YouSaid · the spoken record

Carlos Delatorre

lines on the record: 72
first: 2025-01-24
most recent: 2025-01-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Thank you for having me, Harry. I love what you're doing. You bring a curiosity and a passion to highlight the journey that founders and executives are on. So thank you for having me. I'm honored.”
2025-01-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Every Sales Rep Should Do Pipeline Generation & How to Teach Them | Verticalised Sales Playbooks: When and How | How the Best Sales Reps and Leaders Structure Their Time with Carlos Delatorre, CRO @ Harness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“90% of the engineers to go build a brand new product when we had this like pretty hot company was really scary and he was single-minded about doing it. And that was the right decision. And then the other thing we did was go up market because the large enterprises believed that there was going to be a day after. They might not know when the day after was going to be. And so we were able to basically pivot the company way up market and go to people and say, listen, you know, were you happy with your travel program before COVID? No. What better time to overhaul it than now when no one's traveling and you can have a great program when the world resumes? And so by going up market and by building a second product, that company didn't die and it would have. I'd say that that was a pretty good strategy.”
2025-01-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Every Sales Rep Should Do Pipeline Generation & How to Teach Them | Verticalised Sales Playbooks: When and How | How the Best Sales Reps and Leaders Structure Their Time with Carlos Delatorre, CRO @ Harness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there were just some large enterprise accounts that were still traveling a little bit. You know, we had companies that were in the, what did they call it, that category, essential workers. We had companies that had essential workers, government, some manufacturing. Anyway, we made two key pivots during that period that saved the company, Ariel, the founder, you know, came back from a vacation and he said, by God, we've got to build an expense management solution and we've got to do it fast and burn the ships. And what he meant by that was he pivoted like the whole engineering organization from one day to the next. And, you know, candidly, the executive team thought, man, this is a bit dramatic. You're betting the whole company because remember at the beginning of COVID, we thought it was going to be two weeks and maybe it's going to be four weeks and maybe it's going to be six weeks. So nobody thought it was going to take as long as it did. So the idea of putting”
2025-01-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Every Sales Rep Should Do Pipeline Generation & How to Teach Them | Verticalised Sales Playbooks: When and How | How the Best Sales Reps and Leaders Structure Their Time with Carlos Delatorre, CRO @ Harness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was at Navan. We were a travel solution and COVID hit and nobody was buying travel. The company. Absolutely. I joined in January of 20 and the world locked down in March.”
2025-01-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Every Sales Rep Should Do Pipeline Generation & How to Teach Them | Verticalised Sales Playbooks: When and How | How the Best Sales Reps and Leaders Structure Their Time with Carlos Delatorre, CRO @ Harness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe the reputation salespeople are slimy or greedy or anything like that because I think it prevents some capable people from pursuing a job that could be the best job that they've ever had.”
2025-01-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Every Sales Rep Should Do Pipeline Generation & How to Teach Them | Verticalised Sales Playbooks: When and How | How the Best Sales Reps and Leaders Structure Their Time with Carlos Delatorre, CRO @ Harness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cancel the order for the other machine. Well, yeah, but you got to be here before the in-service on Monday. Great. I'll drive. I had to drive all night, snowstorm into Jackson, California, and I demoed this doctor on Friday. And I brought the competitor's machine with me and I was able to close the deal.”
2025-01-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Every Sales Rep Should Do Pipeline Generation & How to Teach Them | Verticalised Sales Playbooks: When and How | How the Best Sales Reps and Leaders Structure Their Time with Carlos Delatorre, CRO @ Harness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The story I have to tell you goes way back to the beginning of my career when I was selling medical equipment before I got even into software. I was selling this blood analyzer called her counter. I PG'd into an account, into a doctor's office, and the office manager told me they had just bought my competitor's product, a Beckton Dickinson. And I said, but you got to talk to me. Mine is better. All the reasons I'm rattling off all the reasons. She's like, no, the deal is done. I'm like, is it installed yet? No, it arrives next Tuesday. You got to talk to me. No, I can't. And then I thought, shit, I just upgraded an account that had one of those Beckt and Dickinsons. I still, I haven't sent it back to corporate. It's still in my closet. I'll tell you what office manager. You tell the doctor, she's got to see me. And if she sees me and she still thinks the Becknam Dickinson is the better machine, I'll bring one with me and she can have it for free and she can.”
