have marketing and we have the SDR team in general, right, Folks who hypothetically should be experts in getting somebody's attention, enough to the point that they lean in and say, sure, let's have a conversation, but then that doesn't.
Speaker 2:You know, the world of sales is like the iceberg underneath the ocean and the account executive skills are so far away from just convincing somebody to show up for a meeting and hold to that appointment. It's just like is that the best way to get somebody prepared to be an account executive? I would argue no. What do you think? Oh, no.
Speaker 1:If you want them to be a good account executive, you've got to learn how to be an account executive, and it's also odd that that's the theme. And then you go in and look at how some of these companies actually prepare folks. So I did a presentation one time in the sales kickoff and it was called account executive skills you can use as an SDR and I highlighted I think it was 21 different skills you need as an account executive and I showed how you can use 18 of them day-to-day as an SDR. Well, you've got to identify your target market, know who you sell to the personas inside of their discovery questions, responses when you get hit with resistance. You need to know your process.
Speaker 1:Now, your process might be one step, but you still have a process. You need to know how to disqualify folks. There's tons of things that you can still do, but if the job is tailored in a way that you're just an email monkey and you sit there and hit send on a automation platform or you do cold calls, you throw out one statement, ask for a meeting, you're not exploring those 18 or so different things that you can use. So what I challenge companies do, I say look part of your BDR leader's job is to ensure that each person on the team is actively practicing the things that they're going to need in their next role. They're not just sitting there using the hooker brother up close. Hey Mike, you know I'm I'm almost hit my goal Like, will you please just take this meeting meet a lot. To me that's garbage Right.
Speaker 2:Right, yep, totally agree, totally agree. Yeah, a hundred percent. I see that quite a bit. It's been popularized and, admittedly, like it works for some of the things that matter. But this brings up, uh, uh, sorry, some of the things that are measured by the companies. Uh, yeah, whoever's making these KPIs? But this brings up an interesting question. It's like how, how do people come up with those measurements for SDRs or AEs on how to go about and do their jobs? Like, how how are those things defined and why do people define them that way? Yeah, like make 40 dials.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1:You know what my input on that is? I what? Yeah, what's your input? Look at your day and fill it up with the highest quality stuff, and I don't care what it is. Now, when I say I don't care what it is, that's different than what you typically hear. What you typically hear is well, if they can get their job done in four hours, I don't care. They're getting their job done.
Speaker 1:Dog, don't hunt, because there's a marketplace out there of people that want to work 40 hours a week or 60 hours a week, whatever it is. So why would I take somebody working 20 hours a week who accomplishes X, when I could get somebody to do 2X? Put it in any environment that doesn't have to do with humans, and that's an obvious choice. Any environment has to do with production and if you look at somebody that's in a role of prospecting, they're on a production line. They're taking a prospect that is not engaged with your company and they're doing something and getting them engaged with your company. This is a production line, it's manufacturing. It involves human jest, so I'm empathetic to that. There's a little more risk involved variability that we can't explain, unlike physics, but pretty much what it is at the end of the day that makes sense.
Speaker 2:I mean, that makes sense.
Speaker 1:Wait, it's your point, I know it's gonna be hard to get somebody to bait me on this because I I win this debate in in like two minutes. I chatted with a couple people about it. They wanted to debate and I was like, if I can, if I can win this debate in two minutes over a linkedin chat, I'm not having to be on the show. So I was like, mike, you come on, let's yell the clouds together I love it, you know it's interesting too.
Speaker 2:So, like from my perspective, coming up not as an AE, or sorry, not as an AE with SDR experience I have two peers who have had the same upbringing. It just came in as an account executive from various things it could be education, one in which came from consulting. I think it's a very, very strong precursor to being a good account executive. Right, a lot of discovery, pain, you know, uncovering and like solutioning, and they're like they crush it and they're the ones that are closing big deals where I've seen a lot of the downside of being an SDR and I wouldn't take the position that being an SDR would necessarily hurt you as an account executive. No, no. But I have seen cases where we see the same people in I'll call them playbook companies. I'm not going to name names because I'll get canceled by a lot of the sales world by going after specific personalities in our industry.
