How to Create More Diversity in Sales, with Sally Duby [Episode 848]

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Sally Duby is the Chief Sales Officer and Partner at The Bridge Group. In this episode Sally and I dive into how to create more diversity in sales (tech in particular). We discuss whether leaders should set concrete goals and steps to improve diversity. And we talk about how to get more POC and women into leadership positions in sales.

Episode Transcript

SEP-848

Andy Paul: Sally. Welcome back to the show.

Sally Duby: Thanks so much, Andy. It’s great to be back. I miss chatting with you.

Andy Paul: Yeah, I’m looking forward to this. You moved recently.

Sally Duby: I did. I did. I made the big jump from the Bay Area to Denver.

Andy Paul: Ah, to reasonable real estate prices.

Sally Duby: Yes, back to sanity.

Andy Paul: That’s good. So you enjoying, like being at altitude and having a winter?

Sally Duby: I do the four seasons. The winters are okay. I came from Michigan years and years ago-

Andy Paul: Okay. No big deal. Yeah.

Sally Duby: Yeah.

Andy Paul: It’s an adjustment after being in California, but I, somewhere I grew up in Wisconsin spent most of my adult life in California, but then, 10 years ago I started sharing time between New York city and San Diego. And I know people, I said, how do you handle the winters? And it’s compared to growing up in Wisconsin, not very difficult.

Sally Duby: Yes. Yes, it is somewhat easier. we can have 60, 70 degree days and then the next day we could have eight inches of snow.

Andy Paul: Yeah. Yeah. I know the thing about that areathere is a virtual assistant working for me out there and living vicariously through her. And she was talking about, yeah, one day just, you said 70 degrees the next day. Eight inches of snow. Two days later. 60 degrees. So on. Yeah.

Sally Duby: you just never know it keeps you on your toes.

Andy Paul: Yeah, that’s right. that’s good. Unpredictability is good for all of us. so we’re gonna talk about several topics today, but we’re gonna start with talking about diversity in sales. you’ve written about this recently, an article in Forbes magazine, yanno, something you’re passionate about.

So first question I guess, is this lack of diversity in sales? Is it worse in tech? Than other industries, as far as your, 

Sally Duby: my gut says, yes, I don’t have any real statistics other than I meet a lot more women in sales roles. In other industries, real estate finance, all seem to definitely have a lot more women. and sales and tack. I’ve been on track and I’m going to date myself again, but I’ve been that for over 30 years and it’s gotten a little bit better, but it’s still not where you would think it would be in 2020.

Andy Paul: Oh, I have to agree. as you said, you don’t think a lot’s changed in terms of diversity in sales and tech and in the past 30 years, Yeah, I’ve been in it for even more than that. And, yeah, I could almost make the argument that it’s worse because you would expect a certain rate of change, a certain trajectory of change over three or four decades.

And given the fact that we don’t notice any change means that it’s probably worse. That’s how I look at it. Given there’s been no improvement. That means it’s actually worse today than it was there. And why do you think that’s the case?

Sally Duby: I think there’s a multitude of reasons actually for it. some maybe. Outside of text control, I think that women for many years, didn’t think of a career in sales. and obviously I think as we all know too, there’s not a lot of schools out there. At the last I knew a few years ago, there were only about 30 colleges and universities.

that even had a sales program where you could actually get a degree in sales. So before then you couldn’t actually take a sales major. So for many people, I think it was just like, I didn’t get my degree in that, so I’m not going to do it. And I think the culture in sales and how we have in the past, always.

described being on a sales team, you gotta be a killer, you got to do that is not. Yeah. It’s just not something that appeals to me. so I think it discouraged people and it wasn’t a lifestyle. If you think of the traditional field sales role, where you’re always on an airplane. And traveling and never home at night.

That is also something that does appeal to many women and doesn’t work with a personal life for many women.

Andy Paul: There’s certainly the issue of diversity in terms of women in leadership, women in sales roles themselves, when it comes to diversity, let’s say racial diversity it’s as again, the progress is as dismal as it is. If not more so than with women.

