EP 76: John McMahon (5x CRO and Enterprise Sales Expert) on The Startup Sales Playbook Every Founder Needs

John McMahon has served on the board of MongoDB and Snowflake and is best known as a five-time CRO who has built the sales processes that power enterprise sales in Silicon Valley. In this episode, John talked through a ton of practical topics around sales, including the biggest sales mistakes that early-stage startups make, how to hire a sales team to supercharge your company, and more. (0:00) Intro (1:20) The Qualified Sales Leader (9:57) Sales basics in building an efficient and scalable sales org (16:53) Carlo Carelli - Greatest Salesperson in the World (20:55) Product market fit (26:07) The medic qualification process (36:35) Difference between a champion and a coach (42:51) Best interview questions when hiring (53:49) The hardest part of transitioning to sales management (1:03:06) On firing (1:10:06) The process of letting someone go (1:11:30) Accidental sales leader (1:17:25) John McMahon as a sales rep early on (1:21:24) Blade Logic and Opsware (1:26:37) The most common misconception about sales Mixed and edited: Justin Hrabovsky Produced: Rashad Assir Executive Producer: Josh Machiz Music: Griff Lawson 🎙 Listen to the show Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/three-cartoon-avatars/id1606770839 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5WqBqDb4br3LlyVrdqOYYb?si=3076e6c1b5c94d63&nd=1 Google Podcasts: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5zaW1wbGVjYXN0LmNvbS9zb0hJZkhWbg 🎥 Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCugS0jD5IAdoqzjaNYzns7w?sub_confirmation=1 Follow on Socials 📸 Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/theloganbartlettshow 🐦 Twitter - https://twitter.com/loganbartshow 🎬 Clips on TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@theloganbartlettshow About the Show Logan Bartlett is a Software Investor at Redpoint Ventures - a Silicon Valley-based VC with $6B AUM and investments in Snowflake, DraftKings, Twilio, and Netflix. In each episode, Logan goes behind the scenes with world-class entrepreneurs and investors. If you're interested in the real inside baseball of tech, entrepreneurship, and start-up investing, tune in every Friday for new episodes. Executive Producer: Rashad Assir Producer: Leah Clapper Mixing and editing: Justin Hrabovsky Check out Unsupervised Learning, Redpoint's AI Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@UCUl-s_Vp-Kkk_XVyDylNwLA 🎥 Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCugS0jD5IAdoqzjaNYzns7w?sub_confirmation=1 Follow on Socials 📸 Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/theloganbartlettshow 📱 X - https://twitter.com/loganbartshow 🎬 Clips on TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@theloganbartlettshow About the Show Logan Bartlett is a Software Investor at Redpoint Ventures - a Silicon Valley-based VC with $6B AUM and investments in Snowflake, DraftKings, Twilio, and Netflix. In each episode of The Logan Bartlett Show, we sit down with the people behind today’s most important startups and extract the tactics, lessons, and frameworks they’ve learned the hard way. Conversations span hiring to GTM, product, growth, fundraising and everything in between - collectively forming the ultimate playbook to make you a better CEO, investor or board member. Tap follow and enable notifications to stay ahead of the game.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Logan Bartlett?

  Welcome to the Logan Bartlett Show. I am your host, Logan Bartlett, and what you're going to hear in this conversation is a discussion I had with John McMahon. Now, John is both a board member at MongoDB as well as Snowflake, but he is best known as a five-time CRO that has built the sales processes and trained the salespeople that power enterprise selling in Silicon Valley. John and I talked through a bunch of different things related to selling and sales process, including the biggest mistakes that early-stage startups make, as well as how to hire a team to supercharge your company to the next level. Now, before we get into that, a brief request to please subscribe to this on whatever podcast channel you're listening to us on. Now, without further ado, here's John.

• 0:48Speaker 01

  So, the Logan Bartlett Show with your name, it sounds like, you know, I'm getting on a Johnny Carson show.

• 0:53Logan Bartlett?

  That's what we're going for here. You know, it had a different name once upon a time, and I realized the reason I was doing it was to have accumulating value to myself. And so, why have a distinct brand that was separate? Like, why try to create a third brand around all this stuff? And so, I rebranded it in January, and it's been, it's been good. It's been, so our audience, so you have it, is, it's mostly founders, investors, and executives of tech companies, or tech curious people. And I think people that write books are really good at this. And so, I've, I've got you right here. But the structured frameworks for how

• 1:37Logan Bartlett?

  to think about things, but some of the questions I pulled together, some of the things I want to ask you about, I think people just want to be educated, and I'm sure you found this with your own podcast, like, people want to walk out of this and be able to tell their colleagues that they heard, here's how to hire a VP of Sales, or here's how to internalize that our reps, what our reps need to do better for next quarter, or whatever, like, all that little actionable stuff. So, I'm going to try to tease out a bunch of that stuff from you, but your book did such a good job outlining it that I think, I think it kind of gives me the playbook to, to go about it.

• 2:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, the hard part of writing it wasn't actually structuring everything, because I could put that together very quickly, you know, but then I didn't want to write. A boring, what I call like college textbook where it's just a chapter. You close the first chapter, you feel like, I want to close this book. My head hurts. I don't want to see it again.

• 2:31Logan Bartlett?

  Totally.

• 2:31Speaker 01

  So that's why I made it into a story and make it into a story when you're really not an English major. I was an electrical engineering major. That was really difficult. So I had to learn about the hero's journey and custom and, you know, and character arcs and stuff like that. That was, boy, that was hard.

• 2:49Logan Bartlett?

  I came into it, uh, not realizing what style of book it was going to be. And so I expected the textbook. Uh, that was what I was expecting to get. And the first, uh, few pages of it, I was like, hang on, are we gonna, is this just going to be, uh, like fictionalized characters? And so the first couple of pages of digesting it, I was like, wait a second, what's going on here? And then it puts all the stuff in practice and in actionable terms that was easier to internalize, right? Then like trying to remember the five forces of hiring a VP of Sales or like going through the characters and all that stuff.

• 3:31Logan Bartlett?

  It's just, it was an easier read than maybe I expected from a sales book.

• 3:36Speaker 01

  I've heard that from so many people. They felt like they could put the book down and go do something right now. And so many people say now that they just have it on their desk. It's like their Bible with all the yellow sticky notes in it. And they reference it all the time. And then some companies, you know, it's mandatory reading when you come to the company. Okta, Z-Scale, or a number of other ones.

• 4:00Logan Bartlett?

  That's great. I, I, uh, my one, my one, uh, quip with you is that I need an audiobook version of that beautiful New York Jersey combined accent of you just reading to me, uh, through, you know, all the salient points. I, this is the first hardcover book I've probably read in, I don't know, a year or something. So I, uh, that's what I want. I want the audiobook.

• 4:21Speaker 01

  Okay. So I thought, cause I just literally hired a guy. And I said, I can't be every character. So what I'm going to do is get. Somebody that can help me, I'll read all my parts and then I'll get somebody that can go out and outsource other people to read the other characters, characters. I don't know what you think about that because I think it's pretty boring of me just reading it.

• 4:44Logan Bartlett?

  I mean, I don't know you, you in like falsetto, you're like you in a tenor voice, you up and down.

• 4:51Speaker 01

  I don't know. I don't have that reading, brother. You're thinking of somebody else.

• 4:54Logan Bartlett?

  I don't know. I think it would be, I think it would be good. I think you could play all the characters, a one man like Broadway show out there, just you acting out the, the forego journey of the company, but.

• 5:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 5:06Logan Bartlett?

  Well, good. Well, I appreciate you doing this. So I do want to talk about the book and a bunch of different stuff here, but I think first and foremost, I'd be curious your perspective. I mean, you've been doing this for so long and the, the, the industry has, has evolved, but also stayed the same. Is there, is there a single thing that you, as you look back on your career of working with startups or even now being a board member, like the single thing that's hardest for executives or investors or founders to internalize about sales?

• 5:42Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, there's a number of things. I think that they, especially with the venture capitalists that I've, you know, been with that haven't been operators of a business. Um, I think they, first of all, they don't understand the importance of planning early in the year this year for next year. And why I say that is, you know, if you think about enterprise salespeople, they have a six month ramp before they're considered that they should be productive. Productive meaning that every quarter after they've been there six months, they're going to be on quota. Right? So what I, what I saw was it would be like November, almost

• 6:25Speaker 01

  December, and they'd say, Hey, we're going to do 50 million this year. And let's say they have 50 sales reps to make the numbers easy. Let's do a hundred next year. So they don't really understand. And sometimes the tech CEO hasn't been through this process either. And they say, great, let's do a hundred million. They go to the poor CRO and say, "Hey, next year, we're going to do 100 million." "Well, how's that possible? I have 50 sales reps today, each doing a million dollars in business. How am I going to do 100 million next year? Well, just go hire 50 more sales reps." Well, you can't hire 50 A players in a month.

• 7:05Speaker 01

  You know, it's the old, you know, well, I won't, I won't actually say it, but you, you just can't hire that many people that quickly and expect that you're going to come out with, you know, the productivity that you need. So you can't onboard 50, if you only have 50 people, you can't onboard 50 people, you can't train them, develop them, and then you can't squeeze that ramp. If the ramp was six months previously, there's no reason to believe that that ramp is now going to be a month. So even if you hired 50 salespeople on January 1st, they're not fully ramped until July 1st. You've lost six months of the year. So there's no chance of you doing 100 million.

