Move over Great Attrition -Bring on Great Engagement - Matt Piercy, Lewis Gee, Lindsey Moore

Matt Piercy, joins Amplifiers Lewis Gee and Lindsey Moore  to bring to life our New Hire Productivity Report: ‘Move over great attrition, bring on great engagement.’

 We hope you enjoy this discussion as we look at the impact of the ‘great attrition’ on the tech industry. Organisations and sales leaders are under huge pressure to hit their quarterly revenue targets but in today’s economic climate, combined with a 30% employee turnover rate,  we discuss how  new hires faring. We explore how to quickly get new salespeople up to full productivity and the role ‘team’ plays in that.

Matt saw his career take off leading NEMEA  sales organisations for VMware,  then EMEA for ZScaler, and ThousandEyes. Matt shares his thoughts and what he put into practice  around setting new hires up for success.  Matt suggests starting by measuring objectives vs revenue (that is unrealistic in the first few months) is much more likely to get your new hires off to a strong start. 

Lewis,  (who promoted Matt into the NEMEA role at VMWare) brings so much experience on this topic, having  held leadership positions in high-growth organisations ServiceNow, VMware and Citrix – all of which hit through a billion dollars during his time. Lewis shares the rigorous onboarding he experienced and we explore if this is now missing? We feel incredibly fortunate to have Lewis as one of our Amplifiers as we and our clients constantly benefit from his wisdom!

We hope you enjoy the conversation. We’d also love to hear if any of our listeners have stories or tips to share. You can reach us at team@amplifiedgroup.co.uk.

Grab a copy of the report here.

We would love you to follow us on LinkedIn! 

https://www.linkedin.com/company/amplified-group/

Transcript

Sam 0:10

Welcome to Get Amplified from the Amplified Group, the podcast for tech industry leaders and aspiring leaders who want to help their companies execute faster. As always with virtual, I'm back home in Bucks where the sun is out. It's looking glorious out there. Vicki's in Deepest Darkest Oxfordshire as usual. So Vicky, who have we got on today?

Vic 0:30

Well, today, Sam. I know when I'm excited when we've got a podcast, my voice goes up, so I'm really trying to contain my excitement because today we have a podcast of friends, which is just such a treat.

Sam 0:46

So we have I mean the people who come on our podcast are friends generally, aren't they?

Vic 0:51

Yeah. I I mean we have we're not it's not just one guest today, we have Lindsay Moore, who is responsible for all the amazing content that we create at Amplified Group. So I'm thrilled that we've got Lindsay with us. And Lindsay is here to keep us on track today because we also have Louisa G, who is one of our amplifiers and has been on the podcast before. And we have someone that we've been wanting to have on the podcast for quite some time. Yes, and um so it's such a treat because everybody knows each other well, so that's what I mean about us being friends. It doesn't mean that we haven't had so long in the past. But the topic that we're going to talk about is the topic that we have just done a survey, which is about really the great attrition and the impact that that has had on the tech industry, but not from actually the people that have been lost now, but actually all those new people that have been hired, and that together with the current economic climate and the squeeze that that has, and the impact on how we get up to productivity, and quite honestly, where does the role of a team come into that? So, in a nutshell, that's what we're gonna cover, and I'm gonna be pretty quiet because I have learned that as a leader, my job is to create the environment, get the right people together, and just let them work magic. So that's what I'm gonna do.

Sam 2:34

Fair enough. Brilliant. So can we start just by asking our guests to give us a quick introduction to themselves and a little bit of background on their career to date? Maybe Lindsay, you wouldn't mind starting?

SPEAKER_00 2:48

Yeah, hi Sam, hi Vicky. Um, yeah, Lindsay Moore. I worked with Lewis and Matt at Citrix many years ago. So I was there about 15 years, which was absolutely amazing, incredible journey with Mark Templeton. And then I've been working for various scale-ups and startups, um, and now back with Vicky, who I used to work with many years ago. Um, so helping with the marketing and the content amplified group, and I absolutely love it. It just it, I don't know, I just feel like it's my work home, how people work together and getting the best you know from your team. So absolutely love it here.

Sam 3:24

Fantastic. Lewis, you've been on the on before, but if you wouldn't mind giving us another introduction, that'd be fantastic, please.

SPEAKER_05 3:30

Sure, Sam. Yeah, so Lewis G, and uh actually been in and around the industry for gosh, 34 years now, be 35 years as I go into next year and started all the way back in selling software and hardware, including working for ICL. And I'll come back to that point in a little bit as to why that's valid. But then, like Lynn's had a great time at Citrix, and subsequent to that, I've been really fortunate done actually three organizations where I've gone through a billion dollars with. So at the very least, I've been able to pick pick good uh organizations to work with. So that's you know, Citrix, VMware, and then more recently, ServiceNow. Uh now I spend time trying to give something back and work with uh small organizations, scale up startups, um, and you know, thoroughly enjoy doing that without the full responsibility of of running the sales team, et cetera, that I've done up to now. So uh yeah, that's that's me.

Sam 4:20

Laris G. The billion dollar man.

SPEAKER_05 4:23

I wish. I didn't make that myself, unfortunately.

Sam 4:28

Yeah, but it's got a ring to it, hasn't it? And Matt, last but by absolutely no means least.

SPEAKER_02 4:33

Yeah, hi, morning and foremost. Matt Pearcy. I I met, as you know, everybody at Citrix, went on to VMware. Um, I was responsible for Northern Europe at VMware for quite a few years, left there and moved into the SaaS world with a company called Z-Scalar. And I was I led Zscaler's Europe, Middle East Africa business um for a few years and sort of built that from scratch and moved on from there to a company called Thousand Eyes, um, which is also a pure place SaaS business that was acquired into Cisco. At that point, I changed track slightly. So I'm the co-founder of uh an app called Alpha Let's, which is uh an application for landlords. We got that off the ground about two years ago. That's going reasonably well. I'm an on-exet director for a very exciting British company. In fact, I better not spend too long on the entire portfolio. I'm trying to get involved in cycle guiding now as a completely different profession, but that's not really relevant to today. But thank you for having me on. It's great to be here.

