Four Standards of Sales Excellence, with Ralph Barsi [Episode 843]

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Ralph Barsi is the Vice President of Global Inside Sales at tray.io and a great rock drummer! In this episode we discuss Ralph’s four Standards of Excellence for sales (Performance, Process, Proficiency, and Professionalism). We dig into the story of how Ralph developed these standards and why they’re important. Plus, importantly, he shares how to implement and measures his sellers against these standards in his organization.

Episode Transcript

Andy Paul: Well Ralph, welcome back to the show.

Ralph Barsi: Thanks, Andy. Great to be back.

Andy Paul: I mean, you were just here. You can come more frequently. You can, you’re on that list of people who can come when open invitation come whenever you want.

Ralph Barsi: You’re a good, man. I’ll probably take you up on that. Thank you.

Andy Paul: Yeah. Yeah. Alright we’re going to talk about something we touched on last time you were here, which is your four standards of excellence, performance process, proficiency, and professionalism. And we’ve got some other topics talk about too, but I’m talking to Ralph Barsi. We have to talk about books.

Ralph Barsi: Ooh, let’s do that.

Andy Paul: All right. So I’ve got three that I’ve read recently that the, I really liked that. And I’ve got actually, I’ve got more, but they haven’t been released yet and they won’t be released by the time we release this episode. So I don’t wanna talk about them yet. But, so first one and I really enjoyed this book.

Maybe you’ve read it. It’s called, it’s being released a second edition. here it’s, Selling with Noble Purpose, how to drive revenue and do work that makes you proud by Lisa McCloud. So you read that one?

Ralph Barsi: I haven’t heard of it. I just wrote it down.

Andy Paul: Oh, excellent book. And you know, not just cause I’m philosophically aligned with one what she said, but I just did a great job of talking about it, but it’s just that yeah, an excellent job of showing that sellers and sales teams that are motivated by a specific purpose, relating to how they change the lives of their customers perform at a higher level.

And she, she does a good job yeah, citing research about that and so on it, I think it’s so great, Because money’s not really the motivator for sales. I personally never was for me. I never thought about my check until it was in my hand and it’s just identifying what this purpose has done that to be. Abstract, actually, it should be fairly concisely written and aligns with something that I’ve used for years with companies I’ve worked with, we try to distill into five words. What it is we deliver from a value perspective for the buyer and yeah, just an excellent book all the way around.

Ralph Barsi: I look forward to reading it. Was it just published this year?

Andy Paul: The original book was published maybe 10 years ago.

Ralph Barsi: Oh, wow.

Andy Paul: So she’s updated it and, yeah, she’s gonna be on the show shortly.

Ralph Barsi: We can always use more of that theme, especially in our profession, beyond the money. What’s the real purpose, how are you a contributor of value to the profession, to the marketplace, to those around you all day long.

Andy Paul: Yeah. One thing that I like about something like this too, is, and I want to get into this in the main body of our conversation though, is that when I really look at, and I tried to bring this out in my books and the stuff I produce is that I think the difference between you know, the people that are consistently at the top of the pile and the rest is as much about the perspective of what they’re doing as opposed to their skills. and because I, people get skilled to a certain point and then beyond that, the differences are pretty small, but we’re really makes things different for people I believe is their perspective, their purpose, their mindset, the things that are a little more personal, individual.

Ralph Barsi: Yeah. And it’s even more powerful when they actually share what they’re learning. When they give that stuff back to all of us, that’s when the rubber meets the road.

Andy Paul: Yeah. And you and I were talking about this right before we started recording, is this giving back to the profession idea, I think is something that we don’t talk enough about. Is that it seems like we have a generation gapand that perhaps in the conventional sense that we usually to talk about, but this gap meaning too much of what I, at least my perception of what I look at the books published about sales and so on is there’s not enough coming from people 40 and under, and we really need it. We really need it. Those are the voices and the thought leaders that are really gonna drive this profession going forward. And we just need to see more. From that group.

