YouSaid · the spoken record

Jordan Van Horn

lines on the record: 53
first: 2022-08-17
most recent: 2022-08-17
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

“Thanks, Harry. It's been a pleasure, man. I really enjoyed it. And thanks for wearing the Cowboy hat for me. It means a lot.”
2022-08-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Three Reasons Why Sales People Fail | The Two Things That Matter When Hiring Sales Leaders | Why Revenue, Discounting and Price Do Not Matter in the Early Days with Jordan Van Horn, Revenue Leader @ Monte Carlo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think about the ones that have really hard problems to solve. You talked to Eleanor. I think Retool's a really interesting one. They're selling all things to all people. They have no clear buyer or person that owns that problem, yet they still grow incredibly fast. And I think that they've created a very nuanced product-led but also sales assisted growth model, which I think is really interesting. I think the second one that impresses me, MongoDB has always impressed me. But to go from tops down enterprise-led to product-led sales in the last couple of years, that's a really hard transition. I don't think I've ever seen anybody do it. And they've done it really well. So I think those two are really great companies to look at.”
2022-08-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Three Reasons Why Sales People Fail | The Two Things That Matter When Hiring Sales Leaders | Why Revenue, Discounting and Price Do Not Matter in the Early Days with Jordan Van Horn, Revenue Leader @ Monte Carlo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Communication is the obvious one. That's a company problem. I think like 150 people is like a great number where just like everything breaks down from a communication standpoint. I think the second thing that breaks down, especially if you're growing really fast, if you have more new people than Core Nucleus, which is a situation that we're in at Monte Carlo right now, if you were to have a pure democracy, the people with three to six months of tenure would actually win the vote. The first thing to break is what works and what has worked historically and how do you empower and engage that nucleus to basically overpower the new people to help them understand why we do the things that we do. That's a really hard challenge that I think also will think about every day.”
2022-08-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Three Reasons Why Sales People Fail | The Two Things That Matter When Hiring Sales Leaders | Why Revenue, Discounting and Price Do Not Matter in the Early Days with Jordan Van Horn, Revenue Leader @ Monte Carlo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, growing from like no revenue to eight figures in revenue in 18 months is really freaking hard. Growing a team from zero to 80 is really hard. Maintaining simplicity and focus when an organization is becoming much more complex is a huge challenge. Something that I wake up and think about every day.”
2022-08-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Three Reasons Why Sales People Fail | The Two Things That Matter When Hiring Sales Leaders | Why Revenue, Discounting and Price Do Not Matter in the Early Days with Jordan Van Horn, Revenue Leader @ Monte Carlo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd like to see customer oriented sales went out. I think that there's too much distrust between sellers and buyers, but I think the best sellers and the best companies in the world are always trying to drive business impact for their customers. And they just care a ton about their customers who put their names on the reputation of the little line in buying this software. Those are the companies that matter. Snowflake's a great example of this, right?”
2022-08-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Three Reasons Why Sales People Fail | The Two Things That Matter When Hiring Sales Leaders | Why Revenue, Discounting and Price Do Not Matter in the Early Days with Jordan Van Horn, Revenue Leader @ Monte Carlo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About your founder. You're picking a partner. You're picking a partner ideally for the next four to six years. How do you work together? How do you get feedback? How do your strengths and weaknesses complement each other? Having that open dialogue really early on is critical. Just a personal example. There's four pillars of great sales leadership. The one that I really suck at, like I'm not a product marketer. I don't tell a story. I don't create a neat analogy. I can't help anyone understand what this thing is. I'm a systems and I'm a process and I'm a people and I'm an execution person, right? So I needed Barr who created this entire category and who understood how to tell like entire story of the problem that we're trying to solve. I needed someone who is an A in that because I'm like a D minus. And setting that expectation with her, hey, this is what I am. And if you're not, if you're expecting this out of me, don't because I am not good at it and I'm not going to get good at it. I think that's like a really important early conversation between a founder and a sales leader because the reason you're doing this podcast is because I think founders don't necessarily know what to expect out of sales leaders. They don't know what they're supposed to.”
2022-08-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Three Reasons Why Sales People Fail | The Two Things That Matter When Hiring Sales Leaders | Why Revenue, Discounting and Price Do Not Matter in the Early Days with Jordan Van Horn, Revenue Leader @ Monte Carlo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tops down sale. I will never be able to go into CIO's office and show them a really spiffy deck and give them a customer reference and get a deal. CIOs, CTOs, VPs of engineering, they need to see that their teams are using and adopting the product because they're actually realizing that getting humans to change behavior is as hard as evaluating software. That CIO making a unilateral decision, they obviously are really important to the deal cycle. Like they're critical, but they're not the only piece. You have to make practitioners happy at the bottom.”
2022-08-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Three Reasons Why Sales People Fail | The Two Things That Matter When Hiring Sales Leaders | Why Revenue, Discounting and Price Do Not Matter in the Early Days with Jordan Van Horn, Revenue Leader @ Monte Carlo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Discovering qualification. At the end of the day, understanding your customer will always be the most important component of sales. If you don't understand your customer, what problem you're trying to solve, you shouldn't sell them anything. It's not how you build a company. Two, qualification. If you can get sales to a point where it's actually like an engine where you're thinking about where I spend my time as the most important and most valuable thing, where I focus, actually knowing who's going to buy and who's not going to buy early on and putting all of your chips and resources towards the ones that are going to buy is really critical. So what sellers can do is they can really take your company for a ride if they're like, trust me, this person just loves this person's going to do a deal. Like I just know it. I know it. They've never bought software before. They just have this pain that's so big. So let's go like build this integration that's going to take us like two engineering sprints. That happens all the time. It's a discipline around qualification is I think something that is actually like ramped up probably in the last 15 years and I think will stay for a long time.”
