Sales Management Podcast
Cory Bray, 8x author and co-founder of CoachCRM, digs into hot sales management topics.
Sales Management Podcast
102. Breaking into the top 10% of sellers (and managers) with Kristie Jones
What does it take to soar to the top 10% of sales performance, and is it worth the sacrifices involved? Discover Christy Jones's insights as we explore the nuances of achieving elite status in sales. This episode questions the conventional wisdom of relentless ambition, offering a fresh perspective on personal fulfillment and career success. We dive into the importance of honest self-reflection and understanding what truly matters to you, whether it's climbing the corporate ladder or savoring a balanced lifestyle.
Even seasoned sales professionals often miss applying their prospecting prowess to their own career paths. Join us as we unravel the art of strategic career moves, highlighting how choosing the right mentor or leader can significantly impact your growth trajectory. Personal anecdotes illustrate the value of intentionality, urging you to channel your sales expertise into crafting a fulfilling career. It's about more than just landing a job; it's about finding the right fit that resonates with your strengths and career aspirations.
Team dynamics and accountability play pivotal roles in shaping successful sales organizations. This episode sheds light on the balance between autonomy and accountability for sales managers, emphasizing the importance of empowering leaders to craft their teams. Discover how a structured sales process and market-focused strategies can elevate performance, especially in highly competitive environments. From nurturing raw talent to refining sales training, our conversation offers actionable insights to inspire growth, success, and intentional career development in the world of sales management.
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. Where are you at? Are you in the top 10%? You're in the bottom 90%. You want to be in the top 10%? Well, christy Jones is here to talk to us about how we can get there. Christy, how are you Good, corey, how are you? I'm doing great. I think this is something everybody aspires to. They say I want to be the best. Well, what's the best and how do we get to the best? And then, when we become the best, do we want to move up into some other role where we're immediately no longer the best? Very confusing landscape out there about getting somebody into the top 10%. Let's paint a broad picture and then I know you've got some specific areas that we can dig into beyond that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think, first and foremost, I say the top 10% are doing things the other 90 are not either able or willing to do. So I think the first thing you have to ask yourself is are you willing to make sacrifices? Because those in the top 10% probably made some sacrifices along the way. So, whether or not you're willing to make a sacrifice, I think, again, this is, I'll call it, getting honest with yourself. I think, first and foremost, get honest with yourself, right? Are you just? Are you just living to work or working to live? Are you looking for a job or are you looking for a career? Do you want to be able to retire in your fifties instead of your sixties or seventies? You know how? Do you like to be financially rewarded? What's your risk tolerance? There are a bunch of questions that. So I say, like you know, a lot of people don't get quiet with themselves, right? Don't find that quiet spot, get real honest, let's dig in. And, by the way, it's okay if you don't want to be at the top 10%. No shame in that, no, no, no shame in that game.
Speaker 2:Like, as you know, I work with a lot of lifestyle businesses. You know, businesses that you know that are never going to get. They're never going to get to 50 million or 500 million or a billion, and they're perfectly happy doing that. So you know understanding where you're at today, where you want to be, what's the gap in that? You know where's the bridge that gets you from here to there and if you're perfectly happy with the life that you have, congratulations. We all aspire to to be that person. But if you don't right, if you're trying, if you're trying to figure out why Susan on your team is always, you know, at the top of the food chain and always hitting quota, but you're not and you can't figure that out, let's talk about that, because I think there's some very specific reasons why.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love it. So, figuring out what game you're going to play and then figuring out the sacrifices required together, because if you own that business, if you're the person that owns that local organization that isn't going to be national or isn't going to be international, maybe you're in the top 10% of people in terms of quality of life, of lifestyle. You play golf every Wednesday, that's right. Do exactly what you want to do. That's a different type of top 10% than we typically think of, but it's absolutely top 10%.
Speaker 2:No, yeah, I mean, do you right? I mean that's you know, just do you. But you know, I hear from a lot of sales reps. First off, I I'm hearing from a lot of sales reps that they're burned out, they're miserable, they hate their job and I'm sitting back going there's. You're surprised to hear that.
Speaker 1:Well, it's gross, because who picked that job? Did someone else tell them they had to? We don't live in communist China.
Speaker 2:Right, which is why my favorite hashtag is own your own shit, Because that is you're right, Like that's on you, right? I mean, there's a sales job out there for everyone. But if you don't understand what the right sales role for you is and you don't understand what the right selling, the right product or services for you, or what industry that you can be most successful and what company you should be working for and what sales leader you should be working for, Then I think my in all of the years I've been doing this and you've been doing this as long as I've been doing this, I see a lot of sales professionals that are selling the wrong thing into the wrong industry, trying to be an enterprise sales rep and they should be a mid market sales rep working for the wrong company and the wrong boss, and those are all like like we talk about, like sales math and all the levers you're going to pull. Talk about your career, math, right.
Speaker 2:Those are all the levers that you should be considering, and that's there's probably a really good reason why you're not in the top 10%. If that's what you're striving for, you've probably picked the wrong sales role.
Speaker 1:Well, and the prerequisite to picking one of those things is knowing that those things exist.