• 7:45Speaker 01

  Yet I've still seen many organizations still try to make that work, and it just doesn't work. And the second part of that is the discipline of recruiting. Because if you're going to hire 50 salespeople all at once, chances are you're not going to get all A players. You're going to get some Bs, you're going to get a lot of Cs. The second piece of the discipline of recruiting is that you have to lead with management. Because all these reps are going to need a manager to train them, develop them, and help them sell, and actually try to squeeze that ramp time down from six months. So what a lot of companies do when they have a race to have the right amount of headcount,

• 8:29Speaker 01

  those 50 reps to make next year's number, they hire a lot of reps. But it's almost like building a bridge over, let's say, the Bay Bridge in San Francisco. It's almost like, you know, they put the pillars down in the water first. Those would be the leaders. Then they build the road over the pillars. What a lot of companies want to do is just build a road out there with no pillars, and the thing collapses on itself. And I've seen that happen time and time again. And then if they're, if the company's scaling, what I think a lot of people don't appreciate is that every, before you're going to scale, you have to nail everything down as a process. The recruiting process, the pipeline generation process, the candidate interviewing process.

• 9:13Speaker 01

  You know, all of those things need to be processes that are nailed down with measurable steps and KPIs for each and every one of those steps so that you can really understand what's going right and what's going wrong.

• 9:25Logan Bartlett?

  In the book that you go through and you outline a bunch of sales basics, and I would love to talk through each of those and it might be, it might require you circling back to some of the points you just made. But why they're, they're important in, in building out a highly efficient and scalable sales organization? So the first one you talk about is common vocabulary. Can you say a little bit about like why having a common vocabulary is important to a sales team?

• 9:55Speaker 01

  Yo, I've gone into many, I've been invited into many like QBRs and then they ask me to sit there and listen to them go over the forecast. So then I hear people say champion, economic buyer, coach, technical buyer. And they're throwing out all this terminology and then I just make like I'm innocent and I stand up and say, hey, can I just ask a question? You know, what is, since I'm new here, what's your definition of what a champion is? And I might ask three different people in the room live and I'll get three different answers. So that means that in this conversation that they're having about the forecast, they're talking past each other. And I think, you know, any sports playbook, you know, every position, every player has a name to it.

• 10:39Speaker 01

  It has a definition to it, what they do, every play has a name, every play has defining actions and what every player does. And that has to be the same in sales so that when we talk about the customers that are in this sales situation, the economic buyer, the champion, the coach, the fox, the enemy, those types of things, we all conjure up the same definition in our heads when we're talking about it. And the same has to happen in the sales process for every step and every stage in every.

• 11:11Speaker 01

  In the sales process, we have to have a definition of what has to occur there. Who has to do that? What skills do you need and what knowledge do you need to be able to execute that play flawlessly?

• 11:23Logan Bartlett?

  The next two points you had were listening and be here were the phrases you use. What do those mean in the sales context?

• 11:33Speaker 01

  Well, be here, I think that these days I say that everybody's in a constant state of partial attention. What I mean by that is they're checking social media. They're hearing their alerts, they're getting texts, they're getting emails, they're getting phone calls. And no one really seems to be in the moment and be here right now, present. And if you're going to make sales calls and you're going to talk to customers, you've got to be here and you have to be in the moment. And if you're not here and you're not in the moment, there's no chance that you can be a very effective listener. And in fact, in most situations in daily life, when you're speaking to people, you almost get the feeling that before I'm almost done speaking, they already have something that they want to say.

• 12:17Speaker 01

  So they're not listening to really what I'm saying. And listening is maybe one of the most underrated skills or characteristics that a salesperson can have. And the reason I think it's a skill and it's not a characteristic is it's something you have to pay attention to all the time. Am I really here in this moment? Am I truly listening to what Logan says? Am I listening with the intent to understand? Or am I listening with the intent so that I can say something? So I think that those two things go hand in hand.

• 12:50Logan Bartlett?

  In terms of self-awareness and self-awareness, intuition and transformational mindset, those seem to be characteristics of people that you bring on. Are those skills or are those innate things? And how do those translate to a sales process?

• 13:08Speaker 01

  Well, intuition goes basically with being here and listening, right? I mean, for me, I've always thought that my intuition gave me like a second processing unit, so I have my head that can process data and what I see. But my intuition can really process data also. So for me, actually, Logan, I always felt that I was best. You know, in a sales situation when there's, let's say, 10 customers in the room. So I walk in the room and I'm really trying to be here. And I'm using my intuition as I go around the room shaking hands and looking in people's eyes and saying, okay, this person could be a potential champion. This person looks like they don't care. Somebody just told them to show up to the meeting. This person could be the economic buyer.

• 13:52Speaker 01

  And I try to use my intuition just with those handshakes and looking in people's eyes and saying, hi, I'm John, what's your name? And then when I sit down and through the meeting, I'm checking how my intuition is doing, you know, am I right, am I wrong? But, you know, so many people, because they're not here, they're not in the moment, they're not listening, they don't really use their intuition anymore. And I feel like the best decisions that I've made is when, you know, the data that I logically get presented to me and processed through my mind, that when that rings true with my intuition, then I know I'm making the right decision, right? Self-awareness is a little something different, like as a salesperson or a leader, you have to know how you come across to other people.

• 14:37Speaker 01

  So I can't tell you how many times I've had, you know, some issues with people that worked for me, and I would pull them aside and sit them down in a room and I'd say, hey, Logan, when you're not around, what do you think the book is on you? Well, what do you mean? Well, if we were going to describe Logan's characteristics and his effect on other people, what do you think the book would say? And it's amazing how many times, these are supposed to be salespeople, they're supposed to be perceptive, that they just don't understand what the real book is on them. So they lack self-awareness. And if you lack self-awareness and you don't understand your effect on other people, that

• 15:19Speaker 01

  can become very problematic in trying to be successful as a salesperson.

• 15:23Logan Bartlett?

  Can you tease these things out in a hiring process? Like, are there specific questions that you're able to ask for self-awareness and seeing if a person actually has that?

• 15:35Speaker 01

  You definitely can with intuition. You know, like, I might be halfway through the interview process and say, hey, Logan, how do you think you're doing? Well, what do you mean? That's exactly what I asked you. How are you doing in this interview? Is it going positive? Is it going negative? Now, There may not be any real right answer, but I want to hear how they answer. What factors did they put into that answer to see whether or to tell me whether or not they think it's going positive or it's going negative? So I can kind of test out their intuition. And also go back on for listening, go back on some things that I've said before and ask them and go back and check on it again and see if they were truly listening to what

• 16:20Speaker 01

  I said.

• 16:21Logan Bartlett?

  On the urgent curiosity side, that was the last one of the basics that you spoke about. And there, there was a very colorful gentleman that you referenced in here by the name of?

• 16:32Speaker 01

  Carlo Carpagnelli, greatest salesperson in the world.

• 16:35Logan Bartlett?

  So I want to read you the excerpt from the book describing Carlo. And it's, it's such a visible person in my mind that you were talking about, but you described him as when you first met him, he walked in with a three day old beard, a closely cropped DIY haircut and a black turtleneck sweater covered with a purple sports jacket. In addition, his tan corduroy pants with large tufted cords and brown shoes were a typical of any Italian candidate I had previously met. It was hard to understand his broken English and I couldn't help but noticing his two chipped front teeth when he smiled.

• 17:10Speaker 01

  Right.

• 17:11Logan Bartlett?

  So not exactly, I think, people hear Italian salesperson and Carlo Carpagnelli, is that right? I'll get it right eventually. Yeah. Doesn't sound like the, the typical salesperson. What made him so talented? And why do you describe him as the, the best salesperson you ever met?

• 17:32Speaker 01

  Well, let's put that into perspective, the way he showed up, because these days you might be able to show up like that and that was okay. But back then, like 20 years ago, you know, in the Milano office in Italy, everybody, every candidate that walked in looked like they were going to be an Italian model, right? They had their hair perfect. They had, they were clean shaven. They had a suit on a biony or a ketone, you know, suit on with beautiful, you know? You know Ferragamo shoes and um and they and they they played the part and then in came Carlo. And this is where I had to use, you know, some listening, questioning skills. And also my intuition on whether or not I was going to take a chance to hire this guy.

• 18:17Speaker 01

  But what made Carlo so amazing as a salesperson is he, one, he never took anything personally. Two, he was so curious that he would genuinely ask, why? How come? I don't understand. So if a customer basically attacked him and saying that was something really wrong with his product. He'd look him in the eyes and say, yeah, but but why like? And it might be true, but Carlo wanted to understand, why does the customer think that way? And it was so genuine that it would disarm these customers. And it would allow him to overcome those objections.

• 18:58Speaker 01

  And he sold some of the biggest deals in the in the company, you know, year after year. And he was actually able to get to the highest levels of organization. So I'm talking about like the CEO of Ferrari, who at that time was Luca de Montezemolo. And he would get to the CEO of GD and all the major corporations in in Italy. So that's what made him great was he wanted to understand why and it was genuine.

• 19:27Logan Bartlett?

  Is that something that you can that you knew and sensed when you were first hiring him? This urgent curiosity, as you described it? Or was that you just had a spidey sense and an intuition or feel that this was a special individual?

• 19:42Speaker 01

  No, I couldn't really understand him so well with his broken English. So what I did to him is I said to him towards the end of the interview, I said, I paused so I could create a little urgency. And I said, Carlo, I'm not so sure you can do the job. And he looked at me with those eyes and said, and twisted his head a little bit and said, but why? Like, how how could you possibly think that way? And I, at that moment is when I knew, okay, I'm going to hire this guy. No. So yeah, you could say I took a leap of faith, which I usually don't do when I'm hiring people. But in Carlos' situation, I did.

• 20:22Logan Bartlett?

  You talk a lot about the whys of selling and Jody Bonsall referenced this as well. But can we talk about like how each of those are important and how you think about it from a product market fit standpoint? So the first one is, why do they have to buy? And I think, why do they have to buy from you? How do you think about that question?

