How Great Sales Leaders Turn Instinct Into a System with Frederik Maris

0:00Being consciously competent, the way I always explain it is you've got artists, right? And some people, they just wake up and they start painting and it's incredible what they can do. And then you ask somebody, you know, how do you do that? Well, I don't know. I just get up and I start painting and something beautiful comes up. No, but come on, you need to tell me if I want to do something like that, you've got to explain to me how you do it. Well, I don't know. I mean, I might just smoke some weed or something and then I get more inspiration and I paint even greater. I remember Bob Ross. Crazy hair.

0:35Exactly. And he would be on TV a long time ago. But he would tell you exactly how you needed to, you know, paint or do a face or do something. But if I see that, then I'm like, you know what? I think I can actually put something on paper that looks decent because he was telling you the science behind the art.

0:55Frederik Maris: Welcome to the Revenue Builders podcast, a weekly show featuring B2B sales leaders and executives. Hosted by five-time CRO John McMahon and force management co-founder John Kaplan, the show takes guests in the barrel behind the scenes with the people who've been there, done that, and seen the results. Revenue Builders covers best practices for scaling and growing your business while sharing the pitfalls to avoid. In this Revenue Builders replay, we're revisiting a conversation with Frederick Maris, who was CRO at Atos Software SE when he first joined the podcast and is now co-founder and chief revenue officer of Elite GTM.

1:34Across leadership roles at companies including Splunk, Zoom, DataRobot, BMC, and PTC, Frederick has built and led enterprise sales organizations through periods of growth, transformation, and international scale. In this conversation, he shares what it takes to turn sales knowledge into repeatable execution, develop consciously competent managers, and train teams to succeed in complex enterprise environments. Let's dive in. So, Frederick, you know, let's talk about a lesson that you might have learned selling enterprise software that you wish you really knew earlier in your career. Yeah, I think it's so the one of the lucky things that happened to me was I joined PTC at a very early age.

2:17I worked for resale or only for nine months. So I basically got a paid university of sales at PTC. I really see it that way. And when you look at the lessons that I learned there, I mean, I was forced to learn. I had to learn. But I think that early in your career, you want to learn as much as possible, right? It's clearly just suck up as much as you can, try to figure out what's going on, what's important, how things work. And then the other thing is the people that you're working with is incredibly important. So building that network and building that because it's going to deliver you so much for the future.

3:03And in the beginning, you're going to have to prove yourself. You're going to have to get experience. But it's only until later that you can really cash in if you do those things well. So you need to improve in what you do. And you need to build that network with a lot of good people. Yeah. And what does stand out as maybe one or two or even three lessons that you know? That was really cemented in my head in the early days. Qualifying was incredibly important. Yeah, for sure. That's just where it starts. But qualifying is everything, right? Not just qualifying deals. No, everything. Why am I doing what I'm doing?

3:48qualifying deals, qualifying, you know, recruits, qualifying the customer, qualifying everything, right? Exactly. And even, you know, why am I at the company that I'm at, right? Am I wasting my time? Am I doing things that are going to bring me to whatever I want to achieve at a certain time in the future? yeah so that that's a that's a huge one um i think um the other part is i'm a big believer in becoming consciously competent so you want to you want to know why you know things and why they're important um if i i think probably if anything after five or six years of ptc I became unconsciously competent.

4:39And when I joined the companies between that and BMC, I kind of naturally did the things that I did. Even for instance, recruitment, right? I would speak to people and I would, it could go anyway. It could go an hour and I could, I don't really know where it went. I just, at the end of the hour, I'd have a feeling whether I liked that person or didn't. And then when I joined BMC again, I was really brought back to, you know, becoming consciously competent. And Jeremy, yeah, Jeremy Duggan, you're not going to get away from anything there. So he made me so consciously competent around recruitment, for instance, that you're laser focused on what you're looking for in that hour, and you start to prepare a sequence on how you can qualify those things.

5:30It goes back to qualifying again, right? But how you can qualify those things that you're looking for during the interview. So at the end of the interview, instead of saying, I like this person, you know exactly why you like that person and what the risks are. And, you know, you know, so much more than. Yeah. And, you know, things you brought up, you know, to learn really early in your career and be around people that, you know, can make up your network for later. Were you conscious that you were in with a group of people that you would be able to network later in your career? Or do you see that only when you look back?

6:10I think that so clearly as your career progresses and you start to see where all these people went, you realize that you're in something special. I think though, even when, you know, when I was there, just the speed with which things went, the pace, it was, you could tell that that was a special, you know, thing, because when you spoke to your friends, it was different. You know, it's just a different story. So I don't think I was like consciously competent or really aware of what that meant to me at that point in time. And I was a pretty young kid, having a good time, maybe even regretting that I wasn't playing tennis at that point in time.

7:01But certainly looking back, and quite quickly, you realized that that was something special. Yeah. It was funny because you just made me think about it. So when people would come up to interview with me eventually, I had a secretary that would go down and get them out of the lobby. and when she would come up, she almost knew, like, almost everybody kind of was starting to act and almost, let's say, look the same in some respects. She would look at me when the person was walking away from her towards me and basically like, like, there's no way, like, this guy is not going to make it. And after I would do the interview, I don't think she was ever really wrong.

7:42You know, she would shake her head like, yeah, this guy's going to make it or this person's not going to make it. It's really amazing because it was a certain special read of people. Yeah. And then now when you look back, it was also the sales process was pretty well cemented too, right? Do you think now, even after all your experience, that there's a certain step in the sales process or stage of the sales process that's key to being successful? No, totally. Um, if, if you look, it starts and that's where everything basically gets done. It starts with the I and the C it starts with the pain and it starts with a potential champion.