Speaker 2:Yes, you think people actually know what percentage of people do you think, actually understand that these are the seven levers that drive my career? About three to four percent, if that. Wow, not very many People aren't thinking about that, because here's why you call me and say you know, you and I used to work together. You left the company, you went to another company and you reach out to me about three months later and you're like, oh my gosh, like the grass is so green over here. You should totally come Right and I like you and we worked well together and I trust you, but your grasp, your color of your grass, could be completely different than my grass. Right, I may get over there and the grass may be brown for me, even though it's green for you.
Speaker 1:There might be that Arizona green where they paint it.
Speaker 2:It could be Arizona green right, could be that fake cactus where they're really hiding cell towers. You could have one of those in your backyard. But I think that's one thing. The other thing is how many people are currently in your? How many of you are currently in your sales role because a recruiter called you and says oh my gosh, I've seen your LinkedIn profile and you're perfect for my client.
Speaker 1:Oh geez.
Speaker 2:Right, right.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much, Wow. And then you go tell other friends hey, I got a call from a recruiter today.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I'm like that's reactive, that's not proactive or intentional career pathing. Right, You're not in control of your career path. You let some recruiter who doesn't even know you and just saw your LinkedIn profile and thought you were the bomb diggity, controlling your next step in your career path. So I think it's ironic that we spend all this time you know, picking our, you know understanding our ICP, understanding our persona and prospecting into a very specific group of people because we know they're most likely to buy, and then we don't use those same skills at our own career. I'm still waiting for the day, Corey, when someone reaches out to me and says hey, I see you're working with company X. I know you're not hiring because I went to the website and there's no sales jobs under the career page, but I've done some research and here are my skills and here are your problems and we should talk.
Speaker 2:Nobody's done that, that's no, no, no one's done that. No, no, but I get. But. But when I drop a job description for a client, I get three to 350 resumes in the first 36 hours.
Speaker 1:No way.
Speaker 2:Large majority of those that are obviously unqualified because they didn't bother to read the job description. Well, that are obviously unqualified because they didn't bother to read the job description.
Speaker 1:Well, they're throwing their money on the long horse.
Speaker 2:They're throwing their spaghetti at the wall.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Well, they see it. That's one of the issues they do this whole. You got to put the salary in the job description thing.
Speaker 2:Yes, thanks, yeah, thanks to the government.
Speaker 1:And so the government wants to mandate what we do. So you put the salary in job description. So everybody says I want that salary, I'm going to apply for that job, and now all of a sudden we have 800 resumes, so everybody just gets clicked through.
Speaker 2:Yep, yeah, I mean, that's not an intentional strategy, right, that's not playing to your sales superpower. That's not truly understanding who you are. And again, I get it right, people are having layoffs, amazon wants you to go back into the office, other companies want you to go back into the office and you move 300 miles away. So you're going to need a new job. I get it.
Speaker 2:But I'm telling you, top 10 percenters, they're not necessarily throwing their name and their resume into that pool of 300, right, they're using their sales skills, the sales soft skills, the art of sales that I think is going into extinction. They're using their art of sales skills to get their next role and they're being intentional about it. They, they know that in order to get to the place that they're trying to get to, ultimately, that I call them step changes. Like they have to have the right step change, like this job is a is a lever to this job. This job is to this job. This job is to this job, and so you can't be like you know it's. You can't just be throwing the spaghetti at the wall If you intend to be a top 10 percenter what's more important picking the company or picking the boss?
Speaker 2:Um, good bosses. I think good bosses make a big difference. I really do. I mean, and here's why you know I I tell this story story. I just wrote a book called selling your way in and I tell this story. I had a dream company. I was in the e-learning industry and I desperately wanted to work for a vendor that I had gotten to know through being responsible for channel and I got a chance to interview for a sales leadership job in with EMEA and I didn't get that because I had no prior international experience. So I got the interview because they liked me and they let me interview and that was great. But I'd learned that I didn't have enough international experience. So I went out and I got international experience and then a job opened up in the channel department at that at that vendor, at that company, and I met the, the uh, potential former boss, at Midway airport. So we both flew into Chicago, had a cup of coffee at the airport, got back on planes and went back home.
Speaker 1:Is that why it's named Midway? Did you name it I?
Speaker 2:did not. I can't take credit for that, but we did meet Midway Um, it is funny and um. But when I was there because I know that interviewing is a two-way street and although I he was interviewing me first and foremost, I knew I needed to interview him too, because I don't work for bosses, that I don't think will make me better. And what I learned as a person as a person and a professional and what I learned while chatting with him is he was just biding his time to retire and he was thinking and he was hoping to retire the next two to three years and I knew at that point he was in coast mode and so I actually got the job offer and a good friend of mine who I'd met along the way in the e-learning industry was also in the channel, was also in the channel space. He was also a channel um, regional director of channel, and that was the position I was. I was um going forward. He had endorsed me, of course, no-transcript opportunity at my dream company, but it was the right thing to do the company. I did take a job out.
Speaker 2:After that. I was working directly for the COO. I only got a chance to work for him for 18 months before we were bought out by a competitor. We were VC backed and he made me so much better in that 18 months, like it was absolutely the right thing to do. But it took discipline, took a little guts, but it also took me knowing myself. I knew that I didn't like I'm very picky, my circle matters, as I call it, my circle matters and I'm very picky about who I bring into my circle. And I was going to spend a ton of time with that guy and he was not. You know, two to three years after that, after when he finally retired and I got a new boss, I was going to be just incrementally better, not exponentially better.
Speaker 1:Yeah, wow, that's really smart. Seems risky, though.