Ralph Barsi: We do. And it could be one of two things either. They’re not. Producing the material for us to learn from, or you, and I don’t know where to go see it, maybe it is being published and it is out there. We just don’t know what channel to find it from.

Andy Paul: I’m pretty omnivorous when it comes to this stuff. And I’m really talking about long form, right? It’s not that people aren’t producing content heaven forbid people present a ton of content, but

Ralph Barsi: Plenty of that.

Andy Paul: To me, there’s a difference about long form writing a book. And you shared a quote with me. Can you share that again, about the value of writing a book?

Ralph Barsi: Yeah. It’s from a gentleman named Shane Parrish

Andy Paul: Oh yeah.

Ralph Barsi: Who said a writing is often the process by which you realize that you don’t understand what you’re talking about.

Andy Paul: That is so much the case.

Ralph Barsi: So true.

Andy Paul: Yeah. And I speak from personal experience on that. So I, yeah, I’ll put this offer out there for people, you, if you’re 40 and under, and you’re thinking about making your Mark by writing a book and you think you needs some help contact me, let me know. I’m working with a bunch of people right now in that demographic, because this is a passion of mine is I want new voices thinking, thinking radically about what we need to do and challenging the status quo.

yeah, connect with me that LinkedIn.

Ralph Barsi: I love it. I’m

Andy Paul: go ahead. So what’s on your list that you’ve

Ralph Barsi: Yeah, I took this from, aside from your podcast, Andy, I also find myself listening to Tim Ferriss every now and then and sometimes when he’s on vacation, he’ll have somebody. guest host and recently he had someone from the VC world. I think her name’s Anne Murico is her name.

and she got onto the podcast. She delivered three great titles that are in her library and I took one of them. It’s called, How Will You Measure Your Life? By Clayton Christianson. And it’s funny that you just suggested the title you shared, because it’s a very similar theme. It’s just, how are you measuring your life?

Is it really by your activity level every day, if you’re in sales, the number of emails and calls, or is it how many times you’ve hit or missed quota? Or is it more around the number of people you’ve impacted, hopefully positively.

Andy Paul: Yeah, I wrote about this last week on LinkedIn is yeah after I’d been in sales for nearly 25 years and worked for a variety of startups and exits and traveling 400,000 miles a year made the conscious decision to stop. And it was all in sort of this vein of how you measure your life. For me, I’d missed, my daughter’s birthday the first time I’d missed a birthday. And yeah, that was such an eye opening thing. I’d never thought I would have been that person. And, yeah, and within a year I started my own company. It was just like, yeah, I’m gonna take a step back. And the thing I was most proud of when you talk about measuring thing is at the time my son was Alec was the producer on the show. He was in sixth grade. My daughter is in fourth. And from that point at the time they graduate high school, both of them, I didn’t miss  a theater  performance, a dance recital, a lacrosse game, a soccer game. I was that dad that went to every single one of them. And for me, that’s like maybe the most important thing I’ve done.

Ralph Barsi: Yeah. That’s what matters most. It’s what should matter most.

Andy Paul: And I’ve been very fortunate in life and business and so on to be reasonably well off and, could do those types of things. But it’s, it was a sacrifice. I got off from a career perspective, I sort of got on a completely different track. but you never regret it.

Ralph Barsi: no, that’s a great story. I really appreciate you sharing it. Being the father of three, it resonates big time and, I, I hope a lot of people hear that and are influenced by it.

Andy Paul: You want you? Yeah, I hope so too. I, and you miss a lot, but you have to that’s. Okay. you miss stuff professionally. So I limited myself for almost a decade to work. Yeah, two days a week and I had to be in Southern California, so doing consulting projects. So and and one client in particular that I was running sales for him for two and three days a week, basis for four years, doubled sales sold the company successfully, but I was like, yeah, he used to get frustrated. Cause Nope, leaving, gotta get back to San Diego for a lacrosse game. Or my daughter’s got a dance, a theater performance or something.

