Silent Struggles: How Sales Leaders Can Strengthen Their Teams

Hello everyone, uh, welcome. This is Suresh Madhuvarsu here, co-founder and CEO of SalesTable, and I'm really glad that you all joined today for this very important conversation, by the way, because today we're not just talking about the sales productivity or pipeline acceleration, but we are talking about what's underneath all of this, by the way, the emotional fatigue and the experience of selling. And that's really what is important. And the role of sales leaders is actually reshaping that whole angle. At SalesTable, we've always believed in the numbers actually tell you a story, but not the full story, right? You know, that's really the big aspect of it. Behind every quota, every dashboard, every closed deal, there is a human that is navigating pressure, performance expectations, and more increasingly burnout. We see it every day. Reps doing all the activity but losing belief. Managers caught between metrics and morale. And deals that are stalled not because of lack of strategy, but because emotional fatigue. And that's really why we are hosting this session, to help sales leaders like yourself not to just lead with metrics, but with meaning. The shift from reactive firefighting to proactive coaching, really. And today I'm thrilled to be joined by someone who doesn't just understand the sales and tactical standpoint, but from a human one. Deepak Bhutra is a renowned sales coach, behavioral science advocate, and founder of Jabulani Consulting. He's worked with organizations around the world to help leaders shift from managing reps to enabling human potential. Deepak, thank you for being here and bringing your voice and expertise into the space.

Absolutely, absolutely. So, Suresh, thank you for that. In fact, as you were talking, I was wondering who is he talking about. It was so good, sir. If it's about me, I'm very grateful. I'm humbled to be here. Uh, I am enjoying my professional experience, but today's topic is actually a very personal one, Suresh. I have been a salesperson. I have gone through burnout twice in my own career, and I've actually realized that when salespeople are burning out, it's not because they lack skills. But it's because someone in leadership did not pause to ask how they were actually doing. And I think that's very important. So I'm going to talk today on not just pipeline reviews, but on shifting how you listen, how you coach, and how you build trust. This conversation, in my opinion, is overdue, maybe by a couple of decades, to be honest with you, Suresh. So I really want to make sure that we have every sales leader on this call leaning in to listen in very carefully. I'm very excited to be here.

So, Suresh, all yours.

All over to you. Let's get going, sir.

Absolutely.

So, Suresh, I'm gonna talk about, you know, this slide as a preamble to what's gonna come, right? There's a very simple truth. In most organizations, sales performance is very easy to track. There are charts all over the place, right? There are incredible systems, multimillion-dollar CRM systems that will monitor your activity, They will look at your forecast. They're going to look at your conversion rates. The only thing they don't do is look at the salesperson's pulse. No one is going to put a finger there and say, okay, is this guy still alive or not? Because we have every system, but we don't have that system. So visibility is awesome. But to be honest, I think it's incomplete. Performance is visible, but wellbeing is not. And I think that's a gap that's quietly hurting a lot of teams out there. When we talk about activity, right, we have dashboards. I get alerts, closed one, There's so much going on, but what's really going on is that there's a layer of struggle, and that's unseen. And I think that's unforgivable. Stress is something that we don't talk about, right? Well-being is something that it's okay, I get it. After all, and I've been told this to my face by a lot of people, why are you worried? Why are you so worried about salespeople? Don't they make a lot of money? And that's actually a very frightening response to it if you think about it, right? Just because you pay someone doesn't mean that you can flog someone or, you know, go to make them go through the slog. At the end of the day, there's a human layer to it. And post-COVID-19, I've actually seen a lot of things changing. The topics and conversations really need to progress. Whatever stigma was involved needs to be shed aside. So let's stop second-guessing. Let's stop allowing salespeople to question their value. Let's look at their belief system, right? So my request is to look at what's happening. On the surface, you look at performance and you see it, but there's this iceberg, and underneath that is actually serious issues around stress, around agony. And that's where the conversation needs to change. We need to actually respond with a very different feel and look as to what sales leadership coaching looks like going forward. So that's what I'm going to focus on as we move through this presentation. I'm ready to move to the next slide, Suresh, if you are. So, Suresh, we are going to touch upon 5 big buckets in today's conversation, right? So the time we're going to spend together is going to start off with the emotional reality of selling today, right? There are a lot of things that are going on. There's an emotional cost to sales teams. We're going to talk about that. We then move on quickly to talk about some of the warning signs. You know, it's really funny. People ask me, I don't like talking about mental health. So I ask a simple question. Do you ask people, how are you today? That's a good question to start with. And believe it or not, underneath that question is actually a question about mental health. If you think about it, it's just that we have given mental health this huge you know, crown. We made it into royalty. It's not. It's actually simple. If there's one thing that actually unifies all of humans on the planet is the fact that we actually have senses that actually make us problematic, right? And that we recognize that in each other. So we're going to move then from talking about how does a sales leader become emotionally fluent, and I used it about how do you change the game, and we're going to talk about that a bit more. Then, Suresh, we're going to have you talking about how SalesTable actually integrates this entire thought process and actually gives the sales leader the tool that he may have been missing till now to coordinate this entire effort. Otherwise, it remains what we call touchy-feely, right? Now, and then of course, we're going to pivot off. You cannot have a session where we talk about some very smart tactical things that sales leaders can immediately apply to get some low-hanging fruit, right? And we're going to get into that as well.

Absolutely.

Suresh, I'm ready to move on unless you have a question.

Go ahead. Go ahead. Absolutely. One of the things that I'm really excited about, Deepak, is A lot of discussions that we have around, either they're too strategic where people really talk about the 10,000-foot level, or they're very execution-level oriented. But I'm really excited on how we've been planning to really discuss with other sales leaders as to say, not just focus about the strategy, but really bring those realities through execution. And that, that's really where I'm super excited for today, Deepak.

