#599 - How to Make a 10x Impact as a New Sales Leader | Sean Gentry

0:00To me, culture is what happens when I'm not around. So when I'm not there, how is my team reacting? How are they behaving? What are they doing? I say like, hey, one of the things you can expect out of me is that I don't micromanage, but I am micro aware. I rarely ever get mad or upset, except when I find shit that I shouldn't find meaning that like you've done something and kept it from me. I always want good news to travel fast and bad news to travel faster. So if we lose a big deal, or if we lose a big renewal, like you should tell me immediately. So that we can try to triage or do something about it.

0:36Good morning, everybody, and welcome to this leadership episode of 30 Minutes to Presidents Club. I'm your host, Nick Sigelsky, with my co-host here, Mark Kosaglo. And today was an interesting one. Today was a first for Mark because, Mark, we actually interviewed someone who is literally working for you right now. We've got on Sean Gentry, who's one of your sales leaders. So I'm going to let you tell me, Mark, why should people listen to Sean. So Sean came to me at outreach, uh, cold. And he said, listen, I need to be your next AM leader. And I was like, okay. And at that point I was getting dozens of those a week.

1:11Immediately after that email, I get a text from my boy, KD, Kevin Dorsey. And he's like, yo, you're going to hear from this dude named Sean Gentry. Most potential I've ever had in the manager. Awesome dude. And you know, he interviewed great. We hired him. He crushed his role at outreach. He went to Webflow, crushed his role there, worked for his current VP of mid-market of sales. And when our director of account management opened up here with no brainer, brought him in and he's had a humongous impact in his first few months. All righty, Sean, welcome back to the leadership show. I hope you remember we start every episode with your top three actionable takeaways.

1:45So let's get your three. Yeah. Awesome. Thanks, Nick. So number one, I want you to build your people book before you start your new job. So most people wait until they get in and get settled, start throwing one-on-ones on the calendar. I think what actually served me best at starting off my new gig was reaching out to the managers and some of the reps before I actually started and having about 45 to hour long conversations, getting to know them before I ever took my first seat. Beautiful. What's number two? Number two is when you get settled, you're going to want to look for everything that's fixable.

2:15You're going to probably go for the lowest lever to pull and get your name recognized. I actually would say that you wanted to find and find the 10x change versus the 2x change. So not only determining what's the lowest effort, but looking at what's the highest impact change you can make that impacts all of your reps at once.

2:32Sean Gentry: So normally, when a new manager steps in, they're looking for everything that's broken. Is it a call volume problem? Or is it a responses to an hour each sequence that are low? And they're going to look to dig their hands into everything and try to fix all the small problems that may impact one or two reps. More importantly, you want to gather all information of what's broken across the team, find the biggest impact change. For us, it was having renewal conversations further out than we were having them now. Things that the top reps were doing, some of the things that the bottom reps weren't at that time.

3:03So you want to document basically what was working and scale greatness down, knowing that it's going to be a 10x change across the team. Great. So I think the biggest change that I could make to make this episode better is ask you what's takeaway number three. Yeah. Takeaway three is it's hard to measure some of those results early on, especially as a leader, you could get in and get discouraged by not seeing the needle move. And so in the first quarter, you're going to measure behavior change versus results. So you want to actually see, are your reps, are your managers doing things differently day in and day out?

3:35Some of the things that you've talked about has changed as a leader, and you're going to measure that and reward that versus actually seeing the results happen because it's going to take too long to actually provide praise for some of those changes. I think this is actually a first where in an interview on the leadership edition, I've talked to somebody that actually is currently working with me. So no pressure. Great. This is like a one-on-one right now. This is the big thing. And I think you can talk about it from your perspective. I could talk about it from my perspective since I'm still under a year.

4:05You come in and that laundry list of stuff that you want to change is really long. So you said you prioritize it. How? How do you look at a list of 20 or 25 things and pick the one or two that you know you need to start at? Yeah, it's two things. So number one, I did use AI for a lot of this. And I'm sure that there's plenty of reps, plenty of leaders using it or what I even think would be scratching the surface. It all started when having these conversations with managers, with reps, I actually asked a series of the same four to five questions with every single person just to gather a baseline.