And it’s yeah, you just make those choices. I think that’s a great book. Just two other I’ll mention in the same breath that I read, I really enjoyed it. And people don’t think about this and these are both one was an episode we published last week, one’s coming up on a couple of weeks books about team building and culture.

And one was a guy named Mike Robbins. Who’s in the Bay area book called together, creating a team culture of high performance, trust and belonging. And he’s a former professional baseball player, but he’s been in the sort of culture leadership biz for awhile and, I really liked it. Cause when you and the other one was Todd Davis is the Chief People Officer of Franklin Covey, his book called Get Better: 15 Proven Practices to Build More Effective Relationships at Work.

When you read them though, they’re really about sales. you can look at everything through a service sales lens, but you know, if you’re working on a complex sale with multiple stakeholders, you really are building a team. And you need to be looking at it from that perspective. And so some of the lessons from these books about how to build a team of align stakeholders, really relate to what we do day to day on sales. So I, I recommend both those books and of course you’ll take away lessons beyond sales, but, yeah, I’d recommend those as well.

Ralph Barsi: Yeah, I’d add two more. How about that? The first is a team of teams from Stanley McChrystal.

Andy Paul: Oh yeah. General McChrystal.

Ralph Barsi: General McChrystal talking about leveraging decentralized leadership, in combat, but then also, in times of peace. And of course like you, I usually read pretty much everything with a sales lens on and try to see, what’s transferable and it’s usually everything. the second book, is it’s probably more HR centric, but it’s written by Stan Slap. It’s called Under the Hood.

Andy Paul: Okay.

Ralph Barsi: Really about driving team culture and really how culture trumps strategy and, two just killer books for most endeavors.

Andy Paul: Excellent. All three in terms of Clayton Christiansen’s book too.

Ralph Barsi: Oh, yeah. Yup.

Andy Paul: Unfortunately he passed away recently, but, yeah, definitely check that out.

Ralph Barsi: His book is fabulous.

Andy Paul: Yeah. it’s obviously a signature book. Innovator’s dilemma was hugely influential book, alright, we’re gonna talk about standards of excellence in sales and I said, we, in the preface, we started talking about this are these four standards that you create for performance process, proficiency and professionalism. So how did you arrive at these, this concept of the standards of excellence?

Ralph Barsi: Sure. So I’ve, tailored and morphed and evolved them from a couple of different organizations. I think they may have originated in, EMCs corporation. I don’t know if it was with their field organization or otherwise, but, a lot of leadership from EMC went over to Service Now. And I was at service now just under four years and we adopted a lot of the standards that service now that were being used.

At EMC for our sales development organization. And, since I’ve been at Tray now almost a year, we have adopted them here and tailored them to our environment. And, I’ve just seen them work over and over again for a lot of different reasons. And I’m such a huge fan of them that I was excited. You wanted to talk about it.

Andy Paul: Yeah, so I guess the first question about these sort of these, individual standards, organizational standards, both.

Ralph Barsi: They’re meant to be both and what I mean by that is, the latter organizational, I could see it across the enterprise, but, I’m using it today for the inside sales organization. But a lot of, you know, business units have come to us saying, Hey, what is that again? What are those standards? How are you doing them? Because a lot of sales development reps, as they’re aspiring to get off that sales development team as fast as they can.

So, you know, Yeah. So they want to produce, they want to hit their quota consistently and they want out, most of them want to become individual contributors in the field. But others go to different teams, whether it’s in finance, marketing, HR, and, they use the sales development time as that, farming time .

Andy Paul: Time to decide what they don’t want to do as well as what they do.

Ralph Barsi: Yeah.  They qualify and disqualify. You’re correct. So anyway, we have found it very effective, especially when these SDRs become real tenured in the role. And now they’re eligible to be promoted from within and it’s helpful to them and it’s also helpful to hiring managers of those next teams to see how these individuals go into the individual part you asked about, are, qualifying and quantifying their work. And so we’ve basically broken it out and do what you mentioned.

