Before you blame your sales team, look at this | Marc Bandini (Strategic Spires)

Hello everyone, and welcome to The Play by Quotain, where we talk with sales leaders about scaling, coaching, and the future of selling. I'm your host, Alex Talamonti, CEO and co-founder of Quotain. And today I'm joined by Marc Bandini. Marc is the founder of Strategic Spires Group. He's spent more than 25 years leading revenue and GTM across founder-led, venture-backed, and growth-stage companies, building sales teams, growing revenue, and helping drive successful exits. Today he works with founders and leadership teams to make growth less dependent on heroic efforts, more consistent, disciplined, and scalable. Marc, thanks for coming on the show today.

Alex, thank you very much. I'm glad to be here. Absolutely.

Awesome. Well, Marc, you've been building and leading revenue teams for a long time across all kinds of companies and industries. And I'm sure that you've collected some pretty good stories along the way. I'm curious, is there anything that stands out that you'd be willing to share?

Yeah, I think across my career it's more of a consistent battle than really a war story, but I think over time it makes it a war. But it's the battle towards an effective cycle time. Because cycle time is just a critical piece of the business and it's a very complex discipline because, in my perspective, it takes three parts, right? The sales team needs to be prepared and excellent. They have to have their product knowledge, they have to know their buyer, they have to be prepared for their meetings in order for the sales cycle to flow the way it needs to. The second piece for me with cycle time is the enablement. What the company is bringing to the table to make sure salespeople can effectively move through: excellent training, good tools in the background, the pricing process, the approval process for pricing is mapped and has a clear path. Redlines and the contract process have a clear path. And questions and answers cross-department have a clear path, so it's not salespeople chasing things. And we know that when a customer has interest, getting them the right answers while the interest is hot is incredibly important to the cycle time. The third piece for me is the buyer-seller intentionality. And maybe the seller owns the driving piece behind keeping this right, but knowing the steps in the process that work best for us and then understanding how the buyer needs to work through the buying process, the decision process, and then guiding them with the right questions and the right steps along the way to make sure that the deal moves at an effective pace to keep the cycle time realistic. So by putting those three things together, I think that is your best chance to have a good cycle time. But what I just explained was a lot of different parts. So it's a lot of little—

Yeah.

Battles about keeping the company in the right place, keeping the sellers tuned into their job, but then asking some of those brave questions and pushing a buyer back and forth. So there's a lot of pieces to that that always come into play because acquiring revenue, acquiring new customers is really the name of the game.

Course. It sounds like cycle time is very top of mind then whenever you're coming into a company, evaluating the sales team, and thinking about how to grow revenue. Do you have any examples of a time that you came to a company and what you do to first get a handle on what the cycle time is and then start tackling those various pieces that you mentioned?

Yeah, I wasn't really being too terribly flip about it, right? Cycle time is always an open discussion and trying to improve it. And sometimes you look at maybe a piece of the product or maybe the way we're doing our funnel or qualification is part of the discussion. But typically when I've entered into an existing company or started it from scratch, working on taking, let's say, a six-month cycle time down to four months is a measure that's not just important to the revenue team, but it's important to the executive office and it's always important to the investors. They're always looking to see how quickly we can acquire customers. An investor is looking at it from the perspective of one, are we growing revenue? Is the revenue predictability what they want? But also they want to see that the market is reacting to the product or the company that they've invested in. So are they acquiring—

Mm.

Customers at a pace that demonstrates this product is real, its feature set is in play? So I'm not necessarily skipping the detail of your question as much as this is always part of the story. And it has meaning for the revenue people, it has meaning for the executive team and how they manage their costs and their budget, and it has a lot of meaning for the investor package.

Certainly. When you are coming in then and you want to recognize right off the bat what's the first thing that needs to be fixed, how do you go about evaluating that?

