Before You Blame Sales, Check These 4 Things First

The best salespeople don't interview for jobs because they don't need to. So the paradox here is that most salespeople are bad, and it's the only job in a company where to get more money, most of the time if you just stay and do the job well, it's better than leaving to get a raise to go somewhere else.

If I'm actually good at sales and I want a raise, the fastest path is just do the work.

Nigel, welcome to the show, man. I'm going to drop you right into a scenario in typical GTMU fashion, and I want your take. So let's call this company Rock Bottom Analytics. Nice, right? They're a $22 million data infrastructure business that just closed their Q2 at 61% of the number the board approved in January. The CRO built that number, of course, off of last year's pipeline coverage ratio. Three enterprise reps hired in April still haven't closed a single deal. Every Friday forecast call says, "We're tracking. Everything's green." Right up until the quarter closed and it wasn't. The CEO's first move Monday morning is to pull the CRO in a room and ask what's wrong with the sales team. That's a quote, by the way. You've built a career walking into that exact room. I actually got to see you in a very similar room this week. You've done it 200 times over. When a company misses that bad, is the sales team really the problem, or is the problem something deeper, man?

Yeah, thanks for having me, guys, and you did get to see me do something very similar this week in Nashville. So revenue misses exist at five levels in an organization, and the fifth one is the only one that the sales team owns. Unfortunately, most CEOs do exactly what this CEO did, which is start at the fifth one, and it's not where you should start, okay? And so when we have a sales problem, the first question the CEO has to ask is: is this actually a sales problem, or is sales the first symptom of a structural problem? And the reason why it's really easy to put all the blame on sales is that in most of these companies, especially these data companies, they have all the visibility in the sales team. So all the leading indicators exist, and there's more optics there. So it's really easy to beat it up and inspect it.

If I'm that CEO, before I start interrogating the CRO about this miss, the first thing I'm going to do is go upstream. And I want to know, before I even walk in the room: supply. And so in this instance, you know, they're data companies, so they have builders and they have some type of software or software combined with service. Do we have enough to sell? You may push back in the SaaS world like, well, we have an endless amount because we built it once and we can sell it infinitely many times. Well, maybe you don't have enough onboarding capacity. It's all supply-related. Is there enough?

And then the next level is demand. Does the market even want it, okay? And so in the context of this, I'm looking at deals that are stalled. I'm looking for loss reasons. I'm looking for rotting, and I use the term rotting to say it stayed in this stage a little bit too long. And if we're at 62% of plan, but the CRO has four to five times pipeline coverage, we might actually have a product-market-fit demand problem that I don't like as the CEO, and it's really easy for me to just beat my CRO up over. The CRO is probably too scared to go spar with me about product-market fit.

Then we talk about the third layer, which is coverage. I want to know coverage. Can we actually reach them and create awareness? Because that's not a sales function. Salespeople sell to already interested prospects. So did we reach enough people? Did we move them from unaware of our offering or unaware they have a problem to aware, to maybe even interested in having a conversation with a salesperson? And then is it priced right? Did we sell it for too little? Right, because if we're at 62% of plan, maybe we've got price erosion, or maybe it's too high and that's why we can't get enough deals done.

But they all go into that fifth level and say, "We missed our number. What's up, Mr. CRO?" And the first thing I do in coaching these CEOs is say: you better have really good intel into those first four upstream views before we decide we have a sales problem.

Does anyone have that intel? Like, have you seen anyone that really has that intel? And I want to clarify regardless of stage because I think one of the things that people often say in the work we do is like, you work with early stage companies, and of course early stage companies are messed up. Well, let me tell you something. I don't want to speak for you, but I've worked with early stage companies and public companies, hundred million dollar companies, multi-billion dollar companies, and they're all messed up. Like, let's be clear. It's not just an early stage problem. Have you ever seen anyone that actually has this information properly?

In the work that I do, most of them already have it and most of them know it and look at it. They just don't bring it to the sales or to the board meeting, right? So I posted something on LinkedIn today that was a bit of musing from the meeting we were in yesterday and a similar meeting I had earlier in the week where we didn't have a sales problem; we had a structural problem. You guys were in a meeting yesterday where one of the things came up was like, wait a minute, the problem we're trying to solve, we already have data for, and no one's really looked at it yet. And then earlier in the week, I'm on the phone with a CEO and a chief commercial officer for a company that has very inconsistent sales. In the past quarter, they blew their number out of the water in the middle month, and then woefully missed it in the bookend months—the front and the back end. And we have spent an entire year restructuring the sales team, hiring a new sales leader, getting tighter definitions, everything was about fixing the sales team.