4:39So some of those questions were like, what's the good, bad, ugly of the role in the company right now? How do they feel challenged and fulfilled at the end of the week? How do they like to be recognized? Whether that's being shouted out in a Slack message, whether that's having you, Mark, Slack them directly and not being put up in front of the class. And then once you have all those things documented, I actually went to Claude and built a prompt as a director of sales at Decebo and uploaded everything. And because of that, you're going to get a lot of reps that say, oh, the sequences aren't working well.

5:12Or, you know, I'm not getting people to respond to voicemails. And the way I always think about problems, I actually would attribute a lot of this to KD, is that he's taught me whether it's a volume or a volume problem, right? You're going to get a lot of reps who are going to say things that are loud in volume, like people don't respond to voicemails. But that might not be a volume problem that is happening across the board. And so it is so KD. But I actually put that in the prompt for Claude to say, hey, I want you to measure, like, is this a volume? Like, is it loud? Or is it actually happening across the org and going to make an impact?

5:47And what Claude and, you know, and ChatGPT were able to do was surface up basically the impact areas that I could make in the first 90 days. And so with the help of that, and like, I think having the same documentation, the same prompt, it was able, I was able to organize kind of my thoughts and put everything in, that it was able to give me a clear enough response to know which levers to pull. So one of those things is that we were doing a lot of forecast calls around expansions, right? And around, you know, net new acquisitions and dry D revenue, which is fantastic. And it should be that way.

6:19But we were kind of missing the side where we were talking about renewals that were coming up, especially ones that were happening quarters out. The thing that I noticed is that we were just getting to renewals too late, right? We were talking about them essentially in quarter for things that we could influence when realistically CFOs and business DMs, they're making those decisions three, six, nine months out about what they're going to do with their future contract. And so that was a simple change that we could make across the board, something our top reps were doing, or our middle of the pack, bottom of the pack were missing at that point.

6:50But it was a lever that we could pull to institute, hey, you have to start this process, this behavior change of reaching out to these accounts much earlier. We implemented that from a manager perspective that they have to start doing this in forecast reviews and the deal reviews. and measuring that behavior change, we were able to make essentially like that 10X impact versus fixing some of the things that were like a quote unquote loud problem. Like, you know, the wording was bad in a sequence, which isn't going to impact the entire team, at least to make a big change. Sean, what this makes me think of is a concept that I learned from Tim Ferriss, actually, and he calls it identify the lead domino.

7:28And what he means by the lead domino is what is the one thing that you can knock down by which every other domino ends up getting knocked down. And if you can find the highest order domino, everything else gets solved as a result. And so I'm thinking about these, how do I save or win more renewals thing? It's like, you could start by being like, all right, we got to help the reps get to power more easily or help them multi-thread better or run safe plans or identify the business impact. But if you're talking about a renewal that's in a week, You don't have the time or space to do all of those things.

8:03And when you start the renewal conversation, whatever, six months before the renewal happens, it actually gives you a little bit of space. And it sounds like for you, that was the lead domino that you identified. Mark, this is a question for you. When you started as the CRO at DeCebo, I have to imagine that there were certain lead dominoes that you identified. And I'm wondering for you, which those were? Probably the biggest domino was the fact that there was a lot of good work being done and a lot of time being spent on it. But it was a random acts of well-intentioned improvement that weren't based around a centralized framework or strategy.

8:41So they, instead of, if you look at each one, they made sense. But if you added them all together, they became chaotic. And so the first thing I did is I sat and watched for about three months and started in July. in October, I had my leadership team come to Toronto. And then I said, these are the two frameworks that govern all of our decision-making. If it's inside these frameworks, we do it and we do it great. If it's outside this, I don't care how cool it is. We ignore it. And that just brought a lot of real definition to how we want to operate. And whenever I do decision and Sean knows this, whenever I do decision or talk about stuff, I usually do it in the frame of the, of, of the RROM, of our recurring revenue operating model.

