The Power of People: How to Build a High Performing Sales Organization

Lucas Price: [: 00:00:00

She excels at building high performing teams for sustainable growth. And knows how to rally teams for go to market motions. Tracy helps clients deliver value with enriched buyer experiences and positive revenue outcomes. Tracy, thank you for joining us today. What else should our audience know about you?

Tracy Linne: I grew up overseas, so I spent some time as a kid in places like Iran, London, Cape Town, South Africa, where I finished high school. So I had a worldly travel, and now I'm hailed from Marblehead, Massachusetts.

hat. And it sounds like that [: 00:01:00

Tracy Linne: I took my dad's diplomatic corps background and just parlayed that into some of my corporate work. And so I've worked on both coasts for Software companies for many years and had a lot of international assignments, bringing European typically companies here to the U S or vice versa, or managing both.

Lucas Price: Oh, that's great. To start off here. I have a relatively broad question and feel free to take it in any direction you like, but sales organizations are always facing changing environments. That's just part of the reality of being in business, I think. For a few years ago a lot of those changes were things like unlimited demand and how to deal with it and how to build your team fast enough and free money.

Now the change has gone the other direction where demand is shrinking. For a lot of organizations, deal sizes are getting smaller. Deal cycles are getting longer. What are some of the pillars of building a high performing team in the midst of negative change?

Tracy Linne: I if [: 00:02:00

And I think that SAS companies in particular have been challenged. To respond to some of the innovations that are coming along in the people category because the pace is very fast. So when you're looking at maybe 80 percent of the industry with a highly transactional sale, the rate of change is very fast.

dapt to all the changes that [: 00:03:00

And so It's exciting. Most people don't take the time to do that preparation, but I would suggest that actually the mindset of thinking about being in a long distance competition is very helpful. And so if you approach your work. Your new assignments, your changed assignments, your pivots, the programs you build, the people that you hire.

If you approach this with a long term foundational point of view, and today we're going to talk about people specifically that's a different mindset. And there are some Guiding principles, I believe that make that work.

Lucas Price: I saw somewhere and I don't remember where are the exact numbers, but I saw recently some sort of survey of the SAS landscape and it said that, very recently there were. There were, I think something like 27, 000 SAS companies and within a couple of years, it became 47, 000 SAS companies.

ition. And then SAS, we have [: 00:04:00

And we have these incredible gross margins where you can make mistakes and as long as you get to scale, it's okay that you made all those mistakes. It's a much more competitive and much more efficient environment out there. And so I think the importance of getting the people stuff right and not making as many mistakes is becoming more and more important.

prediction the difference in: 2024

And the reason for that is, we now have to layer in [00:05:00] and co manage the implications of AI. In our processes, in our technology. And yet I don't think the people side has caught up. So for a lot of people, this is an opportunity to level set and understand where the strengths are with automation, leverage that and build up and bolster your people strategy because it's harder to attract people.

It's been a tough year. People haven't been making money. How are you going to build the right fly paper? To attract the best candidates, you have to build a system for that. So I think that takes a different mindset and perhaps some reprioritization.

Lucas Price: On the people side some of the items in the life cycle are recruiting the selection process during hiring training upskilling and promotions. Those are some of the pillars. Are there other pillars that are really important?

t. I've listened to a lot of [: 00:06:00

How do you actually hire and develop an advanced people so that you can keep them from a retention standpoint? How do you do the onboarding program? How do you really granularly get into behavioral interviewing, which you're showcasing through your own solution? Our industry doesn't know that these tools and methods necessarily are there.

I would say that We're behind some of the larger organizations in other industries. And I think part of that again is this pace this pace of SaaS, the pressure, and it's frankly even, your board members . So some of the foundational things have been missing. I don't think we can skip over that anymore.

If I may, what I really like [: 00:07:00

But I think the mindset to create the program is important. In people process and technology people is first for a reason because you can't do the other two without having a really strong people strategy. Who's going to do the work. You let the bots do the work. Probably not. So I think the design of the program is really important.

