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When revenue misses, most CEOs start with sales, which owns only one of the five levels.
Nigel Green, founder of Sea Suite and author of Revenue Harvest and How to Hire Elite Salespeople, spent ten years assessing more than 200 sales teams. Adam Jay and Dale Zwizinski sit down with him on GTM Uncensored.
They dig into where revenue problems really start and who belongs on a sales team. Then Nigel grades Adam's Monday Morning Move.
We discuss:
- Why a revenue miss has five levels and sales owns only the last one
- Why reps need to buy into their number before the year starts
- Why the best salespeople don't interview for jobs, and why scouting beats tryouts
- The four sales archetypes: expert, visionary, killer, and connector
- Why chemistry matters as much as competence in a sales hire
(00:00) Why great salespeople don't interview for jobs
(00:38) Rock Bottom Analytics: a 61% miss
(01:37) The five levels of a revenue miss
(06:06) The company with 40% less inventory
(08:31) Why the plan is useless and planning is indispensable
(13:04) Why most salespeople aren't really salespeople
(16:14) Scout, don't hold tryouts
(18:12) The elite salesperson matrix and four archetypes
(22:03) CRO tenure and the 18-month window
(30:11) Revenue Harvest vs. Sea Suite
(39:42) Monday Morning Move
(43:37) GTM Uncensored Questions
We are proudly supported by Nooks, one unified workspace for outbound! Learn more about Nooks today at https://www.nooks.ai/gtmuncensored
Creators and Guests
What is GTM Uncensored™?
Most GTM content covers the same ground. GTM Uncensored finds the operators actually in the seat and digs into what's true in today's GTM, not what sounds good.
Every guest is currently building a company, leading a revenue team, or running a GTM function inside a real business. During the show, Adam and Dale push the envelope until the real story comes out.
The show goes where most content won't: The motions that determine whether a company stays in business, or goes under.
GTM Uncensored is built for B2B revenue leaders at $5M–$100M ARR who are accountable to a number and need a real-world playbook, not philosophy.
Every episode ends with a Monday Morning Move. One specific action you can take this week, and a series of Uncensored Questions where listeners get unfiltered answers from people who've actually been there.
What we cover: Pipeline & GTM motion, post-sale architecture, CS & retention, NRR/GRR mechanics, RevOps, AI in the revenue org, executive branding, and more.
Your hosts: Adam Jay and Dale Zwizinski are co-founders of Revenue Reimagined. They didn't build a consulting firm. They flipped the fractional CRO model because strategy without execution doesn't move the needle. The questions they ask on air are the same ones they're solving inside real companies right now.
GTM Uncensored is the GTM conversations nobody else is having.
SPEAKER FIRST AND LAST NAME:
NIGEL GREEN:
the best salespeople don't interview for jobs because they don't need to. So the paradox here is that most salespeople are bad, and it's the only job in a company where to get more money, most of the time, if you just stay and do the job well, it's better than leaving to get a raise to go somewhere else.
If I'm in customer success, if I'm a controller, if I'm in human resources, if I want a raise, a big raise, I have to leave the company. Otherwise, I'm just gonna get three to five percent. But if I wanna go twenty to thirty percent increase, I gotta go get a new job. If I'm actually good at sales and I want a raise, the fastest path is just do the work.
DALE ZWIZINSKI:
my beach attire for, for Nigel
ADAM JAY:
You, you are not in beach attire. It's Friday. You're still in a collared shirt. Nigel, Nigel's like dressed like Adam. Nigel's got the hoodie on. I'm jealous. I don't have a hood on today. I normally do. Um, but it's all good. Nigel, welcome to the show, man. I'm gonna drop you right into a scenario in typical GTMU fashion, um, and I want your take.
So let's call this company Rock Bottom Analytics. Nice, right? They, uh, they're a $22 million, uh, data infrastructure business that just closed their Q2 at 61% of the number the board approved in January. The CRO built that number, of course, off of last year's pipeline coverage ratio. Three enterprise reps hired in April still haven't closed a single deal.
Every Friday forecast call says, "We're tracking. Everything's green," right up until the quarter closed, and it wasn't. The CEO's first move Monday morning is to pull the CR in a roo- CRO in a room and ask, "What's wrong with the sales team?" That's a quote, by the way. You've built a career walking into that exact room.
I actually got to see you in a very similar room this week. You've done it 200 times over. When a company misses that bad, is the sales team really the problem, or is the problem something deeper, man? Welcome to the show
NIGEL GREEN:
Yeah, thanks for having me, guys. and you did get to see me do something very similar this week, in Nashville. So revenue misses at five levels in an organization, and the fifth one is the only one that the sales team owns. And unfortunately, most CEOs do exactly what this CEO did, which is start at the fifth one.
Uh, and it's not where you should start, okay? And so when we have a sales problem, the first question the CEO has to ask is, is this actually a sales problem or is sales the first symptom of a structural problem? And the reason why it's really easy to put all the blame on sales is that in most of these companies, especially these data companies, they have all the visibility in the sales team.
So all the leading indicators exist and there's, there's more optics there. So it's really easy to beat it up and inspect it. But bef-- if, if I'm that CEO, before I start interrogating the CRO about this miss, w-- the first thing I'm gonna do is go upstream. And I want to know, before I even walk in the room, supply.
Okay? So, uh, is there enough-- And so in this instance, you know, they're, they're a data company, so they have builders and they, they have some type of software or software combined with service. Do we have enough to sell? Okay? Um, and it, and you-- they may push back in the SaaS world of like, "Well, we have an endless amount because we built it once and we can sell it in-infinitely many times."
Well, maybe you don't have an-- maybe you don't have enough, uh, onboarding capacity. So it-- so that, that's, it's all supply related. Is there enough? And then the next level is demand. Does the market even want it? Okay? And so in, in the context of this, I'm looking at deals that are stalled. I'm looking for, uh, re-- loss reasons.
