ASCEND Podcast: Mastering Sales Strategies with Jerry Brooner
In the fast-paced world of startups and technology, there's a constant pursuit of strategies and playbooks that promise success. Yet, according to Jerry Brooner, President at Enable Software, the secret sauce to building successful companies isn’t about following a pre-defined playbook.
In a recent conversation with Anne Gherini of Sierra Ventures, Jerry shared profound insights into his approach to leadership, hiring, and company culture. From his criteria for choosing the right company to join to the essentials of building a customer-focused sales culture, Jerry's perspective is a treasure trove of practical advice for founders and sales leaders alike.
Join us as we dive into Jerry's journey, exploring his unique approach to sales leadership, the fundamentals of building a strong sales team, and the critical strategies for driving revenue growth.
Takeaways:
Knowing Your Team
As a sales leader or any leader, it’s crucial to know your team, similar to knowing your customers. Understand their short-term and long-term career goals by asking them in various ways, not just once. How do they operate? What motivates them? By listening intently, they will tell you what they want. Knowing your team allows you to work just as hard to bring them opportunities. Top performers often won’t ask, so you must understand their desires and provide them with what they need internally. Then, you can provide opportunities accordingly.
Avoiding Sales Burnout
Everyone’s burnout threshold is different. Jerry's first lesson is to identify what causes burnout. What causes burnout for one person may not affect another, which circles back to understanding your team. For many top performers, burnout is often caused by not being in the best position to succeed while being overwhelmed by work unrelated to their goals.
Common Pitfalls with Founders
Jerry frequently encounters these typical errors among founders. First, founders often fall in love with their product, which is understandable. However, the problem arises when the market does not want it, and they hold on too tightly, resisting changes to their original product. Founders might also operate assuming they can manage their business from the zero to one to two million stages. Jerry recommends that handing over the reins to those who can handle processes at this stage might be best when you reach the one-and-a-half to two-million mark. Each subsequent stage, from two to three million and beyond, presents a whole new set of challenges.
Sales and Marketing Team Relationship
In this startup world, you either make something or sell something directly or indirectly. Focus on your output. When considering your marketing team, their main priority is to generate leads that will turn into opportunities that will close. The sales team is compensated on these closes, so the goal is aligned. Both teams must stay on the same page, working together to find and create the right opportunities. The teams must be aligned on the same output if they are on different paths. Inputs may differ, but they are important.
Underrated Roles
The first underrated role is sales operations. Jerry emphasizes that it’s more than just making your CRM look good. It’s about analyzing territories, adjusting quotas, and more, which is the secret sauce of sales operations. The second role is sales enablement, which ensures progress every quarter by building out your pipeline and examining your sales cycle. The last role is value consulting, which includes value engineering and business case consulting. In today’s world, everything revolves around numbers.
Short-term Sales Goals to Longterm Business Objectives
Every quarter is the most important quarter. If you don’t set yourself up for the next year, you will have a bad quarter. Any manager can achieve short-term goals, but a great leader can balance short-term and long-term objectives. Spend time planning ahead while analyzing metrics like efficiency, revenue growth, and employee productivity.
Clarity of Thought
Jerry’s first thought for leaders of any function is this: It’s okay not to feel excited about your role. That might be a sign to take note and consider something else. Understand that you’ll never have all the answers, and it’s beneficial to ask questions and seek help. It’s not just about the role; you should find the challenging parts exciting and have the drive to figure them out.
In Conclusion
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ASCEND Podcast: Mastering Sales Strategies with Jerry Brooner
- Summary
- Transcript
AI-Generated, excuse the errors:
Anne Gherini - Sierra Ventures: Jerry. Thanks so much for for joining us today.
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Jerry Brooner: Absolutely. And thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.
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Anne Gherini - Sierra Ventures: So last year, when you spoke to our founders, one of the questions that came up was, What is your playbook? When you jump into a new company, and your response surprised everyone because you said there really is not one. Can you elaborate on that.
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Jerry Brooner: Yeah, I remember that event very well. I really had a great time speaking to all those founders, and it's always such a pleasure to sit with Tim to hear stories about it.
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Jerry Brooner: When people ask me that a lot
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Jerry Brooner: people say, What's your playbook?
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Jerry Brooner: I've been very fortunate to be part of some very successful companies, the largest software companies in the world, sap, oracle workday, and startups that went out and had couple of great exits. An Ipo at dropbox and acquisition and scout.
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Jerry Brooner: And people say, What's the playbook? Show me the playbook like, it's a secret formula or algorithm there anywhere. What I shared with the founders is there's no playbook.
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Jerry Brooner: and if someone tries to tell you they have a playbook
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Jerry Brooner: they're selling you snake oil. I promise there is no playbook.
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Jerry Brooner: Now, there are some fundamentals.
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Jerry Brooner: There are fundamentals you can have
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Jerry Brooner: that you apply to every position in every company.
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Jerry Brooner: A value-based sales methodology.