2025-01-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Every Sales Rep Should Do Pipeline Generation & How to Teach Them | Verticalised Sales Playbooks: When and How | How the Best Sales Reps and Leaders Structure Their Time with Carlos Delatorre, CRO @ Harness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. I think it's probably always been important. Yeah, I think brand is highly important. That's why when you are a challenger, you need a higher caliber of salesperson because you don't have the brand. As your brand gets bigger and bigger, either great salespeople become more productive or you're able to get more junior or less talented salespeople.”
2025-01-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Every Sales Rep Should Do Pipeline Generation & How to Teach Them | Verticalised Sales Playbooks: When and How | How the Best Sales Reps and Leaders Structure Their Time with Carlos Delatorre, CRO @ Harness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“closing I'm a closer I know how to just convince this idea that you can coerce a customer or do some psychological gymnastics to get someone to sign a piece of paper when they weren't actually intending to. First of all, if you do, that deal is probably going to churn later or they're going to find a way to rescind the order. But I don't believe salespeople sell. Buyers buy. All salespeople can do is create an environment that is conducive to that purchase decision. How do you create that environment? Well, by doing good discovery, by finding challenges, by educating on how your solution meets those challenges. And once you do that, they want to buy. But the art of closing, that's blown.”
2025-01-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Every Sales Rep Should Do Pipeline Generation & How to Teach Them | Verticalised Sales Playbooks: When and How | How the Best Sales Reps and Leaders Structure Their Time with Carlos Delatorre, CRO @ Harness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's hard. It's hard. But I think you can. I think you can. I think a salesperson is probably in a mature territory, is probably going to spend a third of their time.”
2025-01-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Every Sales Rep Should Do Pipeline Generation & How to Teach Them | Verticalised Sales Playbooks: When and How | How the Best Sales Reps and Leaders Structure Their Time with Carlos Delatorre, CRO @ Harness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Difficult for a hunter to crack. So I'd say you want your farmer hunting inside of the account, but you also want your account manager to care deeply about customer value. And with that customer value comes trust. And if there's a question about a new technology, they'll probably bring it to the account manager and give the account manager the opportunity to either fix something in our current offering or change.”
2025-01-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Every Sales Rep Should Do Pipeline Generation & How to Teach Them | Verticalised Sales Playbooks: When and How | How the Best Sales Reps and Leaders Structure Their Time with Carlos Delatorre, CRO @ Harness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a great question. So, I think when you say farmer, what you're referring to is when you have an account manager that is owning one or multiple paying customers whose job it is to maintain and maybe grow those customers, but is not out there hunting for new business. And by the way, what's baked into your question is acknowledgement of the power of PG. That hunter is able to PG. And that's why that hunter is the more effective sales rep. So first of all, your farmers, I don't like the term. I prefer account manager. Your account managers should also be excellent at pipeline generation because they're trying to get into other divisions, et cetera. But I think if your account manager is driving real value with the account, then that account becomes very”
2025-01-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Every Sales Rep Should Do Pipeline Generation & How to Teach Them | Verticalised Sales Playbooks: When and How | How the Best Sales Reps and Leaders Structure Their Time with Carlos Delatorre, CRO @ Harness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“100%. No question about it. Absolutely. They learn faster. Their morale is higher. If I'm having a bad day, but the person next to me is having a great day that gives me hope. That gets me through the trough. And so, yeah, they're absolutely more productive. Also, managers are there to solve problems. Managers are there to course correct. You know, maybe somebody's doing it wrong and they don't know they're doing it wrong, but the manager can see it and help them. So yeah, it's much more productive in person.”
2025-01-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Every Sales Rep Should Do Pipeline Generation & How to Teach Them | Verticalised Sales Playbooks: When and How | How the Best Sales Reps and Leaders Structure Their Time with Carlos Delatorre, CRO @ Harness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably they over index on the value of relationship building and charisma and being the big personality and that doesn't hurt, but it's not really that impactful.”
2025-01-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Every Sales Rep Should Do Pipeline Generation & How to Teach Them | Verticalised Sales Playbooks: When and How | How the Best Sales Reps and Leaders Structure Their Time with Carlos Delatorre, CRO @ Harness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think they're more productive. Yeah, I think we'll see salespeople. I think we'll see sales productivity trend upwards. I think we'll also see attrition rates come down because we'll be able to use AI to supplement onboarding. I think we'll probably see better and better AI tools to help companies and candidates match so that the fit is better. So yeah, I think we'll see higher productivity across the board.”