8:29Um, and it sounds simple, but all these things, they're, they're made simple, but they're not easy. You, you have to, you have to understand what that pain is and not only what is the pain to the company, but what is that person? what are the personal wins you know fears pains whatever and the more you understand that the better you get that the easier it becomes to build that person into a champion and once you really understand the pain and find the pain above the noise and you build that champion and the rest kind of does take care of itself it's still hard work and there's a lot involved but But without that foundation, you're never going to get to the place you want to get.

9:16Yeah, you have to do an excellent discovery process. If you're not doing an excellent discovery process, like you said, everything downstream gets harder to do. But if you do a really good job, everything gets a lot easier going downstream. Right. Easier to find a champion, easier to build the cost justification. Yeah. Types of things. So when you're teaching some of your people about discovery, are there certain key aspects that you tell them like you have to pay attention to in the discovery process? It really starts with the preparation. It's an interesting one because now as a CRO, I'm actually the amount of people reaching out to me, these BDRs with their sequencing and everything.

9:59It's just it's crazy. and you're really always adding or trying to add work to somebody that's pretty busy, right? So I'm seeing all this stuff coming in. I'm like, I don't have time for this. I have to do my important stuff. And once in a while, you'll see something that is like something you're working on at that point in time that kind of gets your interest. But then sometimes the way that the messages are sent is really poor. So it's like if that's the way they start off, what does that mean for the wholesale cycle? And that's very important, you know, because now you're seeing it for people that are trying to sell to you.

10:39Right. And the ones that sounds like the ones that resonate with you are the ones that actually are talking about some of the pains or issues that you actually have. Exactly. You need to you need to prepare and you need to differentiate yourself. Right. That's that's what you when I always tell my guys, you really want to differentiate yourself from the other people that are trying to reach somebody. And you obviously want to do it in a good way because you can also differentiate yourself in a poor way. That's never good. And that differentiation is by understanding what somebody is dealing with, what their issues are, what their priorities are.

11:16And if you do that, then I think then you're going to stand a chance to actually get the opportunity to ask questions because that's really what you want to do. If you don't ask questions, then you're never going to understand what the implications are of the things that they're facing and what it would mean to them if they could fix it and really start to dive into those things. So you can start to get a sense whether there's going to be a cost justification or not. But if you don't get to the point where you actually earn the right to ask those questions, it ends right there. Frederick, as a CRO, let's talk about roles and responsibilities for a second.

12:02So what role and responsibility does the company have of getting their act together and aligning behind the pain, personas, sales process, buying process? what role does the CRO play? Because there's a lot of people listening are saying, my company either has that or they don't have it and I have to create it and get it to my people. And now we got sellers out there that are using differentiation or using some form of discovery, hopefully calling on the right ICP. As a CRO, what did you notice about that? And what advice do you give CROs on how to get everybody together on that? That's actually a really good question, John.

12:56So, when I was going through the whole interview process, you know, again, qualifying, right? Am I going to be able to have the opportunity to make an impact here? Or, which in many cases, I think what the average tenure of the CRO is a private company under two years public company, it's like two and a half years or something. I joined a company that's been in business quite a long time. The interesting thing is they've done a complete switch to cloud native solution. Product is incredibly strong. They've been very successful over the last, I think, 19 record years in a row. It's a very stable growth.

13:43Profitability is through the roof. but they've been doing things pretty much the same way over those 19 years. And we're getting now to a point where we need to scale and where the market is expecting us to go international. They're very strong in Germany. There's enough opportunity, if I say it in a polite way, outside of Germany. and the whole conversations around the recruitment or when I was interviewing was, how do you guys see that next step? Because if you think that somebody's just going to come in there and magically things are going to change or going to go differently, then it's not going to happen.

14:28And I think you're right. The whole organization needs to get behind that. It's how do you develop your products because you're getting input from the market that these and these things are important, but how do you provide the data to make sure that you can do the things that all these modern startups are doing? And in some cases, companies with a lot of money out there, how do you remain competitive? How do you change? How do you actually put a sales process in place? Because that's something that the company had never done before. And for me, what a big reason was to join was I got along well with the CEO.

15:09And I think he clearly saw the need to change and giving me the reins of the sales organization, of the revenue organization, which is more than the sales organization only, but also the fact that they have an external investor in there since about a year now, a year and a half. They're becoming more and more active, who obviously, this is General Atlantic, they deal with, you know, they have a huge portfolio of companies, so they know what good looks like. And they're also, from their side, ensuring that we become a modern company, not from a product perspective, but from a total organization perspective.

15:48So we're setting up RevOps right now. We're hiring data analysts. You know, we're setting up SDRs, BDRs, the renewals people, customer success. Those are all functions that in the past they haven't really had and they didn't really need because the churn is incredibly low. We're like a two or three percent churn on a year to year basis. So those are good things. But that's good for now. You want to make sure that that stays good for the future. And then you can start to really build your business and start to grow more aggressively as well. I think you started with some really, really good advice on when you're interviewing for these companies and or if you're a company, you're thinking about these things.

16:35We talk a lot about the three whys. It should be clear. The CRO is not coming up with these, is my point. meaning part of the role of the CRO is to get a company to coordinate their thoughts and get out of their heads you know the three whys why buy anything why buy anything now why buy anything for me uh the four essential questions of value what problems do you solve for your customers how specifically do you solve them how do you solve them differently or anybody else and where have Have you done it before? The how a buyer buys and then mapping a sales process. My expectation is these things exist inside a company many times in multiple ways, multiple ideas, multiple opinions.

