E714 | Peppa Wise, Multiverse on Meritocracy in Action: How Great Sales Leaders Are Made

17:16Will Maunder-Taylor:you could always stick to right it would make it very very very easy i think you you know your you know your business you know your clients you know where you're trying to go right i don't think in a small business if there's no one else that can train and develop that leader you want to run the risk of bringing someone in that's only got a couple of years of sales experience to lead a team, right? Should you be bringing in sales reps with very little sales experience if you've got a leader in seat that can develop them? 100%. But I think if you've got one sales leader that you're hiring for, you're a small business, they're going to have to do a lot.

17:45Will Maunder-Taylor:I think experience probably counts there more than it does in other places. That doesn't mean it needs to be 15, 20, 30 years of experience in the same industry, right? I think if you're looking at a high quality experience, someone that has worked for a couple of great companies, they've been promoted multiple times in both companies they've they've been loyal they're not job hopping every year the experience is relevant they've got good back channels we'll come on to that as a great

18:08Peppa Wise:actionable tip as well and back you can probably get away with five to eight years experience there

18:12Will Maunder-Taylor:right versus the the 15.

18:14Peppa Wise:Back channels before we go into it in a bit yeah um okay so many things I'll talk about now so back challenges is where you might try and get a better grasp of someone through their network and past during the hiring process right it's not referencing um it's something

18:27Will Maunder-Taylor:that you do as you're going through the hiring process the the great thing about sales people sales leaders is that they're great at selling hopefully yeah um that's really hard in an interview process because they're good at selling themselves yes and your job right is to always look for the reasons when you're hiring why not to hire someone because most people are good people right they like looking for the good in people and there are always going to be a load of reasons to hire someone everyone's done something good but you want to be looking for all the reasons not to hire that person so that you can do a better kind of risk assessment right and so experience got

18:58Peppa Wise:that yeah that's the tangibles to try and make the intangibles tangible if that's at all possible what are the other things you look for and how do you how do you demonstrate that the things you can

19:11Will Maunder-Taylor:like tick a box and say yep they've got that it's a great question and because they're intangible you know the hard thing to do is to try and make them as tangible and as qualifiable as possible right so um most playbook companies out there and this is my background will be looking for um you know people that are smart they've got the right level of intelligence to kind of pick up new concepts new things they are coachable you know they're coming in and they

19:34Peppa Wise:ideally want to learn and i'm sorry to interrupt you the coachability because i think some things you do you might take for granted yeah so what i love about peps's hiring process from what i understand is they will give quite um practical and sometimes hard feedback at the end of each interview stage and expect the candidate to take that on board and demonstrate it in the next phase and that is a live test of coachability and i think i rarely see that in other companies

20:00Will Maunder-Taylor:particularly small businesses 100 it's a great way to test right because you can ask questions about that like uh are you coachable yes yes um what's the most impactful piece of feedback you ever had how did it play out in real life like what's your biggest development area so you can understand are they aware of their gaps you can ask lots of questions but i think giving people feedback live seeing how they respond to it and seeing if they apply it in your next interview some of the best ways to test right if someone's coming in and they're willing to to learn and not

20:27Peppa Wise:many people do it i rarely see i think that's a great takeaway for listeners is starting that it

20:31Will Maunder-Taylor:also helps you filter out some of the you know arrogance you can sometimes find in sales people i think confidence is great arrogance is not so great and arrogance is very often the blocker to being coachable so it can it can help on that as well and then drive which is the most important

20:44Peppa Wise:thing i think for any any salesperson so this is what i love because again if you say someone are you driven you're like yes i'm really driven tell me a story when you're driven i completed a lego model when i was 10 against adversity but how do you how do you seek or prove drives yourself as

21:01Will Maunder-Taylor:an interviewer for your sales leaders yeah it's a really hard one i think all of the intangibles are hard um and again putting these things into kind of score cards even if they're very brief in the background so that you know what you're doing when you're comparing candidates is a really helpful way to try and get a bit of a framework around what you're testing for right and coming up with those questions but generally you're looking for people that have got proven examples of things that they've done inside of work and outside of work that demonstrate you know drive going above and beyond and that that that for some people might be that they've run like five ultra marathons in a row um for some people that might be that they had to take two years out of school because they were a young carer for their parent and they self-taught themselves at gcse right like that that is a that's amazing that is a hugely motivated person you can see in experience as well right has that person worked at a good company and had frequent promotions or progressions suggests that they're driven do they know where their career is going in the next five years ten years and are they taking logical steps to help them get kind of towards it right there are loads of questions that you can drill into on that but you definitely don't give really practical answers

