Taylor Safford: Anchor In Leading Indicators

(upbeat music) You're listening to The Great Day in Sales Podcast, brought to you by Lissio. (upbeat music) ♪ Yeah, yeah ♪ All right, welcome everyone to the podcast. I'm very excited for our guest today. He's got some awesome stories that just come right from here from Utah Valley, which is fascinating. A lot of these awesome startups that started small and now are very big, he's been a part of. So Taylor Saford from Netcraft, CRO there, leading the sales org. Really excited to have you. Thanks for coming. - Thank you so much for having me. It's good to be here. - Yeah, so usually, and again, this is like so many of our podcasts, we just, we had to hit record 'cause the conversation started to get lively. He was showing some passions, so I said, wait, wait, we gotta hit record. Walk us through your background, and typically I ask, hey, give us like your short background. Taylor's got some stories here. We may want the long form, but give us, so you started at Qualtrics. You were one of the earliest hires at Qualtrics and you've kind of built your whole sales career from that. So why don't you walk us through just some of those awesome experiences that you've had? - Yeah, definitely. So really fast, I was a finance math nerd. And so I was studying University of Texas, transferred to the University of Utah, and one of my buddies knew that I had just gotten married and said, hey, I know you're in desperate search for a job, come and interview at the startup tech company, you're gonna love it. And walked into this interview and met with one of the co-founders of Qualtrics, and it was the antithesis of wonderful. It was like, what am I doing? Like, what is this opportunity? And what was even worse is, you know, this finance math major, he said, hey, I think we've got the perfect role for you itself. And that was not what I was looking for. So I quickly started at Qualtrics, in desperate search for a job, I just gotten married and my wife was a part-time waitress and finishing her school. And quickly realized sales was complex, or I perceived that sales was complex, and it was hard. And there were all of these KPIs that we needed to be mindful of. And I quickly found myself at the very bottom of the barrel, with the new sales team at Qualtrics. And it was frustrating. In fact, I tried quitting, I think, 20 different times with Ryan Smith, one of the co-founders of Qualtrics. And finally went into this pivotal 21st conversation of me quitting, which just shows how good of a sales person I am since it took me 21 times. But went in there and just said, hey, like, my wife's a part-time waitress, she's making more than I am. There's no benefits. I'm making six bucks an hour. This isn't a good situation. I don't want to be here. And he said, you know what? I've said to these conversations, you are too best of luck. You're going to go get your MBA at a great program. And grabbed the door on the way out. And he said, hey, one last thing I want to tell you is until you decide you're all in, you'll never find the success that you want, regardless of what you choose to do in life. And it was one of those moments where I wanted to say, probably something that I held back and didn't say, ultimately, but I knew he was right. And up to that point, I had embraced this victim mentality of, I'm not successful because of all of these other reasons. And at the heart of it was, I'm not successful because of me. And so I went back to my desk, cleaned off half of my desk, and my gut instinct was telling me to stay. But everyone else was telling me to leave. And I actually put together a plan, went into his office, slammed it on his desk, and said, I'm all in for 12 months. And within six to eight months, I had become the top performing accounting executive there, and our leadership and help scale some of the remote offices. But it was a really fun run of 12 years to see that company go from 15 employees, and about 1 million an ARR to, by the time I had left, almost 5,000 employees and 740 million an ARR. And then I've spent a few cents at a couple of other startups here in the valley, but the last two decades has been spent with Silicon Slope headquarters, Utah headquarters companies. Yeah, fantastic. I mean, one amazing challenge that you overcame there, experiencing this startup, not making the money that you thought you might, and then Ryan Smith shout out, what a great phrase to kind of, that's just kind of a life lesson almost right there, right? Fantastic. So one thing that jumped out of me, as you were talking about that, was you started talking about your experiences being really hard, complicated, complex, tracking all these different KPIs. What was that shift? Like, obviously you went all in, and I love that visual of just shifting to all in. But what, I mean, did it kind of change how you were tracking your own activities? What were some of those changes that started to unlock success for you at Qualtrics? Yeah, first off was this psychological mindset. And I think too often, cells becomes this head game, where we can gain and lose confidence by our perception of our self compared to others. And up to that point, being at the bottom of the rankings there, it's very easy to start doubting yourself. And I think sometimes a lot of folks and cells, if things aren't going our way, we start questioning, do we still have it? Can we do this? And there was a lot of that going on. And so for me, a key aspect was, instead of comparing myself to others, I'm going to learn from them. And then I'm going to compare my version today to who I was yesterday or last week, and is it better. And that mindset shift really was a strong catalyst of regaining my confidence. And starting to apply a lot of these lessons that Ryan Smith was teaching me when he-- I'd set up these meetings. I think the second was, I actually stop forgetting about my quota. I don't know if that's a good thing to recommend. But I had defined myself based off of my-- and