Lessons - How To Build a Sales Team | Shawn Cruise, VP Sales at RSA

Hi, it's Scott here. On these lessons, episodes of my podcast, I'll be selecting my favorite lessons from various guests and episodes of success story. Today you're going to hear from Sean Cruz, VP of Sales at RSA Security. He is a tenured sales leader with over 30 years experience. He's worked for some of the largest organizations in the world. He gives us the blueprint for how to hire, train, and ensure sales rep success. In a perfect training environment, you kind of have three elements. There's corporate methodology because you need to have corporate training to understand the company and how the company slaps one element. The second element is the mentorship and leadership of a sales leader or someone that you can attach someone to that can provide that. The third element is just go try. The go-try part is the biggest part of it. What we need to do, there's a game called Rebound, it's still in the market, it's little marbles and they bounce up on such a board. I always say to junior salespeople, my job is to provide you the boundaries so you can bounce back and forth so you don't hurt yourself but the best person to help you is your self. Take this methodology which is the corporate side, learn from it, take what I provide you and learn from it and then go out and learn and practice and skill and see how that develops and then do it again, it's like a constant cycle. Do you find that sales reps or could be coming from sales and coming from tech or people that are coming from the outside? Do you find that they try and default onto you as a resource that they should be using a little bit less but they try and use more than they should be? They're always coming back, always asking questions, scared to go it on their own when you try that? I think part of what we need to do as sales leaders is be prepared to make tough decisions about personalities. I've met a lot of great people that are in the wrong positions. That's not a statement on someone's value, it's a statement on the fact that we put you in the wrong position so let's find a good spot. There's no bad questions and there's no bad engagement with a sales leader unless it happens 100 times. If it's constant and consistent, so what I look for is incremental development because it takes time. If you ask me the same question three or four times, I'm okay with that because I want you to be really good at that and part of my job is to, when you ask me a question three times, I'm going to apply that to you and see if you're learning over time. If you ask me the same question eight or nine times, maybe that's an indicator that we should look at elements so it's the balance between the two. There's no right and wrong answer there because sometimes you have to be patient, that little extra bit with certain people, others go fast, others go slow, you kind of have to just watch and see because not everybody matures at the same pace and I've seen some really great sales people mature just beyond the point where people were ready to move them into some other role and they just needed that extra little. The difference between being a good sales leader and a great sales leader is figuring out when you put too much in and you need to make a move versus when you're right close to having someone be the person that you've been training them for. How do you see that? How do you see if somebody is, because obviously you want to try and push those people into the right position when you're hiring and onboarding them because you don't, it's expensive to let them flounder in a role for like a significant period of time. What are the person, I guess you kind of mentioned the personality traits, but what other items would you look for outside of just almost like I'm blanking on the word just like a very charismatic individual who is okay at approaching people. What other traits would you look for in somebody when you are bringing them on that would support their success outside of just their personality? I think personality is top of mind, but I think certainly kind of appearance. The second thing you want to look for is how does somebody appear? They present themselves, yeah. And sometimes simple things, personal hygiene, how does somebody carry themselves in the con or their hands clean, like simple things that you can pay attention to over time. Are they dressed well, nice, different things like that, and that's not always a perfect indicator, but certainly personality is number one, appearances number two, because you can train somebody and teach somebody on technology, you can teach them methodology, but you can't teach them personality and you can't teach them hygiene and personal presentation and just professional, professional appearance and whatnot. Exactly. So that's great. So let's talk more, so we sort of spoken on hiring and what to look for outside of the traditional norm, we've spoken about like coaching and accountability for an individual to be effective, obviously it depends on the market, but for sale strategy, what type of sale strategy does RFA or do you subscribe to when actually interacting and dealing with customers? Is there a certain one that is like a sand lure, or is it challenge, or is it just like that we focus on solving solutions and identifying pain points and it's more like a high level? What is your thought on that? Well, I think every organization will have a variation of its own sales methodology. So we here at RSA use force management in previous lives, we've used sand lure, buzz worth, at the end of the day as a sales leader over the course of your career, you're going to get exposed to different methodologies. So I think out of that methodology, great sales leaders incorporate multiple elements as part of a regional development strategy. So one of the things that always frustrated me throughout my career is that we take sales people, drop them into a territory, and then a year later wonder why they haven't been successful, because if you're in sales you should just go sell, right? And the reality is organizations need to take a significant level of accountability. And I talked to my sales team about this and I talked to my sales leaders. I believe the corporation generally should provide you 50% of the in-region kind of support. And when I say, you know, when I use that number, you know, so as a sales leader, I look to bring in partners, bring in channel, bring in my field marketing, bring in my own network and roll attacks and others into a region, into a territory to help my rep create demand. It's my job to help that early funnel and develop that early funnel with a sales rep in every region that I manage. And I think if I am accountable for half, we'll guess who's accountable for the other half. And I think, you know, given the amount of investment that we make in selecting somebody and training them, we spend a year, year and a half, you know, it behooves us as an organization to invest intelligently in the development of the territory in support of the goals of the territory. So I apply a really somewhat unique model in the sense that I actually carve the business plan for lack of a better description into two elements. Here's what I'm going to do in your territory. Here are the things that we as a company are going to provide to you, field marketing, channel development, different resources, events, workshops, business development. There's our half. Now let's look at the work that you're doing to accelerate what we're providing and create the other half of your pipeline. And I think that's something that, you know, a lot of sales leaders don't really, because it means I'm accountable to my team across the board in individual elements. I think that's one of the areas that I think every company can improve on is really understand like we owe our teams and our individuals effort, we owe them investment, we're accountable to assist. You know, so I'm responsible for vision, I'm responsible for strategy, I'm responsible for resourcing and a bunch of other elements to help you. So now that you've got all these tools, how are you going to then take these tools and give me the other half? It almost helps make the accountability place on the rep a little bit more easy to swallow because now they know that you're coming to bat for them. And I think that's a really good point that a lot of organizations don't do this well, because how many times it's ridiculous, because they invest hundreds of thousands in training development, then it's like sink or swim by, here's the foam book, go sell, which doesn't really make any sense because I've already invested thousands of dollars in you as a rep. So why wouldn't I support you to the best of my ability? It's a really strong point and I think they're more organizations. That's probably why, as a sales leader, as an organization, you are successful because you don't have that, you know, just sink or swim mentality, you kind of, you really do support. No, that's just to add to that, you know, one of the things that anyone in sales, when you're going through the interview process, very often we don't spend enough time asking questions about the company's thought process around in region development. How much field marketing has been applied into the region over the last year? How many workshops have the company done? How many executives have visited into the territory? How many customers are there? There's a whole series of really great questions that should be asked in an interview process of sales people to really understand what you're getting into. It doesn't mean you don't take the job if those things aren't there. What it does mean is that you really understand the situation you're entering into and it allows you to then go back and go, okay, so we talked about this in the interview. You said, you know, there was no field marketing for the last year. How are we going to increase that? Because that's 15% of my business development number. What about this? What about that? And I think, you know, some advice that I can give to anyone, whether you're sales leader or someone that's going through an interview process, it doesn't really matter. That's a really healthy conversation to have. What are we doing within these eight regions, these ten regions? Let's parage one off and look at Ottawa. What's going on in Ottawa? The numbers last time and executive was there. What relationships do we have? There's a lot of really great questions that are really simple and very often we're afraid to ask them because people, because if I ask, I might countable for something afterwards.