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If you think outbound is dead, you’re either lying or you’re bad at it.
Quotas keep rising, your people are grinding, and the pipeline isn’t growing. It’s an equation that drives you mad. While everyone wants more opportunities, only a few know how to build an outbound culture that delivers.
I’m Todd Busler, former VP of Sales, now co-founder of Champify, and I’ve spent my career sharpening how to build a company pipeline that’s self-sufficient.
On this show, I’m talking to sales leaders who have cracked the outbound code. They’ve built an outbound culture beyond their SDRs and scaled repeatable systems that drive real pipeline without relying on hacks.
We’ll break down the winning plays, processes, and frameworks behind growing that outbound muscle to help you get results faster.
No fluff. No hacks. Real strategies from real people who have done it so you can stop guessing and start opening.
Todd Busler [00:00:03]:
Everyone wants to build stronger pipeline, but only a few know how to make it happen. If you're listening to this show, you know outbound is not dead. You just need a little help building a system that actually works. Well, you're in the right place. I'm Todd Bustler and on this show, we're breaking down the plays, processes and frameworks behind repeatable pipeline growth straight from the people who built it. Let's get into it Foreign. I'm very excited to have the CRO from Salesloft, Mark Niemiec. He is a wealth of knowledge when it comes to all things sales leadership and sales management. In this episode, I learned a ton. I was jotting down notes and you're going to leave with some actionable takeaways that will make your business better by the end of the episode. Mark, appreciate you joining. How are things?
Mark Niemiec [00:00:52]:
Things are great. Thanks for having me.
Todd Busler [00:00:54]:
Yeah. I think it's been a full year at Salesloft, huh?
Mark Niemiec [00:00:57]:
A little more. Yeah. 14 months, 15 months more. Feels like a lifetime.
Todd Busler [00:01:01]:
It's awesome. Let's start there. You had an awesome career. Salesloft, Cisco, other places. What made you join Salesloft? What's been some of the biggest mindset shifts that you've had to or biggest adjustments so far?
Mark Niemiec [00:01:15]:
Yeah. Well, why, why I joined Salesloft because my wife told me to. True story. And I don't know if I told you the story when we were in person, but I was asking her what I should do next and she said, you should go be the CRO at Salesloft. And I said, why would I do that? And she said, it's the best tool I've ever used. And for context, she's an enterprise sales rep for a big tech firm. And I said, why so good? She says, tells me exactly what to do, when to do it, why to do it, and how to do it. And remember that big deal I closed last month that covered my whole quota for the year? I said, yeah.
Mark Niemiec [00:01:49]:
She said, I did that because I got a signal from Salesloft to reach out to a potential buyer and close my whole quota in a one call close in a single transaction. I said, I gotta see this thing. So we went home, we were walking the dog. I went home and she showed it to me. And immediately what I noticed about it, it's not busy. It's not full of all kinds of distracting modules and data and all sorts of things. It's built for the seller.
Mark Niemiec [00:02:14]:
It's built for the AE to manage their day. I use this analogy. It may not land these days anymore, but you know, the left side of the Wall Street Journal that kind of tells you the things that are important for you to pay attention to. There's a ton of content in that paper, but when you look at that panel, it says, here's the things I should focus on. And it helps you orient yourself around the things that are most valuable. That's what Salesloft is. So many other tools are built as management tools that are sort of masquerading as tools for sellers and you struggle with getting sellers to engage or use them, all that kind of stuff. And because they're not built for sellers and Salesloft is built for sellers.
Mark Niemiec [00:02:45]:
So being a 25 year or so career seller, I thought this was a wonderful place to go and a really, really fun problem to solve and a great brand and also had some personal connections with a bunch of the leaders, so it was a really great fit.
Todd Busler [00:03:00]:
Yeah, that's like the best vetting you can get. Someone who doesn't work there. It's like, I use this. Here's the results. Come look at the thing. Before you even get into like company, background, team, et cetera. What was the biggest shift for you? I know it's been a little over a year now. You know, selling with the. I know when we met you said, you know, you worked in smaller business units within Salesloft, but you do have that brand on you. What's been the biggest shift? Going from kind of, you know, the most formidable or one of the most formidable software companies to one many people still not have heard of.
Mark Niemiec [00:03:32]:
The brand is certainly it's a real thing. The brand of the company I worked for and many of the companies I worked for are, are incredibly valuable assets. So those things are hard to replace. The biggest shift here has been the culture and the company. The team is focused on a mission that is very, very narrow. Other companies I work for wonderful, amazing companies, but their mission is very, very broad. And so getting focused on a narrow mission there around helping sellers be more effective in their roles. And that is the thing we do.
