[00:00:00] Rosalyn Santa Elena: Welcome to the revenue engine podcast. I'm your host, Rosalyn Santa Elena and I am thrilled to bring you the most inspirational stories from revenue, generators, innovators, and disruptors revenue leaders in sales, in marketing, and of course, in operations together, we will unpack everything that optimizes and powers the revenue engine.

Are you ready? Let's get to it.

"Sales friends. We're not saving lives. Take a breath keep perspective as we round the corner to the end of the quarter." This is from a LinkedIn post that Dave Kennett, CEO and Founder of Replayz shared. He goes on to talk about how he was a crazy- intense sales leader before, but learned that life was just too short for that and he sums it up by saying: "Do your best. That's all that matters."

Dave shares how his experience as a sales leader led him to starting Replayz. Coaching is so critical to revenue growth, we all know that. But how do we do coaching right? And how do we even find the time? Please take a listen to this episode of the Revenue Engine podcast and learn from this sales leader turned CEO and Founder of a business that is changing how companies and helping their sales teams up-level their discovery and demo game, resulting in: improved close rates, faster sales cycle, and larger deals.

So super excited to be here with Dave Kennett, the CEO and Founder of Replayz. For those of you who may not be familiar with Replayz, Replayz helps inside sales account executives up-level their discovery and demo game resulting in improved close rates, faster sales cycles and larger deals. And this can all be done remotely to help busy sales reps and sales leaders learn in a way that fits their schedule. So welcome Dave, and thank you so much for joining me. I'm super excited to unpack your story and really learn more about you and how your team are really changing the way revenue leaders are doing coaching.

[00:02:26] Dave Kennett: Thanks Roslyn. I really appreciate you inviting me. I'm looking forward to our chat,

[00:02:29] Rosalyn Santa Elena: Awesome. So let's talk a little bit about your career journey before Replayz. Right. You've had a long career in a number of sales leadership roles in various industries and different companies. So, can you share maybe some of your background, and some of the things you've done in the revenue world?

[00:02:46] Dave Kennett: For sure. When I first got out of university, I jumped into a tech startup and this was back in the.com days. Super exciting wild, wild west. What a fun time to start my career. But what a poor time to start my career in terms of managing expectations. Like my salary was probably double what it should have been. They 're just like "Hey, why don't you just go run this department over here?" Which was biz dev. And I'm like "Okay, cool. What does that even mean?" And, you know, but, but through that, I was able to really, really go out and help bash down some doors for that company for three and a half years, it's called Worldbid, and we did some pretty exciting deals with some large brand names that really gave me my enthusiasm for business development and sales. And, you know, someone said to me, "Hey, like go big business, early, learn on their dime and, and, and then go out and do startup world." So I actually took that advice. And certainly I know a lot of people who haven't taken that advice and they've been doing amazing in their career, but that happened to be my path. I ended up with a company called WW Grainger, you know, multi-billion dollar organization and learned really good. I think that's where I really started getting an affinity for sales process and training. And that's where I got my first chops from a sales leadership perspective, I look back and think, "Man, I don't think I would have wanted to have reported to me because I've learned a lot since then," you know? And I, and then from there, , moved on to Autotrader, was there for three and a half years where I was Director of Sales and help lead through the print- to- digital transformation in that company. And the sort of, what the macro- economic environment was like, where the whole industry was going print to digital. And that was a terrific experience. And then I went back for the last decade to working with startups and, I would usually be, you know, Head of Sales and really vested in the organization and really try and take it from, you know, stage A to B and B to C. And you know, some of those worked out amazingly well, and some not so much. We either didn't have product- market fit, or ran out of money, or what have you. And every single one of those were just a fantastic learning along the way. That was my pre- Replayz executive summary, I guess.

[00:04:58] Rosalyn Santa Elena: That's great. That's great. I kind of started the same way. We're kind of worked in big companies first and then went to startups. But yeah, I have seen sort of the other way as well, but it's really kind of helped my, my toolbox- if you will- of things that I can kind of pull from.

[00:05:14] Dave Kennett: I can imagine.

[00:05:15] Rosalyn Santa Elena: So two and a half years ago you started Replayz. So what was your original vision for the company and how has that evolved right, if at all, over the past two years? Especially with the year like we had in 2020.