Speaker 2:I had a job Short-term risk.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay, so this is the other piece, so that I had a job so it wasn't as risky.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I had a job so it wasn't as risky but that. But again, I'm a top 10 percenter, right, so I get to pick my next job, right. So I wasn't going to be terminated from my current job and, um, you know it still. You know it wasn't at risk for that, but I had spent too long there, right, I'd overstayed my welcome. As I said, I had missed I probably had missed two step changes because I was there for 10 years so I probably needed to leave.
Speaker 2:You know that as a, you know like that's so long ago, you're like people don't do that anymore. I'm like, yeah, I know people, people don't do that anymore. I got it but they did back in the day and so I probably stayed too long. So I knew, because I'd overstayed my welcome and I didn't do probably another step change in between, or two in that 10-year period of time. I knew the next one had to be an incremental step change, right, because I had missed some interim step changes and I needed to make a big jump and it just wasn't the right big jump.
Speaker 1:Got it. That makes a lot of sense. So then here's a challenge. I see people run into a lot. They like the person at the top of the food chain, but it's not going to be their direct day-to-day boss. So you've got sales world. The CRO is legendary. The person you're going to report to is not that person. How do we think about that?
Speaker 2:I think that's a question to ask during interviewing, right? I mean, a good CRO should be interviewing you. You know, even if it's like you know, when I do interviews and we've got CROs and when I, you know, help companies hire and CROs involved, it's at least a 30 minute interview, right? Normally the last signup is a CRO, but that's an interview question. You should ask like hey, you know, I've done some research on you, I'm impressed with your background. I think you could make me exponentially better. How much access do I have to you? Right?
Speaker 2:Good CROs, by the way, have that access. You know they, they allow that access. They're doing sales training, they're sitting in on calls, they're helping with deal strategy. You know, good CROs aren't just sitting behind a closed door talking to that mid-level managers. Good CROs are getting involved in deals, they're leading by example, and so you know, I think that's a legitimate question that you should be asking. And but I also think good CROs and Corey, I think you'd agree good CROs also develop their mid-level managers. So as a result of that, right, you should have a good mid-level manager If you have an exemplary CRO at that company.
Speaker 1:Especially if it's somebody that's CRO hired as opposed to that's right.
Speaker 2:That's right and nurtured right.
Speaker 1:Okay, so philosophical question for you that I've been thinking about To what degree should people be allowed to pick their own teams?
Speaker 2:You mean from a sales leadership standpoint?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I'm a sales leader, so we can look at different scenarios. We can look at I got promoted into a role or I got hired externally. Maybe it's the same, maybe it's different. Whatever, I'm curious what your thoughts are, okay. Okay, well, I'm going to go lead this team that exists today. You're giving me responsibility. Are you giving me authority? Can I actually pick who's on my team? So we've got these two people on the team. Actually pick who's on my team? So we've got these two people on the team. Everybody knows they're bad. And then we've got this other person that's fine-ish, whatever, okay. And then we got four other people that are awesome. What's the level of autonomy and authority that should be granted to that? Let's call it a frontline manager, managing individual contributors in order to pick their team instead of just deal with what's there?
Speaker 2:Well, first off, we all, as sales leaders and you've done this too we all walk into a company where we didn't pick anybody. Only one time in my career did I build a team from zero. I got the opportunity to build an SDR team from zero to 13 over a three-month period of time. That was probably I knew that would be the only time I'd ever get to do that. I did it one other time as a consultant, where I hired 20 SDRs and two SDR leaders and build an SDR team for a cybersecurity company out of zero. But that does never like. That just honestly never happens. So you can't hold I mean philosophically you can't hold me accountable to a number If I don't have the ability to build a team of top 10 percenters. How do I, how on earth can you justify holding me accountable to a number if you're not allowing me to help people self-select out, as I affectionately call it?
Speaker 1:I like that.
Speaker 2:So soft so, gentle. I know it's the, it's the mommy in me.
Speaker 1:Because, like you said, it's hard to hold somebody accountable to numbers. So the worst thing I was given some advice a long time ago the worst thing you can do for yourself in your career is accept accountability without authority.
Speaker 2:I know right. How can you be like that's? You know that has to be negotiated. You can't hold me to a number and then tell me I can't fire. You know my bottom 25%.
Speaker 1:Yeah Cause, is my job that then it goes back to what's your job description. Is your job description to manage and coach and lead the sales team to hit their goal, or is it to try to do rework on somebody else's bad hire?
Speaker 2:Well, and you understand how damaging it is to have people on the team that shouldn't be on the team. Top people hate it. Yeah, top 10 percenters. By the way, if you're sales leaders, if you're looking for top 10 percenters, you better get rid of the riffraff, because top 10 percenters don't want to be part of a team where the sales leader allows mediocrity.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Right, cause it goes back to your like what's more important, the company or the sales leader? Well, the sales leader, I mean. I remember a time and this is the most horrible feeling I was working for a VC-backed startup and the SDR team that I just mentioned, and I had finally let someone go who was a bottom performer and one of the top performers just did a flyby. This is when we actually used to work in the office, corey, not globe hopping as you're doing.
Speaker 1:Way back in the day. Just to be clear, I am very pro-office. I just currently personally, am not in one.
Speaker 2:I'm pro-office too, but this is back when we actually had doors and offices and one of the top reps just did a flyby and he said hey. And I looked up from my desk and he said about time and kept walking.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's great.
