#459 - The One Dashboard Every Sales Leader Should Build | John Sherer | 30MPC Hall of Fame

Good morning, everybody, and welcome to this leadership episode of 30 Minutes to President's Club. My name is Armand Froke, and I'm here with my co-host, Mark Costglo, and we are back with the one and only. John Sharer, if you missed last week's episode, John has led a whole ton of sales organizations. Most notably led Lattice from 20 to 120 million. He was there at HubSpot all the way through IPO, and he's done a million other things. He's a Hall of Fame 30 NPC leadership guest. In the last episode, we talked about all the different ways you could onboard your reps, and so this episode, once your reps are onboarded and you're running your sales organization, we're going to talk about all the different metrics you should look at as a sales leader in a way that does not make you a dashboard manager, but you use the metrics to actually drive action. So, Mark, why should people listen? It's really simple. Metrics can be as harmful as they can be helpful, and I think John does a really great job of helping you understand great ways to make metrics helpful and avoid some of the stupid stuff that all three of us have dealt with in the past looking at metrics. And folks, we are live in studio with John, and so if you want to watch this one in Technicolor, you can go check it out on YouTube, but until then, three, two, one, let's roll. All right, John, welcome to your second round on the show. We start every show with your top three actual leadership takeaways. Let's get your three. Number one, if you give a rep feedback and they do not apply it immediately on the next call, hold them aside, ask them why, and then ask them to apply the feedback immediately on the next call. Today's show is brought to you by outreach, which helps you increase seller productivity, coach calls more precisely and forecast more accurately using a platform powered by AI agents. If you're running a tape review, you're going to stop at three different points. Number one, when the prospect monologues ask your reps, what did we pull out that was important from there, ask your reps, what should we say or ask next, and then click play and recap. What did the rep do versus what we thought they should do? Our friends at outreach built a 30 MPC resource hub where you can grab this play and an unreasonable about more links on the show notes. Today's show is brought to you by text us, which helps you move your deals forward faster when timing matters. The fastest way to move a feel forward is to avoid getting stuck in the inbox. And so my favorite way to get on a text basis is literally when your prospect requests a demo, just send them a confirmation text saying that you're looking forward to the meeting. And that opens the text channel for you to call back on it later. Folks, we put an entire guide on how to revive ghosted deals, nudge next steps and use texting to keep deals moving forward with text us. Check it out. It's free in the show notes. Easy enough. What's number two? When you're looking at metrics, look for gaps between reps. This is where most of the learning is. So if one rep has a 42% close rate and one rep has a 35% close rate, and maybe the general population average is 35, look for that type of gap and then study what the rep who is the outliers doing differently. So a lot of learnings are that you can pass down to the rest of the organization. You win the award for the cleanest shortest takeaways. Tell me about that for numbers without having any fluff in them. It's perfect. What do you have for three? Look at your looker dashboard every single day. You don't need to study it. You don't need to memorize it. But you want to train your brain to start to see patterns really quickly. Your job is to find potholes. Your job is to understand what's breaking in the business and the sooner you do that, the faster you can drive change. But if you're waiting every single month for your sales ops team to send you a deck on what happened last month, your way too slow. All right. So there's about 10 billion metrics that revenue leaders can look at us. Take us to your top five. Out of the five ones that guide you every single day or maybe you have a different number. I don't know, but what guides you? I'm religious about sales velocity. How many ops are you creating? What's your average deal size? What's your close rate? And how long does it take you to close a deal? The collective of those things will teach you a ton. If you're a small startup and you're trying to go up market, yeah, your deal size is going to go up and your close rate is going to come down. But like, what does that mean? Is that good? Is that bad? There's a balance there. Sales velocity will teach you that. But really, I'm always looking at those four metrics. I'm looking at them on a rolling basis. I'm looking at a cohorted basis. I'm looking at them quarterly. I'm looking at them monthly by rep by segment. Those four things, honestly, like, it's what I need to do my job. Do you have a dashboard that shows all of them dyes, they're using filters to get down? Like, how are you managing that? Because, you know, by segment, by team, by product line, how are you managing all of those cuts? You know, I've always had a great data person who can help me get exactly what I want, make me the reports that I didn't really know I needed, but would teach me the situation. I had half a dozen