E49: The Secret Formula Behind Top-Performing Sales Teams

So the framework that I'm most familiar with is the 3 Rs. So that stands for recruitment, retention, and revenue. It's something that we've implemented very successfully at AppDynamics. It's been implemented at Zscaler as well. It's not something that we necessarily use as much in CrowdStrike, but it's certainly something that I think, you know, any organization that is trying to either roll out a new go-to-market or they're trying to understand, you know, deficiencies in their own ability to fully prosecute the market opportunity, those are the 3 real core tenets. So making sure that we have great people, obviously that's addressed by the recruitment. Once you have great people, you've gotta retain them, right? You've gotta make sure that they feel like they're in a team of A players because A players wanna be working with A players. They wanna feel like they're learning, they're developing, and their best chance for personal and professional growth comes with you. And then ultimately it's all building towards revenue.

Welcome to the High Performance Sales Leader Podcast. And today our guest is Dan Elding. He's the Managing Director of Wingman Enablement. And before that, he was the Director of Revenue Enablement at CrowdStrike, before which he was at Zscaler. But he started his career with IBM in technology, then moved into value consulting at AppDynamics. And from there, he went into revenue enablement. So, he has a unique perspective around people, process, and problems. And he's going going to walk us through how some of the best teams are built. So, Daniel, thank you so much for joining me today.

Absolute pleasure, Priyank.

Fantastic. All right. Well, you've done the triple jump. You know, most people, either they start in technology and they end in technology. If they're in value consulting, that's where they end up. But you've swapped lanes. And so, I know for a fact that you've got a very unique perspective. Walk me through those shifts. that you walked through from IBM through to CrowdStrike?

Sure. So I guess my background is probably quite interesting because I actually did a business and computer science degree. It was a very unusual combination. Turned out very early that I thought my future lay in technology. Turned out that technology probably wasn't my strongest point. And I've always really gravitated towards the business usage of IT. Rather than the raw developing and coding and all that kind of good stuff. So I actually did start my postgraduate degree as a developer, a web developer at Ford Credit building websites. That was great. But throughout my career in technology, I really kind of gravitated more towards the business outcomes. And when I moved to Australia, I started working at IBM as a pre-sales and it gave me a great grounding in conversations with customers. and fixing problems for customers. But about after about 7 and a half years, I had the opportunity to move to AppDynamics. And it was a bit of a fork in the road moment at that point in time where I could either stay technical and move into security at Blue Coat, or I had the ability to move into something a little bit more aligned to potentially my real interest in business outcomes with AppDynamics. Luckily, I made the right decision, I think. Excellent. AppDynamics, and the rest is history.

Right. So AppDynamics, walk me through the value consulting through to the revenue enablement piece.

AppDynamics was doing something really interesting and really different. It was a really disruptive technology, you know, about 9 years ago. For people who don't know AppDynamics, it was a fairly young company founded by Jyoti, who was formerly from CA, and they were really building out this new way of understanding the impact of IT on business. So, it was an application performance management company that really looked at if something goes wrong in code, if a website is unavailable, if an application can't run, what does that mean to the business? You know, what does that mean in terms of revenue? What does that mean in terms of people's productivity? What does that mean in terms of brand damage? I had the opportunity to join the ANZ team, or the APJ team as it became, right at the very beginning where we didn't have a value consulting capability. We had been doing occasional business value assessments from the US, but we didn't really have that capability locally in APJ. My VP at the time, Gene Kavanagh, identified that as one of the most high-priority hires for him as he was scaling out his team. And I was lucky enough to be given the opportunity to join that company. I came in as an individual contributor. After about 12 months, I started getting the ability to develop that role into a manager, We hired a small team and we really saw a huge amount of impact. That was on the shoulder, I guess, between AppDynamics being a pre-IPO company, that whole buzz around being a private company that was building to go public, and then being acquired by Cisco. At the time we were acquired for, I think it was 17.3 times multiple. So it was the biggest acquisition in history at that point in time. So we rode that wave. We had some successes. And then as that journey kind of came to an end, I had the ability to move across into Zscaler. Zscaler was just at that point, they were moving away from their previous go-to-market strategy, and we were implementing something new and different and exciting, which was Medic and a value-based sell. I had the ability to go and join some former colleagues from AppDynamics who were building out this new sales enablement team. For Zscaler, I had the chance to be the first person on the ground in APJ, joining just as COVID kicked off. So my first new hire was actually one that I ran myself because we were going through this hypergrowth. We were hiring a huge number of new sellers and new SEs into the business, but we didn't have the ability to meet face to face. We didn't have, you know, an onboarding program. So it was all very much, you know, to use a phrase that was often used at Zscaler, we were building the cockpit of the airplane as we were flying at 37,000 feet. So it was a very interesting sort of time to be in sales enablement and learning how to do sales enablement. Luckily, I'd had a great foundation from AppDynamics, but, you know, really learning what made people onboarded, what allowed them to be effective, what inspired them, allowed them to really start prosecuting the opportunities. And great technology obviously helps sell itself, but you still have to have people finding the right problems, finding the right customers at the right time.