2022-08-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Three Reasons Why Sales People Fail | The Two Things That Matter When Hiring Sales Leaders | Why Revenue, Discounting and Price Do Not Matter in the Early Days with Jordan Van Horn, Revenue Leader @ Monte Carlo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you screw up as much as me, you have a lot of opportunities to demonstrate it. I try to be really open about my failures. And a lot of the mistakes that these reps are making are mistakes that I made when I was trying to figure out the sales motion like two years ago. So like, I get it. So I think one is I try to communicate to people that like sharing your failures and your mistakes is a sign of strength and not a sign of weakness. And I actually don't trust you if you're perfect. I say that like maybe on a monthly basis. People know if they have nothing to work on that I'm kind of giving them the side eye because I'm a little suspicious about what they're actually doing.”
2022-08-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Three Reasons Why Sales People Fail | The Two Things That Matter When Hiring Sales Leaders | Why Revenue, Discounting and Price Do Not Matter in the Early Days with Jordan Van Horn, Revenue Leader @ Monte Carlo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can lead it because making a safe space for them to lead with their failures and to own it creates such a great environment for learning. So you just can't let those things turn into, I'm going to beat you over the head because you made these five mistakes.”
2022-08-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Three Reasons Why Sales People Fail | The Two Things That Matter When Hiring Sales Leaders | Why Revenue, Discounting and Price Do Not Matter in the Early Days with Jordan Van Horn, Revenue Leader @ Monte Carlo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we post mortem everything deals, POCs, top of funnel, everything gets postmortem. Because the only thing that matters early on in your company's life is how quickly you learn. I told you revenue doesn't matter what matters, how quickly you learn, how quickly you put it into action. So we do deer reviews. We do forward-looking deal reviews once a week where we take our key deals and we actually go really, really deep on them. But we do retrospectives on every single deal where we invested significant resources and we didn't get an outcome. Typically, that's when something gets to POC. And if for some reason that POC doesn't convert to a paid customer, it takes too long. We'll do a post-mormon. I do postmorms on deals that we've won that I don't think we did a very good job on. I think what you're looking for is you're looking for cracks in the sales foundation and you're trying to extract all of the learned.”
2022-08-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Three Reasons Why Sales People Fail | The Two Things That Matter When Hiring Sales Leaders | Why Revenue, Discounting and Price Do Not Matter in the Early Days with Jordan Van Horn, Revenue Leader @ Monte Carlo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Been doing it too soon lately. Our entire team's like Ram because we've gone from zero to 80 people in a year and a half. So we had just actually needed people on the phones in week one. And it's been two soon. I think people should meet a few customers in their first month on the job under close supervision from a buddy or a manager. And I think that's more for their learning. And you have to expect that that prospect is not going to turn into a customer. You just have to like accept that that's a potential outcome. It's more about that person's growth and development. So I need them to be in front of customers pretty early on. But in terms of when they're running a deal cycle, I think you need to wait. We've been doing it 14 days in. I think the right answer is probably like 30 to 60. And we're trying to figure out how to make it faster. But I think it's starting to hurt us a little bit.”
2022-08-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Three Reasons Why Sales People Fail | The Two Things That Matter When Hiring Sales Leaders | Why Revenue, Discounting and Price Do Not Matter in the Early Days with Jordan Van Horn, Revenue Leader @ Monte Carlo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All right, first and XYZ enterprise rep. They have two weeks where they learn the product and they go through a pitch presentation. This is a person with 10 years of experience. So they go through that pitch presentation and they just flop horribly. There's a very clear indicator that something's not going right in the onboarding with a person of that level of experience. And you have to understand what's going on there. So that's your first red flag. I wouldn't fire someone because they didn't do all our presentation. So they passed the pitch presentation. Maybe they do really well. And then maybe you release them into the wild and they go set up three or four calls. Good. All three or four of those calls don't have next step set with them or don't go anywhere or don't have that person talking to other people in the organization asking for introductions. Nothing comes out of them. You have a potential red flag on your hand. What that person is going to say is like, hey, it takes a while to build pipeline. But like, again, ain't nobody got time for that. For our company, we're two years old. You can't ask me to worry about Q1 of next year. That is not guaranteed. It is not guaranteed that we're going to survive for that long. What are the things you're doing right now to actually progress the company?”
2022-08-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Three Reasons Why Sales People Fail | The Two Things That Matter When Hiring Sales Leaders | Why Revenue, Discounting and Price Do Not Matter in the Early Days with Jordan Van Horn, Revenue Leader @ Monte Carlo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Super fair, first of all. I think we focus in sales too much on the lagging indicator, and the lagging indicator is revenue. And of course, we're going to focus on revenue. Like at the end of the day, that's why everyone gets hired, fired, or promote it. But a ton of stuff happens up until that revenue point. And the better you can build out your sales process and your gas sales playbook to have discrete, measurable events, you can get signal on day one of a sales cycle. That deal may or may like 10% likelihood or 5% likelihood that it converts into anything that matters and maybe it's a year from now, but you can know what are they doing with those first interactions, whether or not they're actually a fit for the organization or whether they're doing well. And that comes down to how well you have designed and structured the sales process and how discreet and measurable each of those steps are.”
