[Leadership] Finding PMF and building a sales team with Max Gilbert

It's so brutal being a founder, right? And it's such a hard job and there's so much riding on it. And sometimes just the. And it's lonely sometimes doing the sales by yourself and not necessarily having anyone to, like, talk to about it or commiserate with about it and your investor breathing down your neck. And so like, sometimes they want. You want to hire someone. You're like, well, this person sold stuff before. Maybe they can help me figure it out. I see that happen so often. And there are people out there who are actually really good at this, and there happens to be magic and there's a fit at. I've seen it happen. But the most cases I see this happen, it doesn't work out. And it's not because that person wasn't skilled or wasn't good at sales. It's just because, like, the constantly moving target is such a challenge, especially if someone's really good at sales. So they have a demonstrated history of, like, coming in, taking something that's been sold a couple times, and blowing that up. That's a totally different skill set than figuring out whether anyone's willing to pay for anything in the first place. And so sometimes, like, if you've hired someone who's really good at the ladder, asking them to figure out the former is just. It's not a skill match. It's a bad hire.

Before we get into today's show, I wanted to tell you a little bit about what we have going on over here at Succession. So Succession is a life science sales membership that includes on demand courses to uplevel your sales skills, resources to plan and execute your sales process, a community for peer to peer networking and learning, and live workshops delivered by experts twice a month. You can get access to all of this as an individual for just $79 a month. Or you can uplevel your entire sales team with courses and customized learning designed for each individual rep. Come and join us over at Succession Bio. Okay, let's dive back into the show. Hey, we've got another great episode for you here on the Sales DNA podcast. Max Gilbert is joining us. He works a lot with early stage founders, helping them to go to market, sell the product, sort of build out their sales processes and sales teams. And so this episode, we talk a lot about finding product market fit. You know, how do you know when you've actually found product market fit? Right. How do you look to hire your first sales reps? And a whole bunch of other stuff. But what stood out to you, Nick?

Yeah, I really enjoyed this. And you picked up on the podcast. One particular thing you said about hiring to the level of your. The person you're selling to. I would give too much away about that because it was just really eloquently put and something. I'd never structured that way in my thought process. But he's great. So, yeah, lots of nuggets in here, but that's the one I took away most.

Yeah. Max also puts out a lot of great content on LinkedIn, so you can go find him there, even in his archives of posts. He's done a bunch of little videos here and there. And I think if you follow him, you may get to see a new podcast coming. So we'll see about that as well.

Yeah.

Awesome. Well, what do we say, Nick?

Let's talk. Ryan.

Hey, Max. Welcome to the show. We're excited to have you here.

Thanks for having me.

Awesome. So we gave you a heads up. We asked everybody the same question. Give us a crazy or funny story that's happened in your career.

Um, actually, I met my wife in my. One of my longest stints of my career in consulting. She was assigned to be my, like, peer mentor. My first day of work, and, like, took me out to lunch, which I refer to as my first date with her, which she hates. And she tried to really keep it on the dlc. I don't think about not dating coworkers. And then I.

We were.

We were dating and then they had like an office holiday gift grab party thing. And I ended up opening this package and it was just like a tea set or something weird. And I was just like, in the moment. I was like, I don't know, do I want this? And I look at her from, like, her office, like a couple hundred people. I was like, do we want this? And she was just like, mortified. She's like, I don't know. Do you want that?

And.

And it ended up. Everyone ended up knowing that we were a couple after that, and I was not happy.

Yeah, put it on blast right then and there.

Do you want this? I don't know.

It's a bit better than my story I have related to work and my wife. So when I met my wife, she was a chef, but then, like, retrained and decided to go into a new job. And her new job she went into was mental health, but we'd been together at this point for about five, six years, maybe more. And she referred to me as her work experience. The reason she got into the job and had experience was that apparently I'm the Work experience.

It's true. I mean you are. It is work to work.

Yeah.

Oh. Oh, that's a great story. All right, so now kind of dumping into the business side of things. Maybe Bax, give us a little quick background on yourself, kind of what you're working on because I think it's going to give some context to sum up the topics we're going to cover.

Sure. So I studied biology undergrad and thought I was going to sort of pursue a career research in science. And then I had an opportunity to be exposed to doing a internship in venture capital my sophomore year of college, which really sort of like changed the trajectory of my career. And I realized I love science, I love R and D, I love cutting edge innovation. I think that my best like scales, skills and talents to help advance that are actually sort of like more outside the lab, adjacent to the lab. There's sort of a gap between people. One of my mentors told me that there's like not really a lack of innovation in the world. There's lack of people who are able to market and sell that innovation. And that sort of like really stuck with me. Okay. That's kind of where my niche will be. So I worked in sales and marketing consulting in pharma for a little bit where I met my wife and then we moved out to the Bay Area when she got a job at Facebook, I was like, I'm going to do what people do and join an early stage startup.

I was.