Speaker 2:But a lot of folks they perpetuate this idea that account executives have to be on the hook for a set number of meetings per week. Maybe it's like two, three, whatever. So you get out of the idea is you have PG Monday and the reps who have done a terrible job. They don't put any meetings on the board. You know, you gotta, you gotta crucify them on the spot in front of everybody and everyone else. You want to uh, lift up the folks that are prospecting and hitting those numbers.
Speaker 2:But the folks I've seen this like the folks who do hit those numbers where everybody's beating their chest and getting all these meetings, when you actually look at how those progress or how they progress in their quota attainment, it's not better. And so we have this idea on LinkedIn where folks are constantly saying the most important thing is top of funnel growth, the most important thing is prospecting as an AE. But that's LinkedIn narrative. If you actually go into Salesforce and look at the quarter over quarter performance, you're not at least not always or not even often going to see those same AEs perpetuating that idea as the top performing reps.
Speaker 2:And so we see these folks that talk about oh yeah, I generated 150 meetings over the past six months. Here's how I did it. And then they're like open to work, maybe they're moving around a lot, they're not like hitting their quota. I do think there's a connection between pipeline generation. I do it myself every day, but it's not this narrative that I need to be a full-time SDR and a full-time AE at the same time takes away from my selling time and my selling discretionary effort that I need to be placing towards my deals. So where do you want me to spend my time Filling this arbitrary 5X pipeline coverage metric or do you want me focusing on these deals that are actually going to move the needle for the company and my team? Yeah, you said a lot there.
Speaker 1:I love it. Yeah, I always tell people don't let your teams listen to people talk on LinkedIn. If they think it's entertaining, that's cool. It's probably a little more productive than watching the Kardashians, but not much. So here's my list of.
Speaker 1:I made a list of the most important. So you said a lot of people say pipeline generation is the most important thing for account executives. That's right. Yeah, so let me give you my list of the most important things and tell me, tell me what you think. So the most important thing is the product being good. So if you went and worked at a company that has a bad product, then you already just sorry. You're going surfing on a day with no waves. Okay, that's like the most important thing of okay. So let's, let's say this so I'm going to go play pebble beach. What's the most important thing? Probably that it's daytime, because if it's nighttime, I'm not going to be able to find my ball and I'm going to have to take a lot of penalties. These are the things, man.
Speaker 1:People live in their own little fantasy lands and they have these assumptions that certain constraints don't exist and that it's just part of the world and you can't do that. So product is the most important thing, and with that let's say that 0.1A is pricing and packaging. So if you have the most amazing product in the world and you think it's three times more valuable than it actually is, then you got a problem. Second, most important thing is territory. What territory do you have? So, yeah, if you got alphabetical or whatever, that's cool, but if you're selling legal tech and your territory is downtown Manhattan, you're gonna whoop. The person who's in Western Nebraska Doesn't matter who it is.
Speaker 1:Third most important thing is sales engineering resources. Whoever has the most sales engineering resources all else equal is going to smoke everybody else. It's just the fact of life. So if you've got a technical solution and you can get I've seen this so many times who's at the top of the leaderboard, okay, where's the sales engineering resource allocation? Oh, all to that person. Hmm, shocking. So they're running their own little shadow sales organization up there. And then the. The last piece I put here is just subject matter expertise, and that's not so you can go out and tell everybody what you know. It's so you can use that subject matter expertise to really craft great questions. So we're already here and we're not even prospects in time. You know the radar. We just listed four things. Does it fall above any of those?
Speaker 2:four things we just listed. No, in fact, that list is perfect. It's probably going to be an unpopular list when this airs with folks on LinkedIn, but it's a spot on, 100% spot on.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the people on LinkedIn don't listen to this, though. They just post. There we go. They're talking about how much they sold in 2022 to companies that raised venture capital in 2021. Back in 2022, dude, I'll be the first to admit I sold so much in 2021 like blew it out of the water. I'm not going to post about it on linkedin, I mean, I just casually. Now I'm not going to tell you what the number was, but it was astounding to me, lots of other people, but it was easy. It was easy selling stuff in 2021. It's hard now, but guess what? It's always been hard. It was just easy for a year, right, right, yes, so yeah, that's fascinating.
