Bradley Franks (Applied) - Good vs bad revenue

Bradley has a talent for selling. He also invested a lot of time into educating himself of this complex process. Icing on the cake: he sells a software to help unbias your hiring process. We surely learned a lot listening to him, hope you will too.

We chated about:
- How Bradley got into sales from studying geography
- Training sales people in a startup environment
- Biz dev vs sales as an analogy for people vs HR
- What makes a great demo
- IC to manager transition in sales teams
- Ideal sales tech stack
- Ideal comission and OTE ratio in SaS sales
- THE optimal hiring process

...and much more!

Note: Our apologies for the back then HRH Prince Charles joke at the beginning of the episode. We recorded 23 Aug 2022 and historical events since bring a more insensitive light on this than originally intended.

Transcript

Bradley 0:00

If you are selling software and you sell to the wrong person, who's not target market, you are screwing over your customer success team, your account management team, and your product team for onboarding an organization that's not well suited to your needs.

Spela 0:22

Hello, and welcome back to startups, people, and equity. This is a space where we discussed topics well related to startups, people, and equity. We hope that you will enjoy listening to today's episode as much as we enjoyed recording. Let's dive straight in.

Tamas 0:41

Bradley is currently working on eliminating bias from hiring with. He's responsible for sales and partnerships within a six strong sales team. He landed in sales after studying the same degree as prince Charles, but hopefully he won't be stuck in the same role into retirement age. Like his Royal Highness Bradley has a high empathy, personal approach to understanding customer needs and, desires while selling, which I really respect. He's also very passionate about the social benefit aspect of applied, which is probably why you've been there for three years now on. He's really well worse in the startup scene. All of which makes him the perfect guest to have on today. We'll talk about sales, hiring bias and more so let's get right into it. Hey Bradley. Thanks for making time for this episode. How are you doing, man?

Bradley 1:26

I'm doing good now. I've been compared to prince Charles. You know, it's, it's only downhill from here. Yeah. Geography degree. Interesting. I think geography is an interesting celebrate now. I'm doing good. I'm really pleased to be on the podcast. Thanks for having.

Tamas 1:41

Super. How did you go from geography to sales?

Bradley 1:44

Do you know what? I think that people often make the joke that geography's all about coloring in, but the, uh, the honest truth is I think you cover such a wide breadth of subjects matter that sometimes you find yourself in a position where you have to explain something in a very succinct way. That's quite a complex. And I think to a certain extent, that's what the sales toolkit requires you to do to take something that's quite complex and explain it in very simple terms to somebody that might know nothing about what you offer and applied, but we encourage new sales reps to do actually is, you know, talk to friends, family about what they're doing. If you can't explain the proposition of what you're selling to basically an eight year old, then you're probably over complicating it. But yeah, sales sales is where I've landed. I've sort of, there's this phrase, people go for, that's like, oh, I fell into sales, but I actually think I've always loved talking to people. I've always loved, you know, making new connections. And I think really sales gives me the, the scope to.

Tamas 2:46

Makes a lot of sense. And what are your hobbies? Cuz my introduction was a bit on the professional side, so I don't know. I want to give a bit more balanced picture to the audience.

Bradley 2:57

Very formal. It's true. Yeah. My hobbies. Do you know what I've got into? And this is, I know this is a podcast that's for startups and people, culture, and I don't wanna be that tech person that's sort of biohacking their life, but cold swimming in the last 12 months has been my serious go to, I dunno. Have you ever done it before?

Tamas 3:21

Yeah, absolutely. I've got the legs Zu next to me. So it gives a very good chance. Where do you.

Bradley 3:26

I go to the Lido in hamsters and hamster ponds. We've got a group of about it's funny. We, we call ourselves the serpents. The serpentine is like an open water club in Hyde park. We only went once and then we ended up moving to hamster. There's about 15 of us. We meet up every Saturday and religiously swim like three, four degree Celsius water during the winters. That's what's kept me sane during lockdowns. I'd say that's probably my biggest hobby at the moment. Aside from reading, of course binging the odd Netflix. I used do an awful lot of, sport when I was younger. But to be honest, I think combat sports like kickboxing and rugby, I just don't have, the temperament for anymore. I'm too precious.

Spela 4:12

How do you get yourself ready? For three or four degree water?

Bradley 4:16

I've got lots of friends who I've bought along with me and they'll go for their first time. Maybe when it's like 9, 10, 11, 12 degrees. It's all about breathing. It's all about taking deep breaths that heat your chest and heat your lungs, and that create that tension. And it's also about mindset. It's about not hesitating. I think it's quite a good metaphor for life. Really. If you are thinking about the outcome before, you've actually focused on doing what you should do. You're not gonna be able to do it. And I've brought friends along who really get into their own head about getting into this freezing cold water and freak out and don't do it. It's the people who are focused on taking one step after another and just walking in and focusing on your breathing that leave and then say, oh my God, that was horrible. Normally is the first sentiment, but wow, that was also. It was quite spiritual. It was something that was quite special about it. And I dunno why, but I wanna go back.

Spela 5:13

Well, so, um, salt, but maybe that's because you're a salesman but if we wanna go. To your sales story. Yep. I think I now understand how you landed in sales, but how did you end up in sales in startups?

Bradley 5:31

Really good question. I had lots of friends from university going down the traditional sort of route when it came to careers. So they've become management consultants or accountants or lawyers, et cetera. And I thinks all printers. Exactly. You know? I have been compared to prince Harry, before I had curly hair. And then I decided to grow it out and go to my Jewish heritage.

