Ep. 23- Ambition is the Foundation of Winning Sales with Dennis Deal Sorenson

Speaker A: Foreign. Hello and welcome to the Supercharge Yourselves Velocity podcast, the show where I help you drive more opportunities, bigger deals and faster wins. If you're watching on YouTube, please subscribe to the channel and give us a thumbs up if you enjoy the show. I'm Fergali Carroll and today I'm joined by someone who's built a career out of turning SaaS teams into growth engines and who's now doing it across a whole portfolio of businesses. Dennis Diehl Sorenson is the CEO of Cove Group and also a co founder of Horizons west, where he works directly with leadership teams to win more, better and uh, bigger deals through strategic advisory, executional leadership and immersive training, all of which is powered by a CRO mindset. He's been in the trenches as a sales leader at Teradata and Allegis, leading global teams, landing massive deals, and coaching future leaders along the way. I believe what sets Denis apart is his no nonsense frameworks and his belief that consistency, planning, preparation, practice and play aren't buzzwords, they are the foundation of winning. He's a leader who sweats the details, he champions talent, and he brings serious velocity to any go to market motion. Dennis, welcome. Great to have you on the show.

Speaker B: Hey, Fergal, it is so good to be with you in everything that you're doing now.

Speaker A: Thank you so much. Uh, Dennis, when I think of you, there's one word that pops into my head all the time and that's ambition. Because you're just so passionate about driving ambition into SaaS teams and SaaS functions. But I noticed with your new venture, Horizons west, that you've added two more key challenges in the industry. So it's strategy and it's execution. So I'd love to get the big picture first and then maybe we can jump into ambition, strategy and execution. Just getting behind the details.

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. You know, for me, strategy actually came first. It was at the core of everything that I was trained in when I went to work for NCR Corporation a long time ago. And, uh, at ncr, the company itself had a very well thought out sales process. And we were trained. We actually went to a physical university campus in Dayton, Ohio, and we spent weeks there learning the sales process and how to build a really effective account plan or a strategic account plan or a strategy for winning business within an account. And that served me well for a long time in what I did in my career at ncr. And then later when I went to Teradata and one of the things that I found, um, as I Was in really my first level of sales leadership was that one of the pieces of what I sort of felt like I did naturally was missing in the way that I communicated with my sellers and the way that my sellers approached their work. And that was really understanding what is the total potential of an opportunity to us. And not just the total potential, that opportunity to us today, but the total potential of the opportunity looking three years out from now. So I'm looking at year three of a three year window and I'm trying to determine what is the total potential. And so ambition for me is defining the total potential of account in year three, looking out three years and then saying, hey, if everything were out of our way, if, if every barrier were out of our way, if there were no competitors, if I could rub a magic lamp and make a wish to remove every barrier that would prevent me from selling, what could I sell? What's the total potential? How much would the account be worth to my company? And so ambition really came about in that I wanted the sales teams to begin to think very ambitiously about the total potential. One of the things I tell sellers when I talk about it is that once you see ambition, you cannot unsee it. Once you know that an account represents, you know, a million or 10 million or even a hundred million of total potential of, ah, business that you could sell there, it changes your perspective.

Speaker A: And it's really hard to get away from that, isn't it?

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: Once you've seen that 10, once you've

Speaker B: seen it, once you know it's there, you can't unsee it. And so, yeah, the bell is wrong.

Speaker A: You can't unring the bell. Exactly.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's right. So ambition becomes the precursor to strategy. Right. So I want to, I want to develop a really good view of what my year three plan is. And then I work backwards from that to say, this is what I'm going to build a plan to go get in year one of that three year ambition.

Speaker A: That's a mindset change, Dennis, isn't it? It sounds straightforward, but in my experience I've been lucky enough to work in an organization with you as the leader. It's not a done deal just to change that mindset, right?

Speaker B: No, I think that a lot of that comes from in sales we get, uh, riveted on this concept of achieving quota. I've seen reps build really good plans for a year. And that plan, you know, essentially says, hey, I got a path to make quota. And the problem is, like in golf, uh, Dr. Bob Rotella who wrote How Champions Think, also wrote another book called Golf is Not a Game of Perfect. And I would say sales is not a game of perfect. And so the mistake that we make in sales is that we set ourselves up to play a perfect game. And that's what adding up to quota is to me.