About an hour into this conversation where they're talking about why it's not working, he drops: "Well, we've actually got 40% less inventory to sell this year." I said, "Wait a minute. You don't have a sales problem. You have a phenomenal sales team. You mean your sales team is still at or around the number with 40% less product to sell? And this is the first time we're talking about it? We're getting ready to go lay off salespeople, and nobody's looked at the other side of the business to understand why they're not hitting the number?" And he's like, "Oh man, I don't have a sales problem."

So they have the information. They just look at sales and don't understand how did we get here?

Yeah, it's a scapegoat. And that leads into a good conversation around quota. Because if we flip it and let's say sales is the problem, there's a benchmark that just got released in 2026 with Pavilion and RepVue and a couple of others.

So if it just got released, it makes sense that it was in 2026. Sorry to interrupt, but like, give me a second there.

And they're saying now that quota attainment has fallen to around 43%, and that's down from 60%, you know, just even probably three or four years ago. So you've walked into a bunch of these sales organizations and diagnosed what's broken. How much of the 43% is actually a hiring problem that nobody caught versus the actual sales problem?

I don't think it's either, if I'm being honest with you. I think there's a structural alignment conversation that most boards and management teams don't do. I talk about this in my book, Revenue Harvest, and the first principle of planning. And let's face it, quota is a version of a plan. The plan is useless. The exercise of planning is indispensable.

Say that again because I love that.

The plan is useless, whether it's a monthly plan, an annual plan, a three to five-year plan. The plan itself is dead on day one, but the exercise of planning is indispensable.

I love that.

But here's where most people get it wrong and they want to talk about: is it a hiring thing or was the quota never realistic? You can't answer that until you can tell me you did planning right. And so good planning requires that you take a number all the way down to the rep. And in some motions, especially if it's an account management motion or they have a recurring revenue or retention or expansion opportunity—if it's not just net new logos, right—if we're going to sell something new to an existing customer or we're going to charge them more, the rep has a responsibility to take it to the customer that's on the hook for hitting the number and ask if it's even believable, okay?

So we publish these quotas and forecasts, and then we miss, and we say, "Well, do we have a rep problem, or was the quota flawed from the beginning?" I don't know until you give the rep the number and say, "Is this believable? And don't just nod at me, but tell me: can you assign it to your territory, which is a blend of existing accounts or logos that you would like to have? Can you get bought in on this?" And so if the rep is bought in on it, that means it is believable. And if the rep's bought in...

In on it, and if we say it's believable and we miss it, then it's a coaching conversation. But most of those companies that are in this study, they don't even do planning right because they never gave the rep who has to own the number an opportunity to put pen to paper and play the author.

And that's probably if we back that plan into a bottoms-up model—because everyone's trying to do top-down—and you really understand what the unit economics are from the top of a sale all the way through, how many you really need, what it looks like, then you can go back and look at your plan. So I do also believe we have a hiring problem epidemic where people are generating generic job descriptions for sales people and they're pushing them out there. One of the things I really appreciated in the conversation that we were having yesterday with the client was your process on the hiring process, because people don't go through a hiring process where everyone has a job in that hiring process to do certain things to move a candidate through the pipeline in a manner that makes sense and that everyone can get behind. Because a lot of people are like, "We'll create these generic interview questions and we'll go from a gut feeling." And then like six months later, they're surprised like they're not picking up the phone, they're not making phone calls, they're not doing all the things we want them to do. And, oh, by the way, the job description isn't set up from an expectation perspective because you haven't planned. So I like all the things that you talked about like going back to the planning from day one.

As it relates to the plan for hiring sales people, I also wrote a book on that and talk about everything that I think is fundamentally wrong in the way we hire sales people because we do have a hiring problem.

We're going to talk about that in a minute. That's where I want to go next. In my research for this conversation, you know, you spoke about four archetypes that actually could predict who crushes quota before they're hired. And if that framework is right—and listen, I again had the pleasure of being in a room with you yesterday. We talked about this. We went through, you know, types of people. I saw a little of it in the book before. I'm bought in fundamentally. But if that was right, most of the reps who are missing their numbers now weren't ever going to hit it no matter how good their coaching was. So talk to me about that, and then where does that leave the leader who inherited the team instead of building the team? Because you got the wrong team.