Mark Niemiec [00:04:02]:
And secondarily we help leaders and managers and organizations understand what it is their sellers are doing and how we can help them be more effective. But our reason for existing is to help sellers be more effective. And that's been the biggest shift. Solving many, many problems to solving one problem very, very deeply has been a big shift.
Todd Busler [00:04:21]:
Has that mission changed much in the sales office? I know you've only been there for a while, but has that changed or is that like an active effort to say here's the singular thing we must do. Walk me through it.
Mark Niemiec [00:04:31]:
Yeah. So you know, the company was founded as a category creator helping really top of funnel, xdr, bdr, SDR type Personas drive growth or drive pipeline. That's a wonderful place to come from. But the platform that we built over the past really three or four years or so really broadens that set of capabilities from just the xdr, just that stage one, stage two seller into the full cycle. And that's really the mission we've been on is solving the challenges that exist for full cycle sellers. So shifting from just that XDR tool to a platform that solves the entire revenue orchestration life cycle.
Todd Busler [00:05:12]:
Yeah, that makes sense. I think especially in the early days Salesloft were way more pigeon toward that sdr. And now when you look at your site and the capabilities and I'm sure the way you're selling, it's everything, right? It's not just like get into a deal. Mark, one thing I think a lot of leaders that come from bigger company backgrounds struggle with is hey, you don't have the same resources, you don't have the same brain power, you don't have the specificity of each specialist role, helping in every area. How did you have to adapt your learnings, playbook, leadership style to match where Salesloft is, was and is as a business?
Mark Niemiec [00:05:46]:
Yeah. One of the things that I found when I was leaving Salesforce, even my last couple of years there, we had a lot of people and there was an effort to drive more profitability and that meant reducing some of the spans and layers and folks. And one of the things that we learned is that as we remove some of those layers and people and some of those resources, things got better. We were able to solve more problems more quickly. And so I think there's a point at which you need to sort of reorient yourself around what is the mission and who are the people we need to solve that mission. And so coming to Salesloft, it's got its unique balance of it's got a lot of big company infrastructure, but a lot of small company spirit and employees who wear many hats. And that's a thing that I think people really enjoy here is you get to do a lot of different things. And so the balance that we've found is we have a lot of big company infrastructure, have a lot of the deep marketing capabilities and rev ops and sales ops and all the specialists and SES and value engineers that we need, but we don't have too much.
Mark Niemiec [00:06:49]:
And so at this size and stage of company, it's really, really nicely balanced in terms of having folks that are committed to the mission, being able to find the best and smartest folks in the business to take on the mission, and then having a really rewarding culture around celebrating our wins and helping people do things they didn't think was possible in the past. So it's honestly been a welcome, welcome change. I love the size and stage of company and the focus on the mission with a group of folks who really, really love what they do. So honestly haven't found too many sort of gear shifts that we've had to endure. It's been a really, really great transition.
Todd Busler [00:07:24]:
It's interesting. It's like people, I think, get hung up after, like, bigger companies, smaller company. A lot of it's the same stuff, right? Like find really good people, set clear goals, motivate them in the right ways, take care of the customers. So it's kind of refreshing to hear that. I wanted to have you on Mark as an early guest because I was nerding out on a podcast I heard you on talking about kind of this forecasting script and a lot of the rigor you were bringing to deal execution. I'm going to cover that in a little bit. But when you stepped into Salesloft, what were some of the big changes you've had to make in terms of approaching pipe gen and top of funnel? Like, I think for some of us people that study go to market and they're great companies here, like Salesforce, extremely rigorous around pipeline coverage. They've staged conversions.
Todd Busler [00:08:07]:
What changes did you have to make there with regards to top of funnel?
Mark Niemiec [00:08:10]:
Honestly, not a ton. It's this. That's what we do, right? So it's built into the DNA. There's some tweaks we made around getting more AEs to generate more pipeline. It's been sort of a truism of every company I worked for where AE source pipeline is, you know, three, four times more valuable than other sources of pipeline. We have encouraged our sellers to create more pipeline. We've done that by modulating resources. We've also done that by giving them a stronger value prop and a better story and narrative to talk with customers about.
