Episode 352: Why Sales Teams Need Systems, Not Just Superstars (with Dickron Kherlopian)

What makes a great sales leader and how do you build a high-performing sales team in a business that's built on relationships? Well, in today's episode, as many of you are in the middle of planning for 2026, we thought we'd dive into the art and science of managing a sales team with Dikron Kerlopean, our very own Senior Vice President of Sales at Commscue. Now, Dikron is a sales team builder with nearly two decades of leadership across sales, SaaS, and financial sectors. For one example, at JazzHR, he helped grow the customer base from 2,500 to 11,000 and scaled ARR from $4.8 million to $30 million. At Goko, he led the company through a successful acquisition by Intuit after redesigning sales operations and building a high-performing team from the ground up. Now, his deep experience scaling organizations through structure, coaching, and culture gives him rare insight into what makes sales teams truly excel. Welcome to the Skewcast, the podcast for innovators and maverick thinkers in the promotional products space. My name is Bobby LeHew. I'm glad you're here. In this episode, DeCron shares how to recruit and develop great salespeople, measuring performance beyond the numbers, and leading with both empathy and accountability. Insights that apply whether you're selling promo or software. Today's episode is brought to you by us at Common Skew, over 900 distributors powering $1.8 billion in network volume. Rely on Commscue's connected workflow, process more orders, connect your team, and dramatically grow your sales. To learn how, visit commenscue.com. Now here's my chat with Dikron. Dikron, welcome to Skucast.

What's happening, Bobby?

I'm so glad you've joined us here. For those, you heard a little bit of Dikron's background. What you don't know is that I've sat in meetings with him in strategy sessions, and I thought, I've got to get this guy on a podcast because there's one thing industry, I think, has really struggled with is building sales teams. And you have a lot of experience building sales teams. So let's just jump right into it. You've led high-performing SaaS sales organizations, as I read in the bio. And since you've joined Commscue, which is obviously a company serving the promotional products world, how do you think applying SaaS sales principles to an industry that's much more relationship-driven— how do you think about that?

Yeah, I think my first instinct— and I'm going to spitball on a lot of these answers—

Yeah.

But I think my first instinct when you ask that question is every sale is relationship driven. But obviously, the promotional products industry is particularly unique because it's a lot more like fraternal, a lot more people know each other.

Right.

There are maybe 30,000 to 40,000 companies in it total versus other industries. Like if you're selling into the well-known verticals like finance or sales or HR or I don't know, tech, et cetera, data security, huge, massive TAMs. People don't know each other. You're just throwing the value prop at the wall and seeing who you can attract, right? And in this particular case, I think personalization is key. And in many ways that flies in the face of automation and scale and reaching out to as many humans as possible in a short period of time. AI should be able to help with that personalization.

Yeah.

What ends up allowing for that personalization is good data. You need to be able to know stuff about the people that you're interacting with and bad data, bad CRM hygiene will end up churning out some pretty silly messages to people.

Yeah, that's really, really good. We'll get back to this in a minute. What do you think? And we're going to get into sales performance, but let's start at recruiting and building a sales team. Because this is something you spend a lot of energy on. Obviously, again, everybody heard the bio. When you're hiring salespeople— and then we're going to get into like sales performance in a minute, just so folks know— when you're hiring salespeople, what are the traits you zero in on first?

I'm happy you mentioned this, actually, because the two things that take up most of my time are hiring and systems.

Okay.

Right. Rather, in the hiring bucket, I'd also put like development, like post-hiring, like development. Basically optimizing the human aspect of your sales team. Those are the people that are gonna be executing against the systems that you put into place. So what I want to look for typically is number one is always someone that has a high level of conviction and passion around wanting to spend their career in sales, right? Don't want— because there are low barriers of entry in this industry to be able to get in, especially in the entry level. I don't want to put myself in a position where I'm a career counselor. Right, right. I want people that enjoy having the number on their back, can deal with the pressure. They want the ball in their hands with 2 minutes left. They want to take the last shot. They don't like the idea of somebody else doing that.