So I was employee number 10, the first non scientist engineer at Culture Biosciences at the time and was.

Chief of.

Staff to the CEO, did a little bit of everything and helped us get through to our series A, doing a lot of our initial sales and marketing. When and then I remember Bill Patrick, you know, at the time and I said like, great, now we can go hire a real salesperson. And that process couldn't wait to like go great. Now like we've been winging this, but now we're going to go hire a real salesperson. They're going to scale this and they're going to make our like hockey stick projection charts that we use for a series A come to fruition. And just these struggles of actually making that happen led to me ended up taking, reluctantly taking over sales and not wanting to do it, but doing it anyway and then building a sales team. And after sort of having gone through that experience, now I work with early stage founders, usually scientists who are finding themselves having to sell as part of being a founder and sort of maybe that's something that they, or building their first sales team and kind of reliving that experience and passing that on and working with them.

Awesome. And one other thing that you've done that was, you know, pretty awesome was you actually came and did a little workshop for the succession community talking about like, how to leverage your skills as a scientist to excel and like how your background as being a scientist is actually beneficial and you can use those skills and repurposed that. We got lots of good feedback around that. So, you know, thank you for that as well. Yeah, so that, I guess is a great segue into how do you take this sort of like, you know, you're, you're a founder, early stage company, you've got some tech, you've got this idea, you want to try and get it to market. You know, step one is how do you find product market fit? And it's like, how do you, how do you start to, we'll go like early stage stuff, right? Like, how do you start to think about that process of maybe having those first sets of conversations and how do you sort of get to that point?

The brutal reality that I sometimes have to sort of confront with some of my clients midway through engagement is that that process should start actually before building anything. And sometimes technologists will get up in arms and get really mad about that. And, but, but I think that just the, the hard truth is that like, I personally wouldn't really be excited about going out and building anything unless you had previously validated that something people were willing to pay for. Right. And so it's not just product market fit, it's like product market sales fit. You have to real like find someone who's willing to pay for it. And when I see people do again and again that I try to like, encourage them to, to do when they're doing product discovery research is when you're talking, when you're doing product discovery and you're reaching out to people and saying, hey, can I talk to you about your workflow and your problems in your day? There's a sample bias, right? We're talking to scientists now. So there's a sample bias you're injecting into that of the people who talk to you are the ones who have the time to talk to you, right? And so you're getting feedback on from the people who like, can talk to you, but usually the people who are buying, the people who are making the decisions, the people are setting the priorities, are too busy to just give you feedback and talk about your product, right. And so I like the way that I usually see the most success is by approaching it as a sales problem from the beginning, as figuring out what the product is by trying to sell it does not mean sell vaporware. You can be transparent about what does and doesn't exist and sort of the status of it. Not like claiming you have this incredible thing, but like, hey, if I were to build something that did this, this and this, is that something that would be of interest to you? And if I'm a busy executive and that is on my top priorities, and I'm. I'm like, yeah, okay, I'll take 15 minutes to talk to you about it. And then you're validating that you have to talk to those people initially and understand how their budgets work and how their priorities work. So you make sure you build the right thing at the outset.

Yeah, like, and I think too part of that, you have to figure out who is the person that, to your point, cares about buying that thing or actually using the product. Right. Because sometimes it's different people, the people that are using it versus the people that are buying it. And if you make something just for the user, if it's for some reason price prohibitive for them to just like swipe their credit card and buy it, then you have to have some sort of value prop that rolls up to the leadership. And so unless you can tie your product, service, whatever it is like a business outcome that they're trying to actually drive that they care about, you know, you're not gonna be able to sell it.

And I think that one of the.

Things that I was gonna say, there's a. Some people listening may know I'm a guy called Jonathan Milner, founder of abcam and also a big investor in the Cambridge area. Friend of mine is the CEO of a company invested in. And he repeatedly tells the story of. He just said, he says, get your product market fit, find what works, and then just turn the handle and keep doing it. Just turn the handle and crank it out and. But he's always talking about finding that fit first. And you can't do that with pretend customers.

And if you. Sometimes you'll talk to people, sometimes when you talk to like executives and who are the bosses or the bosses bosses of some of those users who are giving you all that feedback. One of the things that. And sometimes I'll be as part of these conversations or sort of debrief with the client after having some of those conversations where it's just like the, the stark reality isn't it's not that we heard wrong or built to totally built something completely useless or built something that nobody wants. Like the brutal sort of knife stabbing reality sometimes is they'll recognize. Yeah, that's a problem, absolutely. But that's problem number seven on my list. And I'm only focused on numbers one, two and three right now. Right. Or like I, I've got, yeah, I totally get that that's a problem. But part of my job as an executive is to weigh trade offs. And so just in that person's sphere, that is the most important thing. But in my sphere, like it's a thing, but it's, it's losing. It's not as important as some of the other things that I'm thinking about. And so it's like on the one hand you're getting the validation that you did build something for that person, but then the person who really matters isn't willing to pay for it. And then how do you sort of pivot or adjust or reflect what you're doing if you have gone down that road at that point after having done that?