Mark Niemiec [00:08:41]:
One of the things that is one of the blessings of being a category creator, that we are known for what we do. And one of the curses is we're known for what we do and we want customers to know us for other things. And so we had to help shape a new narrative for the company. That was one that was more focused on our platform and solving more full cycle seller challenges. And so that took some training that looks development. It took some creation of new assets and new processes. But that helped our sellers to be able to drive sort of broader messaging appeal to their ICP and so putting them in the position where they're able to tell those stories and create that space to go solve bigger and more challenging problems. It took some effort.
Mark Niemiec [00:09:24]:
We do all the things that folks do around bringing in signals or I should say that I expect most folks are doing around bringing in signals like Champify and ensuring that our sellers know exactly what's happening in the market. We do that and we bring in what we call custom or first party signals where a lot of our enterprise customers have their own data. Maybe it's cross sell upsell data, maybe it's winning patterns, maybe it's end of life or renewal data. And putting those signals in the hands of sellers when you connect them with market facing signals is really powerful. And it helps our sellers to be more efficient and focused and drive more relevant messaging that customers ready to hear. So we made some changes in that way. But by and large the culture of the company is very, very much focused on outbound.
Todd Busler [00:10:07]:
I was listening to interview with another well respected CRO that said something very similar around kind of the quality of AE source pipeline. You know you said 3 or 4x more valuable. Why do you think that is?
Mark Niemiec [00:10:20]:
If somebody's job is to create pipeline, they're going to create pipeline. If somebody's job is to convert pipeline into wins, they're going to focus on creating different types of pipeline. This kind of connects to a thing I say that sometimes that folks think is sort of funny. Sales isn't really a job and folks are surprised to hear that from a sales leader. Sales is a measurement of the job and the job is to solve problems. Salespeople, they go solve problems. Folks who focus on top of funnel, they go create top of funnel. But when salespeople go solve problems, the byproduct of solving those problems is sales.
Mark Niemiec [00:10:52]:
The measurement is sales. And so they're operating at a higher level or higher order of going to find problems that they can solve for their customers versus going to create pipeline. So I think it's a bit of a mindset shift. I think there's obviously a skill set difference in that your full cycle sellers are usually more experienced and know what to focus on. They know not to that they can't waste their time with pipeline. That's not valuable. Or not fully qualified. So I think you'd have a higher bar of excellence from a full cycle seller in terms of what they're willing to work on from a pipeline perspective than somebody whose job is just a great pipeline.
Mark Niemiec [00:11:26]:
So both roles are essential, but I think each source pipeline is going to become more and more valuable, especially as companies look for more efficiency in their growth objectives.
Todd Busler [00:11:36]:
Yeah, 100% agree. I think there was also an interesting nugget that I heard as the CRO of Harness say and he's like, yeah, when you create this culture of AEs generating their own pipeline, you also see the win rate of the other pipeline sources go up because they know how hard it is to get in that opportunity and they're going to treat it with the same level of gold or hand holding needed. Was there a moment early on where you realized like, okay, yes, we have some of the blocking and tackling done, but here's something we really need to level up. I'm very curious about how you went about identifying some of those levers and then saying, okay, here's something I need to go fix in the first n days or end quarters.
Mark Niemiec [00:12:13]:
Back to being a category creator, our go to market was focused mainly on our base product, our base component, which is Cadences. And we, our sellers weren't as comfortable talking about the full platform. And so one of the things that that created was a very sort of narrowly connected, a narrow point of connection with our customers. And that created a durability challenge for us which showed up as a GRR issue. And so one of the things that I noted was that we weren't doing as many, we weren't getting as long term commitments with our customers as I thought we could or should have. The way we solved the problem was by bringing in, we brought in a third party to help us get some perspective on our messaging, which is a wonderful exercise and experience that helped us to reframe our narrative to drive more awareness and more of an enterprise grade story around the six modules that Salesloft brings to market. Once we did that and got that in the hands of our sellers, our sellers were able to solve bigger problems that reached the C-suite. In many cases, that garnered more dollars that required more implementation and change management.
Mark Niemiec [00:13:18]:
When we do all those things, customers are willing to make a longer term commitment because they're driving organizational change. They're not just solving a pipeline problem. So we had to change a little bit in how we show up to the market and show up to our customers. I think about it like One of those ice breaking ships. We had to break some ice to give ourselves some space to operate. When we have that space to operate, we can help our customers solve more valuable problems. That comes with a more long term commitment, higher level executive engagement. It makes us and our revenue more durable.
