E12: Bravado's CEO Sahil Mansuri on the Future of Sales Reps and Sales Leadership

Kyle and I were talking about how Kyle is the CMO over at Copy.ai, and his perspective as we were discussing was that he's getting on a lot more sales calls than he ever had. And as a CMO, he was finding that he was talking a lot in the middle of sales calls and like his Gong stats were off and his sales team was like, hey dude, you're like talking way too much on all these deals. And the thing that I said to Kyle was that there's two ways, there's like two main playbooks that exist in how you close a deal. The traditional path is basically the QSR, quick serve path, you know, your Panera Bread, your McDonald's, your assembly line where you're getting a consistent experience no matter which branch you go into, which franchise you walk into. If you order your tomato soup and green salad from Panera in Brooklyn, or if you order it from the one in San Francisco or the one in Kansas City, It's going to be the exact same meal every single time. And there you're focused on repeatability, scalability, quality control, and ultimately delivering kind of the minimum viable experience of what a tomato soup or what a quarter pounder with cheese can look like. And you compare that to the Michelin star experience where you can walk into the same restaurant 2 days apart. See the exact same menu item, tomato soup, at the French Laundry. And one day it might be a gazpacho and the other day it might be like some French onion combination thing because the chef walks into the market and basically looks at what's the best produce, the best ingredients that day, and is curating and creating a custom experience for you. And the best salespeople I know are Michelin star chefs, not QSR chefs.

Hello and welcome to the Revenue Leadership Podcast by Topline. I'm your host, Kyle Norton, CRO at Owner.com. And every Wednesday we dive deep into the strategies and tactics being used to drive success by the best revenue leaders in the world. So join me as I sit down with revenue operators to discuss actionable frameworks that you can implement in your business today with no fluff, no sales pitches, and no platitudes. But first, a word from our sponsors.

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Today's guest is Sohail Mansouri, who is the founder and CEO of Bravado, which he's been running and operating for the last 7 years. He was a longtime high-performing rep, high-performing sales leader, uh, before that, so has a lot of credibility in the community. And Bravado is the single largest community of sales reps out there. Key number one resource across tech sellers with over 500,000 members. And so we are going to dive into a little bit of the state of the market today. We're going to talk about what revenue leaders need to understand about the sales rep with Sahil as one of the most credible people to speak on behalf of reps everywhere. So appreciate you joining, man. Thanks for coming on.

Yeah, man, thank you so much for having me and great topic. Excited to dive in.

Nice. So give people a little bit of your background, the short version, so they know where you're coming from.

Yeah, I mean, I spent my whole career in sales, kind of what you need to know. You know, I started out on the Obama campaign in 2007 doing phone banking, fundraising, advance, knocking on doors, getting lawn signs up. And we didn't call it sales. You know, we called it getting the vote out. Sure to God, it looked a lot like sales. And I've been doing it now for 17 years, you know, across being a rep, being a VP of sales, being CRO, and then founding Promoto 7 years ago. And, you know, my perspective is that I love sales. I think it's the greatest job in the world. I love to sell. My sales team has to kick me out of sales calls all the time because they're better than me at it, but I really love to do it. And I just have a deep passion for the profession. I love the people that do the job. Enjoy the craftsmanship of sales a lot, the tactics, the strategy, the people management, and the relationships. And so I'm always excited to talk shop because it's my favorite part of my job.

Yeah. And you can tell that I've listened to a bunch of your pods and read a whole bunch of your content the last week, and the enthusiasm and real excitement for the craft definitely jumps out of the headphones. And you still sell a bunch. We were talking at that golf event, You still are in deals like pitching, which, which I absolutely love. And it's something that is missing in a lot of leaders these days.

Well, I think ultimately a business is measured by a small number of variables. Brian Halligan, the founder of HubSpot, was recently quoted in this article he wrote for Sequoia where he shared like his 20— yeah, you read it. And one of the things he talks about is that there's only two things he ever worked on, which were product and sales, product and sales. And I'm exactly the same type of CEO. I spend roughly 50% of my brainpower and time working on product and thinking about what we need to build to help sales leaders and sales professionals be more successful in their career. And then 50% of my time selling those products to the market. And I love doing it.

Yeah. Yeah. So I want to start with a warm-up question that is not relevant to the topic, but I really wanted to ask you. So I listened to your pod with Kyle Coleman, which was great. You gave one of the most interesting analogies I've heard in a while for like the craft of sales. You talked about the difference between the Michelin star experience and the quick serve experience, and maybe just explain to people what you meant by that and the advice you were trying to give to professional sellers. And then I have a couple questions about unpacking that.

Sure. So Kyle and I were talking about how Kyle is the CMO over at Copy.ai, and his perspective, as we were discussing, was that he's getting on a lot more sales calls than he ever had. And as a CMO, he was finding that he was talking a lot in the middle of sales calls, and like his Gong stats were off, and his sales team was like, hey dude, you're like talking way too much on all these deals. And the thing that I said to Kyle was that there's two ways, there's like two main playbooks that exist in how you close a deal. The traditional path is basically the QSR, quick serve path, you know, your Panera Bread, your McDonald's, your assembly line where you're getting a consistent experience no matter which branch you go into, which franchise you walk into. If you order your tomato soup and green salad from Panera in Brooklyn, or if you order it from the one in San Francisco or the one in Kansas City, it's going to be the exact same meal every single time. And there you're focused on repeatability, scalability, quality control, and ultimately delivering kind of the minimum viable experience of what a tomato soup or what a quarter pounder with cheese can look like. And you compare that to the Michelin star experience where you can walk into the same restaurant 2 days apart, see the exact same menu item, tomato soup, at the French Laundry and one day it might be a gazpacho and the other day it might be like some French onion combination thing because the chef walks into the market and basically looks at what's the best produce, the best ingredients that day and is curating and creating a custom experience for you. And the best salespeople I know are Michelin star chefs, not QSR chefs, they are not following a playbook with every deal because they've elevated beyond that. That's not to say they don't know the playbook. That's not, you can't be a chef at the French Laundry if you can't deliver a consistent burger every single day. That's a fundamental. I'm not talking about ignoring the rules because you can't follow them. I'm talking about someone who knows what the rules are, but then is able to add something extra, something special, something unique, which is their own flavor, their own touch. And I think that it's lost in the art of sell, in the art of sales, this enterprise rep, this creative rep who finds extremely unique ways to engage customers who, who does things in a non-traditional way because they have such a deep passion, understanding, skill set in sales that they're able to do things that no other rep could do and get away with and still close you. So that's what I was referencing.

And they have some superpower, like Kyle being the customer and being so deeply entrenched in the product that the typical guidance around talk-listen ratio is not relevant for him because his talking is so much more valuable than an average 3 or 4-year tenure AE. And so my question was, so how do you scale it? How do you, as revenue leaders, I didn't disagree with the point at all, and I thought it was a good distinction that I'm going to borrow. But how, as leaders, should we think about scaling? We need to be able to hire certain amounts of reps and ramp them to productivity, and you can't hire Michelin. There's not enough Michelin star reps out there at all of the different price points that people need to hire at. So How do you think about giving advice to revenue leaders? Like, this is how you train to a QSR playbook. This is where you allow the Michelin star experience to certain sellers. Like, how do you think about scalability? That, that's the thing I didn't understand.