As you said, that advice is perfect for not just founders, because sales reps fall into the same trap. Right? They sit there, talk to the technical end user and get them all bought in. But they haven't rolled it up into some sort of business initiative, strategic initiative that the executives care about. And it has to be like prioritized. I think if we look back, whatever, four years ago during COVID everybody, there's money flowing like rivers. And so just flying around like, you get a dollar, you get a dollar. And money was being spent on sort of like exploratory stuff, where it was, oh, let's just see what happens. So I'm going to try out this new technology, see if it could give me an edge, whatever it is. But now because budgets are tighter, all of that sort of like exploratory funding is not being leveraged. And so it's being put towards how can we actually sol the highest priority, most important problems and initiatives to our business right now.

So when I was in various conversations, someone once pitched something to me and this fits the product market fit even before you get to the stage of is it a top priority? Is that if you ask somebody, hey, would you like this? Then yeah, they'll probably like it, but would you pay for it? It's a different question and it's. Someone explains to me this is the exact reason that budget airlines exist. They give you a seat because everyone needs the seat, then everything else is an add on because then you get to choose what you pay for, right? So asking the question, would you like a first class ticket? Yeah, I'll take one. Would you pay for one? Is a different question, right? And then that's what's happening with product market fit. If you're asking is this, is this a problem and does it solve your problem, but that doesn't ask whether they pay for that to be solved.

Well, the other challenge too is you get false negatives. Even though, like, would you want to pay for it? It's like, yeah, we're going to be able to pay for it, but then I'm not actually going to, right? So it's like, until you're selling to your point, max product market sales fit, right? It's like, can you actually sell that product and actually get somebody to give you dollars for it or pounds or whatever currency you're in?

And that's.

Or the, the, the whole. Sometimes there's this fear of like, oh, well, I don't want to sell vaporware. I don't want to talk about something that doesn't exist. I actually think if you're on the right thing, if you're on the priority, right? Like, there's two types of priorities. Also if you're an executive, there's a priority of like, okay, here's the thing we need to do, go, whoever I'm delegating this to, go get three quotes from competitive people in a relatively commoditized industry and help me pick one and then we'll go do that, right? And then there's the burning problems that like, there's no immediate obvious solution and we're racking our brains and we're thinking internally and we're trying to figure this out because it's important. And if you're on that, if you're touching on that subject, then the fact that you have a half baked idea isn't like, isn't necessarily a hindrance or an obstacle. It's like you're saying like, hey, we actually, we just raised a bunch of money. We're hiring people, we're building that. We want to make sure we're building the right thing. Like, are you like, how important is this to you? Do you want to kind of go down this road with us?

Right?

And I actually was having a discussion with the client earlier about like design partnerships. Like, there's two types of design really. There's one type of design partnerships. There's two things people call design partnerships early on. One is like, hey, we're desperate for customers. Can we give this to you for free so you'll please use it? Or the customer is just like, hey, I would like something for free. So well, let's call it a design partnership. That's eh. And then there's like truly, hey, we need like we will want to shape your product roadmap. We realize that as a startup you have an agility and a speed and sort of a, like this is your expertise to build this. And we want to shape that and invest in this. And so we're willing to sort of give you feedback and actually give you some like money and milestones to invest in making it happen. Like if you can do that, that's ideally at least what you should be striving for from the beginning.

So I could say that exactly that. And it can always. So sales reps should always have their ear out for this as well. Because I've worked with companies that have already established technology, but by establishing those technologies have established skills. And two of the previous companies I've left actually ended up with new products by a customer paying for them to be developed for themselves because they were like, hey, can you do this? I've got a pot of money here because I needed that badly. But you guys have better expertise. So let's enter into a research agreement with undefined outcomes and the company ends up a product and the lab get some vital tools they need. And this happens more often than I thought it would when I first started sales.

So maybe we can transition now. Right? So it's like, okay, we now kind of know what to do. So we know we're trying to actually sell our product to find product market fit. Right? We're not just. They'll walk around, just talk to people and, and we're not trying to. What's the right word? Just listen to people's pain points and then solve them. We're trying to actually sell products to them first. Okay, we're doing that now. How do we know that we've started to find product market fit? I don't want to say we found it because I think, I mean you could probably answer this too. But like product market fit is fluid. I think it can change like with the range sometimes.

Right?

You don't just like get product market fit and keep it forever. But like how do you start to know when you, when you found something? You're like, okay, this is resonating. And how do we know when to start doubling down on that?