Yes. And, and, and, you know, as you say that, I wanna just give a message to everyone on the call. We are not here to say that, hey, Sales Table is going to replace you, the human leader. That's not the purpose of this conversation. What we are saying is that everyone talks about artificial intelligence, and just for one second, just humor me, everyone. There's nothing artificial about artificial intelligence. Whatever it's built on is built on human intelligence that's been interpreted by an engine, right? I am asking salespeople and sales leaders to look at artificial intelligence as a way to create augmented intelligence for salespeople. What that does, it actually changes the entire thought process. Artificial intelligence is just a means to an end. At the end of the day, in B2B sales, your salesperson owns the relationship. He still owns the integrity of what's gonna happen there, right? We have a tremendous opportunity now to say that, hey, how can we augment the way in which sales leaders are coaching and guiding this while also leveraging all the technological capabilities now given to us by how rapidly things have changed. Now, I am very passionate about this topic because, Suresh, there's a big difference. You know, 20, 30, 40 years ago, people thought Excel was a big thing. Excel has now become a complex monster, right? But the fundamentals are still there. And what is interesting about Excel is that you can start off with a very low level, but then it gets very big in complexity.

Yeah.

What Excel did in 20 years is what I'm seeing happening in 20 months. Where I was with AI just 2 years ago and where I am today is like crazy. It is absolutely crazy. So to any person out there who looks at AI as a threat, I look at this as a, what I call, the biggest democratizer on the planet right now. It took people who did not, who needed to know coding, and has given power to the voiceless, power to the people. And that, with that power comes tremendous responsibility on how we use it to our betterment, right? And that's what we're gonna focus on as we talk about this conversation.

Absolutely. I'm really excited, by the way.

Yes, sir. Absolutely. So this is really interesting. What is happening with sales? So I'm gonna throw some data at you, right? And I'm very, very confident, Suresh, that many people on this call have heard this data before, but the context of the data is what matters, right? Telling someone that he looks a bit fat or a bit big is okay, but when you start looking at preciseness, that's when you actually realize that there may be some underlying conditions that are forcing that type of a visual aspect to that person, right? So 90% of salespeople have, on questionnaires, responded to certain criteria in such a way that it looks like burnout, right? 90%. That's a massive number, Suresh. And if you tell people that 90% is some number, that tells you there's a majority of people out there who have an issue.

Yeah.

We gotta think about that right now. Nilesh, sorry, Suresh, you gotta move to the next point, which is, believe it or not, there is multiple research, and I've actually taken the lowest number. the lowest number, 35% is the turnover rate in sales within 2 years, typically starting. Most 35% of salespeople in B2B sales will exit the organization. I have research also that says it's 57%. Now that's a massive range, right? So whether it's 35, whether it's 55, I, I still— my point is it's still too high, right? Let's factor that in here. Then you have another interesting thing that's coming out from research also, is that at any given time, 28% of B2B sales sellers are actually standing up and saying with pride I'm not going to make my number. Now, I am not going to argue that maybe the goal setting was incorrect. I'm not going to get into that debate, but that's a problem. That number actually doubles, Suresh, if you actually look at how many quarters are you going to miss. 2 out of 4 quarters missing is nearly 50%, if not higher. But these are numbers that make you wonder what exactly is going on, right? This is a credibility gap. This is a huge mind shift breakdown, in my opinion. So we have a lot of activity We have a lot of sales activities. We have a lot of people trying to catch up with AI strategy in terms of how to do emails, how to talk to, how to do cold calls. We have textbooks and textbooks and textbooks on technique. And what we're missing is, if we recognize this, then isn't something needed differently than just techniques? And that's what this is all about. So we're doing a lot of performative selling, Suresh. Yeah. But what we really need to do is we really need to get into the emotional connect Behind the mission of what is actually going on. And that's what I'm gonna focus on. So selling is no more tactical. It's not. I'm actually sitting on certain calls where I'm actually helping sales leaders do the coaching. And I can tell you, 9 out of 10 salespeople are still talking— sales leaders are still talking language from the '80s and '90s. It is still all about pipeline. It's still about what's at risk, which deal are you gonna replace, how are you gonna do this, how are you gonna do that, or listening in on calls. And I'm saying, that's interesting. Why are you on calls listening in when you actually got AI that can actually listen in and give you far more data and insights than you possibly can? Do you have the time to listen to 25 hours of transcripts of calls every week? If you do, then you should not be a sales leader. You should be a sales operations lead sitting there doing analysis. Why are you carrying a target? That's the type of things we need to change.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So Deepak, one thing that I was kind of very curious based on what you were discussing is the recent Pavilion report that we got really says only 15% of reps actually even touched the quota in the last couple of years. Especially that is true for the Q1, and then I think probably in the next 1 month or so we will see what is Q2 going to be. But the challenge that we're really highlighting is whether the initial goals itself, whether they are true or not, is a separate thing. But this is actually causing a lot of agony with sales reps as well as the sales management, because now there is very disconnected frustration that everybody is going through. Is that what you're seeing, Deepak, as well?

Suresh, it's actually worse than that. Let me tell you what's happening though, is that the old techniques where you had the carrot or the stick, yeah, right, those techniques are going to fail right now. Because what is happening is that you have complexity upon complexity, you have a different economic environment, you actually have behavioral change. There is ample research. Things have happened in the last 4 years that have actually shifted the salesperson's perception of what they will tolerate going forward. I am— so I'll give you an example. I just had a conversation with a salesperson who has just got an offer at about the $300K mark OTE. And the reason— there's a reason why I'm mentioning that number, because at that number, Suresh, you assume that this person is very well respected, has harnessed talent, he's very smart. No one would want to lose him, right? But this is the conversation that his sales leader had with him. Hey, you're at 93%. What's up? That's not going to work. One more 93% and next quarter we're going to have a discussion on this. This guy is calling me to tell me, hey, Mr. Coach, I have a question for you. Instead of asking me, how can I help you make not just 7% more, but 17% more? Why am I getting this stick? Because that stick used to work in the old days. This guy is calling me and saying that, you know what, I am okay to leave an organization after a year. I'll go find someone else. And that's what blowing my mind, Suresh. That is the mind shift that I'm giving caution to. Please be aware, guys, you're moving into an economy which is based upon gig behavior, as I call it. People will move and migrate as much as they please. You look at fractional leadership, and fractional leadership has opened up tremendous opportunities out there, right? People are looking at careers in a very different way. So I, I do concede that at the end of the day, you know, money makes a difference, right? Spiffs do matter. Absolutely they do. If you want behavior, you need to then give programs or remuneration that encourages that right behavior. That is still the approach you can take. But that approach used to work 100% of the time, is now only working 70% of the time. The question is, what's going to happen to the remaining 30%? And if you're going to double down on the 70% tactics, your 30% is going to become 50%. So this is that catch-22 scenario that I'm talking about, hence why this presentation becomes so relevant. Suresh, back to you, sir.

