Hey, sales leaders.. Want to improve your hit rate?
We’re going to help you out in this episode of Closing Time.
Welcome to Closing Time to show for go-to-market leaders.
I’m Val Riley, head of content marketing at Insightly.
I’m joined today by Amy Volas.
She’s a strategic advisor,
LP at Stage 2 Capital, and owner of Avenue Talent Partners.
She’s also personally closed more than $100 million in business. Wow.
Welcome to the show, Amy.
Thanks for having me back.. I’m excited to be here.
Let’s dig into it because competition for sales reps
feels like it’s at an all time high and turnover is rampant.
It used to be that a sales leader maybe had a period of hiring and then maybe not.
But now it seems like every sales leader is always hiring.
It’s something that’s deeply troubling to me, Val, it’s
this problem that is all the way around the table.
And what I mean by that is, we have a supply versus demand issue
where there aren’t enough of us to do the role.
So we have the supply side.
Then there’s the demand side.
There are more jobs than there are people to do the roles.
And then you have the competency side
of, well, now that I’ve hired you.
Are you the right person for the role?
Did I hire right?. And chances are
there is a discrepancy there, and then we have a turnover problem.
So I’m having a hard time finding you.
Once I get you, I’m having a hard time keeping you.
And then once I lose you, that’s a really big problem.
And it can be a seven figure problem.
And so the troubling stat that I’ve seen is, salespeople churn
almost three times more than any other function in the marketplace.
And that’s a really big problem.
So we have a lot to talk about. Yeah.
So obviously you have a solid HR
team and they’re helping you source candidates.
But the HR team, they tend to be generalists.
So at some point their expertise ends and then you’re the sales leader
and then you’ve got to start screening the candidates.
Yeah, I think
that’s one of the biggest points to
being a sales leader is, what are you doing from a hiring perspective?
It’s a big part of your job that doesn’t go away.
Even if you don’t have an open req, because to your point,
having support from an HR function is a big deal.
But to your other point, they’re more generalist, and the thing about sales,
there are lots of different flavors of sales folk out there.
So are we talking about enterprise or are we talking about SMB?
Are we talking about inbound?
Are we talking about outbound?. Are we talking about channel?
Are we talking… I mean, the list goes on and on and on.
And most times folks will go out to LinkedIn.
They’ll do a simple keyword search or they’ll post up a job
that will all be driven by keywords.
And what are the words: sales,. Presidents Club,
B2B, SaaS, and then you look for the growth numbers, right?
So what did you do?
And there isn’t really a good ability
to understand the context behind those statements.
And that’s where there’s alignment or not.
And I find that the alignment piece is the thing around
whether you get it right or you don’t get it right.
Agree. 100%.
Those different roles that you talked about are so nuanced
and they come under this giant
sales umbrella, but really they are extremely different.
You talk about something called shiny object syndrome.
What does that mean and how does it apply here?
Well, I’m a recovering shinyaholic.
So what it means is, when you let your ego start driving the bus
and you discount or discard all of the other elements
that are really important to making a good career decision.
And so what I mean by that is
some of the shiniest objects are money
or title or the vision that you’re sold on.
And this is a big conversation that I have with my clients.
There’s a lot of rhetoric for them.
Your job is to sell somebody on the role.. I’m like, no, it’s not.
Your job is not to sell somebody on anything.
Your job is to achieve alignment.
People do not expect you to be perfect, but they do expect you
to be honest so that they know what they’re walking into.
Same rules apply for somebody that is interviewing,
whether you’re a sales leader, or you are an SDR or somewhere
in the middle of those two big statements or anything else.
It could be marketing, it could be product.
I don’t care.
When you are clear about what you bring to the table,
what you’re good at, what your superpowers are, et cetera, et cetera,
you can
then achieve that alignment.. But the shiny object syndrome is,
I am OK at my job,
I’m humming along in my role
and all of a sudden I’m reading all this content on LinkedIn about
it’s the great resignation and all of these companies are horrible.
I’m going to stick it to the man and you’re fine
where you are, but you’re your
your colleagues or your friends are talking about their experience,
and that starts rubbing off on you and then that starts getting in your head.
And then they start telling you, guess what?
I went and I got $40,000 more in my base and you’re like, Wait,
I should be able to get that too.
I’m doing good at my job.. What do you mean?
What is this?
And then you start interviewing when all along the way you’ve been doing
fine in your role.
And then because you’re grabbing on to their story
and it’s not your story, you’re now chasing more money.
And little
did you know or realize that this company has a revolving door of turnover
because the more money you get, the bigger the expectation there is on you.
And so you didn’t quantify or qualify the work.
The expectation. What’s really happening behind the scenes, the leadership, product
market fit all these other things that it takes to be really good in your role.
And you left something good that you worked your tail feather off
to establish for $40,000 more of a big headache
where you are not going to make your OTE because it didn’t go well.
And the same rules apply for leadership, right?
So depending on whose study
that you read, leaders stick around anywhere between 16 to 24 months.
That’s a problem, especially in enterprise sales.