Very nice. And so then through to CrowdStrike.

CrowdStrike was an interesting one. So after 3 and a half years at Zscaler, it was an interesting time because we'd built most of the things that were required to make Zscaler successful at that point in time where we wanted to be rolling out Medpig. We were rolling out a value process or a sales process. We were rolling out a value framework. That really allowed us to connect in a new way with our customers and help them solve big business problems. After 3 and a half years, my team had grown to 5. So from just being an individual contributor, I was the Director of Sales Enablement in APJ. I had a team of about 5, fantastic team working for me, small, but really delivering a lot of impact. But we'd grown massively as an enablement team. We were about 80 people. as a company, and a lot of the big problems have been solved. I do enjoy the ability to really find problems and solutions for them rather than just maintaining the status quo. At that point in time, a really good friend of mine who I'd worked with both at IBM and almost joined at Blue Coat tapped me on the shoulder. So Jeff Swain tapped me on the shoulder and said, look, now would be a great time for you to come over and help me effectively implement Medpick. At CrowdStrike, whether they'd been looking at what Zscaler was doing or they just knew about the sales process and this new way of executing a go-to-market that's going to really add control and rigor and really produce a repeatable recipe for success, CrowdStrike decided they wanted to go down this pathway of value-based selling and Medpick. Jeff asked me if I'd be interested in coming over and helping him operationalize Medpick for his team. It was a great opportunity to go and join someone who I really respect and have partnered effectively with for many years. Seemed like a great time to take the leap and really effectively start from the ground up again.

Well, that, what a journey. And you've worked with some incredible iconic companies who are clearly after a high level of growth, have made a lot of investment and obviously need their sellers to be able to execute at a level that will deliver those numbers. And I know a lot of people that you've mentioned and, you know, aware of both some of the successes and the challenges. So, I guess most importantly, let's jump right in by tell me what are some of the key elements that you— or the building blocks of successful teams? What do you see that is common in them?

So, I think if I was to think back to the best sales team I've ever been in, it would have to be AppDynamics. So I don't probably think I appreciated just what an amazing sales organization it was until I actually left it. And the lessons that I've learned from my time at AppDynamics, 4 years at AppDynamics, have continued to really pay dividends ever since. And the last 5 or more years that I've been doing sales enablement have really been anchored in the foundations from AppDynamics. My former VP, Jim Kavanaugh, used to say, you know, it really is a PhD in selling, the AppDynamics journey. And it has been very much true in my instance. But I think if you think about what makes a great sales team, obviously it starts with a great product. You know, you have to have a great product for you to be able to have relevance in the market, for customers, for partners, for time to be given to you and your story versus everyone else who's competing for time and money and budget. It also comes down to having a great go-to-market strategy. So great people who are executing a great sales process is incredibly important because we don't always lose to the best, right? Many times sellers will go and lose to someone who, yeah, was selling a much more inferior product, but they just had a better relationship. They just had a better, a better hustle. They got there first. So you don't always lose To the best. The question is, why do we lose at all, right? So having a really good team where we're finding the right opportunities, we're qualifying the right opportunities, we're developing the right opportunities, we're progressing and closing those opportunities as a team, we're all pulling in the same direction, we're all talking common language, and we're really focused on the customer's outcome. That's what really defines to me a great go-to-market team.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And what are the core pillars that you would attack if you were looking at a framework of transformation? You know, if you're looking to transform a sales team that is either underperforming or has a huge number, you know, they've got to climb this massive ramp. What would be some of the essential blocks or areas that you would attack to get them there?