Yeah.

So, Suresh, this is so interesting, right? A lot of people ask me, Deepak, what's quiet quitting? Let me tell you what's quiet quitting. Quiet quitting is when a salesperson calls his coach to say that I'm upset because my boss just told me that I'm at 93%. If I do one more quarter like that, He's going to put me on a PIP. At 93%, you're going to put someone on a PIP. This is an amazing point to make. What's happening is that that individual is actually preparing his resume, and what is going to happen is that he's going to switch off. He was actually telling me that he is actually dialing down into calling in some of the calls because what's the point of doing all that with all this nonsense? I can work as hard as I want. I can join all the calls as much as I can. I don't want to do performative stage management anymore, Deepak. Whoa, whoa, whoa, what's going on here? Because I was raised in sales. You're gonna smoke cigarettes, blow them in people's face, you're gonna say whatever you want because you're a salesperson, you command the room. Well, that changed. That worked 2 decades ago. Then we quickly got to a point where people stopped smoking in each other's faces, right, Suresh? We changed our attitude and our behavior. Then we got into other things that you will talk to people in a certain way, you will not talk to people in a certain way. We changed. And this is now the next inflection. That next inflection is you've got to change the way that you've been approaching sales coaching, ladies and gentlemen. Now, people may not resign, but they've started doing certain activities. They're logging in a lot of activity. CRM is blazing. But look very carefully as to what are they writing in CRM. It's like, you know, you go to ChatGPT, Suresh, and you write to ChatGPT, hey, analyze my resume and tell me how to improve it. It throws back to you 300 lines. You take that 300 lines and you drop it into your CRM and say, hey, look, This is the update I've got. I've done some research on my customer. This is their buying behavior. This is what's going to happen. Now, when you take that information, actually realize that 300 lines is awesome, but only 70 lines mattered. What are we doing here? It's the same thing with CRM. You need to actually dig in and see, is it relevant what's being put in there? Team meetings. Here's a simple indicator as to when someone is disenchanted. Their cameras will be off. They're going to sit there actually literally Looking at their nails or looking at the sky. I kid you not, Suresh. I've done a lot of analysis. I've looked at calls as well, and really strikes me as to what's going happening. And here comes the best part: they either ignored or someone says, "Yeah, fine. He's in a bad mood." Well, why is he in a bad mood? What's going on? Yeah, because if you have this on a what I call chronic level, then you're gonna have a problem, right? So a lot of other things that happen: you will actually see people doing a lot of performance theater. Oh, I'm busy. I'm this. you busy at though? Because they're busy at noise. They're not busy at the right thing. So there are 20 things that a salesperson can do. But you and I know, Suresh, that there are only 4 things that are going to move them 80% of the time to get to the quota. And if they are not, if they're doing 20 things, but they're not doing the right proportion on those 4, you have a problem. Track that. Look at it very, very carefully. So it, to be honest with you, our job as leaders is to look for that emotional absence and try to make sense of it. And that emotional absence comes in many ways. The problem is that most leaders are busy measuring what's visible. They're not inquiring as to what is going on with all this quietness, restlessness, right? So the tone, the questions need to change. And that's what we're going to talk about as we move on, Suresh. We're going to talk about what needs to happen.

Gotcha. So this brings in an important topic that we keep talking to, we mean, a lot of sales leaders as well, which is everybody is doing the checkboxes. Hey, did you send a follow-up email? Yes, I did. Did you update the CRM? Yes, I did. But then are you doing it with that enthusiasm, that level of belief in the product and the company, and then what you are creating the value? I think that is really where a lot of leaders are saying that they are missing as part of their team. Some are really good at recognizing that because they want to fix, and some, they don't even know that problem exists or they don't even acknowledge. And that, I feel, is the major challenge for any leader to actually create that pathway for revenue growth, especially in 2025.

Suresh, I'm going to give you a hint and I'm going to actually ask the audience to listen very carefully when you talk about sales table. When I talk to sales leaders, they tell me, I hear you, Deepak, but what does that all mean? I just do not have the time to listen to 10 calls, listen to 10 CRMs, and read every line in there. And my response is pretty simple. That's not what I'm saying. That's not what I'm saying. I don't need you to read everything. I need you to understand there are ways to decipher. Now, if you need someone to read something, hey, guess what?

It's a—

there's this little thing going on right now called AI, Suresh. I've heard it's being embedded in a lot of tools, right? If I am looking at call analysis, I mean, we have companies like Gong who've been at this for more than a decade now, right?

Exactly.

They've been at it. They've actually given so much to the world. It's amazing. We now have at least 10 platforms or 10 opportunities out there. And by the way, like I said, power to the people. I, in my own practice in coaching, I'm using AI on a daily cadence. I actually go through 2, 3 different platforms. When I'm on a call, Suresh, I actually have 2 or 3 different recorders coming into the meeting. Because I am actually saying, hey, I'm okay to pay 20 times 3, but the value I get is 5x. And that value is what I'm asking sales leaders to do, is that how do you take away some of this grunt work, right? Outsource it. But then what you get back, and if you can actually train your AI to actually understand your style and what you're looking for, you can actually get a great perspective. Today, as a salesperson, sometimes I'm with customers, I actually have tools that actually are on the screen telling me, hello, you've been talking for 1 minute 50 seconds, Deepak.

