Mor Assouline
FDTC
Mor Assouline has coached over 1,000 sales reps across Fortune 500 companies and early-stage startups. As the founder of AE Ascension and Demo to Close and a 3X VP of Sales, he’s seen every hiring mistake in the book. His core insight: AI will replace average B and C players who refuse to evolve, but top performers who master automation and first-principles thinking will thrive.
Most conversations about AI replacing sales jobs miss the mark. Mor, has a different take. He’s not worried about top performers. He’s worried about the middle. The B players and C players who can’t think for themselves and require constant coaching on fundamentals. Those are the ones in real danger.
The reason is simple: if you can teach AI the basics, it won’t forget. A human rep who needs daily reminders to follow a script? AI will crush that job. But a rep who thinks critically, adapts, and automates their own work? That rep becomes more valuable, not less.
Mor’s bigger concern isn’t AI. It’s reps who don’t even know what Claude is. He’s asking sellers today if they’ve heard of Claude. Their response: “What is Claude?” These reps are walking around burning three to four hours a month on admin work that could be automated in minutes.
It will replace really average sales reps, B players or C players, because they require coaching on basic fundamentals and that’s just a waste of time.
Mor Assouline – Demo to Close
Mor has a system. It’s simple. It’s repeatable. And it works. He scores coachability on a scale of 1 to 3, based on three things: Are they open to feedback? Do they apply it? Do they proactively seek it? Most reps fail at the third one. The ones who do it are the ones who crush.
During interviews, he’s not just asking questions. He’s coaching candidates live and watching how they respond to correction. If you tell a rep they missed something and they immediately adjust their approach, that’s a 3. If they nod but don’t change, that’s a 1.5. If they get defensive or make excuses, they’re gone.
The next layer is asking the “why.” Mor asks reps to self-assess what went well and what didn’t. Most stop there. He goes deeper. He asks why they think that. Then he digs into how they know. This reveals whether they’re operating on intuition or first-principles thinking. If they can’t explain their logic, they can’t scale it. And neither can you.
Three things have to exist: open to feedback, apply it, and proactively seek it. You want threes on your team.
Mor Assouline, Demo to Close
Most hiring managers interview candidates and then pray they can do the job. Mor doesn’t pray. He tests. He uses what he calls a “day in the life” trial. Before hiring an SDR full-time, he had them work for four to five days. Not in person if remote. On Zoom with mouse control. He taught concepts and watched them apply them live on the screen.
This does two things. First, the candidate gets a real sense of what the job is. They feel the pace, the tools, the pressure. If they hate it, they leave before you onboard them. Second, you see if they pick up information quickly. You see if they ask good questions. You see if they’re actually coachable or just good at interviews.
Mor doesn’t give them access to your systems. They shadow. They practice on shared screens. But they’re not creating real data or making real mistakes that you have to fix later. By day three or four, you know if this person is going to work.
During the trial, I teach a lesson and have them apply it on screen. That’s how you see if they pick up information quickly and if they’re actually coachable.
Mor Assouline – Demo to Close
When Mor started Demo to Close, he had a choice: hire a sales development rep or an account executive. He chose SDR. Most founders do the opposite and regret it. Here’s why SDR is the move.
An AE is customer-facing. They run demos. They close deals. They represent your company. That person has to be someone you deeply trust. Someone with experience. Someone who gets your vision. Mor says he’ll only hire an AE from his coaching community. Someone he’s trained himself. Someone who knows the process. Someone who’s already a testimonial.
An SDR is different. They’re building pipeline. They’re researching, prospecting, qualifying. That work doesn’t require your face on the call. An SDR can do it. And if they’re good, they buy you time so you can focus on demos and closes. You stay on the calls that matter. They handle the volume.
After SDR comes community manager. Then trainer. Each hire is intentional. Each hire buys you back a different slice of time. Once you have the infrastructure, then you bring in an AE who’s a known quantity.
Mor treats his job like a business. He audits his own work. He asks Claude what parts of his role will be phased out. Then he builds around those gaps.
He breaks his job into revenue-generating and non-revenue-generating activities. Admin tasks. Email followup. Account research. CRM data entry. He builds a list of everything that eats his time and asks: which ones are high-frequency and low-complexity? Those are the ones he automates first.
He uses Claude. He’s built Claude plugins. He’s started coding simple tools. He’s treating himself like a developer building an app. Six-week sprints. One automation at a time. Deploy. Measure. Iterate. The reps who don’t do this? They’re the ones getting replaced.
For AEs with one to two years of experience, Mor’s advice is concrete: audit your calendar. Find the admin work that happens every week. Build a project to automate it. Use Claude. Use Co-worker. Use whatever tool cuts that work in half. The 30% of your time you’re wasting on admin? That’s your competitive advantage if you reclaim it.
I look at what percent of my time I’m spending on non-revenue-generating activities and ask which ones I can automate. I’m almost acting like a developer for my own business.
