This discussion focused on what effective presales leadership and talent development looks like today, especially in leaner organizations supporting more complex deals. Danny Garcia moderated a discussion with Brian Cody of Clari and Morgan Ballevre of impact.com on the skills that matter most in modern presales, including curiosity, empathy, storytelling, business acumen, technical depth, and competitive awareness. The conversation emphasized that great presales professionals are no longer defined only by product expertise or demo execution, but by their ability to understand customers deeply, connect solutions to business outcomes, and use AI to augment their effectiveness.
The panel also explored how leaders can better coach, develop, and retain presales talent through stronger 1:1s, tailored leveling frameworks, thoughtful feedback, deliberate practice, and career pathing beyond just management. Brian and Morgan shared practical advice on raising the bar for discovery and storytelling, using dry runs and peer coaching to improve performance, giving difficult feedback in a way that builds trust, spotting and preventing burnout, and helping both plateaued and high-performing team members continue to grow. Overall, the session was a candid discussion about building resilient, high-performing presales teams by combining clear expectations, human-centered leadership, and continuous skill development.
Read the full transcript below:
Thank you for joining us today.
We’re going to dive into what it takes to coach, develop, and retain a motivated presales team today. I’m really pleased to be joined by Danny Garcia, our VP of Sales here at Saleo. He’s going to be moderating the discussion. And by Brian Cody, who’s VP of Sales Engineering at Clari, and Morgan Ballevre, who is the Director of Solutions Consulting at impact.com.
So with that, I’m going to go ahead and hand things over to Danny to get us started.
Brian, Morgan, thanks both for joining and being part of the webinar. So let’s kick it off in terms of the session.
The first question that we got here for the group is just trying to establish a frame of reference. And so when we think about skills and behaviors, what do you guys think that are the most important for presales today? Any that you think are sticking out that really make a presales professional great?
Yeah. I’ll go first this time Morgan. So I’ve boiled down our framework, and we’re actually just merged with Salesloft.
Super exciting to bring two themes together and align what great means. So what I look at from a human based perspective, we boil it down to three competencies, advice, solution, compete.
Advice for us is, can you go into market and do you know your personas? Do you know the industries? Do you know the value that you need to create? Do know the workflows? Can you actually go have a business conversation to optimize, process these solutions without having a technology conversation?
Solution is the technology element. So – product – it’s rooted in product expertise, but can you be creative in how you go solution? Do you understand the integrations that you need to work with? Do you understand those systems? Do you understand our products? So you can come up with a comprehensive solution that solves business problems.
And then compete, at the end of the day, we sell. So we are in a highly competitive space across all tech industries right now, thanks to AI and increasing the overall competitiveness that everybody is experiencing.
So do you really understand the market? Do you understand your competitors? And you’re developing the skill sets that allow you to compete, which ultimately comes down to how well you can do discovery, how you can demo, how you can achieve technical win in the sales process. And I think the underpinning now, for all of us as leaders in this space, is how do you leverage AI to elevate those competencies.
So those are our three competencies, and so we round out and make sure that everything we’re doing is oriented back to that, everything from leveling, coaching, career development, etcetera. And then how do we use AI to augment what we need our teams to do?
I love it, Brian. Some of them are very similar to mine, obviously.
I think you and I have spoken a little bit over the past few months. And generally, I think we are quite aligned on that.
From my side and especially with my background, so for those that know me a little bit, I worked in the EdTech industry for a while, but I’m also very versatile when it comes down to living in multiple countries. And I think based on that, there are two big things that kind of popped up when that question was shared with me.
The first one that you mentioned as well, Brian, is curiosity. I think it’s not just curiosity for the sake of it, but genuine curiosity.
And you’ve to be curious about your customers, understanding what’s happening in their world, what’s happening within their tech ecosystem, within their industry, with their company, but also curious about the person that is behind the person company that you’re trying to sell into. And, again, the discovery is really working if you’re genuine about it.
If you’re just trying to sell them something, that’s not going to work. So that’s what you really got to go back to that very much people skill or human skills as well as we can call them, which is that curiosity first.
The second thing which you kind of mention briefly as well, Brian, I think in my opinion is empathy. You cannot be truly a good solution consultant or presales expert if you don’t have empathy towards your client.
Because empathy will bring you the true reality of the challenge that they’re facing and really digging based on the curiosity that you have to what is the reason why they’re facing that problem and then finding the right solution, which hopefully is the software that you’re selling, but it can also be sometimes that you’re not the right fit for their problems at that point. And I think having that empathy is really crucial in order to be a standout solution consultant.
And maybe the very last point is very dear to my heart and for the people that follow me on LinkedIn, I share that because I ran a session at impact.com, it’s storytelling.
In today’s world, especially in a technological world where you have GenAI pumping lines of codes faster than ever, features and function are not what’s going to differentiate your software. Storytelling based on the information that you gather, thanks to your curiosity and empathy, is really what’s going to make everything stand out when it comes down to truly being that good solution consultant.
So I think for me, it’s really around these people skills, which eventually will differentiate us, especially in a world where Gen AI is changing the way we sell, changing the way that we approach problem, and even the way we learn.
I love the IC call out. I tie that always back to persona.
Like, we sell to salespeople. And so do you really know the IC roles that you service? Do you know what operations care about? Do you know the story, the really strong win stories of the before and after states for some of your customers? And you can really get a good understanding of, what does it mean to be in these roles and personally, what’s the game? So love the call out there for you.
Because sometimes, again, you don’t even use the software, like you probably do, Brian, based on what you’re selling. But sometimes, you don’t even use or have never really used the software that you’re selling.
So really having that empathy brings you to that next level to truly understand what’s driving somebody to even listen to you.
Right? Such a good call out. Yeah, not everybody’s going to be a user of their own product that they’re selling every single day.
