Productize Sales Before You Hire More Reps | Heath Barnett

My mentality with AI is how do I insert AI that actually augments my reps, not replace them.

The paradigm has shifted so far in the other direction of "hire no one, AI is going to do everything, you don't need a single human being." And that is not true at all. You don't have a foundation. It's impossible to actually figure out what's working, what's not working, because everybody is doing their own thing.

Welcome back to another episode of the Bridge the Gap podcast powered by Revenue Reimagine. Today, I'm Matt Dale, and I'm here with Adam Jay. Today's guest is Keith Barnett, who's the VP of Revenue at Mixmax and one of the sharpest minds in GTM scale and execution. He's helped build over fifty million in revenue by fixing the engine behind growth, making every rep, every system, every customer motion—two words that are important to us, y'all—more predictable and more profitable. He's led teams at small companies like Uber, Airwallix, and now Mixmax. And today, we're going to break down how to turn chaos into clarity so growth doesn't just get bigger, it actually gets smarter.

Keith, welcome to the show, man.

Man, that is the best introduction I think I have ever been a part of.

I'm telling you, record it. Use it as a walk-on song.

I'm doing good, man. I appreciate it.

You should hear Dale's introduction.

This is Dale.

It's the only thing he does well. It's the only thing he does well.

Yeah, exactly. He doesn't get paid regardless.

You work for yourself, you don't get paid. Keith has this thing called a W2. He gets a check every two weeks. I don't know what that's like.

I've been on both sides though, man. I've been on both sides. I started my first company in 2016. It takes me back to the days of the grind. I got nothing but respect for people who are willing to take that leap of faith. So yeah, it is nice when you have that cushion of the W2. But there is also something about going out and building your own thing. I remember when I started my first startup, man, like my routine was one, I would have no idea how I was going to make rent. And so my normal routine was I'd wake up at three a.m. I would go Uber from four until eight a.m. Then I would work from eight till about six, and then I would go Uber the rush hour from like six to ten p.m. Like that was my routine for a couple years.

That's hustle.

Oh yeah, man. Oh, yeah. I would say I was young and dumb. A lot of people are like, "Oh, I got bit by the tech bug so I joined a startup," and I was like, "Oh, I was twenty-three and I got bit by the tech bug and I just said, forget it, I'll start my own company." And I learned a lot of hard lessons that way. But it was one of those—I thought it was a red light in life that ended up being a green light. So here we are.

Everything happens for a reason.

I don't know if I could do that. I'd imagine you meet some pretty cool people, though.

You meet some really cool people. I think at the end of the day, it was the most cash flow positive. So I knew if I was like starting the week and I was five hundred dollars short from paying rent, I knew exactly what I needed to go and achieve in order to make sure rent was covered and there was food on the table. But I also had my routine. I did not do after ten p.m. because that's when all the dumb dumbs come out. So yeah, there was a lot. You learn.

Is that a technical term? And do we still use that at work today?

No.

I like it.

So but to your point, man, that's why I did three a.m. because three a.m. you got the guaranteed airport trips and those were decent money that way. So there was definitely a system figured out.

Let's get this episode started.

We are starting. We're talking about work, man.

I love it.

So I don't care about Ubering, Keith.

I will close it this way. Full circle. I went from a startup and Uber driver to actually scaling teams for Uber.

Yeah. That is pretty amazing. And like once again, where are the dots and how they connect in life? And as you go and where you are today and what your journey has been like, you find out—as we were talking about earlier in the show before we started—things will end up connecting and then like when you get older at forty, fifty, you'll be like, "Wow, that really did all connect and make sense to me." And I try to explain that to my kids as they go through trials and tribulations. This will all make sense at some time. It may be five minutes or it may be five years, but it all makes sense at some point in time.

It's the whole rearview mirror fallacy, right? I don't know if y'all are fans of Matthew McConaughey, but his book "Red Light, Green Light" is one of the best books ever to just make that so obvious. And it is like when we reflect, "Oh, looking back, I'm so glad that happened to me," but in the moment you're like, "Life is hell. I'm going to die. What is going on?"

I couldn't agree more with you, man. If nobody's read that book and you're trying to understand green, it's so good.

Such a good book.

Dale listens to audiobooks because he hasn't quite figured out that the words go left to right.

