Sales Management Podcast
52. Diversify your career experience to win with Dan Hebert
Dan's had every job in the revenue org and they've helped him build quite the career. As you think about developing talent in your org, check out this episode for an alternative viewpoint to the straight-line career path we often see in sales.
Dan's had every job in the revenue org and they've helped him build quite the career. As you think about developing talent in your org, check out this episode for an alternative viewpoint to the straight-line career path we often see in sales.
Welcome to the sales management podcast, your source for actionable sales management strategies and tactics. I'm your host, coach, crm co founder, corey Gray. No long intros, no long ads. Let's go From Canada in the summertime. It's Dan Abear, Somebody I've known for a long time and we've gone through a journey together, because when I first met Dan years ago, he was a marketing manager and since then he's led sales enabling.
Speaker 1:He's led sales team. He's leading sales development. He's done all of these different things. I want to dig into his career path and how having all these different types of jobs has made him who he is today, and we're also going to touch on the topic of healthy versus unhealthy imposter syndrome, which I think is a fascinating topic, dan, welcome. Thanks, corey man. I remember hanging out back when I had long hair in 2016. For those of you that don't know my long hair story, I decided to start the software company back in 2015 and I said I'm not going to cut my hair until we hit a million ARR, and we never did, so I ended up cutting my hair eventually, but that was funny.
Speaker 2:I never. I never realized that was the reason why you had long hair.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, and that's the only period of my time or period of my life where I've grown my hair more than three inches. And then I met all these people and they all think I have a long hair, which is funny. That's funny, all right, let's. Let's dig into this. You were in marketing at a startup. What motivated you to want to move over to the sales side? And then I want to kind of bop through each one of these roles that you've had and talk about the lessons that you learned and what advice you'd have to people to really diversify experience and how that could impact the long-term career.
Speaker 2:So, like looking back at my career, I started it in marketing, but I always had a foot in sales. One of the things is, if you work at incredibly small companies, you might have a title that has like literally like five or six different jobs under it. So even my first job like it was like influencer relationship manager and then it was like digital marketing or whatever. I was managing the websites and doing social media marketing and blogging and all that stuff, but half of my job was reaching out to influencers and trying to get them to sign up to the center.
Speaker 2:It was a sales development job. I was using all sorts of different channels, reaching out to them saying, hey, here's like, here's why others are joining us. Like, here are the benefits for you, we can bring you more campaigns, we can bring you more income. So trying to figure out what will make an influencer tick in terms of like joining an influencer marketing network was the majority of that job, and I didn't even realize it was sales development at the time. And then when I went to the next startup, I showed up there we were 10 people. I think it was higher number, 10 or 11.
Speaker 2:I was heading up marketing department of. One was great. There was nobody that knew how to use Salesforce, so I became an accidental Salesforce admin. Nobody knew how to do lead routing or all that stuff. So as much as I was doing marketing stuff, I was also doing a ton of sales off stuff.
Speaker 2:Turns out that our VP of sales was really an account executive with a VP of sales title and all suddenly had to start hiring. People had no idea how to put a spreadsheet together, do a headcount plan, do a budget, do forecasting. Never did any of that stuff. So I was like, why not learn how to do it. I know how to use spreadsheets really well, so I started being basically like his chief of staff and trying to figure all that stuff out. At one point, or director of inside sales, who, who managed the SDRs left and you know, nobody could take on that team. So I was like I'll take it on, like so as much as I always had marketing titles up to the point where I met you and then after that I had official sales titles, there was always like one foot in sales, no matter what I was doing.
Speaker 1:So did you want to work in marketing or do you want to work at startups? And that's just kind of where you fit in.
Speaker 2:I originally wanted to be the CMO of Coca-Cola. That's what I imagined when I was in university. I was like big brand, you know, consumer marketing, all that stuff. I had the last year of university I had an interview at L'Oreal in Canada and basically the recruiter shot my dreams. He was like gave me this weird test around, like hey, here's a product you've never heard of, read this. And then in like the next two minutes, come up with a creative ad campaign. Or like cool, okay, can people actually do that? It turns out I could not. So he was like yeah, you're probably better at like market research, more of that side of things.