Speaker 2:I 100% agree and I'll expand on those four. So, product what is the one thing that the customer is going to care the most about? It's the product they don't care about. Oh, you ran a great sales cycle or you were really empathetic. You asked me all the right questions. Those things are important. Discovery is important, sales process is important, but at the end of the day, they're day-to-day experiences with the product Territory.
Speaker 1:Can territory Can I touch on? I want to tell a question. I don't. I don't cuss on this. I may or may not cuss on my personal life. If you know me personally, you'll be able to answer that question.
Speaker 1:But whatever, there's a guy I know that used to sell Westlaw for Thomson Reuters. In the legal tech world there's like Westlaw and LexisNexis, those are the two systems that people use. So he would. He would always tell me he said, when I was walking out of the office with the order, if they weren't telling me to go F myself, I knew I didn't charge enough. So so this guy, they hated him.
Speaker 1:I mean nice guy, great guy, one of my favorite people in the world. But the stories that he would tell me is that he would just price this thing to the point where it was. He almost had them at a breaking point because it was effectively monopoly. So the whole idea of your prospect has to like your salesperson. It helps. I'm not saying that that's the case for everybody, because nobody else works in the world of a monopoly, but I just want to throw it out there as an example of somebody that's very long career, very high performing, very high ticket item person was despised by many of their prospects because the product was so good and he was actually getting the value for it. It's a great story Great example.
Speaker 1:I love it. Okay, go to territory.
Speaker 2:Territory is huge, I mean. So I remember I was selling. I was selling software in that era. By the way, it was easier. I would quantify this easier Right alongside you, in a multi-state territory that on paper it seems like pretty good, but it was in the Midwest. What states? So? Like the Ohio Valley area and like Montana, the Dakotas, minnesota, michigan, some of those states.
Speaker 1:There's some cities in there.
Speaker 2:There's some cities in there. There's some cities in there. The tech scene is like there's some bleeding edge stuff right, Particularly Chicago, Detroit, you get. You get some of that. You don't have a whole lot of like large corporations that are really, really bleeding edge, and the tool that I was selling at the time was very, very bleeding edge and um, and for most people it was like yeah, this looks interesting, We'll be there in like two years, and so this territory is interesting.
Speaker 2:I had four high-performing SDRs back to back to back like one or two on the rankings in terms of the SDR performance and they supported me.
Speaker 2:Just due to org shuffles and things like that, Every single one of them said this is easily the hardest patch, and it's not only the hardest patch, it's the hardest market segment within the patch to sell into. There's nothing here, so we'd go weeks without getting any meetings whatsoever, despite world-class I mean beyond world-class execution from SDRs. And so I felt that pain. So I hit my number, but I hit my number by a small number of transactions that were much, much, much larger number, by a small number of transactions that were much, much, much larger, Whereas everybody that was in the Bay in New York. Those folks never went below 100% of their number ever in the history of the company, and so it's everything. What typically happens, though, is if you question your territory, it's oh, you're complaining, you're not prospecting enough, you're just not good. We need to focus on all these other things. Not enough people spend enough time on that topic of just territory assessment.
Speaker 1:Well, and a lot of times people don't bring it up in the job interview process either. They're like, oh, I'll get this job and see what territory I get. Dude, the job is the territory that is.
Speaker 2:Yeah, how do you? I don't know, I don't know how you can do that. You gotta have some idea, like walking in and saying I'm gonna sell uh, you know, like, uh like a genii software to uh, the state of alabama, and that's it right, I don't know how you do that piece that would.
Speaker 1:It'd be good for recipe. People in alabama love food. Nascar, vroom, vroom. You know who's gonna win what's the probability that kevin harvick puts it in the wall in turn four? Okay, that's right. What else? I love you, alabama, no offense.
Speaker 2:Alabama's got some great Sales engineering. I think it was number three, right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sales engineering resources. So sales engineers are folks that support the salesperson with either technical product demos, proof of concepts they'll do trials or pilots, things like that Person that has the most sales engineering resources. Is it a huge advantage?