22:01Peppa Wise:yeah answers but you can ask on the education one because multiverse deals intelligence not

22:06Will Maunder-Taylor:education or like being smart yes i should say it's like iq and eq yep i might come back to eq

22:13Peppa Wise:because that's another one i think you guys test really well um on the education side and academics because multiverse works in the as you said the talent world of apprenticeships and and it brings

22:24Will Maunder-Taylor:up the whole topic of university not not needed great well like absolutely not because in the past

22:30Peppa Wise:you know people would be like have they got a 2-1 from a top 20 university just to filter out the noise so you can then interview but i sense that's changed and so if you to your point on someone left school for two years to to care for their mum or their dad and self-taught how do you look at academic performance to date has your view changed over the last few years i mean it's not a bad thing

22:49Will Maunder-Taylor:to have a good academic background right so no one's ever going to qualified out because they got a great degree but it's also not going to tick that box because academic smartness academic intelligence doesn't translate to being brilliant at being a great sales rep or a great sales leader right i think that is far more about you know jeremy duggan used to call it street smarts yeah um how quickly do they respond to challenging questions in an interview if you give them like a live test how do they handle that how do they handle objections because again in tough client meetings they're meeting a cio or coo they're throwing objections their way how do they handle that live in the moment like that kind of clock speed right how quickly can they think and problem solve is is the most important part of intelligence i think if someone hasn't been to uni great ideally they've done something that shows that they were you know they had a direction they were doing something so they were they went straight into a tele sales role because they wanted to make money and that's great very hard they went straight into recruitment or they traveled and then they came back and they started their career slightly later all of the all of these things are absolutely fine um degrees fine not having a degree is fine it's not it's not what intelligence

23:53Peppa Wise:means to me is there anything else you'd like to add in terms of how you look for the right people to hire so you get talented individuals involved and give them a chance to to i suppose enter your

24:06Will Maunder-Taylor:meritocracy because that's what sales is 100 i think this is going back to that um that kind of framework piece on hiring right you're looking for and turning it into your icp and ideally get get it documented even if it's just in like a google doc or something right just write it down um what is the experience you're looking for how many years and what type of experience and and there you're also looking for evidence of are they a job hopper like are they moving every year because if that's happening, they're probably going to come to your company and do the same thing, right? So look for the red flags, like intelligence or being smart, like how have they turned up asking great questions?

24:36Will Maunder-Taylor:Have they done research on your company before they come and meet you? How do they handle live kind of problems that you throw at them in the room? Like write down the questions that you're going to ask and score people. Same for coachability, the bits we talked about kind of previously, and the same for drive. If you're running interviews with several candidates and you don't have a framework and you're not writing something down to it, it's really hard to make objective assessments as you go throughout a process. And then to kind of verify all of that, when you think you've got a great candidate in the funnel, back to the back channeling piece, salespeople are great at selling themselves.

25:05Your job is to look for the bad news and kind of not mistrust because you inherently want to trust people, but just sense check, right?

25:12Will Maunder-Taylor:Ideally, you want to reach out to people that are in their network that can give you a kind of a confidential review on them as a person, as a peer, as a leader, as a direct report. to build up that picture and make sure that everything that you think you understand about them from just three or four hours is is true it there have been probably five or six candidates in the past couple of years that the you know i would have offered that really trusted back channels have changed and we've not made this highest right and that's probably saved us from

25:41Peppa Wise:a world of pain just for the people tuning in for small business leaders we talk about playbook companies and clearly pepper works with the best sales engines globally and so when i think of playbooks and small businesses um as a small business owner or or leader i'd be thinking what is the job title we're selling to what type of company do they sit in and what problem is our product or service selling for them and when you know that to pepper's point you then work backwards on the kind of person you want to hire for that and i think there are far too many job descriptions out there which detail a players and try and take every box from being motivated driven like good academic performance or that but actually you can simplify it a lot i think some of pepper's learnings prove that we should overweigh talent uh eq iq as opposed to purely have they done the job for 10 to 15 years before yeah it's a matrix right they've got to have enough of everything yeah are you happy if we move on to you've you've hired talent and And then how do you get the most out of teams?