Speaker 2:So, anyways, from there I graduated in university and realized those jobs at BDC companies are very few and far between terms of marketing and you usually have to be like from either a top school or no people like some some way that you got into those. But what's more common is B2B and like the majority of jobs are B2B. And so I got into this tech startup. I was like, probably like six, seven months after graduation, Was just literally applying for any marketing job that existed. And this tech startup was there and it was a four person operation, three co-founders, and I was. I was the first hire outside of the co-founders showed up on day one. The product was a PDF mockup oh wow.
Speaker 1:It was like nothing.
Speaker 2:We had zero dollars in revenue. We had no product. We had to take a product from nothing into it to market. And it was very interesting and from that point on I was like, well, I don't want to be working these big companies, I want to be working startups. This is so much fun. I got exposed to so many different things. I did sales, marketing, product management, like pretty much anything that wasn't accounting or finance. I did in some some shape or form, and that was my first job out of university and I was like, wow, this is amazing. You know reports directly to the CEO. They never tell you what to do because they don't have time and you just figure out on your own. Like that's perfect.
Speaker 1:You just do it and they say, yeah, great job, thanks here's. Here's six more problems to solve. Go get a tiger.
Speaker 2:You're lucky. If they say thanks. They usually just point out and you could have done it this way instead. But that's fine. Like you learn a ton and from there I just like. The more I did tech startup, the more I got interested in the sales side of things.
Speaker 1:Okay, so how did doing all of this stuff translate into the skills that you've needed? Give us a couple of specific examples, as you've led sales, led sales development, been in sales enablement. What are the things that you've seen your peers not be able to do, that you were able to do because you really grab the bull by the horns and just started doing things?
Speaker 2:So one of the things like well, let's talk first about, like when I first got in the sales enablement One of the gaps that I see a lot with sales enablement folks. They only come from one discipline, so they've either come from marketing, from HR, from sales most likely, the bulk of them might have not even ever managed a sales team before Like they'll be a high-performing rap or mid-performing rap that you don't want to let go, but let's put them in enablement. They could be helpful there. So oftentimes there's just like there's difficulties in connecting the dots between the different functions that need to work together, and I feel like that's one of the major things that you need to do as enablement.
Speaker 1:Because they've seen it from the outside in but not been in it Exactly.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So when, like, I hadn't managed an SDR team, so I knew at least how to manage some. For, on VREP, I had done all the headcount planning for the VP of sales at that startup, so I knew how to build budgets, I knew how to build forecasts, do headcount mapping. I had been an accidental sales force admin at every single startup that I had worked at up to that point, so I knew how to do processes. I knew how to do all that stuff. And then the thing so when I started in sales enablement, when I was at Proposify, it was a hundred percent inbound.
Speaker 2:So all my marketing experience of connecting inbound to sales and making sure that leads don't fall through the cracks, and all that stuff like it all came into practice because I knew that side of the world. Right, I knew, okay, yeah, this is a good lead when it comes from this channel, this is probably not a great lead. Let's action it in this way. I knew how to do the actioning because I had managed some SDRs. I knew how to build cadences, I knew how to do lead responses, like all these different things. So one of the benefits of working these different types of jobs and functions is that you're able to connect the dots and when you think about just management positions in general and sales like a sales manager, a sales leader, sales enablement or whatever, a lot of your job is figuring out how to build the systems that connect with each other. Right, if you have this like little box, that this is my world and the only world that I know, how can you play within a bigger team? Right, you only know how to play this.
Speaker 1:Or if you only have an academic understanding because you've seen it but you haven't done it. So is your recommendation that if people really want to build some of these skills, they take a detour and go work at earlier stage company and just get their hands on everything and just start doing stuff?
Speaker 2:It depends on what you want to do, right? So it's going to be a high performing rep for your entire career. You don't need to do any of this stuff If you want to be going into, like. If you want to be a VP of sales at certain point, like I can tell you now, like being a VP of sales 10 years ago versus now is significantly different. The amount of technology that you have to figure out.