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Jerry Brooner: right. A outbound metrics. You can't improve what you can't measure right? A customer focused sales, cycle, all kinds of things you can do that are same playbook, but every company is different, every product is different, every customer is different, every market segment is different. So trying to take a playbook from one company to another, or even from one market segment to another, within your own company. Is just silly, basically.
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Anne Gherini - Sierra Ventures: That's great. I I totally agree. And so I wanna jump over and talk a little bit about enable and you know, we talked or I just gave kind of your bio and background.
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Anne Gherini - Sierra Ventures: You could go just about anywhere. Why did you choose enable.
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Jerry Brooner: Yeah, and that's very kind of you. I'm I'm I'm not sure I can go anywhere. But thank you very much for the compliment.
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Jerry Brooner: There's there's a few things. There's a few things that I look for. I I'm not a Vc. So I'm not smart enough to go pick out a bunch of like best winners out of startups.
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Jerry Brooner: I'm not that smart. I'll leave that to you at Sierra. But here's what I do. Here's what I do I try to make it simple the 1st thing I do is I look at the market set. The company's going after.
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Jerry Brooner: Just go to the website and look at their customers.
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Jerry Brooner: And if they have a bunch of other startups or a bunch of other things, but if they have companies like Snyder electric home depot these big names. Then you probably have something right? So so that's the 1st thing I do.
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Jerry Brooner: The second thing I do is I try to explain it to my grandma.
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Jerry Brooner: Now my grandma raised 11 kids in Kansas 11 kids. My father was one of 11, and if I can't explain it to her like
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Jerry Brooner: that doesn't seem like a easy business problem to solve.
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Jerry Brooner: I remember, I explained Dropbox to her. Oh, I'm on my phone. The pictures will be saved.
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Jerry Brooner: Simple, simple. When I explained it navel to her. I was like, you know, when you buy a lot of something you want some money back feel like course, if I buy in volume, I want some money back
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Jerry Brooner: that's enabled. So so 1st I take those 2,
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Jerry Brooner: and then 3.rd 3.rd This is where Sierra comes in.
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Jerry Brooner: 3, rd I look, and I say some of the top Vc. Firms
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Jerry Brooner: in the valley, and there are lots of Vcs out there, but only couple of them consistently predict
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Jerry Brooner: pick winners
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Jerry Brooner: consistently. And I look, I look at the look at the board and the investors, and who invested in the series A and the C. It was Sierra and Menlo. And I was like, Okay, you put those 3 together. And then I met the founder and the rest of the exec team. And I was like, this is something that I I really wanted to jump into.
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Anne Gherini - Sierra Ventures: And so how do you think about when you jump in? How do you think about building that culture, especially the sales culture.
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Jerry Brooner: Oh, I cheated a little. I cheated a little
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Jerry Brooner: just to work. But
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Jerry Brooner: you always have to think about building the culture and how you're gonna make and how you're gonna shape it.
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Jerry Brooner: Remember, I talked to you about the note, the non playbook.
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Jerry Brooner: But you do some principles that are always the same values principles.
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Jerry Brooner: It made it really a lot easier for me and Mabel a lot easier, not easy. We still had to focus on a lot easier because a lot of the people that I worked with I remember you met a couple of them when we're in the room at the Founder Center.
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Jerry Brooner: They and and the founders were trying to poach them away from me. I remember that. But the same, you know, fundamentals of basics.
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Jerry Brooner: Have been carried with me, and some of the same people have come along. So it was a whole live user. If you have to start from scratch, it just takes longer. If you have to start from scratch and share with someone your go to market motion and and and your value based sales methodology, then that makes it hard. But if you have some leaders that you've worked with before, who've done this? When you bring them on, you immediately know
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Jerry Brooner: what they're what they care about and what they're focused on. And they know your system and your process and your go to market motion, and they can help teach that.
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Anne Gherini - Sierra Ventures: And when you're bringing on and looking for new candidates, new people to join your team.
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Anne Gherini - Sierra Ventures: what are you telling them like? How are you convincing them to get excited about rebate management? And how are you? How are you looking at that report? What does that profile look like for the candidates.
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Jerry Brooner: It's
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Jerry Brooner: it's a very interesting question. And and I think back to it when I started. So I was employee 63, I was number 63 here, and and when when that, when I was calling people
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Jerry Brooner: to come, join, or I was interviewing, and I'd be like, enable, you know, ENAB, LE rebate, REBI had to do a lot of explaining what it was, so there was a little bit of something involved there. It was a little bit of selling now, now, especially with the last announcement of the the 1 billion dollar valuation and and going, you know
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Jerry Brooner: through 4 fundraising rounds in in in 3 years. Most people notice most people have seen the name, and they've seen the Linkedin, so it's not as quiet. Then I have to look for a profile.
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Jerry Brooner: and and it's interesting to me the profile you look for, because the profile you're looking for when you have 60 people in the profile you're looking for when you have 600 people is vastly different. More specialization specialization. What I'm looking for in a profiles. I'm looking for a career trajectory, right? I'm looking for someone that is constantly taking on a new challenge, and either succeeding
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Jerry Brooner: or having a talent or having a tough time.
