Optimizing Sales with Operations and Enablement

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[00:01:04] Adam Aarons: Thanks, Lucas. It's a pleasure to be here. Appreciate you having me.

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[00:01:14] Adam Aarons: Look, I'm a serial sales guy. I started as an SDR in this business started parametric technology corporation a long time ago. And I was fortunate that I learned from some great sales leaders. Folks like John McMahon, who I worked for at blade logic. BMC following my tenure there at PTC and some of the great leaders like Carlos Dellatorre and others like Scott Davis that came out of those organizations and ran other great software companies, Dolly Rojic or our good friends and colleagues of mine.

But I'm a sales guy from the start to finish. That's kind of who I am. And. What I've done throughout my career.

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[00:01:57] Adam Aarons: I don't know. My dad was a sales [00:02:00] leader in pharma. And then when I was in college, I got a second job selling cutlery door to door for Cutco cutlery. I did really well at it. And so that just sort of. Set the stage for I wasn't the best student in the world, but I was I had really good people skills and I was smart.

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[00:02:25] Adam Aarons: My dad, I think I tried to get into leadership really fast. That was sort of my goal was to go prove myself as a seller and get into leadership. I wanted. The opportunity to do that as really the itch that I was trying to scratch as a salesperson was to get that opportunity. So I migrated into leadership in my late twenties mid to late twenties and never looked back and was always trying to figure out how to be the best leader.

the experience that I could [: 00:03:00

[00:03:01] Lucas Price: Many of the people who are in sales leadership are there, of course, because they succeeded in sales. And it takes a you know, a certain amount of drive to succeed in sales. Is there anything you've mentioned your dad a few times? Would you point to that again? Or is there anything else kind of in your background that gave you the drive to succeed?

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You're subservient to the folks on your team. You need to be the first one in the last one out. You need to set the example and set the tone. And so I think that takes [00:04:00] a level of selflessness. That not every seller has.

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[00:04:17] Adam Aarons: Yeah. I, like what we do as sellers in the direct indirect motion, maybe not so much from a PLG led motion, but from a sort of a traditional enterprise commercial sales motion on an indirect direct product side, we execute, we put together a plan and we execute against that plan and the. The science behind that is to put together a plan that as the best bet, it has the best risk management entailed in it so that you know, you have the highest level of success and with great risk comes great reward and then getting everyone on the same page to follow it and iterate on it as a team and to get better and better as a team and as you're going, things change, especially as [00:05:00] If you're at a startup or an early stage company.

So from an operations perspective it's helping you make those bets. It's figuring out which risks are the best ones to take and give you the biggest reward and how to do that in a way that you can maximize your opportunity. And then enablement is getting people to do it. And we're always doing, we're always constantly iterating and getting better.

So to have two pillars of. Enablement and operation. When I start a sales organization, those are the areas that I, when I talked to the founder and say, look, these are two of the most important things for me, they're the pillars to go build out a great execution engine is the ability to understand operationally how to be most effective, efficient, and to get the job done and then be able to get everyone singing from the same book of songs.

And get better and better at it as a group. And then you can really do great things. You can do extraordinary things if you work together as a team and you just continually iterate to get better and better at what you do.

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Can you tell us a little bit about. You know, how you were able to use operations to find your way through that and save what looked like it was going to be a big hole in your plan.

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So maybe on the low end, you've got an emerging team. You've got a commercial team. You've got an enterprise team, and then you'll subset those as you get more and more efficient. And at one point in my career, we were building a new segment out and we were calling it mid market. And it existed between enterprise and commercial.

here. And if we put focus on [: 00:07:00

And it was good opportunity for us. So we did we got a few months into the year. We were probably further along. We saw it at four months. We had a huge number of opportunities, but our close rates, our conversion rates, even before that just were not very good.

And so we're sitting down with operations. We were at our half year mark at a QBR when we made the decision, because we were all sitting down as during leadership sessions saying, okay, what are we doing? What's going on? And we had already talked with operations. So we had some idea of what it was, but in essence, Each sales rep had like a thousand accounts that they were going after thousand prospects within there.

