How to Build a High-Performing Sales Team With the "Moneyball" Approach

[00:00:00] Aaron: Welcome everyone to the Revenue Mavericks podcast. We have a great guest today, Jeremey Donovan, who is currently the Executive Vice President of Revenue Operations and Strategy at Insight Partners. He has a very storied history. I'll let Jeremey introduce himself real quick. 

[00:00:25] Jeremey: Yeah, Aaron, really excited to geek out with you. I think we're going to talk a little bit about talent and talent selection today, which is a topic near and dear to my heart. And then, yeah, I mean, intro wise, just very high level. I think you did already, which is I work on the advisory team at Insight Partners, which is a VC firm. And before this, I've worked in bunches of different jobs across engineering, product, marketing and sales.

[00:00:49] Aaron: So, Awesome. And, uh, yeah, you, you hinted at the theme for the day, so I'll jump right into it. Um, with a quick, I don't know, story. I, uh, we recently hosted a customer advisory board and one of our customers, he's a, he's a rev ops leader at a, at a pretty big company. He casually commented in between sessions. 

[00:01:11] Aaron: That he's noticed over the last five years, the quality of sales reps and sales managers has decreased considerably, and I don't think it was blaming them necessarily. I think there was kind of a cultural component to his, his observation, but I kind of wanted to start there because it seemed relevant and topical. 

[00:01:28] Aaron: Um, have you noticed that same thing? And if yes, why, and if no, why not? No, I would not actually say I've noticed the same thing. Uh, part of it, by the way, right, as I mentioned, I come from an engineering background and, and, you know, the engineer, despite moving into other functions has never left me. So I'm really hesitant to say X, Y, Z has changed without supporting data. 

[00:01:53] Jeremey: And, um, you know, I think as we. You know, as the judges age, uh, we always think the younger generation is, you know, somehow not as not as resilient, not as this, not as that. But I think I don't necessarily think that there have been significant changes in in the talent level over time. Um, one, one can make again. 

[00:02:18] Jeremey: These are one can have the hypothesis, right? Because would need to be tested. But one can have the hypothesis that during the growth at all costs era. People, you know, we're, we're, we basically let a lot more people into the profession. B to B sass sales. Uh, we let more people as a necessity move into management roles. 

[00:02:40] Jeremey: P things were moving fast. Maybe there wasn't as much coaching or training. Um, again, I don't have the data to support that, but, but, you know, that would be the hypothesis. And then in the last year and a half, at least, Right. There's been a tremendous amount of efficiency, which is a euphemism for cost cutting, [00:03:00] which is a further euphemism for layoffs. 

[00:03:02] Jeremey: Uh, so that we're, you know, we're, we're back to right sizing the capacity of sales teams and management teams to be closer to the, the demand that's out there. Yeah. And, you know, one would presume that. In that environment, everyone started to work harder and smarter to hold on to their jobs and and, um, you know, we're, we would be back at historical norms. 

[00:03:25] Jeremey: So that's like all, all of that is hypotheses. But yeah, I have no data that would say one way or the other, whether people have gotten gotten better or worse. I don't really think people but I mean, my observation is People are people over, over this short span of human history and sales history. So no, I don't think there's a significant degradation. 

[00:03:47] Aaron: Well, maybe, maybe what you hinted at, um, speaks to a shift that you had called out. Um, I saw a post a couple of months ago where you said, um, CEOs are seemingly looking for sales leadership that are more willing to roll up their sleeves. Get out into the field and engage on deals. I mean, what, what do you think is driving that shift in the type of sales leader that, um, CEOs are actually trying to hunt down? 

[00:04:15] Jeremey: Yeah, I, I heard, uh, I was listening to a podcast earlier, another podcast earlier today, I was taking a walk early this morning and, you know, they, they were talking a little bit about this phenomenon too. And I think they were quoting Jason Lemkin, who apparently in the midst of an interview, well, Ask all the questions, but then asks, but are you actually going to do the work? 

[00:04:35] Jeremey: Right? So I think this roll up your sleeves mentality, all hands on deck is, is like very much at the forefront. I have the luxury of interviewing a lot of CRO candidates for our portfolio companies, as people come and go. And, you know, for sure the CEOs. Are looking for CROs who are going to get involved in deals, right? 

