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

0:00your company's success will live and die on the people that you bring in and the environment that you create them to thrive. It's your biggest differentiator and it's the secret weapon if you get it right. Everything can be forgiven if you have pipeline because you have coverage, you have protection. You can take a much more customer-centric approach to your deals, you're not pushing people, you're not rushing people because you've got the protection of pipeline coverage. You want to coach where people can fail and you celebrate it and they're not punished for it. You want people to believe, to think they have great records, you want to celebrate those behaviors, not just the end result. And at the same time, if you give your team development, if you help them fix things, stop them from getting deals closed, they're more loyal than bought in because they've been developed. And again, you step out of this situation of having a mercenary rep that's in your business for a paycheck who's going to go when a better paycheck comes along to having someone who's there because they're earning and they're learning. Ideally, they're having some fun as well. Welcome to a special UEC podcast episode. We spend a lot of time in venture talking about starting companies. Raising capital, building from zero, scaling fast, but there's another path that most people don't even consider. Buying an existing business and running it.

1:00And that's what Unsung is all about. It's a new podcast focused on entrepreneurship through acquisition, small businesses, and the people choosing to build their lives by taking over companies that already exist. Sometimes companies are profitable, oftentimes are overlooked, and many times they have a huge potential. We're launching Unsung because we think it's one of the most important and most under-export opportunities in Europe right now. But everyone should start from scratch. And for a lot of people, this path just makes more sense. Now, this episode you're going to listen to is a good example of why these two worlds overlap venture and small business slash ETA. We're talking about talent sales and how great teams are built. This applies whether you're running a startup or taking over business. So we're publishing it on Rolf UBC and Unsung on the two podcasts. If you enjoy it, make sure to follow Unsung. The link is in the showroom. Hi, welcome to Unsung. Unsung is a podcast for people questioning their careers who don't realize the possibilities of buying their own small business and a podcast to help small business owners grow.

2:06And today we've got Pepper Wise. Pepper is one of the foremost sales leaders in Europe. And currently with the multiverse team, which has been there for six years with well-known sales leaders such as Jeremy Duggan, Steve McCluskey and Dawn Darcy. And we're here to talk about talent sales, getting the most out of teams, and something Pepper's really passionate about, which is meritocracy and how sales can really enable people to accelerate their lives if they're driven and talented. Pepper Wise, good morning. Good morning, thank you. And I think we're very lucky, because if I'm right, this is your first ever podcast. It is my first ever podcast. I have been avoiding them for a good decade. And now I've kind of a bit of a triple whammy. I've got a few coming up, but it's a pleasure to do the first with you, Will. Well, I'm very honored. So we met back in the day when you had your time at Dart Trace. We did, yes. And for those that don't know, Dart Trace, probably at the time,

3:08one of the best sales engines in Europe in terms of approach with the sales playbook, go to market, and obviously the product too. And I'd love to hear your story. But what really stood out to me, and one of the many reasons to ask you on the podcast is by age, roughly 23, you were running, I think, a 16 to 20 person team in Europe. And so I saw an example where a company saw someone talented or driven without much experience, gave them the ability to prove that, and you smashed it, if I may say so. Very kind of you. Thank you. Yeah, look, it was great. Dart Trace, it was a brilliant company. Product market fit was exceptional. They did such a good job. We did such a good job back then of hiring really young, really hungry people with almost no experience, right? It was hiring kind of fresh grads that didn't know anything about sales, bringing them in, giving them support. There was also a little bit of a not single swim mentality, but it was on you to get out there and prove yourself, right? You had this epic product. You had all of these potential clients to go to when I joined the company was so small that the market

4:11was so unsaturated. And you had a real chance if you were driven, if you were smart, if you were kind of coachable and wanted to pick up all the learnings around you to go and make a massive success of it. And then Dart Trace did a great job of really rewarding that. Most of the leaders were ultimately promoted from within because they'd come in, they'd worked hard, they'd prove themselves, they'd delivered a huge value for the business, they were motivated to progress. It's obviously a great retention tool as well, right? If you're progressing, you're on your top talent through the org. And they had a very, very successful IPO, right? They did. They did. They do do very well. So yeah, it definitely set my expectation for working in a challenging, fast-paced, exciting, hyper growth environment. And I think I knew that I'd landed in the right place and was never going to work somewhere that wasn't that, you know, intense. People hear his sales. And if we look at what you were selling at Dart Trace before we come and thought you were doing now, it's quite a complex technical cyber product. You had young sales people demoing the product technically. And you were selling to often quite senior experienced

5:15chief information officers, like tech leaders and big companies, I'm guessing that fits you 100 companies. And you get a 21, 22 year old coming in, holding court with them and helping guide them through a sales cycle. And I compare that to other companies who might look at hiring a sales leader or a sales person and they might say, oh, I'd like to get 10 to 15 years experience and bring them in. Having been that experience yourself, have you got any reflections on that talent versus experience? If you could hire the perfect person every time, they would have all the experience you wanted. That doesn't just mean years, right? It means quality. Is that experience relevant? Is it quality? Does it mean that they're going to do well in the company that you're running today? And you would also have what we call the intangibles, right? You would have someone that they're smart, they're driven, they're coachable. Ideally, you'd always hire that person, right? But recruitment is a really difficult thing to do. It's effectively a risk assessment process, right? Every stage you're running every question that you're asking every part of the ICP that you're digging into, you're trying to understand, is this person going to come here and be successful? An ICP for the listeners. Ideal, candidate profile. Okay. In recruitment.