17:31And the CRO's job is to make sure that you have the ability to get that information out of the heads of what I call the hundred pound brains. and get it into a three-foot conversation in front of a customer. And so I think today, CROs have to be really, really good. Number one, qualifying that before you take the job. Is the information there? Okay, now how do we get it in the hearts and minds and souls of the individuals, the men and women that go to work every day? And then, like you said, how are we on the alert? I think this is where companies miss it because they don't map how the buyer buys and why the buyer buys.

18:10So buyers change. Buyer, things change in the marketplace. Paying changes for the customer. And if you don't really understand how they buy and why they buy, you might miss an opportunity to have a sales process set up for an old way of buying and an old way of reason for buying. So I kind of, I'd like your feedback from you guys. Do you guys agree with that? Like a lot of times CEOs and investors are saying, hey, I want the CRO come in and do all that. And I think it doesn't happen without the basic foundations inside the company. CRO needs to optimize it and operationalize it. What do you guys think about that?

18:51So I think you're very much describing the things that I've been dealing with for the last three months. I've only joined three months ago. There's a tremendous amount of knowledge in the company. It's very siloed. People are not working together. which is something that we're changing now, to make the process repeatable so that new people coming on board that they can ramp quickly. What are the sales plays? What are the personas? What are the material that you can learn quickly to start to practice these things? Our sales cycles are way too long. We need to reduce them significantly. and then work speak the same language so that when you speak to each other that people actually understand what you're talking about those are exactly the things that I'm going through right now This is what I was thinking you were going to say and now we probably all would say that's what we learned at PTC I tell people that all the time the things you just listed was one of the reasons why the company scaled so fast is that it had a really, really good way of getting what was happening to the customer into a process that would allow us to discover with the customer to get them to participate in a conversation and qualify themselves.

20:16And I think that's really, really good advice that you just said. Really good. Yeah. Go ahead, Frederick. No, no. Go ahead. Go ahead. What I was going to say is a lot of this goes back to what Frederick said first is, you know, it's preparation. And what you were basically alluding to, John, is like making sure that the reps know what to prepare for before they go into an account, you know, so that material or information or knowledge is in the house and easily accessible by the reps so they know what to prepare for. Then I think it's that now it's the job of the CRO to make sure that they implement effective training and the training on what do I do with this information?

21:03And then how do I do it? So the knowledge of what to do and then learning the skills of how to do it. So how to effectively open up the pitch, effectively ask the right questions, those types of discovery things that you do. And then it's also the job of the CRO or any sales leader. It's not just a CRO to do, as Frederick said, repeat it over and over because these are skills. So you have to repeat it with your people over and over and over to get them to really understand how to do it and to then be successful doing it. So it takes some discipline around constantly repeating it with your people until they master that because it is a skill and skills don't happen overnight.

21:56You know, they take many, many repetitions. And that's the real hard part of getting, if you went, if you're in Frederick's job to now get that, those skills instilled in your people. And the only way you do it is with repeatability and then winning. And once they win, because they learn these new skills and they know what to do and how to do it, they're never looking back. They're gone. They're on their own. And you can see it in the people. You know when they won and they got through it and they were frustrated, then they got it. And now you see them take off. And the way that I used to think is, I don't have to worry about this person anymore.

22:31I'm going to go worry about these other people over here. I like that. I think that's a, you highlighted three things that I, and we've been talking about this for a couple minutes now, which is related to what Frederick brought up in the beginning with culture and stuff like that. I see three things like knowledge, skills, and culture exist for a sales organization and for a company. And I think the message I'm trying to relay here is that the best CROs I've ever seen are the ones that really understand knowledge exists inside the company, therefore create skills on how to bring that knowledge to the marketplace.

23:12and then there is a culture that is created by the application of that knowledge and skills. And for me, that kind of sums up, for me, it was a culture of accountability. And you can hold an organization accountable. Think about that. If you're a seller and you have the knowledge that you need, which is the pain of the customer, the persona, the ICPs, how they buy, why they buy, and then you've been given the skills on, let's say, how to attach to the biggest business issue, how to differentiate the decision criteria. Those are really specific high-end skills. Now you have an expectation. It's so easy to lead in that environment because you have an expectation that now I'm going to create a culture of execution and accountability based upon those knowledge and skills.

23:59The point I'm trying to make here is that when I talk to a lot of CROs and they tell me, I say, hey, what's the first thing you're going to do. They're going to go, ah, I'm going to figure out the ICP. And then I'm going to, uh, and then I'm going to really understand, you know, what our differentiators are. And, and they're like, they're thinking they're creating all this stuff. And a lot of times I back up and say, Hey, does this stuff not exist already? Like, does the, does the knowledge of the customer problem? And, and sometimes what happens is people start to put in processes and try to recreate stuff that's already in the heads of the hundred pound brains.

24:37I think the great CROs are the ones who get the company to look outside in and say, hey, time out. Let's get all this stuff down. Let me put it in knowledge buckets. Let me put it in skills buckets. And therefore I can create a culture of accountability. I'm working with some CROs that are like six months. They're still trying to figure out what their differentiators are. They're asking the wrong questions internally. Does that resonate for you guys? No, totally. It's an interesting one because here we have kind of two buckets. There's a couple of people that have been here for ages and all the knowledge is in their heads.

25:15They know exactly how to do these things. They don't need any pre-sales. And it's a pretty complex sale. And then there's a lot of young people. And especially for these young people, the knowledge isn't shared. They come in, they're expected, they do an onboarding, and then they're expected to go and sell. So if you want to build that, because the enablement is super important. What I like about the young people is they're hungry, They're coachable. They're driven. They want to be successful. But if they don't get the right coaching and development, then they're going to just be butting their heads against the wall, right?