From my experience, you need to think about your people strategy as a go to market strategy. It is a go to market strategy. How are you going to get your solution to market? You're going to get it through a team and you need to think about deploying that as a go to market strategy. If you do that, you'll treat a program for recruiting, hiring.

ing and advancing your people[: 00:08:00

plan and project. They probably have participation in components of it. It's probably communicated to your external stakeholders. Certainly your board knows about it. I believe that recruiting high performing team has to elevate to that level.

Lucas Price: One of the things I'm thinking about, when people say team, my mind partly goes to sports teams and on sports teams, you want high performing individuals, but you also have people that play different positions.

So within a sales team do you think about Oh yeah, we have this seller and that seller. We are looking for people who have different skill sets within individual sellers. Obviously there are different positions within a sales organization in terms of enablement and ops and management and stuff like that. But. Do you look for different roles with sellers as well?

Tracy Linne: [: 00:09:00

There's an excellent article in HBR, the December edition, where the CEO of LinkedIn his name is Ryan Roslowski, and I was not familiar with his written work before, but he suggests that you need to think about developing your job descriptions much the way you do, Lucas, which is around skills.

y think about jobs positions [: 00:10:00

These should be the definitions by which You not only recruit for you train the recruiting team to recruit by and you train the interviewing team in panel interviews and other methods to use this as part of your guiding principles. So the structure of your program has to have these elements. And you can't necessarily take a sales hiring program from your last company.

And bring it to a new, you really need to design something that's unique to your particular organization and current state, whatever current state is size, maturity level number of roles. complexity of the solution, all of those things. So it's a pretty big task, but if you do the heavy lifting up front, it's pretty smooth sailing.

expense and waste that goes [: 00:11:00

Lucas Price: There are certain traits that I would say sales leaders almost universally look for when they're hiring salespeople and that they might have different names for the traits, but they want people who are, resourceful, they have. Resilience.

Usually they're looking for people who are coachable. What are some of the traits that you would call like more conditional?

t I think are very important.[: 00:12:00

Lucas Price: People really struggle with this in our industry. You need creativity to problem solve differently. Your path is blocked. Nobody's answering your calls, responding to your outreach. So you need the creativity to work through that with your colleagues, yourself, and so on which means you have an open mind about there are other avenues.

I need to understand that and explore that and get help with that. But also this lasting ability to change forever, this adaptability. And I think you can test for that in the very first interview.

u said, an emerging company. [: 00:13:00

Whereas if you're established kind of transactional playbook and you want people to come in and run the same playbook on a transactional motion over and over again, adaptability might not be as important. Is that a good like example of like where you would elevate it and where you wouldn't elevate it

Tracy Linne: I don't think there is a sales cycle in an industry around that isn't changing anymore. And I think the rate of change is accelerating. Because as the rate of change accelerates this is just something we have to manage through and we have to anticipate this.

And if you've got a more rigid team that's responding rigidly, that's not going to help you. It's not going to be helpful. The thing about adaptability is you can retrain, reposition, repoint. The organization to an adjusted mission or a complete pivot. You can't do that if you're missing that ingredient.

t if I was your client and I [: 00:14:00

Tracy Linne: Just like any sales situation, you do a discovery process, . So for each organization, each type of solution that's being sold, there are attributes that make great sellers. I would study the top performers. that are doing well in that environment. And I would certainly study the outliers and the people that are failing.

And you can come up with some semblance of an ideal sales profile using tools or manually. It really doesn't matter. You can get to a common understanding of what great looks like. And from that you can start to build your program around, okay, for this particular role, this is what good looks like.

ver some period of time. The [: 00:15:00

This, much the way a go to market motion might work, you might be having daily stand ups. You might be really managing this tightly. The definition of this often is also outsourced to sales recruiters, for example. I think that's a mistake. I think the design it and own it by the revenue leader.

That doesn't mean the program can't be delegated to be run. But the initial pilot and how it's structured and what's expected by everyone is critically important and that ownership matters. If the revenue leader doesn't own it, why would you expect, your C suite or your board or anybody else to care?

the largest, definitely one [: 00:16:00

And so I think it's making sure that as a revenue leader, making sure that you understand it, that you approve of it, that you have looked at it in a detailed way and say, how can we make it better is incredibly important.