26:45Peppa Wise:Because you have repeatedly done that and got people to become and stay as high performers.

26:50Will Maunder-Taylor:I think this is where the fact that I've been able to work for the people that I have in my career has just been an absolute game changer for me. I've seen this done in the best way it can possibly be done. Working for Jeremy and Steve and Don here, right? Again, it all starts with talent. If you try and inflict a high performance culture on people that don't want it and aren't driven, it's going to be miserable for everyone. right don't do it so it starts with talent bring the right people in that are driven that want to progress that want to be part of something um and that's kind of box number one um you've got to set ambitious but attainable targets right um there is nothing more motivating to a sales force particularly if you're a small company there aren't many people if no one is hitting their number and no one is earning you know try and get someone earning big money quickly if you can to inspire the rest of the team as well that that's a great thing to do so ambitious but attainable targets.

27:38Will Maunder-Taylor:And then the third one, this is something that I really, really believe in. And it's getting people to focus on controlling the controllables. You know, sales is, I think it's the best career out there. It's such an equaliser. You don't need, you know, 10 years of training, you don't need a master's degree, you don't need to have come from a certain background, right? I think it's a brilliant way for people with five years experience to go and earn hundreds and hundreds of thousands of pounds. I think it's amazing for that. Sales is a great job. I think it's a brilliant job, provides great great kind of you know equality for people to earn good money without huge degrees or loads of training um but it can be stressful i think there's a downside of it right you're carrying a quota your your job is sometimes only ever as safe as your your last kind of few quarters right that that is a that is a lot of pressure to put on a person and i think where i see people struggle the most with that and where companies get this wrong is if you're driving a mindset of like just focusing on the bookings number the revenue number like hitting your quota it's really difficult because the first week of the quarter there's not something you can do this week that closes your deal you know that it's too far away what you can do as a leader and what businesses great playbook businesses do is you you build up leading indicators you know kpis what are the things in a sales reps business and in a deal that you know lead to success e.g you're meeting a champion once or twice a week therefore a sales rep in week one of the quarter cannot close their deal in week one of the quarter but they can go out and get five or six meetings that week with their champion and the champions direct reports to improve the business case and build relationships and make sure that they're qualifying the pain further right that is a really actionable really controllable thing that the rep can do that you can celebrate that you know is keeping the deal on track and helps them focus on doing the activities that you know are going to lead to the the deal and removes that mindset of fear right because they're only focused on trying to get to a number they don't really understand how to how to get there you saw me over my mouth and you're

29:27Peppa Wise:so for listeners i think that's a great point on sales 101 because a lot of small businesses will look at their sales hires and they'll be like okay we've got this target they're not quite hitting it and they keep it on and and they don't make decisions on their sales teams and to your point there are lead indicators behaviors that actually we should judge the sales people on and if they're doing and even they're not performing then keep investing in them if they're not doing those behaviors that's when you force a decision and one behavior would be your simple one on champions if a company is intent on signing a quote or a terms for your product or service they're going to give you their time and if your salesperson is not getting time with their champion so the state court is going to get the deal over the line at the other company that's a warning sign yeah and so you're not just waiting and praying for the salesperson to hit their magical target there are things you can look at week to week and and it's different for

30:25Will Maunder-Taylor:every business right and in like for us at multiverse you know for us that's you're doing one to two meeting a week in each deal we know from all the data that we have across all the years that is one of the the highest indicators of getting a deal closed um you might not have that data but what you might know is that okay if you make 10 cold calls you will have one conversation which will lead to one opportunity your average sales price is 50k and if a sales reps quarterly quota is 200k they therefore need to make you know 40 calls like i'm giving a very simple example but you i think your job as a sales leader or as a business leader is to hire great people and then set the conditions for them to be successful and some of that is breaking down and helping them to understand how they are going to be successful that's like the metrics and the data points that they can stick to week on week to know if they're on track or off track it also helps you right know if you're on track or off track when you've got 120 reps like we do now if i wasn't running my business using all of that data i wouldn't have a clue what's going on you know i can't manage my

