198: Gainsight's Adam Wicks: Artistry, High-Stakes Math, and 600% Achievement

0:00 Scott Ingram: This episode is brought to you thanks to the generous support of Nooks. Nooks is the agent workspace for intelligent outbound. For more, just go to nooks.ai. You're listening to the Sales Success Stories podcast, where we deconstruct world-class sales performers to provide insights and strategies to help you improve. To learn more, visit us at top1.fm. Here's your host, Scott. Ingram. Today on the Sales Success Stories podcast, my guest is Adam Wicks. Adam has an incredible track record as the top-performing regional director at Gainsight out of their UK office, and I get the distinct pleasure of interviewing him in person here in Austin since Gainsight was kind enough to do their SKO in my backyard. Thanks for joining me, Adam.

0:52 Adam Wicks: We came here specifically for this. That's why we put it here.

0:55 Scott Ingram: I love this. It was such great forethought. Yes, foresight to book it all ahead of time to know that Adam needs to be featured prominently. On the Sales Success Stories podcast. So let's make this happen and make sure that he's in Austin for it.

1:07 Adam Wicks: I'm excited.

1:10 Scott Ingram: Let's kick things off like we always do. I'm all about delivering immediate value right out of the gates. So let's first talk about the top 3 things that you believe have contributed the most to your consistent success in sales.

1:23 Adam Wicks: Yeah, I heard you ask this question on the previous ones. And I thought about it a lot. I don't really do things that are uniquely different. But what I do think one of the things that I do is I organize resources maybe slightly different to help people typically would, and a recognition that you're really, truly only as good as the people who are around you. How that looks like for me is a deep recognition that my role in sales is to surround myself with the best possible people, enable them to do their best possible work, and in the nicest way, get out of their way. And whether you call it standing on the shoulders of giants or conducting the orchestra, One of the things that I have been at pains to do is to build the best possible team of motivated, informed people and allow them to help us achieve a goal. And so for me, one of those things is about just building a really phenomenal team who are all pulling in the same direction. One of the things that I do think though is slightly unique or differentiates the approach is this. Truly myopic and unfiltered curiosity around what it is that you are doing. And so that shows up very binary in a sales process where you want to understand the why behind why a company would buy something. But it also shows up in the interpersonal relationships that you have, the colleagues that you work with. And the example that I'd give is At a basic level, you can speak to somebody and understand why they're buying the product or service that you might be offering to them. And it could be that they have some organizational objective around increasing the rate with which they sell or the employees that they hire. But the second and third factor there is, why are you looking to improve that? My pay is tied to that. Why are you doing that? Because I want to pay for my daughter's piano tuition. Why do you want to do that? It's because she's a phenomenal aspiring musician. Okay, now I understand why we're all here. My job… and you want to improve your daughter's likelihood of being a great musician in the future. So that real myopic focus on curiosity. And I think the third thing is, and it sounds like a throwaway, but it's just having context in all of the things that we do as it relates to sales. We are in a world where the barrier to entry is typically pretty low. Lots of us… selling is something that is available to most of us, and it can be incredibly rewarding and incredibly hard. And so whether we call it stoicism or philosophy, but having this grounding that allows you to understand that you are never as good as you think you are and never as bad as you think you could be, allows you to be able to operate with longevity. And it's… hopefully everybody gets the opportunity to be at the top at some point, but to stay there requires framework that allows you to operate within a healthy emotional spectrum. So when the deals are flying in, you're not as good as you might make yourself believe. And equally, when the big deal gets lost, it's probably not as bad as it looks like. So I think they're probably the 3 things. The curiosity, the building a great team, and having context on everything that you do. I think they're the 3 things I pick out.

4:53 Scott Ingram: With the context, I think of that as it's riding the roller coaster. You've got all the crazy emotional ups and downs that is just all the crazy stuff that's going around you. How are you regulating that? How are you thinking about that? Or what's the mindset?

5:09 Adam Wicks: I think that ego is very often the enemy within. And we can sometimes overinflate our self-importance in the part that we play in a sales process. And doing things to the best of your ability and following a process diligently and showing up as your best you is a very good way of helping yourself to the best as you can guarantee the outcome that you're looking for. But in the reality, there's so many variables that we don't control As a salesperson, you are very often at mercy to the territory that you sell into, the timing of what's going on, the technology landscape that is laying out in front of you. Very few of those things can you actually influence. So when you start to step back, you can take a much more well-rounded view on it to say, if I showed up and did the best that I could do, I followed the process that I know has historically served either me or the industry. Then it allows you to look at those failures of which, if you're in the right room and competing well, there will be failures with a healthy lens and learn from them as much as you possibly can do. And one of the things that I will try and do is to quantify that and codify that. And say, I do need to be able to materially point to 3, 4, 5 things that will inform me the next time I meet this set of circumstances. And I think it's also okay if you can't find those. It is just one of those, I, I don't know how we ended up here in the deal, the postmortem deal review that we didn't yield the silver bullet that would've got it me the next time around. But I think again, on that topic of curiosity, If you're driven by that, the loss or a challenging set of circumstances feeds this. Okay, I want to go and learn the why behind why we didn't get there. Still doesn't feel good, and the commission doesn't hit the bank account. But I think you can be quite philosophical about it.

7:18 Scott Ingram: A piece of that is something that I've been thinking about a lot in terms of folks like you that I talk to who have been consistently great at sales for years. This really is a craft. Craft. And I think I was also listening to some older… I was reading a Cal Newport book, one of his earlier ones. I think it was called So Good They Can't Ignore You. And he was tying back… at the time he wrote that book, I think the whole 10,000 hours thing was becoming a thing. And a lot of it is, look, if this is a craft, it's not just a matter of doing it willy-nilly for a really long time. It's doing it really intentionally and taking the time to look back at that last deal and win or lose and think about what were the factors, what were the things that I can control, what are the things that I need to learn to carry forward to either continue to do or to stop doing so that you get better and better and the impact compounds.

8:18 Adam Wicks: I totally agree. And one of the things that I think is interesting is very often, and I think it's Chris Williamson who said this, that flexibility is very often more important than the execution of the discipline. And that being the need to be able to in real time adjust to what it is that you're doing is often more important than the playbook that's been prescribed. And every organization will have its own sales playbook, whether it's customer-centric selling, MEDDIC, MEDDIC, pick your flavor, but There are… in, I think the best sales individuals are able to show up and recognize what's required for the opportunity that sits in front of them. And sometimes, on a very rare occasion, the goal is speed and pragmatism. And in that instance, abandoning some of the process is favorable. And in other circumstances, okay, you really do dig deep, the business value case, the ROI documentation, the Deep multi-threading across all levels of the organization is required. But I think the best individuals recognize that they have to pivot based on what it is that's going on in front of them. And I think that also allows for sales processes to appear and be hyper-personalized for the set of circumstances that are there. But I totally agree, the playbook should change based on what it is that's going on.

9:48 Scott Ingram: Let's contextualize this.

9:49 Adam Wicks: Sure.

9:50 Scott Ingram: Talk about Gainsight. Talk about your role. What do you sell?

9:53 Adam Wicks: Yeah. Gainsight's origin stems from really a lot of the early SaaS companies where the challenge was really not about customer acquisition. It was about the retention of those customers. Getting the barrier to entry for new customers coming on board was incredibly low. And so churn quickly became a problem for a lot of these organizations. And so a lot of investment had been made in technology to acquire and sell to customers. But where a lot of the landscape was abandoned is once we acquire those customers, how do we then go on to make them successful? What makes them sticky? What drives advocacy? What drives customer growth? This need to be able to deeply understand the health of a customer. And really, when we talk about health, what we're talking about is the propensity of a customer to stay with you, to grow, to say nice things about you. When you're not in the room. That created this customer success technology landscape, which allows for organizations to be able to empirically assess how likely a customer is to, for example, churn. But then importantly, what are the things that you need to do as a business to interject at that right point in time? So it could be to prevent a churn or to execute an upsell. And I'm sure many of your listeners will work in organizations where there are customer success teams who align with those, customers to help them get the outcomes they want from the product or service that you are selling into. And Gainsight has built up a suite of tools that helps organizations to be able to help customers serve their customers better. It could be something like a customer community platform to allow them to come together to do peer-to-peer networking, self-service support. It could be that it's more around helping people inside of the products, helping them drive adoption. It could be that it's around making sure that those internal customer-facing teams are reaching out to the right customer at the right time based on where they are in their journey. But all of this is around helping organizations to efficiently grow their customer base, their existing book of business, to shore up that existing revenue, which is even more important in the world of AI when Every single technology company now is being disrupted. It's very hard to truly differentiate when I think it feels like every technology company is being attacked from every side. And so one of the true competitive moats is this ability to set, to be able to actively demonstrate the outcomes that you are getting from working with a vendor, to have the relationship moat that sits around it and that true stakeholder engagement. So the business allows companies to do that. My role. So nearly a decade ago, I was one of the founding team for Gainsight in, in Europe. So we had, we had Americas as a, as an office, but we were expanding out. So I was fortunate enough to work with a small team to set that up. And now I'm an individual contributor, but I look after our strategic book of business, which is really the… our largest customers. But it's been a really interesting journey because we started with an approach, as most startup geographies do, where you go after everything. And as the book of business has grown, so has our customer segmentation. And so my role is an individual contributor, primarily new business sales, but focused on that enterprise book of business.

13:26 Scott Ingram: Fantastic. Talk about your results. What has it taken to get to this number 1 spot, especially this last year? I know you had a great year.

13:32 Adam Wicks: Yeah, I think although my journey into sales is not conventional, I do think it's… if I could prescribe the ideal path to do my job, it probably would've been the one that I took. And by the way, it was not by design, it was purely by luck. It wasn't really a traditional sales journey, but I started negotiating as a doorman, a bouncer on nightclub doors. And whilst there's not much formal training given to negotiation, then that's ultimately what that is. A lot of the language that's used isn't immediately transferable to a corporate environment.