I'm looking for rotting, and I use the term rotting to say it stayed in this stage a little bit too long. And if we're at sixty-two percent to plan, but the CRO has four to five times pipeline coverage, we might actually have a, like, product market fit demand problem that I don't like as the CEO, and it's really easy for me to just beat my CRO up over.
And he's-- the CRO is probably too scared to go spar with me about product market fit. Uh, and then, so then the third layer would be coverage
ADAM JAY:
me if I tell you we don't have product market fit, Nigel?
NIGEL GREEN:
Great. I was looking for a job when I took this one. then we talk about coverage. I, I wanna know coverage. Like, can we actually reach them and create, make them aware? 'Cause that's not a sales function. Uh, salespeople sell to interested, already interested prospects. So did we reach enough people that move them from unaware of our offering or unaware they have a problem to aware to maybe even interested in having a conversation with a salesperson?
And then is it priced right? did we sell it for too little, right? 'Cause if we're at 62% to plan, maybe we've got price erosion or maybe it's too high and that's why we can't get enough deals done. But they all go into that fifth level and say, "We missed our number. What's up, Mr. CRO?" And the first thing that I do as the-- when I do my work is in coaching these CEOs is say, "You better have really good intel into those first four upstream views before we decide we have a sales problem."
ADAM JAY:
Does anyone have that intel? Like, have you seen any- anyone that really has that intel? And I, I, I wanna clarify regardless of stage, because I think one of the things that people often say in the work we do is like, "You work with early-stage companies, and of course early-stage companies are f**ked up." Well, let me tell you something, like I don't wanna speak for you, but like I've worked with public companies, early-stage companies, hundred million dollar companies, multi-billion dollar companies, and they're all f**ked up.
Like let's be clear, it's not just an early-stage problem. Have you ever seen anyone that actually has this information properly?
NIGEL GREEN:
In the work that I do, most of them already have it, and most of them know it and look at it. They just don't bring it to the sales or the board meeting, right? So I, I, I posted something on LinkedIn today that was a bit of musing from the meeting we were in yesterday and a similar meeting I had earlier in the week where we didn't have a sales problem, we had a structural problem.
You guys were in a meeting yesterday where, uh, one of the things came up was like, "Wait a minute. The problem we're trying to solve, we already have data for, and no one's really looked at it yet." And then earlier in the week, I'm on the phone with a CEO and a chief commercial officer for a company that has very inconsistent sales.
So So they have-- In, in the past quarter, they blew their number out of the water in the middle month and then woefully missed it in the, the bookend months, the front and the back end. And we're getting ready-- And we have spent an entire year restructuring the sales team, hiring a new sales leader, getting tighter definitions of e-everything was about fixing this sales team. About an hour into this conversation where they're talking about why is it not working, he drops, "Well, we, we've actually got forty percent less inventory to sell this year." I said, "Wait a minute. You don't have a sales problem. You have a phenomenal sales team. You mean your sales team is still at or around the number with forty percent less product to sell?
And this is the first time we're talking-- We're, we're getting ready to lay off salespeople, and nobody's looked at the other side of the business to understand why they're not hitting the number?" And he's like, "Oh, man. I don't have a sales problem." So They have the information. They just,
ADAM JAY:
So infuriating
NIGEL GREEN:
they just look at sales, um, and don't understand how did we get here?
DALE ZWIZINSKI:
Yeah. It's a scapegoat. And, that leads into a good conversation around quota, um, because if we flip it and let's say sales is the problem, there's a benchmark that just got released in 2026 with Pavilion and RevView and a couple of
ADAM JAY:
these other two-- We're, we're in 2026, Dale, so if it just got released, it makes sense that it was in 2026. Sorry to interrupt you, but like
DALE ZWIZINSKI:
you're such an ass. and, and they're saying now that the, the quota attainment has fallen to around 43%, and that's down from 60%, you know, just even probably three or four years ago. So you've walked into a bunch of these sales organizations and diagnosed what's broken. How much of the 43% is actually a hiring problem that nobody caught versus like the actual sales problem?
NIGEL GREEN:
I don't think it's either, if, if I'm being honest. I, I think there's a structural, uh, alignment conversation that most boards, management teams don't do. And I talk about this in, uh, in my book, Revenue Harvest, in the first principle of planning. So, uh, the plan, and, and let's face it, quota is a version of a plan.
DALE ZWIZINSKI:
Mm-hmm.
NIGEL GREEN:
plan is useless. The exercise of planning is indispensable.
ADAM JAY:
s- say that again 'cause I love that
NIGEL GREEN:
The plan is useless. Whether it's a monthly plan, an annual plan, a three to five-year plan, the plan itself is dead on day one, but the exercise of planning is indispensable.
ADAM JAY:
I love that
NIGEL GREEN:
But here's where most people get it wrong, and they want to talk about is it a hiring thing or was the quota never realistic?
Uh, well, you can't answer that until you can tell me you did planning right. And so good planning requires that you take a number all the way down to the rep and have them, uh, the... And, and in some motions, the rep, especially if it's in an account management or they have a recurring revenue or a retention or expansion opportunity.
If it's not just net new logos, right? If we're gonna sell something new to an existing customer or we're gonna charge them more, the rep has a responsibility to take it to the customer that's on the hook for hitting the number and s- and asking if it's even believable. Okay? So we, we publish these quotas and forecasts, and then we miss, and we say, "Well, did we have a rep problem or a quota was flawed from the beginning?"
I don't know until you give the rep the number and say, "Is this believable?" And don't just nod at me, but tell me can you assign it to your territory, which is a blend of existing accounts or logos that you would like to have. Can you make s- can you get bought in on this? And so if the rep is bought in on it, that means it is believable.