Right.

So that's number 1. That, that has to foundationally be true. The second thing is someone that's quick on their feet, analytical, and thinks while they speak. The one thing that you can never train into somebody is the ability to problem solve on the fly. They come with that already. And you do a lot of that while you're in sales. Retrospectives and pipeline reviews and performance coaching, et cetera. That's good afterwards in hopes that they implement and iterate, but you're still relying a whole lot on that person's ability to think accurately and present themselves well in a situation. And trying to fix something afterwards is not as effective. And then the, the third thing I look for is someone that's organized and kind of takes their professional life seriously. The life of a salesperson requires a ton of organization. The hardest thing from the SDR to account executive or prospecting to closing role transition, oftentimes people think it's like, oh, being able to do a demo or being able to know what the product does. It's not that at all, actually. If we just wanted people to demo the product, we could hire high school kids. Right. It's like living that life of understanding, okay, I gotta optimize my PTO around when my prospects are also not there. Yeah. I need to have great work-life balance because I'm going to have an exciting and stress-filled and energy-draining and fulfilling week and talk to a lot of people. What am I doing to defrost? What am I doing to get back in the right mind state to do it all again tomorrow? Anybody can be a good salesperson for a day, but what about every single day, 365 for 20 years?

Yeah. Before we get too far in this conversation, can you explain a few different things about roles in SaaS compared to roles in sales? So in promo, you have typically business development and account executives, and there are different names for different things, but those are primarily two roles, folks that bring in the business and then folks that manage the accounts. In SaaS, there's all kinds of acronyms. Can you explain the primary roles in SaaS sales?

This is gonna be a lot of super sweeping generalizations because it also depends on whether you're in enterprise sales or if you are an outside or an inside rep, et cetera. But usually I'll describe the funnel. How's that? Right. And there's various companies that optimize roles according to that funnel.

That's great. And I, and I want to, I wanna explain this at the front end. So in case we drop any other acronyms in like SDR, anything, people will know where we're at.

Yeah. Yeah. So at the top of the funnel, somebody's gotta curate interest, right? Otherwise you're just, yelling in a shopping mall or a parking lot, and that's not an effective way to get leads. Nobody opens the phone book anymore. It's not very efficient. So somebody's gotta curate the interest. We have to have intent, get on the radar of people that know how to deliver a value prop. And a lot of the times, that's a mix of marketing departments that are using sophisticated means to get hand raisers to generate interest. Sometimes you have human involvement in curating those meetings in the form of a sales development rep or a BDR. Oftentimes an account executive will engage in that. An account executive who is a more closing role is kind of an expensive way to procure leads because generally you want your highest paid people closing them, right? But if you're an enterprise, it's worth your while. If you procure 4 leads and close 1 of them over the course of a quarter, if you're an enterprise, that's good ROI. And then all sorts of things in between. So like, You, you have to procure the interest, get those people to the table, verify the budget authority need timeline. Somebody's gotta provide value, close that business, convince them it's the right thing to do. Whatever you call those leads from front to end is up to you. There's all sorts of ways to slice that, but that's generally the, the, the process.

Okay. How do you distinguish, back to recruiting and hiring, how do you distinguish between someone who's skilled, versus someone who's just been trained, who's really good in interviews?

I love this question. You have to be intentional and creative in your interviews and ask yourself, like, what are you measuring for? Mediocre salespeople are really good at two things. They're really good at convincing their manager that next month's pipeline is better than this month's because that's literally how they keep their job. Survival instincts. They got to pay their bills, right?

Right.

And the other thing they're really good at is interviewing all the time because they interview all the time.

Yeah.

