The Tiger Woods Factor: Ed Lane on Finding Sales Talent That Stands Out

James: Welcome back to Revenue Unplugged. Before we get into it, if you're getting value from Revenue Unplugged, please, please hit subscribe, give us a like and leave a review. It really helps us build out the podcast. Most sales leaders hire for what someone's done.

Today's guest hires for who they really are. When a sales hire fails, we throw the candidate under the bus. We say they don't have to grit. Ed, welcome to Revenue Unplugged.

It's an absolute pleasure to have you on the show today. And we're to be talking about something that is close to my heart, and that's recruiting SaaS salespeople. It's challenge. Many sales leaders go through this every year.

And just going to talk about some of ⁓ the ways that you've your craft ⁓ over the many years hiring with us today. So I'm really grateful for that. As a way of getting started Ed, if you could just give our audience a bit of background as to who you are and who you're working for at the moment. They couldn't handle the pace.

They weren't quite the right fit. But today's guest reckons that could be nonsense. He thinks failed hires are almost always the hiring manager's fault. For the reason of the process was rushed, the candidate pool was thin, or someone got put into the role they were never going to win in.

Today's guest is Ed Lane. Ed's been in the tech industry for 30 years. He started in pre-sales and then carried a bag for over a decade. And for the last eight years, he has been leading sales teams.

Ed Lane: Yeah, brilliant. Well, first of all, thank you, James, for inviting me to the podcast and really excited to have the conversation today. Yeah, so Ed Lane, I run a European sales team as well as a global partnerships business ⁓ a company called Quintata. I've in the technology software world for the better part of 30 years.

In fact, it's 30 years today. Sorry, this the first sort of 10 years of my life I spent as a technologist and then in the in pre sales world. James: He's got a hiring philosophy that flips the way most leaders do this on its head. We get into the epic framework he uses to spot great sellers, entrepreneurial, prepared, internally driven, curious, courageous, and above all coachable.

We get into why the who matters more than the what and why looking at a candidate's CV before the interview is the worst thing you can do. We get into the Tiger Woods factor, the two stage interview process Ed runs at. Ed Lane: next sort of 10 years, ⁓ carried a bag a little bit more than 10 years. And then the last eight or so years, I've been leading different ⁓ teams across large global tech firms like Salesforce, pre-IPO companies, Incino, and then I worked for a P owned organization.

James: So there's a wealth of knowledge and experience there for you to with us. So I think ⁓ best place to start before we go into what you've learned along the way and how you go about your hiring is to look at the benchmark. ⁓ How you personally measure what success looks like in a hire? And then share with us what your success rate actually looks like.

every company he joins and why he flat out refuses to judge a new hire on whether they hit quota in their first 12 months. And if you're a sales leader who has ever blamed a hire for not working out, this one sting a little. This episode is sponsored by Indigo the SaaS sales recruitment business building tech companies with revenue salespeople that need to hire across Europe and North America. Right, let's get to this.

Grab a brew. Ed Lane: Okay, so I'll take the hard question first. Good hiring is really, really hard. And if I'm perfectly honest with you, I'm probably around break even on successful hires.

I'm gonna cover a little bit more of this, I think later in our conversation, we'll dig a little bit deeper. But I honestly believe that a failed hire is largely down to the hiring manager and the company. And I think it's very unfair, we very often throw the... James: Sit back.

This is Revenue Unplugged with Ed Lane Ed Lane: the individual under the bus, but actually too often we make compromised hires, we rush the process, the pool is thin, or ⁓ consciously someone into a role which ⁓ they don't the skills to be successful in. And so therefore I come back to my original point of it's very seldom the candidate's fault. It's usually because we've made a poor hiring decision. So.

⁓ You know, coming back to your original question of how do you measure success? I can look at three, three areas. The first one is time to self-sufficiency. So how quickly does the individual get up to speed with the business that they've joined?

How quickly can they deliver a credible elevator pitch with conviction and context as if they've worked in the business for a year or two years, right? That really credible safe pair of hands. how competently can they put together a customer presentation or an RFP or a proposal, which is kind of 90 % there or thereabouts, just by navigating their way around the business, tapping into past proposals that have been submitted or RFPs, know, are they self-sufficient and resourceful?

