Transcription
[Music] Three, two, one. All right, welcome to Masters of Medic. This is episode number five, and you can probably tell by the smile on my face: I am incredibly excited today because we have the one, the only, the legend, the greatest of all time, Mr. John McMahon. Welcome to the show, John.
Hey, thanks Andy. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.
Yeah, I'm excited to be here. I don't know if I'm as excited as you, but I'm… you're definitely not as excited as I am. Um, and as, as uh, regular listeners and watchers will know, it's normally at this point where I turn it over to the guests to introduce themselves, but there's this old saying that says, um, “this person needs no introduction,” and I think in our industry, if there's anybody that doesn't need an introduction, it's you, Mr. John McMahon. But for those, um, for those who've stumbled across the podcast, the YouTube channel, and maybe are new to enterprise sales, I'll just say this five times: CRO of public companies. Let's see if I can remember them all: PTC, Geotel, Ariba, BladeLogic, and BMC. That's… that's five. Good, pass that test. And then, and then go on to work on the boards and advising some of, if not the greatest companies in our industry. And you know, these ones I definitely remember them all because there's loads of them, but just uh, just to call out a few: we're talking about like Cyber Reason, Sumo Logic, ThoughtSpot, Sprinkler, HubSpot, Glassdoor, App Dynamics, uh, and then more recently, I suppose, Lacework, MongoDB—I could never forget MongoDB—Snowflake. And have I missed any?
No, I'm doing great.
Okay, cool. All right. Well, I've done my homework. I don't know if I could have read them all then.
That's good. I've done my homework. I've done my homework. And it's a really exciting time to have you on the show because I'm sure you know anyone that's on LinkedIn couldn't have missed this, but just in case you have, you've put out a book, "The Qualified Sales Leader." So thank you so much for doing that. What, you must have had this for years now, maybe decades now, of people asking you to write a book. Um, what, like, you might… did you just get tired of people asking, or what's… what was the… what was the idea that made you want to write it?
Yeah, it's interesting. So I have had, almost probably on average, you know, every month, someone would ask me, you know, “Why don't you… want to write a book?” And it's typically like after a meeting, you know, a board meeting, a consulting meeting, a meeting with VCs or something, and I'd say, “Why do you say that?” And they'd say, “Well, because you said this. I never heard that before.” You know, sometimes they'd ask, “Well, where can I find that in a book?” And I'd say, “Well, I don't know if you can find it in a book because I've never read a book that has that stuff in it.” So, um, it's… it's real-world scars. And then I… and even people like Bob Beech, who's CEO of BMC, he… he even said to me like, “John, you have got to find time to write a book,” you know. So it's because of that, number one. And then number two, when I would go into a, you know, whether I'm on the board or or uh, consulting for some companies, I see a lot of the same common mistakes. So I figured if there's… if I'm helping these companies, I'm going to try to help them get over these common mistakes. But how many other software or hardware or tech companies are out there that are making the same mistakes? They're burning a bunch of money; they actually have a good product, but they just don't know how to go to market with it. They just don't know how to sell it, and then they wind up maybe going out of business or selling it for assets. So why can't I bottle some of this stuff up into a book and try to help people? So that's… that's what I did. And… and I have to say, mission accomplished, sir.
It is an absolutely brilliant book, of triumph I have to say. And… and I… I mean, it's no surprise, like, you know, looking at your… your background, the success you've had, that obviously that if you were to put… to spell that content into a book, it's going to be good. But what I really, really liked about it, um, which is really original, I haven't seen it like this before, is that the way it's almost like written almost like a story, right? How it talks through your engagement with a company, which I imagine is a real company with a fake name. I didn't actually look to see if… is it Forego? Is that the name?
Yeah, I had to find the name of the company that wasn't copyrighted.
Yes, right. Yeah. And so you follow your engagement with Forego and um, starting with the QBR and then… and then working the sales leaders and sales teams to kind of take them sort of from a point where they're failing to, you know, finding all the right ingredients to be on the path for success. And that… that's really cool. And I… well, one of the things I wanted… I was curious about was actually writing a book in that format. As I said, it's one thing to take your knowledge and put it into a… a book, but how… what was the process where you actually… there's a way I can really kind of craft this?