14:03 Scott Ingram: Also a relatively low bar to participation in beer. Low bar.

14:06 Adam Wicks: You got it. Exactly that. Yeah, yeah. By definition, the pay is lower, but the stakes are far higher. But you also learn a really valuable set of skills when you are politely asking a drunk group of people to leave the premises. And there I pivoted on to door-to-door selling windows, and not windows in the technology sense, but the ones that keep the heat either in or the cold in, depending on where you live your house. Then the really pivotal part was I went to a company that screened graduates fresh out of university or college for sales competency. And a lot of hiring managers will know that when you hire for sales, you really look to track record as that barometer for whether somebody is credible in the industry or not. So in the absence of that, being able to work out who is going to succeed in a sales environment is actually quite a tough thing to do. The company looked for the core competencies that helped to understand whether someone's likely to be successful, and my job was to screen those. And so you started to get a real picture of… I still even now struggle to articulate despite spending years doing it, but look at the… whether it's the presentation skills, the structural logic, the ability to influence and persuade people, that drive and dynamism, and that kind of X factor that you look for that makes somebody stand out. And so I went through that process and that kind of various other technology sales jobs along the way. But as a grounding, it gave you a really good orientation into what people react well to and how to build those interpersonal relationships that mean that you genuinely can differentiate, not because you are necessarily a better salesperson than the next, but because you're armed with more information than the next salesperson, because you were just so curious around what it is that's going on in that person's world. All of those things combined allowed me to get to a point where the sales results have been really strong. As you say, I think it's now 16 years above an enterprise quota. Of those 16 years, I think there's only been about 10 quarters along that time when I have fallen below the expected target. Developed a nice system for routine and predictability and an ability to be able to prioritize what it is that's important and qualify out those things that are not.

16:36 Scott Ingram: Cool. And in terms of, again, quantified performance this last year in particular, but I know you've been number 1 or number 2 the last 7 or so years here at Gainsight. Give us some flavor there.

16:46 Adam Wicks: Yeah, last year, a little under 600% of annual performance, largest new business deal in company history with a large global rollout of the Gainsight platform across… the deployment of the platform is to 25,000 customer-facing people, which, as the kind of the metrics around that suggest, it's a large, complex, multi-year deal process, and is one that really is a very acute example of having the right team at the table. Again, in that, in that particular sales process, my role is truly just a facilitator for the incredibly intelligent, smart people who work at Gainsight to do their best work, just to help join the dots up and make sure that we have consistency across it. But yes, a really wonderful year last year.

17:36 Scott Ingram: Really incredible results like those that Adam has delivered over and over again start with a really incredible pipeline. And that's what Nooks is all about. Nooks is an integrated platform that the best revenue teams run on to consistently and predictably generate incredible pipeline. Their intelligent outbound approach combines their AI dialer, their powerful signals and intelligence engine, and now their brand new AI sequencing capability. To learn how you can use Nooks to build an incredible pipeline for yourself and your team, just click over to nooks.ai. It's okay if you want to pause the podcast here to do that right now. Then we'll get back to my conversation with Adam Wicks. I want to come back to assembling the team.

18:23 Adam Wicks: Yep.

18:24 Scott Ingram: Because none of these folks work for you. None of them report to you. You can't tell them what to do. How do you think about who you're bringing onto the team, how you're setting them up to be in these positions to be successful? How are you managing that? Because I think that's a hugely critical success factor, especially as you get into more enterprise sales, where I always think of my role is to wield my organization as best I can on behalf of my clients. But there's no books about this. Nobody talks about this. So talk about this and give some direction and guidance, or just how you think about it and making it all happen and come together.

19:03 Adam Wicks: I think it would be interesting if we thought about internal teammates in the same way that we thought about our execution of sales to the prospects that we sell to. Because very often when we sell, we're setting a vision. Here's what you could do by working with us as an organization. I think when you think about internally, a lot of the same principles apply. You really want to make sure that you are setting a vision that everybody can get around. You're qualifying the teammates that you're working with to make sure that they are the best possible people to show up to execute on that process. I think also as well, having metrics around it that everybody is accountable for is incredibly helpful. Whether you call it a deal dashboard, a deal framework, deal KPIs, at the start of a process, you're all signing up to meet that standard, and each one will have their own parts that they contribute towards that. But I think what that does is it builds a cohesion around the deal process, which is more than just a transaction. It's something that people are emotionally bought into. I think that asking people to deeply appreciate the opportunity upfront gives them emotional investment in the outcome. And I think when people see other people caring about it, it's infectious. And people have accountability to one another. And That accountability, I think when you work in a team, even if you're working remotely, that ability to be able to see the whites of the eyes of the people you're working with, to know that everybody wants to be able to share this as a success story on Friday when they sit down with their family at the dinner table, you have almost a moral obligation to your teammates to support them in the best possible way. So there's definitely a skill component to it, making sure that the right person is educated on the right topic that you're in the meeting to discuss, as an example. But beyond that, I think people will move mountains and rip up trees if they are emotionally invested in the outcome. And so for me, it's more about making sure that you paint the vision that everybody very early on in the process says, yep, okay, Adam, I'm signing up for this with you.

21:25 Scott Ingram: Let's…

21:26 Adam Wicks: we'll go on the journey. And it creates a real bonding. And in In the best deal processes that I've worked on, there is almost like a mourning process, or even like a separation anxiety when the signed order form comes in. Because, okay, we temporarily, while we're going through implementation, we close this down and the project moves on to its next phase. But I think that's a wonderful hallmark of a well-executed deal process. Is that there is this emotional attachment to what it is that you're doing. And the celebration of the win is quickly followed by a gap where that meaning sat for a little while.

22:07 Scott Ingram: Love that. And love that you call it or think of it as a sales process. And for me, it's the internal sale. So when you think about the work that you do, how much of it percentage-wise is external selling, working with your customers and future customers? And how much of it is that internal selling and the teaming work that you're doing?

22:30 Adam Wicks: I think the larger and more complex the sales get, the more the focus shifts to internal. My gut reaction to the question is probably 60/40 in favor of internal versus external, is just my, my initial thoughts. I'm sure there is lower value transactions that happen where it's a more simple playbook-driven process where maybe it's 90/10 in favor of external effort in that regard. But I think a lot of salespeople are so well supported by clean marketing messaging and products that demonstrate well and a sales methodology that is well-rehearsed, practiced, and the team is enabled on it. All of those are table stakes. You've got those already. And so if you are differentiating, it is those internal communications that allows you to show up in the meeting on the Zoom or on the Teams meeting that makes that standard content come to life and makes it feel for the prospect like this entire, not just presentation, but platform was built for what it is that they're doing. And the degree to with which you can use that internal work to lower the, or to reduce the gap between what it is that you sell and what it is that they want, I think is an excellent use of time.

24:03 Scott Ingram: I wonder if there's one or two specific things in that process that, again, maybe the typical sales professional isn't thinking about. Like maybe it's the way that you're doing the prep or the way that you're setting the vision or the way that you are assigning a task and giving somebody a role. Within your process? Anything come to mind in the way that you're executing that internal process?

24:26 Adam Wicks: It's interesting that I think this ties back to that first point around unfiltered curiosity, but I'll give you a very specific example. One of the deals that we were fortunate enough to win last year, we shared with the team working on the deal the real why behind the prospect's side, why they're working on this. And none of the whys were around business goals whatsoever. It was helping everybody to understand the people who we're selling to beyond their job title, their KPI set. Here's where they live. Here's what their family life looks like and the things that they care about. Here are the last 3 things that they shared on X or whatever the social media platform they subscribe to. And subconsciously, when we had that first meeting, they are talking to them like people, not prospects. And the emotional relationship that's created is turbocharged and it goes in fast forward. And that same cohesion that I spoke about when you're building that internal team, I think when that starts to happen between you as the seller and them as the potential buyer, that's when the magic happens. That's when you uncover the answers to the questions that simply nobody would ask on a prospecting cheat sheet. And so very often we will do preparation for the people in the deals, not the standard deal metrics itself or the simple qualifications. So I think that's one thing. I think the other thing as well is encouraging the internal or your teammates to help find the boundaries by asking the difficult questions that may qualify us out of a deal. Like, actively look for why we shouldn't be in the room. Be brave about it. All our time is precious. We all probably work too many hours. And so, if this is going to be something that we're going to sit around together, let's make sure we're in the right room. And it's everybody's obligation to do the qualification. I am simply not technical enough to be able to understand the nuances around the enterprise architecture, Nor am I legally qualified to be able to make an assessment on whether we could contractually work together. So inviting people very early on to be really brave and seek out the problems that may exist, again, I think it gives people autonomy and authority to be able to, to be curious themselves around the part of the deal they're interested in. But it also gives everybody the agency to be able to put their hand up and say, very early on, this doesn't look like it's a good use of our time. And we all have an obligation to each other to make sure we're sat in the right room talking to the right people. So I think there are a couple of very practical, tactical things that I would typically do.

27:37 Scott Ingram: Yeah, super solid. I think both examples are so spot on. And I think the first one we lose sight of in that we're all in B2B sales. And that's always been… not always, but for the most part been the focus of this podcast. While our buyers, our businesses, don't buy anything, people do.

27:53 Adam Wicks: Yeah, it's just a logo with a bunch of people. Yeah, working in it.

27:57 Scott Ingram: It's just an umbrella, right?

27:58 Adam Wicks: Yeah.

27:58 Scott Ingram: Yeah.

