A sales leader cut turnover from 60% to under 5% while raising quotas and growing a startup to unicorn status, then replicated the results at another company in six months. TJ Walker asks why academia pays marketing and communications faculty far less than law and economics professors.
Questions this video answers
60%.
Reduced to less than 10%, closer to 5%, in about a year and a half.
Within six months.
Chapters
When you have 60% turnover in your sales team, you're not scaling anything. So I would love to tell you it was all me. It wasn't all me. It never is any one person. But I had a leadership team that gave me enough rope to hang myself, as they say. That gave me the audience and respect that we needed to really make things happen. We came in, we took what was really working for them, codified it, and built formal processes around that, not just for the sales program, but for the sales hiring. We took that organization from 60% turnover down to less than 10%, closer to 5% in about a year and a half. At that same time, we had scaled the number of sales reps hitting quota, we had increased the quota simultaneously, and ultimately that organization went from startup to unicorn status. They were bought out and are highly successful organization, still standing on their own. And not only am I proud of what I was able to accomplish in conjunction with the team there, I was able to take the lessons because remember that greenfield where you learn about these things as well? I was able to take those lessons, map it over to the next startup, and do that same thing in just six months. So it's been exciting for me to work with these organizations because you can see the impact of the results so quickly as well.
Great. That must be gratifying to see something progress like that, because, you know, 60% turnover rate, you're doing something wrong. There's no doubt about it for any organization, regardless of the industry. Now, I am, I'm intrigued by you being in the industry of academia. So I'll ask you a question I've never figured out the answer to, which is, in the academic world, there are lawyers, I know, economists, they are able to convince to sell themselves to universities and say, okay, pay me 400,000 a year, 500,000 a year, certainly 200,000 a year. People I know who teach law, who teach economics, for example, not to mention medicine, are typically really compensated very well. And yet people who are great at the fields of marketing, of sales, of communication, in my experience, and he may, I'm hoping you have a completely different experience, are generally awful at actually selling themselves in the academic world. I've had countless universities come to me and say, hey, tj, can you do a guest lecture? Can you teach this course? And invariably it almost gets to the point where they want me to pay them for the luxury of saying, I'm an adjunct professor and it doesn't matter if it's an Ivy League school, it almost doesn't matter. There's a sense that if you're in the communications marketing field, you should just be happy to be able to tell people you're associated with a university. And yet again, economists, Lawyers can make $400,000 a year without even being a famous superstar. I don't know of any famous superstar communicator who is paid a lot at a university, so I'm wondering if you could talk about that. Is that just my sample size is too small? Is there something marketers and communicators are not doing in the university world? Because it definitely appears to me that the academic world doesn't really respect communications and marketing skills or.