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Jerry Brooner: but still doing, and you can see it when you look at people on their resume. Did they stay at the exact same job at the same company for 3 years.
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Jerry Brooner: I'm not saying to jump companies a lot. What I'm saying is when you're at a company. Have you done something, especially a startup when it's dog years when you've done something for a year like you can see it on their resume. And you see, when you speak to them? Did they go try something new? Did they move to a new department? Did they take on more responsibility? Did they move up? Did they move sideways, and then up there's a lot of things you can look for saying.
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Jerry Brooner: you know, thrill, seeker, challenge seeker. That's what a startup person is. I need someone like that.
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Anne Gherini - Sierra Ventures: And then
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Anne Gherini - Sierra Ventures: hold on. I'll take a pause for a second.
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Jerry Brooner: Pause.
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Anne Gherini - Sierra Ventures: This is beauty of editing right? Not having to do this. Live.
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Jerry Brooner: Oz.
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Anne Gherini - Sierra Ventures: So.
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Jerry Brooner: Did you edit my hair? It's a little off today.
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Anne Gherini - Sierra Ventures: I can edit anything. Well, actually, I'll probably use someone else to do it for me is actually see? Otherwise you'll have like a bobbing head over in the corner, or something.
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Anne Gherini - Sierra Ventures: so what are the most critical stir skills? I'll do, Jim.
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Anne Gherini - Sierra Ventures: what are the most and critical skills and attributes. Aside from just risk taking when looking to hire sales professionals. Was there anything like throughout your career that surprised you that you look for now.
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Jerry Brooner: Know if it surprised me.
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Jerry Brooner: But you can almost tell my hit ratio really good. Within 5 min
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Jerry Brooner: I can start speaking with somebody. It's just a few basic questions.
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Jerry Brooner: and you know I'll I'll share a couple
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Jerry Brooner: and and and then, you know, if you want more, I'm happy to share those, too. There's no there's no panacea for for hiring great people. There's no like. Just do this, and you're gonna find something. Okay. But having done it for for many years. And thousands of people. There are definitely some traits. There's definitely some tricks.
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Jerry Brooner: A 1st one sounds like a platitude
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Jerry Brooner: does, but they have to be customer focused. Now, everybody says this, everybody says we're customer focused. That means I'm super customer focused. I answer, the call every time they call me really quickly, or I know that the company color is green, like a everyone says they're customer focused.
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Jerry Brooner: I remember one of my best reps, and I knew I knew she was a great rep.
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Jerry Brooner: She was covering jetblue.
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Jerry Brooner: and I remember I went to the 1st prep meeting with her, and she showed me. She told me what the most profitable route for what their gas hedges were, and that they were opening the CEO had a bonus tied to opening a route from Jfk. To the Uk.
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Jerry Brooner: That's knowing your customer. Knowing the margin lines, knowing who reported to, who knowing what their goals were, how the CEO is bonus that is, knowing your customer right cause. That's how you get to help them. So that's number one.
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Jerry Brooner: Number one is knowing your customer.
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Jerry Brooner: number 2, and
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Jerry Brooner: this sounds easy as well being committed
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Jerry Brooner: being committed.
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Jerry Brooner: But it's not that easy. Being committed is just not working hard.
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Jerry Brooner: Most successful people do work hard
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Jerry Brooner: unless you're smart enough to write the Google algorithm, which I'm not. But some people are smart enough to do that. Being committed and being committed means that not only do you work hard, but you know you're gonna get through something right ups and downs in a career.
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Jerry Brooner: ups and downs in a company. Things are going well, they're not going well because they're not. But if you're actually committed, you know, no matter what happens, I'm gonna look through it. I'm gonna find solution.
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Jerry Brooner: I'm gonna be committed. I'm gonna work through it until I keep buying a solution. So if you look at those 2 things, that's it's pretty easy to see, you know, who can be successful. And there it's actually rather easy to test, for truly rather easy interview, for if you think of it that way, and kind of work backwards.
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Anne Gherini - Sierra Ventures: Are there any strategies that you use to motivate and retain your top? Perform top performing sales, talent.
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Jerry Brooner: Strategies.
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Jerry Brooner: There are a couple of key strategies that I think any leader, whether your sales trip salespeople.
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Jerry Brooner: salespeople.
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Jerry Brooner: or any other part of a revenue team or a company.
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Jerry Brooner: Right? If you're a leader, the 1st thing you have to do is you have to make sure you know your team.
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Jerry Brooner: Now this is like knowing your customer. Anyone could say, Oh, look! I looked in the Hr system. This is their birthday.
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Jerry Brooner: Oh, I remember they went to college here, or they live in this city. So maybe they're a fan of that local team.
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Jerry Brooner: You have to know their short and long-term career goals
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Jerry Brooner: and asking them once isn't going to give you the answer you have to ask 5 or 6 different times in different ways. You have to know, personal and professional.
