The Painful Realizations that Lead to Positive Change in Sales Leadership

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We are joined today by Matt Buchalski. Matt is a sales leadership professional with over 15 years of experience building and leading sales teams. He's worked in sales leadership at great companies like CA Technologies, ThoughtSpot, and more. He's currently the vice president of sales at RealPage. Matt, thanks for joining us today.

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[00:00:53] Lucas Price: What else should our, uh, should our audience know about your background?

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[00:01:57] Lucas Price: How did you get into sales?

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And I called him every day for a month got a job interview and I walked into his office. And it was 150 people standing up on the phones. And I walked in, I was like, this is awesome. And so I took that started co calling a week after high school and just the, enthusiasm, the competitiveness. the camaraderie between these guys is something I latched onto right away and never looked back and continue to look for that, [00:03:00] all those various characteristics and qualities and the opportunities that,

I find today.

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[00:03:23] Matt Buchalski: Yeah. Great question I've always been fulfilled by helping others. Right. way back to my early teens. I always had this kind of entrepreneurial spirit, right? I had a paper route. I used to melt lead in my parents garage make fishing sinkers so I can go fishing as a, you know, 13, 14 year old in order to get out fishing for a day.

y long time, I always wanted [: 00:04:00

So it was at a very early point in my career when I put the puzzle pieces together, that if you want to be on a great team, you have to have a great new year. What does a great leader do? They hire fantastic people. They believe in them. They, they build them up They pour into them. They love them.

ter. And, and I just started [: 00:05:00

[00:05:01] Lucas Price: I know one of the things that you have a real passion for. Is, uh, educating salespeople about their finances and how to, um, turn. Their sales success into a financial legacy. Can you tell us a little bit about the work that you do that there?

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Um, but one thing really kind of jumps out at me and it's like, we get these folks early in career We pour into them from a sales skills, sales enablement, product, overcoming objections, all the things, right? All the sales skills, we never really talk to these folks about what to do after they become successful, right?

And, and if you're on [: 00:06:00

And I think back to some of the probably financial mistakes I made. I remember being at president's club, my in president's club in Florida and like my big paycheck hit while I was there and we were in Florida for the next three days and I put a healthy dent in that check that time.

, start to acquire real [: 00:07:00

We have a podcast called the more doors podcast and, uh, we've had several successful salespeople on the show. Uh, you know, Ian Cognac

Being a recent guest where, you know, he was number seller at salesforce. com and at the enterprise segment.

For several years, and now, you know he talks very openly about how controlling his spending and, saving for the future have now allowed him to live the life that he wants in his early forties. And he's not in his, you know, in his heyday, golden years, you know, closing deals at the airport, instead of being home with his kids.

sions about the of financial [: 00:08:00

I'm a big advocate for that. I won't get like political about it or anything, but yeah, I think we've got to do a better job of financially educating our young people. But I also think as corporate society, right. We spend a lot of money training our sales teams on how to be effective and make a lot of money. But aside from the obligatory 401k meeting once a year. What else can we do? What other information channels can we open? What other types of spotlight events can we put on the importance of saving for the future and the compound effect of great life? Again, something I'm super passionate about. and I think there's a huge opportunity there for us to go educate our salespeople. Think about the money that some folks make in their job. And if they get RSUs or if they get pre IPO equity in certain companies, and they're lucky enough to go through an exit event, there's like a windfall of uh, you know, potential opportunity and income and capital gains there, but there's also consequences around [00:09:00] taxes. And uh, you know, what you can do to kind of self shelter yourself from taxes and, and ultimately amplify those even more. And I think we just owe it to our people and our teams to go give them visibility to those types of topics.

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world, we do get these

windfalls, you

know, if we're fortunate and, you know, when you're, when

you're making kind of a steady

salary and saving And investing each month, that's great. And that's what, you know, something people should do But I think

like, okay, now I have this windfall. What do I do with this to make for this money to be productive? Financial advisors out there don't talk about that because it's a rare um, often overlooked and not talked much.