6:19Got it. And I think that's really important, right? If you ask a lot of companies, who do you want to hire for this role? Whether that's a sales leader or a sales rep coming to the business, they'll say, I want to hire an A player. Yeah. Everyone says that. Everyone says that. Great answer. Great starting case. No one wants to actually go and hire a B player, right? But how are you, how are you defining an A player, right? And then most people will say, oh, experience. But you could go out there and hire someone that's got 20 years experience that's not super high quality experience. Isn't really relevant to what you do. That's not driven, that it's taking a bit of a back step, who's not going to come in and do a great job for your, for your business. On the flip side, I think Dark Trace did such a good job with very junior talent because the product was so good and the market was so ready for it at the time. Yeah. That there was a lot of heavy lifting done by the product being so brilliant. I think if you're bringing in young, inexperienced talent to a company with a less good product, they're probably going to struggle harder because you need to rely more on the people to do more than the product is potentially doing, right? So I think as with anything, it's a balance. You definitely want experience,

7:19which I would call like the tangible side and you definitely want the intangibles, the intelligence, the drive, the coachability, and then depending on what it is that you're selling and to what type of kind of customer profile you're selling to, you can kind of ramp up or ramp down the importance of each of those, each of those sites. So what I'd love to do is I might take a step back and a high level go through your career and what you're doing today. And then maybe go back and start and take a step deeper on how you look for that. Yeah, great. Let's do it. I deal candidate profile. So join Dark Trace when you were 2021 out of university. Yeah, straight out of uni. Yeah. And started, I think, tell me from wrong marketing team. Good memory. Yes. And then stepped into being an account executive, which is a salesperson. Yeah. And quite quickly you were running the European team. Yeah. And then what happened next? What happened after that? How do your journey continue? I moved on from Dark Trace still kind of very, very good friends with so many people there. And I left to join a really early stage company where we met. I learned so much

8:20at Dark Trace. And I think I wanted to go and see, look, can I take everything that I've learned, go and step into a role where I've got the chance to build from the ground up? I think when I joined that company, it was, it was eight people. It was Mayhem, right? We were working to raise the series A. We were writing contracts at the same time that we were closing deals. It was manic, right? But what a great learning experience. But what I learned from after a couple of years of doing that role was that I was kind of quite self-taught in everything that I was doing. And was I good at sales? Yes, I was. Was I good at sales leadership? Yes, I was. Probably because I was doing a lot of the work of my teams for them, right? And I realized that if I wanted to ever step into kind of a VP role or a CRO role, which is absolutely what I want to do in kind of the Europe's most exciting tech companies. And just for a list. And so VP is a sales leader. Sales leaders? Yeah. CRO chief wherever you're officer tends to be strategic and all commercials or customers. Okay. Yeah. And that's absolutely what I'd like to do. But I knew that I had to go and learn from great, great sales leaders if I wanted to ever go and do that in a very good company

9:24in a very good way. And so I, when I was moving on from, from Sense on the kind of the second company, I was looking at who are these sales leaders in the market, right? The ones that have run the playbook businesses that have led multiple businesses from kind of early stage to billion dollar IPOs or acquisitions. Like who are those people if I could pick anyone that I'd go and work for? And I came across multiverse that was White Hat the time and Jeremy Duggan, who was just coming on board as the kind of the president there. And I spoke to a few people in my network and they all just said, whatever role he's offering, take it. It's going to be a baptism and fire, but you will learn more working for Jeremy for six months and you're doing your, in your whole career. Because he'd done BTC by then app dynamics. BTC, BMC, app dynamics, just known as like a legend of the sales playbook, right? But pretty, he's a tough guy. He's a wonderful guy. So inspiring, so fiercely loyal. The most high standards I have ever seen set by any leader, right? I thought I'd worked at companies with high standards and I was very accountable, but it was another level

10:24learning from Jeremy. And I did. So I was in a leadership role before. They were only hiring for ICs. I took the role because I wanted to learn. And it was absolutely a baptism of fire for sure. It was a tough, a tough time. I loved every minute of it. And can I just say? Yeah. On that point, I think some people discount the value of the learning experience as in sales, if at any job. And they might just look at the total remuneration or the commission earnings. They don't look at, actually, for their career, learning the playbook or the way to do it from top leader. But the fact you set about your journey with that first, I think is a good takeaway for people. I think it's about intentionality and what the longer term goal is as well, right? Like any good sales job out there, you'll learn good commission if you're good, right? That if a company's not offering that, do not join it. That should be great. That's the first takeaway of the session. Incentives drive behavior. That should just be given right. If you are good at sales, you can go and earn a great paycheck in this year and in the next year from your commission. But do anyone what you want to do in the future, right? If you do want to

11:26lead businesses, if you do want to join early sage companies as a CRO and take on that responsibility and make the life changing kind of wealth and money from equity. And you have to work for leaders who've done it before. I really believe that to have the best possible chance of going and doing successfully yourself. And you have to have an eye on an eye. You have to be more motivated, I think, by your development than by the short term like earning potential. I think huge important. It's always a red flag for me. If the main, it's okay. If people's main drivers money, that's great. You know, you want that in sales people. But if it's not followed pretty closely by development, learning, you know, progression, something that they're working towards, you run the risk of hiring a pretty mercenary sales like leader or sales rep until business, who all they care about is how they get to their commission check. They may not be kind of customer centric enough. They might be doing bad deals because it's going to help them earn, but it's not the right thing for the business. And the other risk is that they will move on as soon as a better offer and a bigger package comes their way, right? If you're only leaving for keeping them in the business is paying the commission. Development will come on