Mark Niemiec [00:13:46]:
And that's the ultimate measure of this business is you're getting new customers and they're sticking with you for a long period of time. And getting our sellers to embrace that more long term mindset with our customers was a big shift that I thought we had to make and we made some pretty material moves on that over the past 12 months.
Todd Busler [00:14:02]:
It's always interesting, like, you know, I've been a part of many companies in the early stage and you get your first bigger deal and then everyone goes oh, okay, we, we can actually charge this. Or you get your first three year commit and you go okay, this is pretty possible, right? How much of that was like a mindset shift of some of the reps and some of the people that have been around probably much longer when you got there versus enablement storytelling, working with that third party to say hey, it's really about the story and getting this right because it's usually some combo of the two.
Mark Niemiec [00:14:31]:
Well, I think, look, the company already had a good, was on a really good track on building more enterprise grade deals. There was a mentality that those deals were only available to the, what we call enterprise sellers. And that's just, that's not true. What we found, I think our second biggest deal of the year last year in terms of ARR and long term commitment was actually in commercial. It wasn't even in mid market. So it was an enterprise deal and it was a commercial deal. And what we found was that there was a sense of oh, those big deals are only things that enterprise reps do and oh, those long term commitments are really more of an enterprise thing versus a commercial thing. That proved not to be true.
Mark Niemiec [00:15:11]:
So that was a big shift that we had to go through and it was a little bit of confidence. Like once somebody does it for the first time, I would think about the person, the woman who did that deal. Now that's just her default operating mode. Now everything's just that way. And once she broke through that phase, she's able to think differently. And we see that in many, many, many folks. So the company had a really good enterprise DNA. We have, I don't know, 25, 35 multimillion dollar customers.
Mark Niemiec [00:15:36]:
I mean there's a really strong upmarket motion. What I saw an opportunity to do was to make that more consistently available or more consistently executed throughout the commercial and mid market part of the business.
Todd Busler [00:15:50]:
Concretely or tactically, did you have to make any changes to things like comp plans or how you structured payments or anything else there to just get people more focused on it quickly?
Mark Niemiec [00:16:00]:
One thing we did is we brought in some resources that helped our teams up level the way they engage customers. And so we have an amazing sales team, amazing SE and value engineering team. We brought in a couple of folks who were, they sort of play a multivariant role. They're sort of part mathematician, they're part sales engineer, they're part product person, they're part marketing person and they're all communicator. Those folks that we brought in really helped up level our approach. We had one here in the UK and then we brought in two in the US and those three guys really help us to uplevel the approach with which we engage our customers. They help us create a point of view that is unique to solving each customer's challenge. They help us create really compelling visuals and narratives and storyboarding.
Mark Niemiec [00:16:44]:
They help us create, I think you saw some of those videos, we do some of the video content that helps us take a six or 12 month sales cycle and shrink it down into a 90-second video. Those things really help to make sure that we're telling the right story in the right way. And when customers see those assets, when our champions or our coaches see those assets, they're proud and happy to bring them to maybe the economic buyer and get us into a meeting we might not have gotten into. That executive sees the content and the compelling vision we've co created with their team and they say I want that. And when they see it that way, they feel it. It's a visceral sort of response we get. And I learned this. I worked years and years ago for a company that did a lot in real estate development and they would bring these massive, beautiful models into, into the investor's offices, say this is what we're creating.
Mark Niemiec [00:17:32]:
Well, the reality was it was a dirt hole in the ground somewhere. But what you saw when you saw these fly throughs of these, you know, I don't know, 1-816 scale models was you could feel yourself be in this environment. You could see yourself on the street or living in the high rise. And that puts you in the mindset of hey, I want to make that investment. And I worked for a company that had a bunch of architects and designers and folks that would build these Things. That's the mindset we use in creating some of this content. We want the customer, the executive to see themselves and their world different tomorrow than they do today. And that's one of the ways that we help to tell those stories and we help our customers envision the future with us that's different than what they have today.
Todd Busler [00:18:13]:
I love that there seems like there's so much focus on, you know, automation and operational rigor and like in every conversation since the first time I met you. It's like a big element of storytelling, a big element of how do you make this emotional? A big element of like, yeah, how do you enable that champion or coach to want to get you more senior because of how professional you are and how you're telling this bigger story. And I think there's a lot of learnings there for people as the bar gets higher for just getting exec attention, which I think is awesome, for sure.