2022-08-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Three Reasons Why Sales People Fail | The Two Things That Matter When Hiring Sales Leaders | Why Revenue, Discounting and Price Do Not Matter in the Early Days with Jordan Van Horn, Revenue Leader @ Monte Carlo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Impact. Everyone can make an impact in 30 days. Now, impact doesn't mean that I'm closing a six figure deal with like JP Morgan Chase in my first month, but they're actually having an impact. Impact might look like they're on customer calls and they're having an impact on that customer or they're looking at the sales process and they're having an impact on that sales process. Or they're raising the bar on the onboarding process and they're getting there faster than the people before them. If you're not seeing that, but you're seeing maybe people are like, oh, I developed 5x pipeline coverage where all of these very soft things that TBD about whether they're high impact or not, or I put together like my book strategy ain't nobody got time for that. You need to come in and you have an impact immediately. And I think that you can tell pretty quickly whether or not someone's like actually jumping in and going in the right direction or they're flailing in the organization.”
2022-08-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Three Reasons Why Sales People Fail | The Two Things That Matter When Hiring Sales Leaders | Why Revenue, Discounting and Price Do Not Matter in the Early Days with Jordan Van Horn, Revenue Leader @ Monte Carlo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Make onboarding from your perspective, do you think? First one is proximity. They're not close enough to the person's work, and they don't know how to break out whether the person actually has a weakness or they're new. Managers need to get really adept of what are the signals that someone just doesn't know something because they're new or what is the, hey, there's like an actual skill gap here. Maybe this person doesn't move fast enough. Maybe they are shocked by our environment and they don't know what to do with it. They struggle to actually like parse out those things. Unfortunately, the best way to solve it is through pattern matching and pattern recognition, but you don't necessarily have a lot of that. What I always say to managers is like pick out one or two people that you think had the best onboarding, get really disciplined about those two or three things that that person needs to have and know that inside and out and watch that person like a hawk and support the heck out of them until they get there. And you should know within 30 days about whether someone's going to be a fit or not.”
2022-08-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Three Reasons Why Sales People Fail | The Two Things That Matter When Hiring Sales Leaders | Why Revenue, Discounting and Price Do Not Matter in the Early Days with Jordan Van Horn, Revenue Leader @ Monte Carlo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With those competencies, and how do we know that that person's achieved those levels? I put onboarding at this phase into the hands of the frontline sales managers because it's their job to onboard and enable their people. Someday, when we have a thousand reps, there will be a field enablement or a field productivity function that will own that. But in the early days, it's your managers. And I think that's true for every function for what it's worth. It's incumbent on the manager to go spend third of their time with new hires in the first month.”
2022-08-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Three Reasons Why Sales People Fail | The Two Things That Matter When Hiring Sales Leaders | Why Revenue, Discounting and Price Do Not Matter in the Early Days with Jordan Van Horn, Revenue Leader @ Monte Carlo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I always think that onboarding should reflect the stage and maturity of your company. I didn't create a superstructured, rigorous onboarding program when we had five employees. Because it's not like you're going to be in this 30-day onboarding season and you're going to move out and like everything's going to be hunky-dory. You're walking into like a disaster and you're going to continue to be in a disaster. So you got to figure it out. Early days, the onboarding was, hey, here's the information that you need. Go figure it out. I ain't got time. And then I'm going to give you a ton of feedback. I'm going to shout to you. I'm going to put time into you, but there's nothing structured. That works with like your first couple sales hires. It needs to work with your first couple of sales hires because that's the reality of the company. Later on, as you're trying to go onboard, like what we're in right now, we're trying to onboard and hire people in the borders of magnitude of 10s and 20s, you have to get really, really disciplined and structured, okay, what are the things that you need to know? When do you need to know them by and how do we demonstrate that you've actually known them? So we've put together a very rigorous onboarding program that checks off those competencies and one of the levels associated.”
2022-08-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Three Reasons Why Sales People Fail | The Two Things That Matter When Hiring Sales Leaders | Why Revenue, Discounting and Price Do Not Matter in the Early Days with Jordan Van Horn, Revenue Leader @ Monte Carlo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very fair, yeah. I'm working on it. Yep, that's true. Yeah, I think the comment that I'd make in reaction to that is I used to think that people just wanted to be supportive and they knew exactly what they needed to be supported and they just need like a cheerleader. And I think that's the version of me that worked for Jenya. What I've learned is people need like a really clear understanding of what great looks like and they need to be told how they're progressing towards great. And I think that's how you walk that path of like deeply caring for people, but being able to be objective and doing what's best for them. And learning that hard lesson, I think everyone learns, which is like caring does not being nice. They're not the same thing. You can be like very uncaring and very nice. So that's been the fun one to learn for sure.”
2022-08-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Three Reasons Why Sales People Fail | The Two Things That Matter When Hiring Sales Leaders | Why Revenue, Discounting and Price Do Not Matter in the Early Days with Jordan Van Horn, Revenue Leader @ Monte Carlo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I learned that someone from Jenya. So my first one on with Jenya, he said to me, Jordan, you have a low hiring bar and you have bad judgment. And I was like, oh my gosh, I'm getting fired and I'm five days in. And he's like, this is not a problem. We will fix it. And that was the most powerful. That got me to change really quickly. It helped me focus. It changed my trajectory at segment for sure.”
