The Anti MicroManager with Kyle Coleman

Every company has breakdowns in their revenue process. Sure thing. Deals slip into next quarter, competitors creep in and swipe deals away at the last minute, and deals getting single threaded that don't get to power. These are just a few examples of revenue leak, but there are a ton more and they're preventing your team from reaching their sales targets. That's why I'm such a big fan of Clary's Revenue platform is the only tool that actually helps leaders take control of their revenue and thrive through any market conditions. Especially when things get tough. You can't afford to miss a single detail, but you also can't be leading by gut. Clary combines the science and the art of sales and sales leadership. So go to clary.com if you want to answer the most important question in your business. Are you going to meet, beat or Miss on revenue? Welcome to the live Better Sell Better podcast with your host Kevin Dorsey of Inside Sales Excellence, the number one Patreon group and YouTube channel for tech sellers and tech sales leaders, where we dive in deep for tactical advice on how to book more meetings and close more deals faster and lead sales teams to success. But we don't stop there. We also focus on the person in salesperson. We talk about mindset goals, time management and so much more. So thank you for listening and if you're interested, head on over to patreon.com InsideSalesExcellence now with that, grab a notepad, get ready and let's dive into the good stuff. What up everybody? Welcome to another episode of the live Better Sell Better podcast. This is your host Kevin Dorsey, AKA kd. And today we have on KC one letter ahead of me Kyle Coleman, the VP of Growth at Clary, to talk to us about the anti micromanager how backing down can actually lift results up. So what's cool about Kyle? I feel like he's really burst onto the scene over the past year or so as he's been building out the growth engine at Clary. But burst isn't the right term because if you actually look at his career, he's been slowly building and evolving and adapting and growing to where he is now. He was a former financial planner, then dabbled in some online poker, did some marketing for the government, became an SDR to Manager to Director to Senior Director to now VP of Growth. He's taking his own growth so seriously that now not only is he helping his own team grow, but thousands of people grow on LinkedIn as well. Now his approach to management and rep empowerment really caught my attention a couple months ago. I knew I was going to want to talk to him about this topic, so I'm super fired up to have him on the show. From SDR to VP of Growth, Kyle Coleman, here we go. Welcome to the show.

Thank you so much, kd. I'm pumped up now. That was very kind. Thank you.

Hey, man, I got to say, how I call it, man. And, like, we've been vibing now for a couple months now. We're both part of, like, the Revenue Collective, which, I mean, I guess I'm getting no sponsorship for this, but if you're not in Revenue Collective, go be in the Revenue Collective because it allows relationships like this to flourish. But anyway, back to the good stuff. This is why people love this show. It's all tactics, no fluff. We're going to go right into this first heavy question. I share these ahead of time. We'll see how ready you are for this right in your mind, what is the difference between micromanagement and accountability? Because I think they get blurred sometimes.

This is an excellent question and definitely worth unpacking. You challenged me to keep my answers here pithy, short, so I'll do my best here. Micromanagement is born of a lack of trust, and accountability is born of a belief in autonomy. And those two things could not be more diametrically opposed. If you do not trust your team, then you feel like you have to lord over every single thing they're doing because you don't trust them to take care of business. Whereas if you just demand accountability, you're trusting them to take care of their own business and prove results. Huge difference. Does that make sense to you, kd?

It does, but we're going to keep unpacking, right? So, you know trust and ownership.

Right?

So how does a rep earn the trust to have autonomy? Or do you give autonomy and take it away if the results or trust isn't there? Like, how do you balance that?

It's an excellent question. The way that I've tried to do this over my career is I find the right balance between being prescriptive about what needs to happen while also allowing freedom to figure out the right ways to make it happen. And so SDR sales is a perfect example of this, because people need guidance on how to do the job, but if you tell somebody exactly how they should be spending every minute of every day, that is not going to be successful. And so me, as a leader, I feel like my job is to align the team around what needs to happen and why it needs to happen and to provide a framework for them doing their business, but how it actually happened should come from them. The best ideas come from people doing the work. So I'll nudge them in the right direction. I'll give them the sort of outline of how they can find success, but leave it up to them to fill in the finer points. And then the people that can deliver on that framework, the people that can evolve that, that have ideas that are hitting their numbers and helping other people on the team, those are the people that earn the autonomy, those are the people that affect the process, that keep it evolving and ensure that we're always staying ahead of the trends in the industry and not just following what we hear from people on LinkedIn.

Oh, yeah, don't trust the people on LinkedIn, guys. We're just all full of it. We don't know what we're doing. That's actually all we do is spend our time on LinkedIn. We don't run teams or test anything like that. But anyway, so let's go the opposite side of this, though. Do you have or what are any of the non negotiables for your teams where places are like, no, this is part of being a team at Claire. This is part of working for Kyle Coleman.

Right.

This comes with the package. Do you have any non negotiables or is everything flexible?

Definitely there are some non negotiables. You have to take pride in your work. And the way that I think about this, and I know that sounds kind of vague, but bear with me for a minute.