I had the benefit of selling SalesLoft back in the day when it first came in and it was, you have so much more conviction whenever you are a user of your product and you get the benefits of leveraging a solution like that. Same thing with Saleo, we drink our own champagne, we leverage our technology.
So it definitely impacts the overall conviction that you have with the sales process and what you’re doing on a day to day basis. I’d be curious to hear from the both of you, is there anything that you’ve had to unlearn or that’s surprised you when you think about developing your teams?
I do. And I think maybe the biggest one for me was learning or relearning how to learn.
I think in today’s world, especially with GenAI, the access to information is even faster and easier than it ever was. So there is no more excuses of not knowing your customers.
You can pump financial reports, especially if you’re selling at enterprise level, to gather the data and ask all of the questions to the AI together. And I think, one of the approaches that I had to relearn or unlearn is the traditional way of approaching a deal is not the case anymore, especially when it comes down to knowledge.
So you need to double down on those human skills, which truly make the difference. And I think unlearning that, when you’ve been in the profession for a number of years, is really one of the key aspects of the change that I’ve seen in the market for the last decade, I would say.
Yeah. The two things I would add to that is on the unlearning side, to tie off on what you’re talking about, Morgan.
You know, I was in Salesforce before we had joined Clari, when we were 70 people. We now grow and scale, but I think it’s always, constantly reassessing the old paradigms that you have on things like sales process. Right? That’s where we’re in day to day. I mean, when I first started, it was like, you don’t get a demo until you do discovery. Buyer expectations have changed.
You have to unlearn and you have to constantly think about where are buyers right now? How do you drive customer outcomes in the context of a deal, to drive velocity, to get them where they need to be faster? And so constantly thinking about how that’s going to change. As AI develops, that’s going to change how we think about demos.
We’ll probably talk a little bit more about that later. The other thing that I think is important to unlearn, there’s kind of a push pull here that’s interesting, as I’ve learned from some of my mentors.
I think the thing I’ve had to unlearn is taking control of driving revenue outcomes. That’s one of the hardest things to do.
I think a lot of times you see SE get promoted in SE leadership typically because people respect your work as an IC. Cross functionally, leadership recognizes it.
And so, you ultimately wanna drive agency throughout your organization. You wanna put your people in the position so that they can feel comfortable about failing, which makes them stronger over time.
And how do you create that while continuing to drive revenue outcomes? So, how do you actually support them in deals? We’re not jumping on call and being like, this is to an executive. I’m taking control of this.
Because at the end of the day, one of the things that is still true for leaders in our roles owning an SE organization is you still have to be the best at what you do. I think that’s the expectation.
So how do you not lose that, while also driving agency throughout your organization so that you can really elevate others? Others can start to be stronger than you in certain areas, but you still set the bar and the expectation. So there’s that constant cycle of unlearning where it’s like, got to come in and support this way, but also got to figure out how to get this more broadly applicable to the rest of the SEs.
Could have said it better, Brian.
Yeah, totally agree. I’m constantly having to check myself as well as a leader, not everybody’s going to do the same way that you do it.
And you’ve got to give room and space for people to do it their own way and get the outcome because you hire them for a reason. They’re on the team for a reason.
So you’ve got to give them that opportunity to be able to do their thing.
And just one other point, I’ve seen this play out where, especially within our customer base, a lot of times sellers get promoted to managers because they’re the best sellers, but you have to move out of being a super rep. Then you get stuck in that player coach role.
And so how do you elevate, out of that? I’ve seen that trap. Too many great leaders fall into that trap.
And so how do you eventually break that mold?
It’s eventually a different role, right? The role of a leader is not anymore about doing the job, but actually managing people doing the job or leading people doing the job.
And that’s a very different approach. Actually great leaders are not necessarily the best ICs and vice versa. Sometimes they are, but it’s not always the case.
And you’ve to have a number of more human skills that make a difference and really focus on making your team shine rather than shining yourself.
Love it. A lot of great points here, guys.
Let’s switch into more of the coaching and development side of things. Are there specific structures or questions that you all ask, that you incorporate into your regular one on ones to drive professional growth right now?
So I’ll start with one of the things I underappreciated as a leader. It took me about a year and a half to get there when I first took over the team was actually putting together a really good tailored leveling guide.
I didn’t appreciate it. I didn’t think it would help.
I thought we were coaching well enough. I thought we were doing all the right things.
But once we had that implemented and running leveling conversations at least twice a year, and then quarterly check ins at least, and incorporating those in your one on ones to make sure that you’re developing people with the long term in mind, I think is incredibly important. The other thing I would look at is how do you elevate beyond just deals? And I think this is probably most important for senior SEs plus.
I think level one, level two, you’re prime you’re focusing on making sure that they can execute deals while developing the right skill sets to go execute deals. But level three plus, what are the bigger impacts that you can make? So we’ve actually incorporated in that leveling, which is how are you elevating your role so that other SEs look up to you as a leader? Are you working on projects? Are you pushing out some of the latest and greatest demos? Are you doing side coaching with SEs, whether they’re new SEs or you’re a subject matter expert in different areas? So I think that’s the level where I found those shifts in the conversation of how are you going to make a bigger role.
And then I know we have a lot of leaders here who are coaching managers or who are managing managers. And so I think the transition there is I always start my one on ones with team pulse checks.
How are the people where they are? Like, personally, professionally, just where are they at? I think that’s incredibly important just to get a good understanding of what you’re doing. It always helps when you run skip levels, maybe every other quarter or anything else like that.
Constantly helping them prioritize what are the main things that you’re focused on. Are you spending 70% of your time on deals, not working on projects right now? How do we shift that back if we need to do things that help us scale? And then I think that one of the best questions that I learned from some of my mentors is what else? And a lot of times, you’ll get silence and you just have to sit there.
Just what else? And just wait.
Exactly like what we would do with our customers. Right? Ask a question and let the silence sink in.
