
Podcast episode
Hall of Fame: Miles Kane
30 Minutes to President's Club9 Sept 202434 min
Description
FOUR ACTIONABLE LEADERSHIP TAKEAWAYS When you are trying to clone that first rep, make sure that you don’t confuse personality with skill set. Your customers have the answers. Talk to your customers. Do not do the things that you're horrible at. Hire for the things that are not your strengths. Invest your time in enablement. You and your reps should track how you win each deal for ongoing development. PATH TO PRESIDENT’S CLUB VP, Sales @ Tenderly Founding Member, First Hires Program @ First Round Capital Director, Enterprise Sales @ Drift VP, Sales @ AltoCloud RESOURCES DISCUSSED Join our weekly newsletter Things you can steal 30MPC Training: 30mpc.com/training
Show moreShow less
Listen
Loading the recording
This recording could not be loaded.Open the audio file
Quoted on this wiki
Every place a page here uses this source, in the order the words come in it.
If they don't mention, I'm going to talk to 10 to 15 to 20, as many human customers as I possibly can. Not a good fit. Like you said, you don't necessarily have the complete product market fit nailed there where you're just trying to go from three to 300 reps. You're trying to get from initial interest that you have of the friends and family that might have taken a bet on you into something that is actually repeatable. “To me, the only way I found success in doing that is talking to customers over and over again, because they're the ones that have the answers.” They're the ones that have the problems. They're the ones that you're driving efficiencies or productivity games with your new technology. They're going to give you those answers. So if a sales leader or a seller, for that matter, if they don't immediately say that I'm going to jump on, whether it's live in person, Gong, Zoom, you name it, as many customer calls as possible in those first 30 days.
top reps and doing the deal wins, deal reviews, like how did those deals come to fruition? Where do they source them from? What was the differentiator? And just as importantly, I think from the top wins and the top sellers, also deconstructing the close loss deals on a consistent basis, understanding was it value prop that we missed on? Was it product functionality? “Is there a way to win them back in 6 to 9 months time?” like that. So continuing to invest there, I think it's critical. How do you think about when you start to invest in resources like enablement, rev ops, things like that between zero and 50 million ARR? I thought a lot about this when I joined my current company, Tenderland. I was fortunate
take to stand up a CRM and get all of our data under one roof and actually have a central source of truth. I had buy-in going into it, thankfully, and it took me a couple of times to get there, but I think it's a key critical piece to think about so that it's not just, okay, great. I got the job I got hired. And then you turn to your founder and say, this is what I got to go do and hire. And they're going to say, well, what do you mean? Like “the alignment piece before you jump” that, super critical. Listen, I can't tell you how many times I've heard people tell me, well, just recreate your best rep. I can't tell you how many times I sold at outreach, outreach helps you recreate your best rep until I realized that's not really what it does. Right. But I bet there's
this kind of international deal, don't even touch it. If it's like not growing quickly, don't touch these types of deals. If it's this kind of curve ball, you got to hit it over this way. How do you document all of those early stage learnings and make sure that reps five through 15 aren't learning all of those things all over again? “Well, I think you hit on it right at the very end with the key word is document.” Like so many startups, they're moving so fast and it's all up here in the head and they blink and two to three years go by and they get to like the 5 million revenue number and they don't have anything documented for that scale. So the quicker that you can document these learnings, the better. Quick example, when I joined Tenderly a year and a half ago, we had maybe like 50
especially to your team, the why behind it, and that metrics actually are a leading cause of helping them be successful, it's a big step in the right direction. Early on, what I found was most helpful is I was still in activity tracking because I was like, all right, you need this many opportunities, this many meetings, yada, yada, yada. And that stuff happened really, really early on. “So we knew how to make pipeline, and we knew how much pipeline we needed to make.” And those were two metrics that we tracked up front, leading indicators on pipe gen, how much pipe gen we had, and obviously the inverse of that is win rates. How much pipeline did you need to have based on a certain win rate to get your revenue? But then as you start to get more sophisticated, you start to track where that pipeline falls off because you're not on top of every single deal.
Quotes are verbatim and belong to their publishers. Where a quote has been translated, the original wording is kept below it.