I got you. I'm ready. I know you're gonna get to it.

This is good. If you are in sales and you can, at the end of the day look back and say, I can take pride in every single interaction that I had, every single conversation I had with colleagues, the one on one I had with my manager, every single phone call that I made and conversation I had with the prospect, every demo meeting that I ran. If you can take pride in every single interaction and you're doing something very, very right, I challenge myself to do this. And I think about the conversation I'm having right now with you, Katie. And if I walk out of here and I'm like, man, I did not put my best foot forward, then I owe it to you to tell you and to say, hey, Katie, look, sorry I did not deliver on this, here's what I'm going to do next time to make up for it. Hopefully we can continue having this kind of trusting relationship. So you have to take pride in every single thing that you do and if you can think about it that granularly and you can take ownership of the times that you slip up, because you will, that makes you an effective person. That makes you somebody that people want to campaign for, to work with, to be a member of the same team. That's the kind of person that I want to be working with all the time.

We talk about it a lot with my team. We say, be proud of how you work and the results will follow. If you're proud of how you worked, you can sit down and say, I am proud of how I worked today. You do that day in and day out, the results will follow. Right now I bet you though, we got some leaders and even reps listening to Go right now saying, okay, so there's no activity minimums, there's no like lead minimums, conversion rates. Like, it's, it's just, you know, this utopia of everyone just figures it out on, on their own, like art. Like, do you have standards around that? Or is it literally like, I show up, I work for Kyle Comb, and you say, go hit your quota, however you can figure it out.

It's a combination. And the way that it's combined is again, kind of getting back to micromanagement versus accountability here. We as a leadership team feel like we know we've been around the block enough to know what kind of activity inputs will equal success. And those activity inputs are all 100% effort based. I think of these effort based metrics as the left half of the equation. And results are the right half of the equation. The results don't show up unless the effort is there. And so we feel like we know how many calls you need to make, how many emails do you need to send, how many custom emails need to write, how many LinkedIn messages need to send. We know all the mix of what needs to happen. And so what we provide to the team is ranges. And this is a really important point, and I think something we do differently than any other team is we tell people not just the minimum amount of calls that they need to make in a week, but we tell them the maximum number of calls that they should be making in a week because they need to satisfy this entire range of activity mix. So minimums and maximums for every tactic that we drive and those ranges are always evolving based on inputs from the team. So just because I was a successful SDR eight years ago does not mean anything about what it means to be a successful SDR today. And I need to defer to the successful people on my team to say Okay, I thought that the call minimum was, was 150 calls per week. But you're telling me in this post Covid era, people aren't answering their phone as much and you would prefer to drop that down to 100 calls per week so that you can send 10 more, 15 more custom emails every day. And we make trade offs like that. The other thing that I mentioned here that I think is worth unpacking is that if you're paying too much attention to daily activities, I feel like that's too narrow a lens and kind of bordering on that micro managerial sort of tendency. And that's why I focus so much on weekly activities. Because somebody might want to use Monday as their prep day where they do all their research and they set the foundation to hammer out the activities Tuesday through Friday. That's totally cool. But if you're the type of manager that just comes down on them on Monday because they didn't make, quote unquote, didn't make enough calls, that is not a successful or a good ecosystem for people to earn, to feel like they have your trust. So I know I said a lot.

Of things just then, I'm taking notes, we're going to dive in. But no, I love it and I agree. Right. It's actually funny. I've actually brought those things down from the top of like, you know, we're going to take Friday and make Friday a scrub day.

Yep.

We're just going to make it a scrub day. Right. Let's call it what it is. Right now, Friday isn't our best prospecting day. A lot of these doctors are out of the office. What if we took this full day, got all of our leads ready, got all of our things ready so we can just go into the next week ready to go. Right? Of like, let's just do that as opposed to forcing it on now when you look at the activity. Because like I said this to my managers and my reps, I'm not an activity hound, I'm an efficiency hound.

Yes.

What are we getting done in eight hours? Right? So it's like, is that 100 calls or is that 500 personalized emails? Is that 35 Vidyards? Right. I don't care as much on like the numbers. Like, did we work today? Right. Like, what did we get done in these eight hours? So like, how do you help or coach your team to be efficient with their time?

I'm really glad you asked this question because having spent six years at a data company, I was blessed with this capacity to have Every single number that I could possibly want and be able to dissect it, slice and dice in any way I wanted. And what I found was those numbers that look good on the dashboard. Calls, emails, meetings, et cetera, those are not coaching metrics. Those are vanity metrics that are gamble, that are really easy to manipulate, that are not fully telling of what a rep needs to work on to improve. And so the next kind of category of metric we literally call an efficiency metric, and it is of the personalized emails that you wrote, what percent of them got a response, and that percentage is your efficiency rate or of the live conversations that you have on your outbound calling, what percent turn into meetings. And that is your efficiency metrics for that, that kind of conversion. And then we have this really nice baseline of efficiency metrics that are super comparable rep to rep. I know that if Marlee is making a phone call and she connects, she should convert those connections at the same rate as Cam. They're doing. They're, you know, they're calling the same Personas, they're having the same types of conversations. But if Marley is super high on that conversion rate and Cam is very low, then I know that we need to coach Cam on how to have better conversations when he's cold calling or how to do research better so that he can have a more informed perspective. Those are the types of insights that are actually impactful as opposed to a manager just brow beating their reps to make more calls for the sake of making more calls.

