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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.
Liam Mulcahy (00:00):
Most founders have been exceptional kind of their whole life at different things, and they're not used to just getting an F, like an outright like, Hey, this was completely wrong. But it is something that you need to get comfortable with very fast if you're going to build a company in today's environment because the only guarantee and constant is change and having to be very adaptable and nimble and react to stuff.
Todd Busler (00:26):
Everyone wants to build stronger pipeline, but only a few know how to make it happen. If you're listening to this show, 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 Busler and on this show we're breaking down the plays, processes and frameworks behind Repeatable Pipeline growth straight from the people who've built it. Let's get into it. This is one of my favorite episodes I've done. We've done like 20 plus episodes since we started this podcast, and a lot have similar themes, right? You have sales leaders or enablement people. Today our guest is Liam Mulcahy. I worked with Liam at Unusual Ventures where we helped early stage founders figure out go-to-market. He's now gone on to be a operating partner at Kleiner Perkins and he has the unique opportunity to work with some of the fastest growing companies in the world, many of which you've heard of today. He shares common learnings he sees across these portfolio companies advice he finds himself giving to founders over and over again, and also how you would approach the job market if you're an elite seller or manager or aspiring CRO in this uncertainty that we're all in with AI. I'm confident you're going to enjoy this. Please share and share with some friends and DM me on LinkedIn with any feedback. Enjoy. Liam. What's up, brother?
Liam Mulcahy (01:52):
What's up, doug?
Todd Busler (01:54):
I'm pumped for this. I was saying before we hit record that a lot of these podcasts, while they're very valuable, a lot of the same themes are covered and this one will be dramatically different and I think super relevant for any ICS new leaders thinking about AI and where good sales talent fits into all that. So maybe Liam, just a quick intro on yourself to set the context and we'll hop right into it.
Liam Mulcahy (02:21):
Sure. So I'm an operating partner at Kleiner Perkins. I've been here for four years. Before this, I was lucky enough to work at Unusual Ventures where you and I got to work together on the go-to-market team there. Seed Stage Fund was kind of the first go-to-market person in about 30 companies in three years and what feels like a lifetime ago, I was at MongoDB, one of the top managers is one of the top reps pre and post IPO and what truly was a lifetime ago, I used to write commercials for a while.
Todd Busler (02:52):
Yeah, I had an awesome time working with you at Unusual. I mainly took that job to go work with you, just I was like, okay, you saw a different stage at Mongo and I feel like I started to master really figure out the early stage stuff and I was like, okay, I'm going to learn a lot from your vantage point every conversation and even still today, I just learn a ton from you. So I would love to hear how you think about picking companies to join right now, where you want to go invest the next 2, 3, 4, 5 years of your career. And I'm sure a lot of people ask you that. So what do you think?
Liam Mulcahy (03:27):
Yeah, let's set the stage about, let's assume that we're talking to somebody who's been in sales, they're looking for a leadership role or an IC role, they're interested in early stage and we can say that's any company before 50 million of revenue, which I'd still say is early stage, some outliers taken away and they're trying to understand where do I place my bet? Because there's a lot of frost, there's a lot of celebrating, there's a lot of fog or fog of war in the AI era that we're in today. So to me, I think the biggest thing you have to decide first and be really introspective with yourself is what is it about early stage company building that attracts you the most and what have you done so far in your career that gives you existence proof? You'd be very good where it's the most chaotic and the most unsure.
(04:17):
So to me, you almost have the early stage bug or you don't. It's kind of a rare individual that wants to be in a place where more things change and they stay the same. More things are undefined or unknown than known, and a lot of your own enablement and success is going to depend upon you being a self-starter. So you mentioned working with me at Unusual. The reason I thought it was so cool to bring you into the firm is I think about people's careers based on where they're excellent at creating revenue. And you could define one career as bureau to 10 million. Those are true pioneers. Cutting through the jungle type salespeople usually deal junkie is more art than science. Let's define the next leg as 10 million to 50 million, right? That's people that are also like to be swashbuckling, pretty high risk tolerance. Maybe they've seen excellence but they like it to be a little bit more of a machine and then 50 to a hundred million, which is kind of today where I'd say early stage ends is like, Hey, I'm ready to be there, but I kind of want to scale it.
(05:18):
I'm willing to work just as hard, but I like it to be a little bit more of something that's known but now needs to be larger and maybe go international or go up market. So I think you need to be very honest with yourself. What phase are you great at today? What have you already seen? And if you want to go to a new phase, whether it's before or after a certain milestone, what do you not know and how do you know that you have a chance to survive and thrive? That's just one. Look at the chapters of the book of where you want to go. Now if you're looking at individual companies, I've said this on other mediums and I do believe it, I would try to offload some of the risks. The people whose full-time job is to pick potential market winners and that's what they get paid to do and that's how they've made a career.
