Speaker 1: 0:05

You know it's so complex really, and because it's so people driven on the customer side and on the company side the broad set of skills that you need to be really good at selling to be at that very top, I haven't declined a single outreach. You know, I've had former people from my team, I've had colleagues from way back, I've had recruiters and companies I've never heard of and startups and VCs and all these people that I've either been connected to or have reached out to me and I've said yes to every conversation.

Speaker 2: 0:44

Welcome to Growth Pulse, the B2B Sales Podcast. You might be a salesperson. You could lead a sales team. Maybe you're in a business or you're a battle-tested entrepreneur. Then we've built this podcast for you. Great salespeople are built and not bought. We learn so much from the deals we win, but we learn even more from the deals we lose. In each episode, we bring you some of the world's leading salespeople, sales leaders and experts in sales tech to share their best lessons from both their wins and their losses.

Speaker 2: 1:18

Before we start, please check out the screen of your phone or laptop and, if you're watching on YouTube, make sure you have clicked subscribe and press that like button down below. If you're listening on Spotify or Apple, hit the plus sign to follow so we can let you know when we publish each new episode. If you liked the episode, drop us a comment with any questions about the show. We'd love to get to know our audience. Great businesses always feature world-class salespeople and the best salespeople are always there, so let's jump in. Welcome back to another episode of Growth Pulse, the B2B South podcast. I'm Dan Bartels and here with Simon Peterson, my co-host. We're super excited to have John Rarant join us. John mate, we all work together for such a long period of time and we are so excited to have you on the show after a bit of a hiatus for Christmas and New Year's and bits and pieces mate, so welcome.

Speaker 1: 2:15

Thanks Dan, Thanks Simon, Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

Speaker 2: 2:19

Simon what have you been doing over the break night, I've been particularly exciting.

Speaker 3: 2:23

Mate I've been. It's interesting. I'm back in a company that has a January to December fiscal year so the first time in about 10 years I got to finish my fiscal year at around Christmas time so I was able to have a lovely break with the family. It's a novelty so many years of finishing a fiscal year in January. It's an absolute pleasure and advice to people If you can find a great company that has a December fiscal close out of January, I recommend it highly. My family was delighted.

Speaker 2: 2:52

Oh, mate, I had the same thing. So it was the first time, I think, in about 13 years, that I haven't had a January close, and we went to Thailand for two weeks and I was like there's no pressure, january's perfect. I love January now.

Speaker 1: 3:06

But I just hate January. It's great your pain, guys. I know exactly what you mean. My wife hasn't got any stipulations about the company I joined next, but she but that one. Please make it not a January 31 year.

Speaker 2: 3:21

You don't think that those things when you join a business and you know where does your funny year end? Where do your quarters end?

Speaker 1: 3:27

I find myself Googling it. Are you a company where you reached out, had some interest? You go okay, let's see if this could be you?

Speaker 2: 3:32

Yeah, absolutely yeah. Well, look, the three of us are, all you know, quite experienced sales heads. You know, john, I want to give everyone a bit of your background. You've done a bunch of things across a career, and a very illustrious career, at Salesforce. I want to give you a couple of minutes, you know, give everyone a bit of your background and what you're kind of looking to do next. I know you've kind of stepped out of Salesforce after a very long period, which is, you know, you're looking at the next team to join. But what?

Speaker 1: 4:01

have you been doing in the last period? Well, the last six months I've been on a career break, which I was telling Simon before we started today that it's the first time in my career that I've taken this much time and it was a bit foreign to me, I've got to say, the idea of not getting up and jumping into work each day, but it kind of grows on you you know, we've done a bit of travel as a family.

Speaker 1: 4:23

And then I've had the whole Christmas New Year period with zero pressure other than the idea that one day I've got to go back and find a paying job so that I can keep running this, keep the ship afloat. But it's been a really good break Before that, obviously, I finished a full 10 years at Salesforce, almost to the day. So a decade there, you know, and if I look back at my career, I've sort of done. I did a decade at Oracle when I first started. I then went to Siebel Systems, which got acquired by Oracle, found myself back at Oracle, did a short period of time with a private equity owned software turnaround, if you like, which was an interesting one and kind of was really good for me in the sense of really helping me understand, you know, what a poorly run business looks like and what you need to do to turn that around and how to prioritize your investments to get that business performing.

