Trusting Your Gut in Hiring: When to Double Down and When to Move On

Lucas Price: [: 00:00:00

John joins us with 21 years of sales and sales leadership experience with a variety of technology companies spanning some of the most disruptive players in the technology industry. John gained early career experience selling public sector and federal government at companies like Oracle and Salesforce when the public sector was buying cloud based software for the first time. Later, John moved into commercial sales leadership with workday and most recently sprinkler having built and rebuilt teams multiple times and all sectors of these transformational hyper growth companies, John has an up close and personal perspective on building high performing sales teams in some of the most competitive markets. These experiences and learnings have led to consistent and sustained success across multiple companies, technologies, and trends. [00:01:00] John, thanks for joining us today.

John Pellet: Absolutely, Lucas. Glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

Lucas Price: what else should we know about you? How did you get started in in software sales?

John Pellet: How to get started. I guess when I graduated college actually had a a degree in sports business and, I thought I would be Jerry Maguire as probably everyone else that had that major with me. Turns out I was just pulling, a tarp on minor league fields.

So I wasn't quite the glamorous job I thought. If you're, in New York, you get into finance or LA, you're in entertainment. If you're in, Northern Virginia, which is roundabout where I grew up it was a big technology boom.

I had a couple of people that said, Hey, you should come here. You can make a lot of money and, Getting a sale. That led me back up to Northern Virginia and my first technology job, which was a small startup cutting my teeth, writing proposals and proposal, responses and RFP questions and things like that.

So that was my, that was, that's how I got into

something really foreign to [: 00:02:00

John Pellet: At the time I think, give or take Salesforce was probably about 500 million in revenue. Maybe a little more, I know somewhere around there, but but it was actually an old an old leader of mine recruited me from Oracle and said, Hey we're going to stash this, public sector thing under commercial and see what happens, see if we can, see if we can grow it.

And that was my background the previous, three years or so. So I was like, great, we'll go do that. But. At the time Salesforce wasn't the name everyone knows now, it was, salesforce. com. The only product that we sold at the time was called what was it?

federal government had, many [: 00:03:00

It was, that in and of itself was the uphill battle. So more than anything we were doing evangelizing of, the technology, just what, before we can get to the product, like what is cloud computing and why is this a model? You think, we think could benefit you. Yeah, It was hard.

And if you've ever, ever been in around the federal government, there's reseller networks. There are, authority to operate their contract vehicles, obviously systems, integrators, deployment practices, not to mention obviously the rigorous, security and all that. Yeah, it was, I would say it was like a startup within a budding.

Soon to be billion dollar business. It was very hard, lot of fun though.

Lucas Price: I assume that it took a lot of resilience to break through and make it the big success with public sector that it is today.

K [: 00:04:00

And, I think when I left there, as an organization, the federal group was doing, seven and eight, eight figure deals, . There was no army of people.

It was like a lot of Navy SEALs, . It was like, Hey, okay, we, we got to take this stick and sharpen it into something, something sharp. We can go hunt. And so it was like, we had to make things up, make up, marketing collateral and go find people to evangelize within the government.

So it was really a ground up thing. And you didn't realize at the time because it was, it's just what we had to do to sell a new product. But but yeah, it, it took a lot of adapting and just evolving on the fly. And to say it's chaotic was, I think an understatement, but then, you slowly get those, people that were champions of ours at the federal government and you started to get some people coming over, from other places, from a sales perspective that kind of got it and then, that becomes a force multiplier when you get the right people there.

That first, year or two, it was definitely a grind.

in you. What was it in your [: 00:05:00

John Pellet: At that point in my career, I just left Oracle, which to me was like the end all be all like, Oh my God, you've, it's, this is the mothership, it's Oracle.

And it was, that was the time when, there was Siebel acquisition, PeopleSoft. was, It was an exciting time there. And, I remember when I left I had this little bit of a pit in my stomach. I remember it was like one or two people are like, what are you doing? I was like, you're, you're leaving Oracle to go to this company.