Do they actually understand our pricing model or is that too complex for what they've done in the past? And then really, really importantly, Do they give it a go if they might get a little bit wrong? You know, do they still stand up and deliver and, you know, deliver the company pitch, even though they don't feel a hundred percent comfortable, but they, they produce the, the, the output or they stand up in front of the client and they back themselves that they're going to, they're going to deliver something credible.

⁓ for me, that, that self sufficiency in the first sort of six months, I'm looking for. really good is less than three months. Three to six months is fine. That's competent.

Anything more than six months and I'm starting to worry whether they are a good hire. think the second metric ⁓ sales cycle control. And I put that as sort of a three to nine months. So do I need to babysit them through the sales cycles that they now inherit or they kind of up and away?

And want to say A really important thing for me here is it's not whether they do their number in their first year or their first pro routed period of their time at the business. That's a bonus. If they get there, that's an absolute bonus. It's more about if I started them in the role today with sufficient pipeline coverage, which you typically never get when you start as a seller, would they exceed or hit or exceed their quota in the next 12 months?

So are they rarely Are they in control of what they're doing? And then the last one is cultural fit. And I think this is super important. There's a matrix by two individuals and I always get their names wrong, but I think it's Kaskyari and ⁓ ⁓ talks about competence and likability.

And you've got competence down the one axis and likability down the other. And I think the question you've got to ask yourself ⁓ is, hired who highly competent but not likable. They're called a competent jerk. And frankly, you don't need those in your sales team.

The other side is highly likable and incompetent, the lovable fool. You don't need them in your team either. What you're really looking for is that lovable star, which is high on both axes. And so that's the other one that you figure out quite quickly, I think.

James: want to touch on the first point, particularly around ramp. And I know we're to talk about onboarding later, so I don't want to go into too much detail there. But this where I see sometimes salespeople thrown out too early during that period. So ⁓ how do you assess, mentioned that ⁓ someone getting up to after three months is amazing, but they should be there by six months.

⁓ How do you assess you're looking at, know, particularly if it's enterprise? How do you know how long it should take someone? And is there a one size fits all that you should be up and running by six months? Ed Lane: Um, I don't think, I don't think it's black and white like that, but you do, you do have, uh, some kind of indication of what good looks like.

And you, you know, if you've done the job before, so if you've been a seller and carried a bag for long enough, you kind of know how long it used to take you and what the challenges were in your first three months of not even knowing who the reference customers were or. having those anecdotes and soundbites that are really powerful that you can throw into the sales conversation. So I think you've got to be patient with people and recognize that they have to come up to speed. They have to sit in other sales cycles and meetings and listen in and have have good people like the sales leader in the room with them so they can pick up conversation.

But it's very hard to put a category time frame on whether someone's exceeded that. that window of competence art. James: It's a real challenge and I'm looking forward to talking to you more about it when we go into onboarding. So moving on then, finding the who versus the what, I think is critical.

is, I find when I talk to most sales leaders, we spend a lot of time on the what. Job descriptions seem to be the same from the day I started nearly 21 years ago. where we are today. But the is a valuable part of it.

And normally when you get that right, you stand a much greater chance of the success of the hire. ⁓ So how you spend time looking the who rather than ⁓ the and why? Ed Lane: So, so I use a, believe that there's a certain ⁓ of characteristic of a great seller. and you're right that the job specs, I mean, I see them, I see them generated in haste.

I see them generated using AI tools. Nowadays we don't have the specialist recruiting large HR and recruiting teams that where you specialist hires that would hire only for an enterprise salesperson or only for. an SMB salesperson. So the job specs are, they aren't something that you go by.

What I really go by is I actually have an acronym that I use, which represents the characteristics of the individuals that I'm looking for. And the acronym is ⁓ EPIC. E stands for entrepreneurial. So I'm looking for someone who has entrepreneurial spirit in them.

someone who's prepared to take their territory and run with it and be creative and basically own their own outcome. The P is really, really important. That stands for preparation and planning. So someone who's not going to be successful through luck alone, but is actually going to go, you know, like a sport, they're going to go and do their training sessions, they're going to go and do the the hours on the pitch or the hours on the road or the miles or whatever it is and make sure that they don't leave things to chance, be it a discovery call, be it an important presentation, they've done the dry run, they are, they've sent out the meeting notes ahead of the set follow-up, thank you notes, all of that kind of thing.

that they making their own luck. The eye of Epic is internal drive and desire. And this is so important. ⁓ It kind of comes back to that entrepreneurial thing, but it's slightly different.