And if the rep's bought in on it, and it-- we, we say it's believable and we miss it, then it's a, it's a coaching conversation. And so, but most of those companies that, that are in this study, they don't even do planning right. Because they never gave the rep who has to own the number an opportunity to put pen to paper and play the author
DALE ZWIZINSKI:
And that's probably if, if we back that plan into like a bottoms-up model, 'cause everyone's trying to do top-down, and you really understand what the unit economics are from the top of the sale all the way through, how many you really need, what it looks like. And then you can go back and look at your plan.
'Cause I do also believe we, we have a hiring problem epidemic where people are generating generic job descriptions for salespeople, and they're like pushing them out there. And one of the things I really appreciated in the conversation that we were having yesterday in a client was your process on the hiring process.
Because people don't go through a hiring process that everyone has a job in that hiring process to do certain things, to get move peop- like move a candidate through the pipeline in a manner that makes sense and that everyone can get behind. Because a lot of people are like, "We'll create these generic interview questions, and we'll go from a gut feeling."
And then like six months later, they're surprised, like they're not picking up the phone, they're not making phone calls, they're not doing all the things we want them to do. And oh, by the way, the job description isn't set up from an expectation perspective because you haven't planned. So like I like all the things that you talked about, like going back to the planning from day one.
NIGEL GREEN:
As it relates to like the plan for hiring salespeople, also wrote a book on that and talk about everything that I think is fundamentally f**ked in the way we hire salespeople because we do have a, we do have a hiring
ADAM JAY:
we're g- we're gonna talk about that in a minute. That's where I want to go next
NIGEL GREEN:
You want to go there now or you want to go-- Where do you want to go now? Like, how do you want me to answer this question?
ADAM JAY:
you, you... N- no, I, I'm not trying to stop. Like, w- keep going, but what, uh, what we're gonna talk about next is the four archetypes that you, you lay out, and I wanna, you know, I, I'll, I'll ask it now as we're rolling into this, 'cause i- in my sh- in my research for this conversation, you know, you spoke about four archetypes that actually could predict who crushes quota before they're hired.
And if that framework is right, and listen, I, uh, again, I, I had the pleasure of being in a room with you yesterday. We, we talked about this. We went through, you know, types of people. Um, I saw a little of it in the book before. I, I, I'm bought in fundamentally, but if that was right, most of the reps who are missing their numbers now weren't ever gonna hit it no matter how f**king good their coaching was.
So talk to me about that, and then where, where does that leave the leader who inherited the team instead of building the team? 'Cause you got the wrong team.
NIGEL GREEN:
Well, okay. Okay. Yeah. Let, let's start with the, the last bit of that. The leader that inherited the team versus built the team. Uh, I don't care. If you chose to keep them after you inherited them, you own them.
ADAM JAY:
Preach
NIGEL GREEN:
Okay? So it doesn't matter to me. What I-- Part of the problem that I see in this hiring epidemic is that most salespeople aren't good. And so we hire a bunch of salespeople that actually aren't salespeople. So look, if I tell myself I'm a farmer But there's no harvest. Am I really a farmer? No. Sales is one of those pr- sales and sales leadership is one of those professions where we can bounce around, keep a title, keep an identity, but never actually deliver it.
You can't be a doctor if you don't practice medicine. You can't be a farmer if there's no harvest. You can be a salesperson for your entire career and never actually be a salesperson.
ADAM JAY:
Absolutely
NIGEL GREEN:
so, and so here's, so here's how this plays out from the very beginning, before we even get to the archetypes. If you play poker, and if you sit at the poker table and you can't find the sucker, it's you.
Okay, well, what's that got to do with this? Most people that interview salespeople are the sucker because they are not good at interviewing salespeople. So that is sales leaders, that is frontline sales managers, that is human resource professionals. Those are recruiters. They are not good at interviewing salespeople.
Here's why. Salespeople spend their entire career, every day, going into meeting, convincing people of the outcome they want.
ADAM JAY:
Yes.
NIGEL GREEN:
And so in that instance, it is just convincing you to hire them. That is the sale. And you may say, "Well, if they get the job, then they must be good at sales." Well, e-except for they're selling themself, and you don't even know r- the right questions to push back, that you, you don't, you have no framework for how to do this right.
And so one of the things that I talk about in the book is that the best salespeople don't interview for jobs because they don't need to. So the paradox here is that most salespeople are bad, and it's the only job in a company where to get more money, most of the time, if you just stay and do the job well, it's better than leaving to get a raise to go somewhere else.
If I'm in customer success, if I'm a controller, if I'm in human resources, if I want a raise, a big raise, I have to leave the company. Otherwise, I'm just gonna get three to five percent. But if I wanna go twenty to thirty percent increase, I gotta go get a new job. If I'm actually good at sales and I want a raise, the fastest path is just do the work. There are exceptions, but most of the time it's just do the work. So when you are interviewing salespeople If they're not working, if they're unemployed, they're not good. And that makes so many salespeople upset when I say that. And every recruiter says, "Oh, well, you don't understand. It's a tough market, and people get ripped."
And, uh, and we have a friend, Dan Goldman, who posts all the time about bad things that happen. It- outliers exist. Most good salespeople are busy crushing their quota and are not looking for the job. So most people that are tasked with hiring a sales team go post a job and they interview people. The, so we're, we were talking about football on the ride to the airport yesterday.
Imagine if the Bucs, your team, Baker Mayfield gets hurt, he can't start this year. Imagine, I know it's Dale's team. Imagine if the Bucs said, "Well, Baker's out, so what we're gonna do is we're gonna have tryouts at the stadium. Everybody come down. Let's see if you can throw the football, and we're gonna run, and
ADAM JAY:
Dale's gonna run down there to be the quarterback
DALE ZWIZINSKI:
That's
NIGEL GREEN:
asinine.