That's probably going to go bankrupt. We'll never work. We'll probably acquire them in, 10 months. And I'm not gonna lie. There was a minute I was like, I don't know, did I, did I make a pretty big mistake? It was, again, in the, in my mindset at, whatever, 27 years old, whatever it was survival.

I was like, okay, this has got to work. There's no, it's Hey, we're burning the ships behind us, there's no retreat. This has to work. So from that perspective, for me, I was like, there was no going back. Wow. Did I just take a leap? Cause again that early in your career, you don't know, and.

required, but you just fake [: 00:06:00

And I think I've always been a big believer. As a, as an athlete, I wasn't like the most, I didn't go anywhere, on a full scholarship and play anywhere, but I think. You can make up for pretty much everything with hustle and just hard and just outworking people, and so for me, it was just we're just gonna, we're just gonna hustle. And if you don't know something, we'll pretend, or we'll go find somebody in the organization who does know how to do something or, Ask for help or, for me, it was just this was my opportunity to make a name and springboard my own career.

So I was like, this can't fail, this can't fail, and and again, that was only my, this was my, Oracle was my second job in technology. So I was like, and I remember, early on, recruiters say three years, you gotta be everywhere for three years, that was the benchmark.

And For me, I was like, okay this has got to work. We got to find a way. So it's for me, just at least perceivably in my mind, survival at that point.

that can come from as well. [: 00:07:00

John Pellet: For me and I don't say this with ego or anything, but, as a, growing up high school, stuff like that. I think, academics just came, not easy. I was by no means of, 4. 0 type student and, I didn't get 1600 on my SATs, nothing like that, but, it wasn't a grind for me where it's oh my God, I'm just, scraping by with, D's and C's.

It was, it came a little bit more easy. And, sports stuff, again, I was never some phenomenal athlete again, no division one or collegiate athlete, but I, growing up played a little bit of everything. And I think, again, was able to be, a decent athlete at kind of most things, but never, great or exemplary at really any of them.

where you learn a lot about [: 00:08:00

And I think it was around that timeframe when I just realized I was like, okay, I am a worker, and for me, it was always, and it continues to be just like the fear of quitting. Like I just sometimes I'll be like, God, it would be so easy to walk away, but it's just in your mind. It's. It's absolutely not an option.

And when something is not an option, that's why you hear me throw that out there, like burning the boats, that, that whole analogy, a story, but if it's not an option to quit and you have no retreat, it's okay, you'll figure it out. And I think that's true for everybody. It's just, some people have the mentality.

I think that resilience or grid or whatever really came to me in college when I realized, okay, it's, this is going to, Take hard work but then it's okay, is there something that you want to achieve? And that's, that why is different for everybody. For some people it's, I want to buy the old family farm back.

And I think, if that why is [: 00:09:00

Lucas Price: You've worked in organizations where six, seven and eight figure deals are common. Being a salesperson in those job, in those companies, if you're good at it, can be extremely lucrative. But at some point you decided to make the jump to sales management. What were the reasons that you wanted to be in sales management instead of continue your career as a high performing salesperson?

John Pellet: that's, That's the million dollar question literally. For me, I've always loved coaching mentorship teaching, and And again, I think back, and, my whole life just in, in very, smaller areas that you don't realize until, 20 years later, but it's always been a little bit of a passion of mine and something that excites me and brings out passion is to, play some small part in helping others get really good.

ving and just makes you feel [: 00:10:00

And what really satisfies me, professionally is seeing people, helping people achieve. And what I would say is the greatest years of their career, right? Now that doesn't always happen, but the most honorable thing you can do is to get the best out of somebody else.

And I think the other thing is that it's very hard. It's very hard. As a sales rep, by the way, being a sales rep is great. I absolutely loved it. It's once you master it, it's like you can go anywhere and like you said, you can make a lot of money.