And honestly, it works. It makes people speak at some point.
It’s uncomfortable at first. But yeah.
So honestly, Brian, I think the last point that you mentioned for me is for me the most important one. I think at the end of the day, driving professional growth is about understanding people more than anything, where they are in their career, where they are in their personal life.
Right? Because that happens in the way that you see your career forward. If you’re a brand new parent, you might not have the same aspirations than if you are somebody with more experience.
So trying to really understand where people are in their personal life and professional life and career is really, for me, the most important part and that becomes that continuous discussion. Don’t wait for these annual check ins or quarterly check-in to understand that growth and where they are and also what passionate them.
I think at the end of the day, we are just as leaders supporting team members to go to the next level, to the next role, to the next career move. And people will come and go in your team and it’s all about making sure that you help them get there.
And honestly, the best leader that I’ve had, I’m still in touch with them because they let me kind of wander around the different jobs, the different companies as well. And I still ask them for feedback about: I’m actually thinking about doing that.
You were speaking about mentors just before Brian. And I think the best kind of leaders that you can expect are people that help you grow in your career.
And that’s really by understanding that detail about where do you want to go? What passionates you? What drives you in the morning? And maybe that’s AI. Maybe that’s efficiency, whatever that is.
Or maybe that’s something that has nothing to do with your current role, but you get exposed to it in a certain way, right? So everybody’s slightly different. And from that, I think that continuous understanding of the people within your team is probably one of the most important parts that you can get.
Such a great point. I had a leader who wanted to tell me that we’re just in the people business and we just happen to do it in the facet of being in a sales department.
It’s like at the end of the day, we’re humans working with humans and you’ve got to treat them as such. And everyone’s different, right? So you’ve got to figure out what it is that makes them tick and how do you get the best out of them every single day.
So these are awesome points. Morgan, I’d love to hear from you when you think about specific interventions across the board, like feedback, call reviews, role playing, anything meaningful that has impacted someone’s performance.
So I think we’ve got to look at impacting performance of our team members in two different aspects or two different themes. The first one is getting somebody who’s not necessarily performing as well as they should versus the other one would be actually how do you get somebody that is already quite good to still actually reach out for even better.
The people that have been managed by me know that I love to pick on details when it comes down to that, even especially for the people that are good at what they do. It’s about going from good to great and there is always a possibility to improve.
So asking for that feedback and showing that’s what I do as a leader myself. I keep asking for feedback about everything that I do, even though I know that I’m doing something that is supposedly good enough.
But I think that part is trying for people to make sure that experienced SEs or SEs don’t really need that much feedback or they do, but on very specific things. So telling an experienced SE like, okay, great. You’ve done an amazing demo. You’ve managed that deal very well. Great. There are probably a number of details that you can pick on which makes them go from good to great.
And I think that’s really a big detail, spending your time to go deep in the deal for your more senior SEs to kind of understand what’s happening and how can you help them achieve that next level of excellence, which sometimes is complicated to get to. Some SEs can be really good, but then in order to get to that next level, they need to go into that details aspect. And for people that have average performance or are not performing as well as they should, based on the capacities and skills that they have, I think the most important part is again, that genuine empathy.
Trying to understand what’s not working and why it’s not working. Because at the end of the day, that feedback, you can give as much feedback, you can do as many coll reviews and role plays and whatever you want.
The most important part is that moment for somebody that is performing on an average basis to understand why that is. And it’s up to them to decide, can they go to the next level? And I think for me, it’s more about connecting to that human aspect and actually trying to unlock that part.
And I’ve done that with multiple people within my teams over the years, which is coming back to what we do best, asking questions. Why is it not working? Every SE and every SE leader is great at asking questions.
So going deep into the why of things and coming back to what Brian was saying before as well, asking this – what else? Do you think that is not working? What else can you do that you haven’t done before in order to reach that level of performance? Are usually some of the things and interventions that have been happening a lot. And it’s just at that moment, just spending quality time with those SEs to get them to the next level of performance.
We just came back from our sales kickoff and the keynote speaker on Friday was Sir Ben Hunt Davis. He is a British Olympian gold medal winner for rowing.
One of things he talked about, and I’m starting to incorporate this in how we think about this next year for the combined company. He talked about performance versus results.
A lot of times as leaders, we blend those two things. Performance is how many deals did you win, what were your win rates, competitive win rate, whatever they might be.
But those are results. And so how do you actually look at different performance elements that help you ultimately achieve results? And so he talked about how the team really focused on all the different performance elements that would make the boat go faster, down from individual skills, strengths, techniques to, you know, actual boat design.
And so, starting to think about how we incorporate those things into our next year, but just some tactical ways that we try to approach with that concept in mind. First thing that I think is incredibly important, and we do this from our hiring, off the bat, we ask for self feedback.
In the final presentation, when somebody gives a demo, we always end the call with, what’s your self feedback? Tell me what went well. If you had to redo this, what would you do over again? I take that same approach in a lot of my one on ones, any post call reviews, anything that we’re working on.
I think that always opens the aperture, especially since you incorporate in the hiring process that feedback is incredibly important. You know, I asked the same thing from my SEs.
Like, here’s what I think I did well. Here’s what I would have changed. What would you have done differently? I just gave a road map demo at our KO. So I asked every single SE that.
I think that’s incredibly important tactically to constantly do. I found that to be incredibly successful in setting the right tone and culture for openness to feedback.
A few other things that tactically have really helped us on the performance side, call reviews, role plays. I think they’re a little outdated. I mean, you could go through call reviews. They’re super helpful to get up to speed. But one of the things I found, Salesforce was instrumental in driving this for me.
We brought it over to Salesloft, is dry runs. So actually taking on the role, I guess, is sort of a form of role play, if you will.