Speaker A: Okay. So it's not just okay to make quota. You're saying we need to get beyond that. Forget the quota for a second.

Speaker B: Yeah. I want people to accept quota as a given. Right. It's just a rule of the road in sales. Right. So once I have my quota, I just sort of stick, set it aside, put it in a drawer and don't worry about it. What I want to do is I want to know the total potential of the opportunities that I have and I want to build a plan to go pursue a very large portion of that total potential this year.

Speaker A: So not the 100% of the ambition. Right. So the ambition could be 50 mil, but you want to bring it down a bit.

Speaker B: Yeah. So the way that I teach ambition is that what you want to do is if you say that it's 50 million, then we're going to build a plan to get half of that in year one. And the reason for that is our inclination in sales is to go the other way and set ourselves with up with this hockey stick in year three. And what I want to do, because I know sales is not a game of perfect, is I want to, I want to say I'm going to go after 25 million and let's just say that I've got a million dollar quota. And I said, well, I'm going to pursue 25 million and if I'm only 10% successful in that plan, I will more than double my quota. That's the game I want to play is I want to be able to build a big plan that goes after big dollars and that I know will not be perfect. And so I just let. What I want to do is play a very process driven sales game and let the scoreboard take care of itself. So let my quota be satisfied just by me playing a really good game.

Speaker A: And Dennis, I know I'm interrupting your big picture and I did ask you to give the big picture. So we'll come back to that in a sec. But my first interaction with you was many years ago when you came from the US into London actually, and you addressed a team of us, the sales management team for Europe. It was my first time meeting you. And um, I hope you remember this, you were sitting in front of Us and you were basically, you were giving us the ambition story and you brought up an example of a really, really large client on the west coast. How you went in and you were explaining to them the opportunity that was in front of them, but it came with a price tag. I'm, uh, going to let you tell the story if you can remember that story, because I thought it was a brilliant story. Really changed my attitude and bought ambitious thinking into my team.

Speaker B: I think that, you know, there's so many examples fergal of those types of accounts. And so the exact one that you're looking for isn't popping into my mind. But I'll get, I'll, I'll speak to those examples. I think part of it is, is to say to them that that kind of takes us down. Another concept of not only do you understand what the opportunity would be ambitiously for you as a seller, but also then what is the business outcome to the client if they do what you're proposing them to do? If that client that you and I just talked about, the $50 million opportunity, what I want to know is that in that 50 million that they're probably going to realize a 500 million or greater benefit from investing that 50 million with me. So as part of the job is to understand how, how what I'm trying to sell translates into a business outcome for the client. Right? So in the case that you're talking about, we identified literally billions of dollars of annual value to the client and the investment that would be required over a five year period of time in that case was $500 million. But our business case said that if they did that it would be worth $24 billion to them. And if I was half wrong, it was still worth 12 billion to them. Um, because we had done the math, which is in my view part of a key part of sales is just sales math. Because we had done the math, we knew we weren't half wrong. But it gives us the confidence to go to the client and say we believe it's worth 24 billion. And if I'm half wrong, it's worth 12 billion. It's still worth the investment. And I don't think I'm half wrong.

Speaker A: And I heard that loud and clear from that, that um, meeting that we had and it seeped down into my team and all the other teams as well. And you brought with you when you eventually came into Europe and basically took over the, the running of the European team, you brought that ambition with you and it was amazing. I used to have Some meetings with, with sales teams, sales, uh, sellers, I should say, in different European countries. And we would by default start off these incremental thoughts in terms of how to, how to execute. And I brought your mentality into those meetings and all of a sudden, as you just said, they could see the ambition in the account and then they couldn't unsee it. It was impossible for them not to talk about that. And I know for a fact that we did succeed. But I'm jumping ahead a little bit because I want you to go back to that bigger picture. Right, so you've talked about ambition. Talk to me, keep going. Strategy, execution.