This is the way I read. It's the way I read.

So Keith, very quickly, funny story. I rag on Dale a lot. He does the same. It is who we are. We actually did have someone write into the podcast that I'm so mean to Dale and he's going to need therapy because I'm so mean to him.

He's totally mean to me.

It's complete crap.

Cool. So Keith, let's talk about a little bit about fixing the engine and not adding more headcount. This is something big happening right now. My dog is barking at somebody.

That's you barking at yourself, Dale.

Yeah, exactly. So we talk about adding headcount all the time. You talk about two ways of scaling: hire more people or fix the engine so people can produce more. Why do companies default to the first option?

It's easy and lazy, right? I'm going to actually counter that for a second. I think one is that it's a behavior that we created, right? I scaled at Uber. Uber created that "growth at all costs" mentality. VCs supported that, and so we naturally created this problem in the market. Let's just call it what it is, right? Call a spade a spade.

I think also the old way of sales allowed us to operate that way. What I mean by that is when you think about the buyer's journey, the buyers used to come to us for more of that education before they actually made their selection. Now they do most of that before they even want to talk to us. And so I say that because old forecasting used to be like, "Okay, you want me to triple revenue? Here's what my capacity model looks like. Here's how many reps I need to hire in order to actually achieve that number." That has now been flipped on its head, especially with a lot of the advancements in AI and technology. Like you can actually rethink about how do you actually build not a scalable business, but for me now it's about building a sustainable business and a bit of an autonomous business, you know?

I think you said something really interesting, which is people are just used to doing it. It becomes a pattern, and so we as human beings are pattern-based people and we see it happening in the past. One of the things that we've been talking a lot about is as you're building a go-to-market strategy and building a go-to-market motion, there's two ways to do it. You can do it traditionally, which is hire people, train people, find out six months later they suck, fire people, hire people—you can go through that process. Or you can look at how do I speed that process up, maybe taking some of the jobs that be done in a particular motion and maybe push that to AI, push that to an automation platform? And maybe it's not just AI. I was looking at one—I was looking at Gemini 3 that just came out, which is actually pretty amazing. And then all the new stuff that's happening in Make.com that's enabling some of the workflows. So we don't, we keep talking about AI, AI, AI, and a lot of it is just simple workflows that you can actually end up executing that is not AI.

We're conflating the two together, and I'm curious your perspective on the traditional versus the autonomous slash process automation world, and how what's the best way for founders and companies to get to a place of automation.

So I think to answer that question, it kind of goes back. Let's remove AI from this conversation because I think that before AI we could still do this, right?

So I think challenge number one is actually understanding there's a difference between knowing your ICP and then knowing the go-to-market motion behind that ICP. Okay, let me be very clear. What I mean by that is if I have my ICP and I know what my great ICPs are, my okay ICPs, and then my longtail ICPs, that right there tells me exactly what go-to-market motions I need to build. I need to build a sales-led for my top ones. I need to build a sales-assisted for my medium tier. And I need to figure out how to self-serve the rest of that longtail. And then it's like, okay, now let me understand what does that buyer's journey look like? And then let me build the right go-to-market motion behind that that actually aligns the sales process with the buyer's process.

The problem, the reason we don't do it, is because it requires us to actually think. It requires us to actually make a hypothesis, and it requires us to step out of our comfort zone. And just like what you said, Dale, we're humans, we like our safe space. So I always talk about with sales engagement tools, right? I mean that's what Mixmax is. I always say like no VP is going to get fired for bringing on Outreach, right?

No, they may not.

I mean now they may, but historically they would not.

Correct.

Yeah, yeah. But my point is though, it's the same thing. I think there's this generational shift to where the board that you used to report to also grew up under that same mentality. The CEOs used to be pushed on that same mentality. And I really think, and this could be very confrontational, but I think Twitter was a great example of like when Elon Musk came in and basically cut out all the middle management fat and was like, "Hey, we can be way way more efficient." And look at what happened. Every board now is like, "How do you actually be more efficient?" Like everybody's actually focusing on the rule of 40 again, right? We're actually starting to change our mentality again.

Yeah, it's we went through, and it's so cliche to say, but this growth at all costs, right? Hire people, hire people, hire a hundred people. That doesn't work anymore.