(05:59):
So you can go out and look at venture firms who tend to focus on one of those three stages of companies when they place their bet, call it a, B or C, and then look for individual investors too whose portfolio kind of speaks to you with companies and products that you would want to sell. That's a pretty good way to de-risk some of that decision making to someone who's supposed to be an expert in company picking. I think it's unrealistic for any given salesperson or sales leader to also be a perfect picker. So try to get some more data in there via investors. You could look at their portfolio or you can connect with them directly and then if you're already, you've done that, now you're talking to an individual company. If you're in sales in any capacity, I think you really need to understand what is the future of sales at this company?
(06:42):
Is it going to be mission critical to revenue? Is it only critical for certain types of revenue? How much do we need that certain type of revenue to grow over time? Does the founder believe that sales will important or were they taught that it's important or do they just not believe you're going to find all types? It's all just data to make a decision and how you can premortem an opportunity if you will, like, okay, this person used to come from a company where a sales team was excellent and they believe in sales. This is the first time founder who's now being told by advisors and investors, they need to build a sales team. Or this is a founder who's only been at companies where sales teams kind of have not mattered and they want to carry that forward. Just know the battle you'll have to fight and how they're going to view your importance to the company.
(07:25):
And then if you're maybe the finest green level and you're talking to individual sellers and maybe you've signed an NDA and you have access to data, I think one of the biggest pieces of competitive differentiation for an AI company is not necessarily a product feature. It's like a signed contract, a RR and revenue is coming in a bunch of different avenues. Nowadays you have million dollar POVs, half a million dollar POVs, you have people paying you for four months of work leading to a potential deal. Do you book that as a deal? Is it still just like one-time revenue? You have Sumer companies that are getting to hundreds of millions of revenue off of credit card users who could go away tomorrow. So I think to me, no matter the revenue amount of a company you're considering, I would feel free to ask as a candidate as long as again, you're legally protected, what percent is under contract and does that matter?
(08:24):
And to me, if you look at some companies that have gotten to hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue without a sales team and now they're hiring a sales team, that's almost like oxymoronic to me, right? Because in the past you'd be like, oh my God, just don't hire them. I can't believe you got there without them. The reason I truly believe they're doing that is because they understand the founding team and the board that one of the best pieces of competitive differentiation you can have is a signed contract multi-year agreement for a company to use your product as opposed to someone that's paying you $50 million today but has no contractual obligation to do that again next year. So sales will be important. The importance varies with different types of founders, different types of companies, and at different stages. And that's the data I think you want to go uncover.
Todd Busler (09:11):
Alright, if you can get to a couple million in ARR, you have decent NRR and you have some way of quoted OT ratio, you can kind of scale this thing. There's really no proof for the investors on the AI companies. There's some early proof, but there's not that much yet. So what would be your advice there?
Liam Mulcahy (09:27):
In terms of how do you know if I'm looking at somebody's portfolio, what a true potential market winner is?
Todd Busler (09:32):
For sure. Yeah, because again, if you were betting on a SaaS company in 2016, it was like, look what they did the five years before, but now it's kind of all new.
Liam Mulcahy (09:42):
Yeah, I think one, to put an asterisk on it, I'm not an investor, nor do I play one on podcast or tv, but if I look at this from an operator's lens, some of what's new is old in the sense that if you're going to bet on early stage companies, you're always going to have pretty low quality data to understand if you're in a company that can win a market or if there's even a big market to be won, it is a bet in the truest sense. But there's two things that I think have really shifted to paradigm recently. So I was reading a piece the other day, an incredible piece where it was saying to have a good IPO in today's market, let's just define good as above your strike price. Nine months out when you and I came up in SaaS, it was always stamped in your brain, the march to a hundred million makes you a viable public company and then it kind of creeped up to like 200 million.
(10:31):
Today it's 800 million of revenue growing 40% year over year with an opportunity to hit a billion dollars of revenue within 12 months of your IPO regardless of where your revenue is by the time you go out. So what happens as a result of that is I think there's a mentality of salespeople that's still a bit antiquated where you feel like you missed the bus if you joined a company once, if they've surpassed a hundred million a RR, and I just fundamentally don't think that's true anymore. So I think you could still have some asymmetry and big upside with your equity even if you join the right company at 250 million or 400 million because what has to be true in these markets today is companies are going to get bigger than they ever have been before. Let's acknowledge that the continuum has been stretched pretty long because even if you join philanthropic at 183 billion, the bet you're making even as insane as it sounds is that you want to be there from 183 billion to a trillion.