[00:05:30] Dave Kennett: You know, thinking back to my vision, I think first and foremost, it started with: is this problem we're trying to solve one that's just in my head as a sales leader or is this actually widespread? And so initially it was, "Hey, have we actually got product market fit here?" And I think that's, I can thank my experience with other startups on that, where we'd go too far down a path and invest way too much money, and hire too many people, before actually having product market fit.

And so we, we tested it out with a few, companies first and that is the whole concept. The top coaching and sales cultures in the world do call reviews probably once a week for reps. Right. This is kind of, as we know this unofficial pact between, or official, between a sales leader and a sales rep that, "Hey, I'm going to help you progress in your career. I'm going to do it through impactful one-on-ones, exposure I give you in the organization, the career path plan we put together for you, but also I'm going to help you level up in your day job." Right? From going from junior AE to, you know, senior AE. Going from mid of the pack and the leaderboard to the top, and then going to team lead, et cetera.

A meaningful part of that development that we're not seeing in a lot of high growth SAS companies, despite their best efforts, is code reviews. Right? You've got companies that record calls they're using Gong, Chorus, or just recording Zoom calls. And, if they're like me, I was a Vice President of Sales of a tech organization, had a few, a couple of directors, a few managers and a bunch of reps, and I probably kept everyone too darn busy to actually make time to review calls. And that's what I was trying to solve for when I thought of Replayz. And I'm like, "Oh, what kind of company could come in and just do these call reviews for us? Could they learn enough about our sales motion, our buyer journey, our average deal size to actually be effective at this?" And that's where we realized, "okay, wait, there, there really is an opportunity here. And I think that was where once we tested this with a few customers on a paid basis as, I know there's a lot of leaders that listen to this podcast and they can probably relate that, you can't really test something for product- market fit if it's free. You know, you gotta charge for it because you know, anyone's going to pay for something, or agree to, something free.

So our very first customer we charged and then every customer thereafter and a lot of really good feedback, you know, obviously found areas where we can iterate along the way. And that's where I guess, to, you know, a long answer to your question of my vision for the company then became quite bold. It's like: we want to change the way training takes place in tech and in tech sales. And you know, you and I have both been in a ton of training in our life and, I don't know about you, I'll walk out of it and I've learned a lot from all that training, but half of it just leaves my brain the minute I walk out the door. And the way we review calls, every two or three weeks for sales reps makes it just little, it drives accountability, it builds muscle memory, it allows sales leaders to have more time back in the calendar.

So the lofty vision is we want to be the go-to for all of the high-growth SAS companies in the world, that's the lofty vision. And we're off to a roaring start, I think in the first two and a half years, but we ain't anywhere close to reaching that vision yet. We've got a long ways to go, but you have to have something aspirational, right?

[00:08:59] Rosalyn Santa Elena: Absolutely. Absolutely. So, with the shift to more and more individuals working remotely, there's a requirement, not only for sellers to adjust the way that they sell, but also for sales leaders, right, to adjust the way they onboard and coach. So, what have you seen in terms of changes in the market in this area and how has this affected your business?

[00:09:22] Dave Kennett: You know, unfortunately we haven't seen enough change as a result of that. It's, I mean, it's been great for our business, you know, and in terms of people moving to remote you know, as, as horrible as COVID is and, the first year and a half was, but what we found is that leaders and sales reps really did struggle to adapt on: keeping their culture intact, keeping the key learnings intact, making, helping people feel connected, but also helping them thrive and grow and build a coaching environment. We have a deep respect for a ton of the methodologies out there like Challenger, Sandler, Miller, Heiman, we think they're great. What Replayz is, is a set of best practices and it's a set of best practices that we've put together after watching literally thousands of discovery calls, demos, closing calls, right up to enterprise strategic level with customers like IBM, , right down to emerging markets teams with customers like Vidyard, and then in between with customers like outreach.io and what we found is to build a coaching culture, remotely, is a challenge. And to get your field sellers to adapt to a remote motion, it is challenging, so often even now, a year and a half later after COVID first hit. We've got sellers who are not, they've got a dark background or they're not even using their video at all when they're zooming in to their customers, they're not really doing an effective job at engaging everyone on the prospect side. They're you know, the principles that you would want to use if you were in the office or a boardroom with your prospect or customer, they all still apply when you're selling remotely, but we find that a lot of those principles are thrown out the window.