12:28to it later. I'm sure we're developing is key, absolutely key. And so going back then to multiverse. So you'd found Jeremy. And with White Hat at the time now rebranding multiverse. Yes. And it was such a cool company just doing something really interesting, right? Dark Trace, great tech company, very innovative tech, all the other companies I was looking at, I was looking at work, technology companies, but multiverse at the time was kind of trying to solve for like the people problem side of digital transformation. And I thought the ability to go to a company with this huge growth ambition and these great sales leaders there, but impacting people, that was really rare and unusual, right? And that was that was super attractive to me. And you kind of did it again because you were very humble and started am I right as an account executive? I did. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then reworked your way back up in the second awesome sales engine. And so multiverse, I think revenue now probably in the hundreds of millions error. Yeah. Growing pretty substantial. 50% year on year. Wow, still at that size. Still at this point. We're in our Q4. So it's going well, but we will be another 50% growth year this year. And next it's been a journey from a sales team of five people when I joined six

13:31years ago, right? And how many right now? My team now is about 130 people. Well, almost double over the next over the next year. Very cool. Very very cool. And a mother of two daughters. And a mother of two daughters. We're busy. Life is. What do you think? So must we drink you a little coffee? Needed coffee artists. Yes. Well, don't you? That's impressive. And I want to keep the focus on you. But just for our listeners, because there was another story at Dark Trace where Pepp has got a close friend Katie, who went on to be the global sales leader of Dark Trace. After IPOs is about a $5 billion company. And she's similar age range. Yeah. I mean, we, we, um, Katie, was at Dark Trace when I joined. She's one of my closest friends, um, so much respect for. I think she's a, she's an incredible leader. Again, she joined Dark Trace. Think it was her first job out of uni. Joiners and a sales rep did a brilliant job. Was sales person of the year, you know, a couple of years in a row, got promoted, quickly proved herself at every level. I think this is important, right? If you're going to build a meritocracy,

14:33you can't just promote people because, you know, you like them or think it's a nice thing to do. Yeah. It's only ever when people have absolutely smashed their role that you're promoting to the next one, but that's what Katie always did. Um, and yes, she led global sales at Dark Trace for she's a mum as well. She's a mum. Good for you. Got really more of this. Okay. So, can we, and obviously jump into anything you'd like, Pepp, but if we go back to the initial discussion on giving talented people a chance. And do you think, because you've been in successful organisations, very successful, who they've recognised talent and, and perhaps therefore hasn't taken, um, bravery from, um, the lead. I'm thinking of like a small business owner here or MD for business. And you're staring at CVs for a role you've identified you on a higher. And thinking, is the safe option someone with 15 years experience? But actually looking at your story and Katie's story, there's something to be said for, well, safe option is getting someone who takes all the character boxes. But can we start there maybe on that? Yeah, great, great.

15:36When I think I'm hiring is the single most important thing you have to do as a leader or a CEO, sorry, of a small business or a big business, your company's success. I truly believe will live and die on the people that you bring in and the environment that you create for them to thrive, right? It's, it's your only, it's your biggest differentiator. It's your, your, your biggest, cost-based, quite often, right? And it's the, the secret weapon if you, if you get it right. So I think a lot of people will not spend enough time defining that, the ICP, of what they're looking for, that ideal candidate profile, right? And I think there is an element of what would ideal be and also what's realistic, right? If you're paying, because everyone puts, I want somebody who's driven the most evaded, who's, who's fluent in a good communicator. And you also need to know what you're paying, right? If you're paying the bottom 50th sent title, you probably can't be going out there trying to hire people that are on packages earning like three times as much right now, and then you've got like a great equity offer, right? So what's your ideal profile? And I think on that, you're looking at two things really. If you think about it in a framework, you've got the tangibles, which I would class as experienced, right? That's what you can see on a CV, you can see it on LinkedIn, but not all experiences equal. So again, you're building

16:40frameworks, you're qualifying, you're breaking that down. Is it really important to you that this person has experience of spinning up, you know, satellite offices across Europe and running them successfully? Because that's what you want to do next. Has this person had great success coming in as like the first sales rep on the floor and then growing out the team over five years? Like, what is it that you're trying to do? And what is it in experience that you're looking for? It is worth spending time on that. And for the listeners, I think when you talk about experience, some people may be like, oh, is that five, seven years? But actually, is it a couple of years, like two years of good experience, someone maybe even just early 20s? And that's enough for you, or how do you judge your experience? Well, I wish there was a rule that you could always stick to, right? To make it very, very easy. I think you know your business, you know your clients, you know where you're trying to go, right? I don't think in a small business, if there's no one else that can train and develop that leader, you want to run the risk of bringing someone in that's only got a couple of years of sales experience to lead a team, right? Should you be bringing in sales reps with very little sales experience, if you've got a leader in seat that can develop them 100%, but I think if you've got one sales leader that you're hiring for, you're a small business,

17:44they're going to have to do a lot. I think experience probably counts there more than it does in other places. That doesn't mean it needs to be 15, 20, 30 years of experience in the same industry, right? I think if you're looking at a high quality experience, someone that has, you know, worked for a couple of great companies, they've been promoted multiple times in both companies, they've been loyal, they're not job hopping every year, the experience is relevant, they've got good back channels will come onto that as a great actionable tip as well. And back channels. You can probably get away with five to eight years experience there, right? Versus the 15. Back channels before we go into it in a bit. I can say everything I'm talking about now. So back channels is where you might try and get a bit of grasp of someone through their network and past. During the hiring process, right? It's not referencing. It's something that you do as you're going through the hiring process. The great thing about salespeople, sales leaders, is that they're great at selling, hopefully. That's really hard in an interview process because they're good at selling themselves. Yes. And your job right is to always look for the reasons when you're hiring, why not to hire someone? Because most people are good people, right? They like looking