27:59 Adam Wicks: And those people change. And so the company by definition itself changes. Okay, the logo and the website may retain, but the entire personality of that organization can change quickly and sometimes often. I think you can One of the mistakes is you talk about customers in the arbitrary. You talk about them as an organization rather than the individuals who sit in it. You talk about a deal review for an account, and obviously conceptually that makes sense, but really what you're doing is you're talking to the people who sit in that business. And so one of the things that I think has helped us dramatically is by selling to the people in the business, not the business itself. And the byproduct of doing that is you end up with the same business case that you would have arrived at had you have done it at an organization level, because we're still ultimately talking about ROI and business case. But you have the why that sits behind that. You have the understanding of why it's important to the individual, not just an arbitrary ROI document.

29:04 Scott Ingram: Love it. Love it. The show is called Sales Success Stories.

29:08 Adam Wicks: Yes.

29:09 Scott Ingram: I feel like we should tell a story about a sale. What's your favorite sales story? Maybe it was a big one. Maybe it was a loss that you learned something massive from? What's the story that comes to mind?

29:20 Adam Wicks: I think I'm probably typical in the deals that stand out to me by far are the losses. The last year I didn't make, make my target was by far the most uncomfortable year of my professional career. I carried an enterprise quota and I ended up in a position whereby I had a deal that was due to close in the last month of the year that we had in commit with a large broadcaster that would have made somewhere between 500% and 600% of my annual. And with 6 days left of the fiscal year, we found out that we had lost that deal. And that, that day I was called into the RVP's office and told to leave my laptop in the office and go home, and I may or may not be called to come back in the next day. Like, really one of those… mine was my office was 2 and a half hours from my house. It was a long drive.

30:15 Scott Ingram: It's a long drive without having…

30:16 Adam Wicks: it's a long… yeah, I didn't even put the music on in the car on the way home, just sat and stared. And interestingly, the learning from that was that on the face of it, we had done everything right. We had… it was a joint pitch with a systems integrator, and we had hitched our wagon to one And turns out the, the competition were in a totally different room to us, talking to a far more influential group of people. We had, when we talk about the org charts that you build out, we had one that looked comprehensive. And what we hadn't factored in is there was another 3 or 4 pages that I just simply hadn't even seen. And the really difficult part of that is when you know There is a real genuine screw-up and you own it. And that is one of those processes where you genuinely, you don't want to lose deals, but just don't want to feel like that again. That sort of loss allows you to put all of the preventative measures in place that you can. And so from that moment on, my org charts…

31:29 Scott Ingram: I was just going to say, I don't even have to ask my next question. You're already on it.

31:33 Adam Wicks: Yeah. The org charts that are built out now are wider than they would ever need to be. It's now a habit that's learned from that sort of thing, and it was an incredibly painful one and ended the year on a near zero after expecting to be not on zero, but by far the most valuable sales experience I've had. Now, that then all came good the next year, and whilst we didn't win that piece of business, the lessons learned from that were deep and impactful, and I still carry them around. But yeah, that's by far my standout sales story for all the wrong reasons, but ultimately positive in the long run.

32:12 Scott Ingram: And if you look at the opportunity cost of such a thing, I mean, that swing of theoretical income, yeah, on paper, that is a lesson that was very expensive that I'm sure sticks really hard. But it sounds like they did ask you to come back after your 2.5-hour return trip.

32:31 Adam Wicks: They did ask me to come back, thankfully. Yes. One of the things that you become acutely aware of as you have been in sales for a long time is that you have a total obligation to your leadership team to report things in a way that they have some confidence behind. And that is trust that takes a long time to build and not a long time to break. And that's the sort of one that does a a piece of damage that it takes time to, to rebuild and right these. But yes, I was fortuitous in that I was allowed to continue and actually went on to President's Club that next year. So the lessons learned were, and the irony is in a lot of these circumstances, you can run the same playbook many times and the same set of sequences and end up with different outcomes. The gift that gave me is that I now won't make the mistake, although I make many mistakes. The one that I won't make is insufficient appreciation for the org chart and who's in the zoo on the buyer side.

33:31 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Well, while we're down here wallowing in the depths…

33:34 Adam Wicks: sure, let's stay down here.

33:35 Scott Ingram: Yeah, let's just stay down here. What do you find today? Because it sounds like this is a long-ago lesson. It was. Yeah, you learned. What do you find today that continues to be the most challenging part or the thing that you struggle with the most?

33:48 Adam Wicks: I think the most difficult thing at the moment, it is very hard to differentiate in technology at the moment because the concentric circles of technology now so heavily overlap. It did prior to AI, but now we're in a world where it is incredibly easy to code your own applications. It is incredibly easy to do your own research. Whilst there was a time not so long ago where a lot of information was gated prior to a salesperson communicating the message, you could get a flavor from the website, but if you really wanted to understand the detail behind why you would work with somebody. There was a communication flow that you were somewhat in control of. Today, there is a large opinion that's formed prior to anybody stepping in the room as to the suitability a product would have for a particular application. A lot of the time you need to be able to get ahead of that. I think almost the solution to the challenge is that prospecting and the seeding of the right messaging needs to begin a lot earlier than it did historically. The need to have a voice as early as you can in the process to help guide the messaging, especially if, you know, you are going to market with a new product or service offering. If you've done evolution of piece of technology where maybe you didn't play in one space historically, you do now. They wouldn't organically reach you. And so the emphasis is on the salesperson to actively reach out to the buyers to be able to deliver messaging that much sooner. I think that's hard for a lot of salespeople to cut through the noise. And really the job comes down to the job of prospecting. Buyers are in information overload. So I think having a voice at the table in markets you maybe don't play in as well, or your brand isn't as well recognized is probably one of the biggest challenges.

35:54 Scott Ingram: Yeah, I think this now needs to be a whole segment of the podcast going forward is just this AI piece and just the impacts and everything else. We did a session within the Sales Success Society here recently because I just needed to get a sense of where's everybody's heads at? What are we doing here? And in this period, usually I like to keep these interviews as evergreen as I can, but in this case, I feel like in the last handful of weeks, This has been the most anxious time I have maybe ever seen in markets, in technology, as we were just freaking out about AI in a whole variety of ways. Let's call it the SaaS-pocalypse, all of this stuff.

36:35 Adam Wicks: I'm curious, what are the themes that you're seeing on those? Because I feel that as well.

36:39 Scott Ingram: Let me tell you what came out of it. And I think we probably each took away different things. The way we broke up the conversation is there were sort of 2 halves, right? The one half was How do we think about the big picture and the future and try and do long-term thinking, planning in a time where things are changing so fast? The second side was, okay, let's talk about some of the specific tools and use cases and it's at our disposal. So we need to be making the most of it. For me, the big takeaways I had was one, In this time of just crazy anxiety, angst, controlling the controllables. There are so many things that are out of our control, but what can we control? And one of the ways that I'm thinking about that just in my day-to-day is, okay, can I think about how I'm positioning my organization and my solutions? And also because it's so much easier to do research on our clients than it was in the past. Can I quickly understand their context and their frame of mind? And to your point, now really connect these 2 things in a very meaningful, very impactful, oh, you get me way, rather than it just be the random, here's the thing that marketing told me to say or anything like, to your point, we're way past that.

38:07 Adam Wicks: Don't you think that's wild though, where you can, it's going to become very difficult soon to show up with a unique information set that isn't available to everybody. And I do wonder how salespeople then think about differentiation when all of the value hypothesis for a market is available to everybody. Like, you…

38:30 Scott Ingram: if information is democratized for everybody and you have solutions that maybe aren't overly differentiated, the role that a salesperson might play in And this may be coming from the fact that I've been on the services side for the last decade, but I feel like where we are going to continue to have a really significant advantage is in working through complexity. Anytime that you're trying to bring a complex solution or set of solutions to a complex organization that has a ton of moving parts of own to deal with, you need somebody to help navigate that. That is not an AI thing, and there's a lot of humans to navigate. So really thinking about the political dynamics inside of an organization that are always there, and I think those represent our opportunities. I was also thinking about, and of course this came through, sometimes I use AI to process my thinking about AI, right? So I'm kind of having these chats and One thing that jumped out was the idea of staying at or near the decision layer.

39:45 Adam Wicks: Oh, say more about that.

39:47 Scott Ingram: Meaning that if you're in a place supporting the people who are making decisions, or you're somehow in a position that you are making decisions, which I would argue we absolutely are, we have so much agency in our territories, in our organizations to choose How do we make the most of the challenging and evolving opportunity that is in front of us? And again, control the controllables, do what you can do. And for me, there's no way I'm going to win this alone. I don't have all the answers. I don't begin to have all the answers. So I have to lean on the people in my organization, the people in my community, other amazing salespeople that are going through the same thing and trying to figure it out just like I am. Because again, like, I'm no worse. Close to this. But that conversation was a significant unlock for me. And in a lot of ways, it was just grounding. Okay, hey, man, it's not all going to change tomorrow. Nothing ever moves that fast. And yes, there's a lot of disruption. And we're all freaking out to one degree. Organizations at every level are losing their minds right now. But the reality is, reality still applies.

41:00 Adam Wicks: Totally. And I do think as we speak about things like building an internal team and the things that set people apart, I do think in the same way that, I mean, I'm maybe going back 10 years, maybe slightly less, but it was seen as a superpower for a sales individual to be able to use social media well, to really have a voice on LinkedIn as an example. I do think it will become very quickly those sales professionals who are proficient in AI will both do a better job of the sales engagements that they are working on and be able to complete many more of them because they are able to recognize the work that they are able to offload effectively to AI, whether that is prospecting activity, whether it's research, whether it's the curation of content that allows them to show up and deliver the best possible presentation. And they apply their skills to the things that are uniquely human.

42:06 Scott Ingram: 100%. And again, like the times I spend way less time and I'm getting way better output and quality in the way I'm creating proposals, in the way that I'm creating presentations and follow-up documentation and things like that. That stuff's so easy if you've done the right work and asked the right questions and led with the right level of curiosity so that you bring the right inputs into that process.