Well, okay. Yeah. Let's start with the last bit of that, the leader that inherited the team versus built the team. I don't care if you chose to keep them after you inherited them. You own them, okay? So it doesn't matter to me. Part of the problem that I see in this hiring epidemic is that most sales people aren't good. And so we hire a bunch of sales people that actually aren't sales people. Look, if I tell myself I'm a farmer but there's no harvest, am I really a farmer? No. Sales and sales leadership is one of those professions where we can bounce around, keep a title, keep an identity, but never actually deliver. You can't be a doctor if you don't practice medicine. You can't be a farmer if there's no harvest. You can be a salesperson for your entire career and never actually be a salesperson.

So here's how this plays out from the very beginning, before we even get to the archetypes. If you play poker and if you sit at the poker table and you can't find the sucker, it's you. And what's that got to do with this? Most people that interview sales people are the sucker because they are not good at interviewing sales people. So that is sales leaders, that is frontline sales managers, that is human resource professionals, those are recruiters. They are not good at interviewing sales people. Here's why: Sales people spend their entire career every day going into meetings, convincing people of the outcome they want. And so in that instance, it is just convincing you to hire them. That is the sale. And you may say, "Well, if they get the job, then they must be good at sales." Well, except for they're selling themselves and you don't even know the right questions to push back. You have no framework for how to do this right.

And so one of the things that I talk about in the book is that the best sales people don't interview for jobs because they don't need to. So the paradox here is that most sales people are bad, and it's the only job in a company where to get more money, most of the time, if you just stay and do the job well, it's better than leaving to get a raise to go somewhere else. If I'm a customer success person, if I'm a controller, if I'm in human resources, if I want a raise—a big raise—I have to leave the company. Otherwise, I'm just going to get 3% to 5%. But if I want to go 20% to 30% increase, I got to go get a new job. If I'm actually good at sales and I want a raise, the fastest path is just do the work. There are exceptions, but most of the time it's just do the work.

So when you are interviewing sales people, if they're not working, if they're unemployed, they're not good. And that makes so many sales people upset when I say that. And every recruiter says, "Oh, but you don't understand. It's a tough market and people get fired." And we have a friend Dan Goldman who posts all the time about bad things that happen. Outliers exist. Most good sales people are busy crushing their quota and are not looking for a job. So most people that are tasked with hiring a sales team, they'll post a job and they interview people.

We were talking about football on the ride to the airport yesterday. Imagine if the Bucks—your team—Baker Mayfield gets hurt, he can't start this year. Imagine Dale saying, "Imagine if the Bucks said, 'Well, Baker's out. So what we're going to do is we're going to have tryouts at the stadium.'" Everybody come down, we'll see if you can throw the football, and we're going to run, and Dale's going to run down there to be the quarterback.

[Laughter]

It's absolutely asinine, right? Okay. So if Baker goes down, they already know, right? They already know who they're going to go get. They've got a whole team that's scouting. They don't do tryouts. They scout. That's what sales leaders suck at. They don't go and scout people. They wait until it's too late to hire a team and then they go run a tryout. And guess who shows up for the tryout? Nobody that's qualified because all the qualified people are busy playing, crushing it somewhere else. They're the quarterback already.

They didn't even know there was a tryout. Why would they care?

That's so good. That's why most sales people don't hit their number because they're not actually sales people. And so what I do, a lot of times—wrote a case study on this where I came into a team and cut them from 18 reps to six. And everybody thought I was crazy. We paid the six reps that we kept more money, gave them golden handcuffs, tripled the EBITDA, never missed it, never missed a sales forecast.

And you cut 12 out of—

12 reps. Yeah, cut 12 reps.

I love that. How did you identify the six? Other than the ones who were performing, how did you say, "You're who I want on this team?" Because I think that's something a lot of inheriting CROs and VPs that inherit teams—that I've seen struggle with is, "Okay, here's your team. What is the criteria that's like, 'Man, you're the one. I want you on this team come hell or high water.' My second conversation on day two is like, 'What do I got to do to keep you happy because you're a rock star?'"

So that's where the matrix comes in. The elite sales person matrix. So the thesis behind this matrix is that every sales rep exists in one of these four quadrants. The matrix assumes they're elite. So I'm not just saying like all the elite sales reps are not created equally, okay? So we'll stick with football. It's like you can be a pro football player, but you're not a quarterback. You're a tight end, you're a nickel, you're a defensive end. Like, everybody in the NFL is elite. Not everybody plays the same position. And I think we get that wrong in sales.

And so what we did is we said, "How does the customer want to buy it? And who's really good out of these 18 at selling to the customer the way they want to buy it?" And so that was part of the origination of this two-by-two matrix that says, you know, along the vertical axis, on the top end, you have very consultative offerings. The customer expects you to consult them and guide them on how to make a decision. On the bottom end of that vertical axis, it's transactional. Think of offerings like cable, booking a flight. I mean, you don't need to talk to a sales rep. It's buy now. You look at the price, you make a decision.