Sally Duby: Yes. And, I think it goes back to some of why there are more women when you’ve got so many men in there, people tend to hire. People that look like them or people that are in their network. And so you’ve got, men they’re just used to hanging out with other men and that’s their network and that’s who they’ve worked with before.

So that’s who they continue to hire and look for. And I know from my past experiences as a sales leader, when I was hiring and I was trying to purposely hire more women, it’s really. It is hard to find you get, maybe one out of 10 resumes are from a female or a person of color. And so you have to go out of your way and make a really concerted effort to try to find those people and to search out those people.

And it’s going to take longer. And I think in the world of tack anything that takes longer. Is not well accepted. and I know many times I had to tell my boss and like, why is that position not filled yet? And I’d have to play a little game and just say, I just haven’t found the right person yet.

In reality, when it is time to balance out my team and find a woman, find people of color and it takes longer.

Andy Paul: Yeah, I, there’s so many cultural things. So you refer to, I think that the play into it is having read the stat, a little while ago, but then read it again. There was another article, I think last week in the Washington post about this is that no less than 1% of VC money goes to black entrepreneurs. Think about that less than 1%. And The conclusion. I think it draws that, best case scenario, there’s this implicit bias there, worst cases, explicit biases. But I would think that interesting to you seems like something that trickles down to the entrepreneurs themselves, as they must be aware of this.

If they’re trying to hire senior people, women or people of color, they have to look at the VCs as an example, and it’s like, is that going to be perceived as too risky?

Sally Duby: Yeah. I personally don’t think from the ones that I’ve talked to. I think many of them just don’t even think about it. It’s we need to hire somebody and we want to do it quickly and get on board. So it’s either a referral, right? So again,

Andy Paul: they to the golden boys, they got a

Sally Duby: Yeah. It’s coming from the good old boys network.

and it’s not, I think the thing that’s fascinating is not just people that are around my age group. That’s creating this when I look at the younger demographics and the younger CEOs, the younger managers. We work with a lot of sales development inside sales teams with 10 people much earlier in their careers.

And when we go into these companies, it is to avoid the network at its finest, even though they’re being managed by a millennial.

it’s nothing, has changed between age groups, even though I think the younger generation wants to think. that they are more progressive and more aware of this.

I don’t see it. I don’t see it in the tech workplace.

Andy Paul: Yeah. one thing you wrote about is that you were saying that you thought that HR functional leaders need to set concrete goals for improving diversity. So what would these be in your mind?

Sally Duby: Yeah. I think they have to come up with when they’re hiring, what percentage of people, or what percentage of people in the team do they want to be either women or people of color, and then they work to strive towards those goals. And if it’s not coming from, ideally this is coming from the top down, the CEO is saying, this is a company initiative.

We’re going to do better. We’re going to make this happen. And there, with the chief of people, HR, whatever the role is called in the company to set up these kinds of parameters and give guidance to people that are in the recruiting and in the hiring positions as to how to go about and do this.

But, we’re starting to see, obviously in this time of what’s going on in the country, we’re seeing a lot more of this. I’m seeing a lot of job openings for, head of diversity at companies, which is awesome. but I think as a hiring manager, you don’t have to wait. For, for it to come from top down, you can do it yourself.

And so again, some of the things that I talked about, in the posts that I wrote was one of the things I really liked was, if you ask people on your team who, are part of the good old boy network, if you will, for a referral, they’re going to give you more people that look like them. If you specifically say, like who’s the best woman salesperson that you’ve ever worked with, who’s the best person of color and sales that you’ve ever worked with. And you start getting really specific about what you’re looking for. You’re going to start getting obviously different answers and different results.

and so we’ve got to really do things. A lot different than how we’ve been doing them in the past. And we’ve got to go different. I think one of the things, Andy, that you and I were just talking about before this was. some of our requirements that we put in or the way that we were job descriptions, if you’re putting in, you’re looking for somebody with a killer instinct to go hunt.