42:31 Adam Wicks: I totally agree. And interestingly, the try to leverage AI as much as possible across all the areas of selling, but even with a perfectly curated prompt, the output is still one that you look at that you refine because of your awareness of the situation that's around you. You're aware that it's almost a laser focus in on why are you making those changes. Because an understanding of that allows you to appreciate where you should be applying your time and attention. What is it that academically is the right thing to say based on everything that this AI model is telling me, but I understand differently based on my understanding of the situation? That is the intelligence layer that I am, as a sales professional, I'm applying between the AI model and the sales opportunity that sits in front of me. I don't quite know what that… how to codify that. If I could, yeah, probably. Do more with it. But I think that's almost the key in it all.

43:33 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Okay, so we went into the depths of despair. Let's ride the roller coaster in the fun part of the journey. Again, long track record of success, but what are you most proud of?

43:45 Adam Wicks: I think the ability to be able to balance work and a long and productive sales career with other things that sit outside of it. I've listened to your previous podcast shows. And I do think there is a theme around having balance that provides longevity. And for me, I have 2 wonderful children. I told them I would make sure I share the link with them. And they said, Dad, you need to make sure that you say that you have the best children in the world. So Ethan and Elle, that one's for you. I run a football team. And I know I'm speaking to an American here, but I will not say soccer, but I run a football team and a very brief story because this is by far my proudest moment, hands down. I played football when I was young, I played to a reasonable standard. I always wanted my son to get into football. He didn't enjoy it so much. He actually wasn't a very good footballer and got passed around teams. It was a deeply unpleasant experience. And I thought we might have blown this. He sat on the sideline and cried for a long time. So we thought about tapping out. And I got the opportunity to get my FA, which stands for Football Association in the UK, coaching badges. And decided if we can't find a football team for him, I will set up my own. So we did. Knole Jaguars is the team. And we ended up picking up all of the… at the time, the boys were 7 or 8 years old. We ended up picking up all of the boys that had struggled to find their way into any other football team. Ultimately, the ones that were objectively not very good by the standard of the other teams who had looked at them. And we set up a little team. And we lost our first… the statistic was we lost our first 10 games by more than 10-nil. And you don't need to be super into football to know that that's a tough indoctrination into football. But anyway, fast forward is we're 4 years into this now. The same group of lads that we had won the regional tournament, just the most overwhelming, fulfilling, heart-explodingly proud thing that anybody could do. You watched every parent on the sidelines sobbing, the coaches sobbing. Just, it was a wonderful experience. I'm very proud to say, I don't… when I, when you ask the question, your proudest moment, I don't have to look hard. That is, it stands out there as a shining beacon and one that I really truly love.

46:05 Scott Ingram: I'm sure there are many, but what's the biggest standout lesson from that? What do you take away from that experience? What allowed that to happen?

46:14 Adam Wicks: I'm sure it's exactly the same in the US, but even kids' football at an age of 7 and 8 is ruthlessly competitive. And the coaches of some of the other teams had looked for short-term success. I want to bring in kids who can make an immediate impact on my team. And these bunch of lads hadn't met the, hadn't met the standard. Ironically, the bunch of lads that we had the year later went on to beat some of the teams that they had been rejected from. And the overwhelming lesson I took from this is with the right environment, nurturing, coaching, guidance, there is the raw material in almost anybody. Objectively, these kids genuinely were not footballers. If I could show you the early training videos, you would concur with me, right? It wasn't really up for debate, but given that, given the right level of investment, these boys are now, now they're now footballers. And all it took was the bit of time and attention, bit of focus. And so I think you, there is a parallel to that with a work environment as well. I think sometimes there is the need for short-term productivity, there is a need for results, but very often with the right And obviously people need to show up with the right commitment on their side. I was very fortunate, the boys that I was working with, of which there's now 14 of them, have enthusiasm in droves. That's the easy part.

47:50 Scott Ingram: What I think I'm hearing, would it be fair to basically connect that back to our craftsman analogy earlier? Right. It's really more about taking that long-term view of development rather than, hey, we need to win the game this weekend. No, over the next couple of years, If we consistently do the right things, we'll be able to show everybody what's what.

48:13 Adam Wicks: Yeah. It reminds me of a quote by a famous British chef. He's called Marco Pierre White. So Gordon Ramsay's all over the New York Strip. I'm sorry, over the Las Vegas Strip. He was trained by a guy called Marco Pierre White. And he said a quote, which I love. And it's, a person who works with their hands is a laborer. A person who works with their hands and their brain is a craftsman, and a person who works with their hands, their brain, and their heart is an artist. And it makes a real differentiation. You can see in whether it's 7-year-old kids who are on a football pitch trying to work it out, whether it's somebody who is doing a demonstration, a salesperson like me trying to achieve KPIs and help customers get the outcome that they I think intuitively you can look at people and put them into one of those 3 categories, and all 3 of them are fine. But when you see an artist, somebody who is doing the doing, caring about it, and loving what they do at the same time, you end up with an exponentially different outcome. And those kids are all artists. So yes, you can definitely make that comparison with the work environment.

49:25 Scott Ingram: Love it. Love it. I got a whole new rabbit hole I need to go down. We'll have some fun with that. Let's pivot a little bit into I love to dig deep into the way that you're just managing your day, your time. And it's the way I like to ask this question is, your alarm clock goes off in the morning of a typical day, what time does that happen? And give us a detailed blow-by-blow till your head hits that pillow again.

49:47 Adam Wicks: I was telling you that I am suffering with jet lag somewhat.

49:50 Scott Ingram: Yep.

49:51 Adam Wicks: So my alarm doesn't go off, I just wake up. I don't have an alarm, which is a blessing and a curse because at home it's great, I get it predictably. When I fly the other side of the world, I'm still getting up at the same time. Double-edged sword. But I am not particularly a morning person. I start slow, get up, kids' breakfast, do the school run every morning, and then I will work relentlessly in the blocks that I am, I'm working.

50:17 Scott Ingram: I will…

50:17 Adam Wicks: my Gainsight is a West Coast-based organization. I live in London. There is a time differential there. So an acknowledgement that that some of my evenings may not be my own. So for that reason, I will do an intense block of work where I will acknowledge the outside world has to be… I need to be insulated from it. And I will put on as high-intensity music as I can get away with for as long as I can, and I will just work and work. And I can do that for 4 or 5 hours in a block, and I enjoy the fatigue that comes at the end of it. I get the emotional reward for retrospectively looking back at the hours passed and seeing what I've done. And I get the inverse of that, is if the time block passes and I look back and I haven't got, by my own measure, what I think I should have done, I also feel the downside of that. So I have a good internal reward and punishment mechanism that's healthy, that kind of keeps me on check. I'll then have a block in the late afternoon where I might be running my son's football practice or taking my daughter to dance or something like that, and then reset back into the evening. And once the kids are put to bed, which is probably around 8, 9 PM UK time, and I'll then go on and do a couple of hours acknowledging that I need my West Coast colleagues for support on some things. It's a model that works really well for me. You know, you kind of become very much conditioned to don't work weekends. That's my protected time. But I enjoy what it is that I do, which makes it easy to do that. I'm not a… I don't watch television. I have an incredibly short attention span. And so after putting the kids to bed, sitting down and doing something that there is a reward at the end of it, and the reward could be the proposal's gone out the door, whatever it could be, genuinely enjoy that. And I think There's that cheesy saying, if you love what you do, you'll never work a day. Probably not to that extreme, but I enjoy the process of doing… I love selling, the artistry of selling. Yes, because it's still yet to be really understood. I find it phenomenal that we are in an industry where people can transition from totally what would be traditionally non-complementary roles into it and do incredibly well. That anybody can enter at any given point in time. I can't think of many highly paid professions where you could say that. And so the landscape is constantly shifting in terms of what it is that we're selling into. Technology is constantly disrupting it. Anybody can enter it. The way in which it should be done is constantly debated. We don't sit here and debate how you should fly an airplane. It is a unique thing where we are constantly being evaluated. And then even as a successful person in the industry, each quarter you're reset back to zero and your homework is marked again to see if you're still competent in the thing that you may have done for a decade. This craft is crazy. Very few people are interviewed on a quarterly basis for a job that they've done for a decade. The bar is incredibly high. I salute any and all people who have had a sustained period as a sales professional because you are myopically focused on… you have a binary measure for your success. You have to prove your worth constantly. The lead that you pick up has a value attributed to it as it finds its way into your pipeline. The company has an expectation for what you should do with that. It is a tough way to make a living. And doing it well produces exponential rewards. But I find it fascinating, even having been in it for this long.

54:08 Scott Ingram: Yeah. One of the things you said that just got me thinking was that anybody can come into it, be successful. And it's so fascinating to see who can be successful in this. I think for years and years, and probably still true to some degree, folks thought, oh, athletes are great salespeople because they're competitive. I think to your point, Because they've operated on high-functioning, hopefully high-functioning, like teams. They understand how teamwork works. I noticed a trend, and I don't know that others really picked this up. There were 2 themes over the last handful of years that I thought, that's really interesting. One was teachers. Teachers make phenomenal salespeople, and there are parts of that are obvious, but I think there's parts of that are totally not obvious. One of the other ones was folks that came from competitive debate backgrounds.

54:59 Adam Wicks: Ooh, yeah, I can see that.

55:00 Scott Ingram: Or performance artists, people who were on stage and actors. I've had some wildly interesting people backgrounds on the show. And you think about that and you go, oh, that could actually make sense. Or one of my very favorite is if you've done the thing, if you've been in the role that you are then selling a solution to, that is an incredible superpower.

