S2E7: John McMahon: Leading Sales Teams During Hyper-Growth
John McMahon, author of The Qualified Sales Leader, is widely recognized as the only person having been the Chief Revenue Officer at five public, enterprise software companies and is no stranger to working with sales teams during hyper growth stages. In today’s conversation, you’ll love his sport analogies and straight talk as he coaches sales leaders with immediately actionable strategies for long-term scaling. Listen now>>
Show notes:
John always try to make things simple because he's always said even to the people that work for him, if you can't explain it to your grandmother, then you really don't understand what you're talking about.
In sales, we have different definitions of the same words. So I think you can't really communicate in sales, like, you can't communicate in sports - until you have a common vocabulary for a commonplace.
Have common definitions, a common terminology. Without that, your team is lost, because you're just talking past each other. If you can't get your team on the same vocabulary, ultimately it's going to affect your credibility.
You need a culture where salespeople and sales leaders start to understand that it's not about them. It's about everybody else. And the way that they get promoted in this organization is by helping other people be successful, whether that's on their team or outside their team. And if they don't want to do those types of things, you're just not going to promote them.
If you can have a beer or a dinner with them, don’t hire them. You must get to know your people. You want to love them just like your kids. You want to understand their strengths and weaknesses and fears and security goals. Then you can help motivate them, and you also know what they're scared of.
Links mentioned in this episode:
About John
John McMahon is widely recognized as the only person having been the CRO (Chief Revenue Officer) at five public, enterprise software companies, PTC, Geo-Tel, Ariba, BladeLogic and BMC. John's expertise was formulated as a pre-IPO member of 4 of the 5 companies listed above and scaling those public companies.
Today, John is a board member at public software companies Snowflake, MongoDB and private, pre-IPO companies Lacework, Sigma, Cybereason and Observe. In the past, John has been a board member or executive consultant to: Hubspot, GlassDoor AppDynamics, Procore and Sprinklr.