That those are some of the areas that I think people really struggled with and, and still do. And, and that's, you know, so that's where we get, we get a nice bird's eye view of that because we've got so many awesome customers who are challenged with not getting around to their high growth, they can't possibly coach their customers or sorry, their, their, their new reps as much as they'd like, because they're in high growth mode in their hiring, or they're doing a good job coaching and onboarding the new reps, but they don't have time to mind the shop for their current reps. And I think bandwidth, I think if I could summarize the meta point here, it's: lack of bandwidth. That was pre COVID and during COVID. But during COVID it was: a lot of the coaching slipped and it's like, "well, now that they're not in an office, and they're not in the sort of sellers sitting next to each other in the sales pit, so to speak, yeah, I guess we're going to lose that aspect of it when really, you know, you can have them doing role plays with each other each day and analyzing each other's calls and that kind of thing.

[00:12:10] Rosalyn Santa Elena: Got it. Got it. So, so you touched on this a little bit, you talked about how the fact that, you know, you get, you have an opportunity to work with so many different companies, right? And you know, what are you seeing kind of sales leaders doing right from a coaching perspective and some of the things that they're doing wrong? And you touched a little bit on this around, you know, just having bandwidth and resources and maybe being a little creative in terms of how they do the coaching. What are some of the other things?

[00:12:38] Dave Kennett: Well, it starts with the sales managers, but as a Director or VP that you hire, if you hire a sales manager that is experienced and coaching driven, those are the ones that are seeing a lot of success. Of course, we know that in this high growth environment and with all this VC money being pumped into organizations, I, you know, I can't, all the folks listening I'm sure can relate that you can't hire people fast enough. And with that, you've got a lot of individual contributors that were your top sales rep people are throwing into sales manager role. We all know that, that story doesn't always end well or maybe you get someone that, that is a really good seller as an individual contributor, their attributes, check out for the core two or three or four things you need in your sales leader role, but they're still green, right? They still, you know, just like I was when I was a sales manager. And so they either don't have a framework to coach too, or they shy away from the coaching and they just don't do it. And that, and then senior leaders, that's a metric often they're not inspecting, they're not putting in their performance objectives.

I would ask all the folks that are listening: do, did your sales manager have call recording review objectives? i.e. one review per rep per week or per rep every couple of weeks. And I think some will answer "heck yeah" and those folks are probably doing really well. The ones that don't, you're not alone. It's probably 80 to 90% . We know that the average sales rep gets a call coach between eight to 12 weeks, a one call every 12 weeks. That's not going to create meaningful change. And so my quick answer is: you have to enable your sales leader. We know in this high-growth environment, you can't throw someone in there that's been in a SAAS organization for 10 years leading sales teams, either there aren't out there in the market or you can't afford them, or you don't want to pay that much, and that's cool. It's okay. What do we do then? We enable our sales leaders and we free up their time to be great coaches. And it's that equation that's tough. And that's, that's why people are reaching out to Replayz.

So that that'll be one. I think the other is once you've got a good framework for your discovery, your demo and your closing, and a lot of companies don't, which is the other area we help. But, but once, you know, a lot of companies are, are really doing the best with the resources they have. Okay, a sales leader will say, "all right, based on my last three positions as a sales leader this is what we did for discovery, this is what we did for a demo." And usually that'll get 80% right. But, of course, there's a lot of nuances there. And so that's where we're able to help out and help them understand of these thousands of calls reviewed of some of the highest growth, well-known SAAS brands out there: here are the two or three things that ingredients that you're missing to help drive a better close rate. And once you've got the framework there's no point in coaching if you don't have a good framework to coach to. Right? So I think establishing, so to summarize getting the right sales leader in there, getting them enabled and trained then in ensuring that there is a solid framework for them to coach to, and by that, I mean, what does a good discovery look like? What are the questions you're asking? How do you go to level two level three pain? What are the three customer stories you're going to share in a 45 minute call? Because we know one customer story is enough, social proof is so important when you, you know, at the end of the call, are they going to get a next, meeting on the books, assuming that the prospect's interested, and is that a best practice? And if so, how are you coaching to that? And then the next layer, of course, is how do we reinforce that with the reps as a sales manager, sales leader. And that's where, I think as for the CROs that are listening and VPs of sales, or let's say a CEO of a early stage company. Maybe you don't have a VP of Sales right now, I think it's super important to ensure that your team, that call reviews are happening, that what is being discussed on those calls, are to a framework that you're comfortable with. And that there's enough discovery being done. That's the one area. It won't be a surprise to the folks listening, but that is the one area that we see that's failing at the most. And that is one of the biggest leading indicators is whether you're going to close the deal. Did you really understand what that prospect needs and are you customizing your presentation to it? Because one test that all the leaders that are listening right now can do, if you haven't had a chance to jump in and do call reviews, go pick 10 reps, watch all, or ask your sales manager to watch, 10 reviews from each of them. If they all look the same you're doing it wrong. Because it's about customizing what the customer tells you and then, or the prospect tells you, and then really, customizing that last 20- 30 minutes on the call where you're more on the solutioning side and not just doing a big feature dump of A to Z, but if they're like, oh, A and B is super important to me than spend 80% of the time on A and B.