So maybe to backtrack on what I said, but do a true dry run. Rep run through your deck. If you have a value engineer taking on a role, if you have a leader taking on a role, run through the demo like I’m your customer, and then providing the feedback and then doing the debrief after the call. Whether you watch the call recording or whether you attend the call live, we usually do dry runs for the most important demos to the executive buyers late in the cycle.
So the volume isn’t excruciating for leaders to jump in and do this. The dry runs have been incredibly important.
Think about any industry, any entertainment industry, sports, performance, they practice constantly before they actually go play. They have different schemes for different teams.
They go practice those, and then they actually go execute those. And then they have on Monday, you know, they’re watching films.
So I think that same approach really helps, and you get people out of the fake situation and into what’s really important for these customers. Simple questions that I’ll ask SEs and sales reps too is, give me your, sixty second pitch on the executive POV that you have for this business.
It has to be value oriented. Check them if they go, this product’s going to help them do x, y, and z.
No. Put yourself back to your empathy point more.
Put yourself in the shoe. Pretend you are an employee of that customer.
Break down that executive POV. If you have that baseline sixty second version that then cascades to the rest of the presentation, it’s incredibly helpful.
A shift on enablement that we’ve made, we run these quarterly. Do different competitions that align to our competencies.
So, we get some spiff money or maybe we just fund it out of pocket or we find some way like, hey. You get two days off or whatever it might be.
Find creative ways in which to reward people, but we do competitions. We generally pair SEs up because collaboration is incredibly important in SE team culture from my perspective.
So we’ll do things related to demos of new products. The funnest competition we’ve run, we’ve actually had our SEs present as competitors back to the rest of the team to try to really steelman our competitors case against us.
And then also doing competitions around: Go build an application with AI or go build some new AI product that we have inside of here to try to build some of their skills that will ultimately help them go solution and have the right conversations with their customers.
The competitions really align to the enablement that we want to do, but they break the mold of, hey, I have to go into a system, record myself against this situation or or whatever it might be. So it makes it a little bit more fun, and there’s a reward behind it.
That’s been incredibly impactful with not just the SEs, but we brought that out to the reps, the CSMs, professional services, etcetera.
I want to just add a sentence on the practice thing. Few years ago, one of my leaders was a mentor, basically told me that, especially as an SE, but I think it’s probably true for any kind of roles that you’re doing out there is don’t practice until you get it right, but actually practice until you cannot get it wrong, which is a very different mindset, and you mentioned sports, people like musicians.
Whatever you do, the people that perform the best, what you see is they perform the basics all the time and they rehearse and practice until they cannot get it wrong. So if something happens, they never feel like they’re going to be thrown off by what’s happening.
And I think that’s probably one of the greatest trade that you can see in really good SCs out there is they practice, practice, practice until they cannot get it wrong, basically.
Just calling out a comment. I just saw Steve Klein’s comment on giving a demo without using products, acronyms, etcetera.
That’s great. I’m going to steal that.
That’s amazing.
I’ve done a practice demo without the screen behind you to practice the storytelling. That was another one that worked well.
Demo me the solution without having any screens. And basically you focus on value and storytelling and you don’t focus on what’s on the screen.
And that was another really good point out there.
Hard. I mean, that’s one of the reasons that I became an SE because I found, once I had the ability to show the product in the context of the value that we’re trying to drive, you’re like, oh, this is great.
This is way better than slides or whatever. Agreed.
So, hard habit to break for sure.
Awesome. Yeah, I love what you guys are saying because I think no matter who you are, you’ve got to get the marbles out of the mouth.
It’s one point or another, every person, whether you’re an athlete, you’ve got to stretch in the morning, you’ve got to do all the things to get prepared and ready to go. And you have to do the fundamentals correctly.
Otherwise, if you can’t do those things right, everything else is going out the window. So I love it.
How do you guys raise the bar for discovery and storytelling in other areas of business acumen itself? Brian, you wanna kick us off on this one?
Yeah. So I’ll break it down into specific examples that we’ve implemented for all three.
So storytelling, I think it’s important as leaders, you lead from the front on this.
If you are not modeling storytelling, why is anybody else? So really consistently investing in your demo skills. I mean, a lot of times we’re all still demoing in high pressure situations to executives or analysts or marketing engagements, anything else like that.
So constantly trying to refine yourself on how you improve storytelling. I think it’s also one of those things that you’re never done.
Right? Just like demo builds or anything else like that, you’re never done. So you constantly got to invest in what’s the new version of that.
I think one of the frameworks that we’ve tried to implement or that we’ve implemented across the board here is the basic framework. It’s persona orientation.
I like persona orientation. It’s, as a blank persona, I knew to achieve this outcome, and to achieve this outcome, I need to accomplish these workflows, jobs to be done, steps like however you want to sort of define it.
I think breaking that down has given me a good mental model to be able to go and use for myself and show the rest of the team how that’s valuable and then implement that across the team. And then I think the second part there from the storytelling piece, because, you know, a lot of SCs have strong technical backgrounds.
They love products. They want to talk about products. Elevate your best.
Stole this from Josh Aronoff. Shout out to Josh.
But when we are talking about storytelling, he was telling me a story of how his Australian SEs really picked up on the storytelling. So he was like, I stopped focusing on the entire org. We focused on the Australia reps, and then we started to elevate the Australian reps in company engagements, things like that. And everybody saw the shift in what a storytelling oriented demo was versus the product oriented demos.
So I think that that method has really worked in elevating some of some of your best and the people who lean into it.
On discovery, just a basic concept that I think is true. Good discovery is really a byproduct of two things. It’s natural curiosity, which you should be hiring for.
I think we’ve seen a million comments in the chat around that, so you should absolutely be hiring for that. And then there’s confidence.
Confidence is generally built by expertise as you get more comfortable in the products. As you look at a typical arc for an SE, first, you’re unconfident. You can’t answer any questions. You go into a demo. You give your generic demo.