Speaker B: Once we've determined what our ambition is, what our total potential is, we want to do some really good work in that, where we do a lot of white space, analys analysis, we'd really look at the customer's priorities. We want to link ourselves to what matters to the customer. Whatever the most strategic objectives are for the C suite of that customer, we want to be able to tie ourselves to as many of those as we can and bring in value. Once we identify that ambition, we bring it into our strategic account plan and we build that strategic account plan to compete for year one. Right. That 25 million we identified in that 50 million client, we build a strategic account plan to go do that. And then once I had those two pieces, one of the other things I realized was that a lot of these plans would end up going into a drawer and getting forgotten until the next year when someone asked somebody to, you know, update an account plan. And so the other concept that I needed was really an execution plan. And so the third pillar in what we do is execution. So it's ambition, strategy and execution. And execution is about now taking the goals that you've set and the objectives that you've identified to achieving those goals and bringing them into what we call a ghost plan. Goals, objectives, strategies, tactics. And then lay out a day to day, week to week plan of everything that needs to happen between today and the date that I've set for achieving, uh, my goal or making the sale.

Speaker A: There's a huge amount in all of that you've just said, right? And just playing devil's advocate, right, what happens when you get kind of pushback from the sellers? They're saying to you, 25 million, Dennis, you've got to be joking me, right? My target is a million. I know I can see a million or 2 million here, but you're asking me to think, you know, way out here there's no point in doing that. The client doesn't have 25 million, they don't have that budget and so on. Right. All the obstacles and the objections. How do you deal with all that?

Speaker B: I think that, um, you know, one of the ways is to really do a really effective white space exercise. Look at every possible buying center in an organization or across an organization, and then look at all the things that we have available to sell and understand. You know, really try to identify all the spaces that are white, meaning there's nothing filled into that box that says there's an opportunity there. And all of that is either, you know, it's either something that we don't know, or it's something that we don't know that we don't know. And it now gives us an opportunity to go do discovery and determine what really that white space is empty. So in that case, I would be challenging the seller to go do the real discovery. Don't make assumptions. Don't make assumptions of what your customer will do. Don't assume against yourself in the, you know, setting up the plan. The other approach I've taken in working with my teams on ambition is to say, well, here's what I want you to do. I want you to think about today. If the account is $2 million a year to us, I want you to show me what would have to be true to make the account 10 times larger or 2 times larger or 3 times larger. And so if they're spending this today, what would have to be true? What does 2x3x10x look like three years in the future? And what would have to be true? What would they have to be buying at that time? So for us back in the day at Teradata, we'd say, so you know, if today they're consuming this much Teradata firepower, 10x means they'd be consuming 10 times that three years from now. So then what would have to be true for that to be there? We kind of work our way through it in that same path. But as you imagine, it's not the easiest concept. You know, it's not the, it's not the easiest paradigm shift for some people to be able to make.

Speaker A: It's really new thinking for most sellers. And, um, we have the quarterly pressure trying to meet quarterly targets as well as the annual targets. And all of that just, I think, think shrinks our ambition, shrinks our thinking into two, three month cycles. So it can be quite difficult, Dennis, to get our heads around a three year plan that then comes down into one year with such ambition Ah, attached.

Speaker B: Well, that's why the overriding philosophy is about being process driven in sales, right? And so if you think about at the highest level, what I talk about is being process driven. And I talk about process in terms of the four Ps, Plan, Prepare, Practice, Play. And the three pillars fall in underneath. Plan, prepare, practice, play. And so one of the things that I find is that, you know, to be really effective in sales, if you really step back as a seller and say, I'm going to do sales math again right? Now, how many full hours a week am I physically in a meeting with a customer or in a virtual meeting with a customer, how many real hours a week? And when you do the math on that as a seller, you know, you find out that, uh, a very small portion of your time is actually spent in front of a customer. I remember us talking about it in Europe. We talked about football, right? We talked about, you know, premier league in Europe, right? And we talked about, you know, how much time are these players actually spending in a match versus how much time they spend planning, preparing, and practicing for that match. And in sales, to be truly effective, we have to be able to think about our process the same way we have to make sure that we're doing really good planning, really good preparation, and really good practice ahead of our play. It comes back to what you were just saying about the quarterly thing, because a lot of times there's this pressure to act in a quarter or in a month. And what we have to be able to do is we have to avoid falling into a transactional trap when we allow ourselves to sort of slide away from the first three Ps and live purely in play. It's like being at a kid's football match or soccer match right in the US and watching all of these kids in one place on the field trying to kick the ball. No one's playing a professional game. And as sellers, we can't live in transaction or incremental play because it's just like being a bunch of kids around a ball, randomly kicking at it, and