And we called it hunting for no, because they would call into an account. They'd get someone on the phone and they'd say, Hey, you know, we'd like to talk to you about our solution and how it could solve your problem. Person would say, no, they'd hang up and call another company. And it was like, well, why are they doing that?

Cause they [: 00:08:00

So we took away 750 of the accounts that each rep had. They each got 250 accounts each. And that was total. Prospects customers that they could have at one addressable time and the rest we put in to a nurture program what it is for it forced them to focus on where they thought the best opportunities were and if they got an inbound leader they wanted to go outbound on another account they had to give one up they could not get more than 250 accounts at one time and it provided a lot of focus and we made that bet and when we did we lowered their quotas at the same time because we realized that All the people that we had on board were so far behind already on the year that if we didn't do something, they were all going to fail.

s, but we didn't lower it at [: 00:09:00

To backfill the number for the year. And by doing it and providing focus, the team overperformed. And they actually ate up the lion's share of that 2 million in upside quota that I don't think we would have had, or even had an opportunity to hit if we didn't provide focus. And that's something that is really hard to do is to make decisions like that and go focus and just go do something less.

To go try to get more out of it in certain times of uncertainty, it can be a really hard thing to do.

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[00:10:01] Adam Aarons: You know, it's interesting that you'd say that. And I don't think, I think in the emerging markets, it worked really well for us. And to your point, I don't remember cause it was some time ago where we took those sales sellers from, but to your point, the sales motion was different, the cycle times were different, our ability to manage to that was different.

And we had to figure that out. Where in an emerging market, you're doing deals. The average cycle times are 14, 21 days. So you can move really you're at the economic buyer often on the first or second call. Whereas in a larger account, you have to go wider. You have to find different people within that organization that might sponsor you up.

Even in a company that has a couple hundred employees, the sophistication goes way up. And so to your point, I think it was a matter of looking at the segment and how it was, how you manage to the activities of the buyers within that segment. And that's built on how do they make decisions? How long does it take?

And a couple hundred people [: 00:11:00

[00:11:02] Lucas Price: To continue to tie this into operations, how were, you know, can you talk a little bit about how you think about. Setting up your operations so that it can alert you four months into the year that this, we have a problem here and we need to fix it. And as opposed to, you know, getting really late in the year and just having to be like, Oh yeah, we have a problem and it's too late to fix

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So like they run them if I'm doing it the right way, because if I'm trying to run the forecast call and I'm also asking questions about what's [00:12:00] going on before I get lost. So having an ops partner that sits there with me week over week and says, Hey, Adam, you got that same answer two weeks ago. And I'm not thinking about that at scale.

Sometimes I go, wait a minute. You're right. Are we seeing a signal in the noise? Like we'll pick it up in that meeting and then we'll have a follow up meeting in our one on one and we'll start talking about it. And we'll start self realizing maybe. Three, four weeks into the year. If we've been looking at it for, if we see a trend that's been happening, that's a lagging indicator from the fiscal year prior, like it just depends.

But I find that like, I pull in ops to everything that I can. I tell people I'm better at basic numbers, simple math than anybody on the planet. Like I know what one plus one is and I can get there faster than you. But when you start getting into more complex mathematics, like, That's not my forte and having someone that sits with me, that is like, I'm really instinctual and I think I can feed off of that, but I need someone sitting there with me, walking me through the numbers.

like we're making decisions [: 00:13:00

[00:13:17] Lucas Price: And so what would be the feeling. If you were like, you know what? Something's not set up correctly in operations. We're not getting the wrong, the right signal, or, you know, a mistake. That's very easy to make or easy to overlook in terms of making the right kind of system and processes and teams set up there.

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There are questions that you'll ask. There are gates that we ask you to get through to get from step one to two to three to closed, which is a step seven deal. And as you dig through where our sales [00:14:00] rep is, when they qualify in a deal, depending on where they lose it within the sales process. You can start understanding what's going on and you can look at like, if you're tracking that and managing to it, you can start seeing, Hey, we're losing deals in the early stage.

Why didn't we call it? First of all, why did we qualify it in the first place? Do we have the right criteria? Are we holding ourselves accountable to it? And then if we are, and we're pulling it in. What's going on? Did we not get to the right buyer? Did the person that we talked to not have the right funding?