You get a little bit more confident, and you just start at, answering questions right off the bat.
But the true confidence in SEs comes through once they really know the solutions, the personas, the value that you’re trying to drive, you start to ask questions back. Yes. You’re going to answer the basic technical questions, but you should really ask questions to understand the business context, the uniqueness of the customer that you’re working with.
So trying to drive that, and I’m a big fan of discovery frameworks rather than a five page doc of all the discovery questions that you can ask.
That could be helpful from an onboarding perspective, but how do you apply the right frameworks? You know, I was trained on Sandler at Salesforce to really kinda go through the three levels and, ultimately try to get to the personal pain, but really emphasizing the different frameworks. I think one of the hacks that I’ve found to be incredibly successful that you can apply the frameworks to is reverse demos.
For the personas that you serve, can you just get time with a rep, engineer, HR professional, anybody else like that and be like, hey. Just help me understand how you navigate this workflow today and have some of those framework style questions or areas or outcomes you’re trying to get to make it really easy because then you see a day in the life that you can then marry into your next demo, your business value case, whatever it might be.
On business acumen, I’m just going to repeat some things that I said. Enablement style competitions.
So we’ll do enablement style competitions based off of different personas, different market use cases, different vertical use cases that we’re trying to grow into. And then, really, Morgan, the empathy on the personas and really rounding that out to understand what they’re what they’re trying to do.
Last thing I think is incredibly important here to raise the bar across the board is developing a strong all hands. Andy, CEO of Clari, is a mentor of mine.
He put a lot of effort in the all hands, elevating ICs, elevating different people to speak. You know, he probably spoke for 5% of all hands, and so trying to learn and model off that.
So when you’re going into all hands, you’re elevating the things we’re talking about, storytelling, discovery, wins, anything else like that, and you’re hearing from the people that are in the day to day, living those, and performing well.
I think one of the things that we’ve done at impact.com, especially for the discovery part, is work on an account plan using an AI agent to kind of help on extracting the information and extracting the important information out of anything that is available for us today.
Because the more you understand your clients, the more the questions that you ask are going to be pertinent. They’re going to be spot on based on everything that’s available to you.
Buyers are more educated than ever. So now it’s all about us setting ourselves even more.
And again, GenAI and different agents that can be built, that’s one of the things that our enablement team has been building, which is geared towards both SEs and AEs. At the end of the day, that discovery is also going to be around a role play between your AEs and your SEs in order to extract that.
I think that’s one of the things that I raise the bar in my team is, don’t think about it as a technical discovery or business discovery. This is about you understanding customers so that you can solve their problem.
And the problem can be technical, be business oriented and that’s where we keep adding value into it. But that’s an overall discovery.
That’s where, for example, all of my SEs are part of the discovery call and the direct call of our account executives, especially in enterprise, where we can capture that and look at it from an overview rather than, oh, let me discover the technical pain and the business pain, but rather let’s discover what is our client actually going through. So I think that’s one of the things that have raised the bar with my team.
On the storytelling part, I think that’s the big thing that you mentioned, Brian. Just be the role model, if you want to actually speak about storytelling.
That’s the easiest one that you can leverage and do in your day to day job. If you are able to truly tell a story to solve problems and even like I was speaking at SCO about it a few months back in Atlanta as well.
And we were speaking about the importance of storytelling. And our theme was all in. And all of my slides and all of my stories were around poker and playing cards and so on. And the reality behind it was people understand that and they remember that.
People remember stories. So be that role model about trying to tell the stories whenever you can, even in the one to ones that you have, be that role model about storytelling.
And I think at the end of the day, business acumen is something that you get, you can get trained on. And honestly, there are a number of great people out there that are producing amazing content.
I can look at the presales collective, some of the thought leadership that has been created by a number of individuals out there. Go and search for it.
One of the things that I try to raise the bar on with my team is keep sharing this event with your team. Keep adding, be that catalyst of information because there’s so much available out there.
Kind of navigate through the noise and share things that are actually going to make your team succeed. Not every enablement is going to be internal.
And there are a number of things out there, podcasts, videos, and even PDFs that exist that are really powerful. And at the end of the day, it’s about the people ingesting that information and knowledge and applying it in the real world.
Going back to your point on discovery, we love Notebook LM here. I wish it was a little bit more powerful from an integration perspective, but it’s an incredible workspace.
We built our entire discovery output framework. So we run a process called solution fit where, ultimately, the SEO scores a deal red, yellow, or green.
It’s based off of value, and it’s based off of technical fit. And it’s really looking at the long tail.
Is this going to be a good customer for us one, two, three years, you know, down the line based on what we know in presales? And so that’s actually really helped the SEs help focus on the conversation because all we’re doing is importing all of our transcripts against the framework, all of our customer assets that we get from them, and then it’s giving them the updated score of, hey, value’s still yellow. It’s a good indicator of, hey, we really need to strengthen our value case here.
We spent more time on technical, which is maybe green right now. So the outputs and that visual notebook really help them get back on, okay, what should I focus on? What do I need to know? And then you drive the right things and they, you know, they’re going to go ask the right questions.
Awesome. I love the nuggets we’re sharing here.
When it comes to feedback and resilience, Morgan, I’ll kick this one over to you. How do you focus on delivering some hard feedback in a way that builds trust with the team?
It’s probably the hardest skill as a manager. I think, if you are good at delivering hard feedback, that’s where you actually become somebody that gets respected and not just another manager that won’t be remembered.
I think the first thing that you need to understand is why that hard feedback needs to be given. Again, performance or lack of performance is not always coming from the same place, right? Something personal can happen, something professional can happen, there can be a misunderstanding, sometimes it can be just a one off that sometimes happens.
So trying to understand where the feedback comes from and why that feedback needs to be given is probably going to be the first thing that you have to do as a manager or leader. The second thing is you’ve got to be genuine about it.
