Scale with Strive Podcast
Welcome to the Scale with Strive podcast - the place where you come to listen to some of the worlds most influential leaders in the SaaS industry!
Scale with Strive Podcast
'The Four Pillars of a GTM Playbook' with Quentin Packard
Welcome to the Scale with Strive podcast, the place where you come to listen to some of the world’s most influential leaders of the SaaS industry. 🚀
Our host is John Hitchen and on today’s episode, we are excited to welcome Quentin Packard, Senior Vice President of Sales at Conduktor!
Starting his career in SaaS within Operations, Quentin rose through the ranks before transferring over to commence his Sales career as an SDR and making his way up to a Global Head position.
Quentin has worked for some fantastic companies, such as Splunk, where he joined the business when they were under a Billion in Revenue and under 1,000 employees in the business. By the time he left, they'd grown to over 9,000 employees and multiple Billion Revenues in ARR.
Today, we focus in on the GTM playbook, and the four pillars that Quentin believes are essential here: Recruitment, Onboarding, Sales Process and Performance / Predictable Revenue.
Some of our key takeaways from the conversation were:
💡 Strategies and key attributes to look for in talent
💡 Optimizing the pipeline generation strategy.
💡 Metrics and Strategies to drive performance.
Let’s Dive in!
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Connect with Quentin here - https://www.linkedin.com/in/qpackard/
Connect with John here - https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnhitchen/
Learn more about Strive here - https://scalewithstrive.com/
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0:00. Introduction to Quentin Packard
3:11. Recruitment: Building the Right Team
11:49. Onboarding: First 90 Days
17:30. Pipeline Generation: The Oxygen of Sales
27:09. Performance and Predictable Revenue
34:16. Key Takeaways and Final Thoughts
Welcome to the Scale with Stride podcast, the place where you come to listen to some of the world's most influential leaders of the SaaS industry.
Speaker 2:Welcome to today's episode, where we dive into the go-to-market playbook with Quinton Packard. Quinton didn't come from a traditional sales background. He started in operations and worked his way up through the ranks, transferring over to sales as an SDR and eventually making his way up to a global head of. Quinton's worked for some fantastic companies, with the likes of Splunk, where he joined the business with under a billion in revenue and under a thousand employees in the business. By the time he'd left, they'd grown to over 9,000 employees, multiple billion revenues in ARR and he worked in the observability side of the business, taking it from 30 million to over 300. Beyond the boardroom, quinton's a twin dad and a passionate lacrosse player coach, having worked with the same group of kids for over five years. Today, he'll share his insights into what it takes to build a scalable go-to-market strategy, from recruiting the right talent to creating a sales process that drives predictable revenue. Quinton, how are you doing?
Speaker 3:fantastic, john, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me on pleasure to have you.
Speaker 2:Do you want to give our audience a little whistle?
Speaker 3:stop tour on yourself and background yeah, well, you, you, you're very kind.
Speaker 3:Um, so I think uh all starts with you know family, uh, friends and mentors and leaders.
Speaker 3:I've been very lucky through the years. I still don't think I've worked that hard, but I've been very fortunate to work on some incredible teams, come up again in some really really fun businesses and some exciting markets, and had the privilege of doing various sets of roles and responsibilities, from sales, marketing channels, alliances, operations, as you said. So I think you know the thing I think that's helped me through the years is being super curious, having a growth mindset for life and for work and not having the traditional stovepipe type career right, and not having the traditional stovepipe type career right Taking on stretch assignments, raising my hand when there's been problems and trying to just be part of a team. I think, if anything else you take from me, I love every second about being on a team, whatever size that team is, whatever shape and make of that team. I wake up every morning very privileged and grateful to be a part of teams and love building them, love leading them and love everything that comes from uniting great people around a common mission to go build something amazing.
