Summary

Dr. Jim, teams up with Lucas Price, a founder with an impressive track record in sales leadership. Together, they debunk the common misconception that amassing an army of top-selling individuals is the singular route to a thriving sales organization. Instead, they advocate for a more nuanced and sustainable approach, emphasizing depth and health within a sales team.

Over the course of their dynamic discussion, Lucas unfolds the layers of his philosophy for sales team success, rooted in his own trial-and-error experiences at Zipwhip. They explore the pitfalls of the "throw spaghetti against the wall" approach where reliance is predominantly placed on a few star performers. Instead, Lucas illustrates the significance of having a broad second tier of competent sellers, attributing it to a reflection of effective management and successful developmental programs. He underscores the necessity of balance, insightful hiring, and fostering an environment where every team member has the opportunity to progress and contribute.

Take Aways

It's imperative to focus on developing a strong second tier of sellers, as it's indicative of the overall health of a sales organization.

Successful sales organizations balance external hiring with internal promotions to maintain a flow of fresh ideas and career advancement opportunities.

Structured weekly schedules for managers can significantly bolster their effectiveness and focus on developing their teams.

Feedback and coaching are distinct yet pivotal aspects of management; it's critical for sales reps to identify their growth areas and drive those improvement conversations.

Clear communication and defined expectations between sales leaders and their teams are foundational for building trust and streamlining development.

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

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

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

Mentioned in this episode:

BEST Outro

BEST Intro

How often have we heard that in sales organizations? Pretty often, right? What if I told you that thinking is setting your sales organization up for failure? That's what this founders features episode of building elite sales teams is going to focus on today.

And our fearless founder, Lucas price is joining us to walk us through how to build a healthy sales organization. Lucas, welcome to your show.

Lucas Price: Jim, it's good to be back. I'm looking forward to our conversation.

Dr. Jim: This is going to be an interesting conversation especially since both of us have been and continue to be in sales organizations. And I even remember at several points in my career wishing that I could just duplicate my top producer and have a couple more of those and really set myself up for success.

Lucas Price: Prior to starting yardstick, I was the sales leader at zip whip from near zero. It was less than a million in ARR. It was about a quarter million near zero built the sales organization that took zip whip to over a hundred million. Before it sold the Twilio two years ago for 850 million.

And so it was a very accelerated period where, I had to learn very quickly because things were changing very quickly. That, was really a great informative experience and I made a lot of mistakes, more importantly than that, like I learned a lot of things and have used that to, to try to help other sales organizations succeed.

Lucas Price: One of the things is, I think it's great to have top performers and it's great to look for more top performers. And you're always wanting to, add skills that you don't have to your team. But I think one of the signs of health of a sales organization is how big. Your second tier of sellers are and how productive they are.

That means your managers are probably counterproductive in terms of the things that they're adding and your development plan isn't working. Things aren't getting better. And so that's a really good measure to see whether the things that you're doing outside of just hiring high performers. Are really having a positive impact on your sales organization.

Dr. Jim: So it's an interesting position that you bring up and the reason why it's catching my attention and might ruffle some feathers is that, we as sellers when we're thinking about, our territory planning and things like that, we know the 80 20 rule. We know that 80 percent of our revenue is going to come from 20 percent of our accounts.

I don't see what the problem is in, in approaching it that way. So prove me wrong.

Lucas Price: Yeah. I call that like the throw the spaghetti against the wall philosophy. You hire a bunch of sellers and 20 percent of them become top performers and I think that there's a couple of things that you've missed. There is you haven't really thoroughly vetted the people that you're hiring, and then you're not helping the people that you hired develop and become better over time.

There is a certain portion of the people who are just going to be extremely skilled, have just the right experience, learn really quickly. And you want to find as many of those people as you can. But it's not the case that everyone else has to be deadweight.

And if you're really trying to build an elite team, if you're trying to maximize what you can get out of your team, you need to do more than just hire a bunch of people and see who rises to the top and. And let them carry everyone else's dead weight.

Dr. Jim: Your point about building an organization that has a lot of very good sellers and a handful of best sellers, I think that makes a lot of sense when we're thinking about organizational health. If we ignore that and focus on let's just keep identifying top producers or at least trying to find top producers, what do we miss out from an organizational development perspective that sales leaders need to be aware of that they might not be considering?

Lucas Price: So I wouldn't necessarily say that we're not trying to find the best in the hiring process. I think that's still a really important element of it. I just think that, what's going to happen is that when you're, when you do have a great hiring process, that's great at identifying talent.

All of the right skills, all the right talents, and then life circumstances change for them and they end up having to leave for reasons that were not, couldn't have been anticipated during the hiring process and out of, outside of their control or life circumstances change and they just can't keep up the level of performance that they've had in the past.

And so the unexpected, even with a great hiring process, unexpected things will happen. And at the same time, part of what you're looking for in the hiring process, Is potential is learning agility. And so some of the people that you hire that are going to become your top performers, they're not going to start off as your hot top performers.