It’s not about putting the other person down. Reality being, any feedback being given is about the other person being better at the job eventually.
It’s not about telling them off, oh, you’ve done a bad job. Well, what can you do to get to that next level? What can you do to actually correct that behavior? And again, that comes back in my opinion, to questioning.
Understanding, do they feel the same way? Are they actually on the same page as you are as a leader of why it’s not working? Maybe there is an aspect of, it’s not about finding excuses, but, you know, keep asking why do you feel this way? Going back to the why, right? Which is one of the big things that we do in presales. Really trying to gather that part, I think is probably one of the big things.
And then taking the time. Feedback needs to be, like you mentioned Brian, taking a break before, like taking a one minute pose when you actually give a hard feedback.
It’s not easy. And the person that’s receiving it, if we put ourselves in one of the first things I mentioned, the empathy part, it’s not easy to receive hard feedback.
So take a moment to let that sink in and then ask them like, how do you want to go next? Like we can go deeper and I can go about the different things. We can take a break and come back to it.
I think at the end of the day, the hard feedback is about the other person rather than you so that they progress within your organization and have a better impact. So these are some of the things that I’ve been doing.
I’ve approached it a lot around that servant leadership that has been mentioned. And I think that’s a big thing that I’ve been proving right.
And I’ve managed to put people on PIP and they’ve actually managed to take that over. And I was like, this is great, because there was that realization and I truly approach it as, I want you to stay.
I don’t want you to go. I want you to stay because you have the skills, but you need to prove to me that you have the skills.
Wayne, just go back to one of my mentors here. The way he framed it when I first took over the team, and I’ve tried to live this throughout my eight years leading the organization.
He framed it as you have a moral obligation to improve the careers of your people. I think that’s an incredibly good way to look at it because it looks at how do you accelerate them, but how do you also coach them or provide them the tough feedback that will ultimately be blockers in their next promotion, in their next deal, or long down the road from from where they’re trying to go.
So I always just go back to one of the things I said earlier, I always start with self feedback. You know, as I stated earlier, we started from the interview process, but, hey, what do you like about it? What would you have done different? Always start with that.
Constantly just trying to drive that so that you create right mindset going into any conversation, that they’re open to feedback. They’re not always going to be open for feedback.
So, Morgan, I like what you said, which is give them a pause or maybe even give them an out where it’s like, hey. Do you wanna come back? Do you wanna go, do you wanna have time to think about this and have a feedback session tomorrow? And being okay with that so they’re in the right mindset to hear the feedback.
As you go through the feedback, trying to ask them questions, how are you different? I think it’s also important to have perspective of hey, here’s what I think you could have done better. I always try to say, and I know this is maybe not the best approach, but I’ve struggled with certain things in my career, so I try to help SEs, empathize with SEs.
But, I’m like, I struggle with this in this part of my career. Like, I know I still am trying to get better at asking good questions in the middle of my demo.
So for me, I have to write those down in my preparation before time. Otherwise, I go back to my normal, like, hey. How do you think is… all the bad questions that an SE can ask? So, I think the last part is how do you action the feedback for them? I think Steve in the chat posted, asking the SEs, or your team what’s your action plan coming from this? I think that’s a good place to start, but I think it’s also important to have some perspective on, hey, here’s a podcast. Here’s who I’ve learned from. Maybe go work on this before your next big demo.
Having an action plan so they can start to put that in place and they don’t get stuck in an action and the feedback actually doesn’t plan.
Brian, one of the things that you said that I really resonate with and something that I always try and pull out of my playbook as well is give a human story around where I sucked at doing something. It’s like, there’s nothing better than, oh, you struggle with this too.
It’s like, yeah, and I was able to overcome it. And here’s what I did to take those steps and get on the other side of it.
I think at the end of the day, what we said earlier, it’s people and you’re trying to help them get over the hump that they’re trying to work through. And so those things go a long way.
And Morgan, you touched on the idea of just being empathetic with the situation and asking what their feedback is. One of the things that I always try and think about as well is not always giving a drive by feedback.
It may not be the right moment, or maybe I haven’t thought through the feedback in clear form as to how I want to deliver it. And so I’m always conscious of needing to take a moment to make sure that I can deliver the feedback clearly, otherwise it can not land and then it erodes all trust as well.
So all really, really great points.
I think on that one, I think one of my failings as an early manager, I wanted to be perfect in my feedback, so I would wait too long. And so now what I do with SEs, even when I call reps or anybody that’s not part of my org, I’ll call and be like, I have feedback. I’m not going to worry about delivering it perfectly, but I think it’s better that I share with it with you now while it’s fresh and being okay with not articulating it perfectly and kind of level setting with them that I’d rather get this to you now. I think it’ll be more beneficial than not.
Had some tough conversations that way, but have ultimately turned into stronger relationships, stronger performance from the team.
Timing is key eventually. Some people like it directly, straight after it happens.
I’ve had reps that were like, oh, that went really like shit, let’s debrief right now. And some people need to digest and think about it.
So I think it comes back to being human, trying to understand how the other person actually takes it for good and more harsh feedback. You truly need to actually adapt it a little bit towards who’s in front of you and also your personal style, I think.
100%, I love it. How do you guys look and proactively watch out for signs of burnout and any action that you take that have actually helped?
It’s always a tough one. As we all know, the peaks and valleys of SE. I think most people are generally hitting capacity more than they were ten years ago.
But, I think a lot of times you’d have SEs who are working four big deals at once, and you would have another that might be. They just closed all their deals. Reps are resetting their pipeline. And so how do you smooth some of that stuff out? But I always start with the observable behavior.
Not asking SEs for, hey. How’s your bandwidth? How’s your capacity? But, we live in a world where it’s easy to automate activity tracking.