On the horizontal axis, it goes from a need to have on the left side to a nice to have from the perception of the customer. Do they believe they need? Okay, well, I need home insurance. Got to have that. And I don't need to really talk to a rep. That is in the bottom left quadrant, what we call killers. And those types of sales reps live—

# Transcript

By some will, some won't, so what. They run through a list. They are gangsters at getting it. They know that no is the second best answer.

You put that person in front of a doctor that's going to buy a patient encounter efficiency software, that's not going to work. They want to talk to someone that is an expert, someone that's done it, that can consult them on why this tool works, how it's actually going to work.

So there are four archetypes. There's the expert, the visionary, the killer, and the connector. Your job as the sales leader is to do the job or observe good sales reps doing the job to determine: Does the customer see this as a need to have or a nice to have? Is it transactional? Is it consultative? Is it somewhere in the middle? And come up with an archetype.

And look, in some markets, in some companies that are more mature—like I've got a client now, 197 sales reps across the country—if it's an emerging market, they need a different type of archetype than if it's a mature market where they're trying to play defense and fend off competitive threats.

So again, not all reps are equal, and even in your company, even in the same role, depending on the span of control of the territory, the size of it, they're not different. And most sales leaders aren't willing to do the work to figure out how does the customer want to buy this, and let me go find the rep that they want to buy it from. How they want to buy it. And then build an interview process and a job description that forces a rep to show, not tell.

And that's what we got into yesterday is anybody can tell me that they did this, but we all know that most resumes are just full of lies. It's all fabricated and manufactured to get you—it's a lead magnet. That's what a resume is. In the marketing world, it is a lead magnet to get you the call to action to convert. It's the first conversion element. "Call me. Let me give you something. Let me give you some compelling copy for you to click the offer and get on this call with me, right?" That's all it is and it's full of lies.

And so the job of the hiring manager is to validate it, and the only way you validate it is to make them do the work.

I love that. I couldn't agree more. You've got to show me. The exercise is important.

Let's shift to CROs. Nigel, average CRO tenure is give or take 17 to 22 months right now, which ultimately means most revenue leaders aren't even lasting two full planning cycles. You've sat across from a ton of CEOs who are making the calls. You've probably helped make those calls or actually made the calls that decide which of those revenue leaders stay and which ones get shown the door. What's the real reason most of them don't make it past that window?

The real reason most of them don't make it past that window is that it's the nature of the beast, okay? We're going to go back to football, and I use this statistic in the book "How to Hire Elite Sales People." The average tenure of a CRO at 18 months or less is not too dissimilar from that of a coach at the elite levels of all sports—basketball, baseball, football. We're not complaining about the average tenure of a head football coach in the NFL being 18 months or less, or in the Premier League. It is a nature of the beast. There's nothing wrong with that dynamic.

And let me tell you why. You could be the right CRO that came in and did a bang-up job in 18 months to get them to the next level of growth and scale, and that is not your strong suit, and they need to go hire someone else. And you did nothing wrong, and you should go and do whatever you did for the previous 18 months again somewhere else. There's nothing wrong with that.

I just don't think we need to buy into this narrative that tenure equals success. I couldn't do it off the cuff, but I can—I bet if we wanted to, if we're like if we're on Joe Rogan, we could get, "Hey Jamie, look this up: How many coaches have come in in less than 18 months and won a Super Bowl or won a championship and then left and went somewhere else, or were even fired after that?" So it doesn't—like, I think we're not looking at it the right way.

18 months is 18 months. You've got to live with it. If you want to make $400,000 to $500,000 a year, nobody's crying for you. Go in there and do it. Some make it, some won't. Who cares? Go get another job. Do the work. Go get another job.

Here's something I keep seeing with sales teams I work with. Generic sequences don't work anymore. We've all gotten so good at tuning out the noise that even your own buyers are ignoring you. The problem isn't your reps. It's that your sequences are static and your signals are somewhere else entirely. That's why our clients use Nooks, and the thing that stuck with me is that their sequences actually stay fresh because the signals update them automatically. Right buyer, right moment with no manual babysitting. If your outbound feels like you're shouting into the void, go check them out at Nooks.ai/BridgeTheGap.

So let me piggyback. I don't disagree with you. Yes, and how often do you see that that CEO who got you from A to B is worth investing in, that you could turn that 18 into 24, 36, 48, etc., where they are the right person for the next stage of growth?