It's that absolute desire to find a way forward, regardless of what obstacles are thrown in your path. They find a way around, they find a way over, and if need be, they just bash through to get to the outcome they require. And sometimes might cause a little bit of a noise. My always says you have to crack a few eggs to make an omelet.

And I think it's a very, you know, at some point you sometimes have to break, you know, bash through that wall to get to get where you need to get to. And then the C, and I'm looking for these, I'm interviewing for these traits, these characteristics, curiosity, someone who's not curious, cannot sell my product because they're not going to be interested in the problems of the customer. Someone who's courageous. They have to be able to ask that hard question at the right time, or, know, not shy away from.

a difficult point that's been raised. They need to be able to communicate well with the customer or the prospect as well as internally. They need to have compassion and care. We need to know as a buyer, sorry, yeah, as a buyer, I need to know that the person who's selling to me cares about me and has compassion for my, I don't need sympathy, but I need that compassion to understand or empathy to understand where I am.

And then one of the most important things for me as a sales leader is they have to be coachable. If they aren't coachable, I have a real challenge with moving them forward and helping them develop their career. other thing to add here, I do also deliberately look for people who have changed their lives. And I think it's kind of attached to that internal drive and desire.

People who've grown up... ⁓ in tough circumstances or in very humble worlds, people who've switched careers in search of something better. I've got, I've got a, ⁓ an early stage seller in my team. He's only been selling for three years.

He was a BDR before he was in HR before he left the HR industry and came into tech. he did that because he wanted, he wanted a different path. ⁓ Immigrants, people who've left their homeland or the place of comfort to go and make a better life for themselves. These are the kind of attributes that I think make good sellers.

James: I want to touch on the first, the entrepreneurial piece and just get the importance of that because I think if you take the rest of it and you remove entrepreneurial, you still got a pretty good outcome. I agree with you with the entrepreneurial bit, but putting words in your mouth for you, why ⁓ that entrepreneurial bit there at the front and why to you is important that they have entrepreneurial side of it Ed Lane: Well, you know, entrepreneurs are many things. They're very energy individuals.

They tend to big picture creative thinking people. But very importantly, they have a plan. Entrepreneurs don't tend to run their own business or create businesses from nothing without some kind of Big idea, then a plan that backs into it. And I think one of the most important things in selling is to have the plan of how to become successful, the plan for success.

And sellers or AEs that kind of they can wing it without a plan or without, you know, doing a look back on the last quarter, what went well, what didn't go so well, what do I change for the next quarter? Those people aren't ⁓ because the entrepreneurs are continually refining, introducing new things. And they have this insatiable appetite for energy and fast-paced change. And think in sales, ⁓ we have to able to embrace and show that energy and fast pace.

And I'm saying never sleep, but entrepreneurs don't sleep much. James: No. your opinion, why is it important to think about the who ⁓ not get trapped in the what and just trying to find someone that's got ⁓ amount of experience ⁓ a similar sector selling a similar product, having an okay amount of ⁓ ⁓ people will say, look, we want to have someone that's smashed their target on President's Club. ⁓ the fact is, is that two and three sellers won't hit target.

why you see the importance of looking at who and not just following the Ed Lane: Well, I think, you know, you could draw a line to a parallel with sports, you know, and whether it's Formula One racing or golf or tennis or any of these like high performance sports, high performance athletes. If you look at the top thousand in the world or whatever it might be in whichever discipline, and you look at their statistics and their credentials of whatever their sport is and whatever the performances, they're probably not a million miles away apart from each other.

They are apart from the rest of us, know, us normal citizens, but between each other, there's not a lot of difference. You know, what made Tiger Woods ⁓ spectacularly unbeatable in his heyday? That was the who, not the what, because the what of Tiger Woods was not dissimilar to the other players that he was. competing against in his heyday.

They all had the same watts, the same credentials, the same, they hit the ball about the same distance and hit the same number of greens in regulation and played the same, but it was all about the who, that person. And he had this incredible drive and desire and self-belief. And I think that's what you're trying to find is people with that kind of Tiger Woods factor, dare I say it, the incident. James: Makes a lot of sense.

the right people. We've quite a offline about this ⁓ topic and you've that many of your good hires comes from your network. How do you keep ⁓ a warm in? a day in a life of a sales leader that is so busy.