Speaker 2:I mean I love working with you, quincy, and I think every time I talk to you whether it's high pressure moments or whether it's just relaxed your character always comes out and who you are, and you know it's it's high pressure moments or whether it's just relaxed, your character always comes out in who you are and you know it's always lovely to see. So today we're going to focus for our viewers on the go to market playbook, a topic everyone's talking about 24 seven. You've had some major success and you've kind of broken this podcast down into four sections. So let's dive into your four pillars and how you build businesses. So, starting off with recruitment, I guess talk to us a little bit around getting the importance of the team right first off.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So I think when you think about recruiting, when you're a leader of any function sales, marketing, finance you're just one of many. It doesn't matter if you're a 10-person company or a 10,000-person company. Great people, connected, working together, make great products, make great experiences for customers. And it all begins with having a very clear understanding for what stage you're in as a business, the types of people and the experiences and skills you need across different roles and, like anything else, allocating time every single day or every single week to how you're going to identify people. So for me, it begins with a very clear operational rigor. I block off a couple specific times and there's one day a week where almost 80% of my day is focused on recruiting, working with people like yourself, right. So I block off usually Thursday to do about 80% of my day is sourcing of people, whether it's LinkedIn, going back through the network, sending back notes to people about jobs I'm thinking about down the road and obviously interviewing, and with that I think there's a couple aspects. So there's the time bound part have to have time allocated to recruit. When you're thinking about hiring seasoned leaders, I think working with executive search firms is critical. It widens your net, it expands the different people that you're getting to talk to and it's a great opportunity to hear what other companies are doing and having a business partner to help you shape the types of people and the backgrounds, the experiences, the skills that you should be thinking about. The second there's a great Amazon principle around the bar raiser technique for interviewing. So who is a part of your interviewing process and teams? And having someone from outside of your team be the bar raiser, that has no bias, no expediency bias on the timing to hire that person and come in and be a judge around. Does this person fit our culture? Are they going to make the team and others around them better? Will they raise the bar of the people here at our company? So I think that having that approach helps you really flush out am I hiring the right person or am I hiring the best person? Are they going to make not just their team but the other teams better? And then the last thing I think you know when it comes to interviewing, especially as you start to have to hire a lot right, we had the privilege of hiring, you know, hundreds of people that swung through the years and when you have a, you know a big headcount plan, a big capacity plan and finance, saying, hey, when are these people getting here? You start to go probably a little too fast, and so a couple of things are really important Having a very clear set of interview questions and keeping a record of who is asking what, and not the generic questions of like, hey, tell me about yourself.
Speaker 3:Like, what are you most proud of? Right, yeah, you know. Do you like kids? These are all great. You want to. You want to have a classification type question, right, so you want to go to someone with, hey, these are the three most important things that we look for here in our leader or this type of person.
Speaker 3:How would you stack rank yourself? Why did you pick those things? And then a back channel approach right. Having again, why I think recruiters are such a great partnership. People interview pretty good these days. Right, there's a lot of AI skills. There's teachings on this. We all show up with our best versions of ourselves, and so, having a process and a methodology to go back channel and again stack rank.
Speaker 3:How do people really, how do we see? How do we see someone? How do other people see them? Have they grown, advanced and learn? You know from whatever past experiences and what would they bring to the business. So you know, if I broke that down, you always have to be recruiting, you have to block off specific time to be recruiting. You have to hire people that understand, either come from your network or understand that network effect and can bring other great people. And you have to have a process and a discipline for how do you interview, how do you assess talent right, Not just through skills, experiences and successes, Because, again, I think I was the luckiest guy in the world at Splunk. If you hired me to go IPO or go launch your company, the experiences I had at Splunk probably don't apply to that Right. So that's how I think about recruiting and I think, just the overall approach to it.
Speaker 2:Amazing, it sounds, the things I picked up there. It sounds like you've got non-negotiables straight off the bat, Right, and like whoever you interview, whether you're asking the questions yourself and you're getting down to that individual you have non-negotiables and, like you either meet the criteria or you don't. Um, I like how you've managed to get different people to ask different questions in the interview process. So you know this. The generic interview has not happened five times and no one's really got an overview of the candidate you kind of hinted at.
