Transparency Connects and Retains the Best Reps with Ryan Walsh

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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, 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 InsideSalesExCexcellence now with that, grab a notepad, get ready and let's dive into the good stuff. How much of your workday is actually spent selling? Like be honest, I won't tell. This can stay between us because between internal meetings, back and forth emails updating salesforce salespeople duly found, nearly half of a rep's day is spent on anything. But but what really gets me is how much this hurts sellers. All those distractions are killing rep earning potential by 66% and quarterly revenue by 38%. It is a lose lose. That is why top performing sales teams like Asana, Figma and Intercorp use dually the connected workspace that automates all the CRM work reps hate and routes deals to close wins faster with guided playbooks and call templates, giving sales leaders the clean, accurate data they need to run a winning sales process without the wasted admin hours. Get a lifeline for your sales pipeline. Visit Dooley AI to learn more and try it free. And with that, let's get back to the show. What up everybody? Welcome to another episode of the live Better Sell Better podcast. This is your host Kevin Dorsey, AKA kd and we are going to pull back the veil. We are going to raise the curtain on what is actually going on at the best of the best SaaS. Sales companies out there in terms of how they do compensation, how they structure their culture, but also lifting the veil for reps on what you need to look for. Because so often you can get dazzled by the shiny object. They've raised money. They're a rocket ship. They've got a former Googler in the lead. Like whatever it is, then you get in and it's something completely different than what you were expecting. And that's why I'm so pumped to have Ryan Walsh on the show with me today. One a recovering CRO similar to myself. We do need to go through some recovery after being in the game for so long, but also the CEO of repview, where that is the mission of pulling back the veil and making roles more transparent for salespeople. So we're going to dive into what to look for, what to ask, but also for sales leaders, what you need to be doing to attract the best talent out there. Ryan, my man, welcome to the show.

Awesome, kd. Thanks for having me. Glad to talk about it. Love it. We're passionate about it. I'm passionate about it. I think about it all day long. And yes, my recovery period has been longer than anticipated, but I'm getting through it. I'm working through it. You and I can talk about that after the podcast. What are some of my seven steps to get through it?

Indeed. I might need that checklist. But although, as we were discussing right before we hit record is you're no longer in recovery mode. You're in build mode. You're just building a company. Right. One letter changed. You went from CRO to CEO, and now you're back into the game here. But so what I want to do, man, is like, I want to dive into this. I think it's a fun topic that people dance around. You know, like, we tiptoe around it. We don't really get into the weeds of it. And I want to start with, you know, for reps out there that are looking for roles, what should they be looking for?

Right.

Because if you read the job ads, they all sound the same. Right? So, like, what should reps be looking for in a role to know whether or not it's a good fit for them.

