Scaling Sales, Not Sacrificing Quality – The AI-Driven Secret to Billion-Dollar Growth | Mike Latch & Gregg Murphy | 628

What's the key to scaling sales without sacrificing quality? Greg Murphy and Mike Latch tapped that problem while growing a business from $50 million to a billion-dollar run rate. Along the way, they discovered how technology, strategic sales processes, and thought leadership can drive high performance even among mid-level sales reps. Now they're sharing those insights through their book, Sales Sucks, and their AI-driven platform, Patter. I'm Bill Sherman, and you're listening to Leveraging Thought Leadership. Ready? Let's begin. Mike, Greg, welcome to the show.

Bill, it's great to be here. We're excited to be a part of the podcast today.

Yeah, Bill, thank you very much for having us.

We really appreciate it.

So several things I want to talk to you about flow from the connection between sales, thought leadership, conversations that an organization sales team has with front of house, as well as then going to clients and customers, right? So I want to begin with a simple question, and that is, you're running a startup, startup business, but you've also written a book called Sales Sucks. Those are two equally complex projects. How do they fit together?

It's a, a great connection. First of all, the, the Sales Sucks side of it is, We wanted to share our journey of how we built a company from, we had, gosh, approximately $30 million in sales to about $1 billion in sales. And Mike and I did some of that in a matter of a few years. And so we like to share the story of how we did that. And then also to deconstruct The challenges we face, the pain points we face in that. And that's so we walk folks through the book of how to scale sales and how to do that. And then how does it connect to Patter AI is it's really the tech enablement that allowed us to train, gosh, develop literally 250 new sales reps a month, bringing them up through the organization to quickly get them to a point where they're competent and confident. And boy, we just couldn't have done that without, you know, the work that Mike did in, in building that tech.

So Mike, how do you see the two connecting?

Oh, I see the, I, I see a lot of connections between the two things because, uh, I was the, I was the one that wanted to write the book. And what happened was when Greg and I were execs at that company where we grew, yeah, sales from around $50 million to an over $1 billion run rate, and it was over a little over 5 years, uh, just giving some more precise numbers to what Greg was saying. Over the course of that, we— a lot of that was driven because we built a lot of custom tech and we had a lot of innovation at that company. And I would explain oftentimes to other folks how we were able to be so performant. And in doing that, we would explain what we, what we built on the tech side and how we did it and why and how that helped reps get So good, so quickly. And we, we, we had that explanation so many times with people that we work with and, you know, vendors and new execs and things like that. I was like, someday just write a book so you're like, people can understand all this stuff, right? I'm, I'm a pretty like open, I have a very technical background, pretty like scientist type engineering, problem solving, more eyes on the problem sort of person. And then, um, when we sold that company, I thought I was going to retire. And I sort of did, uh, but then decided to start another tech company to build. Every time we were building, we were building innovative tech at that company and I was doing it at the previous companies. I always had to hire the engineers, build things from scratch. And, and it shouldn't have been that way. Somebody should have built a platform that I could just take and, and rapidly configure for our organization and And so decided to start a company to build that platform so that other people could have like what we built without having to hire their own engineers and product managers and build things from scratch and, and all that kind of good stuff.

Thank you both. Now I want to go back to the company that was experiencing rapid growth. You were onboarding, like you said, 250 salespeople a month, right? And Often organizations look at the hiring of a salesperson as a bet, right? Of the, can we get them productive and creating the revenue needed in a reasonable time? And if not, we need to know, right? How soon can we get them productive? So what I'm hearing from the two of you is a very real-world problem. We're growing, we need more effective salespeople, but we don't have time to wait and just make, you know, bets and take a wait-and-see attitude for 3 or 6 months to see can they hit target and quota, right? So first off, do I have that understanding correct from that problem statement? And then I want to start connecting it to thought leadership. Mike, am I dialing in sort of on the problem correctly? Yes.