• 20:45Speaker 01

  Well, there's a couple of ways in which I use it. If I'm going to go actually like, like I did work with Jody at AppDynamics. And if I'm going to go talk to Jody and I don't know him and I don't know his product, and he's asking me to maybe be an advisor to his company, I'm going to hide the fact that I'm going to ask him those three whys. So the first, and then the same thing. If a sales rep gets up in front of me and they're going to tell me about their forecast about a certain customer, I don't really need to go into med pick or medic to qualify. I can just simply ask them first, tell me why they have to buy. So the reason that they have to buy is they have to solve a pain. And if you can't identify the pain, then you don't know why they have to buy.

• 21:28Speaker 01

  The second one is, you know, why do they have to buy from us? And the reason that they would have to buy from us is because we have differentiators in our product that perfectly align to the customer's pain points, which means we can solve their problem uniquely,

• 21:47Speaker 01

  more than any other company that's, that's on the earth. So there's perfect alignment there. And then, why do they have to buy now? Is the urgency, what, you know, why do they have to buy now? Why not later? Why not a workaround? Why do they have to buy it all now? Why can't they just buy some of it now? You know, why is it so urgent? And I think when you can truly answer those three questions, okay, it's time to think about where that deal is in the sales process and whether or not we can force it, forecast it right now. And if I'm sitting in front of a CEO that asks me whether or not You know, I want to advise this company, consult or be on the board. They have to be able to answer those three questions. Otherwise, I'm really not interested.

• 22:29Logan Bartlett?

  And one of the important things is that being true for a subset of customers, right? It doesn't need to be true for the totality of businesses out there. But there needs to be, I guess, the snowflake example. It was initially ad tech and a little bit of tech businesses as well. Is this, do you prefer to have a very narrow landing point within an industry for answering those questions initially? Or would you prefer it be a broad set of customers that it applies to?

• 22:59Speaker 01

  You mean when we're starting the company as a seller?

• 23:02Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, in the early days of selling. How important is it?

• 23:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, in the early days of selling, it's super important because you, too many, too many companies hire, you know, they start their company, they get a big round of funding, and then they do what I call sprinkle the infield. So they put a sales rep in all the major cities or NFL cities in the United States, right? And then they're hoping that those people can sell. But what they haven't done is taken the time to understand their ICP. What's that? That's the ideal customer profile. So going back to the three whys, understanding the differentiators that we do have in our product right now, okay? Now we work backwards. What pains do they really solve? Okay, if we know that they solve these pains, what use cases are those pains in? Okay, now what use cases, where are those use cases typically located?

• 23:50Speaker 01

  Like, what companies are they in? Okay, inside those companies, which persona owns those use cases? Okay, and then what industries are they typical? Now, based upon that, I'm not going to sprinkle the infield with sales reps. I'm only going to put them in the cities that have those, the greatest amount of those companies with those use cases, so therefore I can sell there. Then what I do is train my sales reps, you know, and choreograph my messaging, choreograph my demonstration, particularly to those use cases, and so will resonate with those personas. And I know everything about that persona, too. I know how they're measured, how they're, what their budget is, you know, and I speak to them in their language.

• 24:36Speaker 01

  And when you do that, then you can go down like to tech and ad tech like Snowflake did originally, build up enough revenues that you can feed development and development can continue to add enhancements and take you into other bowling lanes that you can go down.

• 24:53Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. The being able to target customers and then there's the referential element of, you know, people in ad tech know other people in ad tech and having that validation within these industries, I'm sure, leads to even more efficient sales processes and the ability to go from the early adopters to the whatever the crossing the chasm stages are or something.

• 25:19Speaker 01

  But it's really number one reason why so many startups burn so much money and don't really come out, you know, efficient, they're not making efficient use of their, of the money that they pour into the sales force because they really don't understand their ICP.

• 25:35Logan Bartlett?

  So we dove into a bunch of the, the specific stuff that you cover in detail in the book, but one of the things that I think you touch on a little bit, but that you're perhaps best known for or the, the father of is the, the medic qualification process, not sales methodology. I know, I know that's not the right term, but it's a qualification methodology, right? Medic and med pick?

• 26:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. So let's think about it. Let me give you analogy. If I'm going to explain it is you have a sales process. Your sales process is like a Google map. If I'm going to drive from Boston to New York, I type it into Google Maps. It tells me the ideal route to get to, to New York the quickest. If I, same thing with a sales process. You're talking about all the different stages, maybe five stages and different steps inside those stages that tell you if you follow these and don't skip any steps, you're going to get, it's the fastest way to a purchase order. Now, when I am driving from Boston and I get an hour outside of Boston, I got to stop for gas. I might get off the road and now I got to get back on the road. So I made a wrong turn essentially. Okay. I need a GPS

• 26:45Speaker 01

  to tell me, tell Google Maps how to get me back onto the right highway. And it's the same thing with. With MedPic, it's something that has to layer on to your sales process so that you can understand when you're asking people questions, you know, at what stage are we at and what step in that stage is the deal? And it's used for a lot of purposes. One, to forecast deals. Two, to train your sales reps. If I know that Logan always gets to step three in stage two and his deals start to stall, then just like that playbook we were talking about earlier, I now

• 27:24Speaker 01

  know that he's either lacking a certain knowledge or he's lacking a certain skill to overcome that that step in the sales stage. So he can execute it flawlessly. Right? So I can use it for for multiple, you know, multiple ways. But mainly it's used to figure out, you know, where are we in this deal? Who do we need to talk to? What information do we need so that we understand what the next steps are?

• 27:51Logan Bartlett?

  What was the history of this? Because and I want to talk about the background and coming up with MPTC and then Blade Logic and all of that. But was this a process that you had refined at one of the stops along the way? And then the terminology was only later codified? Or how did it actually come to be?

• 28:11Speaker 01

  Necessity is the mother of invention, Logan. So, so for the first three and a half years of PTC when we started, the product didn't work. And we, at that time, we came out with a major release every six months, which at that time seemed like really fast. Whereas today, you could do, you know, a release, you know, every, every, every hour, you could do a major release every week. So

• 28:35Logan Bartlett?

  It was till V7, right? You didn't actually, you were shipping a product that didn't totally function. So when you went back a year later or two years later with a new version of it, like, were they saying, hey, this didn't work? And you were saying, yes, but now this one will?

• 28:48Speaker 01

  No, we would say, they would say it didn't work. So we would sell them a copy of the software because we only had a two-stage step, a sales process. We would demo and close. We were no different than pot and pan sales guys or vacuum cleaner sales guys. We got our way in And we were going to give you an amazing demo, so well-choreographed. And I knew what I was going to say. The application engineer knew what they were going to say. We knew what objections were coming. We've handled them before. And we're going to demonstrate this thing flawlessly. Like, the curtains open, the white hot spotlight comes on, and we're going to town. We're dancing. And people would say, "This is really amazing. Hey, can I get a loner?" "No." "Can I do a benchmark?" "No." "How about a POC?" "Nope." "Can I lease it?" "Nope."

• 29:33Speaker 01

  "What can we do?" "You could buy it." "You buy it?" "Yeah." "Okay." So they'd buy it. You know, we talked them into buying a copy. They'd call back like a week or two later and say, "Hey, I'm trying it on this geometry," because it was mechanical computer-aided design. And they say, "Like, I can't get it to work. I need an enhancement." "Okay, well, if you need an enhancement, you're going to have to order a couple more copies." "Well, John, I just told you the one I got doesn't work." "I know." "But if you want to step up and get priority in the enhancement process, you have to buy a couple more copies." So we talked them into buying one or two more copies. And so what happened is, in Rev 7, we could, you know, demo the product, and the sales process could change.

• 30:17Speaker 01

  We would actually could do it like a POV. What happened was, we were competing against two companies that were $1 billion in revenue, that had a broad breadth of product. And we knew that if we tried to just say, "Okay, we'll compete against those people, we're going to lose." So this is where the decision criteria came into play, where we had to lock down a criteria that we knew, if we can frame it in this box, we can win. Anything outside that box, we're going to lose. And we actually got a bad reputation, because we would go into an account saying we would play. And then, once the criteria got too big for us, we'd say, "We're out. We're not even going to play. We're not even going to let you touch the software."

• 30:59Speaker 01

  So then what happened is we've, we would lock down the criteria and then we would find out, you know, again, this is all the scars of experience. We would find out that sometimes there was a strong champion in the account for the competition and they would change the process on us. They'd make us do the P O C and then they'd say, and then we'd win and they'd say, oh, well, we want to add some more stuff and they changed the process. So we said, okay, now we got to nail the process. Who's involved in the process? You know, how many steps are in the process and when does it end? So that's the second date. So we started to do that, but then we also realized like, hey, you know, we got these guys that really don't have a lot of power in the accounts. They're buying one seat

• 31:43Speaker 01

  here, two seats there, but they don't really have a lot of power. And this decision criteria and process still changes on us. When we walk into an account, it can be unpredictable. You know, as a salesperson, if you want to walk in and know that things haven't really changed. So then that's when we figured out we have to get somebody that's called a champion where they can, you know, help us control the criteria and control the process. Not a coach, a champion. They got power inside the account. They have influence with the top executives in the account. So that, that became the thing. Okay. So now we really started to win. Now instead of one or two seats, we're winning 10 and 20 seats. But then we started looking around and saying, hey, this company has 500 seats, 500 engineers.

