Todd Bida

THANK YOU Dave Kellogg, advisor, director, blogger, podcaster, and EIR at Balderton Capital for this spot-on post, reproduced here in its entirety:

Transitioning from Founder-Led Sales: The “We Need More Schmedleys” Problem

I remember how silly the board looked that day. Reviewing the slide with performance by salesrep, an alpha board member impatiently shouted the seemingly obvious conclusion: “Look, only one rep — Joe Schmedley — is performing. Everyone else is struggling. The solution to our problem is quite simple: we need more Schmedleys.”

I had to kick about three executives under the table to prevent them from bursting into uproarious laughter. The last thing we needed, the team knew, was more Schmedleys.

Joe Schmedley wasn’t a bad guy. A competent, if somewhat bumbling, enterprise rep. Affable. Could talk about local sports teams. Not a bad guy to have a beer with. Not a particularly good guy at driving paperwork through procurement. Average to a skooch above in most respects. The last thing we needed to do was define our hiring profile by his background and tell a recruiter to go find ten more of them.

So what was driving this false signal in the data? The numbers don’t lie, right? And by the numbers, Schmedley was crushing it. Consistently our top rep.

What’s going on here?

What if I told you:

Schmedley was hired to manage the company’s largest account.

That account was originally sold by the founders.

That account was effectively managed by the execs, specifically, the CRO, CTO and VP of professional services

That account was quite successful with our technology and expanding their use of it every year

Schmedley had little to no success outside that major account

Like some successful salesreps, Schmedley had found himself in the right place at the right time. We knew it. Heck, he wasn’t arrogant, I think he knew it. The only people who didn’t know it were the board, who was actively telling us to hire ten more Schmedleys, making him the archetype for all future sales hires.

The problem was, of course, that the big customer was effectively a “house account,” and Schmedley merely a steward. We were in the midst of the transition from founder-led sales to sales-led sales and the board was confusing the account’s success with Schmedley’s.

What can you do to avoid this problem?

Don’t hire affable stewards. No early-stage startup should. If you somehow convince yourself that all you want is an account manager, then hire a CSM or TAM. Not an salesrep.

Hire smart, aggressive salespeople who want to learn about success in order to replicate it. They shouldn’t be there to milk the house account. They should be there to learn deeply about it, so they can find ten more.

Don’t use a highly leveraged compensation plan. If you’re just running a house account, there is a serious question as to whether you should earn typical enterprise sales compensation — e.g., $300K on-target earnings (OTE). Personally, I’d take the $150K variable, put $50K on OKRs for managing the house account, and the remaining $100K on a leveraged new business plan.

Be consistent. You can’t tell the board in the morning that Schmedley’s success proves the industrialization of our sales model and then, three hours later, say that he’s just a steward. Most CEOs and CROs walk themselves into this problem by trying to have it both ways. Pick one.

Every Seller, Every Interaction, Every Deal

As we accelerate into 2025, AI solutions are everywhere, each looking to revolutionize {fill in the blank}. What truly matters for you and your team?

Today’s sales leaders face two critical challenges:

Scarce At-Bats: Every qualified opportunity is high-stakes, and there’s no room for error. Sellers need a dedicated space to refine their skills before stepping into these moments.

Individual Variability: Every seller has unique strengths, weaknesses, and blind spots. Broad-stroke solutions don’t address the specific areas where each seller needs refinement.

Yet many sales leaders still rely on outdated methods that fail to optimize. 1:1s offer broad guidance but often lack situational depth. Tools that record interactions seldom deliver actionable insights aligned with buyer needs. Role-plays with and without extended audiences are limited by time, uneven feedback, and fear of failure and humiliation. Generic training programs miss the mark on addressing individual learning styles, leaving growth potential untapped, and numbers missed.

Sellers need environments that go beyond observation and passive learning—spaces where they can actively refine, experiment, and master their craft. These systems must offer practical, actionable experiences tailored to the realities of high-stakes selling.

