Great enterprise sellers are aggressive, high-EQ and not technical

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 12:30

   Enterprise sales reps. First, is that correct? And second, like, how did you even know how to interview them? How did you know who is good? Like, how does so many of the CEOs I'm working with are going through this process? How did you do that? Actually, the first thing I did was kind of more or less revamp the whole executive staff. So I would say a year, year and a half later, the executive staff that was running the company was completely different from the one that I kind of inherited. So I would say that's the one thing that I knew we got to change that because it's not working. Engineering a product, I handed it off to a co-founder and I basically ignored it for two years. I focused my attention on everything else to building up the rest of the muscle of the company and so that was that

2. 13:15

   was the first one we have been doing this plg thing so we wanted to product let's grow we love the aws people swipe a credit card we didn't want to have any sales people so that was kind of codified into the uh sort of ethos and culture of the company we don't want sales and we had hired um sort of sales engineers and they were actually the sales department we had a couple of aes but it became clear that look plg is not working and actually in 2015 before i became ceo for a little while we ran an experiment called zero touch which was we shouldn't even ever talk to a customer it should all be automated funnel uh because plg and actually you could see that there before that revenue was going up and it just flatlined for two quarters when we started doing that so you know at one and a half million revenue and you know you know that sales aes have

3. 14:04

   a quota of like a million or 2 million in most companies, you know, like, gosh, if we just get one AE and that guy or that gal crushes it, that would be the whole thing that we've done for the last few years. So we should probably, all the other options make no sense. We should just double down on hiring salespeople. Okay. But what kind of salespeople should we hire? Yes. And how did you know even what questions to ask in the interview? Okay. Well, I ran this little experiment in my head which was let's look at companies where this is working are the best sales people technical super technical super smart do they have phds like the phd technical you know kids are the best sales guys and no there's like absolutely not so then i learned two things from that it's like okay so uh probably that's like not the main thing and secondly it probably

4. 14:54

   doesn't even have any advantage because if it had an advantage there would be some some of these sellers that were great salespeople who also happened to have a PhD, would be at the top. But no, you found none of those guys. I don't think it's not only not an advantage, it's a disadvantage to have a PhD. There you go. There you go. So it became pretty clear that, okay, the way we are hiring AEs, we should change that.

5. 15:15

   We were testing them on whether or how technical they were because how smart are they? But I just looked at the best, and none of the best are technical. So what are we even doing here? So we have to change, revamp who we're hiring. Now, we also had an amazing sales leader that we hired, Ron Gabisco, who knew what grade looked like. So we worked with him and, you know, he should get 99% of the credit for what happened on the sales side.

6. 15:41

   But it was pretty clear that we don't need to just get only the technical people. It started becoming clear that there is, you know, other skills that salespeople have that you should probably go after those. One of them is, you know, I think great technical people tend to be kind of more introverted. i'm generalizing here and they're sort of maybe not the most aggressive opinionated people that are just like toe stepping and so on but i learned quickly that the best salespeople actually they're kind of aggressive very aggressive yeah and the first uh one of the first uh uh ad's that ron had hired dave got us a meeting with a customer that we couldn't get a meeting with and in the meeting the exec that had gotten us the meeting said that ae get him out of here I don't want to see that guy ever again.

7. 16:27

   You know, he's, he's emailed my boss, everybody else. This is like unacceptable. So I got Dave guy. I don't want to see him at all. So then I'm like, Hey Dave, you've like pissed off the customer. Like, well, what the hell is going on? He's like, Ron told me getting into the building, figure out some way of getting it. Nobody was responding to an email. So I went through every door I could and I had to break glass.

8. 16:46

   I got you the meeting. You know, what are you complaining about? So it started becoming clear that, okay, they need to be professionally aggressive. otherwise you know so it's kind of a little bit the squeaky wheel gets all the grease uh so that itself is actually kind of counterintuitive for engineers you know from professor land that those are the kind of you know so that was one but also there was another meeting with one of the early ones i remember keith we were in the room and the customer somehow got pissed at this guy and kind of told him okay who the hell are you what are you even telling me like you should you You know, I was like, ooh, that's pretty bad.

9. 17:22

   Then he suddenly just started asking her these weird questions. He's like, okay, so what is your team working on? I thought, we're supposed to do sales. What is he doing? So, I'll show you the story. At the end of that meeting, she was hugging him, saying, I'm so sorry for saying that. And, you know, so I was like, wow, what did you do in there? Like, he's like, well, I noticed she was emotional. So, I wanted to bring it to a subject that she's comfortable with.

10. 17:43

    Everybody's comfortable talking about what their team members are working on. So, I moved the subject to an area. So, I learned, okay, these guys, they're just like really, really amazing EQ, handling really difficult conversations, you know, that get really uncomfortable. you know they're you know they're the kind of people that it's kind of hard to ignore them you're gonna like if they email you you're gonna respond back to them so it started becoming clear that there's like a rubric they need to be a little bit professionally aggressive they need to have amazing eq they need to be the kind of you know command of the room and then eventually i started learning that okay the really smart ones they actually figure out what's called the power base of the company like how decisions get made high up in an organization it's actually

11. 18:21

    complicated not a single person will say i'm gonna buy this for 100 million dollars it's a complicated web of influencers and people inside the customer you know you know that make this decision so they have to work that power base so it started becoming clear that this is an art and it's a very different art from what i grew up doing and we should just hire the pros and since it's so humanly intensive it's self people are dealing with other humans a lot of the things we learn about how to deal with computers and math and logic and physics it doesn't apply over here and humans haven't changed.

12. 18:52

    So probably these techniques that they've learned over the last 30 years, we should trust them. So that was kind of the journey we went through and we revamped our sales team that way. And a lot of this I learned from Ron.