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74: How to build your bench · Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth

• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's so easy to say you need to go build a bench, but so much harder to do in practice.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: Find the four-step process to do it that will take you less than two hours per week in this episode.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Bite-sized sales podcast, where we believe that you don't need to take time out of the field or off the phones, stuck in a classroom, in order to get great sales and sales leadership training, and that taking bite-sized steps each day to get better at your craft is the best way to improve your results.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: I am your host, Andrew Monahan, and I'm using my 20 plus years in B2B sales to bring you simple, actionable ideas that you can use every day to help you get better.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: Before we get to the tip for today, this episode is sponsored by Sales Bluebird.
• 1:30
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• 1:37
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• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: Sign up right now at salesbluebird.com.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to episode 74 of the Bite-Size Sales Podcast.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: And today's topic is all about building your bench.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: It's one of these things that we're often told as first line managers, oh, that's what you need to do.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: But then the guidance kind of stops there and we're left to figure it out on our own.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: And as you try and get going with doing it, you know it makes sense intuitively, you know it's what you should be doing.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: But as you get going, it becomes tough because there's no template to follow.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: It takes up time that's going to pay off way in the future.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: And there's always more important things to be done right now, or the the priority is to get them done right now.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: So it often gets left by the wayside.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: So in this episode, we're going to talk about it's a four-step process that's going to give you the guidance to get through a bench building process and consistently execute it over time.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: Importantly, there's two things.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: One is this is designed to enable you to do it in less than two hours per week, right?
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: If you're doing more than that, you're probably not going to keep doing it and you're probably doing it wrong as well.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: And the second thing is I'm going to, at the end of at the end of the episode, I'm going to offer you a completely free, ungated book, ebook to PDF to download that gives you some of the detail behind this about how to go and execute.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're interested in what I'm going to talk about, then stay tuned at the end for that to that download.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: So four-step process.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: The first one, and by the way, you know, none of these steps are hugely revolutionary, right?
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's all about just understanding the order to go through and figuring out how to execute them consistently over time.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: So first one is deciding what it is you need to have in a great rep.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: So when you're looking at any sort of hiring, you're always looking, obviously, for A players, you want B plus A players, things like that, right?
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: The beauty of doing a bench building process is it gives you the time and the insight into someone to really truly know whether someone's an A player or not.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: Because you're going to know them over time and they're going to know you as well.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: So I think about two things in terms of the profile of the person.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: One is their values, and the second one are their traits.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: So the values are things that's hard to put a finger on, but traits are probably things that they go and do.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: So in the values, I would put obvious things such as integrity, uh, desire to win, curiosity, things like that.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: Traits might be a prospector, someone who builds great relationships, someone who used to working through the channel, right?
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: Things like that, right?
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, as you get to know people, then you're going to be able to have the time and the and the wherewithal to you know gently probe about what they're all about to understand their their values.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: I I know that uh one company was at recently, one of the key things that we were hiring for was curiosity.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: We were selling a software platform, and you know, when you sell a platform, there's tons of different use cases you could be working on with a big company.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: The question is, you know, which ones are the most important, the most impactful, that you can actually solve very well.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: And the only real way that you can understand that is really digging in and asking a bunch of questions.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: And if you had that genuine curiosity or you have good honed, you know, business curiosity, then you can get there and understand it.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: If you don't, it's much harder for you.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: So we were thinking about curiosity.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: And it was really interesting, you know, I w I was handling a lot of the early stage calls for the for the sales team as they were coming in.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: We'd say, Yeah, this person looks interesting.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: Let's, and I would jump on a half-hour call.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: And completely different to most of these calls, I would actually ask a couple of questions at the start, and then I would shut up and I would say, Hey, what questions do you have for me?
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_00: And that was telling.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: I I probably was able to filter out 70% plus of the people I was talking to simply because of how they approached that conversation.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: It was not that uncommon for them, for their first questions to ask about the whole thing, the roles, the opportunity for the company, they would start asking about comp plans and and tools that we use at work and things like that.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: Now, don't get me wrong, right?