Addressing these challenges requires a two-pronged approach: creating an environment for sellers to master their skills and ensuring alignment with buyer needs in every interaction. Two essential shifts are required to address these challenges:

1. Building Mastery Through Practice 💡

The Problem: Sellers lack a dedicated "flywheel" space to consistently refine their approach and take ownership of their own growth. High-stakes at-bats are too rare and valuable to serve as practice sessions. Fear of failure often stifles experimentation, leaving significant growth potential untapped.

Required: Tools that foster a continuous learning environment, enabling sellers to:

Practice real-world scenarios tailored to their unique challenges.

Experiment with messaging and strategies in a safe, structured space.

Receive targeted, actionable feedback that drives rapid improvement.

The Results:

Faster onboarding and accelerated skill development.

Enhanced seller confidence in high-pressure situations.

Measurable increases in win rates through sharper execution.

2. Driving Precision with Buyer Feedback💡

The Problem: Messaging misaligned with buyer priorities can quietly derail deals, leading to stagnation and often worse. Sellers often misunderstand why deals are lost, attributing failures to external factors rather than addressing actionable gaps.

Required: Systems that collect and analyze buyer feedback, delivering insights that enable sellers to:

Identify what resonates—and what doesn’t—during engagements.

Refine messaging dynamically to align with buyer priorities.

Detect churn risks and upsell opportunities to maximize account potential.

The Results:

Improved win rates by eliminating messaging missteps.

Accelerated deal velocity through buyer-informed strategies.

Stronger alignment across sales, marketing, and customer success teams.

Beyond Tools: The Cultural Imperative💡

Building a thriving sales culture requires intentionality—a commitment to systems and practices that empower sellers to perform at their best. The strategies outlined above are not just incremental improvements; they are the catalysts for this cultural shift:

Mastery Through Practice provides sellers with the confidence and skills to tackle high-stakes situations with precision.

Precision with Buyer Feedback ensures sellers adapt dynamically, aligning their approach with what truly matters to buyers.

These aren’t just tools—they’re enablers of a culture where sellers:

Experiment freely without fear of failure.

Leverage feedback seamlessly to refine their approach.

Consistently align their behaviors with buyer needs to drive results.

The path to a thriving sales culture starts here—with systems that equip sellers to execute at their best and deliver results on every interaction.

And...

The question is not whether your team has potential—it’s whether you’re creating the conditions for them to realize it.

How do professionals get better at what they do? How do they get great?

Anyone on your sales team a competitive listener? Listening only with the intent to react? Can’t wait for a prospect to stop talking?

Shout out to our Tim Goering for this foundational riff on the Sandler Listening Ladder (aka Pain Funnel): designed and deployed to discover a prospect's compelling reasons for doing business before your sellers start telling them anything.

It's aligned on three basic questions. 

What's the challenge? 

What’d you try to do about it?

What if you do nothing? 

Most sellers interrogate in order to find a challenge they can sell to, and that’s backwards. It keeps your sellers from discovering what (if anything), will get a prospect to invest in change. Now.

So think about these three basic questions in the listening ladder, and then build the other directionally relevant questions around these three. 

So what's the challenge that you've got? 

Often a third party story will help break the ice and get them to start talking: "A CxO was telling me last week that...

If what you sell is AI to solve problems: her GTM team is handling mundane, repetitive tasks that are time-consuming and error-prone for humans, and this is distracting them from adding real value to customer relationships. Now, with any luck that’s not you…

If what you sell is no-code building blocks so your customers can shape their workflows, their way: her team was drowning in inefficiency with no top-down, single-voice-of-truth and process for managing projects, tasks, and workflows. Now, with any luck that’s not you…

If what you sell is sales training and GTM transformation: her team’s pipeline was full of anybody with a pulse, and that she was desperate to stop that madness. Now, with any luck that’s not you…

If what you sell is (fill in the blank)...

Oh…really… tell me more about that and don’t skip the details  

This gets them to see it. They hear their voice saying they’ve got the challenge, then they’ve got to own it. 

Gosh, how long you've been thinking about that? 

What’d you try to do about it already? 

Why do you think that didn't work? 