25:57They're not going to be successful. And the only way you do that is you need to make sure, and it's something that I'm trying to figure out, how do I scale that organization? How do I transform that organization as quickly as possible? That first line manager role is so important. because if they don't lead, right, if they don't ask the right questions, if they don't coach, if they don't develop, if they don't support you in the important meetings, if they're not there with you in the new business meetings that you're doing, then their people are – how can you expect their people to do something that their manager doesn't want to do or maybe doesn't know how to do?

26:36And then, you know, it becomes very difficult. And you know that. I mean, force management, it's commanded the message. With all these things, getting the managers to do it, you need them to be in a situation that they can actually, you know, convey that message to the people on the floor. Just I've seen so many companies only train AEs and nothing in between. Yeah, Johnny, that, you know, one of the things I learned from John McMahon was, and that's kind of what we brought to force management at the beginning. John McMahon realized, or him and his staff at PTC back in the day, that the frontline sales manager is so crucial.

27:18Not only do you have to win the hearts and minds of the frontline sales manager, most companies aren't set up to even educate or coach and develop the frontline sales manager. They spend all the time with the reps and the resources, and they forget it's never going to get done without the hearts and minds of the sales leaders. Johnny, how did you did you just understand that or did you, you know, five times CRO? Did you did you learn the hard way? Well, we had to our attrition was way too high. So, you know, when I got the job, I said, I got to bring down the attrition. I'm tired of hearing people say somebody that they recruited when you said, OK, why are you getting rid of them?

27:57And they would say stupid things like, oh, he's a shit bird or he's, you know, he's this or he's that. And then I'd feel like saying, well, wait a second, who hired him? Who was supposed to train and develop him? Who was supposed to lead him? So when you failed, I started putting attention on the first line and second line leaders saying, when somebody leaves, you got to go down to the bathroom and figure out, was it because you recruited the wrong person or you couldn't train them and develop them and coach them to be successful? It's one of those. So go figure out what it is so we don't keep making the same mistakes.

28:33Then I started putting the hard attention on those first line managers to make sure that they knew what the hell they were doing, to your point, and holding them accountable to making sure that brand new reps were getting their first deals. The quicker they could get those first deals and you get them through that process. I had put some MBOs in the comp plan saying, you have to help these reps get their first deal within a certain period of time or you don't get your MBO. So now their attention, because most first line managers don't know how to really spend their time. So what they would prefer to do is the veteran sales rep is going out to get a million dollar deal.

29:13So where does the rep, where's the leader go? The first line manager with not a lot of experience. They go to drag the bear in from the woods with the million dollar deal and bring it back to the campfire. So everybody could say, oh, you were great. You were fantastic. Meanwhile, there's a rep suffering over here. they can't really do proper discovery and can't get their first deal yet. And the next thing you know, they're retreating. And you got to get the attrition down, right? You got to get these people successful. Otherwise, you're going to go recruit the same people with a different resume or different CV.

29:46Same thing's going to happen. So how do I stop? How do I break this chain, this loop that's going on? And the only way is to hold people accountable to making sure that those reps are getting their first deals as soon as possible. So that's where your focus is. Because I think that's like the third thing that if people struggle for too long, they're going to give up, right? That's why the grit and the perseverance in the character, you're going to find a way to get things done. You're not going to give up. That's so important. And especially even more so, I think in these days with the new generations coming up, You look at resumes, people are changing jobs five times in five years.

30:31They try something, don't get immediately the result that they're looking for. They try the next thing. And if you've got some longer sales cycles, it could well be you're not going to close your first deal until maybe, and especially if you're on the new business side, install base is always different. But on the new business side, it could take nine months, 12 months before you actually, after your onboarding, after pipeline generation, going through the sales process to close the real first deal. And that's when people, somewhere along the line, do you continue to see and believe, you know, see the light in the tunnel and believe that you're going to close deals and be successful or are you going to give up and you're going to try it somewhere else?

31:12Yeah, it's so important that that first line manager really, going back to your point, Frederick really knows what to do. Because think about it. If I'm a new sales rep and I don't have a lot of experience, I'm looking at my manager like they are the coach. And if they don't know what they're doing, I don't know that. I came to this company thinking that they do know what they're doing. So if they're telling me do A, next week do B, next week do C, and all of these things I fail at because they don't know what they're doing. Next thing I think, well, it's my fault. That's the coach. They know what they're doing.

31:47So maybe I'm not cut out for this company and selling this product because they tell me to do A and then B and then C. And every time I do something, I'm failing. So it must be my fault. And then they attrit. They're gone. Yeah. Or in some cases, they're actually good. They understand that they're pretty smart and they see that their leaders aren't doing the things that, you know, they would expect and hope. And they're like, why am I, you know, wasting my time here? Right. I'm going to go. What am I doing with these B managers or C managers? I'm an A player. I'm going to go leave somewhere else because I want to be around A's.

32:22This conversation goes full circle to what Frederick said in the beginning of, I think one of the number one challenges for an individual contributor that goes to a frontline sales manager is the realization of competence. And if you know why you're good, you're going to be a great leader. If you don't know why you're good and you're unconsciously competent, I think you're going to really struggle. as I did when I first became a leader. I was a really, really good individual contributor. And I would just tell people, hey, just go do what I do, like watch this. And I would go and do an individual contributor's job at that frontline sales manager.

33:07I know this is resonating for people out there. I know there's second, third line leaders that know they have basically great individual contributors in these sales leaders role, but you'll never scale a company that way. That's why understanding what to do. Johnny, I love your idea of getting to the first deal. You know what? I have not thought about that in such a long time. That could be one of the greatest pieces of advice that a company could do. Frederick said one of his challenges is he's got a long sales cycle. I hear that from every single company that I'm talking to right now. Some of its economy from last year and the years before, what have you.