2025-01-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Every Sales Rep Should Do Pipeline Generation & How to Teach Them | Verticalised Sales Playbooks: When and How | How the Best Sales Reps and Leaders Structure Their Time with Carlos Delatorre, CRO @ Harness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Individual lacked the skills to go build pipeline. He just didn't know how to do it. He was a relationship seller, a competent guy, a hardworking guy, but the skills to actually go and call a stranger and deliver a value prop and have that resonate and secure a meeting and then come in and do a great meeting. All of those skills just he didn't have them. And so that was a painful because he was expensive and I had advocated for him and we had to go like outside of the standard hiring parameters to get him. That was one that was painful.”
2025-01-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Every Sales Rep Should Do Pipeline Generation & How to Teach Them | Verticalised Sales Playbooks: When and How | How the Best Sales Reps and Leaders Structure Their Time with Carlos Delatorre, CRO @ Harness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One that I have made that was particularly painful was to hire someone based on relationships. It was early in my career and I was at a startup and this person was very successful at EMC. The numbers that they had posted and the relationships that they had were so senior, I thought this guy is just going to light it up. I brought him on and I spent the first three months going on these fancy lunches at steakhouses in New Jersey with these very senior folks who were completely irrelevant to the product that we sold. And fancy lunch and the conclusion of the fancy lunch is, oh yeah, I'll ask so-and-so who's the person you need to get to and see if they're interested. And the vast majority were not. And so nothing came of it. And what I realized is that this industry.”
2025-01-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Every Sales Rep Should Do Pipeline Generation & How to Teach Them | Verticalised Sales Playbooks: When and How | How the Best Sales Reps and Leaders Structure Their Time with Carlos Delatorre, CRO @ Harness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Good question. I would say make sure you know what you're walking into. What I mean by that is if a company is looking for a new CEO, that means that there's a problem or a set of problems that need to be solved. Do whatever diligence you need to do to gain a high conviction that you understand what those problems are and then honestly map your abilities and your experience against those problems. So if you're a go-to-market leader and you assess and you reach the conclusion that the problems are largely in go to market could be a great fit if the problems are outside”
2025-01-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Every Sales Rep Should Do Pipeline Generation & How to Teach Them | Verticalised Sales Playbooks: When and How | How the Best Sales Reps and Leaders Structure Their Time with Carlos Delatorre, CRO @ Harness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, having a deal slip is a painful and to have pain and not extract the learning is really is to squander an opportunity. Pain is a great teacher. If we revel in that pain and really analyze, we have to figure out, okay, why did the deal slip? And the answer has to be something we failed to do or something we did that we shouldn't have done. What must we learn or what should we learn and what must we do differently in the future? That's the key thing. Of course, deals are going to slip. We're going to lose deals. Shit happens. Let's figure out why it happened, what we learn, and let's get better as a result.”
2025-01-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Every Sales Rep Should Do Pipeline Generation & How to Teach Them | Verticalised Sales Playbooks: When and How | How the Best Sales Reps and Leaders Structure Their Time with Carlos Delatorre, CRO @ Harness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe with a commodity where I'm going to need it anyway, I could buy it now. I could buy it later. Sure, you could discount your way into that.”
2025-01-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Every Sales Rep Should Do Pipeline Generation & How to Teach Them | Verticalised Sales Playbooks: When and How | How the Best Sales Reps and Leaders Structure Their Time with Carlos Delatorre, CRO @ Harness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How do you feel? I think that using discount to close a deal that was not otherwise going to close rarely works. If it's a considered purchase, there is either a champion that is willing to advocate for this purchase and advocate with the economic buyer for this purchase versus all the other things on the economic buyer's plate. Like either that champion exists or doesn't, and whether that cost 250K or 200k is not going to make the difference. It's binary. Now, once you get a decision to buy, there could be budget constraints and maybe, well, because it's 250, we can't do it until next fiscal year. And we make it 180K and they can do it now or we let them ramp in. I'm not against discounting, but to use it as a lever to manufacture. A deal, I don't think it really works, not in considered purchases.”