31:21Peppa Wise:forecast on a deal basis and you say control the controllables but you still manage to drive and motivate driven people and i and there are two things that jump to mind immediately one is some people will pay a salesperson set a really attractive commission plan and expect people just to do their job but even with the highest performing sales talent you still as a sales leader have to drive focus and motivate i think that's the focus right i think it is um your job you've got that framework right hire good people um set ambitious but attainable targets and help

31:55Will Maunder-Taylor:people to understand on how they focus on the controllables right the culture that you build it's a massive focus on on um inspiring and developing the team right so you want a culture where people can fail and you celebrate it and they're not punished for it right you want people to believe you want people to think big you want people to break records you want to celebrate those behaviors not just the end results and at the same time if you give your team development if you help them fix the things that are stopping them from getting deals closed for example that rep can't champion build that rep can never convert a cold call if you can help them change those things you're making them successful in the role that they do today they're more loyal and bought in because they've been developed and again you step out of this situation of having a mercenary rep that's in your business for a paycheck who's going to go when a better paycheck comes along to having someone who's there because they're earning and they're learning and ideally they're having some fun as well yeah i think post-covid world a lot of meetings still happen virtually but get your reps back out on the road right have them meeting customers have them traveling with their leaders um celebrate the behaviors you don't need to spend a load of money but get the team building things in celebrate you know the cold calling efforts of that week as much as you celebrate the deal that closes at the end of quarter and the cold calling yeah because you

33:03Peppa Wise:expect your um well-paid account executives with lots of experience still to drive their own leads i imagine yeah yeah and the kind of companies and you'll see a lot of playbook companies do that interesting and the kind of companies for our listeners to bring that to life so the top forming sales teams in europe i imagine i'm gonna watch your eyes in case i'm wrong you'd be expecting to do like 50 to 60 researched planned cold calls like a day a week is that up

33:32Will Maunder-Taylor:there yeah so i think then the next bit you come to come down to in like running a kind of a high performance culture is operating rhythm um what is the operating rhythm that you have week by week month on month quarter and quarter what are the key milestones that are taking place every week

33:44Peppa Wise:every month every quarter are you happy to bring that to life yeah sure so i i mentioned it because

33:48Will Maunder-Taylor:you talk about kind of pipeline generation there so um a lot of flavor companies will do what's called pg monday yeah pg tuesday pipeline generation it sounds fun but is it fun is it fun some people like it most people don't i think it's very much seen as a necessary evil to know you know to to get the work done to build the pipeline to to get your business done and that's a day when everyone comes into the office there are no external meetings you're not meeting customers we try and have no internal meetings apart from like one one training session and um realistically the the average numbers are 80 dials you might then have kind of you know eight connects on one day 80 dollars one day you might then have eight connects from that you will have kind of potentially

34:28Peppa Wise:one or two meetings that is an awesome stat because yeah i suppose the likes of multiverse you're you're in quite a busy market with imagine you're speaking to uh cios chief information

34:40Will Maunder-Taylor:offers c level and c minus one again that's a really big focus right is is um you see a lot of companies focus on the meetings that are easier to book which is with a much more junior people and then it's very hard to work your way up yeah so this is something that jeremy and steve rolled in in the early days was we're going sea level down yeah and one of the first things they did was run where they ran a pg blitz for c-suite and we were all just like we'll pick up the phone to cios and coos this is mad we booked great meetings and you know those deals had the biggest average sales price we'd ever done they moved more quickly so because there's so much noise out there you're

35:12Peppa Wise:you're in the best performing effectively in my view sales engine in europe with all the tech all the sales experience and still picking up the phone and dialing even though it's like 80 calls to one or two meetings is where we focus our time.

