Why a Team-Based Selling Strategy Wins

[0:00] I'd say if you're looking for a contrarian device on how to be successful as head of sales, then this would be the podcast for you. Welcome to the Full Funnel Freedom Podcast. If you are listening to this, you are likely leading a team responsible for generating revenue. Purpose of Full Funnel Freedom is to support people like yourself and keep your funnels consistently, reliably full. Welcome to the Full Funnel Freedom Podcast. I'm your host, Hamish Knox. Today, I am delighted to have Bradley Pastner as my guest. Today, Bradley has over a decade of experience running revenue teams, ranging from $8 million to $100 million run rates. He also does advisory work for founder-led and Series A companies through his firm, Team Based Selling, where he brings the approach that working as a team across all phases of go-to-market is the most effective manner to scale an organization.

[0:59] Bradley, welcome to Full Funnel Freedom. Thank you. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.

[1:05] So I've given the audience the 30,000-foot view, who you are and what your experience is. Tell us your story. Tell us where you started and how you got to where you are today. Sure. I'll tell you a story. It's a long story. I'll try to keep it brief. So I started, I got out of graduate school. I have a master's in public administration. And I had a very different career path than what I'm doing now. And it was going to go into elder advocacy and all this other stuff. And I was presented with two job opportunities. I could go work with a friend of mine in tech support, making $31,000 a year, wearing shorts and foosball and margarita Thursdays and all those things back then that were pretty popular and I think still are. Or I could put on a suit and work for $15,000 a year selling end-of-life term care to senior citizens. Wow. I'd like to say it was one of my smarter decisions. It really didn't take a lot to think about it, and I said, all right, I'm going to go, and I'm going to hop in and start working tech support.

[2:04] From tech support, I parlayed that into pre-sales roles, continued being a pre-sales engineer, went to a company by the name of eRoom Technology, where I was, led a pre-sales team, award-winning pre-sales engineer. I parlayed that into being an AE at the same company. So I had the distinction of being, I think the only person that went to club both as an AE and as an SE. And then had a variety of individual contributor roles post that organization. I eventually wound up working for a company.

[2:37] When I was hired, it was called Sistanet. When I started it, it had been acquired by Mercury. And then six months after that, it had been acquired by Hewlett-Packard. But the interesting part, I joined a prior friend of mine who was VP marketing there as director of business development. And Tom Erickson was the CEO of the company. And Tom was VP of sales at the company I started in tech support.

[2:58] So definitely weaving it together. other. And the interesting thing in terms of when I went there and I said, Tom, I'd like to run your sales engineering team. And he goes, actually, you're not that good at that, right? What you'd be really good at doing is running business development for us because we need someone who can sell and who's also technically inclined. And business development for us is not the Accenture model of I'm going to go to Phoenix all the time and play golf, right? What you're going to do is you're actually going to sell our technology to other companies to embed, to OEM. So we did deals with SAP, Oracle, BEA, and TIBCO. The SAP one we couldn't get, so we got three out of the four, but I did go to Waldorf during World Cup, not a terrible trip to make. And that set me up in terms of really the end of my or continued trajectory, right? So I went from there running running OEM. I went over to Autonomy where I ran the OEM business there for about three years. That was the $100 million run rate business.

[4:02] Post-Autonomy, my boss left Autonomy, went to Bloomberg. I followed him over to Bloomberg, spent about five years there. We grew the business from anomaly eight to over 65 million in run rate. Left Bloomberg, joined a governance, risk, and compliance company out of New Jersey. And again, the CRO there, I known because he had been VP of sales in multiple places where I knew some other people. That company was interesting. I came on board knowing that we were, the idea was to either get additional funding or be acquired. And for me that was really interesting. One of the things that folks had said to me was, you've done interesting things at Autonomy, but Autonomy at the time

[4:42] was a billion dollar company. You did interesting things at Bloomberg, but Bloomberg was a 10 billion dollar company. So you always had these things where it was, you've done this but.

