Mark Leslie
Lecturer, Stanford Graduate School of Business. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
Mark Leslie is the former CEO, chairman, and founding team member of Veritas Software. He is also a lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business focusing on enterprise sales and entrepreneurship.
1shows
1appearances
14statements
1resolved
1supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
8said about them ↓ Everything Mark Leslie said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Mark Leslie: Founders solving unexperienced problems face lower success rates
“I think that the probability of success is much lower when you're trying to solve a problem that you've never personally experienced.”
Mark Leslie: You cannot teach someone to become an entrepreneur
“You can teach an entrepreneur How to go start and build a company, but you can't teach someone to be an entrepreneur who's not an entrepreneur.”
Mark Leslie: Leaders cannot change people's behavior because character is immutable
“I think character, my personal opinion, is as immutable. I don't believe that you can change behavior of people.”
Mark Leslie: Founders cannot subcontract early-stage startup sales
“At this point in time, there is nobody better equipped in a startup company to talk about the beauty and the benefits of the product, and the vision of the future that we're painting. There's nobody better equipped to do that than the founders who started the …”
Mark Leslie: Typical enterprise sales account executive OTE is $300,000
“So the typical, what they call OTE, on target earnings, is today around 300,000 dollars. Half in base, half in incentive.”
Mark Leslie: Engineering projects cannot be on time, fully featured, and high-quality
“So my experience with engineering projects is that they can either be on time, they can be fully featured, or they can be high quality. I've never seen it all come together on the same day.”
Mark Leslie: Company culture is defined by crisis decisions, not published values
“Culture in a company has nothing to do with the values that are published. Culture in a company has to do with what happens in a company when things get bad and people have to make decisions on how do they react.”
Mark Leslie: Set sales quotas so 75% of reps hit 100%
“It's my belief that you want to have a company where 75% of the people get to a hundred percent. Then you have a reputation as this is a company where people make money.”
Mark Leslie: Technical founders struggle with asking for customer orders
“So one of the things that technical founders, you know, they're pretty good usually at the vision thing. They're not so good at asking for the order, right?”
Mark Leslie: Organizational trust operates like a bank account with no loans
“I think of trust, I think of it as a bank of trust. So in a bank of trust, you can make a deposit, meaning you can express trust and give people that sense. In times of need, when things are bad and you need people to stand by you can make a withdrawal from th…”
Mark Leslie: Dysfunctional sales behavior stems from flawed comp plans, not salespeople
“And the reason that salespeople don't behave right relative to their compensation plan, it's not the salesman, it's the compensation plan.”
Mark Leslie: Enterprise sales compensation plans should fit on a 3x5 card
“I think a compensation plan should be on a three by five card. This is what your base is. This is how much you're getting. These are the, you know, kind of notches as you go up the thing. And here's what we're paying you for.”
Mark Leslie: Early-stage startups need adaptable sales reps over process-driven hires
“But when you're just starting out, You want delta force. You want resourceful people who have minimal resources, and can react in a way, and can pull other people in the company, and can do amazing things that you can't, that you don't, you know, a big sales f…”
Mark Leslie: Sun Microsystems offered top salespeople Rolexes to break comp plans
“So, they got their five top salesmen in the world, and they brought them into the home office, and they said, the guy who breaks the compensation plan most significantly gets a gold Rolex. It worked. They found out all the holes in the plan.”
The other half of the tape: Mark Leslie's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 7 times in 2 episodes across the shows. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Andy Rachleff 6Peter Levine 1
Statements about Mark Leslie, by other people (1)
Every mention by year
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the a16z Podcast 7
2019 7 mentions in 2 episodes 4 per episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Mark's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| a16zLEDGER | Lecturer, Stanford Graduate School of Business | 1 | 14 | 100% 1/1 | full record on the a16z Podcast → |