Sam 5:29

Absolute pleasure. Thanks everybody. Cheers for the intro. So, Lindsay, if you don't mind, um we've got some as your chief chief content person at Amplified, you've got some fabulous content for us. There's been there's been a survey recently, hasn't there?

SPEAKER_00 5:43

Yeah, so in October, uh so last month, we wanted to look at the impact of the amount of attrition in the tech industry. So the industry has one of the highest attrition rates across all sectors, it's about 30%. And we wanted to understand what the impact is of that on business, hitting revenue targets and team dynamics. So we call our report Move Over the Great Attrition, Bring on Great Engagement. So we were quite blown away. The report went out, and within a couple of weeks, we had 160 responses and loads of comments and feedback. So it was obviously a topic that resonated with people in the tech industry. Overall, I suppose at a glance, um, 81% of the respondees told us it takes six months and more to reach full productivity. There was about a 50-50 split on whether revenue targets reflect onboarding time. But even the fact that 50% think that revenue targets aren't uh realistic is a bit of a red flag. And then about 36 of the respondees had been with their organisation for one year or less. And I guess one final point was 70% of the respondees were leaders or managers compared to individual contributors. So if I just quickly look at the key insights from the survey, I think we can take from it that full productivity of a new hire is not realistic in the first six months. Another one was leaders take longer to onboard, which for me was quite a surprise because some of the comments we had from people were that you would expect leaders to get up to speed faster because of their experience and expertise. But actually, when sort of delving into that and looking at different uh reports, you know, it's not just expertise that you're hiring someone for. You've got to get to know the culture of a company, the politics, and how people, what the relationships are like. So from that side, you can see leaders really have to get their arms around quite a lot when they start a new company. The third insight that revenue targets are unrealistic. And the final insight that onboarding takes even longer in startups and scale-ups. And having worked for quite a few startups and scale-ups, I was surprised by that because I think in smaller companies, you're you're a very tight-knit team and you all want to help each other out, but actually, it's all new. You don't have a sales playbook, you don't know how it's gonna how it's gonna work. So I can understand that onboarding in that environment probably does take a little bit longer. Um, so yeah, so this that that's the insights from the report. We will be sharing this soon, and it'll be available um on our website, amplifiedgroup.co.uk. Um, yeah, so I hope that's quite a helpful roundup.

Sam 8:39

And we'll at some point we'll pop a link in the show notes as well at the end.

SPEAKER_00 8:42

Great.

Sam 8:43

Just to make it easy for everybody. Perfect. That's really interesting. Do you so do you think obviously we've had a bit of a funny period over the last three or so years in terms of hiring, well, working generally, but hiring in particular. Do you think some of those statistics that you quoted made it sounds like a pretty challenging environment? Do you think the whole Zoom onboarding thing has been responsible for that? Has that made it more difficult to get people going?

SPEAKER_02 9:11

Go for it, Matt. I I don't know if Zoom has made it harder to onboard. I I I tend to think that the sales profession has relied for far too long on the concept of a revenue target, a sales target. And um, whilst ultimately in our business, that has to be the ultimate gain, we have to deliver revenue and success to our company. The world is a lot more sophisticated than that. If you're simply relying on that revenue target, it's the worst thing you can do because you bring somebody new on board, and six months in you're having a conversation about whether or not they've hit their target. And if that's what you're relying on, you're setting yourself up for failure. And that's probably what's giving us, I think, the kind of statistics that we're seeing in this report. So I hope in the cut in the course's conversation we come on to some of the things that we as leaders can do to change that dynamic. So I think the world has woken up to the fact, I don't think COVID necessarily extenuated it, that you simply can't rely on a sales target. There's a huge amount more to bringing people on and making them successful within your business than that.

SPEAKER_05 10:19

Yeah, I I kind of tend to agree with Matt in terms of I don't think the COVID and the Zoom thing has caused it. I think it's it's it has exacerbated it. I do think that it's it's become more of a thing, but I think almost even prior to that, I think the world has changed from, you know, when I first started at ICL, you know, the the big old giant computer company, um, wasn't that giant, of course, IBM was a lot more giant, but the British version, you know, I remember going into that. And no matter who you were, no matter where you came from, no matter what your background was, if you're going into a sales role, part of the onboarding was a 12-week um, you know, course that you you stayed away at, you know, so a completely you know, full-on set of activities for a 12-week period. It didn't even matter if you had been the BT director of IBM prior to it, you know, you went through that course 12 weeks, let alone all the rest of the onboarding kind of things. Whereas if you look at now the whole kind of SAS, that Zoom world that we now live in, and I've got a son who's at the start point of this and coming into this, they expect to jump into these roles very quickly. They put them on Zoom, they're doing this process-driven sales activity that they've been taught, and you know, and they're very good at it, but that's all they know, and that's how they do it. So, and I and I think it's expected that that happens really quickly. But I also think the expectation and part of the problem with the attrition thing is that because there's so many of these coming up and taking off, I think even the candidates think they can jump in, you know, six months in this one, then they'll jump to the next one, you know, and away they go. I don't think people perhaps look at the careers in quite the same way that perhaps we used to, because they think they can just jump. Now all of a sudden it's all slowed up and suddenly there's a bit of a backlog here. And I and I think it's exposing some of the challenges around that and some of the shortfalls in that, in terms of like Matt said, you know, how you're onboarding, whether you're instilling any kind of culture. I won't say the word loyalty because we all know you know that that's a difficult one to prove, but that kind of culture that makes you want to stay there. And I think in the report that that Lindsay's uh already discussed, you know, one of the things in there said that a lot more people, the important thing for them staying somewhere is about the culture and the fit and how they feel in that environment than it is about just hitting their sales target and the comp plans and things like that that go with it. And perhaps we've lost a little bit of sight of that.