And then finally, I know this is a long-winded answer and I apologize, but I just feel so passionate about this and you know, the, well, the final part, the final part is, is enable your reps, take your best reps, and have them peer coach to that framework that you build, ask them to do reviews. And then ultimately you want to get to a stage where you give the framework to your whole team and you say, I want you to actually, do an assessment of yourself and in our weekly one-on-ones. I want to see how you did. Here, here's the scorecard I put together for you. Here are the 15 must haves in your presentation and let's see a self assessment. Then you're multiplying yourself as a leader. Those would be my three biggest, I think levers I would recommend for sales leaders to take their coaching game to the next level, without bringing on a company like Replayz.

[00:18:17] Rosalyn Santa Elena: That's awesome. That's awesome. That's really good advice and not long-winded at all. Super helpful. So, so as part of Replayz beliefs, you mentioned that sales is part of part art and part science. You also touch on how you believe in a different way to train sales leaders and sales reps through, you know, muscle memory, accountability process, which I love as an ops person, and human connection. So can you share more about that philosophy and how this makes Replayz offering unique?

[00:18:53] Dave Kennett: Yeah, for sure and I'm going to try and answer that without making it sound like an infomercial for Replayz. Cause I really don't, I never ever want to come across that way in any of these it's really, I want to just drive as much value as I can from my learnings back to your audience that are listening. Art and science, you know, the way I look at that is the science piece is it is data-driven it's once you've built the framework that you think aligns correctly to the average deal size and buyer journey, then you've got your level set of what you can evaluate or coach your reps against. And that's going to change if it's, you know, we work with a number of leading organizations that have huge teams and they'll have their emerging markets team, SMB, mid-market, enterprise and strategic. Well, that checklist is going to vary by each one. Of course, you and your emerging markets, folks, you want them to be high velocity. You don't want them to overqualified. You don't want to qualify out opportunities that really, aren't going to go anywhere very, very quickly because velocity is the name of the game. Whereas in an enterprise motion, of course it's much different, much more customized, a lot more detail on the discovery and multi-threaded approach even more than you would in a smaller deal and that kind of thing. So I think it's about what are the data points you want to measure? And of course, you know, from a key indicator perspective, I would be looking at the reps in terms, and you're like this from a rev ops perspective, I guess, you know, each stage of the factory. So there's somethings, if a rep's not doing well, you can zoom in very quickly to each stage being, you know, what's my SAL to SQL ratio, or even take it back, what's my MQL to SQL? What's my sales accepted lead to sales qualified lead, what's sales qualified lead to op? Some companies call those the same thing and that's fine, in my opinion. And then what's your average sales cycle time? What's the win rate? And then what's the average order size? If you can evaluate each of those metrics, you're going to really be able to diagnose very quickly where, where the weaknesses are happening. Right, if sales cycles taking way too long, maybe they're not good at keeping momentum going through, accountability and, you know, follow up email with: here are the owners of the various tasks we talked about today, here's the timeline, et cetera. So, and then that, you know, that's specific to you know, key performance metrics in terms of actually looking at: is their sales process?. So what they're saying on the phone, well, that's where you can do a checklist, and that's where Replayz comes in as well, in terms of looking at, you know, what we do is we listen to calls, kind of like we listen to call recordings just like an NFL coach would do after game day. They're looking at all the tapes, but we jump in just like, you know, our kids out there that have all their favorite YouTubers and YouTube is on the top right of the screen. Well, that's what our Replayz coach does. Right? We've got senior leaders from SAAS companies that evaluate these based on our a hundred best practices. And they'll, if, if let's say someone gets that dreaded question, shouldn't be a dreaded question, but it is, where they're two minutes into a discovery and the prospect says, "okay, yeah, yeah. I don't need a discovery. I don't need to pitch what's your pricing?" That startles a lot of reps and like 80% of the time I'm going to say they don't handle it well.