Mark Niemiec [00:18:42]:
We also did make some comp plan changes, candidly that, you know, we pay for things that we value, right? We pay more for multi year agreements, we pay more for velocity deals, moving deals through the pipeline faster. We now pay our AEs to support our renewals and make sure that all of our customers are successful. Because the mark of any SaaS company is the ability for customers to come back over and over and over again and short term transactions, that's not the business we're in. So we need our sellers, our customer success folks, our engineers, our value engineers and all of our executives focused on helping our customers be successful with our products. And that was a component that we shifted in the comp plan that helped encourage our sellers to make sure the deals where they were selling were durable, that we were solving problems that were valuable and that we maintained that executive level of engagement throughout the life cycle. So that was a shift we made as well.
Todd Busler [00:19:32]:
That shift I continue to see. I think the ones on, you know, Longer Term agreement or Velocity are more straightforward but even now it's much smaller scale. Companies seeing people are like, no AEs are getting involved in these renewals. Like these renewals are so hard that you have to have some of your best people on them sometime. And it's. I think it's overall a good thing. So I'm excited to see that. I know this show is really about cracking outbound top of funnel, but I did have to get you to tell this forecast script story again. Like it was the first thing I've heard in a while where I was like, oh, maybe it's just because I've been the person where you're like, oh, another story, long winded feel. And when I heard you talk about this forecast script, I was like, brilliant. Where has this been for the last 15 years? Can you tell the audience about it and kind of what led you to even get there?
Mark Niemiec [00:20:19]:
I got there in a few different ways. The most simple way to describe it is salespeople are great at their jobs and they love to sell you and love tell you a story. And they also don't want a lot of pressure, right? They want to operate with some freedom and flexibility. And so what I observed in a lot of forecast calls over the years is there's a lot of storytelling that goes on. And so when that storytelling goes on, it makes it really hard to find the facts, to be able to make a decision around what it is that we have to do, to do more of or less of or shift focus on. That sort of candy coating that gets put on top of a narrative is about telling a story. Forecasts aren't about telling stories. They're about facts and data.
Mark Niemiec [00:20:56]:
I started doing this years ago from a. For a totally different reason. I had a sales team that was, you know, they weren't really inspired, they weren't really sort of proud of what they were doing. And it showed up in our forecast call. And so one of the things I asked, I asked one of the reps to do one weekend, I longhand wrote out, like, what would I want a sales rep to say when they were really talking about a forecast that they were proud of? And so one weekend, I long hand wrote it out and I said to one of my best reps, hey, when it's time for the forecast on Monday, insert your numbers where the blank spaces are. But I want you to read it like this. And he said, yeah, sure, no problem, I can do that. And then I thought to myself, well, what would it look like if everybody did the same thing? And so I went to everybody else on the team and said, hey, I'm not telling anybody else about this, but would love you to read this when you put your forecast numbers in here and don't tell anybody else.
Mark Niemiec [00:21:45]:
And so we went around the room. Eight people went around the room. At the end of the first call, I said, like, how do you guys feel? And there was a visceral feeling of pride on the team because people talked in detail about their business and their opportunities, what they were working on and what the challenges were that exist in those accounts. And that set me off on a bit of a Different mindset in terms of thinking about the forecast call. That's where it started. And then, you know, quite simply it got to a place where I missed a few forecast calls and my boss said, hey, could you just send me a manual update? I said, manual update? Okay, sure. So I used my forecast script that I asked my team to do and that became the narrative I used. And then when I got here and at other companies, I got on these forecast calls and I was getting these stories spun to me and I found it very hard to listen to and get hard to get the facts.
Mark Niemiec [00:22:34]:
And so it's a combination of all those experiences. And look, you know, some folks, they have their own way of retelling the narrative, which is great. As long as they get the facts out and it's not candy coated, I'm good with it. But I do love the consistency that it brings and allows me really to listen for the differentials versus trying to find the needle in the haystack. So there's a bunch of different reasons why I do it, but most notably it's about consistency and about keeping focus on the facts so that we can make good decisions.
Todd Busler [00:23:00]:
Probably the first time you ever had some time left in that forecast meeting too, and you're like, oh, finished on time now this is rare. Do you have some similar. Obviously it's different, but a similar framework or version of that that you bring to kind of pipeline oriented meetings that are more around, hey, what did people source this week or the last rolling two months or whatever that is and how do you approach it with the more top of funnel lens.