Speaker 2:You know half the job is marketing now, like there's so much different stuff than than just 10 years ago. So I think you know taking a detour at some point either from you know, working at a smaller company perspective or just working in a completely different function, like, take a detour for two years, go do marketing, go do sales ops, go do sales enablement, go do solution consulting, like pick something, go do it for a couple of years. The worst thing that can happen is that you suck at it, you fail and you go back to what you're good at, like that's that's the worst case scenario, right? But you'll learn something in the process.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I agree with that. I think building that portfolio of skills, I mean I've done a lot of things. I was a financial analyst and then I was a director of operations and all that was before I got into sales. I never sold anything until, geez, seven years into my career.
Speaker 1:But when I was a financial analyst part of my job, I was actually a sales manager as part of my financial analyst job. Because what what happened was is that there was a sales team and they were just selling the same stuff to the same people and my boss and I decided that we needed to fix that and so we found an opportunity to hire some salespeople. So I was like the shadow sales manager for this group and I had three people on my team and we crushed we're hitting like 200% of goal and the goals were great because we were just selling into new markets. The existing sales team just wasn't touching because the sales manager didn't know or whatever he was doing over there. And all of a sudden I was like, oh, this is pretty cool, the sales thing I was selling I might be the first part, or I'm one of the few people who started their career in sales as a sales manager.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but, I mean that was like doing stuff, like I didn't take the path of SDR to a, to to sales manager, right, like there are different paths.
Speaker 1:Have you ever been in SDR?
Speaker 2:Full time like, quote O'Carrion. No, like I've been an SDR. I've been an SDR, like when I was at level jump I was following up with my own webinar leads and all that stuff and piping stuff for David Gloom for him to do demos, like we were a four person operation when I joined that that team. You know marketing manager title but you know you have 300 webinar leads sitting there idle. Somebody needs to call them, somebody needs to email them, put them in cadences. So have, I like, done the tasks of an SDR? Sure, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah Right, you don't have to have the title and the tenure.
Speaker 1:You have to do the tasks, know how to do the tasks and then be able to coach folks doing the tasks, and then you're rocking and rolling. Yeah, yeah, I love it. I love it. Give me I don't want to don't name names and I'm not talking about people that you've specifically worked with, just people you've observed in your orbit, because I know you're involved in a lot of other things like what are some things that you've seen folks do or run into, where you're like, wow, that person just hasn't developed the foundation that they needed to get to where they are. You can be big, yeah.
Speaker 2:I. So I was working for a sales leader and they they were sales leader at a much larger company, Right, so one of the the big software companies that have been over a billion dollars for a number of years. They were hired at a smaller startup. I think the startup that I was at at the time was probably around like 7 million ARR. So we weren't we weren't at all big, we weren't number one in market. People had no idea that we existed, all that stuff.
Speaker 2:And they showed up. They their idea of like coaching, managing the team, was a one-on-one once a month and then refreshing dashboards on a daily basis oh wow, and creating these really obscure documents, training documents and putting them in a drive that people never accessed. So so when I showed up there I was, you know, the founders were worried like hey, we have a 15 person sales team. We're not really selling anything, Like it's costing us a ton of money to do this. You know what's going on. So I just I started coaching the reps and like actually coaching them, like spending time with them one-on-one, doing more than once a month, more than like several hours a week. I had two, two reps there that were like phenomenal, and reps like some of the best ones that I've ever worked with, but at the time they had no process. They had nothing. Their process was show up for a half hour demo, show stuff for 27 minutes, basically everything, and then say, hey, I'll send you a proposal, you don't let me know if you're interested, and then they would end the call.
Speaker 2:So it's like cool, there's no sales process that exists. There's no. There's like there was no skill development because they were all first time SaaS sellers Like they had sold sporting equipment or like books or something else, but it was the first time selling SaaS and so they just had never learned any of the fundamental skills. But at the underlying piece of it is like there was not even a hypothesis of what the sales process should be. Right, so, like I, I do some consulting on the side and I coach, like early stage tech founders, technical founders, because they they don't know how to do sales.
Speaker 2:And the first thing that we do, and like our first couple of sessions, is like let's open up a spreadsheet and let's just hypothesize around what meetings you should run, based on like how your leads are coming in. Like okay, you're, oh, you're doing a half hour intro demo right now. Cool, let's put that there. How do we run that meeting? What happens after that? And nobody knows. Nobody can say like, huh, yeah, that's what I should. Nobody knows, Right. So just the basics of outlining a sales process. To me is the first thing you do in a sales team and writing it down, and writing it down.
