Hiring and Building a High-Performing Sales Team with Lucas Price, Former SVP of Sales at Zipwhip…

hired for $850 million back in 2022. He's got a great session lined up today on hiring and building a high-performing sales team. So of course, make sure you get your questions ready. Um, before we kind of dive into the content today, a couple of quick announcements. Um, we are almost a month out from SaaStr Europa, which is our next in-person event. We're gonna be back in London this year. We're super excited. Tickets are still available, so I'm gonna drop in a special Workshop Wednesday promo code in today's chat. If anyone wants to join us and you haven't yet bought your tickets. Beyond that, again, make sure that you drop your questions in the Q&A. We will be live streaming the session— we are live streaming the session, I should say. We will be sharing the recording on our YouTube as well as the slides on our SlideShare. So make sure you check that out if you want to go back and revisit or share this with someone who might have missed out. All right, let's see. Lucas, thanks for joining us. And let's see who we have joining us from the attendee side. We've got Logan, Utah. We've got Carlsbad, Denver, Colorado, Saratoga, Lisbon, Portugal, Seattle, Washington, your home base, Nashville, Houston, Texas, SF Bay Area, Calgary, Canada. A lot of California folks today, which is great. London, love to see it. Hopefully we'll see you in London at Europa. Italy. Delhi. Gosh, love it. So many different countries, which is great. I don't wanna cut into Lucas's time, so let's kick it off with our questions to get to know him a little bit better. Lucas, tell us more about what you're up to in your day-to-day role today.

Yeah, so I've moved from being a sales leader to being an early-stage startup founder. And so, you know, I'm working on founder-led sales at this point. I'm working on, you know, product product vision, product roadmap with the team. And so, um, just building out a new startup here.

That's great. Um, and hopefully taking your lessons learned from today into your current role. Um, what project are you working on today that you're most excited about, or just a big initiative that you're working on?

Yeah, I think the things that we're seeing with our customers in terms of, um, AI and how, how to use AI as a, as a coach in interviews, and really the effectiveness we're getting from that, is what I'm most most excited about seeing.

Great, very timely, popular topic too, um, that we love to see. In the last 12 months, what has been the hardest thing that you've worked on?

Yeah, I think, uh, you know, being a startup founder, um, multiple times, you always kind of think that you're going to avoid mistakes this time, and you make different sets of mistakes. And so, I, you know, being a startup founder is just really, really difficult, as many of the people on our call know. And And so that's, you know, just getting all the pieces together and building a successful business. It's never-ending, never-ending set of challenges.

Really is just a new day, new challenge.

Yeah.

And then last question, what is your favorite, your current favorite SaaS tool or platform? I'm sure you have a bunch.

Yeah, I think that my answers to this are probably kind of boring. I think the one that's most useful to me each day is Calendly. I think that what's most you know, what, what I do that I sort of, you know, sort of enjoy because it's newer to me is I'm, I go into, I just record myself in Zoom meetings and then feed the transcript into Claude and have it create documentation for me. And that's been something that I've been doing that's been, you know, like very helpful and kind of streamlined a lot of the work that I do.

That's great. We always get the tech, the tech stack question, and I'm especially, I'm sure for this hiring, this topic, people are going to ask that as well, but won't take up any more of your time. Let's get into the content and then we'll be back here for Q&A in a bit. So Lucas, thanks.