[00:05:03] Jeremey: It's, it's not enough to be an armchair leader. The leaders need to go out. And support their reps. And this is all the way up to the top, right? I mean, I'll also add this. I don't think this is a super new thing, right? Is a lot of times the CEOs of top companies are the number one sales people. Also, it's just that the deals that they get pulled in on just become bigger and bigger and bigger over time. 

[00:05:27] Jeremey: Because let's say they devote. X percent, whatever, 20, 25 percent of their time to customer facing activities, especially sales related expansion or, or a new logo lands, then, you know, as the company gets bigger and bigger and bigger and the opportunities get bigger and bigger and bigger, they're working on bigger and bigger deals. 

[00:05:47] Jeremey: So, you know, ditto with the, with the CROs and as, as organizations in general have shrunk. Relative to the amount of ARR that they're producing a lot less [00:06:00] excess capacity means maybe you're removing layers. And when you remove layers, you got to have those remaining leaders be much more active in deals. 

[00:06:10] Aaron: So let's say, uh, you're, you're scouring for talent often, as you mentioned. Um, is this one of those things, one of those attributes you're looking for in sales leaders? And if so, how do you spot it? Because it's one thing for a leader to say in an interview, Yeah, I don't mind getting my my hands dirty. You know, I get into the weeds. 

[00:06:27] Aaron: I read it. How do you actually know? And maybe the broader question is what what makes an effective sales leader? Like, yeah, what is good talent that you're trying to scope for? This might be one leg of a multi leg stool. But how do you spot it? What are the other things that you're looking for? Yeah, I'm going to kind of go down two paths. 

[00:06:45] Jeremey: One is more of an academic path, and then one is more of the I'll call it applied path. So on the on the academic side. The, the one job I did not work in that would have, I always thought might have been in my future would have been some kind of a, uh, like a analytics HR role because I'm super interested in understanding the correlation of job performance to other factors and how you can play some degree of money ball with hiring and the general academic literature I do. 

[00:07:15] Jeremey: Uh, tend to read more than my share of academic journal articles on different topics because of the whole data-driven thing. Yeah. So, you know, one of the, one of the sort of, uh, linchpin bench, you know, benchmark studies that was done in academic literature looked at job performance as a function of a whole bunch of things. 

[00:07:36] Jeremey: And when they sussed all that out, the, there really came down to three things that matter. Number one is IQ and about 25 percent of job performance can be linked to variations in IQ. It's called general mental ability in the academic literature. The second thing is conscientiousness, which is one of the big five personality factors. 

[00:07:59] Jeremey: And the third thing is job skill. Um, there's a whole bunch of other stuff that is quite ineffective. For instance, unstructured interviews, which we all rely on as the number one thing are notoriously Um, ineffective for predicting job performance. So, uh, structured interviews, much more predictive unstructured. 

[00:08:24] Jeremey: Not so much. Uh, and then, you know, you can sort of go down the list. So on this. On this first academic path, I mean, the things I'm looking for right are, are definitely a sense of, is this person intelligent? Humans are actually pretty good at assessing intelligence and others, but we do have most of our candidates go through a cognitive. 

[00:08:45] Jeremey: Test like a wonder liquor criteria corp test, which is effectively an IQ test on the and then those tests also often have a personality component, which gives you the conscientiousness side and then the job skill is for them to do some sort of project. [00:09:00] Um, you know, you can debate whether they should do a project, which is, which is like a portion of the job that they're about to do, or you could have them do a project. 

[00:09:10] Jeremey: Detailing what they have done in the past. So I'm gonna pause there on the academic side before I switch to the more applied side. But any, any, uh, sh should I switch over or you have any questions about that side? No. Switch over. I think that makes sense. I'm actually, uh, I'm, I'm eager What the next, next part of the Taylor? 

[00:09:25] Aaron: Yeah. So I, I, I would describe the, the applied side has been there, done that, um, right. So what we're looking for is. Uh, think about, have they sold into this ICP before? Have they sold at this price point? Have they sold with this motion, whether that's partner led, marketing led, sales led, product led? Like, have they done this motion at this ASP range before? 

[00:09:53] Jeremey: Have they You know, if this is a company that's growing from 20 million to a hundred million ARR from a hundred million to 200 million, right. Have they been on that journey? So it's as much been there, done that as you can possibly get, you're never going to get a hundred percent of all that. So, but the, but the been there, done there. 

[00:10:09] Jeremey: Aspect of it is, is critical. And then the other piece is this, now we're coming full circle to where we started, which is the deal side. So I, if now that, that. Sometimes, you know, like if something's a higher velocity kind of company, then then the deal side isn't as important. But if you're doing, you know, enter mid market to enterprise deals, then the deal side becomes very important. 