Speaker A: what I hear often. But, um, Dennis, I'm too busy. I don't have the time to plan and prepare and practice. I just. I've got so many meetings, I've got so much pressure, I don't even have the time to prepare for a call.

Speaker B: Well, ultimately, like, what is the job of sales? The job of sales is results. Salespeople get paid for results. They don't get paid for all that other stuff. You know, in my mind, if you're a seller and you're. There's a reason you're in sales, at least there was for me, because I wanted to be able to have influence over what I could earn. Right. I wanted to get paid for my results. And if you're not in sales for that, then you're in the wrong job in my mind. You have to be able to. And Mike Weinberg talks a lot about this. Right. You have to essentially be very disciplined and take ownership of your calendar. And you have to say, I'm going to carve off this amount of time for all this other stuff that fills up our day in sales. And I'm going to have really dedicated time to doing all the key things, you know, and you just kind of go to the three key things that Mike talks about. Create, advance, close. So where am I spending my time in creating, advancing and closing or planning, preparing and practicing and then plan. Right. You've got to give yourself time for the entire process as a seller, otherwise you're not going to be able to succeed.

Speaker A: It's just so true, isn't it? We're talking about strategic account planning. Just give me a bit of money, more depth on that. What does that look like?

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, in some businesses, right? And even in the, like when you and I were together in Europe, when you're dealing with some businesses, you have to think about strategic planning for an entire territory versus an account. But what I'm talking about in an account is really looking at understanding what do I know about the account and that strategic account plan. I want the strategic account plan to be a living repository of everything we know about the company customer, including all of the things that matter the most to the customer. Right. What are those strategic initiatives that are going on? Who are the people that we know within and we're mapping that out in the plan, and who are the people that we don't know and who are the empty boxes on the org chart that we have to go to discovery and figure out exactly who they are. What are the roles of these people? What are their Personas? Are they a champion for us? Are they a detractor for us in the account? Understanding and mapping all of that into the account plan so that you have a. A plan of action that you can operate from. And, and what I find is I would have salespeople and still do that say to me, well, my plan is up here.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's all a bit boring, Dennis, writing all that stuff down. It's all up here. It's all up here.

Speaker B: But Then it doesn't exist. Then it doesn't exist. I think I shared with you guys like, there, there are different experiences that you created as a seller. The experience you create for your customers is really how they'll view you. Right. Either they're going to view you as some type of a vendor, or they're going to view you as a trusted partner, right? A, uh, trusted advisor that they talk to and that they're. That they learn from every time you interact with them. And so it's that experience. And the same is true when you think about, back to what we were talking about in ambition and living in play, when you're chasing around what I call a bunch of squirrels, you know, deals that are just squirrels, small little things, the customer sees you, you as a squirrel. If you see them as a squirrel, they see you as a squirrel. Meaning if you see them small, they see you small. You got to change that paradigm within the customer through the value that you create and bring to the table.

Speaker A: Would you agree? Uh, because I used to believe strongly, and I still do, that you should share the strategic plan with the client. I mean, maybe there's parts of it you don't. Some things you keep to yourself, but generally speaking, it's got to be a joint plan. Because if it's not a joint plan, in my opinion, it's bound to fail. Do you share the same opinion?

Speaker B: I think so. I think if you've got a true partner within the account, a true champion, then I think it makes total sense to really lay out what it is that you believe you can help them accomplish. And that, in my view, helps strengthen that championship. And they actually will help you strengthen your plan because they might point out a few things that, you know, assumptions you've made that are not right.