These four Ps we’ll measure on a monthly basis how well an SDR is doing performance wise and each P by the way, is broken into three subsections. So Performance is Quota, which is in our organization, it’s meetings or new opportunities for the pipeline. The second piece is emails and the third piece is phone calls. So it’s just daily activity. How you’re doing against what we think is going to increase the probability of converting quality meetings to opportunities?

Andy Paul: And so it’s a combination of quantity and quality though, because the ultimate quality comes through in the meeting set and so on.

Ralph Barsi: Correct. And we can walk through the other Ps, but understand that for each category, if you will, there’s what we call readiness criteria, where you’re basically ranking how well someone’s doing between five and one. So five, is there greatly exceeding standards or as one is they’re below standards. So they get this score for every subcategory under every heading and that discussion is had at the end of every month, first of all, they’ll do a self assessment of how well they think they did, then their manager will do the assessment. And what comes after that is a conversation and more often than not they’re talking about the SDRs career arc or desired career path. And a lot of times organizations do that maybe once a year. Maybe a few times a year. So there’s a lot of goodness to it because SDRs are learning in real time really where the gaps are because we’re both able to quantify where those gaps are and they can focus on them. They can fine tune them and once they take a step out and realize, Oh wait, this is really for my benefit. This is really to set me up for success. It’s to prepare me for my next role. It’s also to help me master the craft in the current role I was hired for. And everybody wins.

Andy Paul: Interesting. So for quota, emails and phone calls, each one, you said you rank them monthly on a rate them on a one to five scale.

Ralph Barsi: And that’s, that is true, but that’s, it’s very black and white, very straight forward. You can’t argue with the metrics, but once you start getting into proficiency, once you start getting, starting, getting into a process, professionalism, that’s where it gets a little more subjective. And that’s really where the meat and potatoes of these discussions happen.

Andy Paul: We’ll get to that and we’ll get to that. okay. You do this monthly, you do this assessment. So how does that tie then to like the time the coach has spent on coaching or the manager spend on coaching. Are they coaching to these criteria or how’s that work?

Ralph Barsi: Yup. So the answer is yes, yes, and yes. Every month. So the output of these discussions is you essentially get a sheet that stack ranks all the reps on the team, but it gets into granular detail about, if you look under proficiency specifically under product knowledge, someone might score a two versus a four.

And so that, is a signal or indicator to the frontline leader that we need to coach on product knowledge. And the organizations that have full fledged learning platforms can point right to those specific modules or certification processes around product knowledge to make sure that rep gets back on track, and gets proficient in understanding the product or understanding industry trends, which then lead to objection handling, etc. And that score the next month could go from a two to a three or from a two to a four. And we know that we’ve assessed and addressed that specific gap.

Andy Paul: Got it. And so what you’re looking for is, are you looking for a continuous upward trend in this or when you’re looking at evaluating somebody for promotion, excuse me, after they’ve been there a period of time, cause I’m just thinking as is, at least on certain sales positions is you could be taking on new types of accounts that are more difficult, require new knowledge, new skillset, perhaps to do accomplish what you might’ve done before with a different set of accounts. And, your readiness criteria could be suffering, but you could be actually handling a more difficult job. So it’s okay.

Ralph Barsi: Yes. Ultimately and ideally of course we would like to see, that upward trend, but to your point let’s say, again, we’ll use the SDR as our example, let’s say they’re in the latter part of their tenure as an SDR and they’ve alreadybeen very clear with the business that they’re aspiring to become an account executive?

We, the leadership team will focus on honing in their skills, as they relate to being an individual contributor. So it could be we’re discussing negotiation more. We’re talking about the legal process. We’re talking about to your point, selling to the enterprise and being the conductor of that orchestra, making sure that you’re rallying all the right stakeholders in the enterprise, et cetera.