Yeah. So, yeah, there's a lot of directions we could go with this question. But, you know, let me start with, yes, the job ads all look the same. There's probably another podcast for another day about the actual process of hiring and getting on board at some of these companies and how it needs a serious transformation. And that's something that we think a lot about as well, you know, but not only do the job ad set, the pitches sound the same. Right. You mentioned, like, you know, series A, series B, series C. They're all telling you the same thing. Great culture. We just raised all this money. Grow, grow, grow, grow, grow. Right? And. And there's a few things like. And so before we jump into how do you find this information, there's this concept, especially. A lot of people come to me every single day talking about, I want to get into tech. I want to get into, you know, an earlier stage coming. I'm at xyz, giant company, Salesforce, Oracle. I want to go. I want to go earlier. Fund Maybe equity might be worth something. There's this concept that when you're in a series A, series B, series C, every company hits this, right? There's some amount of greenfield opportunity, right? And then you marry that with what is the capacity that's already overlaid on that green field opportunity for the sales organization. And what we see for sales orgs that are very, very high reg started in some of these earlier stages is that capacity simply has not caught up with that greenfield opportunity, right? It's a very simple thing, right? We just. And to put it even more clearly, there's, there's room to hire 15 more reps and there's still opportunity for those 15. They can still eat, right? They can still get those opportunities. There's more coming in and coming in. The problem is you start to raise that series B of 80 million, 150 million, then you pile on another 70 reps. At some point, every company starts to. Not in every. I mean, some of these, you know, obviously you look at some of these huge SaaS companies or huge tech companies, there's a ton of greenfield opportunity, right? So you can hire a lot, but a lot of these companies, they're sexy, they're newer, they raised a bunch of money. The delta between the capacity that has already been hired from a salesperson perspective and that green field that's starting to shrink. And at some point you reach a tipping point, right? At some kind of, there's, there's an arc there where you reach a tipping point where now you're kind of fighting this battle of creating more. And how do you create more? How do you create more of that green field, right? Through product, right? Innovations through. You're expanding your product, which might expand your market through deal size, which expands your tam as well, right? So, so you have to, you can expand it, but are you expanding it at a rate that's outpacing your, your talent acquisition? And so for me, a huge sign is we try and look for that and we see through what we're building at repview, we see some of these orgs that are kind of smaller rated really, really well. And we talk about that like they have not hit that tipping point. So maybe it's a great time to join. But at the same time, you have to be very cautious because you could be the rep that is the tipping point, right? And you don't want to be that. You don't want to be that higher, right? And that, that can be hard to dig into. You know, we.

Well, let's hit that real Quick, how, how could we, right, like what questions should a rep ask or what should they look for in a company, right, to tell, like okay, what is the capacity, right? Like do I still feel there's a green field or not? Like are there questions they could ask? Are there things that they can do to try to suss some of that out?

Yeah, I mean we certainly the basics of questions and we're huge advocates of this at repview, you know, and we have the data to back it up. But regardless of whether we have the data, just ask the question like what, what percent of the team hit, hit their target last quarter, right? Is it, is it 35%? Is it, you know, is it 80%? Is it, you know, what, what is that number? And then it's a loaded question because what should that number be is another question, right? So some of these companies that are hiring aggressively, it's almost like all what percent of maybe like of the folks who were there a year, like what hit? And then also a company may be very highly regarded, might have an incredible repute score, but maybe that number's a little bit lower. So it's like where are you in that tipping point, right? And I think that I always start with what percent of the team hits quota this quarter, last quarter or this year, last year sort of thing. We start with that. And I personally, when I think about the different aspects of what makes a sales or great or what doesn't, you look at culture, you look at professional development, you know, you look at the incentive comp plan, you look at lead flow. Is it all cold calls or is it all, you know, inbound, right? You know, and then what, what other things are important to you? Is DNI important to you? You know, it just depends on what's important to you. But there's some basics, right, that are, that are super important. It starts for me and what I advise people, it starts with the product because really the product drives every, it drives. Winning cures a lot of bad culture, right? I mean, you know, I mean everybody's winning. You know, you get, get away with a lot, right? And so, so I think that, I think that winning is, is the, the most correlated factor is where does your product sit in the market, right? Is it driving demand? Are you, you know, you're, you know, particularly now in, in tech there's always going to be competitors, right? So how do you sit in that? How do you sit within that? And I used to say, I had a phrase I like to use a lot, which is you throw a Great leadership team at a bad product and the product wins every time, right? I mean, there.

Been there.