Mor Assouline, Demo to Close
Mor’s been a VP of Sales three times. He’s seen comp plans built top-down and bottom-up. Top-down is easy: “We need a million in revenue. Work backwards. Here’s your quota.” Bottom-up is harder: “What can we realistically close?” He ran his own numbers for three to six months. Built quotas from that benchmark. It’s less arbitrary. It’s more sustainable.
The problem with aggressive targets is they feel good on a spreadsheet. They scare the board. They motivate some people. But they break others. Mor sees it across Salesforce, LinkedIn, HubSpot, Shopify. The reps call him. The quotas don’t make sense. The VP doesn’t even know why they set them. Private equity owned companies are the worst. They need a number to hit the investors. They pull targets out of air.
On attainment, Mor’s been thinking about the 70% benchmark everyone cites. He’s not sure it’s right. If your quota is realistic, why wouldn’t you want 100% of your team hitting it? Navy Seals don’t graduate 70% of their class. They graduate the people who can do the job. If you want 100% attainment, set realistic quotas. Then add accelerators. Stretch goals for the people crushing baseline.
When Mor was VP, he paid commission only at 100% quota attainment. 80% quota got you base salary. Nothing more. Controversial move. The two reps he hired with that structure? One got promoted to leadership. The other is a senior enterprise AE. Both are crushing. The comp plan aligned their incentives with his business. It worked because the quota was real.
If the quota is realistic, they should be hitting 100%. If 100% are hitting quota, then you have accelerators in place for the people who want to push higher.
Mor Assouline, Demo to Close
For more on AI and hiring, explore why AI agents belong in systems budgets, not people costs and why AI sales agents will never replace humans. If you’re building a sales team, learn more about nearshore hiring and talent solutions.
I think it will replace really average sales reps. Call it B players or C players for sure because those players require coaching on the most basic fundamental aspects of sales and that's just a waste of time. And if you can teach AI to the fundamental aspects of sales, it won't forget. I ask certain sellers today, I'm like, raise your hand if you know what claude is. They're like, what is Claude? I look at my job. What percent of my time am I spending on nonrevenue generating activities? So, administrative tasks, following up on emails, searching accounts, all this other crap. I'd build a running list of all of those tasks that I do, and I'd say, "All right, well, which ones can I automate?" So, I'm almost acting like a developer for my own.
That's exactly what you sounded like. I was like, "Are you a developer?"
Yeah. You want to treat yourself as a business?
I love it.
This is Louise. I am the host of who we hire and we have the pleasure of having Mor Assouline. Mor is the founder of demo to close. He's a 3XVP of sales and really excited to be talking to Mor today um about sales, sales hiring, sales coaching and all the experience that Mor has to bring. So more I would love to uh hear who you are and what you're all about.
I uh I'm a husband. I'm a dad to two boys and a girl and then another boy on the way. Um I am who am I? I'm I'm self-aware. Um I'm curious. Um and I happen to do uh sales coaching and training for companies and and sales people.
I love it. Well, great to have you here and congrats on the the one in the way and uh your beautiful family. And you you said two things there. So self-aware uh and curious. Th those sounds like really good traits for for sales reps. Uh what are some other really good traits that you look for? Let's jump right in. And when you're hiring sales reps,
um outside of being curious and self-aware, passion, uh conviction, I I look for people that um have have an opinion about something. Um or it doesn't have to be like politics. It could be about about anything about something of they love. It could be a sports team. It doesn't matter. They need to have a passion. Um so that's stuff that I look for obviously. Um critical thinking is a big one. Massive one actually. Um yeah, those are just some. So we have what do we have? We have self-aware, we have curious, critical thinking, conviction. Um those ones.
How do you identify that in an interview process before they're on board? a few ways. If I ask them um if I ask them a question about what they do on the weekends or it doesn't doesn't really matter any any sort of question and they just respond with the answer and that's it and they don't respond or acknowledge the question and respond and then maybe follow up with a similar question to me or a question about a particular topic. So if I ask them what's your ACV at XYZ company as an example that you were in and they answer
do they answer and say it's it was this um it's which is similar to this company right like
that's a way where they're they're asking back a question they're curious so I look to see are they engaged and part of that is like are curiosity um Henry Shuck uh CEO founder of Zoom info actually made a video that I really liked about um how he interviews people at Doom Info, and I'm going to butcher it, but something that he said was, "Can they teach me something new?" Um, and I was like, "Yeah, that's that's actually true." When I when I if I speak to somebody and they share with me, they either correct me in a in a way that teaches me something I didn't know about or challenges me in a in a healthy, respectful way, it's a really really good sign. If I feel like, hey, if I'm gonna make this higher, they're actually going to bring something to the table that I didn't bring before, um, that's a really good sign. In the past, when I became like the first like a first- time VP of sales, and I was so inexperienced, I actually thought it wasn't smart to bring to hire somebody that was smarter than you. I thought it I I used to think of it as a threat.
Yeah.
I like, oh, if they're smarter than me, then the CEOs are going to realize and they're going to fire me. and they're going to hire them or promote them and denote me
and uh that's not that smart of thinking like it's it's not smart.
When did that that change for you? When did you say hey I you know when building a team I need to hire people that are smarter to me.