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Absolutely. But you know, the legacy wealth that I've set up for myself and my family. And the compound effect of that, um, is huge. And I want to really empower other people to do the same thing and potentially grander scale and hopefully earlier in their life.

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audience. There [00:11:00] might be members of the audience who, uh, want to start following you and following you on that

topic. How do you start putting the pieces together and, go from, this is an opportunity to this as a vision,

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And we had sponsorship [00:12:00] from the CSO. My boss is, is fantastic. Um, and, and and we had headcount what we lacked was. You know, the, the orchestration and really how to organize it. And inside of, uh, inside of 60 days, ship righted and we haven't looked back since. But by talking to everyone, once I got into the company, we had an urgent need to fix the training and onboarding program for everyone that we were hiring, right? We didn't have, um, definitive hiring profile or any pro profile, right? We had, you know, no, regimented interview process. We had, no, flags that we should be looking for.

ough we use salesforce. com, [: 00:13:00

They hadn't been de duped. We hadn't trained the team. There was no messaging, so on and so And this is my first week. I'm like, Oh my goodness. What, what did I just do? But I looked, saw that as an opportunity. And, And. I think we've done an amazing job course correcting that. I spent time with sales ops.

I spent time with the team. I spent time with all the VPs of the sales organization. I talked to anyone that I could, that would give me time. And I found the common common wants, common needs, common problems, and then prioritize those and started chipping away. That became my job became chipping away at that to do list.

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And then you start to hear from other people, Hey, I'm not quite sure how I should be doing this. And so you're like, [00:14:00] okay, training, you know, that's standardized. On the other hand, um, I think what my experience in those situations is that there are people that do have agendas that are telling you different things.

And I think those are the most difficult things to sort through where, some people are saying, Hey, no, we should do it this way. And other people are saying, no, we should do it the opposite way. And, it can be really hard to get to the truth in those situations. Do you have any, um, Experience or advice about how you sort through those kind of the, thornier problems or the problems where people are, uh are, telling you different stories about the same thing.

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And, you'll really learn, the, landscape. Um, And I think it's sometimes it's important for your leader to know the types of things you're hearing so that they can help give you the guiding light that you need on what is important and what is not.

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You know when one of those employees is struggling, fingers are going to start pointing. And it was the manager of the problem is the [00:16:00] employee of the problem. I think these are the hard problems to sort Through. and, you know, I know that there's no magic answers to it. That's why they're hard problems, but

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Do you have data to support your thesis, right? What did you say before your manager got upset with you? What were you doing? How many times had he or she given you coaching on that? Why are you still doing right? Asking those questions and really kind of approaching those things like a coach is really important,.

the person that is accusing [: 00:17:00

But if you don't have the trusting relationship with that person, they'll never admit that no matter how many questions you ask and how many heart to heart conversations they ask. So to your point or to your example, like when you when, you're in a situation as a leader where you have differences in opinion ultimately it's your job to find your North star and find your truth in that situation.

And, in my opinion, the best way to do that is ask a lot of questions. And find the data to support either or both cases.

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[00:17:49] Matt Buchalski: Put your to do list together, figure out which actions on that list have the most impact. of the ones that you can identify that have the most impact. Where's the low hanging fruit, which are [00:18:00] more strategic. I'm going to have, you know, do you need to make an update to salesforce. com in order to execute this?

Do you need to hire a copywriter to publish a bunch of training material? Those are kind of longer projects, but find your biggest impact, uh, action items or priorities, go find the low hanging fruit and attack it.

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[00:18:45] Matt Buchalski: clear communication, simple as that, right? You've got to have. The ability to listen to people, collect feedback, create a plan, and then communicate that plan, right? Communication, concise communication of a plan [00:19:00] is one of the most important tools that a leader can have, right? Here's, what's, here's what's got us to this point.