33:46And a lot of it is what we're talking about right now. Now, you help people get unstuck. The quicker you help them get unstuck, the sellers can become consciously competent. And now you can really scale an organization. But the reason I also like that, then it's not just up to Frederick to figure this whole thing out. Because otherwise, he has to watch all these reps and managers and figure out, OK, why can't we crunch the sales process quicker? But when I get my first line managers and even my second line managers focused on getting those reps their first deal, guess what? They start getting pretty smart about how to crunch that sales cycle.

34:23And one way to do that, Johnny, is what Frederick, you said also is let's really understand. If I'm a CRO, I'm probably starting with ICP. I'm starting with why does the buyer buy? What does the buyer do in each one of these stages? and really get to the detail of understanding who's doing what. Because that's how you get it down to the tactical level that says, okay, these are the steps. That's what I loved about my upbringing at PTC is that I was led by leaders that said, John, these are the stages. This is why the customer buys. This is the pain. This is how people become champions. This is how they buy.

35:03This is why they buy. These are the steps they go through. Based upon that, this is what we do in each one of those steps. And do that to excellence and completion to exit those steps and you will be successful. Don't do it. Not only will you not be successful, but you won't be here. And I don't mean to be rude, but that was the culture of accountability and excellence. And that's where those two worlds came together. I think it's always that the being consciously competent. The way I always explain it is, you know, you've got artists, right? And some people, they just wake up and they start painting and it's incredible what they can do.

35:48And then you ask somebody, you know, how do you do that? Well, I don't know. I just get up and I start painting and something beautiful comes up. No, but come on, you need to tell me if I want to do something like that. You've got to explain to me how you do it. Well, I don't know. I mean, I might just smoke some weed or something and then I get more inspiration and I paint even greater. Right. But then remember, remember Bob Ross. Yeah. Do you guys do you know the guy who was the big crazy hair? Exactly. And he would be on TV a long time ago, but he would he would tell you exactly how you needed to, you know, paint or do a face or do something.

36:29And when you looked at that, you're like, I mean, I'm not an artist, right? I have very little artistic capability. I'm a sports guy. But if I see that, then I'm like, you know what? I think I can actually put something on paper that looks decent because he was telling you the science behind the art. And it's exactly like that. If you don't understand the science of what you're trying to achieve, take champion building, right? Some people are natural champion builders. why they kind of feel a person and they gravitate to that person and they're able to make a connection with that person. But if there's a whole science behind it, and if you understand that science, then you can teach other people how to do it.

37:11You can coach them. You can develop them. Hey, one last thing on this topic. If you're a CRO and you are hearing an early stage company, let's say early stage, I think this is when it happens with like technical founders. And I'm always leery to hear this. We need people with more domain expertise. Like the CEO, the executives, the high level people are saying that to me. And I'll be like, okay, that's the situation for me. They haven't figured out how to turn zoologists into hunters. And in the beginning of a company, I think you need zoologists. Like the zoologist can tell you where the bear eats, how the bear sleeps, when it feeds, how it moves around, blah, blah, blah.

37:54But hunter, like you can't teach a zoologist how to shoot a bear like you can't do it. Like so what you need is we're bringing those two worlds together is to really understand how do you get the knowledge and the skills of the zoologist into the hands of the hunters and you will scale a company. If you're interviewing right now or you're a CRO and you're a leader and people are telling you, well, we need more people with domain expertise. All that's telling me is that domain expertise has not been translated into hand-to-hand combat skills in front of a customer, if that makes sense. Well, why don't you just have your SE sell then if you need a domain experience?

38:34It happens all the time. The 100-pound brains have to be on every call. The people, the technical domain expertise have to be on every call, and it doesn't scale. That's why companies don't scale. Yeah. That's an interesting one. It's something that I'm definitely dealing with as well. And then how do we translate that? And what type of people are you really looking for? And I think the more and more I'm just convinced that you need some really strong first-line managers. You obviously need your leadership team to understand what they're doing. But if you've got strong first-line managers that can hire the hunters that are going to go out there and are going to learn quickly, because you obviously need to understand how to speak to the person that you're speaking to and to understand what their issues are.

39:23But that's something that I've done so many times, switching. Without that knowledge and skills, though, Frederick, you could have a lot of hunters sitting in a room with loaded shotguns and they start shooting each other because they don't know how to hunt the bear. And you've got to have that knowledge and skills that we talked about. It needs to be transferred. It definitely needs to be transferred. Yeah, good point. This almost brings up the next topic. Let's talk a little bit about recruiting. So when you're trying to scale an enterprise sales team, what qualities are you looking for when you're hiring some or to try to hire top-performing reps, Frederick?

40:00Are there any certain qualities or questions you're asking during an interview to uncover some key qualities that you want in these people? Yeah, like I said, I mean, this is something I learned from Jeremy, and it's not going to be a surprise, but the ICE criteria, intelligence, character coachability experience. And even during an interview, you can start, you can check how somebody scores against quite a few of those. Where like one of the most basic things for somebody to come to an interview is they need to understand what I'm looking for. And if they don't ask those questions, then how in the hell are they going to go to a customer to understand what their issues are and what their criteria are if they're actually looking for something.

40:47Because in this case, it's very clear, I'm looking for people, right? I'm buying. I mean, it's not a question if there's a latent need or anything like that. I'm buying, right? That's clear. The question is, am I going to buy them or somebody else? From an intelligence perspective, it's clock speed on one side, but it's also the ability to EQ, the ability to build champions, to get people to do things for you. And that's valid for customers because you need to build champions there. But it's also valid internally because if legal puts you on the bottom of the pile, then you're going to struggle closing your deal on time.