Speaker 2:That's awful, I mean that. I mean I felt like dog doodoo, right. I was like oh, I mean that's the worst thing, right. I mean I know we say like the leader's the last to know, but not in sales, because this is a very objective sport.
Speaker 2:The leader is absolutely not the last to know. Now, the later may be the last to know about some unethical value, questioning character kind of things, because you know, if we're not doing, but if we're doing our job and call monitoring, those kinds of things come out too. But this is an objective sport. The data don't lie Right, and so you know I knew I had an underperformer, because the data don't lie. And for for a top performer to come by and basically say it's about time, that's like a sinking feeling. You're like, yeah, you, I that was two months overdue, easily.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you're just lucky that the top performer didn't quit first, because they're like what am I doing sitting here with the bad news bears?
Speaker 2:That's right, that's right.
Speaker 1:Basketball against sixth graders. Oh, it's fun because I scored more than them, but it sucks because they're here.
Speaker 2:Well, no, and who wants to be on a team of people that don't push you Right, right, like, like people think it's like you know, once I get to the top and I'm hitting 120% of quota or whatever, yeah, you know what, but like that, like without any. Those people, by the way, that's those top 10 percenters at 120, 120% quota, they're super competitive. They were probably athletes growing up. They were probably overachievers growing up in some way, shape or form it, maybe not academically, but in other ways. They were leaders, you know, in their, in their world or whatnot. They like competition, yeah Right. So having a having the bad news bears as your teammates, that's no fun, like you said, like I don't feel good about beating the bad news bears, I feel good about beating, you know, the other, the team. You know the other team in the outfield, that's also made it to the world series the best.
Speaker 1:did you watch? Did you watch thursday night football last night?
Speaker 2:I did not watch thursday night football. I do under, I don't. I know what happened. I know it went to overtime. I was, it was 30, 27 when I checked last um, and I, uh, yeah, I did not watch, I did not much, I'm not at, I'm a, I'm a comic ncaa junkie. So collegiate football, collegiate basketball is my thing, uh, nba and nfl not, not, not so much.
Speaker 1:So there's a play that I want to touch on that happened before all the craziness. I was at a bar watching the game. They turned the game off for karaoke before overtime so I didn't even know it went to overtime until my football text message chain started blowing up. I was so upset. But whatever, the place where I'm at values karaoke more than American football. Yeah, the place where I'm at values karaoke more than American football.
Speaker 1:But the play was there was a pass to a guy and the quarterback threw it before the guy turned around because he knew that. He knew where he was going to be. Threw it before he turned around. Guy turns around, ball hits him in the chest and bounces off. So that's the first part. The interesting part is the receiver I forget his name, I think I know it, but I'm not going to say it because it probably wasn't him Receiver drops to his knees and just pauses for two seconds and I could just read his mind. He was thinking I just let my team down and he was thinking through oh man, I just had the opportunity to make a big play. Now I'm that bad news bear. Yep, that's tough.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but I think the flip side of that, interestingly enough, is that the they executed ish right, Like that was the. That was the intended executed play, but he was, I mean, really, it was two seconds right, it was two steps and two seconds too late. Right, he turned around two seconds and two steps too late, but the trust that the quarterback had in him, that also doesn't exist in teams very much anymore where I know I can throw up the ball and you're going to dunk. I'm a basketball, more basketball junkie than football.
Speaker 1:I used to be able to dunk. I dunked when I was 30.
Speaker 2:That's impressive.
Speaker 1:That was, and I will never dunk again because gravity and body mass have overtaken me.
Speaker 2:But I don't think we've asked the most important question. Corey, the most important question was what karaoke song did you sing? I left.
Speaker 1:I don't I'll do karaoke if people with me want to do karaoke.
Speaker 2:No, but I think that's Team sport. For you, karaoke is a team sport.
Speaker 1:Karaoke is absolutely a team sport and I will be the bad news bears, but in this case it's one of those where the underperformer actually makes everybody else feel good, because then you'd laugh at my horrible singing voice, then you feel better, yeah. Or they can get frustrated that I put an eight and a half minute and ruined the night for everybody else.
Speaker 2:I think sports is a great like. Again, I'm a sports junkie and you and you are obviously are too. There are so many parallels between sports and like the example that you just gave, and business and performance, and you know, you think about the top performers in almost any sport or top performers in any industry, like they're putting in that work outside at work, right, the only reason the quarterback knew he could throw that ball is, I bet, in practice that works seamlessly right, and so that's muscle memory, that's mental memory, if you will. That's running the play, knowing what it is and knowing he was going to be there. He was there. He didn't execute it the way it had been executed in practice, but he wouldn't have even made. The quarterback wouldn't have made the throw had they not had.
Speaker 2:How many reps of that over and over and over Right, that's in the playbook. Like that's why I say when people, when salespeople, aren't, you know, let's just say you walk into a company and you're, you're blessed that you walk into a company that actually has a sales process, it's documented, it's formalized and people can actually teach it to you actually get, you actually get proper onboarding. But but you need to take that and say how do I leverage my special skills? I call them sales superpowers. How do I leverage my sales superpowers within the framework that I've been given so that I can take what I'm, you know, being coached to do, but play to my strengths so that I can, I can use their playbook and their framework and get to the top 10% anyway, because I know how to use, I know how to manipulate, let's call it. I know how to manipulate the framework to my advantage, which is what the quarterback did last night.