Sam 12:43

So we should do it, we're doing it bottom up rather than top down. The top down of you being here's you here's your sales target, go off and hit it. Bottom up being here's all the stuff that you need to do to make a success, and we'll retrofit the sales target at some point down the line once you've got going. Is that what we're saying?

SPEAKER_05 12:58

Maybe I mean it's difficult because you've got to carry a there has to be a target, especially if you're going to sales role as a target, whatever you do. But so it has to be there. But I think the the reality of what that can be really has to be looked at. And you know, it's difficult to set those targets, right? And I think it's even worse in that sort of startup world for a bunch of reasons. Often you're being taken on and put into an environment that you don't you know that the company's not done before, you know, might be a new geo, it might be a new industry or something like that. So, as Lindsay said, they don't have the playbooks. The the other challenge as well that I've thought with regard to sort of startup environment, you know, typically you're a small team. As you go into a year, you've already set your targets, etc. If you lose somebody, you lose that one person out of France or wherever they were, the target hasn't gone away. So there's also a danger that when you bring the next person in, almost by default they have to take a target, which frankly is unrealistic. So it just almost exacerbates the whole thing. So I think that's why you do have to at least divorce the two from each other, which is I think where Matt was alluding as well. But I'll shut up and let him have something.

Vic 14:05

But Lewis, what you just said there about that attrition piece, that's that is actually what we saw and what drove us to do the survey and the report in the first place. It was targets have been set for people that haven't even been hired and we can't hire quickly enough. And so it comes back to Matt, you said it so beautifully at the beginning there about setting people up for success. It feels like we're not doing that to start with. So if you're not being set up for success, you're not going to hit your numbers, you're gonna be out the door again looking for that that next place. And so it feels like we're in a vicious spiral.

SPEAKER_02 14:42

Yeah, well, I I came, I I've been in the industry a while, like Lewis, and um in the early days of sales, it we were far more old-fashioned compared to what um what is expected today. Lewis talks about the training at ICL, that was best in class at the time, and today sales leaders rely on this sales methodology. That medic is the big one everyone talks about, M E D, D, I C. It's absolutely everywhere. I was initially quite skeptical of it, but but in my experience of seeing it at work, it does produce consistent, repeatable, successful salespeople. It really does. And there's no denying it, it also allows CROs and CEOs to go to their shareholders and present predictable forward-looking statements. So Medic's been great for the industry, but that's only sales qualification. And it has always felt to me as though we need to apply a process like Medic to onboarding because medic's only any good once you're in the sales cycle. But if you join a company and they say, there you go, you're in you're responsible for London and the southeast of England, go ahead. You need far more than just that's your target and that's your patch. You need a sort of a medic kind of process, and it needs to be built around activities because I think I said earlier, the worst conversation you can possibly have with a new employee is you know, you've been here for three months. Let's sit down and look at where you are. Well, your revenue target's one million and you've done zero. Oh, you're a failure, aren't you? I mean, that that's a disastrous conversation. I'd be far more interested if the employee shared with me a white space analysis of his accounts. So he's looked at the accounts of the territory. Sorry, I said he and it could have been she. They um have looked at the analysis and they they they've come back and told me where they've identified white space. And actually, if you think about it, that could be measurable, couldn't it? I could say in your first six months, I want you to give me 25 white space analyses for 25 of your top accounts. That would be a good measure. I think we should rely on things like face-to-face meetings. I know it's old-fashioned, but there's value in this. If somebody's new, I want them to go out and do a certain number of face-to-face meetings. I'm sorry, stop me at any point here because I'm off on one here. But um, this is great. So I was gonna say, I think I think things like the buddy program are important. When somebody joins your company, assign them as a buddy to somebody who's experienced and let that person, you know, give give that person a small program about how they can be a good buddy. If you can afford to do so, make it worth their while because they've also got revenue targets to hear.

Vic 17:22

Yeah, we see lots of um best practice of teams doing the buddying that you're talking about there, Matt. Yeah. Sorry, carry on, please.

Sam 17:29

This is this is really interesting because you you know, you've you've kind of almost just described uh you know, I don't know where where it is today. I imagine it's an evolution there on, but it you've almost just described how we used to do things at SoftCat years ago in in my early stages of my career before I went into the tech side and I was in sales. Yeah, we did give people targets for the first couple of quarters, but they were so they were so small because we you know we deliberately wanted people to hit and overachieve their targets, you know, they they had a notional value, um, but it was more about activity and attitude and you know the right sort of behaviors and the the energy and the passion and the structure that they put into it. Yeah. Yes, there was, yes, there was a grow a GP target. Yeah, we we ran on gross profit rather than revenue as a reseller rather than a vendor. Um, but as I say, you know, those targets were there to absolutely enable people to hit them without really having to try very hard. Um and even if they didn't, you know, we didn't particularly judge them on that in the first little while. Yes, that ramped up over time, but it was about doing the right thing, instilling the right behaviours in people rather than just the monetary value.

Vic 18:42

It's funny that you'd because obviously you're talking about a partner there, Sam, and Matt's experience and Lewis myself is is more from a vendor perspective. But funny enough, I saw a post this morning on LinkedIn from Phoenix, and it's about this week we welcome 15 more members of our sales academy to Team Phoenix, and they're actually taking them through an academy, it's the second year that they've done it. Yeah, I I'm not and I know I know IBM is still doing it, I'm not seeing that in a lot of the scale-ups that we're working with. It's just missing.

Sam 19:14

Yeah, it's a good show actually, because you know, we we did that, you know. You had a very structured program for really the first sort of two years, which was very sort of sales basics and so on. And then once you got through that, then you'd go into the the um the I can't remember what we called it, I shouldn't the solutions academy, I think it was, where you sort of develop your more of your solutions selling and your more of your consultative approach. Um, and you know, that was a a really powerful program.