Speaker 2:Huge advantage. Yeah, I remember. So, first of all, if you want to quantify, if you just want to quickly figure out in 10 seconds who your best SEs are, open up their calendars Everybody. Go to Google Calendar. Open every single SE's calendar. The one that is completely blocked out for the next two weeks, that's your best SE Yep Side and close. And so when you correlate that to the reps that they're working with now, great SEs won't work with bad AEs, so you do have to be a great AE to have a good SE Like that's. Otherwise that pairing just isn't going to work. The AE is going to bring them in for demos that are unqualified or not well prepped or whatever the case may be, or say do my job for me.
Speaker 2:Exactly, exactly, yeah, hey, just get just the products, will speak for itself. That's it, you got the meaning.
Speaker 1:Can you just kind of figure out what they're trying to do here? And, you know, show them some things and then you know I'll send over the paperwork.
Speaker 2:Exactly, exactly, yes, but there's a compound, there's a real compound effect when you have a good se, good a relationship that takes off and then, last one being subject matter expertise, that goes together right. You have to have that to have great se, because the se is the subject matter expert for the most part.
Speaker 1:right, exactly, yeah, because the probability that they've got they've either done the job of the prospect or they've been in the industry for a long time, that's they're going to have a much greater depth and breadth of knowledge about the problem, the solution, the landscape, than the account executive, the salesperson, would probably not always. That's 100 percent right. 100 percent right. But I'm not worried about getting canceled, like you are, so I'll make generalizations all day long. I love generalizations.
Speaker 1:They're generally right, that's right. Show me two people, show me a sales engineer and show me an account executive. I know who knows more about the industry Nine times out of 10. That's right. That's right. Sales engineers may create account executives if they're trainable. Lower that talk time everybody, if you can get the talk to the problem. There's a lot of sales engineers like talk and they like the product, all these types of things. So you got to retrain the brain a little bit, moving from describing things to asking questions, moving from a 70% talk time to a 40% talk time. If you can do that, man, sales engineers become such great account executives. It's awesome.
Speaker 2:Why don't they become account executives more often? What's your hypothesis?
Speaker 1:Well, income stability is one of them. You can make a really good living. So imagine that you're married, right? You and your wife were both sales engineers, like you make a lot of money, especially if you live in Alabama, right? So so it's a great lifestyle that doesn't have the variable impact that the salesperson, account executive with a 50, 50 comp plan would have. So so I think that's one piece of it. Second piece of it it's a fun job if you do it. You're sitting there and you're solving problems, so you're a professional problem solver. That's cool. You don't prospect. So if you hate prospecting, then it's a good place to go for that, and you're really viewed as more of a business person than a salesperson. And salespeople are business people and I want them to all be that way, but a lot of them don't act like it. So those are some of my thoughts.
Speaker 2:I think you're spot on. I think the other thing too and this goes back to the original prompt too of you know do you need to be an SDR to be a great AE? There is no 100% accountability on an SE, ever. So if you're halfway good at your job, halfway good, you don't even have to be great. If you're halfway good at your job, halfway good, you don't even have to be great. If you're halfway good at your job and a deal doesn't close, whose fault is it?
Speaker 1:Not yours, not yours. It's the account executive Every time, or the product, or the pricing, or the market or something. Yeah, lots of fingers to point that finger's getting pointed at you last.
Speaker 2:Exactly, that's exactly right. And as an SDR, you don't have the weight of that full accountability if a meeting doesn't progress or whatever, because if you're, for example, on stage progression, you get somebody to show up. They don't even have to be great in a lot of cases, because people are so volume and numbers focused they don't really think about who is the ICP and should we meet with this person? What's a tech fit? But if you do get them to meet, if they don't progress, you can always look at the AE and be like well, you need to do a better job of advancing them. It's not your fault. And so owning that full accountability as an account executive is very, very, very unique. You don't get to blame everybody, even though all four of the things that you mentioned, other than the subject matter expertise that's the only one that is directly controllable other than the company that you pick, where the first three actually fall in place it's a very unique role being an account executive.
