What Does It Mean To Be Sales Ready? with Jeff Santelices [Episode 855]

Jeff Santelices is the Chief Revenue Officer at MindTickle. In this episode we start with what it means for a seller to be sales ready. Then we delve into the topic of sales learning and the levers managers can pull to improve sales performance. Next, Jeff shares the KPIs that he relies on to manage his team and reveals the one KPI that everyone uses that is totally useless. Finally, we talk about QBRs and how to run an efficient one in the midst of this pandemic.

Podcast Transcript

Andy Paul: Jeff. Welcome to the show.

Jeff Santelices: Thank you very much. It’s a pleasure being here.

Andy Paul: Where are you been hanging out during the whole pandemic?

Jeff Santelices: So I’ve been like most of the other, folks in my role, working remotely from home and home for me is in Boulder, Colorado.

Andy Paul: Boulder Colorado companies in San Francisco, though.

Jeff Santelices: It is indeed. I’ve been, fairly accustomed to working remotely, over the last handful of years. remote work is not necessarily, novel, but at the same time, I’ve been very accustomed to being on the road, whether that’s, meeting with customers, prospects, partners, and that’s been very different, over the course last six plus months.

Andy Paul: Yeah. I tell a story about I’m the same way on the road constantly. And. Not fallen once in six months. And it’s like, when I was, this was a few months ago, I was packing to get on a flight. found myself, started paralyzed in the middle of the floor. And my wife’s looking at me going what’s wrong.

I said, I forgot how to pack history. So routine, I knew where everything went and my backpack and my suitcase and it’s done. It’s just I was like the first time I’ve done it.

Jeff Santelices: Yeah, you’re actually ahead of me. I haven’t gotten onto a flight, since March 6th.

Andy Paul: Yeah, that was my next to last flight. but we did that the first, we had March, April, may in Manhattan and then escaped out to San Diego at that beginning of June.

Jeff Santelices: Good for you.

Andy Paul: Yeah, actually things are much better in Manhattan than there and San Diego these days relative to, infection rates and so on.

But nonetheless, feels a little more. Open and free out here. So yeah, we’ve been enjoying that, but, let me ask you this question. When I ask all my guests these days is okay. I haven’t been on a plane for six months or more. What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned about yourself during the pandemic.

Jeff Santelices: It’s a great question. what I’ve learned is, the opportunity, the challenge of not being able to travel has actually. Know, been an opportunity in many ways. I think, for those of us who have been, very traditional in their enterprise selling motion have, have built the expectation, and worked with the expectation that, getting business done requires establishing an in-person relationship, being able to, see a person, in person shake their hand, get a sense of, there.

Just how they’re reacting, in person, and being able to read off of that and feed off of that. what I’ve found, over the course of the last handful of months is you can still establish. A rapport. when everyone’s forced to go remote, the opportunity to leverage some new tools, some new approaches, and still try to get to that same outcome, which is, someone on the other side that is, looking at you and believing in you, and assuming and assessing, that, you are, A trusted advisor.

And I think, our team is, and myself, I’ve been able to, I think, successfully navigate to that new reality and in the process, that the number of hours that I’ve spent on the road, whether that’s commuting to the airport at the time at the airport at the time and flight, I’ve been able to.

Find ways to use that time, in, more productive and frankly, healthy ways, for myself. so that’s been very positive. as I try and look for, whatever silver linings we can from this pandemic situation, those are a handful of them.

Andy Paul: It’s interesting. Several interesting points in there is one is. Yeah, there’s been this sort of Russia books about virtual selling that people rushed to market over the last six months. And yeah, I read a bunch of those and I’ve certainly read a couple and it’s yeah. I started believed that the basics are the basics, regardless of the medium, that your ability to form rapport with someone, Is really, if you are able to do it in person, then you’re able to do that virtually if you’re not able to do it virtually remotely, or do it in

Jeff Santelices: Here, the rock job.