35:25Will Maunder-Taylor:Yeah, and look, if a sales rep is hitting their numbers and they've got a brilliant way of doing LinkedIn messaging and they're using their network and they're hitting their numbers, we don't mandate that you have to call a call. However, we know that it is the most reliable way to book your meetings. And that is the single thing that we hold people to account on week by week is that you've booked your meetings because it's controlling the controllable. You do all those things and you lose a deal, we've got your back. But, you know, come on. And it works. Put the effort in up front.

35:49Peppa Wise:Yeah.

35:49Will Maunder-Taylor:um the other reason why it's so beneficial to have your most highly paid people do that work is if you've got a bit of a c-suite or c-minus two kind of outreach strategy do you want a brand new kind of fresh out of of um uni person who's still learning everything trying to have that conversation for one minute with the coo and convert it probably not you probably want your best salesperson to be doing that right and then there's also the way that people treat those leads and those meetings when they've gone through the effort of booking them we have a really high conversion rate so it means that our leading indicators are that our reps have to book you know 10 new business meetings a quarter to be able to do 120 of their number based on our average conversion right and every business is different but because those those sound like simple

36:30Peppa Wise:milestones but the number of companies that over complicate it and to your point don't work backwards from their targets and make it realistic and i think the other thing i'd say for anyone in the small business world i think in in the world of digital in pepper's world you might get one meeting for every 40 to 60 calls if you did this in quieter sectors like for example construction far safety manufacturing i imagine your reps will be on five to ten calls per meeting and whilst you might not have the same high standards because you're not hiring the aaa players and incentivizing them like if you're doing 30 to 40 calls a day just imagine the difference that makes your pipeline and people don't do it it's like you know people sit there and wait for inbounds

37:14Will Maunder-Taylor:or the way for the SDR to send them a meeting, right? When pipeline is king. Pipeline, everything can be forgiven if you have pipeline because you have coverage, you have protection. You can take a much more customer-centric approach to your deals. You're not pushing people, you're not rushing people because you've got the protection of pipeline coverage, right? That comes from great PG. Great PG can probably come from your top reps. So yeah, even if you're a company where you mostly have an inbound motion today and you get your team to start doing 20 cold calls a week, you know you've got the chance to kind of two three x pipeline and that's going to have a

37:46Peppa Wise:huge impact on your ultimate sales yeah and just in case people listening don't know what pipeline is pipeline is the total amount of opportunities potential projects potential deals potential contracts in your in your system that you're forecasting not all of them are going to convert but you can only convert what what's there to be converted and then we're about to go into your operating model and i i have so many questions from people about how often do we have weekly sales meetings how do we like drive cadence or keep on kpis if you're happy bringing that to life

38:16Will Maunder-Taylor:sure i think fascinating yes and i think this is really important that you have the right um moments of like inspiration development and accountability to hold those great people that you've hired and the great kind of playbook that you've rolled out to to account right but you don't want to overkill because it becomes micromanagement and it's and it's not helpful right people have so many internal meetings they can't do their jobs so on a week-by-week basis um we will hold each first line leader will do a forecast call with their direct team um the second line leaders will have weekly forecast calls with their first line leaders and i will have so first line leader second line leader so first line leader would be like a manager who's running i individual contributors so your manager running sales reps yep your second line leader is a leader running your first line leaders okay and then i run the second line leaders the structure um and so every every level will have a forecast call each week i run mine on friday um my leaders will run theirs on a friday morning their leaders will run theirs on a thursday right so it all rolls up to the end of the week when we do it with kind of me and the cro and my second line leaders uh forecast calls important weekly one-to-ones more important than a forecast call oh yeah okay controversial or not

39:24Peppa Wise:but okay so you would have a weekly one-to-one with every one of your direct reports yeah okay

39:29Will Maunder-Taylor:and and a first line leader would would have a you know a sales manager with the the sales reps they've got six generally in their teams will have a weekly one-to-one with with all of their reps and again when you when you're trying to simplify this operating rhythm for us we have pipeline generation tuesdays monday is for one-to-ones so almost all of monday will be blocked out for the leader to have one-to-ones with their team and what you're doing in those sessions is you are looking at the metrics the data the leading indicators from the week before you're encouraging the rep to bring the problems and the gaps they see in their business that they want to talk about that they need help on you're talking about pipeline generation you're talking about pipeline coverage you're probably not really going into the forecast in that meeting and then you're using deal review slots you know deal inspections whatever it is you want to call them and forecast calls to do that during the week but those one-to-ones they are about the