And so like my best reps would probably be a bad interview. It's like, tell me about a time when you blah, blah, blah. They're like, I don't know, dude. I just hit quota every month and crush it. Like, I don't have time to tell you about a time. Get me in the pipeline. Let me get this out. A lot of top performers are, but somebody that's answered that question 8 times and just generally isn't good at it. Is going to be great at answering the question. So I like questions that test for things that you can't prepare for. For example, one of my favorite questions is like, I'll list 5 attributes that they most want to be known for, right? And one of those attributes is like hitting quota all the time. Another one is like being a thought leader. Another one is being well-liked by your team. There's different things to kind of get a sense of where their priorities are at.

Yeah.

Ask them a question that's like, What is the thing that you're an expert in that you geek out about, that you stay up at night looking at on your cell phone? Like, what's that thing for you? And then I'll say, okay, in 30 seconds or less, make me an expert on that topic because I want to see how they're going to pitch. And then I'll try to come up with an objection, right? Well, I don't like fantasy football. It's just too much work and there's too many players to remember. Convince me why, like, I need to spend my time on this, right? And so challenge them on things. And that's a good question too, because you'll get a sense of what somebody's like outside of work. I've gotten some crazy responses to that question, Bobby, some non-work appropriate things.

Right. Really good things in the open.

So yeah, bottom line is like, if you can't talk about something that you care about and convince me to care about it, how are you going to convince me to care about a piece of software?

Yeah, right. Great point.

If you love that and you can't convince me, just Thought, thought questions, read and react questions to get an idea of how somebody operates unprepared.

The reason why this is so brilliant for our industry in particular is that we typically get sucked into this. There's this misnomer that people with bright personalities that are good talkers are going to make good salespeople. And the reality is people that come within the industry, often some of the best people have come from within the industry. Their follow-up is incredible. They're great with clients. They're speedy and responsive. And there's just different attributes than we, we bring in this baggage from what an old what a school sales rep should look like. And that— I love how you sort of like debunk that right away.

Well, they still need to be super tight on the follow-up. They still need to be very—

well, that's what I mean. I mean, that actually, that's like key. But like, we typically hire on personality with some of these roles rather than functionality.

Yeah, 100%. It's human nature. It's easy to get captivated by a charismatic person.

Yeah. So talk a little bit about measuring and managing performance. So every leader has their own sort of intuitive metrics. When you think about evaluating your team? I know you pay a lot of attention to metrics. If anyone's ever been in SaaS, that's a big part of it. But also, you in particular, you have a good gut and a good instinct, and you follow the data. How do you evaluate your team?

It's a great question. There's some layers to this. So there's obviously just like the baseline KPIs that anybody can look at and draw conclusions, but not everything is always going according to plan. So like understanding the story and the why behind things I used to have a mentor and a boss that said things are never as good as you think they are. They're also never as bad as you think they are either. And so if you don't know the story behind the data, you'll never understand why things are happening the way they are.

Right.

You'll make sort of very surface-level decisions. And Mark Graham actually saw a sticker on my laptop that says like data is greater than opinion. And then he said, you know what's even better than data? He goes, accurate stories behind the data. And that's actually, if you really think about it, that's what a sales leader is entrusted to provide is the accurate stories. Everybody can look at the charts on their own.

As someone who's sat in management meetings with you and I've heard you provide context for where we're at in this quarter, what's going on this month with different reps' performances and things like that. How do you, how do you distinguish between someone whose sales numbers are temporarily down or who's lost the ability to drive or sell? We have a lot of people in our industry that fluctuate in their sales, so they'll have a great Q1, they'll have a slow Q2, they'll have a fantastic Q4. How do you manage that? Is it basically what you just said is understanding the through line of the business?

You have to hone in on what exactly you're measuring. So let's take the example that you brought up. This person used to be doing all the right things and now like what happened all of a sudden? And so maybe you take a look at deals that they were assigned, in a certain time period versus another time period? And how did those move down funnel? And how are those things different from each other? You take a look at their close-lost reasons, period 1 versus period 2. Did that mix change? Oh, okay. I see more of these kinds of losses, like more timing-related losses, maybe.

Yeah.