Speaker 1: 5:17

And then from there I left into Salesforce and met you, lovely Jensen, and a bunch of other really talented people at Salesforce and had an amazing decade there. So it's been, you know, it's been a really, really rich career journey for me and a really enjoyable one. So looking for the next gig. Now I've just begun the process of trying to identify what I want to do next and I'm being, you know, really thoughtful about what's next for me. I feel like I've got a lot to offer, but I also want to join a company that's, you know, really sparks interest in me and gets me excited. What they're doing as a company, the people I'm going to be working with and the mission of my role is important to me at this point, so that I've got enough scope to really use the experience that I've got and do a bit of learning while I'm at it.

Speaker 2: 6:10

Yeah, we never stopped learning, do I mean? I think that's one of the things that was instilled to me in my time at Salesforce in particular Was you might know he, but how much there is possibly to learn from your colleagues, from your organizations, from your customers as well.

Speaker 1: 6:22

I think sales is one of those disciplines that you never truly master. Yeah, you know it's so complex really, and because it's so people driven on the customer side and on the company side, the broad set of skills that you need to be really good at selling to be at that very top you know that top 10% of sales people globally it's just so broad and so there are always gaps and there are always opportunities to learn and the domain changes to you know the needs of the customer change and shift. The knowledge of the customer changes and shifts and you have to adapt to that. So it's one of those disciplines that you never truly feel like you've got a 100% hand along. So I think there's always a learning opportunity and that's a good thing to keep in mind. As a sales person, you never know everything and you always need to be curious and to some degree humble so that you can take on those learning experiences.

Speaker 3: 7:20

I was gonna say, john, you've had a. You know, you've had six months to sort of sit back and, as you said, enjoy some time with the family. I'm curious. You know, I've had a career break and it changed my perspective on what I wanted out of my next gig. It gave me chances to relax a little bit. What do I love? What do I not love? Have you found? What have you learned over the last couple of months? Obviously you're thinking about your career, what you want to do next. You've had some time off. What are some of the reflections on and just having some space in your life, that you're not running from forecast to forecast to forecast, quarter to quarter to quarter?

Speaker 1: 8:01

Well, I think the main thing, simon, is, I feel, had I made a decision straight away when it left Salesforce to leap into something new, I think it would have looked a lot like what I was doing in Salesforce. It feel you know you're in a, you're getting a groove and you know role comes along and you go. I recognize all of this. You know I'm doing it. Now In this role I can just lift and shift and just apply those same principles here for a different brand and a different, you know, value proposition and just go, and there's something very comfortable about that. So I guess the more time I've had, the more distance I put between the last job and and my and my decision has just, I think, invited in more options.

Speaker 1: 8:44

And I've I've taken the time to talk to a lot of people. I haven't declined a single outreach. You know I've had former people from my team, I've had colleagues from way back, I've had, you know, recruiters and companies I've never heard of, and startups and VCs and all these people that I've either been connected to or have reached out to me, and I've said yes to every conversation. I think what that's done is just open my eyes to all of the choices I have, which to some extent makes the decision harder, get a bit of choice fatigue and think, why can't this be a bit simpler? But it but I feel like I'll make, well, certainly a more informed decision but also choose something that is holistically going to be better for me over the next five to ten years.

Speaker 1: 9:30

And it may not look like what I was doing, it might look quite different to what I was doing, but I but it will be. It'll be different because it'll it'll give me a real learning and development opportunity and an ability maybe to flex some muscles that I didn't get to flex as much as I would have liked in the last role. So you know I'm a very curious job hunter at the moment and, you know, really inviting every possibility and obviously I need to narrow it down over the next few weeks and months and make a decision, and you know hoping that Next one. On your podcast I'll be telling you about my success in the next gig.

Speaker 2: 10:07

Last kind of 12 to 18 months doing a bunch of different work with different organizations and I'm just stepping into a new business as well and in the FinTech space, one of the things that I've found has been a real area of development for most organizations is actually understanding how forecasting works. Even and it's one of the things that, if I look back on my time at Salesforce and financial force that it was that core piece that SaaS companies in particular and I think there are some different industries that have a much longer term industries and I spent some time Working in retail and they get forecasting from a very different flavor, right for production and different bits and pieces. But really understanding from a sales front, how do we as sales leaders, approach forecasting? So, like I wanted to start with you, john, I mean that you've run some amazing teams in the time that I've known you and some really big deals, but also some Some all go underneath that some high velocity programs as well, with other teams that have to flow into that.