Speaker 2:And like. I will tell you, like, after I was there for a couple of months, like we, we doubled our win rate, we double our ACV, we reduced our, our sales cycle by by more than half. And it wasn't rocket science, it was me coming in on a single piece of paper, having a sales process that I had printed, laminated and put on every eight years desk that had like hey, here's your upfront contract to start your meeting for this stage. Here are the questions that you ask. Here are the next steps. If the meeting is successful, just follow this.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and the ones that did like started selling some legit deals, like, like, not the tiny little $1,800 a year types of deals that we were selling at the time, but legit $10,000 deals, which was what the founders wanted going up market. So the the fundamentals that we're missing. There is like the like that VP of sales had never done any types of sales and operations never, never done any type of sales enablement had only worked at larger companies where everything was already figured out and you usually hire reps that run their own process and you know it's okay to manage dashboards because you probably have like a team of 20 and the entire company might have like 10,000 sales people. So you're just like this tiny drop in the bucket and all you need to do is make sure that the resources are allocated correctly and that you're forecasting accurately. Right, and like that's those larger companies, a lot of it is forecasting accurately when you haven't even created a sales process yet. Forecasting is not the biggest issue. It's like we need to learn to sell, like we need to go out and figure out okay, how are we going to increase our deal sizes? How are we going to lower our sales cycles? How are we going to improve our win rate? We suck against this competitor. How do we do better? Like there's so much stuff to go figure out. We had to create a sales narrative. We had no like proper, like point of view narrative in our sales process. We were, we sounded and looked exactly like our main competition.
Speaker 2:So when you look at all these things together, like, okay, if you, if you've done product marketing before, you know how to do positioning, you know how to put a narrative together, a sales story together, right, and then you can train your team on how to do that. If you've done a native enablement, you know how to put programs together, you know how to build this and onboard it. You know how to do recurrent training. You know how to co-straps. If you've done sales ops, then you can take that entire process and build it in Salesforce and make sure that all the tools are working properly. If you've done sales management, then you can do the actual tactics, the drills, the role plays, like all these different things.
Speaker 2:So if you've done four or five of these different functions, then you can be an effective head of revenue at a smaller company, because you need to be that generalist, right? If you have no intention of doing all these these different buckets, then you have to work at these massive, massive companies and have your lane, your specialty and kind of like play in there. I don't like that world because it's way too political and nothing gets done. The smaller world, like where shit gets done. But if you're our specialist trying to go into a small company, you're going to fail, right? If you've only done a single path, you're going to fail because you have to be able to wear all these different hats.
Speaker 1:Yeah, especially once you're at the VP level or higher, you come down and you've got all these skills that are very basic to learn. That could be a big mountain to climb. So one thing that you've talked about a little bit as we were prepping for this is the idea of imposter syndrome, and I think there's a healthy version of imposter syndrome and a very toxic version of imposter syndrome. Talk to me about your reviews on the topic.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think so. I always say I have imposter syndrome and the reason why I say that is that I feel like I'm never good enough and I'm never qualified to do the things that I'm doing. That's just been how I've been and all that stuff. But to me it's also fuel for my continuous development and growth. I've taken roles that I had no business taking. I've taken promotions and all that stuff and probably if I look back 10 years from now, I'll be like, yeah, I should have done that role because I was offered a promotion, because I was doing my job really well.
Speaker 2:But there's always these things in the back of my mind I was never an AE. How can I be a VP of sales if I was never an AE? I've had some folks in interviews, when I've interviewed for VP's of sales positions, saying oh, you weren't an AE and it bugs me. But then I look at all the stuff that I've done and all the people that I've trained up and how awesome they are and they've left these companies for bigger jobs, better jobs. They're crushing it and the team there is still crushing it. They're still running my process Like there's, there's so much stuff that if I look back I'm like, yeah, I did a good job, I could do the job.