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: That's kind of important, but not at the gate, right?
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: When you're probably not that familiar with the company or what we're doing or why we're hiring and the challenges we're facing, things like that.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: You know, to go that tactical that early was very telling for me.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: And I could tell immediately the ones that had that curiosity, right?
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: They'd say, oh, okay.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: And they would say, you know, I saw on your website that you're charging this market.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: Tell me more about that.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: What successes are you getting?
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: What are the challenges you're facing?
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: And it just was a much more natural conversation with them, digging in and asking very good questions based on what I said.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought, well, you know, these are the people that have that natural, genuine curiosity in what we're doing and how we're doing it, that I then want to talk more with them, right?
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: And that was really my first gait.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: So when you're thinking about values, think about ways that you can just put something in your conversations informally that might give you a bit of an insight into what they're all about without getting into the traits, which are much more, you know, tell me a situation when, or give me an example, or how would you handle the situation, right?
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: You're looking more at traits at that point.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: So the first thing is very clear on your values and traits in your ideal person.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: The second one is good old-fashioned prospecting, as you've probably done as a rep for many years.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: You're looking to fill that funnel with what I call possibles.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: These are people out there in the field who probably not looking for a job right now, but for some reason you think it's worthwhile having a quick chat with them.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: And this is, as I said, is prospecting, right?
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: You want to go to your existing team to ask for recommendations for people they've worked with in the past.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: Look at your own network, who do you know in different areas?
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: You can go and ask for recommendations or ideas from, or even people that you know you might want to bring in.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: Thirdly, you might want to ask your customers what are the great reps they've worked with, who's impressed them over time, things like that.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: Fourth one might be partners.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: Who do you love working with?
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: Who really gets the model we're working with that really brings you business and works best for your team and seems to be succeeding.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: You might want to do some cold outreach as well.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: You might realize there's some companies that you want to go and target, and there's some certain things in certain geos in certain territories.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: Say, let's go find you know 15 people that match this profile and do a cold outreach to them and ask them, hey, I'm not looking to hire right now, not looking to change your mind, just looking to get to know you right now.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: Let's chat, let's have a call, let's have a coffee, whatever it takes.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: And then finally, you might have internal recruiters.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: This is a tough one because sometimes internal recruiters will only work on things where there's an approved job rec.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're looking to build a bench, obviously you're not going to have approved recs there for them to do it.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: So you really need to have that recruiter who gets that the idea is that we we really work on this over time and attract the best people we can over time, as opposed to settle for the best we can find right now with a you know open position.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: So but sometimes those people are willing to put an hour or two, three hours of work in a week to say, let me go source some some people in their network in this geos that other territories you're looking uh to fill going forward or have a bench for going forward.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: So that's the second one, which is fill the funnel.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: And the third one is to qualify the funnel.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: So you got the possibles and you're trying to figure out which ones are really not good options for you and which ones are, which ones are the probables from those possibles.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: And this is interesting because you're not in official interview mode, right?
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: So it's kind of weird to say, hey, I want to chat and then go straight into hardcore interviewing.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: It can it can really put people off you and and not be hugely emotionally intelligent.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: So informally, though, you can ask them questions about what they're all about and what they're loving about the things they're doing right now, what they're really proud of, you know, things like that, just to start building that, a build the relationship, get to know them, and then start probing very lightly for some of the things that you're looking for.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: And what you'll find is that some of them just clearly are not a fit, right?
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: You they were recommended for whatever reason, but you know, whoever gave the recommendation wasn't really sure of the ideal profile you were looking for.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: There'll be some where, you know, they just rub you their own way, it's just all wrong, it doesn't seem right, you know, their approach or attitude with you is not good.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: And you'll probably want to say, well, that's a that's a great towel for what they're like, and maybe put them, you know, throw them out of the funnel rather than keep them in.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: And there'll be ones that, you know, you get a good vibe off at.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: Again, we're not trying to hire at this point, right?