Speaker 2:Right, like. He saw that again. He probably had more than one receiver open, right, sure, right, or and maybe he's a running quarterback, maybe he actually is capable of getting to the you know that 10 yards on his own. But he, you know he was leveraging. He looked at the field. He said this is my best play. I've done this often enough. Muscle memory starts to kick in. You know it didn't get executed, but but, but, by the way, I bet that didn't keep the quarterback from throwing him the ball later in the game no, no.
Speaker 1:You got to trust your teammates. The minute you can't trust your teammates, your teammates shouldn't be your teammates anymore I think that's the same thing.
Speaker 2:It tells people it's like that's right what we're thinking about.
Speaker 1:Maybe putting them on a pip next month, okay, but you're still giving them inbound leads, are you crazy?
Speaker 2:correct common sense.
Speaker 1:Common sense has not shown up no, yeah, feed them inbound leads that you know they're going to screw up. That's smart. If you're going to keep them, if you have to keep them, if the HR department says you must keep this.
Speaker 2:That's the problem.
Speaker 1:Right, Cut their quota in half and just be like your quota is in half. You're not getting any more inbound leads. This is the new game that we're playing. You are now on the junior varsity team. Your Jersey has been.
Speaker 2:Yeah, back when I was a, back when I was a sales owner in the early two thousands, um, we didn't. We were mostly generating pipeline through outbound. But occasionally the marketing department threw us some bones. But you got inbound leads based on your percent to quota the fall the prior month. It's like why am I going to give the warmest leads to the worst reps?
Speaker 1:Yeah, Like, I call it a player privilege. Yeah, it's a player privilege Like in basketball, give the, give the ball Jordan give the Jordan, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Give the ball to Steph, give the ball to Jason. Lots of lots of lots of players I can choose, but yeah, I mean. And so again, like there's so many reasons why you need to be taking control of your career so that you can get to the top, because you know, then you get the warm impact. You know, if you only get 30 inbound leads a month from marketing and you get seven of those, like that just makes your life a lot easier. But you've earned the right. Like I always say, like A players always ask for forgiveness and not permission, but they've earned the right to do so.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so we've got this world where a lot of people do work remote, and how your position inside the company is somewhat of a branding exercise, and I hate this personal branding thing because it means that people that don't know what they're doing post stuff on LinkedIn. That is not what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is how people are perceived by their peers internally inside of an organization. You can be judged based on your numbers, but numbers have context. There's more things than the numbers that everybody knows. So what's your take on how somebody can build their internal brand of being a top 10 percenter in a world where they're hanging out in their spare bedroom all day?
Speaker 2:Yeah, hard, right, I think again, I think, walk your talk right. So do what you say you're going to do. When you say you're going to do it, so that helps build trust. I'll be honest, this is a tough question for me and I'm going to tell you why.
Speaker 2:I don't believe that hunters are helpers and I also don't believe that hunters have to be helpers. So sometimes I hear from sales leaders that are frustrated because they're like so you know is at the top of the list, but I'm trying to get them to mentor or teach a course when you know, during onboarding or you know they're not speaking up during sales meeting and I was like, and I'm like, I struggle, right and I normally come back with well, that's because true hunters and top 10 percenters aren't always helpers. Some are. You know, the last section of my book is talking all about abundance and give back. Like when you've gotten to that, I do think there's a responsibility to give back. But I think charity starts at home and I think the reason why a lot of top 10 percenters are top 10 percenters is because they're a little bit selfish, right? Why would I? Why? Why would you ask me to coach the D player PS, your job?
Speaker 1:You know what the hilarious thing about this is? Go back to the job description. The thing they applied for was it in there? No. And then they sign this offer letter and it has this garbage language in there that says the company reserves the right to change this at any time for any or no reason. Okay, cool. So you want me to do something because you had some coverall legal language in there from some dork in some office building downtown Chicago, got it? Yeah, that's silliness. So if you want somebody to do a job, then you should probably put what you want them to do in the job description that you agree on.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and hunters again like yeah, if you tell hunters that they're going to need to spend 7% or 10% of their time helping their coworkers and again, mostly you're going to want to help the coworkers, that suck Right Probably.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's the that's. The other problem is, I'm not going to say what I'm thinking, nevermind.
Speaker 2:I just did what I did, um. But then the other thing is you know, mine was worse.
Speaker 2:Okay, probably true. Knowing you, that's probably true. The fact, the fact of the matter is these should not be hard terminations or pit plans or whatever. And HR HR department aside, these are not like. Sales is the easiest department to hold people accountable. But if the company itself doesn't have a culture of accountability, then the in the sales team doesn't have a culture of accountability. Then you as a sales leader are probably going to be caught in the bureaucracy.
Speaker 2:Um, you know wheel mice wheel. Um, you know the rat race mice wheel. But. But in general, there, this is such, this is such an easy. These are easy decisions. Right, these are easy decisions Like either you're at 80% of quota or you're not. Either you're at 70% of quota or you're not. You know, either you're adding seven new deals to your pipeline every month or you're not. Either your close rate is, you know, double digits or it's not. You know these are really easy decisions, I think, for sales leaders to make. But and, by the way, going back to the job description, your sales leader better read their job description carefully too, because if part of their job description is termination, you know you're responsible for the performance of your team, you're responsible for hiring and firing and, you know, performance improvement. Then I'd be asking during the, I would be asking during the interview. So tell me about how people get terminated around here when they're below, when they're below performance.