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Jerry Brooner: You have to understand how they operate.
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Jerry Brooner: What's the best way for them? What's the best position for them to be successful? How do they like to be motivated. How do they like to operate? Do they like to call a lot? They need to talk through things they like to go away and wait. So you have to know all that about your team, and that's hard when you have teams start to get big.
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Jerry Brooner: But but if you start, I tell everyone. Everybody will tell you exactly what they want. If you listen, I promise you talk to somebody long enough, and you listen to what they say. They'll tell you exactly what they want or what they feel. But you've got to pay attention.
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Jerry Brooner: You gotta not be waiting to answer. Gotta pay attention right? So number one. You gotta really know your team
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Jerry Brooner: number 2. You have to make sure, I think, for my top performance. I need to make sure they never ask or anything.
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Jerry Brooner: Now let me like I look my top forms. If you know them, you know them. You know what they want to do. You bring them opportunities, you say, hey, I know you want to do this.
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Jerry Brooner: I'll give you an example. I made a promise. I made a commitment to a rep on my team. She wanted to go move to the Uk. And we were going through drop offs at the time through the IP
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Jerry Brooner: and moving through the Ipo
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Jerry Brooner: and then she went to another job within the company before.
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Jerry Brooner: but come to enable
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Jerry Brooner: guess who I called and moved to the UK.
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Jerry Brooner: 6 years later for the same job. But I knew it. I knew she wanted so new. She and I knew that was her career goal, and it gave a great management experience give a greater national experience, but you have to know what your team wants.
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Jerry Brooner: have to know what you want, and then you have to give them that opportunity. She never asked for anything. The top performers will never ask
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Jerry Brooner: right? You need to be able to give them, you know, professional success, personal success and understand what opportunities and challenges that'll keep them interested because they'll get bored real quick. Top performers always get bored because they're really good at jobs, and they do their job in their life. Now I've done well. So those 2 things are a couple of key things that most people I see.
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Jerry Brooner: really, if if someone comes in, they say someone just left the company a top performer that's exactly on the manager, because top performers leave for bigger roles
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Jerry Brooner: better opportunities, but you can give them that internally.
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Anne Gherini - Sierra Ventures: So similar topic that we hear
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Anne Gherini - Sierra Ventures: on sales or anywhere on the revenue team is, how do you avoid sales burnout?
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Anne Gherini - Sierra Ventures: Is there anything that you can do to be proactive for your team, cause you've got big goals, and you know as you're doing with the naval. You're hitting quarter after quarter, and that is a total grind. How do you? How do you avoid them from getting burnt out, or is it avoidable
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Anne Gherini - Sierra Ventures: him.
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Jerry Brooner: Burnout's an interesting topic. Everyone's experienced it in their life.
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Jerry Brooner: And and you're right, especially when you're at a hybrid startup like Enable.
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Jerry Brooner: And some of the team top performers on my team who are who are going really hard
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Jerry Brooner: up
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Jerry Brooner: burnout.
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Jerry Brooner: You have to start back at the beginning.
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Jerry Brooner: Remember that. No know your employee person just like your customer. Okay? So everyone's burnout for us. It's gonna be a little bit different.
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Jerry Brooner: right? And they're not gonna tell you. If you're a top performer, you're always going upright or top right upright, so they just keep going. Keep going
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Jerry Brooner: one. You have to understand what causes the burnout.
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Jerry Brooner: What cause burnout for one person probably won't cause burnout for another person. Now, if you're worried about an employee in the revenue team being burn out by
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Jerry Brooner: going on customer visits. Then maybe that person doesn't belong in sales or different role. Right? So 1st find the role, know the person and find out what the burnout is. Most top performers, most people I've seen the organization who came to Blair now it is burnout
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Jerry Brooner: from
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Jerry Brooner: the rest
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Jerry Brooner: of their job. It won't be the main thing in their job. It's the
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Jerry Brooner: administration.
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Jerry Brooner: right? Or doing work that is unrelated to their goals or not understanding the work. So the burnout comes from
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Jerry Brooner: not putting the person better in the
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Jerry Brooner: not putting the person in the best position to succeed
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Jerry Brooner: cause that's when they wrap, cause they're running and spinning their wheels on a job versus clearly laying out. Here's how here's what your goals are.
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Jerry Brooner: Here's how you achieve your goals and then letting them run.
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Anne Gherini - Sierra Ventures: Now, in addition to your main job, you also have advised a lot of early stage companies, some of Sierra's as well. And what's some of the common pitfalls in the early stage, like those 1st early years that you see founders, or even that 1st sales leader make.
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Anne Gherini - Sierra Ventures: Is there anything that you see that just
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Anne Gherini - Sierra Ventures: continues to happen, that you can, you know, give some advice on to avoid.
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Jerry Brooner: Go find someone with the playbook.
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Jerry Brooner: For founders
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Jerry Brooner: for founders out there. Have one message number one.