I love it. We call them the behavioral metrics. So we track connect rate, conversion rate, pass through rate, how often do you get through? So same thing. So when my managers report up to me, what they report to me is the number one metric per rep. And it's not revenue, it's not pipeline, it's not meetings. It's like, what are the behavioral metrics? Connect rate, conversion rate, show rate, like the things that we can actually coach to and say, okay, we're going to make this better. Actually I want to get your feedback on this because I just did this with my team this past month. So I built actually like a self management calculator, right, where you can put in your goal, you can put in your behavioral based skill metrics, your response rates, your connect rates, your conversion rates, how much of your pipeline you want to come from, calls, emails or Vidyards, because we got people like dig, just let me loose on the phone, let me loose. That's all I want to do. Or the emails or the Vidyards and actually spits out like, okay, here's roughly the right activity marks for each rep.

Right?

Like, all right. You want most of them to come from calls. Your connect rate is this. Your conversion rate is this. Your show rate is this. It all adds up to this. You need to be doing about 55 calls a day. Would that fall into the Kyle Coleman method of coaching? Or does that take it too far of, again, being prescriptive on what they need to do?

No, that's 100% spot on, Katie, because what it does is it's providing context around your ask. You're not just asking them to do activities for the sake of doing activities. You're asking, you're saying, here is your personal style. Here is the facts of the matter about how efficient you are with all these various tactics. And therefore, here's the mix that you need to hit in order to satisfy your goals. Do you want to hit quota? Pretty sure you do. Otherwise you wouldn't be in sales. And here is your roadmap to get there. And here's how we're going to help you get there. And we're going to provide coaching along the way as best we can based on what we learn, what you tell us, you need help with all that sort of thing. But providing that context and lifting the veil behind the activity goals is extremely important. And unfortunately, a lot of sales leaders just don't do that. They just expect people to understand that calls will equal meetings. And that's not. It's not good enough anymore. It's not what people need. It's not. The job is way more complex than that and far less formulaic. And so you have to find ways to break things down for people so they can understand how their different contribution will lead to kind of the same sort of results at the end of the day.

And so that makes me jump to this next topic. Right. So you made a post, might have been two months ago now. Covid time, it all blurs. I have no idea. It could have been last year for all I know.

10 years ago, back in April.

Yeah, 10 years ago. Whatever. On MySpace, I saw this post and you said something along the lines it was like Self Management Week or Self Management month for your SDRs. Right? And you were like, you tell me what you're gonna do to succeed. Go forth, youngsters, and make it happen. And I remember seeing this going like, yes, like, I love this idea. So. And I did it. I told you I was gonna do it.

I did it, too.

So I want to share with you what I ran into. So I'd love to hear. Okay, you ran one. Explain it, because I definitely probably butchered the explanation of it. But, like, what this self management kind of like week or month was what you encourage your reps to do and like what some of those results were. Because I think it was such a, such an amazing experiment to run for.

Totally. Yeah. So this was right as Covid was setting in. We like every other management team, I think, for the most part, every management team that cares, we tried to provide guidance to the team about how to message, how to change your pitch, the types of activities that are going to matter, how to have empathy, how to, you know, how to do all these things at once. And we gave too much guidance to the team, basically. And so we said, you can do this and do this and try that and stop doing this and that and that. And we got feedback a week later from one person on the team. I just love her to death. She's so honest. And it's awesome to have this relationship where this kind of candor, mutual candor exists. And she came to us and she said, we are completely overwhelmed by what you're telling us to do. You think that you're helping us, but the guidance is like shifting too fast and we can't actually try anything. We can't get into a groove where you're disrupting our rhythm. And we're like, okay, thank you. And so what we did was a complete 180. And we got that feedback on a Friday. We met as a leadership team that same day. And then on Monday, we announced to the team SDR Freedom Week. It's what we call Freedom Week.

That's what it was.

Freedom, Freedom. All bets are off. Everything that we have from an expectation standpoint about all the metrics, you know, the vanity metrics, the efficiency metrics, all that stuff out the window. Do your job however you think you should be doing your job right now to drive results. And they were, they appreciated it. Of course, they responded super well. Everybody was really energized. And of course, it was the best week of our quarter from a result standpoint. And we learned a ton. And we took all those learnings and we incorporated it back into our framework. And I'm not going to tell you that every week is Freedom Week now because there are certain milestones, there are certain checkpoints that people do need to hit. But what we did was we took input and we evolved the process based on the bottoms up feedback that we got. And we lost sight of that. It's easy to lose sight of. But this Freedom Week was such a good forcing function to get everybody back engaged and to make sure they know that their feedback matters and that the way that they want to do the job should be the way that we do the job because we want them to be happy and fulfilled and productive and efficient and all those sorts of things. So sdr, Freedom Week, rip roaring success. I can't wait to do it. We're going to try and do it quarterly now.