Speaker 2: 11:11

How do you think about forecasting at an organizational level first, and then, as we go through the conversation, I want to go back to the end and talk about how we think about it as an A. It was as a person owning a quota, but as a salesman on a business, running a business or running a revenue stream. How do you think about forecasting?

Speaker 1: 11:30

and it's a broad subject because getting it right requires the system to work, and it's it's. It's a forecasting system that produces the best result. Prior to sales force most places I worked the art of forecasting was much more dominant over the science of forecasting, and so the it was very much about the personality of a sales leader, their gut feel, their instincts, their read. You know that dominated the forming of a forecast, and so you had high levels of variability based on the individuals and, of course, the underpinnings that fed the data into the. You know, the forecasters spreadsheet or forecasting at, where we've widely varied to, so you got high variability. So the first thing I would say is forecasting is about building a, the right culture. Forecasting and look, there is an art to forecasting. No doubt there is, there are. There is definitely a lens that needs to be placed over the numbers and the raw data when judgment is required. The more you can build a cultural forecasting right through the organization, from the top to the bottom, the more reliable the data and then the less absolute judgment it plays a role.

Speaker 1: 12:52

The other thing I would say is there's a big mistake that gets made at leadership level in the forecasting world. That mistake is the conflation of forecasting versus performance. Forecast is an indication of where we're going to land, where we're going to land this month, where we're going to land this quarter, where we're going to land this year. That gets conflated with performance. When the number that's being forecast is disappointing, up the chain, pressure gets applied downwards, but the number is not good enough and it needs to be improved. The number improves because the forecast, at the end of the day, is the number you can adjust. Forecasts get adjusted, expectations get shifted, but has the actual predicted performance of the business really changed or has it just downward pressure for performance, creating a forecast gap?

Speaker 1: 13:46

What you end up with quite often in these situations where performance looks below target is you get two problems rather than one. You have a performance problem because you're not quite hitting the mark and you have a forecasting problem because you're not landing where you said you were going to land. That's a huge issue in most organisations because they use the forecast as a weapon to drive performance in the organisation. That's something that is not a straightforward thing to resolve because at the end of the day, those pressures are always going to be there.

Speaker 1: 14:21

Forecasting is effectively expectations. Having high expectations is a prerequisite to high performance. There's no doubt about it. There's a nuance to how you do this. Just accepting a low forecast so people could feel comfortable that they're not going to miss is equally a poor outcome for forecasting. It's that sweet spot where someone is pushing themselves but not overindexing, where they might land because of performance pressure. That's the sweet spot of forecasting that you need to build into your culture. There's a million more things too. That's certainly them. I opening thoughts about how I approach the problem of forecasting.

Speaker 2: 15:04

Simon, I know we've talked with some of our leaders over time about there's as much sin in undercalling a number as there is overcalling a number, and it's that accuracy piece that I think is really important. I know you taught me a whole heap of stuff in that space With some of the businesses you've been in since we've worked together, but also before. How do you approach from a mindset perspective or a leadership perspective? How do you approach forecasting?

Speaker 3: 15:32

It's an interesting one, I think. Quite often I get asked about my leadership style or what you've learned over the years. Who's turned you into what you are? I think probably one of my earlier memories in sales was learning about what not to do on a forecast. I think, John, you had a really interesting concept there weaponizing the forecast. That was my first experience with going through forecasts and I was at the other big ARP company that you didn't work for. I just remember forecast being frenetic, angry, lots of screaming and yelling. I remember we used to do a forecast on a Monday. We ended up having to change that because the leadership team decided that their weekends were worrying about what they were going to forecast on the Monday. I think they're.