[4:52] Like, thanks. So no one ever says that when you're unsuccessful. No one says, well, you didn't make your number, but there were market conditions. You were successful, but you had a rechunkle or something like that. So I went on and joined an organization by the name of RSAM. We had an interesting thing where we went from perpetual on-prem, and I would be inclined to say that 75% of the people that listen to this have no idea even what perpetual is or was or means. And we switched that to subscription hosted. We got acquired by a company out of Vancouver by the name of ACL. ACL eventually got acquired by Diligent, left there and joined a company that was headquartered out of Munich by the name of Risk Methods, US Operations. That was supplier risk and one of the things that our team did was vendor risk.

[5:38] Different sides of the same coin. Rebuilt US Operations, came on board running just the account, executive team, new logo business. And by the time that I left and we were acquired by Sphera, I wound up running pretty much everything related to go-to-market in the U.S., including CS and all the other components in there. Left Joint Guard Square as CRO, Belgian-based company, U.S. operations as well. So I was responsible, again, for everything except marketing related to go-to-market and was there for about, I think, a year and eight months. And then it ended. And since then, I've been doing advisory work.

[6:19] What a cool story. Thank you very much for sharing that with the sales leaders listening there today. Yeah, it's that this but, right? You know, that phrase, and that's one of the purposes of this podcast is to celebrate sales leaders. And, you know, because as you've experienced, you don't get a lot of opportunities to be celebrated. It's, hey, you did that but, or hey, you did that as one guest recently said,

[6:41] hey, you did that and go beat that number now. So that's obviously you've lived that I'm what I'm curious to learn a bit more about is this idea of a team-based approach to go to market because oftentimes we have sales is from Mars and operations is from Venus or product is from Venus and never the twain shall meet and the CEO is kind of in the middle and trying to make sure that all the you know everyone's playing nice so when you talk about a team-based approach to go to market what exactly does that look like it It sounds kind of obvious, but I imagine the devil's in the details. It is. It's both those things. It is very obvious, and the devil is in the details. So team-based selling, I...

[7:20] Really came from this point of view when I started working as a sales engineer. Okay. And at a high level, when you think of a sale, there's a business sale and what I would call a technical sale. And this usually lends itself more towards mid-market and enterprise than SMB. But for the sake of the conversation, let's just say it applies to everything, right? So the most effective selling has both of those components in it. I am selling to the business side of the business. However, there's either going to be a technical assessment, technical users, technical implementation, all these other components down there. Even if you look at some of the past couple of years, very fashionable to have product-led growth. Okay, well, really all you did with PLG was you shifted what was typically the expensive sales resources to some other side of the house and called them product specialists. But there was always people that helped drive adoption, helped drive growth, helped to understand user requirements and tie that together, which was separate from how do you methodically move an opportunity through stages, right? Traditional sales selling methodology or frameworks.

[8:29] And when I looked at dysfunctional sales teams, the dysfunctional sales teams was we did a demo and the demo sucked and it was your fault. But I did the most brilliant proposal ever in the world. or marketing didn't support us or engineering didn't do this. And somehow even, and I've worked at some highly dysfunctional organizations, the reps that have been able to be successful have been the ones that could thread that story where they could pick and pull resources to be successful. And the reps that always said, I'm not successful, the ones that you found operated in a complete silo. So 10 plus years ago or so, I registered the domain name on a whim. A few years ago, I trademarked the name, and it's been something that I view both individually as advisory philosophy, and then when I go work for companies, that is the most important alignment that I look for. You need to have that team alignment, and the ideal scenario, of course, is can you get that operating both on the executive leadership team through the organization and then get those functional areas working together where if you get the buy-in that we're operating as a team. I really think largely all the rest of the stuff works its way out. So if you implement Medic, you implement Sandler, you implement Challenger, if you're doing that as an individual, it will absolutely fail, right?

[9:51] Given what you do as a business, how many times do you go out and train and educate a sales organization, yet the last month of the quarter, the CEO, CFO, CRO, whatever, pick your name, says, well, I don't care about that. Just go and do and sell.

