What the Best Sales Leaders Do with Brian McCarthy

07/20/23 • 78 min

Brian McCarthy is an accomplished executive and leader with progressive sales and leadership experience building and leading talented teams to achieve hyper-growth within the enterprise software and information services industry. Brian serves as Rubrik’s Chief Revenue Officer, where he leads the global go-to-market sales strategy. Previously he led the sales, services and support teams at ThoughtSpot, where he led the go-to-market function and the company’s SaaS transformation. Preceding his time at ThoughtSpot, Brian came from AppDynamics, which was acquired by Cisco, where he was responsible for leading the Americas organization as GVP and from QlikTech where he served as President of the Americas. He graduated from Franciscan University.

Join us as Brian shares shares insights on managing and enabling sales teams. He emphasizes the importance of caring for and developing employees, and the need for leaders to have a secure mindset. McCarthy and John McMahon discuss tracking deals and stages in the sales process, forecasting, and improving the probability of closing deals. Tons of lessons from two top-tier sales leaders shared on this episode of Revenue Builders.

HERE ARE SOME KEY SECTIONS TO CHECK OUT:

[0:01:15] Brian's background and experience in sales and leadership roles

[0:09:30] Brian's approach to managing and training people

[0:17:23] The importance of listening skills in leadership

[0:24:33] The unique approach to enablement at Rubrik

[0:42:04] The critical stage in the sales process for forecasting

[0:56:50] The metrics Brian tracks during and after the quarter

[1:02:03] The importance of focusing on productivity in a growth company

[1:04:35] The impact of churn on productivity and the importance of recruiting and training

[1:14:55] Leaders who consistently over forecast or wear rose-colored glasses

HIGHLIGHT QUOTES

[0:40:33] Leaders job as an ultimate success - John McMahon: “Your job is to get the best players and coaches on your team. And then if you do, you're going to look like a freaking hero, right? And you also hit on something that's really critical is that ‘when is a leader's job done?’. A leader's job's done is when they've been able to prove that they were able to recruit people, train and develop those people to take their spot.That's when it's ultimate success”

[1:13:49] The importance of looking at new and existing deals in the forecast - Brian: “I have a much better idea of exactly where they're going to land, plus or minus. And I usually tell them too, as I'm going through, I'll go through and be like, okay, so here's where each of your people are. Here's the range: worst is this all right, I think you're going to be about two and a half million more than you're calling here, but okay, got it.”

Learn more about Brian through this link:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bkmccarthy/

Check out John McMahon’s book here: https://www.amazon.com/Qualified-Sales-Leader-Proven-Lessons/dp/0578895064

HERE ARE SOME KEY SECTIONS TO CHECK OUT:

[0:01:15] Brian's background and experience in sales and leadership roles

[0:09:30] Brian's approach to managing and training people

[0:17:23] The importance of listening skills in leadership

[0:24:33] The unique approach to enablement at Rubrik

[0:42:04] The critical stage in the sales process for forecasting

[0:56:50] The metrics Brian tracks during and after the quarter

[1:02:03] The importance of focusing on productivity in a growth company

[1:04:35] The impact of churn on productivity and the importance of recruiting and training

[1:14:55] Leaders who consistently over forecast or wear rose-colored glasses

HIGHLIGHT QUOTES

Learn more about Brian through this link:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bkmccarthy/

Check out John McMahon’s book here: https://www.amazon.com/Qualified-Sales-Leader-Proven-Lessons/dp/0578895064

Previous Episode

Always be Learning: Scaling through a Focus on People with Dennis Lyandres

Dennis Lyandres spent more than 8 years with Procore during which time Procore grew from $10m to over 900m+ in revenue. Dennis started at Procore as Executive Vice President of Sales in 2014, before moving to the Chief Revenue Officer role in 2018 where he was responsible for driving revenue across all customer-facing functions including Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, Rev Ops, Procore.org and Business Development. From Nov 2022 to June 2023, Dennis served as a Strategic Advisor to the CEO working on key strategic projects such as procore’s emerging fin tech business, key partner and customer relationships, and mentoring and developing key leaders. Before joining Procore, he held various sales and sales management roles at Cloudera and Pentaho. Dennis began his career in mergers & acquisitions with BTI Group and holds a BA from UC Berkeley where he finished with highest academic honors.