Now they own the idea that they might need help on their journey to get past this challenge.  And then the last three:

What are the consequences of doing nothing?

What could that cost you? emotionally, financially? 

Is this a big enough priority that you want to do something about it? When? 

Only when a prospect says they’ve got something you can help them with, can your sellers proceed. That's the Sandler Listening Ladder. 

Rafa Nadal's unwavering persistence and mindset of continuous improvement is legendary...as are the outcomes of his consistency and dedication.

This reminded me of a 2021 Davis Cup tennis.com post about the humility and matter-of-fact determination of a 14 year old Nadal in 2000 ( "I will continue training"), his work ethic, and ongoing commitment to the behaviors that bring success.

Thanks to Em Beihold and Leah Leach for a great show last night in 02138 and for spreading the word about www.activeminds.org/

Em Beihold is an empathetic voice of this generation on the mental health crisis in young adults: speaking up on the challenges and opportunities of opening the aperture...expanding the dialogue...and normalizing the broader/deeper conversation and engagement on young adult mental health issues that are rampant today.

The melding of mental health and music comes naturally to Beihold, who began writing at the family piano when she was just 7 years old. “Writing has always been my therapy; I was always going to be writing regardless of whether there was any success attached to it because that’s what made me feel alive and OK,” she says.

Sales Coaching from The Boss: "You have to first take your mind to where you hope your ass will follow."

Bruce Springsteen's 'mental jiu-jitsu' (aka cognitive reframing) and strong work ethic was the spark for this riff on the value of digging into the 'every day' for frontline sellers. (Shout out to Billy Oppenheimer for the source post.)

The Spark

“It’s like anything else: you have to first take your mind to where you hope your ass will follow. You’ve got to imagine the person you want to be before you can become that person. But then you need to acquire the skills to actually become that person...(but)...most people ...don’t do the work to acquire the skills.” — Bruce Springsteen

On May 2, 1972, Bruce Springsteen auditioned for the record producer John Hammond. Hammond had signed icons like Bob Dylan and Aretha Franklin—two of Springsteen’s heroes. “I would’ve been in a state of complete panic,” Springsteen said, “except on the way up in the elevator, I performed a little mental jiu-jitsu on myself.” “I thought, ‘I’ve got nothing to lose...The worst thing that can happen is I come out of here exactly as I am...If nothing happens, I'm going to walk out of here the same person as when I walked in.’” With this mindset, Springsteen said, instead of panicking, he walked out of the elevator feeling confident. Hammond said, “play me something.” “When I was done I looked up,” Springsteen writes, “and I heard him say, ‘You’ve got to be on Columbia Records. That was wonderful."

The Riff

HOW was Springsteen able to switch gears and get his BEHAVIOR to overrule his panic ATTITUDE to fuel his success?

Before Springsteen walked in to audition for John Hammond, he had generated a lot of evidence: “I had a lot of experience when I got signed,” he says in the video below. “I'd been playing everywhere—every fireman's fair, every bowling alley, every pizza parlor—for 8 or 9 years by that point. I'd played a thousand nights, I'd played for a lot of people, and I'd heard a lot of applause before I walked in to see John Hammond.” So when he walked in to see John Hammond, Springsteen had confidence. 

To ‘bring it home’ for your sellers: Springsteen gives us a great example of people can only manage what they can control. For your sellers that's what they do (or don’t do) every day.

Long before meeting Hammond, Springsteen had reverse engineered his ‘sales funnel’ and had taken control of his consistent every day BEHAVIOR: 'playing everywhere' all the time.

Coming off the elevator, Springsteen reminded himself he couldn’t control the outcome of the Hammond conversation, so he set aside his panic ATTITUDE and just did the 'every day' BEHAVIOR he’d become good at.

What's the behavioral plan for your sellers (or you as a sales leader) to know and DO what needs to happen every single day in order to make your success an ongoing reality?

“The Mundanity of Excellence.”

Olympic champions don’t train more than the average swimmer. Instead, they train differently. In particular, they do “what others see as boring.”