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, that's been my experience throughout this. And Dennis, I was lucky enough to work with you through that strategic account planning process that you implemented for us. And I enjoyed it thoroughly. And it's something I've, you know, I've taken on board and implemented at many companies since then. And it really does work. However, it does take a bit of time. You do need to get in behind the client's initiatives and their needs. And then what I used to do is I would create a joint vision. And when I say joint vision, it was something I would share with the clients so that I might, uh, so I get feedback from the client, and they may actually push back and say, actually, that's not, that's not where we're headed. You've got, you've gone off track a bit, which is great news to me because then I can go back and adjust the plan. And I'm not basically working on a plan in isolation. And I found sales teams feel that account planning is something you do to a client, not something you do with a client. And I think there's a big difference between the two.

Speaker B: It's work and it really is work. But the thing that I tell Sellers is when I'm teaching ambition, I'm teaching strategic account planning and execution, I tell them this is the hardest part, this is the hardest moment right now. There is this moment where you have to shift yourself out of transactional and shift back into strategic thinking. And because you're in sales and you have quarterly commitments and monthly commitments, you have to be able to eat short term to live long term. You have to sort of have a little bit of an expansion of the amount of work that you're doing at the beginning. But uh, once you go through that expansion and you put in place a really good plan that you can execute from that then makes your life a lot easier because you're now just executing the plan that you laid out and the plan becomes a living part of what you do every day. It's no longer this giant amount of work that you go through in lumps. Right. It just becomes sort of part of what you do every day.

Speaker A: And I think that word living is so important because I've seen so many plans that start out uh, January, February, as you say, put on the digital shelf and then dust it off in the following January, February.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: My methodology has always been have these quarterly plans. So the plan gets revised at uh, least twice in the quarter. I don't expect people to be looking at every single day. That's not how things work. But we've got to remember that the clients initiatives and needs can change too. So if it's not a living plan and we just were assuming that they haven't changed, then we're in trouble again. But let's move on to the execution because I think that's so important. And you have, as usual, you have a great framework or process that you follow. Tell us about Ghost. G O S T. Yeah, Ghost.

Speaker B: Ghost again, as I said, was, you know, was kind of born out of the need to be able to keep those plans alive and keep the actual great things that we had uh, planned to do in our front and center. Because of all the things you described, all the other things that come up in the salesperson's Life that they gotta deal with. They need to be able to stay focused on their goals, objectives, strategies and tactics. And really, if you think about a goal, a goal is a big, broad aim that we're pursuing. An objective is then a measurable binary, black, white, on, off measurable item that if I achieve it and I achieve all the other objectives related to that goal, that goal will be achieved. And then the strategies themselves fall underneath the objectives, and the objectives themselves then have the strategy says, this is how I'm going to achieve that objective. And so an example of a strategy might be is that I got to have a strategy for identification of an economic buyer, or I got to have a strategy for navigating their legal and procurement process. One element of that strategy, a tactic within that strategy, would be to identify what it is. So I got to know what their process looks like. And so, you know, if you think about the GO structure, it's really a parent, you know, parent, child relationship. So every goal owns every objective. Every objective owns all of its strategies, and all the strategies own all of their tactics. And back to sales math, it's just adding up tactics to achieve strategies, adding up strategies to achieve objectives, and adding up objectives to achieve goals.

Speaker A: And how do we actually implement Ghost? Because I understand the process here, but how does that actually get done? Who's doing it? Who's controlling this Ghost plan? Because it sounds like a closed plan, is that right?

Speaker B: It's effectively a closed plan. So the salesperson, the individual seller, is the person who owns and creates the GHOST plan. But depending on how they sell and the type of organization, you might also have a team of resources around you like we did in the case of technical sellers and industry consultants and other types of individuals in the organization who can contribute to my execution plan. And I want as much input to my plan as possible. And then within that plan, I as the seller. And, um, probably because one of the other key things of GHOST is that every item has a single owner, right? Every tactic, every strategy, every objective, every goal has a single owner. And every item has a due date. And so what I want to be able to do in, in my plan is recognize that I'm going to own 85, 90% of the items in that plan. But I might have another 5, 10, 15% that are owned by others that are going to help me. It might be my sales manager who's going to help me. It might be somebody that has an action item for me in terms of, you know, a production item or in terms of a, uh, technical Spec that I need. And so I might delegate ownership of certain tactics or even strategies to others. But the vast majority of the plan is built for me as the seller who's accountable for those results in that account.