I think leadership is so hard. It's very difficult because it's ever changing. There's always new problems. There's always new challenges. You have to adapt, you have to get better every day or you'll be, you'll be old stale, yesterday's news. And so the idea of, pursuing something that's hard I think it keeps you sharp, and I think really the last thing, and probably the most, probably the biggest thing for me, Lucas is I just love being around people I love.

. And, I think that's always [: 00:11:00

Lucas Price: as you've made the transition into sales management, had a long and successful career building sales organizations. What have been some of the key insights that you've had around what it takes to build a high performing sales team and elite sales organization.

John Pellet: Here's what I'll say is anything I've learned, has come from, failing at it, several times. And I think, The best lessons are, the most important lessons are learned in blood, right?

You make mistakes that you're like never again, and so, everything I've learned, take it away. It's because I've screwed it up at some point. I had to, bite the, bite the bullet. Eat crow, so to speak. And, you made, made mistakes. And but I, and leadership has been filled with great lessons and the one thing I've learned, I think is probably at the the foundation of it all is it all starts with the people.

Like it all starts with the [: 00:12:00

It's it's a completely different role. And so for me, it was a pivot. And you have to learn that you can't do the job of six people. So what do you need? I think the most important thing for me is. You need the right people. It all starts with getting the right people. And what I've learned is that, you can either win with the right people or you can die trying to make the wrong people, the right people, and by the way, it doesn't mean, good sales rep, bad sales rep. Some, sometimes there's people just in the wrong fit, with. An industry or a culture or a company, or even, myself, but I think it's sometimes it's yeah, like I said, I would much rather, Spend five X the time getting the right people to walk into battle with then, cause you'll spend 10 X that time trying to coach up people for things that are unnatural.

And the [: 00:13:00

Lucas Price: I want to get into kind of the nuances of this idea of the importance of finding the right people. I'm sure that you've had situations in your career where you've had someone on your team. And you thought, Oh, this might not be the right person. And then somehow you've bet that's changed, through coaching, through them realizing, Oh, it takes more out of me in order to succeed here.

And so we've all seen those transitions before. How do you know. When, this is the wrong person on my team, or this is someone who has an opportunity who's right now, they're not doing the right things, but they have an opportunity to start doing the right things.

at is I think sometimes Your [: 00:14:00

This just doesn't feel right. But your mind is okay they have a big deal on the horizon that could save the day or, Hey, but they came from this competitor. They know this space, like something's up and I think the reason, like the human reason is because it is.

Hard. Anyone says it's easy to just sever, people, you're dealing with people's lives here. So moving on from people is. It's hard, it's a hard thing to do. And I think sometimes the human element gets in the way of that. And you make excuses to not do that.

But I will tell you, it was it was our chairman at work day. I remember he said something, he's like hiring and firing is the most important job. And he's if you're not comfortable, getting rid of people, moving people out of the business, you will be moved out of the business.

And it's true. I've. Seeing this, firsthand and it's it's the most important thing. So to answer your question, number one is really trust your gut. If you're spidey senses going off that, Hey, this is not a fit. There's a reason. And dragging that out it's absolutely crippling to a business,

that I can get, if we manage [: 00:15:00

John Pellet: sometimes if the pedigree is there. And the coach abilities there. And again, like we talked about the why you asked me about resilience and grit. It's like sometimes, okay, how do you light that fire or know what that what is going to be, what's going to precipitate that grit and that fire.

