Lessons - Why Modern Sales is Broken | Samantha McKenna & Amy Volas

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