18:45for the good in people and there will always going to be a load of reasons to hire someone. Everyone's done something good, but you want to be looking for all the reasons not to hire that person so that you can do a better kind of risk assessment, right? And so experience got that. Yeah. That's the tangibles. To try and make the intangibles tangible, if that's the tool possible. What are the other things you look for and how do you demonstrate that? The things you can like take a box and say, yep, they've got that. It's a great question and because they're intangible, you know, the hard thing to do is to try and make them as tangible and as qualifiable as possible, right? So most playbook companies out there and this is my background, we'll be looking for, you know, people that are smarts, they've got the right level of intelligence to kind of pick up new concepts, new things. They are coachable, you know, they're coming in, then they, they, they, they want to learn. And I'm sort of interrupting the coachability because I think some things you do you might take for granted. Yeah. And so what I love about Pepsi's hiring process for my understand is they will give quite practical and sometimes hard

19:48feedback at the end of each interview stage and expect the candidates to take that on board and demonstrate it in the next phase. And that is a live test of coachability. And I think I rarely see that in other companies, particularly small businesses. 100% is a great way to test, right? Because you, you can ask questions about that. Like, uh, what are you coachable? Are you coachable? Yes. Yes. Um, what's the most impactful piece of feedback you ever had? How did it play out in real life? Like what's your biggest development area so you can understand are they aware of their gaps? You can ask lots of questions, but I think giving people feedback live, seeing how they respond to it and seeing if they apply it in your next interview, the best way is to test right if someone's coming in and they're willing to, to learn. And not many people do it. I rarely see, I think that's a great takeaway for listeners is starting that. It helps you filter out some of the, you know, arrogance you can sometimes find in salespeople. I think confidence is great. Arrogance is not so great. And arrogance is very often the blocker to be coachable so it can help on that as well. And then drive, which is the most important thing, I think, for any, any salesperson. So this is what I love because again, if you say someone, are you driven? If you're like, yes, I'm really driven. Tell me a story

20:51when you're driven. I can be a lego model when I was 10 against adversity. But how do you, how do you seek or prove drive yourself as an interviewer for your self leaders? Yeah, it's a really hard one. I think all of the intangibles are hard. And again, putting these things into kind of scorecards, even if they're very brief in the backgrounds that you know what you're doing when you're comparing candidates is a really helpful way to try and get a framework around what you're testing for, right? I'm coming up with these questions. But generally, you're looking for people that have got proven examples of things that they've done inside of work and outside of work that demonstrate, you know, drive going above and beyond. And that, that, that for some people might be that they've run like five ultramarathons in a row. For some people, that might be that they had to take two years out of school because they were a young carer for their parent and they self-taught themselves, a GCSE, right? Like that, that is a, that's amazing. That is a hugely motivated person. You can see in experience as well, right? Has that person worked at a good company and had frequent promotions or progressions suggest that they're driven? Do they know where their career is going in the next five years,

21:5310 years, and are they taking logical steps to help them get kind of towards it, right? There are loads of questions that you can drill into on that, but you definitely don't want that. And give really practical answers, yeah. Yeah, really great answers. So if you can't ask them the education one, because multiverse deals... Intelligent, not education, or being smart, so IQ and EQ. Yep. I might come back to EQ because that's another one that you guys test really well. On the education side, academics, because multiverse works in the, as you said, the talent world of apprenticeships and, and it brings up the whole topic of university. Not, not needed. Great. Like, absolutely not. Because in the past, you know, people would be like, have they got a 2-1 from a top 20 university, just to filter out the noise so you can then interview. But I sense that's changed. And so if you, to your point on, someone left school for two years to care for their mother, their dad, and self-taught, how do you look at academic performance today? Has your view changed over the last few years? I mean, it's not a bad thing to have a good, academic background, right? So no one's ever going to qualify it out because they got a great

22:53degree, but it's also not going to take that box because academic smartness, academic intelligence doesn't translate to being brilliant at being a great sales rep or a great sales leader, right? I think that is far more about, you know, Jeremy Duggan used to call it street smarts. Yep. How quickly do they respond to challenging questions in an interview? If you give them like a live test, how do they handle that? How do they handle objections? Because again, in tough client meetings, they're meeting a CIO or a COO, they're throwing objections their way. How do they handle that live in the moment? Like that kind of clock speed, right? How quickly can they think and problem solve is the most important part of intelligence, I think. If someone hasn't been to uni, great. Ideally, they've done something that shows that they were, you know, they had a direction. They were doing something. So they were, they went straight into a tele sales role because they wanted to make money. That's hard. Very hard. They went straight into recruitment or they traveled and then they came back and they started, they career slightly later. All of these things are absolutely fine. Degrees fine, not having a degree sign. It's not what intelligence means to me. Is there anything else you like to add in