That's tricky, right? When you fix things that are underperforming, a lot of people want to look right to the sales team. And I take a step back from that right away. My job as a leader is to look across many different facets that lead to performance. I will go backwards for one second and say that as the revenue leader, I should be looking at my metrics along the way. And I should see lots of leading indicators that tell me that we're not performing the way we want to perform against our goals. So that's an important piece of the story. But moving past that, so we're in the underperforming part of the story. I'm still starting with the data. So the same data that would be my leading indicators, I'm going to look at the data. What is the funnel situation? What are my conversion rates? What's really happening within that data so that I can have a good grounding of where I might see holes or not. The second thing I want to do is I want to look internal. I need to make sure that I'm doing a good job of understanding: have I put the right tools in place? Have I trained my team the right way? Have I given them the right strategic support necessary? Are the assets they need to do a good job there? That's all part of what could lead to poor performance. So I need to make sure I look at that. Of course I'm going to look at the market. It makes sense, right? There might be certain things economically that are going on. There might just be a lot of competition and I haven't done a good job with kill sheets and competitive analysis, whatever it might be. And now I'm getting to the start of your question, which is assessing the account executives. So I look at the individual reps from the perspective of their preparedness, their knowledge set, I'm looking at their intentionality, their curiosity, their energy to the business, and their particular results, putting all that together to lead to what might be a coaching moment or maybe even a harder discussion. But I'm making sure I look at all of that so that I'm looking at it from the big picture for the company because I might need to put mitigation plans in place or I need to put recovery plans in place across a number of different things, the way I'm pursuing customers, my messaging. I have to look at all of that. But then I also now have a very clear picture. So when I talk to an individual who might not be performing, I have a really solid base for that conversation so it can be constructive rather than just say, "You're behind."

One thing that I want to actually go back on that you just mentioned is that as a revenue leader, you're taking a leadership role. And that's not just within the sales team, that's within the entire company. And so when you're coming in and you're looking at okay, the team's underperforming for whatever reason, you're looking at not just the team itself, but are there other factors? And you mentioned the market, for instance, maybe something related to product. When you are coming in as a revenue leader and you're identifying these different problems, and say it's not something that's just the sales team, but actually in one of those other domains, how do—

Mm-hmm.

You communicate that with leadership of the other parts of the org?

I think as a revenue leader or a CRO you're responsible, you're part of that executive team, right? You're responsible for understanding the flow. That's why, even in our last discussion piece, you can't really just focus on the salespeople. Right? There is a handoff and a flow and a process across the entire organization. Maybe you just call it the go-to-market engine between sales, product, customer service, and marketing. So when you look across that, that process flow has to be clean, and then you look at the people part and you're saying, "Okay, are the individual people in these different disciplines working well together?" And that leads you to where your question might have been going. That leads to my responsibility as a CRO or my responsibility as a consultant to help the CRO, right? It leads to, okay, what is your working relationship with an operations leader, with a marketing leader, to make sure that we're passing information that we're both heavily dependent on so that we can do a great job as a company. Because that's where it comes down to is we have a company set of goals. So as a CRO, I care about the company goals, the company priorities, and my part to execute against them. But then everybody else on the executive team—we're brothers in arms, right? We're brothers in arms—

Course, yeah.

Towards meeting that goal, even though you have to work on operations and you have a ton of things to do there. Full respect for that. So where we hand off to one another, we have to be equally understanding of each other's goal sets and then work towards a common goal. But by having that bigger picture, like I was explaining before, then I can map my goals and the company goals and then our people and our process into a very agreeable, collaborative discussion.

How much of the time spent as a revenue leader do you think is actually spent not with the revenue teams, but with those other outside organizations? Or maybe not how much time, but how much is the right time to break it up?

Yeah, that's a very good and hard question. I've been through a number of different companies in growth stages and the culture of the executive team and the maturity of the company, where it is, has a lot to do with the answer.

Mm.

But it's a really good question. It's very important because it cannot be ignored. Absolutely there will be a CEO at some point who wants the CRO to stay as focused as possible on acquiring customers. There's no doubt about it. But it cannot be done in a single silo. The marketing leads, just to be super simple about it, are essential to the way the sales team is going to potentially execute.