Mark Niemiec [00:23:25]:
Those calls tend to be much more numbers driven. We do them in partnership with marketing where there are a lot more data underlying those pipe meetings and so there's less rigor in terms of what the narrative is. There is a pre read that we send out in advance of those calls to make sure that our teams are asking the right questions, that they're ready to answer the right questions. We point out where in the data we're seeing some anomalies and we ask folks to show up with some perspective on it. So we're a little less prescriptive there because there's a really, really strong foundation of data in those meetings. But the key, I think to those meetings is consistency in the approach of the data pack that goes out in advance, sending it in advance and then expecting folks to read it in advance and then pointing out for them where we're going to ask some questions and we'd like some color because the data Tells one story. And that's a place where I actually want some context from the sellers or from the leaders to talk about what's really happening in the business. So a little bit less rigorous there because I think there's more of a strong foundation of data in those meetings and marketing is really wired up well with the data here at this company especially. So that's a little bit more of a free form in those conversations.
Todd Busler [00:24:32]:
Mark, I get asked a lot from sales leaders on, okay, we're trying to build the outbound motion, we're trying to add more rigor to this. What's the one or two most important things that we should be kind of hanging our hat on? I have some sales leaders that say it's all about get your two new business meetings per week and things will take care of themselves. Others about a certain pipeline coverage, what's like this? And I'm sure it's different for different segments, but like, is there a singular metric where you're like, this is what matters. Here's what we need to make sure you never miss this two periods in a row. How do you approach it?
Mark Niemiec [00:25:06]:
First of all, it's expectations. And so we're actually going through a reset of expectations internally around pipeline metrics, health stages, meaning moving, moving deals through the stages and ridding ourselves of pipeline. So we look at how much pipeline we're creating. For sure, we have expectations and metrics for each seller and each manager what they're supposed to deliver on a regular basis. But we know that Once pipeline's about 60 days old for us, the chances of closing, it drops off precipitously. We actually focus on creating new pipeline. Everybody has metrics every week for that and we hit those expectations. We also look at what are we getting rid of.
Mark Niemiec [00:25:44]:
Because the most valuable thing we have in our company is the time of our people. And one of the reasons why we modulated some of our XDR resourcing is we were getting a lot of pipeline, but 86, 87% of it was being displaced, closed, lost. And so that's a very expensive pipe for us to adjudicate. Similarly, once a rep sitting on a deal for 60 days, we actually have a conversation about is this a deal we're going to kill or we're going to keep? And that's a management level discussion on removing some of that stale pipe because the numbers tell us that after 60 days the likelihood of closing it is pretty low. Now in the enterprise space and the strategic space, very, very different, those sales cycles are longer and but we still have similar characteristics. Once it gets about 2/4 old, we know that pipe is very unlikely to close.
Todd Busler [00:26:31]:
Yeah, you get those earlier in the career reps that are like, no, no, no. One more meeting one. And you're like staring at the data, showing them. I think a lot of people think about the pipeline coming in and not about, okay, do we want to still spend the cycles on this? And I think that's a great learning that you're sharing with folks.
Mark Niemiec [00:26:50]:
You find that when you walk away, you get a lot of exercise at agency with the customer and account. When you stop chasing, if it's a real deal, they'll call you back, we're pushing, pushing, pushing, and they can feel that energy. There's a real value in valuing your time and saying, when you're ready, we'll be here for you. But we're not going to keep chasing if this isn't something that's right for you. I think there's a learning there for folks as well.
Todd Busler [00:27:13]:
One thing that I really enjoy when I speak with you is there's this rigor. And you can tell you're nerdy and disciplined with the numbers and the operations and know everything associated with the machine of sales, but also have this creative aspect. How do you kind of think about balancing that with, hey, here's the numbers that must be hit, here's the metrics for different parts of the sales cycle, but also some of the creativity with. Some reps do things outside the box and it works well for them and you want to give them the ability to do it. How do you approach that balance?
Mark Niemiec [00:27:44]:
We're all people, we're all individuals. If I could have any job, I'd be an architect, right? Sort of part artist, part sort of engineer. That's kind of how I operate. I think we live in both multiple worlds in terms of where we get nourishment from our intellect and our soul and our creative expectations, our creative hopes. I think sales is very much that way. It's a very rigorous business where you've got targets on a monthly, quarterly basis, but it's a business about helping people solve problems, which is really hard to put your fingers on and, you know, kind of, you know, grip onto if you tried to. It's a business or it's a job where you have to be able to do both. You have to be able to, you know, live in a, under some rigor and expectations. This is the lifeblood that runs any company. The revenue has to come in, it has to continue to grow. And all those things are really important for people to have R&D dollars and all the support functions that run a company and make it great. But in order to do that, you've got to be able to connect with someone, understand their problems, understand the emotional connectivity they have to it, and be able to solve those problems in a way that's credible and convincing and that customers have confidence in. And that's a very soft thing. And so you gotta live in both worlds. There's a real balance to strike.
