Latest / Success Story with Scott Clary / Lessons - Why Modern Sales is Broken | Samantha McKenna & Amy Volas

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Lessons - Why Modern Sales is Broken | Samantha McKenna & Amy Volas · Success Story with Scott Clary

• 0:00
  What is, why is sales still broken? Because if you're a highly entrepreneurial individual
• 0:15
  in an organization like both of you are, and you're trying to make a difference, and
• 0:19
  your traditional sales manager is not going to hear it, they're going to be very old
• 0:24
  school and they're thinking, so why is sales like that, and how do we fix it?
• 0:29
  I think this is what we can talk about for the next like 90 minutes.
• 0:32
  Yeah, I know, I know again, so I don't want to see it up.
• 0:37
  So a couple of us, Amy, past you, I think one of the things, you know, I realized this
• 0:42
  in my line of thinking as of late, that when I talk about sales and kind of my, my, on
• 0:50
  the least defensible person on the planet, but I do get a tiny bit offended when somebody
• 0:54
  says like, it's sales, how hard can it be?
• 0:57
  And for those of us who have been in it, who have been in enterprise sales, who've just
• 1:00
  been in sales in general and done it really well, holy moly is a complex, right?
• 1:05
  And there are a thousand different decisions that you make every day, the impact, you make
• 1:09
  a right, right?
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  How you write an email, how you structure something, how you are, she's sell when you're
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  presenting a proposal, all that goes into it.
• 1:15
  I think one of the reasons the sales is broken is because people think I can do it, anyone
• 1:19
  can do it.
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  And to be fair, anyone can do it.
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  You can learn how to do sales.
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  There's not a whole certificate.
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  You don't have to.
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  I'm at school for it.
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  You can fall into it and take your innate qualities, but I think that we also think that
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  anybody can do it.
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  So then we don't know how to do it correctly.
• 1:34
  We learn from, you know, plenty of leaders who have been promoted incorrectly and gosh,
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  Amy, you can probably talk about that forever, a little Peter principle there.
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  But we follow leaders that also don't know how to do it.
• 1:45
  And so we've got that first starter.
• 1:47
  And I think the other thing where things are really broken and where I love to focus
• 1:51
  a lot of my time is the foundations of selling.
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  We don't really think about, let's make sure we've got our organizational house in order
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  before we start to think about, you know, we're going to bring in 17 different technologies
• 2:02
  and build this incredible tech stack and you know, do all the latest hacks and tricks
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  and things like that and go into enterprise selling for the first time.
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  So you roll and really think about, do you have your foundations in place?
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  Do you have a sales process identified?
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  Do you know what this fruct is?
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  So to speak on your very first call.
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  Do we know what happens after you sign out of proposal?
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  Do you have these things identified first and foremost?
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  And are you coaching your reps to really be human to be authentic sales people?
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  Do they know how to write a great email?
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  Do they know what to say correctly in an injection?
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  Make sure that at the most basic level you got this and then you build.
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  And I think that the best analogy I can give to this is that sales leaders are like,
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  we're going to renovate our master bath on the second floor.
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  And you're like, that's a reason your foundation is cracked and your home is sinking.
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  And they're like, that's okay.
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  We'll renovate anyway.
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  And you're like, okay.
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  So I think fix the foundation.
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  Let's make sure that the house is standing in a good shape.
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  And then let's build upon that.
• 3:02
  Go ahead.
• 3:03
  I mean, I wanted to get your opinion on this as well,
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  because I think it's a huge, huge pain point in the industry.
• 3:09
  I would agree.
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  And I think, as with anything, so we're talking about the foundation,
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  but then I think bigger than that,
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  it starts from the top down and expectations and leadership.
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  And what I notice is, so I'll give you a perfect example.
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  Not all businesses, not all people are created equal,
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  yet we're treating it as such and sales and recruiting.
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  I believe it firmly believe it starts always with the people that you bring on
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  and the expectations and how you enable them and support them.
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  But beyond that, it's like in my mind, when I think about this,
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  it's not one size fits all.
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  It's not one dimensional, but yet we treated this way in so many people.
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  So like for me, for years, people, I've been in sales leadership
• 3:56
  and I've been an individual contribution.
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  I made the conscious decision.
• 4:00
  And more than one occasion, I did not want to be a leader for that company.
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  I just didn't.
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  And it was like, well, what do we do with you?
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  Because when you're really good at what you do, it's like, well, what's next?
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  And I think that people are just thrown into sales leadership
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  that have no business being in leadership that don't really want to be a leader.
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  They like the ego, they like the accolades, they like the title,
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  but the fundamental piece about leadership in my mind is all about your people.
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  And those are the folks that tend to just regurgitate crap.
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  Or what worked for me as a seller should automatically work for everybody else.