So if you’re just going for more equity
the title
the money but those other things
and what I mean by the other things, product-market fit, leadership.
Do you have a seat at the table?
Do you have the ability to be enabled to do your job
or are you dealing with a founder that doesn’t let you do your job. Right?
These are things that you’ve really got to confirm.
And so for me personally, the shiny object was money
I went, I got seduced by a big, big bump.
And I remember on day one
I called my husband crying being like,. What did I get into?
And as a result of that, when I knew that I had gotten myself
into a really bad situation and left a really good one as a result,
and the only person that I had to blame was me for it, I vowed to myself
that I would never do it again, and I never did do it again.
But I had to figure out a way to not have that happen.
And that’s why I’m so outspoken about the power of a scorecard,
both on the hiring side and both on the interview candidate side.
All right.
Let’s dig into the scorecard, because I really feel like
this is a tactical thing that our sales leaders
that are watching can learn a lot from.. What’s the format and how does it work?
So the scorecard comes from taking a hard
look in your own mirror, meaning, you know yourself, and especially leaders,
this isn’t your first rodeo.
You’ve learned a thing or two, you’ve mastered a thing or two.
Let’s be real, you’ve messed up more than a thing or two.
And you know what you’re good at.
You know when you’re excited, you know when you’re operating on all cylinders
and you know when you don’t want to be doing it.
And that’s OK.
There’s nothing wrong with that.
All of that stuff carries weight.
So when you feel like you’re doing your best work, how do you describe that?
When you are doing a deep eye roll because you’d rather be anywhere else
than in that moment,
how do you describe that?
When you feel like you’re simpatico with your executive team,
with your comrades that you have to do this thing with,
you’re not on your own island,
what does that look like?
How do you describe those things?
And then you look for the patterns and the themes. And those patterns and themes
equal the criteria that then get baked into the scorecard.
So I’m a huge fan of the power of a journal.
I have a very specific methodology that I use to journal,
and we can drop that as a link, Val, for anybody that’s joining us
and basically it’s listening to yourself over the course of two to three weeks.
You can’t look back.
You ask yourself the same five questions, you take a highlighter,
you start looking for the common themes, and that’s what
you start dumping into your scorecard.
And each one of those things carries weight
so that you can quantify and qualify.
So if I say leadership, because now. I’ve seen the patterns, I can quantify
and qualify what that big broad brush stroke of leadership means to me.
If I say culture, I can now quantify and quantify what that big,
broad brush stroke of culture means to me.
So all of those things go into the scorecard so that then
the very first thing that I do in the scorecard,
I put my existing gig or my most recent
gig through the scorecard so that I have a benchmark, right?
Because I’m a big fan of, if you’re going to go somewhere, it has to be equal.
That’s the very least, equal or greater to where you are.
So that you can continue to grow and thrive
and accelerate your career in whatever way, shape or form you wish to.
You know, some people say. I’m a VP of Sales now I want to be CRO.
Some people say, I’m VP of Sales now I want to be SVP of Sales later.
Some people say I’m VP of Sales now, I want to be a CEO one day.
All of those different paths mean something,
but you have got to anchor yourself on what’s important to you
and have weight to that so that when you’re interviewing
you don’t get seduced by the big visionary statements
that somebody can make you to say,
If you do all the right things, we’ll take care of you.
Well, what exactly does that mean?
And what is the work that it takes to do the right things?
And then listen for, here are my eight things on my scorecard.
They’re talking about the right things.
Their right things are none of my right things.
And you can use that as your guide of what to drill into
through the interview process.
And if something’s missing,
before you ever accept anything, you can double back and say White Flag.
Before I make a decision,. I really need to understand this.
If it’s not you that I need to understand this with, who might that be?
So it sounds like we’re maybe removing some of the subjectivity
in hiring, making it more quantifiable.
So in your experience, how has this scorecard method
maybe improved your process?
It reduces the margin for error because you’re taking the emotion out
and you’re taking a very pragmatic
and qualitative and quantitative view to it.
So I get to see it from my lens.
It’s what I use in my business.
Our candidates use it, our clients use it, and as a result,
we have a 98% offer acceptance ratio.
We also do not see the same turnover rates with our clients.
In the last seven years that I’ve had my company,
we’ve had less than five people turnover
within the statistics that we see.
What is that, the 16 to 24 months?. They’re staying for the longer haul.
I’m proud of that.
Those statistics really speak for themselves
Amy, thank you so much for sharing the scorecard exercise with us.
Is there something we can link out to our
to our listeners so that they can learn how to do it?
There is, we have a hiring scorecard.
So for any of our VPs that are listening
or if there are founders that are listening or anybody else.
So my scorecard methodology is applicable to any kind of role.
It’ll just say VP of Sales.
So if you’re hiring, we have that.
And if you are a candidate and you’re looking or you’re even thinking
about looking or you’re considering or you’re going for a promotion
or a different kind of job, this applies to you as well.
And we’ll have both of those links that we can support you with.
Amazing.
This has been great. Amy, thank you so much for joining us.
You’re welcome. Thank you for having me.
All right.
That’s it for this episode of Closing Time.
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