(11:33):
And again, that sounds comical, but it's very much probably what's going to happen or what a lot of people are planning on happening. So if you move that back now, what do you know or how do you know if a company's working when you're at the very beginning of their journey? To me, a couple of things always end up happening that rhyme across most companies. One is the market just starts to pull the product. It's not always the use case that's going to be the longest and the most durable, but some part of the market is pulling you towards it because you're solving something or introducing something they've been desperate for or saw for the first time and now desperately want to use. So it's pretty rare and it can happen sometimes instantaneously. It can happen sometimes after a year, but if it's 18 months and there's zero evidence of market pull, which you could measure by new logos or revenue or anything else, it's not a death Mel.
(12:22):
But in today's market, it's usually not the pattern that a market leader has in the beginning. So one is there's some sort of market pull two, the team has usually gone through the idea maze that some new feature released by an LLM company or by a SaaS incumbent or by some YC cohort isn't going to completely remediate this idea. So there has to be some sort of competitive differentiation with the way you distribute or go-to-market or the technical ability of the products. That's another area that I think salespeople don't press on enough is just asking founders heads of sales reps at companies, what is your actual technical differentiation today it's ephemeral. It's never been easier to get to product parody, but they should have a very strong opinion on why they are the best at a certain thing that a certain part of the market wants.
(13:13):
A yellow flag to me is when it's an every problem. We're the best at everything for everyone. That's a mentality to me where someone has not been kicked in the teeth yet by the realities of trying to sell a product in the market. So one is just like market poll Two is like have they thought about their own version of defensibility and differentiation? And then the third is probably just look at the caliber of the people on the team. So take investors out maybe by a founder or bootstrap or something if they're just getting a lot of people that have seen excellence in their past to come here, you're also able to offload some of your decision-making to people that are also great at something. Could be what you do. It could be marketing, could be engineering. I have learned from one of our own investors is just like, would you bet on this team regardless of the idea they're going to pursue the team, the whole team, not just the two founders, but everybody they've put in the boat so far, would you just back them regardless of what idea they were pursuing? That's almost what I would look for if I was trying to interview at a company once. I've already done a bit of the diligence on market and who's funded them and defensibility and all that other stuff.
Todd Busler (14:25):
And there's a lot of gold there, Liam, a lot there. One point I want to dig into a little bit is around does the founder believe sales is important, right? I'm curious how you think about that, right? Because if you look at Mongo is like a legendary sales organization, obviously product and pull and ENG velocity, all of that and timing, but it was a legendary go-to-market team and look at many of those people like yourself that are off doing big things. How do you think about that if you're a rep or you're coming in a sales leadership position, because there are a lot of founders that do think I have to hire salespeople. Yes, the board is pushing me to do this. That's very different than them appreciating and taking it seriously. So how would you approach that or what advice do you have?
Liam Mulcahy (15:13):
Yeah, one is you could probably just go to a LinkedIn of any company and understand based on their current team, if they've needed salespeople or if they think they need salespeople, they'll be called new things today. Right now it's go-to-market or customer engineer or AI strategist, whatever the new synonym is, but it's salespeople with quotas under the hood. So one, have they hired anybody to date? Two, if you look at the distribution model of the company today, if there's a pro Sumer aspect to any product lovable rep at Innate Clay, then I think you need to be even more scrutinous as to like, well, what would a sales team do here? How would you sell this product to a company and how would you have a business case and a value prop and tie it to some strategic initiative if there's hundreds of thousands or millions of people just using it for whatever on a credit card, maybe like a Figma versus Canva type scenario, right?
(16:06):
Similar products in some ways with different audiences and another, if the product sells itself, that's another way to look at prosumer. Then sales I think goes already at a bit of a disadvantage because then the founders and the founding team and the board can get existence proof that like, well, we've created all this revenue without this type of person on the team. So what did they bring? Products that don't naturally sell themselves they think are always a great place for salespeople to go spend time, and that tends to be in a lot of infrastructure companies. It's not a mistake that a lot of great sales careers have been built off the back of selling infrastructure products because it's a little bit heavier of a lift. There's an install path. You got to convince people to change stuff. You can't just try and buy on your own as an engineer.