9:24I do it in the frame of moments of impact, which we haven't quite released yet, but we're getting close to that. So everything is, for me, the lead domino was, if you don't have those kind of North Star frameworks and strategies in place, everything else after that will kind of sprawl looking for the edges versus if you define it, you're infinitely creative inside the boundaries you set. But one of the reasons that I joined DeCevo and thrilled to work with Mark again is because I know like working with him long enough, I worked with him for years at Outreach, obviously carrying over, is that Mark is so driven by process and like operating within those frameworks that truly is like our love language.

10:03I feel the same way that coming in, it's like I can implement a process and track the behavior and see how things are working. And I will say like one of the things that I love working about Mark that's taught me to be a better leader as well is that you never want to go into a meeting and say how great everything is, point things out as a leader. Anybody can find that stuff in a CRM. But more importantly, it's like, how do you come in, call out what's not working and the plan to save it? Right. And so early on, I knew that if I could come out and align with him and our other leaders to say, hey, this is the issue that we want to focus on raising the bar, whether it's renewals or, you know, expansions, whatever that is that we land on together as a team, what's the plan to work towards that and then keep them updated?

10:44We're going to be successful. You lead with the bad news. And leading with bad news, you have to do it the right way in the right frame. And you can't just be negative Nelly and in there like, this is bad, this is bad, this is bad, this is bad. The way that you do that is one is most people lead with good news. And what it does is over time, you know, the meeting runs late or the meeting needs to finish or something and you don't really quite get into the bad news. So most of the bad news feels unresolved while the good news feels resolved. After that happening over and over again, what ends up happening is you start to develop mistrust because it can't be this good.

11:20And I don't feel like we'd ever get the bad stuff resolved. When you flip the script and you say, hey, there's some good things I want to cover at the end if we have time. But let me make sure we talk about some stuff that we need to work on first. Then you have time to really flesh out and resolve. Okay, here's the action I was going to take. Yeah, thanks for your input and stuff like that. Then you move to the good stuff. that's a right way to frame and order the conversations where now like when sean and i talk like i'll put something in slack sean will dm me and be like hey you're right this is an issue this is another issue related to that here's what i'm doing for this here's the sheet i just gave my managers this is all this do you know what i think sean's got it yeah i i might check in a couple weeks later and be like hey how's it going sean but other than that like i'm like sean's got it sean does that half a dozen times in his first few months here and all of a sudden sean is not on my mind now listen that's that can be bad it can be good the reason is good though is because it shows a sign of trust that must be earned and secondly it allows me to work on other stuff that the leader doesn't have as much control over as i feel like sean has control over his area and that's when as a cro and as a leader you really can start to make a difference because you don't have a bunch of balls in the air that you're trying to make sure don't drop you got like some that are just set over there on the counter.

12:38They're in their display cases. They look beautiful. They're shining. When everything, something's wrong, it whispers to you and tells you what's wrong. And then it goes back to this awesome little case. And then I can deal with the much fewer balls, which is makes me way more effective.

12:51Sean Gentry: Today's show is brought to you by ConsenSys, which helps your demo keep selling even when you're not in the room. Before I show a demo, I set it up like it might have to work without me. I include these three slides before I drop in. Number one, the biggest problems I learned in discovery. Number two, how we solve those problems. And number three, a what does success look like today slide. You can steal that exact 30 MPC demo deck template powered by ConsenSys. Go check it out in the show notes. Today's show is brought to you by Full & Rich, which compiles 20 plus premium data vendors in one place to dramatically improve your call connect rate.

13:24When you're cold calling, you have to make sure you're not showing up as spam likely on your prospect's end. And one way to do this is to stop calling bad numbers over and over again. Mark your disconnected or fax lines or wrong numbers so you know not to dial them again. Or even better, make sure your data provider only gives you verified numbers to start with. We partnered with Full & Rich on a guide of nine ways to improve your call connect rate. Get it for free in the show notes. Today's show is brought to you by Pipedrive's easy-to-use and customizable CRM with built-in meeting intelligence.