It's absolutely asinine, right? Okay, so, if Baker goes down, they've already got who they're gonna- Th- they already know, right? They already know who they're gonna go get. They've got a whole team that's scouting. They don't do tryouts, they scout. That's what sales leaders suck at. They don't go and scout people.
They wait until it's too late to hire a team, and then they go run a tryout. And guess who shows up for the tryout? Nobody that's qualified, because all the qualified people are busy
ADAM JAY:
are crushing it somewhere else.
NIGEL GREEN:
They're too,
ADAM JAY:
already
NIGEL GREEN:
they didn't even know there was a tryout. Why would they
care? That's so good.
That's why most salespeople don't hit their number.
Because they're not actually salespeople. And so what I do a lot of times, wrote a case study on this where I came into a team and cut them from 18 reps to six, and everybody thought I was crazy. We paid the six reps that we kept more money, gave them golden handcuffs, tripled the EBITDA, never missed a, never missed a sales forecast
ADAM JAY:
And you cut 12 out of
NIGEL GREEN:
reps.
Yeah, cut 12
ADAM JAY:
reps I love that. how did you
I want my
the six other than the ones who were performing? How did you say, "You- you're, you're who I want on this team"? 'Cause I think that's something a lot of inherit CROs, VPs that inherit teams that I've seen struggle with is, "Okay, here's your team."
What is the criteria that's like, "Man, you're the... Nigel, I want you on this team come hell or high water." My second conversation on day two is like, "What do I gotta do to keep you happy? 'Cause you're a rock star."
NIGEL GREEN:
So that's where the matrix comes in, uh, the elite salesperson matrix. So the, the thesis behind this matrix is that every sales rep exists, and it's a two by two in one of these four quadrants. The matrix assumes they're elite. So I'm not just saying like, you know, uh, e- every e- all the elite sales reps are not created equally, okay?
So we, and we'll stick with football. It's like you, you can be a pro football player, but you're not a quarterback, you're a tight end, you're a nickel, you're a defensive end. Like, everybody in the NFL is elite. Not everybody plays the same position. And I think we get that wrong in sales. And so what we did is we said How does the customer wanna buy it?
And who's really good out of these 18 at selling to the customer the way they wanna buy it? And so that was part of the origination of this two-by-two matrix that says, you know, along the vertical axis, on the top end, you have very consultative offerings. The customer expects you to consult them and guide them on how to make a decision.
On the bottom end of that vertical axis, it's transactional. Think of offerings like cable, booking a flight. I mean, you know, you don't need to talk to a sales rep. It's buy now, you look at the price, you make a decision. On the horizontal axis, it goes from a need to have on the left side to a nice to have.
From the perception of the customer, do they believe they need it? Okay, well, I need home insurance, gotta have that. Uh, and I don't need to really talk to a rep. That is in the bottom left quadrant of what we call killers. And those types of sales reps live by some will, some won't, so what. They run through a list.
They are gangsters at getting it, getting you to... They know that no is the second-best answer. You put that person in front of a doctor that's gonna buy a, patient encounter efficiency software, that's not gonna work. They wanna talk to someone that is an expert, someone that's done it, that can consult them on why this tool works, how it's actually gonna work.
So there are four archetypes. There's the expert, the visionary, the killer, and the connector. Your job as the sales leader is to do the job or observe good sales reps doing the job to determine, does the customer see this as a need to have or a nice to have? Is it transactional? Is it consultative? Is it somewhere in the middle?
And come up with an archetype. And look, in some markets, in some companies that are more mature, like I've got a client now, a hundred and ninety-seven sales reps across the country. If it's an emerging market, they need a different type of archetype than if it's a mature market where they're trying to play defense and, and fend off competitive threats.
So again, not all reps are equal. And even in your company, even in the same role, depending on the span of control of the territory, the size, they're not different. And so most sales leaders aren't willing to do the work to figure out, how does the customer wanna buy this? And let me go find the rep that they wanna buy it from, how they wanna buy it. And then build an interview process
and a job description that forces a rep to show, not tell
And that's what we got into yesterday is like, dude, anybody can tell me that they did this or... But we all know that most resumes are just full of lies. It's all fabricated and manufactured to get you... It, it, it's a lead magnet.
That's what a resume is. It's, if in the marketing world, it is a lead magnet to get you the call to action, to convert. It's the first conversion element. Call me, let me give you something, let me give you some compelling copy for you to click the offer and get on a discovery call with me, right? That's all it is. Uh, and it's full of lies. And so the job of the hiring manager is to validate it, and the only way you validate it is to make them do the work
DALE ZWIZINSKI:
I love it
ADAM JAY:
I couldn't agree more. It's, you, you, you gotta show me the exercise is important. Let's shift to CROs. Um, sorry about the dog in the background.
So the average s- Cooper, Cooper's barking. Someone's at the door. My wife's not here. Of course, they don't show up till the middle of the podcast. We all know how this rolls.
Um, Nigel, average CRO tenure is give or take 17 to 22 months right now, which ultimately means most revenue leaders aren't even lasting two full planning cycles . You've sat across from a ton of CEOs who are making the calls. You've probably helped make those calls or actually made the calls, um, that decide which of those revenue leaders, which of those revenue leaders stay and which ones get shown the door.
What's the real reason most of them don't make it past that window?
NIGEL GREEN:
The real reason most of them don't make it past that window is that it's the nature of the beast, okay? Again, we're gonna go back to football. And I, and I use this statistic in the book How to Hire Elite Salespeople. The average tenure of a CRO 18 months or less is not too dissimilar that of a coach at the elite levels of all sports, basketball, baseball, football.
We're not complaining about the average tenure of a head football coach in the NFL being 18 months or less, or in the Premier League. It is a nature of the beast. And it's-- th- there's nothing wrong with that dynamic, and let me tell you why You could be the right CRO that came in and did a bang-up job in 18 months to get them to the next level of growth and scale that is not your strong suit, and they need to go hire someone else.