23:56terms of how you look for the right people to hire so you get talented individuals involved and give them a chance to, to, I suppose, into your meritocracy because that's what sells is? 100%. I think this is going back to that, that kind of framework piece on hiring, right? You're looking for and turning it into your ICP. And ideally, get it documented, even if it's just like a Google doc or something, right? Just write it down. What is the experience you're looking for? How many years and what type of experience? And they're also looking for evidence of, are they a job hopper? Are they moving every year? Because if that's happening, they're probably going to come to your company and do the same thing, right? So look for the red flags, like intelligence or being smart. Like, how have they turned up asking great questions? Have they done research on a company before they come and meet you? How do they handle live kind of problems that you throw at them in the room? Like write down the questions that you're going to ask and score people. Same for coachability, the book bits we talked about kind of previously, and the same for drive. If you're running into use of several candidates and you don't have a framework and you're not writing something down to it, it's really hard to make objective assessments as you go throughout a process. And then to kind of verify all of that, when you think

24:59you've got a great candidate in the funnel back to the back channeling piece, salespeople are great at selling themselves. Your job is to look for the bad news and kind of not mistrust because you inherently want to trust people, but just sense check, right? Ideally, you want to reach out to people that are in their network that can give you a kind of a confidential review on them as a person, as a peer, as a leader, as a direct report to build up that picture and make sure that everything that you think you understand about them from just three or four hours is true. There have been probably five or six candidates in the past couple of years that I would have offered that really trusted back channels have changed and we've not made this highest, right? And that's probably saved us for a world of pain. Just for the people tuning in for small business leaders, we talk about playbook companies and clearly pepper works with the best sales engines globally. And so when I think of playbooks and small businesses, as a small business owner or leader, I'd be thinking, what is the job title we're selling

25:59to? What type of company do they sit in? And what problem is our product or service selling for them? And when you know that to Pepper's point, you then work backwards on the kind of person you want to hire for that. And I think there are far too many job descriptions out there, which detail a players and try and take every box from being motivated, driven, like good academic performance or all that. But actually, you can simplify a lot. I think some of Pepper's learnings prove that we should overweight talent EQ IQ as opposed to purely have they done the job for 10 to 15 years before? Yeah, it's a matrix, right? They've got to have enough of everything. Yeah. Are you happy if you move on to you've you've hard talent and and then how do you how do you get the most out of teams? Because you have repeatedly done that and got people to become and stay as high performers? I think this is where the fact that I've been able to work for the people that I have in my career has just been an absolute game changer for me. Right? I've seen this done in the best way it can possibly be be done, like working for Jeremy

27:00and Steve and and Don here, right? Again, it all starts with talent. If you try and inflict a high performance culture on people that don't want it and aren't driven, it's going to be miserable for everyone, right? Don't do it. So it starts with talent. Bring the right people in a driven that want to progress, that want to be part of something. And that's kind of box number one. You've got to set ambitious but attainable targets, right? There is nothing more motivating to a sales force, particularly if you're a small company, there aren't many people. If no one is taking their number and no one is earning, you know, try and get someone earning big money quickly, if you can, to inspire the rest of the team as well, that that's a great thing to do. So ambitious but attainable targets. And then the third one, this is something that I really, really believe in and it's getting people to focus on controlling the controllables. You know, sales is, I think it's the best career out there. It's such an equalizer. You don't need, you know, 10 years of training, you don't need a master's degree, you don't need to have come from a certain background, right? I think it's a brilliant way for people with five years experience to go and earn hundreds and hundreds of thousands

28:01pounds. I think it's amazing for that. Sales is a great job. I think it's a brilliant job, provides great, great kind of, you know, the quality for people to earn good money without huge degrees or loads of training. But it can be stressful. I think it's a downside of it, right? You're carrying a quota, your job is sometimes only ever as safe as your last kind of few quarters, right? That is a lot of pressure to put on a person. And I think where I see people struggle the most with that and where companies get this wrong is if you're driving a mindset of like just focusing on the bookings number, the revenue number, like hitting your quota, it's really difficult because the first week of the quarter, there's not something you can do this week that closes your deal. You know, it's too far away. What you can do as a leader and what businesses, great play business to do is you build up leading indicators, you know, KPIs. What are the things in a sales reps business and in a deal that you know lead to success? EG, you're meeting a champion once or twice a week. Therefore, a sales rep in week one of the quarter cannot close their deal in week one of the quarter, but they can go out and get five or six meetings that week with

29:03their champion and their champions are at reports to improve the business case and build relationships and make sure that they're qualifying the pain further. That is a really actionable, really controllable thing that the rep can do that you can celebrate, that you know is keeping the deal on track and helps them focus on doing the activities that you know are going to lead to the deal and removes that mindset of fear, because they're only focused on trying to get to a number, they don't really understand how to get them. You saw me open my mouth in New York to say so, yes. So for listeners, I think that's a great point on sales 101 because a lot of small businesses will look at their sales highs and they'll be like, okay, we've got this target, they're not quite hitting it and they keep it on and they don't make decisions on their sales teams. And to your point, there are lead indicators, behaviors that actually we should judge the sales people on and if they're doing, and even they're not performing, then keep investing in them. If they're not doing those behaviors, that's when you force a decision and one behavior would be your simple one on champions. If a company is intent on signing a quote or a terms for your

30:07product or service, they're going to give you their time. And if your salesperson is not getting time with their champion to the state court is going to get the deal over the line of the other company. That's a warning sign. And so you're not just waiting and praying for the salesperson to hit their magical target. There are things you can look at week to week. And it's different for every business, right? And like for us at Multiverse, you know, for us that you're doing one to two meeting a week in each deal. We know from all the data that we have across all the years, that is one of the highest indicators of getting a deal closed. You might not have that data, but what you might know is that, okay, if you make 10 call calls, you will have one conversation which will lead to one opportunity, you know, average sales price is 50k. And if a sales rep's quarterly quota is 200k, they therefore need to make, you know, 40 calls. You know, I'm giving a very simple example, but you're, I think your job as a sales leader or as a business leader is to hire great people and then set the conditions for them to be successful. And some of that is breaking down and helping them to understand how they are going to be successful.