• 32:27Speaker 01

  We want them all. Why don't we go up high? So we go up to this guy that we called the economic buyer because they basically had all the money. And that might be the VP of engineering, maybe a division leader, a general manager, or a CEO of a company. And then we started talking our features and functions and they'd say, hey, timeout, I got a CAD manager four levels down. Go talk to them. So we realized at that point, in order to get to the economic buyer and talk to them about what we could do, we had to change our language and we had to talk about time to market, engineering productivity, engineering costs, those types of things and never mention CAD, never mention anything technology wise.

• 33:12Speaker 01

  But we also found out, hey, what they're looking for is they're looking for other customers that did the same thing. And we're going to need an ROI to do that. So we're going to need the before scenario and the after scenario. So here came the I, like identify the pain, identify the problem, identify the initiative, and then tie the metrics around the pain in the before scenario. And then what can we do in the after scenario to enhance engineering productivity, reduce costs, and increase revenues by getting the product out the door quicker? So that was the genesis of MedPic. It took, you know, years to really get there. And again, through, through a lot of scars of experience.

• 33:54Logan Bartlett?

  So it's, it's, it's a process, or it's a qualification methodology where you're shaping the decision criteria, one of the Ds, and the process around the decisioning. That's the other, the D as well. But then, setting yourself up for success, so that you can qualify down the right number of opportunities, and then make sure that you have the highest probability of landing a, a large deal within, within the account. And what, what's, what's amazing to me about this, and internalizing all of this stuff, is that it's very scientific, in a lot of ways, of like how you go about architecting the sales process. I think most founders think

• 34:38Logan Bartlett?

  of sales as a, or technical founders can think of it as black magic, and it's very much an art. But when you lay it out in these terms, it's such an architecture of building the, the process that I think has a lot of parallels to being, building a technical architecture as well. Was that going through your mind? Or did that just happen to be that it, both of these things sort of had mathematic structures to them in a way that also would resonate with technical founders?

• 35:09Speaker 01

  No, it definitely went through my mind. You know, I have an electrical engineering degree. And if there's only one thing you're taught in engineering school, it's that everything has to be defined as a process, right? So you had to think in terms of, you know, a sales process, and then think in terms of how am I going to measure exactly where I am at each and every point of that process, so I can change things, I can, you know, understand why I'm doing things right, or why I'm, things are going wrong. But the biggest thing in that whole med pick thing, it all hinges on having a really strong champion. And that's where most salespeople make a mistake. They get a coach, they get somebody that likes them, wants them to win, gives them inside information, um, kind of

• 35:52Speaker 01

  masquerades and tells them, yeah, I got the power, I can, I can buy this stuff. And they really don't have any true influence in the account with the economic buyer. They can't get a meeting with the economic buyer.

• 36:03Logan Bartlett?

  And the difference between a champion and a coach is the, uh, is the authority and the, the influence. Can you draw the distinctions there?

• 36:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I usually think of an organization chart as that's something that just shows you who has authority in the account, who's in the leadership positions. That's authority, right? But authority doesn't always go hand in hand with influence. So if I'm the CEO of the company or CRO of the company and seven o'clock at night and I got a problem, depending upon where the, what the problem is, I may go down three, four levels to people that I know are subject matter experts or have made good decisions on these things in the, in the past. And those are a lot of times in organizations, especially big organizations, people that are in charge of initiatives, you know? So the CEO says in the annual report, we're going to do these six things. They put initiatives in place. Guess who's in

• 36:55Speaker 01

  charge of those initiatives? All could be potential champions, right? So they have influence with the economic buyer. They have respect in the organization. That usually comes from technical respect or political power. Everybody knows that Logan is an up and comer. You ask enough questions, they know, oh, that guy right there, he's going places in this company, right? Or if it's on a certain domain, then there might be a technical champion that everybody turns to and says, when it's this subject, that's the person in the organization, everybody's going to turn to for the decision. And you have to smoke those people out. You have to find out where they are.

• 37:32Logan Bartlett?

  Has your thought process on sales changed with the rise of companies like Atlassian or HubSpot or Datadog or some of these more bottoms up PLG businesses? Has that informed any of these, these things? Or is that just kind of a distinct motion?

• 37:49Speaker 01

  I think it's a distinct motion. Again, if you think like I do, that everything's a process, then in PLG, it's a process too. It's just not as an extensive process as enterprise sales, where you sell on multimillion dollar deals. All you're doing with PLG is you're taking like a free tier and trying to convert people to a paid tier. So there is a process and you have to understand, well, what are you trying to qualify for in that process? Is it usage? Is it activity? Is it the usage of specific functions? Is it, is it the person, the title, the organization, the persona? So everybody's looking for indicators and they start analyzing every which way in PLG to analyze,

• 38:29Speaker 01

  what indicators do we need to see that can say that this is a qualified opportunity? And this thing should convert from a free, from the free tier to the paid tier.

• 38:40Logan Bartlett?

  One of the things that you, you highlight in such a meaningful way in your book is the importance of, of hiring. And one of the quotes that resonated with me was if sales managers hire C-grade players and do everything else perfectly, onboarding, training, developing and maintaining a great sales process, that team will still have a difficult time becoming the number one sales force. However, if you only hire grade A players and do everything else average, the A players will find a way to win. And then the other adage or, or phrasing you use in the book is A players hire A players, but B players hire C players. Can you talk a little bit about the, the importance of recruiting and, and hiring?

• 39:20Logan Bartlett?

  And why these things are the case between A players and B and C players?

• 39:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, first of all, that's, that statement is a little bit of an exaggeration. I'm not saying that we should do anything average, but it was just trying to.

• 39:33Logan Bartlett?

  You should probably try to be good at all of them.

• 39:35Speaker 01

  It shows the difference between hiring As and hiring Cs.

• 39:40Speaker 01

  Well, I think recruiting is everything, especially if you're a startup and you have big aspirations to be in a multi-billion dollar company, then recruiting becomes everything because the people you recruit today are your future leaders tomorrow. So you have, for me. I didn't really care so much about, let's say a PTC as an example, and we can use other companies. A lot of people want to know that they have domain experience. Okay, I don't really care about that. And they want to know that they have a skill in certain things. I don't really care about that so much. What I really care about is the characteristics of the person. So if I really think about recruiting somebody, interviewing somebody, they have knowledge,

• 40:24Speaker 01

  they have skills, they have execution experience or a track record, which tells you a little something about their background. But their resume doesn't really tell you much. It tells you whether or not they're job hoppers. It tells you some domains that they've been in, but that's about it. The big bucket is the characteristics. Why is that so big? Well, if I hire somebody that's super intelligent, then I'm going to be able, they're going to be able to learn and gain the knowledge that I train them on very quickly. If they're super competitive and they have what I call a PhD, persistence, heart and desire, then they're going to pick up the skills, because skills are things that are learned over time through many different repetitions. Then I'm looking for people that are coachable and adaptable.

• 41:09Speaker 01

  Because sometimes people are very coachable and Logan will say, "Yeah, John, I understand exactly what you're saying." But then I have to come back to Logan two weeks later and tell him again. He goes, "Yeah, I understand what you're saying. I'm going to do it." But Logan never adapts. And when the startups I've been in, sometimes you're in a startup and for two years you look at certain people and go, "Oh my gosh, their skill set and the things they know are just, I wish I could do some of those things." Two years later, when the products changed, the competitions changed, the customers have changed, the markets changed, the messaging has changed, they haven't changed. They haven't adapted. And now they look like a dinosaur. And that's when those people typically, you know, have to leave on their own fruition or are asked to leave.

• 41:53Speaker 01

  So coachability, adaptability, and then...

• 41:58Speaker 01

  You know, you and I talked about curiosity. I think that's huge because that just is another sign of a willingness to learn and a potential willingness to adapt. And then finally, for me, the last one is integrity. You know, if you have real integrity, then I'll, and this is a fast growing company. I don't have to worry about looking, looking back over my shoulder into the past.

• 42:18Logan Bartlett?

  What are your best interview questions for these, these different traits? I read in the book, the, the most competitive thing you've ever done is one of them. And the most difficult situation you've had to overcome. Maybe speak a little bit about those, those questions, but then also any others that you can try to assess.

• 42:36Speaker 01

  Well, I think you have to be careful when you ask some of those questions too. Because again, like we talked about earlier, you have to be able to listen, be in the moment and really be inside their situation. So I, if you ask that question, talk, tell me about the toughest situation you've ever been in your entire life. I mean, I've had many, many people crying in my office, right? And what I'm looking to hear in any of those situations is walk me through how you overcame that situation. What did you do? You know, what help did you get? You know, and how did you overcome it to be the person that you are today?

• 43:13Speaker 01

  And all I'm trying to do in, in questions in an interview is I'm not asking these superficial questions off the resume. I'm asking, I want to be inside Logan's head. I want to be in his thinking, how he thinks, what he thinks about. Those are the types of questions that I'm trying to get deep on. So that, those questions that you just posed are just opening salvos. But I'm going to ask six, seven, eight, nine, 10 more questions to get deeper and deeper inside Logan and understand how he thinks and what motivates him. And what issues does he have and fears and desires and goals? Those types of things, that's what I want to know.

• 43:55Speaker 01

  And I can't tell you how many times I've interviewed people and they've told their manager, geez, I feel like John was inside my head.

• 44:02Logan Bartlett?

  I can imagine getting into the most difficult thing someone's done in their life. And if the person starts, uh, you know, potentially breaking down, I can imagine that, uh, is a, yeah, that you're, you're really inside of, of how they're, how they're thinking about things.

• 44:16Speaker 01

  And you also think about how are they handling me? How are they handling this whole situation? Have they shown up prepared? Are they asking curious questions? Are they listening carefully to what I say? You know, and then I sometimes might stress them out a little bit. Like I said to Carla, like I pause and I say, they say, how do you think I'm doing? I said, well, I don't, I don't actually think you could do the job, you know? So I'm gonna, salespeople are always getting objections. And if you can't handle objection about yourself, it's going to be really difficult for you to handle objections about the product that you sell. So I've always felt like I had to, at the right point, throw out one or two objections.