Speaker 2:you know the three most important things you or the team might look for, just out of interest. What are the typical top three characteristics you look for when bringing on, say you know, a frontline IC?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so, to your point, it really depends on the role, right? If you're hiring an SE, a marketing person, a leader, an IC, I think they're slightly different characteristics, but they are similar. Skill will we always look for things like that. You could have great skills but a different will or a different engine than what we need. There's coachability yeah, I think feedback is gold, right? Great mentors have shared this approach with me and my mom and dad have drilled it in my head. Right, good or bad, in any feedback, there's something gold in there, right? So I think, skill will, coachability, adaptability and then relevant experiences, right? So if you think about, I believe, startups, if you start with startups are kind of in one of four stages. There's product market fit, price, market fit, problem, market.
Speaker 3:Startups, if you start with startups, are kind of in one of four stages there's product market fit, price, market fit, problem market fit stage one. Then there's go to market fit, right, the malleable stage trying to build out your messaging, understand why you win, why you lose. Stage one you're selling to anybody that will buy. Stage two you're trying to narrow it down to play where you win. Stage three is then really about that repeatableness and trying to build scale in the business, trying to build really operational rigor and efficiencies. And then stage four you know in events, right, you're into the go public. You know and build out.
Speaker 3:So why do I say that the relevant experiences matter? So why do I say that the relevant experiences matter? And you could have had tremendous success in a Series E pre-IPO company, and if we put you in a Series A, series B company, it may not go so good. And vice versa is true too. If you've been only a startup person and you go to a 50,000-person company, you may have some brilliant ideas and some great things. You're probably going to have to temper some of those and work on. You know political skills, you know likely.
Speaker 2:So anyway relevant experiences.
Speaker 3:Context matters, not just results. And the last, the last underlying thing I think we look for a lot is people that use the word we versus I. There's no real I anymore in these things we do. There's I for accountability and the losses and the failures, but it should be we about the journey and the successes. So I look for that a lot, amazing, amazing.
Speaker 2:I completely agree with you and it's something we as a business are obviously involved in. Recruitment day to day and the person's fit within the stage of business is normally one of the top five things we hear when taking a job brief or an intake to say, right, well, don't get me someone from Salesforce or a Series A business. You know they won't have that level of infrastructure. So I completely appreciate and agree with you there. So, stage one, recruitment we understand the importance of you know the process, identifying the right people, having on non-negotiables. I think where personally I see a lot of businesses fail is onboarding, which is like your second pillar, right. So best practices, you know tricks, tips and what you've seen on onboarding yeah.
Speaker 3:So the, the onboarding, um and ongoing, you know, training is. You know you think about two, the, the mo. One of two of the most important things about being a sales leader is you know, how well can you build a team? How fast can you build a team, how do you get the right people? And then the second is then how do you think about that time to effectiveness and that day zero, day one, onboarding experience, so an ongoing education. So for us, a lot of it comes down to documenting the how and the what. So we have very specific, as you know, playbooks and an overall process for how we want you to begin your experience with us. We hope it's a great one, but we also know it's going to be hard, it's going to be a whirlwind, it's going to feel like you're drinking from a fire hose at times. So what we do is we have a very balanced onboarding process that literally begins. Balanced onboarding process that literally begins with before you start. So day zero to then day one through day 90. So your first 90 days are pretty detailed for you. It encompasses who you should talk to by when. It encompasses our operational cadence, so you start to plug into things right and not have to. You know, try to figure out where you're supposed to be. Videos you should watch, materials you should read, but all within sequence, you know, logical, thought out sequence of, like, what are the right things to absorb. You know, day one, week one versus week two. So a lot of what we've tested, gotten feedback from other, you know, brilliant operators is, you know you can't. One of the mistakes with onboarding is you overwhelm someone and say, hey, here's the thousand page manual, read it. And you know, by the way, we have meetings next week. So you know, make sure you're ready for it. And that's a really scary thing to do to people. I think what's better is like, hey, you're going to go through the ups and downs, right, the excitement, the child delusion, right, All of the fear and certainty, like that's going to happen. Here's how we're going to get you through that together. And then here's a guided onboarding experience for what your first 90 days are going to look like, and literally again like what you should be doing by when, who you should be talking to, what you should be reading, what you should be watching.