Did we not have the right ROI? So like understanding first from just a base process perspective, I think is really because you can't measure something that you don't understand what your goals are for it. And to get that down to a granular level around what's expected of the individuals that are working with you at the different stages within the sales process that then rolls up to their leadership.

on one person, you can look [: 00:15:00

And then if you're seeing that It can be a litany of different things, but understanding that because you have a really good base process that you can analyze and drill down into understanding where your problems are, I guess just, it's core to, that's what really makes this execution engine run.

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[00:15:58] Adam Aarons: Yeah. And I had a great [00:16:00] boss, Dwight Griffith, who always used to say inspect what you expect. So don't you can't just put the process in place and expect people to follow it. Like you have to hold them and yourselves accountable to inspecting it. But it all starts with having a common set of goals and activities that we're all going to do together.

And if we do, and we decide that we want to change them, we do that as a team. And then we get iteratively better. We have a saying, like it's a fireman's credo in sales, like we all go together. Like, and if you decide that you're going to go against the process and do something on your own, you better be right, because if you're wrong, we'll probably fire you for it.

Like, if you want to go do something and try something different, talk to us. We're all game for trying to figure out the best, most effective, easiest way to get a deal done, but we're going to do that together. We can't all be mercenaries or it just doesn't work. It doesn't scale.

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So that's, so a couple of things here you've previewed a little bit about what my next question was, which was to ask you to tell us a little bit about. How you think about building a sales [00:17:00] process that's repeatable and so that you can have that data into your operations and you've mentioned, you know, you have the seven stages where with clear definitions between them, having people follow process that you've defined. are there other parts? I have some follow up questions on that as well. But are there other parts of like making sure that you have a sales process that's repeatable and scalable?

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It just doesn't sound good. It doesn't work.

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[00:17:58] Adam Aarons: I love it because people will say that, [00:18:00] you know, it's enterprise. You can't really like it's different. Everything's different. They're all special snowflakes. And I'm like, that's kind of, well, I don't believe that. I think it's BS. And like, you'll find that when a seller, two different sellers that are successful talk about how they got a deal done.

There's a lot of commonality in the things that they did. They don't articulate it the same way they might have done it in different order, but the things that they do to go accomplish the trust. And the partnership to go do these opportunities, there's a lot of commonality. And so for me, like I'll say, you know, I had a, when I first went international I used to tell the team, you have to get to the CIO, like, and I was in, I remember I was in London and the head of a Mia was like, you know, he made it, he scoffed at me and he's like, I don't know what you guys do in the U S but it's not that easy here.

ritish and I don't know your [: 00:19:00

And I really don't care. What I'll tell you is you have to get to the CIO. So figure it out. Like when we're, if you've got to earn it, I don't care. You, if you don't do that, there's a hole in the bucket. You're not going to be able to get the deals that you think you're going to get without that, there's not enough shortness to get up.

And I tell you a year later, when I was back in front of that team with the head of Europe, and he made fun of himself, he was like, you know, I said this a year ago, and I'll be the first one to tell you, we have to get to the CIO. And when we do, they want to talk to us. Like, there's a reason to do it. And if you do it the right way and you figure out the right.

And so for me, that's. Like the process is built around how you get there as an individual. We're all special little snowflakes, but you better accomplish the things that we're asking you to accomplish. And if you don't agree on the order, let's talk about it. Like that's why we iterate. That's why we try to get better.

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[00:20:04] Adam Aarons: Yeah. That's an awesome conversation for us to have. I'd be like, that's cool. Let's talk about that. How did you ask for it? Like, how would you ask for it next time? And do you think by not having it? We're better off or we're worse off. Like, so how do we get it? Like, how can I help you get that? Those are strategy sessions.

And if you're like, Hey, I don't need that in order to win. That's a different conversation. It's like, why not? Are we doing something that we shouldn't be doing? Are we asking you to do something that isn't necessary to get the thing done? Cause we don't want to do that either. But those are great conversations and that's how you get better.