2022-08-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Three Reasons Why Sales People Fail | The Two Things That Matter When Hiring Sales Leaders | Why Revenue, Discounting and Price Do Not Matter in the Early Days with Jordan Van Horn, Revenue Leader @ Monte Carlo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First day. And it can be like a little bit rattling, but it sets this tone of okay, we're going to have a very direct and honest relationship from day one. And then I revisit those things every week. I revisit them. Generally, that's how I approach nurturing talent.”
2022-08-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Three Reasons Why Sales People Fail | The Two Things That Matter When Hiring Sales Leaders | Why Revenue, Discounting and Price Do Not Matter in the Early Days with Jordan Van Horn, Revenue Leader @ Monte Carlo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just like customer success starts in the sales process, employee success starts in the interview process. So deeply understanding what someone cares about and what their motivations are and making sure there's a motivational fit for why Monte Carlo makes sense for them, that's the why. We just don't hire people that aren't going to be happy. I appreciate what Eleanor said, but there's like a little bit of selection bias that I hire a very specific type of person that I know will be successful in our organization and will tolerate me as a manager. But one, knowing what they care about, on their first day, I tell them all the reasons why I hired them and all the reasons they are going to fail. And I lay it out on day one. As much as you can take all that conflict and pull it out of the heat of a moment and set them right on the first day, that just makes such a difference. So I sit down with each person. Here are the things that your superpowers. This is why you're going to be my boss someday. Here are the things that are major derailers for you that came up in the interview process and I want you to be aware of them. And I'm going to be watching them. What does that do? That exposes someone's blind spots on their.”
2022-08-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Three Reasons Why Sales People Fail | The Two Things That Matter When Hiring Sales Leaders | Why Revenue, Discounting and Price Do Not Matter in the Early Days with Jordan Van Horn, Revenue Leader @ Monte Carlo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That identity of who I am and to give to people outside of the context of whenever that inevitable conflict is going to arise.”
2022-08-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Three Reasons Why Sales People Fail | The Two Things That Matter When Hiring Sales Leaders | Why Revenue, Discounting and Price Do Not Matter in the Early Days with Jordan Van Horn, Revenue Leader @ Monte Carlo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Here's my phone number if you really need something. You're getting out ahead of those. Jordan isn't responsive or he doesn't care about me or he doesn't think that my problems are the biggest problems in the world. I'm giving them a framework for how to communicate with me. That's the first thing. The second thing is I'm telling them what's important to me. There's seven things on the user guide that are really critical to me. And they're the things that I reinforce every single day. Everyone starts. I give them my user guide. I say, let me know if you have any questions. And for some folks, for direct reports, I'll actually walk through it with them. And then I also put in, hey, these are the five things that are just most important to me in life. This is how I make decisions in my life. What I found is for most people, it basically shortcuts the trust process, especially when you're in an interview. Someone's like, well, hey, how do I know that you're not going to ask me to fly to San Francisco in the middle of a pandemic and work till 9 o'clock for two weeks when I have a brand newborn? That's what people expect from startups. And I can say, let me show you my user guide that I put together not just to convince you to come work at our company, but this is like how I operate and what I care about. It's been a good shortcut for me to like.”
2022-08-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Three Reasons Why Sales People Fail | The Two Things That Matter When Hiring Sales Leaders | Why Revenue, Discounting and Price Do Not Matter in the Early Days with Jordan Van Horn, Revenue Leader @ Monte Carlo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Send it to you after this. It's a public notion document that you saved. Yeah. So what I found is two things. Like one, working remotely and then having larger teams. It's harder and harder for people to understand my motivations and why I do what I do. This is going to sound trite, but like I work because I love working with people and I love the relationships that will come out of it. And I love being proud of something that we've built. But you tell that to a sales rep on their first day. They're like, okay, but what happens when I don't have my quota? What I've tried to take painstakingly detailed effort on is to clearly document like who I am, how I work and what I do. One, I set really clear boundaries at work. I do work a time, but from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m., you will never find me. I sit and I have dinner with my wife and my three daughters. And I tell them, if you try to find me in those two hours, I will not show up. So just so you have an expectation, this is me. Don't ever set a meeting for me from five to seven. I won't decline it. I won't show up. So it's expectation setting on how to interact with me. This is how long you can expect me to respond to something.”
2022-08-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Three Reasons Why Sales People Fail | The Two Things That Matter When Hiring Sales Leaders | Why Revenue, Discounting and Price Do Not Matter in the Early Days with Jordan Van Horn, Revenue Leader @ Monte Carlo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. What I imagine it's even harder in your world because you also have the FOMO factor of investing. You've got four other VCs that are pitching this person. You don't want to be the skeptical one that's telling them, your baby looks a little ugly over here. I can imagine that's a hard skill. I couldn't do that.”
2022-08-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Three Reasons Why Sales People Fail | The Two Things That Matter When Hiring Sales Leaders | Why Revenue, Discounting and Price Do Not Matter in the Early Days with Jordan Van Horn, Revenue Leader @ Monte Carlo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The role. So, what you do in those situations is you bring okay, let's bring like 15 people onto the hiring process and buy some consensus, we will find the best person. That always goes wrong too. So it's like slowing down in that one, getting really clear about what the person that you need in this organization, and then keeping that decision making group to less than six is the third thing that's just so important.”