• 44:57Logan Bartlett?

  One of the things that you you highlight, or that I've heard you talk about is like, it's, there's a right rep or person for a moment in time with the business. And what, someone that's super successful at a huge enterprise where they never have to go figure out where their laptops come from, or how to be scrappy in that regard, is not necessarily going to be the person that you want to hire in the early stages of a of a business. Is that something you can actually figure out from the resume? Or does this go back to those questions? Like, how do you figure out if someone's scrappy, or the right moment in time for your company?

• 45:39Speaker 01

  Well, if you're a raw startup, I mean, you have to be able to, you have people that can do what I call scrounge. They have to scrounge for resources. Everything that they do, there's, there's no, no one else is doing it for them, right? They have to do it for themselves. So if they've, if you look at their resume, and they've only been at big companies like Salesforce.com, and Oracle, and some of those big companies, there's a high probability, very, very high probability, they're just not going to make it in your organization. In a raw startup like that, if most people, and they'd agree with me, that have been in this situation, they see a resume from Salesforce.com, IBM,

• 46:20Speaker 01

  HP, Oracle, they just take it and throw it in the trash can, because they just know those people aren't going to make it. Now, if they, if they've only been there three or four years, and they went through the Salesforce.com training program, yeah, there's a chance that they might make it. If they've been there 15 years, and 10 years at Oracle, chances of them being able to scrounge for resources?

• 46:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, low probability of success.

• 46:50Logan Bartlett?

  Now, if you're a founder or CEO listening to this and you're trying to assess the caliber of your, your sales leader and thinking about, is this an A person? Are there, are there questions that you would, you would ask? Or is there a way of assessing if this is truly the, the person that's going to help take you to the next level?

• 47:12Speaker 01

  You're talking about trying to hire your CRO and it's a, it's a startup?

• 47:15Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, or maybe you already have the person and you, you can't tell how much is, is the product's fault versus, you know, the salesperson's fault?

• 47:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, first I'd want to see if they've ever have a history of doing it, doing something like this before, right? So, because the greatest indicator of future performance is past performance. So if they've never gone out on their own, built an ID, you know, ideal customer profile, and figured all those things out that you and I just discussed, and then trained the sales force, however small it might be, on the messaging, choreographing the demo, getting to those personas, and, and starting to, you know, drag in some business.

• 47:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, you might have the wrong person.

• 48:00Logan Bartlett?

  What about the position, the Tom Brady example of, of him understanding the field, but also we, we touched on a little bit, like the point in time at which someone makes sense for the, for the company. Can you talk about the Tom Brady example and, and how that might feed into startups?

• 48:19Speaker 01

  That's really just more the difference between knowledge and skills, right? Like, I'm a gigantic hockey fan, right?

• 48:26Logan Bartlett?

  Who's your team, by the way, Bruins?

• 48:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, the Bruins, and now they're gonna, they'll be in a five to 10 year rebuild, right? After Bergeron and, and Crecci just left. But I can tell you so many things about, about hockey when I'm watching the game, especially even with people that, you know, have played at Division One, you know, college teams and even, you know, you know, into the pro levels. They'll say, wow, you know so much about this game. But, you know, I can't take a slapshot from the blue line, probably fall down.

• 48:54Speaker 01

  So, and it's the same thing like with Tom Brady. Tom, no one will doubt that Tom Brady might go down as one of the greatest quarterbacks ever. And he has tremendous knowledge of the game. But if we take Tom Brady out of the position of quarterback and put him in any other position on the first play, you don't even need to know much about football to say, what is he doing in that position? He's failing. So it just emphasizes how important skills are, you know, in the, in the game of sales. You really have to have the skills for the position. And what I mean by that is you can't just take a number of, you know, territory sales reps, and then all of a sudden decide, oh, we're going to take these 20 territory sales guys

• 49:38Speaker 01

  and just throw them all into calling on one, you know, major account like Goldman Sachs, Citibank, or Morgan Stanley. They're going to, chances are they're going to fail. Why? They, they've never seen that movie before. They haven't seen the politics. They haven't seen the divisions. They haven't seen where decisions might get made at the top and across other types of functions. So it might be a multi-department decision. And how do I corral all these people into a common decision criteria, a common process for a common POV, and come out of there with a win? I've never seen that movie before. And that's, you know, it's a skill set that a lot of, you know, people that don't know sales just take for granted.

• 50:20Logan Bartlett?

  It's fascinating because you, we talked about the hiring process and how important it is to hire for a lot of the, a lot of the traits, intelligence, PhD, coachability, adaptability, integrity, curiosity. But then there's also this element of, or some element of requisite experience and domain, like throwing out the example of Salesforce or Oracle, if they're trying to come in as well. And also making sure you, you have people that know how to go through a process at Goldman Sachs or a healthcare company and all of that. It's an interesting balance between the traits a person has and the, the domain that they, they've, they've built over time.

• 51:01Speaker 01

  It usually comes with the natural growth of the company, right? When you're, when you're Snowflake and with Chris Steggen and you're first doing just tech and ad tech, you're not throwing. Sales guys into the biggest organizations in the world yet, right? You're starting to develop your product. You're making sure that it can fit into many different use cases. The company's growing. Instead of 50 reps, you have 100, 200 reps, 300 reps. And now you can take a chance on hiring some of those people that might have more domain experience and more skill sets in hiring, you know, going into major corporations like a Morgan Stanley and being successful.

• 51:39Logan Bartlett?

  We've talked a lot about hiring and how important it is to bring in a people. But one of the things that, that I think you believe is that it needs to be the job of the sales organization and not HR, not recruiting or any other to, to bring in the, the sales talent. One, I guess, do you, do you agree with that? And two, why is that the case if so?

• 52:03Speaker 01

  I never understood why I would want, I'm the coach. I'm the head, let's say the head, head coach. I don't understand why I would want anyone else doing my recruiting for me. That's going to define my team. And whether that team is only five people or 50 people, why do I want somebody else doing that? And the next thing I know, I show up to them, let's say it's 50 and I show up to a room where somebody else helped doing most of the hiring for me. And I look at the room and I think, oh my God, I'm going to lose my job. These people are horrible. Like there's no chance that I'm going to take these misfits and turn them into A players overnight and make these big numbers that are sitting in front of me. So I think that sales leaders have to take ownership over who goes on to their team

• 52:48Speaker 01

  and who doesn't go on their team. They have to take ownership. And the reason you have to take ownership is not only to be highly successful, but you need to understand everything about that person that you are bringing on to your team. And you can understand, as we talked before, so much through that interview process. And I'd want to know when the person shows up, here's where I think they're strong and here's where I think they're weak. And I can start to help develop them so they can be successful a lot faster.

• 53:17Logan Bartlett?

  One of the things that often happens within organizations is the individual contributors end up growing into sales management roles in some way, shape or form. What do you see as the hardest part of that transition? Like you've been a really successful rep. Now you need to go manage the northeast territory for the organization.

• 53:41Speaker 01

  The hardest part for most reps when they make the transition to management is that they think they have to prove themselves as salespeople. So they, they want to be super salesperson and they want to sell all the deals. And then the second biggest mistake they make is thinking that everybody's like them. So that they think that everybody's the same, right? So anybody that has had kids understands that these kids grow up in the same house, same parents, but they're completely different. And that's no different when you pick up people on a sales team. You have to understand that each person on that team has different strengths, weaknesses, goals, insecurities, doubts, fears, all those types of things that you have to help them overcome to develop them and make them successful.

• 54:25Speaker 01

  And so the number, those two mistakes are the ones that, you know, most first line managers make the most. And you know, if we really think about it, the, the way to hold everybody accountable to develop their people and recruit the right people costs you nothing. So I used to stand in front of everyone and say, you know, today we're 50 million, next year we're going to be 100 million. Here's all the open leadership positions that are coming about. Now, if you want to get one of those positions, especially if you're a first line manager and you want to go to second line or second, go to third, you have to prove to me that you're able to recruit someone. Develop them and lead them to take your spot.

• 55:10Speaker 01

  And if it's not apparent that somebody can take your spot on your team, why would I promote you? Why?

• 55:17Speaker 01

  Why? You're gonna make it my problem? I'm gonna promote you and now I got a problem down below because you can't recruit, you can't train, you can't develop. And this, and the flip side is true too. To hold people accountable, if they get rid of people, there's too many organizations that just say, "Oh, Joe, the sales rep," or "Sally, the sales rep," oh, they're just no good, and we got rid of them. Well, wait, whoa, hold on a second. Whose fault is that? Sure, Sally and Joe play some part in it, but what about you? Didn't you hire them? Yes. Weren't you responsible for training and development? Yes. Weren't you responsible for leading them? Yes, okay. I want you to go down to the bathroom. I want you to look in the mirror and think hard.

• 56:01Speaker 01

  Come on back and tell me which one you failed at. Because we have, we can't keep failing when we're hiring people, right? So we have to understand, you know, what are we doing wrong? So we can't keep making the same mistakes when we're hiring people. We either couldn't recruit, we can't train and develop, or we can't lead. It's gonna only be one of those three things.

• 56:21Logan Bartlett?

  I want to talk about the process of actually letting someone go and, you know, how, how that ultimately ends up occurring. But there's a, there's a distinction between KPIs and inputs and, and then also quantifying the actual output of it. And so one of the examples in the book you talk about is like, a hockey team gets assessed on goals and not on shots. But you also need to have the measurement in place so you can manage to some of the up funnel activities as well. So how do you think through like upstream KPIs? And does the, does, is it the Bill Walsh, the score takes care of itself?