Speaker 3:Gong calls one of my favorite companies in the planet the HubSpot systems and processes and workflows right, how to go do your job. We spend a lot of time on the how. I think a lot of onboarding things over index, on, like, the why and the mission and vision. That's all important. The goals, those are. You know that, I promise I, I love those things too. But I think the real rubber hits the road and that activation, that feeling of like, oh, my god, I, I love where I am and I feel like I'm going to have an amazing run.
Speaker 3:Here is when the how becomes very, uh, very clear and crisp. So it's documented, it's written, we track it and then we have check-ins. So we have not to, not to micromanage, but to give feedback and help people along their journey. So we have, you know, basically a film review gong, right, recording, listening, you listening, you know processes. We have a feedback loop of helping people. First, hey, self-assess how do you think you're doing, what do you think is good and bad? Then, positive feedback, you know, give them some insights of what's really good. And then you know, one or two coaching, uh, critiques.
Speaker 3:And I think one of the things, especially in the onboarding, is don't tell someone 10 things they need to do. Tell them one right, give them some time boundness to how they can go, do that within a sequence of timing, and then, you know, again have check-ins and be like, hey, in two more weeks we're going to come back. And I want to go through this part again. Here's someone, I think, who's great to help you with this. Obviously, we're here if you need us, but you know, let's go work on this one thing and in this time period let's come back and see how you're doing with that. And so, again, that cultivates, I think, the thinking and the understanding around how do I be successful here? What do I need to do? When do I need to do it? Who can I get help with to do it here? What do I need to do? When do I need to do it? Who can I get help with to do it?
Speaker 2:and usually you know, within 90 days you have a pretty effective and ramping person on schedule to be a productive person, right, and whatever role that is amazing again like that is to me a playbook that sounds like it's been engineered and refined over a long period of time because it was so precise and I like the expectation of not drinking from the fire hose right. I think any sales rep in the world goes into a business and they want to set the world on fire straight off the bat. And managing those expectations and giving that delivery platform is a great way of saying to someone don't worry, by 90 days, here's where you'll be, don't be at it at the end of week one. So I love that and I think there's some great tips there for the people.
Speaker 3:The best sales reps usually ask who's made a million dollars at your company? Yeah, I want to do that and I want to get me. I want to. I know these people to go talk to. I want to get meetings, like I want to go do this like me too what?
Speaker 3:are you going to tell them, right? Besides, you know you have this great company, um, and then you know how are you going to be, uh, confident with them, how are you going to tell a story to them? And so it's usually you know all that. It's slow down and speed up, like you know. Um, I want you to be wildly successful too, but there is an approach and a process to do this amazing, fantastic.
Speaker 2:Well, look onboarding, super important. Some great objectives there. Third pillar of the go-to-market playbook sales process, and when you told me this you were like John emphasis on pipeline generation, always pipeline generation. So the question is to you that the viewers want to hear how to build a scalable sales process.
Speaker 3:So the first is you know pipeline is oxygen and you know, even if you're crushing your numbers this year, I've not met many companies where the CFO says, don't worry, next year the numbers you did so good, the numbers go down, yeah. So you never have enough great people around you and you never have enough pipeline. You always need to be focused on those two things. So on pipeline side, I think there's a there's a lot to it. But if I just simplified it, operational rigor, you know when you're in a more established business and you're really flowing, maybe you can do. You know PGing.
Speaker 3:I kind of come from the thought, especially in the early days, you want to drive and over-index to volume.