So the framework that I'm most familiar with is the 3 Rs. So that stands for recruitment, retention, and revenue. It's something that we've implemented very successfully at AppDynamics. It's been implemented at Zscaler as well. It's not something that we necessarily use as much in CrowdStrike, but it's certainly something that I think, you know, any organization that is trying to either roll out a new go-to-market or they're trying to understand deficiencies in their own ability to fully prosecute the market opportunity. Those are the 3 real core tenets. So making sure that we have great people, obviously that's addressed by the recruitment. Once you have great people, you've gotta retain them, right? You've gotta make sure that they feel like they're in a team of A players because A players wanna be working with A players. They wanna feel like they're learning, they're developing, and their best chance for personal and professional growth comes with you. And then ultimately, it's all building towards revenue. You know, if, uh, if we're all exceeding our numbers, everyone's happy, you know, obviously that's really what sales is all about. Sales is all about, can I actually close deals? Can I make money? Can I exceed my, uh, my quota? But you have to do that in a repeatable, predictable way. So revenue is not just, did I book the deal, but did I book the deal on time? Did I book it without having to discount too heavily? Do I have control of that deal? Yeah. And can I go and find another one? Those 3 elements, the 3 Rs as they're often referred to, that would be the place that I would encourage every sales leader to start with. And obviously sometimes, you know, you don't have the ability to hire an entirely fresh new team, but, you know, sitting down and going through, well, what would be the characteristics of someone I want to recruit? And do I have those capabilities in my existing team? That's also where you really start looking at skills and wills. And, you know, can I coach and develop this individual? Or maybe they're a great seller, but maybe they're not just a great fit for my organization and my go-to-market.

That really sums up the full transformation because if you actually hire great sellers, you retain them, and you point them towards a territory, a target, and a number, I think we can expect great things to happen. But let's get into the how of stage 1. So if I was a, First-time sales leader, what would you be coaching me and training me, or even an experienced sales leader who's made their fair share of bad hires? What would you tell me? How do I improve the quality of my hires at stage 1, which is recruitment?