And you did nothing wrong, and you should go and do whatever you did for the previous 18 months again somewhere else. There's nothing wrong with that. Like, I just don't think we need to buy into this narrative that tenure equals success How many coaches... I, I couldn't do it off the cuff, but I can, I bet if we wanted to, if, if we're like, if we're on the Joe Rogan, we could get, "Hey Jamie, look this up."
How many coaches have co- come in in less than 18 months and won a Super Bowl or won a championship and then left and went somewhere, and were even fired after that? So it doesn't, like so I think we're, we're, we're not looking at it the right way. 18 months is 18 months. You gotta live with. it if you wanna, if you wanna make four or $500,000 a year, like nobody's crying for you.
Go in there and do it. Some make it, some won't. Who cares? Go get another job. Do the work, go get another job
ADAM JAY:
I'm, I'm,
So let, let me piggyback. I, I, I don't disagree with you. Um, yes, and how often do you see that that CEO who got you from A to B is worth investing in, that you could turn that 18 into 24, 36, 48, et cetera, where they are the right person for the next stage of growth? And I'll give you an example, and I can't say what... We'll assume he was the right person 'cause he was there seven years. Colin Spector, um, of Aurum just announced that he was leaving after seven years, and he started in a director role, went to a, you know, and moved up, moved up, moved up, and ultimately helped them grow their revenue substantially.
How often do you, do you see, forget whether someone's there seven years, but that the right person is kept that long?
NIGEL GREEN:
Um I, I think the right person stays that long most of the time Most of the time. I think, I think-- And so here's, here's where the right person won't stay. The, the CEO or the board is impatient or ignorant. It's also the c- or both. Uh, and it's also the case, like, look, what, what we, what we miss in this 18-month tenure is how m- much, and I don't have the data, but I know anecdotally a lot of what's driving that low tenure is self-selecting out, okay?
Um, I have been in a CRO role where after 12 months I said, "I cannot work for this buffoon. I will go leave and go somewhere else. I don't
ADAM JAY:
Or nowhere else.
NIGEL GREEN:
Yeah, yeah, like I'm not doing this. And so there is a lot of-- Because there-- Look, the, there are a lot of really good CEOs. There are a lot of really bad CEOs.
There are a lot of really good companies that get killed by their s- equity sponsor or the venture team that is run by a bunch of vests and MBAs that have never actually run a business a day in their life. And so part of the dynamic at play here is good people, bad fit. It's not just really good companies that made a bad selection.
There's just a lot of good CROs that self-select out because I won't work for an idiot
DALE ZWIZINSKI:
And that, and that definitely love that mind s-s--
I mean, if, you have a new leader, like yeah, you're not talking. If you have a new leader, like it doesn't mean you wanna stay. Look it, I have to deal with Adam everyday. I may have to opt
out.
ADAM JAY:
Dude, it, has been the best four years of your life. Um, but I think all of us have been in that situation where I, I would rather work for no one and have no income than work for this moron.
NIGEL GREEN:
Well, and let's-- there, there's this other factor we didn't talk about, right? So we talked about like, um, is the sales leader bad? Is the company stupid? Uh, sometimes neither is true, and there's this other dynamic that comes at play. So great sales leader, company's smart, and we agree that you have-- you are worth more, but the job, the value doesn't merit your increased earning power.
And so let's agree that it was... And you see this all the time in pro sports where you are so good, but we could trade you for a sh*t ton of money to a bad team and go take all that money and get a bunch of other underutilized misfit toys, 'cause everybody knows you're a star and somebody's gonna pay a premium for you, but we don't actually need it anymore.
Like, there's a lot of that going on in sa- And I have to do this all the time with salespeople and, uh, sales leaders. So I, I just did this on a, on an assignment where they've got this, uh, really great sales leader that's making $350,000 guaranteed. And he came in, and he was trying to hamstring the CEO and saying, "If you, if you don't pay me half a million bucks, I'm gonna leave."
And the CEO calls me and he's like, "What do I do?" And I'm like, "Do you know how many really good reps you can get for half a million dollars? Let him leave. Like, go. Like, if somebody's gonna pay you half a million bucks, go. We're gonna go get two more reps at two fifty that are probably just as good and less entitled, and go, go do the same thing."
And it's not a, and it's not a judgment. It's like, just if you wanna go get it, go get it. I'm not go-- It's not worth it to me to pay you that.
DALE ZWIZINSKI:
Yeah, 100%. And, and look it, we all have choices, right? And I think the higher up you go in your organization or your career or your path, like you're gonna end up making a decision as well. And like it's not, it's not so cut and dry. Like there are a lot of variables. It could be family, for example. Like we talked a lot about that, y- you know, yesterday as well.
Like, you know, how does that inc- And that happens the same thing, go back to NFL coaches. I was trying to, I was trying to look up the stat as we were talking, but could not get it fast enough. But, um, it's the same thing. Like you may go a certain place because your family wants to be there, or they wanna be in Florida or California, like wherever it is.
So
NIGEL GREEN:
The question I get a lot from investors is, "Nigel, is this normal?" And the answer I give them every time is one that my therapist gave me. "Faye, normal is a setting on the washing machine." asking me is this normal is not the right question. Is it right for your unique situation is the better question.
What do you, what needs to be true for you? And let's go figure that. Not is this normal
DALE ZWIZINSKI:
So just to answer the question on the f- the football coach, one in every five, uh, do- don't last more than 24 months, so. cool.
ADAM JAY:
I, I
li- I like that you were able to do a little of your own research. That's impressive
DALE ZWIZINSKI:
Let's shift a little bit. So you have Revenue Harvest and you have Sea Suite. Um, they're built on, you know, y- Revenue Harvest was built on the idea of the sales leader planning out, like, the entire year. Sea Suite is, like, pulling those same leaders under the water and, like, really calling them to, to, to the carpet on their org chart and what's not bui- like, working through them.