Speaker 3:You want to over-index to more conversations so that you can bring feedback to the business, product management, marketing executives around the conversations with customers or prospects. You know what part of the messaging is working and resonating, what are the objections, what doesn't make sense, what other vendors have you been told? Oh, they already do that. You know, we do that with XYZ. So you have to over index to volume and quantity and then, with experimentation, you can start to then refine down and focus on quality. And so what we do, um, first is, every day is a pg day, right, but we do it in blocks, we compartmentalize so early in the morning right before lunch end of day we have pg sprints where we're trying to go outbound and prospect. And the other big thing is we have reset times throughout the week to then learn what happens. So we have office hours for people to go and share, marketing office hours but times to share, ask for feedback, seek for help, and at the end of every week we do a PG recap call.
Speaker 1:And as the good and market team gets on.
Speaker 3:We share the good of every week. We do a PG recap call and there's a good. And market team gets on. We share the good and the bad cry together, laugh together right, ask each other how things are going, tips and tricks, and you know. Then reset week over week on. Okay, so the plan for next week and what we're going to go do.
Speaker 3:There's usually no massive changes, but you know more about how do we execute the sprint or how do we execute the campaign a little better, and also on that call of product marketing, other functions of the business, so that they can really hear the conversations going on and again start to really help that shape where we're either focused on product capabilities, positioning, futures, et cetera. So that feedback loop, that continuous iteration, especially as an A, a, B, a, c series company, it's not just about building funnel. It's about really experimenting and realizing you probably don't have it perfect yet. You have great ideas, you probably have great capabilities, but bringing those things to stories especially if you're in a tech sale and getting customers to understand what you do, how you do it, why they should spend time with you like you're probably going to get that wrong. So being humble about it, being super curious about it and having a methodology to go, execute and then bring the information back in is massively important.
Speaker 3:The other thing which we talk about is it can't just be the reps. So, whether it's the SDR, you know business development program you're running. Whether it's marketing campaigns, you know top of funnel engagements from marketing partnerships. Now more than ever, you know the flywheel effect of how do you work within an ecosystem, no matter how big your company is, there's a bigger market, bigger ecosystem, unless you're one of the hyperscalers, right. So how do you fit into those things and add really a multiplier effect?
Speaker 3:That will then obviously help you start to get into more conversations and build more funnels. So, with that, the balanced route to PG, so that you have a perfect world maybe 20, 30% coming from your reps, 10, 20% coming from your SDRs, 20% from marketing, 20% from partners and that people feel like you are on a collective journey and it's not just on them, like you are on a collective journey and it's not just on them, but the aes have to prospect right, like the aes have to be able to create alone and then convert as a team. Um, that is a massive part if you want to become, if you want to really build a hyper growth type business.
Speaker 2:I think it's thing is, I love it. I think it's always interesting to speak to entry-level reps who are coming into the industry, right, like yeah, I'm going to start as a BDR and then you know, I'll move into an AE so I don't have to pipeline gen again. I'm like, no, no, you're a BDR forever. It never stops, right, pipeline cures all ills.
Speaker 3:Yeah, my CEO and I talk way too much. That's my brother. We talk on weekends. I tell him you're my best BDR in the company. I mean, our board are great BDRs.
Speaker 3:Right, I'm prospecting, so I think you have to always be, you know, abr. Always be recruiting A B PG, always be PGing right, like that's how you create sustainable results and predictable revenue and that's what you create sustainable results and predictable revenue. And that's what people want, right, they want you to build predictable, sustainable businesses, predictable revenue. Right, they want you to have outside in thinking of, like, what do people really want? What are the problems they care about that you're best positioned to solve? They don't want inside out. They don't want, like our point of view. We've already won a few and now we know what everyone needs. And again, john, like that with AI, with just the speed of data, the speed of businesses, like it's changing every three, six months these days. So that's the other part of it. It's yes, you need a pipeline, yes, you need new prospects and new opportunities to close, to drive growth. The other thing is you just got to stay really adept with the market and what people are talking about and care about, right.