Yeah. I mean, it, you know, does it really matter what you do? So I think the product piece, then, well, how do you dig into that? Right? Like, what do you do? Like, what do you, like, who are your competitors? Who? Tell me. I like to get. You get a lot of interview advice from people and they'll say things like, the interviewers are going to ask you some very specific examples, right? Okay, well, flip the script. Tell me three deals that you lost last month and why did you lose those deals? Right. As an interviewee, right? Like, tell me why you lost those deals, right? So, like, it's so funny because nobody ever thinks like that. Well, they're going to ask you very specific. You tell me a deal, you a big deal. You want to walk me through this specific process and why, you know. Okay, well, yeah, like, it's great to show specific. Or if you're interviewing for a leadership role, tell me about a really challenging, you know, employee, you know, issue you had to deal with and how did you. What did you do? Right. Well, tell me about a really challenging prospect your sales organization had and you lost. And walk me through the steps of why you lost it, what you could have done differently. I love that kind of stuff. Make them squirm a little bit, too. And then the last thing I'll say is, don't get the references that they give you. Right. Don't, don't, you know, hey, can I talk to somebody on the team? Yeah, here's Sally closer, right? And she's made 300k last year on a 120OTE, and she loves working here. Hey, Sally, why don't you go talk to Kevin? You know, like, how about we just. How about we independently get somebody? And I'd love to talk to, you know, if possible, can I talk to somebody that's done really well? Can I talk to somebody that hasn't? And honestly, we can help with this. For a lot of companies, a former employee, right. You know, who's, you know, well, that's gonna be biased. They left, Right. Well, that's not always the case, right. I mean, people leave jobs a lot, and many times I see. Maybe it's just I look at LinkedIn a lot and they're always talking about how grateful they are for the opportunity. So, you know, there's some survivors bias there, Right?

Those are the ones that are posting. Right. But if you think about everybody leaving, because you and I have talked about this and Actually, I think this is a good follow up, right? You and I talked about this really. Actually when repview was getting started, and it was actually one of my concerns, right? I was like, well, how do you guard against that? Right? Because sales is a relatively high turnover role, good or bad, right? You have more people leaving, which sometimes can poison the water, right? Of like, you know, disgruntled or didn't work out. And like, so how can a rep kind of weed through the good and the bad? Like, how do you know the good's actually good, but also how do you know if the bad's actually bad, right? You could go look up reviews on me. 10 people that love me. One's like, he's the worst leader I've ever worked for. All he cares about is LinkedIn. He's like, in all this. And it's like, whoa, how do you try to suss that out? How can you tell the realness of it all?

Yeah, it is. We think about this all the time. We get asked about this all the time. And when talking about Glassdoor, people say revenue is kind of like Glassdoor for sales. Well, yes and no. I think we structure everything as data driven, right? There's no rage typing about Katie, my former manager. What happened in that scenario that you just described with the person that didn't appreciate, you know, the engagement they had with you was. They got, they got some gratification for posting that on the Internet for themselves personally and however they want to describe it, right. You know, when you take the emotion out of it, which we, which we have done, because it's simply data and ratings. We're not asking people to tell me about your manager. We're not asking me to how bad was the avocado in the break room? Right? Like, we don't, we don't. We don't want that information. It's not valuable to our users. What we try and do is structured, is you can compare companies with similar data sets, right? Like, well, relatively speaking, when we have 800 ratings from Salesforce and 400 ratings for HubSpot, how does the overall culture score compare? Or how does the lead float? Like, you can. And you can dive into that at kind of even a role level. Like, we try and take emotion out of it and really just drive it based on data, right? I've always said, like, you know, Glassdoor, you get 45% disgruntled. 45% HR told me to do it. 10% in the middle, maybe that's valuable. And some portion of that salespeople and at the end of the day, too, it's also about numbers. What percent of team people really value, what percent of team hits quota. So we kind of package all that into a relative reputation score. Our goal is not to disparage companies. We have no desire to do that. Our goal is to shine a light on companies that are being, you know, providing an exceptionally positive experience to their employees. Our goal is to highlight those types of companies for sales professionals so they can get into those roles. They're all hiring, and maybe some of the ones that have areas to improve, we want to help them improve their organization with data as well. Here's where you need to prove there's, you know, so for us, that's really core to the mission is we have no desire. And honestly, we hear. I hear more every, on a daily basis, more people that are super pumped about their. Their roles than are upset. Yes. We hear like, I got sold a billet goods and I ended up in this place and et cetera, et cetera. We don't. We hear more like, you know, this is great. I got into a great opportunity, a great role. Will that work out in three years? Maybe, maybe not. But, you know, they're super excited. We hear that positivity so much more, which is, which is what drives us. But honestly, you know, getting in, it's such a leap of historically, right? As a career salesperson, right. One of the reasons I probably never left my career, I spent 16 years at the same company is because of that fear of unknown, right? Like, okay, I'm doing pretty well here. Like, you know, I could do better there. But also it could just be a complete shit show, right? I could get over there and then I'm going to get my. I'm going to tuck my tail and come back and say, all right, hey, yeah, okay, maybe. Maybe you were right. Right. And so now it's like, is it possible to give people more confidence in that decision? Right. Maybe. I think so. And that's kind of what, you know, what we help to what we hope to help a little bit too. But it's hard. It's hard that you're asking questions like, how do you know, right. If it's the right org, right? And I'm saying like, yeah, product market fit. You're. A lot of times you're still asking people's opinions and you're, you know, of that. So it is. It is difficult and we're trying to make a difficult process, you know, somewhat easier on the reps and we can.