[10:05] And then everything falls apart, right? You're not reinforcing it. Yeah. Then you go forward a month and a half after and they go, why isn't anyone leveraging the training that we just spent all this money on?

[10:16] Amen. My friend and former guest on this podcast, Marcus Kauke, says we're all client-focused or client-centric until the last week of the quarter. Of course, right. Right. And then that's like, then it's what you just described of, you know, don't care about all that. Don't care about the tech stack. Don't care about the training. Don't care about the coaching. Don't care about the whatever. Get me deals. And unfortunately, that, as you've probably experienced as well, completely undoes all of the investment and all of the time spent because then it tells to the sales team well that was a flavor of the month or you don't actually have to use the tech stack you just have to go out and do more demos close you know get more deals across the finish line discount without being asked whatever those things might be right so Bradley I what I hear in in what you were just describing is like we've got a ease hunters we've got the solutions engineers if you have that in your organization we have the the customer success, customer care individuals. We might have an AAM or an account management function as well. What I'm curious about is, what about the marketing side? Because if we're looking at this team-based approach, we've had other guests

[11:28] on talking about the integration or the collision between marketing and sales. From your experience, where does marketing play a role in this team-based approach to go to market? So it starts at a much simpler level, which is, do we have alignment on goals and expectations?

[11:46] And the easiest way in our world to define goals and expectations is how you're paid. Sure. So I will start, whether it's at a new company or even in a deal cycle, I'll ask someone, I won't say necessarily, hey, Sue, the project manager, how do you get paid? I might say, how are you measured? Sure. How do you define success?

[12:06] If you fast forward a year and you're having a conversation with your boss about the things you've achieved during the course of the year, How does this fit into that? It's just a different flavor of the same question. But it gets to the heart of it, which is we're motivated by a variety of different things. We could be motivated based upon adoration. We could be motivated based upon promotion. We could be motivated based upon being left alone. I mean, that is an actual thing, right? True. But if you don't understand what those motivations are, it becomes difficult to interact with people. And then how does the company reinforce them? So an example is KPIs. Oh, we have all these wonderful KPIs. And when you lay them out, and I'm a visual person, so I actually like printing them and putting them on the floor and sort of looking down and seeing them all. Cool. Giving me 10 KPIs across five teams on an 11-inch screen just doesn't do it justice. But you stand there and you look at them and you go, I'm supposed to achieve 50% of my pipeline through my own inbound work, right? What's marketing focused on? Marketing is focused on upsell, for example. Product is focused on just pushing out a new feature well you know whatever it is what you start to see is that the teams actually are operating effectively within their silo but the way they're measured the way the reinforced forces.

[13:24] That so the question you know marketing versus etc the best relationship aircraft marketing was with the gentleman Gary Napotnik he's the SVP of marketing at a company called W Energy. Gary and I were at RSAM, and we had the bohawk, right, the big hairy-ass goal that we needed to achieve. And Gary and I never worked with each other before, but we just sat down and we're like, how are we going to do this? So things such as the SDR, they reported me for a little bit, they reported him for a little bit, they reported to themselves a little bit. Like, really, we didn't care. The focus was on what's the goal. And they were very revenue focused on it. So we were, I think when we were acquired, we were somewhere, call it 25, 27 million in revenue.

[14:08] And Gary's marketing team, I think, was three people. And I've gone to work for organizations who have done the same number of revenue where marketing would be 20 people. And you go and you go, what the hell are they doing all day? Right? True. So if marketing – I'm okay if marketing does brand awareness. I'm okay if marketing does thought leadership. But then let's be clear and declarative around that is what they are supposed to do so that then I can understand and work with my team and say that is not what they're doing. They are not a lead gen team. They're not a field marketing team. They're not responsible for generating pipeline. Then we know when we interact and play with them, what is it that they can bring? Oh, you do thought leadership. Great. I'm thinking of doing a regional dinner in this event. Do you have a relationship with Gardner, Forrester, Giga, whoever? Can we bring one of the thought leaders you work with in on that? Okay. So I've been able to align what they're doing with my needs and goals and expectations and have a conversation that resonates with them. If I sit sit down and say, who owns Pipeline? I think Pipeline is owned by marketing. I just do. Forecast is owned by sales.