Um it actually happened that not in my first role as a when I was a VP of sales only at like the tail end of being a VP of sales. Um and it it's it's happening more now as a founder. I've been a founder for the last four years. Um, I just made my first hire. Um,
congrats.
Thanks. But it's like it stands out like yeah it especially when you're a founder, you want to hire somebody that's smarter than you so you don't have to spend time training them as much. Um, otherwise if they're not as smart of smart as you or smarter than you and they're just like really like a raw diamond in the rough, then you have to spend way way more time actually coaching them and and refining them and it sucks up all of your time. And as a founder, if you're founder le and solo, you don't have the luxury of time. You actually not at all actually. So
with uh three and a half kids, yeah, it's it's uh definitely not you're really more intentional with with that time and you you can you can put up with less. Um so I mean you talked about one mistake uh that you made, right? Not wanting to, you know, go and hire people that are smarter than you and learning from that. What are some other mistakes that maybe VPs of sales make or founders make when hiring sales roles? I think I think the mistakes that they make and I see it because I I work with companies and I am working alongside either their head of sales or their share or the CEO and um a lot of the questions that they ask are very theoretical. Um they're not willing to do the unconventional stuff. Um so I'll give you an example of something that I used to do as a VP of sales before making a full-time hire. um you you don't want to hire somebody and ask them some use case or case study type questions and the typical questions and they get the job and they can't do the job. Um and so there's no bulletproof way to do this, but if you can increase the probability of their of hiring the right person, it's even better. And so we used to do the thing called day in the life. It's harder to do it more in remote work environments, but you can still do it where part of the interview process is the candidate triing out. It's almost like a pilot. Think of like the NBA
the NBA uh they have these like open scrimmages.
Are you giving them access to your tools and everything?
No. I mean, they'll have access from meaning they'll shadow, but they won't actually have access. If it's if it's in person, it's much easier because these tools are already opened up and and you have somebody shadowing them. If it's if it's remote, um, then no, I wouldn't give them access to the tool. I'll have it like a Zoom, give them mouse control and have them do certain things. So, as an example, the SDR that I just hired, we had a four or five day trial. And last thing to do a four or five day draw. You could do a one day, half day, two-day trial with with the candidate for if it's like truly for a full-time role. Um, but during the trial, I had my Zoom open. I gave them mouse control and like I would teach them a lesson or a concept and I'd have them apply that on the screen that we're working on. Um, so it's a day in the life. It they get a sense of how it is to work here and the types of responsibilities and the level of effort. Um, and then I get a sense of do they pick up the information quickly? Are they are they picking up what I'm putting down? Um, that's an example of something I don't see a lot of people do. Um, and it worked really well for us.
I love it. So, that that's a mistake that they're they're making. They're not, you know, it's hard to see through the interview process. So, without having a a trial or, you know, getting them involved in what an actual day looks like and you get buy in from both ends there, right? Maybe that AE you're interviewing says, "Hey, this sucks. I I don't want to actually do this all day." And uh you know it it it's a good result not having to hire them full-time and and have them onboarded just to learn that in 3 months.
Yeah. And if you're if we're talking in terms of like sales hires, um I'm sure this applies to every every other hire, but coachability and you don't want to hire the wrong candidate because they're not coachable and you don't know because they just said the right things on on a on the during the interview. And so during an interview, and if we're talking about like a case study type of interview, coach them live and see how they correct. They self they course correct. And and when you coach them, part of coaching is like ask them to self assess. And then when you course correct them and then they apply it, ask them to self assess again.
Um I don't I don't see a lot of that. I just see a lot of one-way sync. In other words, like the hiring manager will ask the question, seller or the candidate will respond, they go fill it up, and then they move on to the next question. Um,
yeah, those are some
we we implemented that and that's, you know, we probably took that from your training four or five years ago. Uh, where in every SDR interview, we're asking, you know, what what went well in that cold call? What's one thing you want to improve? And same with the AEES and the discovery uh you know what did you do really well what's one thing you want to improve on so that selfanalysis I think is the biggest part and you know you didn't you didn't touch on this cuz I think this is your world but coachability right so that's you know um like that's what you're testing for there are you know can they respond to feedback and implement it uh and some people are really great at it some others you you know, it it takes longer, but then they get it. Others just get frustrated. So, it's interesting to see and you really do want to identify that early on in the process.
Yeah. I mean, you said something asking them what do you want to what do you think you did well? And then they answer. The the other layer that you that I recommend asking is why do they think that like why is that their answer? Um Kyle Norton uh and he didn't make this up, but he mentioned it and I caught him saying it. Um he talked about specifically using AI and claude and all these tools and he said you should first understand the fundamentals and uh first principles thinking. Um Elon Musk talks about first principles thinking. Um if you're not familiar with it, Google it. No, you don't. Nobody Googles anymore. So claude it.
