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

“Love Chris Yeah, first, you have to agree, pipeline generation is good. You can also say that roughly excellence in pipeline generation equals excellence in sales. Someone who's got a massive pipeline that misses some things in the sales cycles are probably still going to do very well. Someone that executes beautifully but doesn't have enough pipeline, they're going to miss their number. And so that's the first thing. Let's agree pipeline generation by the AE is worthwhile. If they agree with that, and I feel very strongly that that's the case, then roughly a third of your time, 20% of your time one day a week, is dedicated to just outbound cold calling. And then there's another probably 10 to 15 percent of your time that is devoted to prep for the cold calling and follow up from the cold calling. So that's kind of how you get to the 30, how I get to the 35%.”
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's the environment under which the AEs operate. Of course, the SDRs have expectations on them. And so you need to have a system where there's accountability at every level and there's expectations and there's performance management.”
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's right. It's your fault. That's right. So I think the way to orient it is the AEs are responsible for generating the pipeline that will support them being successful, them hitting quota, then anything they get from the other sources is a gift, is a cherry on top, is extra.”
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
“Working. And so the next thing you know, if you take that to its logical conclusion, and I've seen this, I won't mention the company, but I've seen a company where the AEs said, hey, the definition of a lead worthy of me working is the customer's ready to see a demo. They have agreed with the SDR that if the demo goes well, they want to quote and they're ready to buy after that. So that's like 80% of the sales cycle is done and the sales. And so now in that kind of a scenario, you need such a huge investment in marketing and such a huge investment in SDRs just to meet that bar of the expectations of the sales reps. Whereas if sales reps are doing the work to generate their own meetings and their own pipeline, man, when they get pipeline from their SDRs or from marketing or from partners, they'll treat it like gold because they know how much work and how hard it is.”
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
“Great question. There's a few reasons. Reason number one, more pipeline, the more the better. Reason number two, think about when a salesperson gets stuck in a deal. Why are they stuck? They're stuck because maybe they're too low and they can't get high or they're in one division and they can't get over to the other division. How do you get unstuck? PG into the person that you need to be and to be at. You PG into the more senior person. You PG into the other division. And so the ability to generate pipeline will lead to a higher win rate on existing business. What else? Well, if you have an organization where pipeline generation is outsourced, let's say, to another role, it's a natural tendency for salespeople to get more and more finicky around what inbounds or what leads are worth their time or worth.”
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 bigger part of it is just helping each other. So I'm a big advocate of hubs. And so I think at minimum, you want two sales. If it's a company, if it's a product where you have a sales engineer, two salespeople and a sales engineer, that's like the minimum profile for a hub.”
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
“Yes, but for a different reason. So I do think that having multiple reps co-located is far, far better. You know, at MongoDB, you mentioned that you talk to Dave. At MongoDB, we hired a lot of people and our attrition was higher than we wanted it to be. And so we did a lot of analysis on attrition. And what we found is that lone rangers, and we meant that meaning when we have a single employee in a, you know, if we have a single rep in a city and no one else at MongoDV lives in that city, their attrition rate was like four times higher. It's so hard to ramp when you're all by yourself, when that little tiny, that quick question that would have taken 10 seconds to lean over and ask the person next to you, when that now requires you to schedule time with someone and forget it. So the likelihood of failure is so much higher. So sure, the competitive aspect is part 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
“I think it's human nature that we tend to index around our own strengths. When we see pieces of ourselves in someone else, I think it's very tempting to become enamored with that and then to miss other gaps. And so if you've got in a hiring chain of command, you've got people that are quite different. One person that's super charismatic has super high EQ, another person that's super process oriented. The process oriented person might miss that this person is a little awkward or the high EQ person might miss that this person is not very tight on process. And so that would be one area where you have disagreements.”
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
“So we're reaching a conclusion or we're developing an opinion on where they are in terms of maturity on the skill through interviews and back channels. But then I'm a big advocate for at the end of the process, we call it a challenge. We have an event where they have a couple of days to go think about some questions, prepare a presentation, and come back and present it. But that's more of a validation around the decision at the end. It wouldn't be fair to a candidate to do that early on because it does take work. And so once as a hiring team, we develop conviction around a candidate, we'll do the challenge just to like make sure we didn't miss anything.”
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
“We think they're really smart. We think their drive is really high. And so that's more negotiable. So those are some of the things that I'd negotiate on.”