(16:48):
There's a little bit more involved in terms of getting that thing up and running and actualizing the value of a product. And I think salespeople do well there and they also usually command a higher ticket price. So I think anybody that wants to have a larger ECV today, let's define that as over 78 K, then you probably are going to have to have a salesperson involved to be simply just because of human psychology. It's pretty rare that people want to just yell at robots if shit goes wrong and they're paying you six or six or seven figures, they usually just want to know there's a human that they can hold accountable on the other end of the line. And that's also typically how most people make gigantic purchase decisions is by talking to another human. I ask people all the time, what's the largest purchase you have ever made or ever will make where there's no human involved today?
(17:35):
Most of the time it's a car, especially with direct for Rivian and Teslas and stuff, but most people are not buying a house without talking to somebody. And maybe for companies, the biggest thing they would spend on without talking to someone's like an AWS though, but even eventually they want someone to call if things don't work. Or even now with LLMs, if you're trying to get some of the constraints loosened with how you consume, guess what you probably want to talk to a human being. You don't just want to be hidden a community Slack channel or a deck of gun or a Sierra bot or something. One is just what is the existence proof, what's the distribution model? And then you have to talk to the founder at this point to uncover this. You can't do it with a sales leader you're interviewing with or a sales team, but the best way for a founder to believe that sales is important is to have gone through founder selling themselves and seen combat.
(18:24):
I think the best way to develop an empathetic view for anybody's job is to have to do their job for a little bit, and it's like, whoa, that's way harder than I thought. So a retort I hear all the time that does give me the warm and fuzzies is any founder in the portfolio that's had to do founder-led sales always says, wow, this is harder than I thought. It was like sales is more of an art than I thought, and I think that's a totally fair assessment and default state because I think unless you've been in a sales role, you don't appreciate that it's an actual craft and that you can get good at. A musician can become great at playing an instrument. They look at it as a very simplistic thing, and I think a lot of salespeople have given us that reputation because there's only a certain percentage of the market that's really exceptional at the craft.
(19:09):
So I don't hold it against founders if they don't think sales is important, but do they have the mental plasticity to understand that in some ways, all these businesses or org charts are kind of net new. After Chachi BT was released and what's the AI version of an org chart? But in some ways businesses have also been optimized to the hilt man. People have been buying software for 50 years. There's been sales teams for 50 years. There's going to be sales teams for the next, at least 10 years, five years, they're going to look different, but they will be there. So I wouldn't try to reinvent the ways that products get bought and sold. Just focus on your actual differentiation and know that a sales team is going to play a factor into here at some part.
Todd Busler (19:49):
Hey, listeners, interrupting the podcast for a quick 20 seconds for a Champify plug. If you've been getting value from our content via webinars podcast stuff I write on LinkedIn, I hope you understand that we think about and take pipeline generation very seriously. If you're listening to this podcast, it means you care about figuring out outbound, figuring out how to be more creative to prospect into your top accounts and win more revenue. At Champify, what we do is turn your entire company's existing relationships into new revenue. Champify's AI finds your highest converting revenue opportunities from former customers at new companies to previously lost deals ready for a re-engagement and turns them into repeatable pipeline engine at scale, all within your existing workflows and low learning curve, which means high adoption. We're generating 20% of pipeline for companies like S&P Global and working with some of the largest, fastest growing B2B orgs in the world. If you're interested in what we do, we have a compelling offer for people that are listening to this podcast. We'll go through a data test, we'll go through a closed lost audit, and we'll show you the potential pipeline opportunities you have within your existing systems, email sales@champify.io and mention this podcast and we'll present you with a compelling offer. Enjoy the rest of the show.
(21:06):
It must feel good for you when you get that founder to turn the corner technical founder that was like, oh, sales, yeah, I can just hire whoever. And then they have to do it, and you're like, yes, now you feel it.
Liam Mulcahy (21:16):
Now you see it. That's also how I think incredible founders can truly become CEOs. If you're a ceo O, you have to be exceptional at a lot of things, but two of those are definitely getting revenue when and how you need it and recruiting, and that's a lot of what sales leaders and ICS do, and it's also founders are learning machines. Dude, they may be the most impressive learning machines on earth, and they've already had to go through a four year, six year, seven year degree to be excellent at what they do. CS or anything else. Teaching themselves is much harder to learn what you already know. There's a reason that a lot of sales playbooks are on laminated sheets of paper with very simple diagrams. So if founders embrace that, I find that they could become the Terminator because they've already had the kernel of the idea of the product.
(22:05):
They built the product, and now they can command a room of executives and sell the product really well. That's what I think a lot of the more famous founders on Earth can do is they balance the boat with both technical innovation, seeing a future that doesn't exist and creating it and being able to sell and commercialize that future along the way. Those are what exceptional CEOs do, and I think it's important regardless of what the business is, you could be Nvidia and you could basically have six customers kind of, which is insane. Or you could be Apple and have 2 billion customers, but I'd say that Jensen and Tim are also both just really good salespeople, period. So it kind of doesn't matter what you're selling.