It's a great question. And the truth is you don't scale a Michelin star restaurant. There's not 50 French Laundry's all over the country. You know, there's one, there's one French Laundry and you got to wait 6 months in order to get a reservation there and still fight tooth and nail in order to do so. The Michelin star experience doesn't scale, but the Michelin star experience isn't for the same customer that's going to Panera Bread. And so that's, that's ultimately the point of distinction. I think if you're running an SMB mid-market motion, if your ASP is $50K or below, you have to build a QSR experience. You can't build a team that is able to deliver a Michelin star experience because of the velocity of deal, number of deals you need to close, price point at which you're hiring, skillset that you're going to be able to bring people into, all of which Which is not to say, by the way, that you can't be a genius at sales and not have a ton of experience. I know plenty of people who literally like walk in and within 6 months, 12 months, you realize that they're so special that, you know, they, they deserve this accelerated opportunity that others don't. I certainly don't mean to be gatekeeping, but what I mean to say is that if you are selling an enterprise product, if you are, if you have, let's say there's, you know, 20,000 potential customers that you can sell to, and then there's like the top 50 of those clients, the top 100 of those clients. For those people, I think it's worth it to try to create the Michelin star experience. I think ABM was kind of a nod to doing that in some ways. Like it was kind of that, it was this idea of like, okay, if there were only 20 deals we could close this quarter, typically again for a more enterprise or strat type motion, what would they be? And then how do we just go way above and beyond for these 20 logos, these 20 accounts, because they're worth so much to us as a business. And I think like when the opportunity comes to pitch that client, it's worth it to think outside of your QSR assembly line of what the standard sales process at another company looks like and instead say, okay, well, what do we do that is going to, is going to change the perspective of this customer internally and through their business. And that's going to wow them to such a way that they view us as like a partner and a consultant that they have to work with, not as a software vendor that they need to buy.

Yeah.

Okay.

I like that. Yeah. And, or it's graduating people through your QSR experience, teaching them how to julienne an onion and then giving them more latitude to to maybe color outside the lines. KD says like imitate then innovate, which I like.

That's really good. KD is pithy like that. Very. And, you know, again, talk about calories per word, he's pretty good at that.

I like that. Yeah, yeah. We caught up this morning on some stuff and every time I'm like, man, I got a lot smarter the last 30 minutes. So, all right, let's jump into our big topic. So there's two things we want to touch on. One is like a state of the market, because I think things are so different today and you are running a business, you're investing in advising, you see all of this amazing sales rep data, quota attainment. So I want to, I want to first talk about like the macro picture and you can give your, your opinion from your unique perspective. Then I want to dig into the state of the rep. Rep. Like, what do leaders need to know about the rep today in order to hire and retain awesome talent? So topic 1, are we so back? And I would love— I personally see, I'm seeing so many more exciting deals today and companies that are growing really, really fast that the narrative that, like, we're in some tech recession doesn't seem as relevant. But, like, what are you seeing on your side?

Yeah. So let's start with some data and then I'll give you my perspective because I think it's, rather than just come out and say what I think, I think it's helpful to give you some information or give the audience some information that I'm privy to, which makes making calls like this pretty easy. So on Bravado, there's a product that we have called the portfolio, which is similar to Strava or mint.com, but instead of being for fitness and finance, it's for your sales stats. So every month or every quarter you go in and update what percent of quota you just hit, what deals you closed, what was your ranking on the sales team, what percentage of your team hit quota. And the purpose of this is building kind of a digital brag book, a digital repository of your work over time. It allows you to look back and see, hey, you know, last year or 2 years ago, this was my average deal size, but it's actually gone up. Or maybe my deal velocity's increased. Maybe the logos I closed have gotten bigger. It also gives you benchmarks so that lets you look at like a very helpful perspective. You know, last year in '23 was that if you hit 71% of quota last year in 2023, you actually were in the top 15% of sales reps in the United States. And so because the average sales rep, because the only, because the average sales rep hit 41% or 42, sorry, 42% of quota last year. So 71% was actually a standard deviation or two above what the average salesperson hit last year. And obviously we, we saw the ramifications of that take place in terms of layoffs and shutting down and a lot of, you know, kind of recessionary activities. And so again, from an individual rep perspective, it's a tool that does that. Now from a, from a global perspective, that means that we on Bravado get a real-time pulse on what's happening with quota attainment, both from an individual rep perspective, as well as from a team perspective on a monthly and quarterly basis. So I'm going to share some stats with you to explain the answer to the question of are we so back? So the, we've been tracking quota attainment now at Bravado for 22 quarters, so 5 and a half years. And, uh, the highest quota attainment that we have ever logged in the history of Bravado was Q1 of 2022. So in Q1 of 2022, it was, uh, nearly 60%. So it was like 56%. of sales reps hit quota and 61% of sales teams hit quota. Typically there's a greater percentage of sales teams that hit quota than sales reps every single quarter. That's right. But the variance is not massive, you know, it's usually within a few percentage points. So 56% of sales reps hit quota, 61% of sales teams hit quota. And then From then it started going down and the trough, the bottom was Q3 of '23. So it was exactly a year ago today in Q3 of '23, which we saw that only 17% of sales reps hit quota and only 21% of sales teams hit quota. So again, 17% of reps, 21% of sales teams. Yeah. Uh, it was, I mean, again, I'm sure, I'm sure there's a lot of people who are listening who lived that experience. And I certainly lived that experience as we had—

13% good.

Yeah. I mean, we had provided— make our money by helping companies hire sales reps. And so you could imagine that we also were in the set. We were not in the 17% or 21%. It was a brutal time to run a business. But that was the trough and it's been going up since. And, you know, we are not yet done with the, with the the latest results that, uh, for, for Q3, because there's some companies like ourselves that run on the Salesforce quarter, but I can give you, I pulled it just today. Um, 41% of sales reps, uh, are hitting quota in Q3. So again, it was 17% a year ago. It's 41% today and 47% of companies are hitting quota. Again, it was 21%. It's now 47%. So we are not at the high—

what was the steady state? So like '22 was like silly ZIRP times make-believe. What's like a normal 2018 quota attainment? Yeah.

So the average quota attainment is exactly where we are today. So this is actually, this is the answer to your question. The average quota attainment that you would expect to see is somewhere in the vicinity of 40 to 45% of sales reps hitting quota and somewhere between 45 to 50% companies hitting. So we are actually smack dab in the middle of what a good environment, not ZIRP era craziness, but what a really solid, like 2019, 20, you know, early 2021 when things were, the market was good, not crazy, but just really good. We are back to that same environment. And we are already back in this period. So now to answer your question, that was a very long-winded way to get a simple answer.

Just before we get there, so where can people go to subscribe to get this information? Because I'm sure a bunch of people are like, I should be looking at this every quarter. This is like such good intel.

Thank you. Yeah. So we, we produce something called the Revenue Recap. It's a, it's a report that comes out to Bravado members. We send it out, it's free. And you can just go to bravado.co, create an account, and you would get, you'll get all the revenue recaps as they're published.

Okay, there you go. All right. So now we've got the data, we've plugged the revenue recap.

And so then, and so then let me answer your question directly, which is we are so back. And, and, and I think that comes with a really important mindset shift that most sales reps and most sales leaders haven't fully made yet. When we entered the really tough times of late '22 to like most of '23, there was this overarching piece of advice. Don't die. That was the piece of advice, like at all costs, do not die. And that was advice that was given because you could not count on a future round of funding. The investment markets were just dry and no one was putting capital into anything. And so therefore, like if you were not profitable, or if you did not manage to be extremely efficient with your spend, you as a business were going to die. And I think people haven't recognized and caught up to the fact that that is not the mindset that you need to be in today. It is not to say that we should be in the reckless mindset of the ZIRP era, which is to say that we should just turn around and throw money behind every initiative or every idea with no consequence of like, you know, no careful measure of focus and resource because you don't have unlimited resources as we used to back in the day. But it is to say that this idea of like profitable efficient growth that I see thrown around a lot, I think is extremely misleading and dangerous for those who are in the, especially in the early stage venture capital game to embrace because those are not the rules by which VCs will adjudge a business and investors will judge business. And you will end up being this like really weird thing that profitable, but your profit is very little because you're a small company. So it's not value— there's not enough free cash flow coming off the business that it's worth investing in. You're not Facebook, right? You're not spitting out a billion dollars a month or whatever they're spitting out. And so it's not enough cash flow that it's investible, but growth isn't high enough that you can see a path to making a billion-dollar business. And so you're stuck in the middle. And when you're stuck in the middle, no longer venture fundable.