Go down this one layer deeper.

Right.

Like comp aside. Right. Because that's what drives a lot of salespeople. Right? Like what's the ote? What's the comp? Do you have suggestions on how to know if the role is right for you?

You.

Because not every sales role is the same. Right. So do you give guidance on like, okay, based on like what you like or how you like to sell? Like, what are some of the pieces of advice you can give there? Because I think people, they just get blinded by an OTE and realize, wait a minute, that's a fast transactional SMB sale versus a strategic mid market or enterprise sale. Like, what are some things that a rep should actually be asking themselves? Right. So they get asked questions by the interviewer. They're supposed to ask the interviewer what are some questions the rep should be asking themselves before going into a role.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. We think a lot about this. Okay. And this is actually, you know, reput's been around for a couple of years now. When we originally built the platform, one of the core things we did was like, people are like, oh, you go to, you can rate your org. Okay, fine. Okay, yeah. But there's a kind of a slight variation of something that we put into that process. It takes like two and a half minutes all in. There's seven categories that we think are important, and these are important to understand if the company's good at them, to your question. They're also very important to understand how valuable that is in your career. Like, do you care about that? Right? So when you look at it like, how important is base comp, incentive comp, structure, culture and leadership, product, market, fit, diversity, inclusion, lead flow and professional development. Those are, I think I got them. Those are the seven. So before you join repview as part of the process, we give you those seven things and we say, stack, rank them. Stack, rank them. Right. And so we know, right, you, Katie, as an individual cares a lot about lead flow first. I'm just making this up. Professional development second. Right. And then on down the road and maybe you know, cultures last, which is probably not true, but whatever. And so, so then, all right, well what does that mean? And then we know company A is really strong at lead flow and then, you know, you can look at that data. We look at data all the time. What is he cares about lead flow first? Well, maybe, maybe Katie's not the cold calling type. Right. Or whatever. Right. Maybe maybe he's not as comfortable with that, Excels in real. Or maybe professional development is more Important because you're in your first year as an ae, right? Versus like Ryan Walsh, you know that professional development is going to be last. Just give me a phone, you know, and a good comp plan and I'm probably okay, right. I don't need to try and learn this old dog here doesn't need a new sales methodology to pick up at my age.

But.

And so, and so then we know company A and company B and company C are really strong at lead flow. That means a lot of inbound to kd. That's what he cares about. About. Right. And so it's actually a really important exercise for people to think through like what they value. And it's not just that stuff. It's also like big company, small company. Right. Like, like that's huge. Like, and we've seen it all the time. I've hired hundreds and hundreds of salespeople and never got it. You know, we always got some of them wrong. Even you know, after I'd done it for years and years. And you look back and you're like, yeah, we should have probably caught that on us. Yep, probably on us. Like, yeah, how do we do our training? How do they like to learn where our sales works? 250 people, they did really well in a 5 person sales org. Okay. You know, we weren't like, you know, Ford assembly line, probably a lot of process and structure and so like maybe that, you know, big company, small company, you know, there's so many different things technical, how technical is your product? Like. And so, so we try and capture data and our vision on that is just capturing off very basic data. Like we know where you sold because you did ratings. We know who those Personas are as well. Like hey, you know, Katie can go talk to the CMO all day long but you know, hasn't really had experience talking to the cfo. Like in selling into that org. I sell to marketers and that makes a difference too. There's a lot of little things and people. And I've heard that, I've heard that a number of people say things like, well, such an excellent salesperson they could sell to really anyone. Like maybe. But you'll be way better if you know where you've really had success and double down a little bit on that.