Course, content, whatnot.

Yeah, the delivery organization, the implementation organization are imperative to the credibility that the sales organization will take to the client so that they believe this can go live, this can happen, they can make it fit our business, whatever it might be. That all has to come together. So I believe that the working responsibility of a CRO is to absolutely be on top of their sales team's metrics and understanding and training and their enablement and their ability to execute, whether it's a small organization and the CRO is doing it themselves or they have a sales manager and a sales director in between, they need to be completely in tune with that. But their responsibility as an executive to making sure that the company's broad goal set of achieving revenue, acquiring customers is aligned amongst his peers or her peers, that's essential.

Yeah. It sounds like, as you said, the breakdown of that time split between, inside the revenue team, hyper-focused versus outside and managing more like company-level expectations depends on the maturity level and size of the business. Do you think it's not a one-size-fits-all solution?

It's not a one-size-fits-all. And it has a lot to do with the culture and it has a lot to do with the agreeability of the leaders to work together, which is not a small topic. But it needs to be done. And the CEO would culture those relationships to be very collaborative and positive and enthusiastic. But in the growth stage there are periods of time where everyone's head down making sure their silo and their department is getting built, and the process, and doing the training and getting the artifacts necessary for everyone to execute. Then there's a point of time where synthesis is essential. And then there's times of stress where that synthesis is even more imperative because a release doesn't go very well, customer success is getting a lot of complaints, whatever it might be. Those stress moments in a business, an underperforming sales team which is leading to a quarterly review with investors. There's stressful moments that happen in the growth of a company that working together and kinda knocking down those problems is the absolute best way. And getting to that state of executive team flow is very important.

I want to change gears for a little bit and talk about something else. So, one thing that I've been thinking about is that I hear a lot of times when I'm talking with sales leaders, sales is the most measured job on the planet, right? It's very good at measuring outcomes. You look at quota attainment, you look at pipeline, you look at activity. I'm inclined to believe that sales is not necessarily very good at measuring whether their people are actually getting better at selling. Like you can look at the results, but actually seeing how skills for people are improving is pretty challenging. What do you think about that? Do you think that's true?

I do think it's true, but you're actually mentioning what is an essential element to doing good coaching or to making sure the team's enabled. As you said, the sales organization might consider themselves the most measured group. So the metrics are absolutely telling a story. But the skill level and the enablement of each individual on how they're pursuing their craft, how they're pursuing their business, what the company is assuming they know versus what they actually know, that piece is equally as vital as just looking at the metrics. When you say metrics, we're talking about activities like number of calls, number of proposals, conversion rates,

Exactly, dials, whatever. Yeah.

dollars in the funnel, all that kind of fun stuff. Easy to see, but what makes those things successful is how well the sales organization has understood the product, understood the value proposition, how well the sales organization is working through and knowing the internal processes to move quickly, to get pricing, to get approvals. Those items are pretty darn vital. Not to mention, then the slightly softer side, but the people side is incredibly important too. And is there an enthusiasm? Is there a curiosity to learn more about the product? Learn more about the domain, learn more about the customer, the buyer experience, the customer's environment? That all comes into: are we coaching and/or are we measuring the full story in order for people to be and feel successful? Because that's maybe the other side of that whole coin is you want your team to be able to succeed and you want your team to feel success. Coaching isn't just about a manager telling an employee how they're doing. It's also an opportunity to recognize, an opportunity to see how you're growing. So you mentioned it, it's measurement. And a sales manager or sales leader today has the metrics locked. But that softer stuff—I'm calling it softer stuff, but—

Yeah.

All the other piece parts are very, very hard to measure. And then the bigger the team gets, the busier the sales manager gets, and the harder it is for a sales manager to put all that together. So I think today there's some real benefits, and I don't know if this is where you might be going, but in my mind today, with the way AI is helping a lot of this data collection on some of this softer stuff, right? How the reps are really learning, how the reps are really performing, whether it's through recorded sales calls or recorded training, however those events are happening, allows the sales leader to get a lot more input on the non-metric data and then coach effectively, meaning one, they're on point. But two, it's not biased coaching. The last—

Yeah.

