Alfie Isa Marsh, Head of Sales at Spendesk | Global Sales Leader

The only podcast you need for your business, let's do this. Welcome to the sales versus marketing podcast, I'm your host, Scott. Join me as we explore and demystify the latest trends, technologies and strategies used to achieve massive growth in 10x businesses. I'll be sitting down with sales, marketing and business leaders, dissect what's worked for them, dispel myths and deliver actionable insights that you can use to ensure repeatable, sustainable and predictable revenue in your business. Welcome to the sales versus marketing podcast. My name is Scott and today we are speaking with Alfie Issa Marsh. He is the head of U.S. Sales for Spend Desk. Spend Desk is a platform focused on optimizing finances within organizations that the SaaS platform. Alfie is a tenured sales leader. He is built both the UK and now U.S. sales team up from scratch at Spend Desk. Spend Desk, when he first joined was 20 people large. They have over 100 people now and they just recently closed a rather large series of funding so they're doing quite well, they're expanding so I'm very, very excited to speak with Alfie and get his insight on how to scale a SaaS sales team and how to build a community, how to identify your ideal customer profile, how to find product market fit. Alfie has been through Spend Desk as they have literally done it all so with a further ado Alfie give us a little bit of background about where you came from coming from Bloomberg over to SaaS sales and what Spend Desk is doing. Sure so you could probably tell a little bit by my accent that I'm from the UK so I was born and raised in London in a place called Enfield and so I've been pretty much been there for most of my life when I went to university in the north of England and so when I graduated I went straight into Bloomberg so my kind of background was very based around finance, I studied accounting and finance at university I always wanted to get into investment banking I thought that's where all the money was and so on and so forth and I think I was probably like a lot of young people seeing the 2007-2008 crash and reading most of the headlines about all the bankers making lots of money and thinking oh that sounds great we should go into that industry and I think obviously going into that industry straight out of union is was you know very rude awakening that's not quite the case but nonetheless that's where my kind of initial interest as a 15-16 year old kind of kid going into that world started with trading of finance. I sort of soon realised that there's a big difference between like what you're passionate about what you're interested in and where you can really leverage your skill sets and I think that I've always been a social person I always was in sales roles kind of informal jobs Saturday jobs and that sort of stuff when I grew up and so I kind of went down that route within Bloomberg and so I started selling trading solutions and to banks and hedge funds and that was kind of like my main focus I then was there for about three years and then decided I wanted to do a couple of things I wanted to move away from a large corporation there's about 20,000 employees there and the way I saw the company was it was about 20, 30 years in the making they got a whole monopoly over the market and it was very defensive in terms of the sales so you'd hear all these stories from all the old guys that had been there for 20, 30 years and talking about the you know the good old days when there was a couple of hundred people and they just started making out and the whole market was there to go after I thought that's exactly the sort of thing that I want to get apart and so I decided I want to go and work in the startup I wanted to go and work in sales I wasn't too fast if it was in a kind of a fintech environment but more just in a startup and quite open-minded at the time as I actually met my partner at Bloomberg and we both quit and then they decided to move countries and so we moved to Paris and so managed to come across Fendes which was a very very kind of lucky opportunity of a great mix of the fintech background, and then sales and they hired me as the first English or native English speaking person in the company and the first person to go and then look after the the UK market where we then have grown up until then so that's a little bit of background I guess into where we have come from. Now it's really good now did you have trouble because you went to Bloomberg so that makes sense to the financial background but SaaS sales is a whole it's a whole other beast coming from Bloomberg and I'm thinking of like the the financial guys that I know and I don't they they're hard workers but they don't know they don't know SaaS sales it's a very different very different job so I'm curious how you how you were so successful and like ramped up so quickly what where did you learn to do SaaS? Yeah well the short answer is on the job yeah always I mean you're right it was a very humbling rude awakening to go into that environment I think that I've always been the sort of person to kind of jump headfirst into the deep end and kind of see what happens but when you do that yeah it can be quite quite a shock sometimes so I mean the environment I came from when I was working at Bloomberg in a sales environment I mean we everyone had heard of us we were a brand name you know you pick up the phone and you say from Bloomberg there's automatic kind of authority and legitimacy with customers and nine times out of ten we were dealing with it was sales and account management but we were basically upselling and cross selling into accounts so it was super easy to some degree you go in and say hey there's this new feature of this new trading platform would you like to check it out hey yeah sure come by oh have you heard about this product also what you think yeah always got this kind of foot in the door which was quite nice but yeah going into a SaaS environment it was it was very interesting kind of from day one it was very quickly that I realized okay this is not the same environment and it's the sort of play especially when you're the kind of first person going into the market I tell you I was a 20th person in the company actually at the time and so it's the sort of place where if you're not bringing in results or there's not anything happening or moving there's no way to run and hide there's no averages across the team it's very no everybody everybody's very transparent every time you screw up it's very out in the open because and were you the first sales person there were you the first sales guy not the not the first sales person so we yeah maybe a little bit of background about spend there so yeah it's a perusing based startup when I joined there was about 20 people there was already some sales people for the French and the German market and then obviously mix of the founders and take and product and so on since then we've grown from about 20 people to over 160 we're now in four kind of principal markets we have offices in four markets London Berlin Paris and now San Francisco and yeah so our customers are all over 31 different countries so that's kind