Andy Paul: Doing it virtually is not going to save you. And it’s okay, got it. It’s you know, if you’re good at. Connecting with a human being and building a rapport. And you’re good at asking the right questions and establishing the conversations of Florida that and seeing where they go to me, the medium doesn’t matter. But if you’re not good at those things, you’re actually going to get punished by this.

Jeff Santelices: Yeah, very interesting, takeaways and I agree with that, the insight there that, if you were capable of doing it beforehand, you’re going to be equally capable, in this new medium or leveraging this new medium. And I think, part of the.

Yeah. The reason that the in-person medium, ended up being very important from a selling perspective was that, the belief was the customer was expecting you to be there in person as part of the process. the forcing function that’s shifted, at least from my perspective is, if you’ve been in an enclosed tube with 250 strangers for four hours, the last thing in the world that, your prospect wants is for you to land in their home or in their office.

Andy Paul: These are those for sure.

Jeff Santelices: So nobody wants you in person. now both parties are operating under the same expectation, which is, Hey, we somehow need to establish trust, build a rapport, over this new medium, let’s get to it. And, being able to establish that, to your point, is, the skillset that, the new seller in this remote environment needs to ensure that they, they’re capable of doing it.

And I think. All of us that are, good at what we do, have proven the ability to establish rapport in person. And if both parties are willing and capable of engaging in this new medium, they should be able to do the same.

Andy Paul: You raised an interesting, several interesting points there. One that I’ll dive into now is this idea that sellers have this expectation that the customer wanted them to be there. And I speak from the perspective decades, probably the oldest person in the whole audience, including the people, listening of traveling around the world, doing the customers domestically and internationally for set for decades is I never thought, geez, the customer wants to see me.

And I was working for startups or we didn’t have unlimited travel budgets yet. We still had to do what we needed to do. But for me, it was always, I wanted to go visit them because there’s something I could make happen. Whether it’s making, creating momentum, moving to the next stage, answering specific questions, I never felt like it was, the demand was coming from the customer is always yeah, I look at us.

Yeah. I want you to invest some of your time in me because I’ve got something to give you and you’re going to get a return on that time.

Jeff Santelices: Yeah, that’s an interesting perspective. And, and I’ll agree with that. certainly as a sales leader and as a seller, there is a desire to, capture the time of the customer. the time that you’re in front of that customer is time that your competitors are not.

The time that you’re in front of them and potentially, reading and, better understanding, the, the customers, their issues, challenges, and seeing both the verbal and nonverbal language from, from, the key champion, as well as, potentially others across the organization.

There’s positive there, but, I will say that. my perspective is that, many customers, particularly when they’re making strategic investments, and specifically strategic investments from organizations that may be, more in the startup, portion of their life cycle, they want to, get in front of, the executives that know they’re betting on.

And that time. Oh, that in-person time often is very crucial, to making the, the decision to go or not go with a particular. technology solution and oftentimes what I hear is they’re making that decision, less on feature function, but they’re betting on the partnership and the team that, that they’ve had since Matt.

So I do think there’s a win in, in that, relationship building on both sides.

Andy Paul: Absolutely. But my perspective is slightly different, which was, and I agree on all those things she said was that just who’s creating the impetus for that. Okay. If you’re saying it’s nothing used specifically, but as a seller, just saying, geez, I’m waiting to take my cue from the customer, My contention as well. that’s the wrong approach. That’s the wrong perspective I have on it because yeah, you need to be, to the extent you can, you need to be driving. That outcome in that conversation. And it doesn’t mean that yeah, they definitely want to see you I’ve I worked for star from my whole career, practically selling mission, critical communications networks.

Yeah. They wanted to see us cause we were a small, oftentimes the size of the contract was bigger than our annual revenues, so we definitely had to go meet them, but it was done on our schedule. And we weren’t waiting for them to serve, say, we need to meet your guys. It’s we’re way ahead of you on that.

We’ve got this planned out. And part of that was, I think that I think this whole discussion about travel and businesses because sales teams are serve. I won’t say lazy, but not in the sense that people start talking about the travels or became lazy. It’s just yeah, let’s get on a plane. Let’s go see somebody.