Okay, so now that leads me to a few questions here. So one, looking back, what would you say, like the one to two things that went well, but also what were one to two things that you go, okay, this would be a change for the next one because my dumb self, right, Like I see the post, I message you and I think it was during Freedom Week. It was, this is amazing. What's going on. You're like, yeah, we're doing this. Cool, I'm going to do this too. And I didn't like wait for you to get results. I didn't wait for you to share the good or the bad. I was like, I'm going to go do this. So looking back at it, what would be some things you're like, this worked really well in this Freedom Week, but also for the leaders that are listening going like, okay, I want to do this. But what would also be a couple things maybe to avoid or you would change for the next time around?

Yeah, the things that went really well is we found people gravitate to the tactic that they were most comfortable with or they had the most expertise on or they felt like they were the best at. And that was really, really useful, Katie, because what we had was we had people trying video messaging, spending, I should say, spending an outsized amount of their time with video messaging. So then Brad became an expert on how to send a video message and incorporate Clary's product in that video message, how to show the UI and in a 45 second pitch and get somebody's attention. So then Brad became the expert on our team and he could teach that tactic to everybody else so that they can incorporate it into their style. And we had a few different instances of that where we had somebody develop this really rich perspective on just a twist of a tactic that we got used to and then teach that back to the team so that everybody could understand everyone on the team does something better than anybody else on the team. And if we can find those things and we have this ecosystem and this team that is always learning from one another, Admitting mistakes as readily as they're sharing successes. And we're just constantly pairing people up to say, you do this really well. They need help with this, and they do that really well, and you need help with that. Talk to each other, figure it out, and let's see how you guys can influence each other's processes. And that was a awesome benefit that we did not foresee happening. Do you want to dig into that or should I go to the lessons learned?

Go to the lessons learned.

Lessons learned. People lose time to task switching quite a bit. And the lack of structure led to people kind of jumping around from thing to thing, trying new things, which was the purpose of this. Don't get me wrong, but if you're trying to make a call and then write an email and then record a video, and you're trying to repeat that cadence over and over, you're switching between very different things and you're compromising your efficiency. And so we saw people kind of falling victim to trying too many disparate things instead of bucketing their tasks a little bit better. And so if I could, when we do this again, we will have more guidance around. If you're going to try a new tactic, carve out time, be intentional about the way you carve out that time and Repeat that tactic 10 times before you switch to something else. And just be a little bit more cognizant of how the output is coming to be. Not that we're going to measure it, but we just want them to be able to do more so that our sample size is a little bit bigger. Because a week is not a ton of time to get every answer to everything, to build enough of a data set to really make strong or get strong inferences from. We just need them to be a little bit more intentional with how they're spending time and lose less time to switching between things.

Okay, and then I'm going to go to the flip side of this, right? Like, it sounds amazing. You said the results were amazing, but you're only going to do it quarterly. Why? What's the, you know, like, help me understand a little bit because I hear like, dude, this sounds great. I did it once. It works great. I'm going to do it more times.

Right.

And apply it. Why only quarterly? Like, where can there be a middle ground there? Or what am I not feeling fully understand it?

Yeah, it's a good question. It's one of scale, and it's one of a scaling process and standardizing process and creating a team of experts. And I feel like if this. The nice thing about this cadence is what I mentioned before, you know, once a quarter or so, maybe it's, you know, once or twice a quarter, let's call it. But whatever it is, the intermittent nature of it is energizing for people. If somebody came in and every Monday they were like, shit, I have to figure out how to do this all again myself. That could end up being a little bit of a cycle that is not as motivating as it was. The freshness was really motivating for people. And so we feel like we can kind of have it both ways, where we keep people motivated, we keep people engaged, and we also take the learnings and we take the best practices from that week and we apply it to a team process that we can vet and we can then test those things out at a broader scale. And that then becomes the process for new people that get onboarded. They learn this new way of doing things, which is an evolution of the way we did things six months ago because of all the insights and all the inputs that we've gotten from these experimental weeks. That's kind of the rationale right now. I don't know if it's perfect rationale, but it's kind of where our heads are at.

Well, no, and I can agree fully too on the novelty factor. We went through something earlier this year where unfortunately we went through a reduction in force in April. And in April, our theme was rise, right? Rise was the word. We talked about rising above this and rising through this and rising to the occasion. And we structured everything, like to the minute, the days were structured, how many, and they killed it. Like the energy was super high. Like, we had one of our best months in April in all, like this Covid, right? And we're like, yes. We're like, great. But then May came and the bottom fell out and I was like, guys, what's going on? Rise.

Rise.