I love that call out because it's true. Right. Just like there's some. I would rather be blowing out a quota, blowing out a number versus okay, not blowing it out. Right. This is what I'm good at. And I even know this about myself as A Sales Leader About 200 is like my ceiling in terms of how large I like my org to be. Once it's that big, I don't feel like I'm close enough to it anymore. I don't feel like I'm in it anymore. Changes take too long. Like, I'm the builder, and I know that about myself. And now I'm proactively.

Right.

I get opportunities thrown all the time. I'm like, no. Like, I don't want to step into an org that's 200 already and go to 500. I'm the one that gets you to 200. Right. And knowing those strengths and knowing your preferences, I think is really, really important because I'm a huge believer in role fit just as much as skill fit. There are a lot of very talented, hardworking, good salespeople that are in the wrong roles for them. Maybe they are more strategic versus transactional. Maybe they are more inbound than outbound. Maybe they do like to change fast or they just need the playbook. Just give me the playbook and I'll go. And I think knowing that about yourself is so important. I love that y' all are building that in to kind of try to help people establish that early on.

Yeah. 100%. Right. I mean, you've, you know. Interviewing. Right. Like, I bet at patient pop, like a lot of it on. Yeah. I'm just guessing here. Pipeline velocity was probably huge. Right. You're not going to hire depending on your deal size. If it's 8K or whatever for 8K, like, you don't want 190K average seller. Right. It's just not going to work. And the same if you've got 100k average deal size, you have to have somebody that can manage closing eight to ten deals a year, not somebody that needs to close six deals a month. Yes. It's just a completely different experience. You'd have to train. Oh, they're a great salesperson. Yeah. But it's just not the right fit. I've seen so many sellers that we hired that didn't do so well, and I knew they'd be highly successful somewhere else because of some of the mistakes we made in fit up front early, you know, earlier in my career and so that, you know, that experience. We're trying to. We're trying to do it at scale with what we're doing at repview. But, you know, it's. It's. And I think you've seen too, right. Like leaders at orgs that are building. Right. 30 sales or size 50, like they haven't, like they're still figuring that out too. And so I'll go back to one of the, one of the things like when you get to be like a 600 person company, 800 person company, thousand person company, you know you're going to want to. Somebody needs to have the skill at the head of sales seat, in the head of sales seat that has seen those like experience, leadership makes a difference, right. And so you're past the phase of kind of gritty startup and so you can, you can probably afford to bring somebody in that's, that's scaled significantly. And so that's another thing I'll look at depending on where the company is in the lifecycle, right. If it's a 500 person startup, like what is that leader? Like what experience does that leader have? And will I become like will they have the infrastructure for me to be supported as a seller? Whether it's tech stack, whether it's you know, very well baked process I get it's such a huge problem is like disorganized lead routing. And you know, I know from your, you like building like that's the kind of, that's the kind of stuff you got to build, right? Like that's the kind of stuff that makes a huge difference in the day to day selling world of a seller. Well, this lead should have gone to me, right? Why did it go to Sally closer over there, right? Like you know why Sally get all.