dashboards that probably had 20 charts on them each. Now I have my go to dashboard with my core things, but as soon as I needed to go deeper, if I needed to get into head count planning, if I need to get into, am I going to resegment the business? I need to go deeper. And so all of those metrics are available, but then I have like the core dash with the velocity metrics. How much pipelines created inbound versus outbound pipeline, by rep, by segment, by manager, that type of thing. I have it all laid out in the looker dashboard where I don't need to filter where the dashboards are static and I can look at them every single day. So let's start with this core dashboard. You have your four metrics, which is number of opportunities generated, opportunity size, close rate, time to close. But core dashboard that I'm looking at every single day, typically in most of the businesses I've been a part of, the deal size as per segment are very consistent. So I want to see intro meetings completed, I want to see it by rep, I want to see it by segment. I want to see deals that entered late stage. How many deals are actually becoming real? We had very nicely defined deal stages. So that is trustworthy information. That information is useless if you have not defined your deal stages. So those two things are super core to me and then I want to see win rates inbound pipeline versus outbound pipeline and then I want to see outbound activity. You always want to look quarterly. But for me, I've spent a lot of my career with at least one SMB team, SMB is a monthly business. Yep. It's a fully monthly business. Like, I think about SMB and enterprise, like rugby and the NFL, they are different sports. SMB is its own thing. It is a velocity game. It is a momentum game and a lot of times, you know, when you see low metrics in SMB early in a month, you can actually fix it that month, but you're working on a six to nine month time horizon, maybe an in quarter time horizon with enterprise. But SMB, you're in it every month, you know, every month you can kind of rewrite your fate. You can drop the ball, you can let up or you can really push people. And so those metrics are going to guide what I'm going to do in that Monday team meeting. If I feel like we're low on inbound leads and low on pipeline in general, like, yeah, you don't want to do. I'm going to talk about outbound the entire time and talk about your closed lost opportunities. I want to talk about bringing your manager in on your demos. Let's try to improve the clothes where it's on the deals we have left. And that ebb and flow, you're a driver, you're sometimes you're going fast or sometimes you're switching gears, whatever it is, and the dashboard tells you what to do. Yeah. So look at it as a current quarter, quarter plus one quarter plus two, except for in our transactional business, which was current month, month plus one, month plus two and your deal cycle determines the horizon. And then I think best practices, current plus one plus two, that gives you that like forward looking, but not being so caught up in the now that you're ignoring the future, right? If I walk into the average sales leader, their eyes are glazed over, their doom scrolling through stupid dashboards, it's what 8 a.m. you walk in, boom, pop open looker and I'm tell me how you process it, like all the way from when you start, like, is it a daily thing? Yeah, it's not even an 8 a.m. thing. It's like, you know, when you're sitting on the couch and you open up the bar stool app by accident, you're like, we need to look at this for you. That's what I would do with my dashboards. So I then bookmarked at the top, you have a meeting ends early and I thoughtlessly click looker. And I thoughtlessly click a dashboard and then I just, just look at it and scroll. You know, it's like, it's not high intention, but I am a quantitative person. And so like numbers, algebra numbers, click pretty quickly for me. I just do that all the time, but the patterns just come out. I was a sit down and prep for a meeting dashboard person. So like, I fancy myself to be, well, I know I'm a very operational sales leader. I mean, lean heavily into process, part of process is measurement. So I have to have set times where I sit down and look at dashboards for specific purposes, like scrolling through kind of like you're doing. I would be a glaze over person like I wouldn't find it if I just did that every day. So let's say that I wanted to zoom in on one of these metrics, whether I'm doing it passively or in one of these scheduled sessions. Let's talk about deals entering the late stages. What are you looking for? And then what are you doing based on what you see from looking for gaps and numbers, right? So if I see one rap who has 10 deals entering late stage when the average is six, you know, in one hand, you could be like, sweet, great news, Anthony, you're doing great. But my instinct is actually more like, okay, something wrong here. You know, like is he actually doing great or like is he moving deals too early, right? So then I'm going to, I'm going to ping the sales manager and I'm going to say, yo, like, what's up, Anthony's got a ton of deals late stage and they should have the context to be like, yeah, he's got a hot pipeline or like, oh, that's weird. Let's look into it. And then I can say, you know, hey, so and so in sales ops, can you just like check out to see if Anthony's deals are mature like if they're actually in the