Like, dude, we can't rise anymore, dude. We rose. We rose. And they gave the same feedback. It was too much. We could do it for April and we did. But then you got to back off just a little bit. Backed off, but then was like, okay. Then we went the self management route of like, okay, you show us then. And it wasn't like, okay, fine, you don't want to do it my way, show me your way. It was, okay, we're going to give some of that ownership back and go through this. And we did it. We started seeing results from it as well. And we've been evolving this self management where we have Two plans. You can work the normal plan or you can work your own plan. Then you're responsible for communicating your plans to us.

I love that.

Where we fell down in this is people were communicating their plans, but the managers actually weren't giving enough insight to say, is that plan going to work? Right. Getting into the numbers.

Right.

Okay, I'm going to do 45 Vidyards this week. It's like, woohoo. Cool. Okay, 45 Vidyards. Good open rate on a Vidyard. Let's call it 60%. A good response rate on a Vidrad. All right, 30%. We're talking about 12 responses. 40%. And then we weren't doing that. So how do you.

How do I phrase this?

How do you manage your managers to manage autonomously? Does that make sense? That was a really bad question. You get what I'm saying? So this is how you think? Right. How do you help your managers manage? Right. Close enough that they know what's happening, but not. So they're just banging on people's heads every single day.

Totally. I think that there's a really interesting maxim from a book called Extreme Ownership, which is written by a couple Navy SEALs, and they have this interesting and paradoxical thought that discipline equals freedom. And the extension of that, that I think is applicable here is that structure equals freedom. And so what we try and have for our, you know, what we try and instill in our managers is that this, you need to provide structure to your team so that they know how to be most efficient and productive with their time. But within that structure, there needs to be room for exactly what you outlined, Katie, for autonomy, for individual personalization, for that kind of decision making to be done at the rep level so that they can turn the knobs and pull the levers that they think they need to, again, within this structural framework to find success. And so that's the balance that we try and strike, is provide enough structure so that people don't have to think about the entire thing end to end, but don't provide everything so that they don't think at all. Like, we need to find the middle ground so that people are flexing that strategic muscle and are not just robots dialing a phone. That is not what we want. So that balance is super, super key. And it's not easy. And it ebbs and flows and sometimes you'll find that the swings go too far one way or the other, and you just need to keep a finger on the pulse of the team. And in fact, we're going through that right now, I share all the great stuff that happens with us as a team, but there's some not so great stuff too, where we overcorrected in a lot of ways and we took maybe put too much stock in these top down mandates, these initiatives that we were trying to run and neglected to get enough feedback from our team and our team. Fortunately, again, we have this environment where people will tell us when these kinds of things are happening. But we're not perfect. No management team, no leadership team is perfect. You need to keep a finger on the pulse, you need to solicit feedback and you need to show your team that if they give you feedback, you're gonna take action on it so that you're actually listening to them, you're actually making decisions based on their thoughts and feelings of what they need to be successful.

No, I think that's gold. It was one of the things I wrote down that I wanted to come back to is like, I think it was a, maybe it was a rep or maybe it was a manager who like voiced like, hey, enough is enough, right? Like, stop it please. Right? How do you build that type of culture? Right? Because almost every sales leader out there, actually just leaders in general, say, yes, open door policy, yes, I want your feedback, yes, tell me what's wrong. But then no one does it, right? So how do you build a culture where people will actually be candid with you with those types of things?

You have to be candid with them and you have to show them that you are willing to challenge them directly as a means of them improving. And how many times have you heard from a rep who's gone to their manager and said, is there anything I can work on? And the manager says, nope, everything's great, you're doing great. Just keep doing what you're doing. That's not going to create a trusting environment. You think that rep is going to be able to go to that manager and give him or her feedback? No chance. So as a leader, you owe it to your team to understand them well enough, understand their performance, understand their intrinsic motivations, understand their developmental path, what they're trying to do in their career, and give them tough feedback to create that two way street. And at the same time, you have to be willing to change your mind and you have to be willing to actually listen to people when they're talking to you instead of just reacting to them when they're talking to you. So listen, think and respond instead of just emotionally react. And that's how you create this environment that you're going to challenge them, and you expect them to challenge you. And. And both of you mutually will take action on that feedback that you receive.

I think that's so crucial, right? And something that you said even earlier is admitting when you made a mistake, being vulnerable, being like, yo, guys, I got this wrong. You know, this thing over here. Sorry about it. Backing off here, right? Or I thought this would be a good idea, and it didn't work. And being vulnerable with your team, right? Because giving feedback is a scary thing to do. And so if they know you come from a place of care, of, like, I'm not an easy person to work for. I don't know if you're an easy person to work for, but I'm not an easy person to work for. But they know that I care. And that's what allows me to push. That's what allows me to say, okay, like, we can be more, we can be better. But, like, this is the thing that a lot of leaders also get wrong is, like, they'll tell people they care, but you have to show people that you care, right? So how do you show your team that you care?