of a bit of that history but when I joined there was there was actually another person working on the UK market at the time so we kind of started right in at the beginning effectively started right from scratch started as a SDR BDR role that other person didn't stay for for too long and then sort of soon ended up being the only person on the market being coming a full cycle rep then going in the hiring a team and building that from scratch no that's that's that's tough but at least you had some sales support so it's not like you had to like build the sales process from the ground up like there was still some there was still so you went in and they don't get me wrong I think it's still very difficult to do what you do because you were sort of building out like the UK version of what was a company that had some momentum they had product market fit they did understand like their personas and their ideal buyers like that's kind of the level where it's been desk was but they were just trying to go into different markets and whatnot when you joined yeah so we so when I joined it was a few months before we announced our series eight so we were kind of still a seed stage company we had we didn't we have any customers in the UK we had it a handful and kind of cross customers between Paris that had entities in the UK but yeah pretty much it was one interesting thing about France there's startups that tend to focus on the French market yeah of course yeah French market they tend to just focus on their get really big and then try and go into other markets and I spend this it's something that we've had as an ambition from pretty much day one to always be an international company so you know to start with 20 people in the company and start open up with the UK and Germany right from the beginning it was quite rare in terms of that ecosystem and a lot of people thought we were pretty crazy but I think it was a really powerful thing to do that early on because it you learn very quickly how to go into other environments are the markets are the languages market itself I mean if you look at the difference between you know German market French UK and American market just in terms of what works in a selling process it is completely completely different and very very 100% you have to understand like the the cultural nuances of how people buy especially and like you don't think like maybe naively if you don't understand that even between European markets there's massive cultural differences and then as you even grow like further you go like you know like APAC you go North America Latin America like it's like there's even further but like even within like Germany UK France like there's a lot of things you have to take into consideration so that was probably not so easy and I guess like but the massive if you can get it right the potential is massive right because you have the ability to easily go across Europe like very very quickly if you can understand how to take your products market in different in different countries what what I wanted to so I want to go more into how you sort of built out like the commercial organization but I also just wanted for people listening what a spend desk actually do yeah great great question so these just want to think about it is to we we help people make payments in the workplace more easily but to put that into context for people who aren't in finance teams or who wouldn't actually be buyers of the product we have to spend money in our own personal lives just like businesses do then our personal lives is pretty easy UK take 10 bucks you buy something or you take your credit card you purchase it and you pretty much forget about it in the working environment it's very different there's lots of different types of payments that need to be made maybe it's a credit card is an expense claim or maybe an invoice payment but every time there's a payment that happens in the workplace there's multiple things that you have to do on top such as capture receipts make sure that the right person is able to pay and that they should be paying what they're paying for and then on the accounting side at the end to track it and put it to these accounting codes and so on so forth so there's a whole and a host of extra things that you have to do in the working environment now historically most people are managing these sort of things with credit cards and they're not really built for business spending so their main kind of value proposition is of credit for example so it makes it pretty tough now what we decided to do at spend this was to address all these issues and challenges around spend management which we said we have to build the payment methods ourselves from the ground up instead we're going to build them specifically designed for business spending so we have things like disposable virtual cards that employees can request directly from their own computer when they want to buy a book on Amazon also physical cards that can be given if they're going to go to client meetings and these sorts of things but all of the payment methods are connected to a SaaS platform which is then controlled by the finance team and as a layer of control and automation over the process so it's really like bespoke for business expensive so is there anything like that in the market or are you very much like it's like a blue ocean type you are literally the first to build anything like this it's a really interesting question when you look at the market historically businesses have had to spend money for well you know thousands of years to some degree so there's the way that they do that at the moment there's a ton of different solutions out there there's expense management solutions that don't necessarily offer a payment method or there's credit cards yeah yeah so there's all these kind of different ways in an xr and gmail and everything else but with the first company to come together and say we're going to have one platform centralized that's both useful for the employees and the finance teams that you can then go and scale your finance operations up that's really interesting yeah no because I'm thinking of all the tools that I've used and they're all kind of siloed applications that you find a way to to jumble together into something that probably looks like a bastardized version of what your actual product looks like so yeah I that's that's a very I can definitely see how that could be useful okay so that that makes a lot of sense to me the product itself makes a lot of sense so you're you're tasked with taking this to market in the UK and you just started as an SDR BDR doing full cycle sales so how did you build because this is really industry agnostic really building out this commercial organization building out a sales team eventually now you are I I apologize you're ahead of us sales now or UK sales now now US recent recent tradition so we we just raised our series B with index ventures and with that we're now doubling down on those existing markets and open up new markets and one of those is going to be the US and and what does that look like so let's start first like how you built out a commercial organization and it could be you it could be you and a team