[15:15] So if you're going to ungate all of the marketing content, you're going to remove attribution from all of it. You're going to get rid of all scoring from it. And everything is the same. All you're doing is actually you're driving down sales effectiveness to pump up your attribution numbers. Fair enough. Again, you're getting back to where's the inherent conflict in there. So it takes a really strong C-level team to manage those relationships. It takes a board that actually understands not the financial nuances, but a board of potentially ex-operators that can understand why flooding a sales team with garbage MQLs actually doesn't help. It looks really good on a slide deck, right, but it doesn't help. Totally. in being clear and declarative around what are the goals and expectations of the people not from excuse me some bullshit metric because it looks good that we all had our kpis because that's a way that we get paid i don't know if this is really attributed to larry ellison or not i was told it was there are two people at oracle the people that build it and the people that sell it and if you're not one of those people what are you doing here right and when i was at autonomy i.

[16:23] And we can have a whole other conversation around autonomy and the issues around,

[16:26] you know, with HP and that acquisition, which we'll skip over. But it was really clear up front from the beginning that everyone's job inside the company was to sell. And I was told when I started there that even if someone at the front desk referred a customer in, they would get comped. Wow. So you think about those behaviors, right? So if you're, I know a lot of times these days post-COVID, they're really not offices with receptionists. But back in the day, you and I remember offices with receptionists. If your receptionist gets you a lead and that lead closes and you pay that receptionist $1,500, how does that change the dynamic? How does that change the interaction of the company, right? Totally.

[17:03] So those are some of the thoughts around how you do it. But I think the conflict between sales and marketing is the lines in the sand are not well defined. They're not drawn in it. There's blurring between the two. And then ultimately, the failure, and this is why you see CROs and having marketing report up, is to have that one single focus point around it. Right. But I've seen it work. Like I said, our side of the line, I saw it work very effectively. We're someone on marketing, someone on sales, but we're just very focused on what is it that we're trying to drive and achieve. Yeah, that's what I'm hearing there is all conflict is a mismatch of goals, beliefs, values, or expectations. Or in this case, what you're sharing is incentives. That's what you're just illustrating is how are you incentivized, paid, however we want to characterize it. And you tied something in at the very end, which I wanted to ask you to expand on. What I'm hearing in what you're sharing about marketing and sales specifically is this takes a really strong CEO, a really strong founder who gets it and is aligned. line. So whether from your work experience or the experience you've had with when you're working with founders in the advisory capacity, what are some of the challenges that you have seen with a CEO who maybe doesn't get it that eventually does get it? And then and how does that all work when you're working with your clients?

[18:31] So there's a couple different models to figure out sort of resolution or come to conclusions, I like to start with the end goal and then work back. So what is it we're trying to achieve? So we're really not trying to generate more leads. Leads is a leading indicator, no pun intended, but what we're trying to do is generate sales.

[18:53] So there's a different conversation. I think most sales issues at founder-led companies are actually a product marketing issue, quite frankly, because everything is in the founder's head and she can go out and pitch and do all these things because they know it, they live it, they breathe it. It's very visceral to them. And then you hire me or anyone else and you go, go do the same way in the same passion.

[19:14] No one has the same passion for my kids as I do. I don't expect that behavior. Where I really try to focus on is is a couple different things I don't try to reinvent the wheel I'm not in there to try to pretend that I'm smarter I've never built a business like that and raised money so you have to come in with low ego and focus around what is it you're trying to achieve and invariably what they're trying to achieve is the balance between giving up control which really quite frankly they don't want to do but the recognition that they need to move where they are to someplace better. So, and better again, subjective. So what I really try to focus on is, can we define what is in your head, that tacit knowledge to make it explicit? Can we map out what you're doing now? Can we give you a framework so when down the road you want to bring on board a sales team, you actually have an understanding of what that is.