Speaker 3:And you can't get that just from your customers.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I really you know what, what kind of picks up there was. It was interesting because you you were focusing on the the sort of like pipeline gen process, but actually a lot of what you were speaking about there is about the culture you created, and that culture is everyone pipelines, everyone jumps on the sinks, everyone gives honest feedback, everyone tells me where I fail. So you know you're a conductor now. Fantastic business, you've seen them really early stage growth, I mean, I don't know, I'll let you share numbers if you want on the growth, but how? Within that and I think this is where some leaders can go wrong how do you create that culture of don't worry guys, it's okay to fail. Share the failures so the rest of the team learn, because I think naturally sales reps can be selfish and a bit scared. So how did you create that open culture?
Speaker 3:Well, it's not me, it's we, right, we do that from the founders down, I think, the servant leadership right.
Speaker 3:If you really want to go, do this thing for the long term, it has to be about your crew and you have to serve, you have to guide, you have to challenge and you have to build a place where people believe in what you're doing and want to be a part of it.
Speaker 3:And so I think it's easy to have platitudes on the wall of saying what your culture is about living that, demonstrating and showing up every day, whether especially on the bad days, because there's going to be bad days that's what builds, I think, a really strong culture and your people and your actions and engagements with them, that's what really defines and strengthens your culture.
Speaker 3:And as you grow from 10 person to, you know we're gone from, I think, a 40 person company to 100 plus person company, a couple million on our way to be a $15 million business with aspirations. You know of breaking all the records, right, but it always comes down to people and it comes down. You know, back where we started recruiting, onboarding, developing and realizing that your people and how they watch you interact. That is going to dictate more about your culture than all of the slogans and the fancy talks and the TED Talks. Right, how you show up, how you interact, how you breathe oxygen and belief into them when things are hard, that will start to build, I think, the really defining culture to get you through the bad days, that maybe they're not there with you yet, but you know.
Speaker 2:Nice, they're coming Amazing. I think you know I love the we, not I piece. I think you've echoed this over and over again and you know creating that culture is super, super important, particularly to your four pillars all throughout. So we've discussed recruiting, we've discussed onboarding and we've discussed the sales process. Your fourth pillar is all around performance and predictable revenue. So talk me through the importance of the metrics, what you use and how often that's spoken about with yourself and the team.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So the start with expectations up front, right Like here's what we're going to go do, here's how we're going to go do it. Playbook documentation, here's what it's going to look like for all of us if it goes good. But when the bad days happen and they will here's what you can expect from me and here's I expect from you. And then this is how that looks. So I think being transparent right up front on, like here's what I expect, here's what I need, and setting that stage of what does it mean to be accountable? What does it mean to go say what you're going to go do, do what you say, and then you know what happens when you don't. I think it's easier said than done, but having those uncomfortable conversations and helping people be comfortable, being uncomfortable is really important and you're actually doing them a disservice if you don't. The worst thing you can do about performance expectations and building predictable revenue is not setting those expectations, and then people are surprised. Then you failed as a leader. You've let them down.
Speaker 3:I think we've all had good and bad parts of our journeys. I've had failures, everybody has. I think one of the things I've tried to get better at is the no surprise rule, and even when I've had the unfortunate feeling of people moving on or us helping them find a better place to be, the thing I think I've gotten better at is like they're not surprised. We're still actually connected. I help them find the next thing better for them, and a lot of that's just back to the culture. But also setting the right expectations up front and I say this a lot Like these are just moments of times. Right, there's good and there's bad. A lot of luck plays a big part of this, humility plays a big part of this. And then you know grit, grind and effort play a massive part of this. And sometimes you know performance is good and you got really lucky. And sometimes performance is good and you've worked your butt off and you can't sustain that right. It kind of goes up and down. But if you can be clear with people on what you expect, how to go do the job, how you're going to help them if they start to get off track with performance plans, improvement plans, training, education, you know developing of them usually can, you know usually can help people achieve right.
Speaker 3:But the unspoken reality is that if you're running a high-performing, hyper-growth sales team especially, you're going to have turnover If you retained 100% of your business and you went from a 20-person team to a 100-person team, you're probably not doing something right. You're probably leaving some things on the table right. So you got not doing something right. You're probably leaving some things on the table right. So you got to plan for that. You know there's a mentor told me you got to have a plan for not in exact numbers, but one out, one up, one in, right. So the evolution of talent and people. You know someone gets promoted up to something, someone gets exited, someone comes in. You know what is your plan.