55:24 Adam Wicks: The teacher one I find really interesting because as you're talking about that, I think about that is almost what a CSM does. It is the hybrid of salesperson and teacher because you're there, you have the commercial acumen side of it, but also you're there to help organizations learn how to get more from the products or services that you sell to them. I think the extreme end of anything is by definition extreme, but an extreme salesperson, when you think about that, when you put in your head the extreme salesperson, typically, it's not the ideal person you would want to buy from.

56:01 Scott Ingram: You think pushy, you think of the stereotypical version.

56:05 Adam Wicks: You do, you do. And I guess if what we're saying…

56:08 Scott Ingram: yet to interview on this show, just to call out.

56:10 Adam Wicks: Yeah. By following that train of thought, every single salesperson is a combination of those typical sales skills, with a flavoring of teacher or sports professional, and each one brings something uniquely different. The most successful salespeople that I have worked with over the years have not been traditional salespeople. They maybe come from a solutions consulting background, or they've been in consulting, management consulting, as an example. And as you say, they have deep domain industry expertise, they have excellent communication skills, they have have deep empathy, they have curiosity, and they realize that the combination of these skills enables them to predictably bring about the outcome that they want. Then in this instance, instances just happens to be a sale. But I find that the range of personalities, backgrounds, experiences that you get in a sales organization is phenomenal, which always makes offices party great, right? Because you, you end up with people from all different walks of life. But I still don't think… I don't think ever sales will be formulaic. It will be something that you can apply to any individual and allow them to bring about the same outcome. I do think this understanding for the type of personality that has that curiosity to be able to want to ask the next question The person who can empathize with the challenges that the person on the other side might be feeling rather than just driving towards their own objective. Those are the sorts of things that are really hard to measure, but have an outsized impact on somebody's success in sales.

58:03 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Just thought exercise question. Is sales more art or more science?

58:08 Adam Wicks: I wonder if the answer to that question would be different split between management and individual contributors. And here's the reason I say that. I think as an individual contributor, my gut feel says there is more artistry to the process. There is more… back to the point around flexibility is more important than the execution of a discipline. So the flexibility is the artistry of it. That said, from a leadership point of view, artistry is not measurable. I can't put the artistry… it doesn't give me predictability. So in that instance, I want the playbook and I want the KPIs. And I hear what you say around artistry, but I want the science behind it because science is measurable, science is repeatable. We do the same experiment and come up with the same conclusion every single time.

59:08 Scott Ingram: So I think it's a very personal one that this conversation will continue over our beer afterwards. I have rather intentionally put myself in this position. So I very recently… this is the first show where I get to share my news publicly… I joined Winning by Design as a managing director, and they are A, I love revenue. I love that level of leadership, and I wanted to put myself in a position to have those conversations first and foremost.

59:36 Adam Wicks: That's awesome.

59:36 Scott Ingram: But their structure, what they're providing, what we are providing, is so science-based. It's revenue architecture and this stuff. But I believe you nailed it. And I actually think, and this is where I love the Winning by Design approach, because I think in general they're providing broader frameworks where you can operate within the framework and it's measurable, but there's space and there's room to be an artist and to be creative. So we understand here's the numbers we're trying to drive. Like, I don't care what kind of an individual contributor artist you are, you still have a number that you need to hit. Yeah, it's such an interesting position. The other thing that I've said for years Is I think there's been too much kind of management by the numbers, and we've tried to put people in boxes. And what I have found through this show is there are people out there who have superpowers. And if you had somebody on your team who could fly, like they're literally Superman, they have a cape, they can fly, would you lock them in a phone booth? Yeah, because that's what your numbers and your measurement… oh, they need to make 100 dials a day. I'm like, yeah, but if they make 4 of the right dials, yeah, they'll outsell the next 6 people. I love that. You really want them to make 100 dials?

1:01:02 Adam Wicks: Yeah. And I think, not to overdo the art-science analogy, but I think back to when, when I was in college and I did a little bit of art, did it very badly. When you're mixing the paints, if you're doing it well, there is a science to that. You know how that works. And thinking back to my house, I have a photograph from Brian Cox on my wall, which is the part of the constellation. And by that definition, the art is science. And in my whole way, the science is art. I'm literally using a scientific photograph as something to appreciate and say that's artwork. And so I think maybe they're one in the same, just depends with what lens you're looking at it from.

1:01:41 Scott Ingram: And to go to your original analogy, we're talking about a chef.

1:01:46 Adam Wicks: Yes.

1:01:46 Scott Ingram: Cooking and food and baking is an art based on science. I love that.

1:01:52 Adam Wicks: There's something in that.

1:01:53 Scott Ingram: There is. All right. Like I said, that's the beer conversation.

1:01:56 Adam Wicks: Yes.

1:01:57 Scott Ingram: I do want to come back to… we talked about the structure of your day. What are the kind of the core habits and routines that fit within your day?

1:02:04 Adam Wicks: So I don't really have a routine as far as a day is concerned, not in a regimented way. And I certainly don't set off every week with a set of objectives in the sense of I look at my life as a KPI or to-do list. But there are things that I like to look back on and think, that was a week that was worthwhile doing. And by that measure, there is a series of things that I will want to achieve at work and a series of KPIs that I'll want to set myself, because I'm good at measuring myself by numbers. Like, it keeps me accountable to myself. I think a lot of salespeople feel the same. Like, oversight's great, but not necessary. I'm I'm here to do as good as I can do. I will make sure that the work, the work to-do list is complete and I have been as proactive as I can be. So there will always be sufficient time to make sure that is done. I want the self-care component of it also to be taken care of. And so that's at least 3, 4 days in the gym. You know, I, do you like the way I didn't even commit to a single number? I said 3, 4 days. I kind of, I said 3 and thought that's not optimistic enough or ambitious enough, so we'll go for 4. But okay, we'll go with 3. So at least 3 times a week in the gym, plenty of time with the kids, plenty of time playing football. And just making sure, again, I have to keep going back to the same thing, but that flexibility component, right? That ability to say the sands may shift slightly, but that's okay because I'm flexible enough to be able to move things around so that come Sunday evening, you still feel fulfilled, and you have the confidence that the next week it is repeatable. Whether it's work travel, family dynamics change, a big RFP drops on your desk that you've got to deal with, that you have a process that doesn't mean that the week or a single day is disrupted, because the week is flexible enough to be able to allow for you to ebb and flow with whatever it is that life throws at you. I will personally just put blocks on my calendar which is a do not book, which is just recognition for the fact that I am not clever enough to predict what's going to come at me that week. So give myself some grace and allow myself some room to be able to use those for the things that inevitably will come up. And if nothing comes up, great, I just bought myself an hour.

1:04:33 Scott Ingram: I love that strategy. I use it quite a bit myself, right? Whether it's, I need to make sure I have a buffer before this really high-stakes call. I don't want to be back-to-back leading into a critical conversation. Or again, just time for, I need to do the deep work on a project, or again, blocking out time because I know some random thing is going to come at me. That flexibility piece is really interesting too, just again, thinking about the different personality types that thrive in. I can't imagine a way that you can very consistently build a very structured, I do the same thing every day the same way in sales. I just can't imagine how that would actually work. Not at the level of complexity that we're playing in.

1:05:16 Adam Wicks: Yeah, it might just be me. It also sounds a bit boring. Let's mix it up a day or two, whether it's inside my control or outside of my control variety, I think. But yeah, no, I agree. I totally agree.

1:05:27 Scott Ingram: Adam, what about your information diet? What are you listening to? What are you reading? What are you watching? When does that happen?

1:05:32 Adam Wicks: I don't read a lot of, a ton of business books. I like talking to people, much like what you do. I look, this is an awesome format. I like talking to people so you can learn firsthand about things. Although interestingly, one of the things that I, advice I would've given to my younger self, and it's a slightly controversial one, is to seek fewer mentors. And I think one of the traps I fell into, and lots of people do, is to this feeling that somebody wiser than them will show them the way, when in actual fact there are lots and lots of ways. And people who have done it previously did it historically with different contexts. And so that ability to build up your own intuition and conviction and find the path yourself. And so I like the personal conversation with people to try and build up their own conviction. And I try and digest as much information as I can to help me build up frameworks that are useful to that philosophy. Big one. I really like that. I like self-improvement. Sales books, yes. Candidly, a lot of them are now variations on the same topic. Over with the application of new technology to them. But for me, my primary source of entertainment, although it's not an information diet as you called it, is watching football. Sport. Love sport. Is that a bad answer?

1:07:00 Scott Ingram: I so want to lean into this fewer mentors thing. So be more specific in that. So you have an opportunity to talk to your younger self.

1:07:07 Adam Wicks: Yeah.

1:07:08 Scott Ingram: And you say fewer mentors. What mentor? Like, how do you guide them on finding the right mentors? Or what is the right number? How are you thinking about that differently now?