[20:09] So you're able to say, here's my ICP, which I think is, is all sales should start from understanding the ICP. And for anyone who's listening to this, if you're in a company and you can't articulate your ICP and no one else can, run. If you're interviewing and they can't explain what their ICP is, run. Like those are both very bad signs, right? So your ICP can iterate over time. So the founder should be able to, let's sit down and figure out what your ICP is.

[20:35] Let's figure out what you think your sales motion is. And let's document both those things. and then let's figure out an economic model underneath it that would then say at this point i should now go and get more sales people on things like that and that's where i leave in the conversation i i don't have interest in doing interim work or being fractional i want to come in do a bit of the advisory focus on that particular thing um and you know my interest longer term is to be part of an organization, run the team, because I like seeing the growth of those people going through. Just the advisory work right now, hugely intellectually stimulating, great conversations around people, and I think I'm really understanding the early stage around what those issues are. And it's something that, quite frankly, we don't do enough exposing of. And if you're able to crack the nut of having conversation with a founder, I actually think it makes you a better seller, because what's the commonality? It's listening.

[21:35] Amen. Amen. I am very curious, of all the things you could start with in a go-to-market strategy with a founder, why ICP? I'm sure some people who are listening are like, yeah, no duh, Hamish, that's the thing we need to do. From your experience, and why is that the most critical thing to start with? So first of all, a lot of people misunderstand the whole thing, right? So you have, and you can, you know, so Tam and Sam, blah, blah, blah, and all the other stuff. At ICP, I think, and the way it was taught to me is you should have three variables of it.

[22:06] And if you have three variables, it then becomes easy to have three is A, two is B, one is C, and everything else off. And there's a couple of very critical reasons why you want to have the ICP. One, start with, and I always say this, the ICP can and should evolve, right? Right. I mean, yes, Jeffrey Moore crossing the chasm, the whole thing. You want to see an evolution. Totally. I also think a bad plan perfectly executed is better than a perfect plan never executed. Right. So this is our ICP today. And we're going to go and we're going to attack that. We're going to figure out what it is. And if we've really gone and said we have 100 companies inside of our ICP, you should, I think, be able to quickly get through those 100, at least at some level of touch point. And if you're not getting any engagement, maybe our assumption was wrong, right? True. Maybe we should go focus on something else. But now you're able to have a pivot point around where we should go from the ICP over here to where we should go to something else. Got it. So your ICP could start broad. We want to focus on every manufacturing company in the United States. Okay. Okay. Right? But the scale of manufacturing companies are going to be Apple, who probably wouldn't buy anything from you as a founder-led company, down to maybe a 100-person manufacturing company that would. Sure. But your assumption is we want manufacturing. We want this. We want that. Great. Fine. Go get them.

[23:31] The other thing I found is that once you define the ICP, it actually allows you to define and identify adjacent markets, where I think early on that's really important to do.

[23:41] So one company I was with, we started selling deals where the deal cycle was less than our AICPs. The discountability, if that's even a thing, the discount rate was less on those. And we said, what the hell's going on here? And what we found was that there were regulatory and market issues that were forcing behaviors in our customers to go to a different path. Got it. If we didn't have the ICP developed, what probably would have happened is Bob's a great salesperson and Tim sucks. And Bob can close anything. Well, no, what Bob is, Bob is the benefactor of these adjacent things that are coming in. Right. But now we're able to shift it. And now I have data that I can go back to marketing and say, look, here's what's shifting. Could we get data sheets around here? Is there something that we're missing? Could we go back and interview our customers? Is there an opportunity to upsell on-site there? So if you don't have your ICP, you spend a huge amount of time wasting money on, we're going to outsource SDR. We're going to get BDRs. We're going to do this. I spoke with my neighbor, friend, whatever, monkey's uncle, who said, no, what you really need to do is all these other things. and all of them are extraordinarily well intentioned, but it doesn't give you the indication of where should we start. And that is the most difficult thing. Where do you start, right? And a founder's gonna have.

