Hey friends,
When you hear PTC, BMC, or Ariba, you probably picture old-school software.
Big deals, long sales cycles, people in suits.
With all the noise around AI, it’s easy to think this kind of selling is dead.
But then you look at who’s actually running sales at the top AI companies.
The CRO at OpenAI was under John McMahon’s leadership. In fact over 100 CROs today learned from John.
The fastest-growing companies still hire from the same playbook.
So next time someone says sales have changed completely, remember this.
Long story short, this week I listened to John on Topline. (I’m an avid listener of the pod and reader of the newsletter).
If you don’t know John McMahon, he ran sales at five public companies, and his team at PTC built MEDDIC.
Here are my takeaways of the chat he had with the team at TopLine.
John nails one type of CEO that I see sometimes too.
Top of the class, smart at work, gets lots of money from VCs, and suddenly thinks he knows sales.
They even hates paying salespeople because he believes everyone can sell their baby.
Well, if you are a CRO with such a company, you’ve got to learn how to push back hard soon.
Remember the CEO and the CRO should be at the same level. Both C-execs.
One of my favourites, and, to be honest, something I have been personally doing for years now.
John hires for five things:
Skills come later. You only get skills by doing the same thing over and over, and only driven people stick with it.
The line that hit me: every bad hire was a character problem, never a skills problem.
Incredible lesson here.
Another jem here.
John looks back at his old times as CRO vs the John of today - and the main learnings/improvements.
He explains that at PTC, if a rep failed, they just let him go.
Over time John realized this was wrong.
He started holding managers accountable.
Either you hired the wrong person, or you hired the right one and couldn’t train or lead him.
And this is what he told his managers: “I want you to go down to the bathroom. I want you to look in the mirror, and I want you to come back and tell me what you did wrong.” 😅
I agree 100%.
It’s too easy to blame the reps.
Sam asks if it’s a problem when a CRO never carried a bag. John says 100%.
You can’t coach a rep in a deal if you never sold one yourself.
I’m bullish on this too.
Somebody had to say it!
John says that in AI companies going from 1 million to 100 million in a year, most reps are just taking orders.
CEOs tell him they can’t tell who’s good or bad because everyone is selling something.
I see the same thing, to be honest.
At Anthropic or OpenAI, it’s hard to know who’s actually strong because the market brings so much demand on its own.
At Salesforce back in the day, or Slack, it was the same thing.
You’ve got to have some friction to really see who’s good and who’s not.
Welcome friction and challenge in selling; it will forge better reps.
Near the end, John talks about a rep from BladeLogic.
He closed the biggest deals there.
Then he moved to BMC and did it again.
Two more companies, same story.
I love this. That’s repeatability. It’s sticking to fundamentals in sales and showing up in every situation that comes your way.
One good year can be luck. Four companies in a row means you actually know what you’re doing.
I love these podcasts because they tell me one thing: forget the noise, sales isn’t changing.
It’s evolving, yes, but the repetitions will make or break it.
Forget the noise.
Thanks for reading this far, see you all next week!