Just talk to the, uh, to the audience a little bit about Revenue Harvest versus Sea Suite. What's the same? What's different about those two, uh, two offerings?
NIGEL GREEN:
So, uh, there, there are two offerings actually for mostly two different audiences, okay? So I wrote Revenue Harvest, uh, in twenty twenty for sales leaders. And it is a playbook that I intentionally wrote to be timeless, to outlast the SaaSr- SaaS revolution that is almost kind of like an almanac. I wrote it when I lived on a farm, so I had a lot of influence from the agricultural community.
Um, farmers, uh, regardless of what they grow, go through a very methodical seven-step process every year. And the book is a framework that every sales leader, regardless of your selling cycle, regardless of your stage, you can do it, overlay it on your selling motion, and there'll be something there for you to help you hit your number. That book got me a lot of advisory work assessing sales teams. So for ten years, you, you, you nailed it, Adam, earlier when you said, "I've seen over two hundred sales teams." It's true. I did the math. For ten years, I assessed over two hundred sales teams. Giving the guidance from that sales, it's a, it's a twenty-seven part process that I use.
Um, I do it mostly for private equity companies that have either gonna buy this company or have just bought it, and they wanna know, is it as good as we think? So I, I take them through this proprietary twenty-seven data element framework, and then I present it back to the CEO. For ten years I've been doing this, and I can put-- and this is where Sea Suite came into play.
After ten years of doing it, I got so tired of wanting to do it because of this dynamic. Most CEOs sit on one side of this paradigm. There are a select few that are the exception, and those are the ones that get the premium outcomes. They get the exit. They, they, they're the unicorn. What I learned is that most CEOs struggle with making tough decisions.
And so what happens is I can give you the guidance and tell you, after you just paid me thirty to fifty thousand dollars to assess your sales team, some really hard truths, and it's your job as the CEO to do something with that information. So I have this quip that I tell with some of my other consulting friends that most of the advice I give is useless.
It's worthless. It's of no value. And it's not because it's not good advice. It's because they did nothing with it, so it was-- it created no value, so it has no worth. And that's why Sea Suite exists. I did this for ten years, where I would go in and say, "You have to fire your sales leader," or, "You have to restructure your sales team," or, "You have to fundamentally pay them something
differently," And they didn't do it. and they wouldn't do it.
ADAM JAY:
We, uh, we have this conversation all the time.
NIGEL GREEN:
And so what's, what Sea Suite is, Sea Suite is a different decision-making environment for CEOs who have been circling a decision for too long, okay? The types of decisions we're talking about are kill a product line, break up with a founder, raise money, sell the business, start a new offering. All of these really important decisions where more information generally doesn't help. You've asked counsel, uh, you've asked the board, you've asked your coach, you've asked the management team, and there's no consensus. But there's never going to be one clear answer, okay? So what we do is we, we look at the data. Sometimes, depending on how we feel, we use the, the, the data to convince us of one conclusion.
Wait a couple weeks, look at the data again. We can tell ourself a different story with the same data set. We ask the team, there's no clear answer And we try to do this in the boardroom while everyone's posturing. There's a lot of politics, there's theater, it is the worst place to make these decisions.
And so what I do is I get these CEOs out of that environment. They come down for two days, and I take them to a decision-making environment, the ocean, that will punish you if you are indecisive. And I use the mechanism of the ocean, either fly fishing or fish, where you have to see them and make a cast.
It's, it's not like sitting here looking at a bobber. You have to see the fish, and you have to decide to make a cast and present them with a fly. Or surfing, where you're out in a lineup, and you have to decide that you're going to paddle and take that wave. If you pause, you will be punished. And I use it as a container to remind them that failure is not a flaw, it's never fatal, it's just a feature.
And that the ultimate failure is choosing to do nothing. Because if you choose to not make a cast or not go for that wave, what the f**k are we doing? Why are we even out here? If you're not gonna do anything, what do we do? And it's a great reframe for them to say, "If you're not gonna decide, you don't deserve to be the chief executive officer."
And so we take the decision that they've been circling. I distill it down to two equally viable outcomes for them. They validate it that either one of them is livable for them. And then we take it to a different decision-making environment that has no theater, no ego, no politics, no bureaucracy, and they choose.
And that's what Sea Suite does. And so far, I've done about 20 of these intensives, and the types of outcomes we're getting is one CEO that was doing about $4 or $5 million in a direct-to-consumer model, flipped the entire business around and went B2B. And now he went from having, like 800 customers to 3,200 customers.
I had a CEO come down that decided to-- He was doing 250 million in an e-commerce category, dipped to an entirely new category, stay at 250 million, double his EBITDA
It's not that they don't know the answer. Most of us when we get stuck, we're not scared of the decision, we're scared of the consequence of the decision. And so the Sea Suite intensive, I call it shared cognitive load. It's an opportunity to come and wrestle the consequences with someone that gets it in an environment that won't let you stay stuck.
And that's what the Sea Suite is
DALE ZWIZINSKI:
have you thrown anyone off the boat?
NIGEL GREEN:
No, but I have had, uh, I've had some really intense moments on, on a boat, for sure
ADAM JAY:
So when I, when I first heard about Sea Suite, um, in Austin several months ago, um, my initial thought was, "Holy sh*t, like so many people need this." And while I have not done Sea Suite, you and I have had some pretty candid conversations that have certainly helped me gain clarity about both personal and professional things.
Um, and I've, I've actually said to Dale, um, and I have not told you this, of like, "Holy... Like, I would love to do this." Um, and I, I've seen more than Dale. Like I've, I've seen the video. I have a little more context. Um, and I, I agree just from the engagements we do, like there's so many executives that are paralyzed to make decisions, and it blows my mind.