Is it thinking fast and slow? That's
I mean that's one of the that's the that's a really good book to read. The idea is instead of asking how much does it cost to send a rocket ship to the moon or to Mars, Elon Musk says well what are the pieces of the rocket ship to begin with like let so you take you take a complex topic or thing and then you break it down into its simpler components and then you start there. Um so instead of just looking at the end result you're trying to reverse engineer the the source. Um, so when a if a seller or anyone you hire you, you're asking them to like self assess and be like, "Yeah, I think I did this well. I think I did that well. I think I made a mistake here or I think this isn't the right move." Blah blah blah blah. The next thing I want to ask him is like, "Why?" Like, "How do you know?" I'll give you an example. Yesterday, I'm coaching onboarding a seller and it takes them, I don't know, three, four hours to research pipeline like to build a book of business. I'm like, "Why does it take you so long?" He goes, "It's just very timeconuming." I'm like, "Walk me through it." And then he walks me through it. I'm like, "Why do you do that?" And he explains. I'm like, "How come how come it takes you so long to go to the website and review?" He goes, "Well, it's intuitive. I sort of know what to look for." I'm like, "What makes it intuitive?" He's like, "I don't know." I'm like, "But there, if you had to if you hired somebody tomorrow and you had to teach them what you're doing, what what would you tell them to look out for?" And he starts listing it out. That's first principles thinking. You're taking something and then like really working backwards to understand like
its simpler its simplest components.
Love it. Love that example as well. So after that call, did he speed up or sheet?
Yeah. So in that case, he understood the his the patterns that he's running on his on subconsciously and and intuition is really not intuition. It's it's um it's based off of years of p of doing things and the brain picking up on patterns. So what we we're building for him is a quad co-work plug like a plug-in that can do what he does manually, but it'll be automated.
Love it. So, you've seen the insides of so many sales teams, um, you've run your own, you've coached.
Yeah. between the trainings that I've done, uh, the education that I send out, and then the one-on-one that I do.
Have you ever seen somebody just like, "Okay, they're going to they're going to crush it and then they didn't versus, you know, somebody in the beginning who is like, wow, you know, there's so much work that this person needs to do and they really just need to, you know, um, that it's unlikely that they're going to succeed unless they study on weekends, practice, um, and then they turn around. Have Have you seen that through your thousands?" The runs that I've pointed and said they're going to crush usually crush. Rare. I've never seen anyone that I've pointed to and said they're going to crush and they didn't crush. It rarely. Yeah, I don't think it ever happened. I think maybe it happened once. I'm not exaggerating. It happened once. And the reason why is they just had limiting beliefs on on paper and on calls or when they were actually in the field doing the thing. They sounded perfect. Um, but in their head they were, you know, like a nobody, a zero. And so it was they self-sabotaged. Um, that's the old I I'm thinking of one person specifically, but the rest Yeah. Every every time I pointed some leader and said that's going to be your number one, um, I was right.
That doesn't mean it happened often. It didn't happen that often, right? Like it wasn't like me saying like, "Oh, this person that."
If I call it out, it's usually because I'm seeing something like early signs, early talent. They they have the thing. What are you seeing where you're like, "Wow, this this is going to be number one."
Yeah, it's kind of my intuition. I'm kidding.
What am I seeing? So, from a this you can measure it's it's first thing is I'm seeing is coachability and the way I measure coachability is just very simple system scoring system. It's out of three, one, two, three. Um, three things have to exist. They have to be open to feedback. They have to apply the feedback and they have to proactively seek the feedback. So if somebody is open to the feedback and sometimes applies it, they're inconsistent. It's a 1.5. All right. Um when it and I'm you want to have threes on your team. You don't want to have somebody that's open to feedback, applies the feedback, but never seeks it.
Yeah. That's the hardest one though, right? The the seeking feedback. That's the those are the best because you know they're hungry and they they they want results and they come to you and they and they go and iterate and they come back there's like a feedback loop happening. Those ones not every time but that's like one example. So they're coachable on a scale one to three three. They're a three. Um, two, there is I I do believe and maybe this is like a polarizing take and if I made a post on LinkedIn about it, I'll probably get stolen, but I do believe there are some people that are just born for sales. There are people there are certain things that you can learn and there are certain things that you can't. It's your your personality, how you carry how you smoo. There are some people that like can't carry the conversation. They just they don't know how to do they, you know, it's like a charisma. I think there's a big part of that. they're charismatic or they it's a it's I guess if I had to like label it, it's a sense of like intention. They're very intentional with what they do. Um they're very thoughtful with what they do. Um they are you can tell there's like passion behind it. They're not just going through the motions. They act they're very interested. Um, I I've t I've talked like there there are like I just did a a one-on-one with somebody and I was trying to teach him how to present plans and he's struggling like I'm not sold. I told him like I'm I'm not sold
to present plans
to present plans on on a sales calls. Yeah.