Speaker 2:But you have these different things in the back of your mind that are always like, like man, like somebody's going to figure this out, that I should not be in this job. So to me it's fuel for, like, continuous development. Like I take courses, I read books, I talk to people, I watch probably too many gong calls, I dig into the sales process to figure out what's working and what's not. I never go in with the assumption that the way I've done it is the best way to do it, because I don't have that way. So I have to look at OK, who are my top performing reps? What are they doing? That's working? Can it be repeated? Can it be trained or coached to somebody else? Can I turn this into a process? So it just gives me this completely different lens on doing the job. So there's pros and cons of it, but at the back of my mind it's always itching around like, oh man, like any day now they're going to be like this guy doesn't know what he's doing.
Speaker 1:But when I look at its motivation see, you, do something about it. I think the place where imposter syndrome becomes toxic is where people have that feeling oh, I'm going to get found out and they don't do anything about it. Yeah, that's. I don't understand that. I mean, if you're going to be in the job, it's fine to get the job. If you're not amazing at it and you don't have to I love what you said. You've been VP of sales, but you've never been an AE before. And Erin Anders is great at being a football analyst. She was never a football player. Yeah, you don't. You don't have to do the job to the job.
Speaker 1:I manage an engineering team. I've never been a software developer. I manage designer. I've never been a designer before. Yeah, I know what they do. I do code reviews, I do design mockups. That's the fascinating thing about this. You've got all of these jobs that you can. You can say something like oh yeah, you can never be a VP of sales if you've never been an eight. Or you can never be an if you've never been an SDR. But that starts to break down because there's people in your company that are managing people who have never done the job before. Yeah, and the math goes in that up.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and.
Speaker 2:And so one of the things I noticed too is like I don't know if it's like the egotism of sales in general, but this stuff doesn't necessarily exist that much outside of sales. Like, if somebody were to say like, hey, a VP of sales decides to be a VP of marketing, nobody would bad. And I and say like, oh, they're going to suck at it, right. But if somebody's a VP of marketing, that's all all of a sudden in charge of sales, there's like, oh, no, this VP marketing, they can't do it. Like they're not in sales, like. So there's this like elitism of like, if you haven't gone through the ranks of sales, you can't do it. But the perfect example is a founder CEO. Right, it's like they've never done, like they've done probably one of the jobs that they're going to be doing. But they have to manage five, six, seven different functions, depending on if they're a co-founder or a single founder and they just have to do it. And nobody bad to not saying like, oh, the CEO, like you know, got to 2 million ARR by themselves. Oh, they're not a sales leader. Like, no, yeah, they're a sales leader. They hired salespeople, they built a sales process, they got to 2 million ARR and they own them. They're technical founder, like absolutely they can sell Like nobody. Like nobody looks at the founder CEO as being like oh, they're going to fail because of you know, oh, they've never built a sales team or whatever. Right, right, they will say they'll fail because they're crazy, because it's a crazy idea and whatever. And people have their opinions. But it's this weird thing in sales and I've noticed this for a while because I've been in sales and outside of sales around this like idea that if you are not from the like growing from the ground up in sales, that you can't do sales. And it's not like it's not true.
Speaker 2:I've like I hired some solution consultants here at Q4 and none of them were from a sales background and any single one of them could be an account executive. Like I would hire them as an account executive. Why? And it took six months for them to learn the sales skills they were. They came from different departments and stuff. Like some of them came more from like a servicing type of department, but they were just very knowledgeable. So I didn't, we didn't have to train them up on any other products because they knew these products inside out, all they did.
Speaker 2:And to me it's like they have no preconceived notion of what a sales process is. I had to, like, show them out a demo effectively, like I taught them sales skills, like we read books together, we did discovery sessions, like we watched gone calls, we did film reviews, like we did all these different things and it completely opened their minds around what sales was and they're doing amazing Right. And and none of them came from a sales background. It was their first sales role and any single one of them would make a good sales manager, a good, a good account executive, whatever Right. So it's like you have all these talented people that can figure shit out outside of sales. That could be very effective people within sales, or sales ops or sales and amy or whatever. But sometimes there's just this I don't know. There's this gate that we put up as salespeople that, oh, if you didn't come from this background, then you shouldn't be this.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, I've seen that a lot myself too, and we with closed loop helmet. I wrote a book called Triangle Selling and we rolled out. Triangle Selling is a sales methodology to probably 15,000 people, and the two people that stand out as the best students we've ever had are Ritesh and Amy. Ritesh I met as a I think. He was a 21 year old MIT dropout, dropped out to start a company, raised a bunch of money for it and he needed to learn how to sell. He learned Triangle Selling in like three hours mechanical. He was like this is my sales algorithm. He could do it so well and he had the, the academic piece down of knowing what it was, but also the human empathy and he could just, he used to do a great job. And Amy has a I can't remember if she has a bachelor's or master's in engineering from Harvard. He's just a really smart people and this is my barometer for this right you take a really smart person, you give them some frameworks, watch them execute, go get them Tiger, and you don't have to go to MIT or Harvard to do this. This is just literally the two people that jump out of my mind when you say who are the people that picked it up the fastest and just executed like crazy. It's not something that takes forever.