Please stop. Exactly.

It's there. It's absolutely there. Now, there's one thing I'd want to call out, Suresh, in the interest of time, because I really make sure that we cover everything that we want to talk about, right? Is I— the audience is there. Hey guys, please put questions into the chat. Ladies and gentlemen, we are at your service. If there's something that's top of your mind and you want us to look at it, talk about it, put it in there. Give me some time to think about it also, because I'm good, but I'm not that good. And by the way, any question, comment that comes in, if Suresh and I cannot in the interest of time get to it, more than happy to have a commentary or a discussion on the LinkedIn event comments at the bottom. So feel free to write a thesis, ask Suresh and me anything you want to do. Suresh is at your service. I'm at your service. So our relationship doesn't end in the next, let's say, 38 minutes, right, Suresh? It's something that we'll carry on doing for you guys. So Suresh, I'm okay to move on to the next slide if you're okay, sir.

Yeah. And to add to that, Deepak, we actually have a surprise white paper for folks to download soon after this one. So Stay tuned and we will give you the link and everything just so you can actually go back and implement whatever we talked about during this discussion, by the way. So to keep on the discussion—

This slide is just to keep the pain going on, right? So when we talk about science, there's always an impact to it, right? These numbers, I would say at the lower end, because at the end of the day, my own maths tells me that for if you're paying someone X, you're gonna at least lose 2X when that momentum is lost. So you're looking at $100K to $300K worth of impact to your bottom, to your OpEx or to your structure. This is, and to be honest with you, this is just the direct cost. Suresh, there's also so much indirect cost that happened. Let me talk about this indirect cost. When silence becomes survival, you'll be surprised that a lot of people in a group, and I've realized one thing, misery loves company, Suresh. Misery loves company. When you have people that are miserable, you can have lots of intervention. You can talk about productivity. But everything you're doing is reactive. It's now culturally toxic. You're going to have people at a water fountain talking about how bad they feel. And let me give you a little hint here, guys. Every day you wake up and you read something about tariffs, you read something about prices going up. Here's the fun part, right? We can tend to predict, predict, predict misery, and then ultimately misery arrives and we're like, we predicted it. You actually accelerated it because you kept talking about it when we could have stepped back and actually asked ourselves a simple question. If this is happening, what exactly is the impact to my business? And we just spreading instead of positivity on how we're going to react, we are more reacting to the negativity. And all that happens is this loop. Forecast, you're going to actually realize that what was an invisible disengagement has actually gone into your forecast. You're going to see the numbers start to fluctuate badly. Your predictability is gone. And here's the message to the sales leaders on this call, on this call, Suresh, whether you like it or not. Sales leaders, you are sales leaders because you have inherited an uncomfortable throne. You were exceptional at what you did. Someone said that we'd like to give you an opportunity to make other people exceptional. And in that process, you really need to understand whether you're human or inhuman or subhuman or par-human. I don't know. What I do know is sales leaders have the biggest burden on the planet. Not only do they have to look up and give a strategic input into where the numbers are going to end up, but they also need to look down and manage this ambition. this team, half of the team goes in one direction. To me, the other half goes in another direction. To me, this means one simple thing, Suresh. You actually have a scenario where there's immense overload emotionally on a salesperson, sales leader. He doesn't acknowledge it because guess what? He cannot walk up to someone and say that, ah, ah, the unbearable lightness of beating up, you know, getting beaten up in sales. No one wants to listen to you because everyone is looking at the fact that you're driving a shiny Mercedes-Benz and you're earning more than the rest of the people. And that is an absolute pity. I've always said this to people. Sales is a noble profession. I am proud of the fact that salespeople are some of the biggest earners on the planet because what's the other alternative? No one sells and you are— we are all doing what? Bartering back, back to the dark ages, I guess, right, Suresh? So, Suresh, we can move on to the next slide. I just want to keep the momentum going on this topic.

So the one, the one quick thing that I want to talk about is over here, uh, what you put in over there as the financial impact is one thing. Even a lot of sales leaders don't even acknowledge, by the way, forget about even that exists. Because it's very easy to say, if my sales reps don't perform, I'll just fire them and then hire somebody new. And but again, that works for in some scenarios for sure. But that is not a way to deal with because now we are getting into the cultural toxicity, and then people working in fear, and then they don't want to commit failures. And then that is not a culture where people want to work for more time. That is why whenever we now tie it back to the 35% churn that we are talking about, Deepak, it is clear, right? It is very evident why people are churning out because on one level we need to give these reps— I mean, it doesn't really matter, SDR, BDR, AE, and whoever is there.

Right.

But it's really about how much of support can leaders give to these people who are actually doing the real work out there. And that's really what a lot of times we miss. on the sales leadership side. And that's really, uh, grateful that you are talking about that now.

Sure, absolutely, 100%, sir. You had me at hello. So, Suresh, this slide, I'm gonna quickly just talk about a couple of things here. So what is happening is that we have all these issues, we get it. I also don't want the sales leaders on this call to think that I'm throwing them under a bus. I am not. I'm simply acknowledging the challenges you face. Right? So when we talk about emotional fluency, right, we need to start talking less about the problem and move more towards the possibilities. So let's do that for a second here. Right now, emotional intelligence, in my opinion, is actually a big buzzword. Everyone talks about emotional intelligence. I'm like, just stop. It's about fluency. Fluency for a sales leader is simple: reading emotional signals, responding with presence, and coaching not just about performance but state of mind. Right. So you sales leaders on this call, right, most of them are being told, hey, I'd like you to forecast with precision. I need you to coach on technique, make sure that the guy is making 20 cold calls every day, stuff like that, right? I need you to onboard new reps at the same time because guess what? 35% of the guys keep leaving every year, right? So you're constantly onboarding new reps. We have a problem. Oh, at the same time, by the way, HR says, Mr. Sales Leader, the engagement in your team is very low. They don't come to any of the internal calls. They don't go to other safety meetings and stuff because they're always selling, they're always outside. I need that also to happen. Wow. That's interesting, isn't it? Do we pay salespeople to stay in the office or do we pay salespeople to be outside of the office? It's one of those perennial conversations that you can have, right? And you gotta retain talent. That's the reality that you're working in right now. On top of this, understand, and this is something that I'm trying to explain to people and I don't think people are getting it. Maybe we have forgotten what happened in COVID. When you lead teams that are now maybe remote, hybrid, or globally distributed, you now have more emotional fatigue that you brought into the mix. Your leadership role is even more complex than it was ever. You're now trying to build relationships because you've got this entire structure that has changed overnight. What used to be labor arbitrage is actually now emotional arbitrage. You have moved jobs overseas, you've, you've brought technology into the fore, but we're still trying to work with the industrial age. And that's the one I just call that one out right now. What is the gap we need to close? The gap that we need to close is that we need leadership to be in reflective states, right?