Yes, go ahead. All right. So as Caitlin mentioned, prior to starting Yardstick, I led sales at Zipwhip. I started at Zipwhip in 2014, almost immediately became an avid reader of the SaaStr blog and was helped tremendously by the things that Jason M. Lemkin was writing there. I went to the first SaaStr annual and I've been back to most of them since. I really love it. And so recommend it to anyone who hasn't been before for sure. When I started Zipwhip, the B2B business there had about a quarter million dollars in ARR and I built the sales team that took Zipwhip to over $100 million before it sold to Twilio 3 years ago for $850 million, almost 3 years ago. And during that time, I wasted a lot of money on failed sales hires. And at some point I decided I wanted to learn everything I could about hiring sellers and I started Yardstick. And it's not gonna be an advertisement for Yardstick, but just so you know, Yardstick is an AI interview coach that makes sales hiring repeatable and data-driven for growing companies. And in my job, I talk to sales leaders every day about hiring sellers. And in this session, I'm gonna share with you many of the lessons I've learned from that. So sales hires have the highest failure rate and it's a very expensive problem. We constantly hear the distance between top performers and everyone else has never been wider, with the majority of sellers not hitting quota at a lot of organizations. The opportunity cost of a failed sales hire is typically around 70% of their annual quota. And so what that means is that if you think about the, the difference between hiring someone who succeeds on the one hand and someone who fails on the other hand, the difference that's going to have on your top line is 70% of whatever their quota is. And so oftentimes that's a decision. It's the hiring decision is between a half a million dollars and a million dollar decision. And one way to, if you let that kind of cripple your decision-making process, the magnitude of that decision, the then you're gonna lose for sure. And so you need to set up a process that leads to accurate decisions, but don't, but, and not while still not losing to indecision. My belief is that almost everyone underestimates the second order effects of hiring well. So I think it's a reminder, it's worth a reminder of what some of them are. As a sales leader, of course, the people I hire affect my career trajectory. But it also affects the career trajectory of everyone else on my team. And that's part of my legacy as a leader. Waylon McGill, who works for SaaStr, and I think he's on this call today, once pointed out to me that the effect of hiring a salesperson who's just 10% better, it seems like a small difference, but when that seller ramps faster, sets new standards for what can be accomplished within your organization, and learns more from the market faster than the other salespeople you might have hired, It creates a compounding effect, and that small difference becomes huge over time, especially when multiplied across a team of new hires. So what we wanna do is we wanna keep our hiring standards high, and interviewing is the most predictive part of the hiring process, but it actually isn't very predictive. Part of the reason that we fail at this is that the average interview is only about 10% better than flipping a coin. And, um, at predicting job success. If I try to boil down the easiest and simplest steps to be great at interviewing, these are the 4 steps. Implementing these can make the interview process more like 80% better than flipping a coin. So the first one here is consistency. People tend to overestimate their ability to evaluate candidates. And so what ends up happening is You know, I might, and I might not even realize that I'm doing this, but I might have a conversation with one candidate about overcoming objections, and then I might have a candidate with another can— a conversation with another candidate about, about prospecting. And then I'll try to evaluate these two candidates against each other on doing discovery. And that's like we, we as humans, we think that we can do that, make that evaluation. But we're pretty much wrong about that. And so we need to have the same conversation that's lined up to what we're trying to evaluate. The second point on here is, uh, scored, um, using scorecards. The most interviews, the decisions end up getting made in the first couple of minutes based on how much I liked this person. And there's lots of situations that I've been in and probably some of you have as well. Where you're interviewing a candidate and you're thinking, yes, I like them, I like them, I like them. And then you get to the scorecard and it's like, okay, do they have a demonstrated history of being resourceful? No, they actually don't. A demonstrated history of being a high achiever? No, they don't. And so using a scorecard reduces a lot of the cognitive bias that enters interviews by making us think about the candidate component by component. And then behavioral is a style of asking questions that we're gonna cover in detail in a few minutes here. But the research says it's particularly effective for complex job like sales. Research also says that work samples are the most effective part of the evaluation process. And in sales, role plays make the best work samples. So we're gonna talk about that and give some examples of that in a few minutes. We're gonna spend most of our time on these 4 things today. There are other parts of the process that are also required to succeed in maintaining high hiring standards, including specifically defining the traits that are needed for success in your role and having a good plan for how you're going to get there. Having a strong pipeline of candidates. We're— I'm not gonna spend the time today talking about, you know, 20% of your time recruiting and, you know, the different recruiting channels and stuff like that. But that is absolutely critical. You can't have high hiring standards if you don't have, if you're not bringing in the right types of candidates as well. And then the last thing is closing top candidates. These 4 practices will help you close top candidates by showing that you have a well-run organization, but that's not enough. Top sellers tend to be picky about career opportunities, and you need to be able to provide a, a, a great career opportunity to them as well. So before we get into behavioral interview questions, there's a few basics I want to cover. To many of you, this might seem remedial, but most of you will have people on your team that are doing interviews wrong. If I were to just kind of sum up this slide, it's you should try— you should strive to build rapport with the candidate during the interview process so that they have a positive experience and are more likely to open up to give you the information you need to make your evaluation. Interviewing is the smallest amount of power that sometimes goes to people's heads. And you'll see all the time where interviewers are trying to show off how smart they are and telling the candidates that they're wrong. I've made this mistake, you know, earlier in my career. So, you