Empower Your Business with Meddic Certification in Affidavits

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[Music] three two one all right welcome to masters of medic this is episode number five and you can probably tell by the smile on my face i am incredibly excited today because we have the one the only the legend the greatest of all time mr john mcmahon welcome to the show john hey thanks andy thanks for having me appreciate it yeah i'm excited to be here i don't know if i'm as excited as you but i'm you're definitely not as excited as i am um and as as uh regular listeners and watchers will know it's normally at this point where i turn it over to the guests to introduce themselves but there's this old saying that says um this person needs no introduction and i think in our industry if there's anybody that doesn't need an introduction it's you mr john mcmahon but for those um for those who've stumbled across the podcast the youtube channel and maybe new to enterprise sales i'll just say this five times cro of public companies let's see if i can remember them all ptc geotel ariba bladelogic and bmc that's that's five good and pass that test and then and then go on on to work on the boards and advising some of if not the greatest companies in our industry and you know these ones i definitely remember them all because there's loads of them but just uh just to call out a few we're talking about like cyber reason sumo thought spot sprinkler hubspot glassdoor app dynamics uh and then more recently i suppose lacework mongodb i could never forget mongodb snowflake and have i missed any no i'm doing great okay cool all right well i've done my homework i don't know if i could have read them all then that's good i've done my homework i've done my homework and it's a really exciting time to have you on the show because i'm sure you know anyone that's on linkedin couldn't have missed this but just in case you have you've put out a book the qualified sales leader so thank you so much for doing that what you must have had this for years now maybe decades now of people asking you to write a book um what like you might did you just get tired of people asking or what's what was the what was the idea that made you want to write it yeah it's interesting so i have had almost probably on average you know every month someone would ask me you know why don't you read a want to write a book and it's typically like after a meeting you know a board meeting a consulting meeting a meeting with vcs or something and i'd say why do you say that and they'd say well because you said this i never heard that before you know sometimes they'd ask well where can i find that in a book and i'd say well i don't know if you can find it in the book because i've never read a book that has that stuff in it so um it's it's real world scars and then i and even people like bob beech who's ceo of bmc he he even said to me like john you have got to find time to write a book you know so it's because of that number one and then number two when i would go into a you know whether i'm on the board or or uh consulting for some companies i see a lot of the same common mistakes so i figured if there's if i'm helping these companies i'm going to try to help them get over these common mistakes but how many other software or hardware or tech companies are out there that are making the same mistakes they're burning a bunch of money they actually have a good product but they just don't know how to go to market with it they just don't know how to sell it and then they wind up maybe going out of business or selling it for assets so why can't i bottle some of this stuff up into a book and try to help people so that's that's what i did and and i have to say mission accomplished sir it is an absolutely brilliant book of triumph i have to say and and i i mean it's no surprise like you know looking at your your background the success you've had that obviously that if you were to put to spell that content into a book it's going to be good but what i really really liked about it um which is really original i haven't seen it like this before is that the way it's almost like written almost like a story right how it talks through your engagement with a company which i imagine is a real company with a name i didn't actually look to see if is it for go is that the name yeah i had to find the name of the company that wasn't copyrighted yes right yeah and so you follow your engagement with forego and um starting with the qbr and then and then working the sales leaders and sales teams to kind of take them sort of from a point where they're failing to you know finding all the right ingredients to be on the path for success and that that's really cool and i well one of the things i wanted i was curious about was actually writing a book in that format as i said it's one thing to take your knowledge and put it into a a book but how what was the process where you actually there's a way i can really kind of craft this yeah well i really didn't want to write what i consider like a boring sales textbook and there are there are a bunch of them so what i wanted it to do is be more conversational and more narrative type style and i wanted to take the people on a journey because they say if you're gonna write i had to do a bunch of homework first because i'm not really right so if you're gonna if you're gonna if people are gonna read a non-fiction business book they typically wanna be transformed so you got to take them from where they are today to a different place tomorrow and that's what i tried to do so i tried to take this group you know that was in a forecast session of a qbr which many people can relate to and i tried to get those things across as like a burning platform and then from there show them a lot of things that they were doing wrong in the forecast session and also doing wrong as leaders and