2025-01-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Every Sales Rep Should Do Pipeline Generation & How to Teach Them | Verticalised Sales Playbooks: When and How | How the Best Sales Reps and Leaders Structure Their Time with Carlos Delatorre, CRO @ Harness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You mean that we've oversold customers? I do think that a lot of that has worked through the system already. Companies that I'm a little closer to, I think most of that seems to be the trough, let's say, is behind us. I do think that the future, whether it's a consumption business or even if it's traditional SaaS, having sales reps truly involved in driving customer outcomes and creating customer value, I think is really healthy for the long-term viability of a company. The days of the big sales rep with the fancy suit that comes in and does the big deal and then walks off to another account. I don't think that's healthy. And I think those days are long gone.”
2025-01-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Every Sales Rep Should Do Pipeline Generation & How to Teach Them | Verticalised Sales Playbooks: When and How | How the Best Sales Reps and Leaders Structure Their Time with Carlos Delatorre, CRO @ Harness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Salesforce, when you have a horizontal solution, it cuts against meritocracy because there's typically going to be some verticals that are better than others, like maybe, oh, financial services is just like the cat's meow. What a great, you know, it's such a great fit. And so, hey, the team in New York, are they amazing or do they have all the banks mixing up the territories, I think, is really good for meritocracy and for having a fair distribution of opportunity. And so like I said, the exception would be if the solution is just so different that you have to do it, then do it. But if you can avoid it, I'd rather have salespeople that have a mix of the really great ICP and then the ICP or the customers that are a little bit harder to sell to.”
2025-01-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Every Sales Rep Should Do Pipeline Generation & How to Teach Them | Verticalised Sales Playbooks: When and How | How the Best Sales Reps and Leaders Structure Their Time with Carlos Delatorre, CRO @ Harness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Playbooks. Yeah. So I have a different opinion about the playbook versus verticalized teams. Now, let me caveat this if you have a solution where it's just radically different in one like ERP, how you implement ERP at a company that, at a paint company versus a software company is completely different, so much so that it would be unreasonable to ask a sales rep to be able to do both. Centralizing knowledge around what's going on in an industry so that salespeople can be more relevant, more quickly with accounts in that industry, I think is absolutely a thing to do, even if you have a horizontal solution, you know, like a technology solution, IT infrastructure, the challenges, the things that customers in a particular vertical cares about are very, very different. So empowering salespeople with that is really valuable. Verticalizing the”
2025-01-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Every Sales Rep Should Do Pipeline Generation & How to Teach Them | Verticalised Sales Playbooks: When and How | How the Best Sales Reps and Leaders Structure Their Time with Carlos Delatorre, CRO @ Harness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I've definitely seen that happen. It definitely a team can get in a funk. I think the best thing to do is just to stop. Let's all get in a room and let's talk about it. Let's talk about how we're feeling. Typically what will happen as a manager, you know, one of your responsibilities, I think, of a great manager is to maintain.”
2025-01-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Every Sales Rep Should Do Pipeline Generation & How to Teach Them | Verticalised Sales Playbooks: When and How | How the Best Sales Reps and Leaders Structure Their Time with Carlos Delatorre, CRO @ Harness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Deal, but then now they know that concept and they will apply it to other deals. And so you know that medpic is working when you see salespeople talking to each other without a manager involved and they're using medpick terminology where you see a sales rep grab an SC. Hey, can I run this deal by you and just like try to poke holes in it? And the conversation is in that med pick framework. When qualification just becomes part of the culture and it happens all by itself all the time, that's kind of where you want to be. And then the manager is just spot checking or”
2025-01-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Every Sales Rep Should Do Pipeline Generation & How to Teach Them | Verticalised Sales Playbooks: When and How | How the Best Sales Reps and Leaders Structure Their Time with Carlos Delatorre, CRO @ Harness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm a big fan of the med pick methodology. I know you had Mark Groelberger on here. I think he talked about it. That's the soundest framework that I'm familiar with for deal qualification. I think Dan might have talked about it as well. When to do it, you do it when you need it. What do I mean by that? When it's great to do it early in a sales cycle, when it's messy and there's so many different strings to pull on and trying to come up with a strategy, it's also great to do it late in the sales cycle where, man, we're forecasting this deal and we better not miss something. Let's make sure we didn't miss something. So I wouldn't say there's a key moment to do it. But the real, the beauty of operationalizing a qualification framework like MedBig, the real beauty of it is that any given sales rep who, let's say is going through a deal review, they are learning the concepts in the context of this one.”