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  And I'm going to disrupt the entire team to put together some sort of expectation
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  or this is how it needs to be done because it's my way.
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  These are the broken bits and pieces.
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  And so I think it comes down to leadership.
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  I think that there is this world that we're living in,
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  where, and I don't have any beef with them whatsoever,
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  but when predictable revenue was written,
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  people have taken that model and they've totally bastardized it.
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  The fundamentals of what predictable revenue was all about.
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  I totally get that.
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  I'm down with it. I support it.
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  But now you've got this like ripped off plug-in play,
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  over segmentation of sales.
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  And it has nothing to do with the buyer journey or the customer.
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  And I like to remind people this all the time,
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  the customer holds the keys always.
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  They're the ones that write the checks.
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  And they're the ones that fuel everything else that happens.
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  But yet we put together this thing that's all about us and what we want in our process
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  and our motion and has very little to do with them.
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  And especially when you're going after money,
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  it's like now you're in some multiplier of some expectation of someone else's dime
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  and it's promoting all the wrong behavior.
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  And so I think all of those things in combination,
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  coupled with everything that Sam just said and I agree, it is foundational.
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  If you don't have that, nothing else really sticks for the long haul.
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  So it's expectations.
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  It's stop it with the hacking, the shortcuts,
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  the one size fits all mentality, especially for my folks that are like,
• 6:09
  we crushed it with this high velocity SMB sales model.
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  That's awesome.
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  That's how you entered the market.
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  But just because you did that and just because your product was ready for that
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  and Sam and I were on a different conversation,
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  doesn't mean that your enterprise ready.
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  Just because you had one inbound lead from an enterprise customer,
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  how do you know that that's not one of their franchise owners?
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  It has nothing to do with the big decisions made it corporate.
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  There is so much misconception and especially from a sales leadership perspective,
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  people are hired for the for the shiny objects like, oh,
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  you your team more than 70% of your team hit.
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  You went to president's club eight times in a row.
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  You grew the business 200% year over year for four years.
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  You're the sales leader that I want.
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  Well, if I'm running enterprise sales and you did that and it was highly transactional SMB,
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  that sales leader is going to have no idea how to lead what I need to do.
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  And the wrong expectations are going to happen and they're in life the problems.
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  Like read rinse repeat, read rinse repeat.
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  And the minute that we stop reading, rinsing and repeating,
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  the minute that we start seeing some of these problems get fixed.
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  And that's one of the big things that I encourage my clients when we're going
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  through kickoff and discovery.
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  And I'm talking to them about what they need and why they need it.
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  I am amazed at how many people aren't thinking through these things.
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  And that's the work that I crave to do.
• 7:31
  It's like, wait, there's to let me get, let me help you get out of your way.
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  I can see this disaster coming from a mile away.
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  Let me help you.
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  So that's a lot that I just unloaded.
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  But all of that plus Sam plus so much more that's going to come up.
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  I'm sure here.
• 7:47
  Well, and I think you bring it to two good points to you, right?
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  And I think Amy, you're in the same boat from a recruitment perspective of how hard can it be?
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  I interviewed people before.
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  I've hired people before.
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  I know what I'm looking for.
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  Why is it that I need an expert?
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  Why is it that I need to outsource this, right?
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  And hey, a fee to find somebody.
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  But I think it's again, just taking that shift and thinking that there are experts out there
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  who have this figured out down to a science because this is their poor competency.
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  And this is what they do day in and day out.
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  So before you think about hiring somebody on your own,
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  looking maybe for completely misalignment in terms of qualifications to your exact right there,
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  think about how do you bring in an expert to help you and make sure that you don't make the terribly
• 8:28
  extensive mistake of hiring the wrong talent, disrupting your team,
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  costing yourself revenue, et cetera.
• 8:33
  I think the other thing, and this was an expensive mistake that I learned by myself,
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  exactly your point of hiring the wrong caliber person for what you're doing.
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  So when I was searching for one of my enterprise leaders at one point,
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  I ended up hiring an individual who was a kind of VP of sales for a ton of startups.
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  And just incredibly well known in the space in New York, like very big brand.
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  And so I hired her and what was, what was so shopping to me and such a great learning experience
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  was that I was thinking somebody who was accustomed to having the world as their territory
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  and saying, here 40 accounts go make it happen.
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  And there was no, maybe a little nicer, more nice save math.
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  But there's no idea of like, how do I nurture leads?
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  How do I map out an account?
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  How do I build an account plan?
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  How do I start on the top and weave my way in and multi-thread?
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  Because before it's just like, okay, everybody were new and we can do something.
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  And now it's everybody knows our brand, but you need to figure it out with these 40 accounts and make or break.
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  So I think expensive lesson for me to learn as a sales leader and for the organization
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  and what we could avoid in with having proper talent.