try to walk them through the basics and try to take them to a different place in the book and to do that because i'm not a good writer that's what really took the longest time because when i first wrote the book i sat myself down in a condo in boston for four days just locked the door and just wrote everything that came out of my mind right well i could have stuck that into a book but then i thought okay but now how do i shape that into a story and that took so much time like i'm gonna say the first 15 chapters of that book i probably wrote it 20 times right yeah that's fascinating and one of the things that really comes across in the book um is that you definitely have what our class has got a a creative a visual mind is that something you you've kind of recognized in yourself because that definitely comes across in the book and when you say that what do you mean by that like you know example like yeah what in in kind of in its in its um his most basic form it's that the idea of how you're how you're wanting to portray the information in story format but it's also so often in the book you would refer to analogies you know we're talking you know one minute we're talking about one thing you know peas and carrots on a plate and and and it's brilliant it's brilliant because everyone everyone reading that goes oh yeah like when you split the pipeline like that and put it back together yeah it makes noise more sense and so that kind of thing really comes across but it i love that kind of like i think for those people who have read the book or or those that resonate as visual learners um that will be right up their street and is that something you've recognized in yourself well i recognized it more because any time that i would go in as like a consultant or board member and i go to let's say a qbr or something and then i might stan i might use what's going on and use and now we tell a little story maybe a gray boy story or peas and carrots or box up or a lot of the stories that i tell in the book and then when i would come back maybe a quarter later and there's new people in the room because you know they're growing it's a growing business some of the first things that people would say is hey tell the great tell the peas and carrot story again or box up again and i think really you wanted me to tell it again and they did right and then they realized well that's what resonates with people it's not just words on paper that are thoughts you have to make it come alive in some stories and that's really what what i tried to do in the book make it come alive and then things that they can relate to because now if it's pain or pleasure it's great boy you know you know you have an image right in your mind right away yeah yeah good old gray boy yeah absolutely i can stuck up lecture i won't spoil it if you haven't read the book yet but that's a good one i also i'm kind of famous for this amongst my sort of peers um for for doing similar things but i always use sporting analogies um because i just think there's so much similarity between sports and and obviously the professional sales and um you know you know the great example of this in the book is where you talk about um the different type of salesperson for different types of roles and how you know you use i think you use the american football example of like quarterback can't play in different positions and i think that's really interesting with things like that like was there um was there a moment where those kind of things crystallize in your mind or like where you can kind of think back to let's say using that example of having different types of sales people for different types of role whether they be the size of the deal or the industry they're selling into and do you think that second question do you think the people can evolve and change or do you think the people in sales have like almost like their positions in sales um i'll answer the second one first and say i do think people can can evolve and they can come back to that but people can evolve if they want to be students of the game if they wanna if they want to learn the knowledge or the playbook of the game and if they want to take the time which is the hardest part and execute and learn how to execute the skills of the game by practicing and practicing and practicing so they can do that as far as the analogies what i what i think happens is in the roles of uh doing consulting and board work i had to a lot of times get points across to sales leaders that actually didn't understand why i was saying what i was saying and also tech ceos and even venture capitalists as to why this is important so i started to draw analogies so like what you were you were referring to is let's say tom brady who's quarterback for a team here called the he was with the patriots now he's with the team in tampa bay and he's won like six or seven super bowls and probably go down as like the greatest quarterback of all time and people can debate that if they want but one thing's for sure he'll go down as somebody that is maybe one of the most knowledgeable guys on the field when it comes to the game of football and my point was tom brady if we take him from the position of quarterback and move him to any other position on the field he'll fail immediately well why will he fail he won't fail because of the knowledge of the game he'll fail because he doesn't have the skills and then i'm trying to use that analogy to say just because you hired a sales rep and he's knowledgeable about the game of sales doesn't mean that he has the skills to be put into certain accounts you know that will require a different skill set in order to play that execute that game in the account yeah um and so many times i see people just think i'm just going to recruit sales reps and i'm going to stick them in all these positions without really taking the time to say just like a good coach