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[00:20:45] Adam Aarons: Dude. I probably have better examples of when we didn't cause you can self, you know, you talk yourself through all these different reasons why. And people used to say like, Oh, you know, we'll do it. We'll lose a deal. And it's like, well, you know, the product [00:21:00] couldn't do X, Y, Z. And I'm like, no, we got outsold.

And it's like, what do you mean? It's like, we should have never gone into the engagement. If we knew that was one of the criteria. And we didn't lock down the criteria. And so we didn't, you know, it showed up late or we ignored that as one of the key criteria because we thought we could do all this other stuff and we got out sold.

You didn't get to your champion and really identify like that's part of our process is how did you trust you? You thought you had a champion. You had a coach. You thought you knew who the economic buyer was. You never got to that person in the sales process. Like there are key fundamentals to things that you don't do.

You don't get the criteria. You've got a buddy. Who's at an account that says we're going to buy your stuff. Love it. Get in here, get the proof of concept going, but we don't have criteria yet. That's okay. We're going to build it with you. Just get in here. I like it's I own the decision. You get in there, you start working with the account, and then you realize that there's someone else in the account who has more power.

r, who has aligned criteria, [: 00:22:00

[00:22:13] Lucas Price: What can you tell us the difference between a champion and a coach or, you know, when someone thinks they have a champion, but have a coach

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And if they pass the test, then that's a good sign. You've got a champion, but you don't just do it one time. If you got a good champion, you're testing them throughout the sales process

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[00:23:01] Adam Aarons: Yeah I'm really upfront with buyer. I, we don't do that. If that's one of your criteria to make a decision, I'll tell you right now, we don't do it. So we might aspire to, and we might do it someday, but that is not, if you're going to base your decision on that, we should qualify.

Or tell me why. You choose a solution like us without that. And then they'll help you understand where the real value is to them.

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[00:23:32] Adam Aarons: If I can't, then I'm better off losing early than losing late. There's two winners in every deal, right? The guy that wins the deal or gal that wins the deal and the guy or gal that walks away first, because time is an asset that we don't have and it's precious for us to be able to do our jobs. So we can't afford to waste time on things that we can't win.

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And so you do need to go in and. Get companies to change the way they think about this problem. Is that accurate?

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[00:24:27] Lucas Price: so in, in those situations, you do want to understand the reasons for their current criteria and change their current criteria rather than just walking away early, right? Is there, how do you think about being able to do that?

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And so you have that problem. If you stick with the solution you have today and it's how you're [00:25:00] solving it, that I'm coming in and saying, I think I can help you solve this problem better. And if you agree with that, you'll be willing to change the way that you're doing what you're doing today to try to solve it.

If you don't, if you're like, Hey, there's just not enough value in that. Like I say when I used to, when I sit down with a senior leader and say, we're talking about identity. It's like, look, I don't want to just know what's important for you with identity, but what are the top three things that you're most concerned about right now?

Cause I'm sure you got 20 different things that you could go work on, but you won't, you'll work on the things that are most critical to you. And where does identity stack in turn? Cause if it's not that important. Tell me when it will be. I'll come back or like, if it never will be, that's okay too.

I don't want to waste your time. So it's really aligning with, can I help you solve a problem? That's meaningful for you enough that with the 20 other things you could be doing right now, you prioritize it as a top three or five thing to go get done,

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[00:26:01] Adam Aarons: right? Yeah.

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[00:26:18] Adam Aarons: I think discovery is the most valuable and most challenging part of the sales process. So like I said before, that's where you determine whether you should spend time on an opportunity and the more depth you get out of it, the better your understanding is of the risk of winning or not that opportunity or being able to change the criteria.

We, I was on an advisory call with a company this past week and they said, I don't think we've ever won an RFP. And I was like, do you know why? And they're like, yeah, we're probably late to all those ops. I'm like, exactly. Somebody else wrote it. Like, if you're coming in and you're not writing it, you're not able to then don't do it.

nfluence on the criteria and [: 00:27:00

[00:27:16] Lucas Price: Do you think there's a discovery mo methodology that's sort of universally applicable, or do you really have to get in on every company that you've been at and sort of rebuild the discovery process based on the particulars of their buyer and their product?

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That takes a level of comfort and aptitude that we talked about from the beginning. That's why enablement is so critical. To your ability to be [00:28:00] successful.