Tamas 5:55

And after that this podcast is a big step down with his father. I'm sorry about that.

Bradley 6:00

exactly, exactly. But I think. The big concern I had going down, any of those sort of graduate route was that I wanted to from day one, see the impact that my work was having. And I think startups give you the flexibility and the freedom to do that. They're much more capitalism by fire. I think most startups have a lack of learning and development. There are some organizations that are helping plug that like learnability and in sales, the sales impact academy, but really you learn by doing, and I think the appeal. Working for the first organization I went to, which was called N straight out of university was I wanna have an impact immediately in the organization I'm working in and be in the hot seat and in the boiler room, so to speak. And I think that's what drove me to it since actually there's been some really cool organizations that have set up that have helped. Guide graduates. And even those who aren't graduates down paths into tech. So you've got, jumpstarts set up by Matthew, sorry. You might be familiar with them. They take top grads and offer them placement in startups for the first few stages of their career. And also I'm sure you're familiar with you and Blair's multiverse, they're effectively, you know, providing an alternative to university education for those that wanna get into tech. And I know they're working. Not just startups, mostly pretty large organizations, but yeah, those sort of options weren't necessarily available to me when I left university,

Tamas 7:27

I wanna latch onto to something you said there, because you said it's kind of like baptism and by fire, you learn on the job. Has it been your experience that startups on the other hand, give you the room to fail?

Bradley 7:38

If you are scared of failure, don't work at a startup basically. I actually met with a founder, a guy called Hector Hughes. He's got a startup set up called unplugged really? They they've got cabins effectively where you can do digital detox, where you put your phone away for two days and you, you know, exist in the wilderness and whatnot. And he said that he has a bias towards those that do fail or have failed in their careers in terms of hiring into his team. And I think as a salesperson. Gonna be completely transparent, the vast majority of things that you do in your role, especially when you're starting out, you're gonna suck at, and that's good. It's good to be bad. When you start out, you need to be comfortable with taking, extending the metaphor now of, um, the cold swimming, but actually taking one step at a time, breathing in once. Breathing out once at a time and being comfortable with not getting things right. And learning on the job. I recall when I started it applied and my elevator pitch was awful. My discovery questions were clunky. My follow up copy was not at the standard. It is now. Uh, and Patrick, my mentor back then made me watch videos of myself pitching that we'd recorded. It was the most painful experience. Ever had to go through professionally. If you are not comfortable with failing and getting things wrong, then you're never gonna get better. And I think it's that sort of mindset that really attracted me to working in a startup.

Spela 9:09

Do you think there's anything that people around you can do to make the environment comfortable to fail?

Bradley 9:18

Yes. I think the most valuable. In creating, um, we talk about inclusive culture, right? It's this buzzword that exists in the people space. We wanna build an inclusive culture. We really wanna make sure that people are comfortable with ambiguity and so on. So forth comes from the top. The best thing that happened to me when I started working at applied and actually in the last few startups that I worked at were the, um, senior management, the exec. Especially in a 2030 person startup being very open about their failures and being vocal about them and being human. When I started working at applied, I watched back recordings of discovery and demo calls, uh, Andy, who, by the way, Is an excellent commercial director and excellent salesperson did. But at the time, you know, there were a few conversations that you had with some organizations that just weren't a fit for applied that weren't great. And I think it'd be the first to admit that and being 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 weeks into my role and seeing somebody that I'm looking at pitching applied incredibly well. Seeing them not do it so well and be open about that creates that safety and creates that environment where you are willing to be vulnerable. And if you are not willing to be vulnerable with your team, you're not willing to hold your hands up and say, you know, I think I could do that better. You're not going to improve. So I think, yeah, that's the main thing to creating an inclusive, safe space, having senior members of the team. Being earnest, honest and transparent about their shortcomings and encouraging others to do the same.

Tamas 10:54

That's really inspiring. I completely agree. I think it's a great habit to have as a people manager to just be really open about the times when you mess up. Absolutely. Still staying on the sales angle a little bit further, there's this kind of debate, or I'm not sure if it's a debate or not, but there are two kind of terminologies used to describe revenue acquisition, right? One, this, biz dev and the other one is sales. How do you relate to these two terms? Do you think it's similar to people versus HR on the other side of the fence? What do you think about this?

Bradley 11:26

So I'm gonna caveat my answer by saying I'm by no means. A leading expert on this debate on either side, but I am a person that works in sales. I'm a person that works in the HR people space. And I do have an opinion. And my opinion is, is that I think BI dev versus sales. Really is focused on different parts of the revenue acquisition journey. If we can call it that like biz dev as a concept, you'd find typically would be focused on generating leads, generating business. So you'll find people who are. BDRs business development representatives or people who are SDRs sales development representatives. I think sales in terms of role and function is broader. It encompasses BizDev to a certain extent, but I would see more about managing the full sales process and closing. Business as well. So bringing new logos in, I don't think it's totally analogous to the people versus HR debate or topic. Why? Because I actually don't think that all progressive organizations, uh, Gonna go back to using the term human resources or HR to describe their people function. We've seen the most progressive organizations start to develop people, arms, you go to lattice and you look at their team. They've got a people function. The word HR is never going to be written in anyone's title. Now, I think to a certain extent, what you've seen is sales. As a main function of a business organization, trying to distance itself from appearing as sales. And it feels as though it's actually going full cycle. So you might have seen people in my role who are bringing new logos on and selling to government and selling to startups and selling to charities, call themselves partnerships managers. That's what my title was when I joined applied or growth managers and BI dev people might call themselves BI dev managers. And in part, I think that's because sales has. Perhaps understandably having been through sub sales processes, recently sales has got a bad name and I think actually the function of sales is re professionalizing itself. And there's a lot of reasons for that. But I think the main one is, is that the quality of learning and development best practices like genuine playbooks are being scoped out. And people are increasingly proud to say I'm a salesperson. I work in sales. So actually, whereas the HR versus people debate feels more P. People shifting from being, you know, I'm a human resources manager to I'm a people manager, I actually think is dev and sales often are separate. And if they're not separate and they're part of the same function, we're seeing a slight return to people being proud to say, you know, I work in sales. I am a salesperson. Sales is my role.

