Lucas Price hosts Tracy Lynn, founder of Revenue Motions, to explore how sales teams can thrive despite changing environments. Tracy discuses the importance of prioritizing people, implementing a structured recruiting strategy, and the critical role of fairness and mission alignment in hiring. She highlights how designing a robust people strategy is comparable to creating a go-to-market plan. Lucas reflects on treating the sales team dynamically, considering what each new hire adds to the existing group. Tune in for insights on building adaptive, high-performing sales teams.
Take Aways
Focus on People: Prioritize people over process and technology to build high-performing sales teams.
Long-Term Strategy: Adopt a long-term, marathon mindset for sustainable growth and agile adaptability.
Mission Alignment: Ensure that the sales team’s mission is integrated with the company's overarching mission.
Fair and Inclusive Hiring: Implement fairness in recruiting to attract and retain top talent and mitigate biases.
Continuous Communication: Maintain tight, well-orchestrated communication across teams to support unified objectives.
Lucas Price: Welcome to another episode of building elite sales teams. We have a great show for you today. We're going to be discussing adapting to change and how to lead teams that perform in the face of a dynamic environment. We're joined today by Tracy Lin, the founder of Revenue Motions. Tracy is a B2B revenue leader with global sales experience in enterprise software businesses, fast startups, and global scale ups.
She excels at building high performing teams for sustainable growth. And knows how to rally teams for go to market motions. Tracy helps clients deliver value with enriched buyer experiences and positive revenue outcomes. Tracy, thank you for joining us today. What else should our audience know about you?
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[00:01:13] Lucas Price: have a relatively broad question and feel free to take it in any direction you like, but sales organizations are always facing changing environments. That's just part of the reality of being in business, I think. For a few years ago a lot of those changes were things like unlimited demand and how to deal with it and how to build your team fast enough and free money.
Now the change has gone the other direction where demand is shrinking. For a lot of organizations, deal sizes are getting smaller. Deal cycles are getting longer. What are some of the pillars of building a high performing team in the midst of negative change?
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And I think that SAS companies in particular have been challenged. To respond to some of the innovations that are coming along in the people category because the pace is very fast. So when you're looking at maybe 80 percent of the industry with a highly transactional sale, the rate of change is very fast.
So what happens is people tend to focus on the mechanics of that and forget about the fact that you're actually running a marathon and you need to think like a marathon and you need to think about infrastructure in long term foundational plays and then build something that's agile enough to adapt to all the changes that come your way.
ally the mindset of thinking [:
If you approach this with a long term foundational point of view, and today we're going to talk about people specifically that's a different mindset. And there are some Guiding principles, I believe that make that work.
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[00:03:40] Tracy Linne: First of all, congratulations on your podcast. I've listened to a lot of segments and I've listened to a lot of the experts that you've had on and great people with great examples of practical advice, tactical advice, strategy. And I think a lot of that's. It's been covered so far in the sense that, [00:04:00] what's a balanced hiring scorecard?
How do you actually hire and develop an advanced people so that you can keep them from a retention standpoint? How do you do the onboarding program? How do you really granularly get into behavioral interviewing, which you're showcasing through your own solution? Our industry doesn't know that these tools and methods necessarily are there.
I would say that We're behind some of the larger organizations in other industries. And I think part of that again is this pace this pace of SaaS, the pressure, and it's frankly even, your board members . So some of the foundational things have been missing. I don't think we can skip over that anymore.
And I think this year is the year that's actually going to demonstrate it, this coming year. So If I may, what I really like to concentrate on is this mindset idea and the mindset idea is your pre planning,. I think that there's a ton of great technology, great advice specific methods to actually get to creating a program.
But I [:
From my experience, you need to think about your people strategy as a go to market strategy. It is a go to market strategy. How are you going to get your solution to market? You're going to get it through a team and you need to think about deploying that as a go to market strategy. If you do that, you'll treat a program for recruiting, hiring.
level objectives of a go to [:
plan and project. They probably have participation in components of it. It's probably communicated to your external stakeholders. Certainly your board knows about it. I believe that recruiting high performing team has to elevate to that level.
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[00:06:34] Tracy Linne: Just like any sales situation, you do a discovery process, . So for each organization, each type of solution that's being sold, there are attributes that make great sellers. I would study the top performers. that are doing well in that environment. And I would certainly study the outliers and the people that are failing.
sales profile using tools or [:
And then we're going to have to test and validate over some period of time. The communication skills in a program like this are huge. You have to have a tight, well orchestrated team that's talking to each other. If your recruiting arm is Often left field and not working to the same goals that you are, it's a problem.
This, much the way a go to market motion might work, you might be having daily stand ups. You might be really managing this tightly. The definition of this often is also outsourced to sales recruiters, for example. I think that's a mistake. I think the design it and own it by the revenue leader.
e initial pilot and how it's [:
[00:08:10] Lucas Price: when you think about refining a people process, getting the right pieces in place, the hiring pieces and the other pieces, and you're going and trying to implement that in an organization that you're working with, what are the things that are you're looking for to make sure that it is done effectively?
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And have you done the definition work so that you can refine? That engagement through interview process and so on. I think the other thing is mission [00:09:00] the sales hiring Program has to be tied not just to the sales mission But to the has to plug and play into the corporate mission. So if that's not if it's disconnected and siloed That's a problem.
If you don't have, and you don't see this in very small startups where there's a lot of unification around, maybe evangelical selling mission based selling because there's a small team. Harder as you get larger and you have multiple teams, you have 10 teams, very hard to keep that going. But if in the beginning by design, you tie the bigger mission.
And individual salespeople understand that and were recruited with that and saw a vision for that. And that's why they wanted to join. That's a big difference. That's how you, that's how you really work on retention from day one. I think The last one, I think everybody would agree. You want to hire good citizens that fit your culture.
want to get to that answer, [:
[00:10:15] Lucas Price: Tracy, I really appreciate you coming on and sharing with us today. One of my takeaways is to really think about when you're hiring, think about the sales team as a team and think about what does this team need that it doesn't have right now? And not just looking at every.
Open role as an individual, but putting it in the context of the rest of the team and what could be added to the team to help elevate the whole team. So I appreciate having you on and that I think that's a, there were lots of great takeaways, but that's one in particular that's going to stick with me for sure.