2025-01-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Every Sales Rep Should Do Pipeline Generation & How to Teach Them | Verticalised Sales Playbooks: When and How | How the Best Sales Reps and Leaders Structure Their Time with Carlos Delatorre, CRO @ Harness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The rap training Yeah, you wouldn't be able to afford, from a financial perspective, but also just in terms of bandwidth, you wouldn't be able to afford to build that. And frankly, you wouldn't know what to build. With an early stage. That's why I go back to what I said before for a founder, let's say a series A company, I would get some really smart, hardworking, enthusiastic individual contributors and go build it. And you'll be able to build your enablement after you've closed 10 or 20 customers. And you're like, okay, now I've closed, let's say, 20 customers, which means I've probably failed to close another 60 customers. So I've got 80 sales cycles of experience. Now I can identify the things to do, the things not to do, and I can build V1 of my training based on that. And maybe that's just two or three days.”
2025-01-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Every Sales Rep Should Do Pipeline Generation & How to Teach Them | Verticalised Sales Playbooks: When and How | How the Best Sales Reps and Leaders Structure Their Time with Carlos Delatorre, CRO @ Harness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Soon, early. We have a messaging framework that we've built, and a lot of times salespeople get it even before they start, so they're able to read, understand our value prop. It's got sample questions in there, proof points, et cetera. And so they can be on the phone in the first couple of days on board, even before they go to boot camp. They typically go to boot camp maybe week three, four, but they're on the phone even before. And then certainly at boot camp, they're doing pipeline generation and they will typically have set their first meeting for sure before the end of bootcamp.”
2025-01-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Every Sales Rep Should Do Pipeline Generation & How to Teach Them | Verticalised Sales Playbooks: When and How | How the Best Sales Reps and Leaders Structure Their Time with Carlos Delatorre, CRO @ Harness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That really spans about almost nine months. And it has three week-long trainings, a boot camp, an intermediate, and an advanced. And then coming out of boot camp, there's roughly half a day, there's a three-hour remote session that they attend with the same cohort that they went to boot camp with that goes deep on one competency. And so what we end up with is people coming out of boot camp, able to do pipeline generation. They're able to have a conversation, start meetings. They're able to do discovery, do a good first meeting. By the time they get through intermediate, they can land a new logo with our core product. And that's really the key. Once somebody can land a new logo with the core product, the likelihood that they're going to be successful is very high, even though they don't have some of the advanced knowledge or the advanced skill. So that's kind of what we're doing.”
2025-01-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Every Sales Rep Should Do Pipeline Generation & How to Teach Them | Verticalised Sales Playbooks: When and How | How the Best Sales Reps and Leaders Structure Their Time with Carlos Delatorre, CRO @ Harness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. The mental model that we used is we started with this hypothetical, fully ramped salesperson, this individual who has every single skill, every single knowledge needed to be successful in the full gamut of selling our solution. Then we said, okay, let's break down all those skills and knowledges into competencies that we think can be learned in three hours or less. Then let's group them by what is the ideal modality to learn it. Is it something that they can learn on their own? Is it something that they can learn on a Zoom call? Is it something that they really need to be in a classroom to learn? Great. Now let's look at the ideal sequence. What's the right sequence so that we can get them to land a good, healthy new logo as early as possible? And then what we did is we've created a learning journey.”
2025-01-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Every Sales Rep Should Do Pipeline Generation & How to Teach Them | Verticalised Sales Playbooks: When and How | How the Best Sales Reps and Leaders Structure Their Time with Carlos Delatorre, CRO @ Harness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Generally, a year. Yeah. You've got milestones along the way. And so if they're not achieving the leading indicators to success, then we figure out why and we try to fix it. And if it's fixable, great, they're back on track. And if it's not fixable, then that means they're in the wrong role or at the wrong company. And so, yeah, we can, we've parted ways with people at boot camp. It was clear in their first month that we'd made a mistake. And, you know, we apologize for that because we hired them. But why wait nine months and waste their time and waste our time and opportunity costs. I totally.”