And if you can find that and hit on that, then you can actually observe. Is he or she ready and willing and chomping at the bit to do the right things? I'll give you an example,. There was a rep there was a rep early on in my career that was, when I moved into, certain role was on the chopping block, and, just, it was I think had a little bit, probably about a year and a half and people were like, okay, it's not, not working out. And so when I, when I took over this team I was like, literally let's roll our sleeves up to the table and let's like sit side by side and work through these problems. And how are you attacking this big deal that you have in front of you? Literally, whiteboarding, okay, we're going to go do, do this. And. Here's the list of to do's for this week,.

needle in this deal and this [: 00:16:00

Like in two hours, Hey, I've already reached out, and so it was. This like hunger to be coached, which, and it became obvious that had never happened,. And there's a lot of different aspects of what a good leader should do. And coaching is a massive piece of that. And it was quite obvious that the environment where we were in, there were leaders in place.

They expect you to come in and know how to do those things. And that worked for some people, but for this individual, it just didn't fit, but it didn't mean it wasn't capable to have the pedigree. So we did that for a year. Yes, it was literally. Three times a week, sit down, just game plan.

What did you, and then like those sessions got shorter and closer together because we were moving so rapidly and, fast forward, this guy closed a massive I think it was one of the biggest we'd ever done in the company at the time. Changes life. You're, you're a millionaire and you've changed the trajectory of your life.

ut, but then it's sometimes, [: 00:17:00

The hard work of drilling into people and understanding makes them tick.

Lucas Price: A lot of times when it's gut, it's I know what the right answer is, but I don't know that I know what the right answer is, and so I think that a lot of times discussions like this can help us illuminate, what is it? How do I articulate it beyond the gut?

And one of the things, a couple of things that I heard from you. That is ask yourself about this person. Do they have the drive? Do they have the resilience and do they have the coachability? And those questions are a way that you can take it beyond the gut.

Do they have the industry experience? That's not a very good question. Did they used to be a good seller? That's not actually not a very good question either. It's do they have the coachability? Do they have the resilience? Do they have the drive? Those are the good questions . If the answer to those is yes, those are the things where it's yes, I want to keep investing in this person.

They can turn the corner.

John Pellet: [: 00:18:00

And it was like the cost of making a bad hire. And it's okay, you ramp these people takes another, three quarters to realize they're not good. You're off board and we got, and it's it was like a million dollars, whatever it was a large amount of money to, cost of the business of bad hire.

So it's of the utmost importance, recruiting. And I think to your point, there's, when my rep, that moved into first line leadership, he said, we're Sometimes, it's like horses for courses,. Like you got the right person that knows how to sell to that account or whatever.

And while there's truth to that and, in certain businesses and probably maybe more mature businesses I've always will err on the side of. I don't mean literally, pedigree someone that just has that and they can do the things that you can't coach,. That you can't coach or it's just in their DNA or it's not.

each them the other stuff as [: 00:19:00

And I'll give you an example. When I was at work day it was, cause again, we were selling ERP, HCM, payroll, but in a very new environment. It was it was a lot of early adopters of the SAS, delivery model, because, just like Salesforce talking about cloud computing, it was like, now we're doing that with ERP, which was, historically these mammoth, types of deployments.

But what we, historically we had hired a ton of people from, ADP or, Oracle. They had sold these HCM deals and ERP deals in the past. And so I was like, okay, this is, they'll know how to do this. And by the way, a lot of people were uber successful. There's, hundreds of people that came from that, that were cut from that cloth and did very well.

e. I was like, I can't teach [: 00:20:00

And so you think yourself, okay. It wasn't, Oh, we need to know how to sell payroll. We need to know how to sell, HR, whatever the case may be. It was, we need people that can sell a disruptive mindset and take a consultative approach to delivering the business value. Of a new delivery model that's going to help them in all these other ways that are not on the, checkmark feature function list,.

a consultive a consultative [: 00:21:00

Lucas Price: Part of what I'm hearing, tell me if I have this right, is that you're an incumbent you need someone who can organize a process that you're going to go through the checklist and make sure you check all the boxes .

And when you're the disruptor, you need someone who can convince the customer that they need to change their buying criteria. They need to be able to affect the buying criteria. And I think that's, that probably includes traits like adaptability and emotional intelligence. I would say I've seen a lot of failures where it's like, they, a person checks a bunch of the boxes, but they don't really check the like self awareness, emotional intelligence box.