Do you watch the Office and the. Sorry, like the American version of the maybe Michael Scott, where Michael Scott declares bankruptcy. And he's just like, I declare bankruptcy, just yells it really loud. I feel like that sometimes people are just like, we found product market fit. And that's like, if we say it with enough conviction, that'll be true. And like we can point to different things. But I think the, the, the crank that Nick talked about is the product market fit, right? Like does can we do this thing again and again and again? Repe. Can we demonstrate an ability to define an ideal customer profile, have a target of a person who, who has a specific set of needs and that our product fulfills those needs and that they're willing to pay for it. And then if we go out and find three more people that look like that, one, ideally two, maybe even all three of them, will, Will, will kind of agree to work with us too, right? And then we can do that again and again and again, right? And so it's that demons if that repeatability and scalability that is the key to finding product market fit. And I think that the challenge I find people end up with is they have a couple sales that might be. Look like different Personas in different industries with different use cases at different price points, call that product market fit. Then think about scaling and going to hire people to scale what isn't scalable, right?

That.

Because it. So whereas if you can do it 1, 2, 3, 4 times, now you're starting to see that sort of revolution of that crank. Now you hire people and now you scale that because it's scalable. So first demonstrate that it's scalable, which is the litmus test of whether there's product market fit. And now you can scale it as opposed to making some nebulous declaration of product market fit to then go scale it. But what is it that we're scaling exactly then becomes the operative question.

Also assuming this is the founder doing this, right? In this particular case, this is probably not a hire that you're bringing in to like find your product market fit or how have you kind of seen that come to be?

It's a challenge. I think that sometimes, right?

The.

It's so brutal being a founder, right? And it's such a hard job and there's so much riding on it. And sometimes just the. And it's lonely sometimes doing the sales by yourself and not necessarily having anyone to like talk to about it or commiserate with about it. And your investors are breathing down your neck. And so like sometimes they want. You want to hire someone. You're like, well, this person Sold stuff before, maybe they can help me figure it out. And like, I see that happen so often, and there are people out there who are actually really good at this, and there happens to be magic and there's a fit, and I've seen it happen. But the most cases I see this happen, it doesn't work out. And it's not because that person wasn't skilled or wasn't good at sales. It's just because, like, the constantly moving target is such a challenge, especially if someone's really good at sales. So they have a demonstrated history of, like, coming in, taking something that's been sold a couple times and blowing that up. That's a totally different skill set than figuring out whether anyone's willing to pay for anything in the first place. And so sometimes, like, if you've hired someone who's really good at the ladder, asking them to figure out the former is just. It's. It's not a skill match. It's a bad hire.

Yeah.

I think the other most common bad hire technique is to go get the person at the largest competitor that's selling, like, your competitive product, saying, like, hey, you got the best person in this space. They're going to know all the customers, and so they're all going to buy us now instead. And I'm sure you've seen horror stories. That's the.

Yeah, yeah. I think, like, people don't like buying stuff. Right. I think, like, especially B2B, large sort of enterprise sales, too. It's just like going through, bringing on a new vendor and finding, switching from, like, there has to be. There's a very high threshold of, like, friction that you need to go through in order to want to do that. And so your job as a salesperson, Right. Is to sort of like, is to focus the lens on the problem, to build up the momentum and the desire to change. But, like, the idea that, like, some salesperson who previously sold this person could just pick up the phone and call somebody and be like, hey, I'm at this company now. Bring me your business. It's just like, it doesn't work that way, right? Yeah, you have to. To have them switch. Yeah, they have. It has to be better.

Also. The other problem is that they come in and they're like, great. I'm. I'm this great rep. I'll prove that I could sell a big X company. And then you go. He goes, so I gotta make the phone calls. Where's the phone? And where's my CRM? And then we ain't got A phone and what's a CRM? And he's like, what? You know, so this is the difference in what's going on.

Yeah.

Before we move on, one clear point, there's only one the office and it's the British one. The American one doesn't care. Before we just, before we let that.

So one of the thing that I think is also important to talk about because it's, it's sort of this, I would almost say like transition between founder led sales to bringing in a, or a couple sales reps. Right. So we've kind of proven stuff is working. We're able to sell stuff. We're going to bring somebody in to come and help us out. But you can't use the same pitch. How do you make that transition? To take somebody that says, I'm a founder, I've been able to sell 10, 10 widgets into the same ideal customer profile. And here, you know, Mr. And Mrs. Sales rep. Here's how you can go do it too. Like do what I did.

That's an ideal situation too. Right. In a lot of cases where it works that they have been able to do that so successfully. I think that one of the things that I wish it looked more like that and that would be. And we could talk about how to handle that, but that would be great if everyone came that way. It's like sometimes I'll explain to people that your founder led pitch is like a cheat code that you can't give to your sales rep because often, especially if you're early and especially if what you're selling is sort of being defined as it's being sold. And this is one of the things I work with founders on when I'm coaching them too. Like you as founder are the product. Right. And like your ability to project that confidence and that vision and that leadership that you as a company, you have people and resources dedicated to figuring this out and you're partnering on doing this. Like they are very much buying you as much as they're buying the problem they solve. Right. And so that success, you can't necessarily translate just to sort of to, to somebody else and to a sale or even in the case where it's like you are, it has sort of been built. People are just more likely to respond to an email from a CEO. Hey, like outreach. I'm the CEO of whatever people feel important. Oh, the CEO reached out to me. Wow.