And the one thing I think most sales leaders will say is they're time poor over everything. So how you ⁓ keep network alive? What practices do you do to ensure that ⁓ you have that in place? Ed Lane: Yeah, this is a really, really hard one because I firmly believe that the highest from the network, be it your network or other networks are the best highest that you can make.

And I think if I look at my success rate, coming back to your original question, my success rate is very firmly in people that I've hired through my own network, through having worked with them in the past ⁓ or adjacent networks. Keeping your network warm, given how busy we all are, is a really hard thing to do. And I could do a lot better at it than I do myself. I think it's a combination of keeping in touch with people.

I was messaging someone the other day who's based in Germany and asking them about some other people. And I was looking for signals or signs, and then I asked a direct question. But you've to keep in touch with the people that you respect out there who... may give you that heads up, someone's looking for a job, or you can go directly to them ⁓ ask them.

It's much harder when you've had no contact with anyone ⁓ 10 years to phone them up and say, Hey, do know anyone good that does this job? So I think we as sales leaders are going to become more proactive in not just networking with our customers and our prospects, but networking with our peers that we've grown up selling with who are probably now sales leaders. And with the great sellers that we've worked with who maybe never want to be a sales leader, but they've got a network of sellers that they've worked with who they trust and they might reference ⁓ someone to you.

James: I mean, that segues nicely into the proactive over the reactive sales hire. We that one of challenges of hiring in sales is it is normally a pressure hire. And what I mean by that is ⁓ you've had resignation that you didn't expect, or ⁓ you've through or forecasting for following year, ⁓ and you you need hire a head count to be able to attain that. So the pressure is on to get either the head count in to replace the person that's left to make sure you hit target for that year, or you're under pressure to get somebody hired so you can get them ramped up so that they can get as close to attainment for target that year.

have the most success, you need to be the proactive rather than reacting. So do you, so like, should be spending a portion of your week ⁓ reaching to people just saying, hi, how are you? ⁓ Being sometimes like I speak sales leaders who they call themselves, the agony aunt someone that they've worked with before where you just ⁓ hear them out give them some advice. So ⁓ how do you proactive?

and not fall into the reactive trap. Ed Lane: So I'd love to say that I am proactive all the time. I'm not. And I'll give you great example.

It's a real world example from this month, from last couple of months. But it is an example of why proactivity sometime around the beginning of March, so ⁓ about six, seven ago, someone from my network said to me, hey, there's this individual. They might be in the markets. They're quite a good seller.

The earliest stage of their career, they're ready for, I think they're ready for a change. I was like, well, I don't really have a role. And I, I bumbled along for three or four weeks and did nothing. And then I said, I, I remembered the conversation.

I thought I better go and meet with them. And they live just down the road from me. So I went and had breakfast with them two Fridays ago. And I met the individual and went, I really like it.

It's a real, I don't have a role for him. And then three days later, I had a resignation I very quickly moved him to next round interview. So he met someone else in the business and is coming in for his panel interview tomorrow. No, it may not work out, but the point of ⁓ it such a great, I had, ⁓ I because I was busy doing other things.

I probably should have met them. five or six weeks ago, but the net net is I had a candidate who I'd met and liked is a no brainer. If he gets through his panel tomorrow, he will have a job offer next week. And we won't have this big lag time between the other individual leaving the business and this person starting.

And I won't have felt under pressure. And I won't have had to go to the market and waste hours and hours interviewing different people. So that's why we need to do it and do more of it. James: And for me in that is that you met him for breakfast and you him based on having a clear mind with no pressure, no need, no, think that's if you ⁓ not met had the resignation, then met him.

I think a lot of sales leaders would look for the reasons why they wanted to like them because it would be an easy win. Right. Ed Lane: Correct. Absolutely, that's such a great point.

I met him almost apologetically having nothing and I led the conversation with, your name was given to me, let's just have a chat, tell me a little bit about yourself, where you are, where you wanna get to. There was no expectation or pressure on either side. And for me, that was really easy for me to go into that with an open mind. James: Yeah.

Yeah, which is why I think it's so critical because as I say, you could have ended up having that breakfast on Monday and started trying to work out how do I, is this person right? It's a quick, easy win. Don't need to go out to recruiters. Someone else has said they're good.

Let's just roll this and give it a go. So I think it makes a lot of sense. Scorecards. I wanted to talk to you about scorecards because for me, they should be one of the most important tools in a sales leaders plan.