Speaker 1:Yeah, this is funny because we started off with do you need to be a sales development rep to be an account executive? If you gave me your best sales development rep and your best sales engineer, let me ask you this. So let's say I took the best sales engineer and your best sales development rep and your best sales engineer, let me ask you this. So let's say I took the best sales engineer and the best sales development rep and I said which one do you want as an account executive next quarter? Which one do you pick? Nine times out of 10?
Speaker 2:11 times out of 10. That's the SE Sales engineer. Yeah, exactly, yeah, 100%.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because all the things that you said are critical. To be an account executive, the SE is actually prepared to be that subject matter expert and know who to go talk to and when to qualify deals in and out. Yeah, 100% NSC.
Speaker 1:So here's my prediction about the world. I have lots of these, but here's my one specifically around. This is that over the course of the last 10 years or so, there have been way more people come into technology sales because there's way more technology solutions to sell and, as a result of that, lots more people come in, lots more people move into management, lots more people move into second line management, much more demand for people coming in entry level. My big prediction that I've been hammering the table on for about a year I don't even think I've said it on this podcast, I just told people about it personally is that the span of management is going to be able to be increased with the technology that's being developed right now. So instead of having a manager for every four or six or eight people, you're going to be able to have a manager for every eight or 10 or 12 people.
Speaker 1:Well, what's that mean? It means a you're going to be able to recruit higher quality managers. You're going to be able to incubate people before they become managers for longer and, with all the technology stuff, you're going to be able to have just as good, if not better, constant communication, training, feedback, all the types of leadership, all the types of things that managers need to do. Instead of trying to solve yesterday's problem, we'll focus on tomorrow. Instead of sitting in a bunch of meetings with marketing and product and all these other things. Well, there's much better ways to communicate versus what we've had in the last five to 10 years, and so you're just going to have this awesome frontline management core of folks that are going to be able to develop people faster, move people in and out, and it's probably going to trickle down, so you're going to have fewer salespeople managing your territory as well, because they're going to be super humans, borderline cyborgs.
Speaker 2:Interesting. I can see this prediction.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Just you don't need as many people.
Speaker 2:Why do we have so many people? I mean, is there and I've? Maybe this is a little bit of a hearkening to the mission statement of your company what you've been talking about for many years? Just improving the sales skills, but also coaching skills? Necessarily right To go along with that. But, like, why do people overhire and hire to, instead of just investing?
Speaker 1:Well, I'll tell you. One reason is because the more people you have on your team, the more power you have.
Speaker 2:Interesting.
Speaker 1:If you're a sales leader with a six-person team, compare that against a sales leader with a 40-person team. Sales leader with a 40-person team inside of a company has a lot of power and, as much as it's contrary to popular opinion, the power really does matter and it helps you get resources. It helps you get what you want and ideally, what you want is aligned with what the company needs, and you can do a really great job. So it's not a bad thing. So that's one piece of it, and then I think the other one is well, okay. So I'm a sales leader. I can either get two more salespeople or I can get a technology solution to augment my existing folks. Okay, let's do this. Let's use a real example. Let's say I have a team of 20 salespeople and I've got 10 sales development reps. Well, I can do one of two things. I can either say let's cut the five sales development reps that aren't going to make it and let's get the other ones one of those auto dialer solutions is where they can just do way more activity and let's cut the bottom two salespeople and let's give the top salespeople again so they can do some prospecting. Let's give them a technology where they can do 60, 70 dials in an hour and do that instead of 20 or 30 or whatever their current thing is. How's that benefit the senior sales leader to have fewer folks on their team? Well, they have fewer folks on their team. So the implied power thing is that's a thing. As much as people like or don't like it, that's a thing. Second one is it dramatically increases your risk. So now, if one person leaves, that impact of that one person leaving is felt much more strongly. And then the last thing is that do you get credit for this technology? Should, if you did it well.
Speaker 1:But the problem is people often spend more time evaluating vendors than they do implementing solutions. They spend more time trying to negotiate pricing contracts with vendors than they do evaluating the usage of it, running certifications on do people actually use it the way that it was meant to be used? And if you go in and do a time and motion study and watch everybody on your team do the same thing in the same product, watch them individually. Say show me how you use HubSpot, sit there and watch them for 15 minutes doing a certain task, do that with everybody on their team. Guarantee you there's going to be variability and there might be wild variability. That is a massive problem and people don't like addressing it. They don't like solving it. It's not fun, but if you're going to get on the technology route, that's part of the job description. That's a good point. Yelling at the clouds.