Here's why I'm here. Here's the opportunity that I see for us. Here are the changes that we need to go through, right? Um, and when I came when I joined ThoughtSpot, uh, the team was large or pretty much all based in Palo Alto, California, right? I was going to help them build, uh, uh, an office in North Dallas, right?

In order to do that, we weren't going to hire a bunch of all new people. I was going to shift some headcount from Palo Alto to Plano. I was very clear about that up front, right? Some people didn't like it, but that's what I was hired to do. The more clearly you can communicate things, the better, not everybody's going to like it, but at the same time, leadership is not necessarily a popularity contest and sometimes not a democracy, right?

We have a job that we need to do. We have a mission to accomplish. We clearly articulate it. And then we've got to go do it.

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[00:20:09] Matt Buchalski: It becomes more complex to say the least. And I think it, When you're a frontline leader and you're getting kind of information passed down to you and you have a team of direct reports, it's your job to make sure that they know and get them on board, right? As you move up and you become a second, third, fourth line leader, right?

The amount of communication that you need to do increases and sometimes increases exponentially, right? So I have a fantastic frontline leadership team in my organization. But they, can be opinionated, right? It's, their job to shoot at my ideas. And it's their job to question me about some of the things that I think we need to do.

very interesting job, right? [: 00:21:00

I don't want to say bias or waffling, but it's bias or waffling, right? Especially for those folks that you've promoted into leadership roles. So I think, you know, as you move up, you've got to get your leadership team on board with the plan, the mission, the message, you've got to give them an opportunity to poke at it, shoot at it, sleep on it, where possible, and come back with questions about the why and the how, and then you communicate that out to the team in a uniform voice. Uh, that everyone is completely on board with and, if you don't sell your agenda, if you don't sell your plan, you don't sell your mission like that up front, it's going to be very difficult to get everybody moving in one direction with one voice.

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[00:22:03] Matt Buchalski: It's actually not that difficult for me, knock on wood. And maybe that's because of the relationship that I've built with the rest of my leadership team. I mean, they have, you know, I think of myself as kind of a conduit between the GM that I report to and the four or five leaders that I have in my organization.

But I mean, we're tight, right? And I think We've done an amazing job over the last four years, just building trust with one another, but there are certainly some hairier topics that we talk about and, you just got to create again, I keep coming back to this, but you've got to create a space where everybody feels safe to say no, or I don't agree, or here's what we haven't talked about yet, or here's the things that we haven't thought about.

And how are we going to address this? How does this offset X, Y, and Z? And you've just got to be really, thoughtful. I love kind of the build process, but my, even my boss will tell you I'm a little bit of a bull in a China shop. This is very hard for me to do right. I get very compelled with taking action.

times like I've, embarked on [: 00:23:00

[00:23:34] Lucas Price: When you're gathering that feedback from your leaders and allowing people to poke holes in it and refining your messaging and refining the plan based on that what are mistakes that can be made that people should avoid as they're thinking about going through that process?

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It's our job as leaders. To go find time to talk to that person about what they didn't feel comfortable saying in that meeting, because it's the unspoken that sometimes becomes louder than the voice. And, we have to go, we can't assume that everyone's on board. I also really like that. If I'm going to have a group meeting with my team, my leadership team, we're going to talk about something in my one on ones with them, I literally say, what'd you think of the meeting?

What'd you think of the conversation? What did you think of the reactions? Did you understand where Susie was coming from when she objected? Did you understand where Sam, why Sam was excited about why this is going to be awesome? I want to really kind of double tap into all that because you'll, you're going to unearth emotion.

t about, and that's the time [: 00:25:00

[00:25:03] Lucas Price: Yeah, I think that's great. I agree. I think, you know, a lot of times as a leader, It can be valuable to go first, especially around vulnerability and, you know, to encourage the open conversation. But when it comes to opinions about a plan, I think when a leader goes first, if people are on the fence, they'll, you know, they can kind of like fall in line with the leader and then you don't really hear all of their objections and what they, and so I think being able to guide, you know, being able to hear from other people before you.