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Jerry Brooner: bless you like. I would never have the medal to be a founder like, I think, the world of founders, someone who takes it all and puts on the line for their company. So I will always return a message from a founder. If there's a founder out there that has a question, send it to me. I promise you you'll get a response, because I admire founders.
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Jerry Brooner: I think founders may
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Jerry Brooner: a lot of very typical
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Jerry Brooner: errors that I see over and over again from the very beginning.
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Jerry Brooner: and I know it's hard. I know it's hard.
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Jerry Brooner: 1st of all, what I see from founders is founders fall in love with their product.
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Jerry Brooner: and they should. That's why they've built a company right?
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Jerry Brooner: The problem becomes one, the product.
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Jerry Brooner: The market doesn't want it, or it doesn't want it in that shape that they can't hold on too tight and not change from their product. The market will tell them the market will tell you if your product is good, if your product is worth a lot of money or a little money, or your product needs to change. And there are too many times that I see founders holding on to product or a product
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Jerry Brooner: attributes without being all changed. So so you gotta look to change
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Jerry Brooner: number 2,
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Jerry Brooner: I think founders a lot of times
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Jerry Brooner: operate in a I'm 0 to one or 0 to 2 million stage.
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Jerry Brooner: When you get to about 2,000,001.5 million, you need to start handing it over to people with processes to scale.
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Jerry Brooner: and I see founders do it too much. Oh, I don't wanna spend the money on hiring this expensive person, or I don't wanna spend the money to hire this. I got to a million. Let me get the 3 million for me, and they will. All great founders will still get that high.
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Jerry Brooner: But going from 1 million to 3 million and or 3 million to 11 million are different worlds.
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Jerry Brooner: Because now you're starting to talk about capacity and people and operations and marketing and demand Gen and all stuff. So if there are 2 things for founders, I would say, you know. Make sure you listen to the market on your product, and then number 2 start thinking about your scale, about the 1 million mark at the 1 million mark. You know them. The the market wants your product.
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Jerry Brooner: Now you gotta figure out how to get in the hand of everybody.
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Anne Gherini - Sierra Ventures: What's 1 thing you wish that founders knew about sales.
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Jerry Brooner: I don't know if it's 1 thing I wish. I think founders are great salespeople.
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Jerry Brooner: I think founders are unbelievable salespeople
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Jerry Brooner: right. They they
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Jerry Brooner: manage to get money from people like you. They go to say, I have this idea on this product may or may not have a customer
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Jerry Brooner: may or may not. I may or may not even have a product, but give me a million dollars, or give me 5 million dollars, and then, you know, I might give it back to you in 10 years. That is a great sales job. You get someone to do that. That is a great sales job.
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Jerry Brooner: What I think what I would share with founders.
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Jerry Brooner: What I would share with founders is.
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Jerry Brooner: it's an art and a science.
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Jerry Brooner: and you have to have both.
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Jerry Brooner: When you're a founder. You're normally doing the art.
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Jerry Brooner: Right? Here's our vision. Here's our picture. Here's what we're gonna build. Here's what we're gonna do for you. And that's all. Part of it
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Jerry Brooner: fell apart.
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Jerry Brooner: But that's only half
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Jerry Brooner: you have to do the science.
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Jerry Brooner: the science of it. There are stages in a sales cycle.
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Jerry Brooner: Things need to happen. There are people you need to talk to. There's budgeting, there's Po, there's security. There's a formula and a science that goes into it. There's an Roi model. There's the number of touches before a contact comes back to you. Number of touches within your organization. So there has to be an art and a science founders are normally great at the art. It's the science they need structure and help on.
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Anne Gherini - Sierra Ventures: So I'm gonna take a question from last year when you were speaking to our founders. Because again, I I really appreciated your response. And this is coming from, you know, a recovering marketer myself. How do you get sales and marketing to get along.
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Jerry Brooner: What if I give you? What if and what if I give you a different answer than I said last year?
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Anne Gherini - Sierra Ventures: Depends, how different.
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Jerry Brooner: What did I say last year? I'll test your number.
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Anne Gherini - Sierra Ventures: Yeah, last year you said you incentivize marketing similar to how you incentivize sales, or you should and that marketing should be held to that same pipeline number, and that was the unifying piece that I think a lot of founders still miss today. That marketing is off in the silo and sales is over here, and Cs is over here, and everyone's marching in a similar direction. But the kpis are all different.
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Anne Gherini - Sierra Ventures: and so you end up just having them clash back and forth with each other. And so, as I'm talking to founders on a regular basis, these are some of the messages that I'm trying to get get across. And I remember you point you were saying like, I. I don't know what your structure is for doing, and maybe it's different every time. But it
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Anne Gherini - Sierra Ventures: it's so important. I think everyone in the room was like, you know, maybe some of the marketers got a little uneasy. Some of the salespeople got a little uneasy, but it's it's a challenging question. And I I'd love to. Just how how do you handle it at enable? And or is it something that's just kind of inevitably, always going to be challenging in the startup world?