Speaker 3: 16:19

Fundamental for me in good forecasting is trust. I think there's a human aspect to it and there's a thematic aspect to it. I think we've all worked with probably some of the best software systems that can turn an aggregate of hundreds and hundreds of opportunities, boil it down to the linearity of month one, month two, month three, what am I going to do this quarter, what am I going to do this half this year, et cetera. I think that's great, but I think underpinning it, John, as you quite rightly mentioned is, selling is an innately human activity. I think you need to build trust with your sales team. By trust I certainly don't mean forecast 50% of your number and thank you very much. We're all good, you want a high performance culture, so you want people to be pushing the envelope, but I think you need some consistency in the way you assess your sales team and the way they look at their deals. Have they got the right stakeholders involved? Do they really understand the buying cycle of the company? And you boil that up into an AES forecast. You then roll that across 60, 70, 80 AES and then, as a leader, you need to bring that together and give a number that's got a sum of semblance of logic. I do think fundamental to getting a good forecast is trust, and trust goes both ways. You need to trust your salespeople and they need to trust you. I think when I bring a new AE on board, one of the first things I do is I say it's okay to make mistakes and it's okay not to know what your next steps are in a deal. It's not okay is to sit there and not say anything, because if you have that as a culture that bubbles up and you end up with people predicting deals coming in when they're just not going to happen and that just cascades across the business.

Speaker 3: 18:12

For me, I guess the human side of forecasting is often overlooked, and I think less so in 2020-24,. I do remember in the 90s it was a very male, dominated, ego driven, angry type of meeting and I think thankfully that's gone away for the most part that I've seen. I think for me it's got to be a two way conversation. The most stress I've ever had in my professional career is walking into forecasts where I'm not certain of the number that I'm forecasting, and that's the most stress. It's worse than getting through an average pre-sales demo or an average sales meeting with a customer. That the most stress I've personally felt.

Speaker 3: 18:58

I remember at sales force Robert Zimmerman looked at me after my first forecast I'm new. Okay, I was really wound up in stress and he taught me a great lesson. He said it just got to relax. The forecast is the forecast. Be as accurate as you can and trust the people around you. That was a fantastic piece of advice and I think my stress levels just went down. But I think new sales leaders, people that have taken on a big team. The whole concept of forecasting is just combined.

Speaker 1: 19:27

Sometimes no, no doubt. Look, wherever uncertainty is involved, there's a certain amount of anxiety, and forecasting is, by its own nature, it's an uncertain process. So a certain level, I mean I actually feel, walking into a forecast call, you should always feel a certain level of let's call it stress, I'll call it healthy stress.

Speaker 2: 19:53

One of the things that I think is really relevant for how we think about forecasting when you're either building a team or you're building a division or a business, is you both mentioned like turning up to a call and you've got a forecast. Either I'm calling the number up or I'm calling it down, or I've got a bit of anxiety. One of my experiences has always been that anxiety is always driven when you don't know the data or the detail about your deal underneath. Right, you've got to. Maybe you're a leader, you've got to rep that you know you've opened up some of their deals. There's nothing there, there's no information, there's no next steps, there's no dates. You have no idea what's going on. So all of a sudden, you're always all this anxiety and as a rep, your experience is. But I've got this great connection with this customer and they told me in this call and I'm relying back to kind of what you mentioned before, john is kind of the gut feel rather than the logic behind it.

Speaker 2: 20:53

Right, one of the things that I learned at Salesforce and I suppose this is helping companies deploy this stuff for so long is sort of how important building a system underneath it is. It doesn't need to be a serum. There's a whole bunch of different technologies that are available for it, but I think it's the culture that I let into and said, okay, so you know how important, not just in the technology systems, because the serums are just one piece of technology from business needs, but a whole bunch. But it's so much more about the culture and the business practice process around it and through to you saying how do you build the culture you guys have? So I mean, you know, I worked in your team for a long time and you know one of the things I was giving credit for is is that sort of that culture piece that we definitely built in the two teams we're a part of and two of you approach like understanding, giving that salesperson the confidence of we're going to uncover gaps.

Speaker 2: 21:51

And this is not. This is an assessment, an objective assessment around the health of this engagement and the work to be done, rather than rather than a punitive kind of assessment of what you have or haven't done, and this is an assessment of your performance. How do you? That's a really like nuanced message. How do you build that when you don't have it to start with?