Yeah, well, I really didn't want to write what I consider like a boring sales textbook, and there are… there are a bunch of them. So what I wanted it to do is be more conversational and more narrative type style, and I wanted to take the people on a journey because they say if you're gonna write… I had to do a bunch of homework first because I'm not really… right. So if you're gonna… if you're gonna… if people are gonna read a non-fiction business book, they typically wanna be transformed. So you got to take them from where they are today to a different place tomorrow, and that's what I tried to do. So I tried to take this group, you know, that was in a forecast session of a QBR, which many people can relate to, and I tried to get those things across as like a burning platform. And then from there, show them a lot of things that they were doing wrong in the forecast session and also doing wrong as leaders and try to walk them through the basics and try to take them to a different place in the book. And to do that, because I'm not a good writer, that's what really took the longest time. Because when I first wrote the book, I sat myself down in a condo in Boston for four days, just locked the door and just wrote everything that came out of my mind, right? Well, I could have stuck that into a book, but then I thought, okay, but now how do I shape that into a story? And that took so much time. Like, I'm gonna say the first 15 chapters of that book, I probably wrote it 20 times.
Right.
Yeah, that's fascinating. And one of the things that really comes across in the book, um, is that you definitely have what our class has got a… a creative… a visual mind. Is that something you… you've kind of recognized in yourself? Because that definitely comes across in the book. And when you say that, what do you mean by that? Like, you know, example, like…
Yeah, what… in kind of in its… in its um… its most basic form, it's that the idea of how you're… how you're wanting to portray the information in story format. But it's also so often in the book you would refer to analogies. You know, we're talking… you know, one minute we're talking about one thing… you know, peas and carrots on a plate… and… and it's brilliant. It's brilliant because everyone… everyone reading that goes, “Oh, yeah,” like when you split the pipeline like that and put it back together… yeah, it makes… more sense. And so that kind of thing really comes across. But it… I love that kind of… I think for those people who have read the book or… or those that resonate as visual learners, um, that will be right up their street. And is that something you've recognized in yourself?
Well, I recognized it more because any time that I would go in as like a consultant or board member and I go to, let's say a QBR or something, and then I might… I might use what's going on and use… and now we tell a little story, maybe a gray boy story or peas and carrots or box up, or a lot of the stories that I tell in the book. And then when I would come back maybe a quarter later and there's new people in the room because, you know, they're growing, it's a growing business, some of the first things that people would say is, “Hey, tell the great… tell the peas and carrot story again, or box up again.” And I think, “Really? You wanted me to tell it again?” And they did, right? And then they realized, well, that's what resonates with people. It's not just words on paper that are thoughts; you have to make it come alive in some stories. And that's really what… what I tried to do in the book: make it come alive and then things that they can relate to. Because now, if it's pain or pleasure, it's gray boy, you know, you… you know, you have an image right in your mind right away.
Yeah, yeah. Good old gray boy. Yeah, absolutely. I can… stuck-up lecture. I won't spoil it if you haven't read the book yet, but that's a good one. I also… I'm kind of famous for this amongst my sort of peers, um, for… for doing similar things, but I always use sporting analogies, um, because I just think there's so much similarity between sports and… and obviously the professional sales and… um, you know… you know, the great example of this in the book is where you talk about, um, the different type of salesperson for different types of roles and how, you know, you use… I think you use the American football example of like, “Quarterback can’t play in different positions,” and I think that's really interesting with things like that. Like, was there… was there a moment where those kind of things crystallize in your mind, or like, where you can kind of think back to, let's say, using that example of having different types of salespeople for different types of roles, whether they be the size of the deal or the industry they're selling into? And do you think that… second question: do you think the people can evolve and change, or do you think the people in sales have like almost like their positions in sales?
Um, I'll answer the second one first and say I do think people can… can evolve, and they can come back to that, but people can evolve if they want to be students of the game, if they wanna… if they want to learn the knowledge or the playbook of the game, and if they want to take the time, which is the hardest part, and execute and learn how to execute the skills of the game by practicing and practicing and practicing. So they can do that. As far as the analogies, what I… what I think happens is in the roles of uh, doing consulting and board work, I had to a lot of times get points across to sales leaders that actually didn't understand why I was saying what I was saying, and also tech CEOs and even venture capitalists as to why this is important. So I started to draw analogies. So like what you were… you were referring to is, let's say Tom Brady, who's quarterback for a team here called the… he was with the Patriots, now he's with the team in Tampa Bay, and he's won like six or seven Super Bowls and probably go down as like the greatest quarterback of all time, and people can debate that if they want, but one thing's for sure, he'll go down as somebody that is maybe one of the most knowledgeable guys on the field when it comes to the game of football. And my point was, Tom Brady, if we take him from the position of quarterback and move him to any other position on the field, he'll fail immediately. Well, why will he fail? He won't fail because of the knowledge of the game; he'll fail because he doesn't have the skills. And then I'm trying to use that analogy to say, just because you hired a sales rep and he's knowledgeable about the game of sales doesn't mean that he has the skills to be put into certain accounts, you know, that will require a different skill set in order to play that… execute that game in the account. Yeah. Um, and so many times I see people just think, “I'm just going to recruit sales reps, and I'm going to stick them in all these positions without really taking the time to say,” just like a good coach of the football, soccer, hockey team would say, “Well, do they have the skill set to actually play that position?” And that's… that's the analogy that is trying to get to, right?