And they end up like not being able to succeed because they're not aware of what's going on in the room sometimes.

on in my career, I made the [: 00:22:00

Like I would almost say for me at least, I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but like in the interview process, gut is something almost like I don't want to trust because, and again, having taken a lot of classes on interviewing, there's, inherent bias and just, Hey, you went to the same school I went to, or you like the same team that I, root for as a kid,. Whatever the case may be.

It's there are psychological reasons you latch on to people that necessarily don't make sense. And so sometimes trusting your gut is not the best thing. I would say actually Workday did a phenomenal job of outlining how to interview with science,. And it was a real good learning opportunity as a leader of like, how do you actually interview for the competencies that are going to make this individual successful here?

love to prospect. I love to [: 00:23:00

Everyone knows the textbook answer. But what I've found is if you say, Hey, tell me a story tell me how you did this, like what was important to you? Walk me through, what was her name? Oh, and how did it go when the presentation didn't go back? What did you do? And what did your SC do?

When you get in the weeds, you can quickly root out, he or she owned this process and made mistakes and let you know, or they're just, telling a story and I found interviewing for the competencies along the ride and having them actually talk about Exactly what they've done.

It helps I think tremendously and it's helped me I think avoid some mistakes and probably find some really good gems that otherwise I would have just

ospect into and get in those [: 00:24:00

And not just give them three minutes to tell the story, but have be ready with lots of follow up questions, 10 minutes where you can really get into the details of the story and see whether they've done it before or whether they've read about it on the internet.

John Pellet: That's exactly right. And i'll tell you what. One thing I will say, lesson I learned at sprinkler was I spent hours in the interview process, whereas, admittedly early in my career Oh, we had a one hour interview. I like you, let's do this.

Come on boy. And I spent hours over multiple sessions. When you get a phone, you're like, I got two more questions. I really want to drill into that area. It's we're going to set up more time, until we are both, Really sure. It's we will spend hours because it's, you're getting married, you're getting married at work, and it's hard to get divorced at work, so it's you want to make sure you're going to this eyes wide open and both sides do, I like to. Really be uber transparent with, I don't really try to sell candidates. You want to get people excited about the opportunity because if you don't believe it, you're not excited.

They're not going to, of course, I think, I give people a good, bad and the ugly, right? Cause I want you to vet us and me as much as I'm betting you

Lucas Price: this [: 00:25:00

I'm not saying I don't. I think Google's research on interviews is that. After the fourth interview, each additional interview has like less than a 1 percent chance of changing your hiring decision. So when you have that fifth conversation, that sixth conversation, that seventh conversation, All you're really doing is making yourself more comfortable with the decision.

You're not actually changing your decision. And so now sometimes there is something that you really need the answer to. So I'm not saying never, but generally what I want to do is I want to invest a lot of time on the interview design upfront so that I'm going to get everything covered in those four interviews.

ve been talking about that I [: 00:26:00

Like it's better to just have the person and see, but when you really think about that person who's 10 percent better, it's not just that they're going to sell 10 percent more, they're going to learn more from the customer. They're going to teach more to the rest of the team. And it's going to compound to something like really huge over time.

And so being patient. To really find the right person is something that's like really underrated. And the impact that we have is like very easy to underestimate. It's it really, becomes gigantic over time.

John Pellet: I couldn't agree more. There's one thing it's it was like a, one of the Jocko Willink books. But it talks about, he's I don't want to be the leader, like at the front. That's just, everyone has to follow constantly. He's I want everyone on the team to be a leader.

are, there's a cultural fit. [: 00:27:00

I think it's it makes your job easier. And I think, when you get in like a second line role that becomes even more important, . It's like, how do you have force, how you create more. Force multipliers at every level. Because it's hard if, you have one leader and role, it's it's, if you have people and again you see them naturally show themselves, .

