Damon McLean is the Head of Sales Development at Assembled, a workforce and vendor management platform whose mission it is to create a support operations platform that helps companies maintain exceptional customer experiences.

I’ve known Damon for several years and had the opportunity to work alongside him and see first hand how he works with teams and how he helps them achieve new heights.

In this episode we unpack Damon’s incredible back story on his training for and participation in olympic track and field events. He shares with us how he translates performing at such an elite level to getting SDR teams to perform at their best. We go deep on the balance between individual talent and accountability, and fostering the right environmental conditions.

I hope you’re ready to get fired up because this is one of those interviews where you’re going to be inspired in a big way.

#salesconsultantpodcast #leadership #personalaccountability #goals #motivation #coaching #teams #teamculture #talent #salesenvironment

Time Stamps:

[1:00] We unpack the early days of his olympic track and field career and his move from Jamaica to the United States and getting a full ride to Princeton. He talks about how his track and field career established a lot of his foundational beliefs toward how to reach your goals.

11:00] You have to go all in. Damon talks about the level of commitment it takes to train for an olympic team.

17:00] How the ecosystem of coaches and environmental conditions set the team up for success.

19:30] How he deals with unmotivated team members when his background of working with top athletes is one where each person is motivated and so motivation isn’t often a problem (unlike in business).

[22:00] Creating an environment that facilitates each team member’s intrinsic motivation.

[24:00] How Damon structures and approaches his one on ones differently including how he creates psychological safety for the reps on his team through vulnerability.

[30:00] Damon’s view on how much time and energy reps should invest on their own time to develop into the best rep that they can be.

[34:40] Why Damon doesn’t subscribe to a one-size fits all approach to daily KPIs across his teams.

[42:20] The difference between Outcome Goals and Process Goals. And, how to apply them in your team.

[45:00] How Damon splits the percentages (must equal 100%) between Environmental Conditions and Individual Talent in terms of what it takes for a team/org to exceed its performance goals.

[47:00] At Damon’s company they have access to AI tools that uniquely position him to provide ‘just-in-time’ enablement to his SDRs using the same core AI engine they use in their product. He refers to it as ‘The Perfect SDR’... the SDR that knows everything because they have been training the model on everything pertaining to the GTM details of their business.