One of the biggest mistakes I think I made earlier in my managerial career is that I neglected to hold people to as high a standard as I hold myself to. And they would deliver work and, you know, say, it's a presentation deck or something like that, and they would deliver work, and they say, okay, this deck is done. I'm feeling good about it. And instead of holding them to a higher standard, I would take the deck and I would make the changes myself. And I would do the cosmetic things to make it look and flow better. And I would do the substantive things, change the content, things like that, instead of having the courage to challenge them about it and to tell them, like, this is not good enough, and here are the reasons why. And so I finally. I feel like I've gotten over that, and it was a super important part of my development as a manager. Is not. It's not a bad thing to have high standards. Like, it's not a scary thing, and people want to improve, and people need that feedback. Otherwise, you'll never scale yourself as a manager. You'll never actually be able to let go if you are doing the work of the people on your team over and over and over again. And so showing people that you're challenging them and challenging them with context about this. And sometimes it's really stupid stuff, Katie. And I feel like an idiot when I'm giving this feedback and I'm like, this font should be blue and not black. And here's why. And sometimes it's actually important, like impactful sort of stuff. Like you can't communicate this in this way because it's not aligned with our marketing message. It's not aligned with the new product rollout. It's an old way of thinking you clearly just copied and pasted from an old deck instead of thinking for yourself and adding a new perspective. So, like, let's talk this through and let's figure it out together. So leading with questions and leading with a really high standard for what you're expecting of people was game changing for me as a manager. And I think it's made for much more productive and open sorts of relationships with the people that I work with.

Now, something that you mentioned, Extreme Ownership earlier, which I love that book. Did you read Dichotomy of Leadership yet?

I have not, no. Okay.

So it's the follow up book and I actually liked it more than Extreme Ownership, which is rare. Very rarely do I like the follow up book more. But what, what it talks about is the actual, first of all, the application of it. Because Extreme Ownership was really good on the different ideas the stories are. But then some people took ownership too far. And that was what I wanted to ask next year is how do you teach people to own things? Because it's like human beings, this is what they talk about in the book, the dichotomy. We crave structure. You said it earlier, structure motivates, but we hate micromanagement. We love an ABCDEFG path to success, but we hate micromanagement. We crave change, but we're afraid of novelty. We have all these different things that we go back and forth on, which is just hilarious as us as a species. So how do you help ingrain this ownership, but at the same time, full circle back to what we were talking about earlier, but not having it be micromanagement because sometimes people can feel like little ticky, tacky feedback like that could be micromanagement. What do you mean? Change it to blue. Stop micromanaging me. How do you help encourage people to take ownership of that feedback where they're not taking it as micromanagement, but they're taking it as development.

This is a really excellent question. And I think that it all comes down to communicating context. If you as a leader can effectively communicate both what needs to happen as well as why it needs to happen. I know I said this before, but I think it's really, really important what needs to happen. And why, what their contribution is going to be and why it matters. How is this initiative aligned with something broader that the company is trying to make happen or something that the department is trying to make happen or, or something that's more meaningful than just this project in a vacuum? What is it that is gonna make this an exciting thing to work on, that makes sure that, as I mentioned before, that this project aligns to the things that matter to them, the things that get them out of bed in the morning, the things that are intrinsically motivating. How will this help them build an experience that'll aid them in their development path? Like if you can provide that context to people and connect those dots and you as a leader necessarily have exposure to things that they don't, you see things that they would never be able to see. You're in meetings cross functionally that they just don't have exposure to. And it's up to you to cascade that context down so that they have as full an understanding as possible and so that they understand that their contribution is meaningful. And you're not just asking them to do something for the sake of asking them, you're asking them so that they can contribute to moving the company, even just nudging it a little bit in the right direction. And that's what I think is really, really empowering for people, is developing that full understanding. And that if you can do that, I think you solve this dichotomy issue. And I think you certainly solve the micromanagement issue.

I love it. What we've been preaching to management over the past few months is enough of the what. It's about the why and the how. Why and the how, why and the how. Like what we want more revenue, what we want more pipeline, what we want more like. No, enough of the what. The what is simple why context. But then the how. So even with the self management that was where we missed on the first track is like people were saying like, here is my plan. But the follow up of why is that your plan? And how are you actually going to execute it? That wasn't there. It was like, here's my plan. And on paper, beautiful plan. It always works in the spreadsheet. Every plan I've ever built has always worked in the spreadsheet. You know how many unicorn companies I've built in spreadsheets? It's a glorious thing. Like it never ends, right? I've got many of them. Right. But that why and the how I think is crucial. Now, something I wanted to touch on before we Run out of time. Here is. I want to talk about your growth. I was hinting at it a little bit earlier, right? Like this burst. Right. And that's how a lot of success always looks. Right? It's like, oh, wow. They just overnight, like, here he is. But that's not the case for you. Like, you've been chipping away at this, but your journey. You made a. Again, like referencing another post. You made a post a while back that showed almost like your chart of your career with some ups and downs and all this. How do you go from financial planning to VP of growth at a really fast and up and coming company that I'm really excited to see what y' all do. How do you make that transition? What was the timeframe on that too? From financial planning to now? How long was that?

10 years.