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Jerry Brooner: It
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Jerry Brooner: put it, though
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Jerry Brooner: probably a little bit of all the above
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Jerry Brooner: a little bit of all the above. But let me share very specific. I feel this way about the entire company. By the way, every department within the company.
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Jerry Brooner: I'm a firm believer.
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Jerry Brooner: I think. Tim told me this. I think Tim told me this smart guy
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Jerry Brooner: who
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Jerry Brooner: you either make something or you sell something.
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Jerry Brooner: You make something, or you sell something
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Jerry Brooner: right at a company. You're trying to sell something. You're trying to make something make something so.
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Jerry Brooner: And if your job isn't 1 of those 2 directly.
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Jerry Brooner: I promise you it is indirectly you're trying to help somebody make something, or you're trying to help somebody sell something
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Jerry Brooner: there is no in between.
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Jerry Brooner: So you just have to make sure that people understand that, and their goals are aligned to that. Compensation drives behavior. Now you can. I've seen it.
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Jerry Brooner: and I've seen it at big companies and small companies. Let's go back to marketing.
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Jerry Brooner: They pay them on
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Jerry Brooner: marketing touches or marketing influence, or the number of events.
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Jerry Brooner: all that are inputs. Those are inputs that's not the output you're looking for. What's the output you're looking for?
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Jerry Brooner: Close revenue like? It doesn't matter how many events, how many web touches. How many Mqls. SQL Aql. Whatever. Ql, none of that matters unless you get the close revenue
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Jerry Brooner: right? So if you incent a marketing team on events, they're going to be a whole bunch of events. But they might be terrible.
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Jerry Brooner: or they might be good. But again, that's an input, that's input you're looking for the output, which is close revenue. So you want marketing team
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Jerry Brooner: and the sales team, thinking I need to find a lead
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Jerry Brooner: that will turn into an opportunity that will close. How do I get a lead that will turn an opportunity that will close.
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Jerry Brooner: and then you need to get the sales team who's already cause they're paid on close thinking, how do I go? Make sure I get the right opportunity. So you have to incent them to go the other way, too, so they both can have the same on. Let's find the right opportunity. Right? Let's create the right opportunity together, and then let's close it.
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Jerry Brooner: But if you're in sending them on different things or measuring them on different things again.
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Jerry Brooner: Certain things are inputs. Right? Number of leads is an input
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Jerry Brooner: you're just looking for an output. You want the end result, which is closed revenue, and you can tie anything from marketing, anything from customer success and anything from sales back to close revenue. And if you can't tie it.
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Jerry Brooner: then stop doing that.
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Anne Gherini - Sierra Ventures: I love it.
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Anne Gherini - Sierra Ventures: so one more question kind of in that line. What's 1 of the most underrated roles in this? Let's say the whole revenue org. Are there any roles that you know? Maybe typical founders aren't thinking that they need to prioritize that you rely on regularly.
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Jerry Brooner: I will give you 3, cause I can't tell you which one.
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Jerry Brooner: But when I came to enable there were 3 offer letters that went out the same day. I got mine
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Jerry Brooner: same day.
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Jerry Brooner: and there were 3 very specific roles and people in those roles.
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Jerry Brooner: Aye.
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Jerry Brooner: the 1st one. I tell every founder this, and and none of them believe me.
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Jerry Brooner: I tell every sound I tell every 1st time vp. Of sales. I tell every 1st time Cro. I need this, and none of them still, believe me, cause I see how greatly understaffed it is. Sales operations.
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Jerry Brooner: Now people think of sales, operations, and go. Who's going to do my deal desk, or who's gonna like? Make my Crm look prettier? Dashboard? No, no, no, I don't know. That's part of it.
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Jerry Brooner: Do you want to know how to analyze territories, how to increase quotas or decrease quotas, how to understand? You know where the top accounts are, where the best personas we're sitting that sales operations.
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Jerry Brooner: That's your secret sauce.
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Jerry Brooner: Alright. If I was the 1st time
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Jerry Brooner: Vp. Back when I was 1st thing I would do is, go to sales Ops, and make sure it's a really competent person.
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Jerry Brooner: really, really common. Now, most of the time, like when I went to this company to do some advisory work. The other day I said, tell me about your sales operation. Let me meet the person, and they introduced me to the person, and the person ran. The Bdr. Team was for 4 years out of college. Nothing wrong with that. But they ran a sales Ops.
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Jerry Brooner: probably a little booster for sales. That's number one.
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Jerry Brooner: number 2, I would say. Sales enablement
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Jerry Brooner: sales enabled.
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Jerry Brooner: It's impossible you can do a top down capacity model. You do a bottomed up lead to close revenue. You can do all that if you can't train someone on what to do
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Jerry Brooner: and how to do it, and when to do it. Then you've wasted money.
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Jerry Brooner: People, I see founders and companies spend
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Jerry Brooner: tens of thousands, hundreds of hiring people
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Jerry Brooner: recruiting, finding them
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Jerry Brooner: bring them on, and then when they get there. I remember the last company I went to. I was.