I think everyone makes mistakes with hiring. I know I have, and I'm pretty sure that everyone has made mistakes with hiring. Mistakes happen. But really what we're looking at doing is how do we de-risk that part of the process? Because we know that it's so important. If you make a bad hire, you know, it has a huge impact both to the team but also to the revenue, right? And, uh, you know, sometimes it's actually worse to have a bad hire than no hire at all. But there's always that pressure, especially as you're growing a team, to fill heads because they can start contributing towards revenue. Um, so ultimately, I think, you know, the framework that I would fall back to is ICE. ICE is a well-known framework for recruiting the right people because You know, it has to come down to something more than just a gut feel. You know, we have to know what are we looking for, and we have to train our leaders, right? So if a leader doesn't know what they're looking for, what they do is they typically hire people who look like them or sound like them or they've worked with before. Doesn't necessarily mean they've hired the best. Even if they're great sellers, they may not be a great fit for the product, the culture, whatever it might be. So ICE is really setting out to define the criteria For what a great hire is gonna be looking like. So, you know, that ultimately starts with intelligence. So is this person smart? You know, do they have the capabilities mentally to be able to thrive? Obviously you can't teach intelligence, so it's a very good filter to look for. First of all, if they, they could have all the other characteristics, although some people might argue that if they're not intelligent, they can't. But, you know, regardless of that, if they're not clever, they're gonna struggle. So do I really wanna be investing my time and my resources in this person versus somebody else? And the answer is almost certainly no. Second one is gonna be their characteristics. So their character, are they in for a fight? Do they wanna put in the hard yards? Do they have the grit and determination to really dig in and be successful? Because especially when we're talking about value typically means the company is doing something disruptive, right? We're doing something different. We're not just selling the same solution to the same customers. We're selling a new way of fixing a problem. And that's one of the things that's so exciting about whether it's CrowdStrike, AppDynamics, Zscaler, there's many other great technology companies out there. Wiz is another example. Obviously, they're doing things that are different. And because it's different, it's hard, right? So you typically have smaller resources or fewer resources. You're having conversations with customers who don't understand how to actually fix the problem in the right way. So it's always going to be a struggle. There's going to be more bad times than good times, especially at the beginning until you get that traction. So you need to have people who are prepared to dig in, you know, and they're relishing the fight, not just tolerating the fight. So having that character is super, super important. The third one is coachability. So I've seen it many times where we hire great reps who've got a great history of selling. They work for fantastic companies, but maybe they don't actually have The characteristics that we are looking for. And those characteristics also mean you have to be adaptable, you have to learn, you have to embrace the fact that there's always more, there's always new things to learn, there's always more improvement, there's development that you can have. It doesn't matter if you're a 5-year rep or a 20-year rep, there's always something else you can learn. You can refine more and more. Coachability is really around taking on feedback, however uncomfortable it might be. And internalizing that and thinking about, well, did I actually do something that, you know, I could improve on? And if I did, you know, am I gonna take it personally? Am I gonna sulk or am I actually gonna embrace that and say maybe there's a better way of doing things? You know, 'cause obviously coachability is really, it's done because we wanna make you better, right? We wanna make you more successful. We wanna help you overachieve. We wanna help you get whatever those goals and ambitions, whether that's buying a house, getting promoted, whatever it might be. You know, everyone has motivation. The coachability is, can I help you help yourself? So if people are closed and they don't think they can actually learn anything else, they're almost certainly not gonna be a good fit for us because, you know, there's always more to learn. There's always different things, you know, and just thinking that I know it all and I can't learn anything and, you know, this company's gonna bend their go-to-market strategy to me because I'm a great individual rep, that's not how great sales cultures are built. So great sales cultures are unfortunately shaped by people who come in who've got great potential and they adapt and embrace and really lean in to the opportunity this company and this culture has. And then finally, obviously, it's experience, right? So we don't want to be giving, you know, all this responsibility, all this expectation to people who don't have a proven track record of being able to do this. And that experience and that track record is not just have I sold before, but Have I sold in these conditions? Can I thrive in these environments? Typically it would be intelligence is the most important, but it's something that we want to validate for. But then the other areas are the things that we can really develop. So coachability is really, can I make this person better? Can I shape them into being an absolute A-player? Are they going to bring other people in who are also going to make this virtuous circle So we have a really strong sales culture where everyone is pulling in the same direction. No one is pushing back. Everyone believes in the mission and we're celebrating and winning together.

That's fantastic. And I think that, you know, a framework like that would have saved many careers. When I look at some of the spectacularly bad hires, which I get to See firsthand when I come in and I'm usually doing a replacement hire. The first thing I want to know is what happened. And because we want to reduce risk of a repeat. And often, I find that a lot of people stay at a surface level or have a surface-level conversation, which I've got great rapport. So, we found something in common and we love the same football team, right? And this person's got great results. But then you haven't dug down deeper into what are the conditions that they achieved their results in? What was the momentum and velocity? What was the brand name? What was the state of the territory? Was it an expansion or a net new acquisition? And all of a sudden, you're dealing with this set of poor discovery practices at interviews, and you make decisions with inadequate information because— You had good rapport and the results seem good. And now you're gonna realize over 3, 6, and 9 months, you've got someone who is actually not a good fit for the role.