The, you know like Roe to street disputes, my man. Those are my favorite every week actually. Let's flip this real quick as we start to come up on time. Let's flip it to. Because also we could talk about VP hiring and what to look for there and a whole nother episode because I'm at this point I'm actually very strongly convinced most A's should not be hiring a vp, they should be hiring a director and a consultant. Because they can't afford a you, they can't afford a me, someone who's actually built. So they get a first timer to step in who was a part of a build but wasn't building and they hope they can figure it out, which is just a massive mistake. You need a great director ahead of with someone who's done it as an advisor consultant and that combo is I think the best build framework. But if we look at what then the best orgs seem to be doing. Right? Right. The ones that are scoring high on repview, like the things that are in their control. What are you seeing? Because product Market fit isn't always in their control. The capacity kind of is. Right. Like you should have stopped hiring, but whatever. Like from the things that are in a sales org's control, what are the best of the best doing out there to attract and retain the best talent?

Yeah, I mean, this is, this one. People can debate this a little bit. You need to have a modern setup, right? I mean you need these. There's so many sales tools out there. And so I'm not going to get into who's better than who necessarily, but you need to have a full modern selling stack, number one. Right. I think that's, that's kind of table stakes at this point. And you can debate what that modern stack is, but I think most of the folks listening will have a general sense of what, you know, what they should have. Right. I mean, I think that's number number two we just talked about like process. Right. And then that can be a scary word too. Right. That can be like man. But so what's the balance between autonomy within a process and lack thereof. Right. And so I'm a huge proponent of, of strong guidelines guide rails that are, that are governing the whole system and then letting salespeople do what they do best within those guidelines, within those boundaries. Right. So what is the, like, what is it like? I don't, like, I don't want to have like, if I have a good salesperson, I don't want to have a script for every call. Right. I don't want to have, you know, yeah, you got cadences and you got email, you know, stuff. And of course you're trying to drive lead gen. I get all that, that's fine. But I'm talking about the sellers and the seller's autonomy. And you know, ultimately my, my philosophy has always been this is the information I need to do my job as a CRO. I need this information, like to go up the chain, to continue to go up the chain. If we can get that information and we're executing well. Like, I want to give a lot of autonomy to managers, directors and salespeople themselves. If we're, if we're struggling, then we dive in a little bit deeper. So I think, you know, I think the, the, the tech stack is important. I think autonomy is important. I think how transparent is leadership about everything? Right. Like why? Like, I think expectations minus reality equals disappointment. Okay, so that's, there's a, like a literal mathematical formula in there and you can apply it to hiring. Right. Like, hey, I expect get 40 leads per month to me as A rep and I'm getting 15. Okay, well 40 minus 15 equals disappointment. Right? Now if you had said, hey, it's going to be 15, you got to drive your pipeline. Da da da da. Huge difference. Because I know what I'm getting into. Maybe that pushes a few people out of the interview cycle that would have. And it's the same thing within an organization. Hey, we're changing the comp plan, right? Okay, well that's scary. Okay, well here's exactly why. Here's the impact we expect on everybody, et cetera, et cetera. Or hey, this process is changing, right? Like why Every opportunity as a leader to communicate is an opportunity to develop your people as well. Right. Like giving. There's some subset of your people. Every organization, like when you were running patient pop sales org there like some subset of those people are going to be VP of sales one day somewhere likely. Right. Hopefully. And that'd be awesome for you. Right? That's a, that's huge. And I love it. I love when I see people that were on my team that are now, you know, killing it somewhere else. Like, and I just think to every decision you make regarding communication, regarding transparency, regarding, you know, what information you give them, how you coach them, it's more than just getting in a one on one and coaching people. You're delivering decision making process in an open, transparent way that's going to shape how these people and these team members and your employees understand about transparency, understand about decisions and also just understand about process and structure of how to run a team. So I think for me transparency is just a huge, huge thing of decisions. Right. Obviously there's some things you can't always share, but you know, at some level, if you're a CRO, you get to decide what a lot of that is, you know, for the most part. So those are a couple thoughts on that. Yeah.