[00:10:33] Jeremey: And the question I've been trained to ask there is basically to to have them walk through a recent deal that they were involved with. And. The one of the key things is to have them. I mean, leaders usually have been trained or otherwise use we as opposed to I so they'll just do we we we all, you know, all the way home on that. 

[00:10:54] Jeremey: Uh, but they what you what you need to clarify with them is tell me what you did and and also specify what other people did and you're so there you're listening for. Yeah, yeah, you're listening to what their role is in those deals. Like, we're not expecting CROs to be generating pipeline. Typically, we're not expecting CROs to be, to be the person project managing the opportunities, but they're playing a role. 

[00:11:22] Jeremey: Right, um, early and often in that. The other thing I look for, and then I'll, I'll pause in, in CROs on the applied side is that they come in with a playbook of some kind. And again, quoting, I'm a, I'm a curator. I don't, I have some original thoughts, but I curate a lot. And so I got this also, I think, from something I read or a podcast and the comment was, you want to hire people who, leaders who come in with a playbook written in pencil and not a pen. 

[00:11:54] Jeremey: So, so the worst is like, they don't have a playbook. Yeah, the middle zone [00:12:00] is they do and it's super rigid and and they're it's it would be hard to assess this, but they're inflexible to the context of the organization. They're joining. The best is is the playbook written in pencil. So, you know, I get a sense of that by asking people. 

[00:12:15] Jeremey: About the sales process or aspects of the sales process. Like if I'm talking to someone and they mentioned P. O. C. I'll pick up the thread on P. O. C. and I want to understand how disciplined are they? What do they do on what do they expect and inspect on P. O. C. S. Um, but it could be any aspect of the sales process to sort of to drill down on, especially for enterprise selling. 

[00:12:38] Jeremey: I want to hear About how you know what methodologies they use. I want to hear about pipeline generation. I want to hear what their forecasting rhythm and cadences. So these, there's these, these things that show the, I mean, this role is a professional role with a not exact clones, but. You know, there's a lot of similarity of best practice. 

[00:13:02] Aaron: Yeah. I, you'd referenced that, that post and I think somewhere in the comment or maybe it was on the same post, you had made the point that you have to let the data tell what the process should be rather than dictating it with a, a firm, a firm framework in place. And I've seen both sides of this play out, which is really, really fascinating. 

[00:13:20] Aaron: Um, back to the evaluation, you know, you're assessing talent on, on all of these different, uh, areas. factors, what's the hardest for you as a leader when you're looking at talent to pull out from candidates? I mean, when you're trying to assess talent and try to figure out if they're an ideal fit for a situation, what's the hardest thing to actually determine? 

[00:13:40] Jeremey: It's probably something I didn't mention. I mean, I think those things that I mentioned are ones that are somewhat easier to assess. I also, by the way, Really try to rely heavily on backchannel reference checks. So if I spend an hour with a sales leader, um, good or bad, like that's only one small data point and, and sales leaders should be incredibly good at selling themselves. 

[00:14:06] Jeremey: So the backchannel reference check really gets, gets more information. Um, yeah, to your question about what's the hardest thing to assess. I think the hardest thing to assess is just is cultural fit because. When I'm interviewing somebody, I don't work at the company. So I've talked to the CEO and often, you know, the head of HR about what they want, what they, what the success, I always ask what, you know, what are the sort of profile of successful executives in the company? 

[00:14:37] Jeremey: I really want to know also about the, their false positives, where they hired someone who didn't work out and what was it about them that didn't work out. So I do want to get a sense of the culture of the company, but let's say the company is. You know, we have a broad spectrum of companies, but let's say the company is more like an aggressive in your face, um, type of a [00:15:00] culture and, you know, how do you assess that in a candidate, whether they're going to be okay with that? 

[00:15:06] Jeremey: That's that's kind of hard for me. I think maybe having worked for companies with leadership. You know, where that company is known as being a more aggressive in your face kind of culture. Um, that's a good proxy, right? It's again, the been there, been there, done that. But it's otherwise, it's otherwise hard. 

[00:15:27] Jeremey: I mean, every once in a while, all, all these days, you have to be really careful and interviewing, um, not, I mean, obviously, you're always in compliance with laws, but the place you also have to be careful of is, is glass door, right? Like. Um, there's a little bit of walking on eggshells in interviews, so I try not to disrupt candidates that much, but I have done it. 