And I love the idea of getting them i- in a different environment, away from the noise, deep focus, all, all the things that I would imagine you would do to like, I'm just gonna use my term, like face your f**king demons. Like, 'cause gotta make a change. You gotta fix it regardless of what that change is and how, because what you're doing, and I'm gonna be overly dramatic, but like you're killing yourself.
You're gonna give yourself a heart attack at the end of the day, or you're gonna give your business a heart attack at the end of the day. Like this sh*t's gotta stop. Um, I, I hope for you, um, that Sea Suite continues to expand, that it gets the exposure it needs, that more people come and do it, um, because it's very different than therapy.
And I-- listen, I think therapy's great. Everyone should have a therapist. I'm a big believer in it. Um, but this is different. Um, I'm all for it and I'm excited to, you know, hopefully one day do it myself. Um, but also just to see the business grow and see others do it. And I mean that very, very sincerely.
NIGEL GREEN:
Thank you. I, I think it's, it's the most rewarding and fulfilling work I've done in my career. And, uh, it-- what it does is it takes all of the things that I got in trouble for as an executive. I was, you know, I was one of the youngest Fortune executives at age thirty-one. I've had many of private equity managing partners tell me I'm unhireable.
it takes all of the things that are unique to me that aren't, like, special. I, I don't mean that-- when I say they're unique to me, that I have figured out that the rest of, like, corporate America doesn't understand. And that is that if you only make decisions around EBITDA or, or capital efficiency and there's no value base, like who am I trying to become or who am I, who are we?
There-- If there's no, like, overarching identity questions being asked, I just don't know if you're making a good decision
DALE ZWIZINSKI:
Totally Yeah So good
ADAM JAY:
All right, Nigel, we're gonna move to the Monday Morning Move. So this is designed to be a practical takeaway that our listeners can take this week. You have two jobs, sir. Number one, you are gonna rate my Monday Morning Move from one to 10, one being the worst, 10 being the best. You can imagine where Dale wants you to rate it.
You know where I want you to rate it. I am on a winning streak, so let's keep that up. I'll pay you later. Um, number two, what would you add, push back, take away, change, or just tell me that it's total sh*t? Um, here we go. Pull last quarter's list of every rep who missed quota and before you touch a single one of their activity metric, run each miss through these three filters.
Was the target realistic given the pipeline they were actually handed and/or built? Did they get a real ramp period when they were thrown in cold? And has a manager sat with them on a live call in the past two weeks, or is it only a feedback loop looking at a HubSpot or Salesforce dashboard? If two or more reps fail the same filter, the fix isn't a new comp plan or a new tool.
It's a conversation that your sales leader has been avoiding having with themselves. That's the move. Stop auditing the rep first. Audit the decision that put the rep there
NIGEL GREEN:
Okay. You-- So you're doing that on Monday morning and you want me to understand, you want me to assess whether
ADAM JAY:
that, i- i- is that a good Monday morning move or not? Is that, is that something that's gonna help drive the business forward that you think someone should do? Or did I totally screw the pooch here? Dale's getting excited based on your reaction.
NIGEL GREEN:
I think that's probably a three
ADAM JAY:
Ooh. Oh. All right, tell me why Da- Dale's so, Dale's, Dale's so happy right now
NIGEL GREEN:
Why does it matter is the question And so So many sales leaders come in on Monday morning and they look at the data without first asking, " What do I want to accomplish? What does the business need this week?" Okay? And it could be that on Monday morning The last thing you need to do is start analyzing data and think about ramp time and is the quota realistic. What might be the best thing to do on Monday morning is remind your team why we're here and what we're doing is special. And I think sometimes we treat Monday as if we're already behind
from Saturday and Sunday, versus reminding the team what a privilege it you get to do it this week. What do you wanna make happen in your one shot at this week?
And I think that- the plan, the goal, the forecast doesn't matter if the mission isn't noble and the team doesn't see that their role in accomplishing that mission matters. Where there is no vision, the people what? Perish. What do most sales teams need on Monday morning? Vision
ADAM JAY:
Okay. A three. I, I don't disagree with you, by the way. Um, I think what you're saying is accurate. I, I think the vision is key, but vision or no vision, does a leader not have to look in the mirror and recognize, like, are we, should we be auditing the rep or should I be auditing my sh*t first?
NIGEL GREEN:
100%. 100%, Adam. That's a Wednesday at 3:00 tap. That's not a Monday morning move. It is a great exercise. It's a Wednesday at 3:00
DALE ZWIZINSKI:
I like it.
ADAM JAY:
Listen, I'll take it. I'll, I'll, I'll take the criticism. I love it. That's why you're on the show, man.
It, it, it's not to tell me I'm perfect. I'm still better than Dale, but it's not to tell me I'm perfect
DALE ZWIZINSKI:
we really appreciate your time. We, we move into something called, uh, GT, uh, uncensored questions. This is more of like a rapid fire type of scenario. So we'll just fire a couple questions off to you and see, uh, see how uncomfortable you get, which I know is not gonna be uncomfortable at all. So you've diagnosed over 200 sales teams.
You mentioned it, Adam mentioned it. Name the worst hiring call you've watched a CEO defend to your face after the data has already proved them wrong
NIGEL GREEN:
they hired the person that they told me they wanted to engage me, uh, to keep them from hiring they said, "I'm thinking about hiring this sales leader from a previous business, but I want to make sure that," uh, their words, "That I'm hiring the moment, not the memory. 'Cause I remember them being really good, it was 10 years ago, but can you just make sure I'm doing this th-" And I gave this executive, uh, all the reasons that they were right, that they were gonna hire the, the memory and not the moment, and they hired him anyway
DALE ZWIZINSKI:
And then what happened?
NIGEL GREEN:
I don't know. I don't think I ever talk to him anymore. I was like, "This guy's an idiot. I can't talk to him. I can't be around idiots." So
ADAM JAY:
Nigel, you wrote a book on planning the perfect sales year, and then you built a company that pulls executives out of the building to decide things that a calendar can't. Which one of your own books do you trust less today?