• 57:05Logan Bartlett?

  Or is it, hey, we, we gotta keep track of what the score actually is? Otherwise, we're just putting shots against the net that are getting saved.

• 57:12Speaker 01

  A couple analogies. So first of all, if I'm a baseball coach and, you know, Logan's hitting 300, I don't really have any problems. Then all of a sudden Logan starts hitting 220, I got a problem, right? So now I'm going. Down to the coaches, the pitching coach and saying, "Hey, is Logan watching film of opposing pitchers?" "Yeah, well, he used to spend a couple hours a day in here and now he's only spending like 10 minutes." I go to the batting coach and ask the same thing. "Yeah, he used to spend a couple hours before and after every game hitting balls." "You know, now he comes in for 10 minutes and he starts hitting some balls." Okay, so those activities of watching film and hitting balls,

• 57:53Speaker 01

  that's starting to play a big part into the accomplishment of hitting 300, right? And that's the same in sales. Like, too many leaders are keeping track of activity, but they're not measuring true accomplishment. So what I mean is they're saying, "How many emails did you send? Calls did you do? How many meetings were you in?" Okay, those are great activities, but that doesn't mean that they're gonna accomplish it and get a sale. So somewhere in the sales process, there has to be an anchor that says, "When I do this thing, when I get to this point, then I know I'm gonna get a sale." So, one of the things that I did, like at Blade Logic, is I said, "I want you to get two POVs a quarter."

• 58:38Speaker 01

  Because the quota was $500,000 a quarter, the average deal was 250, and if they got the POV, and I trained them around the POV, and they could only get to a POV if they met the economic buyer in person. And the only way to do that is you had to have a champion, right? So, basically, all those things were gonna happen by definition. So, I don't care about how many emails you send and how many meetings you have and how many calls you make. I don't care. I only care that you're getting two POVs that are successful every quarter, because then that means by definition, everything else has happened. Kinda like if you're hitting 300, you're probably doing all the other activities, right?

• 59:20Speaker 01

  So I think too many leaders, especially first-line, second-line leaders that haven't done it before... They're measuring on these people going in and getting meetings. So they run in and they get a meeting so that they can say, I got a meeting with Logan and XYZ Corporation. Okay, great, but what does that mean? Logan's just one guy in 50,000 people. That doesn't mean this is going to lead to an order. It's not an accomplishment.

• 59:43Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. I, I, I think one of the things that is, for the most part, a lot of founders ask, when the business is going well, rare are the examples, and I would love to talk about Chris Degnan, where he's been able to scale from the very early days of Snowflake. He's almost been there 10 years as the CRO. And I think that's the exception. And I have a lot of founders asking themselves, hey, is this the person? This person got me from one to 10. Is this the person that's going to get me from 10 to 100? If you're a founder in that seat, thinking through the CRO or the VP of Sales, or maybe the VP of Sales and you're thinking through a first or second line manager

• 1:00:27Logan Bartlett?

  that's been with you from the early days, how do you answer that question? Or what are some of the inputs that you could ask yourself of like, yes, this has been the person, they've done a great job through this point, but it might not be the person for the future?

• 1:00:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's really hard, but it's all again, all about coachability and adaptability. So many times in the early days of board meetings, you know, when Chris would, you know, step out of the board meeting, the CEO might look at me and go, you know, do you think he's going to make it next year? And I'd have to say yes or no. And when I would say yes, it's only because I saw like a material and tangible increase in his abilities and which gave me confidence that he's going to continue to grow. And so if you're not seeing tangible evidence of progression in leadership and the ability to manage people,

• 1:01:24Speaker 01

  the ability to handle deals and higher complexity deals and higher complexity problems.

• 1:01:30Speaker 01

  Then the chances are that they're not going to make it. But I don't think that you can just go off of one or two indicators. That's really tough.

• 1:01:39Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:40Speaker 01

  I mean, certainly, people are keeping track of sales productivity, is the average deal size going up? And is the churn going down? Are they, you know, what's the churn on the salespeople? There's a lot of things to pay attention to, but that doesn't necessarily say that a leader is actually making incremental measurable jumps towards towards progression.

• 1:01:59Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, so of all the traits, it sounds like the coachability and the adaptability are the ones that are gonna that you need to ask yourself, is this person demonstrably better or growing at the speed at which I need them to to be this next role?

• 1:02:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, and they take, they take coaching very well. So if you, you can see that too, that's evidence. Like if you say, hey, Chris, in order for you to make it next year, here's some things you're gonna have to start to pay attention to. And then you see evidence of him actually putting that in place. And he's never done that before, but he's doing it now. You know, I'm starting to have a lot of confidence.

• 1:02:34Logan Bartlett?

  Firing is something that I think all companies deal with and figuring out how to, how to let people go. In your experience, I'm sure you've had to let go of more people than you care to remember.

• 1:02:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:46Logan Bartlett?

  Did you, did you know it early on in the, in the cycle that hey, this was maybe a missed hire? And you waited too long to let them prove themselves? Is it just hard to have a heuristic around that? What, what, what did you typically find when you, when you made the wrong hire?

• 1:03:03Speaker 01

  What's interesting is always typically goes back to characteristics, right? It doesn't go back to their domain knowledge or any of that stuff. It goes back to their characteristics that you missed in the, in the interview process. Certainly, you know, I've made mistakes and early on you have to decide like this person's just not going to make it. But I've also been guilty of holding on a little too long. In fact, there's a person that's been the CRO like three times. And when I was at Blade Logic, they hadn't sold anything in nine months. So I had the CEO telling me, hey, you know, you have to get rid of this person. So then it was a year. And the CEO and the chairman of the board told me, you gotta get rid of this person. I said, no, I'm not getting rid of them.

• 1:03:49Speaker 01

  They said, why are you not getting rid of them? I said, because I personally am making sales calls with them and I can see the, again, that tangible jump in their capabilities. And it was in the fifth quarter that they landed two deals, one for 1.1 and one for 1.3 million. That person's a CRO today. I could have really hurt their career. If I didn't take a real intimate interest in understanding them and where they were, I could have ruined their career. But if I don't see that incremental evidence and I don't see the hard work that they're putting in to learn the skills and gain the knowledge, then certainly if they don't want to put the work in, why am I putting the work into them? It has to be a shared responsibility, the leader and the person.

• 1:04:31Logan Bartlett?

  It sounds like in that example, you uniquely believed the entire time and maybe the board or the outside people didn't. Have there been examples where maybe you lost faith and that person actually ended up course correcting and it worked out? Like, are there the counterfactual of maybe you thought you should fire them and they proved you wrong over some period of time? Or maybe you did fire them and in retrospect, that was actually the wrong, the wrong call?

• 1:05:04Speaker 01

  No, I think most cases, when you do let somebody go, it might be that they reached a certain level, like, you know, enterprise sales has many different levels. It's almost like double A ball, triple A ball, single A ball, and then going into the pros as an example. So there's different levels of it, different complexities of product, different complexities of selling, you know, especially when a startup, when they don't know your name and they don't know your product. And, you know, if I call up and say, I'm John McMahon from Cisco, okay, they got the budget, they know the, you know, the person to call on, they know your products. Hey, I'm John McMahon with Blade Logic. They don't know who you are and they don't know what your product is. They think you sell Blade servers and you're selling software, right? So there's, you know, there's different complexities.

• 1:05:50Speaker 01

  To it. So sometimes you see a person where you say, hey, this person's just not going to make it over here with us. You let them go and they find their way to a place where they really find a home based upon their knowledge and their skill set and they're successful. And in a funny way, you did you did them a favor because they were miserable, you know, where they are. And the and the funny thing about letting people go is I'd say that 95% of the time, they know it's going to happen. And they're sending you signals, subconsciously, they're sending you signals or little things that they do. They're saying, we need a watershed event. I need you to let me go

• 1:06:30Speaker 01

  because I'm not just going to quit. Because I've never, I've never terminated a person too early.

• 1:06:37Logan Bartlett?

  That was kind of my assumption on that you never, once you've made that decision, it's such an emotional thing to get to the point of letting someone go. They have a family, they depended on you, you, it's also a reflection of yourself, right? That says, hey, I made a mistake. And so you have to admit, getting through all those psychological hurdles to get to the point of letting someone go, for you to be wrong about it is just so unlikely. And so once, one of the things I'll tell my founders and try not to be too Machiavellian about it, but if that's the way you're feeling, it's probably that snowball is just going to keep building, right? And you're going to regret not doing it earlier.

• 1:07:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh, no, you're right. It's very emotional. I've had people where I've been to their house, you know, met their kids, you know, had dinner with their families and wow, they just get to a point where you just got to let them go and it's, it's painful. But you know what? Again, they land on their feet and then they they're doing much better. They just weren't making it. It's like, like we said, you know, you just went from single A ball to triple A ball and now that ball's not, you know, 85 miles an hour anymore. It's 93 miles an hour and it's moving and you can't hit it. Time to develop that skill or back go down level.

• 1:07:53Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, well, and it's also could be fault, like it could be selfish to you of holding off, you're delaying this person finding their next career that they're going to be able to be at for years, right? And if you're just waiting, holding out hope for another quarter, but you've mostly made up your mind already, it's actually not fair to, to the individual, right? To keep hanging around if it's already predetermined what you're going to do.

• 1:08:19Speaker 01

  What's funny is sometimes I look at these board decks and then you'll see the people will put down, you know, that they churned, let's say 25% of the sales force and they'll say right next to it, non-regrettable. And I'm thinking, okay, so that means you have to become a better recruiter. If every single one of those people you churned, you don't regret, you're a horrible hire. You're horrible. You gotta get better.