of senior leadership it doesn't matter I'm still curious um within the UK and then how do you take that process and then transpose it into a new market is it identical or is there small nuances now that you do have a developed sales team yeah sure so um maybe linking back to one of your other questions about the change from Bloomberg and going into assassin environment and and kind of a rude awakening so it ties in nicely when I first started it was very clear that I needed to come in and create opportunities so that we could then go and close them I kind of from working in such a structured environment I kind of expected uh wrongly to come in to come in place send my emails do my activity and out would pop a few of those yeah I hear you man I'm just laughing because sorry just a book context I used to work for for bell Canada which was an enormous organization a kin to it's not it's not international but it's it's publicly traded like a kin to the size of Bloomberg and now I'm I'm working in startup environments so like everything you're saying is I'm living it I'm living it I know I know but uh that's right didn't interrupt the apologies no no it's it's good um so yeah so so we just basically started doing that and uh you know kind of you know getting some results but you know definitely not what what what we're hoping for at the beginning um and I'll just remember you know sitting down with with my boss's Nicholas Marcia ourselves uh revenue director and he kind of just took me to one side and was like you know we're not getting results uh by doing what you're doing so you need to effectively figure it out and change what you're doing it's like uh okay so yeah useful advice hey well this isn't working so what what about something else what is that I don't know but something else yeah and so I kind of uh you know just jumped into that you know head head first and and started you know working hard to figure that out and um there there was two two two kind of key dynamics there so um you asked about open up in different markets if it's a copy paste and these sorts of things so when we open up in France you know we were in the French ecosystem community so if you think of it like uh your your first circle and then what's your second circle and third circle the the the first circle with those friends and family people you know and other founders and startups and rodar CEO was out on his moped around Paris going to people he knows and that was the kind of the first 50 customers effectively um but you have you know your first 50 is going to get you through your first beta and it's going to get your first paying customers and so on and then you can kind of expand out from there um now when I came into uh the UK we didn't have that at all we weren't in the front uh so in the UK ecosystem and we didn't have any brand we didn't really have any customers and I think for the first kind of three to six months it was much more of a spray and prey type of not necessarily intentionally um but it we kind of just realized that actually we need to replicate what we've done in the French ecosystem more naturally there but kind of artificially create that in other markets so that first started with getting hyper focused on what our ideal customer profile was so we knew exactly the size of the company that we were working well with the types of brands the pain points we were pretty quick and understanding that side um so we just made sure that you know quality in quality out if you're contacting a right wide range of uh segments then you're not necessarily going to get lots of traction so we kind of got laser focus and I think that uh in with regard to if that's different for other markets I wouldn't necessarily recommend that as an approach if yeah you didn't know that you had product market fit I think for us we were pretty confident that we had put a market fit right from the right from the get going in the UK market in other markets if we didn't have that product market fit you do want to test lots of segments out to see which one stick and then figure out okay this is then where we need to get laser focus but I think I'll have it but that is I was going to say that that is like when you when you do when you are required to have a little bit more of um a wide approach to identifying your your proper product product market fit in in that environment you have to be aware that that's going to take a little bit more time to commercialize so then map that into your projections and map that into your business strategy because if you're trying to take on a market and you can't even afford to pay and keep a light sign at home like in it's it's going to be it's going to be detrimental so I think that being aware that it's going to take a little bit longer to commercialize in a certain market is important to like your overall strategy if you don't if you don't have that that target customer profile ideal customer profile so defined exactly and to that point you know they I think this is some of the issues that sales leaders have not even necessarily the sales leaders but working maybe with other CEOs or senior management that aren't in the direct customer facing roles is when you do go to the market if you don't have a product market fit your objective is not to create a scalable sales process your objective is to get product market fit and effectively that sales leader is a medium for communicating with the market and saying okay you know you want to you want to make sure you have a sales leader that can if a deal is going to be one they will win it and if the deal cannot be one obviously they're going to lose it but you need to know that if you're not winning or you're not getting traction it's because of a product market fit issue rather than an execution issue but at the same time you need to have that relationship with the senior management to know that this is not a case of how do we build a scalable process it's how do we make sure we've got those foundations to then build a scalable process on and then that's you know when different kind of objectives but I think that's where you have to have a very clear from top down to to the rest of the teams what are the objectives in this certain period and taking it from that I like the way you phrase that because I do believe that a CEO that hires a sales leader too early on is looking for that scalable repeatable predictable revenue and they don't understand that that perhaps they've hired the sales leader too early if they haven't figured out that product market fit yet there's you know I'm always I always say that you should probably hire a marketing leader before a sales leader to generate demand and that demand should flow over to the CEO who should then identify the proper sales opportunity identify the buyer persona and then once you have too much demand for the CEO and the close rate is exponentially high then you can hire a sales leader to build a scalable sales process but I think that a lot of you know I listen to a lot of sales podcasts myself and like the lifespan of a SaaS sales leader is something like max at 18 months yeah but I don't think it's always you know sometimes it is the sales leader's