Why is it that we have more timing-related losses now than we ever have? Can't be macro because 2 months ago wasn't like a different time. Wasn't a different person. We didn't run any different campaigns. So why do we have more timing losses now? And you have the conversation with the rep. So zoom in on like actual differences from before and after, like in that particular situation. In another situation, you're measuring something different. And this is why it's important to really understand your data, because if you're trying to solve a problem, you have to think about what is the underlying data point that will tell you the story about that problem. And then dig into it. Then you got to take that to the rep and there's a people management aspect of it. You have to have a good relationship with them and you have to have an honest conversation about that observation. If you have a really specific observation, the rep can't say, I don't know what you mean, man. Like it was just a tough month. I get over it. It's fine. Like I didn't do anything different. That's often what you're going to get. So if you have that underlying foundational indisputable data that corresponds with the behavior that you've, that you're suspecting, Um, that'll ground the discussion. You'll be able to get to the root cause easier and have a plan of action moving forward.

Okay. I've had enough experience in SaaS and plenty of experience in promo, so I've had my feet planted in both worlds. And so speaking of sales targets, how do you keep metrics small enough to manage but big enough to remember? And the reason why I ask this in SaaS it tends to be the needle moves to more complex. There's a lot of complexity around numbers. In promo, there's too much simplicity. You have gross sales, but there are other metrics like gross margin, gross profit, average order size, and we're not measuring those. So in many ways, in my perspective, SaaS is heavy on the complex side, promo's heavy on the simple side. How about you? Like, how do you keep the most important metrics top of mind and what are they for you?

You need good dashboards. They just kind of, you kind of settle on a few that measure, tend to measure your business well. Obviously, you can't be too married to any one thing because the interesting thing about SaaS is as a SaaS leader, you need to become an expert in a new industry every 5 years basically, right? So it's different than promo. So like my standards for like what metrics I look at can change depending on the situation.

Right.

But oftentimes we need a measure of quantity. We need a measure of quality. So what's coming in? How much of it are we winning? When we win it, how deep are we selling into that relationship that typically is in the form of either product lines or average revenue per unit, et cetera? How long does it take us to do so? One of the funny things with, uh, sales cycle length is people assume an average win time of shorter is better than longer. But what happens if you have somebody that can't win the long play deals? Of course, their average win time is going to look shorter because they can't win any of the complicated ones. Right. And of course, if they win the complicated ones, you'll see their win rate go up and you'll see their average dollars per unit go up. So like they all kind of interplay with each other. And it's just a matter of understanding like what are the things that you want to make sure you're optimizing in your particular business.

Ironically, I have no questions in our conversation about dashboard visibility, but this is one of the number one reasons why customers come to us, probably one of the top top 3, top 4 is visibility and what's going on in their business. And you said that, and I've watched you wrestle with tools behind the scenes, different things we can get to get clarity. And that's one thing you did right away when you came in. I remember you submitted a report from these calls with prospects, then we submitted that into AI, of course, and found just this incredible, like, intelligence graph of why people want our platform. But dashboards is something in common that you share as a passion and that our customers come to us for in looking for visibility in their Speak more to that.

Well, it just takes less time for you to get the information you need to do your work well.

Yeah.

Right. The point of a dashboard is the acknowledgement that these are the things I typically find myself going to. How can I get the information faster?

Yeah.

Nobody wants to sit there and tinker with spreadsheets all day.

Right.

But yes, using technology to create them for you is important, especially when you don't have the data. Like, how do you do this when you don't have the data? And it seems very intimidating to start collecting that data because I want to look at what happened in the past, like 10 months.

Right.

If I start those best practices now, I still can't look at the past 10 months as accurately as I want to.

Right.

Sometimes you have to think, I can't go in the CRM and look at like the top 7 reasons why people are interested in looking at us. But what I can do is have AI ingest my call notes and tell me the top 7 reasons for the past year. It's not perfect. But it'll at least start getting you there.