right stage. So that motion, I'm doing it all the time. And at the end of the day, like it's quantitative, but it's driven by a qualitative understanding of the people and your managers and what's going on in the business because a lot of times like data is just there to answer questions for you or it's there to prompt you with questions that you should ask people. And so you really need to be both like locked in on the data, but really with 40 dashboards to look at what you're hearing from your managers, what you're seeing in Slack, what you're seeing in the rep conversations that you're having when you're doing skip levels, ultimately we'll tell you what charts to look at, so there's a balance there. One of the things that you talked about was, all right, if I'm going to look at this level of detail like every day, but if I have to do something strategic, I got to go deeper. I got to know more like if I'm going to resegment, you have to know more. Like help me understand, like, how are you determining? Is this a tactical fix between a manager in a rep or is this a strategic fix where I need to go deeper to figure out like, do I need to resegment because I'm seeing stuff like, how do you make that determination as you're looking through all these numbers? I think it's, I think at the end of the day, it's instinct, right? Like, I can think about a time where we resegmented it lattice. And one of the things that we were seeing was like, we had a mid-market segment, I forget the exact numbers, but call it 10 reps in it. And that segment closed deals from 30 K to 200 K. And what I saw is three of the reps have really high close rates on deals between 100 and 200 K. And everyone else had really low close rates on that deal. One reps are better at something than somebody else, maybe it's because it's a different sales process there. Maybe there's a line that should be drawn at 100 K and there should be a mid-market segment that's 30 to 100 and a different segment that's 100 to 200. Then we looked at enterprise who had 250 plus and kind of looked at the same analysis and ended up rejiguring the teams. And so that's an example of like looking at close rates on certain ACVs that taught us there's actually a different segment than we thought. I thought it was zero to 100 employees actually was zero to 250. I'll remember a similar exercise at outreach. What we did is we plotted deals in like small cohorts of deals. And we started to say, okay, let's look at what happens as the deal size increases. And sure enough, like when you look at that data, there's these step changes that happen. Like, oh my God, between 25 and 30, something happens to our win rate, something happens to our cycle time. And when you start to cut the data like that, the data tells you what to do. And if you see large discrepancies that are holistic across a group of people, that's a signal for strategic change. But if you have specific individuals that aren't meeting the rest of the group's priorities or maybe they're far exceeding them, then that's more tactical. Like, what are we doing here? Right? And that's kind of how we did it. But those four North Star metrics tell you almost everything. Everything else is kind of like a dig in on those four. If you get those four, you're saying that the sales velocity thing, we need to get that up, the formula up on the show notes or something for people. Because that's a very nice, you know, glom together, you know, cumulative type of metric. But you do have to break it apart and just constituents to really understand what's happening if the metric is bad. It's a great metric to communicate to your board, hey, here's how we're looking at things. Here's what it means. We're looking at it rolling in cohort, we're looking at it by segment. And I know that a lot of sales leaders, the first time they're kind of getting invited to the board level that can be a stressful moment. I found that educating the board on sales velocity and saying, hey, we're going to use this. There's been a really effective way to build trust and then like stay locked in on one set of metrics versus like constantly pivoting quarter over quarter. Sales managers, no one ever teaches you how to do your job. If you've ever wondered, ah, why are my pipeline reviews useless? Should I actually hire this person or am I going to have to fire them in three months? Or maybe my forecast is like a finger in the air exercise where I'm totally guessing? Guess what? It's really a little bit like me and you had to figure out this stuff from scratch. Fortunately, I partnered up with the best sales leader in the game today. His name is Mark Casaglow. He let outreach from zero to 250 million plus in ARR. And he has graduated eight sales managers who just became VPs. And that is through his three step sales management operating system. There's a special discount code in the comments. I guarantee it will be the best sales management resource you've ever used in your life. Today's tactic is brought to you by attention, which uses AI to capture all of your sales interactions, automate sales, busy work like CRM updates and flag hidden deal risks. So if you want to avoid ghosted deals and every discovery call with these three questions, number one, do you want to buy a K validate if the deal is real? Number two, when do you want to buy validate if it will close this year? And then number three, how do you buy validate that they will get you in front of