From a recent Billy Oppenheimer post:

Thirty-eight years into being a stand-up comedian, Jerry Seinfeld was asked how his daily work routine has evolved over the years. “It’s the exact same,” he said. “I do the exact same now as I did when I was 21 in 1975.” He sits down with a yellow legal pad, he said, and “my writing technique is just: You can’t do anything else. You don’t have to write, but you can’t do anything else.”

That’s your day? the interviewer asks. That’s what you’ve done every day for thirty-eight years? That, to me, sounds torturous. “It is,” Seinfeld admits. “But you know what? Your blessing in life is when you find the torture you’re comfortable with…Find the torture you’re comfortable with, and you’ll do well.”

+++

In the early 1980s, the sociologist Daniel Chambliss spent 5 years studying swimmers at every level of ability.

In 1989, he published his research in a paper, “The Mundanity of Excellence.” Essentially, Chambliss found that Olympic champions don’t train more than the average swimmer. Instead, they train differently. In particular, they do “what others see as boring.”

Chambliss tells the story of a group of coaches from around the world visiting a U.S. Olympic Team practice. “The visiting coaches were excited at first…then soon they grew bored, walking back and forth, glancing down at their watches, wondering, after the long flight out to California, when something dramatic was going to happen.”

“They all have to come to see what we do,” the U.S. Olympic Team coach said. “They think we have some big secret.”

Continuous improvement

It's either an aspirational buzzword or it's embedded in your company's mojo. It works better when culture is paired with tools to fuel a flywheel of problem-solving and optimization. 

Quantum Metric posted a related riff a while back with Andrew Glover at Netflix on the magic that happens when single-source-of-truth signals/insights are stack-ranked by value and autonomously routed/wired into next-best-actions that matter most.

Yes, Quantum Metric fuels Netflix continuous product improvement, but their impact is even more compelling in the context of how Netflix culture organizationally aligns on, demands, and supports its team members who never cease ”Seeking Excellence” everywhere else throughout the company as well.

Excerpts from Netflix's Culture mantra https://lnkd.in/eUNs2PJb are here:

Dream Team We model ourselves on being a professional sports team, not a family. A family is about unconditional love. A dream team is about pushing yourself to be the best possible teammate, caring intensely about your team, and knowing that you may not be on the team forever. Dream teams are about performance, not seniority or tenure. Honest, Productive Feedback At Netflix, positive and constructive feedback is part of everyday life—not only an annual event. Meaningful feedback can be hard to give or accept. But like any new habit, it gets easier with practice. So we help people learn to give and receive feedback through coaching and modeling the behaviors we want to see across the company. It takes courage and selflessness to ask someone what you could be doing better, or to ask yourself what feedback you have yet to share with a colleague. Both rely on trust and positive intent, which is why we invest time in developing strong professional relationships. We know this level of candor can be especially challenging for new hires, people in parts of the world or cultures where direct feedback is uncommon, and if there’s a power imbalance. But it is an important part of getting stronger, as individuals and as a company, because it’s what fuels our dream team.

Does this sound like your company? If not...carpe diem...life's too short to sub-optimize where/how you create value and make a positive impact.

If you can “use the difficulty just ¼ of 1% you come out ahead”.

Sir Michael Caine announced his retirement from acting this morning (at the celebrated age of 90). I’m reminded of his powerful professional and personal mindset: shared here and initially sparked for me by a chance meeting with him many years ago.

Tell a more valuable story

Required in this economic environment: relentless, selective, motivated RELEVANT outbounds to crush your quota. Nobody needs your Salesloft-generated spam. (Special thanks to the Databook team).

Pipeline may 'cure all', but only when built through persistent relevant account-based cultivation of coaches, champions, and economic buyers within each prospect. How: with prospect-relevant informed outreaches. Quality and relevance in your outreaches does not guarantee success...but will always outperfom SPAM and doing so trains you - the seller - to better build substantive connections in an otherwise noisy market.

Crucial also is the alignment of marketing and sales to back-stop & fuel frontline sellers with value-based, account-based messaging that is consistently broadcast at all touchpoints. With marketing and sales saying the same thing to prospects, sellers can better leverage differentiation and dial-in with account-based specificity on each prospect's pain points with platforms like RollWorks.