The problem is I think now we've, to use a Dale term, the paradigm has shifted so far in the other direction of hire no one. AI is going to do everything. You don't need a single human being.

And that is not true at all. You have to have the balance somewhere in the middle.

Yeah. If you're purely transactional, I would buy that, right? But if you're not purely transactional, like at the end of the day, people want to buy from people. Like that is not going to change, unless it's something where it's like I can put my credit card down, it's very transactional. I think it's actually like people don't want to talk to people, right? Like you remember, like we've all been there. I used to get so upset where I was like you're forcing me to be a hand raiser when I should be able to actually self-serve this. But when you think about the B2B space of like true, you know, 20K, 25K plus ACVs, that's going to require a relationship still at the end of the day. And so I think you're spot on, Adam, to where my mentality with AI is, how do I insert AI that actually augments my reps, not replace them?

Yeah. How do you do that is the question, though. There's so many tools out there, some of which are good, some of which aren't. But I think this actually, you know, will tie into where I want to go. And you talk about productizing sales, right? And I think that's a great term. But what does productizing sales actually mean and how does it actually affect headcount and performance?

So when you think about the different phases of a company's growth life cycle, the first phase should be founder-led sales, which is very much like I am finding product-market fit, maybe I have one or two AEs that report directly to me, but like that phase is just wild west. Don't get me wrong, I love that phase because it's fun because you're breaking stuff, you're just trying to figure out what works. But you hit this inflection point to where that doesn't work anymore. It starts to become highly inefficient. You actually don't know how to define what good looks like. And so for me, if I was to give you the most like Eli5 answer of what productizing sales means, it is just simply being able to define what good looks like and then building your go-to-market motions around that. That's what products is.

I keep thinking about breaking it into its smallest pieces and like trying to figure out what each part is. And I liken it to, and I talk about this a lot, like if I was to ask you what do you do before you leave the house on a day, like if you go out to work and list all the activities that you do, you'd probably miss like 40% of it because it's just so ingrained in what you do. It's like, oh, I go brush my teeth. Oh, so you didn't get out of bed? Oh, so you didn't, like there's eight or nine other things.

Wait a minute. You don't brush your teeth in bed?

Yeah.

Well, weirdo.

So those things are very difficult, especially at a founder level or when you're running so fast that you're like, I can't stop to write everything down. So one of the things we talk to a lot of founders about is just write everything down before you try to bring somebody on, because if you're trying to onboard people and get them to know what you're doing, like once you bring them on, it's too late. Like you got to get all that stuff kind of in a digestible format. And then the other problem that I'm seeing a lot is there's just so much data. Like what is the important data versus what's just noise? And how do you distinguish digestible data?

So there's two things I want to dig on that, and I agree. It's like so the first thing I do every time I join a new company that's at this phase is just go interview the reps and just ask them one question: What is your process to be successful?

And when you get a different response from every single one of them, that right there tells you we haven't figured out how to productize sales. We have not actually understood how to define this to where we can hire, onboard, and actually ramp up people to be successful in their job.

So true.

And that's actually the biggest reason of why I challenge a lot around hiring, because a lot of times we hire reactively, and you're not setting up the rep for success. You're just throwing headcount at a problem. Where I'm like, stop being lazy and actually focus on the problem. Figure out the crux. Everything else becomes solvable after that.

Yep. I love that.

Yeah, the root cause analysis is so important. And I do think a lot of companies, and we're dealing with this even with a couple of our clients right now, absolutely are hiring reactively. And you know, certainly at early stage, like there is no onboarding, there is no documentation. And this mindset of you know, hire someone, throw them in and they'll figure it out. Like listen, if you're seed stage, first rep, founder-led sales, and that is your skill set, certainly. But when you're growing and attempting to, you know, I'll use the word scale loosely, figure it out isn't an option. And you wonder why, you know, four, five, eight of your last hires, you know, didn't make it past six months. At some point, when do you look in the mirror and say it's not all them, it's us?

Yeah. And we're playing with people's lives.