power? We put together a guide on how to unblock the three biggest deal blockers in your pipeline there's a link to get it down in the show notes. So sales velocity is a metric that measures how quickly a sales team can generate revenue over a specific period of time. It's also known as deal velocity or pipeline velocity. Sales velocity is calculated using four metrics, number of opportunities, average deal value, win rate and average length of sales cycle. The formula is sales velocity equals number of opportunities times the average deal size times the win rate percentage divided by your sales cycle length. Right. So you're basically taking how many opportunities do I have multiply that by my average deal size. So number of opportunities, how big they are that gets you like a total number. And then times your win rate percentages, which is like how many of those actually turn into revenue. And then you're taking that and you're dividing it by how long it actually takes you to close a deal. And I think that basically gets you, it sounds like that gets you like a dollar per day type of manipulation. Is that what it's going for? Yep. 100%. How did you practically use this in your daily conversations with reps? So I didn't really use the loss of you with reps. This was an upward management tool everywhere, everywhere I've used it. Love it. You know, with reps, usually I like to simplify math stuff as much as I can. And it's usually like, hey, we're going to pick one metric at a time. Yeah. And we're going to put this into your quarterly coaching plan. We're going to try to move this metric. But velocity to me, a lot of times is it's an effective tool at communicating what's going on in sales to a non-sales audience. If you have a product or marketing founder and you're trying to communicate to them what's going on, I think they see this equation and they're like, oh, yeah, it makes a ton of sense. And they can buy into that. And then you can, you know, sort of communicate, hey, like sales velocity is going up. Like the goal is to like be growing sales velocity, typically, you know, if it's like, hey, sales velocity went down this month, they're like, oh, why? It's like, okay, well, let's look at the inputs. Oh, look, sales cycle length got really long in this period of time. Okay. Why is that? And deal size didn't go up, which is usually why you're willing to accept sales cycle length going up. Right. Okay. Wow. We had these two deals that took a really long time to close. Is that something that could be a systematic issue that we want to coach reps on? Or is it an outlier? I remember about year two or year three at outreach, I realized that I wasn't doing cohort analysis. And so all of my analysis was kind of junk. What is cohort analysis to you? Like, how do you think about the word cohort? What does that mean? Say I wanted to look at my close rate in September. What I could do is I could see all the deals created in September. And I could see all the deals like close in September. And that's going to give me a reasonable win rate, right? And I can show them. Take a look. But what is that actually telling you? It's actually telling me nothing. Nothing. Right? This is where I got burned. Because what I care about is what is the close rate on the opportunities created in September? But guess what? They're not mature yet. So I'm stuck in this place when looking back a month where I'm like, how do I tell the story of last month? And so you actually need to then go a couple levels deeper and you need to understand hey, and if all of the opportunities created in September, how many should I expect to close? 50% of the deals we will ever close from a September lead will close in September. 25% of them will close in October, 15% of them will close in November. The rest sort of on a long tail. So I can now, 30 days later, look back at September and begin to see, hey, am I pacing with this cohort of revenue effectively? This is super important, right? Because as your business starts to scale, what's going to happen is marketing is going to need to find new lead sources. You can't wait for full maturity on the batch of leads to see if they're a good fit. You can see it way sooner, depending on your sales cycle length. Studying this early and often as your business changes is super important because you can catch like, oh, shit, like we didn't close any of those leads. Yeah, it's like, okay, well, let's stop generating those types of leads. Let's pivot. Let's do something different. And that comes from a cohorted analysis. So many early sales leaders, I see don't know the distinction of there's a difference between like a closed date and a start date. Do I want to do a closed date cohort where I'm looking at everybody that has the same closed dates or do I want to do a start date cohort where I'm looking at everybody that has the same creation date. So I want to track everybody and all the deals that were created in May and what happened to them after May or I want to take all the deals that closed in September and I want to back look at what happened to all those deals, right? And that's the two lenses you have to look at with cohorts. Otherwise, you will create meaningless numbers. You'll go to your board and say, our win rate was 57% this month. We crushed it. The next month, it'll be 12% and really neither number was accurate. So if someone asks you guys, what's your win rate? How do you answer that question? I'm