know, don't feel bad if you do, but it's a behavior that's not useful for finding the right hire. And really interviewing candidates is not the place to get psychological needs met. Um, the, the other thing I wanna point on this out on this slide here is the, the last bullet point. You do don't need more than 4 interviews. This is based on research done by Google where they put candidates through between 1 and 20 interviews before making a job decision. And what they found was that the 5th, 6th, 7th, and all the interviews after 4 only had about a 1% chance of changing the hiring decision. And so a lot of times after 4 interviews, we might feel some indecision, but usually that 5th and 6th interview is not going to change anything. It's rarely going to change anything. It's really just for us to get more comfortable with it. But when you're building an efficient process and a scaling process, you can't just keep sending people through interviews and it, it, and there's, there's really not much point to the interviews after 4 most of the time. So we're gonna start by talking about behavioral interviews. A more formal name for them is competency-based behavioral interviews. And to do competency-based behavioral interviews, you need to start by determining the competencies and traits that lead to success in your role. And so this is not a definitive list of sales competencies. This is just a few examples. There's lots of variance across sales roles, probably more than we expect. The right type of sales experience is critical for many sales roles, but I see a lot of hiring processes that either look for the wrong types of experience, they overvalue certain types of experience, or they use experience as a replacement for carefully considering traits and competencies. One example of this that I see all the time at, uh, at, at first kind of entry-level jobs, is sales leaders who say, hey, I only hire ex-college athletes. And there are a lot of traits that ex-college athletes have that could be indicative of success in sales. You know, they might be— they're likely to have a history of achievement, resilience, drive, passion. But not all ex-college athletes have that. And there's lots of other life circumstances that can build those traits. So build those traits. Excuse me. So I, I believe that most hiring processes would benefit by focusing more on evaluating traits and less on being, on relying just on experience. The counterpoint to behavioral questions are situational questions, and they aren't very effective, but they're very common. These are hypothetical questions that start with phrases like, what would you do if, or how would you... Interviewers often like hypothetical questions because the answers are easy to evaluate. These interviewers will say the answers give them insight into how the candidate thinks. When you're asking a situational question, the interviewer usually has a correct answer in mind, and it's pretty easy to evaluate whether the candidate got it right. But is that actually useful? A question like, What would you do to get started if you were assigned 1,000 accounts in your territory and you needed to prioritize them? Might help determining if the candidate is smart, but it might also just be that the candidate read someone smart on the internet. And besides, I want to hire people who are smart and effective, so I want to use interview questions that help me evaluate both. Interviewers often have a hard time letting go of these questions, and I'd suggest that if you have a Notion or a Google Doc or wherever else that you use to keep your interview questions, When you go look at them, you'll probably find that many of them are hypothetical questions. I would encourage you after today to go and rewrite them as behavioral questions. We only have 4 interviews to get this right. And most of the time, these situational questions are a waste of time. Behavioral questions ask for a detailed walkthrough of a past experience that is relevant to the job. And so they start with a phrase like, describe a situation when, or walk me through a time when, or tell me about a specific time when. So if we, if we think about the question on the last slide and turned it into a behavioral question, it would be, walk me through when you've had a large number of accounts in your territory and you needed to prioritize them. This allows us to get to an actual story from the candidate that demonstrates effectiveness. And with the right probing, we can also start to understand the thought process behind past decisions. And what lessons have been learned. There are legitimate criticisms of this type of question being overused and losing effectiveness, but there's ways that you can use them where they remain highly effective. Sometimes people ask questions that are way too generic, like, tell me about a time you showed initiative. Now, if I get that question as a candidate, my mind is going to go blank. You know, there's like too many stories for me to sort through. And then when I pick one, it might not be demonstrating the right sales skill that's relevant to this job. And so it just is like a question that it can be useful, but a lot of times it won't work to get what you need. And there are other times when people use behavioral interview questions that are way too specific. I have a friend who was interviewing for a product marketing role recently, and she was asked, tell me about a time when you were working on messaging and the CEO was very opinionated about the messaging and how you change the CEO's mind. And, you know, her, her thought was like, well, of course I've dealt with multiple stakeholders, but I haven't been in that particular situation where I felt like I needed to change the CEO's mind. And so that question's getting way too specific where it's going beyond the skills that you're looking for into just a, a, a kind of bespoke set of circumstances. And And we don't want to write our questions that way either. In a moment, we're going to show some examples that strive to have the right level of specificity. Interviewers left to their own devices tend to use way too many questions in an interview. What happens is I'll be told, hey, Lucas, go interview this candidate for resourcefulness and adaptability. And I'll Google interview questions on that. And maybe I'll go find a list of 12. And then the first candidate, I'll ask them 8 questions and they, they talk pretty fast. The second one is a little slower. They'll get 6 questions. The third one's really fast. They get 10 questions. And so now I've lost the comparability because I've, I've, you know, used too many questions. And asking too many questions also allows the candidate the option of giving superficial answers. It puts the candidate in control of whether you get the detail that you need as the interviewer. And you won't have enough time to go deep into follow-up questions. So you might just be hearing what the candidate read about on the internet. When using behavioral questions, these are some of the things I'm thinking about as an interviewer that guides my follow-up questions. I wanna know about the situation, the