Join us as Dennis shares his journey to sales leadership, from his early days to the phenomenal success he had at Procore. He discusses the core fundamentals he had to learn, including prospecting, business acumen, account planning, and building urgency. Dennis highlights the human aspect of sales leadership and the important lessons he learned in recruiting, training, and developing the right people; as well as the need to trust and empower his team. Dennis also emphasizes the value of continuous learning and the role of leadership in creating a culture of success. Dig into the lessons he learned on his road to sales leadership in this inspiring episode of Revenue Builders.

HERE ARE SOME KEY SECTIONS TO CHECK OUT:

[00:05:57] Importance of business fundamentals and financial literacy

[00:09:39] Skills needed for sales leadership: recruiting, training, developing, promoting, and terminating

[00:19:11] Unique aspects of training and development: clear expectations, self-service, certifications, coaching and buddy systems

[00:34:42] Transitioning to the CRO role: prioritization, managing time effectively, hiring great leaders, aligning cross-functional teams

[00:46:26] The importance of leadership and building more successful leaders

[00:49:31] The value of showing care and having each other's backs

[00:50:43] Assessing the most important problems and finding solutions

[00:51:06] Scaling challenges: assessing the most important problem and finding a solution

[00:52:09] Adapting to new challenges and focusing on the next problem to solve

[00:54:13] Transitioning from a private company to a public company

[00:56:16] Learning from mistakes and being proud of Procore's impact

HIGHLIGHT QUOTES

[00:08:48] “If you're talking to someone low level, and maybe that's some way to build a groundswell or get intelligence or whatever your account strategy is there, then yeah, I think you can talk more feature function, more jargon. But certainly, as you get more and more senior, and as you demonstrate more and more of a mastery of the subject. Simplicity is absolutely essential, right?” - Dennis Lyandres

[00:46:34] “My mindset really crystallized by this role, which was like, leadership is the most important thing to whether I wouldn't. Right and so I've got to be spending my time hiring great leaders and making sure they can be wildly successful and within leadership. I've come to believe that the highest calling of a leader is to obsolete yourself is to work yourself out of the job.” - Dennis Lyandres

Learn more about Dennis Lyandres through this link:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dlyandres/

Check out John McMahon’s book here: https://www.amazon.com/Qualified-Sales-Leader-Proven-Lessons/dp/0578895064

Next Episode

Scaling Sales and Qualifying Deals with Adam Aarons

Adam Aarons is a seasoned sales executive with extensive knowledge of the risk and compliance space. Adam is well known and admired for his time as the CRO of Okta, during which Okta grew from a $1M startup to a publicly traded $300M+ ARR category winner. Adam was previously an active advisor to Drata, and has now joined the company full time to drive revenue at scale as CRO.

In this conversation with John McMahon, Adam discusses the keys to scaling a salesforce, including productivity per head, average deal size, and ramp times. He emphasizes the importance of understanding the ideal customer profile and where they are located. Adam also highlights the critical role of qualification in the sales process, focusing on the ICE framework (Identify pain, Champion, Economic buyer). He stresses the need for continuous discovery and the importance of establishing decision criteria. Adam shares insights on forecasting, metrics, and the value of customer success in reducing churn and driving revenue. He also discusses the challenges and lessons learned when transitioning from a sales rep to a manager, VP, and CRO on this episode of Revenue Builders.

HERE ARE SOME KEY SECTIONS TO CHECK OUT:

[0:00:42] Introduction to Drata and its automation of compliance data collection

[0:49:52] Using an automation platform to coordinate customer outreach and marketing campaigns

[0:55:18] The need for effective communication and expectation setting between managers

[1:00:55] The importance of coaching for young CROs

HIGHLIGHT QUOTES

[0:57:08] "Having respect and empathy for people that haven't done it before, that you're working with to make sure that they understand the why versus just saying, hey. Trust me, let me go do my job like I know what I'm doing.”

[0:52:03] "If you're a leader and you're doing this work, it's hard work. You should expect it to be hard. You should enjoy the grind and enjoy the challenges because you learn so much in these jobs that even with the things that you and I have talked about, there's so much more depth that you could dive down into."

Learn more about Adam through this link:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-aarons-438111/

Check out John McMahon’s book here: https://www.amazon.com/Qualified-Sales-Leader-Proven-Lessons/dp/0578895064