And that’s done by way of shadowing. It’s done by way of other learning modules, et cetera. But, and you may not see an upward trend, in that respect because they are learning it for the first time. And it’s not the role that they’re in at that moment. So all of that is taken into account.

But the great thing about the standards of excellence is okay, we’ve got four key areas of focus that we can start with. And then we understand that it’s a holistic approach and evaluation that we take with every individual. And so there’s a lot of non tangible things that we might want to look at as well when making the decision.

Andy Paul: But I love the fact that you attempt to measure the intangible, which I think is important, as a counterbalance to just strictly going on the quantity of the tangible.

Ralph Barsi: Yep.

Andy Paul: So when you’re looking at performance though, and this, we touched on this earlier in the conversation is, yeah, this is one thing that I spend a bunch of time thinking about is, what really drives enhanced performance?

Ralph Barsi: Yeah, we talked about this last time. You’re right.

Andy Paul: And yeah, for me, that’s the sort of like now may five major categories are like skills, behaviors, mindset, and acumen and product knowledge, right? Familiar with the customer and the product, put those together. You have others?

Ralph Barsi: Repeat what you just said. Skills, you said acumen.

Andy Paul: Mindset, beliefs, behaviors, habitual habits let’s say, and then product and customer knowledge together. And the reason I bring it up is that I’m that conversation, somebody that made the case, that training will only take you so far. And, we invest in training, we’ll get people skilled to a certain level and beyond that, the marginal return on more skills based training is very small. And the what really sets the top performers apart is mindset. And yeah, we call it perspective. We call it a clarity of purpose about what they’re doing or so on, but it’s, it falls into to mindset.

Ralph Barsi: A hundred percent, but we can go all day on this one.

Andy Paul: Yeah. So how do we train mindset with people, right? Or do we train mindset or do we provide perspectives that people can embrace? Different perspectives that people can embrace and into their own mindset? This is one, I think it’s a weakness for us and sales. We talk a lot about it but the mindset tends to conversations tend to be more toward our personal motivation rather than, resilience rather than why am I doing this? What’s the purpose of what I’m doing. And if I’m animated and motivated by my purpose, then I’ll be more effective.

Ralph Barsi: Good friend of mine and colleage recently shared a story with me where, he was trying to introduce meditation to his team. Every morning as a team, this is, of course, when we were all in the office, the team would sit around in the conference room, and I dunno, I think it was maybe a five minute exercise and it incorporated meditation. It could have been some visualization and imaging and started to really resonate with the team. And that’s how, that’s an example of how mindset was being coached. And I use the term, in the past tense because he’s no longer in the office with that team, but also it was poo-pooed by the company.

Once HR heard that he was doing these daily meditations with the team, they discouraged it and actually and asked him to stop. So to really answer your question, it depends on, you talk about the word embrace, it all comes down to, does this company embrace this approach? Are they really empowering this leader to do what he or she does best when it comes to coaching and training on mindset?

Andy Paul: Yeah, this gets to a topic I think you and I have touched on in the past is that change starts from the top and it seems like a lot of the frustrations, some of us feel about how sales is being conducted. And I’ll just use my general statement, which is, yeah, pretty much the way it’s been done for the last hundred years, is there’s this reluctance starting at the top to acknowledge that there’s better ways to do it because they get a certain result the way they’re doing it now. But it’s not optimal. No one should try to kid themselves that it’s optimal, but Hey, if we stick an arbitrary target in the ground, you hit it, that’s good enough.

Yeah. To me that’s a problem. I think the meditation thing is a great idea. Mindfulness, whatever you want to call it. I know there’s sensitivity. Some, there’s the local school district here in San Diego that wouldn’t let teachers, teach mindfulness like the same thing, five minutes a day. Cause you know, some parents are playing, they thought that was religious instruction, but I like that. I think that’s a great thing. Alright.

Ralph Barsi: I’m a big fan. I’d love. I’d love to see more of it. I’m a big mindset fan.