2025-01-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Every Sales Rep Should Do Pipeline Generation & How to Teach Them | Verticalised Sales Playbooks: When and How | How the Best Sales Reps and Leaders Structure Their Time with Carlos Delatorre, CRO @ Harness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think what you're asking is when do you sort of declare failure and part ways? I think ideally what you have is a series of milestones over the course of someone's journey that start in the first few weeks. They go to training, they prepare for training, they go to training, how did they do on the entrance exam? How did they do in their role play? How did they do in the final exam? Were they able to get meetings coming out of their first boot camp? Were some of those early meetings converting? Are they able to get to an economic buyer in their third month? So there's all sorts of milestones along the way. And so if you sort of”
2025-01-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Every Sales Rep Should Do Pipeline Generation & How to Teach Them | Verticalised Sales Playbooks: When and How | How the Best Sales Reps and Leaders Structure Their Time with Carlos Delatorre, CRO @ Harness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, that's a good question. Certainly down to 50K, maybe below 50K, probably, you know, starts to break down. Because down to 50K, your reps are going to be earlier in career. And so their OTE is not as high. And then when you're up into the enterprise level, then your average deal is probably more in the $2 to $3,000, $400K range. It certainly works there.”
2025-01-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Every Sales Rep Should Do Pipeline Generation & How to Teach Them | Verticalised Sales Playbooks: When and How | How the Best Sales Reps and Leaders Structure Their Time with Carlos Delatorre, CRO @ Harness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Depends where you are in the journey. Early on when product market fit isn't really good. Yeah, it might be three to one. The rule of thumb, once you're scaling, you want to be at five to one or better.”
2025-01-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Every Sales Rep Should Do Pipeline Generation & How to Teach Them | Verticalised Sales Playbooks: When and How | How the Best Sales Reps and Leaders Structure Their Time with Carlos Delatorre, CRO @ Harness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The numbers that you just shared doesn't take into account you had a paying customer and you did some expansions in your paying customer. You had a partner bring you a lead that was like 70% sold. So that is purely just the rep going cold into a completely green territory. There's going to be some good stuff, some low-hanging fruit.”
2025-01-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Every Sales Rep Should Do Pipeline Generation & How to Teach Them | Verticalised Sales Playbooks: When and How | How the Best Sales Reps and Leaders Structure Their Time with Carlos Delatorre, CRO @ Harness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think there's a risk of over-obsessing on the number of meetings booked. Obviously, that's the easiest thing to track. And so typically if someone is doing good PG, they should be able to, on average, get two meetings in a given week. Sometimes people will get more. Sometimes people will get less. And they might get one or they might get zero. And still they did a good job. It was just an unlucky week or a particularly tough account. And sometimes, you know, people hit a hot streak and they'll get four or five, but two to two to 2.5, that's kind of the sweet spot of like really good PG with the process that I just told you about. But the thing to really obsess about is a little bit further down the line is they're qualified pipeline coming out of it.”
2025-01-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Every Sales Rep Should Do Pipeline Generation & How to Teach Them | Verticalised Sales Playbooks: When and How | How the Best Sales Reps and Leaders Structure Their Time with Carlos Delatorre, CRO @ Harness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the early days, you know, the first time I ever exposed to it was at parametric technology early in my career. And we call them power hours. Whatever, Thursday at 9 a.m. Everybody be in the office. And so Thursday at 9 a.m., you pull up ACT. This is before Salesforce and you just start making cold calls. And it wasn't very structured. And the problem with doing just an hour is you can easily go for an hour and never talk to anyone. And so you need that positive reinforcement of a conversation, even if it's a conversation that doesn't land a meeting because you learn from that. You think, oh, if I had handled it differently, I could have gotten the meeting. But if you do, if you do a bunch of cold calling and zero comes from it, it's really hard to bring your A game for the next power hour.”
2025-01-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Every Sales Rep Should Do Pipeline Generation & How to Teach Them | Verticalised Sales Playbooks: When and How | How the Best Sales Reps and Leaders Structure Their Time with Carlos Delatorre, CRO @ Harness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Couple other things, so yeah, the Thursday we declare, Friday, and over the weekend we prepare. Monday morning, we review the preparation. Monday afternoon we train. Tuesday, we do PG all day. And then obviously throughout the week, there's follow-up, there's harvesting. And then I love to do a wrap-up on Friday. So I typically run that myself. And it's the wholesales team. And we celebrate the PG success of the week. We tell stories of success. We tell stories about successful meetings. We also tell stories about opportunities that have been created from previous weeks, PG, and it really builds, I think, an enthusiasm, a belief, and it really reinforces this thing we do that's so important, so powerful, but also so hard. And so that's kind of the circle of life, if you will.”