Enablement is like the biggest challenge. A lot of it comes down to enablement. It's funny because I actually just vibe coded this like two weeks ago. I'm about to share it into the community. Because I've done this, right? We always think we have to have the perfect environment. We have to perfectly understand our ICP and the problems we solve before we can build an enablement deck. I call BS on that. Now, I think that, so for example, what I vibe coded was you can just put in your URL. I have an agent that's going to go scrape all the information, pull out your potential positioning, problem statements, etc. And then it actually creates an output that actually puts it in a Gamma structured format to where you can just copy the text, paste it into Gamma, there's your enablement deck.

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>> Don't give me another excuse that you can't actually build enablement quickly now. Those excuses don't work anymore.

>> Yeah, I mean, I think that's the benefit of AI, right? We can do things in a much faster way that historically we couldn't.

>> When I worked for Toast, we had an enablement team of 45 people. It was insane. And I think those days are gone. Arguably that was too much. But every new hire got flown to Boston and you sat in a classroom for a week and then you were out in the field for a week and there were tests and if you failed it was certainly not because you were not set up for success and you were not given the tools. Now am I suggesting that everyone go hire a 45 person enablement team? No. But do I think that there are ways to create enablement much faster and easier now? Absolutely.

So Heath, how did go to market teams systemize coaching, content, deal review so that it actually scales similar to a product release?

>> So I'll break it down. I actually put this together because people ask me quite a few times. I would say I've been blessed to where every company I've gone to, I've had people who have followed me. Let me be very clear. I do not poach. I have had people that have followed me into other companies though, which tells me something, right? Because if somebody's willing to actually give up their safety net of a comfortable W2 and go with me into a company where it is utter chaos and I need your help to organize this, there's something there. But I couldn't really figure it out. And so what I came up with after thinking about it was when you hire for grip and you build force, that's what drives scale. So let me break that down for you.

When you hire for grip, grip means do they have grit and growth mindset? Are they resourceful? Are they intelligent both from an IQ and EQ perspective? And then do they have process, practice, and preparation? You give me those four, I can train you. You can train sales. You cannot train character. And so I think that's the first one: actually understanding what does good look like in who we hire. We don't even answer that question a lot of times, right?

>> Nope.

>> So that's the first one I'm paying attention to: well, what does good look like? Who are we actually trying to bring in here?

>> The force piece is actually like how do I operationalize this? And so for me the force is foundation and frameworks. First and foremost, if you don't have any foundation, and what I mean by foundation is it doesn't have to be MEDDIC or NEAT or BANT, but it's something that your team is consistently using. Because the problem is when you don't have a foundation, it's impossible to actually figure out what's working and what's not working because everybody is doing their own thing. So it's impossible for you to understand what are my controls, what are my variables, right? When you look at this from a science experiment perspective, the second one I'm actually looking at is okay, we have a foundation. Is there clear ownership? Does everybody clearly know what they are responsible for doing? A lot of times I go look at comp, right? Nine times out of ten, we expect a behavior, but the compensation actually tells us it's trying to drive the complete opposite behavior. And so right there it's like, how do I expect people to take ownership when I'm incentivizing them to actually act a different way?

>> After that it's real time coaching, right? Goes back to that enablement. We don't have to have a perfect structure. I live and breathe by the 70-20-10, which is 70% of your enablement is going to be on the job, 20% is peer review, 10% is actually formal training. So let's just be really focused and really involved.

The C is customer obsessed, right? You have to be customer obsessed in order to actually figure out how do I productize this? How do I build this to be repeatable? And then the E is just plain and simple enablement and execution.

>> Right? Like so that's the force. And so for me, when I hire the grip and I build the force, that's what then allows me to actually scale. And so with scaling, it's like actually looking at what are the systems that we're putting in place. So that kind of goes back to the go to market motions. Do we have customer clarity? Have we actually aligned our go to market motions with that customer's buying journey? And then actually, have we built the right leadership layer to actually enable us to expand?

>> And so for me that kind of gives you the layout, right? Because first, if I'm talking about scaling, do you have a system in place? Yes or no? Do you have customer clarity? Yes or no? Have you aligned your motions to that? Yes or no? Do you have the right leadership in place? And then actually, do you have the machine that's going to build this compounding thing that allows you to expand?

>> I love that. And so based on that question, I'm actually going to jump ahead a question because you just actually answered what we were going to talk about, which was signal, systems, and scale. And I think in that motion, you just outlined that really well. And I think people can take that and jump off with it. So I'd like to go a little bit into the future of GTM leadership. And I think this is really important because I don't think there's a small majority of leaders that do this, that do leadership well. There's coaching, there's.