1:07:17 Adam Wicks: Yeah, I think the trap that I fell into was seeking people who'd done something similar, who could show me how it should be done. And the reality was that the insight that I should have been looking for is the process that they'd gone through to reach the conclusion, not the strict playbook that they'd done. And weirdly, only as I got older, I started to change the questions that I was asking of people. It was less around, tell me what you've done, but tell me why you did it that way. And I think a lot of us, when we talk around ourselves, it's almost like a… is their storybook. It's the chronological sequence of events that they went through. And it's interesting, everybody loves a story, but almost the bigger learning is in the mental decision process they went through at each step and the things that they weighed up to go left instead of right. And maybe a more accurate statement would be not to seek fewer mentors, but here is what you should be looking for in seeking them out. I was very fortunate in my job as a… I mentioned I work for a company that assessed sales young graduates for sales competencies. In doing so, the companies that we were assessing them for, I got to go and meet with the chief revenue officers of these companies to say, what sort of people are you looking for to fill? That's like a recruitment type role. I mean, at the time I was a kid meeting with these phenomenal sales leaders, and I was asking for their chronological, what did you do? How did you get here? I started as this, I then moved to that, and here was the next step I took in my career. And I was writing down a list of all of the things that you do to be successful. And I was ready to go and take that and do it myself. Obviously, that just doesn't apply. And had I pivoted and asked for the why behind every decision, I think I would have come out a far more informed person because that's then actually applicable. And also, context matters. And the reasons why people made their decision is almost as important as the decision that they made in the first place. There are deeply personal or things that inform why people make a decision that got them there. History is relevant as well. The decision that was made 5 years ago, it may be an appalling one today. Just that ability to be able to… and it's hard to do it as a junior or new person to an industry, but as quickly as you can, build up conviction on the things that you can be confident about. Have an opinion. I ultimate and unbridled accountability for what you do is such a gift. That ability to be able to say, if I'm successful, I want all of the flowers, and if I'm not, I'll take all the criticism because I have a hypothesis. I am responsible for my own income. I will get the commission check if it's successful, and I will take the inverse of that commission check if it's not. And I think that is a hugely undervalued skill that if I could have gone back to my 21-year-old self, I would challenge them to work out what you can build up conviction in very quickly and stand behind it until the evidence tells you otherwise, and then course correct, and then stand behind that opinion, and then course correct.

1:10:51 Scott Ingram: Yeah, it's interesting. I think about my own journey in a lot of ways, and I've had tons and tons of mentors to the point where I feel like I have something to learn from everybody I talk to. Obviously, I talk to some amazing people that are in my same line of work very intentionally to learn a lot from that. But I've always thought through those conversations, even through the books that I read and things like that, it's looking for nuggets. It's looking for insights that I can try and see if they fit for me. Because that's the real trick is figuring out what's going to work for me, for my style and my personality, because I'm not going to be somebody else. So what they did, like by definition, probably won't work for me. But there's probably pieces.

1:11:36 Adam Wicks: Yeah. And even if it's not immediately applicable now, the ability to have a filing cabinet of experiences that you've heard from other people, who have gone through things that maybe are not immediately relevant to you, but you can draw upon that at a future point in time, I think is incredibly helpful. You know, I think the… and that's one of the wonderful things about working at Gainsight is you're surrounded by incredibly gifted people who have a wealth of experience that raise the game of everybody else in the room. And I think you, you have not only an opportunity to learn from as many people as possible, but almost an obligation to reciprocate as well. And it makes it a bidirectional transaction. And going back to when I was 21, I didn't have a ton of, a ton of information to impart on these seasoned sales leaders. So that was much more one way. But I think as you gather more experience and understanding, there is an obligation, or should be an obligation, to reciprocate where possible and to be that… if you have been in the industry for a while, to actively seek out opportunities to find people who are new into the industry and do the right thing, which is to, if you've climbed your way up the ladder, throw a hand down to help somebody else climb up.

1:13:03 Scott Ingram: That's always been one of my goals with this show. I think of this, what we're doing right now is mentoring at scale. We've got an opportunity to impact a lot of people without… I don't have time to have 1,000 conversations with folks. Also, the idea of not only the catalog of insights, but the people that have those answers. One of the things, as I was deciding between roles, I had another opportunity that was truly like big enterprise focused. And when I thought about that opportunity and what I would need to do to be successful in it, I thought back to, and actually I need to close the loop with him because it was less relevant in this current role. But I interviewed a guy early in the podcast in the first couple of years named Trong Nguyen. Trong is now retired, but the most truly successful enterprise salesperson I've ever talked to. If you could be number one at Dell and then go to Microsoft and be number one at Microsoft, the list goes on and on. It's so ridiculous. Incredible guy, and I knew that the work that I would have needed to do in that other role… that's the guy that again may not have the perfect answers for me. But gosh, if there were a good guide, it was going to be Trong, and he did agree. Sure, I'll be happy to mentor you while I'm busy traveling around the world and doing all the great things he's doing now. Let's talk a little bit about so that was our information diet rabbit hole. That was fun. What about just tools and apps? And now I have to again add on kind of the AI layer. Like what? What technologies are you using on a regular basis?

1:14:36 Adam Wicks: The number of tools that I use has decreased dramatically because of Claude and ChatGPT. They fill so many gaps through the entire sales process, prospecting, ability to identify the right people, the curation of messaging that is, is relevant, the understanding of business priorities. The tailoring of messaging, even the ability to be able to understand pricing relative to the wider market is all readily available. And it is an incredibly powerful tool. As you were saying earlier, proficiency in AI is, if not already, going to become a key mandatory requirement to be successful in especially enterprise sales, but sales more broadly, I should suspect. LinkedIn, no surprises. I'm not a particularly active poster as it relates to thought leadership, but certainly when it comes to the curation of the right points of contact to, to be in touch with, building out territory plans, those sorts of things… LinkedIn. Social media as well, for more for connecting with the people whom I'm working with. I think a great barometer of when you start working with somebody is, especially on a customer or prospect side, is if they add you on social media because they're interested in your world beyond the email correspondence. I think they're probably the main tools. And then we have the internal work applications, which obviously Gainsight being a very big one is a wonderful way for us to understand the types of things that we should be doing with our customers, anything we need to get ahead of. We have an unbelievable AI platform called Staircase, which in a world of information overload allows for salespeople to be able to cut through the noise and work out what's happening right now. If I describe what it does practically, it's phenomenal. If you are working with a customer, if you consider how many different departments in your organization are talking to that customer, you've got you and you've maybe got a CSM and you've got support team and executive and professional services. There's just this huge amount of noise going to and from the people who you're working with. We have a platform that allows us to synthesize all of that information, every piece of traffic and correspondence from your organization to theirs and synthesize into what's happening right now, what's the real heartbeat. And so when I think about the technology that I use to understand What do I need to do right now with those customers I'm working with? That is my, okay, here is the hottest topic today that I need to act upon to either identify a revenue opportunity because they're talking about something that we haven't yet uncovered, or equally there's some challenges that we need to get ahead of. Staircase is, is the application that's, that's certainly one. But I think they're the primary pieces of technology that I use.

1:17:42 Scott Ingram: And do you subscribe to a particular sales philosophy?

1:17:46 Adam Wicks: I think not a specific one. I think over the years, like many people, I think I've been through Winning by Design, Miller Heiman, customer-centric selling, traditional MEDDIC training. There is wonderful components to each of them, and I think a lot like your analogy you were saying earlier around you speak to so many different people, mentors, leaders, people who have just done interesting things, and you pick the pieces from it that are the most relevant and applicable to you and your world and conversations and environments that you find yourself in. I think what I've found to be useful is to do the same thing from a sales methodology process and to say, for example, the M in MEDDIC for me is just It's the first thing that I hit. I have to know why we're in the room, the metrics that we're going after, the difference between where a company is now and where it is that they need to be. And then there's areas around customer-centric selling that I find particularly helpful. I actually find the account mapping in Miller Heiman to be a useful exercise. That's actually what I retreated to after the loss of that big deal I was talking about earlier. So I… not anyone in particular, but I do think there's a wonderful cocktail that comes out of all of these over time, that you create your own hybrid approach, which just services you well in the market you sell to, in the company you work in, the technology that you operate with, shaken, not stirred. What about the motivation side of all this?

1:19:21 Scott Ingram: How do you think about motivation? What ultimately drives you?

1:19:24 Adam Wicks: It's funny you ask that, because that is a question I ask of a lot of the salespeople who I've interviewed over my career. Why are you here? And there's very binary answers to that, which is For example, I like the income, but that's very binary. And if you've earned enough money, are you then no longer interested in the career? I think from my perspective, I have a genuine pride in selling. And much… it's, I guess, anybody who operates in a field that has a competitive component to it. You were talking about sports earlier, competitive component to it. A very clear mechanism of measurement, the ability to be able to repeatably and predictably achieve that is, it's almost addictive in its nature. And that one of the challenges it presents is that the more that you achieve in the field, the more that becomes the minimum viable product. I think they call it the curse of competency. If you're good at something and have high standards, that's great because you're probably gonna do quite well. But you may never be fully satisfied because the second that you achieve, the bar then goes up a little bit further. And the motivation for me is the artistry of it. I enjoy the artistry of it. I want my children to be able to see that. I tell them when they do something at school, if you're going to be there and you're going to put the hours in, you may as well give it your all. You're there for the same amount of time. Just go all out. And I try and set that example, which is Dan's also going to his version of school. He's up in his office, he's doing his work. I'd rather go back to school. Their recess sounds great and they have snacks, and I think their snacks are better than mine. But I just subscribe to life is short and we're just flying around on this big rock, and we're just… for me, just selling software. But if you're going to do it, you may as well do it as well as you can. And for as long as I'm able to, I will continue to do that. And I think that's the motivating thing. It's if you're going to be here, give it your all. Love it.

1:21:40 Scott Ingram: Love it. Is there something you believe that the average or typical salesperson would think is just crazy?

1:21:47 Adam Wicks: Probably not that the average person, average salesperson thinks is crazy, because I think inherently everybody understands it. But I think on the face of it, it may be questioned. And that is deal size is seldom an indicator for how impressive the sale is. Let me tell you what I mean. But I've been fortunate to do some large deals through my career, but the ones that were truly testing super hard… I was employee number 3 in a very small technology company. In fact, I was the first sales hire. We eventually exited the business, sold to a private equity organization. As a 3-person company with no marketing, no brands, no track record, getting a $50,000 deal across the line was phenomenally difficult. The level of mental gymnastics, creativity, building the plane while you're flying for that is a degree of entrepreneurialism that is seldom afforded to the large deals that I've done, where far more resources are available to you. And often when we are interviewing, I'm very curious about not just the stellar many tens or hundreds of millions dollar deals. But tell me about the ones where you had to show up in many different forms. You were part marketeer, you were doing a bit of the legal, you really had to act as the full entrepreneur in that.