40:13Peppa Wise:development of your rep i think that's key because loads of people will sit down with their sales person go through their um their crm so if you're in a simple company the excel spreadsheet of all the opportunities still acceptable very acceptable very acceptable but actually you're not holding into account you're coaching helping solve their problems and like just helping smooth them selling

40:35Will Maunder-Taylor:really and it's very important part of it right deal inspection qualification support and pipeline like that's a really big part of a sales leader's job but that should be done in a space i believe outside of your weekly one-to-one which is about the the person you know are they developing how how's their you know we said earlier did that person have a problem building champions is that stopping them from converting their opportunities okay how do you use that session to track track are the actions you agreed that they're doing to develop working do they need more enablement how can you help them more you know it's getting out the problems week on week so that there's never a point where you know someone suddenly miles off track and you had no idea yep really really important um pipeline tuesdays forecast calls deal reviews you know happen kind

41:13Peppa Wise:of throughout throughout a week final question for me on that is forecast calls sales reps will always be under pressure to say i'm definitely going to close this deal this quarter and have a number that's broadly within the target and sometimes as a sales leader for your first and second line um it might be hard something you've got to take on trust but what are the questions you'd ask and one is the behaviors and interactions from customers but what are the questions you ask to get some confidence in that forecast i think there are two approaches you can take here one

41:45Will Maunder-Taylor:One is qualification into the points that you know are risks or positives in a deal, right? So a rep's telling you, hey, Will, I've got a great deal. 300K. It's going to close next month. It's a done deal. Great.

41:56Peppa Wise:I'm going to report it up.

41:57Will Maunder-Taylor:Tell the CRO. It's happening. I'm going to spend my paycheck now. And you're saying, okay, well, I'm seeing on the CRM or I'm seeing on Gong or I'm seeing wherever you're recording this, right? You've not met anyone at that company for three weeks, right? They're like, yeah, my main contact's been on holiday. He said to get back to me this week. He hasn't. It's all good. they've said they're going to do it yeah you know i mean that's a glaring red flag but it's qualifying it's the same thing that you're doing in a recruitment funnel when you're hiring someone is you are looking for the flags you're looking for the bad news and you're asking multiple levels of question at each point because someone that's got good answers will be able to give you answers to those multiple levels of questioning and someone that is blagging will not write so when's your next touch point what do you need to achieve in your next touch point and you will also know as a business what are the milestones that you can record that mean you know the deal is going to happen because it's objective so that might be that you have got um a contract sent out to them or they you've had the first red lines back from their legal team because you know that means they've actually engaged a legal kind of rep or they've assigned a project manager to the team great they've now actually invested kind of their internal resource on the deal now it's got a higher chance of conversion or you know you've got when your pov finishes you now know that you've got a proof of value proof of concept if you offer a trial so trial yeah okay um so again different for every business but you need to know what those milestones are that are more objective than the subjective things your sales reps probably telling you so that you can you can challenge effectively so i think that that's the person-led approach but in the brilliant world we're in today right with with ai and with all this tooling and everything available and you don't have to spend a fortune here um there are also tools that do all that for you have you got top not we're gonna go too techie but i mean we use gong we use gong a lot and gong.io they do

43:35Peppa Wise:recordings of calls with prompts visually data analysis they also you know it's a it's more of

43:41Will Maunder-Taylor:like an end-to-end kind of risk management process as well right they record all the calls they flag signs of positive champion attitude they flag signs of negative attitude if you integrate it with your kind of emails they can see when you haven't or have had email contacts they can see when you have or haven't had meetings they can see that you're actually just meeting that really junior person like week on week so even though it looks like your your activity is high it's not good quality so again if you're not an experienced sales manager or you can't bring one in i think sometimes relying on these tools to guide you to where you should be looking where you should be focusing is a great way of small businesses having that level of qualification and inspection super

44:16Peppa Wise:above and beyond whatever the rep is saying and as we come to a close before i ask a few final questions anything else you'd like to bring to life well it's a very big open-ended question um I think that to sum up the things that we talked about today right if you hire good people and