Call I saw you on. I saw you on 10 calls thanks to a solution, and you really put this piece together. Here's one piece you're not, right? Very effective coaching and communication rather than a bias of the last time I saw you. And again, the larger your sales team, you also have bias on how you favor maybe high performers and low performers. But now that bias could be taken away because now you're seeing everybody for exactly what their skill sets are, exactly how they're learning their products, exactly how they're executing with customers. And of course executing means you could see their preparedness, you could see their answers and questions. That's being put together today better than it could ever be put together. And I know that this isn't exactly where you are leading, but if I were to go backwards in time a little bit, I as a sales leader would have to go on so many sales calls with the sales individuals to truly have a full story of how well they prepared, how well they know their product, how they handle objections, how they qualify. These are the essentials to good selling. And for me to really know how they're doing, I'd have to ride with. But today, a lot of this information can be brought to me in a very organized, very pattern-recognition way, so I can coach excellently.

Well, I think that this is a wonderful segue then into the topic of AI. I think it's undeniable that everybody's thinking about it. It's kind of unavoidable past a certain point. And you're certainly correct. AI has made certain activities that were previously unscalable, like going to listen to all your reps' calls, suddenly become possible and now something that's desirable for those pattern recognition opportunities that you mentioned. I'm curious, where do you think humans still have the edge when it comes to specific activities within sales? Based on what you're seeing right now, where do you think is the divide between what AI should handle versus what humans should be doing?

Yeah, maybe I'll start off with my point of view on sales excellence. So what AI brings to the table and the number of solutions and the creativity that's out there right now for salespeople is that they can bring so much data to the forefront and have it analyzed and put the patterns together, put sequencing together. But their responsibility is to still be excellent. They have to prompt it in a way that matches the business goals, their particular excellence on selling their product. It's the salesperson's responsibility to have the judgment to use what's valuable and to put it into play. So I put a lot of responsibility on the salespeople. They've freed up time by having massive amounts of data, forecasting information, whatever it is, brought to them and organized. So now use that time to make sure it's the data you want and it's presented in the way you want it. You're still the expert. A concern of mine is that I don't want salespeople to have false confidence. What AI is doing is bringing an incredibly polished presentation to the table. A very polished and almost indisputable analysis. But the truth is, it has to be read and it has to be deeply thought through before it's either presented internally to upper management as some type of result and before it's presented to a buyer, which then steers the direction of your sale. And I think that that excellence and that analysis and that filter is what makes a salesperson valuable while using the best tools possible. So now I move it to maybe where you were going because I kind of went backwards there on you, but with sales leaders, they now have this same power. A lot of data can be presented to them. But just look at the example. If a salesperson's bringing me a tremendous amount of information, the time that's saved now—I think typically a lot of people rush pre-call planning. But now the pre-call planning can be done so effectively at the AE level. The AE now has time to work with their sales manager or their sales leader, who also has a very valid perspective, because they share goals. They're in this together. That pre-call planning could absolutely be rehearsed more, reviewed more, strategized a little tighter, so now we have two sales experts that actually have the time and the data in front of them to truly bring, and I know this is unbelievably cliche, but they can bring a win-win proposition to the next meeting. Here's what the buyer needs, here's how it's valuable to them, here's how it's valuable to us, and here's how we're going to sequence and walk through that discussion so everybody gets what they need to move forward. I shouldn't use the word time. But they're enabled with that. And that is tremendously powerful. So you're taking just leaps over where we used to be where maybe call planning was five minutes before the call started in the car, right? So silly example, but you see my point.