13:52My favorite discovery question is the multiple-choice question, which sounds like, typically, when I'm talking with folks like you, they're focused on A, B, or C. Which is it for you? Now, A, B, and C have to be problems that you can solve because that's how you steer the conversation in the direction of places you can help them. Now, Pipedrive's built-in meeting intelligence helps you focus on your follow-up question, not on scrambling to take live notes. And we built a full discovery toolkit with them free in the 30MPC closers hub. There's a link in the show notes. Okay, so just to go back to what you shared earlier, Sean.

14:21So step one is you're going and you're having these conversations with all of these managers, all of these reps. You are taking the recordings from those calls. You're putting them into Claude. And then what you were doing is you were saying, hey, help me identify some of the common patterns and themes while also keeping in mind volume versus volume. And then what you shared with me actually on the pre-call is you're sharing your plan to try to start to solve this stuff. But you are asking Claude to pressure test that plan and call out where you might be thinking about things wrong. You go from someone who's just like, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

14:52Sounds great to someone that is a thought partner. So at this point, now you have a plan of attack. Doc, I want to ask you in your first 30 days about, we started to touch on this with the bad news first versus the good news first. I want to ask about how you communicated that plan downward to your team and also upward to the folks that you report to. I'm curious about what that first, like those first couple team meetings that you led looked like. And then also what your first couple one-on-ones with your boss might have looked like where you shared that plan. It's not the first time that I've stepped into an org and been, quote unquote, the new guy, right?

15:29Both the managers that I started working with have been at DeCebo for years. Like my top senior manager has been here for over four years now. And so stepping into the roles is kind of the new guy. I don't have true like industry experience for DeCebo as well, right? So it's, it's I've done this role before, but I'm not in the same space. And so stepping in, I feel like you have to kind of call out the elephant in the room. And that was, I think, one thing that was helpful on these initial calls to say like, hey, I understand that you probably wanted my job. I am not from this space. I am new.

16:02But here's why I believe I'm the best fit. And here's why I'm excited to work with you. Right. And kind of you as a team. So I think when I was communicating things to my managers, you have to lead with some empathy to call out that, hey, I'm new. I am coming in. There are going to be things that we are likely going to change. but I also want your input because there were certain things that I would ask my managers about and they could either say, Hey, yeah, we tried this before and it didn't work out. Or that's just a stupid idea. Or, you know, yes, let's go ahead and try it. And so I wanted to make sure that I had their buy-in.

16:34So it comes with empathy and really the why. So if also I came to them with some like unbiased or undata driven approach of why I wanted to fix what I wanted to fix, it would get thrown out the door. So that's where I feel like some of this data and talking to the entire team and coming with that support was helpful and communicating it down. And then communicating it up, I think it's similar. Like I understood what the data showed. I understood what the voice of the team was, some of the biggest things you were running into. And I was able to identify, I believed a big enough problem to pull on that lever to help the business.

17:04And so working with, you know, Corey, RVP, working with Mark and saying, hey, this is where I want to focus and make the biggest change. They were able to align on that as well, because the numbers were what the numbers were, right? And say like, I believe that if we move, you know, this percentage up here in terms of renewal rates, this is going to be a huge impact to the business. This is basically the flag that I want to plant in the ground over the next couple of quarters, right? And then I think more importantly, because we work in a remote environment, like my boss is on the East Coast. I'm in Seattle, Washington.

17:36You know, Mark is Eastern Standard Time. I can't be in the room with them at all times in communication. So I do my best to proactively communicate with them as much as possible. Right. So one thing that I've actually started to do even way back to my outreach days is that every single week I send my boss a full report on what I've done that week. So essentially how I'm pacing to my number, what our renewal percentage is, what my expansion and pipeline numbers are. I send him any trends that I'm noticing in the business. So what's working well, what's maybe not working well. And then I also send him my focus for the next week.