Spela 14:18

I can relate to your analogy, but looking back through my career so far, I do remember a. Negative feeling of receiving an email and someone signing as sales or sales team lead. But now 2, 3, 4 years later, I receive an email. I see sales and I say, oh, I know exactly what to do with this person. I know what I can expect from them. And it is not clouded. And then I have two guests and return an email that says. Well, how can I help you? I dunno what to do with you.

Bradley 14:53

You're an executive partnerships level, two manager. What do you want from me? You know, I think where sales gets a bad name is where there's not good management and direction around what the core value proposition is of a product, especially in SAS and the problems and challenges and paint. That product solves. If you are just spamming people and you're going for volume, and you're saying, Hey, can we have a conversation? I think you'll be interested in this. That's all about me, me, me, me, me, me, me. This is what our product offers. This is what we do, you know, can you speak to me please? Whereas if you go in with the approach of some organizations, Many just like you, loads of nonprofits, like comic relief, UNICEF, welcome trust. They struggled with hitting diversity goals. I know that you've got an coming up where you going need delivering certain metrics on this. Have you consider recruitment as part of that process, it's being more consultative. And actually it's very easy for me to sit here and say, that's what you should do as a good salesperson. Very few people actually end up doing it. So I think. At least at the very least your rights, you know what to expect from sales people, but there are, there are good sales people and there are not so good sales people.

Tamas 16:12

Maybe I'm gonna give you a super high bar, but let's see. Um, how is the sales process different when you're talking to government functions, UNICEF and a startup?

Bradley 16:22

Yeah. So I think that applied look, elevator pitch. For those of you who aren't familiar with, what we do, we effectively help people in HR and talent teams hire effectively without bias and in a way that provides much better structure around making hiring decisions and just a fairer journey for candidates that results in high levels of retention for organizations, better candidate experience and improvements in diversity without the need for things like positive. Organizations that we work with, that we have traction in exist. As you've said to mass in the, the nonprofit space in kind of the third sector, the quasi government space and startups, generally, if you're a B Corp or you, uh, have a social mission of some sort, you tend to be more inclined to be looking towards applied as solution in a traditional applicant tracking system like greenhouse or lever or workable. The sales process differs, not just depending on the industry, but depending on the size of organization and its makeup. I think when selling to government, there are more boxes that we need to tick. Most government departments that are looking to purchase software have to go through a more rigorous procurement process. So we work with, uh, the equality and human rights commiss. We also work with the department for leveling up it's worth caveating. All of this by saying applied as an organization, comes from the nudge unit, uh, the behavioral insights team. So we come from the office, but we normally have to part of a shortlist with two other. Applicant tracking systems and explain what our comparative advantage is compared to those, as well as go through what I would say are more rigorous GDPR compliance checks than that, which you normally would. We're also on, what's called the G cloud. Which is like a central government portal for procurement software. I think that's the compliance side of things. The interesting side of things is I think generally speaking, when we sell to startups, it's the person that you're speaking to. That's responsible for the function and therefore it's their problem that you are solving. I had a conversation with the startup earlier, whose name I'm not gonna mention. 16 people. They have no way of managing their application processes. They're doing all of their hiring through an inbox and they're planning on doubling their team and the person responsible for hiring. And the CCO is sweating because if they don't fix that problem, they're going to fail. That's very different to a 200 person organization, like the equality and human rights commission saying our applicant tracking system feels a bit dated and we need to. So the urgency and sense of urgency and getting set up is also something that I think separates selling to government and third sector from selling to startups. When you sell to a startup often, that problem is business critical. My other experiences, selling to charities, very few charities have people teams. In spite of being the most progressive organizations, the charity sector, the third sector is stuck on using the term human resources or resourcing instead of talent. And it could just be a lingo thing. To be honest, I also think, and this isn't too, um, to poo poo anybody in the nonprofit sector, there's a phrase that's commonly used, which. Charity time we work on charity time. You might do a discovery call and a demo three weeks later, and then await for a very long bureaucratic decision making process to unfold over the following 2, 3, 4, 5 months. I've had some larger nonprofits who've probably taken six to 12 months to announce. A decision when every person that's going to be using the system is actually on board with the benefits and value. Whereas what we tend to see is, is startups are able to move faster and they are more agile and more nimble. So I think long winded way of going about answering a question, I actually think our sales process doing a great discovery call, understanding the needs and pains that are there. Offering a bespoke demo, scoping a proposal that's fit for the, the needs. Of the prospective client. That's the same, it's the timelines rigor number of people involved, uh, that generally differ depending on the industry we're selling to.

Spela 20:44

I just had a question pop up in my head because I've worked with, uh, sales people. I have been sold to, I tried to sell and I think discovery is definitely one of the key pillars. And I think that one can kind of be predetermined. An organization, then it comes to the demo and a demo can either go spectacular really well, or it can really flop. So what do you think is the thing that makes a demo really good?