And I'll give you an example. We'll assume he was the right person because he was there seven years. Colin Specter of Orum just announced that he was leaving after seven years. And he started in a director role, went up, moved up, moved up, and ultimately helped them grow their revenue substantially. How often do you see—forget whether someone's there 7 years—but that the right person is kept that long?

I think the right person stays that long most of the time. Here's where the right person won't stay: The CEO or the board is impatient or ignorant or both.

What we miss in this 18-month tenure is how much—and I don't have the data, but I know anecdotally a lot of what's driving that low tenure is self-selecting out, okay? I have been in a CRO role where after 12 months, I said, "I cannot work for this buffoon. I will go leave and go somewhere else. I don't need this."

Or nowhere else.

Yeah, yeah, like I'm not doing this. There are a lot of really good CEOs. There are a lot of really bad CEOs. There are a lot of really good companies that get killed by their equity sponsor or the venture team that is run by a bunch of VCs and MBAs that have never actually run a business a day in their life.

And so part of the dynamic at play here is good people, bad fit. It's not just really good companies that made a bad selection. There's a lot of good CROs that self-select out because I won't work for an idiot.

If you have a new leader, it doesn't mean you want to stay. Look at—I have to deal with Adam every day. I may have to opt out.

Dude, it has been the best four years of your life, but I think all of us have been in that situation where I would rather work for no one and have no income than work for this person.

And let's talk about there's just another factor we didn't talk about, right? So we talked about like, "Is the sales leader bad? Is the company stupid?" Sometimes neither is true, and there's this other dynamic that comes into play.

So great sales leader, company smart, and we agree that you are worth more. But the job, the value doesn't merit your increased earning power. And so let's agree that it would, and you see this all the time in pro sports where you are so good, but we could trade you for a ton of money to a bad team, and you go take all that money and get a bunch of other underutilized misfit toys because everybody knows you're a star and somebody's going to pay a premium for you. But we don't actually need it anymore.

Like, there's a lot of that going on. And I have to do this all the time with sales people and sales leaders. So I just did this on an assignment where they've got this really great sales leader that's making $350,000 guaranteed. And he came in and he's trying to hamstring the CEO and saying, "If you don't pay me half a million bucks, I'm going to leave."

And the CEO calls me and he's like, "What do I do?" And I'm like, "Do you know how many really good reps you can get for half a million dollars? Let him leave. Like, go. If somebody's going to pay you half a million bucks, go. We're going to go get two more reps at $250,000 that are probably just as good and less entitled and go do the same thing."

And it's not a judgment. It's like, just if you want to go get it, go get it. It's not worth it to me to pay you that.

Yeah, 100%. And look at it, we all have choices, right? And I think the higher up you go in your organization or your career or your path, like you're going to end up making a decision as well. And like it's not so cut and dry. Like there are a lot of variables. It could be family, for example. Like we thought a lot about that yesterday as well, you know, how does that in—and that happens.

# Transcript

The same thing and go back to NFL coaches. I was trying to look up the stat as we were talking, but could not get it fast enough. But it's the same thing. You may go a certain place because your family wants to be there or they want to be in Florida or California, like wherever it is.

The question I get a lot from investors is, "Nigel, is this normal?" And the answer I give them every time is one that my therapist gave me: "Hey, normal is a setting on the washing machine." Asking me if this is normal is not the right question. "Is it right for your unique situation?" is the better question. What needs to be true for you and let's go figure that out. Not, is this normal?

So just to answer the question on the football coach: one in every five don't last more than 24 months.

I like that you were able to do a little of your own research. That's impressive.

Let's shift a little bit. So you have Revenue Harvest and you have C-Suite. Revenue Harvest was built on the idea of the sales leader planning out the entire year. C-Suite is like pulling those same leaders under water and really calling them to the carpet on their org chart and what's not working through them. Just talk to the audience a little bit about Revenue Harvest versus C-Suite. What's the same? What's different about those two offerings?

They're two offerings, actually, for mostly two different audiences. I wrote Revenue Harvest in 2020 for sales leaders. It is a playbook that I intentionally wrote to be timeless, to outlast the SaaS revolution that is almost like an almanac. I wrote it when I lived on a farm, so I had a lot of influence from the agricultural community. Farmers, regardless of what they grow, go through a very methodical seven-step process every year. The book is a framework that every sales leader, regardless of your selling cycle, regardless of your stage, can overlay on your selling motion, and there'll be something there for you to help you hit your number.