of the football soccer hockey team would say well do they have the skill set to actually play that position and that's that's the analogy that is trying to get to right right is there um when you're putting aside the sort of experience which i think is kind of the the element you're sort of talking about there where they've kind of got the skill experience of the position in this case just going back a bit further where let's you know where we are just looking to higher sales reps you've obviously probably more so than anyone else in our industry got a track record of finding not just talent early on but calendar follows you through and proliferates across the entire industry i think that's been well documented i think you know i forget how many of the blade logic team are now cross or at sea level at some point which is incredible um but was there anything when you think about that those those um people you brought into your team was there any kind of um i know you talk a bit about in the book but there's any kind of really raw attribute that you you look for in um in a salesperson earlier in their career early on i'm really looking for mainly two things i'm looking for intelligence because then you can pick up the knowledge or the playbook of the game i'm looking for uh persistence heart desire competitiveness whatever you might call it so that i know that they have the competitiveness and the willingness to practice over and over and over to gain new skills right so if you really think about like we said there's the what you have to do with the game that's the playbook and then there's how do i execute those plays are the skills right so if somebody's super knowledgeable super intelligent they should be able to pick up the knowledge of the game if they're super competitive and motivated they should be able to practice practice practice to pick up the skills of the game and actually a lot of times if they're highly competitive and motivated they'll not only pick up the skills of the game and pick up what you were teaching them but they'll also find a way to learn other stuff because they're so motivated right but without those two two uh characteristics of those two behavioral traits i think it's going to be difficult for people to uh for you to really train them and develop them over time and then what happens in a lot of these high growth companies that i've been in and been associated with is the company might be you know one company for two years then the next year they're almost a different company what does that mean they came out with new products they have new competition they have to call in different buyers the skill sets change now it's a more complex cost justification more complex proof of value so there's a whole bunch of things that change and if you can't find sales people that are coachable and then adaptable because some people are coachable they'll actually listen to what you say but they never change they never agree right and it's people that are not coachable so you need to find people that are coachable and then they're they are adaptable and then over time those people wind up staying with you as you grow and a lot of other times i've seen it where the company's changed products change competitors change customers have changed and then i look at somebody that i used to admire two years ago and i think oh my gosh they're a dinosaur right what are they doing here yeah that adaptable one i think is is genius it's almost like you know because as you were saying i'm thinking about these instances i've had with when working with people and they appear coachable but if they're not adaptable then it's actually i'd rather have someone that's that's neither i rather than have someone that's coachable and not adaptable who's nodding their head and agreeing with you and and being appearing to be coachable but not changing right it's terrible yeah that's that's the worst thing and i think you know like you said the adaptability you know just as you said that dinosaur right we've all we've all worked with that person who you know was at the top and then they've just but the beautiful thing i think is a beautiful thing about our industry of sales is it you've never you've never completed it you never you know you've never like finished you've never stopped learning because it's always changing and evolving and um you know there's no doubt about that there's many times where somebody still does something and i've always i still think of myself as a student of the game and somebody does something or says something and i think oh my gosh that's brilliant yeah i'm gonna take that incorporate that yeah for sure yeah that you think you and you've seen sales people like this and i see them all the time they're un they think they know everything now and they're unwilling to learn and they're unwilling to find a way to develop new skills and those people are going to be left behind and maybe they're just the way they are and they don't want to learn anything new and they don't want to develop any new skills that's fine for them but they're not going to go much further yeah exactly right you talked about your phd which i love persistence heart and desire which i think is brilliant and it made me something i was reflecting on recently which is that i've had a really really really good track record or or run of hiring former recruiters who have come into the team as an sdr and then you know grabbed hold of the sdr role and really made it their own and just smashed all their numbers and then gone into the field and done the same and it's really for me interesting um about you know that tough role which is being in recruitment what it teaches you around persistence desire and heart those those three things and i have a bit of a chicken and an egg question for you which is i know your background come from you know working at ups working