2022-08-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Three Reasons Why Sales People Fail | The Two Things That Matter When Hiring Sales Leaders | Why Revenue, Discounting and Price Do Not Matter in the Early Days with Jordan Van Horn, Revenue Leader @ Monte Carlo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there's probably two or three. The first one is veering from a higher structured hiring process and letting bias creep into the process is always number one. And that can happen, I'll pick on you. Like a board member says, hey, I heard this person's like the best person in the company. I'm like a first time head of sales hire and I'm like, okay, well, I don't want my board member to be happy and I want to show that I can go get this person. So I'm going to go just like skip a few steps in the interview process and try to win them, right? And just try to sell them. So that's one, and that happens all the time, right? Your founder is going to say, I think this person's world class we need to hire up. Every time I've gone with that and veered off from my process, I've regretted it just deeply. So I think that's one of like sticking to your process, no matter what people say, that's the first one. The second one was I didn't adequately run reference checks. We're pretty good at getting to the truth in the interview process, but those reference checks are just so valuable. And so running like two or three references, you have to do it. That's the second one. And the third one is not having a clear idea of what you want and not having conviction on what makes.”
2022-08-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Three Reasons Why Sales People Fail | The Two Things That Matter When Hiring Sales Leaders | Why Revenue, Discounting and Price Do Not Matter in the Early Days with Jordan Van Horn, Revenue Leader @ Monte Carlo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Discovery makes the best. Someone's curiosity, ability to ask questions and hold court. No one wants to sit around and listen to someone talk for an hour. So if you're able to ask good questions and get to truth and you demonstrate that you can do that in a presentation, and that's like counterintuitive because you're presenting something, that's the most important thing. The worst ones are this is like a book report and I want to show you that I learned all the content. I want to show you that I know the answers to the test. You get this from all the Ivy League and for you, our friends across the pond, the Oxford folks. Those are the folks that got the A pluses all day. They're going to give you the answers and I want the answers.”
2022-08-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Three Reasons Why Sales People Fail | The Two Things That Matter When Hiring Sales Leaders | Why Revenue, Discounting and Price Do Not Matter in the Early Days with Jordan Van Horn, Revenue Leader @ Monte Carlo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And ideally, the presentation is giving them a good experience of what it's like to work at our company. So the presentations work for them. It's a final test on motivation. It's a final test on just like hard skills. But most importantly, we give them all the information. We say, you can talk to anyone in the company you want, all the resources are yours. They can see what it's like to work with us. I let any candidate call me and say, hey, what's the answer to the test? I'll give you the answer. You get an A plus for asking the question. I'm not going to get hit by a bus the day you start. Like I'm still going to be here and I'm going to be part of you being successful. That's the last step of the interview process.”
2022-08-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Three Reasons Why Sales People Fail | The Two Things That Matter When Hiring Sales Leaders | Why Revenue, Discounting and Price Do Not Matter in the Early Days with Jordan Van Horn, Revenue Leader @ Monte Carlo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First interview that happens with the hiring manager before they get to talk to anyone else. So ideally, when they go to our onsite where they meet other people, the manager has vetted, is this person a cultural and motivational fit? And do I believe it's possible that they are excellent? If you get those two checked off, you're going to like half the people that end up going to talk to the rest of the team will end up getting hired because that's the meat of it. Then the onside is three interviews. It's typically with one person who's actually doing the job, a different manager who's not involved in the hiring process and then like a cross-functional person. And you've ideally identified two or three competencies that this person needs to have. And each of those interviews is focused on going really deep on one of those competencies. So I might say, okay, Liz, you need to give me a high degree of confidence that this person has tolerance for ambiguity. And there's a structured interview in how she does it and there's a score. So then when we all get together in that debrief, we're like, okay, this person has the skills and the competencies. They have the motivation. They have the cultural fit, then that last step, if we give a go, then they go to the presentation.”
2022-08-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Three Reasons Why Sales People Fail | The Two Things That Matter When Hiring Sales Leaders | Why Revenue, Discounting and Price Do Not Matter in the Early Days with Jordan Van Horn, Revenue Leader @ Monte Carlo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, good question. Maybe going back to that framework of culture fit, skills, and motivation. So the first interview, the screen is the motivation. Do you want to do this? Because this thing is hard. Like there's a lot easier ways to make money. And so that's kind of my, like, I'm going to try to scare you off and see if you want to keep talking to us and if you're still excited. So that's the first thing of like, is there motivation aligned to come to Monte Carlo? Do we make sense for their career as much as they make sense for our career? Because if you don't have motivation, this job sucks. Point blank. You don't want to do it. It's not fun. So I think that's like the first interview. The second interview is their historical track record. Is it a track record of excellence? Now, I said attribution is really hard in sales and marketing, but you still probably aren't going to hire someone who is middle of the pack or low performing historically throughout their career. Eventually luck's going to turn right. And so you're looking for someone who has had sustained success across their career and then you're going deep on that success. Did they actually do it? Were they just like on a rocket ship and on ride?”
2022-08-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Three Reasons Why Sales People Fail | The Two Things That Matter When Hiring Sales Leaders | Why Revenue, Discounting and Price Do Not Matter in the Early Days with Jordan Van Horn, Revenue Leader @ Monte Carlo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not in sales, candidly, we do a presentation like a pitch at the end, and I hate it. I've been trying to kill the pitch presentation interview for like seven years, and my sales leaders just won't let me do it. That's the closest thing to it, but I'd say like 90% of our interview is looking back at relevant experiences and trying to find patterns in that person's background and how they perform, how they relate to others and how they use the experiences that they have to acquire the skills that we know that they need to be successful in our company. And case studies don't really get that.”