[25:03] A point of view because again they think it's brilliant this is the problem we're solving you look at the history of gong you look at the history of outreach you look at a history of a variety of very large companies that we drift in here in boston that you view as saying they were fantastic companies in their space the product they have now is not the product they started with and the only way you're going to figure that out is if you focus down and all All those companies talk about a feature functionality that was used out of their product that wasn't the core. So that's why I believe having the ICP is the best way to start. And it precludes all the things around we're going to spend money on process, we're going to spend money on data, we're going to spend all the money on things. No, like let's actually sit down. People want to avoid it because it is a hard work. And people want to avoid it, especially at founder levels, because what you may wind up realizing is like, yeah, your kids are actually ugly, right? And no one wants to hear that. So what do you do from there?

[25:59] And then you have to make those adjustments or figure out, you know, what do you do with that? So I really appreciate you framing it that way, Bradley. And, you know, we will not have time to touch on the topic that we talked about offline around picking a lane when it comes to what methodology are you going to use. You mentioned a couple of them earlier. I would love to have you back and we can chat more about that in the future. I do have a few questions for you before we wrap up today. today the first one being and as you laid out at the beginning of our our podcast today you have had a very incredible career different companies different roles i gotta believe that you got a bunch of scar tissue and some bumps and bruises from that so if you could go back to younger bradley and go back as far as you like and say hey younger bradley in the future you're going to have all this great experience you're going to have this incredible team-based selling organization organization. You're also going to have a lot of scar tissue and bumps and bruises. What would you coach your younger self to say or do different to get to the same place with less scar tissue and fewer bumps and bruises?

[27:00] I would have focused more on following people I've worked with versus following opportunities. So when I look at where I've been most successful, it's been people that know me, know the value I can bring versus having to go and reestablish that at companies. And it's just unfortunately part of the world that we live in.

[27:22] Companies get acquired, people move on, things like that. But I look at the places where I have had that success and I can draw those linkages between people and I look at the companies where I've not had that success and I can draw a similar linkage of not knowing those people and when you're in sales well I think when you're in many roles you do need a little bit of benefit of the doubt as you're pushing through and I've had good tenure at those organizations where people said like alright we're going through a bump but we have trust and confidence and you work and you push through those bumps and there's golden you know gold on the other side of those sales and the other ones you know not not so much I very much appreciate that that's a great bit of insight for the audience of sales leaders listening today second question for you what have you read watched listen to whether recently or in the past you would encourage the audience of sales leaders listening to check out for their own development this might not be what you want to hear but actually don't.

[28:19] Don't do the sales stuff. So I think it's really critical to disengage, to check out, to read other things, other content, other information.

[28:31] I read, I have three children. So if they're reading stuff for school or anything like that, I really try to read so I can engage with them. I think it makes you better when you engage with people. I'm a huge sort of historical fiction fan, that type of thing, espionage. I like the author, Jack Carr. I'm waiting for his new book to come out as well. My daughter was doing some work for Eleanor Roosevelt for school. So I've been reading The Ordinary Time to be able to help her engage with that. And I think we're so surrounded by all of this that where I find most of my ideas, quite frankly, are outside the realm of what we're focusing on.

[29:10] And that's, I think, the best way to broaden yourself. I completely agree with you. I was coaching a very successful seller, and they were telling me about, like, all these books that they were reading on sales. And I said, I'm going to encourage you to stop doing that. And they're like, what do you mean? I said, well, it's like going to seven different yoga teachers and then, like, trying to mishmash together all the things that they said. And also, to reinforce your point, is the ideas are found elsewhere. Like, we're in the business of human-to-human interactions. And so read things about how other human beings and you know, Eleanor Roosevelt an incredible human

[29:45] being How did they interact with others? I bet you're gonna find some great ideas. That's an incredible insight Bradley Thank you for sharing that with us and speaking of you've given us a ton of great ideas and insights already What do you have as a final thought or a closing bit of wisdom or something to plug the floors yours? Oh, Sure. So what I would say is you need to be true and authentic to yourself. And I think things will follow. And one of the things I appreciate about our conversation or any of these is the opportunity to do that and have a conversation and to be real and be human.