Right. Is there… when you're putting aside the sort of experience, which I think is kind of the… the element you're sort of talking about there, where they've kind of got the skill, experience of the position… in this case, just going back a bit further, where, let's… you know, where we are just looking to hire sales reps… you've obviously, probably more so than anyone else in our industry, got a track record of finding not just talent early on, but… talent follows you through and proliferates across the entire industry. I think that's been well documented. I think, you know, I forget how many of the BladeLogic team are now… cross or at C-level at some point, which is incredible. Um, but was there anything when you think about that… those… those um… people you brought into your team… was there any kind of… I know you talk a bit about in the book, but there's any kind of really raw attribute that you… you look for in um… in a salesperson earlier in their career, early on?
I'm really looking for mainly two things: I'm looking for intelligence, because then you can pick up the knowledge or the playbook of the game; I'm looking for uh, persistence, heart, desire, competitiveness, whatever you might call it, so that I know that they have the competitiveness and the willingness to practice over and over and over to gain new skills, right? So if you really think about like we said, there's the… what you have to do with the game, that's the playbook, and then there's, “How do I execute those plays?” are the skills, right? So if somebody's super knowledgeable, super intelligent, they should be able to pick up the knowledge of the game; if they're super competitive and motivated, they should be able to practice, practice, practice to pick up the skills of the game. And actually, a lot of times, if they're highly competitive and motivated, they'll not only pick up the skills of the game and pick up what you were teaching them, but they'll also find a way to learn other stuff because they're so motivated, right? But without those two… two uh… characteristics of those two behavioral traits, I think it's going to be difficult for people to… for you to really train them and develop them over time. And then what happens in a lot of these high-growth companies that I've been in and been associated with is the company might be, you know, one company for two years, then the next year they're almost a different company. What does that mean? They came out with new products; they have new competition; they have to call on different buyers; the skill sets change; now it's a more complex cost justification, more complex proof of value. So there's a whole bunch of things that change, and if you can't find salespeople that are coachable and then adaptable… because some people are coachable, they'll actually listen to what you say, but they never change, they never adapt, right? And it's people that are not coachable. So you need to find people that are coachable and then they're… they are adaptable, and then over time those people wind up staying with you as you grow. And a lot of other times I've seen it where the company's changed, products changed, competitors changed, customers have changed, and then I look at somebody that I used to admire two years ago, and I think, “Oh my gosh, they're a dinosaur,” right? What are they doing here?
Yeah, that adaptable one, I think, is… is genius. It's almost like, you know, because as you were saying, I'm thinking about these instances I've had with… when working with people, and they appear coachable, but if they're not adaptable, then it's actually… I'd rather have someone that's… that's neither, rather than have someone that's coachable and not adaptable, who's nodding their head and agreeing with you and… and being… appearing to be coachable but not changing, right? It's terrible.
Yeah, that's… that's the worst thing. And I think, you know, like you said, the adaptability… you know, just as you said that, “dinosaur,” right? We’ve all… we’ve all worked with that person who, you know, was at the top and then they’ve just… but the beautiful thing… I think is a beautiful thing about our industry of sales is it… you’ve never… you’ve never completed it, you never… you know, you’ve never like finished, you’ve never stopped learning because it’s always changing and evolving. And… um, you know, there’s no doubt about that. There’s many times where somebody still does something, and I’ve always… I still think of myself as a student of the game, and somebody does something or says something, and I think, “Oh my gosh, that’s brilliant. Yeah, I’m gonna take that, incorporate that.”
Yeah, for sure. Yeah, that… you think… you’ve seen salespeople like this, and I see them all the time; they’re un… they think they know everything now, and they’re unwilling to learn, and they’re unwilling to find a way to develop new skills, and those people are going to be left behind. And maybe they’re just the way they are, and they don’t want to learn anything new, and they don’t want to develop any new skills. That’s fine for them, but they’re not going to go much further.
Yeah, exactly right. You talked about your PhD, which I love: persistence, heart, and desire, which I think is brilliant. And it made me… something I was reflecting on recently, which is that I’ve had a really, really, really good track record or… or run of hiring former recruiters who have come into the team as an SDR and then, you know, grabbed hold of the SDR role and really made it their own and just smashed all their numbers and then gone into the field and done the same. And it’s really, for me, interesting, um, about, you know, that tough role, which is being in recruitment, what it teaches you around persistence, desire, and heart, those… those three things. And I have a bit of a chicken and an egg question for you, which is… I know your background comes from, you know, working at UPS, working all crazy hours outside of college and all that kind of stuff. Now, do you think that the PhD is something that you can learn, so therefore you find yourself, as you did, in a grafting role and it teaches you to… to those… those free attributes, um, or do you just think that those people… people with those attributes gravitate towards those roles and… and um… and therefore, you know, they find themselves happier in those roles, and people that don’t have those attributes stay well away from them?