Let's talk a little bit about coaching, culture, and motivation. So what's your philosophy on coaching salespeople? Like, are you hands-on approach? How do you help salespeople overcome their own obstacles? I mean, the one interesting thing about sales, particularly in your role and in this fast-paced SaaS model, is that you are— there's a lot of psychology going on in this sales role. So what's your philosophy on coaching?

I think it's easy to lose sight of how busy and heads down and intense the day of a salesperson is. Like even if you see just 3 meetings on their calendar and space around it, you know, they're prepping for each of those meetings. They are doing their post-call notes after each of those meetings. They are preparing their follow-up after each of those meetings. They're doing their follow-up from prior meetings from prior days. Between those meetings or prospecting between them. So they're just heads down, go, go, go, go, go. And they need someone to take a deep breath with in a 45-minute meeting each week where they're not doing any of those things, especially if that someone is coming to them and saying, hey, like bird's eye view, like here's how things are going with your operation. Like, let's dial this up and dial that back. Like they need somebody to come in and help them zoom out catch a breather. Also, like the way you structure your one-on-ones and how, how you execute those as a leader is really important when it comes to coaching. So there's got to be an element of that. There's got to be an element of doing some deal review, knowing what deals to click into. Sales reps hate it when their manager clicks into the same deals every single week. You got to know which ones to click into.

Yeah.

And when you click into them, As you're helping them through it, you need to be able to find common threads in the gaps. Like, hey, I couldn't help but notice, like, in the past 3 that we talked about, um, the reason that you're not able to get them back on the line is because we actually don't even know what their next step was after your meeting. You don't even know what to hold them accountable to. And that's why you're coming to me saying, hey, what should I say? I can't get a hold of them, right? That's an example. So Throughout the whole thing, it's your job to be perceptive and come up with common themes and prescribe the right medicine to it, if you will.

Yeah, I know you're a big sports guy. And what's interesting, even when I'm talking with speakers, recruiting and coaching speakers for our events, one of the things I often send them is a statement about how even LeBron James needed a coach. And the reason was for perspective, because his head's down in the middle of the game. But the coach is out here looking at what's going on across the entire court. Does that feel right to you?

Yeah, he doesn't want to have to worry about how many minutes the 7th guy on the bench has in the rotation, or if his teammate's in foul trouble when he's busy getting double-teamed, scoring 40 a game, right?

What's something you learned about motivating salespeople that you'd wish you learned earlier in your career?

You want to prescribe your own characteristics on everybody as a baseline.. And after you manage enough people, you realize just how different people are and just how much they are the same as well. Yeah. And so I had a great mentor that said, you're one of your biggest tragic flaws is that you always assume everybody wants more responsibility and more success and more work. And maybe you do, but not everybody does. So you gotta figure out what they want. And there's 3 things that motivate salespeople from what I've seen. It's more leads, more money, and career aspirations and, and progression. Typically you can get away with it temporarily if one of those things aren't working, but if more than one of those things aren't working, then they're not happy. Yeah.

Well, I'm so glad you brought this up because I've heard this after many interviews with folks, even in the promo business where they're basically trying to hire themselves, which is a mistake because the business is more complex. Customers are more complex. Customers are different.

On that bot. Distributors have one similar parallel to like a founder-led startup in the SaaS space. The founder or the owner, CEO, salesperson number one at the distributor is often trying to download themselves into like their heir apparent that's going to take over and run it for them. Right. And from their point of view, like that's what's been successful. So it's very easy to see why you would want to just simply clone that as opposed to get super creative with it.

Right, right. Where do you feel you should invest your time? In sales reps who are underperforming but have tons of potential, or reps who are performing well and there's just more they can do? Is there a trade-off? Is that— this is an interesting nuance.

Yeah, you don't have an unlimited amount of time. Yeah, every minute you spend doing something is time not spent doing something else. So if it takes you 50% of your time to get one person up to being a B player, If you could use that time to elevate 3 B players up to an A player, it's just smart time allocation.