[30:18] I had a post this morning on LinkedIn just about asking for help. Right. And there is always a reluctance really in any segment outside of revenue to ask for help. Engineering will outsource Q&A the outsource UX and UI design marketing will pull in a content writer the pull in third-party analyst CEOs will have an admin and assistant god forbid if you're in sales and you ask for help right like what do we hire you for in the scope of everything that you're expected to understand in the rate of change in knowledge that you're expected to own, you you can't right true so getting back to the starting thing team by selling and all that. You want to assemble the best team. And sometimes the best team is not made up of all stars. I'm a Boston fan. We're going to the finals. How many times have that five, well, short Marcus Smart, how many times have that five been there, right? Bruins had the best record ever and they choked in terms of round one.

[31:16] Patriots, you know, they were undefeated, lost in the Super Bowl. So it's really not about having the best players. It's about having the best commitment from the people you have. Love that. What a great way to wrap up today. Bradley, thank you so much for being a guest on Full Funnel Freedom today. Thank you for having me. Sales leaders, I really appreciated Bradley's ideas and insights today.

[31:44] Few things that really stood out to me. The first being this team-based approach. I love this idea of team-based approach. That, you know, that cliche about, you know, not everyone's in sales, but everybody is in sales. Again, I'm messing it up, but that is a great, great mindset to have, especially if you are a CEO or a founder having that everybody's in sales. And related to that, I love this idea of variable compensation for everybody. You're in compensating individuals for bringing in qualified, qualified leads, uh, to the organization, no matter what role they're in are.

[32:22] Team members, everyone in our organization, they don't just go into a cube when they're done their job and their role for the day and then come back. They are at soccer matches and hockey practices and dance and chess and theater and art and all these other things. And they're interacting with individuals who may actually become clients of ours. So why not necessarily reward them for that? The other thing I really appreciated Bradley talking about is this idea of what's the end goal like what are we really trying to achieve here and putting aside our egos and our fiefdoms and really working for the overall goal which is where we talked about this idea about conflict in a lot of business cases ultimately becoming because of mismatched incentives and to Bradley's point about how marketing is being incentivized to do upsell and expansion, whereas sales is looking for inbound leads, well, there's going to create a conflict there. And the last thing that I really appreciate him sharing today with you is this

[33:27] idea of locking down your ideal client profile or ICP. I'm not sure if we said ideal client profile when we were chatting.

[33:40] That's one of the first things that we do with our clients at Sandler Calgary, because to Bradley's point, it is ultimately the fountain from which everything else flows.

[33:50] Everybody is not our ideal prospect. We want to narrow down that ideal client profile. And I appreciated his very simple metric for if they hit three of the three boxes on our ideal client profile, they're an A-level client, Let's go after them if they hit two of the three there a B, We'll get to them next and if they hit one there a C, Yeah, maybe we'll end up working with them and see if we can develop something else and then a anyone who has zero boxes They're out great way of focusing our sales teams great way of helping them understand Who do I need to focus on so they're not just chasing everybody? I'm very curious to hear what your big takeaways are in the comments on our social media Until we connect on the next episode, go create Full Funnel Freedom. Thanks for listening to today's episode of the Full Funnel Freedom podcast. You can continue to support us by leaving us a review and a rating, sharing this episode with a couple of sales leaders in your network who you care about. I'd love to connect with you. I'm easy to find, Hamish Knox on LinkedIn. Also, if you'd like a free 15 minute call with me, go to www.hamish.sandler.com forward slash how to Sandler until we connect on the next episode, go create full funnel freedom.

[35:14] Music.