SPEAKER_02 19:42

Yeah. To put it bluntly, there's two sides to this, isn't there? What does the business want out of this? What does the employee want out of it? Well, the employee wants to know that they've made a good decision, they're working with a company where they can be successful, that their career ambitions can be fulfilled, and all that kind of stuff. The business wants to know am I spending monthly on this individual and am I going to get a return on it at some point? So if we did work towards having some kind of measurable program, you answer both those questions far earlier in the process for both sides.

SPEAKER_05 20:12

And that's the key mat, isn't it? It's the both sides thing. And I think you know, something again in the survey that came back and said that if as a candidate, if the person that sat opposite you interviewing you tells you you're gonna be, you know, your revenue target, you're gonna have a three-month grace period, but then you're gonna have to hit your revenue target and they'll expect you to do so. That's probably a big red flag for you because you know, reality shows you probably won't be hitting a revenue target in three months. So it's got to be a both way thing. And I think the candidates here probably need to have the confidence to say, well, how are you gonna get me to that point? How how you know, what do you do to help me get to that situation in your environment? And but but I think a lot of this as well is that this whole startup thing, this whole scale-up thing, it's all gone crazy, hasn't it? You know, when perhaps when we started out in our roles, there are a lot fewer of IT companies, and we've all got histories with either large resellers, you know, like a like a soft cat or whether it was ICL or whether then it was the first of the big sort of software players, an Oracle or whatever. They were there, they were large, and they had these processes in place in these academies. I think suddenly we've got this culture that says, you know, online you can suddenly make a business that that's that's rocketing. So I think if you ask half of the CEOs and the people that run these businesses, they don't even have a knowledge of that and that sort of academy approach, uh, you know, et cetera. So I I think everyone's just expecting that you can jump in with a little procedure that you walk through, this is how it works, and then you get on that screen and you sell. I mean, bear in mind half these people have never even met their own team. So, again, to Sam's point, part of that academy is being together, and you'd said it, Matt, those face to face meetings. These guys, you know, talk about body language. They only ever get this now, don't they? Just the face on the screen. Where's the rest of the body language? We just moved into this instantaneous world, and therefore there's an assumption you can get up to speed. But guess what? It still doesn't work, it still doesn't happen.

Sam 21:56

And I think the proof there's a I think there's a tendency in the in The vendor world to do the I I think of it as the Instagram onboarding thing. So, you know, you send your news starter a nice pack with a laptop and a branded water bottle and a branded t-shirt and a branded notebook so they can put it on their desk and take a photo of it and post it to it to LinkedIn rather than Instagram about how they've started their new job and so on. And that's the onboarding process and it's sink or swim from there.

SPEAKER_02 22:24

That's the sales management doing the same as what our worst salespeople have done to us over the years, which is presented us with a forecast built purely around their happy ears. And um, when we when we bring someone in and we give them a branded water bottle and we say go off and be successful, we're doing just the same thing, aren't we? We're just sort of hoping they're gonna do well and we trust our instinct. And unfortunately, we need a lot more than just instinct these days to ensure success.

SPEAKER_05 22:50

Yeah. And then you go back to the medic. You know, that's why medic works, because it's a philosophy, you know, it's a process that you walk through, but it's but it's more than just a statement of say these things. It actually digs in, asks the right questions to ensure that actually, A, to ensure that the information you're getting back is correct, B, to assist the person doing it to get that correct information, you know, to the exactly to your point, Matt, that's kind of what we need on an onboarding basis so that people can feel part of it, you know, and and a and a key part of that, and again, this whole sort of draconian thing of putting that number over your head, you know, it is the sort of Damocles, isn't it? You know, and therefore that's what everybody focuses on. Whereas getting you into that team, into that culture fit, you know, feeling like you're a part of the team and safe and secure in that is far more important, probably in making somebody productive than just waving a big sword over their head about a number that's coming up in three months' time if they their 30, 60, 90 that they presented to you says by 90 days they're up and running, you know, which we all know isn't the case. Yeah, necessarily.

SPEAKER_00 23:51

For me, it it's just I feel like we're just losing that people connection, those relationships. And, you know, you're vulnerable when you start a new company. You don't want to look like you're gonna fail. You want to be successful. And if you haven't got those relationships, you may not feel like you can put your hand up and say, I'm struggling here, I need help because you've been brought on to do a job. Um, so I think just going back to basics, kind of the old-fashioned way of, you know, actual face-to-face, those chats that you have in the kitchen when you're making a coffee, all those sort of touch points that have disappeared now. I I think it's a real shame. And you can't measure that, but it's just those conversations and connections that that you make, or you know, sat in an office when you hear someone on a phone call, you like you pick up tips and hints of how people are selling or what they're doing, and that's just seems to have gone.

SPEAKER_02 24:40

Yeah. Well, the but the the book the buddy program gives you that um at least uh one person who cares about meeting you because they have to. That's the that's what the program's all about. So that gives you your your human conduit into the organization, I hope. Then if you have the process that we're talking about as well, then you should be able to sit down with somebody a month or two months or three months in, and you really can have a positive or hope, hopefully not a negative, but hopefully a positive conversation about the direction that they're have traveled, where they're heading within your company. And you can say you're doing the right things. And based on everything I've seen from every other successful salesperson you've ever taken on, you're going to be successful, or you've got to start stepping up in these areas, or I'm afraid you're not going to be successful. Let's hope it's the former. There is um, there's one other thing I wanted to quickly mention prior to this, if I can. Tell me if I'm going off topic here. But what gets that candidate to join your company in the first place prior to even beginning their onboarding is just as important as the onboarding process. And all of us have worked in hyper-growth companies where you have a target to hire, you know, 25, 30 people in the space of 90 days. And unfortunately, you inevitably end up under pressure over that, despite the best-made plans. And then, you know, you find yourself, whether you like it or not, and none of us ever want to admit this, but you know, we lower our bar a little bit here and a little bit there. And it's really critical that we don't allow ourselves to do that. But more importantly, I've always been surprised when I've joined companies about how little they know about the profile of an ideal candidate. And it really isn't hard to figure out because if you're surrounded by good people, then look at their backgrounds and look at what they've done and look at what they did and write it down and figure out the common denominator. It's not hard, but it does surprise me how little we do that and we end up compromising. There is a similar process and blueprint that we should be applying to the entire recruitment process prior to onboarding. And if we did that, that would probably take away 30% of our onboarding programs. I hope that makes sense.