Yeah.

We also need to make sure that those leaders are telling their salespeople, hey, how do I help you go from being reactive to reflective? Means think about what's going on. You need to understand how to decode the silence. It's very important, guys. Personal coaching— coach the person, not the problem. I see that you're at 93%. How do I beat you up so that you can get that extra 7%? No, no, stop. I see you're at 93%. Tell me what's going on. How can I help you to get to the 7%? Same point, same ask, but just the tone, tonality, and pitch is very different. Pattern recognition. This is very, very, very important, right? Understand the silence, decode it, understand what's happening there. You know, look at energy drop-offs in meetings. I say that to people a lot. Now again, people tell me, Deepak, that's not my job. I'm a sales leader, right? I have to— I'm a number. The problem is that leadership is an attribute which is given to you. You have been actually given what I call a— what's the right word, Suresh? You're now something different, right? You actually earn the right to be called a leader. And one of the things that people get wrong is that they think a leader is not a manager when a leader is something unique. And my answer is as follows: a leader is as good as his followers. Your followers make you the leader that you are.

Yeah.

So please stop. If you look at religion also, Suresh, right? At the end of the day, immense pain, immense sacrifice, a message is created, and you have followers that take this message onwards. And that's the— that, that is the relationship, right? The North Star is not the leader, it's the followers that have given you the privilege of being a leader. The word I was looking for earlier was privilege. You have earned— you are privileged individual as a sales leader. So let's act and behave like we are there, right? So, uh, I'm okay to move on, Suresh. Then we're gonna, you know, I think I'm gonna hand over to you, sir, to talk about the tool a bit further, right?

Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks, Deepak. I mean, let's just bring this conversation from the strategic understanding the pain points, and then how do we bring all this together in a much more execution-oriented way for our teams that we are working with? And before I jump in, one of the things that we've seen talking to 400+ sales leaders in the last 2 years is there are common patterns, right? Which is, Every sales leader has a challenge on how to help the teams. That's there across, that's universal. Number 2 is really how do we really make sure sales reps are performing in a much better fashion without really getting onto the 35%? And then there is actually one of the customers that we were talking to, they have 85% churn rate. Deepak, can you believe it? I mean, they are in the constant mode of they bring in people, they train, they stay there for 6 months. If they stay for 6 months, that's a good ROI for them, by the way, for that particular sales team. Then on the top of it, now we are seeing this emotional drain and the economy and post-COVID stress that people are going through. It's very easy for somebody to say, hey, that's all normal. We've seen these cycles and whatnot. But for the sales teams that are going through, for the sales leaders who have to carry the quota for the management team, it's not easy. That's exactly really where we said we have these lot of traditional tools that are siloed, that really talks about either the coaching in one level or performance management in one level, but then how do you really bring everything together? And I think, you know, that's really where we wanted to make sure that we bring everything together. So without further, what Sales Table really brings together is how do we really ramp reps faster? Structured onboarding, role plays, coaching to cut ramp time and boost quota attainment. That's really the one area that we focus very strongly, followed by the rep performance is only as good as— we need to have the data, we need to understand what reps are doing. That's really where we think about the real-time activity management. What this really means is not to track somebody per se, but what is the right amount of activity that we need to do to get to our goals? That's really where we backtrack from the goal and say, this is the right activity for the sales rep to do. Then everything needs to come back together with the right coaching and guidance from either their sales enablement teams or the sales management. Because at the end of the day, without the best practices that are being shared or AI-driven coaching, none of this is possible at a scale. If you have 1 or 2 salespeople, maybe you are able to do it. But let's think of it as if you have 20 salespeople, 100 salespeople, 200 salespeople. I'm sure, Deepak, you worked in organizations where 300,000, 500,000 salespeople exist. Now the question really becomes, how do you coach at scale and making sure that every day they are getting the right help. And that's really where, as the last point, where we say it is really about practice, perfect, perform, right? Because at the end of the day, I was just on a previous webinar, by the way, Deepak from SaaStr, Jason was talking about it. A lot of sales reps, when they go into the calls, they're like, you know what, I don't know about that. Let me come back. I don't know about this. Let me come back. And then that comeback really frustrates a lot of prospects who are out there. So that's really where this last point for us, which is practice about all the objections that happen over a call or a discussion, the role plays that you have to really work with just before the call so that you are much more confident when you go in front of the customer. That's really where we brought everything together. SalesTable is that one all-in-one platform that helps you ramp faster, track smarter, and coach better. That's really what we have brought in together. To move on, let's really dig something deeper as to really see There are, yes, there are these human signals, but we are not talking about sentiment scoring or vague mood metrics, right? We are really talking about very trackable behavior patterns that sales managers would otherwise miss, or it takes too much time for them to really understand. So let's kind of, you know, dig through some of them. For example, the daily funnel check-ins. Catch the real risk early on before the CRM actually shows anything. Sales reps log quickly the daily updates so that managers can see slow-moving deals or the activity gaps so that I can actually help my reps on how to take care of those. And now think about the training and the skill gaps. For example, when you are executing on a deal, You go to discovery calls, things do move forward, or you go to the demo calls and the things don't move forward. That basically gives us some behavioral aspects of it, because if I go into a discovery call and things didn't really move forward, that basically says 2 things. Did I ask the right set of questions during the discovery calls? Did I provide the right value during the discovery calls? Discovery calls. Those are the questions that we need to ask and then provide that guidance right then and there. Number 2, let's say somebody goes to the demo calls and things don't move forward, then the question that we behaviorally bring it out is, are we providing the right demo to the customer?