Speaker 2:I think those are all. Yeah, those are all valid points. We see it all over the place. We see it all over the place. We see the cycle continue and perpetuate. Instead of just investing in the core skills of their people or their, you know the frontline managers Exactly. They're just, they're focused on playing the game, of playing the SaaS game. So see my first point about the uniqueness of being in SaaS. I don't know that that's necessarily a unique problem, but it's definitely not absent from the SaaS industry is exactly what you just talked about.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, because people sit behind computers and air conditioning during daylight hours, so it's a luxury job. It is a luxury job. That's right. I was. People tell me they're like man sales development's the hardest job. It's like, yeah, you work during daylight hours and air conditioning and you sit down. Right. That means like most jobs are harder, just by definition. Exactly yes just by definition. Exactly yes, but again, you know what's the most important thing?
Speaker 2:of playing Pebble.
Speaker 1:Beach that it's sunny outside. Not even sunny, it's daylight hours, pacific time. That's right. I mean, I played Pebble Beach a few years ago. I played Pebble Beach in 2019. Beautiful course, amazing experience, love it.
Speaker 2:I'm not, I'm not, I'm not a golfer, Uh, but, but I uh in recent uh, maybe somewhat of a non sequitur, but somewhat related to that Uh, what is your handicap? That's the hot topic right now, because if your handicap is good enough, then you get to be president of the United States. So what, uh? Yeah, what is yours?
Speaker 1:Well, it's not as good as his. Well, it's not as good as his. Yeah, no, we should definitely. You know, the president doesn't have a good handicap, and you know what are we doing?
Speaker 2:What are we doing? That's right.
Speaker 1:That's the important stuff. I'm not allowed to talk about politics, but I can say a fact that Trump played with Bryson DeChambeau, and so anybody that thinks he's not good at golf can go watch him play an entire 18 round golf match and make up your own decision. I'm not telling you if you should like it or not. Don't talk about politics. But uh, that was an interesting fact. Um, no, I'm not. I'm not really a handicapped because I have good holes in battles. I'm a good scramble player. Okay, I played last time. I played with my. We did a two-man scramble and we shot one over, so that was fun.
Speaker 2:Very nice.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. So it's just like anything else. It takes so much time to be good at golf. If you don't play golf two, three times a week, you're not going to be good, especially if your mechanics are off, exactly off, exactly. Yeah, I think the whole thing like natural golfer. Like yeah, bryson dechambeau is a natural golfer. Go watch the videos of him when he was 17 years old and what he was doing practicing. When he won the us open, he was the last guy to leave the course. He was on the practice range. I think it was after round two. He was on the practice range. So like 11 o'clock at night.
Speaker 1:And so then you end up in this world of sales and people are not learning continuously. And then you get these dorks on the internet to tell me things like I don't need a certificate to know that I'm good at my job. I was like, okay, beavis, I didn't say a certificate to hang on your wall and get autographed by your mom. I said, look, can we get clarity that this person actually knows this stuff? Can we get clarity that this person actually knows how to do this stuff? That's all I'm asking. It's a fair ask. It's not hard, that's right. But then they're like oh no, we don't need to do this, we're not, we're not in school anymore. Well, what happened in school? We learned stuff, we learned stuff at a pretty good clip, and now we're just like We've got this illusion of mastery. So I don't know man.
Speaker 2:But I guess everybody needs to be an SDR to be a salesperson now. Yeah, that's the conclusion. That's right. That's right. It's funny the point that you just made about continuous learning that that really only happens up until, like you know, college, maybe a couple of years after we don't have to keep working.