Todd Busler (22:45):
Yeah, the learning machine is something that stands out to me, the most impressive founders I've worked with or know that's it, right? They can learn anything quickly, and you're right, they're coming from a place of they know how to learn quickly and don't have bad habits. So it's a very good combo
Liam Mulcahy (23:04):
And good instincts. A lot of the best founders I've seen that could do founder-led sales really well, they're unknowingly doing parts of the sales playbook. Now, they're not going to say like, oh, this is a great two-sided discovery question, or I'm making this person into a champion. That's just what we put on it to make it understandable and have a common language, but they do it kind of innately. And the way that I try to introduce concepts like the three why's or Med Pick or anything is like this is just like a coding language, but for revenue. So it's just an organizing principle of getting people to want to buy what we have to solve, problems they need to solve for a certain amount on a certain date. So the same way you could be really, maybe you prefer Rust or Java or no J whatever, med Pick to me is just a coding language for revenue, and I think if you try to go the extra 10 feet to explain it, the founders, they not only embrace it, but they become exceptional at it.
Todd Busler (24:02):
Love it. Liam, next topic I want to talk about was you work really closely with some truly breakout organizations, Harvey Glean, windsurf. There's a lot of top notch organizations that you've been a very close part of. What are some of the best companies in the KP portfolio doing differently when it comes to pure go-to-market execution?
Liam Mulcahy (24:27):
That's a great question. I will endeavor to try to talk about. If I think about a lot of the portfolio companies we have, what's the one center Venn diagram of what makes their go-to-market teams very good, and I'm still going to anchor that into the early stage. So the teams at rippling and Figma are fantastic, but they're at a later stage of their journey now and even were when I started at kp. So the companies I've had exposure to and have helped build at the early stage in no specific order, this is my own belief, so asterisk it, but in today's market, I think Mindshare is equally as important as Share Wallet for a short amount of time. So I think when I look at teams that have been able to create a new category or be the first or a very fast second into a market that's brand new, they will hire a go-to-market team, whether it's salespeople or whether it's marketing teams that just incept the market with what they do and how that fits into their workflow, and they do it violently and usually with taste.
(25:25):
So it could be the reason why people, anybody in the industry will say, oh yeah, I know Harvey, or Yeah, I've heard of Glean or oh profound or oh traversal or that is goal number one is just be known and be able for people who do not work at your company who've only heard about you casually to tell some other person who doesn't know you what you do in two sentences. So to me, I think one of the early transitions these teams have done well is they capture their value proposition and what they do and two pithy sentences and it allows people to just plot them in their mind of, is this tool for me? Is it not for me? Who's the tool for what do they do with it and what's new about it? That's the first battle to go win and it can feel very squishy, especially with pretty quantitative founders that only want to see the world through code or revenue, which I get.
(26:15):
But this is the beauty of incredible marketing teams and all the companies you've mentioned have incredible marketing teams and did from the beginning, product marketing, demand gen events doesn't matter. I just see it as this mission along with salespeople to go evangelize a new way of doing something and incept the market with that new way in a very simple but effective manner. It seems pedantic, but it's actually really hard to boil your company's value proposition down to two sentences where almost anybody can understand it. So I think that's maybe a commonality of all those companies. Another one is at the founder level, the leadership level, and then at the individual contributor level, they're comfortable making decisions with data that's not the highest fidelity. So they do not wait to have perfect data to make a decision. They're okay placing bets that are reversible based off of middling confidence and then just course correcting instantly if they were wrong.
(27:16):
That is a muscle that I find I have to strengthen and break in and rebuild. And a lot of companies, even at the rep level or the founder level, it doesn't matter. You could take a rep who's seen a lot of success, put them in the earliest stage they've ever been, and it's just like, yeah, you're just going to have to screw this up a few times, but it is way more important for you just to go and do a bad discovery call and not get the value prop and probably price this thing wrong. But the failure mode is to just stop and think too much. And at the founder level, the way that manifests is like, well, do we hire a sales leader now? Do we hire a marketer? Should we expand the product we've only hired in New York? Do we go international? Now we need to debate these things, especially depending upon how reversible or reversible they are, but for a very short amount of time and then we just need to pick a decision and just go.