41:25From a character perspective, I'm always looking for people that want to find a way to get things done, that want to win, that are not going to give up. I'm looking for people that they have to be very competitive, but they have to be team players as well. I'm just not interested in the people that don't give a shit about anybody except for themselves. I look at people glass half full versus half empty, positive mindset, and there's a whole science behind that, what that brings. Happiness Advantage is a really interesting book that basically describes that science. I'm looking for the self-awareness, for the accountability, for curiosity, because that's super important.

42:10And then I'm looking for honesty, integrity, and the people that do what's right for the customer, for the partner, for the company. And I always say it's a bit naive, but, you know, I think we should also do something that's good for the world. We're not here to only drive in a nice car, to live in a fancy house. I think we've got a responsibility towards, you know, our children, whoever comes after us to try to leave this place in a better way than we found it. and then your coachability because you're probably going to be changing things and you're going to be implementing new things. So for people to be open to those things, but then at the same time, the experience is important because they have to have a minimum level of, you know, whether it's sales experience or prospecting experience or fast growth experience or, you know, SaaS or whatever it is that you're doing or customer base, if you're putting somebody on one big account, there's a limited amount of experience that you need to have with people for them to be able to become successful.

43:20And then I, probably because I was always young and did quite well without the experience, these days it's a different story. But, you know, I usually take people that are very high intelligence, character, and then coachability as well over the experience, because those people are going to grow quickly. Experience is only a matter of days, could be weeks, could be months, all the other stuff. And especially the first two you have or you don't have. Yeah. Those are really good things. Competitive, team player, positive mindset, self-awareness, curious. How do you test for EQ? How do you probe for someone's EQ?

44:01How do you do that? I think it's hard to ask of certain observations you're making. It's definitely has to do with observations. And it's, it's kind of, it's like, how does that person behave in the meeting? I mean, some people are just, they're cold. They're, you know, you just, it's difficult to have a conversation with people or it's just, they, they don't, that's something you can feel pretty clearly. And I think I've learned to feel a lot of things as well, because yes, you want to be able to look at the numbers and write something down. But I think that triangulation with gut feels super important as well, because we are still human beings, right?

44:39So if somebody could come in and quickly bond, whether it's with your secretary or PA that's bringing the people into the room or yourself, or maybe somebody else they speak to somewhere else, those are things that are important. And then the other part, which is incredibly important as well, because even though you might have gotten quite good at interviewing, you're still dealing with salespeople, right? You're dealing with people that they're there to present themselves and they're not stupid. They're not idiots. None of them is. So checking references and not the reference that they give to you because they'd be incredibly stupid if they give you a bad reference, But checking with people that you know, that know them or somehow, you know, you trust to really tell you how they are and what the good things are and what the bad things are, because everybody has those things, right?

45:39That's just incredibly important. So sometimes what I like to ask is, especially for salespeople, especially for self-awareness, how do you think you're doing in this interview? you? I love that question because they now have to give me how they perceive that they're doing and what they perceive, you know, my reactions to their answers and their questions are. And it tells me a lot about how they feel that situation's going, because at the end of the day, that's what we do as salespeople. Sure, there's a science behind it and the questions we're going to ask and how prepared we are. But when you're sitting in front of a customer, don't you always ask yourself, I do, like, I wonder how I'm doing right now.

46:25And it's great to get to understand how they perceive that situation. And I'm not saying that there's a right answer or a wrong answer, but the way in which they lay it out to me about how they think they're doing and how they think I'm reacting to it really is an amazing, it's an amazing question and response. Well, what I, and maybe I shouldn't say here, because you never know how many salespeople are going to listen to this but i usually the first 20 minutes i tend to just have a an open conversation and then sometimes i ask people like how do you prepare for meeting or when you go to cxl what do you do and they start to tell me everything that they do and then how do you run the meeting and they start tell me all the things they do in the meeting and then i'm like okay that's really interesting so why why haven't you done that in this meeting you know and then all of a sudden they're like, oh, shit, right?

47:20Which is to your point, like how you're doing. I mean, what were your goals, right? What were you trying to set out in this meeting? And then they're like, these are my goals. How do you think you're doing against those goals right now? And the smart people, they're like, okay, you know, I'm not going in the right direction. Then they immediately take over. And that's good because you know that somebody's then capable of actually, and you want to push people out of the comfort zone. You want to get them out of that standard demo. Yeah, well, they're going to be out of their comfort zone a lot of times in front of customers, right?

47:52They're going to get knocked off their feet and you want to see how supple they are to get back on their feet. Right. And if they don't enjoy that, then that's maybe not the right place for them, right? Then they need to be somewhere where they can stay on their feet all the time because it's hard work. It's tough work and people are going to throw you curveballs all the time. You asked a great question about EQ. I want to come back to that in just a second because I want to summarize what Frederick, you were saying, and Johnny, you were saying. So I heard how they learn is really, you have to figure out how people learn.

48:25Because a lot of people will say, you know, intelligence, they're not intelligent, they're intelligent. I think that that's not enough. That's not deep. Everybody, they're getting to you. They have some form of intelligence that they gather and analyze data. They might not do it the same way you do, but you have to understand how somebody learns. and then you have to understand if that fits, if you have a mechanism inside your company to provide that to them because people might learn in a different way than you're actually presenting knowledge and skill to them. I also like to look for how open they are to learn new things.