They get ⁓ used that often. ⁓ And reason why I like them so much ⁓ is one, it really makes the sales leader think about the hire. When they're putting a scorecard out and they're writing down the characteristics and the skills they want people to have ⁓ the against them. It makes them really understand what they're looking to hire.

And it makes the interviews so much better because it's laid out in a way the questions are smart, the answers that you're looking for become factual then above all it takes a part gut decision making out of the process. But to me why you have a scorecard, how you use it, how build it and how you read the results. Ed Lane: Yeah. So this is something I'm really passionate about.

And we've got, we've got a, um, a pretty comprehensive scorecard that effectively has been built from the ground up by the sales leaders. Uh, we sat in a room, Ooh, almost 18 months ago and started us and it's evolved over time. we, effectively have, uh, seven criteria that we look at and, those criteria, I'll give you examples. Um, you, this is about salespeople.

One of them is about sales experience. Um, Another one is about new business pedigree, because we're looking for sellers that aren't account managers, need new business Another is engaging with power. So we've got seven of these. ⁓ then the ⁓ X axis, have levels of competence, one to five.

So one being novice and five being expert. And in each of those little boxes, so that's a seven by five matrix, We have a description of what that skill would be that level of competence across entire matrix, as well as some questions to ask, some interview questions to ask for that. And then we flag types of roles that we're looking for. So ⁓ a junior coming straight out of ⁓ a business role into sales would probably be mostly ones and maybe a two.

somewhere, you know, ones and twos or maybe all ones. whereas a sort of a, five to 10 years in role might a combination of threes and fours and your real heavy hitter top end enterprise sales people will be fours and fives or mostly fives, maybe one or two fours. And so that's, we then interview against that scoring criteria for the specific role that we hiring for. And each interviewer captures their, their score.

against those seven criteria, as well as some other notes. And then we have an average. So we average the scores at the bottom and it becomes kind of scientific scoring mechanism where every interviewer is maybe not asked every single question in the same way and maybe not covered all sevens. Some of us might only cover five because we run out of time, but we've got a pretty good complete picture of specific skills and the level of level of capability that Canada has.

James: And what made you go down the route of scorecards? do you see adding value to your end result? Ed Lane: So ⁓ have an approach, I think interviewing is part subject, subjectivity is subjective and part objective, but the scorecard brings objectivity in. So let me take you through ⁓ way that I will interview for a new candidate.

I will effectively do, and this comes to the point that salespeople are very, very good at selling themselves, right? And so. ⁓ You've got to structure your interview process in a way that you kind of see through how they sell themselves. you can remove your unconscious bias or subjectivity and then apply objectivity to it.

So my approach is, is I start with the subjective and I'll typically have two first round interviews. The first, the first one is a, is a, is the subjective interview. And Hey. I'm giving you, you why don't you kick off with 10 minutes?

Tell me about yourself. Why are you in the room? How you found us? Where you want to go as a career?

Why are you interested in joining us? All of that kind of context. and by the way, I don't read CVs. So deliberately, I don't read CVs to remove unconscious bias.

So when I hear their 10 minutes introduction about themselves, it's with a complete clear, there's no prejudice ⁓ a perspective of, you've been in the industry too long, or you work for that company, which I don't respect. So I hear them for the first time with clear ears. That allows also me to see how they sell themselves. Like, do they tell me the story in a way where I go, oh yeah, I get why you're interviewing.

That makes perfect sense. I would be doing the same thing if I were you. So that's the sort of the 10 minute part of the subjective interview. I then go on to selling to them.

And I think this is something that sales leaders do miss. As sales leaders, we can't forget that the candidates we interviewing have choice and they typically interviewing at multiple other potential employers. And so it's our job to sell to them as much as they're gonna sell to us. And I do believe that time and time again, good candidates will buy into ⁓ hiring manager.

as much as they buy into the company. They want to join a hiring manager that they can grow with, that they can be successful with. And so I think it's really important as the hiring manager to be authentic, to be honest, not to oversell the role, and give them a really good perspective of what it is you're offering them and the journey that you expect them to go on. And then the last part of that interview is we just go into informal discussion, Q &A.

They'll ask me some questions. I'll ask them some questions, but I'm really listening out to see how much did they listen to me? How genuinely interested are they in the role or the company? Like, have they thought about some good questions to ask me?