Andy Paul: Yeah. I will come back and visit that more and more. Cause that is, I think an increasingly big top had a great guest. I interviewed last week. There’ll be the show come out by the time people hear this little already been out. Ryan Gottfredson a professor at Cal State Fullerton has written extensively about this. And he’s got a book out about mindset and in a great assessment on his website over the force or four key pairs of mindset or continums of mindset,

Ralph Barsi: It gives you something to go do with what you just learned.

Andy Paul: Absolutely. Okay. So let’s talk about process. Now, when you’re talking about process where you’re talking about overall sales process or their own personally defined process, What’s the thing that’s being measured here?

Ralph Barsi: It’s the former Andy, it’s more overall sales process. But in our organization, the three sub components are your CRM maintenance, your meeting hygiene and your touch patterns.

Andy Paul: So meeting hygiene-

Ralph Barsi: Yeah, so we can talk about that. So outbound or inbound. So most sales development reps are booking meetings for account executives, and I’ve always likened and a newly booked meeting to a medical record. when I was a kid, I would go see the physician. I’d be sitting in the exam room, waiting for the doctor to come down the hall. And every time they did, they would pull the clipboard off the door. This is old school.

Andy Paul: No, it still happens. It still

Ralph Barsi: It’s old school, so they would pull the clipboard off the door and they’d come in. Oh, Hey, how you doing Ralph? While they’re flipping through the chart, getting caught up on why they’re even visiting me today.

Same thing with a meeting, a lot of SDRs will book a great meeting, but they’ll just, they won’t include a lot of the color and context that an account executive needs in order to truly grab the Baton and carry it on from there. So we’re always examining the meeting hygiene and the degree of that hygiene with our SDRs. And we put it in the standards of excellence.

Andy Paul: And what was the third component of it? CRM maintenance, meeting hygiene and-

Ralph Barsi: Third is touch pattern. So this just really is ensuring that we’re complying with or adhering to SLA that we might have in the organization. Marketing is investing a ton of money to produce one lead and we have a service level agreement that says look when an inbound lead comes in and maybe it’s scored a particular way, we’re going to follow up, by way of 8 to 10 touches over the next 20 business days. so we want to make sure that we’re measuring, the reps on adherence to that SLA that we’re doing our part in the puzzle.

Andy Paul: But aren’t some of those touch patterns, low prescribed in the sequence, cadences, you put out?

Ralph Barsi: They sure are.

Andy Paul: So how much discretion do they have over that?

Ralph Barsi: Yeah, in a mostly outbound culture, they have a lot more discretion. And of course I use the example of an inbound lead, but, you asked earlier about outbound and on the outbound side, that’s a big deal where they don’t really have too much sequences in general going out because it’s gotta be so highly personalized and customized. When, for example, if you’re calling into the enterprise, and trying to get a net new logo into the pipeline and you’ve got a prospect into it. Yeah. It takes a lot of research, a lot of customization and a sequence isn’t going to do the trick

Andy Paul: Yeah, though I wasn’t talking about necessarily the initial contact, but beyond that they could be put signs on somebody into a sequence though.

Ralph Barsi: They could. They could.

Andy Paul: All right

Ralph Barsi: What do you think so far?

Andy Paul: I like it. As I mentioned I like this idea of combining measures on intangibles, as well as tangibles, And instead of being so reliant on tangible things that we quantify that is, yeah, I think there’s these other things really do drive performance, do drive your process, meeting hygiene, I like the CRM maintenance. I’m a huge fan of, and how do you measure the CRM maintenance by the way?

Ralph Barsi: CRM maintenance. That’s basically similar to the meeting notes. You want to make sure that, you are putting in the right amount of descriptive notes in a CRM record. You may say next step is, account executive will hold disco, call period.

Andy Paul: Yeah, just, you’ll just do the disposition dropped down.