Certainly. I think that we're seeing a lot more opportunities now where, like you said, you can actually take more time to prepare for these sort of things because maybe your CRM is just looking at your upcoming meetings and it's like, "Hey, here, I put together all the times that anyone in the company has spoken with this person." You don't need to go and do that yourself, right? You don't need to waste that time doing that. And now what you can do is you can actually focus on, like you said, doing that win-win proposition. And I don't think that's cliche. I think that's the whole goal of sales in a way.

Yeah, I appreciate you fixing it. The individuals, whether it's the sales leader working with the team or with the customers and the team, or the individual account executives or reps working with the people—the information that can be provided, and if we intelligently prompt our solutions, we get great stuff back. But you still need to make those judgment calls on what the buyer is ready to receive and how they're ready to receive it. Right? They might be a sensitive individual who's worried about their staff's careers because your solution set might have an impact on that. I'm not saying that the sequencing or having AI write your email is a bad idea, but you better read it first because what if a very valid point on why there's a cost reduction and a huge savings by reducing staff of three is part of the value proposition in the email, but you know that particular person, when you were walking down the hallway, was telling you how they were best friends with three of the people on their team. You might not want to trip up on that on a cold email. You might want to make that a softer discussion in person, right? That's your judgment call as a salesperson. You've got to think through that.

Yeah, and that's kind of where the importance of that human judgment still lies, I think. Marc, we have a lot of founders in our audience. I'm curious, you work with a lot of different stages of companies. How do you take what makes a founder successful at selling at an earlier-stage company and turn that into something that a team can repeat and scale?

Yeah, that is a big piece of the growth of a company. And it's vital on both sides, right? If we just be somewhat general about it, a founder starts a company because they have a particular passion, they have a deep set of knowledge, they have a problem they've identified that they know how to solve. And there's a passion and a belief and a depth in that that is just tremendous. And that's a certain spirit and gravitas that comes with it. Also the founder is the leader of the business, so they have a cachet around them, they also have an ability to be flexible, they have some risk that they can take different than other people. So you put that together, that's very, very powerful. But what's also really good about that particular moment is founders very typically have networks and they can have access to certain buyers in a different way than your everyday repeatable, "I need to do a hundred of these" kind of engine. Also, in those relationships, a lot of gaps can just be brushed over. Right? I'm the founder, I run this business, you and I work together, you and I are business associates. I tell you I'm gonna make that particular gap go away, you believe it. Right? So there's an understanding there in those initial deals and the way the founder sells. And that's all good stuff. So I get back to your question. I think it's obviously the sales leader, if there is a sales leader, that now steps into this question. Capturing what does work and what doesn't work, what the ICP is, what the message, what value proposition hit versus not, all of that stuff needs collected. The sales process that worked for the first few deals needs to be documented so that it's understood, you know, a demo is very vital to our sales process or not, whatever it might be. That all needs to be collected so that it can be turned into something that is repeatable and trainable. And you have to remember all those enablement things we were talking about earlier. The training necessary around the value proposition or around the product. At that stage, if we're talking about founder-led sales, the product is very much still in growth mode. So product knowledge is always growing. There's no sleeping on the fact that you're constantly getting up to speed on the next release or next feature functionality. So all of that needs to be captured and put into a playbook and sales can do that. I think maybe my two cents on a little special sauce here is the recognition that the product and the messaging and the company's operation behind the scenes was also founder-led.

Mm.

It too needs to grow for it to become repeatable. So your ICP at the founder-led moment might be very different. Not very, but might be different. The buyer might be different. The product set might need to be different in order for salesperson number 10 to come in, get excellent training, understand the value proposition, and execute. So we put a lot of emphasis, myself included, on the sales team understanding and learning the product and getting into the founder's flow and then learning to take it over. And we find a lot of individuals don't get there. And we have one person successful, then we lose that person. There's a lot of iterations there. But what I've found is as an executive team we have to recognize that it's not just moving the sales team to the next level of scalability, but the whole company is moving in scalability, which makes it a bigger chapter. But that's what makes it sticky and that's what makes it work.