And we kind of conclude there is the first interview, the subject of interview. And from there, I decide whether to go into the objective interview, which is interviewing against the skills matrix. And that's where... James: Yeah.

Ed Lane: So if they get through the subject of one, it's then right. Now I really want to, I haven't asked you in that first interview, I haven't asked them anything about number attainment or, you know, you know, types of clients they cover or which sales methodology they use. None of that. It's just about them.

James: It's a fascinating point because I think the first stage interview is where a lot of sales leaders get it wrong. You know, have it where they just get grilled straight away. had one sales leader recently at a series A startup interview someone and they said no to them at first stage interview because the candidate couldn't articulate perfectly what they do. Ed Lane: Okay.

James: I was like, that's not what this stage of interviews ⁓ about. You ⁓ you be passing through candidates in that stage that can articulate what you do, but couldn't sell anything. One part you mentioned ⁓ in that, as though staged it, but we definitely didn't, ⁓ you mentioned you asked them to ⁓ what they to achieve in the role. It's a fascinating point because I'm constantly saying that people always talk about what they've done.

This is what I did. This is how I did it. And there's not much spoken about what you're to do. What's next and why, what are you looking to achieve and why are you going to achieve it?

What's your belief? What's your desire to go and do that? Because the reason why someone achieved that, let's say for instance, without going into to broader too much topics that somebody wanted to buy a house and I needed to get a deposit. And it's like, I did this, I hit that.

Have you got your house? Yes. What's next? I'm just gonna live in it.

And it's like, right, so I now get how you hit that number. You I know what your reason was and you go into the deal as to why they needed a house and there can be a whole load of different reasons behind why, but that made them achieve what they did. Now that why has gone away. So the behaviors will change.

So I think it's really fascinating that you bring that, because I think that's an important part that gets missed so often, where it's like, right, they were really good there, so they're going to be really good here. Why are they going to be really good here? Because they were really good there. And then they're not really good here.

Ed Lane: Correct. So I fundamentally believe every job is a stepping stone to another job. But actually what I'm looking to hear that they want to use me as a stepping stone or my company or this role as a stepping stone to get somewhere else. And I want to see the ambition of the individual.

They've ⁓ something over here and now they want to go do something over here. And this is the reason why we look like a good business to work for. Because let's be realistic. you don't keep people forever nowadays.

This is not a job for life. I don't want someone who just wants a job. I want someone who wants to come in, do a great job for two to three years. ⁓ And I can't ask them to lock life away past three years.

I kind of want them for two to three years, because I think the first year is learning, the second year and the third year is the dividends. But yes, I'm definitely looking for where they want to go in their career. James: Love it. the last bit, which I think is really important is to talk about onboarding.

And I think sales leaders get hiring right more often than they think. They just onboard wrong. And I'm gonna go into all the different horror shows of onboarding that I've seen my time ⁓ or heard from I've talked to. Want to focus in on your onboarding.

What does... the first 90 days like to you? How you making sure that you stick to the plan? Ed Lane: Great question.

So we are blessed to have a really strong sales enablement function at Contata. And we have a formal 90 day onboarding plan. And that is run ⁓ the sales enablement team. And is a list of, set out week by week, class to accomplish, check-ins, ⁓ pitches.

⁓ a of the theory and learning the theory as well as the practice and standing and delivering, et cetera, et cetera. For our more experienced AEs, we shorten that to 60 days. So it is actually, we can refine it and drop things out for our sellers that have just started from a BDR into an AE. They do the full 90 days and maybe some extra stuff.

But that is rarely, rarely important. Because look, every company and solution is slightly nuanced. So even if you get a really experienced stellar in, well, you guessed it, one of my passions is playing golf. So let me use the golfing analogy.

I sales are not just similar to sports. And the golfing analogy is I may be a reasonably competent golfer. But when I go and play a new golf course, I suddenly become somewhat incompetent because I haven't played that course. So the first few times I play it, I'm not as good as I will be the next few times I play it, even though I'm still the same golfer that I was that played the other course the weekend before.

so I need time on that course to familiarize myself with how it plays, where's best place to attack the from, so where do need to drive, which... You know, where the water hazards that I need to stay out of, which are the really tough holes that I just need to be conservative on, because I could take a 10 on those holes and worst case, I want a five. You know, how does the course change with weather conditions? And this all kind of plays into selling another company's solution, different competitive landscape, different types of sales cycles.

different types of objections. So you have to, as a seller, go through that familiarizing, familiarizing yourself with, with the course. And that's really what the formal onboarding plan does. And, you know, having it owned and led by a sales enablement team takes that onus of responsibility off the sales leader.

