Lessons - Why You Can’t Close Deals | Kris Hartvigsen - Founder of Dooly

Now, I guess my question is as we continue to develop all these tools, all these tools are meant for, you know, including duly and other ones, they're meant for enablement. So they're meant to basically make things easier for sales reps and each tool is making things easier. And the sales reps, responsibilities and KPIs and what they're accountable for is ever increasing. Now, you know, this is partly due to technology but also automation and other types of naming tools that allow sales reps to basically increase their personal effectiveness. And I guess the question is, what does the future of sales, what does the future of work? What do all these things look like when we're continuously giving new technologies to increase the performance of these individuals noting that they're still, they're still only human at the end of the day. So is there a limit to how effective we can make people, is there a limit, a psychologically to how effective we can make people, when is the cutoff point where where we can no longer increase the effectiveness or the efficacy of an individual with a tool? Yeah, I think so. Like every single product that you bring on board will report that it's going to improve your performance by 10%. Right. So theoretically, at some point in time, you're exceeding the limits of what's possible. This one's better. This one makes you 10% better. This one takes shapes off 10% of my time. So if you have, you know, you buy 20 products at each shaved 10% of your time off, theoretically you're going back in time. Yeah. That's obviously not the case. So I think that what you're going to see in the future of work, and I'll talk more about the future work. Because if future work is actually a really interesting thing right now, like when Bert talks about it all the time, and a number of other major media companies are really engaged in this whole concept of the future of work. Future of work is letting people leave the job that you told them that they were signing up for. Right. So if you look at the definition of a salesperson, and you said, okay, what does a sales person do at its core? If you were to sum it up in five words or less, you would say a salesperson sells stuff. Right. More or less. Now, that's not what a salesperson does. A salesperson forecasts. A salesperson does expense reports. A salesperson has one of the ones with their manager. A salesperson takes notes and meetings, a salesperson updates the CRM, and that's all of this other stuff. But you don't talk about that, right? So the reality is, I think that the future of work is that the definition of your job at its simplest level is what you're actually going to be doing. And all of the technology that you surround, the seller with or the worker with, are going to solve the problems of the things that you didn't tell them were in their job description. All right. That's an interesting way of thinking, but it makes a lot of sense because that's right. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, it's, I mean, I, maybe it's oversimplified, but I think that the reality is, again, I'll go back to that initial example when I signed Major League Baseball or at the NHL, nobody came up to me. It's a high five, Chris, really good job on signing those deals. Did you update the competitive field in Salesforce? Did you file your expenses for that trip? Nobody said that, right? It's, it's assumed that you're going to do those things, but as a seller, it's assumed that because my paycheck is so predicated on my performance, I'm not going to do those things, right? Like I'm really not 50% of the sales, sales person's paycheck, 50% plus, actually, if you're a good seller, is based on your performance. It's an open-ended paying role, right? You can make as much money as humanly possible within that job unless you have a cap commission plan, which I think you're terrible. So if that's the case, you're hiring somebody that you know is under the pump to perform no other role in the business, engineering, HR, nobody else has quotas that if they miss them, their paycheck gets cut in half. You might miss your bonus, but your bonus is probably not going to cut your pay in half. It's probably incremental. That's why it's called a bonus, right? Commission is not a bonus. It is your pay. So when you're thinking along the lines of that, you have to really be empathetic to the needs of that person. The future of work is the ability for us to deliver on the promises of what you're going to be supposed to be, and getting rid of all the block and tackle crap that get people tied up in their daily chores and activities. So that's why you look at all of the revolutions that are happening around the world. It's all about trying to improve the perception of a specific thing that's happening, right? Perception, a woman in the perception of a lot of people in the perception of this perception of that. Even in the perception of work, and I don't want to compare that to because they're not even close to the same thing. In the perception of your job, you never signed up for all the other crap. Yeah. So we want to get to a point where we give them an empathetic solution. And if you don't provide them with an empathetic solution, they will find it. And it might not be a year come. That's a very good take, boy, for anyone listening, and I think that that's why we see such high turnover rates. 