Speaker 1:And I think that one of the challenges that sales work, see, is you've got this culture of like, oh, our ramp periods nine months, why? Why is it not? I understand that it takes nine months to get deals through the system so you can see people actually taking something. From first meeting to close Deals take time absolutely, but in terms of giving people knowledge, you can get knowledge real fast. I mean you can crank knowledge. Go to chesscom, buy a premium membership, do the lessons. Your chess score is going to probably double in the next. You could double it in a day, literally, because the lessons are so good, they're so tailored, they're so focused and they're within a system of frameworks that work. And then in terms of onboarding with salespeople, it's like, oh, it takes forever. You know I do a little bit this day, a little bit this day, a little bit that day.
Speaker 1:You look at a 90-day program. 90 times 8 is I don't know 700 or something, and that's a lot of hours, a lot of hours. I guess it's only five working days, so there's so much time to do things. And if it's well structured and well delivered and well received. And then it's practiced and it's coached. People get really good at things really fast. I think that a lot of times the programs to get people really good aren't as good as it could be. And then the idea of what do they need to be really good at defining what that is, finding the gaps and then getting them where they need to be. I don't know, I see some gaps there. What are your thoughts?
Speaker 2:I think it comes back to what we're talking around like single track into specific roles. Right, a sales manager that doesn't know how to onboard people, then Ramp is going to go take longer. When I first joined here, my job was to head up the sales enablement department. We didn't have one. We were hiring like 50 people and we had no onboarding program and I looked at what the different managers were doing. They were giving a spreadsheet with a bunch of different links to presentations or product marketing materials and then they were doing Salesforce training on how to enter deals in Salesforce. It's like cool, wow, okay, it explains why time to first deal is seven months. Yeah, because if I were a rep and this is what I would be given, then, yeah, I get it.
Speaker 2:But if you haven't ramped up, a whole lot of folks like a lot of sales managers that work at large companies have an entire sales enablement team or sales onboarding team that have your new recruits for three months before you even get introduced to them as managers, right, yeah, so you have to do zero pretty much for onboarding. They come to you ready and then it's like, okay, you're in the field now. But if you're at a company that knows like it's, the manager stopped to onboard. How do you know how to onboard somebody, how to teach them skills, like how to teach them knowledge? How do you structure that stuff? Put it in a program in a way that actually gets people to move the needle faster Like it's difficult.
Speaker 2:Like me and the other sales and enablement manager at the time, we built an onboarding program Like we. Like, I'm a strong believer of build the plane while you're flying, by the way. It's like that's why it's my startup background. But we've launched something in two weeks and because we were having people come in pretty much every single week new recruits and every single week, we made it better, but within a quarter. We had that time to first deal down to within quarter.
Speaker 1:So from nine months to within the quarter.
Speaker 2:Yeah, time to first deal, right, yep. And then time to prospecting before the program was like six weeks before they picked up the phone and did any type of activity. We had that down in terms of two to three weeks, yeah Right. So and it's all about like knowing K, like both me and the sales enablement manager here, like we both came from sales backgrounds and we both came from enablement background, so we could put two and two together. Like I had just come from a VP of sales job. I had built an entire sales team from the ground up, all the process stuff. I know math really well, I know process stuff really well. He had 20 years of learning and development experience, trained up thousands of salespeople, generated millions in onboarding revenue. So when we put our two minds together, we had all the skills there. Right, we knew okay, we can't wait three months for somebody to learn everything to go in the field. It has to happen gradually and having the different, the different aspects of like knowing how to build a sales process from scratch and knowing all these types of things and knowing how to put our training and development program together. Like we were able to do some amazing things. Right, it was the same, the same my previous job before that as a VP of sales. I started as a sales enablement manager but quickly became the VP of sales. Like when we first started. Like we had an outbound SDR team that was for, I want to say, four or five reps and a manager, and the eight months prior of all of that, that focus, before I joined, they generated like 12 meetings in eight months, right, and it was because they put an SDR, like a senior SDR, an SDR manager role that had no idea how to do segmentation, no idea how to do sales ops, no idea how to coach, develop, no idea how to hire. Like you know, it's like this happens and then you have a VP of sales from a very, very large company that has no idea how to develop people. That's just a refreshing dashboard. Like it was a recipe for disaster, which is exactly what happened. It was disaster.