so what I chose to focus on were these leading indicators that helped me define, did I win the day, or did I win the week? And if I did, I celebrated it. There were times on Friday where I didn't bring in any revenue. I wasn't good enough to do that at that point. But it was just, hey, I was productive and efficient enough to wear it at Friday at 2. I had put in and won every single day, I had won the week. I'm leaving early. I'm celebrating it. And ultimately, day in and day out, week in and week out, I got to a point where I was putting in the work and delivering on the leading indicators. Where in the end, hitting my quota became easy. It was just a byproduct of all of the work that I was choosing to do on a daily and weekly basis. And that-- I guess the ability to simplify that mindset and believe in leading indicators was something that completely transformed my career. Yeah, I love that. It seems like as you start to unlock that, you kind of forget about the revenue that you're bringing in, really fosing in on those leading indicators, I've been told that success and sales is replicable. Once you figure out kind of your method, the framework's things like that, it's replicable. And you've now transitioned to other places leading netcraft currently. I mean, it seems like those leading indicators, like you mentioned, is really the thing that is replicable that you can easily take to your next role. Would you confirm that? Yeah, it is. I mean, structured and unstructured data analytics and then cybersecurity, external cybersecurity, very different industries. Totally. But to your point, highly transferable skills and mindset from what you choose to focus on ultimately ends up actually translating the quarterly quota attainment from an ARR perspective. And most importantly, it's not just about, hey, we as salespeople can be successful. But how do we also help the customers that we're working with be wildly successful in their endeavors and goals? But that is something that we've started to embrace at netcraft. It's a little bit different to where we have a uniquely talented team where some of them have been engineers for years. And then they've transferred over to be sales individuals or focusing on sales. And so this, it's a big change going from an engineer to a salesperson. But then also you get this new sales leader coming in and saying, hey, let's focus in on winning the day and winning the week. This is cliche. Stop talking about this. There's so much change going on. Performance-based compensation, KPI change. And at the end of the day, how do we make it simple? What items can we focus on to help them be successful? And we've seen our opportunities generated drastically increase, probably more than 100% year-over-year increase last year compared to this year. - Wow. - Just by simplifying, if you feel like-- - We still have a ways to go. If anyone's watching from the netcraft team, they're like, we still have a ways to go and we do. But we're making strides in the right direction. And we can continue to do a better job at listening to our sales team and making those iterations and implementing those changes. But we're off to a good start. And we're making strides in the right direction. - Yeah. What was it like at Qualtrics with that growth and just the culture of adding so many salespeople? 'Cause that, I mean, it's like every week you'd have, and I mean, at some point, you're pretty much every week every month, there's this new little pod of salespeople. How do you manage that? How do you stay in your lane and really focus on what you do every day? But then also you got all these people joining. What was that experience like? - It was hard. It was challenging. It was chaotic. There are a lot of adjectives that we, probably a lot of the OGs could immediately surface the show's PG. So, we got to keep you game like the original folks in the beginning. But. It was a wonderful lesson on how to do things the hard way. People don't realize the first six to seven years at Qualtrics, we didn't have a marketing team. We were doing things and at that point we were a cashful, positive and profitable. So it wasn't like growth at all costs, you have tons of money. How do we get really scrappy and figure out how to be creative and scale the right way? And so I think the best way that I would phrase it, which is similar to how Ryan Smith would phrase it is, we were run as fast as we could in one direction and we would slam as hard as we could into a wall. We'd be like, huh, that worked out for a little bit. How do we redefine ourselves? How do we rebuild ourselves better? And then let's set off in the next direction. And all of us were just embraced that all-in mentality to where we'd run so hard and so fast where we'd hit those barriers. And then it was a wake up call and then how do we iterate and change? But bringing those many folks in, we realized tribal knowledge doesn't scale. How do we simplify the sales process? Because we tend to over complicate things. And we saw that a lot in the earlier days to where we'd go and hire a lot of salespeople and it was almost like the strongest and fittest survive. And there was not a lot of enablement. There was lack of focus on leading indicators or KPIs that would really translate to the A or quarterly A or our progression. And we learned through that quite quickly to where how do we make sure that everyone is successful or the majority are? And that was a learning process, but chaotic, challenging, hard, complex, all of those things come to mind. So you started to unlock success for yourself, hitting quota, probably making decent coin as they say. But then you go into these management roles. You talked about opening up offices or seas. What was that like? I mean, I feel like we've had a number of people on the podcast now and many of them very successful top performers in their craft and then go into management. You opening up, places all over the world and meeting new people like that. Tell us about that