I think it’s something in your background that has to motivate you, and you have that fight, and you have that desire in you to succeed, this willingness to do whatever it takes to… to develop new skills and to try to win. And it comes… it comes in different forms from different people. Um, a lot of times people say, “Well, if he didn’t come from a really… if he didn’t come from a real poor background or something, and he didn’t have to fight his way and didn’t have to earn his way through college, then I don’t want to hire him because he doesn’t have enough desire.” And then I think, well, that may not be true, because I’ve run into people that their dad owns a business, and the dad was highly successful, maybe overshadowing the son, and then the son decided, “Hey, I’m going to go be a sales rep,” and the father was pissed off, but the son was also highly motivated to prove the dad wrong. Like, “I can make it as a salesperson. I am motivated to do it.” So it… it’s different motivations for different people, and I can’t tell you, because I’m not like a psychologist or anything, where it comes from, but I’m trying to find that when I am recruiting people. So I will ask them, “What is the toughest situation you’ve ever been in?” And then I turn my ears on, and I’m asking a lot of questions. I want to get inside the person. “What is the most competitive thing you ever did in your life?” And I’m going to get inside their head. I’m not asking… when I’m recruiting, I’m not asking superficial questions. I’m not just looking at the resume: “Oh, you used to work for XYZ corporation, and you synergistically built relationships.” I’m not interested in any of that. I’m interested in the person; that’s the per… it’s the person I’m hiring, and I’m interested in their character more than anything. So I’ll spend half the… first half an hour is all about going after their character.
I love that. And… and you know, it’s clearly… you’re clearly looking for the right things and finding the right people, looking at the track record. And do you… do you think that, you know, if you think back to, you know, I’m sure you’ve been in um… in… in interviews where you’ve met someone… you know, some of the great people that have, you know, uh… that have followed you um… through their careers… do you see what you saw in um… those people when they were bringing you in for like final decisions, maybe on some… some hires at the final interview stage? Do you sort of say, “Hang on a minute, you… this guy reminds me a bit of you,” and that kind of thing?
Uh, I can’t… I can’t say specifically, but I can tell you that sometimes you have to… I think you always have to just focus on the character or the behavioral traits of the person first. And I can give an example. So the greatest salesperson I ever ran into is a guy named Carlo Carpenter out of Bologna, Italy, uh, and he’s no longer with us, God bless his soul. But Carlo, at the time when I was interviewing him in the Milano, Italy office at that time, we all were supposed to wear suits, right? And if you go to Italy, they all had their Ferragamo shoes and Canali suits and that type of thing, and their hair slicked back with a lot of product, and they were at that time they were like clean-shaven and everything, right? So Carlo walks into the office, and somebody says, “Your… your next interview is here.” Carlo walks into my office, and he’s got a purple jacket, a black turtleneck; he has a three-day-old beard; his hair is cut as if um… somebody like… he cut his own; he’s got brown corduroy pants with the big cords, and he’s got brown shoes, and then he has two chipped teeth; his front teeth are just chopped like… right down the middle. And so I first think, “I wonder who sent this guy to me,” you know, “Are they sure that he’s the guy that the salesman appeared?” Right? Because of the way everybody else… but then when I started to speak to Carlo and go after mainly his character and in his broken English, I started to realize, “I think this guy is really special. He’s got a lot of the right characteristics.” And even when I would throw a question at him like, you know, “Carlo, I’m not so sure you can do the job,” he was so curious, genuinely; he looked me in the eyes and authentically he’d say, “But… but why?” Like, he was blown away that I thought he couldn’t do the job, but it was really just… I was… I was saying that as a test, right? I wound up hiring Carlo, and you know, he was perennially the top sales guy in the world that year in and year out. And any time you made calls with them, guess where Carlo was calling; he was calling on the CEOs of the biggest companies in Bologna, Italy, GB… you know, Manchester United, what is it… Marcioni… you know, Ferrari, right? CEOs all the time. So is this… is this the guy that… when you… I think you in the book you said you went to a meeting with Ferrari with him, and he had a good meeting… you know, good days of meetings… you guys came out… you’re in the car park and you… you kind of came to a realization that you hadn’t… I can’t remember what it was…