Bradley 21:16

I think the first thing that makes a demo good. Isn't forcing it down a prospective client's throat. It's um, it's qualifying properly before the demo, like. We're not gonna solve an organization's needs because they are tied by the hip to using the resume. Everyone in the organization loves the CV. They don't see the value of using skills based questions and hiring managers believe that they're interviewing really well by asking candidates about their background. The demo is going to flop. We're not aligned in terms of philosophy and we shouldn't be entering into a further discussion. So I think that's the first thing it's qualifying out rigorously. The second thing is making sure that every single person on the demo, you're probably going to have new people. They're able at the start to voice what's important to them. What's important to them when it comes to hiring in the instance of applied, what do they wanna get out of the session today and why are they here? And then the third thing. Providing a recap of what you understand to be the situation now. So a recap of what we spoke about last time and what you are going to show them specifically, that helps them address that problem. So for some organizations, the main reason they get in touch might be. We have terrible equal opportunities monitoring. We have no way as an organization of knowing the proportion of men, women, people of color, those from disabled backgrounds that are applying to our jobs. And we need to be able to report on that. Cause we're underrepresented in a specific area. We work with whiz kids who are like a. 30 person, nonprofit that help children who are disabled in wheelchairs, they didn't have a way of tracking disability effectively in their hiring process. That for them was the most important thing that we could help with getting that out on the table. And then using that to drive the. Value of the product and not just the features is ultimately what's gonna make for a great demo. And then I think the fourth thing is treating a demo as a conversation right now, this is a podcast. So in a way, it's like you asked me a question and I might speak for maybe too long, 2, 3, 4 minutes. You don't want a demo to really look like that. If everybody's engaged, you want a demo to be an extension of your discovery, where you are reiterating what the pain is that that person's outlined. Oh, just to check, like, this is what our equal opportunities monitoring form looks like. You're not using anything like this right now. Are you. Understanding what the pain is. That's there reiterating the value of that is really important and treating a demo as a conversation and not just a one sided conversation is really important. So I think as a salesperson, that's the best that you can do going into it and setting it up. I also think it's about not being hesitant to ask for feedback. Like we're selling software. It's important that people see the value and that. Excited about what the software you're selling can do. But it's also important that you're getting feedback and therefore a steer on whether or not this is actually something that's gonna going to eventually be introduced by the team that you're speaking with. I wanna drill down into an aspect of your customers, perhaps. How often do you feel like it's a bit of a social washing that they're using applied? How often do you feel like it's a badge that they wanna acquire to legitimize their hiring process? And how often do you feel like it's a need that is philosophically or on some moral level important to the. Yeah, that's a really good question. I think almost every people or HR or talent team that goes into purchasing applied, does it. The right reasons we want to boost diversity. We know candidates are being overlooked. We know that if you have a non-white sounding name, you typically send 80% more resumes to get the same callback rate than if you have a white sounding name that sucks. It's not right. It also means that we are competing for candidates that everybody's competing for. And there's great talent out there that all too often is overlooked. Where do I think, you know, there can be limitations in terms of implementing it. It's when hiring managers aren't bought along the journey. I don't necessarily think there's ever. Like washing we're using applied. Therefore our diversity challenges are gonna be solved. There's still work that has to be done in sourcing candidates that are from a diverse pool. There's still work that has to be done with bringing hiring managers along that journey. And that's why we offer a. Monthly training sessions and drop ins on how to build work samples and structure interviews. And actually we, we used to run biweekly, completely free training, uh, that I would look after, with our hiring team.

Spela 26:03

There is a clear shift towards I see individual contributors. And managers actually having the same opportunities. So you can be at level five and you can be an individual contributor or a manager, but of course in the past, the one way to go up the ladder is to become a manager. So there's still a bit of a bias to go that way. However, I've heard how horribly wrong a manager that is actually an IC how horrible that can go. So what do you think. What is important in a sales manager, particularly in comparison to an IC that is in sales.

Bradley 26:42

So I think. In terms of understanding where individual contributors make bad managers, it it's all about being able to look at a salesperson that can diagnose. Here's why I'm successful in my role. Here's why I attain 110, 130, 150% of my quota. And here's how you, as my sales team can recreate that if you are not able to articulate. Train others and be empathetic to others and actually have lots of the soft skills. Then you can be the best individual contributor in your organization, but you probably will struggle at least from the get, go to be, be an effective manager. I think what we are seeing in sales, especially in SAS sales software sales is increasing specialization in certain parts of the sales funnel. I am not cut out to be an exceptional sales development representative. I'll hold my hands up and say that the skillset of an SDR and that's effectively someone who runs sequences, reaches out to prospects. Cold is incredibly diligent and well organized is very, very different. The skillset of managing a few opportunities and. You know, building consensus within an organization and doing lots of demos and scoping out and negotiating a proposal, they're just different skills. And I think the way the market is, uh, in terms of software sales actually reflects that you can be paid, you know, 60, 70,000 pounds. Per year as a mid to senior level SDR, a post series B organization. That's a similar base to that, which you would be on comp wise as an account exec a perhaps slightly smaller organization. I think what you are starting to see is management of those teams in pods. So you might, instead of going from an SDR. Straight to, you know, I'm managing head of sales to like I'm managing a team of SDRs. I'm an SDR team lead. You might see people going from being an account exec to managing a team of account execs or coaching a team of account execs before then eventually taking the step to be, you know, heading up a region of sales or driving that the whole sales team. I think it really comes down to effective management, comes down to, you know, hiring great people at first. Especially in a startup that can operate autonomously and the role of a manager should be to help unblock and facilitate their. Journey them being the team. I did read quite an interesting Harvard business review article. That was all about managing introverts versus extroverts. If you didn't guess I'm highly extroverted and could probably talk for England and actually extroverts. Best managed by introverts. Interestingly, because somebody who's extroverted wants to talk about the ideas they have, what they're doing, how things are going and, and an introverted manager is going to take a set step back and facilitate that better than perhaps having two extroverts, you know, yapping on Um, whereas if you have somebody who's, perhaps not as much of a self starter is more introverted, actually having an extroverted manager is gonna be. Really beneficial. I think, I don't have necessarily a clear coherent answer for you on that. My experience would suggest that, um, I see a management they're not so dissimilar. If you take, a slightly, a slightly more granular step moving towards management from being an IC.