Speaker 2:I will give an example of an SDR who is crushing it as an account executive. Actually, he's at Monte Carlo, so he was in SDR and moved into an enterprise AE role not even commercial and he closed one of the biggest deals on our team recently and he was promoted like within the last few months and one of the things that he did differently from anybody that I've seen is he would use time away from prospecting. So he was very good at his job. He'd get really good high quality meetings that convert. But he also crushed it in terms of continuous enablement himself. So he was in gong listening to calls. He was getting on everybody's calendar the folks who are right atop the leaderboards more than others just asking questions how would you approach this situation? Oh, ok, can we run through a scenario where maybe I'm the AE and you're the buyer, like, how would you do this? That that type of mentality right. It's going to serve you well, regardless of what position you had going into the account executive position. That's that's what's necessary.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly. So let me ask you this let's not talk about your current company, let's talk about some theoretical world that you may have been in the last in the past, right? If I went into the call recording software and I said how many people so it's Friday when we're recording this how many people listened to a call this week? What percentage would ping up and say yes?
Speaker 2:Oh, that's a great question. So I've worked at four different software companies. We've used Gong at all of them. I would say maybe 5%, like a couple of folks.
Speaker 1:A couple of folks. Yeah, it's wild how little engagement these things get. Now I love them, I think they're great. I use the heck out of them because I use them for proposal. So I do tech enabled services. So we do tech, we do services. And man, you think selling software is hard, try selling services. That's why I always tell these people I'm like, yeah, you can't demo service, that's right, that's right. So I go back and listen to the listen to the call. I'm like, okay, I want to understand all the pain I uncovered, but I also want to understand what are the little symptoms or nuances or things that I might've missed that I can bring up in my next call and help that help build the agenda for that. So I use the heck out of it for that I love it.
Speaker 2:It's a cheat code. I love using it for that because I am very limited in my mental capacity to remember every single tiny little detail. If you're not doing that, then what are you doing? It really does show a differentiation in terms of your ability to listen, understand and empathize where they're at.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love it, man. No, this is fun. Yeah, and I think that you know, in closing, it's not a bad thing to do any job. And one thing I'd challenge anybody to do, especially if you're thinking about your career, the careers of people on your teams, think about the people that you respect in the world. They don't have to be in your profession or anything like this.
Speaker 1:Go look at people that have Wikipedia pages and one of the things I found that was stunning was that rarely do they define what that person did before age 35. Sure, if you're Zuckerberg or Sergey Brin or somebody like that, it's going to be in there, but outside of those type of folks that just did wild things, you're never really going to see anything. You're going to say you know they were in this industry and this profession or whatever, and then somewhere between 35 and 50, depending on who it is it really clicked and that's when it went off. So the whole point is, if we're trying to develop folks, just do something and do it well, continuously get better, and then, once you get a couple gray hairs, then it starts really compounding and you can take off, because years of experience is not important. Years of better experience is awesome If you did the same thing 20 times in a row. If you have one year of experience, 20 times over, that doesn't really get you very far. But if you got 20 years that compound and build on top of each other, you can pretty much write your own ticket at this point in the world.
Speaker 1:100% agree. Love it, man. Well, mike, anything to plug today?
Speaker 2:Anything to plug. I want to give just a shout out to the SDRs that I've worked with, uh, who have gone on to do bigger, better, incredible things. Guys like Chase Langley, preston Bowers, uh, thomas Sherman, all I mean there's. There's so many that I could. I could go and and uh and shout out from all the work that they, they do, lucky shot. Uh. I can keep the list going, but I'll just say shout out to you guys for going through the grind, really taking your craft seriously, and to all the hiring managers that are looking at folks coming in from other industries. Don't just look at NSDR and say hey, yeah, now you're ready, just because you know how to prospect. Open your mind a little bit and look at places like education, consulting, places where being an actual sales professional and those skills have been developed. Those are the things that are really critical. Those are the two things I'd say.
Speaker 1:I love it, and the absolute key to that is you've got to have a clear competency matrix. If you don't have a competency matrix that defines what people need to know and what people need to do to be successful in the job, you're setting your team up for failure. If you don't have one of those, flip me a note, freestuffatcoachcrmcom, and I'll get you hooked up with the template. Mike, thank you so much for joining me today. Thanks, corey. All right, everybody. We'll see you next time on the Sales Management Podcast.