49:02This is a big one for me. I can see that people are intelligent. I can see that they learn in a great way. I can also feel a little bit like not invented here syndrome, like that they're not going to be open to learn a new thing. So it doesn't make any sense for me to bring somebody in who's intelligent, who's capable, but chooses not to do what everybody else is doing and assimilate it into their own way can be a really, really big problem. And the third one you said, Frederick, was this collaboration in the ecosystem. There's no sales jobs today that don't collaborate. There are no sales jobs that aren't involved in an ecosystem, both at the customer and and internally.

49:44So if you don't have the ability to collaborate in an ecosystem, you're not going to make it today. And then this last one on self-awareness, I think is a huge one, Johnny. And your point is like, you know, how do you test self-awareness? What I like to do is I like to listen really intently. It's hard to do, but you listen really intently to the interviewee. And I'm looking for if they're trying to understand why I'm asking a certain question or why I am making a certain statement. I find that those people are emotionally intelligent because before they open their mouth, they try to understand why the other person in front of them is making a position, making a statement.

50:32It's hard to do, but I'm telling you, if you're trying to find great people and find people that are self-aware with high IQ, they're first analyzing why they're saying something, why they're answering a certain way, why the customer is asking a question, why they're making a statement. That is a real good gift, right? Especially today for sellers. If they're not trying to figure out why, then they're just rolling. Yeah, John, I think that's a really interesting point because we tend to react to things, right? That's just the way humans are wired. And if we can refrain from doing that, but try to figure out, first of all, what am I trying to achieve?

51:20But the same goes for my counterpart, right? What is my counterpart trying to achieve? And if you start to think about those things, and then how do I best go about achieving that, my reaction, because somebody presses on some kind of button, is probably not the right way to achieve what I'm trying to do. So calm down. Think about that. That's not going to give me the outcome I want. I should be doing this. And for the other person, you know, why is that person asking me those questions? What are they trying to achieve? What are they trying to find out? That takes you to a whole different level.

51:54Highly related to self-awareness. Highly related to self-awareness. That's a good one. I think a lot of times, too, I love to listen carefully to the questions that they ask, which tells me a lot about how much they've prepared, how well they've been listening to me, how deep they can probe into what we've said in this conversation. You know, if they're not just asking superficial questions, but you can tell when somebody, based upon your conversation, all of a sudden they ask something like the third level down and you're like, whoa, okay. They not only got what I was talking about, they've extrapolated it down and they're way down here.

52:35And it kind of tells me the level of their expertise or their preparation, you know, for that meeting. And whether they qualify, Johnny, like Frederick, you were saying, we asked somebody a question and we're like, hey, you know, explain to me how you get to the economic buyer. Let's just say. And if a person doesn't qualify what I'm asking and why I'm asking it and they just go, ah, economic, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Here's three things to do with an economic buyer or what is your sales process or whatever. But I'm always aware of people that are, and these are the best sellers, that are qualifying before they answer.

53:19And they want to make sure. There's 10 things I could tell you about how I get to an economic buyer. I want to make sure it's really, really relevant for what we're talking about here. Are you talking about during the sales cycle? Are you talking about prior to if I'm, you know, and they qualify. And I'm like, this person is not only listening, but they are understanding that their job is to gather their thoughts before they make a response and to try to make that response as close to my question as possible. That is like when that comes across in an interview, you're like home run. Well, then they're telling you exactly how they're going to operate right in front of the customer.

53:58It's a walking audition, right, Johnny? Yeah, it is. It is. It's like Frederick When he was at PTC early on He learned qualifying Qualifying everything, right? It goes all the way back to the beginning of this Of this episode here So what What are a couple reasons Why sales reps Fail? Why do they fail? We had to pick one or two reasons Let's talk about it Why do they mainly fail?

54:33um so aside from from hiring the wrong person uh okay so maybe you did maybe it's on you you hired the wrong person right yeah so so the way i see it there's there's there's there's there's there's really three things you either hire the wrong person and that's why the recruitment is so important and the references are so important because it just costs you so much i mean you do the math and you figure out, you hire somebody, so you're in the recruitment, you hire somebody, you onboard them, you give them a chance, then usually you don't kick them out before the probation. So then after six or nine months or 12 months, you find out that they're not going to be successful.

55:14And then you have to go let them go. It's going to cost you a lot of money, especially in Europe. There might be, you know, PIP involved or those kinds of things. Then And before you get to the next person, you could well be 18 months down the road. Yeah. That is just really expensive. The other part is just not being able to make them successful by the development and the coaching you're giving them. And it's development, it's coaching, but it's also inspiration to keep them going through those difficult times and to get them over that hump. And that has, I think on one side, it has to do with the direct manager.

55:56So they play a crucial role. But it obviously also has to do with the overall company, the support that somebody is getting within the organization, whether it's from BDRs or sales process or marketing or whatever else is there. Do they feel that they're carrying the weight by themselves or are they getting support from the organization? And are they treated fairly? Are they are they being are they are they enjoying what they're doing? Do they do they see that they're developing in their careers? I think those are I'm always trying to look for besides the growth and the money, which is important.

56:38And but it's like if somebody is going to be they can be on that same growth journey and make money somewhere else. Right. Let's be honest. I mean, there's there's hundreds of companies out there and there's some very good companies and fast growing companies. So there's enough choice. But you want basically somebody to be able to look back three years down the road to say, I enjoyed that journey. I mean, you're a cyclist, John. You know that you don't cycle to get somewhere. You cycle because you enjoy the journey, right? When you're a climber, you can't enjoy just being on the mountaintop because that almost never happens.

57:16You're there, what, maybe five seconds and you go down again, and then you start the next one again. So if you don't enjoy the pain and the toil to make it all the way up, then it's going to be miserable. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. So so, guys, this question, I think, is really a deep one, especially for this segment that we're doing with you, Frederick. If you fired somebody and then we're asking that question of why they fail, the first answer is it's always us. Because if they've gone through the process of hiring and nobody does that, they don't say they're always saying what was wrong with the individual, what they lack.