So one of the things I look at is what’s the historical average for number of customer facing meetings per week and how does that correlate to what the SEs have told me in the past, one of my high capacity where you’re not cross referencing that against deal volume and the size of deal volume. I think they’re just looking at the internal behavior without having to ask is really important.
And then, how do you help them out to get through the burnout moments? Think, two thoughts from my approach is, one, how do you lean in with them? How do you help them improve their overall performance and execute? Because I think a lot of times when you’re getting close to burnout, you’re worried about some of the big demos you have or a big meeting that you have to go do technical architecture review. So can you help with that? Either in the design, the framing, anything else to make them feel a little bit more comfortable so that they’re not operating solo and just constantly in their head thinking about do I want to frame it this way or this way? Am I stuck in demo prep type. I think the other thing that’s an advantage of the SE teams, typically through comp plans and just the mindset that SEs have is creating a collaborative culture.
So one of the things we try to encourage here through both the mindset and the comp plan is tapping another SE to be a secondary SE on a deal. You have support there.
That way capacity is a little bit more smoothed out across the board, somebody who maybe doesn’t have as many deals or as high intensity deals right now. Can you get the support of the SEs? And then that is just naturally picked up, throughout the business where SEs will go and support each other without leaders having to jump in and be like, hey. Can you jump in over here and help Morgan with this upcoming demo prep or helping out with this stack or anything else like that. So I think those are two of the ways in which I’ve applied the action to help solve burnout.
Yeah, I’ll double down the team aspect. I think on the way to look at it, I think we all have different ways to look at it from leaders and from a leadership perspective.
But the way to action on it is truly the important part, our plan at impact.com and any company that I have been part of, SCs were targeted on a team basis.
So that means, again, you have two SCs working on a deal. You can definitely do that and nobody’s going to not be rewarded for it eventually, because if we win the big deal, everybody wins and you can decrease the workload.
So I’m a really big fan of that because that drives the behaviors of reaching out for help. It’s not about you and your deal, it’s about the team’s deal.
And if somebody needs to step in, including myself as a leader, I’ll definitely do that. The other part that I’ve been seeing as well is sometimes people get stressed because this seems to have a lot, but helping them understand the deals, priorities and coming back to that, I know it’s a very old school thing, but sometimes your brain starts spiraling a lot like, oh, I got this, I got that, and I got this, and then so many requests.
And then when you start asking questions about, you’re stressed about that deal, but it’s not happening for another week. What’s stressing you out? Well, I need to be a little more. Well, maybe you can push out for the next week or ask your rep to push it out. Don’t be afraid to also tell your SCs that it’s a team sport eventually when the way we win deals.
So having SCs also voicing that towards their rep. This is happening. This is actually a really busy week. Can we push out for a week for the number of things that I need to deliver? And honestly, most of the time, it will be okay.
People understand. We’re not working in a place where we are actually saving lives. We’re selling software at the end of the day. Except if you’re selling medical software, that might be a different story.
But eventually, you can push out a number of things smartly, and make sure that you help your team understand priorities. I’ve had that at one point with one of my team members who came to me on a Friday. It’s like, I got so many things happening, and I don’t know how to do everything. I was like, cool. Breathe for a second. Tell me what’s happening. Explain to me the deals. And then let’s sort them out in terms of importance based on the amount of AR that they represent, in terms of where they are in the sales cycle.
We know that sometimes prospects request everything at the beginning of the sales cycle. Can we push that out a little bit later.
And I think teaching people, I saw somebody in the comments, I think it was Steve, SCs and SEs are people pleasers, but teaching them how to say no and stand for themselves is also a great way to prevent that burnout ahead of time.
One of the other things, and I know it’s hard to always do this, we just did for organizational alignment, align most SEs to the RVP level rather than the individual reps. The one one of the things we’re looking to accomplish there, is, hey. Look at the RVP number. Your goal is to help this RVP hit their target and align with the RVP, create a strong relationship with the RVP on where is your capacity best being used? And go to them with an open mind of, hey, I’m observing these behaviors, and I’m spending my time doing these things. Is this the best way for me to spend my time for us to hit your number?
Super powerful. An RVP will always point them in the right direction.
Switching gears a little bit.
Brian, from a plateaued presales professional – How do you help them break through a situation like that? Anything that you can share with the audience?
I always have the framing of how do I help this person build their story for the next career move? Whether that’s internal promotion, whether that’s external or anything like that.
But I think that type of framing, it kind of aligns to the moral obligation framing from earlier. But, I think once you have yourself in that mindset, it can really help you get creative in how you think about somebody who’s plateauing.
I think we’ll walk through a few different scenarios and some of your next questions, Danny, on different situations of that. But I think depending on where they want to go, how do you elevate their time and capacity to be able to do the things that get them the next move? Is that moving up the IC chain? And so there, you’re going to focus more on overall performance and skills and looking at the overall results.
Are they driving the results and the actions there? Are there areas, if they’re stronger in storytelling, can you put them in positions for analyst calls, different events, speaking engagements at RKO, or anything else like that? If they’re more technical, can you get them involved in EAPs, product SME, or building internal tooling with AI to help the SCs scale some things like knowledge or demos or anything else like that?
And then, not all organizations have this advantage, but, finding creativity in the role, and I think that’s incumbent upon you as the leader of, like, hey. Are there specific roles that make sense to solve the business problems that your company is facing that you can try to push this person in that maybe isn’t your traditional management path or help them get to that next move with that next career move mindset, in the back of your head.
100% aligned with what you said, Brian. I think at the end of the day, it’s making sure that as leader, we’re looking after people that are in our team for a certain amount of years.
And they can move internally, as you mentioned, Brian. Or they can move externally. And as leaders, our job is to help them get that next move, whatever that is.
And sometimes plateauing is not about things you haven’t mastered.