That book got me a lot of advisory work assessing sales teams. For 10 years—you nailed it, Adam, earlier when you said I've seen over 200 sales teams—it's true, I did the math. For 10 years, I assessed over 200 sales teams, giving guidance from that sales perspective.

It's a 27-part process that I use, mostly for private equity companies that have either going to buy a company or have just bought it, and they want to know if it's as good as they think. I take them through this proprietary 27-data-element framework, and then I present it back to the CEO. For 10 years, I've been doing this. And this is where C-Suite came into play.

After 10 years of doing it, I got so tired of wanting to do it because of this dynamic: most CEOs sit on one side of this paradigm. There are select few that are the exception, and those are the ones that get the premium outcomes, that get the exit, they're the unicorn. What I learned is that most CEOs struggle with making decisions. So what happens is I can give you the data and tell you, after you just paid me 30 to 50,000 dollars to assess your sales team, some really hard truths. And it's your job as the CEO to do something with that information.

I have this quip that I tell with some of my other consulting friends: most of the advice I give is useless. It's worthless. It's of no value, and it's not because it's not good advice. It's because they did nothing with it. It created no value, so it has no worth. And that's why C-Suite exists.

I did this for 10 years where I would go in and say, "You have to fire your sales leader" or "You have to restructure your sales team" or "You have to fundamentally pay them something differently." And they didn't do it. They wouldn't do it.

We have this conversation all the time. All the time.

So what C-Suite is, is a different decision-making environment for CEOs who have been circling a decision for too long. The types of decisions we're talking about are: kill a product line, break up with a founder, raise money, sell the business, start a new offering—all of these really important decisions where more information generally doesn't help. You've asked the board, you've asked your coach, you've asked the management team, and there's no consensus. There's never going to be one clear answer.

So what we do is we look at the data. Sometimes, depending on how we're feeling, we use the data to convince ourselves of one conclusion. We wait a couple of weeks, look at the data again, and we can tell ourselves a different story with the same data set. We ask the team, there's no clear answer. We try to do this in the board room while everyone's posturing, there's a lot of politics, there's theater. It is the worst place to make these decisions.

So what I do is I get these CEOs out of that environment. They come down for two days, and I take them to a decision-making environment—the ocean—that will punish you if you are indecisive. I use the mechanism of the ocean, either fly fishing or fishing, where you have to see them and make a cast. It's not like sitting here looking at a bobber. You have to see the fish, and you have to decide to make a cast and present them with the fly. Or surfing, where you're out in a lineup and you have to decide that you're going to paddle and take that wave. If you pause, you will be punished.

I use it as a container to remind them that failure is not a flaw. It's never fatal. It's just a feature. And the ultimate failure is choosing to do nothing. Because if you choose to not make a cast or not go for that wave, what are we doing? Why are we here? If you're not going to do anything, what are we doing? It's a great reframe for them to say, "If you're not going to decide, you don't deserve to be the chief executive officer."

So we take the decision that they've been circling. I distill it down to two equally viable outcomes for them. They validate that either one of them is livable for them. And then we take it to a different decision-making environment that has no theater, no ego, no politics, no bureaucracy, and they choose. That's what C-Suite does.

So far, I've done about 20 of these intensives, and the types of outcomes we're getting: one CEO was doing about four or five million dollars in a direct-to-consumer model. He flipped the entire business around and went B2B. He went from having like 800 customers to 3,200 customers. He was doing 250 million in an e-commerce category, flipped to an entirely new category, paid 250 million, doubled his EBITDA.

It's not that they don't know the answer. Most of us, when we're stuck, we're not scared of the decision. We're scared of the consequence of the decision. So C-Suite is an intensive. I call it shared cognitive load. It's an opportunity to come and wrestle the consequences with someone that gets it in an environment that won't let you stay stuck. That's what C-Suite is.

Have you thrown anyone off the boat?

No, but I have had some really intense moments on a boat, for sure.

When I first heard about C-Suite in Austin several months ago, my initial thought was, "Holy shit. So many people need this." And while I have not done C-Suite, you and I have had some pretty candid conversations that have certainly helped me gain clarity about both personal and professional things. I've actually said to Dale, and I have not told you this, like, "I would love to do this." I've seen more than Dale. I have a little more context. I agree, just from the engagements we do. There are so many executives that are paralyzed to make decisions, and it blows my mind. I love the idea of getting them in a different environment, away from the noise, deep focus, all the things that I would imagine you would do to, like, face your demons. Because you got to make a change. You got to fix it, regardless of what that change is and how. Because what you're doing—and I'm going to be overly dramatic—but like, you're killing yourself. You're going to give yourself a heart attack at the end of the day, or you're going to give your business a heart attack. Like, this shit's got to stop. I hope for you that C-Suite continues to expand, that it gets the exposure it needs, that more people come and do it. Because it's very different than therapy. I listen, I think therapy's great. Everyone should have a therapist. I'm a big believer in it, but this is different. I'm all for it and I'm excited to, you know, hopefully one day do it myself, but also just to see the business grow and see others do it. And I mean that very, very sincerely.