10 years. Okay, so in 10 years you weren't even in this industry. I've been in this industry for 10 years and it took me long enough to get here. You weren't even in this industry 10 years ago, and yet here you are. How did you achieve that sort of growth? Because a lot of people would see that sort of trajectory and go, like, I want to achieve that, but they don't know everything that goes into achieving something like that. And I wanted you to kind of share that a little bit of not what your growth has been, but how did you do it? How do you make that many pivots and transitions and then get to where you are now?

Yeah. I view career development far more like a rock wall, rock climbing wall than a ladder. And I think a lot of people think that career progression is just a ladder that goes straight up. And that's just simply not the case for anybody that I've ever spoken in depth with. You can ask any leader at your company and I think they'll probably echo a similar sentiment, which is this rock climbing wall that you're on, you have to move laterally, sometimes you have to move down, sometimes you have to move across the wall to find the right footholds before you can really start to climb, before you can really start to escalate. And so that's what I feel like I did over the first, call it four or five years of my kind of journeyman type. Tenure out of college was I was taking all of these different roles sort of opportunistically based on experiences that I wanted to develop, things that I thought would be interesting to me. And I think what is useful or what's beneficial of my approach is I'm always thinking about the last thing or less things that I've done and what I've learned from those things and how I can apply it to my current role. And so an example of this would be I was an account executive at an advertising agency. We had an internal creative team. And I was kind of the liaison between the internal creative team and and the clients that we were working with to deliver on these different brand assets and things like that. And what the skill set that I developed was understanding the two very different worlds of an internal creative team and a client team that has no idea what goes on behind the scenes and doesn't understand the complexities of creating all this really intricate sort of creative and brand sort of stuff. And so I developed this capacity to speak a language with one group, translate that language in a way that's not simple, but is easy enough to understand, and go back to the business side and be able to say, here's what's happening and why and what kind of feedback do you have? And then I could figure out the right way to bring that feedback back to the team. So I just became a really good type person at mediating conflict, understanding what each team was saying and certainly emotionally charged environments, being a calming presence that was able to translate what every team needed to one another. And then that exact skill set could not be more perfect for being an SDR or being an SDR leader, where the same exact thing is happening between marketing and sales. And so I developed this capacity to understand what matters to marketing and marketing leaders and to speak as confidently with a CMO as I can speak with a CRO because I understand their world and what matters to sales leaders. And being the sort of translator between the two made it very easy for me to ascend this sort of ladder. Once I found the right foothold in that rock wall, I was like, man, this universe between marketing and sales is perfect for what I have studied over the last five or six years in my career. And now I'm ready to move up the ranks. And that's exactly what ended up happening. So everything you're doing now is in service of something that you can do in the future. And it's up to you to find the connective tissue to be that person that translates your prior experiences into kind of current ways that you can manifest those experiences. And I think a lot about that. I study a lot of interdisciplinary stuff. I learn psychology. I learn educational sort of principles about instructional design. Like I care about how people think and how people learn, and I apply that to my work. So a very long answer, but I think it's just thinking about experiences, being intentional about those experiences, and not discounting anything you've done in the past, but rather applying lessons learned to what you do now. That's what's made me successful.

I love that. Especially that last part that you then touched on, too, was just growing yourself. Right. I actually made a post on this just the other day. I'm listening to a book right now, and it said, do you have five to 10 years experience or do you have one year of experience repeated five to 10 times? There's a total difference. What you did is experience. You took what you learned, applied it to the next thing, learned there, applied it to the next thing while still learning new things and apply it to the next thing. And that's where all of a sudden you can just get that hockey stick of a career growth where it's like, oh, shit, here we are. And it happened overnight in quotes. But it's not true. Something else that you've touched on that no one else have I really actually heard mention is learning about learning. Learning how people learn and how crucial that is as a leader. Right. Because if more leaders understood how people learned, they would change their onboarding, they would change their coach, they would change so much. But a lot of sales is a learning problem. They didn't learn it the right way. They were never taught the right way.

Totally.

They weren't taught these things. And we say, go figure it out. Right? Go, Go figure it out. And we'll see how that. How that works out. So, nah, man. I love that growth. I love that journey. I'm pumped to see where the hell you're gonna go in the next 10 years.

Like, Jesus.

Right? Like, who knows where. Where you're gonna be in 10 years now? So I'm gonna pull this back here real quick because we've been riffing for almost 45 minutes now, really, on micromanagement and accountability and programs and plans. Let's say everyone forgot everything we've been talking about for the past 40 minutes, right? They forgot it all. But you wanted to give them three pieces of advice on how to properly lead or manage your team. They forgot everything else. But you're going to give them three things around how to do a little bit of what you've been talking about today. What would those three things be?