2022-08-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Three Reasons Why Sales People Fail | The Two Things That Matter When Hiring Sales Leaders | Why Revenue, Discounting and Price Do Not Matter in the Early Days with Jordan Van Horn, Revenue Leader @ Monte Carlo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Key question that I think gets to all skill set that has been the most powerful question that I ask what was hard about it? Because that question gets to the root of what that person actually did and why their skills are relevant to your company. For example, the Twilio example I just gave, what's hard about it, like, I don't know, I had to send a contract and there were 20 people and there was no legal department. So it was hard to tell them that they had to 10X their contract. Like that was hard. That was a tough conversation. But the person that's like, no, I had to go talk to like 15 different people and I had to bring like engineering involved and I had to get my CTO involved and there's this one person who's trying to buy a competitive product and there were 15 different companies popping up at the time we had no idea what their differentiators were and how we were differentiated. That person is your person that's made of gold. They went through some hard things and they're going to come in and they're going to really perform well for you.”
2022-08-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Three Reasons Why Sales People Fail | The Two Things That Matter When Hiring Sales Leaders | Why Revenue, Discounting and Price Do Not Matter in the Early Days with Jordan Van Horn, Revenue Leader @ Monte Carlo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. That's your job. That's a great use of board. And the third thing is the hardest one. And that's like the skill set misaligned. That Twilio example that I just gave is the problem. What I think founders need to do is they need to make sure that they're going very, very deep on past experiences. Jenya said this a few weeks ago, right? Like he said, like, I don't do the forward-looking case studies anymore. I go really deep on a relevant experience. And what I mean by really deep is you are asking forth and fit and sixth level questions to that person. Hey, I saw that you did 183% of your number in 2018. Tell me how you got to that number. What did you do? What did other people on your team do? How is that relevant to what other people did in the organization? What were the deals that made that up? And what did you do on that deal? What's the deal that you're most proud of? What are the things that you would have done different you could have learned from? Well, then I saw you dip down to 175% of your number the next quarter. What happened there? Going like that in terms of what specifically they did. And then there's like a”
2022-08-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Three Reasons Why Sales People Fail | The Two Things That Matter When Hiring Sales Leaders | Why Revenue, Discounting and Price Do Not Matter in the Early Days with Jordan Van Horn, Revenue Leader @ Monte Carlo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Interview process. I think early on in that interview process, the temptation is to sell the dream of what the company could be. And I think that's important. But you also have to sell the reality of where you're at. You have to sell what's hard about it. I start every first interview. I don't know if there's a good Iron Fags or a bad one, but I say like, oh man, we have problems. Let me walk you through all of the things that are wrong at Monte Carlo and all the things that we need to fix in the next six months. And I just like lay it out. And the person whose eyes light up and is excited about that, that person belongs at Monte Carlo. The person who's like, tell me how many leads I'm going to get a month. You're not going to make it here. Leads might come. They might not come. We're two years old. I think that telling people the truth and letting them self-select in and self-select out and using what we call in sales negative pressure, letting them sell you on why they still want to be part of this thing even though it ain't perfect is super critical. And then if you want to get them pumped and excited, use board members like yourself to go sell them why this is going to be the next like $40 billion company. Early on, I want people to see the dumpster fire they're walking into.”
2022-08-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Three Reasons Why Sales People Fail | The Two Things That Matter When Hiring Sales Leaders | Why Revenue, Discounting and Price Do Not Matter in the Early Days with Jordan Van Horn, Revenue Leader @ Monte Carlo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. So salespeople fail. I always approach things through the lens of failure. It's what drives me. So salespeople, it makes for horrible night sleep. Salespeople fail for three reasons. They don't fit within the organization. They maybe can do the work, but they might take the company in an entirely different direction than you want as a founder. They have a motivation problem. They don't want to do the work. They got there. It seemed cool to start to join a startup. Then they came in. They're like, oh my gosh, I have to do everything. Third thing is they just not that good or the skill set isn't aligned with what you actually need from the organization. So you're not able to do the work. Cultural fit and motivation, those are actually definitional things that you need to have set out ahead of hiring any human being, much less sales. You need to do the work up front to define how you do things and you need to care enough about what your culture is to see how like a person is going to positively or negatively impact that culture. Starting with a clear understanding of who you are is paramount. Otherwise, this person's going to drive you nuts and you're going to have no idea why. The second thing is motivation and your question is like how do you structure an”
2022-08-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Three Reasons Why Sales People Fail | The Two Things That Matter When Hiring Sales Leaders | Why Revenue, Discounting and Price Do Not Matter in the Early Days with Jordan Van Horn, Revenue Leader @ Monte Carlo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Million, $40 million customers. If you look at my resume, you'll say, okay, this person's at a great company and they're the number one sales rep for six years consecutively. Clearly it would be a major coup de tough if I could get this person to join my team. That person might not have done anything at all. And I think that is so true, especially in a product-led sales era of understanding.”
2022-08-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Three Reasons Why Sales People Fail | The Two Things That Matter When Hiring Sales Leaders | Why Revenue, Discounting and Price Do Not Matter in the Early Days with Jordan Van Horn, Revenue Leader @ Monte Carlo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the type of first highs they make in sales. One is you're trying to solve a product market fit problem by hiring a salesperson. And I don't think that Founder would go into that hire and say like, I have a product market fit problem. I'm going to go hire a salesperson. They're going to say like revenue stalling or leads aren't progressing. Maybe if I go hire a salesperson, that will solve that problem. So I think that critical thinking, what problem you're trying to solve is probably the biggest one. But I think the second biggest one is I think sales and marketing are the two toughest groups of people to evaluate. It's so hard to attribute excellence to individuals. Let me give you like a dumb example. Let's say I was the first sales rep at Twilio in 2009 or whatever. And I go close. What do I do if I'm the first rep at Twilio? Well, I go close like Uber and Lyft and Airbnb when they're 15 person companies and they just need like a messaging service. And it's like a transaction on a credit card or whatever. And then I ride that way for the next six years. Those customers turns into 10 million, 20 million.”