18:10What are the things that I'm looking to tackle? whether that's like, you know, filling open headcount or, you know, winning this huge renewal that's coming up. So when we get into our one-on-ones, that's usually the first thing we cover is the top two or three topics so we can keep on pace. But also he rarely ever slacks me and says like, Hey, what the heck are you working on? Right. Because I'm always trying to do my best to let him know. Sean, I think another, uh, aspect that you nail in the beginning is, uh, measuring behavior change versus results. And we know results are so lagging, but behavior change can be instant.

18:41And that also lets you know, like, do you have the hearts and minds of your people? And, you know, we both understand how important that is, is give me an example or two of a behavior change that you did here. And then how do you track it? Like, how do you how do you see that it's happening? One of the things that I noticed very early on is especially talking about renewal. So I noticed two things from the leadership side and then the individual like contributor rep side. So from the rep side, I noticed that we were starting to talk to renewals, you know, one quarter in, right? Which especially in our segment is too late.

19:13People have already made their decisions. If they were going dark, they had already decided something, you know, four to six months, maybe even prior to that. So the first behavior change I wanted to do was start out forecasting two or three quarters, right? That we were looking in Q1, we were looking to Q3 and even Q4 and starting to forecast those deals. So each rep had roughly, you know, say 20 to 25 open renewals for the fiscal year. have they communicated and started talking to those ones that are going to renew in September, October, November? Because I know, Mark, you and I have talked about this, like a renewals essentially start once that first contract is signed, right?

19:48Once they sign on the dotted line, like that is the start essentially of a renewal process, right? The customer journey. So that was the first thing I wanted to notice is that are the reps able to actively communicate with the, you know, quarters out deals that are going to renew? So the second thing is from a leadership perspective is that the managers had to be expecting this and then inspecting it. So when they were going through their weekly deal reviews, they weren't just talking about the open expansion deals and pipeline. They were starting to pull up their Q3 and Q4 renewals to say, hey, is there activity?

20:20Are there conversations happening? Is there engagement? Do we have a champion at the site? Right. And part of the way that I use Claude and ChatGPT to help is that I started essentially exporting all of our annual renewals in Gong. I would get an email sent with every single open renewal. I would throw that into Claude and it would basically surface the opportunities or the renewals coming up that didn't have any activity for this year. So rather than looking through, you know, a lens of Gong and pulling everything, you can just export all of the open renewals, send them to Claude. I cross referenced that with some of our internal usage data.

20:57so I can essentially see like, are the reps contacting them? And then is the customer actually utilizing the platform? And then if neither of those things are true, these are the red flags that we need to start honing in on. And that's what I would have my managers go after. So Claude was essentially also helping me surface, like where is the biggest risk that's coming up? And then can the managers manage to that on a weekly basis? And then are the reps actually doing their execution of it? Did this live in an application or were you just putting it in a spreadsheet? Because as I understand it, the process for this renewals dashboard, export all open renewals from Gong to see the engagement with the account.

21:40Two, look in the CRM. Are we actively trying to contact them? And then three, internal usage data. Are they actually using our product? One, was there any other data that you pulled into that? And then two, did this live in an application? Was it a spreadsheet? Did you just send out a memo to the team? I'm curious what you did. You basically use Claude Cowork to build a prompt. Essentially, this is what you're looking for, right? So if I go in and say, hey, I'm the director of sales, I'm looking for open renewals that are coming up, you know, in Q3 and Q4 and beyond. So let's say in the next 12 months, I'm looking for deals that basically are flagged as risk.

22:11So having low activity in the last 90 days, let's say we have not engaged with a single person there, like meaning the same person consistently, therefore, you know, a champion, You know, are we having like utilization or usage issues that are coming up? And so plugging in all of the export data from Gong, from Salesforce that you can pull as well. You can download a CSV. You can drop that in there. I was downloading a CSV from a company called Totango that we have that measures all of our usage and utilization. And then we actually built a Glean agent that surfaces any risk through these three things.