And. I found as formative part of my career, selling to major enterprises, working for startups, where he had limited funds, oftentimes bootstrapped is we had to be able to justify what was going to happen in that meeting in order to get approval, to go travel. And I think it’s such a great way for sellers to look at it.

It’s not just one. I get on a plane and it’s not what’s going to happen. What’s going to be what’s the outcome. That’s worth it. And to justify doing this right now. And there was just this rigor around travel that I think has been missing. And so I said, we’d use it laser only what you really needed to look at it.

So how do I use it strategically to advance the sale?

Jeff Santelices: Absolutely. I agree with everything that you just said there.

Andy Paul: Okay, we’re done. That’s all I wanted. so tell people who aren’t familiar with mind. Tickle. Tell us what mind tickle does.

Jeff Santelices: So mind tickle of the field’s readiness solution and our vision and the path that we’re taking is to service customer focused organizations. And to ensure that. Every one of their resources that is in front of a customer, a prospect of partner is on message on task the first time and every time. And our strong belief is that every interaction is a revenue generating.

A brand creating opportunity, and you can either drive that new revenue opportunity or, establish and enhance your brand. Or you can do the opposite and it’s. Absolutely critical, that, all of those resources, end up being on message on task and our solution, our platform helps an organization do that, by, executing on a handful of different fronts.

We end up, providing a medium through which, all of those, employee resources can learn about, what it is that new message, that new positioning really is. And we do it in a very, micro learning, engaging fashion, and once that content is delivered and consumed, we then provide a medium through which.

That employee can practice, delivering that message in a compelling, concise, confident manner. and they do that through plays within our platform. And. As those role plays are being practiced and then ultimately submitted, your frontline managers, your coaches end up being able to provide feedback and input to help that employee continue to tune that message and, step up in terms of their performance and ability.

And then once the employee is actually in front of. A customer or prospect, we provide a medium for the frontline manager to provide real-time coaching, to ensure that, when they’re doing well, they’re getting positive reinforcement feedback. And when they’re seeing gaps, they’re also able to provide a consistent level of feedback and input as well as remediation to assist that.

And that. Coaching and feedback in execution in front of a real prospect is done through our platform as well as through an automated bot that can record those calls, analyze those calls and critically in our platform, closing the loop of our enablement and readiness. vision is a sign automatically, remediation capabilities.

Remediation programs, for that employee, as they start seeing, areas where they need to improve. Versus what it is that you wanted and intended and all of this, that I just described as available on a single platform, a single user experience, single UI, single data model, which allows for tremendous, actionable analytics, for managers to really understand as sales leaders in particular, Where are people on message?

Where are they off? How is this impacting my key goals? My key metrics, which oftentimes for sales leaders end up being around sales productivity to help them get to their number. And very specifically, if they’re seeing churn and things of that nature, how do I get. New sellers on board and ramped and productive as quickly as possible.

our analytics end up providing eyeballs into, things such as that. And that’s where we become a pretty critical component of the sales stack. as revenue leaders continue to drive forward. Okay.

Andy Paul: But just make sure that people understand this is just that it’s a platform. all the learning content though, is produced by your customers for their team.

Jeff Santelices: That is correct. That is correct. we are the underlying platform that allows you to deliver that core content in a very concise, engaging, gamified manner that delivers the content that sellers need. At the time of their specific need. so think of us as the delivery vehicle, the core content is delivered or created by the customer.

And we do have a series of partnerships with folks like Blanchard, CVI. Sandler and others, where whereby if a customer is in need of, core sales, methodology, sales, training, partner, ecosystem type of types of content, our partners can oftentimes deliver that. within our platform

Andy Paul: So define sales readiness. What’s it a measure of.

Jeff Santelices: Our customers and particularly our sales leaders to assess clearly, the competencies that, you know, that matter, that really drive the needle for, for our, and again, most often we’re we’re servicing sales leaders and their teams, what we end up.