1:23:31 Scott Ingram: Tell me about a time that you were the entire team.

1:23:34 Adam Wicks: Exactly, yeah, where the playbook wasn't constructed for you, there wasn't a process. You… those are the ones I love. They're deals that I find so interesting because as we all climb higher and higher to the top and look more and more at the mega deals that exist in the industry, there is this amazing plethora of entrepreneurial wizardry that salespeople are doing to build a company, especially in the early days, which I just think is absolutely outstanding. So I'm not really a point that I think other people would disagree with or find crazy. But my personal view is I love the small, scrappy startup work through the night deals as much as the mega deals. Love it. Love it.

1:24:29 Scott Ingram: I've got a friend that I won't name him. But if you're curious, and you want to ping me, I'll connect you if appropriate. Probably somebody that's been on this podcast, is experimenting with positioning himself as a fractional founding salesperson. So putting himself in that position to do that at scale with multiple, it's really interesting work that he's doing.

1:24:50 Adam Wicks: So that's a super cool proposition.

1:24:52 Scott Ingram: If you need that, hit me up, I'll introduce you. But he's still testing it out and trying to figure out if that's the thing he wants to do. Let's go to the flip side of the crazy thing. I'm curious about, as you think about the sales dogma, like the stuff that everybody in sales believes that you think, actually, I think that's wrong?

1:25:11 Adam Wicks: I don't know the answer to that question. Can I ask you what you think? I would love to know your take on that, genuinely, because you've asked that question to plenty of people. As you think about synthesizing all of the responses that you've got, your broad horizon, how do you think about that question?

1:25:29 Scott Ingram: One, There is an episode where I was interviewed. So if you go back to episode 62, you can hear like the whole thing, but it's been a minute now. And who knows how I answered it? Because I'm sure I was asked that question. I'm sure I answered that question. One thing that's actually really aligned in the work that I think our respective organizations are doing is, to your point, in terms of the size of the deal that matters, I think there's too much emphasis on just the quota and just the revenue number. I think that we don't look at the quality of deals. And I actually articulated this at one point. I was in an organization, I hadn't been there very long. We had a new CRO come in and was kind of looking at me and looking at some other people. And I basically made the case for, yeah, on paper, I'm not the number one guy right now. But if we look a little bit deeper, I think there is an argument that I am. And it was really about, again, if we look at just top line. So let's say you have a rep that does $1 million and another rep that does $800,000. And the million-dollar rep, 25% of their deals churn after the first year. And another set of the deals are creating just a massive amount of stress on the services organization or the implementation team because they're just not right-fit companies. This is round peg into square hole. And they're leaving, they're pissed off, like they're out in the market saying bad things. But the $800,000 guy, his customers are super happy. They're renewing, they're making introductions, they're doing reference calls. All the things are going right. They're very profitable. Again, I think we don't look deep enough into… and this is where I fell in love with the work that Winning by Design is doing, because I had some of these ideas conceptually, but they did the math on it. They have this whole bowtie model where the left side of the bowtie is the sales and marketing funnel on its side. But the real power in a SaaS business, in a recurring revenue business, on the right side of the bowtie is retention and expansion and growth. And that's actually the compounding side of the business. We actually have control. Nobody talks about this. We have controls as sellers in bringing in the right deals for our organizations that provide so much more leverage and value. In fact, one, one of the deals I'm the most proud of in my entire career is super early. This is 15 years ago, I did a deal with an organization at a time where we… this was a startup, I'm not going to name all the names in this one… we would sell any company all the stuff that we had. There were 3 main products, like we'd give you everything for $10K a month. So $10K MRR, $120K ARR, like you could have everything. There was so much value in this and so much impact that we were going to be able to deliver I sold one of the tools for 3 times what we normally sell it for, right? So this is like a $350,000 deal. I basically set them on the roadmap and the trajectory to become a million-dollar client, which they did. And I'm 90-some percent sure that they are still a client today, and they're probably paying more than a million dollars. So that one little deal I did 15 years ago is now generated $15, $20, $25 million in revenue. And what does that mean for the value of that business? I'm super proud of that. Because again, it was thoughtful, it was super impactful, it was good, not only for the customer, but it was good for us as a business.

1:29:15 Adam Wicks: That makes total sense. I think one of the things that I see in, in my world is the playing that forward is the conflict that can exist in some org design between For example, a Chief Sales Officer who might be responsible for the new pipeline acquisition, and a Chief Customer Officer who may be responsible for retention, expansion, growth, those sorts of things of that customer base. And in total extreme ends of the world, you'd have the salesperson selling whatever they can get the purchase order on. And in the other inverse of that, the Chief Customer Officer can veto anything that they don't think, you know, fits well. And the reality is that the chief sales officer needs to be sympathetic to the retention rate, and the customer officer needs to be ambitious enough to take on customers that don't fit perfectly within TAM. As an example, we do have to stretch this, and there are going to be risking clients, but this constant to and fro of those 2 things. But I think it's interesting the role that the salesperson plays in that, and is the compensation model structured in a way that allows those people to benefit from signing clients that are healthy for the organization as a whole, rather than just that individual year's quota. And I think that's a huge point for companies, especially considering that customer acquisition cost is significantly higher than customer retention or expansion cost. And therefore, not only are we spending a lot of money on commission, marketing, advertising to acquire these bad fit deals, but they then churn. We would've been far better taking less revenue upfront that we get to the efficiency further down the line with those more margin-rich dollars than that other one. So I think that's an awesome point. I love that.

1:31:04 Scott Ingram: I actually had a version of this conversation recently with Jeff Bajorek, and he asked the same thing. Okay, then how do you manage the alignment on this? And again, I'm not a fan of adding just layers and layers of complexity. But my thought was, just put a trail on it. Give me a small commission every time they renew and every time they buy something additional. That now creates an incentive for me to bring on really great fit clients that are going to renew and grow over time. And it creates an annuity for me. Cool. Now that's golden handcuffs. I get that as long as I work in the same organization. So if I'm high quality and I'm bringing high quality deals, my golden handcuffs get thicker and stronger over time.

1:31:46 Adam Wicks: And I do think there is a model that the industry is moving towards where that is inbuilt by design as we move towards consumption-based models for pricing becoming far more the norm now, or even at the extreme end, outcomes-based pricing. If you're telling me the outcome of using your service is this business outcome, we will pay you or a percentage of that once we get there. And with the advent of AI, the barrier to entry being lowered, more risk being applied to the vendor versus the buyer that starts small, grow organically, there is a really interesting question there as to what role does the salesperson play in that sort of environment? And is that more of a CSM versus a salesperson? And in that world where the sales motion never stops, which has been true of SaaS where we have an annual renewal for a long time. But in a world of consumption, the line between sales and customer success is incredibly blurred. And so how do we then think about the remuneration for people in those sorts of roles? And our salespeople, to your point around teachers, are we needing more sales-teacher hybrids Because that better serves the economic model for consumption. I'm not sure, but I think it's gonna be interesting to see how that, how that plays out.

1:33:12 Scott Ingram: You know what I realized in what you just shared is I've always been a fan of the idea of success-based pricing. Yes. The challenge is just tracking it and holding everybody accountable to that is totally insane. Interestingly, what if there, we decide mutually in some way that there's some type of AI that is the arbiter. Of that success. Yes. So now it's a third party, if you will, and that's better for both parties. As a selling organization, if we're delivering massive levels of success, I expect massive income results from that. And it de-risks the whole situation for the buyer because they're only paying if they're getting the result.

1:33:59 Adam Wicks: Yeah, I totally agree. And I think often when outcomes-based pricing is positioned by, for example, a CFO, It's seen as a way of de-risking it for them. I will pay you at the point in time that outcome is derived. However, there is potential unlimited upside there. And so the amount that you could pay for this product or service could be significantly higher. And so that unknown, I think, is still uncomfortable for both buyers and sellers. The, the potential of not receiving remuneration from a vendor point of view is deeply uncomfortable. From the buyer, I don't want an unlimited and open paycheck for this. There's probably some…

1:34:41 Scott Ingram: there's probably happy medium. Yeah, exactly. You pay me something instead of absolutely nothing so that we're not completely, as the vendor, at risk. And we'll cap this at some level to where… and you agree that you don't get to renegotiate the deal because you're so successful using whatever it is the heck we're selling. Yeah. Adam, we've already done some of this, but let's get a little bit more explicit about it. So what advice would you give to somebody that's in the early stages of their sales career right now?

1:35:09 Adam Wicks: A great piece of advice that was given to me is when it comes to… if we think about somebody starting a sales career… is to focus on the 4 Ts that help you to orientate yourself and pick a career that is going to be fulfilling. The 4 Ts being the timing of what it is that you're doing, picking the right market opportunity at the right time, the territory that you're going to be selling into, and understanding that is fruitful and viable. The technology, assuming that we're talking about software or a technology organization here, although not explicit to that, I guess you could call that product, is one that has a differentiator. And then the final part, which is what you bring to the table, is the talent. So timing, territory, technology, talent. Want. And you are responsible for that last part and sharpening and refining and upskilling on that. So that is your piece to bring to the table. But before you even get there, the other ones are your desk research projects, your back-channel references, your Glassdoor reviews. That is how you think about that. And in the age of whatever your preferred flavor of AI is, your ability to be able to uncover everything on those 3 Ts is greater than it's ever been. On the talent part, it is an arms race when you start in a career in sales to get yourself as eloquent and competent as you possibly can do in the environment that you're in. And so on all of the the expected components of your job, look to be overcompetent. So on your understanding of the technology, fine, the MVP, everybody will get there, but go further than it. It will serve you well. On your understanding of the value proposition, you may well be fortunate enough to rely upon a business case team or a value engineering team. That's great, they are there, but the degree to which you understand that. The degree to which you can be competitive in your own organization when you're starting out early is really important, and competitive in a healthy sense. It will take time for revenue to build as you start out, but the activity metrics… one of my old CEOs said to me, activity breeds rewards. You simply have to do. It is a cliché, but working super hard and being as focused on the personal upskilling as you are on the act of doing the job itself… the philosophy being, if you've got 2 hours to chop down a tree, spend an hour and 45 minutes sharpening the axe and the rest of it swinging… that ability to build your craft And part of that being… and I'll use my own personal experience here… I got into sales because I wasn't particularly good at anything else. I'm surrounded by people who fell into the sales industry, and that can sometimes breed apathy in the early stages while people are still working out what it is that they want to then go and do. In the graduates that we brought into sales careers, the dropout was incredibly early across all industries. We placed across pharmaceuticals, financial services, but those that really dug in, upskilled, went on to hugely successful careers. And there's some phenomenal data around how early years performance in sales goes on to produce outsized impact. And so it's the start of the race, and a good start to a race is a key component to winning it. It's very difficult, it's very hard. Keeping motivation is incredibly challenging. But if you are in the absence of the wins coming through immediately, if you're seeing personal development happen, that's your win. You can pocket that and bank that, and the results will follow.