Yeah. So really, your time allocation begins with the ROI that the business can achieve in their sales growth, not necessarily just individual rep performance.

Yeah, it's opportunity costs, right? Again, like, yeah, your job is not to be a career counselor. Your job is to hit goals.

Yeah, I love that. All right, let's— this is a natural segue into managing yourself, because leading a sales team Man, that can be emotionally taxing. Like, it's constant energy output. And, and I've, I've worked with you now long enough, Dikron, for you to basically watch you be like this. And for those that are just listening and can't see what I'm doing, just an even line the whole way through. From the minute I met Dikron, every time I encounter him, it's this way. So how do you personally keep that equilibrium, stay sharp and motivated yourself as a sales leader?

You don't. You just look like you do.

That's a great honest answer. I mean, that's fantastic.

I mean, when you're in a position of being a public figure in a company, people are naturally going to look at you to see how they should be reacting to things too. Okay. So like something great happened, look at you, how they're reacting right now. Something bad happens, they look at you, how they're reacting right now. Right. And so you, instead of having people read too much into what's happening, you celebrate the successes, but you have to keep it like this to some extent so that you maintain a level of stability for the folks that are looking up to you for that. Yeah. Like you're the master of this domain. So if you start interviewing me like this, I'm going to think, oh man, this, this podcast is not going well because I don't do this every day. Right. So like, I'm looking to you to, match.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay, you're doing—

yeah, that's great. It's great advice. I also want to know, like, you sort of gave an answer earlier to how you yourself regulate your own sort of emotional and life through managing salespeople, and that is that you have yourself a healthy work-life balance, because you had sort of an answer earlier at the top of our conversation about making sure people are well-rounded as individuals. But leading a sales team is difficult. When you reflect on your growth though, Was there another lesson you've had to unlearn from your early days?

Yeah, actually, I remember my VP of marketing that I used to work with at JazzHR walked up to me when I was in the office one day. It was like 6:30 PM. And she was like, you know, one day when you're married with kids, you're not going to be able to do this every day like you do now. And I was like, yeah, yeah, like whatever. It's always going to be like this. I'm never going to have more responsibilities or age or any of that. And yeah, it's freaking hard now. Making sure you get your stuff done by 5:30 and making sure that like afterwards you spend time doing things that matter outside of work so that, you know, later on the next day you're fresh and rejuvenated and you're bringing your best self all the time. It matters a lot. It just takes a discipline organization too. You can't just like, that just doesn't happen by itself.

Yeah. Yeah. That's really good. I'm glad you brought that up. Last question I have for you is kind of blended into a few questions here. But Brian Halligan at HubSpot, he said this on X. He said in the startup to scale-up journey, he's seen three phases of sales leaders. He said there's the starter, a leader who can hire a few reps and close some deals, high-res closer, not analytical. Then there's the solver, a leader who can figure out the profile, the rep, hire them, train them, ramp revenue, analytical and process-oriented. And then he said there's the scaler. And this is what you are. And this is what a lot of the listeners of this podcast are because they're running businesses in promo. They sort of have a CEO hat as well as a VP VP sales hat, or they have a VP sales, but they're a scaler. And here's what Brian said: that is, hire a leader who can rally the sales troops, constructively collaborate with the senior team, deal with the board, and wisely move the knobs and dials on comp, territory, channels. It's high-risk as inspirational and analytical. And he asked the question, does that sound right? Does that sound right to you?

Sound right to me, but it makes it sound a lot simpler than what it actually is in real life.

Say more about that.

Yeah. I mean, just, you know, moving the knobs that it masterfully just lands on exactly where it should be all the time, every time.

Right. Yeah.

Yeah. No, it takes mistakes. It takes having a gracious leader that's patient with you. And I've had those. It takes sort of moving the knob back quickly once you realize things aren't going well. Right. Like it's, it's like this, like that almost makes it seem like it's like a step function.