Yeah.

Once you bring that up, These are the kind of things that we want to really understand, skill gaps.

Right.

So again, we can go on and on. But the most important thing for us is, how is the entire team really bringing in, how are they with each other in terms of lessons learned, best practices, updates, and wins? That's going to be the real important At the end of the day, Deepak, I'm sure you would have seen it's not just telling about what happened. We need to know who is paying attention, what they are paying attention to. That's exactly the place where we want to make sure Sales Table is actually bringing those early signs in general.

Correct, Suresh.

And to move on from there, where we really think there is a, a lot of broader leadership value that SalesTable can bring to this ecosystem is because everything we have talked about so far, it's really about the behavior signaling and tracking the emotions at the end of the day, right? And it's transformational when embed your daily rhythm. And that's exactly where we measure these benefits on every single aspect of it. Because clearly, uh, every sales, uh, leader that we work with, they ask us a few things. What are the KPIs? What should I really measure the success of Sales Table on? And that's really where we say, for example, faster ramp time. Why is that Most companies take about 5 to 6 months to fully ramp up a new sales hire. And with SalesTable, you cut that down significantly to the extent of even 50 to 60% with our existing customers. And that's a promise that we have made to our customers. Reps get the structured onboarding daily practice through role plays and the skill assessments, of course, is a big deal because you want to retain the knowledge that you have That really means that they are selling faster, they are building the confidence much earlier with their customers, and leading to high ROI in terms of whether the revenue growth or existing customers that you want to really keep. That's really where we want to really think about the ramp times. But the one thing that I want to highlight over Yeah. What I want to talk about here is what does it really mean by higher quota attainment? Because that's something that every sales leader and the rep really grapples with. And when you combine the faster onboarding, real-time coaching, and the daily skill building, that really brings in all the numbers together. Because think about this, if I'm going to a call with a VP of sales pharma tomorrow and I want to understand how I can purpose my solution to this particular VP of Sales, I need to know how I should pitch. I need to know what are the challenges of the pharma industry that I want to talk about. All that real-time pre-call preparation is actually done using Sales Table. Not only that, Let's say the customer that you are talking to, they are probably brash, they don't have time, they are very distracting during the calls. If that is the customer that you are approaching, let's say you are actually able to have a role play with such a persona and SalesTable actually accommodates that in real time so that when you go in front of that prospect or a customer tomorrow, you know exactly what kind of challenges that you may be facing. You've already talked about it, you know what to say, and that's the kind of confidence that we build at the end of the day using Sales enablement. So for us, it's really about accelerate clarity in your coaching and creating this emotional safety in your one-on-ones and make the better leadership decisions backed by insight and not just with instinct. That's really where we want to bring the data together. I think, Deepak, going back to your initial example, we want to provide that data, but also the behavior so that it's not that I want to give the feedback at the end of the quarter, which is 90 days are already done, But if I need to do something today, I want that feedback today. I mean, with the sales table, we actually work on a lot of use cases that are driven by our customers, that are demanded by our customers, and especially the ones that I want to focus on is, remote sales onboarding, remote sales upskilling has become such a big deal for everyone because now all the companies have become remote/hybrid organizations. When we think about the sales kickoffs, when we think about the topics that we need to product trainings and everything, now no more companies have the luxury of bringing people in. And they need to really find ways to make sure salespeople are doing the right things from the product and the services point of view. That's exactly where we want to make sure using our sales table, you do the right things from the team management aspect of it, team readiness aspect of it. Most importantly, the one use case that we've seen pretty regularly, which we haven't talked about, by the way, Deepak, is really about the partner enablement because—

The channel side of things.

We bring in a lot of partners. It is very easy to say I have 20 partners, I have 100 partners, but the essential question that we need to ask is how many of them are really bringing you the revenue? How many of them are really helping you with the pipeline? That happens for several reasons. One of the reasons that we realized with our customers is when we bring in partners, we don't onboard them, we don't train them. We just throw out some PowerPoints or docs and then we expect them to actually go and sell for us, and that's not the case anymore. more. So that, that's really where we feel pretty strong about the capabilities and the behaviors that we bring out of Sales Table. Again, um, Deepak, you talked about a lot of AI, and for us, yeah, it is really embedded across Sales Table, whether it is about the role plays, whether it is about the sales manager who is a virtual assistant, uh, kind of chatbot for us, it is there to help sales reps 24/7 so that even if sales manager is not available, then you always have help that you need to go and really be confident at that point of time.

Yep.

So I would probably give it back, Deepak, on the next session.

Yeah, absolutely, sir. So, Suresh, that was a great conversation. And I think the reality is that when we talk about these topics, right, people always ask me a simple question. I get it. They sound very touchy-feely. And what we're saying is actually that you take the touchy-feely and actually give it form by talking about SalesTable, a product or a technology, or I would say an infrastructure, a process actually, if you think about it, right? That allows you to now take all these things that we've spoken about and give shape to it, right? So we talk about a divine power, but then we have a way of figuring out what that divine power is. So that's, to me, is— and I'm not comparing Suresh, right? But SalesTable is now giving shape to this concept of how do we go about solving for that. So I'm going to try to bring everything together in a very simple way. Here are some tips that I've seen working very well. Number one is look at what SalesTable can do for you. SalesTable can actually figure out how to surface these human signals that you might be missing, right? Your coaching becomes meaningful when it's grounded in emotional insight, but when it's also physically presented to you in a way that you can make sense of it, right? And that's what Sales Table does. So how do you turn all this conversation that Suresh has had into a system? It's not a one-off, right, Suresh? You can't do something one-off. You need to have a system. And I've always told people, systems provide you with scale. Systems also provide you with structure. And systems can actually be optimized and improved because you have a feedback loop in it. Right? So instead of looking at it that way, so a very simple place to start is a weekly burnout check-in.