Right.

And there's just all these little sort of leg ups that, that the CEO, the founder will have that your first salesperson won't. Right. And so similar to like finding product market fit before finding salespeople, I think you have to build and define and validate a scalable, repeatable sales process that's about the product in order to make sure that your first sales reps will be successful. Right. And so sometimes people will like, approach me, hey, I'm ready to do this. And it's like, I think you're almost there. And I can be. Probably had to do work that you don't really want to do right now and take a couple of steps back, retrace your steps and figure out how to repeat that. Now do the next 10 widgets without, with, without your founder pitch, but with a, like a sales pitch, acting like a salesperson. Right. And if that works now, like, we're really ready to pour gas on that.

Well, that's not how it works. Right. If you add 10 people, you get 10 times the revenue everyone knows up into the.

Right.

Yeah.

Add some people 10 times revenue. Done.

And so when you're building out this story, I'm guessing what, you just take the same pitch deck that you went to raise money with, that you're pitching for the vc. You just got to take that, give that to the sales team too. Right. Is that pretty much how it goes?

It does. Sadly, that's not how it should go. But I'm sure you see this too, right? Where it's like. And I think there's also a moment, especially if the founder doesn't have as much sales experience where rightfully so they're feeling like puffed up chest, like, I just raised 10, $20 million, like I can do anything. Right. I just convinced all these VCs in this market, no less, to invest in me. This pitch is obviously amaz, right. And it's. It's that you have to realize that potential clients don't care. They don't care about sort of your TAM or the trends that you project are happening in the market or the industry. Like, they only care about themselves and they only care about their problems. And like, there's sometimes one slide, like on the problem statement that maybe can sort of be like the, the seed of like what should then go into a customer deck. But it does not translate.

If you, if you're a rep now and you open yourself, your sales deck pitch and one of your first three slides is, this is our company, our founder is this person. We have this many people in this many locations, you are still carrying a pitch deck slide.

Yeah.

And then no matter how old your.

Company, your next slide. And then your next slide is the NASCAR slide with all the different logos that you guys have, like, come on.

Like, no one cares. Show those two slides and I guarantee everyone stop listening.

I think. And to that point too, I think it's like just people don't often re. Like, especially now. Or you can tell. And then people on Zoom, like, are they doing something else over here? Are they texting? Are they not listening? Right. Like you have some more. You have so little time to grab people's attention too. And if you're starting with that sort of boilerplate stuff, like, as soon as someone pings up their phone, like, you're done here, you're really gonna. Unless you just have some sort of theatric to reclaim it. Right? And so it's not just that that's.

Oof.

That shouldn't be in there, but if it's slide 8 towards the end and you're working towards next steps, like, okay, we can get over it. Like, oh, by the way, we have people from MIT and whatever, whatever. We're amazing. Okay, but if you're starting there, then.

It may depend actually, because I don't want to say it's completely false because, you know, I'm thinking back to Synthego days and, you know, our co founders were brothers and they worked at SpaceX Engineers and kind of brought like the tech to the science. Right? That's kind of like part of the, you know, pitch. But. But it worked for like the early adopters. So the people that were like the earliest early adopters of the technology liked that story. Like, you know, two years in, that story is like completely irrelevant. And it's not like something that's going to get somebody to buy, right? It's. But for the early days, in the very beginning, if you have something that's like truly interesting there, or it's like, oh, our scientific co founder, you know, this is his ninth startup or whatever, right. Like, maybe something there is like validating because, you know, they clearly know how to like, you know, put out good tech.

The Tech1 with SpaceX was a specific example. And because we were building a tech platform for something that is really new and innovative. Innovative. It pointed to their experience in doing something like that. So it gave you confidence in that particular piece. Right? It wasn't just that we've got Bob and Bob's got lots of papers, right?

It wasn't Bob the paperman.

Yeah, it literally delivers in terms of like, product market fit being sort of an inflection point. And maybe they can be some independent, but often they'll sort of happen together or can even be the same. Inflection point is the shift from promise based marketing and sales to proof based marketing and sales. Right. And the story of who you are is so important to like the promise of why you should trust us, why we can do what we say we're going to do and why this sort of early, early success on the S curve should sort of project and make you believe that we're going to keep going up and.

Right, right.

But at a certain point, like stop promising. Have you delivered on this? How long have you been around? How long? How many customers you had? Tell me success stories, tell me use cases. I don't.

Right.

Care anymore because it should be based on the proof and that again, the proof based is so much more scalable because you don't need people to sort of come along with you and believe in those promises.