SPEAKER_05 26:43

Yeah, and it does Matt. And if you think about it, if we're, you know, we're both involved in environments where we've often sold through channels, you know, and through go-to-market routes. And we absolutely had profiles for the ideal partner that you wanted. You knew who you're after and the different types of partner, whether it was, you know, as a soft cat, whether it was one of the consulting companies, you know, because you'd you'd identify what it was you had, why you wanted to, how you wanted to go to market, therefore, who was the right people to go do that. So I have those processes in place, but do they do that with with people? And and you're right. I mean, the last large company that I worked for, you know, went through a tremendous acceleration period. And, you know, I often laugh and say to people, I was in the fortunate position, the only, but actually it was a bad position, the only target that I ever missed on a regular basis every quarter was my recruitment target. You know, and in a way, that sounds well, that's okay because it means you're hitting your number, but you're setting up a challenge, you know, for the future because the numbers were only going one way. So despite that saying with a smile, it was really, really painful. And like you say, then there's the danger that you start dumbing down who you're going for, and and that becomes a real recipe for disaster if you're not careful.

Sam 27:54

Yeah. That hiring process is all important though, isn't it? You know, not overselling the company, not you know, not trying to shoehorn in a candidate that isn't quite what you think you need. You've got to you've got to match expectations, haven't you?

SPEAKER_02 28:14

And I think, Sam, if if we if you do some of the things we're talking about here, you can identify very quickly in somebody's career with you whether if you are matching expectations or not. And that goes back to that, you know, it works from both sides thing I was talking about. If we do this right, then we create an environment that gives both sides greater clarity and visibility into what path they're on and how this is going to turn out.

Vic 28:38

We recently recorded a podcast with Tim Hearn, very successful sales manager. And one of the things that we concluded on the podcast with him was that sales is a team sport, and we don't tend to think of it as a team sport, we think of it as individual contributors. But actually, one of the things that we've been doing, and you know, we've we've talked about Okta many times on the podcast, one of the things we've been doing with them is actually identifying part of those criteria that we're talking about, Matt, was identifying people that are team players to start with. Because actually, what you do as a as an account manager is you pull the right people in to support you. Yeah, your relationship that you have with your sales engineering or or your systems engineer or whatever you call them now, your sales specialist that you have, and that coordination, that it is the team piece of that yes, the buddying, I can really see that, but also pulling people together and being that team, particularly, I think people feel like they're under tremendous stress at the moment, which is again one of the reasons we were driven to do this survey. And if you feel like you're on your own and you haven't got a team supporting you, that that's even more pressure. Or is it what do you think?

SPEAKER_02 29:59

I'll tell you what what I am thinking, Vicky. The more I sit here, I think there's an opportunity for Amplified to own for onboarding what Medica's become for the sales qualification methodology. Because the industry is crying out for this, and somebody should own it, and uh somebody should design something and get a good acronym together, and let's let's promote this out there. And you're you're well placed to do that, I think.

SPEAKER_05 30:22

I know I think it becomes ever more so as this relentless boom has suddenly ground to a halt. Because I think the impact, particularly on the startups and scale-ups now, could be huge because they'll end up losing the good people, you know, the best people, perhaps left with others, you know, and they become on a downward spiral in terms of losing those people, getting rid of those people, you know, and we need to maximize the people that we have at this moment in time, we need to maximize the teams that we have in play. And I think, you know, that's where a lot better could be done, particularly in these new worlds that haven't got those academies in place, et cetera, which yeah, sounds kind of old school, but maybe we need to go back to that. And and on your point about the teens thing, I think it's right. I mean, you know, Matt and I are both uh heavily into cars and car racing and things like that. And I think I think it's a team like that. You know, people often say to me, well, Formula One, you know, it's not a team sport, you know, it's a massive team sport. But there is one person in the front, the person that typically sits in the car, you know, that is is driving that, if you like, literally in the case of the car, but is also pulling all that team together. But without the engineers, the chief engineers, without the CEO, you know, the person that's getting the funding for the team, it's that sort of team. It's not like a football team where you're just constantly passing to each other. You know, people need to take a lead, but they need to pull with them. And all that's down to, you know, who do people follow? They follow leaders, not managers. They follow leaders, they follow people that inspire them. You know, I've worked with Matt many times. I know how Matt inspires a team and how people want to work with him and for him, you know, and that's what we need to instill again. And that's the sort of thing, you know, back to that software thing. You build in that proper process that people are taken through and are supported through, you know, the expectations are set at right levels. You know, they they want to follow you and they will then get in the trenches and go there with you, you know, and and that's what we need to find now. And I think it's a very flippant world we're in at the moment, and people transition and the attrition rate's high, which is okay when it's all growth and everyone's jumping from here to there, you know. But all of a sudden, and it feels like we've hit the stoppers here, it really does. Yeah, seeing it from what I'm personally doing, but also from, you know, as I say, my son and some other people I know at his stage in his career, it's gone from boom to bust very quickly, it seems. And everyone's suddenly standing back and thinking, oh wow, what just happened? Yeah, so now's the time to put some of these things in place and manage it and own it.