Doing very well is helping our customers, identify competencies, both, hard skill as well as soft skill competencies, work with them to define the programs that can help those people in those roles, improve on those competencies. And then ultimately we’re able to determine and correlate.

Performance in those specific competencies to performance, to key metrics that sales leaders are really tracking and tracking closely. So as an example, everyone’s tracking, bookings and revenue, and what you’ll be able to see is. Now who are the folks that are, actually performing on the revenue front and how are they performing relative to the competencies that the sales team, the sales organization, the sales leadership have defined as being critical and important.

And by being able to correlate those two things. What’s interesting. And this is oftentimes I think something that, many of your peers and you probably have seen this over the years as well, as you’re continuing to build and scale up your team, oftentimes you’re able to assess not necessarily in a hard analytic fashion, but you’re looking at your team and going, wow.

This set of people made their number. I’ve been up there with them, they’re not necessarily our top tier, sellers, how are they making their number? Why are they making their number? are they, are they truly our best people? And then on the flip side of that, you’ve got, sellers that, you’ve worked with in the past, they’re very good at, at what they do.

And you’re seeing them and saying, man, why isn’t Jane or Joe, I know they’re very good. Why aren’t they, get into their number, and you don’t necessarily have hard data behind that. And if you were only to make, your, top 10% and bottom 10%, analyses just based off of the number, you might be, praising folks that, frankly are getting lucky and you might be calling folks that are really good, strong contributors, but maybe it was a bad patch that they were giving or bad timing.

Andy Paul: What’s your interesting point though, because What face up luck and circumstance play a large role in sales success.

Jeff Santelices: I don’t disagree. I don’t disagree at all.

Andy Paul: Hard to factor in, right? So it’s yeah, it was this, the problem with the patch or the person or both.

Jeff Santelices: What’s interesting about my tickle and our solution is it actually provides you with hard data and an ability for you to see clearly whether or not. that person, that with whatever quadrant he or she is in, their level of readiness based off of how they’re performing on the competencies that you’ve graded.

And you can clearly see, this person. Is, doing really well and, knows and understands the messaging knows and understands the competition knows and understands how to handle objections. they perform incredibly well in terms of all of their role-plays that they’re driving, so it’s not a matter of skillset or gap that is holding them back.

So you can actually see that. And make data driven decisions as you’re continuing to tune your team. So that’s where, I think, to your point, there is a lot of luck. There’s a lot of feel. There’s a lot of, other soft elements that go into building scaling and being successful, in driving a sales organization.

But what you want to be able to do is. Is, build more of, your core and your base, with core data analytics and eyeballs that give you confidence that, you’re going to, to have something that’s not going to be lucky one quarter, but, actually.

Yeah, repeatable, successful and scalable, over the long haul. And I think, mind tickle and our sales readiness platform provides that venue, to, to give sales leaders, the confidence that what they have, they can truly scale, and, and make repeatable.

Andy Paul: Yeah, when I look at their surface general acknowledgement that over the years its sales training has failed in its mission. And, but the issue is not really the content, at least in my mind, not really the content as much as the learning methodology and which is one of the things I’m interested in the platform that you have is because I think that it’s one of those that’s out there that says, yeah, we’re.

And it’s not just micro learning, but that’s certainly a part of it, it’s a real-time feedback. it’s the way people learn. if you’ve read David Epstein’s book range only talks about this in detail. it’s I guess one of the things is, are people understanding that’s really the issue because.

Yeah, we don’t see enough companies, abandoning yet this whole methodology of, Hey, let’s have a big annual sales kickoff meeting and we’ll bring in an expensive speaker, which oftentimes the past was me and it was, paid well, but you’d walk away knowing that they weren’t getting anything out of it, that they were retaining beyond them 25 days.

Jeff Santelices: Yeah, it’s a great observation. And if you think about, the people that are, typically in sales positions, these are folks that are highly. they’re very, self-confident, they’ve been successful, through many phases of their careers.

Oftentimes they’ve been in the organization they’ve been in, they’ve just come off president’s club. No, I have made quota and have been in the mall. They’re multipliers. These are folks that, they’ll walk into the room, confidently, believing that they’re the smartest person in that room.