The impact: shortened sales cycles, increased deal sizes, maintained margins, better-blocked competition, and increased conversion rates.

Pipeline Cures All

Instructive post for sales leaders from Joe Morrissey on mindset, tool, and capability shifting sales teams to inject OUTBOUND into their DNA and daily operating rhythms.

(Outbound) can be a real shock to the inbound-driven, “create and close” culture of many growth stage startups. For most sales reps and frontline managers, building pipeline is the least fun part of the job, and very few account executives (AEs) or frontline managers will want to do the grunt work of cold outreach. As a result, just telling your sales team to “build more pipeline” can be a bit like screaming “get more goals!” at the scoreboard.

Your top sellers are already doing this...they did not become top sellers by order-taking on inbound leads. The requirement, in every kind of market is to set up the outboud flywheel mindset and practice for the rest of your driven sellers to adopt as their own. (Those sellers who don't adopt can become someone else's headache.) The following is an abbreviated wayfinding checklist from the full artcle for ensuring that your sales team is equipped to own and execute:

You can't forecast your way to growth

As People.ai’s Art Harding points out in a recent article, pipeline quality will strengthen forecast accuracy more than any standalone visualization or forecast data entry tool. 

Pipeline generation is a data-driven process, which when optimized, must stack-rank and convert multiple data points into serially actionable insights for:

sales leadership to inspire, coach, inspect, and hold their team accountable

sellers to consistently achieve better outcomes: higher conversion rates, larger deals, more renewals, shortened cycle times, and better margins.

No company today can afford forecasting calls filled with wishful thinking that leave people feeling like deck chairs are getting rearranged on the Titanic: some accurate data, some fantasy, all adjusted with arbitrary changes to CRM values, and re-packaged as reliable, when it's not.

The antidote: AI to drive the aggregation of disparate data points into actionable insights to accelerate GTM success. Companies like People.ai are leading the way in helping their customers get the GTM outcomes they require.

In the article, Art maps out a path forward for sales leaders to course-correct with confidence and clarity: transforming business activities like email, call notes, research, and meetings, and aggregating those disparate data silos through AI-fueled account and opportunity management tools that increase sales rep productivity, accelerate revenue growth, and maximize ROI. Better collected, better contextualized, and stack-ranked data will fuel better outcomes now, while there is still time to improve multi-threading, drive or shape future meetings, and penetrate key buying centers on every open opportunity.

..the forecast call has been the center of the world for sales leaders and sales operations, and requires teams from across the organization to consistently capture and roll up qualitative and quantitative data points about the past, present, and future.

Every Venture Backed Startup is Now Competing for Reserves 

Good read on the state of VC funding in mid-2022 from Jason Lemkin and the SaaStr team:

So much has changed in venture capital since the start of the year, and many founders don’t fully understand it.  It’s just a radically different business than it was in January.  And founders don’t really need to understand all the changes in venture capital.  But they should understand some.

One is the concept of “reserves”, which is super important to VCs, but not something founders usually need to understand in The Best of Times. Because in the Best of Times, there’s always more money to invest in top performers — and even mid-pack performers.  Money almost always comes from somewhere to write second and third checks into the winners.

The TIME value of Dataminr.

Dataminr was co-founded a decade+ ago by a Whiffenpoofs alum and two classmates to prevent public and private organizations and the people who run them from getting blindsided by hyper-current events and be better capable, to better react, more quickly.  It’s hard to imagine a scenario in the not-too-distant future where any Fortune 5000 company would not have a lens like this to sit on top of the global chaos that is 2020 and beyond to respond better, faster, etc to issues large and small that impact their livelihood.

Build coaching capability throughout all levels of your management team

As Herminia Ibarra and Anne Scoular pointed out in a 2019 ‘new classic’ HBR article: Rapid, constant, and disruptive change is now the norm, and traditional command-and-control management practices don’t work. The role of the manager, in short, is becoming that of a coach.