Speaker 2:We had to, like, take the team down from 15 to six and rebuild from the ground up. But when we rebuilt and we hired like when I was hiring eighties again time to first deal was within 30 days because we had a good inbound flow, and within four, like I remember, there's one of my eighties left at the same time as I hired a new AE and I was like shit, we have way too much inbound for one AE. So I need you new guy who's been on here for four days to start taking calls and running opportunities Love that Right. And he was like oh shit. And I was like here's how we do it. We had an intro deck with Sandler's talk tracks like UFC, read this like here's how you do your pain funnel. Here's like here's the next step. Here's the one sheet sales process. And he closes first deal.
Speaker 2:I think it was day 27. And then he was fully ramped within three or four months, like hitting his quotas. And to me the rule is like average sales cycle plus 90 days equals full ramp time. So if your average sales cycle is six, 60 days at 90 days of that, that's a five month ramp. If it's taking you nine months to ramp, like you don't know how you're on board people or hire people or something going on, so when you have all these things together you can make shit happen. But it's really, really difficult for somebody to do this If you don't have more than three or four different types of functional experience on like how to pull it all together, cause at larger companies you have specialists that each own a piece of it. If you're at a smaller company, you don't have the luxury of that Right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and if anybody's listening and they realize that they don't have that, I wrote a book called hiring, onboarding and ramping sales people. If you send a note to free stuff at coach serumcom free stuff at coach serumcom I'll get you copy that book. And if you're worried about sales coaching, we've got a sales coaching course too. See me email address free stuff at coach serumcom I'll flip that over to you. Yeah, Dan, that's that's fascinating.
Speaker 1:I think that just building that skill set, because a lot of times folks say, well, I've got 10 years of experience. Well, the question is, do you actually have 10 years of experience or do you have one year of experience? That groundhog date itself 10 times over, and it sounds like in your case you truly do have. I don't know if it's 10 or whatever the number is, but you've got the diversity of experience that's built on itself. And now when you see a problem, it's not like you've got one screwdriver and you go at it with whatever that screwdriver is. You got a toolbox full of screwdrivers and you pull out the right one Exactly. Yeah, no, that's good, that's good.
Speaker 1:Well, hopefully this is motivating to some folks If you got the opportunity to try some new things, either even within your role today. Take on some some additional opportunity. Maybe take on that training role for new folks on your team and get better at that Work on coaching. Get into the operations spreadsheets, Please. Stuff at coachsierremcom for spreadsheets for salespeople course as well. Well, Dan, we're about out of time today. Any last words on the topic, Anything you want to plug.
Speaker 2:No really, it's like take the time to do a quick detour at some point. Like the first 15 years of your career is for learning. Right After that you start getting into certain specialties or certain areas where people expect certain things of you. So, like in your first 15 years, if you single track it, like you know, when you get into building teams and doing some big things, later on you're going to realize very quickly that there's there's stuff missing. So just take a quick detour if you can, you know, spend a couple of years somewhere else. Worst thing that can happen is you don't like it, you suck at it, you go back to what you were doing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, cause if you're good at what you're doing, people will have you back. Yeah, yeah, love it. All right, dan Abert. Thank you so much for joining us Sales management podcast. If you want to check out free version of coachsierremcom, go to coachsierremcom Free version of coachsierrem. I gave you the website Free version of coachsierrem at coachsierremcom. Subscribe to what we're doing. We're pumping these up twice a week Apple and Spotify. I'm Corey Bray and I will see you next time.