• 1:08:44Logan Bartlett?

  Normally, I think a lot of our enterprise companies see roughly 20% attrition modeled into their business and that includes promotions, right, as well as managing out. Are there, is there a percentage that you think about on an annualized basis of what's a normal versus excessive amount?

• 1:09:02Speaker 01

  I think it's typically in the super fast growing companies that I've been associated with, it's closer to 25%, right? Because even Jack Welch at one time said, if you can hire eight A players out of 10, you're a really great recruiter, right? So that's 20% right there. And then you have 5% for promotions, right?

• 1:09:24Speaker 01

  So yeah, I've seen mainly 25 and I call it like, you know, churn, you know, attritions plus promotions equals churn in the sales force.

• 1:09:34Logan Bartlett?

  You've probably had to have a lot of these hard conversations with, with people going through this. Or is there anything that you would say to someone listening, having been through a lot of those emotional cycles about how to actually go about the process of letting someone go?

• 1:09:49Speaker 01

  Well, usually it's not a surprise, it can't be a surprise, right? I mean, had to have as a leader, if you're intimate with your people and you know their skill level, their knowledge, their, all those things we talked about, their fears, uncertainties, doubts, because you're intimate with them, then it's not, this should never come as a surprise. Even if they quit on their own, that should not be a surprise to a leader. So anytime I've seen a leader, Where they say, you know, Logan just quit. What do you mean Logan just quit? You never told me like he was thinking of quitting. So they're surprised. You should never be surprised as a leader. One, it shouldn't be a surprise. And two, they should understand a lot of times you're putting people on a plan and you're hoping that they're going to get there. And a lot of times they might choose out.

• 1:10:33Speaker 01

  So you say, you know, we have two choices, Logan. Here's some things that we've discussed, you know, 10 different times. And now I'm going to have to put you on a plan because your performance just hasn't been there for the last couple of quarters. Here's the things you're going to have to get correct in the next 90 days. And the other option is that you be, we package you out. What, what do you, what do you think you want to do? And a lot of times Logan will say, I'll take the package. I don't think I can get there.

• 1:10:58Logan Bartlett?

  I want to take a step back just because it's, um, I, I think your, your background and path into all of this. You referenced earlier electrical engineering, uh, by, by trade. And it, I get the feeling in, in hearing you, you speak and talk about all this stuff that in some ways you might've been an accidental, uh, sales leader, that this wasn't some predestined thing that you were going to go into this field. And I, I don't know if you, if you consider yourself introverted. I've heard you describe yourself introverted. You seem, you, you can fake a good extrovert on a, on a podcast here. But if we go all the way back to NJIT or growing up in, in, uh, in New York

• 1:11:42Logan Bartlett?

  and then moving to New Jersey, what sets you down this, this path of being a, you know, an iconic now sales leader?

• 1:11:50Speaker 01

  Well, what happened is I went to engineering school and then, um, I was one of the, even though I was, you know, um, an extroverted introvert is the way I describe myself. I could speak and people elected me to the.

• 1:12:06Speaker 01

  Be the president of the student body of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers. And to make a long story short, one night I had a panel, I brought in a panel to talk to the students, you know, people from production and QA and design. And I had these round tables set up so the students could sit down with one of those authorities and ask them questions at dinner. And when I got done running the logistics, the only table that was left was sales and no one was sitting there except the sales guy. So I sat down and talked to him and the sales guy, I could speak with the sales guy. So I went home and I told my dad, because I lived on campus, but I went home and told my dad, and my dad never went to high school. So I told him the situation, he said, well, you know, I don't know a lot about this world,

• 1:12:51Speaker 01

  but I do know that really good sales guys can make a lot of money. And being a poor kid, I was like, okay, it's over, I'm going into sales.

• 1:12:58Logan Bartlett?

  Was that HP or did you find your way to HP after that?

• 1:13:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, HP selling electronic test instruments to electrical engineers, yeah.

• 1:13:05Logan Bartlett?

  So you were selling hardware, physical products at that point, and then you found your way to software sales, when and how?

• 1:13:14Speaker 01

  Well, I was one of the top, you know, salespeople at HP selling instrumentation. HP was worried that software was going to come and eat their instrumentation business. Some of these boxes back then were like microwave analyzers and spectrum analyzers were a hundred thousand dollars. That's thirty years, thirty something years ago. So they got, they acquired a software company and the VP of Sales came over near my desk. I didn't know who he was. He said, hey, you know, my name's Mike Reed, I want to introduce myself. Says, hey, Mike, how are you? He goes, I hear you're one of the best sales guys. I guess so. And he said, well, I want you to join my team. I said, well, why would I do that? And he goes, because all my guys make over a hundred thousand dollars. Remember, this is over thirty. Okay, done, we're selling software.

• 1:13:59Speaker 01

  So it didn't take too many, you know, a lot of thought for me to change career projections, you know, and that's how I got into it. But any time I did, did anything, thinking back on my dad, though, he had a big effect on me because any time that I would brag about anything that I did, I say, hey dad, you know, I just did that, did this, he'd say, yeah, that's really good. That and a token will get you on the subway, now get the fuck out of here.

• 1:14:27Speaker 01

  So it only kind of like, you know, put me back in my place about what's important versus what's not important. So titles and all that type of stuff really don't matter. It only matters what you really do.

• 1:14:40Logan Bartlett?

  That's great. And so, so then you were selling CAD and you ended up at PTC. What was the connection to going over to PTC?

• 1:14:51Speaker 01

  I got promoted to manager as one of the youngest managers at HP. And I remember being in a meeting in, at that time, I was in Southern California. My territory was from San Diego to Santa Barbara. And I was in a meeting with all these first line managers, second line managers, all the way up to the VP for like the whole Western area, you know, more than, probably from Colorado West. And I remember they never talked about how we can help salespeople sell more. It was never about selling issues. This is a sales organization. It was all about the politics and bureaucratic BS. And I remember sitting there saying, I don't want to grow up

• 1:15:31Speaker 01

  and be like any of these guys. I want to, I want to do something else. So I just started looking around and there was this, back then, you know, I didn't have the internet and this thing fell on my plate about some company called PTC that was just starting out in Boston. So I called the CRO at the time and I said, Hey, you know, I want to join the company. He said, You got a resume? And I said, No, because I'm not really looking for a job right now. But if you want me to make one up, I'll make one up. And I, everybody told me I was nuts because they had zero revenues, products, you know, didn't work. But I felt like I had nothing to lose. Like I wanted to try to prove to myself that even in a small, small company,

• 1:16:16Speaker 01

  I could really, I could, I could excel at this sales game. Let me take a chance now. I wasn't married, didn't have kids. Let me go.

• 1:16:24Logan Bartlett?

  And did you go in there as an IC initially? Or did you go as a sales manager?

• 1:16:28Speaker 01

  They had just.

• 1:16:31Speaker 01

  Put a guy in the in the in the Western US and he had a team of like five people. And so I became one of them and two months later, we went to a QBR back in Boston. And when it was over, the CEO came over to me and said, well, we're flipping you with the guy that runs the West. So now you're running the West. So I was only doing it for a couple of months.

• 1:16:53Logan Bartlett?

  What was John McMahon as a sales rep way back, way back when? Were you, I assume leadership and management has been your calling, but but you must have been a pretty good sales rep as well.

• 1:17:04Speaker 01

  I don't know if I was great. I was never the greatest presenter. I was a good listener and maybe that's from what we talked about before. So I was a good listener and I didn't want to present anything because maybe that's part of that introversion. I didn't want to present anything till I thought I was really right. And I heard everything that, let's say, Logan told me that he really wanted. But the one thing that I was was persistent. So when I wanted to sell something, if I wanted to get to the VP of Engineering at General Dynamics, I'd go at six o'clock in the morning with a couple of cups of coffee. And at that time, like they they would put on those cement bumpers, you know, VP of Engineering. So I'd just stand there and wait till he came. Now, this one, you got to get your elevator pitched down pat, right?

• 1:17:47Speaker 01

  Because you got 30 seconds to a minute, where he'll hopefully let you in the door and you can have a cup of coffee with him. But that's the type of salesperson was I was is just more persistent than than really excellent at the at the craft. And maybe that put more more people need is they need a little more persistence.

• 1:18:09Logan Bartlett?

  Yes, well, you hear these stories and now, you know, people are unwilling at times to cold call. And I I'm like, you know, some of the old days, you get restraining orders today for for the stuff you needed to do to be effective. Salespeople, I'm curious, PTC and Blade Logic both have such a unique sales tree of people that have, you know, studied under your tutelage and Steve Walsky as well and dating back to, I mean, Mongo, obviously, and and Datadog had it, Snowflake had it, Okta as well, Zscaler. Like, there's so many people that came out of those organizations. How much?

• 1:18:51Logan Bartlett?

  Was the unique talent of density of the people you were able to recruit versus the process and all these people just, I look around to my friends that I came into the venture industry with, and we were all likable people, but the fact that we've risen was we were investing in software in 2013, 2014. And so there's some like survivorship element of it as well. What do you, did you know it was special from a talent standpoint then? Or how do you sort of think about the inputs of the process around it and the actual people that were there?