I mean, I can give you an example just from succession experience. Like our additional customers, people we knew, right? They trusted us, they bought us as founders, right. Like they knew who we were and they trusted what we could do. And then when we started to talk to people who didn't know us, that didn't know us other than like maybe listening to podcasts and finding content on LinkedIn, whatever it is, you need more of that proof, right? It became like a real sales process. I didn't just have to, we didn't just have to reach out to people we knew and be like, hey, you want to work with us? Like, yeah, we'd love to. Right? You have to make. Because that's the other thing too. I mean a lot of founders in other places can go to their colleagues or people that they know that might be facing similar challenges with them. They go to their network or they go to their VCs network and you get these sort of warm introductions to people and you can leverage that to get a few customers. But if you can't go cold and you can't talk to people who don't know anything about you. Right. I guess that kind of falls into that product market fit bucket too, right.

I'm ready just to hire salespeople, like just.

Right.

Like if you can't sell this cold or like meet someone cold and sell it to them, like why are you going to expect. Why now you're saddling this person with some made up quota of why they should be able to do that. Right? Like unless you can say I sat down for a moment. That's the right. The top down hey, we need to make this much money and therefore you need to sell this much. I'm sure your reps you work with.

Well, every company ever, right? Every quota ever has been set that way. I think. What are your bottoms up? Give us your bottoms up number. What do you think? Oh, yeah, I think I could do, you know, 300k or whatever. And okay, yeah, no, but you're going to do a million. You're just going to do a million. You'll figure it out.

I was about to say, the only thing worse than a made up, top down quota is when you first asked for the bottom up. If everybody just said, hey, this is what we said, we've got to do, we've got to do it. I know it's not really like, you know, at least it would be half truthful, rather than you tell me what you can do and I'll tell you.

Great trust, great relationship. But I also think going back to like hiring your person, we're all triggered by that, right? Hiring your first sales rep. If you're going to try to hire someone who's sort of like really good at this, right? And then, then they're going to want to see some of those things, right? And I think that like, sometimes founders will say, like, look, I found this person, they know the industry, they know the people, they have the Rolodex. They're like, and it's like if, if they were really good, then they, and you gave them the sort of OTE number, what they should be expecting to make. They'd want to know whether that was sort of believable or, or not. Right? Like, I'm concerned that they're not concerned that you actually haven't sold more. Right? And so like, on that alone, I'm, I wonder why this person is sort of so interested in this, right? And, and so like, I think the ideal, right, building that playbook is the founder's like, listen, I, right, I leveraged my network, I used all this to get our initial case studies and then I, for like a month just grinded like a sales rep, like what I'm expecting you to do. I was able to reach out to this many people with this process, this often. These are some of my like, conversion rates I was doing in the CRM. Like, this is what this funnel looked like. Now this is what I'm expecting you to replicate, right? That's, that's also going to help you hire the best talent. It's like, okay, great, like I could do that or I could do better or I think here's where I would change that process as opposed to hoping this person will be successful or that you can sell something cold when no one's ever done it before, which is a really high bar to put on something.

What are your. So I've seen, and I guess in regards to the sort of initial sales hire, I think there's a lot of different opinions about it, but there are, you know, opinions of, hey, why don't we take somebody that we've got in our company who knows everything really well, maybe a scientist, and put them into sales and let's put them out there and then you'll have them go start selling. Then on the flip side, they don't have sales experience, right? So are they going to be ready to sell? And especially with like limited resources. But then you go out and you hire like an absolute killer of a sales rep who's done it, you know, at multiple companies. But then they come into, you know, a new environment where maybe they, you know, aren't set up to be successful. So like, how do you know, like, who's that, right? Like fit to take on such a challenging role of like a first sales hire. How senior do you go, right? Like, are you talking like you go, do you hire the VP first or the head of first and then have them do the job or do you bring in like the soldier and then have them work their way up?

I, it's funny because I was actually, I think the answer often starts with how senior is the person you're selling to, right? And so like if you're, if you're selling directly to scientists, right? Or sort of to the scientists who do have some decision making authority or someone's like maybe just like director level, I find, or what I've seen in my career is that the most. They're most receptive and most likely to talk to people that are sort of relate to them more as peer, not as salespeople that they have um, like walls go up when they're being sold to. And like way I like to think about that is that scientists are trained like their whole career has been trained to be like distrustful of anything that isn't sort of empirically proven or like demonstrable, right? And that like, if you're coming at them with like big hyperbolic claims, right? There's nothing more boring than a science paper, right? You could be announcing a breakthrough that's incredible. But like it must be as absolutely dry and adjective list as possible, right? Because that's, that's like how they want to if, if we hype this up or like God for like put an exclamation point in a science. Can you imagine like the like we've cured whatever exclamation point of science and no one would believe it even if it was true just because it was too excitable.

You know, you know, had a scientist, your product guy, right? And they give you a press release or something as a product guy and it's so fat and dry that you're like, they don't want you to change one word because it's, well now you're over promising. I'm like, no, I'm just like maybe coloring in a little bit. I'm not.

