The Ledger, every show

“Take your best salespeople and make them see a sense. There's no point. There's no point in having your best salespeople sell. Well, what's the point? People aren't going to buy anyway. I mean, and if they do, they're going to buy in onesie twosies, not in the…”

“We would predict based on the data that we're seeing that over 80% of companies will miss their Q four goals.”

“92% of sales leaders are VPs of sales are men. Over 85% of sales leaders are white.”

“In Q three of this year, 63% of sales reps missed quota. 63%. That's up from 54% in Q two and 46% in Q one.”

“76% of companies missed their Q three target. 76% of companies missed their Q three target. That's up from 59% in Q two and 51% in Q one.”

“Salespeople get labeled as coin operated and mercenaries and, you know, all these other adages because the way we compensate them, the way we treat them, the way we measure them is in a mercenary sort of way.”

“Companies either grow or they die. There's no middle, right? There's no like, oh, we're gonna cut burn and just try to like survive the winter long enough so that like, that doesn't work, right? Because employees get, get demoralized. Investors lose faith. The…”

“Stop using email. Email is where deals go to die. Text message is where deals get done. And so this notion that, like, I'm going to e-entry over email and that's how we connect is just far worse than the thing that I would really recommend”

“I don't think just relying on a bunch of STRs and cold emails and stuff is gonna get you through the next six to 12 months.”

“This idea that like, I'm going to go onto my CRM system and fire up a hundred cold emails and I'm going to close business. Like that works when capital is cheap and everyone's buying everything and every rep hits quota and every company's growing, et cetera. T…”

“100% of VC is a salesperson. Cause they're selling LPs to give them money and they're selling CEOs to take their money in exchange for equity. Like that's the job of a VC. All the analytics, all the data and the, this and the, that, those are just like updatin…”

“It doesn't exist today in SaaS. It does exist in other places. It just doesn't exist in SaaS really.”

“People try to like optimize their way out of problems. You can't optimize your way out of a problem. You got to completely change the rules of the game.”

“Cold prospecting goes down in favor of cross selling and upselling your existing customer base, because it's hard to break into new accounts when companies have budget freezes and hiring freezes and layoffs, and everyone is watching it really closely, the capi…”

“You got to forecast a year, but then set milestones, checkpoints, and kind of make predetermined decisions that allow you to avoid the bias of then walking into Q one and being like, oh, we missed in Q one, but no, no, we're really going to hit it in Q two. Yo…”

“The real problem isn't sales compensation plans and quotas. That's a symptom. A real problem is we all just wanted to have hyper growth instead of thinking, are we actually building good businesses?”

“The average enterprise sales cycle was 62 days. It's now like a 115 days or something.”

“Great salespeople don't have what I call happy ears. This is a problem that people misunderstand. People think that being a great salesperson is being ever the optimist, and that's actually not the case, because then you'll waste your time on a bunch of deals …”

“This notion that like the way you're good at sales is because you're super extroverted and pushy and willing to put yourself out there and whatever, ah, is, is, is a misguided notion.”

“It's one of the few companies that has made it to a hundred million dollars in recurring revenue. Without a drop of venture funding. It's a Norwegian company, actually.”

“The ratio between your OTE and your quota is typically five to one. Your quota is usually five X. And this comes from this idea that your cost for a sales rep fully loaded should be about 20%.”

“And I think, especially if you're a founder or a, or an executive who wants to learn how to sell and wants to understand how your buyers make decisions, I think it's really impactful and teaches you a new way to think about sales using psychology.”