22:46And we're pulling in the Glean agent to Claude as well. Claude was able to essentially build out a full web browser for us that we could click through and cycle through and dig into the data where it shows us what the AM or the account manager is actually tracking and how they forecasted it, and if there's discrepancies in what the AI is calling. So an AM may call out and say, hey, I've got super biz that is coming up in December, and it all looks good. It's likely, right? It's going to renew. But the AI is telling us, you actually haven't talked to anybody there in the last four months. their usage is down from 70 % to 40%.

23:19Maybe they had a couple of leadership changes and you no longer have a champion there. This actually shouldn't be likely. And so from a leader's perspective, we're able to dig in and say, hey, where are the discrepancies here? And these are the ones that we're starting talking forecast calls now in May for a renewal that's coming up in Q4 versus the way we were doing it before. We were talking about the concept of the lead domino or the highest leverage change. I have to imagine that there were things that you knew were problems, but they weren't the highest leverage problems to solve. And I'm curious, what were some of the problems that you intentionally let and maybe have still left burn that you're able to share with listeners?

23:55You know, some of the small changes that you can always go through, especially when it comes to prospecting is built in my blood. I mean, starting off so early at outreach, like, you know, you should always, always, always be creating pipeline, like pipeline over everything. This is how I've always thought. And I think that's where most managers come in and they say, hey, I want to tweak how we're doing our phone call blocks. And I want to tweak how we're sending our emails and some of the verbiage in our emails or our voicemails. And it's easy to change call scripts and things like that to see if there's going to be impact.

24:25I had reps come to me and say, hey, like some of the sequences I'm sending out aren't worded the way that I would word them, right? And I could go through and probably make that rep or two happy by saying, hey, I'm going to reword this for you and send it out. But essentially, the change wouldn't be enough to impact whether the entire team or see the needle move enough that I could go back realistically to Mark and say, Hey, like I changed wording in the sequence and we saw response rates go from 20 to 22 % for one rep. Right. But essentially for the lift, it was not going to see the result that we needed to see versus are we, you know, starting to contact people six to nine to 12 months out, are our managers running through this in our forecast calls.

25:06And now I can go back to Mark a quarter or two out and say, hey, we got our, you know, renewal percentage on these major deals from X to Y. And that was like the goal that I'd set out to achieve. Because that's going to impact

25:18Sean Gentry: millions of dollars of revenue. Today's show is brought to you by ConsenSys, which helps your demo keep selling even when you're not in the room. Before I show a demo, I set it up like it might have to work without me. I include these three slides before I drop in. Number one, the biggest problems I learned in discovery. Number two, how we solve those problems. And number three, a what does success look like today slide. You can steal that exact 30 MPC demo deck template powered by consensus. Go check it out in the show notes. Today's show is brought to you by Full & Rich, which compiles 20 plus premium data vendors in one place to dramatically improve your call connect rate.

25:53When you're cold calling, you have to make sure you're not showing up as spam likely on your prospect's end. And one way to do this is to stop calling bad numbers over and over again. Mark your disconnected or fax lines or wrong numbers so you know not to dial them again. Or even better, make sure your data provider only gives you verified numbers to start with. We partnered with Fullenrich on a guide of nine ways to improve your call connect rate. Get it for free in the show notes. Today's show is brought to you by Pipedrive's easy to use and customizable CRM with built-in meeting intelligence.

26:21My favorite discovery question is the multiple choice question, which sounds like typically when I'm talking with folks like you, they're focused on A, B, or C, which is it for you? Now, A, B, and C have to be problems that you can solve because that's how you steer the conversation in the direction of places you can help them. Now, Pipedrive's built-in meeting intelligence helps you focus on your follow-up question, not on scrambling to take live notes. And we built a full discovery toolkit with them free in the 30MPC closers hub. There's a link in the show notes. I guess I have one more question for both of you, and this is around cultural change.