all crazy hours outside of college and all that kind of stuff now do you think that the phd is something that you can learn so therefore you find yourself as you did in a grafting role and it teaches you to to those those free attributes um or do you just think that those people people with those attributes gravitate towards those roles and and and um and therefore you know they find themselves happier in those roles and people that don't have those attributes stay well away from them i think it's something in your background that has to motivate you and you have that fight and you have that desire in you to succeed this willingness to do whatever it takes to to develop new skills and to try to win and it comes it comes in different forms from different people um a lot of times people say well if he didn't come from a really if he didn't come from a real poor background or something and he didn't have to fight his way and didn't have to earn his way through college then i don't want to hire him because he doesn't have enough desire and then i think well that may not be true because i've run into people that their dad owns a business and the dad was highly successful maybe overshadowing the sun and then the sun decided hey i'm going to go be a sales rep and the father was pissed off but the son was also highly motivated to prove the dad wrong like i can't make it as a salesperson i am motivated to do it so it it's different motivations for different people and i can't tell you because i'm not like a psychologist or anything where it comes from but i'm trying to find that when i am recruiting people so i will ask them what is the toughest situation you've ever been in and then i turn my ears on and i'm asking a lot of questions i want to get inside the person what is the most competitive thing you ever did in your life and i'm going to get inside their head i'm not asking when i'm recruiting i'm not asking superficial questions i'm not just looking at the resume oh you used to work for xyz corporation and you synergistically built relationships i'm not interested in any of that i'm interested in the person that's the per it's the person i'm hiring and i'm interested in their character more than anything so i'll spend half the first half an hour is all about going after their character i love that and and you know it's clearly you're clearly looking for the right things and finding the right people looking at the track record and do you do you think that you know if you think back to you know i'm sure you've been in um in in interviews where you've met someone you know some of the great people that have you know uh that have followed you um through their careers do you see what you saw in um those people when you when they were bringing you in for like final decisions maybe on some some hires at the final interview stage do you sort of say hang on a minute you this guy reminds me a bit of you and that kind of thing uh i can't i can't say specifically but i can tell you that sometimes you have to um i think you always have to just focus on the character or the behavioral traits of the person first and i can give an example so the greatest salesperson i ever ran into is a guy named carlo carpenter out of bologna italy uh and he's no longer with us god bless his soul but carlo at the time when i was interviewing him in the milano italy office at that time we all were supposed to wear suits right and if you go to italy they all had their ferragamo shoes and cannoli suits and that type of thing and their hair slipped back with a lot of product and they were at that time they were like clean shaven and everything right so carlo walks into the office and somebody says your your next interview is here carlo walks into my office and he's got a purple jacket a black turtleneck he has a three-day old beard his hair is cut as if um somebody like he cut his own he's got brown corduroy pants with the big cords and he's got brown shoes and then he has two chipped teeth his front teeth are just chopped like right down the middle and so i first think i wonder who sent this guy to me you know are they sure that he's the guy that the salesman appeared right because of the way everybody else but then when i started to speak to carlo and go after mainly his character and in his broken english i started to realize i think this guy is really special he's got a lot of the right characteristics and even when i would throw a question at him like you know carlo i'm not so sure you can do the job he was so curious genuinely he looked me in the eyes and authentically he'd say but but why like he was blown away that i thought he couldn't do the job but it was really just i was at saying that as a test right i wound up hiring carlo and you know he was perennially the top sales guy in the world that year in and yet year out and any time you made calls with them guess where carla was calling he was calling on the ceos of the biggest companies in bologna italy gb you know manchester united what is it marcini you know ferrari right ceos all the time so is this is this the guy that when you i think you in the book you said you went to a meeting with ferrari with him and he had a good meeting you know good days of meetings you guys came out you're in the car park and you you kind of came to a realization that you hadn't i can't remember what it was but something you hadn't discovered and he's like right and he walked off and went back inside to go and find out right so we came out after like almost all day making sales calls and it was you know getting dark and the cars are leaving work and they're nice ferrari cars some of them weren't some affairs well i was admiring them and speaking to carl and carlos said well how do you think it went and i said well it went really good here's the things that we now know that we didn't know before but because of that now here's