Vic 32:49

So, what you just said there about going into the trenches I find really fascinating because what you want is you want people to do this because they want to do it, not just not literally because they've got a gun to the head. So it's the it's the carrot or the stick piece of it. And for me, what is missing is because we're now mostly living in this hybrid world, we're not we're not spending time connecting as people. You jump on a call and you get straight into right, what's the forecast? What are the numbers versus how are you? No, really, how are you? And and taking that time to start with, and if people feel like they're cared about, they will go the extra mile for you. Um and and I see that on a daily basis. In fact, even on our Monday call, we always spend time at Amplified to start with, just catching up, but just generally. But then actually, when we go away to get on with what we need to get on with, honestly, what Sally and Lindsay have done this week is more like the work of 12 people because of what they've done, because they go the extra mile, because they care, because they Lindsay, I'm talking for you here, so please chip in, because they feel cared about, they go that extra mile. And I really think we're all under so much pressure to get on with business.

SPEAKER_00 34:19

Yeah, I would agree with that, but also the power, even though we're doing all our meetings over Zoom, we completely brainstorm out an idea. So it's not as if we've just said, right, go do, and someone delivers some content, comes back, and it's not quite right, you go off again and do it. We've all chipped in with ideas so that the final idea is amazing, I think. And there's a bit of magic behind it. So then you've had the team call, and then we can go off and create it and get it right the first time rather than having to do different iterations. So I just think the power of all the minds together just creates something.

SPEAKER_02 34:53

I I think about this uh such a lot, and uh, there's a real balance to be struck here. We just can't afford to go around our business while just being nice to people because ultimately, if I if I end up being measured on how nice I was to people, I reckon I could win that. Um, but unfortunately, I unfortunately I wouldn't be in a job. So it's a fine balance, isn't it? So what we're talking about here in terms of maintaining a sort of a an agreed upon structure about what good looks like, with I mean, the the context here is um I think productivity and ramping and onboarding. So an agreed framework in which you know we we both agree what success looks like, then then I'm with you. And I think Vicky, the example you gave about Sally and Lindsay, you're clearly doing that. You're doing a good job with these people because you're getting the best out of them, you're being nice to them, everyone's happy. So you're showing there, I think, what winning in in this scenario looks like. But I do think about that a lot. You can't have one without the other, unfortunately. You've got to have your arguments on cold, hard, you know, process and numbers, but also you cannot afford to forget that we're humans as well. And these people are humans and they have emotions and families and problems and everything else.

Vic 36:05

So totally agree with every everything you've just said. I mean, we which is why we often have the debate uh um amplified in our formula of purpose, trust, clarity, and simplicity, which is what we believe you need for the speed of execution. Purpose comes before trust. Because if unless there's a reason why you're together and what you're working on, and you've got a purpose and you've got a goal, there's no what's the point of building the trust and having no relationships. You have to have the purpose first. You have to have a reason that you're going to try and do and make happen.

SPEAKER_02 36:41

Yeah. I I can honestly tell you, by the way, Lewis is the man that taught me, and I and I I'm not sure I've ever said this to Lewis, that you can be nice at work. Um he's the person I learned it from the most for sure. So yeah, you balance it well, Lewis.

SPEAKER_05 36:57

Well, thank you, Matt. Um I agree.

Sam 37:00

If you are nice, as you know, the the assembled throng on this podcast, in my experience, totally are, on the rare occasion that you needed to be direct and forceful with somebody for whatever reason, I think it had a load more effect. Whereas if you if you're constantly effing and blinding and waving your finger in people's faces, it definitely loses its effect. And I can point to one to one time where I gave somebody a telling off, shall we say, in public. And that wasn't an emotional response, that was a deliberate point that I wanted to make. One time I did that, every every every other time was was praise in public and blame in private. Um, and it had so much more effect because of that, I think. So, you know, you don't have to be unpleasant. In fact, you shouldn't be unpleasant in business, I think. And it and it means that if you then do have to have a a full and frank with somebody, it definitely has some something of a greater effect.

Vic 38:01

I've got um a little anecdote there actually. So radical candor, so Kim Scott is very popular in the valley, and a lot of tech companies have have used her work. But if you if you go to radical candor and you just scope someone and give them some feedback, if you haven't got that psychological safety and that trust and that relationship to start with, and I know organizations that have have looked at so when she talks about radical candor, so she she says you have to give people feedback, but care, and there's been a lot of focus on the giving feedback and not so much focus on the caring piece. So when we do radical candor, we do it in our accountability section. Because to your point, Matt, and and Luis, and the whole thing about results, yes, it's really important about getting results. And but you have to have the clarity of what those results look like, and you have to do it by holding each other accountable to what you're being clear about. But you can't do any of that if you haven't got that psychological safety and that trust in the first place, which brings us right back to the productivity and the targets piece, because what what we're seeing happening in organizations at the moment is people will pretend that their pipeline is full because they don't want a hard time at the beginning of the quarter. And they hide it and they hide it and they hide it and they hide it, and then it gets to the end of the quarter, and suddenly that deals with it because they can't ask for help early enough in the sales cycle. So, how can we set people up for success?

SPEAKER_02 39:36

So I can can I go first on this? So I I I believe what what I ended up doing in my last company was um we decided that we managed to compromise on the ramp time being nine months. I actually wanted to do a year, but I ended up compromising on nine months. So at the end of a nine month period, whoever we bought on board had to go on to 100% of their sales quota, you know, and and just you know, live and die by that quota. That's the way the company wanted it to be. So over those first three quarters, the first nine months, I think the first quarter we go from no revenue target at all. We simply measured on the kind of things I was talking about earlier. Yeah, um meetings and white space analysis and calls and attending QBRs, etc. They were the things that we measured and they were the things that we looked for. Um, and if we saw that kind of behavior and activity going on, then we were happy. In the second quarter, I think we gave something like five or 10% of their quota, and then in the third quarter, 50% of it and so on. But you've really got to get away from the fact that the sales quota is everything. You've got to give people the space in order to grow and be successful within your company. It's good for your company, it's good for them as well. Um, and it it does cost money, right? This is an investment that the business needs to be prepared to make. And if you're a business that can't afford to make this investment, you need revenue from day one, then I would suggest the question you need to ask yourself is whether you are hiring too many salespeople, you just can't afford to do it because you're actually just going to waste the money anyway, because you're going to bring people on and set them up for failure. So I think the answer to your question, Vic, is you you measure on activities and you should be very clear up front with both them and your business about what the activities are you're looking for, why they lead to success. Um, and then they are a target, just like a sales target, but it's different to revenue.