Ralph Barsi: But if, again, if it’s not in the CRM, it didn’t happen. And if you even play the long game and you think about, let’s say it’s that you close win that deal. It’s a new customer and now a year and a half goes by two years ago, go by and it’s up for renewal. You’re going to have a, an account manager or customer success manager, taking a look at those initial records when they’re parachuting into do their part and they want as much of the narrative as possible.

Andy Paul: Absolutely.

Ralph Barsi: So we can identify, how well did we help resolve these initial critical business issues you were experiencing? What has surfaced since et cetera? And if it’s just not colored up well in the CRM, it’s an uphill climb for everybody involved.

Andy Paul: Yeah. that should be theoretically, it should be the entire account record being out with emails and all the communications and so on. Just so somebody can come in and educate themselves about what’s been going on. Yeah, I was always, especially when an environment where reps are turning over what every 14 months, AEs and SDRs and so on is, yeah. If that information is not in the CRM, it’s like you’re toast with all these transitions. You have to make an handoffs between new account management and so on. Yeah.

Ralph Barsi: Yeah. And retention is so key. NPS is so key, and if that stuff’s missing, it’s just, it’s a world of hurt.

Andy Paul: All right. let’s talk about proficiency then the third P , what are you defining proficiency in.

Ralph Barsi: sure. That’s so that’s where product knowledge falls. Also the communication skills that you mentioned, that’s under proficiency and then organization and productivity.

Andy Paul: And how are you measuring productivity?

Ralph Barsi: Productivity is we want to make sure that reps are managing their time efficiently and effectively. They’re balancing their responsibilities to the field. To their own manager and team to their own development, an example here of what we would put for someone, who’s a five in the readiness criteria is we’ll say something like consistently expands their internal network. They’re seeking outside influence whether that be attending a webinar or taking classes, participating in an association. They’re aware of where they are against their targets. Et cetera. Yep.

Andy Paul: I love that whole thing about expanding their network internally. And so that’s, I was thinking the first thing, excuse me. I think it’s the first time I’ve heard that. Somebody bring that up as something that’s important and absolutely is important. iI’s like sales is a team effort.

We talked earlier about team building, right? It’s not with the customer, but you have to build it internally as well and I always thought that was something I did extremely well when I was carrying a bag or even as a VP is I thought it was hugely important. Reminds me of story of people, not a big soccer fan, but when, you’re going to club took over Liverpool, and I don’t think this is the only club that does it, but yeah, it took the players and these, that was a hundred plus staff members, not just coaching staff, but kitchen staff, cause any soccer teams, they have their own kitchen and feeding them data, blah, physical therapist, like a hundred, 125, same team. He tested the players. They had to know the first names of everybody in that organization.

Ralph Barsi: beautiful. I love that

Andy Paul: yeah, just think how often, I remember working for one CEO, it was just despondent one day, a founder of the company and so on. And he said, I said, what’s wrong? He says, first time I met someone for the second time. I couldn’t remember their name.

Ralph Barsi: Brought him to tears.

Andy Paul: Oh, he was hated it. Hated it. cause there’s more countries that, I didn’t pay enough attention to the first time when I met him. And what was the message I was sending because of that?

Ralph Barsi: Oh, that’s beautiful.

Andy Paul: Yeah.

Ralph Barsi: One thing. It’s one thing to know everybody’s first name, but it’s another thing to actually call them by their first name.

Andy Paul: yeah,

Ralph Barsi: a lot of people don’t do that. Andy.

Andy Paul: that’s what gets those fourth P, professionalism, ralph. You thought you slipped one by me.

Ralph Barsi: Sharp.

Andy Paul: But that’s part of it, right? Is how you treat people.

Ralph Barsi: That’s right.

Andy Paul: so what are the components? Last thing we’ve got time for here today, but let’s go through the components of the professionalism.

Ralph Barsi: Sure. Yeah. It’s broken into a leadership, coachability and teamwork

Andy Paul: Yeah. Love it.