Speaker 3: 22:14

I think yeah, sure, I think, dan, it's an interesting one. First and foremost, you've got to lean in with your AEs. You get to know them One of the things I love to do or you bring a new AE in and you spend some good quality time getting to know them as a person. What gets them out of bed in the morning, what motivates them. You're obviously going through a process and hiring top talent, so you know there's some basic skills there. But I think first and foremost, you want to make the environment safe, and I think the thing that kills me in a lot of sales organizations is a inherent view that because I'm more senior than you, I know more than you about all of your deals. So I want people to feel like we're all in it together. We're roll our sleeves up. Yes, I've got a more senior role in a hierarchy, but when it comes to the deal, we are equal players in trying to understand what to do next. And I think when you start acting in that way, I'll say to a rep look, I've got no idea what you do next. What are your thoughts? Have you thought about this? Have you thought about that? So I'm not telling them what to do. I'm uncovering there that most people I have working my sales team are way better sales people than me. That's why they're doing what they're doing. So my job is to help them uncover it and, I think, making them feel really safe about debating and figuring out the best approach to doing it, bringing in people that aren't necessarily part of the deal for new pair of eyes on the deal, et cetera. So really making them feel comfortable, just feeling like they're surrounded by people that have genuinely have their back, want to help them get to be successful, close the deal, whatever it may be. And so when they come to a point where they don't know the answer, they just say, hey, simon, I don't know what to do here, and look, if I know what to do. I'll say, hey, have you thought about this or that? And admit that sometimes I may not have the right answer. So bring other people in.

Speaker 3: 24:04

I love the concept of reps helping other reps and I think if you build a culture of A's helping each other and this may sound trite, but first thing I always do is I set up a WhatsApp group amongst the sales people and there's a bit of banter there. To start with, they'll share pictures of what they've cooked or whatever they've done. But then you start getting a very informal line of communication outside of a formal deal review, outside of a forecast, where people are asking each other and bouncing off each other and I'm seeing that where I am today. It's probably 50 messages a day in a WhatsApp group of 10, 15 reps, and it's all productive, but they're all helping each other and they're all building each other's confidence and I think that's fairly fundamental to the beginnings of building a team.

Speaker 3: 24:50

I think look, I harp on about this every time, but it's about empathy too. I try and put myself in the shoes of the rep. If they're new to the business, what don't they know? What would I have struggled with? If I'm trying to show that I'm a really good rep, what am I likely to be doing? And just make them feel comfortable. And I think empathy is a big part of it.

Speaker 2: 25:11

It's one of the things that I see organizations try to discover in themselves is how to set up their process to work and that everyone's in the organization trying to sell stuff. But they focus on I need more information about my customer, or I need to work at what products I should sell better, what my pricing number should look like. The problem is the forecast is almost one of those pieces that it's almost where all the information has one singular point that you can manage and you discover is it real? Is it? Where do I need to drill into? Where do I need to put more effort into? My territory? Carving doesn't work. My design of my year nine months ago wasn't the right design because we're failing the forecast. I need to develop my team better here because I don't understand a product set. All those things kind of come into culmination forecast, but it's built. Also, you make something really crucial.

Speaker 2: 26:14

There is actually managing up as well that piece of saying hey, listen, the rep is just giving us the reality of where this deal is at right now. This is not an empirical measure of that person's value or not. This is the reality of where we are. We are going to hit or we're not. Let's not, you mentioned earlier. Let's not just tell the person that number is not good enough. That's a different issue, which is the performance of the organization to hit to a target, et cetera. The reality of where this deal is at is where this deal is at Now. Let's decide what the problem is and our solution can be move the target. The solution can be find more deals. The solution can be sell more stuff. Solution might be go back a couple of steps to go forward in the deal, to make the deal bigger.

Speaker 2: 27:00

But the empirical information of where is this hack? You've got to get a baseline. I think that's as a leader. It's that sin of where is it really at? I will say that there's a layer which is we've all seen that rep that undercalls, the rep that overcalls and there's a bit of that, but that then becomes back to. You've got to coach that person. What's the real number? What are you pushing in that AE level up? What do you think is that the most important piece of making a change at that individual contributor level?

Speaker 3: 27:37

I think I was going to reflect there on. You've got different types of personalities the sandbag or the one that has happy ears, et cetera. Identifying people's personalities is pretty important, but I think I'll be interested in actually your opinion as well, dan, as well as John. But you've run organizations with people that are very new to sales, people that are sort of mid-career, and then your senior enterprise salespeople. You've got to treat them differently. You've got to understand that they've got a different frame of reference, different level of experience. I'm curious, dan, you've had sales teams from first job in sales. People have been doing it for four or five years and then seriously experienced. Do you see what do you see that's different about the way people forecast where they are in their career.