There's no more money ever.

That's right. That's right. That's exactly right. Unless it's, and by the way, venture funding, and I think VC funding gets a weird rap here because there's a lot of people that, especially in sales, in the sales community, I see this a lot. Yeah. There's a lot of, you know, kind of like fuck the VC, like they screwed us sort of like vibe. And I understand where it comes from because you're like, like, you know, they pushed us to grow and then when we couldn't grow, they were like, well, why did you spend so much money? And it's this like feeling of like, you know, talking out of both sides of your mouth. And I think the reality is, is that as a business, if you're an early stage company, you have signed up for a specific deal that you've made, a specific path you've signed up for, which is to say that you are going to take what would normally take 20 to 30 years for a company to do, and you're going to try to do in 5 to 7. That is what you have signed up to do. That's what venture capital is. It's taking a business that is making $10 million a year and giving it $50 million, which makes no sense. Like, why would you give something that makes $10 million, $50 million? But you do that because you want $10 million to become $100 million, not in 20 years, but in 4. And so you're basically paying for growth. You're putting fuel on the fire, et cetera, et cetera. There are many other paths to entrepreneurship. There's many other types of companies out there. But if you choose to work for a VC-backed company, which many of us do because it's high paying, it's prestigious, it's the most fun growth, there's a lot of career advantages. Know that you have not signed up to grow profitably and efficiently. You have signed up to grow beyond the wildest imagination of what a startup could do, of what a company can do. And that's the only game that you're playing.

Which is the only reason that people would put money into something so risky. Like, you know, capital allocation is all about risk-return, the risk-return trade-off. And so you need the super high-end return profile to give a 24-year-old founder and a bunch of people who've never done this before $50 million.

That's right. Or, or do something else, right? Or, or, you know, if you want, again, if what you want is to grow profitably, efficiently, slowly, and meticulously. That's a perfectly valid way to build a business. But ain't nobody giving venture capital. You're not, you're not going to raise money from Sequoia or Andreessen or Redpoint or whatnot from with that pitch, right? And so if you're going to go give that pitch to take the VC dollars, then know that that's what you signed up for.

You just got to live like you're, you're, you're signing up to bootstrapping and you have to If you want to grow slow, you have to bootstrap. You can't want to go slow and take venture dollars. Like, those things are mutually exclusive. And I think that— it's funny, throughout the whole market downturn, I've been trying to share this message. I've shared it on a few pods. Like, yeah, you want to be more conservative financially in this market, but like, don't forget what these businesses are about. We are about power law returns. We are about returning an entire fund on one investment. And if you're in the venture game and that's no longer possible, you sort of got to do something else now. As a founder, you're not going to get the same employee type as an early employee. Like, your return profile is completely different, so you have to be asking for completely different cash versus equity. But like that message didn't materialize. And the answer was really, hey, a bunch of these companies aren't actually venture-backable companies. They need to go away. Like they are, they are like no matter what, not viable. Maybe they can do a one and done raise and basically bootstrap after one venture round and to the much to the chagrin of the venture investors, but like, that's no longer— we're no longer playing that game. And I think, like, one other comment just on what you said, it's like people grumbling, oh, venture told us to grow, and then venture said, why did we do that? And I don't actually think that's what it was. I think, like, because I see this a lot with the rep community and the VP sales community, it's like, oh, like, you did this bad— you did this thing to us. You changed your mind. Well, no, I actually think founders and venture capital investors were just rational actors. We saw the greatest change in interest rates in the history of interest rates, basically, like they changed overnight. And so when the cost of capital changes that drastically over a short amount of time, you simply have to rethink your decision-making. And I don't think venture said, why did you do that? I think Really, the message was we need to do something different now. But people misinterpreted that as like the venture capital guys and the founder are the bad dudes. But like, no, we're just making rational decisions based on the macroeconomic environment. And it's hard, but like, we are all sort of in the same boat together, which people struggle with.

Yeah. I mean, let me bring— I think that's Could not be more well stated. And let me bring it down to the VP of sales rep level to, to explain how we all did the same thing. I remember because we run a jobs business, so I get to see this in real time. I remember when, uh, we launched our jobs business in the middle of 2021, we were talking to VPs of sales. who were making $250K to $300K, uh, OTEs at their current companies, getting offers for $400K, $500K OTEs. And I remember reps who were mid-market reps that were making $80K base, $160K OTE, getting offers for $150K to $180K base, $350K to $380K OTE. And I don't remember anyone complaining then.

Nobody turned that down.

I don't remember anyone being like, whoa, this is unreasonable. Like, I'm an $80,000 to $160,000 rep. Like, my ability to carry a quota is $700,000. The biggest deal I've ever closed was $35,000. But now all of a sudden I've got, you know, this offer in front of me to go sell, you know, a $2 million quota. At this company with all these ridiculous expectations that I've never even come close to achieving in the course of my career. But of course, so I don't want to take this offer. I want a lower base. I want a lower OTE and I want a lower quota. I don't remember once being told that. What I remember instead was people saying, dude, my current company is a fucking idiot. They don't value me. Like, this was my value in the market. Like finally I'm getting paid what I deserve. And I remember people having this like every 6 months, 12 months, 18 months, I want to change jobs. I want to get paid more, get paid more, get paid more. And then as soon as the market cooled and there were layoffs and everyone stopped changing jobs all of a sudden and tried to hold onto the one they had, and suddenly loyalty came back overnight. And by the way, that is the rational thing to do in a capital market. You know, if you got 'em, smoke 'em, you know, like, at the end of the day, it's just the way it is. Like, you know, if the market will bear something, then, then that's what, you know, you're, you're going to get paid. And, and so ultimately, we all make the same decision, is my point, is that it's not as if I did something irrational, or you did something irrational, or the SDR who got recruited and got $100K base did something irrational. It's just where the market was. And today, the market's somewhere different, and we just have to accept That's the reality that ultimately the market will bear what it will bear.

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There.

Yeah. Hard agree. Yeah. We were all complicit in it and there was no good people and bad people. It was just sort of a thing that happened. And I'm a big believer in extreme ownership. We all just have to except those things happened. I am actually not worth $400,000 as a 4-year tenured AE. I'm actually worth this. But hedonic adaption is very difficult to deal with. We get so stuck on these things that are difficult to lose.

And valuations of companies is another thing that I think was in the same realm. I remember Gong raised at $7 billion, Outreach raised at $4 billion, You know, there was this like, oh, like all these like super small, like, like you got to $5 million ARR and you were raising at a $500 million valuation. And, and, and like, no, I'm serious. I know multiple founders who were at a $5 million valuation. They got a 100x multiple on their revenue. And then, you know, today you could be $100 million in revenue and still not get a $500 million valuation, you know? And people were really easy, were really quick to embrace when it was 5 on 500. But today, if it's 100 on 500, people are like, well, that's unfair. That's unrealistic. Like, people aren't paying me what I'm worth. And so it's almost like it's in the same way that I find some people treat religion, which I always laugh about, which is like, if something good happens, they say praise to God. If something bad happens, it's like, oh, well, God is testing me. Either way, it's Either way, you can find a way to defend the thing that you're trying to believe in. And I think that we have to have intellectual honesty. And I think extreme ownership and intellectual honesty are really critical components for someone who wants to be a serious business professional and executive, which is to say, yeah, as a VP of sales, as a CRO, I way overspent on these reps that my company did not need, that were not able to do this job. I way overestimated what our team was able to do because everyone was just buying and money was flowing around. And yeah, maybe my own compensation wasn't quite in line with what it should have been. That's okay. Today we're in a different world and we just accept that and we just keep moving on, you know, one foot in front of the other.