26:53So one thing that you guys might not be aware of is Armand and I recently switched jobs at 30 MPC. Literally for the last five years, I was leading our sales team and Armand was leading our content team. And part of the reason that we made the switch was we both had taken the business really far in our original roles, but we felt like in order to get to the next level and scale, we were both like, I think you'd be better at my job and I think you'd be better at my job. And so we switched. So I am now leading our content team. Armand is leading sales. And one of the things that I found that I observed when I took over our content team was that there were some cultural changes that I wanted to make.

27:28And I imagine for both of you, when you took over your new sales leadership job, there were cultural changes that you all wanted to make. And I think a lot of times people talk about culture in this very nebulous, fluffy space, and they don't actually get into practical, actionable things that they did to change the culture for the better. Sean, I'm wondering if there were any concrete steps that you took on the cultural front. And then Mark, I'm going to ping that question over to you. It's always helped me to understand what culture truly means, right? And how I define it, because it's like you said, it's nebulous.

27:59It's different for every person. Like culture used to mean like kegs in the office and ping pong tables and things. To me, culture is what happens when I'm not around, right? So when I'm not there, how is my team reacting? How are they behaving? What are they doing? Right? And so very early on when I came in, the first thing I did is sat down with the managers and set expectations. Like this is how I run my team. This is how you can expect, like what you can expect from me and this is therefore what i expect from you then i did the same can you give me some specifics in terms of like what you said in that conversation sean yeah so one of the things is is i basically walk through a whole deck that i've created about working with sean working with sg yeah like i say like hey one of the things you can expect out of me is that i don't micromanage but i am micro aware like part of my strength and skill set is I always want to know what's going on, what's happening.

28:50And like, I tell them, like, I rarely ever get mad or upset, except when I find shit that I shouldn't find, right? Meaning that like, you've done something and kept it from me. I always want good news to travel fast and bad news to travel faster. So if we lose a big deal, or if we lose a big renewal, like, you should tell me immediately so that we can try to triage or do something about it. And so part of it is like, this is what you can expect out of working from me. I also tell them one of the huge things that I try to pride myself on is that I've got two young children. I am family first, right?

29:25If you've got both of my managers have kids, if you need something for your family, your partner, like your kids, like I will never ask anything about that. Like take care of your family, take care of your kids. And similarly, like I also really cherish like time outside to exercise, to work on my fitness, work on my mental health. Like, and so I want my reps and my managers also to put themselves first. I believe that if they are not taking care of themselves, whether that's physically, mentally, emotionally, that it's very difficult to give their best at work. So if they need that time to like go for a walk, do yoga, go for a swim, go for a run.

30:03I want them to do that. And I give them that flexibility and freedom upfront so that they should never feel bad about that. Because if they can't do that, I don't think that they're going to give their best to me. So part of that is all the expectation setting upfront. And I truly believe if you know somebody and you trust that person, like Mark and I have worked together for a long time, I would say that we trust one another. We are going to work hard for one another because we have that trust, right? If you don't trust your boss, you're not going to work hard for that person. And so part of that is the expectation setting up front.

30:34And then I think the second thing around culture is that I believe like, you know, a lot of managers say, Oh, never get too high, never get too low. Like there should be a floor of how upset, but there should be no ceiling. Like you can get super excited, you know, raise the roof off everything. And so I always try my hardest. I'm not perfect, but I try my hardest to shout people out the way they want to be recognized around behavior. So if we had one of the reps on our team that had an awesome renewals call and that gets shared, I want to celebrate that person. I want to celebrate people for their actions and their behaviors, also for the results, right?

31:13But I believe there should be no ceiling in how high the team gets. I love it. Well, Sean, this has been a phenomenal episode. The clock is ticking. We got to move to the final question. So we've talked about a lot of best practices for leaders to follow when they're starting in a new job. Now I got to flip that question on its head and ask you about a worst practice. So my question for you is, what is one bad habit that you think all sales leaders need to break when they're starting in a new job so that every sales team out there can get better? Yeah, if we bring it back to AI, it's just the avoidance or reluctance due to fear, right?