actions, the reasons for the actions, the results, the teamwork involved, the lessons learned, and how the candidate has applied those lessons. When I go deep into the details I need for each question, I find that 3 questions is how many I should be asking in a single interview. So here's an example of an interview question for a sales role that needs to build pipeline. We have the question, we have the competencies being evaluated with the question right below it, and then we have the guidance from the last slide applied specifically to this question along with some of what we're looking for in the answer. The aim of this question is that it has a level of specificity that matters for this role, but no more. If the company is selling into a lead-poor environment where the seller is going to need to build pipeline, then I probably want to eliminate sellers who have never done that. And if they have experience building pipeline, I want to know the details of how they did so I can evaluate their adaptability and their resourcefulness. Now we're looking at a question that might be used for a seller who's selling against, against established competition and bringing a new framework to market. So they can't just fill out an RFP. They have to show the buyers there's a new way of doing things and convince them it's worthwhile. Many companies don't need this, but if you do, then you want to find sellers who can succeed in this environment. And this is our last example of a behavioral interview question. Again, this question is only specific— is only useful in specific contexts. You won't want to use this question with SMB or transactional sales. I want to pause for a minute on the guidance that goes along with each of these questions. When you think about scaling a process, building this type of guidance to go along with the interview questions is essential to scale the interview skills and effectiveness in your organization. Now we're going to talk about scorecards. This is an example of, of, uh, where we're looking at, um, we're looking to evaluate a candidate's demonstrated history with these competencies as well as the scoring scale that goes along with it. And then this is now we're looking at how an interview would make predictions of a candidate's ability to achieve goals using the scorecard. Some of the interviews won't collect all of the relevant data, and so you won't score the goals or competencies that aren't relevant to your interview. Couple things I have to say about writing these goals. I like to think like 60 days from now, 180 days from now, 2 years from now, what would make me look back and say this was a successful hire? And then on those same timelines, what would make me look back and say, hey, this, this was a hiring mistake. And I, and that usually helps me illuminate what should go into the goals. The other thing I would say about writing them is you want to put the what and the how in the goal. So what do I mean by that? So this first goal, meet or exceed annual quotas is the what. And how are you going to do that? You're going to do that by closing 25% of the opportunities. At an average contract value of $250,000. Or if we look at the last one, the what is keep CRM— I'm sorry, the what is contribute to the strategic and tactical clarity of the business. The how is by keeping CRM data and forecast accurate and up to date. So I— those are the things I'm thinking about when I'm writing goals. And then the other thing that goes along with scorecards is Really limit the number of items you have on a scorecard. It's very easy to come up with 25 or 30 items that, that seem like they're essential to you, but you won't be effective at evaluating all of them. And the rest of your interview team could start to lose trust in the process when they see the failure due to trying to make too many judgments and not getting enough information on any one of the judgments. So I prefer 3 to 6 competencies and 4 to 6 goals. And really, the fewer the better. You'll remember that the most predictive individual step here is the role play. And so this is, this is Marc Roberge's version of the role play, which is a great one. He writes about it in Sales Acceleration Formula, and he's updated it over time. I have a link there to a podcast where he talked about it recently. And, and so this, in this context, it's about a cold call. It's about a prospecting role. But you're going to give the candidate the information about the pitch and the buyer. You're gonna let the candidate take their time to figure out what to say. You're gonna do the cold call role play. After a few minutes, you're gonna end it. You're gonna have the candidate self-assess. You're gonna let the candidate know that in this exercise, you always give one piece of positive feedback and one room for improvement. And so that lets the candidate know that it, it isn't personal. It isn't a, isn't a sign that they did poorly. It's just something that you always do. You always give two pieces of feedback. And then you watch carefully when you're giving feedback. Is the candidate tuned into what you're saying, or do their eyes glaze over and they don't really want to hear it? And then you do the role play again. And what you're looking for is not necessarily for the candidate to do it perfectly, but you're looking for candidates that try to incorporate the advice because you're looking at their coachability. And so this is great for SDR and prospecting roles, but the principles about looking for the coachability I think applies to other types of role plays as well. And so this is a, this is an example of a discovery roleplay, which is my favorite for seller, seller's roles, roles for sellers. So I'm going to provide these 3 items to the candidate, the written information about the scenario, a LinkedIn profile in the, with the ICP and the persona. And then I'm going to provide them a recording of what a great discovery call looks like for our organization. You know, probably the best recording that I have. So this gives them a chance to prepare. It gives them a chance to listen for what good looks like for our company. And then I'm gonna do the role play with them. And, you know, these are some of the things I'm looking for when I'm scoring, but you probably have your own discovery methodology that you'd add to this criteria as well. But that's what I'm thinking about when I'm doing a discovery, discovery call role play. For a lot of us, sales leadership is particularly difficult right now. Many people will tell you that frontline sales management is the toughest job in their company. And being great at hiring makes everything else in sales management easier. And that's really meaningful, especially in this environment where sales leaders need to find more ways to win. These are my key takeaways from what we talked about today. Analyze the traits that lead to success. Build an interview plan with structured and behavioral interviews. Use role plays to predict success and use a scorecard to reduce cognitive bias. I'm happy to have been able to share these ideas with you today, and I'm happy to address any questions you have.