And, getting them to switch to a new message, to pivot, to, the new set of, things that are being, positioned and sold and they’re considered strategic, by the new leadership, oftentimes sales. Is slow or the best sellers are slow to the uptake, add to that, the challenge associated with, every minute.

Is a selling minute. And if you’re asking someone to, get out of the field out of a selling motion and into, multiple hours or potentially multiple days of training and certification, most salespeople are not going to look at that and go, Oh, Yeah, I’m excited about doing that, and whether that’s virtual or in-person, frankly, the time for a seller, is oftentimes deemed lost time. If they’re forced into that selling environment. And the key to me is, how do you flip the switch and. And make it something that, sellers want to engage in that they want to actually, be a part of because they believe that frankly, it will help them in their quarter.

It will help them in their deal. It will help them get to their quota and into multipliers. and, as you mentioned, part of this is ensuring that. Yeah, you have a medium that takes into account the role, and the personalities that you’re trying to engage with. So you can’t, do you know traditional, multi-day, multi-hour types of courses.

It’s not going to be something that is going to get adopted. And, if you look at traditional learning and training environments, adoption for sales is incredibly low. so you need to figure out and what it is that we’ve done is very much microlearning based. it’s very much gamified.

One of the things that we found is that, sellers are highly competitive. They all want to be at the top of, name, the leaderboard that’s out there. and some selling environments absolutely love, gamifying every element of their emotion. And, and we’ve, we’ve built, on that, on that front.

Andy Paul: Of being contrary, I think that’s nuts though, right? it’s sales and self is competitive. just the nature of selling we’re competing against, a competitor, whether it’s another company or the company’s status quo, the customer status quo. and this is, I know, not part of the conversation we’re planning on having, but it’s yeah, isn’t there like enough is enough on the competition and the stress that comes with it.

And, the expectations. And I sensitive this cause we’re on this, the episode of the show, that’s our show that’s being published today. The day that we’re recording, this is all about mental health and sales. And one of the villains is gamification, quite frankly.

Jeff Santelices: That’s interesting. so for us, as we look at it, we’ve taken advantage of, again, the mindset and the mentality of salespeople, sales leaders, and we’ve built, gamification to get them engaged, to make it fun. versus, make it stressful, So as an example, we have a capability it’s called high fly, that, we use for social engagement, across our user base, within a company. And what it is just, it’s almost like a 1980s style arcade game where, you’re, part of, multi, there are multiple teams and you’re part of one of those teams and you’re working individually as well as part of a team to fly a balloon.

As high as you can possibly get to, over the course of, three different modules or three different, questions. and what’s interesting is as a question gets asked, it can be a general question, a general trivia question that could be just very fun.

It could be, a. Yeah, a question that is very company specific, maybe you’re asking, who’s the product leader, responsible for this product line. you’re forcing folks to familiarize themselves across the organization, or it could be, a sales methodology or a specific competitor type of question.

You can customize this as you please, but as you’re asking questions or answering questions, Know, the more you get right. And faster that you get them and answer them. Your balloon is gaining elevation, but you’re also using fuel. at some point in time, you need to get more fuel and how you do that is through, socially engaging.

Either with your team or with other participants in the game. And if you think about that, know this isn’t a high pressure situation. This is, making, learning. Actually very fun and, using it in the context of, a familiar UI UX, as a, of an arcade game and mixing in both fun trivia, as well as important elements that people need to learn and recall and retain.

So that’s an example of gamification that doesn’t put stress. Into the equation, but rather puts fun, and social engagements, into the equation. And that’s that to me is where you strike a nice, healthy balance.

Andy Paul: Yeah, and I didn’t mean to yeah. Attack gamification per se. It’s just that you’ll have so many things in sales that are enabled by technology that we do, because we can not because we should. and that’s, I think what I’m asking people is just be more thoughtful about that, Just because we can have the, we have, the technology enables us to blast emails in sequences, out to customers at a certain rate doesn’t mean that we should.