Um, I mean, unsurprisingly, you have a lot of experience in this realm, so it makes sense that you're, you're drilling in on a key aspect of what we were attacking before. There, there were other, there were other advantages and benefits from the tech that we built, but one of the, perhaps one of the most important benefits is that we could take a sales rep that was coachable and rapidly get them through all the learning curves. You know, we were in strategic sales, you know, this happened to be so roofing, residential solar, energy efficiency. So things that, that it really benefited the end customer to like take the time to explain things and configure things the way they wanted, present them options. And so, you know, they weren't transactional sales. So whenever you have strategic sales, like you said, 3 or 6 months to figure out if the sales rep is going to have a chance of getting to quota. And oftentimes it's a year, year and a half for strategic sales reps that, you know, kind of become veteran reps and known product and, and sales scripts. And we could, we could just, the, the, the technology would do so much of the heavy lifting in a bunch of the edge cases associated with strategic sales that you could take a brand new sales rep teach them sales scripts and understand why. And in a lot of tricky topics and a lot of challenging objections, the software was there to heavily facilitate a great job of explaining that topic or navigating the customer through a decision. And, and they could get that, they could get there in, you know, weeks because so many of the topics and objections were optimized by the tech.

And from that point, we didn't have a choice. We had to get there within weeks. So we had to identify who those performers are quite quickly. And so we would put some key metrics in to measure that, to see that. And it was quite obvious early on. It's an incredible thing when the tech really enables a sales rep who might not even know much about the industry, but back to Mike's point, if they're coachable, and they have a little competitive edge, they want to be better. They want new opportunities in life, man. You can mold people and help them succeed so quickly. The way that we, we talked about the process was we had had all these scripts and these sales processes and then walking people through all the decision points we wanted. If a sales rep had a bad night the night before, right, tough night, they're maybe not feeling good, that they look like you go, Okay, what do I do? And they could open up their laptop and go, oh, I just talk about these key points. And then I help a customer make a decision. And that's really essentially what we did that could make a low-performing sales rep perform like a top-tier rep in a pretty short period of time. And if they weren't, we knew our processes were so dialed, they just weren't a good fit. And that's okay.

So Greg, staying there for a moment, one of the things that I also hear and I want to call out is because of the field— this was in solar, right— that it wasn't like you had a pool of potential hires as salespeople who were fully fluent in this, right? And so that onboarding and training process it wasn't like you had people just changing and going from wearing a red shirt to a blue shirt. You had to teach them the underlying ideas and content as well. Do I have that correct?

You have that absolutely correct. And so we've learned through scripting. And so for some folks, scripting is a bad word. They don't maybe understand it.

And we'll get to the several S words here in a moment.

But yeah, go ahead.

And so we look at it as a standpoint of, of our— we want to communicate complex ideas in a really simple manner that just about anybody could understand it. And so that's what our scripting has done. We've really broke it, broke it down, and we explain how to do that, how to properly break complex topics down that people can understand it and deliver those key decision points throughout the sales process. And so Good though.

This is the piece that I want to drill and underline on because I see this disconnect in many organizations that are practicing thought leadership where there are good ideas within the organization, whether they're in product team or research team or at the senior exec level, but they don't know how to communicate it to the frontline salesperson. And that insight never gets to the client or the customer. And that can happen in a transactional sale. That can happen in a relation sale or a complex sales environment. And it falls apart because you miss that interface between the organization and the customer client.

100%. I'd say one of the, one of the key elements that, and Mike and I have now worked together for nearly 15 years and And I would say one of the key levels to my success is Mike. And what we've done is when you can bring in a sales leader, that's what I am, and then you bring in a guy like Mike, a great tech guy who can help to, okay, how am I gonna communicate that to where people understand it through tech? And you can like meld those two together. We both have this commitment, we're not gonna put anything out into the field unless if it makes sense and it's really gonna help that customer make a decision. Or then help them understand why this is a better option or an opportunity for the customer. And that melding together just created a synergy that is incredible. And that's, I think, a pretty big miss in a lot of orgs. You have guys building these super techie things and they think it's so cool. The engineers are like, look at it spin and it's all this cool. And the sales reps go, I don't even know how I'm gonna talk about that. I don't see the value it creates. And they spend thousands of dollars on it.

Well, and I want to go to you, Mike, because we've identified a problem of how do you scale for rapid growth to get a sales team out. That led to a homebrew solution inside that organization that has also— that same idea has led to the book. It has led to a new business that focuses on the tech solution. But what Greg was talking about is this interplay between someone like him who has a relational sales mindset and someone like you who has a technical and engineering mindset. And I think both are needed to both identify and work on solving the problem. And in some ways, you might think the two mindsets are oil and water. But in your case, you've turned it more into the Reese's chocolate and peanut butter in the same cup.

Right.

How'd you guys come together, Mike, and how did you leverage each other's strengths?