Yeah.

When you're talking to— when you're having even a 5-minute conversation, always try to embed the very simple things that I talk about. Try to assess what is the energy level of this individual on a scale of 1 to 10. And a very simple question that I don't want you to ask, but I want you to get an answer for by asking the right questions, is how full is your tank this week? It's not a pipeline question. It's an energy question. How many gallons or liters of gas do you have in your tank, mate, is what I'm asking you. I'm not asking you how many millions of dollars you have in your pipeline. Big shift in thought process, right? Ask your salesperson what is emotional drag they're feeling. Where are they feeling friction? Is it from process? Is it from people? Is it from mindset? And Suresh, I say this because I did my doctoral study actually in sales, job satisfaction, organizational commitment. And I did that because I was deeply frustrated by the amount of bureaucracy that was being created for salespeople.

Yeah.

And by the way, I'm an ex-sales operations guru, right? And I can tell you one thing, we lead with this type of stuff, right? We will go invest in this multimillion-dollar CRM system where the fields are all designed for exact absorption of what's happening in the field, but not necessarily designed for what's actually relevant for a salesperson at the ground level. And that's the reality where we are. And that's maybe one of the reasons why AI is so popular with salespeople, because they now have something that they can take ownership of, that they can trust, because AI is most likely looking at their point of view and their perception rather than telling them what they're doing wrong. It's telling them what you can do better.

And that's a huge shift.

That's a huge shift. It's a huge shift. The one thing that I want sales leaders to understand is that you need to migrate to psychological safety. I know this word upsets a lot of people. Psychological safety doesn't mean that there's something wrong with an individual or that you're in a padded cell where you don't want to hurt. No, no, no. Psychological safety only means that the person knows that they're being treated for their identity, not for their role. What that means is that your role, you will get, you will bleed in your role. You will sometimes win a deal, Suresh. You'll sometimes lose a deal. But when you lose a deal and when your role is on fire, is your identity on fire?

No.

The answer is no.

Yeah.

And I think that's the trick over here. So my message to sales leaders and sales reps is very simple. On a scale of 1 to 10, when your role is on fire and you're at a 5 or a 3 or a 1, what's your identity like? If you tell me it's a 5 or a 3 or a 1, I'm saying no, you're making a mistake, my friend. It's always a 10. Keep it at a 10. Go prosper. You get that right and half the burnout is gone in any case, right? So thought process, right? Celebrate behavior, not just outcomes. Ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding! So Peter brought in the next deal, guys. I'm so happy. And later on you find out that Peter actually bribed the supplier or the partner to get that deal. How do you feel now? How you like them apples? That we would sometimes say, right? So I'm always telling people, when you celebrate something, don't just celebrate the outcome, right? Also ask yourself a question: were the right actions and approaches taken regardless of the results? Did we learn something? Even if we lost face, well, not lost face, lost the deal. But did we learn something from it? Last but not least is, and this is a very interesting phrase, and even I didn't understand it, maybe I still don't do this, decompression windows, right? This is actually about simply encouraging people to understand that, hey, you are allowed to take time off. You're actually allowed to put into your diary half an hour, I'm going to sit staring out of the window doing nothing. Do it. Do it. I had a manager that actually would make it very clear from three to five every Friday, guys. It's my me time. Now people think that that means he's going to go sit in a bathtub and luxuriate. No, he actually would just sit there and think about the five or six things that went wrong during the week, or he could have done better. And then he comes back on Monday morning with an action plan of never repeating that mistake and making how do you say this mental recovery and reflection. Between high-pressure activities is nothing wrong with that, guys. Accept it, embrace it. It'll be amazing when you do that. And I say this from personal experience, Suresh. I have personally had to seek external support and guidance multiple times in my career when I felt I could not cope or not understand what was going on to me. And I can tell you one thing, initially I used to blame my managers for it. And you know what actually someone told me, which is my wife? She says, you can blame as many people as you want. At the end of the day, Deepak, People will remain people and they will never change. You can go from one bad manager to a great manager, and then that great manager gets promoted and you're back to bad manager. What will happen then? And that's why I'm telling people, work on your mental agility, resilience. And in sales, sales longevity is a very critical topic, ladies and gentlemen. Suresh, please change the slide before I keep talking about this, because this is a subject that gets messed up.

Amazing topic, by the way.

It is, it is. So I'm going to make this topic amazing to reality. Here's what's happening, ladies and gentlemen. This is research. In a traditional organization that is absolutely, let's say, industrial-oriented, whatever, the average ramp time is about 3 to 6 months, right? That's typically what happens. To be honest with you, ramp time doesn't mean that the guy— so one way is, I read the manual, I am ready to sell. Yeah, really? How would you feel if you had to go for cardiac surgery or heart surgery, Suresh, to find out that the guy who's going to treat you has only done 2 surgeries before? And he's now gonna do a— in fact, they don't even allow it. You have to go through a certain migratory path before you get to that ability. But in sales, guess what? Ride along, come along. You're a salesperson, you'll pick it up quickly. Oh, okay.

Right.

Let's see, let's see. So we have that mindset. You have rep retention at 65%, which the inverse of that is that 35% of the people leave, right? So that's just mathematics, right? Quote attainment at 50%.

Yay.