• 1:19:30Speaker 01

  Well, you know, I put such emphasis on recruiting. So that's probably at least 70, 80% of it. So the people had all the inherent characteristics to be successful. And then I would just like spend a lot of time training and developing them. So every, every week we'd have forecast calls and use the forecast calls as, you know, understanding what the forecast is, but as development sessions. Every quarter I got everybody together, everybody. It was very costly. And I remember the first time I presented it to David, I played logic and he was like, oh my God, it's going to cost so much money. And I said, Dave, if we just start getting more, you know, just think about how many extra deals we have to get that's going to pay for the whole thing. And then to Dave's credit, after

• 1:20:15Speaker 01

  we did it a couple of quarters and he saw the increase in productivity and the deal sizes growing, you know, he bought in. So it was really a lot of training and development and investing in the people and a lot of things that we talked about today where you had to invest in your people, you had to train your people, you had to understand them and be intimate with them and help them grow and develop. And if you didn't do it, I wasn't going to promote you. And I think a lot of the really good guys, you know, the Dali Rajics, the Adam Arons, all those guys. They they took it to heart and they did it. And now they're preaching the same thing, you know, where they are.

• 1:20:52Logan Bartlett?

  You referenced Dave, who is now the CEO of Mongo, and I want to ask about him in a second. But I people probably, this is long, I think, since forgotten to most of the people listening. But the Blade Logic Opsware wars were pretty iconic, right? You had Dave on one side and then Ben Horowitz, who people might be familiar with from Andreessen Horowitz, on the Opsware side, and you were leading Blade Logic. And they also had a PTC crew as well, right? So can you talk about just like the culture of of those wars? And and the battles that you guys had between Blade Logic and Opsware?

• 1:21:36Speaker 01

  Well, we were definitely in a lot of lot of battles. But I tried to focus my people, not on them, but focus on, you know, making sure that what we did, we did with excellence, right? And then the second part is truly understanding

• 1:21:50Speaker 01

  your competitor and understanding where their weaknesses are and where our strengths are, and making sure that we had our messaging just really down pat and really exposing their weaknesses and highlighting our our strengths. And, you know, Cranny was trying to do the same thing on the other side.

• 1:22:06Logan Bartlett?

  Mark Cranny, who is the Opsware CRO or VP of Sales.

• 1:22:10Speaker 01

  Opsware CRO, yeah. So, yeah, it was fun because sometimes I could even talk to the VP of purchasing at a company, and it might be down to us and Opsware on who's going to win the deal. And then I could basically tell the, you know, VP of purchasing, let me, let me, oh, did you meet Mark Cranny? Yeah, okay, let me tell you exactly what the program is. And, you know, they're laughing on the other side.

• 1:22:33Speaker 01

  So.

• 1:22:33Logan Bartlett?

  Because you and Cranny were at PTC for how long together?

• 1:22:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I hired him twice, like, and I almost never did that because I hired him and then he left. And it's, he might be the only person that I was willing to hire back.

• 1:22:48Logan Bartlett?

  It's wild that, that a war that waged from whatever, 2001 through 2005, six has produced such iconic sales leaders as well as relevant CEOs as well. So you're, you're still on the MongoDB board today? Is that right?

• 1:23:06Speaker 01

  Yes. Yeah.

• 1:23:08Logan Bartlett?

  David Cherya is, in my mind, you get exposure to two of the, for my money, the best CEOs in software, between Frank Slutman and Dave Acheria. What makes Dave so special? You worked with him through Blade Logic, you're on the board now at MongoDB. What do you feel like his, his secret sauce is?

• 1:23:30Speaker 01

  Well, I'd say that both of those guys, you know, if we can put them in the same bucket, they're both fighters. There's fight and flight and there's, there's not an ounce of flight in Frank Slutman. There's not an ounce of flight in David Acheria. They're coming every day and they're coming every day to play. And like you were saying, that sometimes this is war and they're ready to go to war. They got, they got the war paint on and they're ready to go. And they both have really strong opinions on the way in which things can be, should be done. But at the same time, they're, they're open to listening. And if they have to adjust their thinking a little bit, because maybe times have changed, competition's changed, products changed, you know, I give them

• 1:24:15Speaker 01

  credit for adapting. Again, I mean, those guys are not the same guys that they were even five years ago. They've all changed and adapted. So, but when I think of both of them, I think of them as like pure fighters. And I like to believe that that's what I have in me too. Like I'm just a pure, I'm just going to keep coming at you. I'm going to wear you down. If it's a wear down contest, I'll wear you down.

• 1:24:41Logan Bartlett?

  The the commonalities of the adaptability, it sounds like, and sort of the iterative learning, even at this stage, both of them have proved quite a bit, but it sounds like they're still learning. And then also, the competitiveness seems to be the two commonalities or characteristics between between both of them.

• 1:25:02Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, if you think about their products, think about the product that Frank only had when he took over versus the product that he has today, and how many more doors and disciplines they go into inside an organization. And now he changed it from a data warehouse to the data cloud. I mean, then think about what Dave has to go through where he had a free tier and he just was converting people from the free tier to the paid tier. And now he's got free tier, paid tier, channels, you know, inside sales, outside sales, you know.

• 1:25:34Logan Bartlett?

  Cloud, he's built.

• 1:25:36Speaker 01

  Cloud, and he's in China, and he's with Alibaba and Tencent, and he's, I mean, it's the complexity just keeps changing every day. And what makes those guys so good is not only are they fighters, but they're adapting to the to the challenges that are presented to them every day. And I don't think enough people understand the challenges and how CEOs have to adapt in order to stay ahead of the game, this world with technology changing so fast.

• 1:26:05Logan Bartlett?

  What's the most common misconception about sales that that you think people have?

• 1:26:10Speaker 01

  I think it's what you brought up earlier, that they think it's an art form, when really, it's, it's, it's a lot of science. And certainly, you're dealing with people, people that are selling for you, and people that, you know, are your potential customers. So there's a lot of art there. But there's so much science to the game, too. And you need the science so that you can figure out, like we talked about before, what's going right, what's going wrong, and how do I quickly adapt and make changes? Because in a, you know, we're measured in quarters, but when you subtract out weekends and a couple holidays every quarter, you know, you're left with 60, 62 days to execute a much bigger number.

• 1:26:51Speaker 01

  And if you don't have everything down to a process, you know, like a scientific process, and something goes wrong. And you don't have that. Well, where are you going to point your finger to figure out what's going wrong and make a quick change so you can post a bigger number within those 60 working days? It's going to be pretty tough. And the companies that nail those types of things, those are the companies that consistently tick up and to the right. They've even gone and spoken to the deans of a couple of business schools and said, hey, you know, I don't understand why you don't have a sales program. You haven't, you came in here as a new dean, you put an entrepreneur program in place, but why don't you have a sales program?

• 1:27:34Speaker 01

  Well, I even had one of them say to me, well, John, you know, if I really wanted to get a sales in here, the rest of my, you know,

• 1:27:44Speaker 01

  people that helped me run this place, they would think there's something wrong with me. And I go, well, let me ask you a question. How do you think a company buys three or $4 million worth of software? Do they just pick up the phone and say, I want to order $4 million of software? How does that happen? And he said, I really don't know. So then I started walking them through, like, you know, all the discovery questions and account, you know, items, account plans and territory plans and ROI models and, you know, operational value versus business impact and, and quantifying, you know, value before and after and those types of things. And, and the deans are blown away and started implementing sales programs.

• 1:28:30Speaker 01

  And it's again, it goes back to answer your question that they mostly think it's an art.

• 1:28:33Logan Bartlett?

  Can sales leadership be, be learned? Or is it only sales management that can be learned and sales leadership needs to be innate?

• 1:28:42Speaker 01

  I think you have to be, to be a good sales leader, you have to be selfless. You can't be selfish. And if you're willing to be selfless and you're willing to understand that the only way I get promoted and the, and the fastest route to my success is through my people and making them successful. You know, then you can be a really good sales leader. If you think it's all about you and you're selfish and you think you're going to get your your way there by, you know, horsewhipping people, it's just not going to happen. And not truly understanding, you know, where those people are coming from.

• 1:29:18Logan Bartlett?

  Besides buying your book, The Qualified Sales Leader here as a, as a plug, what, what would you recommend to people that are trying to learn more about sales process and enterprise selling? Uh, is there, is there anything that you would guide them to?

• 1:29:36Speaker 01

  There's The Challenger Sales, pretty good book. The Spin Selling's a pretty good book. And Andy White wrote one specifically on, on medic. That's a pretty good book if you want to dive even deeper than my book does on, on medic.

• 1:29:50Logan Bartlett?

  You happen to have a great podcast yourself. Uh, so if people want to hear you, uh, flip the tables and, and talk to some of the, uh, some of the best sales leaders, I guess that's another one, right?

• 1:30:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, we go really deep on different issues like how do you handle an RFP? How do you, what is the, you know, an hour just on? How do you prepare for an economic buyer meeting? Or what's, what is the difference between a coach and a champion? So we go deep on those specific, you know, different issues like that. And to your point, if you're educating people, they're going to come, you know? So I think right now we're up over like 230,000 listeners and we never advertised or anything.

• 1:30:26Logan Bartlett?

  That's incredible. Wow. I, uh, yeah, well, it's, uh, you and, you and John Kaplan, right? Uh, together. So John, who runs, uh, Force Management, uh, the, the consulting firm that teaches a lot of the stuff we talked about here as well. So I can, I can imagine it's a good group to hear from.

• 1:30:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is.

• 1:30:45Logan Bartlett?

  John, thanks for, uh, thanks for coming on. This was, this was great. Uh, I'm sure we will want to run back this at some point and go through a bunch of the lessons, but I really appreciate you coming on.

• 1:30:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, thanks, Logan. It's been fun. I mean, you asked a lot of really good questions. You bounced me around from people to process to, to personalities. So it was fun. It was fun. Cut me on my toes. Cut me on my toes.

• 1:31:07Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Well, thanks for coming on.

• 1:31:09Speaker 01

  All right. Thanks, Logan.

• 1:31:10Logan Bartlett?

  See ya.

• 1:31:10Speaker 01

  See ya.