Great. Thank you, Lucas. All right, everyone, get your questions ready. We do have a couple already that I will kick off with. Lucas, yeah, I was gonna say, if you wanna go ahead and unshare your screen, I'm gonna come up here.

Hey, Lucas, it's Jason. Could I ask one question before we jump in?

Yeah, go ahead, Jason.

Maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe a little bit's changed since the Zipwhip days. But how are you— how are you thinking about folks, sales executives, you— we might hire that are jaded after 2021, 2022, '23, where it's just harder today. They feel like they're being asked to do more work than 2 years ago, being paid less. And that the system's kind of rigged against them. And I feel like these were— you didn't bump into these people that much pre-March 2020, but now I feel like it's the majority of LinkedIn. So do you work with these folks that are a bit broken and jaded from the last 2 years? Do you hire them anyway and take some risk? How do you deal with this ennui that's in a lot of sales folks who just feel like it's harder and the system's rigged against them today?

Yeah, I, that's a great question. I think that optimism is important in sales. And so I think that it's really difficult to work with people who are jaded. And I wouldn't necessarily say never, but you have to know that you're going to be putting in a lot of coaching and a lot of effort into them. And you probably don't want to do that. Like I would say, you know, 99 times out of 100, you don't want to, you want to, you want to hire people who are going to make your job easier, not make your job harder.

Yeah. Okay. That's a good triangulation. I worry that, I worry it's just, you, I mean, you see it on LinkedIn, but that's an algorithm, right? I hear it in the interviews I take with everyone from SDR to CRO. I hear this jadedness and the advice I give founders is unfortunately you can't hire them.

Yeah.

Right. But I would, I'd love the challenge that I'm wrong, but I'm not hearing that challenge.

Yeah, no, I think you're right. It's, it's, you know, there could be some unusual circumstances, but for the most part, you want people who are coming in that they're excited to come in and do the job and that they're going to bring energy to it.

Yeah. Let me, let me let other questions. I think that's a great way to summarize it. It seems so obvious, but I think people overlook this in the hiring process. You need this optimism in sales. It's so many nos. It's such a hard job, right, that When the optimism is gone, the close rates best case are going to go down, aren't they? You have to have this. It's got to come from somewhere, right? Or, you know, it can't be pure delusion. But if you don't smell the optimism, you don't see the optimism, don't make the hire.

Okay.

I'll let other questions. Thank you.

All right. Let's try and kind of keep it in order of topic. Michael, do you want to come up and ask your question just about this great hire and kind of red flags to be looking for afterwards?

Yeah, sure. Thanks, Caitlin. Question for me is, you know, we all make hires, we all assume we make great hires, and then ultimately, inevitably, sometimes you run into somebody who might not be a great hire. And so my question is, you know, what red flags or things do you see in those first few days and weeks? What are those red flags and how do you identify those quickly to get that individual off your team, realizing maybe they weren't the great hire you originally thought? Yeah, I think that those early on when you've hired someone can be the hardest time to see it because you've hired them because you're optimistic about their future. And so it's when you're gonna likely to have the most blind spots. You know, you, you've, uh, gone through this process, you've identified them as, you know, the, the, the best of the best and they're on your team. And so I think like recognizing that you have to, you know, kind of separate the, the, your personal feelings about them from their judgment on the job early on is is one of the big things. And then, you know, a lot of the things that you're looking for during the interview process, you should see that carry over. Are they prepared? You know, are they bringing energy to the job? Are they fast learners? Are they coachable? You know, so I think like a lot of those same, you know, goals, characteristics, traits that you've decided are really important for this job, you should be kind of trying to step back and objectively evaluate early on in the process, Are they accomplishing the things? Are, are they, are they, uh, behaving in the way that we predicted during the interview process, separate from my feelings and my optimism about this person? Awesome. Thanks so much.

What's the timeframe you give that? Is it 30 days, 60 days, 90 days?

It depends a lot on the job. So, um, if it's a very kind of transactional sales role, then, you know, you're, you're, training is going fast and you're, you know, early on in the training, you might be getting people on calls or watching calls or whatever. And so, you know, I, I would start like looking at— and so in that situation, I'd start looking like, you know, do they have the adaptability? Do they have the resilience? Do they have the, you know, those traits? I'd start looking at that 2 weeks in, and then I'd, you know, and, and, and then another 2 weeks and another 2 weeks, and then soon after that, I'd start, you know, spacing that time out much further. But for a very transactional role, I think it's very fast. For longer sales cycles, it's difficult because there is a certain amount of luck about whether those first opportunities close or not. And so the evaluation is different. I think in those cases you have to, you have to be looking at, you know, are they effective at getting visibility into the decision-making process regardless of whether this opportunity closed or not? And so the timelines get longer unless they're just coming in and not, you know, performing the behaviors, not being on time, not being coachable. And that you usually can, you can often see pretty quickly. I would say oftentimes sales managers know that they've made a mistake in, in 6 weeks.

Good timeframe. Okay. Corey in the chat just gave kind of a quick tip. The book Who, W-H-O, is a great book that provides a thoughtful methodology aligned with what you're talking about. So if anyone's curious, you can check that out. Yeah, I agree. Ben, can we invite you up to ask your question around AI and other apps to evaluate the performance? If not, I'm happy to ask.

Sure. So I'm just curious here, Lucas, do you use generative AI? And there's a lot of tools out there that, you know, for example, taking the conversation, taking their LinkedIn profile, putting that together, and then using that as a way to, to compare that against company culture, sales methodology, and to kind of, to have that also give another level of feedback as compared to filling out a scorecard or in combination with it?

Yeah. So I don't use generative AI to evaluate candidates. I do use generative AI to evaluate interviews. Like, you know, did the interviewer follow the plan? Did they ask good follow-up questions? You know, what feedback can we give to the interviewer based on that? You know, there might be a day coming where it's used to evaluate candidates. I think that there's some, uh, you have to be careful with the laws here in the US here around EEOC. And I think that there's still some sorting through to do along those lines. Um, there are also assessments as well that are, you know, like personality or culture type assessments that, that you can use to, to measure someone against your culture. I, you know, I, I believe that in a lot of cases, if those are used properly, they can be additive. but they're not as, um, helpful as the interview. Interviewers are more predictive of success than, than other types of pre-hire screening. And so they can be additive, but not as a replacement for interviews and scorecards.