But something you hadn't discovered, and he's like, right, and he walked off and went back inside to go and find out, right? So we came out after like almost all day making sales calls, and it was, you know, getting dark, and the cars are leaving work, and they're nice Ferrari cars; some of them weren't some affairs. Well, I was admiring them and speaking to Carl, and Carlos said, "Well, how do you think it went?" And I said, "Well, it went really good. Here's the things that we now know that we didn't know before, but because of that, now here's some things that are still question marks," and I'm looking at the cars, and and then I turn around, and Carlos is walking back towards the front door, and I say, "Where are you going?" And he said, "I'm going back into Ferrari." And I said, "Well, why?" Because, because I'm going to get answers to those questions now, and I'm going to do it in Italian so I can do it a lot quicker. Now, most salespeople wouldn't do what Carlo did because they weren't curious like Carlo, right? So what they would do is get back in the car with me, then ask me those questions, and I'd outline what we don't know; they'd drop me off at the hotel, or we'd have dinner, and then they'd start scheduling meetings with Ferrari over the next two weeks to get the answers to those questions, right? And Carlo, I don't think we'd be able to drive home without knowing the answers to those questions because it would literally drive Carlo crazy. But more importantly, um, what I put in the book is Carlo had, in not just the curiosity, had an urgent curiosity; urgency to find out now, and then urgency to understand that as a salesperson you don't really have 90 days in a quarter; you really have like 61 days if you take out weekends, an average of holidays, three or four days a quarter, you're down to 61 days. So time is your enemy, so you have to have an urgent curiosity in order to be a good salesperson, right? And not everybody has them. I love that; that was the one trait. He was smart; he was driven, but that was the one trait that I thought really separated him from all the other salespeople, and you can't, because you can't make that up; you either have it or you don't, and it's either genuine and authentic or it's fake; there's no middle claim because people can feel it, you know, if you're genuinely curious.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely right. And I think that's like, um, you know, I think that that feeling, you know, we've all had, regardless of whether we think we're, you know, genuinely curious or not, or anything around that, but that feeling when you really want to know something, you know, I've got that, you know, when someone you're like, "Oh, I need to ask this person that; I have to," and and if you can just imagine, you know, Carlo, he's probably like walking around 24/7 like that, especially in his deals, and it's like a superpower almost.
Yes, absolutely, definitely that's interesting. What do you think? So if here's a guy that, you know, sounds sounds like a character, you know, in in in multiple ways, yeah, you know, I've got a picture of him in my head from from from the book of, you know, his as you say like the core draw is the pub; it sounds like I, you know, I just I'd love to see a picture of him; secret alliance. But um, and someone that's gone on as you say to work in your organization, so top top elite organizations as a top seller, so you know, got to be in the the top one percent out there in the profession and obviously earning serious serious amounts of money as a result of that. What do you think maybe not just Carlo, but if you do know, it'd be interesting what do you think was motivating him year after year to to go and and after that that number one spot, or was it was it not the one number one spot; is it just himself; just had to be number one?
Well, it's interesting; I think that he he was always curious and always he always wanted to learn, which, you know, is what I think makes great salespeople and great sales leaders is their ability to be students of the game and always wanting to learn, and their curiosity for Carlo continued to drive him. So I think that he started, you know, three or four years in a row he was a top salesperson, and then what I did to him is I called him one day and I said to him, "I want you to be a sales leader," and he said, "I don't really want to be a state; I want to be a sales leader," and I said, "Well, you have 24 hours to think about it; let me give you here's what we're going to do; you get to think about you either get to be a sales leader; you get to quit, and then come up on me." Wow, because I knew, but don't don't forget I really knew who he was because yeah, and then he he decided, "Okay, I'm gonna do it," and he took on that new challenge, and again it was his curiosity and that allowed him to become like one of the top sales managers too. Oh, the guy that you underneath Carlo is is now the CRO of a company called MongoDB; Cedric Pesch; he's like one of the reps that works, so right, yeah; he worked with a lot of really great reps also.
Yeah, well that's that's that's that's kind of the that's a beautiful thing isn't it of, you know, the the um what you call like the network effect of good people doing good things; it's awesome to see. And on on the motivation thing, I'm really curious to you know you yourself as well, like you know obviously you uh you've gone um you had a tremendous success of being on the tools as I would say as a you know as a CRO as we discussed already, and then you know um I think obviously after BMC you you went into advising and on boards and that's kind of thing; what's like it's it's a very very different thing to be sort of doing what you're doing now to what you're doing you know as a CRO; what's what is it about the new role that motivates you? It's not you, but you know what I mean, from there?