Spela 30:19

Very interesting conclusion. Super insightful. Yeah. I need to drill down in this one because the conclusion now completely through me, I expected to say no, you know what? People manager, you need to have certain skills need to be willing to actually focus on people in their careers rather than just the process of how to sell more. And so. So tell me, what do you think, how do you train a manager out of an IC?

Bradley 30:47

How do you train a manager out of an IC? I think the main thing that changes when you become a manager from being an IC is how you need to interact with the wider organization. So some sort of like executive training for a first time manager. With somebody that's done it before is really valuable. If you are working in sales, you pretty much as an IC talk to prospects, you might occasionally talk to product and give feedback that, you know, we've closed the deal because of this. We've lost the deal because of this, but really you exist in sales. As a manager, it's not just your role to support the team and care most about what they're doing and how they are. It's also super important to be able to give the headline points to different members of the team. Different team leads that have different priorities and knowing how to be succinct and structure. That information is something that the organization needs to do to support you with that. So for. If you're heading up a sales team and you're talking to the CEO, they're not gonna care as much about the sales efficiency of your team. They're not gonna be as focused on, okay, this is the number of discovery calls we've done. This is the number of demo calls we've done. This is the number of proposals we've made. What they want to know is, is do the next three months of revenue that we've forecasted for. Look like they're gonna come in and how can I help you if that's not the case? What the head of product wants to know. Of the five new product features we've released in the last six months. How many new deals have we made that we wouldn't have had, had we not built those features? And what other features have you seen? We need to build in order to unblock them. So being able to actually navigate conversations internally is something that you are not gonna have experience doing as much when you step into management. I think the second thing is also. Being really open to the fact that you are probably not gonna be amazing at it. At first, the first time you sell applied, or the first time you sell any software, I don't care how good a salesperson you are. Your pitch is not gonna be amazing. Copy is not gonna be amazing. Might be okay. And I think the same thing applies to management, especially when your role is to make your team succeed. Like, if you are managing a sales team and you're no longer an individual contributor, who's judged by the percent of quota that they bring in, or how much revenue that you, they bring in, it needs to be about elevating those around you. And you know, you, um, what's that sport at the Olympics at the winter Olympics, when they, they throw the ball on the ice. What's that called? I can't even remember what curling curling the role of a manager isn't to throw the, is, is it a car? What's it called? I dunno, the, the puck, the oversized puck, the role of the manager is not to throw the oversized puck it's to be one of the people that stands on the side that just makes the path of the puck really easy. And when the person who's thrown it eventually gets there and nails it. They take a step back and say, well done, you absolutely smashed it. You need to be a facilitator rather than somebody. Taking credit for everything. And that's actually a bit of a mindset switch for managers. And I see it all the time. Uh, when we talk to sales teams and they're looking to scale first time, managers need to be able to take a step back and, uh, celebrate the successes of their team and actually realize that being average at lots of things, as a manager is still a massive achievement. You're looking after a lot more spilling plates than you ever would have before. So yeah, I think that's. That's my long wayed answer to that question.

Spela 34:22

Wonderful. I think it came full circle. I think we were talking about the same thing in different words. Amazing conclusion. And this is my, uh, I feel like I should ask this everyone. Do you think to be a good manager, you first have to be an impressive, see

Bradley 34:41

I think within an organization, if you've started quite junior, in order to have the respect of your team in sales, you probably need to have delivered some pretty sufficient revenue in order to have the right to be granted the privilege of managing a team. But if we look at some of the best managers outside of sales, they're failed individual contributors. Like awesome. Ven. Is my favorite football manager of all time. And I don't necessarily agree with making analogies between sport and tech, as much as the bros on Twitter, love to do it, but in all seriousness, he was pretty much a failed footballer. Didn't achieve a huge amount, came into the premier league and was. Arguably the most successful manager that ARS nor have ever had in the, one of the most successful that the premier league has ever seen. And that's the same for plenty of really successful managers. So I think it depends, there's not one size fits all as far as the rule goes. I do think that within a small startup, there is probably more of an importance in being a strong IC before being given the right to. Management responsibility. But once you've done that, there is of course, you know, an element of upskilling that's gonna be required.

Tamas 35:58

Why did you have to bring up sports? It's so difficult for me now to stay on topic. I wanna follow the path of providing. Your opinion and your, your learnings for other sales departments. And one crucial part of this is not just transitioning from IC to management and so on, but also the text tech that you're using. Yeah. So could you talk, to us a little bit about the text tag that you use that's applied for sales?