1:39:30 Scott Ingram: Love that. Love that. What about now somebody that's in the middle of that race and they're pacing okay, but they're nowhere near winning the race and they have aspirations to be a winner of the race. They want to stand on the podium. They want to be on the top of the leaderboard. What do you tell them?

1:39:46 Adam Wicks: I think every salesperson should be able to acknowledge there is a better salesperson that they could become in the middle of the race, working out the delta between the salesperson you are. And the salesperson you could become is a really important understanding. You have got the ground-level understanding. You've maybe got 3, 4, 5 years under your belt at that point. Your ego would have to be pretty off the charts to say I'm the completed person at any point in your sales career. That ability to be able to look at what you think is the complete rounded salesperson, whether it's arbitrary or it's real. If you can look in your world to somebody who is just flawlessly executing… by the way, that person also probably thinks they have a delta to make up… but that ability to be able to understand the difference between the person you could become and the person you are, and understand that gap, and invest entirely and completely in filling that gap. Gap. For me, it's totally and completely invest in that gap. For me, what I have found it useful to do is to do quarterly check-ins and to say, what is the delta at this point in time between me and the best person that I'm seeing it done? And very often they are tactical things that I'm seeing them do. And the… with the passage of time Um, just because you were good at something doesn't mean you're any longer good at it. And I have been historically a wonderful negotiator. My skills got not so hot over a period of time. I don't know if it was a lack of appreciation for it or just I was working on different things, but I got to a meeting and thought, I'm not as good at this as I should be. Okay, we go back to the drawing board on it. And so that constant self-evaluation, which is way more important than an external person coming in and marking your homework because they only see you at a point in time. You are seeing the constant view, and having that gold standard that you know you can aspire to and checking your own homework against it is a really healthy calibration. So at that middle point of the race, understand the delta. And work on it.

1:42:15 Scott Ingram: The most interesting thing about that is calling out the idea that skills atrophy. Yeah. And if we use the race analogy, there have been times in my life where I could run a 7 or 7.5-minute mile.

1:42:32 Adam Wicks: Good for you. A lot better than I could do.

1:42:34 Scott Ingram: But if I go run right now, I am not going to get anywhere near that, even though I've done it in the past. And to your point, there are There's parts of the sales process where, yeah, I just haven't flexed that muscle in a while. I haven't run that kind of a race, recognizing just because you had it once doesn't mean you have it right now. All right. I got my own thinking I need to do now just based on that, because I do think we can easily fall into that trap of I've had that skill, therefore I have that skill, which is maybe a false truth.

1:43:06 Adam Wicks: Yeah. And the humility to acknowledge that can be true, especially if it's something that you've done well for a very long time, to go back to basics and say, this thing that I've done for a very long time, has it degraded? Or has my… has the way in which I apply this, does that now need to change? Because my role has changed, my organization's changed, the market has changed. Is the level of discovery that I've done for the last five years… is that sufficient today, or does that need to change? I think that is a healthy framework to go through.

1:43:47 Scott Ingram: Yeah, love it, Adam. We've covered a ton of ground. This has been so much fun. Is there anything we didn't talk about that you really hoped that we would?

1:43:55 Adam Wicks: Nothing specific, but I will call out something as we close out. I think podcasts like this are. Even more critical than they ever have been. You were talking previously about the fact that technology… that there's a lot of angst and anxiety in the space at the moment in sales, that we have a lot of disruption going on, whether it's geopolitical, whether it's financial headwinds, whether it's technological disruption. I think just having a community around you of like-minded people who are helping you navigate what it is that sales means to you, to enrich your thinking, to hear people have a discussion like this now, I think is hugely, hugely valuable. We're in a wonderful industry where the work can be challenging, the upside is wonderful, the opportunities are plentiful, but it's tough. I just think there's a great platform. I love what you're doing. I think this is a great service. This to people who are interested in this industry and would like to participate and listen to these conversations. So just, I guess, just a thank you to you. I think it's a thank you from me. It's nice to have the platform. It's nice to be able to talk with you as well. I've thoroughly enjoyed the discussion, and having listened to the podcast myself, I get a ton from them. So I guess just closing is a genuine heartfelt thank you.

1:45:22 Scott Ingram: Love that. Appreciate it. If I consolidate, so you talked about the 4 Ts. Yes. The way I heard that, I would just simplify into, let's tie our themes together. So the first theme is taking that long-term personal development focus so that regardless of how you're viewed as a performer today, over the next number of years, you can be at a point Personally, whether you're already at the top now and you want to stay there, or you're in the middle and you want to get to the top, that you're developing the talent and you're developing yourself, and frankly, you're developing your AI skills and everything else to be in a position that you can thrive. And the other three T's to me are really just putting yourself in the right position. I agree. And both of those are things that as a collective group we're working on. So again, as I release this, where I'm probably still in a little bit. Of a beta phase. There's probably some testing that's happening with folks like Adam who've been on the podcast and folks that have been to the summit in the past, but we're changing the game with what we're doing inside of society, the Sales Success Society, for exactly this reason. I think I'm not looking to create a place where, oh, we have the answers, right? Come buy our training, come buy our thing. No, this is the place that you go with the other artists, the other craftsmen who, like, we're really be intently trying to figure this out, and we need to find our way. And as the world evolves… what's crazy to me is when I started this podcast, it'll be 10 years this coming October. Wow. And my first…

1:47:05 Adam Wicks: dude, congrats, that's so cool. You must feel so proud, man. That's awesome.

1:47:10 Scott Ingram: My first thought was, this will be really interesting over time because at some point we'll have a recession. And I'll get to learn from people that are selling successfully in the middle of recession. What I did not plan on was we would learn from people who were selling successfully in the middle of a global pandemic. And now we're going to learn how people sell successfully and continue to grow and evolve their careers and find success in the middle of whatever the heck we're going to ultimately call this AI wave. Hey, in the future, Ping me and just let me know what we ended up calling this phase. But this is huge. To your point, the most disruption I've ever seen in my career that's been a couple of decades long. So it's a fascinating time. I appreciate you just taking the time to share the story. The last thing we have to do is we have to figure out a way to make this actionable. What would you encourage our listener to do over the course of the next one-two weeks? To improve themselves and improve their results.

1:48:11 Adam Wicks: Number 1, make a list of the things that you think are gaps in your own skill set. Do it in isolation. Don't ask for input. Mark your own homework and then ask for somebody who is a trusted advisor who you work with to give their input on it. Once you've done that, if you're feeling brave, put it out to a broader set of people, and if they're comfortable, share the other people's feedback as well. I said these 3 things, Steve gave me his input on them, here's Steve's input, can other people then add to this? Build it up as a catalog, get everybody's take on what it is other people are saying. It is a really interesting exercise for you to start understanding yourself better. It's slightly different to the traditional performance reviews This is starting with your own understanding of yourself and allowing people to make commentary of it in an informal environment. It's been really helpful to me. I think the second thing I would recommend, and I only say this because it has served me so phenomenally well over the last nearly 2 decades, is really get to know your colleagues and the people with whom you are working with at your customers or your aspects. Really get to know them. You'll find it opens up conversations, opportunities, friendships that you may not have done otherwise. And I have found sharing things about me… and, you know, maybe even considered sometimes as oversharing, we're all humans… gives people the permission to do the same. And I I'm very proud that many of my friends that I have now are people who ultimately are sold to over the years, and I think that's a wonderful thing. And then the final thing I would encourage people to do, again just because it's worked for me so well, is when you're building the internal team that you're working with to go on a deal, really passion and pride into setting the mission as to what you're doing, why you're doing it, why they're coming on the journey with you. And if you don't know, spend the time to work it out. It is a great investment of time. A truly motivated team around you will move mountains to make great things happen. I owe the vast majority of the success that I've had to the people around me. Um, a very small cog in the overall machine. And so just having these wonderful people show up in their fullest way with their full personality, feeling great about doing amazing work that you helped to set a vision for, really does do spectacular things.

1:51:10 Scott Ingram: That's incredible. We'll say just as a parting thought, I think the very last thing to get disrupted Our human relationships, the more you can lean into that. And if you're still here, you're probably our people. Drop me a note. Send me a note on LinkedIn. Send me an email to scott@top1.fm. I'm going to set up a trial thing. Ask me about society if you're interested in that, and I'll share that particular vision. Adam, thanks for taking the time. It's been absolutely incredible. It's been awesome, dude. Thanks for having me. Thanks for listening to the Sales Success Stories podcast. To be sure you never miss an episode and for an invitation to our Sales Success Community powered by Influitive, subscribe to our newsletter at top1.fm.