31:07That's like the metrics and the data points that they can stick to week on week to know if they're on track or off track. It also helps you right know if you're on track or off track. When you've got 120 reps like we do now, if I wasn't running my business using all of that data, I would never clue what's going on. You know, I can't manage my forecast on a deal basis. And you say control the controllables, but you still manage to drive and motivate driven people. And I, and there are two things that jump to mind immediately. One is, some people will pair a salesperson set a really attractive commission plan and expect people just to do their job. But even with the highest performing sales talent, you still as a sales leader have to drive focus and motivate. I think that's the focus. I think it is your job. You've got that framework right, hire good people, set ambitious but attainable targets and help people to understand on how they focus on the controllables, right? The coach that you build, it's a massive focus on inspiring and developing the team, right? So you want to coach where people can fail and you celebrate it and they're not punished for it, right? You want

32:08people to believe, you want people to think big, you want people to break records, you want to celebrate those behaviors, not just the end results. And at the same time, if you give your team development, if you help them fix things, stopping them from getting deals closed, for example, that rep can't champion build, that rep can never convert a call call. If you can help them change those things, you're making them successful in the role that they do today, they're more loyal and bought in because they've been developed. And again, you step out of this situation of having a mercenary rep that's in your business for a paycheck, who's going to go and a better paycheck comes along to having someone who's there because they're earning and they're learning. And ideally, they're having some fun as well. Yeah. I think post-COVID world, a lot of meetings still happen virtually, but get your reps back out on the road, right? Have the meeting customers having traveling with their leaders, celebrate the behaviors. You don't need to spend a load of money, but get the team building things in. Celebrate, you know, the call calling efforts of that week, as much as you celebrate the deal that closes at the end of quarter. And the call calling, because you expect your well-paid account executives with lots of experience still to drive their own leads, I imagine. Yeah. Yeah. And the kind of companies. And you'll see a lot of

33:12play-bit companies do that. Interesting. And the kind of companies for our listeners to bring that to life. So the top forming sales teams in Europe, I imagine, I'm going to watch your eyes and get some wrong, you'd be expecting to do like 50 to 60 research planned call calls like a day a week. Is that up there? Yeah. So I think then the next bit you come down to like running a kind of a high-forms culture, it's operating rhythm. What is the operating rhythm that you have? Week by week, month by month, quarter and quarter. What are the key milestones that are taking place every week, every month, every quarter? Are you happy to bring that to life? Yeah, sure. So I mentioned it because you talk about kind of pipeline generation there. So a lot of play-bit companies will do what's called PG Monday, or PG Tuesday, pipeline generation Monday, Tuesday. Is it fun? Is it fun? Is it fun? Is some people like it? Most people don't, I think it's very much seen as a necessary evil to get the work done, to build the pipeline, to get your business done. And that is a day when everyone comes into the office, there are no external meetings, you're not meeting customers, which we try and have no internal meetings, like one training session. And realistically, the average numbers are 80 dials.

34:19You might then have kind of eight connects. On one day. 80 dials one day. You might then have eight connects from that you will have potentially one or two meetings. That is an awesome stat, because I suppose the likes of multiverse, you're in quite a busy market with, imagine you're speaking to CIOs, Chief Information Office. C-11 and T-1 again, that's a really big focus, right? You see a lot of companies focus on the meetings that are easier to book, which is with a much more junior people. And then it's very hard to work your way up. So this is something that Jeremy and Steve Rodin in the early days was we're going sea level down. And one of the first things they did was run with the round of PG Blitz for C-suite. And we were just like, we'll pick up the phone to CIOs and CIOs. This is mad. We booked great meetings. You know, those deals have the biggest average sales price we've ever done. They move more quickly. So because there's so much noise out there, you're in the best performing, effectively, in my view, sales engine in Europe, with all the tech, all the sales experience, and still picking up the phone and dialing, even though it's like 80 calls to one or two meetings

35:23is where we focus our time. Yeah, and look, I am, if a sales rep is hitting their numbers, and they've got a brilliant way of doing kind of LinkedIn messaging, and they're using their network and they're hitting their numbers, we don't, you know, mandate you have to call call. However, we know that it is the most reliable way to book your meetings. And that is the single thing that we hold people to account on week by week is that you've booked your meetings, because it's controlling the controllable. Yeah. You do all those things and you lose a deal. We've got your back, but you know, come on. And it works. The effort in the front. Yeah. And the other reason why it's so beneficial to have your most highly paid people do that work is if you've got a bit of a C-suite or C-minus to kind of outreach strategy, do you want a brand new kind of fresh out of a uni person who's still learning everything, trying to have that conversation for one minute with a CIO and convert it? Probably not. You probably want your best sales person to be doing that, and then there's also the way that people treat those leads and those meetings when they've gone through the effort of booking them, we have a really high conversion rate. So it means that our leading indicators are that our reps have to book, you know, 10 new business meetings a quarter to be able to do 120% of their number based on our average conversion rate and every