2022-08-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Three Reasons Why Sales People Fail | The Two Things That Matter When Hiring Sales Leaders | Why Revenue, Discounting and Price Do Not Matter in the Early Days with Jordan Van Horn, Revenue Leader @ Monte Carlo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Low and it's simple, then you can probably go higher. It's based on how many reps can actually handle the transactions. If you only have enough transactions to support one rep and you just hire a junior rep, if you feel like you have enough where like three or four reps can go get transactions, then you hire a head of sales. Fairly simple. It's your willingness and readiness to go and hire people because honestly heads of sales, if you go too senior on a head of sales, they don't know how to sell anymore. I haven't carried a bag since 2012. It's been 10 years since I had like an individual quote on me. Everyone on my team is better at selling than me. I just want to call that out of hiring that head of sales, there's some benefits to it. So if you want to grow a team really quickly and you want to attract talent, that's the right time to do it. But if you just want a really good salesperson, don't just think you're getting ahead of sales because it's going to be easy to manage. They're going to do things that don't matter. They're going to like implement Salesforce or something stupid that you don't need when you're a five-person company. What would you say are the biggest mistakes that founders UC make when it comes to specifically the type”
2022-08-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Three Reasons Why Sales People Fail | The Two Things That Matter When Hiring Sales Leaders | Why Revenue, Discounting and Price Do Not Matter in the Early Days with Jordan Van Horn, Revenue Leader @ Monte Carlo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Someone, and they were going to actually do better than you're doing as a seller. Now, if the other one that people will typically hire salespeople are in is like you have a competitive market scenario, it's a fast-moving market. You might have things where you just need to transact, or you just want like a lot of conversations to start happening. You want to amplify your message. That person's going to be like kind of a marketer. That's okay. Just have the expectation that person's a marketer. But what problem are you trying to solve? I mean, I think what problem you're trying to solve might lead into this question, which is like, how do I know whether to get a head of sales who's probably more experienced or whether to get young sales reps to really just feed the sales machine? How do I know which one's the right sales hire to make first? Yes. So three variables to that. One is the complexity of your sale. Two is the degree of confidence you have in your go-to-market motion. And then third is the level of involvement that you want to dive a little bit deeper. If you have really transactional deals, your ASPs are, let's say, sub 12K, for example, a year.”
2022-08-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Three Reasons Why Sales People Fail | The Two Things That Matter When Hiring Sales Leaders | Why Revenue, Discounting and Price Do Not Matter in the Early Days with Jordan Van Horn, Revenue Leader @ Monte Carlo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Senior or like a mid level head of sales that can go build out a team really quickly, or if you're like an enterprise motion, you could probably go hire a person that needs minimal supervision. But you're still going to spend 25% of your time with customers or prospects. That's not going to change for six or nine months. Just to set expectations, good luck walking away from sales. What are the other two? You mentioned that was the third I jumped to it. What were the other two? Yeah, so the other two are one, you actually believe that by bringing in a professional salesperson, you're going to get more revenue per lead. I have a subset of leads. I know because there's a person because they're going to process it better, you're going to get better results. I think there's three things that you need. You need one, four or five customers that you've made successful that have paid you and said, like, yeah, it was worth the money. Even if it's $500, doesn't matter. The second thing you need is you need to be able to repeatedly generate, call it five to ten weeks a week. And then the third thing that you actually need is you need to make sure that those leads are actually progressing from the discovery phase to the evaluation phase and those early leading indicators. If you have those things, you can probably hire”
2022-08-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Three Reasons Why Sales People Fail | The Two Things That Matter When Hiring Sales Leaders | Why Revenue, Discounting and Price Do Not Matter in the Early Days with Jordan Van Horn, Revenue Leader @ Monte Carlo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just too much. It's not that we're flooded. That wasn't the third one I was going to get to. That's the other one. So let's go straight to that one since that's the one you hear the most. That's a you question, not a sales question, right? That has nothing to do with go to market. That's where you want to spend your time. And do you want to spend your time building a product or in front of customers? Now, I'd argue that they don't think that you're going to hire a salesperson and go save a bunch of time instant. Maybe you have like a fast transactional deal and a bunch of inbound volume and you need someone who's just going to process and transact. Okay, go hire a sales leader, right, that's going to build out a junior sales team if that's the case. But if you're just trying to like step away from it because you have other things you want to worry on, hiring people doesn't make their life easier. We had a saying in Monte Carlo in the early days. Every time you hire someone, you failed because you couldn't solve the problem with the people that you had on the boat. So you had to go hire another person. And that I think shifts people's thinking in terms of how you think about solving that problem. I would say that founder who's like, I've got a million things and I just need help. If you have a transactional business, yeah, you're probably ready. You could probably go hire a”
2022-08-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Three Reasons Why Sales People Fail | The Two Things That Matter When Hiring Sales Leaders | Why Revenue, Discounting and Price Do Not Matter in the Early Days with Jordan Van Horn, Revenue Leader @ Monte Carlo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And I've listened to the answer from other folks on this, and they're all slightly different. But I think so much of hiring any sales leader, it comes down to two things. Luck and timing and to what your business needs. I would always ask you if I was your angel investor, I would ask you, hey, what problem are you trying to solve with hiring a sales? Why do you want to hire a salesperson? I think that's the first really critical question of what are you trying to solve? Because if it's product market fit, you don't have and you think hiring a salesperson is going to help, it ain't. It's not going to help you. Don't hire a salesperson. If you're in a competitive market scenario, you're a fast moving market. You have like all these free signups and you want to amplify the number of conversations and learning, or you want to bring in an expert and that you hope that expertise could come in and increase your revenue per leave, it's probably time. The first thing that I would say is if you know on this one here, the most common”
2022-08-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Three Reasons Why Sales People Fail | The Two Things That Matter When Hiring Sales Leaders | Why Revenue, Discounting and Price Do Not Matter in the Early Days with Jordan Van Horn, Revenue Leader @ Monte Carlo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And insofar as you can get multiple champions or even a department being a champion for something, that's a significant backup plan.”