Speaker 1:Oh, there you go.
Speaker 2:Right. So I mean, we're not people, companies. Again, companies are at fault for this too. I work really hard to make sure interview processes with my clients are two way streets, so I want the candidates to be educated consumers, as I call them. So you better be asking the hard questions. Like again, as a sales leader, you're going to walk in and you're going to inherit a team, and they're not all going to be top 10 percenters, because they never are, and so you need to be asking those questions without even knowing who the bottom 25% are. You don't need to know names, but you know that they exist when you walk in, right.
Speaker 2:And so how do those things? How you know, how do terminations happen around here? How does hiring happening around here? How long do is somebody have to be on a PIP plan before I can make the termination decision? Those kinds of questions you need to be asking the person that you're going to be reporting to, because if they don't have a culture of accountability, the answer is going to be oh well, you know how many? You know how many of the bottom 25% were terminated in 2024?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You can figure that you can figure that stuff out. People aren't asking the hard questions.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and the accountability piece. If people actually know how to coach, then it's not that hard, because lots of things you can do, but one of the easiest things is like okay, christy, so how are you feeling about your pipeline? Oh, not good. Okay. Well, what are we going to do about it the next week? Well, I'm going to do these three things. Okay, cool Next week. Hey, you said you were going to do these three things. Did you do them?
Speaker 2:No, Well, you know, my favorite question is going once once a Christie tells you what she's going to do next week, my follow-up question to that is how would you like me to handle the situation If you don't do what you say you're going to do? Right, I let them set their own punishment, set your own consequences, right. Why should I pick that? I mean because there's a chance, like you said, that that's going to happen. So then I say great. So how would you like me to handle the situation when you don't walk your talk come next Friday?
Speaker 1:Well, I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it.
Speaker 2:I don't let that answer slide.
Speaker 1:When you ask somebody to set their own consequences, they always over-inflate what it should be. Well, it's going to be really bad. Oftentimes it's over-inflated as opposed to under-inflated, and if it's underinflated, you got all kinds of other problems.
Speaker 2:So true, my friend. What are you? What are you seeing out there? I'll flip the script for a minute and I'll play. I'll play podcast.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:What are you seeing Like? What are the like? What are the biggest things you're that clients are hiring you to solve? What are the biggest problems you're seeing right now in the world that we're living in in October of 2024?
Speaker 1:Yeah, back to basics, fundamentals, because there was a period of time, so we went from anybody will buy anything 2020. And so for this part of the conversation, we're mostly talking about people that are selling more technology type things, as either in other types of businesses. I'm sure some of this will resonate, because I think there's a general economic trend across the world 2021, 2022, everybody bought everything. It was really easy you could hit your quota by breathing in many cases, because a rising tide does float all boats and then all of a sudden, it was like oh, cost cutting, everything's bad. Everything's bad across the board, and it becomes really easy to make excuses. And then, coming out of that, well, in a lot of markets, things are good now and some people aren't getting the most out of those markets, and so what we find is that they're not setting themselves up for success, they're not setting their teams up for success and there's not alignment across the organization Like what do we actually do here? Anything from?
Speaker 1:you know, what is the target market? What personas are we targeting? What messaging do we have? What's the pricing and packaging that actually makes sense, that's fair in this world? And then you talked about having a well-defined sales process before. What are the stages, activities, exit criteria, supporting collateral, all that type of stuff? Just having a really fundamentally sound sales organization in place that you can bring people into, promote people up through and just have it run like a well-oiled machine, because every manufacturing shop in the country has this, every distribution network has this, every airline pilot that you've ever flown with has this. And for some reason, whenever things are good in sales, people just lose complete sight of this. Everything's great, dandy, whatever rigor goes out the window. Well, now is the time that, if that's not in place, it needs to be in place, because your competitors are putting it in place and things are getting better. Things might get really great, but at the same time, that pain that you experienced 12, 18 months ago, it's coming back at some point, baby.
Speaker 2:Do you think that you touched on it briefly, but this is one of the things that I see. They think a lot of companies want to be all things to all people. Right, you've only got 12 sales AEs, how on earth can you sell in the blue ocean? I'm still finding that people, that companies, and it's a scarcity mentality problem, in my opinion. I take myself as the example. I'm not a sales trainer, I'm a process expert that exclusively works with B2B SaaS companies, early stage VC banks. That's a very specific swim lane, yeah, but I still walk into companies or see companies all the time where they've got, you know, 12 sellers, even 20 sellers, and they're you know 12 sellers, even 20 sellers, and they're you know we've gone global. I'm like 20 people divided by the globe. Really, yeah, what do you think Is this part of the problem?
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's absolutely part of the problem and I think the problem is the root cause of it.
Speaker 1:In many cases, if we're talking about VC backed SaaS companies, the founders can sell in any market because they've lived and breathed the problem well before they started the company, hopefully, or they're 160 IQ people that have figured it out pretty quickly and then they've had enough experience selling and getting told no and building the product and they just have complete expertise around what the product does, what the use cases are, and they've had just the benefit of broad and deep conversations.