So the question is what is your best practice for that? And then being able to actually going back to the data, being able to say, all right, here's our four step process for that. Did the rep. , yes or no? Or is it red, yellow, green? They kind of did it cause they got two out of the four steps. That's the data part. I think the, the art, of course, there's tone, there's your ability to connect. There's how you make your prospect feel. We all know that, I mean, you know, if you think of the last buying decision that you made, it's probably partly left brain in terms of: okay, how did everything work out there? It is probably partly emotional. Did this person, do I trust this person? You, you probably made an informed, like a quick decision on that in the first 20 seconds of your call. And that part is, is, can be learned, but some people come across that more naturally.

And I love this example. I was proven wrong. , I was proven wrong early in my tenure at Replayz here where we had a rep that was on a PIP, and this person was on a performance improvement plan. The, you know, we have executive check-ins with our customers once a month where we're talking to the senior leadership about their framework and how we're supporting the reps. And we're kind of thinking partners for them. They asked about this one rap and they said, you know, do you think this person is going to make it? And I said, well, you've got way more data points than me, but just based on these calls, we've reviewed, I think they're really going to have to follow our best practices to get there, and I think it's going to be a challenge, but we're going to support the heck out of this person and see what they can do. And six months later, I kid you not, the person was the, the top rep, they closed, they had an annual quota, they closed their annual quota by March and their account. They were at normal calendar year. So Q1 he'd already hit his quota. And, , it was just super impressive. And this person always, like, I always knew they were high, like high potential, but what I was curious about was would the, if they just applied the science, right, can it work? And it turns out they're a very affable person anyway, and very bright, but they, when I looked at, I wanted to do a, a quick study and be like, okay, I want to analyze the calls that led this person to crushing their quota one quarter in when they were on a PIP six months before that. And I took our Replayz checklist and sure enough, they hit every single point pretty much. I mean, maybe they're off by 10%, but they became a model student of our best practice. And that, you know, I thought art played a much higher role. I'm realizing now I realize then that yes, it is science, which only underpins our value even more because we're coaching to a scalable, repeatable framework and, you know, so that would be my, that would be my, my answer on that one.

[00:24:58] Rosalyn Santa Elena: Okay. That's great. I love that story too. So you touched a little bit about the hundred best practices. Can you talk a little bit?

[00:25:08] Dave Kennett: Yeah, we, you know, back to the science part, the question is that we had to ask ourselves: are there commonalities among high growth SAAD organizations that have a similar ACV? Let's say it's a 50 K average deal size. And let's say that the average sales cycle is three months. If I've got 20 companies that we're coaching, that our team of coaches are coaching, and they've all got, you know, apples to apples in terms of deal size, et cetera, you know, average sales cycle and, sort of buyer, buyer journey. We get the win rate data from pretty much all of our customers. And so, because we don't want anyone spending a dollar with us, unless they're going to get a return, which is thankfully why we've got such a high renewal rate. And I wanted to understand what were the commonalities between the top reps? What did they do really well?

And what are some of the things that they, when you look at their closed loss deals, why was it? Reps love to put product roadmap or it was out of my control, but we like to analyze what were the forced errors? What were the unforced errors? And what we learned is we can really draw a series of best practices that work for each segment of sales, whether it be high velocity, 3 to 8,000 ACV, right up to a million plus deals with IBM who's a customer of ours. Right. And, and then we templated those into our a hundred best practices and it's everything from, you know, how do you tell a customer story in under one minute? Cause we, we see reps not using social proof enough and they'll do things like we'll talk to their prospect like, "oh yeah, we've got a great customer story. There is a case study from marketing. I'll send it." And just like, wait, they're not going to open that. And that's number one. And number two, like you're paid a lot of money as a sales professional to be a great communicator, back to the art, and actually communicate that. But back to the science it's it's, then we see reps communicating it where they take five minutes to tell a story and you're, you're burning four minutes unnecessarily. It should take one minute to tell a customer story, or we, we see them just reference a brand they're like, I just did a minute ago. Oh, IBM's a customer. Okay. That's great. That, that doesn't tell me that it's a similar use case to mind. Therefore, it's given you some brand credibility, Dave, but it hasn't, hasn't given me a reason to actually go with you. It doesn't speak to my use case. And, and so that's where part of our a hundred best practices, we've got four of them that talk about how do you get great customer stories instead of waiting for marketing or customer success to feed them to you. Because they're really busy in high growth environments. And I bet you, the folks that are listening can really relate to this and I'm sure you can as well. It's just, we, we wait too long sometimes for someone else to do our work. And it's like, hey, just ask your sales leader if you can call three happy customers and just say, what's your experience? I'd love to understand, you know, what quantifiable return you've had and the little soundbites they'll give you, you can turn into your own little customer story right there.