Mark Niemiec [00:28:52]:
And with our sellers, we don't have a formalized sales process as much as we have a sales scaffolding. And that's there to support folks through the process. One of the gentlemen who runs this part of this business for us talks to the reps about, hey, everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth, right? He uses that Mike Tyson quote. And he said, look, the sales scaffolding is there to help you get up when you get knocked down. But you're going to have to, you know, you're going to have to fight this fight with the best way you know how. And that also is how our product works, right? That is built into the fundamental, you know, sort of product philosophy of the business. When we were a Cadence's business. Cadence are very rigid. This will happen in this order.
Mark Niemiec [00:29:31]:
When we move to a dynamic platform environment with rhythm, those journeys become dynamic. And so I think that acknowledges some of the changes that have happened in the industry. We have both the rigidity of the system and the analysis and the data to tell us what should happen. And then we have the flexibility in terms of how it's applied based on what's happening in the market, what's happening with the buyer and what's happening with the seller. And those two things have to live in harmony together. And I think that's part of our ethos as a company and the product we bring to market. It's also the reality of how this business works. In my experience.
Todd Busler [00:30:01]:
I like that scaffolding. I've never heard that. It's not a treasure map. It's like a guide, right? And no deal is ever perfectly linear. Like, so I think that framing is really important. Mark, I want to go back to the. You know, when I first met you, you showed me these kind of lifelike, succinct commercials. You talked about the benefits of trying to, A, shorten deal cycles and B, getting more senior in organizations.
Todd Busler [00:30:24]:
I found when you add new resources or new plays that you can run, you have this, like, excitement around it. But also you have a resourcing constraint. So how do you approach, like, okay, where do we want to divert some of these resources that we know will help us, but we only have so many people. How did you approach that?
Mark Niemiec [00:30:42]:
Yeah, so in the first couple of months I got here, our CEO at the time wanted us to build a strategic accounts organization. And so we did. We built a small team that was focused on, you know, some of the largest customers and opportunities out there. And one of the things I knew from my past is we needed to up level our skills from a design, a workshop and facilitation, a vision, setting, perspective. And so I brought in an old colleague who had done some of this work previously with us, and so brought him in with the intention of having him help us on the strategic accounts part of the business. And after about a month, folks started seeing some of the content he was producing. And the slides looked a little different, and the stories looked a little bit more compelling and crisp and rich. The positioning of the platform became more essential to the themes that we were sharing with our customers.
Mark Niemiec [00:31:29]:
And more folks around the organization started asking for the same help. And he quickly got overrun. And he said, hey, man, I'm happy to keep doing this, but I need help. And so we went and hired another gentleman who came from the same group and brought in another gentleman who was already here in the uk. And the three of them together created this sort of triumvirate of deal support, of narrative and storytelling, of deep analysis of business cases, and again, bringing together that storytelling with the business case, the art and the science, and making those two things connect for customers. That was one of the big changes we made when I got here to help up level and tell those stories. One of the outputs or byproducts of that is when we had a sales team who said, look, man, we've done all this work and there's no way our competition could have done as much work as we've done. What I heard in my mind when she said that to me, the sales engineer said that, I thought about that Mark Twain quote, well, if you've got all this time and all this content, could you write it in a really short letter? And so what we did is we took her nine months of experience, of notes, of workshops, of facilitated sessions, and we shrunk it down into the most succinct three slides we could.
Mark Niemiec [00:32:38]:
And it was probably the richest set of three slides I ever saw. And then we use that as our foundation to go tell that story in a really high fidelity way. So we created a video that tells our narrative and what problem we're trying to solve with the customer. Got a lot of their own language and quotes in there so that when we shared it with the customer, with our champions and our coaches, they felt that it was their story that was brought to life in the video. And they helped us get to the CEO, eventually the board chair, and closed one of the largest transactions in company history because we were able to have that narrative ready to go when we got to the C-suite. And when we did, the CEO saw it and he said, where do I sign up for this? And I think that's the first video I showed you. And so we do that selectively. We'll do it in some larger pursuits, we'll do it in some commercial pursuits as well, but we do it where we think we have an opportunity to really tell a crisp and compelling story at the C-level.