And become everything that they can be. And so it's not get rid of the hiring process, still work really hard on the hiring process, but also make sure you have the career progression and the frontline management and the sales enablement and the training and the processes in place that are going to let other people succeed, not just your very top performers.

Dr. Jim: That's a good point. If I translate what you just said and put it on a bumper sticker you're arguing that you want balance across the organization as a hedge against disaster. So if you only have a couple of people that are super high performers and you have no depth underneath.

Now you have the whole rest of the organization to go ahead and develop and you mentioned a bunch of things that you could be doing. It could be an infrastructure component. It could be a leadership capability component. What are some key things? That your managers within the organization need to be doing on a consistent basis to develop that second tier of producers within your

Lucas Price: organization.

The things that we talked about in terms of having the. Sales organization infrastructure that enables a wide range of sellers to succeed. The same thing is true for sales managers. The sales managers need to be given the correct boundaries, the right infrastructure so that they can thrive in their role and they're not left to their own devices to make up all every bit of it as they go.

And, here's the types of deals that you should be assisting them on and being part of the calls and meetings. And this is how many meetings, customer meetings you should be having per week. I think. Providing that type of process and structure for the sales managers enables the sales managers to have success in the same way that, you know having some guidance for a new seller in terms of the, these are the activities and results that you should be seeing on your path to success.

Then what happens is that you have a period of time where that new manager is trying to figure stuff out and six months down the road, they're really struggling. And now you're in triage mode. So if we're talking about providing managers with the right infrastructure to put them in positions of success, what should sales organizations and leaders within sales organizations be doing to get their managers prepared to lead so that they're effective?

Lucas Price: There's lots of answers to this question. I think one of the things to start with is think about the composition of that management team. And this relates to a mistake that I made. We were growing really fast and our board was telling us grow faster, hire more salespeople.

And then we were like, we don't have enough ideas from the outside. We need more kind of professionalism and outside experience brought in here. And we went a long period of time where we were hiring all of, almost all of our managers from the outside and very few people were being promoted. And I think the right thing to do to get the right pieces in place is to, have a bunch of your managers come from inside promotions and some of your managers come from outside as well.

And I think that, people have certain ideas about this. Some people say it should be 40 percent promotions. Some people say it should be 60 percent promotions. I think anything in that range is fine. I just think you shouldn't do what we did where you swing from one end of the pendulum to the other, you should have a, a constant mix where of both internal promotions and outside.

So that's one piece of it. And then the other piece I think is, as I mentioned before, give be prescriptive about what you expect from your managers, about the meetings that you expect them to have, when you expect them to have them, what you expect them to accomplish in those meetings and.

One way to do it would be like, Hey, every other week for the first, let's say nine weeks of the quarter, we do a pipeline meeting where we talk about what pipelines being created. And then on the opposite Monday.

We do a forecast meeting where we talk about the deals that are in cycle and what we can do to affect those deals. And you're going to do your one on ones on Monday, and here's what's going to happen on the one on ones. And then on Tuesday, perhaps there's going to be some sales enablement training, and then on Friday, maybe you're going to do your team meetings and you're going to.

Where they can attend customer meetings and they can provide coaching and development to the reps on their teams. It doesn't have to be that structure, but that's the type of structure that puts your managers in the position to succeed.

Dr. Jim: There's a part that I'd like you to expand. You mentioned a potential. Way that you could structure your week where you have one meeting for pipeline, another one for forecast, another one for your one on ones. Why is it important to split those things out into different meetings?

And it's focused, what you're going to talk about. You're not going to talk about every deal. You're going to talk about the deals that can really be impacted, that can, make the biggest difference on this sales period. The one on one now doesn't need to be this meeting where it's just talking about, Hey, these are the activities that you're doing.

How come you're not doing enough activities? Because you have a team meeting that's going over. The most important pieces of that. And so the one on one can be driven by the needs of the account executive, they can bring the things to you that you can help unblock. They might need some internal resources in order to close a big deal.

Dr. Jim: I'm glad that you called out the true purpose of a one on one is to unblock whatever is happening at the rep level. But there's another element that I'd like you to expand on. If you Are building a sales organization that's high functioning. You want your AEs to drive the one on one conversation.

Here are the things that I want to have line of sight to bring those to me. And I used to typically do this where I would have the reps that reported it to me, send me a high level agenda of what they wanted to cover in the one on one. So we're laser focused on that, but there's another element that I'd like you to expand on and this entire conversation that we're having is on the topic of building depth within your sales organization.

Tell me some of the ways that you can embed development into those one on one conversations that's going to take that middle tier or even your top tier to the next level within your sales organization.

These are the things that I want to get better at. And feedback is where I would go to you, Jim, and say, Hey, Jim, these are the things you need to get better at. And you may or may not agree with the things that I've identified that you need to get better at. And so as a manager, if you can help draw out the things that.