(28:03):
And if it's wrong, we slam the emergency brake Digest live was wrong and pick a new direction. But the failure mode that I see all the time is analysis paralysis or field the dreams mentality. Well, once we have this one product feature, then all of a sudden the flood gates are going to open up. Dude, maybe the way this manifests the most to me, I'm looking at an office right now, I'm trying to normalize taking discovery calls in the row. Again, there's this culture that I understand why it's manifested primarily probably out of COVID where all sales reps almost regardless of seniority has to be in a booth or it has to be in a conference room to have a discovery call. When you and I came up to highlight the gray hair that I have now, everybody used to just take calls in the row, and to me it's just a confidence thing and it's just like, Hey, you're going to suck, but the way you're going to get better at this and how do you compound your learnings faster is to publicly take a call and then have maybe someone who's better at a certain part of a deal next to you go like, Hey, this thing was that and here's the way I do it.
(29:06):
And you're like, shit, you're right. I'm going to do that next time. That's how I learned. The observer effect is really important, and it's really hard just solicit feedback if you're in a padded phone booth. So I'm also trying to get people comfortable with just screwing up and being wrong and looking dumb and making mistakes from the rep level all the way to the founder level because the key is we just have to move. And I got this advice from Ilia at KP where he was talking to me about how I do my own job and he was like, I don't need you to help founders make perfect decisions. That's actually a failure mode. I need you to help founders make more decisions faster and then just admit when we're wrong and then run that cycle over again in another direction.
Todd Busler (29:47):
How do you think that has changed as you're working closely with some of these super high flyers?
Liam Mulcahy (29:52):
When I was selling MongoDB for example, we add competitive differentiation in a few ways, but a thing we used to say all the time was, Hey, if somebody else tried to come out and build a NoSQL database to copy us, it would take them like five years and half a billion dollars. How long it took us to do that, and back then there was a lot of credence to that today you could take any company almost, and there's been compression in terms of the amount of money and time it takes to get to feature parody. So what does that mean? Your competitive differentiation is ephemeral, so how does that change the playbook? Most of the time the advice managers would give is like you're over here trying to do a deal on comparative and holistic differentiators. When you need to focus on competitives, I think you're going to have to do more deals on comparatives, which then puts more of a burden on a salesperson to be excellent enough to craft because you can't hide behind some one, two unique competitive features that nobody else has.
(30:45):
It puts more pressure on you to be truly excellent building champions, doing discovery, tying to big problems and all of that, and acknowledging that the landscapes never shifted this quickly and therefore we have to be even more audible ready. But that's an example of the playbook that's remained the same and then has actually gotten more important is the concept of being audible ready, responding to competitors or different scenarios or strategic initiatives. And maybe I'll leave you this and you could take it where you want. The one piece of the playbook that I think is still universally true, this is, again, this is how I look at it. I don't think this is enforce management's documents or anything is that it just assumes the reps are wrong. When I used to go into QBR is when I go into q bs today in the portfolio, I just assume that every deal I'm about to hear is unqualified, and it's not meant to be mean or macho come across as macho or a hardo.
(31:38):
It's just like, I don't believe any of this stuff's qualified. I'm going to take a pessimistic view of the world and by using this operating language, med pick whatever you want, ban, I don't care spiced. If you show me enough evidence via the customer that it is qualified, well now you have the full resources of the company and potentially the board behind you to go close it, but it is a positive pessimistic view of the world. And most companies and reps that end up having bad quarters or bad years, the constant is they're always getting surprised. Oh, that actually wasn't the eb. Oh, I thought they could sign, oh, I thought the budget was allocated. Oh, I thought this was mission critical. Oh, there's all these surprises and what med pick and spice and all that stuff make you do is just never be surprised. So you're constantly almost trying to kill your deals and throw what if scenarios at people, and that's one of the best ways to build a champion is like, well, what if the EB comes back and says that they don't care about this or they want to go as a competitor? So I think the thing that's always remained is assume that it is done Fal side and let the process prove to you that it is not just the rep's belief in their own ability or viewpoint of the deal.
Todd Busler (32:51):
The first point you brought up, I think I couldn't agree with more. Almost every, we sell to sales teams, most of our customers, we know the competitive landscape. A lot of our prospects we're talking about why they're winning deals competitively and almost everyone across the board is like it's getting a lot harder to influence the required capabilities when the required capabilities are either a yet to be defined or look extremely similar to the competition. And I think the way you sell matters way more now, and I think that's going to continue to be true.