Okay, thank you.

All right, Eric, do you want to come up and, um, kind of shifting to the, the role play, we had some questions about the discovery call.

Yeah. Hi everyone. So you, you gave a couple of examples of role play and in that, you know, you lay out the situation and so forth. Do you try to do that in the interview or is it something you send ahead of time that they can prepare? Definitely send ahead of time that they can prepare. And, you know, I want them to— I want to give them like, this is the link, a LinkedIn link to someone who like looks like our persona at our ICP. And I'm going to play that person in the role play, you know, but, and so, so that's the online investigation you can do about me is this link to this fictitious, it's not a fictitious person, but it's not actually me. And then I also wanna give them a recording of one of our great discovery calls so they can get a feeling for what we're trying to accomplish in the discovery call. They can listen to it, they can use that to prepare. And now I can evaluate, you know, are, are they a preparer? Because that's very indicative of success in sales is someone who prepares.

Great.

Thank you.

Thanks, Mo. You're up next. All righty.

Hello. Oh, is it?

Oh, okay. Okay. Mo.

Yeah.

So my first name is Mohammed, so I thought you were using the short form. Mo, go ahead. It's your turn.

I'll get you next.

Thank you. Thank you.

It was very useful.

And we are building about something about recruitment. And I was wondering, what tools are you using and What are you missing? What you need to see in the future? And how can this help you for vetting salespeople? And yeah, let me know more about that, please. Thank you. Yeah. You know, we're using LLMs and I don't know, we're kind of building. I'm not quite sure what you're looking for in the answer. I guess I would say like one thing that I think I'm sure that the market's going to be flooded with soon, but I haven't seen a lot of right now. And I think that there's a real desire for it. Is high-growth companies, SaaS companies right now are getting thousands of applicants to their jobs. And, you know, and they're having to turn off like, no, we can't evaluate anymore. And I think there's kind of an old-school set of tools that use keywords to sort those resumes. But I think using LLMs, they'll be able to be sorted much better. And so you don't have to, you know, so you can build your profile. It can be, the resumes can be scored against the profile. You don't have to turn off and say no more resumes in. You can continue to leave it open and, and just have them sort, have them stack ranked against each other. Does your ATS provide you with the right tools for that or not? So I don't have a tool like that now. There, there probably are tools like that out there. You know, it's not something, it's not something that I, I'm like out there looking for, but I, I, a lot of my customers, I feel like are, are making that complaint to me that it's just, they're, they're having a lot of difficult, a lot of difficulty sorting at the top of the pipeline. Thank you.

Awesome. All right, Mohammed, I'm gonna bring you up to ask your question.

Thanks, Caitlin. Lucas, great workshop. And I had a chance to look up your LinkedIn profile before jumping onto this call. Quick introduction. I'm Shahrokh and I'm the founder of Remote Bridge. We help North American companies hire customer success talent from Asia at 40% less cost. My question is, can you walk us through your experiences building high-performing sales team outside of North America? And would you change anything given the years that you've spent in sales leadership? I was looking at your time at Gravity Payments or maybe at Yardstick. There were some team members who were based in a different geography, probably in Asia and India. So I wanted to loop that in and hear from, from you. What would you really change if geography comes in the equation?

So I haven't, I have not built sales teams offshore outside of North America. So I've worked with companies that do as an advisor or as customer, but I'm not sure that I have a lot of experience to share there. I mean, I, you know, I've seen companies do it successfully. I think it's pretty challenging and pretty difficult, but I know there are companies doing it.

Fair enough. Thank you.

Yeah, sorry, I don't have more for you there.

Another good Workshop Wednesday topic for another week. Um, just looking at the chat, got another book recommendation. The Team That Managed Itself also has a great section with a similar approach to hiring, the focus on product managers. Um, AJ, do you want to come up and ask your question?

Sure. Um, Lucas, great presentation. Uh, you said that, uh, in general, after 4 interviews, uh, you get— you hit the law of diminishing returns. How do you— how do you deal with a lot of people wanting to interview because they want to have a say in the hiring process, especially for sales managers? Yeah, yeah, I think that's— that's more of an issue the higher up you go. It's usually not a big issue for frontline sellers, but, you know, executive team sales managers. Yeah, lots of people want to have a say. I don't think it's wrong to ever do more than 4 interviews. I think that, you know, sometimes it can be good for the candidate if you're going into a director or a VP-level role, like you might want to meet, you know, your counterparts in marketing and product and stuff like that. And so I don't think it's wrong, you know, so it's not that it's wrong to ever do that. It's just that You don't need to do that in order to make the hiring decision. And so you have to realize what the real reasons are for you to do that. And, I mean, I've been internal before where, you know, everyone was raising their hand and saying, hey, everyone wants to have their say. And I've just had to explain, like, this is the candidate experience that we want to give. And so some of you who want to be part of this interview loop, I'm sorry, you're not going to be, or you're not going to interview every candidate. We're going to split the candidates in half or, you know, something like that. And so, I think that, you know, it is okay in some situations to go over 4 if you understand why you're doing it. But I wouldn't necessarily just allow everyone to be part of the loop who wants to be part of the loop. Thanks. Thanks for all your insights. Yeah, you're welcome.