>> Very, very small majority.

>> Yeah. And so you've talked about building GTM teams as like a bow tie-shaped machine where marketing, sales, and success are one system. But what's the hardest part of achieving that alignment and generating that into a leadership for the future?

>> I think the hardest part is I'm going to go back to customer clarity. That is what it all comes down to. Nine times out of ten, I notice a disconnect where marketing has a different version of what they think ICP is and the personas, and so their messaging is different than what sales is actually saying or doing. Then you have customer success who might not understand how are we actually optimizing, who are we optimizing for. Unfortunately, customer success always just gets thrown to the pit where they're just like, "Figure it out." And so that's where the disconnect usually happens: we don't have alignment on who our ideal customer actually is.

And what that does is too often we focus on what should we say yes to. When you have customer clarity, it is very easy for you to say what you say no to, which makes it a lot easier to have that conversation of what we're going to say yes to.

>> That is like...

>> I like what you just said: what we say no to. That's not talked about enough.

>> It's not.

>> It's not. Everyone has this mindset that we have to say yes to everyone and every dollar is good dollar and every revenue is good revenue and every deal is a good deal. And listen, all of us, I believe, were reps at one point or another and we all wanted to close business. We all were sales leaders that also got paid on closing business. And I think what reps don't realize is even as executives, we get paid on closing business. No one wants to say no to revenue. We all want the numbers to come in, to hit the quota, to get paid however we get paid. But at the end of the day, where do you say no? Because not all revenue is good revenue. Not every deal is a good deal. And I love that you brought that up and I think it's something that needs to be talked about much more often.

>> So I'll give you a great example. When I joined here at Mixmax, if we talk about inbound, inbound is one of our biggest channels. We don't spend on performance marketing. It's all organic. So it's awesome, but it also, if you start messing with your positioning, you'll see that we just relaunched our website with new positioning. So we're dealing with the whole scramble of reoptimizing SEO, AEO, all that fun stuff.

And so to that example, it's one thing I challenge. Mixmax killed our SDR program, right? I'll just go out and say it. And part of it is I went back to the definition where I'm like, well, what are SDRs actually hired for? What were they hired for before technology became in place? In my view, SDRs were just the filtering mechanism of how to filter your leads, right? Where now I feel like we can do a really good job of that.

And so one thing that I implemented immediately was actually understanding like what goes to sales, what goes to our go to market engineering or marketing to actually warm it up until they become a clear, better hand raiser. And then also, who are we just going to say no to?

# Transcript

There was strong correlation that companies under the size of 50 employees. My first question is, we're a PLG company. Why do they feel like they need to talk to sales? Because a 50-person company probably has a sales team of like two to five people. So that's my question number one.

But question number two is when I look at the data, our conversion rate from demo requests to closed one was 2%. So that's the question that you have to start answering, right? On paper we're like, "Oh yeah, these STRs are generating a ton of pipeline." Here's a conversion rate, and you just look at it and accept it for what it is. What I looked at was opportunity cost where I'm like, "Okay, so we're going to ask people to do a hundred demos to actually just close one deal." And that one deal is probably worth 10K. Where if I automate that, when that's 50% of my lead volume, that means I just increase my rep capacity by 50% for them to go focus on the channels that are actually going to bring more value to the company. It makes such logical sense when you talk about it. The hard part is digging into the actual numbers and actually acting on the numbers, and most people don't think like this.

I'll tie this to another problem that Dale talks about a lot: when we're talking about AI tools. So think tools like Swan if you're familiar, tools like Attention and their super agent. The mindset of how to go into these AI tools and ask the right questions to get all the answers you want in 36 seconds, right? I went into Attention yesterday based on just some stuff that Dale was doing and asked the question and it got me everything I needed. We're so used to, "Well, I got to go look here and I got to go look here." You have to understand what are the numbers, how do I look for them, and what do they mean versus the broader approach of, "Yeah, well we just need some revenue and some sales numbers and go hire some people." Like, we have to have people who don't have an SDR team. It's all of go-to-market is changing.