Jeff Santelices: Yeah, I agree with that.

Andy Paul: All the time in every aspect doesn’t mean that we should. And it’s this lack of, I’ve seen with the embracive of various technologies is, Oh, we can do this let’s and no one ever says, maybe we shouldn’t.

Jeff Santelices: Right.

Andy Paul: I just asking people to add that perspective, because it creates, consequences in many SAS company, I’m not new to people.

Listen, the show is in SAS companies. Like one thing that’s missing is selling. Yeah. We’re so good at the top of the funnel and we just play the odds. We filter down as a result, we got, we operate really low win rates. Well, Why are we doing that? it’s really a function of what’s occurring when we’re doing our proactive outreach and so on.

It’s, that’s one of the functions, so it’s just, yeah. if gamification, I get it. I think the aspects that’s important to use and does have an impact, but it’s like, Yeah, I hear people talking yeah, we just, we gave him a fight, everything it’s like. Yeah. Because I think people get tired.

That’s the other part, right? If it’s one thing, if it’s something we do every quarter or something we do, and some interval that does make it fun makes it a contest, so on and so forth. Great. But it’s like part of the daily routine. I just wonder whether people just, so again, to tune it out.

Jeff Santelices: Interesting.

Andy Paul: But anyway, so I was gonna ask you a question. because really this is a platform and one of my passions is I think we’re there not enough happens in sales is this continuous learning and you addressed it as, I, the top sellers, oftentimes, wrinkle their noses, when you have things like, Hey, spend time on this platform and learn.

Which I think is more symbolic of the larger issue, which is getting sellers to invest a sufficient amount of time learning. But just curious is when you look at your own sales team, what’s the biggest learning needs that you see.

Jeff Santelices: Yeah, great question. And. And as we’ve gone through, our own analysis of, how our funnel, is performing, one of the things that, over the course last handful of quarters, that, we started with was really ensuring that we had all of our team.

No, getting to the core message and delivering it in a consistent fashion because, again, analyzing, both, how our frontline managers were listening in on, on calls, both, top of funnel, middle of funnel, and, at the tail end of the funnel, we were seeing, our team delivering.

Different messaging, and we needed to drive to a much more consistent. approach. So that was one area that we ended up, seeing our, our team, needing to work on quite a bit, as we worked through, the last handful of quarters, what we were recognizing is that, our top of the funnel, efforts, where we were really, Executing on discovery, and qualifying, specific opportunities in or out, was not where we needed it to be.

So recognizing that we ended up, focusing in, over the course of a quarter to starting with, a, just as you mentioned, a QBR. where we brought in an outside expert that you know, is very adept at, and has a proven methodology for, top of the funnel discovery and objection handling.

We started with that as a session, during our QBR and then followed that through over the course of the quarter, with a series of missions and role-plays, and other activities that would continue to reinforce what it is that we learned and take our sellers, up through the next levels of learning.

So for us, using, our analytics to understand where we’re. we’re where we were, we can challenged, and then, leveraging our platform over time to not only, intake, some of the best practices, but also ensure that we were delivering content, that would help them.

Continue to move up level, on this skillset and then continue to measure it over time. those were the areas that, I think, we’ve been focused on over the course of the last six months. and I think it’s proving, to show some significant value even through this COVID window where, I think all of us thought the sky was going to be falling.

We’ve actually found. a lot of folks, that are, after we got through the initial shock of, the shutdown they’re recognizing that investing in this area, in this arena, now that they’ve got fewer people that need to be more productive, or, they’re finding themselves, with, growth that, they, they didn’t anticipate as they went through the replant, they’re actually making bigger investments and we’re able to uncover those opportunities, partly because of the investments that we made over the course, last two quarters.

Andy Paul: Yeah. what’s our final question for you is in the S yeah, more, I don’t say philosophical necessarily, but. Yeah, I have over my experience has been as come to realize over the years of building deems and consulting with companies, extensively about this as it is that, there’s a limit to how much benefit you get out of skills training.