experience. Yeah, that was unexpected. I remember the two co-founders and then our new CRO at the time, John Diagostino, who is a wonderful friend and very talented sales leader. But a few of them approached me and said, hey, we have this crazy idea. What are your thoughts on starting a new regional headquarters for Qualtrics? And I turned around and I'm wondering, are you talking to me? I'm in my early 30s. This is crazy. And at first it was Charlotte. So I went home and told my wife and Nicholas Sparks, novels are going through her mind. She's like, Charlotte and North, let's do it. And it quickly changed to Dallas. I came home and I mentioned to my wife, it's Dallas and she just cried. And I'm like, is there a big difference between Charlotte and Dallas? But you just, you didn't learn yet. You got to wait to share that information with the spouse there. You got to wait till you absolutely know. But it was hard because that was also another learning process to where, I mean, imagine, me coming to you Justin and saying, okay, go start this new office. You have no resources. Figure out how you're going to recover. Never done it before. It's a new office. And like best of luck. And we were down there by ourselves figuring it out. And there were, there was a landing team of four of us. Some of them are great leaders at closed and other companies that were my first picks. And we went down there and we ended up scaling the regional headquarters in Dallas, Toronto. So within two years they said, hey, do you want to do Toronto as well? And then also a sales team in Chicago. And so we had scaled those two and a half offices to two to 300 people within four years going from zero million in ARR to close to 80 to 85 million in ARR within four or four and a half years. And it spans seven different functions. But that's really where I think I learned what does it take to start these new teams and offices all over the world to where now at netcraft, like there are team members in Melbourne, Australia and the bath and London, United Kingdom here in Utah. And without me having that experience, I don't know if I'd feel confident being able to take on this unique opportunity. Well, so fun. You mentioned Chicago. Is that is that how you, is that how you knew Kyle A.C. was he on your team out there in Chicago? Do you have any, do you have any Kyle A.C. stories we control him with on LinkedIn? That's why claim the theme now. So is it? But, but no, Kyle was, I think another Cinderella story similar to mine, but in different ways to where Kyle's stories, you know, very inspiring to where he went through kind of a similar personal like realization process of like, who am I? What do I really want? And do I want to go all in? And I think his story follows a similar pursuit of how can I get in the right mindset? And then what, how do I simplify this and focus in on the right things that translate to quarterly quota? And too often we as individuals obsess over our quarterly outcomes, but we don't obsess over or treat the same leading indicators with the same sense of urgency or level of importance. And that was his big realization is he went all in on those leading indicators and completely transformed his career. So somewhat similar, but Kyle is fantastic. And I can't share any of those stories. Yeah, he's a friend of the blog. Yes, I guess we don't have to control him too much. Yeah, what are some, what are some unique things you're doing at netcraft? You said you've got a long ways to go still, which I'm sure you're just being humble. But what, like what are some things you've unlocked? You said you don't want to double pipeline generation the last year. What are some things that you feel like have have changed things over there? Yeah, so netcraft, as I mentioned, it's, it's a different team. Like we have individuals once again that have extensive engineering experience that are now spearheading our account management teams and these people are incredibly talented, very very intelligent and know our space incredibly well. And so the mistake that I probably would have made 10 years ago is I would have come in and said, okay, we're going to do it exactly this way. This is this like this is the process. These are the KPIs. Like, it's not negotiable. And this is how we're going to do it. And here it's let's meet the team where they are and figure out how to leverage their strengths and try to simplify things. And they probably don't feel like it's very simplified at the time being. We've definitely got some some areas improvement, but meeting the team where they were and then figuring out what are the steps to get us in the right direction. And the team, once again, has done a fantastic job at embracing some of this change, actually providing radical candor and feedback when, hey, some of the suggested changes aren't that beneficial, but we're starting to get, you know, Salesforce in place. We got our KPI, some of the baseline KPIs in place, something that's really important for me is an any new relationship. I believe that there are three things that really fuel any type of success. And that's defined roles, expectations and accountability. If those three ingredients are in a relationship, whether it's a spouse or significant other friend or colleague, you're typically going to have a successful relationship. So we focused on those things. We've now adopted some technology to help us out on the prospecting side and forecasting side. So we're trying to make this simple. And we're in the final stages, I hope, of partnering with Aliccio. Because a big thing for me is those leading indicators and being able to group those together. At any point, the board can see how productive our efficient our team is. And rather than me having to track like seven different KPIs, no, it's just point productivity. And so I'm really excited about that. But yeah, those are some of the things that we've done amidst a number of others with territory and account segmentation and new GTM plan. There's a bunch