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  So again, just a good thing for our sales leaders to consider.
• 9:44
  When it goes back to that one size fits all, I enact a pick on your alma mater.
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  And I don't know where it was that this was, but I know that you worked at LinkedIn.
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  And I have this conversation a lot.
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  I go back to HR Tech as well where it'll be an HR Tech startup.
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  And they're like, we want somebody from LinkedIn because look at their culture and look at their playbooks.
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  And I'm like, do you realize that their playbooks have been set in stone for a really long time in the person?
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  That you're going to take out of that.
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  If they've never created that playbook before, they know how to manage to that playbook.
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  They don't know how to create it.
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  So the work that needs to be done at different stages of companies, different kinds of companies,
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  different sizes of teams, right?
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  Like so you could be in a small company, but the team's really big or the reverse of that.
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  Or you could be at a LinkedIn or a Yahoo or whatever it might be, the work is different.
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  And so there's this lack of understanding of the nuances and the complexities of sales.
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  It isn't just this plug-and-play thing of, here's your patch, here's, I mean, I remember when I first started,
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  I was like, here's the yellow pages.
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  I'm like, okay, you know, and yes, I go that far back, but it's like, just go up and do it.
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  And it's like, and luckily I did and I stumbled a lot, but I learned.
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  It doesn't have to be that difficult.
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  And what I find is people aren't listening for the differences.
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  And so it's like, well, this is our way of doing it.
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  This is what we know.
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  And what people aren't understanding is, well, you're treating your prospects horribly.
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  Yes, you're force-feeding business and what does your churn look like?
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  What does that look like?
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  And by the way, how many lost opportunities do you have throughout the process?
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  People just want to look at the new low goes in, but there's a whole ecosystem of stuff
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  that's happening that's hurting your business that people aren't thinking of.
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  And the right leaders for your business are thinking about all of that.
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  Not just a little bit of, well, we got funding and now we have to throw up 50 new low goes,
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  but we'll treat them horribly, shove them in.
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  We're going to turn them in less than 12 months because we don't know what we're doing.
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  We don't have a customer success motion.
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  It is an ecosystem and all these things are part of it.
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  And sales isn't something that you just do.
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  It affects your buyer and it sets the stage and tone for what happens next.
• 12:03
  So, sorry.
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  I have a question.
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  I'm not going to ask.
• 12:06
  No, it's good.
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  It's very good.
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  So I was actually original.
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  I was going to ask a sales question, of course, the whole thing in view of sales.
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  But I want to actually ask a people question because I think as we're sort of unpacking this,
• 12:19
  a lot of this is not surprisingly driven by the people that you hire, the people you bring
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  in.
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  So when you are, you know, everything you're saying makes sense about how it's not a one-size-fits-all,
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  how you have to find the right type of leader, how the leader has not just maybe the operational
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  experience, but actually conceptualizing and ideating and building out that playbook and
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  then maybe running with it depending on what their background is like and there's all
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  these different nuances.
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  So is it finding the right person with the right experience or is it finding the right
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  person with the right personality traits because not everything can always be found and
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  experience because well, it or it's very difficult to find somebody who's scaled to start
• 12:57
  up from 10 to 50 million and then build up that playbook successfully.
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  And then that's the perfect time for that person to pivot into a new role and accompany
• 13:05
  us doing the exact same thing.
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  Is that an easy person to find or can it be substitute with some level of competency
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  plus some personality traits that can allow them to understand and build that out even
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  if they haven't done it before to the same level or the exact same nuance is what you're
• 13:19
  hiring in.
• 13:20
  Yeah, so for me, it goes back to that it's not a one-size-fits-all and so that's where
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  my enterprise selling chops come through a discovery and I think both of those things
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  are important.
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  So like, what are the DNA traits that this person inherently needs to bring to the table?
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  You can't teach somebody to care, right, like either they do or they don't.
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  What do they care about though?
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  It's what they care about and why they care about it that I'm especially interested in
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  and I need to listen to my clients of have we taken the intentional approach to understand
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  why are we hiring, right, why, why is it time now?
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  And if it's in one of the things that I do the most of is is cleaning up, right, they've
• 14:05
  gotten it wrong, they're feeling the pain, their recruiting process isn't working, they're
• 14:10
  suffering from all the horrible effects of mishiring, there are lots of lessons to learn
• 14:15
  there.
• 14:16
  Let's not repeat those.
• 14:17
  Let's take a moment and figure that out and connect some of those dots.
• 14:20
  So a lot of that is going to be, well, why do you think that this is a good time to hire
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  why this role?
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  Sometimes I have to tell people like you want a VP, you're so early stage, don't do that,
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  right, that's going to hurt you.
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  So it's understanding the why and then the what and really diagnosing there's two different
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  buckets there.