Thank you. I think it's the most rewarding and fulfilling work I've done in my career. What it does is it takes all of the things that I got in trouble for as an executive. I was one of the youngest Fortune executives at age 31. I've had many private equity managing partners tell me I'm unhirable. It takes all of the things that are unique to me that I don't mean are special. I don't mean that I think they're unique to me. That I have figured out that the rest of corporate America doesn't understand, and that is that if...

You only make decisions around EBITDA or capital efficiency, and there's no value-based like who am I trying to become, or who are we? If there's no overarching identity questions being asked, I just don't know if you're making a good decision.

>> Totally agree with that. So good. All right, Nigel, we're going to move to the Monday morning move. So this is designed to be a practical takeaway that our listeners can take this week. You have two jobs, sir. Number one, you are going to rate my Monday morning move from one to ten. One being the worst, ten being the best. You can imagine where Dale wants you to rate it. You know where I want you to rate it. I am on a winning streak, so let's keep that up. I'll pay you later. Number two, what would you add, push back, take away, change, or just tell me that it's total garbage? Here we go.

Pull last quarter's list of every rep who missed quota. And before you touch a single one of their activity metrics, run each miss through these three filters. Was the target realistic given the pipeline they were actually handed and or built? Did they get a real ramp period when they were thrown in cold? And has a manager sat with them on a live call in the past two weeks? Or is it only a feedback loop looking at a HubSpot or Salesforce dashboard? If two or more reps fail the same filter, the fix isn't a new comp plan or a new tool. It's a conversation that your sales leader has been avoiding having with themselves. That's the move. Stop auditing the rep first. Audit the decision that put the rep there.

>> Okay, so you're doing that on Monday morning and you want me to assess whether that's good or not?

>> Is that a good Monday morning move or not? Is that something that's going to help drive the business forward that you think someone should do? Or did I totally screw the pooch here? They're getting excited based on your reaction.

>> I think that's probably a three.

>> Ooh. Oh. All right, tell me why. Is Dale so happy right now?

>> Why does it matter? That's the question. And so many sales leaders come in on Monday morning and they look at the data without first asking, "What do I want to accomplish? What does the business need this week?" Okay? And it could be that on Monday morning the last thing you need to do is start analyzing data and think about ramp time and is the quota realistic? What might be the best thing to do on Monday morning is remind your team why we're here and what we're doing is special. And I think sometimes we treat Monday as if we're already behind from Saturday and Sunday versus reminding the team what a privilege it is to get to do this week. What do you want to make happen in your one shot at this week? The plan, the goal, the forecast doesn't matter if the mission isn't noble and the team doesn't see that their role in accomplishing that mission matters. Where there is no vision, the people perish. What do most sales teams need on Monday morning?

>> Vision.

>> Okay. A three. I don't disagree with you by the way. I think what you're saying is accurate. I think the vision is key. But vision or no vision, does a leader not have to look in the mirror and recognize should we be auditing our app or should I be auditing my own stuff first?

>> One hundred percent, Adam. That's a Wednesday at three p.m.

>> Okay.

>> That's not a Monday morning move. It's a great exercise. It's a Wednesday at three p.m.

>> I like it. Listen, I'll take it. I'll take the criticism. I love it. That's why you're on the show, man. It's not to tell me I'm perfect. I'm still better than Dale, but it's not to tell me I'm perfect. Nigel, we really appreciate your time. We're moving into something called Uncensored Questions. This is more of a rapid-fire type of scenario. So we'll just fire a couple questions off to you and see how uncomfortable you can get, which I know is not going to be uncomfortable at all.

So you've diagnosed over 200 sales teams. You mentioned it, Adam's mentioned it. Name the worst hiring call you've watched a CEO defend to your face after the data's already proved them wrong.

>> They hired the person that they told me they wanted to engage me to keep them from hiring. They said, "I think about hiring this sales leader who's from a previous business, but I want to make sure that," their words, "that I'm hiring the moment, not the memory, because I remember them being really good. It was ten years ago, but can you just make sure I'm doing this right?" And I gave this executive all the reasons that they were right, that they were going to hire the memory and not the moment, and they hired him anyway. And then what happened? I don't know. I don't think I ever talked to him anymore. I was like, "This guy's an idiot, and I can't talk to him. I can't be around idiots."