All right, here we go. This is hard. The main thing I think we've talked about and agreed upon here, kd, is you as a leader need to understand and communicate the why, you need to focus on context and you need to cascade that context down. You need to remember that you have visibility into things that other people don't and you have to be the one that makes sure that they get visibility to those things. So focus on the why, communicate the why and make sure everything is really deeply contextualized. That's number one. Number two, this is a principle from Dwight Eisenhower which I think is really, really useful. He has a really famous quote and he says, don't let the urgent crowd out what's important. And this is so, so key to be an effective leader. You need to understand what the important things are for long term success on your team. And you can't let the day to day chaos crowd that out. And if you lose sight of what's important and impactful to your team, then your team becomes rudderless and there's no direction and it's your fault. So don't let the urgent crowd out the important. And then the third thing is I'm going to get a little bit more tactical here because this is a hobby horse of mine, Katie, and I think it's important that I stay on brand quality over quantity all day, every day. If you are the type of leader that is brow beating your reps to make more calls for the sake of making more calls, you are operating under a model that is not only outdated, it's also ineffective. And you're going to lose people and you're going to lose their trust and they're going to turn over and they're going to go be successful somewhere else. Focus on quality. And if that means that you need to update and revise your thinking on how to do the job, well, do it. Because this game, especially from a prospecting standpoint, is so much more about strategic research and teamwork between SDRs and AES and so much less about quantity. Quantitative formulas, winning the day. And then SDRS just hand things off to AES and everything's good. That's not how it works anymore. It's teamwork, it's strategy, it's quality and it's up to you to engender that across your team.

I love it. There was a study, I think it was inside sales, I guess now where are they? Zant? They released a study. It was like two years ago actually two years ago. Now it's time to like how to get the most out of SDR performance. And what everyone paid attention to in that study was the average number of dials being like X and the average number of touches Being Y. But there was one thing that was the highest correlation to SDR success, and it was how often they communicated with their ae. And no one paid attention to that. No one was like, oh my God, I should go do that. They just like, they focus on the easy stuff, AKA dials. But going like, well, how am I actually encouraging relationships? How am I actually making sure that communication is happening, that quality over quantity, even when it comes to relationships? So those are some fire pieces advice. I made you dispel, like 10 years of experience down into three things, right? Which is like, you know, hard to do. But here's what we're going to end with, right? And it's my favorite question. The name of this podcast is Live Better Sell Better, right? Like focusing on the person in salesperson. And a lot of what we've been talking about is kind of around, like, taking better care of that person, how we manage the person, right? I have this weird belief that if we live a little bit better, if we take better care of ourselves, that the sales also improve. So what would be your live better advice, right? You know, how to live better. More fulfillment, more joy, more energy, more fun. Like, what would that piece of advice be for everyone?

Listen, Go out of your way to find opinions that you disagree with and engage in conversations with those people. Or read the opinion piece that you feel like you have a preconceived notion about and sit with it and think about it and try your best not to react to it. Like, don't go on Twitter and do a little tweet about it. That's not what I'm talking about. Sit with it and think and respond to it. And what's been useful for me is like pen and paper writing down my responses to things like that. It builds a much more comprehensive worldview. It ensures that you're keeping an open mind to be open to different perspectives, that you're willing to change your mind when certain arguments are persuasive to you or it forces you to really have a firm foundation of the things that you hold true and you hold dear and that you spouse. And so if you can. It's hard in this day and age to get outside the echo chamber, but it's super, super important. I think to live a more rich and rewarding life is to expose yourself to viewpoints that you don't necessarily agree with and have a conversation with people about it. Like, we're losing a lot of that in this day and age. And so if I can affect even one person to go out and do this. I feel like I'll have a successful appearance on the show.

I love it. I love it. And it's different than a lot of the advice we get of like, oh, go meditate, go journal. And you're saying, go find differing opinions and sit with it and write it out and feel what you're feeling and identify why you're feeling what you're feeling. Is it an emotional response or is it something else? I think that's phenomenal advice and I love it. I hope people do it, especially that writing. That's one thing. It also helps get that tension out. If you just take it in and you don't get it out, that's when we get so angst. But if you write out what you're hearing, what you're feeling, what those questions are, what that conversation is, I think that's a phenomenal piece of advice. You've given so much phenomenal advice in this. Where can people go get more of it? How can they find you? Where can they follow you? I'm already a follower and subscriber. What can other people do to get in touch with you?

Yeah. So if you're curious to follow me, I'm pretty active on LinkedIn, as Katie has mentioned here. So I'm Kyle Coleman on LinkedIn. Pretty simple. I try and post something every day. And then if you're curious to learn more about Clari, Clari.com, c L A R I. And that's basically it.

My man. I love it. And just as a heads up, like, I'm looking at Clary right now, and I did get one of the best prospecting emails I've ever gotten from Clary, and I'm going to continue to spit this out. For the longest time, I got a phenomenal prospecting email that came from one of your reps. I got to tell you, he practices what he preaches, y'. All. He's making his reps good. He's making them strong. Kyle, my man, thank you so much for coming on today. Thank you for all the knowledge and the energy and the passion you bring to this game. You made me better today and I appreciate that. Love you, man. Appreciate you. Thank you so much.

Thank you, sir. It's been a pleasure.