some things that are still question marks and i'm looking at the cars and and then i turn around and carlos walking back towards the front door and i say where are you going and he said i'm going back into ferrari and i said well why because because i'm going to get answers to those questions now and i'm going to do it in italian so i can do it a lot quicker now most sales people wouldn't do what carlo did because they weren't curious like carla right so what they would do is get back in the car with me then ask me those questions and i'd outline what we don't know they'd drop me off at the hotel or we'd have dinner and then they'd start scheduling meetings with ferrari over the next two weeks to get the answers to those questions right and carlo i don't think we'd be able to drive home without knowing the answers to those questions because it would literally drive carlo crazy but more importantly um what i put in the book is carlo had in not just the curiosity had an urgent curiosity urgency to find out now and then urgency to understand that as a salesperson you don't really have 90 days in a quarter you really have like 61 days if you take out weekends an average of holidays three or four days a quarter you're down to 61 days so time is your enemy so you have to have an urgent curiosity in order to be a good salesperson right and not everybody has them i love that that was the one trait he was smart he was driven but that was the one trait that i thought really separated him from all the other salespeople and you can't because you can't make that up you either have it or you don't and it's either genuine and authentic or it's there's no middle claim because people can feel it you know if you're genuinely curious yeah yeah absolutely right and i think that's like um you know i think that that feeling you know we've all had regardless of whether we think we're you know genuinely curious or not or anything around that but that feeling when you really want to know something you know i've got that you know when someone you're like oh i need to ask this person that i have to and and if you can just imagine you know carlo he's probably like walking around 24 7 like that especially in his deals and it's like a superpower almost yes absolutely definitely that's interesting what do you think so if here's a guy that you know sounds sounds like a character you know in in in multiple ways yeah you know i've got a picture of him in my head from from from the book of you know his as you say like the core draw is the pub it sounds like i you know i just i'd love to see a picture of him secret alliance but um and someone that's gone on as you say to work in your organization so top top elite organizations as a top seller so you know got to be in the the top one percent out there in the profession and obviously earning serious serious amounts of money as a result of that what do you think maybe not just carla but if you do know it'd be interesting what do you think was motivating him year after year to to go and and after that that number one spot or was it was it not the one number one spot is it just himself just had to be number one well it's interesting i think that he he was always curious and always he always wanted to learn which you know is what i think makes great sales people and great sales leaders is their ability to be students of the game and always wanting to learn and their curiosity for carlo continued to drive him so i think that he started you know three or four years in a row he was a top salesperson and then what i did to him is i called him one day and i said to him i want you to be a sales leader and he said i don't really want to be a state i want to be a sales leader and i said well you have 24 hours to think about it let me give you here's what we're going to do you get to think about you either get to be a sales leader you get to quit and then come up on me wow because i knew but don't don't forget i really knew who he was because yeah and then he he decided okay i'm gonna do it and he took on that new challenge and again it was his curiosity and that allowed him to become like one of the top sales managers too oh the guy that you underneath carlo is is now the cro of a company called mongodb cedric pesch he's like one of the reps that works so right yeah he worked with a lot of really great reps also yeah well that's that's that's that's kind of the that's a beautiful thing isn't it of you know the the um what you call like the network effect of good people doing good things it's awesome to see and on on the motivation thing i'm really curious to you know you yourself as well like you know obviously you uh you've gone um you had a tremendous success of being on the tools as i would say as a you know as a cro as we discussed already and then you know um i think obviously after bmc you you went into advising and on boards and that's kind of thing what's like it's it's a very very different thing to be sort of doing what you're doing now to what you're doing you know as a cro what's what is it about the new role that motivates you it's not you but you know what i mean from there i think it's it's pretty much the same though because what you're doing is um like in the book uh and this happens all the time when people say hey i'm a sales rep but i want to be a sales leader and what i usually do is ask them well how many kids do you have and they might say well i have three kids and i say well that's interesting why do you want five more right and they're like well what do you what do you mean by that and i say and i'm trying to get them to understand that it's completely different say well when you were single you got up when you went wanted to get up you went to bed when you wanted to go to bed you ate what you wanted you had your own schedule you worked when you wanted to work and you did the activities that you wanted to