And those are lessons I've learned as well. I'd rather over communicate at this point in my career than under. I'd rather share too much than share too little. Because of that point you made, right. Where it's like those expectations get misaligned and there's so many unspoken expectations and I think that's where a lot of leaders get, get in trouble is there's expectations that never got discussed and because they never got discussed, you don't even actually know what the expectation is of your people, of your managers. And there's already that gap and divide there and being able to speak to those things and dive in. I was actually just talking about this With a VP that I'm mentoring and working with right now, he's like, you know, I have an open door policy. I was like, do you understand the point of the open door, though, is for you to walk out, not for them to walk in. You have to go out to your people and find out what's happening, find out what's going wrong, find out what they want, what they don't want, what they like, what they don't like. And being proactive there. It's not. Open door policy for people to walk through is wrong. You have to walk out your door. That's the whole point of an open door policy.

It's the big. Honestly, in my opinion, as a VP of sales or CRO or whatever, like, one of the biggest challenges, if not the biggest challenge of the remote environment, is you're just not going to have the same level of touch points with your team, period. Right? I mean, we were not a remote company. We had some remote folks and we had a couple, you know, we had offices, you know, multiple offices, sales offices around the world. But, you know, A, I go to every single one of them on a very regular basis. B, you know, you just. Even just chatting with the team vibe, right? Like, you just can't get that. And that's really hard. And I don't. I don't think I have. I haven't. I have not been in that seat since post pandemic. So I don't. You know, I don't think I have a great answer for it yet. I think I would probably have to do it myself, try and figure it out. What are some of the Zoom happy hour like? I don't. I don't know if I'm really feeling that.

Definitely not that that passed within the first three weeks.

The first three weeks it was cool.

After that, people like, I swear to God, you invite me to another Zoom happy hour, I'm going to lose my shit, right?

So it is. I mean, that for me is probably the most challenging thing about leading a large sales organization in a 100% remote environment is you lose that personal touch, you know, no matter how hard you try, you lose it. You can't be on the office floor with six people on the sales floor with six people there, or walk by and just listen to a call and say, hey, try this next time. Or, you know, hey, great call, or whatever, you know, just impossible to do. Which is, I think, is going to be a headwind in people development over, you know, over time. But we'll adjust, we'll Adapt.

Yeah. No, it's interesting because, like, there's ways to do it, and you have to just be so much more intentional and proactive around it. But interestingly enough, you just touched on at the very end there. The number one place, number one metric that I saw impact across, like, this pandemic and shift to remote was ramp time. That that was the only metric that didn't recover in terms of figuring out how to do it better. Was able to get closers back up, able to get pipeline back up, able to get like. Was able to function. Ramp time, the absorption of new information, the onboarding process, that is where I saw the biggest hit to productivity was it took almost two months longer to ramp. And that's coming from me, right, like, where I have an onboarding program and we focus heavily on training and coaching and review, and we have the process that was the hardest thing remotely to do was how to onboard people in a way, because now they're sitting in their bedroom, right? They're sitting in their room, their room, their room. They're not hearing it all day long. They're not getting supported all day long. They're not getting that. You know, the buddy that leans over goes, oh, hey, try this next time. Like, that was by far and away the hardest thing over the last two years to try to figure out, and we made improvements. But I can't even say that I truly figured it out because it did. It took so much more time to ramp people up, so. And actually shoot. Speaking of time, we're already at 40 minutes. See, this is the problem, man, is like, these. I can go all day on some of these things, and I want to make sure that, like, we can rabbit here. So I got two final questions for you. Right? So the first one, right. We tend to call it like the big three, where it's like, you know, we've been going for about 40 minutes or so. Like, if you wanted to make sure people remembered three things from this episode in terms of, you know, what to look for, how to structure an order, like, or even so much of how to score high on repview, what would those three pieces of advice be?

