Scaling Sales Organizations w/ Anthony Bratti | builders podcast

0:00Luck just doesn't happen. You need to put yourself in the position of where you're going to create greatness.

0:10Today, I'm talking about scaling sales organizations when you need to make it to the next milestone of revenue, such as from 100 million to 500 million. My guest is Anthony Brody. He's the GM at Centerfield, and we also hit on building a sales career and why he does a cold plunge every morning. In my weekly chat with Marty Beckerman, we talk about the interview they conducted with In-N-Out Burger owner, Lindsay Sutton. Do me a favor, and before listening to that segment, try to guess the average compensation of an In-N-Out store manager. Today's sponsor is Top Resume. Even when you have all the qualifications in the world, your resume needs to tell a compelling story to get the attention of a hiring manager.

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1:31Hey, Marty, how are you? Good to see you. Doing great, John. How are you? Good. And we usually talk about multiple stories when we get together each week, but this time we're just going to talk about one because I find it so interesting. and it's about the burger chain, In-N-Out, mostly in California. Talk about the cult of In-N-Out, would you? Sure, well, very few restaurants or destinations in the way, especially fast food restaurants or destinations in the way that In-N-Out is for people when they visit California, they get off their plane. In Los Angeles, especially, there's an In-N-Out burger two minutes from LAX and it's always got a line of cars a mile going out to the airport because people are so excited to go there.

2:22Yeah, and last time I was there with my kids, my son in particular wanted to make a beeline there. He thinks the fries, the burgers, the shakes are awesome, and they are. And you had the chance to interview actually the president and owner of In-N-Out for the newsletter, and she became president, I guess, at a young age. Maybe you can tell that story. Yeah, this is probably the biggest interview the newsletter's done in its history of an active executive. So, Lindsey Snyder became head of In-N-Out Burger at 27. Her uncle and father had been in charge of it. Her grandparents founded the company.

3:02Her uncle and then father both had pretty sudden and tragic deaths and she unexpectedly had to take over. We asked her about, did she feel people doubted her internally because she wasn't even 30 yet? And she said that even though nobody is fully prepared to step into that kind of role, she had worked since she was 17, she had worked in the restaurants with the food. She had actually worked on the carpentry of the restaurants. She had come up through the marketing department and was already running the entire marketing department herself. So she was kind of, this restaurant is kind of her birthright in a way.

3:45And the assumption had always been she was probably going to take over at some point. Wow. Kind of a crazy way to become the president or CEO of a company, not anything that you'd expect, but I guess she had worked there for 10 years already. Internet has so many quirky and unique things about it. One of it is that they pay, especially in the quick service food industry, pretty good wages. What did you discover as part of the interview? Sure. They've always paid above minimum wage, but the most surprising thing is how much they pay their managers, including profit sharing. Managers can make$180 ,000 a year at In-N-Out, which even for a Los Angeles cost a living is pretty good.

4:32And we asked her about that. And she said that they pay for good talent and they want to make sure that they have the best managers in the industry and they're willing to pay for it. Yeah, I love that. Everybody says they want a good culture. You truly attract the best talent by paying great. That's really cool. And their prices are not crazy. I went to a fast food place with my son. I won't name names a couple of weeks ago, but a burger combo meal was$15. And in and out, although I think prices have gone up a little bit, still very affordable. Did you talk at all about growth plans for the company?

5:10I mean, I know that they're in California. I've been to one in Vegas. I think they're in Arizona. But is Lindsay thinking about national, international? How does she approach that? They've definitely been expanding the last few years. I think they're in about seven states now. They have 400 locations, so it's not just California. But what's really unique, since they're still a family-owned business, even though they're a really big family-owned business, they don't necessarily need to report to shareholders. They don't need to make every quarter as much of a rapid growth as possible. And so she says we have an intentional slow growth policy.

5:51They do not want to compromise on quality. They don't want to go. They could easily be in every state right now. But she says we are only going to expand as quickly as we know we can keep the quality at the same level. She doesn't want to dilute the product. And it's working. I mean, they're getting, I believe, 700 ,000 customers per restaurant per year. They're making billions. religions and, you know, I mean, as far as religions in Los Angeles go, there's Scientology and an Outburger. All right. Well, I know you can read about the entire interview in the newsletter. Thanks, Marty. Good to see you.

6:35Thanks, John.

6:41Hi, Anthony. How are you doing? Good to see you. Good, John. How are you doing? Nice to see you. Happy Friday. Yeah. Happy Friday. Okay, good segue because we're recording this. It's midday for me. I'm on the West Coast. You're on the East Coast. How do you feel as a sales leader, as a revenue leader, as a GM at the end of a weekday? Is it time to nap? Is it happy hour? Do you want to go on a run? What's the end of the week typically like for you? Yeah, so it's four o 'clock on Friday. I spent the beginning of the week on the West Coast, beautiful Santa Barbara, wonderful red-eyed back home to a set of home experiences, as you'd expect.