I come in to come and do the. the, you know, listen to them do their company pitch or to do a discovery session or whatever it means. I also look, also believe great sellers have inbuilt DNA in them. I think great sellers are born, they're born with that DNA, you either have it or you don't.

That being said, a little bit contradictory, there's nature and nurture. So yes, those great sellers from a nature perspective, come with great bedside manner. I don't think that gets, doesn't get created. ⁓ tend to be likable or they have that internal drive that I spoke about a little bit earlier.

They can pick themselves up and dust themselves off when they've lost an opportunity from nowhere. They will through that period of mourning and then they'll come back even harder the next time. That you can't create, that's in the DNA. But then there's the nurture side, which as sales leaders, we have to be better at doing.

⁓ and I think this is often the ball that we dropped. So sales is a numbers game, as we all know, it's a numbers game that needs a plan. It's a game of project management. It's a game of reading the room, qualifying with a cool head, objectively, of sometimes some premeditated amateur dramatics, you know, ⁓ can't that done.

I've been trying to, you know, HQ said, you know, all of that kind of, You know, and being patient and timing what you say to people and when. And I think that bit. You aren't necessarily always born with, and that's the nurture of it. So great sellers still need to be nurtured.

And I think it's absolutely the job of the sales leader to those AEs acquire those skills over time. So the younger, more, more early stage career AEs need more of it. but the good sales leaders are coaching and nurturing those skills, not in a team meeting, not in a one-to-one, they're doing it in the sales cycle. And so my final point for you on all of this is, I rarely think that the ⁓ role of the sales lead is so important is that they need to be a player coach.

They need to be there rolling up their sleeves, leading from the front because... ⁓ As humans, we tend to imitate good behaviors. We want to be like the good out there that we see, especially the good that delivers results. And so if we can watch ourselves lead or being good, delivering results, we're going to do exactly that.

And so we have to be the example of great. James: I agree. other thing I always say about onboarding is what hear all too when I speak to a sales leader ⁓ and we're particularly on enterprise, ⁓ they'll say, take me 12 months to know if they're any good. And, you know, an expensive hire.

to get right and I won't know until then. say, okay, so why do you not know until 12 months? Because he goes, well, that's when I know what they're gonna do. And I was like, but that's a result.

And quite often I then talk about you could train a heavyweight boxer for a year and they go into that fight and they don't win the fight. But does that mean they're no good or did they just lose that particular fight? So when you do onboarding, if you structure it in a way that shows how you become a great salesperson and there are activities that you ask them to do and you can measure their success and how they learn and how they adapt and develop along the way, then you'll know if you've got, regardless of what the result is, because then you could have someone that doesn't get the result you're looking for.

go, do you know what? I back this person and I back this person because of X, Y and Z not, oh, I don't want to go back to the market. I'm going to give them another six months. to see if they come through.

gives you data and fact and you've coached and developed and I call them the other leaders that don't do that are the spreadsheet warriors. know, we're to put bums on seats and we're going to look at numbers and if the numbers make sense, good. If they don't, and sometimes have success, but they won't know why. But more often they won't have success and they'll keep trying to repeat the success they had, but without any real eyes.

realisation or guidance of how it was. So which is another fundamental reason why I think onboarding is so important for the individuals who are going through it, but the managers to understand what's going on and what great looks like and how you get there. And information, having a good sales enablement team makes that wonderfully better because they can break the data down and tell you exactly what it all means. Ed Lane: Agreed.

And look, to your point earlier, sales is a game of peaks and troughs on timing, territory, target, the three T's and sales people get unlucky. But as the saying goes, the cream rises to the top. And so I don't think the first 12 months is necessarily proof of the pudding because you could give an individual like you're doing all the right things and just not being successful, especially in enterprise where sales cycles are six to 18 months. Right.

So I think there's other leading indicators that we spoke about earlier that people should focus on rather than do they hit their quota in the first quarter. James: Ed, I really appreciate you taking time out to join me on the show today. a difficult topic talk about. ⁓ As we said before, this isn't a silver bullet, I appreciate you taking time out to share you've done, how you do it, and why you do it.

Ed Lane: Pleasure, James. Thanks for the time. was really good to be on the show.