fault but I don't think it always is I think a lot of it has to do with I'm hiring a VP sales it's just going to drive my business at the next level and they don't the CEO doesn't isn't aware that a lot of what should be done that he's asking the sales leader to do probably should be done by the CEO first yeah so yeah absolutely and and you know you're second to that point of the of the tenure of a sales leader this is something I speak about fairly often in in my posting on LinkedIn is the kind of difference between growth and the fixed mindset not just of an individual but also of a company and I think that there are a lot of founders that will hire a sales leader with the okay you've done x to x and another company it's a copy paste because we hire you and you're going to do the same thing there and that doesn't really just doesn't really work and it's a case I think a lot of companies don't create an environment where they hire someone with the capability to learn how to do that in the future and give them the tools to then succeed and it tends to be the other way around where it's okay I expect that you can do this and the moment I'm seeing signs that you're not getting traction then we're going to fire you yeah and that sort of I think that is more of a fixed mindset rather than a growth mindset at a company kind of level agree I think it's I think that that also is such an important point for sales leaders that look for work like how to and and I don't have a good answer for that because that's something that I've that sort of comes up in conversation with a lot of people that work in in SaaS sales leadership like how do you identify a company when you're hiring that you are aligned on that growth mindset as opposed to a fixed mindset with the leadership and if you have any suggestions I think that would be really valuable but I think that that's something that is something that has to be important I'm just not sure how to identify that exactly yeah I I'm it's a tough one I think it's just the same when you interview for candidates in to come into the company as a sales leader you've got a lot of questions about what are your you know you've got fixed growth mindset questions tell me about when you failed and if they start blaming things or they don't talk about the way that they've grown then it's more you know fixed this mindset there are certain things like that but I think yeah you should do that and challenge the the founder on those kind of same sort of things and I think that my you know our founder Rod is one of the people and this is again another thing from being in Bloomberg to in a startup world I was having a discussion over a beer the other day about this at the beginning I used to really not like this about Rod and he was just so honest with everything and when he didn't know something he would tell you he didn't know yeah where are we going to be at this point I you know I really don't know what happens if we fail well we have to figure it out at the time and all these kind of things that you know from Bloomberg that's stressful that's so stressful coming from Bloomberg yeah and I've just come from this kind of structured environment and again it's a fixed type of environment mindset why it's but it's okay this person is talented they should be able to execute now rather than seeing that person as it doesn't matter whether they know how to do that now they're going to be able to get there and learn their way to that and actually you know two in a bit years later than I've been in the company it's actually one of Rod's biggest strengths is the fact that he can hire people and know that they can then grow and he will hire people who know more about a subject matter than him to make decisions for him and so it's actually a strength and I think those are the sorts of things that are really embodied in a growth mindset type of company but how to get that out before you join I think you've got to interview them yourself really I think so okay so let's okay so we went off a little bit so I just wanted to go back to looping back to where you're taking taking product to market and I do apologize because I can't actually remember where we left off but I'm okay so you want to you want to find that product market fit I'm just thinking back so in the in France you had this network in UK you wanted to artificially recreate that how did you effectively artificially recreate that environment so that you could be successful yeah so the the first thing is we got really focused on those ICPs and those segments we knew we were lucky because we had more of a product market fit we knew which ones they were and that kind of progressively got more concrete over time so we got very very focused and said okay the next hundred customers that we're going to obtain are going to be in this segment and that really helped because the the kind of metaphor to compare this to is if you were trying to light a fire with a bunch of Kindle but it's very separated out you might catch fire at one end but it's going to go out before it in itself so the title you can put that together the more traction you get and that's when you then can go okay into your second circle you've got to get in the world of mouth and you go into more traditional industries so that's definitely how we started doing that on on a sell side we also started to build a community called the CFO connect community we mainly sell to CFOs and finance teams and so it's very important for us to be able to again create a community and create value for those people where people are going to talk together sit together you start building a brand and really add value outside of just where your product is and I think that what was quite helpful in being an international company is we'd already started in Paris we were doing this in Berlin now London San Francisco it's it's it's very attractive for these bi personas because they don't necessarily have a lot of events for them in the kind of startup world it's very much the CTO or the CTO or the sexy titles and the CFOs were always kind of left with you know not much actually to them but more and more increasingly they extremely important roles within the startup environment and so we've really focused and doubled down on this CFO connect community so it's a very smart strategy was that was that a marketing initiative yes yes yeah yeah marketing initiative and so in marketing now take over that a lot more but in the early days there was a much more kind of you know sales and marketing going to create those events and contacting people when leveraging personal connections and so on and so now we've managed to kind of scale it up and systematize that a lot better very good okay so now so you build a community you have your your ICP your your personas you're making some headway in the UK so is that still you sell at this point in your career is this still you selling direct you're you're an individual contributor at this point still in the UK or are you starting to build out your team yeah so I pretty much was the main person in folks on full cycle up until about November time when we hired our first SDR and so pretty much from then onwards that's when