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[00:28:07] Adam Aarons: first, I talked to the founders and the people that own marketing and the company, and usually if it's pre product market fit, I'm not always the best advisor or leader. Like there's usually a basis around product market fit when I get involved. And then it's just understanding like.

How do you articulate the value? I used to go through this exercise saying, so what? And it was like, you know, well, we're able to do this. I'd be like, so I was like, well, that helps companies do this. So what? It's like, well, because they can do that, what does that mean? And then what does that mean? I'm trying to drive down to a quantifiable value.

to hone in on. So what, like [: 00:29:00

You become very unique. With a value proposition in a way that becomes very defensible.

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[00:29:50] Adam Aarons: I'm fortunate now that I've got a big network and I can draft off of a lot of people in my network that have a lot of the qualities I'm looking for when I didn't and I don't, and I didn't make this [00:30:00] up. I got this from a mentor of mine. There's four things generally that I look for.

Number one is intelligence and you just can't, you know, you need people that have, this is a difficult job. It takes a high level of sophistication and intelligence, and you can't teach that. So people need to be smart. They need to be coachable. So as I mentioned before, like we don't have mercenaries on this team.

We're all going to get better together and coachability is a really big deal. Drive. Is the third is like, are you driven? Are you driven to a higher cause than yourself? Are you driven to try to go do something great? Are you driven to really try to make a mark and try to do something special? And then it's the last one is will, which goes beyond drive.

It's like, are you willing to get up? Are you willing to take the good with the bad? Are you willing to go do what you have to do? I think. One of my favorite books is the hard thing about hard things by Ben Horowitz. Cause he talks about those moments and you know, I don't mean to, but I laugh when I read some of that stuff.

personal and awesome to see, [: 00:31:00

[00:31:13] Lucas Price: of the things I hear all the time from people is like, from sales leaders is, you know, okay, maybe I have my list. Maybe it's the same as your list or a little bit different intelligence coachable drive. Will I'm out there interviewing candidates and I can't tell who's fooling me and who really has these characteristics.

How do you interview? How do you evaluate? To figure out whether they're going to be able to, you know, demonstrate these inside your organization.

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Who was the VP? And I'm getting blind references while you're going. Cause [00:32:00] if I ask you for references at the end of the call, who are you going to give me?

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[00:32:03] Adam Aarons: say the nicest things

about you, right? I'm digging as I'm going and I'm pulling those names down. And then I run. Through LinkedIn and references.

And you'd be surprised. You can learn a lot about people that way. Also something that somebody taught me, but you need to be really careful is like ask people, what's the most difficult thing you've ever been through in your life and be prepared, some people, it really tells you about the grit of some folks and the lack thereof with some.

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[00:32:42] Adam Aarons: As I said before, like find good mentors, find good people that have done what you want to go do in this game and you don't need to rebuild the wheel. I'll say that not just for sales leaders, but for founders I find that, you know, Especially with certain founders because they've figured out how to do something that no one else has [00:33:00] done before and they're brilliant in doing that, that they believe that there's a different way that they could potentially go to market and look at different ways that they could build out a sales organization.

And I'll tell you, like, those are, there's bodies strewn all the way from here to IPO with companies that have tried to do it differently. There's also bodies of companies that have tried to do it the right way, but they've had a lot more success. Following companies and leadership that have done it and there's great examples of that like with MongoDB and Datadog and AppDynamics and Zscaler and all these great organizations.

Peers of mine that have gone in and run them and snowflake. And you just look at the quality of what they're trying to go do. And they'll tell you, they write books about it. I'd say go follow those fundamentals, go find some great mentors that you can learn from and leverage them and always be a student of the game.

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I might not ask him those ways. But if I'm missing any of those, if I'm not getting those things consistently in my discovery, then I probably need to reorganize how I do my discovery. So I really appreciate you sharing that with us. Is there where can people find you online?

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[00:34:33] Lucas Price: All right, great. Thank you, Adam. to our listeners, if you enjoyed this episode of building elite sales teams, please leave us a review in your podcast app. You can find more of our content online at yardstick. team. you have any feedback for me, you can contact me on LinkedIn. Thank you for joining us.