Ralph Barsi: Leadership. A number five would be an SDR who is a servant leader, sought by peers for their expertise and exceptional communicator perseveres through the toughest challenges inspires others.

Andy Paul: Right.

Ralph Barsi: Just top notch. coachability applies, constructive feedback, handles scrutiny, from improving talk tracks to email, copy, to presence in the office and around the business runs their own business within the business. And as a key contributor to the SDR and field team.

Andy Paul: Gets-

Ralph Barsi: Gets me fired up too.

Andy Paul: Oh yeah. Yeah. Cause this is people can take control of this, right? I mean it’s-

Ralph Barsi: Everyone can

Andy Paul: yeah. Yeah, this is, you can complain about bout, you don’t throw a product pricing features and so on, but yeah, so many of these things, you even talking about it in these four Ps and especially here is these are things you absolutely have control over.

Yeah. We talked a second ago about, building your network internally. You can do that, right? up to you. And these are the things I think that maybe seem of secondary importance, but actually in many respects are primary importance. So if you’re trying to get, if you’re working as an AE, trying to get a big deal done and you have to enlist sales engineering, and sales ops, legal, da da da. Yeah. If you haven’t built that network and you suddenly show up and say, Hey, I need your help. And then I have the choice between you and the person who’s been cultivating that relationship, you’re gonna be waiting for

Ralph Barsi: all right. That’s all right.

Andy Paul: Yeah, I think those are really important. I love that.

Ralph Barsi: Yeah. The resources are within you and around you, you just have to look for them and they’ll appear

Andy Paul: We have to put yourself out there and you have to consider it part of your job.

Ralph Barsi: Right.

Andy Paul: That’s it. That’s why I like what this four P thing. And I said, this professionalism pillar is that it’s not oftentimes specified to people. The good people do it. Maybe they learned the value of it at another job, or sombody told them, or they just intuitively know that they need to work with other people, whatever, but by making it part of the responsibility and that what you measure and assess them on. I love that because it’s not always intuitively obvious to everybody.

Ralph Barsi: I’ll finish with teamwork.

Andy Paul: Okay. Go.

Ralph Barsi: SDR inspires cooperation and collaboration builds the team up, serves others, gathers team sentiment and feedback, and coaches, the team and or shares potential solutions to leadership.

Andy Paul: Yeah. Yeah, this is great. I love this. It’s just so comprehensive and yeah, I think people want to feel that they’re being judged on their total contribution to the organization. And this really does that. I don’t know, escaping the first is, Hey, do you have certain things I got to get accomplished. I have a quota and I have to send out my emails and phone calls, but it make my phone calls, but there’s so much more to it.

Ralph Barsi: And we feel by using these, it goes, it goes to the adage where focus goes energy flows, so we want everybody focused on these four key areas in building their skills and their competencies. And we want to set them up for success.

Andy Paul: Yeah, I love it. Yeah. I think, yeah, people listening to this, this is a great example of, I think a way that, assessing and measuring and assessing your people that a, makes it feels more inclusive, feels, That’s that gives people hope that it’s not just all on one thing. But there’s lots of pieces that contribute to their success. And that also for those who have looking at the future, it’s what you’re really doing is you’re really training them. I believe in what are the important things you need to master going forward? Because some of these things definitely become a heightened importance as you move out of the SDR role.

Ralph Barsi: Oh, yeah. And if you’re firing on all cylinders as an SDR and it’s quantifiable through these standards, you’re going to hit that break even point so fast. When you get to that next role, you’re going to be a producer so much quicker.

Andy Paul: Absolutely. Yeah. I love it. Okay. Ralph fantastic. As always, unfortunately we got to jump, but people want to contact you. How can they do that?

Ralph Barsi: best way to reach me is also on LinkedIn. It’s simply my name Ralph Barsi. And you can also check out my blog at www.Ralphbarsi.com.

Andy Paul: As you should. That’s a good blog, okay, Ralph, we’ll do a second shortly.

Ralph Barsi: Sounds good,