Summary

Lucas Price chats with Joe McNeill, Chief Revenue Officer at Influ2, about building elite sales teams through career development. Joe highlights the challenge of hiring top AE talent in scaling startups, stressing the value of cultivating talent within. He shares insights on fostering a collaborative meritocracy where sharing ideas, even bad ones, is encouraged. Joe also discusses strategies for progressing entry-level employees into impactful sales roles, spotlighting the benefits of incremental responsibilities and mentorship. Tune in to discover how to create a thriving sales culture and develop top performers.

Take Aways

• Hire Smart and Energetic Individuals: Focus on intelligence, energy, and integrity when hiring to ensure a foundation of capable and motivated team members.
• Encourage Brainstorming: Cultivate a culture where sharing ideas, even bad ones, is welcomed to foster innovation and incremental growth.
• Development Over Headhunting: It's more resource-efficient for startups to develop internal talent rather than relying on hiring top-performing AE's from outside.
• Incremental Responsibility: Gradually increase team members' responsibilities to prepare them for advanced roles without overwhelming them.
• Flexible Career Paths: Respect personal career choices ensuring the team can thrive with both ambitious employees and those content in supportive roles.

Learn More: https://www.yardstick.team/

Connect with Lucas Price: linkedin.com/in/lucasprice1

Connect with Joe McNeill: linkedin.com/in/joemcneill

Full Episode: https://bit.ly/3Tk73pE

Subscribe to our YouTube Channel: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLR0BMWoMgPMcHJ4yLLSUhbuafMmdhJTSy&si=tzQz7NFvDdT8Kj8Q

Connect with Dr. Jim: linkedin.com/in/drjimk

Mentioned in this episode:

BEST Snippet Outro

BEST Snippet Intro

Or increasing year over year revenue. Joe has a career of experience with skyrocketing scalable business growth. Joe, thanks for joining us today. Is there anything else that you'd like to add in terms of your experience and what you guys do at Influe2?

[00:00:47] Lucas Price: Joe. Can you start off by sharing with us that the importance of developing and progressing the careers of your existing team and the importance that plays in building [00:01:00] an elite team

But hiring in general is just imperfect, right? It's an imperfect science. Even when you are amazing at it, you're dealing with people and. People are tough at times, I started my career in staffing. So I understand that, like it's an imperfect science. So development is important because a going out and hiring folks is very resource intensive.

The hiring top performing AEs is nearly impossible for a rapid growth startup. Maybe it's a little easier now with the market, the way it is. And there's more folks than there are jobs, but it's hard to sift through it. And see, it's just expensive. And we don't, us and sales and with growing companies, we don't have a buffer.

And then develop them and early mean doesn't mean right out of college, it could be someone changing careers, right? It could be someone halfway through their career. Maybe they were a teacher and they wanted to move into sales. That's early in there and whatever career path they're joining because, you can train them and you can get real world.

Experience as to how they perform and you can throttle their income that way.

[00:02:59] Joe McNeill: [00:03:00] Let's just talk about hiring SDRs. I think some people are hiring SDRs that maybe, they want to be top performing AEs and, ideally that's the case. But I think if you hire really good folks coming into the SDR role, like they can be top performers in a number of different disciplines, right?

Like we had SDR is going to recruiting, going to marketing going to finance. So for me, I've always believed in the Warren Buffett quote, right? Hire for intelligence, energy and integrity. I think like you hire smart people. With energy that are good humans and you'll be in good shape.

[00:03:39] Joe McNeill: Yeah. So the culture I always communicate that I'm trying to create at any organization I'm leading is, and I stole this from a former CEO, but it's called a collaborative meritocracy, . Where I don't want people in their lane, . I want people. Brainstorming at where we can improve anything, and, if you want to foster an environment of [00:04:00] brainstorming, you need to have everybody understand that most ideas suck, like most brainstormed ideas suck and that's great. You get in these environments where people are afraid to speak up because they're afraid their idea sucks.

Your idea probably sucks, but the problem is if everybody's comfortable verbalizing ideas a lot, you'll get good ones every now and then. And I think some people get defensive if it's like, Hey, why do we do it this way? Like, why don't we do it this way? It's there are no sacred cows.

And I think, especially in go to market strategy with scaling SAS companies, I think too many people are looking for Oh, we're going to find this revolutionary strategy or thing we do that moves us dramatically forward. And that's not really it. Usually it's very, you're clawing for incremental gains.

And you need to be, not be afraid to screw up. Like for the most part, if you operate in good faith. There's nothing that you're going to break that we can't fix. We encourage mistakes. If, especially in a startup environment, if you're a leader or employee and you're not failing at some things, you're not making mistakes.

You're not doing enough stuff and you're not trying hard enough. You see the people come from really big organizations and they struggle with that because like they need this order of operations and all this stuff. And they're afraid to make a mistake and to slip. But you just need to, you need to go out there.

You need to put a lot of thought into something. You need to have a reason why you think it's a good idea. You need to execute it. They need to reflect and say, you know what? I thought it was gonna work with this way. It didn't. It went sideways on me. This is why I think it went sideways. And this is what I'm gonna do about it.

So for me, I think a lot of growth happens just with how you foster your culture. If. If you have people that have too much ego to speak up when they make a mistake and laugh about it if your culture is too tight, where, you say, Hey, don't worry about what this group is doing, you just stay in your lane and worry about this.

[00:06:08] Lucas Price: Getting back to career progression what are some of the best practices you've found in terms of the formal steps for considering whether someone can be promoted, what process they go through to be promoted? Are there things that are things in particular that you think are effective for putting that structure in place?

If you have like very complicated selling motion, Then, putting someone as a solo, solo seller into that role straight from an SDR role is probably not the move,. So you need to give people more responsibility, but not set them up to fail.

I think if you can start to layer on more responsibility in a more deliberate way, in a more intentional way, it tends to work better.

[00:07:39] Joe McNeill: Yeah. So what we did was, we had a AE that was a senior AE that was doing great on a really big territory. . And typically what happens when you're growing is you split off a piece of that territory and you throw another AE in there, right? And so you have the conversation with the ae and you say typically we would split your territory, but here's another proposal of what we could do.

If you don't think you can do that, you want to be a solo in a smaller territory, then you do it this way. So I think, in those cases, this was more of an enterprise motion. There's a lot of. Work that goes into that on the side, we're a growing company, so we didn't have, enable people, this people, these people, the, he had to do a lot of stuff.

And if we just sat down and broke down the responsibilities of what this junior could support, it was really helpful and it really helped them. And it was pretty successful. And a lot of times, the junior had a good too, because they got to ride shotgun with 1 of our, 1 of our top.

AEs in deals in cycles, collaborate with them every day. And then they were ready for their own territory.

[00:08:55] Joe McNeill: The senior AE was running the big meetings. They own, the communication with the executive [00:09:00] sponsor, most of the time, most of the positioning and high level strategy and the junior AE was doing a lot of follow up work. They were coordinating with solution consultant, solution architect for the demos.

They were coordinating with. Maybe the champions within the group, instead of the executive sponsors and building relationships there, they're helping with assets they were, it wasn't always a one size fits all, but they were doing more of the quote unquote.

Less complicated pieces of the busy work of the deal, rather than like the high level structure and strategy.

[00:09:41] Joe McNeill: It really depended depends there probably is a right answer for that, where this is the time period that would work. But a lot of times the business kind of dictates what's happening too. It's if we have, if we need a new, another, solo AE eight months later, and we think this person's the best fit, then maybe that drove it sometimes, the junior AEs.

So a lot of it depended on, what, how the junior AE reacted to the role, if they wanted more, or if they were happy where they were at.