Speaker 1:Whereas you're bringing in a hired gun who might have industry experience, who might not, who might have a lot of sales experience, who might not they're not going to be able to get up to that founder level. It's going to take them five years. So I think that's the problem is that you can't clone yourself. You've got to bring in role players that can do very specific jobs and when it comes to markets, for example, well, if you're selling lots of things into lots of markets to lots of types of people, the probability that you can come up with the right question to ask in the moment on the call is pretty much zero. If you're selling one or two things into one or two markets to one or two people. You can dial it in and it'll be more repeatable, and then it becomes muscle memory, like you mentioned earlier.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, completely agree. I'm just saying too many people, yeah, too many people selling. I was on a call with a client this morning and they had just done a little ICP exercise without me present and so they wanted to review it with me. Oh, I love it when they do that. Yeah, me too, although they were going to do some pre-work, no-transcript, and I'm like well, what's that mean? Like what's growth mode mean? They're like, well, you know, like they intend to have more centers. I go, okay, but by when and how many more?
Speaker 1:And how do we see that from Zoom info?
Speaker 2:And to think, oh my gosh, like you are me, zoom info. And to think, oh my gosh, like you are me, you could have been on this call. You would have been like I could have slept. I could have slept in today, cause that call started at 8.15 for me. I know you don't do anything until 10. So you wouldn't have taken that call for me, but had you been willing to get up a little early?
Speaker 2:and get started. That's what I said. I said we can't filter Zoom info, apollo, seamless or the HubSpot database that you have by growth mode. No, I said how are we going to build a list of growth mode?
Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure. Well, okay, so this is. I love this. Two comments One is, whenever people are doing ICP target market exercises, the thing I always make them do is I say, list out all the attributes of the market, so geography, company size, growth objectives, whatever it is. And then you got to give me an ideal, a good and a rejected, because if they only give me one of those columns there's no real understanding of what it is.
Speaker 1:So I'll learn from the people that you absolutely not talk to the ones you really want to talk to, the ones that are okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I do that. I don't do the middle, but I like the middle. I do the. Who are we going to and who are we absolutely not going to sell to? What do they look like? I don't do that I don't do that good. I do the ideal and the rejected, but not the good.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and so that's the first piece. And then the second piece is that, when it comes to Salesforce development, sales team development, training, a lot of times the focus is so much on the product and the skills and things like that. How am I going to do discovery and how am I going to demo it and how am I going to do a proposal? Well, there's a layer of knowledge that lays beneath this and it's not something that's going to happen overnight, and so one of the questions I always ask people is, I say do you know what mitochondria is? And everybody's like yeah, it's powerhouse of salt. I'm like okay, one more question for you. You know what photosynthesis is? They're like yeah, it's how plants turn sunlight and energy. I was like cool, so you learned this 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago. It's made you $0 in your entire life.
Speaker 1:Now let's talk about some of the things that are relevant to this industry in terms of the jobs to be done for the personas that may have something to do with what we do, or all the, all the indirect competition, all the other activities that they're doing out there. Let's let's try to understand this world. Oh yeah, I don't know what Kubernetes is. I don't know what microservices versus monolith is. It's like you know what mitochondria is, so why wouldn't you learn something that actually makes you money? So taking that approach just to get a self-realization that holy cow, there's some. You don't have to be expert at it, you don't have to do the job Like understand how to know this stuff so that can inform the types of questions you ask. I think that's a big gap in a lot of companies too.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I like it. Yeah, there's some. Yes, we could do this all day. So much fun.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, so much fun, we're just solving?
Speaker 2:we're just solving sales problems right and left.
Speaker 1:Is that what you thought I was going to say? Where, where there's only one question, there's always one question. I asked Did you think that's where I was going to go?
Speaker 2:No, no, and I'm like, and then I had to go and I was like, and then you said, like everybody knows the answer, I'm like that's not true. A lot of people don't know what mitochondria is.
Speaker 1:Somebody in the group always knows the answer, but it's a team exercise.
Speaker 2:You're right, one out of 10 is going to. Yeah. Well, at least you're gonna get one, yeah. Yeah, photosynthesis is probably easier, but mitochondria I'm like I did you really? Everybody knew the answer to that.
Speaker 1:It's wild how many people I was shocked at, how many people know the answer, cause I picked it up the first time I ever said that it was kind of off. It was an off the cuff thing, cause I never you were just being you, yeah, just being me like that one time when we're doing that panel in St Louis. I'm not going to repeat that now, but it was hilarious.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that was a very good evening.
Speaker 1:So then, yeah, yeah, so I just said that and everybody knew it. I don't know like half the room knew it, but they didn't know what their product does and nobody knew more than three customer stories. So that's the other thing. Raise your hand. If you know at least one customer story, keep it up for two and three and four and five, and all of a sudden all the hands get on. Y'all have 10 use cases and nobody here knows more than five customer stories. That seems to be a problem to me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I was on the phone with an SDR this afternoon, who will remain nameless, to protect him.
Speaker 1:We always call him Little Timmy on here, so let's call him Little Timmy.
Speaker 2:I was talking to Little Timmy, actually literally right before I jumped on with you doing a one-on-one coaching session, and he's been in the company seven months. This is my first one-on-one with him and I you know he started to go to. He said my show rate is horrible and I'm like define horrible. He goes a third. I was like oh geez, oh geez, like oh, that is horrible. I said okay, well, let's start by like what are you saying? And so he went through his pitch. I don't even like that word, right, and I said okay.