do it was all about you and now you became a manager where now you became a you know you had a family and now what happened it wasn't about you anymore it was about those kids like what they were going to eat when they were going to eat what their school activities were where their out-of-school activities were when they were going to go to bed all those types of things and you started to realize also that those children are all completely different they they basically came from the same parents in the same household but each one of them is completely different different strengths weaknesses insecurities fears goals all that type of stuff so if you when i the point i was trying to get across is are you sure that you're prepared to change from being as when you were single to being married and having kids or to be in a rep and now it's no longer about you it's only about those people because if you can make understand that they're all different and you can work to coach and develop those people to be highly successful then you will be successful but if you think it's still about you when you become a manager you're the wrong guy you're the wrong leader right right absolutely right yeah i think so and you see it so often don't you and it's kind of that classic of you know top rep they've kind of you know they've won president's club year and year they've been number one and like what's next i i'm uh you know by nature they're an aspirational person they want to be bettering themselves and so they're kind of looking around and they see it as a as a step up and you know and and it's not necessarily the right the right one and you know there's all these sort of examples of that it may not they may not be the right ones because maybe they are selfish maybe they're not selfless maybe they can't put themselves in other people's shoes right you know maybe they're a megalomaniac there's a whole bunch of things that i've run into where people are super salespeople but they would make terrible terrible sales here right terrible maybe they're mercenaries or mercurial there's a whole bunch of things that i've run into you know and one or two times that i've tried it it just typically doesn't work out right right what about yourself then you're you know obviously tons of success your you know your portfolio if you want to call it that of people you've been advising is second to none is there any is there any um scenario where somebody could get you back on the tools you know get you back into a c-level position at some company would that is there any if there's any companies out there with you know just about to bag a series of serious amount of cash they've got a really hot product they want the greatest of all time to come in and lead there you know i have to say no my phone's gonna ring off the hook no the answer is no okay fair enough yeah i'll take that but uh you didn't specifically say no you said you're going to have to say no sorry any you know those were the uh yeah that's brilliant but what would it what would but hypothetically would do you ever do you ever sort of miss it dribble like what are you like finding but you missed the camaraderie you miss watching people develop that that you've recruited and you've trained and put a lot of effort in and because like i've always said to my sales leaders like you have to be intimate with your people you know just like you would be with your kids to know their strengths weaknesses insecurities fears doubts goals all that type of stuff so when you really get intimate with a lot of the people to understand where they are in their career what they really desire and you're helping them get there and you're seeing them develop there's a lot to be said about that i really really really enjoyed that stuff um i know it's evidenced by a lot of guys i mean somebody once counted recently that it's like 150 guys that are like cross that used to work whether it's ptc or geotel or you know blade logic or one of those companies yeah so i do miss that camaraderie i don't think i really miss the quarters and i don't think i really miss non-stop airplane travel because if you if i ever took you back and i showed you my diary i'd be blown away with how many different countries i was in you know every week right yeah i know i can i can definitely imagine it i can definitely imagine it what's um what are the one of the things i always think is interesting is that you have you have had a knack of picking to work with some of the greatest organizations out there and there's a bid on actually we can talk about in a moment as to whether you know whether you've maybe they've become great because you've helped them realize their potential because there's definitely that side of it but there'll be a lot of people listening to this um uh who are thinking about their next move and there'll be a lot of similarities i think in what you recognize as a good opportunity a good place to go and and you know plate your trade that they can take whether they're you know right at the start of their career like an str to an ae to sales leaders all the way through what are some of the things that you you you know you spot in in these organizations you choose to to share your wisdom with well the first it's the three lies so what nice so because let me back up any time that i'm gonna go whether i was gonna join a company or i was going to be a consultant to the company or be on the board i want to first have them answer the three whys so why does the customer have to buy you know why do they have to buy from you and why do they have to buy now and because at the end of the day we're sales people so if we don't have if the so let's back up so if why do they have to buy means that there's a major pain that the customer needs to solve major not a minor team but something what i call above the noise above because most companies can deal