Yeah. Yeah. If you want to participate in this game, in the venture capital-backed software game, you have to accept the rules. You can't want to play this game and then not like the rules that there's volatility and cyclicality like that. That is just inherent. I often jokingly say about these types of things or the way people act, like, you can't blame the lion for eating a gazelle. Like, that's just serious. It's just like silly. Like, how are you mad at this lion? Like, this is just— this is what capitalism is. This is what venture capital is. And if you don't like it, that's totally cool. There's lots of other things to do in the world. But like, you, you have to know what you're signing up for.

And we are so— and to end your point on we are so back, You know, you have OpenAI's— one of OpenAI's co-founders, Ilya, left and founded this company called Super Safe Intelligence, or SSI. And they raised— you can't make this up— a $1 billion, with a B, billion-dollar seed round. No product, you know, just him and a handful of people, and they raised a $1 billion seed round. And it just goes to show something that I think most people don't— where's the profitable, efficient growth on that? You know, there's, there's not. It's, it's that venture capitalists are in the business of doing one thing and just one thing, which is returning capital to their LPs. And they're going to make the bet that they think the most amount of return I can generate for this dollar compared to any other startup in the world I can put this dollar in, why should I give it to Owner? Why should I give it to Bravado? Why should I give it to whomever? And if you can't make a compelling case that $1 to Owner or $1 to Bravado is going to be worth more than putting that dollar into anything else in the world, then you're not going to win. It's not that you're trying to convince them that putting a dollar into Pravada or Oder or whatever is valuable. That's actually a fairly straightforward case you can make. It's the case of don't give it to OpenAI. Don't give it to Anthropic. Don't give it to what this YC startup that's crazy hot. Don't give it to what— give it to me instead. And to convince someone of that, like, you better have something that's really compelling and growing astronomically fast with a massive vision and a huge TAM. And like, I think most people want the benefits of working in a venture-backed startup, the pay, the status, the coworkers, the prestige, like all those things come with it, but not pay the price. And I think it's, it's, it's an unrealistic expectation from the market. And of course, if it's not for you, which is not for many people, you know, I'm just a junkie for it. Like, I'll only ever do this game because this is the game I love to do. I think you might just be in the same boat given your career history and background and interest, Kyle. But like, for many people, but for many people, it's not the game. And that's fine. That's completely fine. Bootstrap a business, go raise some debt, grow efficiently, like build a different type of business in a way and have realistic, modest ambitions and make a, probably make more money than you and I will make and probably have a much healthier work-life balance than you and I have and much better mental health than you and I have. But then that's just the game. But if you want to play this game of being part of a legacy-defining, a world-changing piece of technology and people and product, then you know, you gotta pay the tax.

Yeah. Well said. Just think of all the cortisol you're missing out on. By the way, did you just quote Spaceballs, smoke 'em if you got 'em?

I do appreciate that you caught the reference.

That is a deep cut. Spaceballs is in my top 3 favorite movies of all time.

So, well, and another thing that you and I share is sickness for— yeah, me too. Anyway, we'll keep going.

Kevin "KD" Dorsey: All right. So let's transition. So this is like state of the market. I think this is really valuable data. So let's transition into the state of the rep because you have such a unique view into the psyche of the sales rep. And I was in Bravado earlier today when we were doing prep. And it's interesting, like one of the things I screenshotted was like the second post was It's bleak out there. How do you keep going? Like, it's been really tough to try to improve my outlook with so many employers putting a hold on promotions and pay increases, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so the, the, I think there's a, there's a disconnect hearing your opinion of like, we are indeed so back, or we're back to normal with still maybe where the rep is. And so let's just maybe give the macro, what's the state of the rep today? And then I've got some specific things, state of of remote versus in-person and engagement, and we'll get into some specifics, but like, what's the high level from your perspective?

Yeah, you and I talked about this the first time we met, and the perspective I'll share is unfortunately not super nuanced. It's just kind of the facts, which is it just all depends on where you're working. You know, that post that you just talked about, it's bleak out there. People are putting a hold on promotions and pay increases and stuff. I, I, I had, I didn't see that specific post, but I would put every dollar in my pocket against every dollar in your pocket that that post wasn't written by a rep who works at Anthropic or OpenAI or NVIDIA, you know, like, and so ultimately one of the most important things that you do as a salesperson is you choose which company to work at. And I think many sales reps chose companies that used to have a pathway to greatness that don't anymore. I think I've heard something Someone called this, like, they used to be a unicorn, but now they're just a donkey with a dunce hat on or something like that, which I, you know, like ultimately, you know, if you worked for one of these darling, you know, like Hopin, you remember that company that Hopin code? Yeah. Like that company was like the hottest of the hot and raised it like billions of dollars and then ended up getting sold for like $7 million to RingCentral for like parts or whatever. Like if you were part of a journey like that, but you haven't hit the end of that journey, you're just like on the treadmill of that journey, then, then that's where that darkness comes from. So I think right now you have a bifurcation in the market. You have both early and late stage startups that are either in a position to capitalize on the AI boom or are kind of second order effect beneficiaries of said AI boom. And if you work at a company like that, then you are, you know, again, your sales team isn't safe. This, right, Kyle? Like, your sales team isn't saying, we're not doing promotions, we're not doing pay increases, we're not growing. Like, your sales team is like, holy shit, I am so excited about next month, next quarter, next year at Odor, because it's bigger, it's better, it's faster, it's growing. And, and like, you know, ultimately, there's a lot of companies that are not winning today, and there's a ton of great salespeople who just need, and sales leaders for that matter, you know, obviously Bravado serves sales leaders as well. And I talk to sales leaders about this. I kind of wish I could just, I wish I could just say the thing that's in their heart. And maybe this, with someone listening to this, I hope this helps you, which is it's not your fault. Your company is just fucked. I just want to say no, but like, I genuinely want to, I want to say that with a tremendous amount of of empathy because that too could have been bravado just a year ago. Right. So I don't want to say that in a way in which it comes off as harsh. It's like, it's not your fault. It just didn't work. It's not working out. It's not going to work out. There is no hope. There's no amount of selling. There's no amount of product innovation.

You're done. Yeah.

This company is done. And the reason why you're done is because your founders don't believe anymore, your investors don't believe anymore. Maybe you've gone through sales leadership changes and maybe like, you know, they're trying to make some desperate spinoff to some PE shop or something. But like the days that you remember or the days you were pitched when you were recruited into this company and now you've shown up and now you see your day-to-day vibe of this company, like It's not your fault. Your company's just fucked and you just need to get out and find a new job. And I think there's so many founders, CROs, sales leaders, sales reps, SDRs that just need that.