An individual needs to get better at, then then now you're having a coaching conversation and we're talking about, Hey, what are some plans? What are some ways that you can get better at this skill that you've identified? And now the individual is bought in to these are things that I want to improve instead of these are things that you want me to improve.

And one of the things that's like really helped me in these conversations and got me much better at them is at the end of them. Not leaving it undefined what the next steps are, how I'm, what the communication plan is going to be. The end of the conversation is always, Hey, Jim, once you've tried the things that you said that you're going to try today, once you've tested them out, once you've done them to try to get better at them, what are you going to do to let me know how it goes?

It's always putting ownership of the communication back on them, making sure that there's a followup plan. And then I don't need to be tracking a million different things and be emailing, Hey, Jim, what happened in this call today? We've established that you're going to come back with me.

Those are the kind of the steps that I've found most impactful for having these positive coaching conversations that really bring about changes and sales results.

Dr. Jim: One of the things that I'm thinking about is every leader and every sales rep. Is crazy busy and if you're creating this high velocity sort of feedback culture and action culture, what are some of the things that you did as a leader to make sure that those follow up items and those development items didn't fall through the cracks?

And one of the ways to lose trust with me is to not do the things that you're not, that you say you're going to do and not communicate with me about it. If you, things will happen where you say, Hey, Lucas, I'm going to do this and it doesn't happen. But and that's going to be okay. Like I'm generally going to be pretty understanding of that life gets in the way, but I won't be understanding if you don't tell me, if you tell me, Hey, Lucas, I'm doing this on Friday and then on Friday comes and something blows up and you're not able to do it.

If you send me an email and say, Hey, Lucas, I know I told you I was going to do this on Friday, but I'm not going to be able to do it until Tuesday now. No problem. You're not gonna lose credit with me. If I'm emailing you on Monday and on Tuesday and on Wednesday saying, Hey, Jim, what about this thing that you told me on Friday that you're gonna do on Friday?

And, I fail with it sometimes, but not very often that, I usually, if I can't keep a commitment I'm, I try to be perfect around communicating on that. I'm not always perfect, but I try to be perfect. So setting that framework of Hey if you want to move up.

And get promoted and working with me, if you want to build trust with me, if you want me to give you more responsibility this is the way to do it. So I think establishing that up front as a day one conversation does a lot to then having those follow up conversations coming up with a plan and putting the responsibility for communicating the results of the plan back on them.

Now they know what the benefits and what the costs are of communicating back with me about that plan or not communicating back with me about that plan.

And it's a little bit more elegant way of of approaching it than what I typically did, which was, Hey, I'm not going to chase you around for stuff that you said that you're going to do. We've covered a lot of ground in terms of building performance depth across your organization. But what I'd like you to do is think about all the things that we've talked about right throughout this conversation and map out the key principles that sales leaders need to have in mind when they're thinking about building that second tier of producers within the organization.

Lucas Price: Yeah, there's probably like a list of principles that's the right answer to this question, but I'm not sure if I know what it is. So I'm going to give you one idea that I hang my hat on when I'm thinking of this, which is as a sales leader in a growing sales organization, And you're trying to work yourself out of the job.

And so that's like a progression that you might go through in your career. You might go through it across multiple companies. You might go through it across one company, at each of those stages, in order to get to the next stage, you have to create. A group of people who can do the job that you were doing.

In order to be the director, you have to create a group of managers who can then manage the salespeople. And so if you think of yourself of Hey, I'm building a core team here, who's replacing me in the job that I do right now. Then that I think provides a really good guidepost in terms of continuing to build the organization and continuing to think of how to build excellence across the organization

Dr. Jim: If folks want to continue the conversation, what's the best way for them to get in touch with you?

Dr. Jim: Solid conversation, Lucas. when I think about the chat that we had, there's a couple of things that stand out in my mind, one of the things that I think is particularly important. For anybody that's listening to this conversation is that you as a sales leader needs to set the tone and the expectations on day one, and that needs to be clear in terms of what's inbounds and what's

out of bounds for you and everybody else that reports into you within your organization. So if you're looking at building depth amongst your producers and building capability and your managers, that clarity of communication has to start from you as the sales leader, and you need to be able to model what good looks like.

The comfort level that they need to come to you with questions. If you're not creating the opportunity in the space for questions, you're going to have an organization that is top heavy. You're going to have an organization where a few people will naturally rise to the top and everybody else is left to figure it out .

So if the goal for you as a sales leader is to build a healthy sales organization and have a pool of people that could replace you in the job that you're currently having, you need to take the time, model what good looks like, and then move forward with discipline so you can pull that off. So thanks everybody for listening.

Lucas, thanks for being on the firing line on this episode. For those of you who have tuned in. If you liked the conversation, leave us a review. And if you want more information, go to yardstick. team and hit us up there. And we'll be happy to have a conversation with you.