Bradley 36:24

Yeah, absolutely. So I think it, tech stack all starts with the CR. For those of you that don't know, I'm sure everybody listening does CRM customer relationship management system. There are some really cheap ones that you can start with. HubSpot is free for startups, I believe in the first few years. And you can also have all your marketing come under that roof. We went with clothes. But there's also pipe drive, I believe, which is also quite cheap as the first CRM. That's what we started with we've since moved to Salesforce. Why gives better data in terms of looking at your conversions of marketing qualified leads through to deals more granularity in terms of reporting. If you are going to use Salesforce as your CRM for God's sake. Do not give your individual contributors the hell of having to use it as the main tool day in, day out, Salesforce is clunky. Salesforce is great in some ways, but using day to day is really not desirable. I would highly recommend attaching. Or stacking on a tool called scratchpad, which we've recently introduced or applied. Now scratchpad is a perfect example of a product led growth tech tool. It makes it super easy to amend any set of fields in Salesforce and manage a really scalable sales process and do things like take all of your notes and forecast and just have everything from a pipeline hygiene perspective, up to date in Salesforce that's required. That's the sort. Base layer of any sales team. I think then of course, you've got slack for communicating and having quick updates and whatnot. We use notion as an intranet or database for best practices and playbooks. We've also introduced. Zoom info for gathering prospecting information on ideal customer profile. We previously used a tool called lead IQ, which was a little bit cheaper and probably better for some early stage companies. Our, our IDRs tend to live in, in zoom info and then they used sales loft, uh, which we considered, went for alongside, we don't use outreach, but we considered outreach for, for actually managing sequences and cadences. I'd also. We use SalesLoft for recording our sales calls and doing feedback sessions and coaching and whatnot. There's a module that you can add on for a, you know, a couple, couple dollars a month per user. We did previously use gong, which is sort of the leader in call recording software. It's great. It's quite expensive. It was probably slightly too advanced for where we were as a six person strong sales team. But that's something, if you are, you know, Further stage of your growth I'd recommend. And then the final. That we introduced was the sales impact academy. SIA, your six person sales team. You are not going to be able to offer all of the learning and development to all of your reps, especially those that might not have sales experience prior or software sales experience prior and SIA offer. Really good training modules on how to prospect, how to conduct discovery, demo, negotiate, and then take that step through to management. And I'd highly recommend it for elevating the sector. I can't speak highly enough of the content they're putting out.

Spela 39:42

That's amazing. I know you, in the beginning mentioned that learning and development is lacking. Yeah. And do you think that this sales impact academy. Fills the gap in sales.

Bradley 39:52

They're doing great work in terms of asynchronous training, you can also do live sessions. I think the biggest challenge with any training, we don't want conscious bias training is good for building awareness in hiring for instance, but getting any training to stick is really tough and having something that's there. That's asynchronous is great because it means that you can have your reps come back to a few key points that they've learned and actually implement them. There are some other great. Organizations out there doing sales training that we've also done. It applied Paul Paul crew and the team at are doing some great sales training. And I believe they've also introduced, uh, an on-demand training module. You've also got wiser who are a recruitment agency. They have SDRs and AEs of London and they offer quite a lot of bespoke. I say bespoke, they offer quite a lot of, um, free training to, to reps, uh, introducing things like how to do the medic framework and how to conduct a good demo call and sharing best practices. What I've definitely seen in the last five, six years is like a much higher bar around the quality of information that's available to sales reps than ever before. When I started selling. You know, it was, here's a book on by Sandler. Go read it and figure the rest out yourself. There's definitely a lot more out there that you can interact with.

Tamas 41:13

We have to move on, I think, to bias in hiring. But, uh, so please veto, if you don't think that this is a question that we can answer in a couple of minutes, but sure. I really wanna understand your opinion about when is it time for a startup to introduce, uh, commission based remuneration for sales teams

Bradley 41:30

day one.

Tamas 41:31

And what's the split that you would re. Between base and OTE.

Bradley 41:35

So I think the split between base and OTE, I was having a conversation about this. Funny enough, with a, with a family friend of mine. My sister's boyfriend's dad is an estate agent and they famously offer very low base and very high potential earnings in terms of commission. This conversation came up because he said if it was down to be, and I was 22, I would take no base salary in all commission. And I said, That's interesting why? And he said, well, you wanna work hard. You wanna be incentivized. And I think that approach would never work for software sales. Why? Because there are so many factors beyond your control deal control is everything, but you can do absolutely everything right. Time and time again, and still not close business. And you don't want your sales reps to be disincentivized off the back of not doing. Off the back of actually doing everything right and not landing it. I think in property, salespeople or estate agents are sort of guiding a process that exists and they're not influencing the sale quite as much. Uh, they're sort of facilitating it more than anything in recruitment. They tend to have a more similar structure, which is much lower. I think I have like maybe 30% of their, their salary will be base and. Additional 70% is OTE. And in part that's because once you've sold the product it's done, like once somebody's passed six months of their probation, it's done, you've made the sale from a recruitment perspective. Once someone's bought a property and they've exchanged and completed, it's done. There's no need for as much accountability in the sales process. If you are selling software and you sell to the wrong person, who's not. You know, target market, you are screwing over your customer success team, your account management team, and your product team for onboarding an organization that's not well suited to your needs. So I think the main thing is, is you should be incentivizing sales reps at first, but, uh, 70 30 split is what, what I'd recommend at the start.

Spela 43:34

Yeah, just thumbs up from my side. it's a, but interestingly enough, I did just speak with the CEO. They just, uh, removed all of their commission based compensation because it was brought up by their sales team and so far so good. They're growing even more. So I think, yeah, I wanna, I wanna talk to them in six months to see what ended happening that.