going to give them like an averaged cohorted win rate. The first thing you got to understand is your sales cycle. How long it takes for a cohort of leads to become mature? So say I have a 90 day sales cycle, right? So that means we're in October, September, November. So basically you're telling me the July deals I have are mature. So what I'm going to go do is I'm going to go look at my like Q1, Q2 win rates. And that's actually going to tell me a true cohorted close, right? Now if you see a ton of movement in there and you made significant change that can put you between a rock and a hard place where you're like, yo, but I actually think we started crushing it in August and the data's not mature yet. And that's where you can go and look at sort of like, okay, but August is 60% mature. How does a 60% mature August compared to other 60% mature periods to begin to show signal? But that's not a close rate. That's a signal that close rate might be going on. So if it's Q3 today and you had a 90 day sales cycle, you can safely assume that you can look at Q1 and like most of those deals should be quote unquote seasoned or matured. And so for any deals that were created in Q1, the way you calculate win rates would be close one divided by close one plus close loss. Or are you including all the deals that remain open? I include the things that would be considered still open in that case. So it's close one divided by all opportunities generated in Q1. And normally I think this is a place where there can be nuance and it's important to define what is an opportunity? I would highly recommend all sales leaders to only include qualified opportunities in that win rate and on the definition of a qualified opportunity. This can get you in trouble also. So for us at LADS, this basically was called stage two, but opportunity made it to stage two. We counted it as pipeline. Nothing before an opportunity was pipeline. And so like that definition needs to be super clear. Yeah. I looked at qualified versus non-qualified win rates. So we created the opportunity at outreach when the meeting was booked so that we could do some early funnel metric, you know, in analysis there. But it wasn't for us. And that was stage zero. Stage one for us was it was sound as a sales accepted leader gone through our five criteria. And yes, now that's qualified pipeline that I can look at. So I always did a little differently. For me, I always looked at, I reported closed one over closed loss plus closed one. And then I had a secondary thing of remaining pipeline open. And that would show me like, all right, this is our win rate on what's closed. This is what is remaining open that we think we can get this kind of a close right on. That was typically the way that I did. But I think it's really important to have this idea of qualified versus non-qualified. And it has to be a religion inside your company. Everything moves to stage one unless it's met the criteria, no laziness, and nothing that's met the criteria stage and stage zero or an early stage, it must be moved over. And that's a huge part of my weekly deal reviews is making sure that that is running well. Because like you said, if somebody says what's your win rate and somebody that doesn't know sales, which happens all the time, runs a quick sales force report and pops over and be like, oh, your win rate is 10%. And you're like, wait a second. You just took like every deal that's still open and took it over and then you've screwed up the number, right? And that's what people do a lot of times when they don't really understand the numbers. That's why it's so important to have an Anthony or a Brett on your team that understands and can keep you from these kind of pitfalls when you're looking at numbers. For both of you guys, it's critical that whether it's going into stage one or stage two, there's some cutoff point where you're like, this opportunity is qualified. It goes into win rate calculations, qualification calculations and all that stuff. The most common way that this is enforced is through pipeline reviews. So managers are scrubbing pipeline, making sure that reps are coming in prepared with proper pipeline hygiene and all that stuff. How much of this should be done through pipeline reviews versus done through sales force, automations and validations. So for example, you can't move a deal from stage one to stage two unless you fill out these three fields on your opportunity who's the champion, who's the problem, stuff like that. My sales team right now doesn't fill out any fields in the CRM, not one. If you're an organization that's doing 30 to 40 new opportunities a month per rep, I think your strategy on what needs to be filled out here is pretty different because a manager's not scrubbing 30 to 40 apps. What's important to me is like, I hold the rep accountable to their sales cycle or their close rate, and so they're not going to move shit to their actual pipeline. If they think it's going to make their close rate look bad. So I usually end up with the reverse tension, which is like, now that wasn't that could have an opportunity. I'm like, you set up a second call, it's an opportunity, right? So that was always the thing for me is like, hold them accountable on close rate, they close rate something that we talk about regularly, but if there's a second call, it's not. Yeah. I have a general rule of thumb in my CRM. If we're not going to report on it, then it shouldn't have a field. And