7:18And the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to catch up on two workouts that I didn't have time to do during the week, which I'm very much looking forward to. So that's going to kick off the weekend. Well, this isn't a health hack podcast, but since you brought up your routine, I know in the morning that you get up and you do a cold plunge. Talk about that. How how much of it is part of your Anthony special sauce? Yeah. So, uh, it's, it's a great story. So back in January, I went on a camp with a gentleman named Jesse Itzler and, uh, it was called an ice camp retreat. It was in Minnesota.

7:59And, and in that experience, John, they actually carved a hole in a lake and the water was 30.5 degrees. And I went in that lake, uh, and then ended up doing a 5k race around this frozen lake. And so ever since then, I came back and I have a cold plunge. And so it's set at 35 degrees. And every morning, like just get out of bed. And I go into the cold plunge to start the day. And that gets everything flowing. And it's fantastic. So when you get up and you know, then you put under slippers or whatever, are you running downstairs because you're so excited to be in the plunge? Or is it like, I've just got to do it?

8:38You know, look, I took the red eye the other day and I got walked in the door at 845. I had a 10 o 'clock meeting and walked in, put the bags in, maybe an hour of sleep. I jumped in that cold plunge and then I hit the ground, hit the ground running for the staff meeting. And so it was no questions asked. That's part of the routine that keeps it going. I do have to say, so getting in the water is hard, just like getting up and going to the office and doing the things that we have to do every day is hard. So that's the first part's hard. And then the second part of it, it gives you the energy throughout the day.

9:11So if you haven't practiced, yeah, it's not a health hack podcast. That might be our next one, but definitely gives you the juice to get going. It beats that 16-ounce latte at Starbucks for sure. Yeah, yeah, I can imagine. So you traveled this week. I'm curious. I want to ask you all about building marketing and sales organizations. But you mentioned travel this week, coast to coast. What do you think about getting on the road these days? Is it overrated? Is it underrated? Is it properly rated as far as cultivating relationships, growing your pipeline and getting big deals done? Yeah, great question.

9:52You know, it's it's required and I think it's underappreciated for the folks that haven't been in that community of getting on the planes and going to go do the work. So I was in San Francisco last week at a conference called SASTR. This week I was at a conference for Commission Junction in Santa Barbara. The themes there are very much you need to get in front of your customers. Relationships matter. And the best ways to make deals happen faster is getting out and getting in front of folks. You know, at the end of the day, Zoom is great, but you can go to 10 Zooms in a day and have to go back to your to-do list.

10:30And it doesn't have that same impact of that in-person session and meeting. So anybody thinking about best ways to grow revenue, get people out of the office and into the office because there's a whole learning culture that happens there. And at the same time, get out and see those customers and be where they are. The other thing is you really need to create those. Luck just doesn't happen. You need to put yourself in the position of where you're going to create greatness. and it that doesn't happen sitting in your you know in your home office sitting on a phone in a zoom you know i'm very much the last person to leave an event and spending time and developing those dinners and those relationships with the folks because people want to have the experience and the relationship and you create your own luck so in the world of commercial and enterprise and going and building businesses, that luck's created on the road.

11:27So the airports are full. And it's interesting to see, I live in Atlanta, and there's Clear, and now there's this thing called Digital ID. And Clear used to be the fast paths to be able to go through it. But if you haven't experienced Digital ID, that gets you through nice and quick. So as lines get bigger, you can get through faster. Oh, that's okay. I might have a follow-up question about that later. I mean, it's frustrating in LAX specifically, the clear lines like longer than the TSA line now. And so you're saying there's a new thing that just bypasses both of those? Yeah, that's great. Okay, I'm going to look that up after this.

12:08So by the way, I agree with you that there's this biochemical something or other reaction that occurs when you're face to face with someone, whether it's a colleague, a prospect, a customer that AI can't replicate. And on the one hand, as efficient as Zoom is, like hopping from meeting to meeting to meeting, or in our case, just being able to do a podcast ad hoc, when we're in the office, there's all these organic things that occur. And you can have impromptu meetings constantly. And it feels like that's more efficient now than I kind of remember anticipated. So, Anthony, I want to talk about your experience and your playbook, if you will.