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Jerry Brooner: tell me about your sales enablement, and they said, Oh, here it is, and it was like a Google sheet with 4 lines on it. One was like, you know, the the website of the company. So if you're trying to trust somebody to scale. You need to make sure sale. And it's just not ongoing, right?
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Jerry Brooner: It's not just one time
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Jerry Brooner: it's ongoing. Once you train them 3 months later. Where are they at? What are they doing? What are they certifying on 6 months later? Are they building pipeline? Do they understand how to build pipeline and set up progress to sales cycle. So sales enablement.
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Jerry Brooner: and the 3rd and final one, probably close to my heart is
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Jerry Brooner: value consulting value engineering business case, consulting
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Jerry Brooner: everything in the world, especially today, especially today, is a number.
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Jerry Brooner: especially, everything is getting scrutinized. So you need to have a number on everything.
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Jerry Brooner: and everything does have a number.
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Jerry Brooner: and the amount of time you're spending right now. There's a number on this.
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Jerry Brooner: There's a number.
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Jerry Brooner: Tim's probably like, what is she doing for my bottom line. There's a number on this for you. Everyone. Time has a number, because right now you need to make sure that your project has a number to it, both a hard cost and a soft cost. How much hard dollars am I going to get to bottom line, and how much time savings am I have? If you just have something a time savings. But you have to do that throughout the sales process.
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Jerry Brooner: So I would say, those 3 areas are are top top hires.
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Anne Gherini - Sierra Ventures: When you think about sales enablement. At what stage does that need to come in? Because I've definitely seen.
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Anne Gherini - Sierra Ventures: I think, in that really early stage which I work with a lot of our.
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Anne Gherini - Sierra Ventures: you know, seed seed and a stage portfolio companies. They're ready to go hire agencies, or you know, Bdr Bdrs or Bdr teams, and they don't really have a playbook. So it's kind of like, how can you train these people without it? Is it that early, or is it kind of founder needs to do it till certain point and
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Anne Gherini - Sierra Ventures: and then you plug in sales, enablement later down the road.
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Jerry Brooner: I would
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Jerry Brooner: work with the founder and ask him, What's your growth?
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Jerry Brooner: Most most founders, at least in the Sierra portfolio, are doubling year over year at least.
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Jerry Brooner: doubling 2, 3 x. So if you're at 2 million and you're doubling, you plan to go to 4, then 8
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Jerry Brooner: think amount amount of people.
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Jerry Brooner: Bdr sales reps, solution consultants, technical experts, industry experts that you need to train and hire. And and you're right.
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Jerry Brooner: People spend tens of $1,000 and lots of times going and hiring all these people, and then they show up on the 1st day, and they're like, Well, how do I talk to them about my company, my industry, my persona, my marketplace. How do I tell them about our sales process? How do I tell them about, you know, engaging with the right future. So I would say, I would say, it depends on your growth, but definitely by 3 million.
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Jerry Brooner: maybe 2.5 million, because you're building. Not for that year for the next year, and the year after.
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Anne Gherini - Sierra Ventures: So as your roles kind of progressed throughout your career, and going from
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Anne Gherini - Sierra Ventures: pretty much, only doing sales to now, President, and enable you've got a lot of you got your hands in a lot of different pots there. How do you think about that balance of short term goals versus long, long term business objectives. Is that something that you've built your own playbook for like, how how do you think about handling that.
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Jerry Brooner: It's a it's an age old question, alright short term versus long term.
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Jerry Brooner: Every quarter is the most important quarter.
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Jerry Brooner: and it will be for the rest of the time every quarter. You're in the most important quarter. But if you don't set yourself up for next year, and then when you get to that point. You're gonna have a bad quarter. So
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Jerry Brooner: any manager, any manager, can do a short term.
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Jerry Brooner: One of our other board members Dan shared. Any manager can do short term. A really great leader can do the short term while planning for the long term.
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Jerry Brooner: You need to do both.
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Jerry Brooner: You need to be able to do both.
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Jerry Brooner: How we do it, how we do it we're enabled. There's lots of different ways, I'm sure, and the revenue is one way, but we spend time. We spend time. Our CEO is very big on spending time, Andrew on it. We will do offsites. We will take time out of calendars. And we'll say, Okay, where are we going to be in 3 years? Where are we going to be in 5 years? What are the metrics? This is how detailed he is. What are the metrics of that company in 3 years? Where are our metrics now? And how are we getting to those?
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Jerry Brooner: That's everything from efficiency, tech revenue growth employee productivity revenue per employee. So we're he's he's well ahead of us. So so for me and makes it
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Jerry Brooner: for me. It makes it really easy, because there's a corporate level, and then I have to bring it back down to the revenue piece of it and understand how I move to that.
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Jerry Brooner: So so I get an easy card, because with our my CEO.
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Anne Gherini - Sierra Ventures: Yeah, Andrew, one of the things we we talk about a lot with great founders, and Andrew's name comes up is clarity of thought
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Anne Gherini - Sierra Ventures: and just knowing really being able to kind of pull back and see that long term vision, but still be able to execute quarter on quarter. I think that's 1 of the really phenomenal things about enable that your team has been able to do that and like hitting those numbers, but also have this much grander vision that you're working towards?
