How the Best Sellers Think Differently with Sahir Azam

[Music] Welcome to the Revenue Builders Podcasts with John McMahon and John Catlin. This podcast is brought to you by the team and force management. Today's segment features Sahir Azam, partner at Index Ventures and former Chief Product Officer at MongoDB, where he helped scale Atlas into a multi-billion dollar platform. This conversation breaks down what actually separates top enterprise sellers from intellectual curiosity to resource orchestration. And why those traits alone aren't enough without leadership, building the right operating model around them. So here also explains how sales leaders create scale through enablement, accountability, and structured engagement, not just hiring more talent. For leaders trying to build repeatability and complex sales, this is a clear look at what it takes. Let's dive in. [Music] So see here, I know from experience that as a Chief Product Officer, you were extremely involved in the sales side of the business, making countless sales calls all over the world. As a Miles. Yeah, a lot of miles. And as you think back, can you think about some of the sales people you saw and the best attributes of the best sales people? Yeah, absolutely. I think there's a few things that I call out one. I think it's critically important, especially in today's buying environment, is intellectual curiosity. Technical buyers have an increasing or decreasing tolerance for sellers who don't know the product and the technology and how it gets used in the reality of the organization. And I think if you're not intellectually curious enough to really understand the product and the technology, I don't think you're going to have credibility. And I've seen that actually change over my career where the bar gets higher and higher around that. And it doesn't mean that you need to be deeply technical. It's a spend the time to learn and be able to connect with that audience. And I think the other aspect is even if you're selling high in an organization, the average CIO today is much more technical than they were 15 years ago. And so the idea of it just being like a business relationship sale, I think it's very rare today. Sure, that's additive. But I think it starts with really understanding the business problem and the technology in a way that really can connect with the buyer. And so that intellectual curiosity, I think, is the through line for all the best sellers, no matter what personality and background and profile they've had. And the second thing I've seen, especially for complex enterprise sales, is the sellers that orchestrate the resources in the organization on their behalf are really powerful. It's not like they're always the face of it. They're obviously leveraging the pre-sales engineer, but they're also bringing in executives at the right moment. They're bringing in references that have from the ecosystem in the right way at the right time in the sales cycle. And they're almost like playing a backseat role sometimes, a playing orchestrator versus being just the loudest voice in the room. Very good point. And I think the other piece that I kind of connect both those things is, learning and being in John, this is one I learned from you, is like being a great listener. You know, the best sellers ask the best questions and just extract information and get, you know, that arm that organization that they're going to bring to bear with all the right points that they need to bring up by first deeply understanding what's happening in the business, what's driving the champion, you know, what's top of mind for them. So I think those are some of the things that really stick out. And I've been lucky that, you know, I've had the privilege of working with a lot of great, you know, sellers across various companies through my career. And those are kind of the things that if I try to simplify it, it comes down to. Yeah, really good. How about the sales leader? If you go up one level, what you just said to hear is so powerful because you've got all these, I call them the hundred pound brains. And you were definitely in that category. The hundred pound brains inside the company. And the best, the companies that do it the best, I think, the companies that do it the best are the ones that harness the knowledge of how a customer buys. And therefore, documents how we're going to engage. What it's going to take to engage. What, you know, what stages we're going to do, what exit criteria. And then, and then a clear understanding of how we're going to engage the sahears of the world. It's got to be qualified. Customers got to be qualified. We've got to be qualified. So it's like that next level of the, you can go higher that talent that has that intellectual curiosity. They can, they can, they can gather the resources. But if you don't have a company level, meaning the sales leader mind, that says, I'm going to build an engagement model around the, really the interaction and orchestrate the interaction of that. You're not going to be a great company because you're going to, the best sellers, they're going to hoard all the resources, which you would expect them to do. We're going to wear out the sahears of the world. We're going to have, we're going to have people working on unqualified deals. And that's how companies just, they can't scale. And I know if you work with Johnny, you were in good, the work of Straits, you were in good orchestration. Yeah, Gap, I, I'm totally with you because there's almost like layers of this. Like, you know, the question I was answering earlier was more about like the characteristics of the individual contributor or sounder. But I think in terms of at the leadership level, it's, you know, it's a few things. I think it's the operational rigor, kind of aspects that I think you're bringing up in terms of a playbook and resource management and really, you know, territory management, all the things that kind of go into that. But I also think it's culture, you know, I've also seen not so great sales organizations where there just isn't a culture of accountability. You know, where there isn't that, you know, it's marketing didn't give me leads or, oh, I don't know how to run my forecast because it's a consumption based business. Like at the end of the day, like, you know, that's just to me a cultural challenge that I've seen with, you know, some of the sales organizations that are not as high performing as the ones that, you know, John and I have had the privilege of, you know, kind of working on together. And I think the other piece that kind of fits into that from a leadership level is just a deep investment in enablement. I mean, you can have somebody who's intellectually curious and incredible. But if you don't define their ideal customer profile, you don't teach them about the technology. You don't take the best learning from the best sellers and then, you know, make it programmatic such that you can ramp the next generation of sellers and, you know, you can never do it in a repeatable way at scale. And so I think that really has to start from the top. And it's not an easy decision because for many sales leaders, the easy answer is, give me just more quota capacity that will solve itself in terms of, you know, driving the revenue. But the reality is the better dollars might be spent elsewhere on these leverage, you know, functions that are harder to maybe attribute the impact of, but actually can unlock the scalability of the organization. Well said, that's going to be a clip that's going to be replayed over and over and over again. That was well said. Yeah, well done. Thanks for listening to today's episode. If you enjoy the content, please subscribe, rate and review the show to help us reach more people. This show is brought to you by Force Management, where we help companies improve sales performance, executing the growth strategy at the point of sale. Check out ForceManagement.com for more information.