Bradley 43:59

I think you want to, you want to be compensating your top performance. I think, I think you want to, it's not that a salesperson is like heavily incentivized to close a deal because they've got this commission target that they really want to hit. I think it's, you wanna be rewarding your talent and you wanna be incentivizing your talent somewhat to be delivering results. And, um, at applied, we have a slightly higher base to commission split. In part, cause we wanna give sales people, you know, security, but we also do of course, wanna incentivize that you can earn great money if you're delivering value to the business.

Spela 44:38

Yeah. I think the thought process was compared to, I don't know, software engineering. They also work on features and incentivizing them to finish it faster with. Lead to something subpar. Yeah. So why are we doing it in sales and not in the other departments?

Bradley 44:55

Totally. If you cut people's bases way too much and you are like, okay, 60, 70% of your earnings in software sales come from commissions. You are setting yourself up to generate bad revenue, bad revenues, bad for the business. Cause you don't see linear growth. A lack of linear growth is no fundraise, no business.

Tamas 45:14

Well put. Yeah, absolutely. I think that leads us onto. Another target audience is probably hiring managers and because of the nature of the tool that you're dealing with every day, I was wondering if you had any advice for hiring managers, listening to this episode,

Bradley 45:30

hiring managers, I'm gonna be as succinct as I possibly can in this answer. I think it's three things that you need to take into account ideologically, and then we'll break that down into practice. So speed. It's not everything. It's the first point I would raise hiring managers, especially first time managers that are under pressure to deliver results are so key to rush with the risk of getting it wrong, um, and hiring the wrong person, which is much more painful, much more costly, much more time consuming than if you spend a little bit more time upfront investing in thinking about what you're looking for and making the right decision. I think the second thing ideologically is be humble. Like being more senior does not make you any less prone to bias. In fact, there's quite a lot of evidence that would support you are more biased if you are senior, because you have a preconceived idea of what good or bad looks like based on personal experience and other teams you've managed or people you work with. And third don't jump to conclusions. Unless you work in a super niche industry or you are hiring like a professional chartered person, like an accountant or an insurance broker, you should do all you can to get rid of references, logos titles in your hiring process. And. Use shortlisting and interviewing as a time to discover and learn more about a candidate without passing judgment, really hard to do, but actually treating your hiring process as a sales process where you, you have a set list of what you're looking for. You have a key criteria and you're learning more. That's gonna be far more beneficial to you than just jumping at this. Person's good. This person's bad. This person's okay. In practice. How can you establish an effective process? Well, I think the first thing to say is take it seriously if you don't have the right. You're screwed. So you wanna be robust and be robust at speed. So I think if we're thinking about five things you can do, I would say, firstly, banish the CV, focus on using work, sample questions, get candidates to show you how they can do the job by getting them to do little bits of the job upfront in a sales role that could be getting somebody to write a prospecting email, or talk about how they'd structure a discovery call. It doesn't have to be long. Second thing, take a show. Don't tell approach. Having scoped out all of the skills, values, behaviors that you believe are important for someone to succeed in that role. So don't just look for somebody that directly replaces the background of your top performer. That's a mindset thing at third structure interviews, wherever you can, once you've shortlisted based off work samples, have everybody independently scoring against a set list of questions that are important. We can talk about marketing rubrics. Another time there's something called the Michigan fish test, which is really interesting, focuses on how people from different backgrounds focus on different things and why it's so important to use consistent rubrics. Uh, fourth have multiple people involved as a result of that. So use crowd wisdom. Don't rely on making all the decisions yourself. People have different perspectives. You're gonna miss stuff. Other people are gonna see new things about candidates, and finally, like, see your whole hiring processes will work in progress. Like it shouldn't just be this mic drop moment. When you hire someone where you run off into the distance, you're like, we've done it. Um, reflect on what you did. Well, what you could do better and be accountable to making those changes. Of course you can do all of this replied. And I'm, I'm not gonna explicitly plug us, but if you are a really early stage organization or a nonprofit, I work for an organization called screen share they're one. Now two full-time employees they could not afford and did not need an applicant tracking system that enabled them to do this. I operated the whole hiring process of a spreadsheet and actually on my LinkedIn, I've posted about, I've done a blog about how we achieved hiring through that process. So yeah, that would be my advice to hiring them.

Spela 49:22

It was very, very good. I, I do wanna clarify one thing, you mentioned crowd sourcing the hiring decisions. Yeah. Do you mean having one interview with three people or three people having. Separate interviews with the person. And is it three? Oh yeah.

Bradley 49:40

so three is the optimum number of people that you should have in a single interview. There's a really interesting study done by Laslow Bach, who I'm sure listeners of this podcast are familiar with X VP of Google. You know, people team. What was found was in a single interview. If you have one person reviewing the average accuracy of that interview is 60. So, what that actually means is 10 people you're interviewing. You're not gonna get the decision right over who you should be progressing or who you should be hiring almost half the. Basically, if you have three or more interviewers, the accuracy of that interview is 86%. Now there are exceptions to that role. There's a guy called Nelson Abramson. You can look him up on LinkedIn. He still works at Google to this day. The average accuracy of his interviews is better than that of three people. It's like 91%. Something crazy like that. Now, when you're a scaling business, you can't have one person do every interview. So if somebody thinks they are Nelson and there will be someone that thinks they are bring them into Des you know, designing marketing, rubrics, have them sit in as one of three people in an interview. To clarify that point, we would recommend having three people. Or two, if you're really stretched in a single interview and each scoring independently of one another submitting those scores and then comparing those scores once you've submitted them. So as to prevent group think where the loudest voice in the room or the most senior voice in the room, Is the most influential because that's no good for anyone.