Speaker 2:And I said, um, so that was all about you and not about them. And I said so what, what? What was in it for them? He's like well, an opportunity to go and get a demo. And I said, oh, you're pimping the demo too. I love that. I love the pimp, the demo strats. I call it pimp the demo. I'm like we're going to pimp the demo baby.
Speaker 2:I said so, but what, like, let's just back up for a minute. Like, what three business problems do you solve? And he goes we, we, we, we, we reduce stress. And I said, I said you know what. So does cardio, so does my red wine closet, and so does my therapist. And I said so how do you do that? And there was just silence. I said that's so generic. There are. I mean, do you know how many different ways there are to reduce stress? And the, based on the people you're talking to, there is heavy drinking and probably not a lot of cardio going on and and so. But I'm like there and I said to him so at the end of the call, right before I got with you, he says so can you tell me one thing, like just one thing, that you think I should be thinking about.
Speaker 2:You know, in order to get you know, you know further in my career. And I said you have not been provided any sales fundamentals. You've worked for two companies as an SDR and neither one of them including the one that just became my new client, which is why you're here is has done you any, you know, provided you any training. They've all done you a disservice. I said you don't have any basic sales skills. I said if you did, then your show rate wouldn't be 33%. And I said so, if I were you, I wouldn't worry about the product, I wouldn't worry about any of that stuff. I said I would just start to understand basic sales fundamentals. And so I sent him. You know, kevin Dorsey. So uh, Katie has a course out on Udemy called people focus selling a masterclass, and it is was it's currently 1399.
Speaker 1:Oh, wow. He's raking in the big bucks these days, yeah.
Speaker 2:Down from the 94 99. And I was like I go, oh look, it's on sale. So I said you go to your CFO who has hired who was the one that hired me and I said you ask him if you can spend $14 on this course to better your sales skills. And I said and if he says no, you call me, I'll give you my credit card number. Oh, wow.
Speaker 2:But you know what I mean and like it just we aren't. I mean sales leaders are failing, we're not providing the art of sales. We are now all science of sales and the numbers, and again I said, data don't lie and I and I believe in the numbers. But this poor child I mean a third 33% are not showing up and nobody is stepping in to coach him.
Speaker 1:Right, it's wild.
Speaker 2:I mean that's, I mean that's like. But here's the bigger problem, because I heard your intro on what do we call it? On? 78 play, versus back to our record days, your speed intro. This is for sales leaders. But if we don't teach this SDR, little Timmy, if little Timmy doesn't learn basic sales skills and fundamentals, and then Timmy becomes an AE and then at some point Timmy is going to become get, get, get offered a sales leadership job, because in my world we love to take the top 10 percenter who is an individual contributor and not a helper and whatever and offer them a sales leadership job. So if little Timmy ever gets sales fundamental training along the way, soon he's going to be the sales leader and we're never going to get no one's ever going to get sales fundamental training.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, there's. There's a lot of VP little Timmy's out there.
Speaker 2:There's a lot of VP levels, a lot of cool, cause they worked in a company where you could.
Speaker 1:you could get a contract signed, Even if you couldn't sell your way out of wet paper bag. They're like here's what the product does. Cool, I want it, Cause, whatever reason, I just don't understand why SDRs ever talk about the product. It doesn't. I don't understand that at all.
Speaker 2:I said. I said what's the goal of the call? And he said to get a demo. I said then why are you talking about all this other like? And I said like what is it? What's the call? He goes get a demo. I said well then why aren't you telling them that up front? Yeah, hey, corey, the reason I'm calling today is he that wasn't even that like. You, didn't I go. You're not even telling them why you're calling them or why you picked them right. Why them and not somebody else down the street?
Speaker 1:Well. So here's a. Here's a question I always give folks to ask when they have a hold rate challenges. So if you're managing sales development folks out there, anybody just go to them and say, all right, when this person's boss taps on their shoulder and says, why are you meeting with little Timmy, what are they going to say? And if what they say doesn't defend spending that 30 minutes, then you didn't do your job. And then everybody's like why is this person going to meet with little Timmy? Oh, cause it's the product's cool. A doesn't defend spending that 30 minutes, that you didn't do your job. And then everybody's like why is this person gonna meet with a little timmy? Oh, cause it's the product's cool. I'm not paying you to go talk to somebody, but we got this new feature and it reduces your stress.
Speaker 1:Oh, it's got the widget feature. Widget feature is awesome, so all right, let's do plugs. I'll go first. So, christy, can you should know very quickly. Our book sales development was literally written, so Hillman and I didn't have to train SDRs anymore. 288 pages to help people like little Timmy. So if you want to copy free stuff at coach CRMcom free stuff at coach CRMcom I'll send them out with the first 10 people. Christy's got a new book out. What do you got?
Speaker 2:Selling your Way In the playbook for setting your income and owning your life, not a how-to Go. Get Corey's book for all of that. I want to help you pick the right sales role in the right industry in the right company with the right sales leader, in order for you to get to the top 10% and be able to retire earlier than you are currently thinking about doing that. So go to sellingyourwayincom and then connect with me on LinkedIn and tell me your one takeaway from our unstructured conversation today on the podcast.
Speaker 1:I love it. Go check it out. And if anybody wants structured conversation where they have pre-written 10 questions, go to one of those company branded marketing webinars, because we're never going to do this. All right for tuning in sales management podcast. We'll see you next time.