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: We're just trying to figure out the probables.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: You got a good vibe that some of the values are aligned for whatever reason.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: They seem to be uh genuinely interested.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: Uh you're building a relationship and you say, okay, I'm not hiring this person, right?
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: So all we're trying to do is bring them into my probables at that point, right?
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: And then, you know, you can wrap up the conversation and say, listen, you know, I kind of like a lot of things about our conversation about you.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: You know, as I said, I'm really not hiring right now, but I'd love to keep in touch with you in the coming weeks and months and quarters just to see what happens.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe there'll be an opportunity opportunity to work together, maybe there won't, but let's keep in touch.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: And that's a great way to then, you know, go into the next section, which is how do you keep someone interested and excited in joining your team, joining the company, working with you going forward?
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, as you go down these four steps, it becomes harder and harder to do in your mind on a consistent basis, right?
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: So you've put the work in, you've got your bench maybe, and then you're trying to think, well, I really should reach out to people, but then you know, things take over.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_00: So this is where you have to time block things and figure out how can I keep in touch with these, maybe as many, as many as 20, 30 people that are sitting on on the on the virtual bench, right?
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: Who you want to keep in touch with.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: How do you keep in how do you keep uh front and center for those people?
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: So I would encourage you to do three things.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: One is set yourself the goal to have a one-on-one, either phone conversation, coffee, whatever it might be, depending on you know travel, geographies, type of sale you're doing.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: Have something that says every quarter, I'm gonna connect for 15 minutes to half an hour with each p each person on my bench, right?
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: And if you work that out, that's gonna be maybe an hour a week doing that.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: If you look at the numbers involved, you say that's maybe an hour a week to do that.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: And you just have to be rigorous on doing it every week.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: You're trying to get some sort of connection with someone.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: The second thing you can do is every month send an email, you BCC, all the people on your bench, and you say, Hey, just want to give you an update on where we're at.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: We've had some great news, we've won some great wins.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: Whatever you can talk about that would build excitement.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we've we've uh expanded the team due to demand from our customers.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_00: We had three big million-dollar wins in in the region that we're really excited about.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: These are Fortune 100 companies that are now on board.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_00: We grew the business quarter on quarter.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: You know, what you know, obviously, there's things you can say and cannot say for confidentiality reasons.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_00: But what you can do is use these numbers to give an impression, a correct impression.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously, you don't want to deceive, a correct impression about how you're building your team, growing the team, the excitement, the great talent that's coming on board, things like that, right?
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: Because you want them to look at that and go, huh, that's that's interesting.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I last talked to him, the team was six, now it's eight.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_00: He's talking about three big wins that are million-dollar wins and Fortune 100s.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: Something that you know, you're just keeping that excitement and that interest brewing.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: The third thing I would do is I would use LinkedIn in a similar fashion as you were doing with those emails.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_00: Is what can you say and what can you do on LinkedIn that anyone, not just the ones on your bench, might look at you and what you're doing and say, Yeah, there's someone that kind of intrigues me I might want to work with going forward.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll give you two examples of people that I think have really done this well.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: One, an old friend of mine, Alfred Arrias.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: Alfred, I've known for many years.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: He joined a company called Tanium two or three years ago, I think it is now.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: And he was the first person in to build out their inside sales team and their SDR team.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_00: And he was literally the first person in.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: The model at the time when he went there was you know just big enterprise deals.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_00: And he was, he came in to build out, you know, the different type of activ uh sales motion going on, you know, down market a little bit, but also with SDRs as well.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: And what was interesting was you know, when Alfred started off, it was just him and then he hired one or two people.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: And if you ever have the time, maybe you don't, but if you go back in his timeline in LinkedIn, you'll see over time that the team was two, and then a month later it was four, and then three months later it was seven, and then it's 12.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, over the last few years, it's just built up and built up, and he's done a really good job of posting, doing posts that that that feed that excitement, but also show pictures of people, right?