And then it’s about coming back to that empathy aspect that I’ve mentioned a number of times. Understanding what they want to do next is crucial so that you can get them to that next level of project that they can work on in order to really be where you are.
And I think eventually it’s also being super transparent as a leader about where your organization is, not for every single plateauing SCs. You’ll have something next. Right? Sometimes that’s nothing next. It’s outside.
And as a leader, it’s your job to support that. It’s not a problem having people leaving the organization because they become basically people that would refer other SCs or other people to join your team because you’ve been such a good leader.
And that actually happened to me a number of times. I think that’s one of the shifts of mindset is it’s not because somebody is plateauing. That is a bad thing. You’ve to look at what’s next for them and really help them get there.
Awesome. And the inverse of that, when you think about high performers, how do you create growth opportunities for them, especially when promotions or management roles are potentially limited within an organization?
It’s extra exposure. I think, as Brian mentioned earlier today, it’s understanding what’s driving them.
Is it more the storytelling and being in front of the rest of the organization to actually raise their internal image or external image? It’s about understanding if they are going towards product. I think giving them that extra project internally in the company is actually helping them understand that it’s not because you’re a high performer that there is a job for you here the next time, but also it’s all about the possibilities that exist.
And as Brian was mentioning, let’s be creative. Sometimes there is a job that don’t exist and there is a number of jobs that didn’t exist maybe five years ago that now are getting created.
So now when you’re starting to say, let me think about what’s next. It’s about getting to the next step and creating that next level for them and maybe a brand new opportunity in the company or outside of the company.
I’m going to focus my answer on the management role. I think that’s one that a lot of us face some challenges with when you have one, two, three, a number of high performers.
They think about the management track. So I think, one, it kinda goes back to, hey. Can you broaden their scope of how they think about what the future is, both from their career perspective and where the direction is going, as it relates to the presales role of technology or anything else like that? And so, looking at the management role as one example here. Anybody that’s interested in management, I tell them the same thing.
Are you doing the things before the actual interview that would put you in position? Pretty much everybody that I’ve hired as a leader, from an internal promotion, has acted like a leader on leadership’s behalf in one capacity or another. That’s coaching new SCs or coaching experienced SCs as a subject matter expert, that’s scaling out things via projects, whether it’s how do you improve RFPs, how do you create the next level of demo storytelling, anything else like that.
Or if they wanna go alternate paths, around product or maybe they just want to figure out what’s the elevated IC role. You know, one of the things we’re exploring for somebody, before we actually had a manager position open up and we moved them in that was more of a field CTO role, which was tighter integration with product to capture voice of customer and broad support of our big, most strategic enterprise deals because very technical role, didn’t have a manager position.
So we’re looking at, okay. This is a way that the business is aligned, got our chief product officer on board, got our chiefs our CRO on board, and got our HR team on board of, like, hey. This is a role that makes sense. Skill sets aligned. Strong talent. We’d like to retain them if, you know, back to your point, he’s going to go somewhere.
I’m going, you know, great. We’ll find a great role. But if we want to retain him, I think this role makes sense from a business perspective and aligns to some of the career goals in lieu of having a manager position.
So trying to find those roles that will help the overall business impact to the organization, when you have the opportunities to do so, and you have to go the right way about it where for us, it was CRO, CTO, and making sure that HR is aligned with the proper job scope, and we can go look at the market and see, hey. What’s the compensation for this role, this other thing. So making sure that you’re checking all the boxes across the board there to find a good role for them.
I love it.
One of the first things that I always ask somebody that wants to get into a leadership role is why? And just understand that they have the right intentions for jumping into that. Because at the end of the day, you’re not the one getting the shout outs or the praise for doing the good work.
You’re living in the shadows and elevating other people. So it’s one of those things they’ve got to have the right intentions for it.
So I love what you guys have been saying. We’re coming up on time here.
I think maybe we jump into one or two of the Q and A questions. And I’ll just read one off the bat and we can do a quick popcorn style before we run out.
A question from Joe was, what role does industry vertical specialization play in that empathy and understanding? I would argue that it’s helpful that you can overdo it. Brian, I think we can both experience in your days of selling CRM into both industry verticals.
Yeah, I think when you have obviously dedicated industry verticals and established industry verticals, it’s a little bit easier because you have folks dedicated to those areas. I was in financial services at Salesforce. We had health care. You know, we had the core, which had a few more industries to focus on, but I think it’s a little bit easier there.
I think when it comes down to the empathy of that, it’s going to require a team effort from the company. If you’re expanding your ICP and you have an idea of, like, hey. We’re getting into med device for manufacturing or financial services or whatever, it is going to take a company effort there to make sure that you do the right work. And then how do you find the right person with the right profile who is going to be uncomfortable and in something that is very ambiguous and is going to be comfortable building something from scratch.
If you can find somebody who has practitioner experience in those industries, great. That’s awesome. But you want somebody who’s just going to go build from scratch, I think, is one of the biggest things there and do the right research and coordination with the team.
I think from an industry vertical specialization, I think it’s important, but nowadays, coming back to one other point that I made, information and knowledge is a lot easier to access. So if you truly have that curiosity, you can upscale yourself in that knowledge about the industry.
You’re not going to become an expert overnight, but if you’re truly curious and want to learn, you can learn a lot about that and really upscale yourself. As long as you have that empathy and that curiosity, that specialization becomes important.
But in my opinion, if you’re curious, you have empathy and you have good storytelling, you can learn the specialization as you go on. That’s something that we can definitely do.
Last thing, just to jump on that, learned this from a friend of mine. Just using any of the LLMs to go ask, I’m going to present to this company. Give me a day in the life of this role, this role, this role, married up with market research.
That just speeds up the, okay, I’m going to this situation I’ve never been into. Now I have a better idea of, like, who we’re serving and why.
Perfect.
That’s awesome. So many great nuggets, guys. We’re up on time. Thank you.