Vic 41:32

Makes so much sense.

SPEAKER_05 41:34

I I think you've got to, you know, this really lent, you know, strikes at the heart of if we're talking startups, scale-ups, those kind of businesses, you know, this really goes back to you know the leadership team and the board as well, to be able to do that match. Because, you know, again, I'm I'm assuming that you are mostly talking about new, you know, uh new roles in new geos or parts of the geo or industry or whatever. So, you know, something else is already going on. I guess what I'm thinking about is the point that we sort of briefly touched on earlier, whereby, you know, somebody is your one individual in France, for whatever reason they leave, you know, there's already a target sat in France. You know, it takes quite a lot of confidence and a surety as a leadership team to be able to push back to the board and say, listen, we're taking on a new person. You know, the obvious thing is just to say, there you go, there's your million-dollar target, you know, but this this person is new and with the best will in the world, that's that's not going to happen. So that's quite tricky to do because they have to balance that. If you're on fast growth, like I say, these things can be offset, you know, because you're growing anyway and you're just carving up a bit more and adding another, you know, adding another area. So, you know, it's not always as easy as that, but it it takes leadership to do that because you've got to invest in the people. But you're right, you've got to measure them on other things. There should be a whole bunch of tasks that they have to do or that would make them successful, and you've got to be able to measure on that. I think KPIs and things people pay a lot of lip service to. I'm not sure they often properly measure on you know, on those. Um, you know, and and maybe even think about, you know, people put in you know guarantees or whatever, you know, maybe those should be linked to more of that than it's just a guarantee, you know. So let's link them to something accountable to something. It's just not accountable for the ultimate one, which is the number which will come in in nine months. But you know, that could be something maybe we should look at that more.

SPEAKER_02 43:23

Look, Lewis Thompson's going to send, which um we didn't talk about too much, but the maturity of the territory or the role the person's coming into is really critical. I always used to think of it in terms of there are three categories. The the top one is the mature territory. It's a bunch of existing accounts that generating a lot of revenue. You've probably been hired because you know these accounts very well, anyway. Um, that would require a very different onboarding approach to the next one down, which I would always call a moderately developed patch, maybe one or two accounts that are decent, but the rest of it is greenfields. And then a third scenario, which is kind of the one I Was talking about earlier, which is pure greenfield. We brought on a new salesperson because we're trying to expand. We've got salespeople covering the existing business, so you've got to go and build something from scratch. That's where I was talking about you've got to go and fight for to be as lenient as you can in those early days. If you were in one of those other two, you wouldn't need quite as much flexibility. And since I'm talking very quickly within that green field patch, I even believe there were three tiers of what that could be. Um, if you worked in a company where your only purpose was market share, for example, you're selling disk drives, you can take out one brand of disk drive, you can put another brand of disk drive. I would suggest that you could get up to speed quicker in that market than a market at the other end of the spectrum where you are evangelizing. I mean, if VMware in the early days, and you had to convince somebody that you don't need physical servers because I'm going to give you this thing called a hypervisor that's going to virtualize it. It used to blow people's minds. Um, what is this sorcery of which you speak? Exactly. Yeah. So this wasn't market share, this was a completely fundamentally different pot of money and a different way of doing things. And that took a lot, lot longer to get that off the ground. And there's there's a tier in the middle of those two as well, by the way. But there are tiers for all these things, and it isn't a one size fits all.

SPEAKER_05 45:19

Yeah, you're right, Matt. And I I often thought when I was doing, especially when we were in fast growth. Um, so you know, maybe I was at a service now, for example, we were growing so quickly, we were slicing and dicing these territories on a very regular basis, you know, and it was always a fight with the existing guy to sort of take something away from him or her to, you know, give to this new person coming in, you know, and and always they were desperately trying to hang on to all what they felt was the best, you know. So ultimately, increasingly, what you were giving the new people coming in, not only was it green field, but it was the lesser and the lesser. And I often thought maybe I should turn this around the other way because they're brand new to the business, they don't know it. And I'm now gonna throw them in the toughest patch. Maybe I should take my best person over here and say, Well, you're gonna have this. I'm gonna completely reset your targets, a whole different thing. But you are far better disposed to go do that than this new person that I'm about to recruit. But we rarely do that. You know, you take the new person and you give them a greenfield patch, and then you hope they're gonna get up to speed, sort of thing. And I often thought that was a bit of a weird dichotomy because you put your best person on it, you know.

Sam 46:24

So there's actually an awful lot of rigorous analysis that should happen in the background before you hire people to look at their addressable market in the in the territory that you give them, or you know, we we we did it the other way around because by and large we were hiring graduates for um what initially was quite a transactional sales role, and we then, because they were graduates, we then developed them into more solutions salespeople over time. So, you know, we knew that the average salesperson would do X within a given period. So, you know, we'd base targets on a percentage of that and so on. Um yeah, we but if you're we had an awful lot of analysis that went into how likely they were to succeed, how long it would take them to make a turn of profit for the company and all of that kind of thing that gave us the breathing space to do it based a little bit more on activity than target. So, you know, there probably is a whole load of free work that needs to go in, which admittedly is hard in a startup or when you're going into an entirely new geography or something like that, but to have a genuine maths-based, much as I hate maths, approach to setting any ensuing target rather than just saying, well, you know, the business needs us to do X, so your target is 30% of that X because there's three three of you or something. Does that make any sense?

Vic 47:48

It makes loads of sense, Sam, and it also I think talks to the maturity of soft care, and many of the scale up don't have that maturity in the business.

SPEAKER_05 47:57

It takes a long time to get there. And the leaders don't have it, you know. Why why are you the CEO of a startup? You know, why are you even the CRO of a startup? You know, it's it's probably not because you're an existing sales leader that, you know, it often isn't it's because you're techies, because you've had an idea, you know.