I think it's it's pretty much the same though because what you're doing is um like in the book uh and this happens all the time when people say, "Hey, I'm a sales rep, but I want to be a sales leader," and what I usually do is ask them, "Well, how many kids do you have?" And they might say, "Well, I have three kids," and I say, "Well, that's interesting; why do you want five more?" Right? And they're like, "Well, what do you what do you mean by that?" And I say, and I'm trying to get them to understand that it's completely different. Say, "Well, when you were single you got up when you went wanted to get up; you went to bed when you wanted to go to bed; you ate what you wanted; you had your own schedule; you worked when you wanted to work, and you did the activities that you wanted to do; it was all about you," and now you became a manager where now you became a, you know, you had a family, and now what happened; it wasn't about you anymore; it was about those kids, like what they were going to eat, when they were going to eat, what their school activities were, where their out-of-school activities were, when they were going to go to bed, all those types of things, and you started to realize also that those children are all completely different; they they basically came from the same parents in the same household, but each one of them is completely different; different strengths, weaknesses, insecurities, fears, goals, all that type of stuff. So if you when I the point I was trying to get across is are you sure that you're prepared to change from being as when you were single to being married and having kids, or to be in a rep and now it's no longer about you; it's only about those people? Because if you can make understand that they're all different and you can work to coach and develop those people to be highly successful, then you will be successful, but if you think it's still about you when you become a manager, you're the wrong guy; you're the wrong leader.
Right, right, absolutely right. Yeah, I think so, and you see it so often, don't you? And it's kind of that classic of, you know, top rep; they've kind of, you know, they've won President's Club year and year; they've been number one, and like, "What's next?" I I'm uh, you know, by nature they're an aspirational person; they want to be bettering themselves, and so they're kind of looking around and they see it as a as a step up, and you know, and and it's not necessarily the right the right one, and you know, there's all these sort of examples of that; it may not they may not be the right ones because maybe they are selfish; maybe they're not selfless; maybe they can't put themselves in other people's shoes, right? You know, maybe they're a megalomaniac; there's a whole bunch of things that I've run into where people are super salespeople, but they would make terrible terrible sales leaders, right? Terrible; maybe they're mercenaries or mercurial; there's a whole bunch of things that I've run into, you know, and one or two times that I've tried it, it just typically doesn't work out.
Right, right. What about yourself then? You're you know obviously tons of success; your you know your portfolio, if you want to call it that, of people you've been advising is second to none; is there any is there any um scenario where somebody could get you back on the tools, you know, get you back into a C-level position at some company; would that is there any if there's any companies out there with you know just about to bag a series of serious amount of cash; they've got a really hot product; they want the greatest of all time to come in and lead there? You know, I have to say no; my phone's gonna ring off the hook. No, the answer is no.
Okay, fair enough. Yeah, I'll take that, but uh you didn't specifically say no; you said you're going to have to say no. Sorry, any you know those were the uh yeah, that's brilliant. But what would it what would but hypothetically would do you ever do you ever sort of miss it; dribble? Like what are you like finding but you missed the camaraderie; you miss watching people develop that that you've recruited and you've trained and put a lot of effort in, and because like I've always said to my sales leaders like you have to be intimate with your people, you know, just like you would be with your kids to know their strengths, weaknesses, insecurities, fears, doubts, goals, all that type of stuff. So when you really get intimate with a lot of the people to understand where they are in their career, what they really desire, and you're helping them get there, and you're seeing them develop, there's a lot to be said about that; I really really really enjoyed that stuff. Um, I know it's evidenced by a lot of guys; I mean somebody once counted recently that it's like 150 guys that are like CROs that used to work whether it's PTC or Geotel or, you know, BladeLogic or one of those companies. Yeah, so I do miss that camaraderie; I don't think I really miss the quarters, and I don't think I really miss non-stop airplane travel because if you if I ever took you back and I showed you my diary, I'd be blown away with how many different countries I was in, you know, every week.
Right. Yeah, I know; I can I can definitely imagine it; I can definitely imagine it. What's um what are the one of the things I always think is interesting is that you have you have had a knack of picking to work with some of the greatest organizations out there, and there's a bid on actually we can talk about in a moment as to whether you know whether you've maybe they've become great because you've helped them realize their potential because there's definitely that side of it, but there'll be a lot of people listening to this um uh who are thinking about their next move, and there'll be a lot of similarities I think in what you recognize as a good opportunity, a good place to go and and you know plate your trade that they can take whether they're you know right at the start of their career like an SDR to an AE to sales leaders all the way through; what are some of the things that you you you know you spot in in these organizations you choose to to share your wisdom with?