we started hiring and building out the team and growing it from there so I mean you could split that into maybe after the first year if you like very good and then when you're building out you're when you're building out your team what are recommendations for sales leaders that switch from individual contributor to hiring their first SDR because this was the first time you've hired somebody correct yeah so many many many mistakes so so what are what are like some lessons learned that I'm curious from to go from an IC2 to more of a management position I think that my attitude which was definitely the the wrong one was when I first started moving into more management role I'd always kind of proud myself on being a good individual contributor and executing well and hitting target and having a high sales whatever that was always my kind of focus as long as I can really contribute to the team in what I'm doing that that's great it meant that I managed to build a lot of experience and know what did work and what didn't work in that market but then when we started to hire out a team I think the issue was it might might my mistake is focusing on trying to get tell people this is what you can do and this is what you should do and just expect them to be again a copy-paste of because you've got that knowledge to do and you expect to kind of see the output at the end of it and that was completely the the wrong focus and this is why I think often you know people say good sales people don't make say make good sales leaders because they don't necessarily make that transition into okay how do I let this person create their own path and empower them to do what they need to do move blockers away from them and figure out what are their strengths and understand how can I motivate this person rather than just saying this is what you need to do to be successful it's really about that kind of human human relationship and that was a really big change and no ups and downs you know lots of failures along the way and definitely still learning and I think a book that are you probably already read the radical candor was a really helped me in management but also from the point of encouraging my team to be that way with me and and actually sit down and say okay Alfie what's the feedback that you know we can give you that to help you improve and here's a situation where actually you know something didn't go the way that we wanted it to and learning from my team as much as possible rather than just trying to tell people what what the right thing to do now listen man I think you I think you've ramped up and climatized to the role quite quickly everything you're saying is very much on point and I do feel that a noddle unfortunately not a lot of tenured managers are as as a walk into the reality of how to be a successful leader as you are in your short time so that's seriously hats off to you've really done well in the role because everything you're saying is like it's so on point and that's how you actually lead like that that is truly how you lead and that's the issue with sales management right like you always have the number one contributor they move into a management role they don't actually have the time they don't even know why they're good at sales they're just naturally good at running through this activity list that has led them to be successful but they can't map it out they can't put it and bundle it up and write it down and codify it and put it into a playbook which is really as a leader you have to be so self-aware of the activities that are going to lead to success and then enable and remove blockers and all that stuff so it's I think that's a hundred percent on point but it's really good that you you were able to learn that because I know a lot of sales leaders that are much later on in their career that still don't know that so but um that's very good so so where so what so you've you built out your sales team um now is there anything that uh when you're moving this is the only other thing that I really wanted to ask about the the strategy for spend desk do you notice any differences when you're moving to a different region completely so you're moving to North America you're heading us sales are there are there stark dynamic cultural differences between Europe that you've had to climateize to or are you still doing the same community creation same ICP and that's it's sort of this like that portion of it is a copy and paste yeah I I think the the the nuts and bolts tend to stay the same the systems and the processes which are the most important things tend to stay the same but it's the execution that's different um you as I said with different markets they focus on different things for example in America you want to have products that are specifically built uh for for the United States you know if we have a euro sign on on the platform when it should be a dollar sign that that that that screams okay this isn't necessarily built for the ice market there's little things like that and and and just kind of processes so I'd say it's more in the execution but the overall nuts and bolts and the kind of strategic side um it stays the same and I think that that's what we notice from doing that in multiple European markets as well is once you've got the formula right it's more just the execution and the execution right you know we really focus on hiring a native talent within those markets who can have those relationships and know how to have that correct execution for that particular market and is that something I'm curious about that um that that native talent uh do you hire industry specific or do you hire um like a growth mindset individual that is is so excited about learning about something new like what is your or like what's your ideal not customer profile but your ideal hire look like I mean definitely that the the the the the latter sides um you know we don't really care what they've necessarily uh the job title has been before or the industry that they've come for me it's really what they can go on to achieve and uh are they really passionate again you know no one wakes up and says I want to sell spend management software for a living that's not necessarily anyway I've spoken a bit about this before like passion is not something that you just find it's something that you actually have to cultivate it and go out there and figure out what you're interested in and uh and actually cultivate that and have a fascination something that you can continually improve but also get economic value out of um so I think yeah definitely for the candidate side it it's more about a growth mindset their passion their drive it's also important there's a good cultural fit from are they a kind and trustworthy person you know one of the things that we've really uh focused on a lot and it's definitely held true as we we scaled up is uh you know we don't have a cutthroat type of sales environment um people aren't uh holding knowledge or not sharing it amongst their peers you have top performers who go out of their way to document uh their processes so that they can then share them with the team and it's those sorts of attitudes which are really really important and especially