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 spent almost my entire career at Challenger companies. If you're going to disrupt a marketplace, the risk associated with hiring someone that hasn't been at a Challenger company is really, really high. So that one is a near non-negotiable pipeline generation, hiring AEs that have not built their own pipeline, that one is non-negotiable because if they say they will, if they say they want to, they just don't know how hard it is or they don't remember. Maybe they did it as SDRs a long, long time ago. That's a really big risk. That's kind of a non-negotiable. Maybe they've only sold into mid-market accounts and they've only sold deals in the 50 to 150k range. We're going to put them in enterprise selling 500k deals with many more stakeholders. But again,”
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 involves a comparable number of personas of stakeholders. Have they sold a solution in the same general domain, meaning, am I selling into IT and they've only ever sold business apps or vice versa? Some of those for me are non-negotiable. Some of those are negotiable. But if we have a lot of gaps, then it just means my ramp time is going to be longer.”
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 would look for experience at a Challenger company. It's so much harder to operate at a company where you don't have a big logo that sells for you, that carries for you. Has this person been successful in that kind of environment? Have they had to do their own pipeline generation? Or have they always relied on SDRs or marketing or partners or what have you? So I would look for a history of self-sourcing pipeline generation. Have they sold a product that is of comparable complexity? Have they sold into account of comparable size? Have they sold a solution of comparable price, which means it would have multiple stakeholders, which means it would require a business case, which means more politics would be involved from the customer's perspective. Have they sold a solution?”
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 when you're hiring the thing you can't change is the innate attributes, the DNA of the person. That's where you should spend the most amount of time get to understand who that person is in the areas that they can't change. Then you should have, hopefully, a pretty good idea of what are the skills that they will need to be successful. Once you figure out, okay, this is the type of human being that I need now. How many of the skills that they'll need to be successful do they already possess? And then the skills that they don't possess, how difficult is it going to be, how long is it going to be take for them to acquire them? And that is the formula. You can't change the DNA if they don't have any of the skills. It's going to take a very long time for them to have the ramp. So first, the DNA, then the skills, and there's always going to be a gap. So you need...”
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. And they're going to be super junior because they're going to be happy to be at a tech company because it's probably the first tech company they've ever worked at. And you're going to have to do a lot of the heavy lifting. You're going to have to train them. You're going to have to remind them that they should wear a shirt to a meeting. But that's a beautiful part of the journey that I think only a founder can really do well.”
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
“Don't hire a leader yet. Hire individual contributor. First, just hire SDRs and you be the rep so that you get, I think for an early stage company, the CEO really has to develop the plays, figure out the message, at least that initial message. And once you have conviction around who do we sell to, what are the personas, what's the message, then I think you can build an organization around that. Until that exists, I would advise the founder to hire some individual contributors around them, co-locate, sit in the same room so you can hear each other and duke it out and refine the message and refine the plays. Once you've got some conviction that it's repeatable, go and hire a team around 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
“Future, do they already bring and investigate or interrogate what they've accomplished in the past, what their life journey is like, and form an opinion around their innate attributes so that you can start to have an opinion around the likelihood of their success in the job that you're trying to fill.”
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
“And I I think it's important to think about the job that needs to be done. Arrive at a conclusion, a well-formed opinion around whether a candidate is capable of doing that job. A trap and a mistake that people make is over rotating on what they have done in the past and assuming that success in the past predicts success in the future. Certainly a track record of failures is something to be thoughtful about and to avoid. But success in the past, you have to be able to break down what needs to happen in the future and identify what skills or what attributes are required in order to accomplish this outcome in the future and then figure out almost like take a battery of what this person brings and how much of what they need in 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
“I think art is what we call something when we don't understand it yet. People could say, oh, Picasso, that's art. How does he do it? And then you have students studying for years and then they break it down. Well, it's the colors and the shapes or whatever it is that's the basis of Picasso's art. And so I think like anything, there are people who are savants, who are gifted. And there are people who can connect dots that others don't see, but then others can follow, can learn, and can replicate those things. So I think it's more science than art candidly.”
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 it absolutely can be learned. I think when people say that someone is born a salesperson, usually what they're referring to is charisma and a big personality. And I don't know that those things are necessarily what makes a great salesperson. They don't hurt, but they're not the core of it. So sure, having more empathy, being genuinely curious, I think those things help, you know, our innate attributes that make people better salespeople, but I think most of it is learned.”
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 as a teenager, my cousin Thais was dating a guy who was a manager of a clothing store. And I think I was 14 or 15 at the time. And I had worked for several years mowing lawns and raking leaves and doing odd jobs paid by the hour. He decided to give me a shot at the store. He would let me come in on the weekends and sell men's suits. The commission rate was 10% and the suits were 800 to $1,000. And over the course of a weekend, I could usually sell one suit, maybe two, maybe three. And so to make $100 in the air conditioning, in the mall was pretty amazing. And I thought, hmm, there's something to this.”
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 for an early stage company, the CEO really has to develop the plays, figure out the message, at least that initial message. The AEs are responsible for generating the pipeline that will support them being successful, them hitting quota, then anything they get from the other sources is a gift, is a cherry on top is extra. I don't believe salespeople sell. Buyers buy. All salespeople can do is create an environment that is conducive to that purchase decision.”
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