And it's a hugely costly and disruptive experience, right? I mean, it's interesting because recruiting is a little bit like selling. In fact, it's very similar, which is why so many sellers started in recruitment. But if you think about what you're trying to do, you're trying to qualify You know, is this person actually telling me the truth? You know, and it's exactly the same between a candidate and a prospect, right? You know, I'm asking the hard questions early because as John McMahon says in The Qualified Salesman, which is actually a, you know, it's a great book, and obviously he's, uh, one of the, one of the grandfathers of, of medic and value-based selling and a sales process. You know, one of the quotes that really stood out to me is bad news can't wait. You know, and bad news can't wait applies both to selling but also to recruitment. So, you know, if I'm not sure about, you know, is this person telling me the truth? Are they telling me what they think I want to hear? And obviously, you know, you as a recruiter, I'm pretty sure, you know, you coach people to be prepared to answer questions the way that you're expecting the interviewer to want to hear the response. So superficial surface-level responses don't always allow you to get a good read of, is this person telling me the truth? Or are they just telling me what they want to hear? You know, it's one of the hardest things that reps have to deal with as well, which is, you know, asking the hard questions early, qualify as hard as possible, look for reasons not to progress the deal, look for reasons not to hire this candidate, even if you haven't got a strong pipeline. But again, you know, going back to the whole pipeline generation situation, you know, pipeline is always the solution to pretty much any problem you have, whether that's in recruitment or whether that's in actual selling. Having a strong pipeline gives you the confidence to qualify out of a bad candidate or a bad deal and go and find a good candidate or a good deal. I'll give you a very short anecdote for him. One of the sales leaders I used to work with, both at AppDynamics to a degree, or he certainly was at AppDynamics and a little bit at Zscaler. So Mark Peat, based in EMEA, incredible sales leader. Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to spend a lot of time with him. I spent a little bit of time with him and some of the things that, some of the lessons I learned from him still resonate with me today. I remember I was trying to hire someone in EMEA when I was looking after the international sales enablement business for Zscaler. And I put a candidate forward and I thought this person was a home run. And the feedback came back afterwards and said, it's a no for me. And I was shocked because the feedback he said was, you know, the guy sent me an email as a follow-up and he had a couple of spelling mistakes in it. And there was a bit more to it than that. And I was like, this is ridiculous. You know, why would you throw away what potentially could be a great fit, great candidate, just purely because of this? And he said, look, you know, when I sat down with him, he had a few spelling mistakes in his CV. He had some gaps in his story. He had, he clearly documented what he wanted, who he thought I wanted to know. And I gave him some feedback and I said, look, there's some gaps here, there's some mistakes here. I want you to really think about the feedback and then come back to me at the right time. This guy thought that urgency was actually the right thing to do. But actually it was attention to detail. So it was, if you don't have attention to detail now, you're certainly not gonna have attention to detail in your, when you're in the job, because obviously everyone's got at their best behavior when they're going through that process of trying to get through the front door. So it was coachability. It was his character because he wasn't actually embracing this and he wasn't internalizing it. And his rush to show willing was actually the thing that undid it. And I, It took me a little while. I had to sit down and really internalize it. And I was like, I don't understand what happened. And then I started thinking about it. It's like, he's 100% right. It's down to the details because the details are the things that give him a gut feel that this is not necessarily the right candidate, even if he's articulating that he is. There were these tells. And, you know, to his credit, he was laser-focused on the things that he thought were important and he didn't compromise. And I think quite often we compromise and we make allowances and we go, maybe they didn't understand the question, or maybe they were just trying to show willing. But actually what it was is it's a failure to internalize, a failure to take that coaching on, and a failure to actually turn that into some kind of action that would allow me to progress. And it's a lesson that I've really internalized myself, and it really resonates to me even to today.

Yeah. Very insightful. Let's move on and talk about the second part, which is the retention piece. What are some best practices that we can action in here to ensure that our reps are successful, they're selling, and not struggling to survive? Because successful and happy reps stay.