Half the people are making the number. Yes. And half the people aren't making the number. Coaching NPS, 6 out of 10. Where I come from, my grandfather ran a business in India. I learned everything from that man. A 6 out of 10 is actually a bad score. A lot of people say, yeah, but it's— I'm not bad, right? I'm on the fence. Ladies and gentlemen, the people that are undecided are the ones that actually lead to bad politicians being voted into power, because that group of people did not make a choice. They decide either not to vote or they do something, and then you have a very spectacular outcome, right? The reality is that you cannot look at a number that's on a fence and call it good or bad. I call it indifferent, and indifference is bad in sales. So when a salesperson is sitting at a 6, right, your goal is how do you get him into being something that's not a detractor but is more attractive, right? This is what I've been watching as you bring in AI and as you bring in empathy on the part of a sales leader.

Yeah.

You bring a combination of a sales table-like architecture, right? And you bring into that now a different way of doing things, a more authentic, a more open way of doing things. You will have doubling of impact. Effort also reduces. But I always tell people, what's the good of reducing time? I give time to sales back, right? But the guy doesn't go sell more, then what did you achieve? Then let him go home early, right? Yeah, yeah.

Go—

your ramp time can be half, half, 6 to 3 months. Honestly, I've seen those results. Rep retention can actually go up as well because now your rep is going to leave you for extreme situations only, not for the easy. Water flows in the path of least resistance, Suresh. You got to understand that right now. Suresh, I'm going to speed up here. Quote achievement, coaching NPS 75%, these are all metrics that I think are very cool, desirable, right? Suresh, can we move on? I just want to— let's say we can just quickly wrap this. So what I— the closing messages that I want to share quickly, Suresh, right, is you have an amazing opportunity. A change in mindset plus Sales Table as an architecture, you now, sales leader, move from being a number chaser to being a pattern detector. It's powerful. It is extremely powerful. And I really call upon you to think about the statement that I'm making over here. When you're a pattern detector, you're actually, if you think about it, AI come alive. Pattern detection is an AI attribute. That's why I keep telling sales leaders, you have got the power to take AI to make it your own AI, which is augmented intelligence. Think about that. It's very powerful, right? Now you move from being a behavior auditor or technique auditor— actually is the right English to use—

Right.

Technique auditor. You move to being an emotional ally. Now please, again, there is a lot of people that talk and think about this as touchy-feely stuff. What's an emotional ally? An emotional ally is someone That is simply giving you the support that allows you to develop your own emotional resilience by being able to talk about it openly, right? These are leading indicators. Modern leaders create space. They reflect. They just don't redirect. And that's what I would say. Take that, put it on a t-shirt and sell it, Suresh. Couple of million dollars right there, sir. Right now, move from being a quota manager to a culture shaper. It's extremely critical. Culture is what's gonna actually retain salespeople, and culture is what's gonna have that mood around the water cooler change dramatically. You involve, you got to make sure that you're evolving. Your goal is to going from managing motion to guiding meaning from that motion. Very critical. And I think that it's very important that we need to get sales cultures that are not just about production, production, production, but are about endurance, endurance, endurance. That's the message I would give on this slide, Suresh. Suresh, to be honest with you, I'm looking at the time. Let's maybe give the ladies a wrap-up. I'm going to hand it over to you, Suresh. What's the one thing on your mind that you'd like to just talk about on this slide?

Yeah, absolutely. So first of all, thanks for giving your attention, your time, and most importantly, your depth of experience and openness, Deepak. Really appreciate it. And for our audience out there, thank you so much for coming in. And I know this is an important topic for a lot of sales leaders that is out there. And we definitely hope you took away a few of the right aspects on what does it really mean by an empathetic leader, especially in the sales, and then how do you combine AI in really bringing the results together. And that, that's really where I'm really excited about because for me it's really personal at the end of the day and it's very human in that sense. So we really urge you to say, lead with not just with the urgency, but with empathy. And make the coaching less about correcting, but about connection. I'm just reiterating what Deepak talked about, by the way, right?

So Suresh, I'm going to jump in there, because everyone who knows me knows I always like the last word. But Bernard Okwego just actually put in a comment that I really think is very powerful. I am not a sales leader. I would like my sales leader to hear this discussion. How do I share this to them? Bernard, this video is going to be online. Watch it again. Correct, Suresh, if I understand the process? Absolutely.

Yeah. It's there forever.

Number 2 is that there's a white paper that Suresh is offering. It is on your screen right now, ladies and gentlemen. There's a QR code on the screen that you can see. Bernard, please pick that up. I'm actually also going to put this image onto the LinkedIn feed as well so that people can see it. If there's one thing that I really highly recommend you take from this call is ability to take this entire conversation into a template, into a structure that actually allows you to figure out what are the 2 or 3, 4 things that you can do. And of course, Suresh, from a SalesTable point of view, what would you want people to do if they wanted to reach out to you and contact you and communicate with you and understand and explore what SalesTable.ai has to offer?

Yeah, absolutely. First things first, for us it's really about How can we help sales organizations to close faster and achieve quota in a much consistent way? That's really our goal. If those are the challenges that your organization is going through, would love to chat on how AI is really helping these things. I'm available on LinkedIn for sure, Suresh Madhuvarsu. Then, or if somebody have to email me, it is suresh@salesforce.com. salestable.ai. I will of course make sure that mine and Deepak's contact is available on the stream that we have right away soon after this call. But I think those are some of the ways I would love to engage with the community and make sure even if it is nothing to do with the Sales Table, we're actually seeing a lot of AI application in sales in general. I'm always listening to a lot of sales leaders on how they are thinking about AI and really see if there are ways that we can collaborate or even help each other. I'm definitely open for that collaboration for sure, Deepak.

Absolutely. Suresh, I couldn't have said it better. From my side, I think allowing me to come on this forum and share my 2 cents is great. I feel lighter. I really hope that the audience got something out of this. I'm also available if someone wants to reach out and just ask me what's up, what's going on, how can I help? Absolutely there. So Suresh, from my side, thank you for this opportunity, sir.

No, absolutely. Again, without further ado, I would say Deepak, thanks a lot for lending your time. Really appreciate your time, and I wish we will do more of these discussions in future for sure.

Absolutely.

Thank you everyone.

Thank you everyone. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.