like, for example, we're going to put MedPick, all in sales force and the reps are going to type it out MedPick. And we're going to create a validation rule that if they don't have these fields filled out, they can't move to stage two. If they can't make stage two, they can't create a flow. If you're not going to run a report to do analysis on a number, then why are you keeping the data? It doesn't make sense. All it does is create busy work for everybody. So you definitely should use validation rules as sparingly as possible, and you should definitely make sure that you limit the number of fields on the op on the account. Get it down to five fields, like the less fields, the better. I completely agree. Hey, folks, if you keep getting grilled in your pipeline reviews, try this. Show up with your deal risks already flagged, so gaps in pain, timeline or power and your net to move ready to dock. That's kind of where Clary helps is they will show you live signals and risks on your deals in one clean view. So you can run your business, not have your manager do it for you and poke a bunch holes. So we put together a free guide on three plays to get your sales manager off your back. The link is in the show notes. Go check it out. Today's show is brought to you by Insightly. The CRM helps you spot deal risk early. So pipe reviews actually drive your number. One question I ask in nearly every deal review is, what do we need to get in our next interaction with the customer? If my rep can't answer that question, the deal has risk and I have something I can coach to. Now, we built a guide with our friends at Insightly CRM on how to run pipe reviews that surface real risk and get deals moving again. And you can get it for free at the link in the show notes. There's one last objection that I struggled with related to this all the time, which is I know that this isn't helping me drive the sales process forward. But everyone else in the organization wants information around when we lose deals. Why do we lose deals? And so I think every leader has been pressured to have crazy analyses on closed loss by stage, by product reason. Are we losing because of the economy? Are we losing because we don't have this feature? Are we losing because it was sunny outside versus rainy outside? And so when you get asked that type of question and you need to educate the world on when you're losing deals, John. Why are you losing deals? How do you do it? You know what our number one number word competitor at lattice was, according to sales force, 15 five. Do you know why? Because it's the top of the pick list. There's this tool called gong. It records all the calls. All the information is in there. I don't know why you want a sales rep to tell you what happened on the call. It's recorded. They are literally trying to power through their day. They are not thoughtfully giving you data. Things there. Get everybody who wants information to see. I don't know how cool the AI stuff's gotten, but like you can always like, like I've got somebody in the Philippines who helps me go through all the calls and pull out the things that the team needs to know. Yes. Like $7 an hour. Most closed lost reasons that when I go in and look at companies in their CRM, it's a single pick field. In a rep now has to make a judgment call. I know I lost it for these three reasons, but I can only pick one. Which one is the most influential? Which one is going to matter and communicate about me and my skills the most versus I just moved it to a multi-pick list field and you can pick as many of the things are the reasons that you did it. You do that over a huge tranche of deals and certain things bubble up to the top and certain things never get picked, but creating the closed lost reason as a multi-pick list field was like a game changer for me. Smart loss analysis. Yeah. Like that. When someone asked me when we lose, where do you lose? I actually think about some of the metrics that you gave earlier. Some of the revenues going down or if our win rates are going down. Now I need to understand where in our stages are we losing deals? And maybe as we go from demo to multi-threading stage, that's when we're losing deals. And what that means is certain reps are better at getting access to power versus others. But getting that stuff from a pick list field, I've found it's just super, super reliable. I think another good proxy for that is just if you have a sales roadmap with a stage-based deal management and you have specific exit criteria and deals are falling out at certain stages, you know what the problem is. Is they're not able to understand how to achieve those exit criteria and that's why you're losing deals. It's not because the competitors are prices because reps don't know how, for example, to help somebody set an implementation date. The exit criteria to me is a really strong way to get real closed lost stuff based on skill, not based on what the rep wants to tell you in a pick list field. So naturally some of this stuff will happen with product leaders as well. And product leaders, they want to know, okay, if we solve this problem if we build this feature, like this is going to impact the most amount of revenue, the most number of deals and stuff like that. And so when you're trying to apply pressure on product to build the right types of things so that you can win more deals, how do you go about answering those types of questions? I tend to trust certain people