Man, a good one real quick. Because I think this is where, at least for me as a revenue leader, AI has just unlocked my capabilities to the next level. You know, 80% is good enough, right? Because that other 20%, you waste time trying to get perfection. I do actually believe this, though. Where AI, when used the right way, can actually do the 80% for us so we can actually focus on that 20%, because that 20% does make a big difference.

When you think about it that way. So to your point, Adam, I don't care if that data is perfectly accurate to the percentage point. What I care about is if it's directionally telling me the insights that I need to make informed decisions. Because what's the difference between 35% and 37%? Right? That's the other problem. We get too hooked into, "Is the data accurate?" Where now for me, I'm like, let AI ingest it, let it give us directional information, and then let's go focus on the actual action. No more of this talking to talk and booking a meeting to have another meeting to have another meeting to figure out what we're actually going to do.

We have a client. I don't know if you remember this, but we were talking and they were like, "Well, why don't we have a pre-meeting to prepare for the meeting?" It's like, no, I'm not having a pre-meeting to prepare for the meeting. That's insanity.

All right, we have to get into rapid fire because we have to wrap it up. But I do have one sort of quick question before that that I would love an answer to, and it ties to everything you're talking about.

Let's pretend it's not Mixmax. You're going into a brand new startup, well-funded, so money is not an issue. You're designing the go-to-market org from scratch. Not for the future, but for just the immediate future. What does that go-to-market org look like? We'll assume they are not a PLG company. They do have what they believe is product-market fit and decent revenues. You're the VP of Revenue or the CRO. What's this org look like?

The first thing, and this is my requirement for every organization, is having my right-hand person, which is RevOps. I feel like RevOps has been underinvested in for way too long and is also looked at incorrectly. I think RevOps and sales operations are very different. Sales operations is managing the tools. But the problem is we've bucketed both of those roles into the same persona.

Because you're my Salesforce admin, you're my RevOps? They are wildly different. I'm a HubSpot and Salesforce admin. That doesn't mean I'm your RevOps person.

Exactly. So that's my first hire, because we can move 10x faster when I have a partner next to me who can actually help own the analysis, the forecasting, the reporting, everything like that. Then I'm going to look at hiring your core AEs before I even hire SDRs.

On the SDR side, it depends on what their ACV is, right? And so I went straight into solutioning. I'm going to take a step back and think about what am I looking for first off, right? What I'm looking for is understanding who's your core customer, who are you selling to, right? Is this a very enterprise motion? Is this more mid-market? What is the market that you're going into? Because then I can have an understanding of what the actual buying journey should look like versus what it actually is like today.

Okay, so that's the first thing I want to understand: actually, who's your customer and then what are your current operations around that customer? That shows me where the low-hanging fruit is, where can I actually go and optimize.

For example, I'll use Mixmax as an example. When I first joined, our outbound average sales cycle for outbound deals was about six months, but the average selling price was only like 10 to 15% more than inbound. So I'm like, well, why would we keep investing in this? Why not make inbound super efficient, knowing that we have about 200 demo requests a month and then we also have about 3,000 signups per month on our product?

Right there, I was like, okay, we don't have a product-led sales motion. So if we have 3,000 signups and none of those are our actual ICP, we actually do have a product-market fit problem, right? That's the way I looked at it: just like, where are most of your customers coming to you from today? Where are they hanging out? How do we make sure that we're meeting them there? And then how do we build the right operations around that? That can be a two-step sales cycle with an STR and an AE. That can be a one-step sales cycle. It all just depends on what that buying journey actually looks like, and then I'm going to try to align our actual sales journey with that.

The problem is most leaders try to force the buyers to match our sales process.

Our process. Yes.

We treat sales as a linear process. That is not true in any way, shape, or form. I think now that our buyers are much more educated and much more sophisticated, they're calling the bluff now.

I could not agree more. I say all the time: your sales process, your sales journey needs to align with your buyer journey. When you ask a rep what stage a customer is in, it should loosely match what the customer would say. Listen, we're going to use different terminology. No customer is ever going to say, "I'm in discovery." That's just not going to happen.

All right, we are at that time, which means it is rapid fire time. Although I feel like there's a whole lot more that we could dive into. Hopefully that is a child coming into the office that's making you smile like that, or it's a closed one email on the other screen. One or the other. But I hope it's a kid.