36:27business is different. Because those sound like simple milestones, but the number of companies that overcomplicate it and jaw point don't work back because from their targets and make it realistic. And I think the other thing I'd say for anyone, the small business world, I think in the world of digital and pep as well, you might get one meeting for every 40 to 60 calls. If you did this in quarter sectors like, for example, construction, far safety, manufacturing, I imagine your reps will be on 5 to 10 calls per meeting. And whilst you might not have the same high standards, because you're not hiring the AA players and incentivizing them. If you're doing 30s, 40 calls a day, just imagine the difference that makes your pipeline and people don't do it. It's like, you know, people sit there and wait for imbounds. Yeah. Although if they asked you ask them a meeting, right, when pipeline is king, pipeline, everything can be forgiven if you have pipeline because you have coverage, you have protection, you can take a much more customer-centric approach to your deals, you're not pushing people,

37:29you're not rushing people because you've got the protection of pipeline coverage, right? That comes from great PG. Great PGs can probably come from your top reps. So yeah, even if you're a company where you mostly have an inbound motion today and you get your team to start doing 20 calls a week, you know, you've got the chance to kind of 2, 3x pipeline and that's going to have a huge impact on your ultimate sales. Yeah. And just in case people listening to don't know what pipeline is, pipeline is the total amount of opportunities, potential projects, potential deals, potential contracts in your system that you're forecasting, not all of them are going to convert, but you can only convert what's there to be converted. And then we were about to go into your operating model. Yes. And I have so many questions from people about how often do you have weekly sales meetings? How do we like drive cadence or keep on KPIs? If you're happy bringing that to life, I think fascinating. Yes. And I think this is really important that you have the right moments of like inspiration, development and accountability to hold those great people that you've hired and the great kind of playbook that you've rolled out to to account right,

38:29but you don't want to overkill because it becomes micromanagement and it's not helpful, right? People have so many internal meetings, they can't do their jobs. So on a week-by-week basis, we will hold each first line leader will do a forecast call with their direct team. The second line leaders will have weekly forecast calls with their first line leaders and I will have... And so first line leader, second line leader. So first line leader would be like a manager who's individual contributors. So your manager running sales reps. Your second line leader is a leader running your first line leaders. And then I run the second line leaders, the structure. And so every level will have a forecast call each week. I run mine on Friday. My leaders will run theirs on a Friday morning. Their leaders will run theirs on a Thursday, right? So it all rolls up to the end of the week when we do it with me in the CRO and my second line leaders. Forecast calls important. Weekly one to ones. More important than a forecast call. Controversial or not. So you would have weekly one to one with every one of your direct reports.

39:29And a first line leader would have a sales manager with the sales reps. They've got six generally in their teams. We'll have a weekly one to one with all of their reps. And again, when you're trying to simplify this operating rhythm, for us we have pipeline generation Tuesdays, Mondays for one to ones. So almost all of Monday will be blocked out for the leader to have one to ones with their team. And what you're doing in those sessions is you are looking at the metrics, the data, the leading indicators from the week before. You're encouraging the rep to bring the problems and the gaps they see in their business that they want to talk about that they need help on. You're talking about pipeline generation. You're talking about pipeline coverage. You're probably not really going into the forecast in that meeting. And then you're using dual review slots, you know, deal inspections, whatever it is. You want to call them and forecast calls to do that during the week. But those one to ones, they are about the development of your rep. I think that's key because loads of people will sit down with their salesperson, go through their their CRM. So if you're in a simple company, the Excel spreadsheet of all the opportunities, still acceptable. Very acceptable. But actually, you're not holding to account, you're coaching, helping solve their problems and like just helping smooth them selling really.

40:35And it's very important part of it, right? Deal inspection, qualifications, support and pipeline like that. That's a really big part of a sales leader's job. But that should be done in a space, I believe, outside of your weekly one to one, which is about the the person, you know, are they developing? How is there, you know, we said earlier, did that person have a problem building champions? Is that stopping them from converting their opportunities? Okay, how do you use that session to track them? Are the actions you agreed that they're doing to develop working? Do they need more enablement? How can you help them more? You know, it's getting out the problems week on week so that there's never a point where, you know, someone suddenly miles off track and you had no idea. Yeah. Really, really important. And pipeline Tuesdays, forecast calls, deal reviews, you know, happen kind of throughout throughout a week. Final question for me on that is forecast calls. A sales reps will always be under pressure to say, I'm definitely near closes deal this quarter and have a number that's broadly within this target. And sometimes as a sales leader for your first and second line, it might be hard, something you've got to take on trust. But what are the questions you'd ask?

41:37And one is the behaviors and interactions with customers. But what are the questions you asked to get some confidence in that forecast? I think there are two approaches you can take here. One is qualification into the points that you know are risks or positives in a deal, right? So a reps telling you, hey, well, what's great deal? 300K, it's going to close next month. It's done. Great. I'm going to report it up. Yeah. Tell the CRR. It's happening. I'm going to spend my paycheck now. And you're saying, okay, well, I'm seeing on the CRR or I'm seeing on Gong or I'm seeing like wherever you're you're recording this, right? You've not met anyone at that company for three weeks, right? And I'm like, yeah, my main contact me on holiday. Said to get back to me this week. He hasn't. It's all good. They've said they're going to do it. You know, I mean, that's a glaring road flag, but it's qualifying. It's the same thing that you're doing in a recruitment funnel when you're hiring someone is you are looking for the flags. You're looking for the bad news and you're asking multiple levels of question at each point because someone that has got good answers will be able to give you answers to those multiple levels of questioning and someone that is blacking will not write. So when's your next touchpoint? What do you need to achieve in your next touchpoint? And you will also know as a business,