[00:15:54] Jeremey: I mean, one time I was doing an interview and the candidate was like, it just wasn't clicking and I, sometimes I would just sort of let that go and say, okay, this is a no. Um, but in this case, the company loved the person. They didn't have a ton of candidates on paper. The person was amazing. And I just I wasn't sure what was going on. 

[00:16:19] Jeremey: And I and I said, okay, I'm gonna call an audible. And just say, Hey, like I don't, it's not clicking for me and I don't know why. And I, I replayed a little bit of the interview and I said, I asked you this, you answered that it wasn't exactly, it wasn't, you know, it wasn't what I was expecting, whatever. I don't, it's been a while. 

[00:16:37] Jeremey: It's probably been a year since that interview. And in that case, the candidate got really upset and yeah, yeah, really upset. Um, Basically, who the heck are you? Um, uh, at least I'm not a kid anymore. I'm, I'm, I'm getting to be an older person, uh, or my kids would say old person, but, um, like who, who are you basically an advisor who works at a VC to, to be judging me, you know, super veteran, CRO. 

[00:17:12] Jeremey: So he was, he was not happy. And, but what that told me was like, this is not the right person for, That, you know, that was one of those direct in your face environments. And if he, like, if he was going to react as if it was, I was, yeah, I try to be intellectual about it. It's not an ad hominem attack. It's like, I think we're having a communication issue. 

[00:17:35] Jeremey: And if he reacted that way to a communication issue, right. Not going to work out at that company, even if he's great, because culturally. Was not going to be a fit. I try not to do the cultural fit piece, but that would be a harder part to to assess. And I try to track my false positives where I said, yes, they hire the person they turned to be bad. 

[00:17:57] Jeremey: My false negatives where I say no, and the [00:18:00] company decides to hire the person anyway, and then they turn out to be great. Like, it happens. I just interviewed two zeros yesterday. One of them. I was a no on and the CEO of the company, um, said, wow. Like. Your take was completely different than our take. And, and they're probably going to hire the person. 

[00:18:18] Jeremey: And, and I have no, like, I'm just a voice in the process. I have no objection to that. I'm actually, I want the person desperately to work out. And if they do, then I calibrate and I figure out what was it about? What did I miss? Um, I constantly want to calibrate cause I'm, I'm, I'm not infallible. I just hope that, um, and strive more than hope. 

[00:18:44] Jeremey: I strive to be. To get better and to have a higher, to have a higher success rate, fewer false positives, fewer false negatives as I, as I do the job back when you had mentioned that, uh, the example of, you know, the worst case scenario is they don't have a sales plan. But what you want is somebody who has a plan with in pencil that they can adjust if needed. 

[00:19:09] Aaron: I imagine that there are some standardized best practices that go into having a solid sales plan. So what do you typically look for when when somebody says, Hey, this is how I typically run things or what I look for, what I measure, like what's what's included in that? Yeah, I'm a big fan of the of the PTO. 

[00:19:27] Jeremey: If I throw it's PTC way, but I guess it's PTC blade logic. AppDynamics, Zscaler, Snowflake, like that whole diaspora of companies, especially on the enterprise side. And, and there, there's a regular cadence of pipe, you know, of like PG, pipe gen, whether that's daily or whether that's in large enterprise pipe gen Mondays or pipe gen Tuesdays, whatever. 

[00:19:48] Jeremey: Like I want to, I want to hear something in the playbook about discipline pipe gen. I want to hear something in the playbook. If they do POCs. I want to hear something about very, very disciplined orchestration of POCs. Um, I want to hear about their forecasting rhythm. Um, and that forecasting rhythm is inclusive of deal inspection. 

[00:20:09] Jeremey: So what methodology are they using? How frequently are they assessing deals? What deals this quarter, next quarter? Like I really want them to go into pretty excruciating detail on, on how they approach that. And then. Um, and then how they how they generate and roll up a forecast. So, you know, if you're in a higher volume environment, humans don't even need to be involved in forecasting. 

[00:20:33] Jeremey: In fact, they make it worse. But if you're in a low volume, big deal environment, we have plenty of, we have over 500 portfolio companies. We have plenty of them who are more in that camp. Machines aren't good at that, right? Like machines are not going to call a quarter where you have a handful of Of, you know, million dollar deals and, and it's not these are, these are startup and scale up organizations. 