Like, and I think a lot of it, there's so many parts of human psychology that play in here, but sunk cost fallacy and hedonic adaption, like, oh, I am a VP of sales. I'm a VP of sales. Well, you're only a VP of sales at like a crap company. And this is equally harsh, but you're not good enough yet. You don't have the profile and experience in craft yet to be a VP of sales at like a good company. And so, but like the market it at one point supported bad companies surviving in the ZIRP days. Lots of bad companies raised money that had nice-to-have products. But like, we're back to normal now. And I think a lot of it, a lot of the challenges, like, or I'm a mid-market rep, it's like, well, you've only carried a quota for 18 months. Like, you're probably not a mid-market rep, you're still an SMB rep. And, but like, you're a mid-market rep at a bad company, but you can't be at bad companies now. The market does not The market is not going to support bad companies existing, and you have to move your feet. And the advice I find myself giving so much is like, just optimize for the company quality, optimize for product market fit and the leader. And like, I know it sucks, and like every part of our human psychology tells us not to take a step back, but if you're an enterprise rep today, Go be a mid-market rep at Vanta. Go be a mid-market rep at one of these companies that is, that has good product market fit and incredible leadership. And you will be so much better off than clinging on to, well, I'm an enterprise rep. No, you're an enterprise rep at a crap company. Like that's where you'll get that job.

And now let's think about the downstream effect of what you just said. First of all, I mean, That was absolute gospel. Like every word of that was so true and so exactly where we are in the cycle. But with now, let's add a caveat to that, which is, okay, so if the enterprise rep who shouldn't really be an enterprise rep, but would be a rockstar mid-market rep at Vanta wants that job. If you're a mid-market rep somewhere, you probably need to take a step down to SMB. And if you're an SMB rep somewhere and a mid-market rep applies for your job, now you're not competing with the rest of your SMB market. You're also competing with the mid-market rep from outside. And I talk to sales leaders all the time that are like, yo, the quality of talent I can bring onto my team today is much higher than the quality of talent I could have brought on 2 years ago. So I'm thinking of just making wholesale changes on my team and basically, you know, out with old, in with the new, you know, and so, and so that does create a really tough psychology for someone to work in where they know that they're imminently replaceable. You know, one of our latest clients that we're working with, I won't say the name of the company because I don't have permission to share the story, but one of the latest clients we're working with is paying us in order to help them recruit for mid-market and enterprise reps. And, but they have a job posting open and the VP of sales there told me they get between 200 to 300 inbound applicants per day for this job. And yet they're paying us to help them recruit. And, you know, my first question is like, why do you need to pay us? And he was like, yeah, but the people who are applying are not the talent that we're looking for. And that leads to the next question, which I think is really interesting, which is, okay, well, what do you mean? What do you mean this isn't the talent you're looking for? And he was like, well, once upon a time, I was willing to take a chance on a hire. Once upon a time, I was willing to say, okay, you maybe don't have exactly the right qualifications, or maybe, you know, you didn't do so well at your last job, but, you know, it could have been the company or the whatever. Now I can't afford to miss on a hire.

So you don't need to take that risk anymore.

Exactly. So I'm going to pay Bravado in order to ensure that the person I bring on is the absolute best hire. Because if I bring in bad sales hires, my CEO is going to fire me. Like, my ass is on the line because I previously brought in some people that weren't very good and our CEO is like, you can't fuck it up this time. And I'm not going to fuck it up. And I think that like that pressure and that dynamic again trickles down to the rep who now is facing in, like if their boss's job security is on the line based on your performance as a brand new hire, then that per— that person's going to put a tremendous amount of pressure on you. You're going to walk in and feel that pressure and be in a stressful environment. And so it is, it is a tough market.

That bringing that anxiety to your team will make them perform worse, not better, which is the doom loop.

Yeah. Well, that's why I loved your cramps thing. I really love that. I think you bring such a healthy perspective around what it takes in order to actually build a high-performance sales team. And I think starting with community and recognition as the first two elements, I think is so right. So right. Like you can't get the best out of a sales team that isn't winning. You can't just do it just the same way that you can't cut your way to product market fit. You can't, you can't do enough cuts that will ever get you product market fit. You could only grow into product market fit in the same way. You can never pressure a sales team into being high performing. You need to create a winning culture first and then you'll get the best out of your people. And I think you really hit the nail on that?

Yeah, I think one of the big challenges people have just in, in general, very broad strokes, is the inability to think long term. Like, um, so often the mistakes you see in, or especially early VP sales, but like many types of VPs of sales, they just can't have a long enough time horizon. And this is, this is actually a quote from a friend of mine who I worked with at Shopify, Lynette Pistorius, who's like super smart operator And she's like, kindness is just about having a short time horizon. Like, why would you be like in the macro? Why would you be unkind to somebody? There's no long-term benefit to that. It's only long-term negativity. You develop that reputation, that person won't help you. And I think the sales leader mistreating or managing poorly is just about like if you zoomed out and you asked somebody, hey, is it better to have like a high stress, high anxiety, high-pressure environment to get performance out of people? Or is it better to have people highly engaged and bought into the work and feeling like they're developing? Like, most sane people will say definitely the second, but the second is a much longer payoff time horizon. And you can get action today off of stress and anxiety and micromanagement. And this is the same for people, sales leaders failing to plan that well and failing to spend enough time on CS and spend enough time with the product team and focus on customer quality. Like, a lot of these things are just choosing short-term versus long-term. Comp plan, we don't need— well, we can maybe touch on comp plan, but you and I have the same beliefs on comp plans. Why are you putting a VP of sales on a 50-50 plan? They need to think 6 to 18 months in the future if it's a real VP of sales. Somebody who needs to own revenue generation for the company for multiple years, they can't, it's really difficult to do that if living your same lifestyle that you enjoy today means you have to deliver the quarter.

Totally.

You just, you're, you can't. Yeah, it's hard.

You just don't want people to make the wrong sacrifice, right? And, and it's, and, and comp plans are an incredibly powerful tool in order to create incentive alignment. But when your incentive as the CEO of the company is to create a billion-dollar business in the next 5 years, and your VP of sales' or CRO's comp plan and incentive is to hit this number this quarter, no matter what, then you are unnaturally creating a friction point between them and you. And ultimately, if you have misaligned incentives, it's impossible for a team to win. And so I just think it's a simple fix, which is just to say every person in your team, every member of your leadership team should have an aligned incentive. And that aligned incentive should be making the best possible decisions today that lead to the most profitable business tomorrow. Yeah.

Yeah. So going back to the state of the rep. Yeah. Macro question. Do you think there's enough good reps out there for the number of software companies that exist today?