So Greg and I met because I was introduced to the owners of a residential solar company where I was going to grad school and, or going to part of my grad school in Hawaii. And they said, we don't need any engineer like you are, Mike, but you could go into sales. And I said, sales? What about me is bad that you think I would be good at sales? Right? Sales is like a bad word in my family. So long story short, I did end up working in sales and I worked for Greg. It was a commission-only in-living-room sales position. And Greg said, you know, Mike, don't talk about how solar panels work for 45 minutes. You know, I have a good process. It, it, it works and I'm pretty coachable. So I was very lucky that that was my first experience in sales, was that he had evolved a, a, a very ethical sales process that just brought up topics, made sure they were understood, and then you'd move on to the next topic and make sure that people understood the, you know, the ramifications of any decision that they would make as they go along. So that, that is an algorithm, right? That's a step-by-step process. And it also was very, it, it was very aligned with just the way that I was raised. You know, I had a happy childhood. I had a lot of unconditional love from my parents. I'm a respectful person if I'm in somebody's home, like that's the way I was raised. And so it was just, it, that was all a good fit. So I wasn't experiencing any like dissonance or, or discord as I was sitting in living rooms helping people make a decision whether they bought or sold. At the same time, I have a, kind of a scaling mindset. I'm kind of a process type guy. Like, okay, if we need 100 or 1,000 or 10,000 people to do this, what's the right level of process or bureaucracy? Like, how often can this not— how often can this fail? Or, you know, like, if you're building software for a space shuttle, you know, it can't fail. So how do humans do things when it, when it absolutely cannot fail? And how do humans do things when a little bit of failure is okay? And we'd rather have some growth. And so, um, that's how I ended up with this pretty deep understanding of what it's like to be a salesperson, what actually helps. And then I had a different— just by coincidence, I had a different expectation of how much software should help that interaction. A lot of things that I could do, you know, I could redesign systems from scratch. I could explain somebody the, you know, in, in detail, the incentives, and I could just deal with a lot of edge cases in front of somebody. That's just my personality type. Um, you know, I was a physics TA, right? I, I taught, you know, complicated concepts to people that didn't understand them. So, so a lot of what we did at the, at the next company where we went from, you know, 50, you know, around $50 million in sales to a billion dollar run rate on, in a bootstrap company. Had to do with, had to do with just a different expectation on what tech should, how much tech should help our salespeople. And a lot of what we innovated, a lot of what we built just came from that different expectation. You know, 90, I'm making up the number, you know, almost all the sales enablement and sales leadership folks that I would meet, their expectation of how much software can help in strategic sales, where it's like complicated topics, all is, you know, is limited to, you know, will it, will it get a wrap, will it get a design that's buildable, you know, how quickly can it do that, you know, or that the operations will allow, how quickly, you know, can I get the right collateral, the marketing team create something, make sure they use the right version. Um, almost none of them The expectation is, hey, I'm, I'm a, I'm a chief revenue officer. I'm, I'm a sales VP. I got 1,000 reps and they're in living rooms or they're, they're in, they're on sales appointments. And a really common thing that comes up is, boy, that seems pretty expensive. Right? Why aren't you building me features that incredibly facilitate that conversation? Right? You know, oh, it's more expensive. What do you mean? Well, you know, I, I got this other quote or I got this other thing and it was less expensive.

Oh.

Well, let me push a magic button and I'll, it'll reconfigure to something similar to that and it'll be a similar price and it'll, it will clearly call out what, what your product or service no longer has. And I, and I'll help you explain what the, what you just, what, what you'll be missing out on it. And is that worth it to you or not? Nobody that I interact with expects software to to absolutely guarantee that interaction is excellent. But I, but I do expect that. And so does Greg. And so do people that we work with. There's been this diaspora of people from this organization that like have this totally different expectation on how much software should help in those interactions. That's kind of how we came together and, and a little bit about the, the mix and why we're not oil and water.

Fantastic. If you're enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe. If you'd like to help spread the word about our podcast, please leave a 5-star review at ratethispodcast.com/LTL and share it with your friends. We're available on Apple Podcasts and on all major listening apps, as well as thoughtleadershipleverage.com/podcast. Now, Greg, I want to turn to you. You mentioned the scripting word earlier, and I want to come back to that. We've had a conversation previously around the ethics of scripting and why scripting isn't necessarily a bad word. I'd love to hear your perspective on that.