Well, the first it's the three whys, so what nice, so because let me back up; any time that I'm gonna go, whether I was gonna join a company or I was going to be a consultant to the company or be on the board, I want to first have them answer the three whys: So why does the customer have to buy, you know, why do they have to buy from you, and why do they have to buy now? And because at the end of the day we're salespeople, so if we don't have if the so let's back up; so if why do they have to buy means that there's a major pain that the customer needs to solve; major, not a minor team, but something what I call above the noise; above because most companies can deal with hundreds and hundreds of pain points; it's almost like you could slice your finger, put a band-aid on it; it's okay, you're gonna live, but if you fall down off your bike and separate your shoulder and break your arm and break a couple ribs, requires third-party attention; it's not something you can really live with; companies are the same; they can live with hundreds of pain points, but can you get above the noise to pains that are going to require third-party attention, right? So one is why do they have to buy; are we addressing a major problem, right? And then who does this really affect in the company; does it affect somebody at the highest levels of the organization, you know, who's the persona that's most affected by that? Because anytime there's a pain and as a negative consequence, then there's an attachment to a job measure, and now who owns that job measure? I want to know because that's the person we're essentially going to be calling.
Yep. So that one question of why they have to buy, if you unfold it really tells you a lot. Why do they have to buy from us? Then I want to know like why is your product different than any other product, and now tell me what capability in your product solves that pain you just told me about, and now why do they—this is a big one—why do they have to buy now? Why can't they wait? What other solutions do they have to get around buying your product or buying any other product, right? And if I don't understand what the negative consequences are of them and the implications of of the pain of, you know, why they have to buy now, I'm really not that interested. I mean, after that you can start; if you get through that, you can start to look at the size of the market, the growth of the market, how many competitors in the market, because at the end of the day these companies are either going to get bought or they're going to go public; if you're going to be successful, it's the only two ways to go on liquid, right? So if you have 20 competitors, but there's only if you really think about the people that are going to acquire a tech or software company, it's really not much more than a handful of companies.
Right. Right, we're two hands full of companies. So I always my analogy is, okay, we have a house on this block in this neighborhood, but how many buyers are there really for this house, right? I want to know that because if we're not going to go public and we're going to get bought, I want to know who the buyers are, so you can ask yourself a lot of those questions, you know.
Yeah, I um interestingly I I mean we both worked with with Rajeev at Sprinkler, you much more closely than I did, and he used to as I'm sure you you know how they're saying that everybody is a Sprinkler customer; they just don't know it yet, and I think that that's, you know, if I think about some of the great companies you've worked with like AppDynamics, I can remember a time where every customer I spoke to they were either already a customer of AppDynamics or they were in the process of becoming a customer of AppDynamics or they knew they had to, you know, it's like on, you know, they need to get it, and I I can think of, you know, a lot of the companies, certainly the companies you've worked with where it's been similar to that where it's just, you know, like Snowflake is a great recent example of that where just, you know, going off, but I myself I worked at an organization, I won't say which for obvious reasons, but where I felt like they had those three whys, and in fact, you know, we we we had an acronym to describe what our product was, and the RSKO, the CEO, had us chanting, "Every company needs an ABC; every company needs an ABC," and I I I believed it because it was a a good proposition, and every company didn't need it, but they didn't quite execute on it; they didn't quite meet what I thought was their potential, the product's potential, and I I remember thinking actually this is an interesting one um I used to say to them at the time, "You need Force Management here; you need Force Management to come in and take kind of what we saw happen um when I was at Sprinkler; they kind of came in and they got everyone talking the same language; they got the proposition right and all that sort of stuff," which I know is, you know, when I hear you talk, you know, it's it's the languages, you know, negative consequences, all that kind of good stuff, and I guess my what I think, you know, obviously you know you you and you um you know John Kaplan's part of that; I think part of that um BladeLogic alumni um he used to work with me at PTC.
Yeah. Oh okay, right. So um and and what what I guess my question is is what what is it that or when was it that you sort of see is the right time to kind of um change gears like that in an organization? What was it about when you were advising Springfield?
Right away, so the reason I think a lot of companies fail is because in the beginning um most most of the companies that are found that are founded by tech CEOs and they believe everyone is going to buy their baby just like the CEO you talked about, right? And maybe someday that'll be true, but in the beginning when you're a young company you have to be very smart about who you target. So in the book I even asked the question, you know, what did Jesse James, the famous bank robber in the 1840s, what did he say when somebody asked him why he robs banks? So because that's where the money is, right? So he could have robbed stage coaches; he could have robbed schools, hospitals; anybody chose to rob banks; why? Because that was the biggest return for his investment. And the point that I am making is in the early days of let's say PTC, we could only sell to medical device manufacturers and consumer electronics; in the early days of Snowflake, we can only sell to tech and ad tech, but we were smart enough to know this is the differentiation of our product, and now it solves these pain points; these pain points go into these use cases; these use cases is owned by these this persona in these companies and in these industries, so where are we going to spend our time, not selling outside the target market, but selling directly into the target market, and that's where a lot of young companies, especially tech companies, make a huge mistake because the founder gets everybody to believe that everybody's going to buy their product, and to your point, yes, everybody is going to buy the Snowflake product, but in the early days everybody wasn't because it wasn't fully capable of being sold to everybody, so we would have wasted a lot of time, a lot of and burnt a lot of money trying to sell to organizations that weren't prepared to buy our product because we weren't solving, you know, big problems for them; product wasn't ready yet.