And uh I'm just like I'm not sold like you're not comm you're saying the thing the words that you should be saying but and you're following the framework and doing this first and that second. this is the classic like three three plan model with you know good
whatever whatever the framework is and and and like on paper you're you're doing exactly what you should be saying but I don't feel it from you like I don't feel it I'm not convinced I'm like what's something that you are you have a strong opinion on that you can draw a line in the sand and and have a really strong take and like argue with somebody and he's like I don't know I'm like basketball you watch sports like who's your favorite player he's like oh LeBron's a goat I'm like really? He's like, "Yeah." And then and then I like egged him on to see if it was true. And you could see he you get very passionate about it and and like like and he's like, "No." He's like, "You don't know what you're talking about." I was like like that passion. I was like, "That's what I'm looking for." Um and so I'm looking for passion. Something that you have conviction around. You have to have an opinion. If you're like, "I don't have an opinion, you know? Yeah, why not?" You're boring. You're a boring person. And and so I I look for that, especially with sellers, um when I'm hiring them.
Love it. Love it. Love it. Love it. So half of our clients are trying to go and replace you know sellers with AI. Some are doing it semisuccessfully. What is your take on how sales teams are evolving from STRs inbound outbound AES inbound outbound um and with AI and and is is that going to replace sales reps?
I think it will replace really average sales reps. call it B players or C players for sure. Um because those players require coaching on the most basic fundamental aspects of sales and that's just a waste of time and if you can teach AI to the the fundamental aspects of sales, it won't forget. So yes, it will replace certain sales people.
Yeah. Um, it I do believe it'll replace a salesperson that is still spending 30% of their time with administrative tasks and they haven't figured out how to use tools like Claude Co-work or uh, I don't know, Whisper Flow or whatever all these tools that are out there to like speed up the process. This guy that I I coached spends three to four hours finding deals, finding leads to prospect and because it's so exhausting, he only spent he only does it once a month. So if he learns how to use claude co-work to do that, he'll crush and then he'll be a value of a company. So the reps that will become extinct are extinct are the one that are CB players that are stuck in the running the old playbook that are are not adapting. I ask certain sellers today. I'm like do you raise your hand if you know what claude is? They're like what the hell is claude?
Really? Wow. If you were an AE right now, uh, one to two years of experience, you're selling software or services, uh, you're you're living all day in Zoom, what, you know, in addition to Claude, uh, like what how would you future proof yourself? What skills would you learn? How how um, you know,
um, I spent a lot of time thinking about it for my business so I can it applies. I I look at I look at my role as a sales trainer, coach, orchestrator, AI or systems builder, whatever. Um, and I think to myself, all right, what part of my job can realistically be uh replaced um by machine? And I think a good chunk of it can certain things that can't, like being emotionally available for somebody to think through an emotional problem. um dealing with very very nuance scenarios of a of a deal and which happens quite often. Um and so I think about it and then I go into Claude Gemini and GPT and I ask it to be ruthlessly uh skeptical and you know like just be Mr. wonderful from from Shark Tank. And I prompt it and give it my role and and I ask it like what parts of my role will be phased out, which parts why, and I try to I use AI to tell me where where they can take my job.
I love it.
Um, so that that's something that I that I do. Um, and then so that allows me to think, all right, where can I futureroof my business, which I've started to I've started changing what I coach on. I'm starting to build out AI tools. Like that's what I'm trying to do. Um, and then and then as far as like my role, if I was a if I were an AE or an SDR and as a salesperson, I look at my job and I look at what percent of my time am I spending on nonrevenue generating activities. So, administrative tasks, following up on emails, uh, searching accounts, all this other crap. And then I'd make a I'd build a running list of all of those tasks that I do, and I'd say, "All right, well, which ones can I automate?" and which ones are high what I call high frequency low complexity high frequency means they happen often it's like a daily or or weekly task that I have to do and which of those high frequency tasks are the lowest complex and I was like all right well I'm going to take that lowest complexity highest frequency I'm going to make that a project for this the next six weeks and I'm going to build I'm going to use that a claude plugin to build a project around automating that and when I'm done I'm going to look at the next high frequency low complexity task do a sprint for six weeks. So, I'm almost acting like a developer for my own.
That's exactly what you sounded like. I was like, are you a developer now?
Yeah. Um, so you you want to treat yourself as a as a business.
I love it. That is that is great advice. Um, for those looking to future proof, right, go and ask AI what, you know, how how are you going to take my job and how do I future proof myself? I would also have conversations with with with leaders and ask them like how do you think it like interview them?
Yeah.
And then right and see what people are doing and like read up on it and it feels overwhelming to a lot because it's just happening at such a fast pace. Uh there are YouTube videos from I forgot his name is Andre something but he has like a whole three-hour course on AI and GBT and like that video is technically out like super super outdated. It's insane.
It is. It is insane. So, you you said you chose Clawude over GPT. Why?
So, I did in the last three to four weeks. Um GPT's output was pretty um GPT. It gaslights me a lot.
Um
and it tries to sound clever
and um what really made me like, "Oh my gosh, Claude, you might be on something." Was
I was prompting with Claude back and forth because I I always felt Claude was better at writing. Always. Yeah, it is.
Um, and I thought it was just good for writing a writing AI like tool. That's it. And then I was like going back and forth and then I asked it a question but in like five different ways and it just called me out on it and the I didn't have any settings for it to be aggressive. I think it said like stop over thinking it or something like that. I was like whoa. I was like I love you. Thanks for calling me out.