Sam 48:15

Because you had the idea, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 48:16

Exactly right. You know, so they don't have you know that background in it, and all of a sudden, you know, you spin in across, you know, you know, I looked at a place yesterday that that that my son's somebody's contacted him, um, and and I looked on their website and they said, you know, we're a company of 60 people um spanning 20 countries, and um, you know, and we have one base here and one base here, then an Indian base for obviously where they're building the product, you know, and and there you go, and you think, wow, okay, and it's an AI thing, and you know, so it's very technical. And and you go, okay, so have they got any experience in any of those markets? You know, I don't know, but probably not, let's be honest, you know. Yeah.

Sam 48:57

Um, so yeah, so tricky. You know, that's that that's why Amplified Group exists, isn't it? To to support businesses that are on that scale up startup or scale up journey, yeah. But exactly that, don't have the experience that Vicky, Lindsay, Lewis, Matt have to be able to go and inject that into them and give them a bit of that structure.

Vic 49:23

Yeah, nice, nice uh segue, Sam. But um just before we before we come back to us, something that's really come out of this conversation is the importance for leaders to be courageous um in supporting their teams to be set up for success. And I know that's that's easier said than done, but if there's something, well I suppose it is coming back to our flag, if there is something that we can do to help them and to be the voice for them some more. So, guys, I really appreciate this conversation this morning. It's been so insightful.

SPEAKER_05 50:03

I think the other thing that, you know, and and Matt actually brought it up earlier, so I'm not going to take the credit for this tool, but I will mention it so we don't forget, it's you know, it also shows that one size doesn't fit all. So, as well as being, you know, courageous, they've got to be creative and they've got to look at what they've got. Because, you know, as Matt just described, then different tiers, different levels of of where you're bringing people in, let alone the maturity of the business, etc. So, you know, there's no one size fits all here, and this and that makes it even more important that you've got that purpose, but the trust, and you know, and that people are actually looking for you to succeed, and you're in it together because there's not just an easy, you know, there isn't a medic at this point in terms of that, you know, maybe there should be, maybe that can be one that's creative enough to do that, but that it's not there yet. So, you know, you've you've got to do this as a team.

Vic 50:52

And I think that is that you're in it together, times are tough, and you will be stronger together. And actually, one of the things that we are seeing the most with our clients at the moment, is and actually winning an awful lot of new business around, is how we're helping teams accelerate being together and learning how to work together. And actually, you can you can really accelerate that piece of the process. And I think that for me is the is the easiest way to solve one size, doesn't it all because then you're putting the brains together to figure it out versus actually a leader having to come up with it on their own. So is it a good time to kind of wrap up at the end?

SPEAKER_00 51:41

And you know, the the the purpose of this survey was to find out the effects of companies hitting revenue targets with with the with the amount of attrition in the industry. But what we really wanted to do was to see how we can help those companies and what we can do in simple bite-sized bits that we can just give out to the tech industry, just really want to help these teams be more engaged, and how can we turn up that dial to productivity? So, is it a good time just to talk about what we've got to offer?

Sam 52:16

That sounds like a fantastic idea.

SPEAKER_00 52:18

We've got some when we work with clients and when VIP can and the amplifiers work, there's some simple exercises that we do to help build trust between people, people get to know each other. So, what we're going to do is create um some tips that we're going to give out each week. There's five tips and tools to help team managers or leaders get their teams engaged. So it's really simple getting to know you exercises, but we think that you know it people get put into those management positions with very little training very often, especially in scale-ups. So if we we think it's a skill that can be learned, it's just like riding a bike, and we want to, you know, we can show you how to do that. So we've got five simple steps that we're gonna start putting out about getting to know each other, understanding different personality types, because it's really important, you know, sometimes you feel like you're not getting anywhere, but actually it's just someone's got a very different understanding or different requirements of what they need to get the job done. And so we're gonna touch on that. Engage in positive conflict. So, how do you have those challenging conversations without turning into an argument and not being very nice? But it is important that you challenge each other. So that's another one we'll be looking at. Being a clarity seeker. So very often people have meetings, you come out of the meeting, five people have different ideas of what needs to get done. So we're gonna give some tips on how to become a clarity seeker. And then the final one is let's talk results. So, what how can we help you get and hit those results?

SPEAKER_02 53:46

If appropriate, Lindsay, the the challenging conversation that I hope Amplified can really help people with is the one that exists between the owner of this organization that we're talking about building here and the CEO, maybe the CRO of the company. Because as Lewis said earlier, there's quite often a startup. These people don't have huge amounts of experience of running sales organizations globally, and yet you've got to go to them and persuade them that the onboarding process is going to be slower, a little bit more expensive, but it's going to be worth their while because it will pay for itself in the long run. But helping people position that it was one of my biggest challenges, and I think I probably failed the first four or five times I tried it and eventually figured out the right kind of language to use. But that's a challenging conversation that I believe organizations could could do with. I could have certainly done with some help around that.

Vic 54:42

Yeah, Matt, that's something that we've recognised is helping these leaders that you're talking about getting ahead of the curve and how they go back and influence the US in usually the US, yeah, early enough in the cycle. So that they're getting ahead of the planning process versus just being on the receiving end and the capture of it.

SPEAKER_05 55:06

Yeah, yeah. And again, you shouldn't underemphasize the value in the whole personality traits and types things, because you know, it's tricky. So understanding those personality types, taking the time to do that and sharing that across the team so you all understand is hugely powerful.

Vic 55:25

Guys, just so appreciative of everything that you've shared there. Wow, amazing.

Sam 55:31

Thanks everybody for joining in. What a fantastic discussion. Um, really good to have the assembled wisdom of the panel on today. We really appreciate it. It just remains for me to say thanks for listening to Get Amplified from the Amplified Group. As always, your comments and your subscriptions are gratefully received.