especially in the early days when you're launching a market because you you don't have the um you know you you don't have the safety of being averaged out by the rest of your peers yeah no that's a I love I love that culture is important and I love that you have that culture where knowledge is shared and like the the best practices from top performers is recorded taught over um I'm I'm very curious how you successfully uh find that in the candidate how do you find somebody that fits into that culture you have a question that you like to ask or a process that you like to follow or yeah I think our hiring process is probably notoriously quite uh comprehensive uh in in terms of the types of questions that we ask when we go through those those deeper layers um in terms of the types of interview questions it's really about going through three four layers and understanding the case to tell me about a time when this has happened and dig into that and what did you learn from that so you know one of my favorite ones is asking about what's their biggest failure in life and figuring out when what is that uh why did you fail what happened and why did you fail because that really helps people take and when people have a fixed mindset they're scared of failure because a fixed mindset failure is validating that you suck at something and success validating that you're really talented where that's you know that's not true a growth mindset says that failure is just an opportunity to learn and when you ask that question you can see it very very clearly in certain candidates when they are open about talking about failure and they don't see it as something to kind of defend against and it's more what did I learn how did they grow and those sorts of things so that's definitely you know a big aspect of that and I think there's an element of when you speak to someone um you could just feel that connection happen when you when you ask one sentence and they respond back with a whole answer and the conversation sort of flows and they're really passionate yeah if you know if I ask you what are you passionate about outside of sales or work and you you tell me and I said oh amazing okay photography tell me a little bit more about that what's your favorite camera or what's your favorite photographers and there's kind of you know crickets then well what are you actually passionate about because if you're not passionate about what you say you are how on earth can you be passionate about coming into this company and kind of kicking us I like that answer I've heard that before I've heard like the assessing out like how how passionate you are about something it doesn't really matter what all that it matters is that like if you are that passionate because if you're that passionate about something in your life then as a sales leader it's my job to unlock that passion for my organization and I'll do that for you I just need to know that you have passion and then everything else is on me so that's I like that a lot that's very good um uh what did I want to oh uh just when you're in terms of I just like to ask this for sales leaders and I know it's a little bit of like a such a like a norm like a boring question but I really do like asking and getting different people's opinion on it um what are what are worst practices you see in sales leadership in sales management um that you've seen throughout your career that you really really think is toxic to culture environment uh you know the psyche of a sales rep like what have you seen that that is really not good um I think I'm kind of lucky in to a certain degree to have had a well so far a relatively short career I'm kind of in the early stages of that so and I've only worked in in two professional environments that the Bloomberg and spend there so I've been quite lucky to not really experience that much of a toxicity environment but more from understanding in the people that I speak to I think it's very dangerous you set a target and ask someone to kind of execute on a target without A getting them invested in the why why are we doing this what's the bigger picture and also showing them that you're investing time to help them get there I think it's quite um toxic when someone is in a stressed environment they don't necessarily know how to get to somewhere and your attitude is well you better get there or we're gonna fire you uh that's just a horrendous attitude to take in general and it's not very nice if you haven't received it in but you can have someone who is perfectly capable of getting there in the future if you invest time in understanding how you can help them and and what things that they need to work on so I think that that's the kind of like you know here's a target go and do it and the good performers will do it and the bad ones won't and and that's that and we'll just you know turn out the team and hire some new people I think that's a very toxic way to think of it um which is just the nature of the sort of short termism in sales you know month to month quarter to quarter and the pressure from management coming down it's it's it's it's it's I understand that you know you can't blame these people necessarily from from doing that it's a construct of the environment that they're they're in so I think it's everybody's responsibility from not just the leaders but the company to create an environment where you don't create that type of attitude but having said that there are also companies that are scaling super super quick and they actually just need to have that they don't necessarily care and invest in in a long-term uh sales team because they're happy to turn over STRs or salespeople because that's just part and process and actually you know for them from a business perspective the kind of perspective I can kind of understand the point because investing in time when you could just hire someone quickly and fire them when you're going that quickly but it's just it's not you know it's not the way to do it and you've got to be really careful when you're going into a company to understand which company I'm like into is this the type of environment that that's in because if you get you you find yourself in that kind of environment you should try and get out as quickly as possible that was a that was a very good answer I'm glad I asked that question that was a really really good answer um thank you uh no that's that's perfect because I 100% aligned with that um is I don't really have any more like like sales leadership management questions um we've been doing this for 40 minutes now I want to wrap up and I want to just ask some sort of like higher level questions to help some people like frame uh where you are in your career and where you came from it won't take long to finish us off but I just wanted to ask is there anything about sales leadership building out and scaling a SaaS team that you think would be a really good point that I didn't hit on um we didn't we didn't speak too much uh kind of on the actual what it takes to build a good outbound system um that's true let's you have uh do you have a few minutes and because I actually I forgot about that absolutely yeah yeah okay so yeah I think the the the key key thing in an