[00:20:57] Jeremey: So it's not like a giant [00:21:00] corporation where they have a big enough and that that's going to massage out. So in that case, right? Like, The discipline deal inspection, the discipline updates to forecast categories and stages, um, disciplined. Another piece I didn't, you know, mention is, or I have mentioned about not in this context of this answer, but it previously is, is a sales process. 

[00:21:21] Jeremey: The stages are all pretty much the same. Sometimes they have different names, but what are the specific exit criteria and how do you manage and hold reps accountable to those exit criteria? It's just, you know, it's, it's what you're hearing the subtext of this is basically. The, the bad news is there are no silver bullets. 

[00:21:39] Jeremey: The good news is that the science of how to do this, there's art too, uh, but the science of how to do this is known. Where, where it falls down is that humans are, are imperfect and, uh, do not have infinite energy, do not have infinite recall, uh, don't always do the rational thing, but, but if, if, to the greater extent that you, that you can execute Right. 

[00:22:08] Jeremey: The details of doing of these things of that operational rhythm and cadence and process and methodology stick, you know, like stick to that. And you're much more likely to be successful. So that's what I'm looking for. Is that level of discipline? Um, you'd also mentioned the sales methodologies. I admittedly have not done a ton of research on this, but I am curious. 

[00:22:31] Aaron: Is there like a proven improvement performance when you adopt like a medic type approach or some other methodology? I mean, have those, have those proven to have a substantive impact on, on sales performance or not? So this is one where I do have data and, and it's a weird result. The weird result is that Um, we don't see a significant difference in performance of companies who say that they have strong adherence to a methodology like Medic versus those who say they don't. 

[00:23:05] Jeremey: Um, and moreover, if you were to double click on the specific methodologies of whatever Medic versus Bant versus whatever, the same thing. It's like, No one methodology shines above others. So I've racked my brain because it's super counterintuitive result from a data perspective. And I was talking to a colleague of mine about this and they came up with, with, I think the solution to the puzzle and the solution to the puzzle is that there's a, the issue is, um, You have lots and lots of instances of companies with incredible part product market fit that are very sloppy on methodology because they don't have to be. 

[00:23:50] Jeremey: Strong and then you have the opposite side, which is you have lots of companies who are struggling and when they go into struggle mode, the problem might be product or [00:24:00] marketing or could be sales execution, but they try to fix everything all at once. So then they get really disciplined on methodology. 

[00:24:06] Jeremey: So you have this, like, under otherwise underperforming company. That's incredibly methodology focus. Like, they get right. It's, it's, it's like, uh, You know what, if you end up in the, in the hospital with a heart irregularity, you, you know, for a period of time, you, you know, you stop drinking, you eat right, you, you don't smoke. 

[00:24:25] Jeremey: Like, you do all the good things. You get enough rest exercise. Like, I think that's this person's hypothesis. I thought was a really good one. So I think that's why the data doesn't. Doesn't say it. I would still believe that if you were to somehow be able to correct for, you know, product market fit or these other factors that companies who have a robust adherence to methodology are are much more likely to be successful. 

[00:24:52] Aaron: I'm going to start looking for people that are in the throes of adopting a methodology, and I'll use that as a signal that they don't have product market fit, and they're trying to compensate for it through a better execution. Yeah. Well, the thing no one's going to do is a real, the problem is, is like, no one's going to do a real A B test. 

[00:25:09] Jeremey: They're not going to take half their company and have half the company do medic. Disciplined and have, you know, that would be interesting. If they did, that would be really fascinating. It would be. Yeah. And maybe a super large company could do that test, but I haven't seen it. Like, if you, if you do something, you're going to tend to roll it out at relative scale. 

[00:25:28] Jeremey: Um, and, and yeah, so that would be super interesting. Well, we talked a lot about sales leadership. I do want to at least spend five minutes if we can to round out the episode on on sales talent. Um, you know, I'm imagining the leaders that you hire suddenly are thrown into a situation where they've got to now scour the world for quality sales talent. 

[00:25:50] Aaron: How should they be looking at reps? I mean, what are the criteria? You've mentioned some of the criteria that you look at in leaders. Is it similar for reps or is there a different criteria? Yeah. different lens that you use to evaluate sales talent. Yeah, I'll talk to sales talent. I just want to close out on one other thing on sales leadership. 