those things don’t resonate with women. So change what you’re looking for, change your wording, make it something that’s going to appeal more to women or people of color, show diversity on your website. We usually see things on websites of employees, they’re playing basketball or they’re playing foosball.

those are things that women are just, it doesn’t necessarily excite us. You can also start putting things together that specifically again, are going to get you outside of your normal network for a lot of these positions. Do we really need them to have a BA

Andy Paul: You? No, I think that’s. That’s a great question. If that’s a barrier then yeah. That’s a barrier that needs to come down. Cause that’s, that is, I don’t know. Have you used your BA and your sales

Sally Duby: No. my BA was in hotel and restaurant management,

Andy Paul: Mine. Mine. Mine was mine. Wasn’t history. 

Sally Duby: as we would just say that there are. there’s very few now, back in my time, there was no one who had a sales major. so it didn’t matter. and I would have an experience. Why do we need it? If you’re in security, we see this all the time. The security and the security part of tech is really, I dunno, I guess they think they’re more complex than everybody else.

And it’s always, you’ve got to have security experience. how are you going to break in these new people? And, women, and people of color and give them an opportunity in a starting hole if you’re requiring experience and why do you really need that security experience?

Andy Paul: Yeah,

Sally Duby: everybody got started in sales without having a security experience and they got their first job and managed to figure it out.

Andy Paul: Yeah, why do I want to come back to that one? I think the critical point though, is for me, as I think about this as that we just need, the diversity needs to start at the bottom, at the entry level people in sales, because that then forms the pool from which. Future managers and directors and VPs and CEOs are developed.

and I agree. I think the things you’ve talked about as do we need BAS can we do more aggressive use of internships, bringing in women, people of color students as interns into sales to expose them to profession and so on hugely important, right? Because it’s. Yeah, we just need to get people in doing the work and then be able to develop them from there and we have to be serious about it.

I always look at, I’ve talked about this example before, the NFL put in a rule to try to encourage the hiring of minority candidates. Head coach and senior coaching positions and it’s been available. I don’t know for, yeah, almost 20 years or so. And it’s had no impact at all.

it’s it’s one thing to have the rule in place. 70% of NFL players are black and less than 10% of the head coaches are black. In fact, the same number of head coaches this year in 2020 black head coaches in the NFL as the Wars in 2003, But what dictates though is what drives that is that most of the head coaches are drawn from the next tier down, right?

Just like in management. Probably my VP’s from my directors, my managers, while the next tier down is primarily what the offensive defensive coordinators on proteins are mostly white men. The pool always starts drawing from the experiences with gotta get people. Into our entry-level positions, more women, more people of color.

And I said, I love the internships. I love what we are really looking at, we don’t need a BA degree most. Yeah. We’ve had this inflation of people rushing to colleges and then the last 40 years, that’s, people have to get degrees to be admins these days. it’s like why, it’s just become this bar.

So let’s, I agree. let’s look at taking that away. and I think your point about. Making sure management teams know how to hire, how to interview, how to remove the unconscious biases, if you will, out of the interviewing process. one thing that people are doing that makes so much sense, and this is what I advocate as well as your standard interview questions.

So everybody.

Sally Duby: was just going to bring that up and

Andy Paul: so that once when someone’s being interviewed as is if you have four people that are interviewing them during the course of the day, those four people all ask the exact same questions in the exact same order. So when they get together and debrief, they’re using a standard set of criteria to evaluate the person

Sally Duby: And you get so much more out of it when you give people the questions they need to ask for the role. cause I quite often, we’re always like, okay, so why do you want to hire that person? I really like them well. Okay. What else is there that, there’s gotta be a lot more as to why you want to hire somebody besides you like them.

And what that is telling me is that you really don’t know how to interview. And we didn’t know what questions to ask and you couldn’t get any really good information, but they were really nice. And maybe he had a really fun conversation, BSA.