It had an opinion.
It had an opinion and that's what it feels like. It feels like Claude has an opinion and GBD just tells you what you want to hear. I was like, "All right, let's look into this Claude thing." And then I was like, "Let's see. Let's see what he's capable of." And I started I'm like, "Can you uh can you um I I have like a I do group coaching every week and there's post coaching calls. I have to like download the recording, upload it to an LMS with additional notes and I got to move. It's very tedious." I was like, "Let's see if he could do it." And I download Cloud uh co-work. I'm like, "Let's see." And I gave it my my task that I do and it's doing for me live. I'm like, "Holy shit."
Wow.
And I was like, "All right, that's it." I just upgraded to Claude co $100 a month plan. It's just it's a no-brainer. Honestly, it's a no-brainer.
Love it.
I built out an audit tool, an app online. I vibe coded. I didn't even realize I was vibe coding until I was like I Googled what vibe coding was. Dude, I've been vibe coding three to four hours a day.
So, what what what else have you built?
So, I built a call auditing tool and I'm constantly tweaking it. So, um I it's a V1 where I've given it my methodology and my IP. Um and I pull up put a call transcript into it and it audits the call transcript and I give it more call transcripts and then it finds recurring patterns within the call transcripts of the sellers and it spits out a report. That's something that I built out. So, you cloned yourself for call feedback?
For Call Feedback specifically. This the V1 version of it. It's not as good as me. Not yet. Hopefully, it will be. Um, that's what I want because it's it's like a very it's it's a high complexity, medium frequency task. I do it multiple times a month, but it takes me two to three hours to do it. So, for
cold call feedback specifically,
cold call, sales fe sales call feedback, demo feedback, discovery feedback. Yeah. is just very very tedious because I'm listening and I'm looking for the tonality and and if they could do 80 to n 85% of of what I want and that's good enough. Um that's one example. Um there's a company that I work um I work with. They're a client of mine ra they raised between series A and B over 120 million and um they have a rev ops team in there and so I partnered up with RevOps team to build out a call auditor as well but since they have a team we built it on uh N8N and we I built a playbook for them on how they should run discovery calls and demos for their company specifically and we built out a scoring rubric. I give it to them. We partner up and we built an agent that scans, crawls every single call and scores it based on the rubric and then it spits out a report in Slack with like areas of improvement and then we had them build out a dashboard in Salesforce with trends on skills.
I love it. I love that it goes into Slack and then it pushes it to Salesforce as well. And then what what are they using for the call recording?
Gong.
Gong. And then Gonga syncs to Claude or what? What else?
No, they don't use Claude. They use I don't know. I don't know if they use I know they use N8N. Um I haven't sat with them like in the back end like seeing what they do, but I'm
the models.
I'm prompting the RevOps team to do it and then they come back to me and we go back and forth. Um he's gone. I don't GPT or Claude. I should talk to Cloud though.
Yeah. I mean I don't know any other organizations that are are doing that at that level. Um, I don't know many. I know that one obviously. Um, I'm sure there are more. Um, owner.com for sure is doing it. Uh, I'm sure Salesforce is doing something like that. I'm sure
I know owner.com for sure that.
Nice. So, you know, we've been talking about coaching um, you know, the last few minutes here and AI in coaching, which is really exciting. What about like actual frameworks that really move the needle with coaching? So, you know, you're a new founder, you just hired your first four sales reps. H how how do you coach them?
Well, it depends on what um you should have an idea of of what good looks like already based on if you're founder led sales up until this point, you closed your own deals. Don't like the IP is sitting in your brain. You have to dump that IP to somewhere. And I'd recommend Um, I recommend everyone doing this. Block out if you can one day a week or it could be one day a month. It's just like your thinking day where you're spending time like thinking about the business and like thinking about what can I offload, what can I delegate all like think about the business and instead of firefighting all the time. I do this. It's my Thursdays. Those are my working on the business days. Um, and if you're a founder and you're watching this or or you have sales hires already and you don't have a process, like that is your thinking day where you like, all right, well, what's the most common use cases that are happening in our company in terms of the leads that are coming through, etc., and let's build a V1 model. If you if you think about like, oh no, I got to build a framework and a playbook for everything, you're going to kill yourself. But if you do it like let me take one chunk at a time and like build that like like I said six week sprints build it deploy it build it deploy and then over time you start tinkering and iterating. Um I'd recommend doing that. It also depends right if if majority of your your your leads are coming in inbound then that's what you should optimize for. If majority are coming outbound then optimize for that. If it's 50/50 then start inbound and work outbound.
Love it. Yeah. I think it's rare for a founder to get most of their their you know leads outbounds coming from referrals, intros, you know, network and I I've seen a lot of founders go and fail uh at outbound processes. I mean I you know I've failed before I've succeeded for sure um you know creating outbound processes. So what what's your advice for CEOs you know going out and thinking about hey I you know I am not a top sales expert maybe they're in product or you know engineering and you know they have been closing the deals um but they they don't have that knowhow in sales process so like what what do you recommend for them?