100%. I think if you think about what most people are looking for from an employer, it is the opportunity to develop and it's the opportunity to achieve their steady goal, right? So if you're in sales, obviously the number one success metric is, did I exceed my quota? Did I make money? Am I developing? But it's also, am I learning? Am I getting better? Do I have a career path? Am I better today than I was yesterday? Do I have the confidence that the skills that I'm learning now are going to set me up for the future? And I think all of those comes down to a couple of factors. The first factor is their leader, right? You know, is their leader able to inspire them? Are they able to build them up? Are they able to develop them into something better? And one of the biggest, I guess, weaknesses that I sometimes see in sales organizations is we don't teach leaders How to be great leaders. You know, a lot of the people have come into the role they're in today because they were a great rep and they effectively get promoted because they were very effective as an IC. And now we're asking them to do very different roles. So we're asking them to effectively step back from it's all about me and it's all about you from now on, right? So it's a very different mindset and some people just aren't capable of making that transition. They become super reps. They try and do everything on behalf of their team. That doesn't allow them to make mistakes. It doesn't allow them to learn. It doesn't allow them to develop. You're basically creating a bottleneck and you're that single point of failure, but not just for yourself, but for your entire team. But having great leaders who understand, and again, it comes down to their character as well. Do I want to be taking a backseat and having the success? You know, I want to be the witness of the success rather than the person who's actually doing the success myself. It's a different mindset, right? But, um, you know, having the right people in those roles and then training them what to look for when it comes to hiring, how to actually develop, how to do coaching, how to be better. And one of the things that I've always kind of set myself up and my team up is if we're gonna teach anyone how to do something, we have to be better than them at doing it today. So if we're implementing the value framework, if we're Doing deal clinics with MedPic, I have to be better than the person who's sitting across the table from me. Otherwise, they're learning nothing. I'm wasting their time. I have to add value, right? And I have to add value immediately. The same with their leaders. Their leaders need to be able to inspire. The problem with MedPic and value-based selling is it can feel like inspection. It can feel like we don't trust you. It can feel like we don't think you know what you're doing. However, it can also be an amazing enlightening experience if I can show you new things, I can give you new angles of inquiry, I can help you de-risk, I can give you a pathway to success, I can help you think about what do I do next? How am I gonna use my time more effectively? How am I gonna get a better return for my investment? So leadership is such an incredibly important part of operationalizing Medpic and value-based selling and inspiring people so they want to stay in the business and building that culture of mutual success. But obviously, you know, we have to enable the team as well, right? So that's kind of really the second part of things. Once you've got great people and we've got great leaders and we've taught great leaders how to be great managers, great coaches, we also need to continuously reinforce, you know, the expected behavior. How to articulate my message to my customers, how to really identify needs when they are when they're there. I mean, yeah, problems are temporal; they're transient, right? So the danger is that we're just waiting for opportunities to come to us. We have to be proactive. So we have to teach sellers what to go and look for. We have to make them think proactively. Why would a customer need to engage with me, and why would the time be now? Versus 3 months ago or 3 months in the future. So there is obviously a big enablement element. And as companies grow, they become more complex. So CrowdStrike's a great example where they started off, you know, very, very specific around endpoint detection response, incident response, and threat intelligence. They were the core really effectively and a few other products. So then they've grown to 30, 30 products, 30 different solutions, 30 different potential stakeholders. So you have to enable the sellers so that they're not just falling back to what they know, but they're also able to have conversations with new stakeholders about new problems, to understand different competitors, to be able to influence the thinking of these customers. So they're thinking solutions and platforms and outcomes, not just a vendor or a capability they're familiar with. So there's all sorts of different elements of making a seller effective. What we do, why we do it, who cares about it, what it means if we fix those problems, all of those are super important conversations that the seller has to be able to have with confidence, with credibility and authority with the audience for them to be successful.

Absolutely. And I can already see that it's a platform that is built upon layer and layer of excellence, right? You bring the right people in, you ensure that the leaders have the capacity and the capability to coach these reps, and then you enable the reps to have the right conversations with the right people. Tell me, as we start looking at the final piece from a revenue point of view, what are some of the best practices that must be in place to be able to now deliver on those numbers, you know, ensure that the forecasts are accurate, you've built this team that when it gets onto the field, you score, you're gonna win? What are some of the things that must be in place?