12:59You've been a revenue leader, an executive, a sales leader for some of the biggest companies in the world like AT &T, for startups just starting from scratch as employee number one, or for stepping in as CRO for a private equity portco that we both know really well in areas like digital marketing, manufacturing, and so on. So when you start a new gig or you were to start a new gig, and as leader, it's your responsibility, you're the one on the line that says you've got to get from$100 million to$500 million or from$500 million to a billion dollars. Can you synthesize for me kind of what's your playbook or distill down how you would start or approach your day one?

13:48Yeah. You know, John, it's interesting. Folks are really adverse to change, right? And when you're spending time either inside the company or working with customers, the approach to change for opportunities is it's not always – it's hard for folks. They struggle with how to do that. So really what I've mapped out over the last couple of years – and you were kind. I've done it for decades, right? But what we've mapped out – I've been able to map out is a very prescriptive process to be able to kind of what I call like a money map. But from quote to cash, what does the customer buying experience look like, including the functional org supports, supporting organizations?

14:41And what does that look like and where really are the areas of opportunity? And so as you map those out, you're able to better understand, does everybody have their own swim lane that they work in, right? Where does everybody go back and forth? Are there scorecards so that when an employee wakes up every day, they know exactly what's a good day versus a bad day? And is everybody aligned around the expectations and how to get there? So the first things first is from a process standpoint, it's a very prescriptive process, which works through the quote to cash of an organization to understand where the opportunities are.

15:20And the output of that starts to give you a set of work streams, which are either incremental, so they're going to impact revenue in month, quarter, and year, or they're transformative, which helps drive the next 12 to 24 months of a plan. And so we've seen a lot of success in that everywhere we've gone over the last couple of years. That's really interesting. I like how you framed that up, quote to cash, and looking at the customer buying experience. So let's say that you've mapped it out. Now you understand it. Now you know what people are working on. How do you start to take it to the next level where you know if something is broken, know if something's working, know if something should be supercharged?

16:05What's the next thing you do from there? You know, that's where you start to really get a lot of the great war stories as you're working through everything, right? So I'd say that the next step as you've started to map those out is a very easy process, what I'll call inspect what you expect. So now you understand the quote to cash process. You know how everything happens. And now are we measuring the things that we expect to be able to happen? So, for instance, if a sales rep has a quota that they need to be able to get to, does their funnel match what they need to be able to achieve that quota?

16:42And if the funnel matches, does the set amount of appointments that they need to go on and proposals out the door match? And, you know, it's easy to assume. Somebody once told me that everybody works hard and then that's the looks like they're working hard and that's the right measure of it. But really, does the data show in their dashboard that they can hit those numbers? So the next major theme is really inspecting what you expect. And I'll give you a funny story. I spent some time working with a company and they missed their number month over month, quarter over quarter from a revenue standpoint.

17:24And the thought was, is that sales needs to do a better job selling. But through the quote to cash process, we were able to see finance was actually recording and forecasting revenue based on expected installs. And if you expect an install on the first of the month, which they all don't happen on the first of the month, you would expect a full month of billing. Just by walking through the process as installations happen every single day and then the month the revenue comes off, right? You'd obviously miss your revenue just by the fact that finances was miscommunicating what the revenue expectations were from sales.

18:07And so I think that's just an easy alignment conversation of inspecting the forecasting, inspecting the revenue, and then tying to it. You know, I'm curious. So if you've inspected what you expect, because I think more about the marketing side of things and the messaging and positioning in my day job. And how as a sales leader, as a strategy leader, do you know if your message is landing at companies every step of the way? So maybe there are five touch points to a sale typically. Where do the alarm bells go off if you're like, maybe the message isn't working? I think I would imagine there's like a data element to it, but there's also an in-person element and there's asking your sales team.

18:59And then there's understanding if what you're hearing is really true, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Can you unpack that for me? Yeah. I mean, it's interesting. You never know what part of the funnel where that breakdown really starts to happen. Is it at the top of the funnel or is it at the bottom at the five yard line of the funnel? And so there's a set of clear processes that we've put in place to be able to, you know, through those dashboards. If something gets delayed, so if you forecast the deal is going to happen on the 15th of the month and it's the 17th and there hasn't been an update to it, you know, that's one alarm bell, right, if it was supposed to close.

19:41But at the same time, if, you know, the great telltale sign is that every deal is going to close on the 30th of September, right? So that's not going to happen. And there really isn't an event that's going to take place or scheduled activity that's in there in the system, right? You can only close a deal if you know you're going to have a meeting. And I'm sure all meetings are not happening the last day of the month. So I think to take your question, I think what we need to do is inspect each part of the funnel and figure out where the breakdown is. And if the breakdown is in the top of the funnel, then make sure that our funnel is resonating with the right buyer profile.