Andy Paul: but that’s the whole point about standardized questions is you that’s part of a system of that. I advocate that having a scorecard that you assign point values to various things, and it could be interviews is just one of the things you’re evaluating, but is yes. Let’s make it more data driven and less subjective.

And I think that’s at least one step that companies can take to try to. Get more diversity into their workforce.

Sally Duby: exactly. And really being able to understand the, what it takes to be successful in the role and that things like the degree, things like previous industry experience, you can teach people, product stuff,

Andy Paul: yeah. Oh, absolutely. Wow.

Sally Duby: And that’s only what tech companies are the best at is teaching people, product stuff.

They’re not good at teaching people how to sell

Andy Paul: No.

Sally Duby: or do any of that other

Andy Paul: we’re gonna, we’re gonna get into that in just a second, yeah. Yeah. Cause that’s the question I’d ask you. So by doing it back to your question about, is, for you’re in an industry and you’re hiring a salesperson, do you need to hire someone with that industry experience?

because to your point, is it easier just to teach the product side than finding someone with. Yeah, the sales skills you need. And, I have to admit, I go back and forth on this because yeah, I’m an example at one side of, as I said, I was a history major, but I spent now prior to starting my business spent 25 years selling very complex technical products for the most part.

And it was funny. I was very successful at it, but there were certain things. I felt somebody with more technical background could do better. So it wasn’t like it was complete, yes or no, because on the other hand I made a career. I’ve taken engineers and turned them into salespeople.

So, I really always said, Oh no, engineers don’t have sales DNA that’s so hard to teach us. Yeah, actually, no, I felt a lot easier to teach the sales skills than to teach the detailed technical stuff that they needed to. And several industries I worked in

Sally Duby: Yeah. I think it is an interesting question. everybody’s scores. Sorry, my dog has decided to just speak up at that point in time, and she had some stuff to contribute. 

Andy Paul: I thought she made a very good point.

Sally Duby: but again, I think even if you, I have some previous experience doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to be able to come in and get up and running at a new company with different products, maybe different messaging, different, features and benefits. And for salespeople. So I’m going to tell a story.

This was years ago, but a good friend of mine worked at Oracle with me. And, he was in field sales. I was inside sales and we were having a conversation one day comparing stuff. And I started going off on these tangents about products. And he was like, how the heck do you know that? And I’m like, I had to learn all of this.

To be able to do my job. And I’m like, you don’t know this. He’s are you kidding? I’m like, what do you do when you tell people, when people are asking you a question, he’s A temple, it’s a fam. And I’m like, Oh my God, what is that sound? And he’s F magic. And I’m like, Oh, you do not get by with that.

He’s yeah, they laugh. And we move on. And I’m like, okay, that’s one way, but the other way is a lot of field salespeople. they do have an se that is with them on every single, what used to be in our not too distant past of field call. Or they also have among phone calls a day and inside you don’t have that.

One-on-one pairing to be able to do that. So you learn it in quick order and you end up being able to talk circles around your counterparts. So again, I think you learn as much as you need to be able to sell the product, but in most cases, in reality, I think Andy, what’s much more important is how do you convey and find out what the person really needs, how you can make them successful.

In their current job and you stick to for the most part higher level business value conversations, then getting into the nitty gritty and you get the tech people together to talk tech

Andy Paul: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. yeah, which sort of gets back again to the original point is, are you looking when you’re looking to hire salespeople, are you looking to hire specialists or generalists and. Yeah. I think if it’s from just an industry perspective, yeah. I tend to lean toward generalists, but if there’s something you’re selling chip design equipment or chip manufacturing equipment, yeah.

I’m going to lean probably toward a specialist. I’m going to want a seller with maybe a double eight background or something like that, and understands the fundamentals. But yeah, I think for the most part, but I lean toward the generalists.

