Javier shares his unconventional path into sales—from selling industrial supplies to running large enterprise sales teams—and how that perspective keeps him humble. He believes tech sales, while complex and demanding, is still a privileged career compared to the “real world” jobs of frontline workers. That humility, paired with a deep curiosity about customers, is what he sees as the cultural backbone of great sales teams.

We dive into the universal patterns behind category-winning companies: being at the right place at the right time, executing with discipline, and tailoring GTM motions to personas and markets. Javier explains why territory management is his “superpower,” showing how equitable, data-driven account allocation creates meritocracies, uncovers hidden revenue, and enables dynamic scaling.

Beyond mechanics, Javier reflects on leadership, hiring, and culture. He shares candid thoughts on unconscious bias in recruiting and why sales leaders must treat hiring like revenue—valuing repeatable processes over lucky wins, and intentionally sourcing diverse talent that can grow into tomorrow’s leaders.

ELIO NARCISO:

Hey everyone, my name is Elio Narciso, the co-founder and CEO at Scalestack. Welcome to the Revenue Engine Masters podcast, where, as you know, we deep dive into go-to-market and sales ops and marketing ops and, like, revenue, and how to find cutting-edge ways to transform how businesses grow today. 

Today our guest—and I'm so happy to have you here—is Javier Molina. A seasoned CRO with a proven track record leading go-to-market teams at companies like MongoDB, Docker, and Starburst. And I think what's interesting about your career is that you've built large enterprise sales teams, but you also have a deep understanding and passion for bottom-up selling motions. And I thought that was super interesting. Seeing your career, you've been leading several enterprise teams serving millions of developers. So you have a deep understanding of that buyer. And in general, you're an expert on open source monetization and developer-first go-to-market. 

So there's gonna be a lot of great stuff we can talk about today. So welcome, Javier. I don’t know if you want to share anything else about you with the audience?

JAVIER MOLINA:

No, thank you. Quite the intro—I appreciate it. And I don’t know about “expert”, I definitely learned. I’ve got my battle scars and learned by fire. And yeah, I think you did a good job introducing me. And I think you're one of the only people that says my name correctly besides my wife, so thank you.

ELIO NARCISO:

You told me that, yeah. 

I speak Spanish, so that's why I enjoy saying it properly—but also because everybody mispronounces my name, and so I have a passion for getting names right. But yes, you made me laugh when we met in person the first time and you told me only your wife calls you that way—and sometimes it's, you know...

JAVIER MOLINA:

Yeah. Only when I'm in trouble, usually.

ELIO NARCISO:

Very good. So welcome to the podcast and thank you for being here. 

One of my last guests in this was Roman Gruhn, also a former Mongo. And in his podcast, he basically had, like, almost a love letter to sales. In the sense that he shared how difficult sales is, especially tech sales. And that, you know, he empathizes and wants to build great go-to-market ops teams that help the really difficult job of sales. And so, since you've been a seller, you've led teams, and you've been a CRO—how difficult is tech sales today? And why is it maybe more or less difficult than, say, five years ago?

JAVIER MOLINA:

Yeah, really good question. To preface it, I actually think tech sales is easier relative to other professions, for what it's worth. Like, if you don't know anything about my background, I did not have a career aspiration to be in sales when I was in college. I had a capstone class with a professor that used to sell horse shampoo, and he taught me all about objection handling and prospecting and making cold calls, which is where I found my passion for sales.

My first job was selling industrial supplies. I had to cold call oil fields, go out, meet with them, understand their needs, go back to the office, place the order, wait for a Sprinter van to show up, unload the van, box it up, and then deliver it back myself to the customer.

And I made 3% on every sale. So when you're selling $300 worth of nuts and bolts, you can do the math there. It's not that much money. My next job was selling security systems. I worked seven days a week. I was the number one rep in the country and I made $62,000. So when I tell that story, especially with BDRs and people that are early career, it's not in the sense of, you know, I walked both ways in the snow to school, but more so, when I got to software, And I was being asked to make phone calls in the air conditioning and they were paying me 50% more than I was being paid at my last job where I worked seven days a week and nights, and I put 50,000 miles on my car in two years. I thought it was relatively easy based on what my experience had been. So I think it is a very complex job. 

Tech sales is not for the faint of heart. I think you have to be willing and open to learn, willing and open to develop yourself. I think your personas are extremely technical. I think you're dealing with massive technology waves that are happening right in front of our eyes. And so there's a level of drive, ambition, intelligence that you have to carry with yourself every single day.

And I think with that, it is a difficult job, but I think we also get paid pretty well for what we do. And I try to ensure that level of humbleness and lack of entitlement is embedded into all my sales teams.

ELIO NARCISO:

I love that. Recently, one of my investors - or not my investor, but investors in Scalestack - posted about his dad being one of the top sellers in the Ontario food market. So he's based in Toronto and his dad for 50 years has been working six, seven days a week at the Ontario food market. And he got profiled in a newspaper there in Canada and the story went super viral because, I mean, imagine how much his dad has learned over his life about all of the things that we care about - caring for your customer, caring for quality, caring for attention to detail and picking the right product for your customers. 

So it was an incredible story and it's basically what you're saying.

JAVIER MOLINA:

Yeah, I mean, relative to what I call the real world - my wife was a social worker and she got paid as much as a teacher's salary. And I think it's just absurd, the pay differential and complexity and difficulty between what I do and what she used to do. Same goes for first-line workers. My mom was a pharmacist in a hospital. So I think, you know, I can go on and on on this topic, but I just think it's a  good perspective to have. 

I think we're incredibly fortunate to be in tech sales. And while it is complex and difficult, relative to other careers, I think it's a great career to be in, and it's also a lot of fun.