Everyone's been on a team like, oh my God, she's amazing. She's clearly like our unofficial team lead. Everyone follows her once, she's killing her number. But it's, but then how can you go and create more, . Like how do you go and develop people into being leaders within their team, within their ecosystem, with the supporting functions.

think, inspiring your people [: 00:28:00

So that they can translate how that, what that impact means to them. And obviously, show that excitement so they can start to open themselves up to coaching. And so I think when you get the right people then they're much more easy to inspire others and those around them.

And when, I think when you find a team that's, very inspired about what they're doing. I use that term, not like. Vince Lombardi quotes and whatever the case may be. But for me, like the inspiration is why are we doing this? Why are we here? Why are we at Salesforce or Workday or Sprinkler or whatever?

Why do we believe there's no better place in the industry to be other than here right now, market opportunity, your accounts are you inspired about the accounts? Are you inspired about your financial upside? What it does for your family, whatever the case may be.

n in terms of leadership and [: 00:29:00

And so I think that, I think it all starts with inspiration because if people believe then everyone is open to being coached, everyone's open to being coached. They're like, that's where I want to get. You're telling me this vision. We can go to this place. And you can help me get to my goals.

Tell me how to get there. And then it leads to that logical next step, which is, coaching. And I think, then and only then do you get the opportunity to go and inspect the business, and unfortunately, I think and one thing I did learn at Springer, these are all things that, everyone knows.

But. The one thing I did learn at Sprinkler from our our CRO was that like, it is a linear process, . You have to inspire in order to be able to coach and have someone receive coaching and absorb. And then once you've coached them, you've earned the right to inspect, but too often people do it the other way around.

he right to inspect and then [: 00:30:00

Here's a hole. Here's an opportunity for you. Here's a gap, but it's an opportunity to get incrementally better. And then guess what? The whole cycle starts over and then you inspire again and here's what this opera, you close this gap. Here's the opportunity you have. If we can work on this skill, imagine what it would do for you.

Inspiration starts all over again. That cycle starts all over again. And then, okay, you buy in, you believe, I believe you believe. Great. Here's how we get there. You coach them up. And then it's just, it goes around the cycle. And I learned that there is a very logical reason you do these things in this order.

Lucas Price: I love it. I wasn't planning on showing this, but it came up a lot today around, how to do data driven repeatable scientific hiring. I'm teaching a class for pavilion university on that starting April 3rd. Signups are available now for it.

on that at some point in the [: 00:31:00

John Pellet: The number one thing is be relentless about getting the right people. Relentless about looking for the right people. Recruiting should be always on. You want to get those right people. They take 9 months to get, and it takes a relentless level of grit to go and find and retain people.

But I, every success I've had as a leader was a hundred percent attributed to my people, and every failure I've had has been on me. Putting the wrong people in a wrong position or not doing the right thing. So it's 100 percent comes down to people be relentless about how you manage your time specifically, day by day, week over week to, enable those people, get them, like you said, not perform they are or out or whether it's recruiting new people, but literally hours and hours.

ng. Retaining ramping up new [: 00:32:00

The job is easy.

Lucas Price: And where can our listeners find you online?

John Pellet: my LinkedIn profile.

Lucas Price: LinkedIn is great. John Pellett on LinkedIn. A couple of my takeaways are, I really liked that when you said at the beginning is, getting the best out of someone is hard. It's very hard and it's challenging. And a lot of times, we don't really know it until we've made the mistakes ourselves. And there are some of these things that it's really hard if you don't go through those learnings, and I think it takes resilience. It takes being able to identify resilience in others. It takes having a structured method of looking for resilience and emotional intelligence and drive and a coachability and others in order to find the right team. So I think those are some great takeaways. From our conversation today.

slash blog. If you have any [: 00:33:00

If you're a pavilion member, love to have you join. If you're not check it out. It's a great organization. And thanks for being with us today.