Yeah, I, I'll, I'll start it off by, first of all, by a story, and then, and then, and then end it with how we sell, like to sell with aloha, as we call it. And so it's really, if you think about a script and effective use of it, every movie that we see has a script, right? And so we look at a Top Gun, for instance, the first Top Gun. And if you were to ask somebody about that movie, they'd be able to tell you key components of that movie because they remembered it impacted them. And that, and Tom Cruise put his personality into it to make that script just come alive and dance until you remember it. It evokes some sort of an emotion. Emotional response to it. But if I was to ask you to tell me about some key facts about the Civil War, certain dates, you probably wouldn't remember those key things, right? And so that's the power of scripting. So a script should take a homeowner and a sales representative through an ethical way of communicating value points to them in a story base, in a way that they can understand it. It's based out of respect of the homeowner, of their decision. We want to create autonomy for them to help make their own decisions. And in order to do that, you have to help them then make decisions once they see the value points. And it literally walks people through that process to where the customer feels like they've been heard, seen, and understood. That's what we mean by selling with aloha. And so the scripting, if it feels like, we always say somebody's like pushing rocks uphill, I have to say these words that's not mine, it's probably not a good script. And where you feeling like you're having to like push the envelope in certain areas, maybe there's another way you can communicate that that can allow like a mid-performing sales rep, which is usually the biggest part of a sales org, to comfortably and confidently say it without feeling cringed out by saying those things.

And what I love on that, Greg, is you're leaning into the lessons that we've learned over hundreds of generations in storytelling. And rather than going and grabbing people who are gregarious and social, throwing them in to the deep end of the pool and saying, go figure this out. You have almost a technological sales enablement tool for relational selling and complex sales, right? So you're not taking the human element out, you're not simplifying the cognitive load so they can focus on the relationship. Mike, I want to turn to you and ask you a question about the book. The two of you have worked together, but then somewhere along the way you said, let's write this book, you know, of Sales Sucks. What was the experience of writing together like, and what did you learn from the process?

Uh, the experience was pretty good if you imagine 2 people that like to work together that are relatively competent in an area that's useful for a lot of companies. And we're team-oriented, so a lot of the process was, was remembering, right? Like all the things that worked and the things that didn't and trying to put it together in a coherent manner so that future people can get similar results and don't have to take as many lumps. As we did, right? We're both, like I said, we're pretty team-oriented. So what we learned and we continue to learn at Patter is every time you can figure out a more succinct way to deliver the same message, you're really helping other humans, right? Like, if I don't have to spend as many milliseconds understanding a concept, As I used to, I've got more milliseconds to spend on something else. Fundamentally, a human only has so many seconds with which to exist. And so, and there's only so many seconds that humanity spends on important topics, right? Trying to, you know, the more time available, the faster cancer gets cured, all that kind of good stuff. So that's, you know, that's what I remember was it was fun trying to put all these messages in one place. String them together in a way that it'll be easier for somebody else to get, you know, similar results. And it also helped us refine ideas and concepts that, that we had so that it'll be easier to— for somebody else to leverage those concepts.

Greg, anything you would add about the experience in writing a book?

It was fun. We locked ourselves into the upper room, as we called it, and had big Post-it notes all over the place. And, you know, the first day it was a arduous. We're like, yeah, I think, you know, we're just trying to like really dial it in. And it seemed like on our second, third day, the creative juices started to flow. And, and back to Mike's point, we're, we're able to draw up and draw out a lot of really incredible experiences that we had and how we really— those key shifts we made even back in 2010, 2012, working together, like some key things that we I'd actually forgotten about, but they really were the foundation of what created where we are today with Sales Socks and Patter. And so we just had a blast and it really helped me is with the color of my hair, I'm kind of more in the twilight of my career that I wanted to be able to make an impact to like, how can we make sales better? How can we make the world a better place? And I feel like this is a pretty straightforward contribution to that and that we can help other people leverage and scale their businesses ethically and help a bunch of people, you know, that maybe have not been those top performer reps to like earn a great income. They could like buy a home and they could do the things that they've always wanted to do. And so I think about the customer, but I also think about the salespeople out there that have never really been given that opportunity to really grow and excel. And that's probably the part I'm even more excited about.

So as we begin to wrap up, I want to ask each of you a question, and that is, you've talked about Patter and the solution it provides, you've talked about the book and the experience. How are you using thought leadership to support Patter and the goals you're trying to achieve there? Greg, I'll start with you.