57:56If they're in your company, then why they failed is somewhere inside of inside of you. Not in all cases. Something could happen. Some injury, some death, some whatever happens in their in their families, their personal life. I'm not talking about the obvious one. And for me, I think you've got to look at yourself first. And why? So you've got to go back to the interview and you have to be able to say to yourself after the interview that this person. I can see them in this job. I can see them with massive amount of energy in this job, that they not only know what to do in this job, but they're going to wake up in the morning and feel like they're less than 1 % of the population that says what I do matters and that I feel like I'm really, really lucky doing it.

58:47And I know I might be going overboard, but something's going to give. If you don't have people waking up in the morning and believe they're doing exactly what they're supposed to be doing, they're at risk, plain and simple. And that all, you know, you have to be able to tie into that. And so I think you're first looking at yourself. Yeah, I think it goes to something Frederick touched on. One was the person, did you make a mistake because the person was not a good fit? So you didn't really qualify them during the interview process. Then now it becomes, if you did qualify them and you think they are a good fit now, which is already your mistake.

59:27Now you give them to your organization. So now did you give them now it's training, development and leading. So did I train this person the right way? Did I develop them training being like classroom knowledge or constant knowledge development, being the skills that they need and then giving them to the right manager, right? The manager can have the most effect on their skills. You can train people in classrooms to give them the knowledge, but it's the manager that they're underneath that can kind of do that repetition and give them the right skills. But it's all on you because you have to think about the risk.

1:00:06When I hired this person, they're not a unicorn. So they have certain things that they're lacking typically. So can I cover those risks? And when you're a small company, maybe you can't cover the risks because you don't have the right training program and you don't have the right manager to give them to. So you have to understand your risks. If you do understand those risks and you hired the right person, but you didn't give them to the right manager and you didn't train and develop them, it's all your fault again. Yeah. Yeah. I really like that. Everything is on you in the end and everything is a choice by the way um i remember this one time when uh when uh i ran into a difficult situation in a company it was a dutch company a long time ago and i i was basically you know blaming this and that and whatever and one of the people on the board actually he took me for a walk in a in a forest i thought it was a bit you know strange to go in a forest but it actually worked out really well come out of the forest yeah i know Instead of in the office, he said, let's go for a walk.

1:01:12We ended up in the forest somewhere. And then he basically said, look, and we're good salespeople, so there's always a million reasons why somebody else or something else or whatever. The only area we're going to learn from is if we take full accountability, what could I have done differently? And that's also the only thing that you can do different to make sure that it doesn't happen again. because the other things, they're going to happen again tomorrow or next week or next month. And if I can adjust to those situations to make sure that when they happen, they don't have those consequences anymore, that's when you're really doing your job.

1:01:52Yeah. And also, you know, life is like a series of chapters. So somebody could be a certain way when they get hired and then life happens. So I think the greatest leaders that I've ever seen are the ones that are constantly checking the pulse. And like, if you're leading right now, ask yourself, when is the last time you spoke to somebody that you're leading and just ask them, what do you like most about what you do for a living with us? Number one. And then, what do you like least about what you're doing with us? And I think when you ask that in a really authentic way, they say words that are spoken from the heart and to the heart of all who hear them, you're going to get some great understanding of where that person is right now in this role.

1:02:43And a lot of times, sometimes I hear people trip. They're like, man, I'm shocked. Like, I don't know. They did great in the interview. They started off great. And then something, life happens. Something happens in the company, whatever. But when you don't have your finger on the pulse, and sometimes it's just like, there's some little tweaks that you can make with those individuals to make sure that you don't lose out on all of that energy they put in and you put in uh and there i when i used to do that i used to say when's the last time i asked that question and when i asked myself why didn't i if i'm honest i didn't want the answer because i knew the answer was not going to be good and that you're just you're fooling yourself so yeah i wrote that down john thanks that's uh that's a good one Good tip for the day, isn't it, Frederick?

1:03:27It's a good tip, man. Well, Frederick Maris, thank you so much for spending time with us. Now, Johnny, Frederick, he's amazing to me, and a lot of the Dutch people are. And he's a Dutch guy. So, yes, he speaks Dutch. He's absolutely fluent in English, maybe more fluent than I am. Yeah. And then he can speak fluent German. And maybe, I don't even know, can you speak other languages too, like French or something? I can do French for the holidays. When I was a little kid, my Spanish was even better than my Dutch. But that's too long ago. I forgot most of that. So I can still understand it a bit. And then maybe just a little bit of Italian.

1:04:09But then it really starts to tell off. I don't know how he turns his head from talking to us fluently in English. Then he'll get on the phone, speak fluent German. Then go home or talk to somebody in Dutch like that. You know, that's a super talent. And as you know, in many other ways besides languages. So thank you so much, Frederick, for doing. I'm a connoisseur of hair, Johnny. So, you know, I am struck by the Ray effect that if you're listening to this, go check out the video on YouTube and check out my buddy Frederick, because this dude is getting younger every year. It's great to see you, buddy.

1:04:47Really good. It's been a pleasure being with you guys. Guys really enjoyed it. Yeah. So thank you, Frederick Maris. Thank you, John Kaplan. And thanks to everyone for listening to another episode of the Revenue Builders podcast.

1:05:01Frederik Maris: Thanks for listening to today's episode. If you enjoy the content, please subscribe, rate, and review the show to help us reach more people. This show is brought to you by Force Management, where we help companies improve sales performance, executing the growth strategy at the point of sale. Check out forcemanagement.com for more information. Down it, down it.