Sally Duby: Yes, I agree. And I find this interesting too. We have a lot of people that are very specific when it comes to, at the leadership level, whether it’s a sales development leader, an inside sales leader. fiance sales leader, is that they’re looking for that industry experience. And, I know from the SDR and inside sales, that if you understand what makes sales development teams tick and how to work with sales and marketing, that the product side is so less important.

To develop a really good team that will take your socks off. I’ve done it myself. When I went in, I went from doing the database stuff into a company called network general, which got hot. I forget who now. I don’t know if it was network clients or one of those, but anyway, cause this was years ago and it was a really technical product.

And I was just like, I don’t know any of this stuff, but did I build a really high level functioning sales development team and inside sales team?

Andy Paul: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

One of the perspectives that people don’t look about, or look at hiring sales is, we use the term generalist, but I’m sorry I used it because I actually don’t use that term anymore. I call sales specialists and it’s something where I think we need to really develop and serve a term.

Is this okay? I’m not just a salesperson. This is somebody that really understands sales. And how do we gauge that? Because I always talk back to this quote on my favorite quotes all time from this, British philosopher Thomas Huxley was, in life, we should try to learn something about everything and everything about something. And that describes the way I’ve lived my life and not think about it. Okay. yeah, I’m by Reed wildly a hugely curious individual, yeah. Try to know something about everything, but the one thing I know everything about, I think I know most everything about, but obviously I don’t know everything about it, but the thing I’m trying to learn everything about is sales.

So I think as a sales person, You really don’t want to be a generalist. You want to be a sales specialist. You may not be a security industry specialist or whatever industry you’re trying to get into, but if you position yourself as a sales specialist, you can verify that by what you read, what things you’re learning and so on, that becomes pretty powerful.

Sally Duby: Absolutely. I liked that. I liked that and I totally agree. I think that we need to get really down to the brass tacks as to what do you need to look for? And it’s, it’s a little bit different based on the role of the position, right? If you start at the SDR level, you’re looking for some general qualities and skills.

That can translate into with the right training and coaching, being a good one salesperson, right? Like good communication skills, the grit, the emotional intelligence, perseverance. I think the curiosity is a great one. Are they always wanting to, just ask questions, whether it’s. internally to learn more about the company, the product or buyers, or is it when they’re on a phone call with, with a prospect that they’re asking questions, are they motivated? Are they internally motivated? to do the job cause this, the jobs are hard at sales. It’s not easy. and

Andy Paul: that’s never been easy.

Sally Duby: no. And does it bother you when people say no to you or hang up? you can’t let. Those kinds of things bother you. I remember what I was selling insurance for.

That was my very first insurance job. And literally, I’m selling business health or health insurance to businesses. And literally it was knocking on doors, just going to a big, business park.

Andy Paul: Yep.

Sally Duby: Yeah. And, literally knock on doors. And I remember going into one just, and there was a sign above the receptionist desk that said we shoot every third salesperson.

And the second one, just walk out the door. And, you got to just laugh and I turned it into a joke and had them all laughing and got in to see the person I wanted to see. But, if you’re too sensitive about some of those things or take things literally, I’m sure a lot of people just looked at that during a random walk right out the door.

Andy Paul: Yeah, start my own similarity when I was very early the first few months on the job as my territory was the East Bay or the Bay area from Fremont to Fairfield. And, went out with a senior salesperson to go on a call and he was selling. The accounting systems are selling computer systems with an accounting application for CPA firms to help run their business too.

It wasn’t. I guess it was our tax prep involved. I think there might have been tax prep and Paul, I can’t remember, but certainly for business operations for CPA firms and yeah, we get to the door of someone CPA firm who is going to cold call and yeah, sign said no salespeople. And he goes into the front door and I’m right behind him and the receptionists and this atrium says, can’t you read? He said I can do very well, he says, I’m not here to sell you something, I’m here to help you improve your business operations. And for me that was like eye opening. It was like, Oh, that’s how you do that. That’s how you do that.