Yeah, I mean, I think one of the most demoralizing things that a seller can have is tasting failure, right? So you do all the things that you know are important, you work super hard, you're taking time out of your evening and your weekends, you're prioritizing work over family or other interests and you lose, right? And that's how people lose confidence in the go-to-market that a company is positioning or pushing. So there has to be something that drives success, right? And because ultimately what we're looking at is repeatable, consistent, predictable success. So revenue is tied to having a go-to-market that you can, you can depend upon, right? So it's effectively a recipe, right? So a recipe says if you do these things in the right order, you get the correct outcome. And every time I do that, doesn't matter how skilled I am, if I execute this with excellence, I do things in the right steps at the right time with the right people with the right intent, I'll get the same outcome. And obviously there's going to be some elements of luck and good fortune And there's the human element that takes away some of the science. But ultimately what we need to be doing is making it a scientific process wherever possible. And many people will say, well, that takes away the art of selling. It doesn't, right? Because it's the, it's the execution of the science that's the art, right? It's your relationships. It's how you build credibility and trust. It's your passion for fixing customers' problems and how you can actually communicate that so they build trust and they believe that you have their best interests at heart. That's the art of selling. But the science of selling is knowing the things that allow you to set yourself up to be effective, the things that allow you to de-risk your deal, the things that allow you to get to the end with all the elements that you need to be able to successfully close that deal with control. And that's really where, you know, the sales process comes in. That's really where MedPic comes in. And it, but ultimately it's where the leading indicators come in. So for anyone who's not familiar with the concept of a leading indicator, The leading indicators are effectively all the things that I need to have control of to have a sustainable, repeatable business. So it's how many opportunities am I finding every week? It's how many discovery meetings am I running? It's how many new business meetings. So where I'm taking a potential opportunity and I'm saying there's actually interest here, there's budget, there's stakeholders, There's a need that I can address, and this is where I want to invest my time. And not just my time, but my SE's time and the rest of my ecosystem's time. It's the things that I'm going to do that are going to allow me to differentiate, to influence the thought process of the customer, to articulate technical value, to articulate business value, to elevate the conversation to the people who have budget and influence, to build relationships with the people who have problems. And want to fix those problems and have the influence and power to be able to actually drive this narrative forward and fix that problem because they genuinely believe that we are the right solution, the best outcome for them. And to get to the point where we can negotiate with procurement and we're saying, we understand your problems, we understand what's important, and we understand that our capabilities will allow you to fix that in a way that no one else can. Yeah. And that really is the science behind selling. Or it should be the science behind selling because no one wants to lose a deal. Everyone knows the elements that make a deal winnable or losable. But if you look back at where Medpic, and Medpic's not new, Medpic's about 25 years old. If you look at the sales process that wraps around Medpic and allows you to progress the deal, make sure that we're not getting ahead of ourselves, making sure that we're using the right levers. to be able to have a technical conversation, to have a business conversation, to find the right stakeholders, to differentiate all these things. Again, this is not new. The leading indicators of looking at how do I not just find one deal, but how do I find the next deal, the next deal? So I'm always working opportunities. I'm never chasing one bad deal because I don't have anything to backfill. I always have that predictability and linearity of my business. So I'm trying to avoid that hockey stick at the end of the quarter where everyone's panicking and procurement is going, we know it's the end of your quarter, so we're gonna try and delay things and get more concessions and more price reduction or whatever it might be, better terms for us. You know, it's all about how do I get control? How do I get control for this deal and every other deal? And that's really the essence of a great revenue-generating business. You know, the linearity of AppDynamics, the fact that AppDynamics was able to grow, I think it was 52% year on year in the last 9 months before we got acquired. You know, the hypergrowth that Zscaler had, admittedly there were some tailwinds because of COVID and work from anywhere and people not being able to go to the office, but there was hypergrowth when you have control, when you're finding the right opportunities and you're finding the right number of opportunities, when you understand the things that actually allow you to qualify this deal as good. and I'm gonna invest time versus burning cycles with people who will never engage with you on value. They're only ever gonna have conversations around price. So all these elements of a great sales process underpinning the leading indicators and then using MedPic to qualify that deal to make sure I get to the end and have the ability to say, this is a deal, this is a great deal. I can forecast this deal. It's not gonna slip. I know exactly who's gonna pay for this. I know why they're gonna pay for this. I know exactly the consequences if they don't pay for this. That's really how a great revenue team is structured.