Right.

Yeah, it's great. Sometimes you gotta play in the builder mode and you're a coach and you're a process builder and you have to like siphon off the other stuff and deprioritize it. So it's a lot of reading and reacting and understanding what the business needs.

Yeah. And I see you almost kind of said, I don't wanna put words in your mouth. You almost kind of said you dip in and out of some of those roles at times, right? Depending on what the business needs. That's interesting. Finally, one last piece of advice. Now a lot of us are heading into 2026 as we record this. It's early November. There's lots of business planning. There's lots of goal setting, targets, things like that. And if you could give one piece of advice to a promo sales leader trying to boost their focus on their sales team. So maybe they're sitting here thinking, I really— we want to amp our sales. And a lot of us do this. We're like, we want to grow sales. And then it's a matter of where they as a leader should focus and spend their time. So as a last piece of advice, they're planning for 2026. How would you encourage them heading into the new year?

Make a plan. It's got to be a plan that trickles down to what makes sense. If I have X amount of opportunities last year, I won X percentage of them. I got this much revenue from each one, and thus it ended up landing me at whatever revenue I did. Okay. So if I want to improve my win rate, maybe I need better presentations. Maybe I need a higher quality prospect. Whatever, maybe I need a better human that's actually delivering the pitch. If I want to increase the pool of demand that I have at my disposal, maybe I need to go to more events. Okay, it costs me this much to go to those events. Does that cost justify the expansion of the top of funnel demand gen? Does it, how does that trickle down to the bottom? If I keep my win rates at this level or if I raise my win rates. So all of the dials on those things get turned up or down. Hopefully up based on actual real life changes that you make. And your business is actually never going to get better. Like those things will not get better on their own, save for macro things like the interest rates going back down to zero. But generally, like those things aren't going to adjust upward on their own unless you're actually making tangible business changes that correlate to them.

And speaking of that, as you plan for 2026, you're putting out an annual plan. Is your instinct to evaluate that more on a quarterly basis as far as where you as a sales leader makes dramatic big changes? What's your rhythm as you head into the year and you set this big hairy goal of growing 30 to 40% or whatever it might be? How are you evaluating that as you move along through next year?

Well, it's not just me. You got to get all the stakeholders involved. There's different participants in different parts of the funnel, right? So like a head of sales will typically get together with their head of demand gen or head of marketing. And say, hey, like, can you provide like a safe bet and ambitious bet of like, what do you think demand is going to look like month over month? And there might be like different people in charge of that depending on like the channel of acquisition. And then you as a salesperson are like, okay, I have this much coming in. Here are the additional things I can do to get more to come in. Now that we understand that, do I have the right headcount to meet it? Do I have too much? Do I need to hire more? If I hire more, When are those people over the course of that year going to be fully ramped and making an impact? If I have a higher mix of new people, does my win rate now go down?

Yeah.

Your average ARR now go down. Hey, let me talk to product. What does your roadmap look like? Oh, major release is coming in April. Great. That means my average ARR, average revenue per unit might increase because we now have more product to sell starting in April. So like every part of the plan has to be correlated to something that makes sense.

You can't just go ahead on last year and say, yeah, because I love this, because what you really said, the key to unlock strong planning is this collaboration with your colleagues. Because in promo, what that looks like is we're selling an account, we're selling $1 million worth of promo into this account, but we're only working with marketing. What can we do to work with HR? What can we do to work with purchasing? And what are the other stakeholders within our own organization that can help move that needle? So there's lots of cross-collaboration going on. Before you can actually finalize those plans. Yeah, that's good. Dikron, thank you for the time, man. We could— I know we could have talked for an hour. Thanks for joining us to talk about this. It's huge as we head into 2026, so it's a big service to our customers for us to just think about sales. We'll have some easy steps from this conversation in show notes that we'll add from our conversation with Dikron. But thanks, my friend.

Yeah, thanks, Bobby. Appreciate it, man.