I think that's a really, really interesting question because the definition of a good rep has changed substantially over the course of the last 12 to 24 months. It used to be that to be a good rep 24 months ago effectively was a job of charm charm, personality, charisma, and detail orientation and process following. And I think the new unsaid thing that needs to be added is technical capability. And I think there's a lot of sales professionals that are not technical enough to sell in today's environment. And technical here, by the way, doesn't mean that you write code. That's not what I mean. I mean fluency with the latest trends as far as AI is concerned, as far as their industry is concerned, as far as their ICP is concerned. You know, I would, I would be willing to put a lot of money says that if you hired someone who used to run a kitchen at Owner.com, they would probably have an outsized likelihood of being successful because if they've been in the shoes of the customer, they have a deep sense of empathy of what the customer is going through. When I hired our VP of sales at Privado, I didn't hire someone who had sold a talent product before. I hired someone who had been under the pressure of hiring a ton of salespeople before because I was like, this woman knows exactly what it's like on the face of our customer when they're like, hey, you gotta hire these 10 reps by next quarter. And if you're behind, it's not like your quota goes down. It's just that you gotta get more productivity per rep. So like your ass is on the line. And if you felt that pressure, you know exactly how to sell this product to someone suitors as well. And so, you know, I think it's a lot of, it's a lot of trying to find sales professionals who can bring that level of empathy and stewardship and consultation to the market. You know, I think, I think there is a shortage of that in part because of how most companies recruit. I think you are a very notable exception to this, Kyle. And I'm not just saying this because I'm on your pod, I think I've said this to you before we ever scheduled this, which is the way you write job descriptions and post them on LinkedIn is something that I think everyone should take a page out of. You should link to it in whatever this podcast thing is, like a few of your JDs that you've posted on LinkedIn because they are so explicitly exclusionary to a lot of people who don't want that job. You self-select, like, you're like, hey, we do a shitload of cold calling. These are super fast transactional deals. You're talking to people like, like there's a lot of people that don't want to do that. You know, they want to sit behind an email. They want to have long sales processes. They want to, they don't want to sell to kitchen, you know, to small restaurant business owners. Like there's a lot of people that don't want those requirements. They don't want to sit there and cold call all day in order to generate their pipeline. And if they don't want to do those things, then they're not going to apply for your job. but there's too many job descriptions that are out there that don't do a good job of actually self-selecting out the reps that wouldn't be a good fit for the role as well. And so I think that the requirements of sales have changed. I think it's harder to sell than it's ever been because outbound systems are fraying and are reducing in efficacy unless you either take the old-fashioned, like, get on the phone and call people approach, or you do the, like, I'm going to fly around the country, meet people in person, have a personal brand and a network approach, or maybe there's something else that you can do that's outside of that. But this idea that you're going to— Yeah, sure. Yeah. But what you cannot do is spin up a few licenses of Salesloft or Outreach, sit there with an army of 22, 23-year-olds spamming people. You just can't do that anymore. And in a world in which that doesn't work, there are many sales reps that don't have the skillset to prospect and generate their own pipeline anymore. And if you can't do that, then I think you're really in trouble. And so I do think there is more of a shortage. Percentage than people realize of people who can actually hit quota in 2024 or '25.

Yeah, I'm also— I think that so much of the onus is on sales leaders as well. Like, you're not going to have reps just ready to sit in the seat and do the job. Like, you need so much more enablement than I think people invest in. Like, when I tell people about the size of my enablement RevOps teams, like, wait, but you've only got 19 AEs. I'm like, yeah, but like, how are you going to run a high productivity team without these tools if you're just sort of sitting people behind their phone and like asking them to figure it out? The rev ops and enablement investment. I think rev ops gets much more of the credit that it has always deserved today. Enablement is the next one that I think people are going to really understand as being underinvested in. I talked to a company 2 or 3 weeks ago. They are in our space and they've got 40 and change reps, 1 enablement person, 1 person. And, they do the training, they do everything. It's like, yeah, of course, your reps don't— there's no consistency in execution. Nobody's learning. Nobody's advancing. Who's building any of this?

[Speaker:Kevin "KD"] What are your ratios if you don't mind sharing? So I have, um, so 19 reps.

Yeah, so 19 AEs. So we'll, we'll start Jan 1 with 23 AEs and 4 people in enablement, uh, full-time. And we have 2 today, 2 supporting, like, call it 16 reps. Um, and then in RevOps, uh, same numbers on the AE side, and we've got a director, 2 full-time internal folks, and then a team of contractors doing contract dev, who are— 2 of them are almost full-time. But my productivity per rep is roughly 3x my competitors. I've interviewed a bunch of leaders from people in my space or direct competitors and learned a little bit about their motions. And we're on a per-person basis in a completely different performance category because you know how to do your job. We spend a lot of time building content for the reps and building rules of engagement. And, people can go watch my SaaStr talk. Lem can put it on his Twitter. It'll be on the YouTube, SaaStr YouTube soon. But, I talk about sort of the systems we have to communicate changes. When we make a change to business process or playbooks. There's a green, yellow, red light process. And, if it's a red light change to comp, then we need a Notion doc plus an in-person sit-down training and then the managers have to go over it in their one-on-ones and then you do Q&A in your individual one-on-ones. And so, without that rigor, I don't think you can keep up with the chaos and the pace that these businesses run. And so, it seems heavy-handed. You're like, wow, that's a lot of overhead. Well, yeah, but I'm also getting 16 reps that are doing the work of 45 reps other places because our system is good.

So, let's take everything you just said and bring it back to the question you asked me, which is what is the state of the sales rep and what's in the mind of the rep? And, and the answer is the number of companies that are thinking about sales rep productivity, capacity, skillset, upleveling, training in the lens that you are. If you were to imagine 1,000 CROs sitting in a room, what percentage do you think are holding the type of ratios and the type of investment that you're making for a team of of 16, 19 people, you know, a 6, 8 person team that's fueling that in order to drive productivity of 50. Like what percentage of the market do you think looks like that roughly? Just take a guess.

I don't know. I don't want to be overly arrogant, but like not—

No, just what do you think? Like what do you think?

10%?

I think 1% would be a stretch. Honestly, I really do. I mean, Again, we have somewhere in the vicinity of 90,000 VPs of sales and CROs on Vivado. And the reason why I enjoy your friendship so much is because, I mean, nobody's doing this. Nobody's doing this. Like, maybe there's a very tiny handful of people somewhere scattered around that are doing this. There's a lot of people.

He makes me feel like I need to do more. There's this.

Yeah, that's right. But you know, off the top of your head, the people that are doing it, you know that I also know some people that are doing it, but that's not the point. The point is that the average rep stuck in a company that has never even thought about doing what you just said. Forget about doing it. It's never even occurred to them. All they think about are more reps, more deals, more pressure, higher quota, more sales, more, more, more volume, more, more, more, more, more. Nobody's stopping to think about the sports science approach of, you know, basically small team of sellers heavily be supported with everything they need around them and making them high performing. Because I'll tell you what, who— I'll tell you who's really happy when you have 3x the productivity of the average rep. It's the rep. That's who's really happy. Because at the end of the day, winning, closing deals, seeing success, and having things and tools around you for you to level up your career, like, that's what it's all about. You know, I saw in your, in your prep doc, you asked the question, What is the difference between a good and a great CRO? And I've been thinking about it since I read that question a couple of days ago. And one of the things that stuck in my head is we are so eager to build AI SDRs, AI prospectors, basically automating away entry-level sales jobs. And, and I think the, the people who are really excited about that are the people perversely who are the worst at actually training and developing sales teams. Because when I think about AI SDRs, it makes me really nervous because I'm like, well, how am I supposed to build the future rockstar sellers if I can't hand them these types of jobs so they can learn on the job? Like, am I going to have to hire them as like super junior full cycle reps? Or like where my mind turns when I, when I hear automating away like entry-level sales jobs is what the future pipeline for sales talent looks like. And I think it's something that people aren't spending a lot time thinking or talking about because they don't spend a lot of time thinking about developing. They just want to hire someone else's rock star. But I'll tell you what, I think your best talent is the talent that you develop internally. It's not hiring from external and just finding the perfect rep because they worked at Strike last or Shopify last or whatever. It's finding the person who's, you need some training and some coaching, but has those raw intangibles and then getting the best out of them. And then they become the super outlier performer at your company.

Yeah, yeah, couldn't agree. Yeah, we did this like awards trip a couple of months ago. So I was trying to count how many promotions we made. I think around 50 in the last 18 months between people going like SDR, senior, AE, inbound to outbound, outbound to multi, multi, like all the way through. And because it's just, it makes sense. Like why I, you know my system, you should be better than somebody on the outside. And we've definitely found that. It's, yeah, I think the other big thing with this AI-STR thing, again, it's short-term. There's no way you can spam your entire market sustainably through $50 million ARR because Google Outlook, like all of these all of these email providers are going to have to close the door at some point if every company is just playing the spam cannon game. And so, yeah, in the next 6 to 12 months, there's a tremendous opportunity to AI spam your market and the messaging will be like better than it was, but still like very low open and reply rates. But you can now do enough of it a little bit better that it will be effective. But then as soon as more companies are doing it, that game is done. And so it's Stevie Case, who's the CRO of Vanta, gave me this language. She was like, it's a party trick. It's not durable. And I don't want reps— when she's interviewing reps, she's like, does this person have a durable advantage, or did they have one good year hitting an exceeding quota because of some party trick? They found some little niche in the market, and I think think this AI SDR thing is a party trick.