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: It's the team getting builder bigger each time, and also them socializing, right?
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_00: So he's building this culture in that team of a team that's tight, they're working hard, they're growing, they're socializing, they're having fun.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_00: And that, you know, if if you saw that and you liked that, that's the sort of person that he's probably trying to attract into the team.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, Alfred's done a great job with that.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_00: I know Alfred.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_00: Another person I've I do not know, but I've just recently been seeing some of her posts is Amy Slater, who works at Palo Alto Networks.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: And if you look at her posts over the past two or three months, you can see someone who obviously, you know, teamwork and working with their team and meeting with their team and bonding with their team is super important.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_00: But then she goes and volunteers as well outside of work and she talks to other groups.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_00: I saw one recently, she was at, I think, at UC Berkeley, talking to a bunch of people about sales there and things like that.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_00: Really fascinating, right?
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_00: And if you look at what she's doing, she's she's saying, This is what we're working on, and we we met last week and for a QBR over here, and then you see the group and she talks about you know the passion behind it and things like that.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't know, I mean, maybe all she's doing is just trying to portray, you know, really how she's feeling.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe it's very, very natural, but it's a great example of someone.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_00: If I'm looking in from the outside and I'm kind of interested or intrigued, I'm going, well, you know, that's a that's an interesting person to work for there right there, right?
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_00: She seems to be attracting a great group of people.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_00: They talk highly of her, you know, building a certain culture.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe I might be attracted towards that group, if that was you know the type of role I was interested in.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, you got to think about how you use these tools to keep the excitement going, keep the interest, raise the interest over time, so that when territories do open up for you, they may well align with the interest level from someone else uh looking to come in that's on your bench.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: So, takeaways from this is yeah, this needs to be consistent.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_00: Building bench activities die if you try and do too much too soon and you realize it's dominating your schedule, and then you'll drop it.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, the the truth the key is to block out time every week to do this.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_00: My recommendation is you can do everything I've talked about, doing it in less than two hours per week.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_00: And if you only work the 40 hours in a standard work week, that's only 5% of your time.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_00: So that's not a huge amount.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_00: And my final action for you is I've actually got a resource for you to look at.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's completely free, it's ungated.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not asking for emails, just to look at the main content.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_00: And to get to that, you go to unstoppable.do forward slash BYB.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_00: And that's that's for build your bench BYB.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_00: So unstoppable.do forward slash BYB.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_00: And in there will be a lot more detail about the about the activities we talked about, how to go about doing them, things like that.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_00: And then there's other resources you can access where I do ask for an email to get there, but you can get going with that, the extras if you if you want to.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_00: So I'd encourage you to take that next step.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_00: Building your bench will significantly impact your ability to execute over time.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_00: In the medium and long term, you'll be very, very thankful that you can build your bench.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's it's like you know, the best time to plant a tree was 30 years ago, and the next best time is today.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_00: Same thing with building your bench.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_00: The best time to start building it was probably two years ago.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_00: The next best time to do it is today.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_00: If you like this podcast, the most useful thing you could do to support it is share it with just one person.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_00: It will mean the world to me, but more importantly, for that one person, it may well transform how they lead and also their results in the coming quarters of the year.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_00: It will take you just 20 seconds.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_00: All you have to do is click the share icon in your podcast app and follow the promo.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_00: Also, I need your suggestions, please.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_00: If you have a topic you want me to cover or just want to get in touch, simply email me at upside at unstoppable.do.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_00: That's upside at unstoppable.do.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_00: And now to wrap up this episode, training without implementation is just entertainment.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_00: So if you heard something today that you want to use, take action right now and keep getting better every single day.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_00: And finally, I'm signing off as the great Joe Sexton would by saying, gone to sell.