Sally Duby: That’s great. Yes. And again, I think it goes back to. who’s going to be the more successful salesperson in the end. Do you need somebody with those technical skills or somebody that can turn it into a business value conversation like that person you were just talking about? I’m here to tell you about how to improve your business operations.

I’m not talking tech technical stuff with you, right? At some point in time, that’s probably going to have to come, but again, there’s other resources, other avenues for that.

Andy Paul: yeah, his thing that stuck with me throughout my entire career to stay, as I’m not here to sell you, I’m here to help you. And I think that’s a mindset that most salespeople completely miss out on this. I think their job is to sell something as supposed to help somebody solve a problem.

Sally Duby: Absolutely.

Andy Paul: So the guest got a point that we had touched on earlier about.

Oh, sales training is lacking. and so I’ve got this, I’ve got this theory, so let me run it by him. And I’ve been asking lots of guests this recently, I’ll often ask people how they learn, how to sell, Saying, setting aside their experience, which everybody has their own experience learning, who was the big influence in the morning?

I saw, was it a coach and a mentor or was it, other peers? Was it a customer? Was it their own, personal work? They did. Or was it company supplied training. And so far again, this is not scientific, just talking to a lot of people is the thing that’s always most influential people really learn how to be cellar coaches and mentors.

And we know there’s also research as the, Hey, the single biggest thing you can do to provide a big uplift in sales performances, more effective coaching. If that’s the case, we spent $20 billion a year on sales training in the United States of which a small fraction is spent on training and enabling sales managers, coaches, how to coach. So wouldn’t we be better off. Flipping those amounts and spending let’s say $19 billion a year training managers and a billion dollars training salespeople.

Sally Duby: I love that. And I totally agree with that philosophy. I think this is where there is. So much upside for companies and, again, we see it all the time is that you have an SDR rep that was an SDR, maybe your first job out of college. And they were at an SDR for six or nine months. And all of a sudden they’re an SDR manager and they get absolutely no training. They get no mentoring. They get no coaching themselves, but yet they’re out hiring people and they don’t know how to hire. So it goes back to that first problem that we were just talking about. and now, and they don’t know how to coach because they were never coached. Because their manager was at the same, that they had before was at the same sort of levels they were, they had just recently gotten promoted.

They don’t know how to coach, they’d never received coaching. and it just keeps getting worse. And one of the things that we are doing a lot of now is actually work coaching first time managers. these things. How do you properly coach? Why do you want to coach? How should you be spending your day?

What is the most important thing? That you should be doing to impact the success of your team. And so going through all that and making them understand this is really what the job is about. And the most impactful thing you can do is spend time on coaching and how to do it. And then I have this conversation every week with a couple people I’m mentoring, they’re like, I have tried really hard to coach.

But my VP comes in once this report, he wants me to do this in Salesforce. He wants this done. He or she wants this done. And it’s and my coaching time keeps getting less and less.

Andy Paul: Okay, so let’s stop there. Here’s this is gonna sound too simplistic, but I’m speaking from personal experience, the answer to your VP when they want you to come do that stuff is just to say no. you’re hiring me to do a job. And that job is to generate a certain amount of sales. I don’t have time for that report. I don’t have time to do that thing that you want. So what do you want me to prioritize, giving you a report or selling something and this conversation, people, there’s so much fear inherent in the way that sales is structured and operated these days.

It’s Yeah. I had a boss at one point who asked me, said, don’t you ever just say yes to anything? And the answer was no, because this is my job. You gave me this job to achieve a certain thing. It wasn’t to produce a certain number of reports. So it wasn’t just that, I’m gonna focus on, you can fire me if you don’t like it, but I’m gonna focus on getting sales.

This is what you hired me to do. And I started that. My first management job all the way through being CEO, senior VPs at companies talking to CEOs. No, you want me to do certain things now, look, I’ll think about that. See if it makes sense, but my priority is I’m trying to get this quarter done.

I’m trying to get the year done. No

to start saying no.