with hundreds and hundreds of pain points it's almost like you could slice your finger put a band-aid on it it's okay you're gonna live but if you fall down off your bike and separate your shoulder and break your arm and break a couple ribs requires third-party attention it's not something you can really live with companies are the same they can live with hundreds of pain points but can you get above the noise to pains that are going to require third-party attention right so one is why do they have to buy are we addressing a major problem right and then who does this really affect in the company does it affect somebody at the highest levels of the organization you know who's the persona that's most affected by that because anytime there's a pain and as a negative consequence then there's an attachment to a job measure and now who owns that job measure i want to know because that's the person we're essentially going to be calling right yep so that one question of why they have to buy if you unfold it really tells you a lot why do they have to buy from us then i want to know like why is your product different than any other product and now tell me what capability in your product solves that pain you just told me about and now why do they this is a big one why do they have to buy now why can't they wait what other solutions do they have to get around buying your product or buying any other product right and if i don't understand what the negative consequences are of them and the implications of of the pain of you know why they have to buy now i'm really not that interested i mean after that you can start if you get through that you can start to look at the size of the market the growth of the market how many competitors in the market because at the end of the day these companies are either going to get bought or they're going to go public if you're going to be successful it's the only two ways to go on liquid right so if you have 20 competitors but there's only if you really think about the people that are going to acquire a tech or software company it's really not much more than a handful of companies right right we're two hands full of companies so i always my analogy is okay we have a house on this block in this neighborhood but how many buyers are there really for this house right i want to know that because if we're not going to go public and we're going to get bought i want to know who the buyers are so you can ask yourself a lot of those questions you know yeah i um interestingly i i mean we both worked with with rajeev at sprinklers you much more closely than i did and he used to as i'm sure you you know how they're saying that everybody is a sprinkle customer they just don't know it yet and i think that that's you know if i think about some of the great companies you've worked with like app dynamics i can remember a time where every customer i spoke to they were either already a customer of app dynamics or they were in the process of becoming a customer about dynamics or they knew they had to you know it's like on you know they need to get it and i i can think of you know a lot of the companies certainly the companies you've worked with where it's been similar to that where it's just you know like snowflake is a great recent example of that where just you know going off but i myself i worked at an organization i won't say which for obvious reasons but where i felt like they had those free wise and in fact you know we we we had an acronym to describe what our product was and the rsko the ceo had us chanting every company needs a abc every company needs an abc and i i i believed it because it was a a good proposition and every company didn't need it but they didn't quite execute on it they didn't quite meet what i thought was their potential the product's potential and i i remember thinking actually this is an interesting one um i used to say to them at the time you need force management here you need force management to come in and take kind of what we saw happen um when i was at sprinkler they kind of came in and they got everyone talking the same language they got the proposition right and all that sort of stuff which i know is you know when i hear you talk you know it's it's the languages you know negative consequences all that kind of good stuff and i guess my what i think you know obviously you know you you and you um you know john kaplan's part of that i think part of that um blade logic alumni um he used to work with me at ptc yeah oh okay right so um and and what what i guess my question is is what what is it that or when was it that you sort of see is the right time to kind of um change gears like that in an organization what was it about when you were advising springfield right away so the reason i think a lot of companies fail is because in the beginning um most most of the companies that are found that are founded by tech ceos and they believe everyone is going to buy their baby just like the ceo you talked about right and maybe someday that'll be true but in the beginning when you're a young company you have to be very smart about who you target so in the book i even asked the question you know what did jesse james the famous bank robber in the 1840s what did he say when somebody asked him why he robs banks so because that's where the money is right so he could have robbed stage coaches he could have robbed schools hospitals anybody chose to rob banks why because that was the biggest return for his investment and the point that i am making is in the early days of let's say ptc we could only sell to medical device manufacturers and consumer electronics in the early days of snowflake we can only sell to tech and ad tech but we were smart enough to know this is the differentiation of our product and now it solves these pain points these pain points go into these use cases these use cases is owned by these this persona