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Anne Gherini - Sierra Ventures: So
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Anne Gherini - Sierra Ventures: what advice would you give? Revenue leaders that are just kind of starting out or aspiring revenue leaders, people who are looking to kind of take on that 1st
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Anne Gherini - Sierra Ventures: leadership role and in sales.
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Jerry Brooner: Started.
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Jerry Brooner: Get ready for a lot of gray hairs like I have
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Jerry Brooner: my 1st comment to to any of them, and any
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Jerry Brooner: leader in any function.
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Jerry Brooner: whether it be marketing. I know you're a recovering marketing person
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Jerry Brooner: or product or engineering, whatever it is.
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Jerry Brooner: if you don't get up
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Jerry Brooner: and are excited about the tough times and the challenges we have and the and the joy, the celebration. And maybe you're not in the right role.
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Jerry Brooner: That's okay. I had a lot of roles that I was one really bad and terrible at. But number 2 I didn't enjoy. I was in marketing for a year. I was terrible at it, and I didn't enjoy it very much.
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Jerry Brooner: But when I got to a role that I did once I got to.
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Jerry Brooner: once I got to a role that I did.
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Jerry Brooner: I would say, you know, find that moment, find that role and and enjoy it, and and understand that you're never gonna have all the answers.
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Jerry Brooner: Ask a lot of questions. Ask a lot of people for help, and and you're gonna be just fine.
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Anne Gherini - Sierra Ventures: Yeah. One of the I think the misconceptions that a lot of people are told early on is, go find like a an industry or something that you know you really are passionate about, and I think it's so much more about the role like, I love
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Anne Gherini - Sierra Ventures: marketing at the end of the day, and I was surprised throughout my career that the times that I enjoyed it the most I was selling really boring products like crms and things that I you know I wasn't. You know I have an athlete. So I wasn't out there, you know, marketing, Nike, I was marketing a Crm product that, you know, felt like a big spreadsheet. So yeah, I think it's
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Anne Gherini - Sierra Ventures: I think it's finding those roles where just the the key functions in that, how you use your brain every day really does excite you?
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Anne Gherini - Sierra Ventures: And then on that note. So if you were, if you didn't have a career in tech or sales.
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Anne Gherini - Sierra Ventures: What would you be doing.
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Jerry Brooner: I'd be a history professor.
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Anne Gherini - Sierra Ventures: Oh!
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Jerry Brooner: Probably. High school.
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Jerry Brooner: Nice. Yeah.
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Anne Gherini - Sierra Ventures: It is.
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Jerry Brooner: And I. Probably it would be centered around
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Jerry Brooner: World War 2, the American Revolution
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Jerry Brooner: area or the Civil War. I'm a history, Buff. So I like reading a lot of books. I would be a history Professor.
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Anne Gherini - Sierra Ventures: That's great!
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Jerry Brooner: It's a little like sales. You're educating the market.
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Anne Gherini - Sierra Ventures: Yeah.
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Jerry Brooner: Yeah, our marketing leader, Sean, would probably agree with you.
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Anne Gherini - Sierra Ventures: So to to end it. Are there any books that you recommend? For leaders or for founders that are thinking about sales or thinking about scaling businesses. Is there anything that you've read throughout your career that really like
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Anne Gherini - Sierra Ventures: made an impact on you.
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Jerry Brooner: I would 1st say any book.
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Jerry Brooner: any book read always, I read now today, every day I mark it out of my calendar, and I take time out or so, so always read and educate yourself.
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Jerry Brooner: One that sticks out to me
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Jerry Brooner: that I've used and read several times. I just gave it to everybody at our Presence Club is, the score will take care of itself
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Jerry Brooner: by Bill Wallace. The score will take care of itself, besides being an avid 40 niner fan the scores. He it's not. It's not a football book. By the way, it's a business book. And he always talked about control the inputs and the score will take care of itself. Control the inputs.
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Jerry Brooner: you know, control what you do each day, control how you practice control, how your team thinks control how you train. He trained everyone and the entire company, even the receptionist at the front of the 49, is building. He went through the same training that the football players coaches there. He, those were inputs he could control inputs. And then he said, once you control inputs.
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Jerry Brooner: the score will take care of itself. Don't worry about that.
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Anne Gherini - Sierra Ventures: Oh, I love it! That's such a great, great way to to end this. And, Jerry, if there's if founders want to get a hold of you. What is the best way, or to do that?
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Anne Gherini - Sierra Ventures: It.
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Jerry Brooner: On Linkedin.
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Jerry Brooner: Jerry Bruner, BRON. ER. Or to come to Sierra and ask you.
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Anne Gherini - Sierra Ventures: That's always a that's always a good one.
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Anne Gherini - Sierra Ventures: Jerry, thank you so much for for taking the time. I really appreciate it.