And, and, and so we've got a hundred things, everything from each stage of the call of here's, how you build rapport, here's how you do introductions. You know, in a presentation here are the top five things that the lowest performing reps , do, here are the top three things, the best reps that have the highest win rates do, and that's everything from customer stories to doing a meaningful check-in every minute and a half, instead of just asking, "Hey, any questions?" Or, you know, it makes sense. It's like asking meaningful open-ended question right through to the close of really having respectful, but challenging conversations on whether this is the right fit. That is that that's a quick overview on why our a hundred best practices exist because there absolutely should be a level set of, of data that's repeatable and scalable. And you can't do that if it's just ad hoc and, and these, these have been proven now time and again.

That's amazing. I love that. And you know, as you're talking about some of the examples, I'm thinking about the last few calls I had with vendors and how they ask, they do ask those questions, like, "Does that make sense? Any questions?" you know, instead of being more specific.

Those are really informative. Aren't they? I know I learned a lot from them and I hate to say it, as you can imagine, there's a lot of pressure on me when I'm selling for the organization, because they want to be like, if, like, if I do a poor job of that and you're like, okay, in your, your company's coaching me. What I find informative in listening to vendor pitches is sometimes I will see things in them that I actually do, and I didn't realize it before I do poorly. And I realized how it made me feel. And I think that's a great exercise for teams to go through. If you're a senior leader listening to this ask, you know, appoint one of your team members to choose that next item in your tech stack and form a little committee. And I know it's going to take time away from selling, but the meta point is maybe it's two or three hours over a three week period, but they're listening to other vendors pitch and they're picking up the good things and the bad things. And it might actually force them to look in the mirror and be like, "okay, I actually do that thing really well, but that thing not so much."

[00:30:12] Rosalyn Santa Elena: Yeah. I love that. So, so as I think about the Revenue Engine, right, in this podcast, I always hope that others will be able to learn how to accelerate revenue growth and really power, right, the revenue engine. I think we've talked about a lot of different things that are really helpful that I think the folks who are listening are going to be able to go back and actually implement right away. But from your perspective, you know, what are the top, maybe two or three things that you think revenue leaders should be thinking about today to really help to drive and grow revenue?

[00:30:49] Dave Kennett: I think they, and I think probably most folks listening to this are already doing this part. Really being rigorous around analyzing, performance indicators that, you know, the there's the leading indicators of: him listening to a call and I'm seeing these behaviors from. And, it's very likely that because they're following this framework, it's going to lead to a higher close rate and, oh, they're not following the framework. It'll lead to a lower close rate. A lot of us leaders aren't looking at that, we're looking at the lagging indicator of is simply win rate or average sales cycle time or average order size. And those have to be looked at, but when they're not, up to par, the question is what are the leaders doing about that? And I think too often, we think, "well, this rep, sucks" or "this rep are they gonna make it?" Or, you know, when really we need to be looking at ourselves as leaders and to our frontline leaders and asking "what have we done to support the hell out of these people over the last few months?" and have we held up this unofficial contract of "I'm going to get you to that next step and what that looks like?" Yes, informative one-on-ones which often I see that a high index is put on are my sales managers having meaningful one-on-ones with my reps, our reps, and that is important, and what's discussed in there is important in terms of the rep feeling accountable to pipeline, the rep feeling supported, the leader removing blockers, but the overlooked part more often than not is, are calls being reviewed? Are they being reviewed by someone who feels confident that in their coaching ability. And that's where we coach the coach with most of our customers. And are they actually coaching to a framework for success? To me, those are these, sort of dark sort of, in the broom closet, blind spots that we probably, all the folks listening are probably know they're there, but we always have what we feel are higher priorities. And what we've learned is that, of the companies like our customers that really emphasize supporting the team in how to navigate through a framework of a call that you've laid out and navigate it through successfully and build muscle memory, those lagging indicators, they're going to look freaking awesome, right. Every single one of our customers, the average win rate goes up. Order size definitely goes up. Sales cycle time usually goes down. Those would be, you know, those would be some of the things that if I were a senior leader on here, I'd really be out wanting to have a jump off this call, have a meaningful conversation with my sales manager saying, "Hey, am I supporting you enough with what you need to have time to coach this team? And what is the framework you're coaching to? And what are the number of calls we think we should be reviewing per rep per month?" My guess is less than 15% of your listeners have a solution for that right now. And guess what? That was me for 20 years, which is why I started Replayz and, and, and not surprisingly we've we probably got a lot of folks listening that have worked in companies like you have, and I have, that are brand names. Everyone's heard of high growth organizations. And guess what? It's not just the new emerging startups that are late seed stage, that, that don't get this. It's some of the brands we've all heard of. And. Right. That's okay. As long as we recognize it and do some of that's.