Sally Duby: exactly. Or figuring out, it’s hard for, I think people that are early on in their careers to know how

Andy Paul: were, was, I

Sally Duby: I know. I love doing that

Andy Paul: I’m not a huge risk taker. I’m not, no, I’m not. But, you do have to take a risk. the people that they get ahead and sales, a common thread is they break the rules. Yeah, it’s not that it’s not that they do anything unethical or whatever, but they understand what’s the biggest priority.

And they’re gonna focus their time and effort and get the biggest priorities accomplished. And they’re not going to let anything stand in their way. Don’t get your weekly report done. You don’t get your weekly report done. Fire me. I’m 110% of quota.

Sally Duby: Yeah, I, that is my big advice to a lot of people that I coach a mentor or talk to is you don’t necessarily have to say no first say, okay, here’s what’s on my plate. Help me prioritize coaching and making sure my team really. Actually use their goal for this month. Is that still your most important item for me?

Or you want me to go try to figure out how to run this report and get this data right. And when you start putting it in perspective, that’s, what’s most important, most sales leaders that I’ve done this with have backed off and said, you’re right.

Andy Paul: Yeah,

I may ask them for it. I’m here. It’s yeah. That’s your problem.

Sally Duby: yeah, I think in this, having, being able to have those conversations instead of just being the yes person, because you think that’s gonna keep you in good with your sales leader, for some people, I guess that does work. And that’s what they, but the sales leader is looking for is just yes, people, But those people are probably the ones that I would never want to work for.

Andy Paul: and the people that say yes are the ones that just, you’re not gonna achieve what you want to achieve.

Sally Duby: Exactly.

Andy Paul: it’s come on, you have, no one is looking out for you except you. You may have a good boss on occasion that you really bond with and they’ve got your back, but by and large, the only one looking out for you is you.

And so it doesn’t mean to be selfish. you want to be a team player because that’s going to help you. You don’t have the right mindset, but you also have to get your job done. And, they may say you had this conversation once with a CEO at a startup. I was working for. I inherited this organization that was not doing well, and the CEO thought the answer and we’re off selling outsource services for managing networks and so on.

and he thought the answer was to hire a bunch more people. and I said, here’s the problem you’ve got, or I have people that jumped bail to. You have an organization that can’t sell these people, right? I’m not going to go hire more people until we learn how to sell these people. and I had P and L responsibility for this organization. Then I finally said to him, I said, look, Dude, I go hire these people, but if it doesn’t work out, you’re going to fire me. But if I make this a profitable organization continue to grow sales while I do it. Yeah. We may not be hitting your growth forecast.

Where are we making money? And we’re gonna understand how to do business, How to do this business. And he just backed off. He didn’t. I was like, yeah, if you don’t like it, fire me, but I’m going to do my job.

Sally Duby: And that is such a key point that I think things in particular, in a tack where it’s like growth at all costs. And so you’re just hiring more people, but you’re not making the ones you’ve had successful is craziness, but yet.

Andy Paul: well

Sally Duby: it’s all the time and touch it’s mindset. And everybody in texts seems to think that scaling means just adding headcount and know it doesn’t do you any good to hit head count?

If they’re only going to produce it’s 50% until you figure out what that magic sauce is. That you can actually then take and replicate you figure out how to sell this properly and who your right buyers are and who’s your right target market. And then you can look at anybody’s success, but yeah, it’s a novel concept of being worried.

Andy Paul: Yeah. I just think that giving yourself the freedom to say no, now here’s the flip side of what you got to perform.

Sally Duby: Exactly. If you’re not performing.

Andy Paul: if someone asks you to do something, say, no, I don’t have time. Cause I’m hitting my number. Then you’re going to hit your freaking number. But. Yeah, we can help all people learn how to hit their number, if they’re open and prepared to learn and work hard.

But that’s the, yeah. You want to take that risk, then you gotta be prepared to back it up. And I always was.