Well it depends on what they need help with um if they have
say again
everything right they they They've closed deals.
I mean, but they have closed deals themselves. So, document just that part of your playbook and then give it to your first AE hire and then have the AE run it and then AE can iterate. And I mean, I want to say this, but it's going to sound like I'm trying to like do a plugin here, but I'm I'm really not. Don't go with me, but like hire a coach if you don't if you really don't know. Like I hired I just hired an SDR and I told you this last night. Um and I've been coaching them and like training them, but I'm realizing it's just shooting up a lot of my time. A couple things that I did. Um I have the playbook of what they need to do. So there are two things that I did. One was I went to Claude. I built a Claude project and I fed it the playbook of how I respond to leads, how all these templates that I have, all these things. and I fed it to Claude in under the instructions section of the project. And then I share I tested it out for about a week by myself like all right this is good enough. I gave this STR the Claude project and now he has like an assistant that has my playbook. That's one example that I'm doing to speed up like offload some of the training and coaching. The second thing is I hired somebody to that has experience with what I need what I'm what I'm coaching them on to just coach them for me. I don't have to like it's just going to save me time. And so there are two things you want to outsource.
I I love it. I love it. And uh you need to hire a coach. There's no you know so when we work with clients and founders that's the first thing we asked them like you know what kind of sales onboarding playbooks do you have? Great. We'll be happy to work with you, happy to help you hire some uh you know top talent but you need to hire a coach. Doesn't you know here's a list of of five go and find your own as as well. And that has been the difference in founders that I've seen succeed with sales, you know, a lot faster, at least in the first year, rather than in year two or three is making that investment. Um, in you you don't have time. You don't have time to go and listen to every call to be, you know, and and and having that it it buy you it buys you time. So, I think that's one of the the biggest things something I want to, you know, jump back to. you mentioned um AE, right? So you said, "Hey, you know, you're a founder going to hire your first AE." Uh so that's the first hire they should make and and you for your business, you did SDR. Um and and like how is that process like when do you think you're ready for an AE or will you always close those deals? So if I if the reason why I hired an SDR first and not an AE because AE is customerf facing um or prospect facing they have to get on a call run a presentation etc and then follow up on the deals. So there needs to be a level of insane trust between who I hire uh level of experience etc. So, if I were to hire an AE, which I will eventually, it'll only be somebody within my coaching community, people that I have coached myself.
Wow, that's huge. That's uh what an underrated uh play of having coached a thousand reps is you get to go and pull the the best one. And it serves me two purposes. One, I don't have to train them as much because they understand the process. And two, they're a walking testimonial.
Right. That's brilliant. I love it.
And then SDR, that's like the that's a pipeline. Like that's something I don't need to be there doing. They can do it for me. And then on the phone, on the call, or on a Zoom that they need to see my face for now. Eventually, I'll have someone that represents my company, which would be somebody that I've coached. And then then the third one is hiring like a community manager, someone to manage the community. And then like the fourth is like an actual trainer. Same idea. The trainer is going to be somebody probably from either the community or maybe external. Love it. So, you know, as we wrap up here, I want to get into something, you know, the sales leaders, you know, some of them talk about um some of them, you know, tiptoe around it, but compensation. So, compensation versus culture, like what drives performance or quotas too high? How do you structure this ideal quota? What you know, what is your take on that? Um, I mean, I've been out of the VP of sales game for a bit. I haven't been out of sales game for a bit. So, I've been more out of the game of like building out comp structures. Um,
but you see them in action, right? You see how how teams are performing, if they're happy with it, you know, what actually motivates them. Is it the culture of the company or is it
it's it's everything, right? So, there's like OT, but that that the OT alone is not enough. Um it it's OT and then actual attainment of OTE. Um if you're an early early stage startup, you don't have attainment there like you don't even know. I mean every time I joined as a VP of sales for a company um they were really really early pre- series A um really really I mean talk like early. One of them company called Practice Panther was one of the first tech companies that I joined. Uh when I joined they were at zero ARR like they were doing nothing. Um, and we quickly got to the millions within I don't know four years, very quickly. Um, but anyways, when I joined, I ran sales and I was like, "All right, what can I actually hit? How much revenue can I actually close in a month?" And I ran it for like three to six months. Like, all right, that's the benchmark now. And so, I built V1 of the com structure around
what type of realistic revenue I was able to hit. So, it's a more of a bottoms up approach. Um I know a lot of companies what they do is a top down approach which is like where do we want to be? All right and let's work backwards. How many how many deals you have to close and at what revenue size and then they work they do it that way. I think for some companies it works. I it's it's and then for some companies it doesn't work. Um benchmark like doing it from bottoms up is more realistic.
Yeah, makes sense. I never heard about it that way. I I always see it done. Okay, we need to hit a million. What do we do need to do to hit a million?