that we've accomplished over the last 14 months. Very cool. I was thinking about your three things, the defined role, expectations and accountability. And it just made me think of previous jobs or roles I've been in and I'm thinking, okay, which one of the three was lacking there? Oh, yeah, it was this one. And I love that you mentioned about relationships, too, even, you know, so I think it's applicable a lot of places. So a lot of times I ask questions on the podcast here around like, what would you do day one, joining an organization? And that kind of helps us end up on a subject and start talking about things. And those three, I feel like we've seen that and the way you talk about it, too, it sounds like that's been like a comfortable way to really take the skills of the people you have now, as you mentioned, lift them up slightly and then just continue to put. We hear more and more too, maybe 20, 30 years ago, you would hire a CRO and it was like, what's your play? We're hiring for their playbook almost more than the person and their ability to problem solve creativity, help us figure out what we have here. And now I think much more the best CRO hire is much more the problem solve of the person that's going to come in. Has that been, I mean, not to say there was a problem to solve in netcraft, but do you feel like that's been one of the big challenges joining a new organization as a sales leader is really, okay, what are the biggest problems I can solve joining? Yeah, I mean, that's something that I learned from, you know, during my time at Qualtrics and we interviewed a number of individuals to come in and be our CRO and fortunately we landed on one of the most world class like sales leaders in modern history, at least in my opinion with John Hagasdino and John came in and he was phenomenal with relationships. And he didn't bring a script and he didn't bring a playbook. I don't even think we made any changes for the first 12 months. Wow. It was just like he was learning us that we were learning him, but he instilled this confidence in us that we could go and do these crazy things. easy things and he set these daunting goals and something that I've embraced here at NetCraft as well as a similar mission statement that he's had, but success has got to be at four levels, the customer level, the company level, the team level and the individual level. It is not fun to be on a losing team and you're the only winner or vice versa when you, when like everyone's hitting quota or the team's doing well and you're not. Same thing like if you're at a company but your customers really aren't being successful and you're starting to see a high-churn rate, those things aren't sustainable and so that's success on those four levels is really important. But coming into NetCraft, I could have instilled this playbook and brought all of these, these different items and I do have these. But I think we sit here and you interview, you know, sales leaders all the time, I've watched this, you do a great job. But almost every single salesperson is going to say discovery is probably the most important aspect. And that's what I felt like John did a world-class job in. Is he took that time to really uncover who we were, what were our needs and how could he take his experience and apply the right aspects and I'm trying to do that here and I also want to learn from our team. There's a lot that I can learn from our VP of sales and VP of account management and the new folks that we've acquired through an acquisition of acquiring another company that I have absolutely loved learning those lessons and then okay, based off the problem and what they're really good at. This is how we could approach it versus the stereotypical playbook that I have might say we should do something totally different. But it's leveraging the strengths of the team, really understanding what those are and then implementing and iterating based off of your preferred playbook that you've used time and time again. You mentioned something a bit ago and before we start wrapping up things, I just wanted to ask you mentioned point productivity, which I wanted to describe because it's something in a list, you know, we really believe in you. You start mentioning Kyle A.C., who has a number of frameworks online that you can go and download. But why do you, why are you a believer in this concept of kind of looking at your productivity and assigning points and weightings? It's a nuance. You can ask sales leaders, hey, have you ever been on a point system and you'll get a yes or no? It's people understand it to that point, but you're obviously implementing it. You mentioned point productivity in one of your comments. What does it mean to you? How do you feel like it's really helping sales teams out there and how does it different from just track and revenue? Basically. How do I feel about it? That's changed drastically. When I first was introduced this concept and myself and my boss at the time at Qualtrics really was the trailblazer leading out in that area. And then myself and Lucas Baker and this other individual, we kind of created this. Kyle will take any royalties based off of your new framework. To be honest, he's made it far better. But at first I was sitting there thinking my boss just wants to micromanage me. And I don't like this. And I don't like that visibility. I don't like being measured 15 different ways. And I'm not going to go along with this. And that was the victim mentality that I had at Qualtrics when I was not doing well. And I was the worst performing AE. When I had that mindset shift, everything transformed. And it was like, okay, I'm going to embrace accountability because I'm going to learn from it myself. I want to learn where are ways that I can increase my productivity. I continue to hear this belief of this belief of work smarter, not harder. And I don't agree with that. I want to work smarter and harder. If there's something like I can go a little bit extra to make sure I hit my quota. And so