Speaker 3: 28:30

I guess there are people listening to this podcast most AE's that listen to this. They want some advice on how to deal with a forecast. I think my advice to people is don't be verbose, don't be the storyteller, don't spend 25 minutes telling us about what's going on. Short, sharp, to the point. I notice as people move through their careers it gets short, sharp and to the point. That's what I've experienced people learning. I'm curious what your experience is.

Speaker 2: 28:58

My experience and it's actually not related to where you are in your sales career. I think people can fall in and out of these bad behaviors, no matter where they are. I've used this catchphrase a hundred times on this podcast already, but the thing that I've learned from my time at Salesforce and understanding what the data of a business is it's about if you want everyone on the same page, there better be a page, and the concept behind that is it allows you, if you've written things down, if you've got the information, the right records, if you've just got a plan for this engagement, if you've got a plan for the next step, if you've got a plan for the problem you're going to try and resolve now, it actually means that the sales process is not about you trying to convince anyone to do anything on the other side. It's about you helping them find a solution to a problem they've identified. I've never convinced. I've been a career salesperson to this date. I've never convinced somebody to do something that they didn't already want to do, so I'm just helping them through the process. So now, when I give a forecast, if all that information on an individual deal, all that information is there, and now I'm reporting what they're telling me. Their timelines look like I'm now telling them they want to solve this problem. Therefore, the quantified value of what they're going to spend because we've actually identified what the products will serve, the services or solutions they got to buy it looks like this when I go to the aggregate of all of my deals, it's a pretty simple process because now I can rank the order of my deals and I can say this is what it looks like.

Speaker 2: 30:46

Whereas and your question is, between the early person in their career to a person late in their career when all of a sudden, I start getting stories about the reason that this doesn't work, or the reason that this what it means is none of it's written down, and my viewpoint on this and the piece that I try to teach people, no matter what level of career they're in, is, I don't want your story. Your point of view on this is actually pretty irrelevant. I want the customer's point of view on this, because they're the person that's going to sign the check and put the order form in right, and so I want what have they told me, what have you been able to pull out of them? And for me, it's all about how do you actually get that level of nuance or that level of viewpoint on what's happening. And when you get that, all of a sudden forecasts become like super accurate and someone's actually and even down to the pieces, and we've all seen this in our time all of your deals are sitting on the 31st of the month.

Speaker 2: 31:50

You made that date up, unless there's an end of month special. If you buy on the 29th to the 31st, you get 10% off. If that's when it is, or you're giving me a month, you made that month up.

Speaker 3: 32:05

Or it's a Saturday. I love the Saturday deal because or it's a Saturday.

Speaker 2: 32:09

Like there's things that just jump out and you go, these are like this is all made up. And when it's made up, it's like, well, okay, that's okay. Our problem is to go and find out the reality of what's happening for our customer, what they're looking at or probably they're trying to solve where they're at in their process, and then, yes, we've got some stuff on our side. But that piece to me is and again, you can have some people who've been amazing enterprise sellers and have forgotten this over time You've had people early in their career who get it and they just I'm going to write everything down and they've got an answer. They know the answer to everything in this deal. You mentioned some structure, john, giving them some structure in a process and a deal. Now, all of a sudden, the forecast process becomes it's just an articulation of what's already happening and there's almost no pressure to it. They're above the number, they're below the number, but that's the number, like that's what it is, that's what it's going to be. There's two or three deals that are falling around. These are the pressures on that and I'll find out about that on Tuesday.

Speaker 2: 33:09

Thanks so much for joining the podcast. I think that's been a really productive conversation for myself and for our listeners as well. It's always good to remind myself For everyone listening. Look, if you're listening on Spotify or Apple, click the plus sign to subscribe to the podcast itself. If you watch you on YouTube, click down below. Give us a like and a subscribe. Hey, and if you're looking for a phenomenal new sales leader, look up John Rann on LinkedIn. He's looking for his next great opportunity. Thanks, simon. Thanks so much, guys. Have a wonderful weekend. I'll see you on Friday and look forward to talking to you all soon.