outbound system is uh you are you have to be customer centric so you have to think and speak in in in the terms of the customer that you're speaking to um and I think that um there's some really good um LinkedIn content creators out there for example uh Beck Holland has got a load of great stuff and flipped the script Josh Braun has got some killer content uh he was the head of uh sales at base camp uh and the the way that they produced the the content and frame that is it's fantastic and I'm very very in in line with that um when we when a lot of sales reps if you're fixing an outbound they try and focus you know finding someone with a pain at that time that knows that they've got a pain and I did a post about this other day but if you ask someone okay do you have a a problem with your commute to work you're probably going to say no because you get to work if you've been doing it and there's no real problem so the the amount of people in the market that you can actually uh get to and get a response from is very very small if you switch your focus to an education one and speak it in terms of the customer but firstly really understanding what are the objectives uh of the people that you're speaking to and you can do this by going on uh job searches type the the buyer for sonar's name and look at the key responsibilities it will tell you exactly what they're trying to achieve doesn't matter about what your product does but you know their top level so speaking that first and then educate them on something that can either prevent them from getting to that responsibility or objective or a better way of doing things and if I was to say to you hey um I'm sure you don't have any problems with your commute to work but you know uh there's actually a way you can click your fingers and you would arrive in 30 seconds giving you two extra hours of your day would you like to learn more 100% oh yeah it increases the audience potential enormously because you no longer are trying to capture people that know they've got a painter or wherever and know that you could help them you're now focused on on a much wider audience and this is something that we spend this we're creating a new category spend management as you said before it's not something that's actually heard of so there's a lot of education that comes in forward and I think if outbound sales reps took that from the beginning it's really easy you just have to speak and have conversations with potentially qualified people and educate them on either something that's preventing them from getting where to they want or something that they could help them uh get even better so there's two books that you you're reminding me of when you say that the first one would be the challenger sales method or you're truly challenging and and you're you're highlighting a pain point the customer may not even know they have and the second one which I really like is called play bigger where you're creating your own category that's one of my favorite books so on my book list and uh the the beer I had the other day with my friend you bought the book with him and said that you gotta you gotta read this I need to read it it's exactly like what you're saying it is it is selling to your selling to a customer a problem they didn't know they had and you are the category king and you are creating a line item on their budget sheet for your product they they reference a lot of like Mark Benioff and sales force and the fact that nobody needed nobody knew they needed a cloud-based CRM solution they were just purchasing all this on-prem data like data center like servers and whatnot and then Mark Benioff basically created this category for cloud computing that really didn't exist at that point now it's now everybody right like that's all off site so that's exactly what you're doing so that's uh it's it's very good and I think to be aware of that is um because you're right you're not a budget you're not a line item nobody nobody knows about you or anything that you do you're you're a mix of a whole bunch of line items right now very good very very good I like that a lot that's a and I think that anybody um if you're not like uh if you're a SaaS product there's a good chance that you you are not replacing something and that that what you're doing is going to be in addition to and I think that's probably one of the most difficult things for people to understand or have their mind around especially coming from big business where like you worked in finance I worked in telecom telecom is a line item telecom is always a line item so if you're not buying it for me you're buying it from someone else doesn't matter you you always have it in perpetuity for forever everyone has internet everyone has phone lines everyone has you know they're hardware and all that stuff same with finance if you're selling to the right buyer somebody is investing in some trading platform somewhere to do whatever they have to do so with SaaS it's much different very very cool good very very good all right um so that's an incredible at an incredible point on outbound um it's not like you're always solving a problem and that's something that's a really really good takeaway so sometimes you have to be the one who's pointing out that problem for your buyer exactly and you know I think for the thing the biggest thing I think SDRs get scared about is just the that kind of rejection of all they're not going to have a pain and it's and that's fine you're you're just there as a medium to figure out who actually in that market uh to have a conversation with whether it's it's a good fit or not for that that's fine it's just educate the market and try and have conversations with people and then that that simple idea of just open up conversations conversations can happen in many many different channels linked in phone email person whatever it just doesn't really matter what the channel is you just need to have a conversation with someone and so I think that people get so focused on how can I increase my response rate or get my subject line done and it being else and you kind of forget that you're trying to have a conversation with someone and there's many many ways to do that and especially as technology changes definitely some of the best opportunities that I've had in SaaS don't come from people that are our actual customers they come from phone calls of people that that conceptualize the software differently than I do and then they'll take it to a reference or one of their clients or one of their peers and they're positioning it in an entirely different way than the first you know 20 people have ever heard it being positioned them to and then it that's another potential potential opportunity that I've never thought of before so if you if you only focus on your open rate and your click through and like your landing page conversions and you aren't just having these these really candid conversations really building like some of the best some of the best sales tactics are just asking for coffee to get feedback from people that you know that's it's so it's so helpful like a kind of actionable tip that people can use especially in going to markets and especially if they're trying