Liam Mulcahy (33:21):
Maybe this is a unique way to say it, but the world, I think we came up in from the say 2014 to 21 I think was more value selling and then insert any book on value selling today's market I think is way more challenger sales, and that to me is actually a bit of a harder sales solution because you're educating and kind of debating and selling at the same time as opposed to aligning a very unique thing that you do with a unique problem that somebody has. Obviously there's commonalities in both, but I would default most people, founders, reps, leaders, CROs, to more of a challenger sale mentality today just because of how new everything is with AI first companies or AI enabled companies, you're creating a lot of budgets. You're taking away a lot of budgets, you're introducing a lot of new pricing models, which comes with its own headache and baggage from the past. So there's a lot more on the salesperson to be great at things like the challenger sale and building champions and not getting surprised and deeply qualifying and multi-threading than in the past where it could just be like, yeah, we're the only horse in town and we do this one thing better than everybody and that gives us pricing power. I just think that is less common and will be less common going forward.
Todd Busler (34:36):
A hundred percent. Alright, last topic here for the last couple minutes, Liam, this is awesome, is around coaching patterns. So what are some of the most common but fixable kind of go-to-market sales problems you're seeing?
Liam Mulcahy (34:49):
After this recording? What I'm going to go jump into is a company who I think is pretty emblematic of an org chart today. They've hired 15 salespeople. They have varying degrees of skill and background, but they're all just salespeople. So anybody can sell any deal, they're just the sales team. But now revenue's getting to a point and where we need to start to introduce a segmented team, some sort of mid-market or strategic or enterprise, well, you call it again, I don't care, but there's basically just different types of sophisticated drafts or different types of sophisticated deals and we have to have a territory based view of the world. It can't just be completely round robin or whoever's knocking at the door or random outbound occurring that happens. I think that should happen earlier in companies. Always a question I'll ask a founder that we may be potentially looking to invest in, and I ask this to be helpful not to try to, it's not a gotcha.
(35:42):
It's just like, Hey, if you hired me as a salesperson today, tonight, show me the top 50 companies you need to sell to in the next year or the top five or the top 100. Just like who do you believe are the perfect companies and the perfect people at those companies to go sell to today based on how good and bad our product is and the severity of the problem they have that we solve. And that is a question that rarely is there an answer or a Google doc that they can share. So that's at the company founder level, but it's the same with the reps. So ideally the company you work at has enabled you to have some sort of an account-based view of the world to spend time or there's propensity to buy, but don't put all your hopes that somebody at your company did that job for you and then just kind of blindly follow the accounts and the territories that you were given.
(36:30):
If you have 50 accounts, if you have 500 accounts or 10, you go stack rank 'em, develop your own hypothesis. You think about assigning use cases to different companies. It's on you to even just understand how do these companies work and how does your product work with how they make money or lose money or stop losing money. So I think there's this onus on companies to have a bit more of a defined view of the world for who they're going to go after at any given moment and why. And then for reps, take control of your own destiny, figure out the patterns of inbound if you're blessed enough to have it and then figure out how you're going to go do outbound. But the one thing that's been true since I was a rep to me coaching reps today and 2025 is there's just a level of give a shit to the job where it's like if I'm in a QBR and somebody goes up there and they're calling a deal 20 K, 200 k, I don't care, and they're like, yeah, it's with isometric, I'm making the name up.
(37:27):
I'll be like, Hey, before you go any further, what does that company do? How do they make money? What do they do? 70% of the time people have no fucking idea or the answer sounds like, well, they're in the logistics space. I'm like, go keep going. I don't care if you're like, oh, but we transact so quickly. I'm working 50 visible opportunities a quarter in today's day. If you have Chachi pt, Claude gr, I don't care. It takes 29 seconds to figure out what a company does and maybe another 29 to figure out how your product can help them make more money or be of value to their customers and make their product better. So that to me is like a universal thing of coaching. Whether I'm talking to an SDR or territory planning with a CRO or a founder that's doing founder-led sales, it's like just develop your own critical view of the world and put in the extra 20% of effort. For some salespeople, this will be like no shit advice, but it's not the majority out there, man. Most people show up. They have no idea what the company does they're trying to sell to, and that's not selling.
Todd Busler (38:28):
Especially with going back to our previous point around the way you sell matters. Again, this is just getting more and more important. So any common issues or common themes you're seeing with taking great ICS AEs, transitioning them into leadership roles and either common mistakes you're seeing or areas where you're spending an outsized amount of time coaching to develop that talent.
Liam Mulcahy (38:52):
The most universal lessons I've learned here are one, most companies should hire an enablement person earlier than they think, especially if your company's growing at pace or if your landscape and market changes rapidly, which I'd argue most good markets that's happening right now. And again, you want to hire great enablement people the same way you want to hire great sellers and great engineers. So check the pedigree, do your diligence, but I guarantee you the benefits of having one early will compound significantly just by getting them in there because it's also another proxy for how do we keep responding to the market as it's changing so rapidly. So one is higher enablement earlier. The second is how do you enable a team that doesn't have time to go to the bathroom during the day? So I'm also noticing whether it's the 9, 9 6 mentality or whether it's just companies that are blessed with so much inbound, they don't know when they're going to actually eat.