Yeah, well, so first of all, just, I'll kind of split this up a little bit. I think people in their. In their careers, I do think we need to try and think about being patient a little bit more at whatever level that you are at. And I know that people are getting recruited all the time, all day long. I know there's a lot of opportunities out there. Frankly, we're Trying to help with evaluating those opportunities of what we're building at Repview. I don't think there's anything wrong with if you're happy and you see a path, just be a little patient. I was patient again. This is years ago, 15, 20 plus years ago when I was kind of running through that same motion that a lot of our salespeople that are probably listening to this are. But I think just take a step back and try and be patient and really thoughtful about some of those decisions that you make. Number two, product market fit. I'm going to go back to that. It can be hard to dive into, but the most important thing that will drive the success of the business, frankly, is the product market fit. It, like, is, you know, is the product winning? Is it a leader? You know, there's a huge difference in your ability to exceed to succeed when you're selling the number one product in the market versus the number four product in the market. Huge, right? One is going to win. Two is going to get a bunch of wins. Three, it starts to get tough. Four down, like, okay, you know, you're swimming upstream, right? I think that's, you know, I think that's important. Then let me touch on the last thing that you said about ramp time. Let me just, let me. I'll use my third bullet on that. Which is, everybody should really think about that as a salesperson, right? So Katie just described his biggest hurdle as a sales leader was can't get them up ramp time. What can you do as a seller to help mitigate that? Like, how do you be intentional about listening in on calls, like, seeking out calls, like, hey, are you using like a chorus or a gong or one of those types of things like, how can I get my hands on literally every call in the library? Good calls, bad calls. Ask the person that did the call, the salesperson that's been there for a while, like, ask if they have 10 minutes to just answer your questions about the call, right? Like, what are the things that you can go through, your training stuff, Go through it twice, right? Like, because you're looking at ramp time as your number one problem there as you described them, I believe that that makes perfect sense. And so what about those three reps out of 20 that you hired last year that like, blew out the ramp time. Like what? Like, how do you view them? Like, I don't know, but they got something, right? Be one of those people, right? And you can do. You can choose to do that. You can choose or you can choose not to do that. There's so much of what we do and drive success are choices that we make, right versus skill set versus talent. It's intentional choices that you, like, elect to make and commit yourself to. So I'll leave that as the third one, which is, you know, be intentional about how you do things like that. There's.

There's my word again, man. Intention is my favorite word. It's my favorite word as a leader, as a father, as a husband, as a person. It's like, what are you doing with intention?

Right?

I talked about this a lot with my teams and my managers. 10 minutes of intention is better than an hour of attention. Like, what is your intention here? Are you on that practice to actually get better? Are you on that practice? Because I had to take a practice. Are you listening to the call to get better? Or are you listening to the call because, well, Ryan said on a podcast, I should listen to more calls. And so it's like, what's that intention behind what you're doing? That's what drives everything. And then the last question I want to ask here, right? So the name of the podcast is Live Better Sell Better. Because I also have this weird idea, right, that if we lived better, if we had more joy, more energy, more happiness, more fulfillment, that the sales would also improve. What would your Live Better advice be for people listening?

I mean, I think that the advice I like to give people is that don't let your performance on a leaderboard define who you are as a human being. Right? There's so many things that are more important, right? You know, family, mental health. Right? Like, it's, you know, at the end of the day, it's like, I made a few less dollars, right? I didn't do as well as I wanted to do. I'm working hard. But don't take performance on the leaderboard as performance in life, right? When you look back at. When you look back at it, you're not going to remember, hey, Let me think. Q2, 2007, I was number two out of 11. That doesn't matter. What matters is how you treat people. What matters is how you treat your family. What matters is the legacy you leave. It's not a score. It's not a leaderboard. And so, like, hey, if you're. If you're. Because I've seen people that really struggle with, you know, not doing as well. There's so many things and factors that are out of your control in your performance at work that. That. That will impact you negatively. And so you need to realize that. And I think when you look at what's in control in your life outside of work, I think there's where we live, like, you know, and here in the US for the most part, there's so much that is in our control. Right. We can control more of that. And so I think let that define you. Let your how you treat people, your family. Let that define you, not your position on the leaderboard. So I'll leave folks with that. Hopefully, they'll help one or two people.

That's always the goal with this. Right? One or two. And that's also I love the mission that you're on, because there's this idea. Right. Of work life balance. Work life balance, which I don't believe in, because work life balance implies that they're on two opposite ends of the.