No color, only black and white. And so I think that if you're hiring someone from within or sort of a scientist and having them do that role is really helpful when they're sort of selling to their peers in that science role. And I think to the point you made about, and this is a shameless plug for all of us, right Then you can't also just expect that person to figure out sales. You have to equip them with coaches or resources or training programs that are going to help them understand those skills. And like the way I explain that to people is like, you're a PhD scientist, you're like the, the stuff you know is really hard. Like the stuff that we can help you do is actually not like how to use a CRM, like not that difficult. We can sort of figure it out.

And there's the discovery call, like how to run a discovery call, like just like organize some of your questions, how to prospect, right? It's like, it's definitely all teachable and you plug in your PhD expertise into, you know, those frameworks and you know it's going to work a lot better.

And it's such a winning combo versus if you hire someone who is really good at all the sales skills but like doesn't understand the detailed, nuanced complexities of the science, that's a high bar to sort of put them in. But like on the flip side, if you are able to sort of sell to a really high level executive, it is a really sort of economic, buyer driven process, then you probably do want someone who's really good at that and then they know how to pull in the people internally who can sort of bolster that case appropriately because that is sort of a different kind of type of skill that might benefit from someone with lots of seniority and experience.

I have consumed endless amounts of Content related to sales, sales, hiring, podcasts, whatever, books, all of this stuff. I've never heard it so eloquently said though, of like, hire to your customer, like hire your first sales reps to your customer. Which is if you're selling to your point, scientist to scientist, and like you're selling reagents or something that can be, you know, basically purchased by the end user of a scientist, have them be scientists, right? So they're selling to executives or higher level decision makers. That scientist isn't going to know, you know, shit about how to run a sales process, multithread, get multiple decision makers involved, how to put together a business case, how to get to power, right? Those are things that they're just not going to be able to do. And so you have to put somebody in place to do it. Like, I just think it was so eloquent and I agree, I love that. So I thought that when you said.

It, and I think the first version of that, of hire a scientist to sell to scientists, people do by accident without even maybe going through that thought process. Because we're like, well, we've got some scientists around, they can talk to people, let's put them out and they can communicate our science, right?

You gotta find a scientist who can talk to people, right? That's the, that's the challenge.

It. Tear me up for my joke.

I said earlier, right?

They're rare as rocket horseshit. Straight from my mum's series of jokes.

Oh my goodness.

I think it's. And this is also something that we all sort of touch on in sort of our world that I think that. And this was my sort of experience hiring a team at Culture Bio too, that we found to be really successful was that like when I would hire fermentation engineers or scientists who were the peers of the people that we'd work with, even if they were like less polished in their pitch or less sort of buttoned up in some of their execution of the sales process. Like the words coming out of their mouth were just more believable to their peers, right? And they just were like, were better able to sell to them. And the question then, right, is sort of a jet, how do you hire for that role when those people aren't looking for the job as sales jobs, right? And I think that like one of the. If they have some of those skills, right, or they're willing to sort of be like, learn some of them, there's also the enticement, just the reality of the fact that like you'll probably have A better work life balance. You won't have to be in that. There's money is right. You'll make more money. You'll, like, you won't. You'll get out of the lab. You won't get called in at 2am to like, fix an experiment that's breaking. And it's just a question of like, how much is that a priority to you? And often what they'll say is like, right. But I don't even. I wouldn't even know where to begin. I don't have any of those skills. I don't. And that's where I think it goes back to. Like, yeah, but those things are teachable. Like, you already know the hard part and that you don't have to like, become someone else. You don't have to be someone different. That's where the cell, like a scientist stuff comes in. Like, you are. You are probably much better at this than you think you are because you think you need to look like some Persona of a salesperson that nobody wants.

To buy from and nobody actually does that anymore, to be honest. Like, the whole, like, I hate this perception that like, sales is achy. Like, I. I haven't seen an icky salesperson in years. It's usually. It's not really. I don't know, I could be wrong. Your inbox isn't full of like, very like. It's just most people aren't like the 1970s car salesman that everybody thinks they are.

I don't know.

You're a lot of outbound. Outreach is so gross, right? You don't look. I don't know what's in your inbox.

I believe the technology for that. I blame the technology for that versus the actual sales reps. I think it's just laziness and you're leveraging the technology to load up your spam cannon and hit send.

So I also think that when you go back to what you said about talking to enticing scientists, I actually think sometimes we've been in sales too long and we try to do it the wrong way. So we talk about money and work life. But if you're actually a scientist, that isn't necessarily what drives you or you wouldn't be a scientist. Let's face it, if you're clever enough to be a scientist, you could have been a lawyer or whatever, and if money was your driver. But I actually think that what people don't realize and what I didn't realize when I fell into this career is how much enjoyment and how much science I'll stay in touch with and how I get to help not just my lab but multiple labs like get through their research and get better results. And that's what should be your driver. And it's part of why we started succession is that we want these great technologies to actually find it into the hands of customers. And when you, if you start to pitch like that to your internal scientists about solving problems, driving the science, driving other people's science for your knowledge and you're going to make some money and have work life balance, I think that's probably going to help you convince.