Speaker A: And then how does that link up back to the strategic account in terms of, do I have multiple ghost plans for the strategic account? Is it just one? Is it a one to many? How does that work?

Speaker B: I would have a strategic account plan, and in that plan I'm identifying the goals that I want to achieve. If it's a new account, I might have one goal.

Speaker A: This can work for prospects as well as.

Speaker B: Absolutely. Yes.

Speaker A: Okay. Because I've often had a bit of pushback about strategic account planning for prospects because there's a, there's an idea here that, well, I don't know enough about the prospect, so I can't really do a plan.

Speaker B: Well, how are you going to learn about the prospect would be my response. Uh, I'm pretty sure that's your job.

Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. We can use this for prospecting as well as basically cross selling, upselling within the existing accounts. Okay.

Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, you know, I think back to even my early days at ncr, right? And I think, okay, we weren't selling million dollar deals then. Um, you know, a big deal for us might be a couple of hundred thousand dollars. Right. And I think about, okay, here's a prospect that I want to call on. And they're a, a business machine commercial company. They sell business machines and I can go sell them supplies that NCR makes. And so what do I need to know about them? Well, uh, I need to know that they're in that business. I need to try to learn everything I can about them. I look at things, you know, back then I didn't have the Internet. Today everybody's got massive tools that we didn't have to be able to go do research. And you know, a big part of our research was actually picking up the phone and going there and getting a meeting and then asking questions and actually writing down the questions that we wanted to ask and then actually going through those questions with a, uh, prospect and learning about their business, learning about what they care about. I mean, you know, just basically footwork that you have to do.

Speaker A: Dennis, do you think the advance of AI because AI now is so prevalent, do you think that's going to change what you've described here, that whole process, ambition, strategy, execution. Do you think sellers will become a little more lazy with the use of AI or do you think maybe the opposite? They'll Become sharper.

Speaker B: Well, I think if sellers were lazy to begin with, they'll become lazy with AI. But I think sellers who really understand the role that they're in will figure out like everything else that's evolved over time, they'll figure out how to leverage AI to make their process better. And I think that AI will actually make the process better. As in the classes that I teach now, I talk about how we used to sit in a room and take a uh, company's annual report and project it onto a screen and sit and read it. Well, today I can go and ask an AI tool, tell me about this company, tell me what their top priorities are. And I got to validate that it's right. Because not everything in AI is right, but you can get a massive head start on that. And you can also use AI to do all the basic things that you need to in helping you craft of communication, helping you think about what a sales call plan should look like. You know, even now there's AI tools that will role play a sale call with you.

Speaker A: Absolutely. I mean my personal view on this is I always treat AI as an assistant. It's never a replacement for my critical thinking. You use the word validation. That's really important. I mean we've seen so many examples. I was talking to an ex colleague, quite an experienced seller, and he was describing to me how he was renewing a contract for a client mid year so it was adding some additional products to the contract. So therefore it had to be pro ratted. And instead of using his brain to figure out what that should cost, he asked AI and said, you go figure it out for me. Which it did, gave him the answer. And luckily one of his colleagues checked the answer and said this is wrong. Where did you get this answer from? And he rather sheepishly said, oh, uh, I asked AI for that. And he said well go back and ask your AI to double check that. Which he did. And the AI just said, oh yeah, sorry, I'm wrong. Ah, that wasn't the right answer. Here's the answer. And it was a real awakening for him that he almost got caught out because that didn't get to the client, thankfully. And I've talked to a lot of different sales leaders around here and everybody's using AI to some certain extent, but the laziness can creep in like that. You fall into the trap of just assuming everything AI does is right. We should know that it has different models and different models have different capabilities and he probably used their own models. So what? He just didn't follow his own process, which is validating before he went to the client. I'm passionately involved with AI. I use it every single day for pretty much every part of my sales process. It's helped me so much. But what it's actually doing is just speeding up an existing framework or process. It hasn't replaced anything. Frameworks are still very valid. Strategic account planning is one of my passions too. And it's something that, uh, AI can assist me with. Just like, you know, the company report, the annual report. I mean, these things are deathly dull to read. Now I can get a nice summary of that, but I actually still have to check because sometimes it's hallucinating and giving me answers that are actually not in the reports. So I think that's a message to everyone there. Using AI at the moment, I want to use what time we have left talking a bit about talent and hiring great talent because I think, uh, I'm a strong believer in if we get the right people in the right roles, then probably 80% of our job as sales managers and leaders is almost done for us because we have the right team in place. And I see so many companies struggling with, and I don't want to use a derogatory term, but let's say CD players, people who are just not cutting it in the organization, but they're not serious, in my opinion, about, ah, talent. Talk to me about your approach to getting good talent into companies.