I love what I love most about everything you just said. I love Stevie as well. She's brilliant. The thing that I love about what you just said is this idea of durability. And I think systems-level thinking around what would create a durable, scalable sales process, sales team motion, is again just underinvested in. I love your— I'm going to take away from this conversation this idea of a context window or time horizon. It really is clarifying to say that, hey, this is going to work for a little while, and so we're going to do it. But is it actually the right thing to invest in? And I think AISPR is a great example of something that like you take something that wasn't working that well, which is spamming people with outreach and sales often, whatever, and now you're just going to add another layer of, call it trickery on top of it. But ultimately you're not really solving the problem, which is there are real customers out there that need your product and that don't know about it. And what is a sustainable way for you to introduce it to them in a way in which they are receptive to the message? It's actually not that hard. If you think about the problem more concretely, it's just like, hey, there's restaurant owners who would benefit if they were to be on owner.com and they just haven't heard of it for some reason. How do I introduce it to them? And if you just kind of start from first principles, it's a lot simpler than saying, let me buy some 11x artisan, this, that, spin up these things, domain masking, this, that, whatever. Are. And, and, and ultimately, it's just, it's just another form of trickery, you know.

You know, so let's tie off this, uh, state of the sales rep topic. Like, what else do revenue leaders need to know about the rep today? And I wonder if you have any data on it, you know, like in-person versus remote. What are they optimizing for? Like, what do leaders need to know from your insight of the psyche of the rep?

I think that it is undeniable that it's undeniable that there's a bifurcation in terms of some sales professionals and sales leaders really prefer to be in person. They really miss the energy. They really miss that, that, that the camaraderie and the vibes. But I think that you, you are significantly limiting the talent pool that you're going to recruit from if you use an in-person strategy because, you know, it's inconceivable that the best reps are just all within a 20-mile radius of wherever your office happens to be for your market. I think that remote work is something that is desirable, especially for people who are in later stages of their career when they have children and, and things they need to balance. And ultimately, you know, the data, what it shows is that company— so on Provata, one of the things we track is in-person versus remote quota attainment. And one of the things we've seen, and one of the things that we've seen is that there is absolutely no correlation whatsoever between whether its sales team is in-person or remote and whether they hit quota or not.

Fascinating.

No correlation whatsoever. We have tracked this statistic since 2020. With COVID because I was curious to see what the changes were. And we've, we've been, we've been splitting teams. As soon as people started coming back, we would start to pocket them. There's absolutely no correlation. There are sales teams that are fully remote that are blowing out quotas. There are sales teams that are fully in person that are blowing out quotas, and the inverse is true on both sides. However, however, there is certainly a correlation that if you are selling an SMB ACD product in person does work better. And if you are selling an enterprise product, remote does work better.

I was just going to ask that question. Yeah.

Okay. Well, there you go. So that does correlate. So I think it's more contextual based on your motion and the experience level of your reps and such. But overall in the market, there's no correlation. But if you are selling a sub-$20K-$30K ACD product where the average rep, you know, that you're bringing on has a sub-10-year of less than 3-4 years and they therefore require require a little bit more training and probably enjoy the, the perks of an office a bit more. Um, they do, they do benefit from that oversight and that camaraderie. And then if you're sell— if you're, you know, you're selling $10 million to $50 million, you know, enterprise software, cybersecurity deals, whatever, uh, then trying to create an in-person culture for that sales team is, is highly, um, uh, you know, it correlates to lower performance. Yeah.

And you'll introduce such a selection bias.

Highest.

Because if you're a 35-year-old, 40-year-old enterprise rep and you're really good and you have a bunch of different offers, you've probably got kids or you like to travel or you've got other stuff going on and you're just going to cross companies off the list that are like, hey, you got to be in an office. I would like to be in an office a little bit here and there, but I got a 2.5 and a 4.5-year-old world, it would be hard to be like, hey, you got to be in an office every single day, be in traffic 45 minutes both ways. That's a tough sell.

It's a tough sell. And the other thing that I find is that this, by the way, you know what, fine. I wasn't planning on sharing this publicly, but I think it's worth it just for you, Kyle, since you've been Now there is a definite correlation between one of the fun things that we did as like a little internal project at Bravado. There's a strong correlation between rep performance and whether they have kids under the age of 5, which is to say that, yeah, because it turns out that as soon as you have a kid, you're like, shit, I really gotta make my quota. I really gotta wait.

So they make, they Yes.

Rep performance increases of people who have kids under the age of 5. And our thesis at Bravado is that the reason for that is because kids are expensive, right? But also it's like you have like a deeper purpose with every second. You know, you're like, I'm not going to waste my time with shitty leads. I'm going to like really make every deal count. Like, you know, there's like a forced function of focus and not wasting your time chasing bad opportunities and really honing in on the deals that'll close and stuff. It's actually quite interesting and remarkable. But yeah, we've seen very strongly that especially in the first 3 or 4 years, rep performance increases right after. It's like when someone buys a house, gets married, or has a kid, it's like their performance tends to uptick over time. It's a super interesting trend.

Wow.

There's a science behind it.

I would have thought it was the opposite. As a dad of 2 kids under 5, there's so much going on in your home life that I would think it would get in the way. But hearing that explanation does make a lot of sense because you just cut everything. When I had kids, I just cut everything that wasn't my kids or working and all of the shenanigans. I don't really drink anymore. I barely go out. I don't get to golf, unfortunately.

But like, your vacations have stopped, your boys trips have stopped, your whatever.

And you really carve down to, yeah, you carve down to like work and family. That is really interesting. I'm glad you shared that. Yeah. Okay. Anything else on the rep side? Like things that a sales leader needs to know about the state of the rep?

I think there's one thing that we didn't touch on. It's not a big point. I'll just leave it here, which is I think we have gotten, I think we have underinvested as a community over the last couple years of giving people a vision of where like their careers are going and instead really focused on the day-to-day productivity. And this idea that like, you know, you can just be like, hey, like, you know, you can make a little bit more money or you can do whatever and like that's good enough. You know, I don't think so. I think something that I would love to see more leaders do is be like, hey, Hey, I know there's all these tools that are being created to help with like productivity of sales teams and stuff like that. What if I gave you a budget and you can buy a couple of them and check them out and then report back to the team as to which ones are good or bad, and you can like help us improve the productivity of the team through your own efforts. Or, hey, like, you know, we sell to restaurant owners. I'd love to, I'd love to, you know, send you, you know, for a month to go work in a restaurant and get a sense of what that is like so that you can really build some empathy and try something different for a bit. Like the creative fun stuff that used to happen that we used to do things like this. I think we've forgotten, we've forgotten that. I think we've forgotten to have fun a little bit as a company. We've like gotten really good at like the QSRing the experience. Come full circle.

Serious the last couple years.

Yeah. And, and actually it's robbed us a little bit of the joy. And I think part of what makes sales so fun is these like experiential outliers sort of moments. And I like to think of them as just like magic moments for the team. And Continuing to create those, I think, in whichever way that as a leader you can, is extremely accretive to the performance of the team.