Speaker 3:How do you manage that? So, bringing full circle, I think, focusing more on leading indicators versus the lagging, having clear understanding of your OKRs, your clear objectives, of what you want to go do across. You know weeks, months, quarters, right. How do you think about that? In short periods of time to then, you know, hopefully get you to the place at the end of the year where you didn't just deliver the number but you drove sustainable growth and you're set up for an even bigger year the year after. I think that's a big part of it.
Speaker 3:The operational cadence so we have a Monday go to market staff meeting, we have our forecast-ups and then we have departmental leadership meetings where we just talk about the metrics of the business, the results of the business. We over-index to more of the. We call them, not the problems, the opportunities to improve. We subscribe to what Andy Grove talked about in high output management, about being great neighbors to each other, lifting each other up, especially when we're struggling, and always looking in the mirror first when results aren't there, never pointing the finger. It's easy to say what marketing isn't doing great or product isn't doing great.
Speaker 3:My line to my sales team is unless you can code and write a marketing plan, let's focus on what we can do and then ask and seek feedback of what we could do to help our neighbors be successful. And then usually you know, we'll get our results. So be a good neighbor, be a big steward. You know peer to the business, have goals, you know, have your accountability and your results that you want. But then you know, burn those things and focus on the leading indicators, focus on the pipe gen, focus on the NBMs, focus on, you know, the marketing activation, engagements and leads right, focus on the earlier parts of the story. And then usually that you over-index on the volume, you over-index on the leading. Not that the lagging takes care of itself, but there's more things to learn and work on and hopefully get a little lucky and execute against, and the results tend to be a lot easier to achieve. Amazing.
Speaker 2:I think there's so much there within performance and predictable revenue. You've got what Amazing I think there's so much there within performance and predictable revenue. You know you've got what everyone would glance over and there's leading and lagging indicators. You've got the objective stuff, but you've also talked about the subjective stuff, which is almost a process, and you know I have a saying that the process runs the business and the people run the process, and I think quite clearly there, you know you've pieced the puzzle together. But, quentin, a lot of really enjoyed speaking with you today. We've had some absolute gems.
Speaker 2:If I can get three takeaways from this podcast which people can highlight, the things that stood out to me were in recruitment, you've got your non-negotiables right and we have to fundamentally stick to those. Number two is my favorite Pipeline is oxygen, no matter who you are in the business. The culture is pipeline that sprints, and then that expectation if we fail, we learn. And number three, which would just seem to be a theme throughout, is it's we, not I, and that's maybe how we build a business. I think this is what I get from you time and time again. So anything you'd like to share with our viewers to end off, no, I'd say again thank you for having me on.
Speaker 3:It's an absolute pleasure. The work you do is incredible. I think companies would be lucky to work with you guys. I'd say the one thing I'd leave you with is try to listen to understand. I'd say the one thing I'd leave you with is try to listen to understand right. Seek feedback, seek how people are thinking about things. Really think about that approach to be curious about things before we judge.
Speaker 3:It is easy and becomes, I think, especially as the pressure picks up, um common to criticize and to tell people things, especially as you don't understand them. And if you want to build a sustainable thing, if you want to build, you know, a great culture, a great company, great results, if you want to do something legendary, you need to surround yourself with great people, you need to empower them, you need to listen to understand and then you need to galvanize and challenge them to work better together. If you do that really well, I think I got the easiest job in the world right. I don't think I work that hard. I think I love what I do, but it is a lot of. It comes down to patience and the practice of trying to listen to understand versus hearing to respond.
Speaker 2:It's amazing. I love it well. Some absolute nuggets there. Thanks for your time today, quinton, and I'll catch you soon see you soon, my friend thanks for listening.
Speaker 1:I hope you enjoyed today's episode. Don't forget to subscribe and if you want more information about the podcast, head over to our website. Scale with Strive.