Share what you want to do as a leader. What your opinion is as a leader can be, uh, can be valuable, but it's difficult to do, you know, uh, a lot of times we got to these places by having good judgment, by having opinions. And, we want to share those rather than listen to others first, oftentimes.

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And then, all right, team, this is what we're doing. Go get on the phone. This is the new message. Boom. And, I wasn't winning a whole lot of influence and I wasn't winning a whole lot of loyal. Uh, members of my team and it took me a couple of really tough three sixties a long time ago to, to realize that.

And, I think that was probably some of the most difficult feedback I ever received, but resulting in the most positive change over time, right? Creating that environment, asking the questions, having human to human conversations, bringing people into the decision making process and letting them know it's safe, it's a safe place to object.

, and maybe not undervalued, [: 00:27:00

[00:27:01] Lucas Price: did it take to turn that difficult feedback into useful feedback? How were you able to use it instead of becoming defensive about it?

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I was on the verge of tears a couple of times. It was just really difficult things to hear and especially read about yourself, especially the narrative part of a 360. My goodness, you can really figure out how many, uh, unhappy fans you have in your organization when you dig into that stuff, but I just, I'm committed to self improvement.

made a list of things that I [: 00:28:00

And then I started to read, you know, get back into reading leadership books and podcasts and the whole thing. Not only did I start consuming that content, but I started to make changes personally and professionally. So right around this time, this whole thing is happening on my professional life. I went through a very, significant personal change, uh, outside of work where I started to meditate more often and go to the gym and go on a big weight loss journey and the whole thing.

you to stop sending emails at: 1230

This is before, like you do the automated something you can do now. And just those little changes. Made me less of a one track leader and more empathetic to respecting people's time and that sort of thing. So I identified a couple of very, easy action items. I went through this kind of personal and professional change at the same time.

And since then, it's just been. It's kind of an up and to the right and everything that it did.

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[00:29:35] Matt Buchalski: Yeah. Um, embrace and execute on the concept of getting 1 percent better every day, whether it's personally or professionally, or maybe even both that the compound effect of that is very, real and will have huge impacts on your life. Um, I can tell you that from firsthand experience, uh, also [00:30:00] don't underestimate the power and impact of building great relationships, uh with your boss, with your colleagues, with your direct reports, with your skips, the whole thing.

Make yourself available to talk, make yourself available to listen, uh, be there and be human with your team. Don't, it's not always about how many deals did you book? It's not always about how much revenue you bring in. Did you hit your quota? Ask them about them, know their husbands or wives, names, kids, names, pest names, where they're going on vacation.

What do they want to do next? And when you humanize their experience in working with you, the results become exponentially different.

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And then here at the end, when you shared about, [00:31:00] um, how you realized you had to change in order to be the leader that you wanted to be, and, you know, A lot of us, you know, talk about personal development and we talk about it in a way that it's just all positive and, uh, but the truth is that it's really difficult.

You know, a lot of times in order to get to where we need to be as leaders, we have to confront things about our identity that are, that's not the way we view ourselves. And and that can be really difficult. But going through that difficult journey is what gets us where we need to be as leaders.

And so I really appreciate you kind of sharing and opening up a little bit about that. Um, where, uh, where can our audience find you online? You mentioned the podcast, maybe you could give us a get a little bit more about where to find that and where else to find you online as well.

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I'm a co host of that show. We, release about an episode a week, but, you know, it's very relevant to your audiences where we're, doing, we're taking intentional effort to talk to folks that have grown up in technology sales and sales positions. Um, and either, you know, build themselves legacy wealth, and in some cases really escape the W2 and, take their next steps as an entrepreneur inside of multifamily real estate.

So check out the show. We've had Ian Koniak from Salesforce. We have, uh, Sam Silverman on this, on the show. We have a couple of other amazing guests coming up specifically from the technology sales and sales leadership field and, uh, more coming after that.

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Thank you for joining us today.