Yeah, I'm almost done reading The Power of Moments by the Heath brothers, and it's like fantastic on this topic about the importance of moments, how to create them. We're trying to do a lot of this on my team right now. We got these plaques, and you can insert your awards into the plaque. Just sort of like in a video game you earn badges, quota attainment, you were the top rep, the values award. It fits into this glass piece of the plaque as a tangible reminder of your accomplishments, like coming back to the importance of these moments when we're remote. It's like, awesome, I had my best month ever. I'm still just sitting in my little office typing on my little keyboard. What— nothing, nothing changes. And so trying to, trying to like attach a moment or a physical object to that is something I've been trying to do.

I love it. I love that. I love— I've heard of some companies that are— they have like a, like a letterman jacket sort of thing, and then you get like a patch that you can add on and like stuff like that.

I thought about doing like a Cub Scout's like sash, like a girl's Girl Guides sash. Yeah, but, uh, I thought people might might not love that. That Martin Roth has a bunch of cool stuff that he's done on that. He, like, he gave everybody a baseball bat the first time they hit quotas, uh, hit their full quota, and there was like a bat ceremony and like all this stuff. It's, it's, uh, yeah, these things are special and then it's hard to replicate when you're—

and that's, and that's part of creating. And it's just, it's just, you know, it ultimately work is business. And we started this conversation talking about the criticality of not ignoring our kind of fiduciary responsibility and the game that we signed up for. But it was never about the ping pong balls or the free sodas or the cool offices. It was about the feeling of having a really cool space to work with cool people. And in a remote world, you have to replicate that or you're just going to lose people. You're going to lose their motivation, you're going to lose their fun. And so I think I haven't read that book that you just mentioned, The Power of Moments, but it seems like a really good one and I will check that out. Yeah.

Lemkin had a great post today. Work-life balance is critical. It really is. But when your work is also your hobby, I mean, you can really ship a lot of stuff. And I was like, oh yeah, that's a good one. When you can make it feel like I do like coming into work every day. I love sales. I love being able to grow and invest people. People. And so, yeah, like, it doesn't— people are always like, man, like, do you ever get burned out? Or how do you, like, do all this, all these things? I'm like, I don't know, man. I like it. Like, I genuinely enjoy the puzzle and the people development. So, all right, let's go to a quickfire because we're running out of time. Okay. What do you wish you knew as a leader, like, at the beginning of your people management career? Something you know today that you wish you knew back then?

Yeah, I mean, I think we just touched on what I think is the most unobvious part of it, of being a leader, which is that you have to remember that the rep wants to do the best job and win too. Like, it can feel as if like, why didn't you just say this? Or why didn't you just do that? Or why are you, why are you, why are you, why are you? And getting to the how and the motivation of the person and tying that to their work. And I think Katie does an incredible job on this part, you know, where, you know, when people started this company, he has them write down like, if you were to hit your annual number, what would you do with that money? And then like remind, knowing what matters to that person and then being able to speak to that, knowing the names of their partners and their kids and being able to like refer to that in moments that shit gets tough because it's sales, shit always gets tough. Like it's a hard job and creating Leading with a culture of empathy, I think is easier said than done, but not eschewing tough conversations, I think is the other half of it. So like, it's a two-part thing. So like, at once you want to lead from a perspective of love and compassion. At the other end, like a lot of sales leaders I know hold back the real feedback. And I think sometimes like they're thinking it too and you just gotta, someone's gotta say it and it can be hard for someone to to just say it. And so I really love a sales leader who is capable of saying the hard thing and saying it with love, but saying the hard thing and then having the right conversation.

Yeah. What's the hardest lesson you've had to learn in your career?

I mean, I think the hardest lesson I ever learned was my arms are too short to box with God. I think that was it. I think it was just the fact that like it doesn't matter. A lot of what you do doesn't really matter compared to what the market will do. I worked so hard. I'd gotten the first real early stage startup I joined was Glassdoor, and I worked, I was always like crazy hardworking because I had strict Indian parents that refused to let me be any other way. And so I worked 95% of my capacity or whatever when I was at Glassdoor. And obviously we had tremendous success as a company and it changed my life forever and whatever. And then I went to go join this other startup and that startup was just not good, right? The product was not good. The marketing was not good. This company was never going to be successful. It didn't matter what I did, but I worked like 195% at that company. I wouldn't sleep. I would stay in the office all night. I would do, I did just an outsized amount of work in inhumanly amounts of work because I had such pride and ego issues and self-esteem issues that I could never fail as my first VP sales job. I just, I could not live with that failure and I did fail and it scarred me for a while and it was really hard. But now with the benefit of hindsight, I know that Ultimately, I could have worked like half as hard at Glassdoor and we still, I still would've been super successful as it turns out. And I could have worked even 5x harder at that other one. And so like ultimately the market will do what the market will do. And so when the market turns and times are shitty, like you just gotta, you have to be dispassionate and unemotional about things like your career and your work. And you have to be cogent of reality, which I think is really hard to do because then you have to accept that it's not all in your control. Control. And that's a hard thing as a salesperson to accept because you want to feel in control. That's part of the reason we do this job is because we like having control over our pay and our destiny and our futures and stuff. And to accept that, like, nope, sometimes it just is what it is and you just got to accept it, I think is really hard for people. And it was certainly hard for me.

That's a good one. Last question. What's the best thing you read in the last 12 months?

I do read a lot. I enjoy it. It's my, it's my, I used to watch TV before, before going to bed and then get really poor sleep and then, you know, woke up to blue light issues and stuff like that. And so now I read a lot. There's a book called Stumbling Upon Happiness. You know it?

Yeah. Yeah. Dan Harris.

Yeah.

Good, good plug.

So Stumbling Upon Happiness is predicated on this really interesting concept, which is that if If people say, what does it mean to be human? It's like, oh, we have opposable thumbs or whatever. But the thing that the author posits is that the reason why to be human is to sacrifice your happiness today in exchange for a happier future, which is to say, if you're super hungry and there's a giant piece of chocolate cake in front of you, you will abstain from eating it because you're like, well, next week I'm going to the beach and I don't want to look like a fat ass on the beach. So I'm gonna sacrifice my hunger and my happiness of eating this cake, even though I'm super hungry now, and instead eat like, you know, some cucumbers or whatever so that I can look good in this picture next week. And so that's what he says is like the thing to be human. But if you look back at your decisions, you're always filled with regret, you know. You're always like, why did I do that? That was so dumb. I should have made this other decision. And how counter, uh, counterintuitive it is that we always seem to make the wrong decision and why it is that we are not good at predicting what our future self wants. And he does it through a set of experiments, but I just find it really funny to explore the frailty of the human condition.

Yeah, that's great. I haven't read it. I have that on my list now.

It's so good. You'll love this given your personality.

I've read some of his other books.

Yeah, this one's so good. Yeah, yeah.

Anyway, well, this was great, Sahil. I, I, uh, I think people are going to take a lot away from this and, and hopefully hear some like important and powerful messages about state of the market and how to think about it and grapple with it. I think that that's, uh, all really great stuff and some super cool research. So hopefully everybody goes and, uh, signs up on Bravado, they get the revenue— what's it called— the revenue Revenue Recap, bravado.co. Anywhere else you want to plug?

No, no, no plugs, man. Just happy to share advice into the world of sales and, and try to do the best that we can, you know, to uplevel this profession that you and I share and love.

And go follow you on LinkedIn because you're all— you're— you've always got something to say there, which is, uh, which is good.

Too much to say there.

Too much to say. Well, cool. All right, uh, appreciate it, man. This was great. Thank you for listening to the Revenue Leadership Podcast. If you enjoyed it, don't forget to subscribe and you can find a link in the show notes and be sure to leave a 5-star review, share it with your network, and please join me next Wednesday for another great conversation.