42:39what are the milestones that you can record that mean you know the deal is going to happen because it's objective. So that might be that you have got a contract sent out to them, or they've you've had the first red lines back from their legal team because you know that means they've actually engaged a legal kind of rep or they've assigned a project manager to the team. Great. They've now actually invested kind of their internal resource on the deal now. It's got a higher chance of conversion or you know, you've got when your POV finishes, you now know that you've got a higher chance of a proof of value, proof of concept if you offer a trial. So trial. Yeah. Okay. And so again, different for every business, but you need to know what those milestones are that are more objective than the subjective things your sales are probably telling you so that you can you can challenge effectively. So I think that that's the personal approach. But in the really world we're in today right with with AI and with was tooling and everything available and you don't have to spend a fortune here. There are also tools at all that for you. Have you got top not going to go too techy, but I mean we use gong. We use gong a lot. And gong.io they do recordings of calls with prompts visually dating houses. Yeah. They also you know, it's a it's more of like an end-to-end kind of

43:42risk management process as well, right? They record all the calls. They flag signs of positive championship attitude. They flag signs of negative attitude. If you integrate it with your kind of emails, they can see when you have an or have had email contacts, they can see when you have or haven't had meetings, they can see that you're actually just meeting that really junior person, like week on week. So even though it looks like your your activity site, it's not good quality. So again, if you're not an experienced sales manager or you can't bring one in, I think sometimes relying on these tools to guide you to where you should be looking and where you should be focusing is a great way of small businesses having that level of qualification and inspection. Super. Above and beyond whatever the the rappers is saying. And so as we come to a close, before us a few final questions, anything else you'd like to bring to life? Well, it's a very big open-ended question. Um, I, I, I, what are the best sales questions? Good point, Will. I think that to sum up the things that we talked about today, right, if you hire good people and your job as a sales leader is to create the success, that create the conditions for them to be successful and you can reward them by progression

44:45and promotion and all of those great things. Generally, you're better off building your talent bank by doing that versus always bringing in external leaders. I think you want a bit of both because you don't want to create an echo chamber, hire good people, develop them, progress them, you will really, really reap the rewards. I agree. Totally. And so the last two things I've finished on is I'm just going to think of giving business owners, business leaders, the confidence to hire talented but more junior people potentially. And then also people who to your point are driven, talented, really want to have a, the opportunity to create wealth and value in their life and may not have the confidence to jump in sales. And so for the first ones, the leaders, from what you've been saying, people should have the confidence, having defined what kind of a salesperson they need, like who are they selling to and what are they selling, what they need to go through those steps with the, with the potential customer to actually spend more time

45:45focusing on talent, drive, empathy and EQ. And give them a chance. Don't go for what seems to be the super safe option on paper. Yeah. Again, I think it really is a balance, right? If you're a small business and you're not going to have a huge team and this one person can be doing a lot, you do need them to have a certain amount of experience, but work out what the minimum is and what is important in that experience. Because again, 15 years of poor quality experiences means nothing and you're probably paying more for it too, right? So qualify exactly what it is that you want experience and then spend your time understanding what matters to in the intangibles and how you're going to qualify and test for that in the process, back channel. And also, look, if you haven't hired a sales leader before, it's really hard. Bring people in your network that have, you know, that there's, there's a, there's a great value in bringing someone for a final stage or a challenge stage to sit on your shoulder and help him to 100% 100% and then thinking about a young 18, 19-year-old or maybe a grad, 21, and they're thinking, hey, I'm driven talented, I want to be in a role where I can fly if I do well in that before. I think sales is great for that. What would your advice be to

46:48them if they want to find somewhere to start? Because they probably look at your applications for sales roles, which also you need to have closing experience at least five years. Where would you guide them to start? I think that if you're very early in your career and you've got no work experience starting out in kind of an SDR role or an SDR is effectively sales development representative right? That's a cold cooler. A cooler business development rep. You know, the people that are opening up the pipeline at the start, but aren't you responsible for closing any of it? Get that on your CV. It throws you in at the deep end on the hard bit like the cold calling, but you will get a chance to work with your AEs if you join a good company to do that. Lots of companies run programs where they want to bring in people with very, very limited or no backgrounds and train them, right? Sometimes bigger companies can be good for that too and a lot of companies will have like access programs where they're deliberately trying to support people coming in from more difficult backgrounds with less experience to help them build great careers, right? So to look for those opportunities, recruitments, another great place to start, I think. You know, I love it if I

47:48see a CV and people have been in a bit of a boiler room recruitment role for their first job. Yeah, because some people I know would frown on that and they'd be like, oh recruiting, but it's hard. It's hard and it's so transferable to sales, right? If I'm hiring them for like an enterprise rep role, the obviously need to have sales experience on top of that. If you've started and been successful in recruitment, you've been in a company where you've got big targets, it's there's pressure and you've done a great job. You've progressed and you enjoyed it. It's a really good sign that you're probably right for a high pressure, you know, sales department. You don't have a brand behind you to sell for you. It is a grind. Yeah, it's a grind. Gritty sales jobs are a good sign. Yeah, go and take on a Gritty sales job that's going to be hard for a couple of years, but it will pay off like you can't imagine if you do a good job there, right? We've got, we've got sales reps more to us. We've got sales reps of plenty of the companies out there that are, you know, 25 earning like hundreds of thousands pounds. But you need to accept you're going to have a hard few years, you know, building the basic skill sets to get there. And I hope for you that like pepper, you don't know like me. Fingers crossed. Makes no difference. You're on the phone. Well, after some hard years or so,

48:50pepper wise, that was awesome. Thank you very much. I enjoyed it. I know for you. Love you to see you. Thank you.