[00:26:06] Jeremey: So, we just wrapped up a study where we pulled every CRO who's ever worked for any one of our portfolio companies, and Insight's been around 25 plus, I think, plus or minus years. So pretty good sample size and we went back and pulled data on all their biographical histories and we knew the performance of the companies so we could actually correlate to success and, uh, as a just a side note, unsurprisingly, for me as a statistician, only one thing had true statistical significance, meaning like at 95 percent confidence interval, it was highly correlated with success. 

[00:26:46] Jeremey: And the one thing was actually a STEM degree. And it makes sense. This all ties together because I talked earlier about three things matter IQ conscientiousness and job skill. So there's a super high correlation [00:27:00] between, um, like your college degree and IQ. It's not perfect, right? Like at the upper end of the spectrum, I think physics has the highest average or median IQ. 

[00:27:12] Jeremey: Um, at the lower end of the spectrum, I think early childhood education, um, is lower, but that's not like it's inherently about the person, right? Like my mom was an elementary school teacher for 40 years and she's smarter than me, you know, super high IQ. Um, she, you know, that was the option that was available to her, right? 

[00:27:32] Jeremey: And two things, I think it was the option that was available to her at the time. Uh, and it was also where her interest was, right? Like, that's what she wanted to do. That's where her passion was. So like, there are plenty of people in the distribution. You know, there's some physics people with not high IQs and there are some, some early childhood education or other careers that are, Correlated with, uh, lower median IQ, right? 

[00:27:57] Jeremey: Who, uh, still have high IQs. But anyway, that was the one thing that popped out. So now onto your question about reps. Um, I've looked actually at similar data for SDRs and for AEs. Um, and for SDRs, we did a big study of about 2000 people and defined success as being promoted from SDR to AE in the company they were at. 

[00:28:19] Jeremey: Because if they leave before that, that's a big investment, um, in Without the return and what we've, there's a lot of sub pieces to it, but we found kind of two big findings. One was the best population to hire SDRs out of statistically is people who worked in agencies in like as a recruiter in an agency for two years. 

[00:28:41] Jeremey: So that turned out to be statistically the best SDR profile to hire. And then the other thing we found out about SDRs was. Um, we looked at sports because a lot of people believe sports matters, and it turned out that sports participation, uh, overall did not matter. But when we cut it down to, More finally by team sport versus individual sport. 

[00:29:04] Jeremey: It was, there was, there was a correlation with success on the individual sport athletes. So yes, to gymnastics, you know, there could be a team component, but gymnastics, swimming, tennis. Golf, whatever, no to basketball, baseball, softball, football, you know, that kind of stuff. Another piece of data, which is we did a similar study for enterprise reps and for enterprise reps, there is a correlation between sports participation and we define success for enterprise reps as lasting two or more years in the company because you can skate through as an enterprise rep for a year. 

[00:29:40] Jeremey: But, um, because right, if you have a nine to 12 month sales cycle, you're not really going to know for a while whether the person is good at their job, but they're probably not going to make it past two years as an enterprise rep if, if, uh, if they're not good. So anyway, there is a correlation. So there's some validity to that. 

[00:29:59] Jeremey: It's one [00:30:00] factor amongst many. Um, but you know, if you're playing money ball and you're hiring at scale, Then, then, you know, as long as it's not a, not a discriminatory practice, then right. Then, I mean, then sure. Sure. Why not? Um, where that I think where that the earliest I can trace that is also back to PTC. 

[00:30:24] Jeremey: So, um, parametric technology corporation where John McMahon came from and and others, uh, and it traces back to a framework that they use called ice in hiring. It's intelligent. So they also have the IQ component, although, you know, now they, they've added IQ and EQ to that, but, um, C is, is conscientiousness. 

[00:30:45] Jeremey: The other C is coachability. So those first two components are in there, and then the E is experience and they go in that order, um, that those are like the most important things. Sometimes one of the C is the conscientiousness, one they call character instead. So it's, it's. It's interrelated. It's definitely interrelated. 

[00:31:03] Jeremey: So, um, but in that kind of ice thing, part of what they were looking for in like the coachability and potentially the character thing was embedded in sports and they were really, really adamant about hiring former athletes. Um, and the thesis, the hypothesis is not unreasonable, right? Like, the hypothesis is these are people who are extremely dedicated, right, to learning and improvement. 

[00:31:32] Jeremey: They're coachable. They know how to work on a, you know, like, enterprise selling is team selling, so they know how to work on a team and collaborate. Like, I think it's a pretty good hypothesis. And again, the data supports it. The data does say that there's a correlation between success and, and, uh, and team sports for enterprise reps. 