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  What are the things that the person absolutely has to be, has to embody, has to believe
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  in and then on the flip side, what are the things that characteristics of the work that
• 14:54
  they need to do, the work that they've done, how that translates.
• 14:57
  So I had this conversation with early stage companies all the time where they're like,
• 15:02
  I want a sales leader that has taken a company from zero to 50 million 10 times and like
• 15:07
  that person doesn't exist and if they did, they're working for themselves now consulting
• 15:11
  making a boatload of cash, they don't have to take this role.
• 15:14
  The work is a grind and they don't want to go through that.
• 15:17
  So let's talk about your stage, right, what's the work at your stage?
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  Because chances are the person that can get you from zero to perhaps five to 10 million,
• 15:28
  it's a very, very different leader than the leader that's at 100 million and it's okay
• 15:33
  to hire over them if they can't rise to the occasion, but give them an opportunity.
• 15:38
  These are the things to think about.
• 15:39
  People aren't thinking like that.
• 15:41
  So I always tie it back, Scott, to what is the actual work and then all the other things
• 15:45
  that you're talking about sort of shake out.
• 15:48
  I'm a huge fan of the scorecard and using all of that to map it out as to all of this
• 15:53
  carries weight.
• 15:55
  Let's think about what weight it carries and let's use this as our guiding force so that
• 15:59
  we do get it right together so that it's not just making assumptions or not knowing you've
• 16:03
  got this heavy here in front of you.
• 16:06
  You don't know how to talk to them.
• 16:07
  You don't know how to ask some questions and you read some stupid thing online about these
• 16:12
  are the top 10 questions to ask a sales leader.
• 16:14
  You have no idea why you're asking it.
• 16:16
  You have no idea what they're answering, but it sounds good.
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  So I'm going to hire them.
• 16:21
  Stop it right now.
• 16:23
  And if you are doing that with Pete's in love, please call me because I will help you.
• 16:27
  I think you talked about a good word earlier ecosystem and I want to say something using
• 16:34
  your terminology.
• 16:35
  Also, Scott, I think it tends to be a shocker for a lot of business owners and even see
• 16:40
  your leaders.
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  If you, one size fits all, doesn't exist.
• 16:43
  You also have two types of sales leaders.
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  You have true sales leaders who have been individual contributors.
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  They are the Amy and Sam's at the world who have been there and done that, been in the
• 16:52
  trenches and grinded it out and can actually tell you how to do it.
• 16:56
  And then you've got operational leaders who are probably sold maybe for a year or two,
• 17:00
  weren't super successful, but knew all the mechanics and the math of it and couldn't map
• 17:04
  out a process for how you should look at your table of reports and your Microsoft BI's
• 17:09
  and all of that and figure out exactly what you need in order to be successful.
• 17:13
  You need both kinds of leaders in your organization, right?
• 17:16
  Because you're going to need someone who's going to be able to go to the table with your
• 17:20
  clients, build rapport, know how to start the call, know how to work the room, know what
• 17:24
  actually sell what it is that you're doing and then you're going to need your operational
• 17:28
  leaders, right?
• 17:29
  You can get them sales operations, but you can also just get that in an operational leadership
• 17:32
  by having that at a different level of the organization too.
• 17:35
  I think people focus one, don't have a viewpoint for that and then two, a lot of people get
• 17:40
  really excited about the operational people because they're like, oh, data, data, big
• 17:44
  data.
• 17:45
  That is exciting and that's wonderful, but you also meet, especially as frontline managers
• 17:50
  that people who are working and coaching your apps, you need leaders who are going to
• 17:54
  be able to say, this is how you do it, restructure this email this way, restructure this proposal
• 17:58
  this way.
• 17:59
  Let's do a prep call and a dry run before you go and you know, possibly botch it in front
• 18:05
  of one of our biggest opportunities that are so you've got to look for that across the
• 18:08
  board.
• 18:09
  I think that the, again, the focus on data and operations is great and is important,
• 18:15
  but again, making sure that you have a balance between your leaders who can fill the serving
• 18:20
  and gaps for you.
• 18:21
  It's like building a baseball team.
• 18:22
  You're not going to, everybody's the baseball team, everybody's a VP of sales or whatever,
• 18:26
  but you got, you know, your umpires, your batters, your third basement, et cetera.
• 18:29
  Everybody has a alluded role and it's strength that they bring.
• 18:32
  If you only brought one of those and built your entire team based on that, you wouldn't
• 18:35
  be successful.
• 18:36
  Right.
• 18:37
  I hate sports analogies and great that I just gave you one, um, but that, that's the good
• 18:41
  analogy.
• 18:42
  I like it.
• 18:43
  I mean, it's a good one.
• 18:44
  Yeah.
• 18:45
  It's very good.
• 18:46
  Every baseball player where you got to find the right position.