44:38Will Maunder-Taylor:your job as a sales leader is to create the success that create the conditions for them to be successful and you can reward them by progression and promotion and all of those great things generally you're better off building your talent bank by doing that versus always bringing in external leaders I think you want a bit of both because you don't want to create an echo chamber hire good people develop them progress them you will really really reap the rewards

45:00Peppa Wise:i agree totally and so the last two things i'll finish on is i'm just going to think of giving business owners business leaders the confidence to hire talented but more junior people potentially yeah and then also people who to your point are driven talented really want to have the opportunity to create wealth and value in their life and may not have the confidence to jump into sales and so for the first ones the leaders from what you've been saying people should have the confidence having defined what kind of a salesperson they need like who are they selling to and what are they selling what they need to go through those steps with the potential your customer to actually spend more time focusing on talent drive um empathy and eq and give them a chance don't go for what seems to be the super safe option on paper yeah again i think it really

45:56Will Maunder-Taylor:is a balance right if you're a small business and you're not going to have a huge team and this one person's going to be doing a lot you do need them to have a certain amount of experience but work out what the minimum is and what is important in that experience because again 15 years of poor quality experiences it means nothing yeah and you're probably paying more for it too right so qualify exactly what it is that you want to experience and then spend your time understanding what matters to you in the intangibles and how you're going to qualify and test for that in the process back channel and also look if you haven't hired a sales leader before it's really hard bring people in your network that have you know that there's there's a great value in bringing someone for a final stage or a challenge stage um and get to sit on your shoulder and help

46:32Peppa Wise:100 100 and then thinking about a young 18 19 year old or maybe a grad 21 yeah and they're thinking hey i'm driven talented i want to be in a role where i can fly if i do well and outperform i think sales is great for that 100 what would your advice be to them if they want to find somewhere to start because they probably look at job applications for sales roles which all say you need to have closing experience of at least five years yeah um where would you guide them to

47:00Will Maunder-Taylor:start i think that if you're very early in your career and you've got no work experience starting

47:04Peppa Wise:out in kind of an SDR role or an SDR is effectively sales development representative right a cold

47:11Will Maunder-Taylor:caller a cold caller a business development rep you know the people that are opening up the pipeline at the start but aren't yet responsible for closing any of it get that on your CV it throws you in at the deep end on the hard bit like the cold calling but you will get a chance to work with your AEs if you join a good company to do that lots of companies run programs where they want to bring in people with with very very limited or no backgrounds and train them right sometimes bigger companies can be good for that too and a lot of companies will have like access programs where they're deliberately trying to support people coming in from more difficult backgrounds with less experience to help them build great careers right so to look look for those opportunities um recruitment's another great place to start i think you know uh i love it if i see a cv and people have been in a bit of a boiler room recruitment role for their first job because

47:54Peppa Wise:some people i know would frown on that and they'd be like oh recruiting but it's hard it's it's hard

47:59Will Maunder-Taylor:and it's so transferable to sales right if i'm hiring them for like an enterprise rep role they You obviously need to have sales experience on top of that. But if you've started and been successful in recruitment, you've been in a company where you've got big targets, there's pressure, and you've done a great job, you've progressed and you enjoyed it, it's a really good sign that you're probably right for a high-pressure sales environment.

48:18Peppa Wise:And you don't have a brand behind you to sell for you. It is a grind. Yeah, it's a grind. Gritty sales jobs are a good sign.

48:24Will Maunder-Taylor:Go and take on a gritty sales job that's going to be hard for a couple of years, but it will pay off. You can't imagine if you do a good job there, right? We've got sales reps more to us. I've got sales reps plenty of other companies out there that are you know 25 earning like hundreds of thousands of pounds but you need to accept you are going to have a hard few years you know building the basic skill sets to get there

48:43Peppa Wise:and hopefully you look like Pepper you don't look like me fingers crossed makes no difference you're on the phone well after some hard years of sales Pepper Wise that was awesome thank you very much and well done and everything you've achieved

48:55Will Maunder-Taylor:lovely to see you thank you

49:02Thank you.