[00:31:51] Jeremey: Um, I couldn't tell you for other reps necessarily, but I assume it's like. As you progress from the SDR to the enterprise rep, probably you start to skew from, from individual athlete into team, team athlete, but there's lots again, like, what does that explain? I may be at most 10 percent of variation and job performance and even 10 percent would be probably. 

[00:32:17] Jeremey: Wildly optimistic degree of of, uh, of R squared on that 1. the last thing I wanted to tackle with you is the question of enablement. Um, this crosses the boundaries of sales leadership and sales rep. So it seems relevant. And, uh, the thing I wonder about is. I don't know that I've ever seen a framework for what good enablement programs ought to look like. 

[00:32:40] Aaron: So, I, I, I would like to get your thoughts on what, what is good enablement? What, what, what does that actually mean? And is there enough emphasis on, on sales talent development and enablement? And if not, why, like, what, what can be done about that? Or what can be done to improve it? I guess this is the question. 

[00:32:56] Aaron: Yeah, I wait. This is what I wish I had the, I wish I had the answers to [00:33:00] both of those. I mean, I'll, I'll give you my best guess. So first I had a, I worked for a CRO. We were talking about, like, measuring return on enablement, and I was pushing back a little bit because it's incredibly difficult to do that, especially again, like you're not going to not coach certain people on in a, in a pure AB test at scale. 

[00:33:22] Jeremey: And he had a point of view, which is basically that in his experience, he met zeros peers who believed in it and those who didn't. And those who believed in a dedicated a certain amount of, you know, capital to enablement and then you do the best given their capital, whatever capital you've you've allocated, you do the best you can. 

[00:33:42] Jeremey: And I've kind of settled on on that as being what you do. Like, I believe firmly in enablement, but I don't. Like, even even in the academic world, measuring return on learning is a nearly impossible thing to do, especially if you're trying to really get down to the, you know, if I did one extra hour of medic training for this person, right? 

[00:34:06] Jeremey: Like, what's the return on that? Who? Who knows? Um, but yeah, otherwise, yes, I am passionate. And I think it's, I think it's a combination, right? I mean, there's obviously the, I break it down into onboarding and then ongoing training. If there was one thing I would like to see more of. on the ongoing training side without Going way into super detail, it is call coaching, and I think there's no excuse right now, because most companies are, you know, have some sort of a conversation intelligence call recording solution. 

[00:34:39] Jeremey: And yet, I think very, very, very, very few managers, I don't know if I can stick a few more berries in there, actually ever listened to call recordings and provide coaching. And whether that's the manager or enablement or peers reviewing each other's calls, it's like, I think that's one of the big unfulfilled promises of, of conversation intelligence that people are just recording the calls. 

[00:35:01] Jeremey: And I think they're getting value, right? It's, I can go back and listen to the call if it's been a, if it's been a week or two, or I don't have to take notes as aggressively during the call because I can go back and record things like, I think there's product management and marketing can listen to see if things are happening. 

[00:35:17] Jeremey: Or search to see if things are happening. So there's a huge, there's enough value in there that makes the category a very valuable category, but I think it could be so much more valuable if reps were actually getting coached by, by managers and peers. So that, that to me is the biggest, um, untapped opportunity and enablement. 

[00:35:37] Jeremey: And I think why it's not happening is there's just not good expectation around that, partly because if I'm a CRO. And I'm going to lean on my manager. I'm going to lean on them to make sure that the deals are, you know, that the, the stages are right. The, the amount is right. Like these things that are very, very concrete and tangible. 

[00:35:59] Jeremey: I'm going to lean on my [00:36:00] managers to  

[00:36:00] Jeremey: do that. And I'm, because I can't. Have them, I, rightly or wrongly, I can't have them do everything, right? I can have them do anything, but I can't have them do everything. And the thing that suffers is, is call coaching. Yeah. All right. Well, is there any, uh, final insight or thoughts that you'd like to share on, on sales and sales leadership talent that, uh, that we didn't cover? 

[00:36:23] Jeremey: I think we did a pretty good, I think we did a pretty good job. If I say R, if I say R squared, you know, he probably did a good job. So, well, listen, I appreciate your time and your insight. I think it's going to be hugely valuable to our audience. So thank you so much for coming on Jeremy. For sure. Thanks Aaron.