2022-08-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Three Reasons Why Sales People Fail | The Two Things That Matter When Hiring Sales Leaders | Why Revenue, Discounting and Price Do Not Matter in the Early Days with Jordan Van Horn, Revenue Leader @ Monte Carlo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Champion left is brutal. It really is. First of all, it depends on the size of deals that you're in the complexity of deals that you're operating on. It doesn't make sense to build this multi-threaded, overly engineered go-to-market motion when you have a $4,000 ASP. So for those lower end of the markets, these single-threaded, that's fine, but just move quickly because time kills all deals. Compressing those deal cycles down is actually far more important than multithreading. You're basically minimizing the window for something to go wrong. On the upper end, you have to multithread. You have to have multiple stakeholders. You have to have a person, even if you get the deal and the champion leaves, you're still screwed, by the way. You still have to go roll out that product and get it adopted and used. Your champion's gone, guess what? You got churn risk on day one of the contract. So I think it is really critical to have a champion to have a practitioner who's going to deploy it and to have an economic buyer in the organization and have access to all three of those parties and make sure that they are all on the same page. I think that's quickly becoming the role of an enterprise sales rep.”
2022-08-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Three Reasons Why Sales People Fail | The Two Things That Matter When Hiring Sales Leaders | Why Revenue, Discounting and Price Do Not Matter in the Early Days with Jordan Van Horn, Revenue Leader @ Monte Carlo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so that's a sales playbook. Should that be created by the founder, or can this be created by an early sales team instead? So I think that you're going to have dozens of versions of a playbook over time. I think there's a V0, and I think there's a V20. In the early days, those playbooks need to be really open-ended and they need to make space for all the things that you don't know. In the later days, the problem that you're trying to solve is I need to go hire an onboard 25 AEs and they need to know specifically what to do.”
2022-08-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Three Reasons Why Sales People Fail | The Two Things That Matter When Hiring Sales Leaders | Why Revenue, Discounting and Price Do Not Matter in the Early Days with Jordan Van Horn, Revenue Leader @ Monte Carlo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Discrete steps that you take to accomplish five things. One is to help the customer understand what you do, and the second is to evaluate whether or not your solution is going to drive some sort of critical business outcome for that customer. The third is to gain consensus across whomever's involved in that decision-making process. The fourth is to agree and formalize their relationship. And most importantly, the fifth one is that sales process and that sales playbook should create a blueprint for a customer to be really successful and for you to make good on those promises that were made in the cycle. So that's all a sales playbook is.”
2022-08-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Three Reasons Why Sales People Fail | The Two Things That Matter When Hiring Sales Leaders | Why Revenue, Discounting and Price Do Not Matter in the Early Days with Jordan Van Horn, Revenue Leader @ Monte Carlo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It and I was like, what does that mean? No offense. I don't know what it means either. I'm with you. It's not different than a CRO. So my remit is sales development, sales, CS, customer success, partnerships, bunch of broad functions. But one funny thing about Monte Carlo is we managed to get to like a billion plus valuation. We managed to get to an 80-person go-to-market team and we still hadn't hired a recruiter or a head of HR. So we don't have any formal titling or levels at Monte Carlo. And I think to your question, what we don't know yet about what to call me is whether it's CRO or COO. And I think that there's a question in terms of remit and how we want our sales team to be oriented. But it just hasn't been a really core focus to figure out what to call me. Okay. So we have head of revenue. That's one nomenclature relatively solved in a very unclear way. Thanks for that, Jordan. My pleasure. But my next one is sales playbook. Love the word sales playbook. How do you define what actually is a sales playbook, Jordan? So a sales playbook.”
2022-08-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Three Reasons Why Sales People Fail | The Two Things That Matter When Hiring Sales Leaders | Why Revenue, Discounting and Price Do Not Matter in the Early Days with Jordan Van Horn, Revenue Leader @ Monte Carlo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, I work with today still at Monte Carlo, and they're some of the most talented folks that I've ever worked with. I mean, Jenya is just a machine. I loved it when he talked about the hiring panel that he assembles for each hire. We're going to get on to talent evaluation. I do want to start on just... Because I think it's helpful to really just get a foundation. Respectfully, your title is Revenue Leader. What does that mean? How is it different to a head of sales”
2022-08-17 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 Sales: Three Reasons Why Sales People Fail | The Two Things That Matter When Hiring Sales Leaders | Why Revenue, Discounting and Price Do Not Matter in the Early Days with Jordan Van Horn, Revenue Leader @ Monte Carlo · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source