in the organization to like, hey, Ross, why are we losing deals? Like I need you to think about it and get back to me and tell me why. And usually we're also come back with a thoughtful take and examples of where it happened. So I'm more interested in specific examples than I am in data. For me, like maybe it's because I learned better via stories, but like I actually think it's a better way to help people understand the nuances of what's going on versus like didn't have Salesforce integration, right? It's like, okay, like there's probably more to the story than didn't have Salesforce integration. And so I, with those product meetings, have typically brought in the reps or the managers per segment to have the experience and story detail into the meeting with product and let them represent it. So we product can ask questions and you have a person who actually was there who can answer those questions, or I don't feel like the data really helps them. If product is asking sales, what is losing us deals, then they're not talking to the customers in CS about what is happening in turn because that's probably why you're losing deals. And so if product is looking for direction from sales on what to do to stop losing deals, typically what you're going to get is every reps last thing that is the most important on the front of their mind. They're not going to get a thoughtful answer versus if you just go to GONG or call recordings and listen to actual customer calls with your CS team, they'll tell you everything that you need to fix in your product. And this is what 90% of companies are completely oblivious to. They will do everything in their power to innovate, to get new sales, and won't do the most basic shit on the planet to keep a customer. Don't ask sales what to build next to wind deals. Go ask CS what they need to do to keep deals. I guarantee you when more deals do in that. John, another amazing show. We have to move to the final question. Matt, we talked about a lot of good habits. What is one bad habit that every sales leader should break so that all teams get a little bit better? If you have any inkling of a feeling that you should not hire somebody, do not hire them. Period. Even if you can justify it and do the mental gymnastics because you've got a higher encoded a hit and you don't want to miss it because it's your quota. If you've got a feeling that says, just stop doing it. Yeah, it's never worked out for me. Ever. Yes, is a hard no love. That's right. John, amazing show. Everyone, hang on for a 60 second recap coming up soon already. Mark, it is time for a two by two recap from this part two episode with John. Sure. What do you have for your two? Two by two. Number one is I at outreach was the number one user at Tableau, and I realized I made a huge mistake. Every dashboard had all these filters at the top, and I should have just done what John did and just forgot all the filters and just had every little report on the dashboard. Pre-done. It would have saved me so much time. It had been so much easier to see stuff. And the number two is the less fields in your CRM, the better. If you're not going to report on them, if you're not going to be using them, if reps are going to fill them in with crap information, which is happening on 90% of the fields in your CRM right now, just get rid of them. They're not helping you in any way. They're holding you back. Let go. It's okay. Today's show was brought to you by 11X. You're all in one digital GTM team handling, creating, qualifying and converting pipeline across every channel. If you are still using stale triggers like congrats on the funding, you're getting blended in with everybody else. The best use unique signals, exact linked in posts, negative product reviews, podcast appearances, and use those as their trigger. And we built a growth playbook with our friends at 11X breaking this stuff down. You can get it for free at 11X.ai/30MPC or grab it in the show notes. Number three, when you're calculating win rates, you have to have some point of qualification for the opportunities. So maybe it's stage 1 or stage 2. And then from there, you should not be looking at deals that were closed and lost within September. You need to go back and make sure that you're looking at matured pipeline. So for example, if you want to know your win rates in Q3, you might have to look at the deals that were created in Q1 so that they've had proper time to mature. And then lastly, number four, the four metrics in John's Core Dashboard were number one, intro meetings. Number two, deals entering the late stages. And lastly, number four, inbound versus outbound pipeline generation. So folks, in a couple of weeks, Mark and I are doing a live session on his ultimate five stage sales process that he used at outreach. He did not come up with that name. I came up with that name. And so folks, if you want to put some of this reporting stuff in action, the key is to have a stage based sales process that you've enforced in your sales organization, whether you want to sign up for that session live or watch it on demand, depending on when you're listening to this, a link to that session will be in the show notes. And we'll also include links to every other episode that John has had on our show. I would really recommend listening to the first one ever. It is not only a really great episode, it is also pretty hilarious and fun. Alrighty folks, hang on and we will see you for the intro.