There's also that candidate fatigue of it being too many for them and them getting the burnout or—

That's true. But sometimes, but if you're coming in, let's say, as a VP of marketing, you do want to meet the VP of sales and product. And so there is, and yes, you had to meet a bunch of board members too. And so, you know, at a senior level, there is candidate fatigue is a risk, but as a, at a senior level, you do wanna meet your counterparts.

Yeah. Yeah. All right, Kevin, I'm gonna bring you up to ask your question around resume screening.

Thanks, Jason, Caitlin, and Lukas. So one practice that we put in place is, so I'm frontline manager, sales manager, also have like an inundation of resumes. And one practice we put in place is in the job description to give a signal like, here's our company profile, tell us specifically what interests you about working at NextPatient. And I found that as a good screener. I basically— people who don't address that, I just write off and don't even look at them. And I'm curious if you in your job postings have anything like that at the top of the funnel to like assess if the candidate's actually critically thinking and you should get them into process? Yeah, I think that, you know, a lot, in a lot of situations right now, you have to think about like, how can we prescreen? But I think you also have to be careful about prescreening too. And so, you know, someone told me that they, they were doing, they were requiring like a video And, you know, you had to submit a video as part of a prescreening thing as well. And so they were only considering the candidates that submitted videos. And what they found is that the drop-off rate for, for female applicants was much higher than male applicants in that particular situation. And so on the one hand, you need to find ways to prescreen, and on the other hand, you need to look at your prescreens and see if they're creating kind of a homogeneous group of applicants and whether you're getting a lot of false negatives and whether, you know, those— I'm sorry, yeah, false negatives— and whether those false negatives are a problem for you. And so I think that, you know, if that's working, if like asking them a simple question, to include a simple question in the resume is working for you, I'd say keep at it. I would just say, you know, be careful and like look at the data and make sure that you're not losing the wrong type of applicants consistently.

Thanks. Some good things popping up in the chat. One idea suggested it was a panel interview. So Brian just wants to know, what do you think about panel interviews as kind of a solution for having more people in the room?

Yeah, I think that could be great. You know, when I'm thinking about frontline sellers, I think that training your current sellers to interview can be a step towards management, a step towards management training. But you might not just want to, you know, hand over the interview to them out of the gate. But okay, you're going to attend the interview, you're going to fill out the scorecard, you're going to give your feedback. And then after you've done that a few times and, you know, done a practice run, then we're going to start allowing you to interview candidates. That could be like a, you know, part of your, part of your career tracking. And so I think panel interviews can be great for that. And I think, yeah, if you just want to, if you want to get more people exposure during the interview process than having I don't, I don't like making huge panels like the candidate, you know, I think you can do huge panels if it's like the, you know, if you're, if you're hiring for someone who is going to be presenting in the room a lot and you want to see how they, but for a frontline seller role, I wouldn't do a panel of, you know, 4 or 5, 6 people, like 2 or 3 people, I think is kind of where I'd, I'd probably limit it.

Okay. Brian, I don't know if you have any follow-up questions to that. I'm happy to. Invite you up if you want.

That was perfect. I don't have any follow-up, but that was a great answer. Thanks.

Okay, awesome. Thank you for the question. Let's see, we have a couple. Vicki, this is a good question. Then we've got some questions coming in from social too. I'll move to Vicki. Do you want to come on up? I'm happy to ask as well if not. Okay, I'll just ask if you can hear me. Hi, I was just wondering now, like doing sales before, it's easier to rate their productivity and how well they're doing, not just by closes, but calls, emails, LinkedIn. How do you do that now when there's so many different ways that people are connecting? I know using a CRM, but it's just spread out what people use, Crunchbase, LinkedIn, emails. Calls, co-calls, conferences, how have you figured out has been a good way to make sure they're being productive and not just telling us on what they did?

Yeah, you know, a lot of this is, is role-specific. It depends on, you know, the type of sales role that they're in, you know, both whether it's prospecting or not, and, and, you know, like how transactional the sales are. But it sounds like you're you're thinking about those more transactional type of roles. The, you know, there are, there are tools out there that you can add social steps into the sequences and stuff like that, you know, Outreach, and I imagine most of Outreach's competitors, you can do that as well, is one example. But I think a big part of it is like figuring out the parts of the pipeline that matter most for you. And, and, you know, having that as the key measures. And so if someone can do, I don't know, 70% of the, of the dials, but they're creating 120% of the pipeline, then, you know, you might, you might look more at that, at the pipeline creation. Now, of course, you need to make sure you have ways to validate the pipeline creation. And, and, you know, is that turning into real deals and stuff like that? But that's— I don't know. I don't know if I have a great answer for you because it is— it does depend a lot. On the specifics of the role, but those are some of the things I would think about. Is that, is that what, is that helpful? Or you're welcome.