NIGEL GREEN:
Oh, man. I think, um, that's a really-- That-- You're-- I may get uncomfortable. Um, I don't know that I trust any of them as much as I did when I wrote them, just because it-- they all get stale. So they-- If, if, if I trust that logic, I would say, um, I probably would have to trust, uh, Revenue Harvest less. I still trust them both a lo-a lot.
Yes, for-- But I really trust them a lot
DALE ZWIZINSKI:
Yeah. There-- It becomes an evolution.
NIGEL GREEN:
And here's why I say that. So like I wrote the second book, um, because I, I had this conviction that you, if you just get really good at hiring people, you can f**k up a lot of sh*t. But you, you can just like never even read Revenue Harvest, never plan, never position, never train. If you just hire really good salespeople, you don't have to do a bunch of sh*t.
And that's the whole thesis of the book. So I would say, yeah, that's, that's my answer
DALE ZWIZINSKI:
Before writing your book and, like, going through the evolution, what was one of your early mistakes that you made that you were like, "That was just stupid." Like, you look back today and you're like, "That was one of the dumbest things I've ever done"?
NIGEL GREEN:
The, one of the dumbest things I ever did was at the age of 31 of 31, uh, after having two back-to-back healthcare exits, my ego led me to want to be perceived as more than just a healthcare sales team builder. And so I did this really dumb thing, learned it, grateful for it, but look, you know, hindsight's always 20/20, and took the CEO position of a company because my ego wanted to be the CEO, and it was in an industry that was adjacent to healthcare, and, and I think I lasted six months
DALE ZWIZINSKI:
It's a different motion as well. And, and while, while the CEO sounds like a great title sometimes, it's like sometimes it's just not what it's all cracked up to be either.
NIGEL GREEN:
I was the CEO of a business that was doing about as much revenue as two reps in a previous life where I might've had 200. So it was, it was just the dumbest move in the world for me. The, the, the founder of the company said, "We hired a battleship captain for a rowboat."
ADAM JAY:
Ooh, I like it.
I like it I love that idea
Nigel, there's a federal case going right now, uh, Mobley versus Workday. Uh, and a judge let age and disability discrimination claims move forward because Workday's AI screening tools can be treated as the employer's agent. So you built your book on hiring elite salespeople by hand, one conversation at a time.
When a company hands that decision to an algorithm and it goes wrong, whose fault is the bad hire? The software or the CEO who trusted it?
NIGEL GREEN:
It's always the CEO
never gonna blame a machine
Because they don't, they actually don't think. Uh, but I do want to talk about that. I, I love this work. Uh, maybe, maybe we don't have time, maybe you don't want to go there or
ADAM JAY:
No, we, we, we, we, we, we will go. We have time
NIGEL GREEN:
Look, um, I don't think discrimination is a good practice at all, and un- it's an unfortunate reality, okay? I t- don't talk about discrimination in the book, but I do talk about biases. And this is where I think a lot of sales leaders f**k it up, is that they are over-indexing for discrimination, DEI, all, all the, all these things to try to build a melting pot
. That i- is fine. You can do that, but don't miss this point. If you only hire for competency and you don't assess your personal chemistry with that sales rep, I don't care how competent they are, you made a bad hire. And here's, here's how this plays out. When it's Friday at 5:00 and the rep needs you because they're on the West Coast and it's only 2:00, but it's, here I am on the East Coast and I'm shutting my day down.
If I don't genuinely like them as a person, I'm not gonna take the call
ADAM JAY:
Absolutely
NIGEL GREEN:
You will spend more time with the people you work with than you do with your family. You better enjoy being around them because you won't give them what they need, and you will ultimately fail because you hired competent people that you didn't have chemistry with, so you didn't give them what they needed and it was a bad hire
DALE ZWIZINSKI:
I love that. And I, and I do think the human needs to take responsibility in all these decisions. And you're right, even if they are competent, but they don't either fit into the culture or you don't give them the tools that they need to be successful and you enjoy working with them, it's going to be a very difficult road to, to, to move. So you-- we brought you through a bunch of GTM Gauntlet conversations. We'll give you a layup for the last one. I get to know a lot about kind of the different things you like to do, but what's your dream vacation destination?
NIGEL GREEN:
Dream vacation. I don't know that I have... I, I, there's not one specific spot. I just like to be on the water. So if there's a wave, if there's a fish I can chase. Um, there, there are places that, um, I'd like to go to Belize, I'd like to go to the Bahamas, I'd like to go to the Seychelles, I'd like to go to Jeffreys Bay in South Africa and surf that wave.
Uh, I'd like to go back to Hawaii at some point and surf the North Shore. Uh, somewhere salty and somewhere warm
DALE ZWIZINSKI:
I was gonna say it's gotta be somewhere that's got some nice, uh, nice waves
ADAM JAY:
Nigel, la- last one. That is the last one. But where can people learn more about Sea Suite? I, we, our, our audience, founders, CEOs. Shameless plug, let's direct them.
NIGEL GREEN:
Yes, seasuiters.com. So, uh, and it's spelled, you know, like the sea, S-E-A, Sea Suiters, E-R-S, seasuiters.com. You can find me on LinkedIn. I'm not hard to find
ADAM JAY:
Thanks for joining the show, man
NIGEL GREEN:
And those videos that you talked about out on there on YouTube, uh, I'd love to link them in the show notes if that's
DALE ZWIZINSKI:
Yeah.
NIGEL GREEN:
you guys
ADAM JAY:
100%.
NIGEL GREEN:
Yeah.
DALE ZWIZINSKI:
Yeah
let's do it.
ADAM JAY:
Thank you, sir
NIGEL GREEN:
Thank you. guys you
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