35% in sales. Yeah. Some of it's, you know, unregretting, some of it's because somebody doesn't have a passion. I crossed my number at an antivirus company one year, sort of between Vision Critical and my last entrepreneurial, where I figured I wanted to get into SaaS. I hated my job and I left because I hated selling antivirus offers. Some people would be like, security software, sign me up. This is really cool. I was like, screw that. Again, got to kind of allow a passion to. So 25% people cheering year over year, unregretted, regretted, misfit. Now, just to tee it up, I want to, first of all, I just want to ask, is there anything outside of what we talked about in your journey, in your life, before duly or at duly that we didn't cover? Because if we're teed up for that, then I want to ask sort of closing questions, just lessons learned from your career. But I just the floor for you to before we go. Yeah, I would say the only other thing, there is one lesson that I really try to bring into my job, which I learned is a baseball coach. And look, you, sure, there's tons of stuff that we don't know. But let's talk about this one specifically. I remember I had this kid on my baseball team a few years ago. And I had just gone through this coaching program to learn how to be a better coach. I still think I'm an okay coach. I don't think I'm a great coach. I'm certainly going to coach at the major league level anytime soon. But this kid was so self-aware that it was like wild to experience this. I was trying to teach him how to do his swing as teaching him wrong. And this kind of goes into the whole idea of enablement, right? And he paused and he goes coach. I don't learn the way you're teaching me. I'm a hands-on learner. I need to have the bat in my hand in order to learn. You're trying to teach me like a visual learning. So there's actually three types of learners. There's people who are tactile, people who learn from hearing, and then people who learn through seeing. And he was very much a tactile learner. And so I'm like, okay, holy crap. I didn't even realize that I was making a mistake. Here's the bat. All right, let's break it down into smaller bits. Let's put you in your batsman, okay? L1 reposition, hands-on reposition, hands up by the ear, all that kind of stuff. Now you need to put it here, now you need to put it here, now you need to put it here. And as soon as we did that, he, like his game changed. He was a kid who couldn't swing a baseball bat who went on to be, there was an award that he was nominated for at the end of the year for like basically most improved player. A kid who gave his heart and soul under the game. And it was like this moment of great pride for me. But again, I think what I learned from that is, the way that you learn isn't the way that everybody else learns. So you need to really sensitive to that when you're delivering, training or material to other people. When we think about that again, from an empathetic perspective, we think about that inside of our product. How and when is it appropriate to educate you? That is a very good lesson. And I think that when you are looking to coach a trainer, or even build a product like that has to be something that's to be taken into consideration as well. And I don't think enough people do the whole other conversation, not just on building the best possible user experience for a product, but the way to coach people is a whole other conversation that I have a lot of issues with some sales. You know, not a lot of people coach sales individuals properly either. But a lot of it is, again, because of, we touched on it at one point. It was just the person who usually defaults into a leadership position and doesn't know the best way to coach or trainer on board. And then you get that rocky period in that person's onboarding. A lot of it is because it's usually just the best person in that role that moves into the next role, right? And that's not as good fix either. There's probably one other thing that is interesting as an entrepreneur and somebody who likes to be hands-on and whatnot. You need to have a bit more patience than I think most entrepreneurs do with the people who are learning that don't know it as well as you do. You know, I see you always the way I work with my kids. It's like, ah, I could let you cut that onion, but this is my last thing. I let you cut that onion, but I can do it way faster and way easier. So I'm just going to do it. And I can say, but I want to learn. It's like, okay, you got. So the art of letting go is, it's I think important. And realizing that despite the fact that you probably are better at it out of the gate, you can let people get better than you at it. If you give them enough opportunity, can you need to make sure that you are aware of that? And I would say that's an ongoing lesson for me. The art of letting go is hard when it's your baby, when it's your thing. When you know that there's an easy way of doing things, that's a tricky one.