Speaker B: If you start at the beginning of that process, it starts with as a leader or a sales manager in a company taking ownership of that hiring process. Right? So the very first thing that you want to do is take a look at if this is the job description that I'm going to put out and say, this is what I'm hiring for. Have you read it? Do you know what's in it? Do you know what it says? Does it say what it is that you want it to say? I, uh, recently did an engagement with a client where we were reviewing their talent and their hiring process. And in the job Description it says 10% travel. And I said to the client, is the job a 10% travel job? And he's like, no. And I'm like, well, that's what the job description says it is. So first of all, I would start

Speaker A: there because that was copied from another job description, right?

Speaker B: Yes, yes, right. Like, and I think sometimes that sales, uh, managers, you know, Mike talks about this too, is it's the hardest job in the company and for all the things that the seller has to do, the sales manager has that plus plus plus that they've got to get done. And I think as sales managers, it kind of comes back. There's certain things we have to recognize that we can't fully delegate to others to do for us. We can't fully delegate to our talent teams and our HR partners the responsibility for finding good talent and bringing it into the organization. We have to do our part. Which in, in my mind is, hey, let's get, let's get the job description. Let's get the role right. And then as we think about when we're going to go through a hiring process, again, not deferring to my talent team or my HR team, but trying to partner with them to be able to say, okay, when I'm hiring for a seller, I'm looking for certain core characteristics that I want to hire. If you've got a set of things that you're looking for, like right off the bat, for me, I want drive. So then I got to design questions and an interview process that help me determine whether the individual has drive. And so I need to make sure that that's really, you know, as identify those core characteristics that I want to hire for. I need to have kind of a stack ranking of what those are. And then I need to have questions back to your AI. Now, I don't have to invent them myself. I might get a help from AI in helping me craft the right questions to help me determine whether the individual has the core characteristics that I want. You know, and so I think about it, and this was actually a discussion I had with an HR leader at, uh, one of my former companies where I said, you know, because one of the, when I read the job descriptions, what they were looking for is people who've done exactly what this company does. And in my experience, hiring someone from within the industry who is an A player is very difficult because a lot of A players within the same industry that you're in don't want to change jobs because they're A players, they're making good money, and most of them are happy where they are. So what I have to be able to do is I have to be able to understand that I think about it like, uh, a cake Virgo. The cake itself is the core characteristics that I need to hire. Frosting on that cake is if that person comes from something that's in my general industry. And maybe candies on top of the cake, on top of the frosting on top of the cake might be that they've actually sold exactly what I sell in my space. I'm first looking for the core, because if I'm hiring only for the candy or the frosting, uh, that's where I'm going to end up with my C and D players.

Speaker A: Dennis, we could probably talk for another hour on this topic. It's such an interesting topic. I want to thank you for coming in and talking to me today. I know you've got an exciting new client engagement in London. I'm hoping to get over to meet you when you're there. Wish you best of luck in that engagement. And of course, thank you again for coming in today. It was a pleasure talking to you.

Speaker B: Thank you so much. It was an honor to be here.