And at some point, the difference between tiers of performers is more about. Mindset and perspective, right? Understanding having a better understanding what their job is or a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset or whatever dementia will take on that. And so how do you look at well, how do we educate people about that?

Because I think. At a certain point, the marginal gains incremental marginal gains you get from training are small. But if you get people to look at what they’re doing differently, perhaps that’s where you get more gain and more impact. and including in mindset also is in my mind is one of the areas we fail with sellers is we don’t help them develop.

The requisite business acumen to be as effective as they could be. So I just wonder how do you train those things?

Jeff Santelices: Yeah, that’s actually a great insight. as I think about, some of, just, my own, approach to some of this, I think about. Know, from a growth aspect perspective, ensuring that, we’re even within a specific role, ensuring that we’re providing, our team members, with a path to growing, expanding, getting promoted, getting, from one level of cellar, up through another level of sellers so that they actually have a view into, a career path and a career track, and they know and understand, some of the skillsets that they need to showcase in order to move from one level to the next.

As an example, the career tracking and path thing that. That, we’ve seen, we don’t have all of these levels here at MindTickle today, but, at the starting point, is, a BDR. a lead development rep, coming in, they, they will, assuming they hit the right marks, in that specific role, their next role is an associate account executive job, where, they’ll take smaller.

Oppotunities we’ll have a smaller quota, smaller opportunities, and they’re doing a mix of, selling and business development. Then they move into, an account executive seat. And then, as they get more proficient at, selling and closing larger deals, they ultimately get into, get moved into.

No, a global account manager role or a GAM role where they’re managing a smaller number of total accounts, but these are very large strategic accounts that they need to manage across the across organizations and that career track and, trajectory, having. clarity, for the reps in terms of, what their path looks like, what skill sets they need to develop, over what timeframe, is a critical piece part to seeing, who actually has aspirations to move up and through that organ, through those various roles and who frankly, wants to be the best.

At, at a specific level of specific role without necessarily, moving, transitioning, et cetera. as an example, I have folks that, it’s clear to me, they, are very happy. being a career BDR, It’s what they like. It’s what they intend to do.

And with both parties, management and the individual all understanding that then we can maximize, how we engage with that individual, over time for those that have bigger aspirations, then we ha we can put a different track, a different set of. goals, in place that all of us are working towards.

And, underlying all of this, of course our platform can help with that. But, as a leader and a sales leader, navigating through that growth mindset, understanding the individual and giving them a track to success is part of the core equation that I think is key.

Andy Paul: Yeah, there’s music, my ears. When you said somebody wanted to be a career BDR, it’s Just so many companies have this sort of, it’s almost like academia rights or publisher perish or upper up or out. And it’s if people are good at this job, And they enjoy it. That’s like manna for heaven as far as I’m concerned, because cause for so many people, that role is just torture.

I’ve had guests on the show. That’s I worked as hard as I could the first year. Cause I wanted to get out of that job and it’s I understand I did this GAC, same thing, but I got it. I want more companies to understand that. Yeah, you got people that are good at this and I even encourage them to go. . Underemployed salespeople in their forties and fifties. And there’s this implicit age-ism about SDRs and BDRs, unfortunately, that are really good at this stuff. Go hire them.

Jeff Santelices: We have a handful. We have a handful of, folks in that role that, they thrive. And they have for a long time. And I love it. So exactly to your point though, those are folks that, I want to make sure, we continue to nurture and make as successful as possible because they are, as you mentioned, gold to us as an organization,

Andy Paul: Yeah. Encourage them. don’t say they’re getting too old or that, they must go. It’s no, I’m with you. All right, Jeff, it’s been fantastic. So

Jeff Santelices: Thank you so much.

Andy Paul: To learn more about MindTickle or connect with you, how can they do that?

Jeff Santelices: They can reach out to me, via email, at any point and I’ll be very responsive to any of your guests that are reaching out.

Andy Paul: Excellent. All right. Jeff, thank you.

Jeff Santelices: Thank you very much.