Tracy Linne: And let's go one step further. This should go right into your RevOps dashboard as a people line and a series of metrics that you're sharing with the organization in Company Ops Reviews so that people get used to seeing the data. Sales is a team sport. Hiring is even more. A team sport. You don't have a mentor very early on told me, Hey, I don't see any cash registers around here.

because we're producing, we [: 00:17:00

Has our market changed? Has our competitive situation changed? It's very hard sometimes to erase the people challenges and your actual go to market motion. So it could be changes in the market which look like non performance and there could be, individual performance problems that have nothing to do with going to market.

this stuff, you can start to [: 00:18:00

Lucas Price: when you think about refining a people process, getting the right pieces in place, the hiring pieces and the other pieces, and you're going and trying to implement that in an organization that you're working with, what are the things that are you're looking for to make sure that it is done effectively?

Tracy Linne: You have to have A few guiding principles that everyone in the organization understands in the design of the program. First one, really obvious, fairness. So fairness is how you keep bad things like bias out and so on. Fairness to the candidate, so what does that mean? That means are you fairly representing what the opportunity is and are you actually trying to attract the best and brightest?

n But to the has to plug and [: 00:19:00

If you don't have, and you don't see this in very small startups where there's a lot of unification around, maybe evangelical selling mission based selling because there's a small team. Harder as you get larger and you have multiple teams, you have 10 teams, very hard to keep that going. But if in the beginning by design, you tie the bigger mission.

And individual salespeople understand that and were recruited with that and saw a vision for that. And that's why they wanted to join. That's a big difference. That's how you, that's how you really work on retention from day one. I think The last one, I think everybody would agree. You want to hire good citizens that fit your culture.

time to time, which is just [: 00:20:00

Lucas Price: So what are the things that you're doing on the first interview to help you get there?

Tracy Linne: You're deciding if you're going to advance this candidate or not. Is it worthy of further exploration?

Lucas Price: Does that come from kind of standard screening interview processes, or are there certain questions that you find that are helpful for doing that?

Tracy Linne: I don't think it matters how you get there. You have to have a process to get there and anything else beyond, unless there's some extenuating circumstance, you're justifying. Oh, maybe. We all do it. It's human nature. This person could fit you, and there's so much research that suggests that basically, in the first five minutes.

Lucas Price: Yeah, I think that's a good point. I think we've probably all been in that situation where we're like, I don't think this is the person, they seem like good enough to be a finalist, so I'll pass them through. And I think that you're saying, no, we shouldn't be passing those people through.

We should be continuing to look right.

Tracy Linne: So [: 00:21:00

Tell your customers we're growing, help us find people. At first, nothing will come out of that. But a lot of goodwill comes out of that. And what happens is like a rumor. It starts. This company's growing and they're always looking for great people. And they have great people. And in time, it becomes truth.

And you may be screening some people that aren't so great as a courtesy. Because your biggest customer sent them over. It's fine. Keep going. In the long run, it works out. You become known as a culture that cares. And that is looking for quality candidates and that tends to perpetuate the rule and it becomes the truth over time.

k about enacting this people [: 00:22:00

Tracy Linne: As you build your interviewing teams, if you're doing balanced hiring scorecards and the like, some mechanism to measure input from multiple people, maybe from cross functional groups, product marketing, other areas, other executives you use a balanced hiring scorecard to try and even that out so you get multiple perspectives.

But the final decision Not everybody has a an equal vote.

Lucas Price: Yeah.

Tracy Linne: It's very important. This is an expert role just the way a developer would be an expert role or any other professional sales is often not traditionally been thought that way. And it needs to be thought that way. It's become a very technical role.

going with candidate a, just [: 00:23:00

Lucas Price: Yeah. That makes sense. Tracy, I really appreciate you coming on and sharing with us today. One of my takeaways is to really think about when you're hiring, think about the sales team as a team and think about what does this team need that it doesn't have right now? And not just looking at every.

Open role as an individual, but putting it in the context of the rest of the team and what could be added to the team to help elevate the whole team. So I appreciate having you on and that I think that's a, there were lots of great takeaways, but that's one in particular that's going to stick with me for sure.

Tracy Linne: Thank you for having me. Appreciate it.

Lucas Price: All right. Thank you.