(39:44):
If they're going to eat that day, you just have to make it a sacred thing. You have to say whatever the cadence is biweekly or whatever, whether you're watching film or critiquing each other's gong calls or I've seen it manifest in a bunch of different ways, but if you don't make it a priority, you won't do it. And then you're going to have this asset that will only perform at its current. It'll compound, but not a lot. It'll get better in the single digit percentages year over year organically, but if you put an enablement person in there and you make a bit a priority to try to enable them, primarily just making salespeople more technical. One thing I debate all the time is how much of an enablement should be on product versus on the craft of sales? I think it depends a little on the sales team in front of you that you're hoping to help get better, but a failure mode is like zero for both.
(40:35):
So to me, if you're a first rep in at a company and you're trying to enable yourself without enablement, you need to spend time with the engineers and just try to understand as much as you can how your product works and how an engineer would look at it or whoever your buying persona is. If you're at a larger company with maybe 30 reps and there's some first line leaders, then it's incumbent upon those leaders too to say, Hey, I've noticed listening to the gong calls or looking at deals, we universally seem to be poor in this thing, and here's how we're going to get you better at this thing in a tactical way in 48 hours and then stick with it and hammer it. That's where I think what you inspect is what you expect is so true, which is another playbook thing that's kind of always the same. You just have to hammer these messages home and have a standard of excellence, and if the team isn't there, it's on you, the founder, the leader to get them there. You don't just get to yell at people you hired for not being great at something. That's the burden of leadership.
Todd Busler (41:27):
You didn't teach them to be great. Yeah, exactly.
Liam Mulcahy (41:29):
Yeah. So you got to teach them to be great and take the time out to make that a, so I think to me maybe tying this into a point we made before that, I don't want to sound trite or domish, is yeah, in 10 years there're going to be more or less salespeople in tech at the early stage less. I don't think that's that hard to understand, right? We could do more with less or more with the same amount of people. So then who is going to remain? Who are the people that are going to still be having great careers in sales in 2040? I think it's folks that are going to make themselves more technical. You have to be exceptional at the craft. So if you have not had a chance to go train with people that are great at sales today, go optimize that for that in your next role.
(42:13):
Make sure the product's good and stuff and traction and whatever, but really prioritize who you're going to learn to be great at, whether it's learning to be a leader or learning to be a great ic. And then if you can do that, then you have to become more technical. We're seeing this compression and org charts horizontally and vertically. So the vertical one is we just need less people to do the same work for every team. Not dramatically less yet, but less. And I think it will continue to be slightly less. The horizontal compression to me is you had these things that were just sales and just solutions engineering, and now that's more of a Venn diagram and for the lower end of the market where the technical burden is not as high, let's say like a lovable or rep or something, sellers are becoming kind of Es because it's easier to become technically great at a product like lovable, but if it's a product in the infrastructure space, I'm seeing some of the best salespeople that are at President's Club or actually just solutions engineers.
(43:09):
And I think too, if I was to give you a spicy take, let's say 2030, I think some of the best salespeople that are going to go to club at 2030 are going to have computer science degrees, and I keep encouraging that. I'm like, you could be the Terminator. You literally could be the best sales person ever, and that's a very exciting world to me and one that you need to acknowledge if you don't currently have a CS degree and RA salesperson selling technical stuff. It's just like continue to make sure that you're like pencils sharp. You don't need to be hands on keys coding, but you can't not know what a context window is.
Todd Busler (43:45):
Liam, you're the man. This is a little bit different flavor of episode, but I'm a hundred percent sure people will get a lot of value. This, I think every time I talk to you, a I learn a lot, I wrote down Learning Machine. I like that you just have this really unique role where you see such a breadth of different organizations and markets, but also same problems kind of universally that allows you to summarize what's happening across the landscape, which I always get a ton of value from talking to you, and I'm sure the listeners do. I would encourage people to follow Liam on LinkedIn and he will once in a while, write something very deep and interesting on Medium. Read it, you'll learn a lot. Find yourself taking notes. Liam, you're the man. Appreciate it.
Liam Mulcahy (44:26):
Thanks Todd. Appreciate it, man. Alright, see you.
Todd Busler (44:28):
Thanks for listening to Cracking Outbound. If this was helpful, let us know by messaging me, Todd Busler, 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.