Right, right. And you know that that kind of brings it all back to like the the qualified side of things because I think what you're really talking about there is, you know, qualification isn't isn't just about qualifying the deal in play; it's qualifying your proposition; it's qualifying your approach, and you know that's that one of my questions was actually going to be why, you know, I wanted to to hear your perspective of um you know you could have with your expertise you could have talked about, you know, any number of topics; the ex-sales leader, but you chose the qualifier, which I'll say well because your point like the qualified sales leader; a qualified is like our middle should be our middle name; it should be John Qualify McMahon, you know; it should be Andy Qualify White, and the reason is is because no matter what situation you're in, you're always qualifying, so you're qualifying when you're recruiting people; you're qualifying, you know, if everything they're saying on their resume or CV is true; you're qualifying if they're the right fit; when you when your reps come up to you to speak to you about a situation, you're qualifying why you should spend time on it; you're qualifying whether or not they're gonna get that deal or not, you know; so when you're talking to customers, you're qualifying them; you know, when you're talking to your CEO and he's asking a question, you're qualifying, you know, why are you asking these questions; what are we gonna do; all those types of things; your middle name should be qualify, so that's why it's the Qualified Sales Leader.
Yeah, I'm hoping to see lots of LinkedIn profiles names change, you know, to, you know, John Qualifier Smith, you know, that you know if anyone if anyone's doing their research and that you know they're they're interviewing with you for any kind of roles you're associated with, that's what they should be; they should be this far into a podcast to hear this gem and popping up to sell you. I was it's interesting; I was um interviewing a guy just last week, and I started asking him questions, and he said, "John, you know, I already have the answers to your questions," and I said, "Well, what do you mean?" Then he held the book up.
That's yeah, well that that's that's true, and but then you know it's it's it's like this um you know I was talking about this the other day where um I was I would interview, you know, AE candidates, and um you know I would you know it's it's five minutes before the interview, and I would load up their LinkedIn page just to kind of remind myself; I'd already I always made a point of doing a good amount of prep when I'm interviewing someone because I think it's you know they should have put some time in themselves, and the amount of times I'd load up my LinkedIn, I'll just sort of look at who's viewed your profile, and they viewed my profile five minutes before the interview, and I'm like, "Come on, man, like, you know, that's crazy; if that's that's the first time you're checking me out," um, but by you know a tip then, you know, if people people are now are interviewing someone's interviewing of you, they should turn their visibility on or their LinkedIn profile and be looking at you every day; every day; every day; just feel like you're stalking; they're stalking you. So I think that yeah, absolutely right. But um, you know, likewise, you know, sure the guy's done a die the guy's done a um a nice you know a good thing of of reading the book before interviewing with you, but like that's table stakes now, right?
Yeah, right; exactly; table stakes; you know, anything less is is just not it is unforgivable in my mind in this in this hyper-information world we live in. So the CRO that I'm working with, he said, "John, it's making you're making it difficult to interview," and I said, "Why?" He said, "Because you're giving people the answers to the test." I thought you're gonna say he's like he was gonna say, "John, you're like you're selling all our secrets," like as if it's like the magic.
Circle or something, a little bit of that too, a little bit of that too. Yeah, that's very, very true. Cool. Well, John, thank you for this. This has been epic. I've really—like, as I always say, one of the biggest reasons why I wanted to do this, this series, was basically to learn myself. So I'm getting to talk to guys like you almost on a weekly basis now, and and learn it. And I think this was this was incredible. Um, even though I had uh read the book very recently, I still feel like I've just learned a whole ton more stuff. So thank you so, so much for us. And um, get a book on Amazon right? That's uh easy on Amazon right now. I'm trying to get a book aggregator that can get it out into different stores and other countries that that it's not in because I'm already getting requests from like Turkey, UAE, Saudi Arabia, everything, and I they can't get the book. So I'm trying to find other ways to get it to them.
Yeah, and I I can quite imagine the the demand is there. It's awesome. I think it had something like, you know, must have one of the the fastest, not just fastest selling, which is always interesting, but fastest ratings through the roof. Awesome to see. And and quite right too. Um, so yeah, I wanted to get the book finished before doing mine, but yeah, brilliant book. Thank you so much. And um