2025-01-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Every Sales Rep Should Do Pipeline Generation & How to Teach Them | Verticalised Sales Playbooks: When and How | How the Best Sales Reps and Leaders Structure Their Time with Carlos Delatorre, CRO @ Harness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Obviously, it's an accountability event to make sure that the prep was done, but more importantly, it's about making the prep even better. Hey, I don't think you're aiming sufficiently high. You don't have the CIO in here. You don't have any senior people, or they're too high. Jamie Diamond is not going to respond to an email.”
2025-01-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Every Sales Rep Should Do Pipeline Generation & How to Teach Them | Verticalised Sales Playbooks: When and How | How the Best Sales Reps and Leaders Structure Their Time with Carlos Delatorre, CRO @ Harness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It takes an hour or two. Remember, the manager is in the role because they know what they're doing. They've got some experience. And so it's not to say that the manager is going to have a really great insight for every single focus account, but as they scan the 10 accounts, there'll be two, three, four accounts where they have an idea. Oh, Barclays. I read an article two years ago. Let me find it. Or I heard something on Bloomberg Radio. Let me go find it for you. So that's the PG prep. So the reps got help from marketing, help from their manager. You know, you might even have a team of data analysts that help with the PG prep. I'll talk about that in a moment. Then Monday morning, there's a conversation, a one-on-one conversation between the manager and the AE to review their PG prep. And this is where the manager really digs in to make it better.”
2025-01-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Every Sales Rep Should Do Pipeline Generation & How to Teach Them | Verticalised Sales Playbooks: When and How | How the Best Sales Reps and Leaders Structure Their Time with Carlos Delatorre, CRO @ Harness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Down into two or three sentences that can be read or can be included in a PG email. There was a new case study. Here's the case study, but here's like, again, two or three sentences. So marketing sends out this PG passport on Fridays at noon. Then the manager knows what the focus accounts were because they were declared on Thursday, takes that PG passport, takes their experience, and forwards the PG passport back to their team with some advice. Hey, Harry, I see you're going after this account. This would really resonate with them. Hey, Jill, my neighbor works at HR in this account. I asked her. She said she'd be willing to take a call from you to validate your contacts and make sure those are the right people. Okay, so now the manager's involved in PG Prep.”
2025-01-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Every Sales Rep Should Do Pipeline Generation & How to Teach Them | Verticalised Sales Playbooks: When and How | How the Best Sales Reps and Leaders Structure Their Time with Carlos Delatorre, CRO @ Harness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ten most important people on those 50 names, I'm going to also now investigate the person. Have they been on a podcast? Have they written a book? Have they written a blog? What do they care about? And I'm going to develop a hypothesis to a conversation starter for the top 10 of those people. Okay, that constitutes PG prep. So I've got two accounts. I've got, let's say two or three hypotheses per account. I've got 50 names with all the requisite information, email, phone number, and I've got hypotheses per contact for my top 10 contacts. I can get some help in my prep. Where do I get help? Marketing on Fridays at noon is going to send out a PG passport. News of the week. Everything that happened this week curated for use or reuse in the PG setting. So we had this new release. Well, let me boil that release.”
2025-01-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Every Sales Rep Should Do Pipeline Generation & How to Teach Them | Verticalised Sales Playbooks: When and How | How the Best Sales Reps and Leaders Structure Their Time with Carlos Delatorre, CRO @ Harness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I research the company, I look at their job postings, I look at what you might even go in looking blind and see what their engineers are saying, see what people are griping about. I try to get a sense for what's really going on inside the company. And then I develop a hypothesis about something that I think they care about that we can impact. Maybe I develop two or three hypotheses. This is for the account. Then I go in and I say, okay, let me come up with, let's say it's two account. Let me identify 25 human beings in that account that based on their title, based on their LinkedIn profile, I think are relevant to what I sell. And let me capture those 25 names, their email address, their LinkedIn. I'm going to check to see if I can find them on social media. And then I'm going to go into some database and find their phone numbers. So I've got their mobile numbers. And I do that for two accounts. So I've got 50 names for my.”