in these companies and in these industries so where are we going to spend our time not selling outside the target market but selling directly into the target market and that's where a lot of young companies especially tech companies make a huge mistake because the founder gets everybody to believe that everybody's going to buy their product and to your point yes everybody is going to buy the snowflake product but in the early days everybody wasn't because it wasn't fully capable of being sold to everybody so we would have wasted a lot of time a lot of and burnt a lot of money trying to sell to organizations that weren't prepared to buy our product because we weren't solving you know big problems for them product wasn't ready yet right right and you know that that kind of brings it all back to like the the qualified side of things because i think what you're really talking about there is you know qualification isn't isn't just about qualifying the deal in play it's qualifying your proposition it's qualifying your approach and you know that's that one of my questions was actually going to be why you know i wanted to to hear your perspective of um you know you could have with your expertise you could have talked about you know any number of topics the ex sales leader but you chose the qualifier which i'll say well because your point like the qualified sales leader a qualified is like our middle should be our middle name it should be john qualify mcmahon you know it should be andy qualify white and the reason is is because no matter what situation you're in you're always qualifying so you're qualifying when you're recruiting people you're qualifying you know if everything they're saying on their resume or cv is true you're qualifying if they're the right fit when you when your reps come up to you to speak to you about a situation you're qualifying why you should spend time on it you're qualifying whether or not they're gonna get that deal or not you know so when you're talking to customers you're qualifying them you know when you're talking to your ceo and he's asking a question you're qualifying you know why are you asking these questions what are we gonna do all those types of things your middle name should be qualify so that's why it's the qualified sales leader yeah i'm hoping to see lots of linkedin profiles names change you know to you know join qualifier smith you know that you know if anyone if anyone's doing their research and that you know they're they're interviewing with you for any kind of roles you're associated with that's what they should be they should be this far into a podcast to hear this gem and popping up to sell you i was it's interesting i was um interviewing a guy just last week and i started asking him questions and he said john you know i already have the answers to your questions and i said well what do you mean then he held the book up that's yeah well that that's that's true and but then you know it's it's it's like this um you know i was talking about this the other day where um i was i would interview you know ae candidates and um you know i would you know it's it's five minutes before the interview and i would load up their linkedin page just to kind of remind myself i'd already i always made a point of doing a good amount of prep when i'm interviewing someone because i think it's you know they should have put some time in themselves and the amount of times i'd load up my linkedin i'll just sort of look at who's viewed your profile and they viewed my profile five minutes before the interview and i'm like come on man like you know that's crazy if that's that's the first time you're checking me out um but by you know a tip then you know if people people are now are interviewing someone's interviewing of you they should turn their visibility on or their linkedin profile and be looking at you every day every day every day just feel like you're stalking they're stalking you so i think that yeah absolutely right but um you know likewise you know sure the guy's done a die the guy's done a um a nice you know a good thing of of reading the book before interviewing with you but like that's table stakes now right yeah right exactly table stakes you know anything less is is just not it is unforgivable in my mind in this in this hyper information world we live in so the cro that i'm working with he said john it's making you're making it difficult to interview and i said why he said because you're giving people the answers to the test i thought you're gonna say he's like he was gonna say john you're like you're selling all our secrets like as if it's like the magic circle or something a little bit of that too a little bit of that too yeah that's very very true cool well john thank you for this this has been epic i've really like as i always say one of the biggest reason why i wanted to do this this series was basically to learn myself so i'm getting to talk to guys like you almost on a weekly basis now and and learn it and i think this was this was incredible um even though i had uh read the book very recently i still feel like i've just learned a whole ton more stuff so thank you so so much for us and um get a book on amazon right that's uh easy on amazon right now i'm trying to get a book aggregator that can get it out into different stores and other countries that that it's not in because i'm already getting requests from like turkey uae saudi arabia everything and i they can't get the book so i'm trying to find other ways to get it to them yeah and i i can quite imagine the the demand is there it's awesome i think it had something like you know must have one of the the fastest not just fastest selling which is always interesting but fastest ratings through the roof awesome to see and and quite right too um so yeah i wanted to get the book finished before doing mine but yeah brilliant book thank you so much and um