20:22And if our messaging is just not closing for the customers because the messaging isn't resonating, then figure out how to rework those proposals to make sure that they're working. And it's especially in hyper growth modes, it takes takes a lot of tweaking and and and bending to be able to make sure that we're hitting the hitting the customer profiles. Yeah, that's a really good point, because you've been involved in a lot of companies that are that are doing ultra fast growth. And so there are more sales meetings happening, ideally, than you, Anthony, can sit in, hear about debrief about. So you've got to kind of collect this data in some way and synthesize it.

21:07You know, I wonder, so let's say the top of the funnel and the messaging is kind of landing and you're getting into the end and sales aren't happening. So one of the things that I've experienced from time to time is a product team or an engineering team or manufacturing team might say, well, sales isn't selling the product the right way. And the sales team might say, our product doesn't do what our customers need. And so that's what I would say is an unhealthy or unproductive conversation. How do you flip that around into one of productivity and partnership? What's your playbook for having ultra-healthy and collaborative relationships with the folks who are creating the product that you're selling?

21:56well and to the marketing organization so so great great question john what i've done is set up just bi-weekly check-ins they could be weekly or bi-weekly we're reviewing those funnel opportunities and making sure that the sales team clearly understands what the product does and they're presenting it appropriately and and and the product and marketing team are hearing the feedback from the sales about what what customers like about it anthony that totally makes sense. Let me reframe the question a bit, which is sales sometimes, or all the time, will want to sell more than the product has to offer.

22:36And then product marketing, the CEO always wants more leads. How do you manage this dynamic to get the most out of the team that you have? John, sales has never seen a great lead unless there's a contract automatically tied to it, right? So the dynamic between sales, marketing, and product is it's a healthy tension across the organizations, right? And so through those bi-weeklies, what we're able to establish is a set of dashboards that shows here's what's marketing's delivered. And then here's the output from a sales standpoint of what the funnel was, what closed, and what's going to happen next.

23:14From a product standpoint, here's what's generally available on the truck, you know, to be able to sell. And then here's how sales sold it. And then maybe some other custom options, which would be able to get more customers to come in. And you can look at those through your win-loss reports and win-loss or delayed, right? And maybe there's feature scope there. But the most important thing as you go through the process is you really have to look at a philosophy I call less is more. And And people also look at that as like the 80-20 rule, right? 80 % of our revenue and opportunities come from 20 % of the prospects.

23:51At the same time, 80 % of our revenue comes from 20 % of the activities that we do as an organization. So as we've walked through kind of the money map and then inspecting what we expect, the next key piece is making sure that, listen, we can't do everything. You can't throw darts up on a dartboard and expect that they're all going to hit. We need to be really focused in what's that 20 % of the activity that's going to drive that 80 % of the growth. And then throw those 80 % of the other activities as kind of like a tier two or have junior resources do that as best they can. But it shouldn't be an area of focus.

24:34And so what I do is I work with a team on, hey, what's that 20 % that's really going to impact our revenue and growth? Cut the other 80 % down and then just add more strategic opportunities to it. And so that theme of less is more helps us get more sales capacity, which is going to become a continuing big buzzword in the industry over the next couple of years as the economy continues down this path. But we get to add more sales capacity, more marketing capacity without adding resources to the plan. And so another critical piece is focusing on less is more. And they all create did you know moments.

25:15And, you know, an example of a did you know moment is when you run out, you have a meeting with a customer, you have an internal meeting with a salesperson. And I come back into the office and I'm like, hey, John, did you know? and you're like, did I know what? Well, did you know that you're doing, you're in a fast-paced growth business and you're doing the same thing you did same way as you were doing it 10 years ago? And there's money in did you know moments. At the end of the day, a did you know moment could be millions and millions of dollars because they haven't really rethought the new ways to be able to do it.

25:50So I'm all about creating did you know moments. And then I like to call my friends, as you know, and talk to them about it. Yeah, I like that. Did you know it's kind of almost like a game show title? And I want to play a little bit of a game show with you kind of around turning back time. I think as many folks just starting their career in sales, in revenue operations, want to own a P &L, it's how do you get there? And so if we could turn back time a little bit, I said you'd been doing this stuff for years. You corrected me. You said decades. So imagine yourself 10, 20 more, whatever you want to say, years back when you could turn back time.

26:35You're a junior employee. You have big goals in mind, but you're in today's workforce. You're not in the 90s. You're not in the aughts. You aspire to have bigger goals. What would you recommend? What would you do? Well, I think employees really need to trust the firm that they work with. In today's world, it's so much like, oh, they want me to go to the office. Oh, somebody wants me to do more work and not get paid more for it, right? Organizations have gone through downsizes over the last couple of years, right? And that work gets sometimes put on the junior employees. and there isn't always compensation associated with that.