2025-01-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Every Sales Rep Should Do Pipeline Generation & How to Teach Them | Verticalised Sales Playbooks: When and How | How the Best Sales Reps and Leaders Structure Their Time with Carlos Delatorre, CRO @ Harness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All right, all right. So before I get into the weekly cadence, let's say for the quarter, I'm an enterprise salesperson, I might select from my territory 20 top targets for the quarter. And I'll sit down with my manager the first or second day of the quarter, and I'll validate, hey, are these good? Yeah, you missed this one's not very good. Great. Okay, now I've got 20 accounts that I'm going to go after over the next three months. On a given week, I'm going to focus on one or two accounts, maybe three if they're on the smaller side. So let's say an average of two, I declare those on Thursday. Those are my focus accounts for next week. Thursday night, I declare them, which is just, I click a couple things in Salesforce. Now over the course of Friday and over the weekend as a salesperson, I do some research. What's the research? I look at what the execs are saying on social media. I read the 10K. Now you can use AI to make a lot of this stuff so much better.”
2025-01-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Every Sales Rep Should Do Pipeline Generation & How to Teach Them | Verticalised Sales Playbooks: When and How | How the Best Sales Reps and Leaders Structure Their Time with Carlos Delatorre, CRO @ Harness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The world of sales reps? Oh no, less than 10%. It's elite. It is highly, highly correlated with elite salespeople that have the ability and the tenacity, the willingness. It's hard work.”
2025-01-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Every Sales Rep Should Do Pipeline Generation & How to Teach Them | Verticalised Sales Playbooks: When and How | How the Best Sales Reps and Leaders Structure Their Time with Carlos Delatorre, CRO @ Harness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I don't know that you can yet, but you will. But really, the most effective means of pipeline generation is outbound cold calling. The human voice-based interaction over the phone, the emailing is you do it. That softens the field. That creates some familiarity so that when they pick up the phone, they're like, oh, Harry, why does that sound familiar? And maybe they don't even know why it sounds familiar, but it sounds familiar because they've received a bunch of emails and those emails had your name on it. They landed with some sort of a positive aura around them. I'll give you an anecdote. There was a sales rep who I love named David Boyle, and he was calling on Dun and Bradstreet. And Dave is an epic PGR. And so we were at a company Oblix. And the pinnacle person to talk to.”
2025-01-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Every Sales Rep Should Do Pipeline Generation & How to Teach Them | Verticalised Sales Playbooks: When and How | How the Best Sales Reps and Leaders Structure Their Time with Carlos Delatorre, CRO @ Harness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely, absolutely. But I'm really glad that other companies don't. And I hope a lot of those companies are our competitors.”
2025-01-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Every Sales Rep Should Do Pipeline Generation & How to Teach Them | Verticalised Sales Playbooks: When and How | How the Best Sales Reps and Leaders Structure Their Time with Carlos Delatorre, CRO @ Harness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That company solved this problem, generated this value because I invested in them. There's a pride that comes with that, that if you haven't had it, you're probably going to give up on the journey towards PG excellence.”
2025-01-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Every Sales Rep Should Do Pipeline Generation & How to Teach Them | Verticalised Sales Playbooks: When and How | How the Best Sales Reps and Leaders Structure Their Time with Carlos Delatorre, CRO @ Harness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is, yeah, it is because the likelihood if they've been successful not having done pipeline generation, when they get in that dark, lonely room, and what I mean by the dark lonely room is making the phone calls and saying, wow, that is the 19th phone call where no one has picked up and I've left the same fucking voicemail 19 times now if they haven't done that and they haven't been in that lonely place, the likelihood that they are willing to make that 20th call is low, even if they were willing up front when they actually get into it, you have to have been through that journey and seen the other side, the other side, meaning the joy of landing that big meeting, the joy, the fulfillment of creating an opportunity and closing a deal and knowing that deal exists because I PG'd it.”
2025-01-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Every Sales Rep Should Do Pipeline Generation & How to Teach Them | Verticalised Sales Playbooks: When and How | How the Best Sales Reps and Leaders Structure Their Time with Carlos Delatorre, CRO @ Harness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source