It's not a kid. They're at school, but it was a closed one that came through.

All right, just the second best thing to seeing the kids. When my kids were two and four, I even got them excited about closed one deals.

Heath, what's one sales ritual that you'll never give up?

Meditation. Before big calls, I will carve out 15 minutes to actually go meditate and calm my mind. It allows me to walk into that conversation very focused. That's one thing that I've always done. I actually have literally a meditation mat right here next to my desk for that exact reason. If I know there's a big call, even if it's five minutes, something to just slow me down.

The second one that I'll actually give to people too is the Superman pose. I still do that before I go in and present. I still do that before I go and talk to customers, even in a remote environment. Still just doing that before.

# Transcript

I get on a call, and it actually does have the psychological impact.

>> I love that. I wish I could meditate. I can't figure out how to do it. Whole separate conversation.

>> You can't keep your mind quiet. That's the problem.

>> That is the problem.

>> Look, there's so many things going on in his head right now. He can't even fathom it.

>> I always have something in my hand. Yeah, it's hard for me.

>> What's the most overrated sales metric?

>> Call volume.

>> Call volume all day. I have been so against activity metrics, and I would say activity because it's always call volume. It is the biggest false negative that you can ever have in a sales organization. Here's why: one, multi-threading is becoming even more critical, even in the SMB and mid-market space today, right? So for me, if I'm tracking you on phone calls, who actually had a better day? Dale, who called 50 different customers and just tried to call one person, or Adam, who actually made 50 phone calls but actually only talked to maybe 10 customers because he was multi-threading it. I'm going to play the long game. I think Adam's going to beat you, Dale, right? But on paper, you both made 50 phone calls, so we're like, "Good job. You hit your call metric for the day."

What I actually look at is unique accounts engaged. That is the metric that I align with my team because the data shows us that based off how many unique accounts you engage, here's how many opportunities you can book. And so it allows me to actually give reps a bottoms-up model for them to take ownership in their targets.

>> Totally. What's the best advice you've ever received about leadership?

>> Man, there's a lot.

>> Don't listen to Adam J.

>> I think what immediately comes to my mind—I don't know if I've learned this. I would say a lot of these things that I've come up with has been a culmination of a lot of lessons that I've learned. One that I'm a big believer in is help people become better people. When we actually help people become better people, productivity is a byproduct. Too often we just take withdrawals and we don't make deposits in our people. I do the complete opposite. The withdrawals are already understood contractually. They know what the withdrawals are that we're expecting. So my job is to now actually deposit into you, and it's not just about how can you perform for our company. It's about how can I help you grow into what you want to become? That's personal, that's professional, and that's also at this company.

I have had reps, and I always make sure that I understand what are their motivations. It could be paying off college debt. It could be they want to get married so they're saving for an engagement ring. Whatever that is, when I actually understand what motivates that person, I can actually build a very strong coaching environment around that person now.

>> Love it.

>> I would say that's one of the big ones.

>> I know what you're going to ask is the last one.

>> Last question. Let's wrap this baby up. Adam, new dream vacation destination, considering you have a map in the back of your backdrop.

>> Man, so I was lucky. I grew up in Europe my entire life. I was born in Texas. We moved to Germany when I was five, so I've been blessed to go to a lot of places. Dream destination—it's cliche, but it's just because I've never been over in the APAC region. I've gone to China a bunch, but there's a lot of Thailand that I want to go visit. There's a lot more in the APAC region that I want to go see.

>> Go backpack in the APAC region or Uber?

>> You can Uber around.

>> We could.

>> You can drive for Uber around.

>> Monaco.

>> I did Thailand. Thailand was great. I did three weeks in Thailand. It was amazing.

>> It looks amazing. If there's anywhere I love to go, it is the French Riviera or the Tuscany area of Italy. I could go there and be like Ari Gold in Entourage and just chill in my villa for as long as life would allow me to if I could.

>> I love that.

>> I love it, man.

>> I love that. Heath, thank you so much for joining. Thank you for all the knowledge that you shared. Y'all go check out Mixmax. Don't go check out that other stuff. Go check out Mixmax. Reach out to Heath. I'm sure he'll put you in touch with someone amazing on his team. Thanks for joining the show, man.

>> I appreciate it, man. Thanks for giving me the opportunity.