to find product market fit is once you have a conversation with someone and you demonstrate your product or service it's and you've got them kind of bought into what you're doing in the vision etc it's always good to ask them so if you were to describe this product or service to a friend in the same industry who's never heard of as before how would you describe it because when you say that and you hear what they actually give you back it's it's absolute gold because it's in their terminology it's what they've understood they will say things that you've never even thought of before and this is when you can have absolute gold and and really then replicate that in your outbound prospects in their their after and do like yes like you're preaching like yes yes like I so that's so important for finding product market fit I also love that approach when you're way past the point of finding product market fit and you're just interviewing your customers you're you're interviewing your customers you're asking them why they bought from you and then you're including that messaging in your outbound marketing because they're using keywords that you've never used in your outbound marketing they're focusing on features that you didn't even think mattered but were there anyways so that getting that feedback is super super important when when we pass over you know customers to our customers success team there there's almost there to a certain degree you know our customers success will say this is where you know we can make your dream come true so tell me what are your dreams and you you'll you'll hear them come out with things that they didn't actually tell you in their sales process because there's more trust in once the relationship has been built and it's the customers success is a different team I think it got me thinking I mean how many sales leaders actually ring up the customers after they've actually closed an account and asked them why did you buy why not buy another thing what was it about us that you actually lied because that no I think that when I again starting out from the beginning I had no real idea what why people were actually buying versus another reason and when you're trying to get a product market fit that's where you really you really need that information so you definitely should try to call them up in respect yeah and plus like they're buying from you they're going to be brutally honest they're going to be brutally honest why they're buying from you because they don't care there's like it's not like if you ask a customer who's been ghosting you hasn't purchased yet like what do you like about our product against the competitor they're going to lie to you like they're going to come up with some BS because they don't want to hurt your feelings but after they bought from you you have their money they'll they'll be brutally on it and you can even on the flip side you can ask them what did you not like about the sales process what did you not like about our product what did you not like about our company and because you have their money they feel no obligation to hold back so they'll they'll tell you the honest truth and that's probably the most honest authentic feedback you're ever going to get that's great very good okay cool that was I'm glad thank you for reminding me about the outbound I know you mentioned at the beginning and I totally forgot but I'm really really glad we brought that up okay so that's okay so that's all I got for the for the sales question that was really it was really powerful I wanted to ask is a couple things for people that are earlier on in their career if you were to tell yourself your 20-year-old self one thing probably to do with your profession what would it be that one thing that you think would make the biggest impact on your life fail quicker learn faster and just haven't really opened mind be put yourself in uncomfortable positions and and always be pushing your boundaries and and just never take the the perspective that you know everything that there's always things to learn and yeah the quicker you fail the quicker you learn and the more that you grow very good and if you were going to recommend sources and knowledge could be a person could be a book could be a podcast where where would you suggest people go and learn some good things that you've read her or listened to yeah so I mentioned a couple of people earlier there's a bit of calling for some awesome content out there just in Welsh as well especially if you're looking at building kind of like a LinkedIn brand I think that in terms of things like statistics and things to know where you're benchmarking yourselves against other other companies companies like GONG and sales law put a ton of research out there and there's just a bunch of community more than sales pros revenue collective and I think LinkedIn is just an absolute gold source of yeah there's so many people now that are a freely sharing really kind of rock star knowledge on there so you just find those good people weren't and eat up the content yeah there's there's time there's you mentioned a couple names that I follow as well that are very very strong like they they put us in really really great stuff and like for me I don't hyper target as much as some like some of the content I put as a little bit more broad but I know some people that I enjoyed following their hyper targeted on sales or hyper targeted on marketing and like the stuff they put out is very very powerful so I'm actually I don't know if you're part of the revenue collective but that's something I've always found very useful as well I'm not sure if it's particularly famous in in the sales world and I actually found this one from the marketing book podcast which has some great stuff on it but it's the book called questions that sell and it's from a guy called Paul Cherry it is one of the best most influential books in helping myself and our team in the sales process because the questions it's all in the execution it's types of questions that you ask and it's the way that you ask them and it has completely transformed the way that conversations and discovery calls I had to be able to get all of the knowledge that you need to be able to provide the top class sales process and I'm not sure if it's a particularly kind of famous or well-read one in this kind of staff I don't know it but I'm gonna I'm gonna get it now that's for sure yeah very cool okay um and then lastly where do people find you if they want to connect yeah LinkedIn is pretty much the easiest place uh Alfie Easter Marsh at spend desk or you can drop me an email at Alfie at spenddesk.com awesome thank you so much man I appreciate it that's all I got but man thank you very much thank you again for listening to these sales versus marketing podcast uh thanks so much Alfie for lending your insight on all things sass sales as always you can listen to this podcast wherever podcasts are found including Spotify iHeart iTunes aCast and you can also watch it on YouTube uh if you haven't already please subscribe like share with your friends family colleagues and peers I hope you all have an incredible week have a productive week and we will speak again soon bye now you