I hung up the phone after a long and painful conversation with a seller, sitting on the edge of my bed in a crappy hotel room, with the sudden realization that I spend 80% of my time with the bottom 20% of my sales team. So, how the hell did I end up here?
It would take me some time to accept that I ended up in this spot because I had hired poorly and wanted to help save people. However, midway through this problem, a mentor asked me about our bottom performers: "Would you hire these people again?" Talk about a wake-up call!
As a sales leader, you can control only two factors: your people and their effectiveness. If you hire the best people, they will naturally be more effective quicker. Again, the right people, the right spots, at the right time, and your job as a sales leader is much easier. Then, if you can enable those A players at a world-class level, leadership can even be...gulp, fun!
When I started in sales leadership, my cadence was the most critical element. My thought was, let me build a world-class operating rhythm, and I can plug in a B seller and raise them to an A. Boy, was I upside down.
If you get recruiting right, you can screw up almost everything as a leader. Or said another way, with the wrong people, you can do almost everything perfectly, and you will not achieve greatness. And with the right people, you can do everything else on average and still achieve exceptional results. It's a great way to think about it because it highlights the importance of recruiting above everything else. It's not over-dramatic to say poor recruiting is your business's #1 risk (and opportunity).
The big pivot for me as a leader was when I started treating recruiting like my revenue pipeline. Finding, nurturing, and closing A-players takes 6-9 months. Not all of them in your funnel will work out timing-wise, etc. So, if you are not actively building the pipeline in recruiting (BPR) 6-9 months ahead of when you need people with 2-3X coverage, you are already a year behind. In a hyper-growth company, recruiting will always be 50%+ of your time as a leader.
Recruit amazing people and give them great enablement; the revenue will come!