Wow. You have just delivered a masterclass on how to not only build a championship team, but also to win the cup. Daniel, thank you so much. There is so much value that somebody's gonna take away from this because I know that as sales leaders and account executives who tend to listen to this podcast, There are so many elements that can be unpacked. But I would say the overarching theme that you've brought to this conversation today, in my mind, is that it's not about luck. It's about being intentional at every stage and just engineering excellence, driving execution. And when you do that, you're going to get predictable results.

Absolutely. And look, I used to hear it a lot at AppDynamics. I think it was Jeremy Duggan, he used to say this quite often, which was you can get lucky once, right? But we're not here to be lucky once. We're here to overachieve quarter on quarter on quarter, right? Because that's what the market's expecting. That's what we're expecting as a sales team. And that's what you're expecting individually, right? Because you don't want to just have one big deal and then have 2 quarters of famine. You want to have predictable results where you're achieving over your number every quarter because that's what we're all here to do, right? We're here to be the best we can be. I think just to leave this on this note, the best reps see medpic and value-based selling and sales process and leading indicators as a way of achieving their goals. It's not something that they're doing as well as selling. It's just giving a language, a common language to what they're doing instinctively. You know, great reps are always looking for problems. They're looking for people who care about it. They're looking for advocates in the business. They're looking to set themselves apart from everyone else. We're not telling you to do something new. And that's, I think, the biggest mistake a lot of companies make when they try and implement a new go-to-market or they try and roll out MedPic is they don't explain well enough to the leaders or to the reps what's in it for me, right? They don't explain this is not something new. It's not just administration for the sake of it. We're not just here to add complexity and red tape. We're here to try and make it scalable. We're here to make it repeatable. And we're here so that the leaders can look at every single person's business and add value instantaneously. You know, you're doing well in your go-to-market if I come into your business and I can add value in the first 10 minutes. And the reason I should be able to add value in the first 10 minutes is because everyone's deals are structured in the same way. So I don't have to ask a bunch of questions. I don't have to dig into people's memory or their notebooks because the information is there. So I can start adding value. I can start challenging you. I can say, have you thought about this? What about this? Why would that be an important issue? Who else cares about this? You know, you've got some gaps. What would you like to know? You know, if you don't know what your gaps are, then they're risks. So how do I help surface those risks? And then we can start building a plan to overcome those risks. It makes you much more prescriptive, right? You're much more intentional in terms of who you're meeting, why you're meeting them, what you want to get out of that meeting. Did I have a good meeting? Did I achieve my goals? Sometimes we just go in and have meetings for the sake of meetings because we think we know bad things happen when we don't get in front of customers. So let's go and have a conversation. Let's have a coffee. Let's have a checkpoint. But why am I doing it, right? So it's, you have to be intentional because that way the customer respects you. They understand what we're doing, but we also are explaining to them along the way, we're trying to help you fix your biggest problems. We know it's an important problem to solve. We know it's a priority. If you don't fix this, it's hurting your business. Let me help fix this problem with you. But to do that, I need to know information. I need to help you understand what makes us different. I need to be able to showcase this to you. I have to make sure I'm across all the other stakeholders that have a vested interest in fixing that, because if they're not talking to me, they're talking to somebody else. And then you're going to have some kind of internal conflict between different vendor solutions. All these things that we're trying to do, if we do it well, everyone is moving in the right direction. The partner, the sales team, and the customer, right? Because the customer's on a buying journey.

Yeah.

You know, they want to fix their problem as much as we want to solve it for them. It's important. So if we all go in about the right mentality, we think about this as helping get the customer the outcome, it helps get the rep the outcome they care about, and it helps the company get the outcome that they care about. Why wouldn't we do it, right? Because people lose deals all the time because they forget to do something they know is important. This is just giving you the framework, giving you guardrails to make sure that you're not gonna lose a deal that you should win. And it's making sure you're not wasting time in a deal you can never win. And that's really what it is. Do this well, it's amazing results for everyone.

Daniel, this has got everything that every sales leader would need to diagnose and identify some areas to improve and every rep that would need to really go from struggling to actually being successful and significant in their sales career. So, thank you so much. You have given immense value, and I am certain it's going to come back to you as people listen to this episode. So, thank you so much.

Awesome. Appreciate your time, Pri. Thank you.