I think that's great. And the point on how founders, they're kind of special at the company, right? Because tHey, like you said, they're coming with their previous connections or whatnot. They can get away with things that perhaps the rest of the sales team maybe can't. A lot of things have to change because what worked for the founder to get to this point is perhaps not what's gonna work when you've got the rest of the team that has to come and bring it to that next goal.

Right. When you strip it down, it's such a compliment to the founder and that's why the relationship between a CRO and a founder has to be very open and collaborative at this moment in their time. Because what the founder can do is say, look, I was up till three AM six months in a row building this. I know everything it does. I know why it does it. I know what I built that didn't work and why I rebuilt it a different way. You've got to say, "Okay, that's an amazing story, but the next guy who we're gonna find on LinkedIn is gonna come in here and what that person has to sell is not your late nights." They have to sell the feature functionality that actually makes the buyer side and their operational team, whatever it might be, execute with excellence. They need to be successful. And I need to tell them how they're going to be successful with our solution. And it's not because you programmed it every night for six months.

Certainly. Well, Marc, there's one last question that I'd like to end these off with. I'm curious, what's something you believe about sales today that most sales leaders would disagree with you on? It's a hard question.

It is a hard question, but maybe it's a popular answer, I don't know. I have an answer. So—

Okay.

My answer is that more pipeline is not better. Okay, so people—

Okay.

Talk about pipeline in a lot of different ways and agree with some of the things I said, but the problem is a lot of sales leaders, a lot of executive teams, want a big funnel. But a pipeline that is big and not accurate is not good for the business. So looking at number of deals and amount of dollars in the total pipeline or its multiple of quota: absolutely important, but having it be big so that you can talk to the venture team, talk to your executive team, make everybody feel like we're well covered is absolutely not a good thing for the business. A large pipeline is not necessarily better. What matters is a qualified pipeline. It's an organization that has very clear criteria for what qualifies as a good opportunity. They have a process for collecting that information. There's a process for exceptions to perfect criteria because there is no such thing as perfect. In the sales process, that qualification is consistently, continuously evaluated so that when we have a deal in the pipeline, we know that it fits our business. We know that we can sell it with excellence. We know we can perform and implement it and turn it on with excellence. We know that it fits. So we're pursuing deals that give us the best chance to make our quota and make our revenue goals. Because what's happening on the other side is bad deals sit in the pipeline. They over-amplify the value of the business, they over-amplify the sales team's quality. Then you get back to your underperforming question before. Padded pipeline is going to mask where we really are. And I think maybe that's my secret sauce. My underlying point is if my pipeline is right-sized and it's not the size I want, maybe it's qualified, but it's not the size I want, as a leadership team, we see that. We're not satisfied with it, but we know it's right, so then it tells us, well, what do we need to look at then? Shit, maybe my messaging's not hitting. Maybe my sales training's not hitting, right? But maybe the product features aren't working in the market right now. Let's work on that. If the pipeline's so big that all the other disciplines kind of see the funnel review at the weekly CEO meeting and everybody's happy with these big numbers, no one looks at what the gaps might be for our business growth. So it's better, even though it's harder, because sales leaders are back to the measured individuals, right? It's harder, but it's so much better for the company to have a very realistic picture of what the market is appreciating about your business and what gaps exist. So then you could just work on those gaps and make yourself stronger. So maybe all that I just said is not contrarian, but it hides behind a pipeline that everybody wants to see big.

I think that's a great point to end this on.

Okay.

And I actually do think that's a good thing. A lot of people will say, "Hey, top of funnel solves all problems," but that's not necessarily true if it's a top of funnel that's full of a bunch of unqualified opportunities.

Yeah. We all desperately want customers to validate our product. We want revenue to give us the ability to buy more, build more, do more. But at the same time we also are building a company that can withstand five years, ten years, twenty percent growth, forty percent growth, right? All those things have to happen and we have to build all those things. They don't just appear.

Hundred percent. Well, this has been The Play by Quotain. Thanks, Marc, for coming on.

Thank you, Alex. Appreciate it.