Todd Busler [00:33:27]:
Last theme I want to dive into, Mark, is I've seen you write about and on other podcasts about kind of the importance of understanding your customer, being able to like, put yourself in their shoes, understand, you know, what does a really strong point of view or hypothesis look like? How do you go about enabling the field to do that?
Mark Niemiec [00:33:44]:
I guess this goes back to when I was a kid. My father would say to me, if you're a salesperson, you got to know your product better than anybody else could know it. And when you're engaging or talking to customers, you got to know them better than themselves. That'll allow you to connect to some of the challenges they have and position yourself as a, as a problem solver. And so deep account customer research is really important to be able to show up as a thoughtful partner to your customer. We talk about, you know, getting to be trusted or a trusted advisor. I think those things are byproducts of helping customers solve problems. If you solve somebody's problem enough times, eventually they're gonna come back and say, these guys can be really, really helpful.
Mark Niemiec [00:34:19]:
So I think that time to trust is important, but in doing that or getting there, it's about solving customers problems so that you can bring value. And when you bring value, they're gonna trust that you're able to bring more value. Building that customer trust is really important. And by knowing their business, knowing their problems, knowing their challenges, and framing your hypothesis as a, as a question, hey, we think this is something that may help you solve one of those top three executive level challenges that you've talked about in earnings calls. And oftentimes we're wrong. And that's great. And we say, hey, where do we get it right? Where do we get it wrong? And when the customer puts their fingerprints on it, we find that we co create that vision together. And that's where a lot of the winning happens for us.
Todd Busler [00:35:03]:
There's so much gold here, Mark. I think there's some subtle things you say that I'm pulling out of the conversation. First thing on just like bringing in specialty talent.
Todd Busler [00:35:11]:
Right, you mentioned these people that are like part mathematician, part artists, right? And the impact that can have, I think the mindset transition of sellers, of like selling is the scoreboard, but you're the problem solver and giving them the guide or the scaffolding to kind of make a deal happen. Same thing on the creativity and emotion. I think that gets overlooked today where it's all around numbers and AI and automation. It's like actually that stuff matters a ton and it's awesome to hear or see that success playing out in real life and then just the rigor around things like forecast scripts and aging pipeline and being really diligent. What advice would you have for people that have come from larger organizations that are maybe going to a more startup upstart in terms of hey, this is what you need to do to be successful, or here's some of the common areas, you might run into some traps. What advice would you have?
Mark Niemiec [00:36:01]:
I had a mentor who I worked for about 20 years ago. He sort of taught me this by doing it. He was always willing to roll up his sleeves. He was a very senior executive. I worked for him in a bit of a skip level job. And no matter what was going on, he was always willing to hop in the boat with us and roll up his sleeves and go talk to customers, go get involved in support issues. And so being willing to roll up your sleeves and asking folks to do things that you would do yourself and not just saying it, but truly doing it, that is something that I think folks maybe when they get to a certain level, they might overlook or they might think they don't need to do that or that's something that other folks do. Going to a smaller company, I think that's absolutely essential.
Mark Niemiec [00:36:40]:
Being willing to do that and then being willing and able to dispense with previously understood convention. Just because it worked there doesn't mean it's going to work here. There are things you'll learn and take with you from place to place. But a lot of this stuff is cultural. Even the greatest ideas, the greatest mechanisms, processes, what have you won't work from one company to the next because the culture isn't there to support it. So take some time to understand the culture and where you are. Because every culture is different and the way they accept ideas, share ideas, you know, criticize ideas and collaborate is different and that can sometimes mean the difference between success and failure in an objective. So I think I'd spend some time understanding the culture and just be willing to get involved in any level of the company.
Mark Niemiec [00:37:21]:
Love it.
Todd Busler [00:37:21]:
Mark, I think we owe your wife a big thank you for getting you expose this opportunity and you've been a wealth of learning for me. So I appreciate you taking some time out of your busy day. I'm rooting for you and really appreciate the time.
Mark Niemiec [00:37:33]:
Awesome. Thanks so much.
Todd Busler [00:37:34]:
All right, see you Mark.
Todd Busler [00:37:57]:
Thanks for listening to Cracking Outbound. If this was helpful, let us know by messaging me Todd Bustler on LinkedIn and share this episode with a friend that you think will be interested. If you want more resources about building and scaling all things outbound, you can sign up for our newsletter at champify.io/blog.