31:43Like I think I've talked to leaders and I work with leaders outside of this that just say like, hey, I just don't know where to start or I just don't know what to do with AI. And so they just use it for recipes or like gym workouts. And it's like, hey, get into it, play around with it, spend the time. And I think the biggest hack that's helped me is like, I'll use the prompt. Like, this is what I'm thinking. I want you to pressure test this, or I want you to like see areas that I'm not thinking about or tell me where I'm wrong and using it as kind of the devil's advocate. That's been the best way that I've been able to like go back and forth and learn how to actually like use it or prompt it.

32:17So I would say for any new manager, like just don't avoid it. It's here, whether you like it or not. So dive in and use it, spend the time. I love it. Sean, thank you for joining us. Everybody stick around for a 60 second recap coming up soon. All right, Mark, it is time for your two by two recap. What do you have for your two? Two by two. One is from a man KD via my man SG, which is volume versus volume. Is it loud or is it a lot? And loud could matter, maybe not. Volume, like a lot, that always matters. And then second, don't micromanage, be micro aware. That I'm stealing that. I thought that was brilliant.

32:57I thought it was so dope. So those are my two takeaways for today. All right. My first is actually one that I got from you, Mark, which is when we were talking about cultural change, the first piece is you have to define what kind of energy do I want in this organization? And then you have to know that you're the energy engine for that. And you have to start to attach to the energy that you want, the things that you're going to do. For you, Mark, those were things like anytime we closed a deal over$10 ,000, the AE was getting a personal message. It's anytime Sean sends a plan for, hey, here's a problem, here's how I want to solve it, you're giving it a big let's go.

33:33For Sean, the way that he's extending that is he has a floor for how low he'll allow himself to get, but from a ceiling perspective, there is no ceiling. He can raise the roof infinitely. And so when you're making cultural change, you have to understand that you are the energy engine, that GTM is the energy engine, and that starts with you as a sales leader. And then number four, Sean talked about the proactive updates that he sends to his leadership at the end of every single week, which are things that he worked on that week, problems they're running into, what his focus is for the next week.

34:05And he is giving proactive visibility into these things so that leadership never has to wonder, what is Sean working on right now? All right, Mark, that's the episode. I guess, how can people help us out? Yeah, listen, they can always help us out. one way is in the comments below, put some stuff you want us to talk about or questions you wanted to ask. Or if you have a great sales leader, put their name in there and let's get them on the show. And then secondly, you can always help us out by hitting that like and subscribe button, right? I love it. I feel so YouTuby now. You are a YouTube. Look at this.

34:37Mark Kossigl, the YouTuber. Folks, thanks for listening. We'll see you next week on 30MPC.

34:43Sean Gentry: Today's show is brought to you by ConsenSys, which helps your demo keep selling even when you're not in the room. Before I show a demo, I set it up like it might have to work without me. I include these three slides before I drop in. Number one, the biggest problems I learned in discovery. Number two, how we solve those problems. And number three, a what does success look like today slide. You can steal that exact 30 MPC demo deck template powered by ConsenSys. Go check it out in the show notes. Today's show is brought to you by Full & Rich, which compiles 20 plus premium data vendors in one place to dramatically improve your call connect rate.

35:16When you're cold calling, you have to make sure you're not showing up as spam-likely on your prospect's end, and one way to do this is to stop calling bad numbers over and over again. Mark your disconnected or fax lines or wrong numbers so you know not to dial them again. Or even better, make sure your data provider only gives you verified numbers to start with. We partnered with Full & Rich on a guide of nine ways to improve your call connect rate. Get it for free in the show notes. Today's show is brought to you by Pipedrive's easy-to-use and customizable CRM with built-in meeting intelligence.

35:43My favorite discovery question is the multiple choice question, which sounds like typically when I'm talking with folks like you, they're focused on A, B, or C. Which is it for you? Now, A, B, and C have to be problems that you can solve because that's how you steer the conversation in the direction of places you can help them. Now, Pipedrive's built-in meeting intelligence helps you focus on your follow-up question, not on scrambling to take live notes. And we built a full discovery toolkit with them free in the 30MPC closers hub. There's a link in the show notes.