I would say we focus on— most sales organizations focus on their top performers, you know, which is usually the, the, a pretty small group of the team, right? It might only be about 5% of a sales team. And then the bottom, like usually 20%, there is usually the, the, people that just aren't working well. And, but your biggest is that mid-performers. It could be up to 80% of your sales organization. And so we've, we've put a lot of focus into if I can just get one more sale out of my middle class, my mid-performing reps, it's going to have such a significant impact to the bottom line. And a way you do that is through ethical practices, helping people make decisions and selling with aloha. And bringing in the tech to enable them to then make those decisions. I've seen most organizations focus on that top performing reps and they're trying to make everybody like them. Well, a lot of those top performing reps walk with the confidence and a swagger that, boy, that's tough to replicate, you know? And they're just good. They're just wired that way. And then, or they'll create all these practices and policies off these super low performers that are just creating a lot of problems. And what we say is like, Put your focus, transition those people at the optimal speed. And because they're taking up space for somebody else that needs to be there, that's going to become that mid performer who's coachable. And you can change the bottom line of a company quickly if we just adjust our focus onto that mid-tier rep.

Mike, let me turn to you and ask the same question. How are you using thought leadership to support Patter and get your message out?

So one way is the book. We started working on the book before Patter even came into existence, knowing that we were going to be starting another tech company to solve this, and a lot of the concepts are complicated and have nuance with leveraging technology the way that we did. So over those 5 years of growth of the last company, I would often experience when, when dealing with other vendors that were trying to sell us sales software, I, I, I became their CIO after that company bought my software company, and I would meet with other execs at other, you know, roofing organizations and residential solar and things like that. And I would often experience the sensation of, why aren't you doing what we're doing with tech? Once you've been exposed to the concepts, it's so obvious that it's better and it helps. And what I found was in often having conversations with people. I'm a relatively articulate person and have a lot more experience than most people breaking down complicated topics to teach them to other people. And I still was never really able to get somebody to appreciate how much better they could be performing and how much more performant they, their, their sales team could be. If they were channeling their dollars and tech effort in a, just a different way than they were. And so the only way we ever really got people to really understand it was when they would, they'd be a part of our organization. We would pretend to sell them something the way we sold to our clients, and they would really see this tight, tight coupling between tech and what the reps were saying and the questions they were asking. And so the idea was that, okay, these, these are just genuinely difficult concepts and different enough from the status quo that people aren't going to get it unless they see it. And so the book was an attempt to help people like, okay, I'm admitting that this is complicated stuff. You just hear us talk and it isn't enough to get you to act and do things differently. Hopefully the book provides enough evidence, enough nuance, enough details where it does make sense. And because we, we genuinely believe that this is the beginning of a significant change in the way strategic sales is done. And it's really probably just taking a bunch of things from transactional sales where you, it's easier to get the behavior that you want, pushed out into more complicated sales, which is strategic sales. So hopefully the book helps with that. And, and hopefully there's lots and lots of other companies like Patter that come in that really, that really help tech really help a lot more than how tech currently helps in strategic sales and sales appointments.

So as we wrap up, what I'm taking away from this conversation is asking a question that others haven't asked. In your area, which is, for example, how do we accelerate growth and sales and enable our middle-level salespeople to perform at a higher level? And to find an answer to that solution and not stop until you find a way that works. And then from there, that willingness to to ask that question and create an answer has led to not only the success of that organization and growth of sales, but even more from that, the willingness on the— your part to share those insights in book form, as well as then create a tool that others can use to apply. I want to thank both of you Mike, Greg, for joining us today to talk about the journey of thought leadership, as well as sharing your journey along the way.

Thank you, Bill. Really appreciate you having us.

Yeah, thank you very much, Bill. Thanks for your time and thanks for having us here.

Okay, you've made it to the end of the episode, and that means you're probably someone deeply interested in thought leadership. Want to learn even more? Here are 3 recommendations. First, check out the back catalog of our podcast episodes. There are a lot of great conversations with people at the top of their game in thought leadership, as well as just starting out. Second, subscribe to our newsletter that talks about the business of thought leadership. And finally, feel free to reach out to me. My day job is helping people with big insights take them to scale through the practice of thought leadership. Maybe you're looking for strategy, or maybe you wanna polish up your ideas or even create new products and offerings. I'd love to chat with you. Thanks for listening.