>> [laughter]

>> Nigel, you wrote a book on planning the perfect sales year, and then you built a company that pulls executives out of the building to decide things that a calendar can't. Which one of your own books do you trust less today?

>> Oh man. I think I may get uncomfortable. I don't know that I trust any of them as much as I did when I wrote them, just because they all get stale. So if I trust that logic, I would say I probably would have to trust Revenue Harvest less.

>> I still trust them both a lot, right?

>> Yes, but I really trust them a lot.

>> Yeah, it becomes an evolution.

>> And here's why I say that. So I wrote the second book because I had this conviction that if you just get really good at hiring people, you can screw up a lot of stuff. But you can just never even read Revenue Harvest, never plan, never position, never train. If you just hire really good sales people, you don't have to do a bunch of stuff. And that's the whole basis of the book. So I would say yeah, that's my answer.

>> Before writing your book and going through the evolution, what was one of your early mistakes that you made that you were like, "That was just stupid. Like you look back today and you're like, 'That was one of the dumbest things I've ever done.'"?

>> One of the dumbest things I ever did was at the age of thirty-one, after having two back-to-back healthcare exits, my ego was wanting to be perceived as more than just a healthcare sales team builder. And so I did this really dumb thing. I learned it, I'm grateful for it, but look, hindsight's always twenty-twenty. I took the CEO position of a company because my ego wanted to be the CEO and it was in an industry that was adjacent to healthcare, and I think I lasted six months.

>> It's a different motion as well. And while the CEO title sounds like a great title sometimes, it's like sometimes it's just not what it's all cracked up to be either.

>> I was a CEO of a business that was doing about as much revenue as two reps in a previous life where I might have had two hundred. So it was just the dumbest move in the world for me. The founder of the company said, "We hired a battleship captain for a rowboat."

>> Well, I like that idea. Back to the boat. I love that idea.

>> Nigel, there's a federal case going right now, Mobley versus Workday, and a judge let age and disability discrimination claims move forward because Workday's AI screening tools can be treated as the employer's agent. So you built your book on hiring elite sales people by hand, one conversation at a time. When a company hands that decision to an algorithm and it goes wrong, whose fault is the bad hire? The software or the CEO who trusted it?

>> It's always the CEO. Never going to blame a machine because they don't actually think. I don't think discrimination is a good practice at all, and it's an unfortunate reality, okay? I don't talk about discrimination in the book, but I do talk about biases. And this is where I think a lot of sales leaders screw it up. Is that they're over-indexing for discrimination, DEI, all these things to try to build a melting pot team. That is fine. You can do that, but don't miss this point. If you only hire for competency and you don't assess your personal chemistry with that sales rep, I don't care how competent they are, you made a bad hire. And here's how this plays out. When it's Friday at five p.m. and the rep needs you because they're on the West Coast and it's only two p.m., but here I am on the East Coast and I'm shutting my day down, if I don't genuinely like them as a person, I'm not going to take the call.

>> Absolutely.

>> You will spend more time with the people you work with than you do with your family. You better enjoy being around them because you won't give them what they need. And you will ultimately fail because you hired competent people that you didn't have chemistry with, so you didn't give them what they needed and it was a bad hire.

>> I love that. And I do think the human needs to take responsibility in all these decisions, and you're right, even if they are competent, but they don't either fit into the culture or you don't give them the tools that they need to be successful and you enjoy working with them, it's going to be a very—

We brought you through a bunch of GTM gauntlet conversations. We'll give you a layup for the last one. I got to know a lot about kind of the different things you like to do, but what's your dream vacation destination?

There's not one specific spot. I just like to be on the water. So if there's a wave or if there's a fish I can chase. There are places that I'd like to go to Belize, I'd like to go to the Bahamas, I'd like to go to the Seychelles, I'd like to go to Jeffreys Bay in South Africa and surf that wave. I'd like to go back to Hawaii at some point and surf the North Shore, somewhere salty and somewhere warm.

Nigel, where can people learn more about C Suite? Our audience, founders, CEOs. Shameless plug. Let's direct them.

Yes, seascooters.com. You can find me on LinkedIn. I'm not hard to find.

Thanks for joining the show, man.

And those videos that you talked about, Adam, they're on YouTube. I'd love to link them in the show notes if that's something that you guys are interested in.

Yeah, absolutely. Let's do it. Thank you, sir.

Thank you, guys.

Appreciate you.