[00:34:11] Rosalyn Santa Elena: Great. Thank you. That's super helpful. So thank you so much for joining me, but as we wrap up and before I let you go, I always love to ask two things. So one, what is the one thing about Dave that others would be surprised to learn? And to what is the one thing that you want everyone to know about you?

[00:34:34] Dave Kennett: Okay. First one, I'll I guess recency is probably the thing here. This, this weekend I did adventure race for the first time, five and a half hours up and down a mountain. First we had to, kayak for five kms, or three, three miles, three, 3.1, three, 3.1 miles or something. And then we had to orientineer ourselves through this mountain, up and down, and there were 14 checkpoints we had to hit and you don't get the map of where the course is until like a half an hour before an hour before. And, and so maybe people didn't know that I, I like, running and I'm in, you know, I love doing five Ks, 10 Ks, half marathons. This, this one was mountain biking, orienteering, running, hiking, and kayaking. And I hadn't been on a mountain bike for 25 years and I was using the clip on SPD pedals and there was a couple awful bales. And, I hadn't orienteered before. Thankfully I had a good partner there, but because of my, you know, lack of mountain biking, prowess, we took the slow route and it, we didn't know that that diverted us about half hour to 45 minutes. I'm used to, at least being in the top third of the pack for these kinds of, for a race, we were bottom third and so don't, but don't mind being vulnerable and sharing that, but, so that might be, and that was a good, you know, that was informative for me in terms of life, too, right there. When I look at that, I should have prepared mountain biking a little bit more.

I should have prepared rowing. I haven't done a lot of kayaking and I should have taken more time to look at that map and think my way through it. And probably attached to our hitch to people who have gone through or are familiar with those parts. And it just reiterated to me that there's a parallel in sales here.

You can have two sales reps with the equal ability and expertise and background, but if you don't take time to be strategic, and sometimes go slow to go fast, you're going to spin your wheels and end up being a less successful than the other person. And I'm going to do a post on that sometime the next couple weeks, because it, it just, that analogy was screaming in my brain, as my legs were freezing up on me and the top of this mountain. So that was one. And then, sorry, what was the second question?

[00:36:42] Rosalyn Santa Elena: So one thing that you want everyone to know about. Maybe it's the same thing?

[00:36:48] Dave Kennett: Yeah, I think for, for that one, I don't know. I think that's one of those things where my actions speak for who I am more than anything else. So all that, you know what I could say, what I want people to think about me. I'd rather, they lean it from conversations like this, from what my team says about me, from what our customers say. So let's leave that one as a, you tell me what you, you know, you know what I mean? I don't want to try and project, anything. I, I think it's all about my actions. That's what I'll say on that.

[00:37:19] Rosalyn Santa Elena: That's awesome. Well, I love that. So thank you so much for joining me, Dave. It was such a pleasure to chat with you and before we recorded it was so much fun with you too.

[00:37:29] Dave Kennett: That was pretty fun. That was, that was an adventure in and of itself.

[00:37:34] Rosalyn Santa Elena: Yeah, definitely. So I'm so grateful for your time and thank you for sharing your story and just sharing so much incredible advice as well and insight.

[00:37:42] Dave Kennett: Thanks Roslyn. I really enjoyed the chat.

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