Sally Duby: Yep. It does start. I think companies would be a lot more successful if they made their frontline managers more successful and focused them on exactly how to coach, how to make their teams work, and how to instill that team concept. I think one of the things we’re lacking today, and this is a totally new subject here, is a sales culture. In a lot of these companies, I just don’t see the intensity, the energy, and I’m going to do whatever it takes to hit my number quarter as mom.

Andy Paul: yeah. What’s happened is it’s evolved into what I call a selling culture as opposed to a sales culture. And yeah, we’ve got this process. We’ve got our tech stack. If we throw enough crap into the top of the funnel, we’re going to sell some stuff. And that’s a selling culture, as opposed to what you’re talking was a sales culture was yeah.

How am I going to make this number right. How am I going to work with my customer is the most effective way in order to scale the company the right way. And, one is a very thoughtful approach to how you work with your customers and how you perfect a repeatable business model, as opposed to just a brute force way to address it.

Sally Duby: Yeah, good point, but it’s just that intensity that drives me. there were many, I know, working at Oracle, it’d be like closing out the quarter in, I wanted to be not just in a hundred percent, but I wanted to be at 120% and have my accelerator kick in at 120%. And I would go to quarter to 12.

This was again, back in the good old days, go to the San Francisco airport and pick up a FedEx envelope. Off the turnstile and then drive it to Oracle headquarters, get it date stamped and timestamp to show that it came in

Andy Paul: For an order. 

Sally Duby: for an order. And then I would actually go down and package it up. I’d go into shipping and package it up and put a label on it and make sure it was waiting out on the dock for the FedEx ship.

Andy Paul: Yup. Been there, done that.

Sally Duby: Yeah, those are some fun times.

Andy Paul: Yeah. yeah, different environment, but it does. Yeah, speak volumes about, yeah. what are you prepared to do within the bounds of being ethical and legal, but what are you able to do? Is it pushing yourself to yeah. Do what you need to do. Yeah, it’s yeah, we’re just talking like grit and selling.

It gets back to the hiring process. We started talking about beginning, but also I think part of it, we talk about sales enablement, but I think part of it is self enablement. It’s a mindset. It’s yeah. This whole thing you talked about is, do I have this growth mindset that says, yeah, I can learn how to be this way.

Sally Duby: Yes. we’ve got some work to do, And so I think that there’s definitely some good tools out there to help companies as well, to determine, one I’m really familiar with, OMG that, they have a short survey and through. they’ve tested almost 2 million sales people and sales leaders at this point in time.

So they’ve got really good data and science to back up their findings, but they can determine sales DNA. Does this person have the right sales DNA and that can be broken down into, are they better suited for hunting or better suited for the farming role? to really help give you some guidance. And I think especially now in today’s world where, we’re being told, when companies are putting a job posting up for every sales related job posting, they’re getting anywhere from 200 to three, even 400 resumes. So no one can spend the time screening. for that, which goes back and complicates some of our other issues that we were talking about on getting more diversity in the sales teams, but there’s gotta be ways that you can apply some science to this, to figure out who and narrowed down your pool of candidates.

Andy Paul: Yeah.

Sally Duby: In better ways. Because it’s just, it’s tough these days and you want to see everybody get hired past hiring managers, that’s being a manager of a sales team. That’s not your only job, but it’s a very important piece of your job. So you’ve got to become as efficient and effective at that as well

everything else that you’re doing.

Andy Paul: Salary front a lot of time, but great conversation as always. If people want to contact you and connect with you and learn more about you, how can they do that?

Sally Duby: So you can find me on LinkedIn at Sally Doobie, D U B as in boy, Y I’m on Twitter as well. So feel free to reach out and connect with me. We’d love to hear from you and thank you so much, Andy. This was awesome. Love it. Love the discussion.

Andy Paul: It’s always fun to talk with you, Sally. And we’re not going to wait so long to do it next time.

Sally Duby: Thank you.

Andy Paul: All right. Thank you, Sally.

Sally Duby: Thank you.