Yes, thank you. Thanks, Vicki. All right, couple questions from social coming in. Let's take a look at, um, while we've got a few minutes. I'm just talking about stats and metrics. Um, can you tell us a little bit more, you know, you mentioned you use AI for the interview process, not necessarily the interview. Can you tell us a little bit more about some of the stats and metrics you track, or if you have a dashboard, both as a CRO or a founder, you know, what kind of things, KPIs, metrics are on there?

Uh, related to interviews in particular, or just—

okay.

Yeah. So what, what I'm looking for is, um, are like, which of my interviewers are the best at making predictions? Which of, which of the traits that we identified as being predictive for this job are actually, those scores end up being predictive to succeeding in the job, getting high scores in those traits. Um, which of the questions that we ask that are tied to a certain competency or goal are actually predictive of that competency or goal? Um, so we're, we're kind of like looking through the whole stack of the interview plan around what, um, which of our predictions are right, which ones are, which of them are wrong and why were they wrong and what adjustments do we need to make?

Do you actually go back after you have a successful hire? I'd imagine if you rate them a strong hire and look at their interview questions and those metrics.

So, um, someone asked the question before about, uh, kind of evaluating post-hire, you know, when do you start that evaluation process? You, you asked to follow up on that. I do that with the actual scorecard that I use during the interview process. And so I'm set, the stakeholders who are working most closely with that new employee are getting an email to click on a link periodically, and they're going out and filling that score out, that scorecard again. So we made predictions during the interview process, and now we're saying, you know, are they demonstrating a high level of coachability on the job of resourcefulness? And then are they achieving their, their goals, you know, hitting quota, exceeding their ramp, all of that stuff. And so I'm taking all of that data and, and, and I can use that to kind of backtest and refine the process.

Awesome. One more question from social. You mentioned 4 interviews. Can you tell us just a little bit more about the structure to them?

Yeah. So I, you know, so the first interview oftentimes is a screening interview. I think that, that like that Marc Roberge example that I gave, you can oftentimes include that in the screening interview. Like you can't include the discovery in the screening interview, but that, that cold call example, you can include that in the screening interview. And then, you know, depending on the seniority of the role, I'll do, you know, I call it a chronological interview, but It's a who style interview or a top grading style interview where you're going kind of methodically through their resume on relevant jobs and finding out their performance at each of their last relevant jobs. And then I'll do a couple of, uh, it now, if it's an entry level, I'm not going to do that one, but I'll do an extra behavioral interview instead. And so besides that, I'm doing behavioral interviews. There are 3 questions. They're, you know, very tuned to what it's going to take to succeed in this job. And then after all of that, after the candidates have been through the process, I like having a debrief meeting with all the interviewers where we go through and we, you know, figure out next steps with each of the candidates. And if for the candidates that we think that we might want, that we're going to offer a job to, we'll then do reference calls. Great.

That's really helpful. Those are all our questions for today, so thank you so much for joining us again, Lucas. A reminder, his slides are—

just one more question, sorry to interrupt. I wanted to post it, but I thought it'd be just nice to ask it right away before we run up with time. Lucas, you mentioned about consistency in interviews, right?

Yeah.

Can you share some specifics? So is it about the number of questions you ask, the kind of questions you ask, and how long do you think is the right time frame to gauge that consistency and whether that is successful for your business or not?

Yeah, that's a great question. Thanks for asking that. I don't want to overstructure the interview. I don't want it to be like, you know, asking questions that the answer is yes or no, yes or no. That's like the most structured and most consistent, right? But someone could just fill out a questionnaire if that's what I was after. And so when I say consistency in the interviews, if we think about it in the context of, of a behavioral interview, I wanna have the same 3 discussions with each of the candidates. So, you know, for an example, we could look, go look at those 3 questions that we gave. And, and I, I'm gonna, each of those, I'm gonna spend, I might spend 10 to 15 minutes on each one of those 3 questions, continuing to ask follow-up questions and going deeper and deeper in. For a senior role, I might, I'd spend more time on each of those questions. But, and so it's not that every, you know, question is exactly the same. It's that I have, I'm having the same 3 discussions. I'm planning those discussions ahead of time. I'm guiding them. And I'm not just kind of being like, well, I have this list of 12 questions. And, you know, last time I asked number 1, 4, and 7. This time I'm going to ask 2, 6, and 3, you know, so it's just, it's less impromptu. It's more planned out. And it's having that every candidate. Every sort of finalist candidate that I'm really considering, I want to have the same set of discussions so that I can compare them better against the things that matter most to me.

Perfect. Thank you. Caitlin, thank you so much.

Yeah, of course. Awesome. That's great. Any other last-minute questions before we wrap up? Should have asked that live. That's a good reminder. OK, well, thank you again for joining us. As a reminder, these slides are posted on SlideShare, and the recording will be on our YouTube after we wrap up. Next week we have RevenueCat joining us. They're gonna be walking us through the state of subscription apps. So make sure you join us there. Hopefully we'll see you in London. And if not, we'll see you next week.