this point system started helping me transform how I approach my days. What are the key items that I should focus on in the most critical? I think too often Greg McHale, McHughan, McHalean, Essentialism wrote a fantastic book of just focusing in on the most impactful and important items. And I think sometimes in our careers, we lose sight and focus on what really matters on a day to day and week to week and month to month basis. And that's where the point system for me helps keep me in check. Last example, massive RFP comes in early in my career. I spent two days, maybe two and a half days filling it out. Guess what? We didn't win. We didn't get close to winning. We were in the very beginning stages at Qualtrics. And what I had lost was two and a half days of productivity. Did I hit my quarterly quota? No. Because I kept embracing those opportunities. And we need to remember that a good day, and I don't know if you're going to get here, because you always ask your folks, well, we will. You're ready for it. Okay. I don't want to share my answer, but it includes a certain number of three critical aspects, at least in my opinion, that if you do those repeatedly on a daily and weekly basis, then your quota becomes easy. And so measuring yourself and your productivity and efficiency with points completely changes everything. And that's why I'm really excited to hopefully formalize this partnership with Alissa. Very cool. And I think you're getting into it. So I'll make sure to prompt you and you can formalize your answer, because that's my favorite part of the podcast. Okay. Last question at the end. But yeah, so thank you for sharing your kind of belief in the point system. And I love you mentioned RFP too, a request for proposal. So I've also experienced things where you get this enterprise RFP in and it's like, you know, all hands on deck. Let's make this awesome thing. And then you send it off in 30 minutes. It's already rejected in 30 minutes. So I agree. If you focus on those leading indicators, that's where success comes from. But I want to still pose a question to you, because we always do this. For you, what does a great day in sales look like? And I usually preface it with, you know, it's not every day. You close the 5, 6, 7 figure deals. If anyone is, please contact the podcast. We want to talk to you. But in your mind, and as you're now training teams and you've built sales floors all over the country and even in other places in the world, what do you feel like is a great day in sales? I feel it's three things. It's creating pipeline. It's progressing and closing pipeline and it's personal growth. And personal growth can actually be stemmed into two distinct areas. I think sometimes we always say, like, me, me, me, what can I get? How do I get better? And yeah, that's an important aspect. And you should be spending 30 to 60 minutes every single day. And I think Kyle would agree with his point system in the framework that we created at Qualtrics years ago. But a second aspect of personal growth is, how can you help others? My career started to change when I actually started reaching out to other people and they helped me. I've got to think, Heidi Larson. I got into this prospecting funk and she was brand new and she set more meetings than anyone and I don't know how because I swear she was whispering on the phone every single time. But she went on to be the all-time greatest salesperson or one of the top three at Qualtrics in closing one of the biggest deals ever. But I couldn't set a meeting for the life of me. I got into this funk and I went to her because she was setting the most meetings and I'm like, Heidi, what am I doing? And she was so embarrassed because she's like, I've been here three years or you've been here three years and I've been here a month. How are you going to learn from me? But she also came back later and she said, hey, that taught a lot about me and gave me confidence where I was helping you and teaching you. And she started, like, that was a personal growth opportunity for her. And so as we look for ways to help others while also helping ourselves, both of those funnel into that personal growth standpoint and then creating pipeline and progressing closing pipeline. Closes should sell or closes we should celebrate as individuals. But I think I told you even before we turned on the recording, I celebrated my demo set or IQM set or the official meeting set more than my closes because I dialed in my win rate to where I knew I was going to win 60% of the time. And so setting up a meeting with FedEx or Delta Airlines or MasterCard or any of those cold call meetings that I set, I was just excited and ecstatic because I knew that I had a high propensity or ability to go and close those. So those are the three and then I measure them by points. Yeah. I think that's fantastic answer. And it made me think about in a management perspective too, so many awesome sales managers grab an hour with their team and it's like, hey, what do you want to talk about? I don't know. What do you want to talk about? And you know, it's the Vultures in Jungle Book if you know that reference. But I love that I'm guessing you've simplified it and you come and talk to your team and it's like, how are you building pipeline? How are you progressing deals and then are you growing as an individual? I feel like those three questions could just make everyone on one very meaningful for salespeople that want to grow, make more money, also just grow individually. And I just love how you've simplified so many aspects of sales sitting on the podcast. So I want to thank you for joining us. And I think everyone listening will definitely take something from it and we just appreciate your time Taylor. Thanks for joining us. Awesome. Yeah, thanks again for having me. It's been great talking with you. Awesome. Okay. Well, thank you. Yeah. Thanks for listening to The Great Day in Sales Podcast. Check us out at podcast.alicio.ai or anywhere you stream podcasts. (upbeat music)