Tamas 51:15

And would you recommend multiple conversations or do you think that you can cover most things off with like a qualifying call or like a, yeah, just to get to know in a single interview?

Bradley 51:26

It depends what stage of growth you're at and how difficult the role is that you are hiring in. I think what we've seen works best is a quick call with the recruiter or the hiring manager to sell the candidate on the role. So understanding if it's a. What are your salary expectations? Why are you applying like this? Shouldn't be part of actually assessing candidates, get them interested and have them complete work samples that are scored anonymously. Then invite those candidates to a first round interview. We strongly advise that first round interview being as close to the role as possible. So using a role play. If you're a salesperson doing a pitch. If you're an engineer doing some pair programming and then having a final round interview for diving a little bit deeper into the sort of hard skills and scenarios you might be focusing on, you might have an extended case study. You're answering questions on, or you might have a value alignment set of questions in terms of how you go about doing your work. What we've tended to see is two rounds of interviews should be sufficient for most positions, two rounds of formal assessment that.

Spela 52:25

I think that's a very good moment to move on to the rapid fire questions. Yep. It wrapped it up very nicely. Now question for you. If you were to rejoin an organization, would you want to join a very early stage, a growth stage or a late stage startup?

Bradley 52:43

I'm gonna go with growth. Why because that's what I've known. I think you get the best balance of scoping out new processes with structure and not feeling like you're putting out fires all the time. Whilst being able to actually have an impact, which is the main reason that drove me to work at applied. If you're working too late, you might not be able to get that all right.

Tamas 53:06

Up next. Are you believer of in person hybrid? Or completely remote?

Bradley 53:14

Hybrid.

Tamas 53:15

All right. What's your optimal mix? We are currently more leaning towards remote applied.

Bradley 53:21

I think my Optum mix would be two to three days in the office and then the rest at home. I think there's real value in getting together, building trust, meeting in person, but also significant benefits to, uh, being able to work from home and have flexible working structure.

Spela 53:39

If the next offsite of your team would be up to you, where would you take them or what would you be doing?

Bradley 53:46

How well has the last year gone business wise?

Spela 53:50

it was amazing. The first in category,

Bradley 53:53

it was amazing. Do you know. I would love to be able to do a trip somewhere in the Scottish Highlands. I don't think anyone from the team would let me, but, um, going and doing some cold swimming, enjoying some good whiskey and celebrating our wins would be amazing. Would also be. Probably incredibly costly and I'd be shouted at, but yeah, I'd go for the Scottish Highlands. I've always wanted to go. Nice, please let me know when you go and I'll, I'll apply, uh, before uh, finish the sentence. The next big thing in startups is complete automation. I see, despite us all being, you know, in what we would consider to be the most. Forward thinking most agile teams in any organizations in the world. I think we spend far too much time doing manual tasks and far too much time sending emails and far too much time thinking of something. And then actually it taking quite a lot more lag to actually action it. And basically being able to automate that sort of thing or bypass the manual work is where I see the world of work moving.

Spela 55:08

Yes, I can sign under that. I would love to see someone just directly transcribing my thoughts and then pressing a button. And that does it.

Tamas 55:17

just bring it onto the same platform. I don't wanna use four or five products for accomplishing the same goal.

Bradley 55:22

Yeah, well, I do, you know what? I was split on choosing that or saying complete integration and not just tools like Sapia that are advancing it, but having. You know, everything fit into one place and not having to dig for data, just having it there. Being able to be logged into a single system without the clunkiness of single sign on or multifactor authentication. So I think there's two things I see happening. I'm pretty sure both of them will happen some point.

Spela 55:51

Oh, yes. I feel the need to express this thought because it pains me so deeply, but I was discussing this with McKen and my wife and I got a little bit angry at the startup world because we're creating tools to make something easier. But then to use that tool, a company has to create a new department. So we're actually making our lives. Easier for 10 months. And then it gets too specialized and we have to create a new department, which creates a new silo so that they can use that tool. And then you end up with seven departments within one department and you didn't solve anything. So it's, I, I need this automation to come through. Bradley I think that's your next startup. It, it needs to happen. That's that's it it's gonna happen. I'll join when they're at growth stage.

Tamas 56:43

Um, look very quick before wrapping up. Who would you like to hear on the show? Next?

Bradley 56:47

I thought about this for a while. I'm gonna go for act bar Karega. He's a, he's the recruitment director at Mefi and he's the founder of Mausi, which is a people consultancy. He's always posting great content on LinkedIn, around closing the gap of inequality and hiring. I love his thirst for data driven hiring. He's also a lovely person who I've met, uh, a fair few, um, recruitment events and hiring events. And I also think he's rightfully outspoken about, you know, the candidate experience and where there is like genuine inequality and the labor market. And I think he'd have some really interesting insights. So I'm gonna nominate.

Tamas 57:28

All right. Thank you so much. And thank you so much for your time as well. I really enjoyed this conversation several times. I was on mute when you kind of elaborated your points, but highly resonated with them. And then it was just such a joy to listen to you.

Bradley 57:41

Well, thank you so much.

Spela 57:42

Yes, same here. It's been a pleasure. Same here, Bradley. I've loved it. Awesome. Now I'm gonna go and set, set up my own podcast. Do it. yeah, I would listen to you. I, I found this very useful and I'm not even in sales. So some life learnings here. It's very kind of, you.