And I think it's like it's so related to this idea of like even if there's not like the icky salesperson. We talked about top down quotas and stuff before too. Right. Like I think that if the organization is. If you're sort of being driven with like goals and quotas or like around like activity or certain talking points like if, if the sales or the commercial org is like making you say stuff or encouraging you to like follow up or chase people that aren't an opportunity then like that's the key. Right. And so I think it's like you, that only works. But you have to demonstrate if you're trying to hire that type of talent, which I think we would all advocate is like what most of these organizations should be doing then like you need to project ads that you will rely on and defer to that person's sort of internal wisdom of how to relate to their peers and how they'd like to buy. And so like if they are qualifying an opportunity appropriately and someone's not interested, like give them the deference to allow them to leave that person alone and move on to something else. Right. As opposed to like expecting them to chase down a lead that's not a lead because then it's like that's where they think like this is salesy, I don't want this and bow out. So you have to have that alignment of like the sales rep with the culture that they're being fed into.

They'd be chasing down reps, asking them why this deal didn't close when you had it in zero percent probability as a follow up. And now why did this not close? Like it's been two weeks gone by. I thought this was a thing.

But our up. But our hockey stickrat are up and to the right. We said it was going to go up and to the right. So can you close that deal?

Yeah, yeah. There's a lot. It's like when you go into Excel and you just, like, drag the bar all the way to the right. Yeah, it's like 30% growth each quarter. Right. It's like more lies have been told in Excel than in Microsoft Word. That's where all the projections come from. Cool. So we're actually a little over on time, but, you know, this has been a great conversation, Max, so thank you. You know, maybe since we just kind of talked about some icky stuff that sales reps may or may not do, what would you say is something that sales reps should stop doing?

Honestly, the root of most issues, I find, is stop wanting it so much. You can't want to sell someone something more than they want to solve their problem.

Problem.

Right. And. And usually your desire to sell something has no impact or a negative impact on that person's actual propensity to buy that thing.

Right.

And so, like, just finding that. And this work usually happens outside of work. It's just like sort of your life and your perspective and your mental health and, like, are you, like, can. Can you be someone who's okay with rejection and hearing no and walking away and stop pushing on people?

Well, it's interesting you say this, because I've talked to a couple people recently, and it's like, hey, what's the purpose of the call? Or what's the purpose of the meeting that you're going to go into? Well, I want to tell them about this, or I want to. I want to show them about this capability. Or it's like, I want to convince them to try and buy this product. And it's like, you shouldn't be thinking about convincing. You shouldn't be thinking about telling. You should be thinking about asking questions, uncovering challenges to determine if potentially you might have the solution that could solve their problem. This guy, Josh Braun, talks about, like, detach from the outcome. And I, like, I just love that. It's like, think. Focus on the things that you can control. Detach from the outcome, and, like, more things are going to come to you.

And, like, could and would and maybe and maybe we might be able to help you. And also, like, being more mindful of that and how you come across when you say, like, it's like, oh, we could definitely help you, or we'd love to help you. I also just like, people talking about how much they love to do stuff is just so weird to me because it doesn't happen outside of a sales context.

Right.

It's like, hey, let's see if potentially we might be able to help you it's like, it's these. Those nuances. And I think also help project sort of an air of trust building because you're not being pushy.

We often start a call by talking about whether we think this is going to be a good fit for both parties because there's no point. Even if you really, really want to work with us, if we don't think we're a good fit and we're not going to help you move forward, then we shouldn't want to work with you as well, regardless of targets. Um, and I think that's how you should approach any sales call. Right.

Just on that. Like, I'll often just tell people and coach clients on this is just like, hey, oh, we have 30 minutes today. Like, I have some questions for you, some questions for me. Our goal ultimately is to decide if it makes sense to keep talking or not. Like, and that's cool either way. Right? That's all we're here to do. Does it make sense to conti. To have another conversation? That's it. That's what we're trying to do here. And if you just frame it in that it just takes so much. You're not trying to sell. This isn't a referendum on whether they're going to buy your product right now. That's. It's just about. Should we keep talking?

Yeah, yeah.

100%.

Like a first date.

Right? You're just trying to. You're just trying to find out if it's worth going on a second date. And sometimes that first date comes in your first day at work when you're going out to lunch with your mentor.

Exactly right. You know, full circle.

To extrapolate from that, I have a foolproof way of being better at rejection and criticism. Get married. Get lots of practice. Lots and lots of practice are being told your ways the wrong way. And this is not. I'm sure all kinds of marriages is the same. Live with someone long enough, you get criticized.

Oh, that's good.

I will.

On that note, thanks so much for coming on the show. Really appreciate it. And, yeah, we'll talk soon.

Cheers. Max La.