Right. So that that's also that's also good, right? There's cons to that because it's like well we've never done it so like now you're just like throwing on the board and like it's very arbitrary. Um but it also is good because it forces you to take bigger bigger action uh bigger steps bigger decisions uh think big think creatively and you know when I started my business you know like I was like how I have X dollars in expenses um I've only this this is maybe this is a perfect example like as a VP of sales I was making a certain certain figure and when I went on my own I was like well my expenses are more now and if I were would have gone through the bottoms up approach I would have been like all right well how much did I make historically as a VP so let me go let him do that wouldn't have worked like I have these expenses so I need to make X how do I go and do that and then you push yourself you go you really push yourself and you start to almost bend reality for yourself because you have to and I remember I closed my first like 10k a month deal and I when I I told them the cost of the monthly deal I like I held myself back from giggling because it was the first time I've ever thrown in a 10K per month proposal. Um, but so that's that's the benefit of a top top down approach. You really push yourself and think creatively.
I love it. What a what a good example. Had to be a good feeling for sure. So you're saying to everybody out here, go buy a Lamborghini or have eight kids is the go
uh but uh I know for some people uh you know some people s they their potential is shown when they are squeezed and cornered and for some people they don't need to be squeezed and cornered. I think most people do need to be squeezed and cornered. It's fight or flight. It's and when you have a family, you have nowhere else to turn and so it's just fight no flight.
Have you seen uh comp plans backfire?
Yeah, I mean I see it all the time. These are like because I co I coach reps from Salesforce, LinkedIn, Clavio, Shopify, HubSpot, you name it. Nooks, like I see it AC like I coach so many sellers from all these different companies. Series A, Series C, Public, Oracle, Netswuite, Palo Alto Networks, all of them. Uh, some of them have really shitty comp structures, like super super unrealistic, very like they pull that out of their ass. Um, and you can tell because there's you can tell cuz when I tell the rep, hey, go back to your your VP or your leader and ask them this question and like pressure test it, they come back and be like, yeah, they don't even know. They just, you know, so yeah, they backfire. It sucks for the rep. Um I think what happens is when you're uh private equity owned um or you have investors that you have you have like a big target to hit and you have to you have to please the investors and the board etc. And so you you just go aggressive and strong and there are pros to that and there are cons to that. There's good good and bad on both ends.
What do you think is a healthy attainment? So you know is it 70 80%? Yeah. Um, it's funny. I see a sales leader at DL. He says 100% of our AES hit or quota. I don't I don't think that's necessarily good.
No. Right.
But then at the same time, I think to myself, why wouldn't you want 100% of your team to hit COD? Like why would you
We do, but don't you want to raise it a little bit where it I mean, like when you think of a test, not everybody gets a 100red in in a race. Not everybody, you know, wins number one.
Yeah. Okay. So, let's look at the Navy Seals, right? You have you have a massive class that starts out and then eventually the class is down to like six or four or seven or whatever it may be, but all of them are like killers. So, wouldn't you want rather have a smaller team that are 100% quota every time because they're just killers than having a larger team at 70% quota?
That's fair. That's fair. I mean, if if it you know, the if the numbers add up, it it makes sense. I think you do a lot you I think you do a lot with highly efficient sellers versus having a bigger team with like less efficient you have to spend more resources and time with them and then you you you can spend money and time and resources on your high performing sellers but it has way more impact.
So this is this is going to be the LinkedIn post. Uh more more says all sellers are born and you should be hitting 100% quota attainment. Uh,
you know what? I would love to hear quotes like that.
Those are the quotes we'll pull out.
They they should hit 100% a quota if the quota is realistic.
Yeah.
So So that's your that's your stand that it really should be 100%.
It's a I haven't given it enough thought to say like that's my stand, but I only base the 70% off like quota attainment from like books that I've read from like Mark Rober or whatever it is. I'm like or Jason Lin. It's like it should be 70%. Like now that I'm thinking about it, wouldn't why wouldn't I want my team to hit 100%.
We haven't really questioned it, right? We're just like, "Oh, it was written in this book. Let's go and run this playbook."
And I'm sure they had a good reason, but like if the concern is, well, if 100% of your team is hitting quota, then it's too easy.
Um, who says, "What if they're just really good?"
Yeah.
And why not then have accelerators in place? And those accelerators are more of these like stretch goals that's much harder to hit that their accelerators only kick in if they hit these these these numbers.
When I was VP of sales, by the way, the quota that I set up for my team was you have to hit 100% quota to get paid commission. If you had 80%, you don't get commission. You get your base, but you don't get commission.
Oh, that's Yeah, I mean that's going to motivate you. And but we did it we took a bottoms up approach and then we event and then we had like accelerators in place and the revs that I hired and I coached are still there and they one of them got promoted to leadership the other one is like a senior enterprise AE they're both crushing. Um I'm sure if I made a post on LinkedIn like hey when I was VP of sales I made a quote of I'm going to get attacked. Um
well you want to get attacked sometimes right? You want to have that opinion as you as you mentioned. Um more you've been more than generous uh with your time here. Uh where can folks find you?
Uh LinkedIn or they can go to my website demotoclose.com. Um copy on the websites. It's slightly outdated. I need I need to update a little bit. But LinkedIn LinkedIn you log on to the website right now and seeing amazing. More thank you so much for for being on who we hire.
You bet. Thank you.