ELIO NARCISO:

Very good. I love that. 

So you mentioned different types of selling jobs and then you built these revenue engines across database companies or analytics or developer tools. And then with the other examples that you mentioned, what are the patterns that you think are universal across different product categories for sales?

JAVIER MOLINA:

Yeah, sorry. I think in terms of patterns, there's a couple of them. 

One, regardless of whether it's data or infrastructure or analytics, I think it's the right time, right place. Like even if you look at the history of Datadog, before Datadog there was Source Labs and a company I used to work at called SolarWinds. Datadog really came along with the timing of DevOps. You had Vertica and then you had Snowflake. You had MapR and Hive, which Databricks ended up winning that space. 

So I think there's an element of right time, right place and timing with the market and trends. It's not to say that the initial thesis or technology was wrong, but more so the timing of the market. 

Even when you look at Mongo, the timing was perfect. It was when SaaS was coming online. It was when applications were becoming more modern. It's when DevOps was turning into a huge role in the developer space.  Right time, right place, I think is one pattern. Two, I think the right level of execution across all of those markets or segments is still relevant.

‍Meaning, going to market and the way that you approach it is relative to the company. So PLG versus enterprise or open source adoption versus outbound prospecting. I think the right mix and the right level and understanding how you win is really important. 

So whether you're selling to data engineers or DevOps teams or CIOs, there's an element that you can apply across the board.

ELIO NARCISO:

And so timing, very important and being at the right time with the right product. 

What about the customer and the persona themselves? 

I had a different guest - this is Chris De Noia, another CRO - and he shared with us that he wants his salespeople to love their customer. That you need to be passionate about the actual people that you're selling to, otherwise you're not gonna care enough. 

And so, I think we mentioned at the beginning that you built large enterprise sales teams, but also have a deep understanding of bottom-up selling motions. How do you sell into so many different types of personas? What has been important for you as you developed your career?

JAVIER MOLINA:

I think ultimately you're tying a couple of things together. One, you're tying the actual users of the technology together with the adoption of the technology and the... Because I think if you don't, in the space that we're in where you're... I think about it a lot like you're selling sales products. I've never sold go-to-market products like you, you have to appeal to the AEs and then get a budget from the CRO.

The days of getting the CRO to implement something down to the AEs is, you hear the gamble there, right? And I think the same thing is relevant for technical sales. 

So the personas that you're selling to, one, they live in a world where their job is predicated on bringing forth the best technology to help them do their jobs. And as sellers, just by trade, we are professional sellers, we are not professional DevOps engineers or data engineers. So their world is much more technical and complex than we'll ever know. So, being able to help them buy the best solution relative to the market or industry that you're in, I think is the job

Being technically curious is always a good trait as a seller. And being upfront and honest with the market opportunity your company provides—but also the challenges that others in their space face—is really important.

So those are the kinds of patterns I see across data engineers focused on analytics, developers building apps, DevOps teams managing infra. You need to drive adoption at the IC level, but tie that value to the C-suite—CIO, CTO, but at the same time also pass the standards of the infrastructure platform teams. There's that three-legged stool I reference often—being able to appeal to all three is critical in this kind of sale.

ELIO NARCISO:

Wow, a lot of great stuff here. 

So let me pinpoint one, which I think is great. It's like curiosity.

I wholeheartedly agree that you have to be curious to be in this job. You have to be, because I mean, caring means also like curiosity - like what are their problems?

‍What is it that we need to solve? Because only then you can really sell, which means bringing a product that can solve their problem. 

My curiosity for you is, it seems as you explained, like different, very different motions - you know, appealing to an individual developer who maybe loves certain things about simplicity and free tools and stuff like that. And versus selling to a leadership layer or an enterprise buyer. 

First, I'm curious about where you have found more personal enjoyment in selling? And two, what are the motions to grow both sets of buyers? So what have you done in your career to say, the bottom-up approach in order to scale needs to have this versus the enterprise-led sales needs to have this other set of features?

JAVIER MOLINA:

Certainly. I think to answer your first question around enjoyment, I enjoy the engine of revenue, right? I enjoy how product marketing is thinking about taking the product to market, how marketing and BDRs and outbound prospecting is thinking about creating demand and pipeline, how the sales team is executing across enterprise, mid-market, how our backend operations team is supporting the workflows of the AEs and we're building out territory management dashboards and really the whole thing that fits together, right? 

I make a lot of references to collegiate sports, but like, you know, in the U.S. college football is a huge deal. And the product that they put on the field, I think it's very important. But at the same time, pick your sport or pick your industry, music, what have you. But all the pieces have to fit together, the production, the musicians, the conductor, the whole thing has to fit well in harmony.

I think that's really the ultimate role of the CRO. And what I really enjoy is both the science and all the sales process that we put in place, but also the art of figuring out who and how and why customers buy from us and how to replicate that and create it to be more durable. 

In terms of how to appeal and how to build these certain things,

I think you can never be a master of everything, right? You have to be able to be a great leader, and to be a great leader, you have to attract great talent and you have to set proper expectations.

Most CEOs are very product focused, engineering focused, go to market focused, what have you. They're not all of the functions. You know what I mean? So, they have to be great at being a leader - driving direction and expectations and strategy, and then holding leaders accountable to outcomes while also using their teams to collaborate. 

I think, again, the revenue leader's role is very similar. I think you hire really strong enterprise leaders to help run your enterprise business. You hire a really strong, proven rev ops leader to run your rev ops team and so on and so forth across all the dimensions. 

So I think when it comes to attacking the SMB mid-market space where maybe most of your customers or buyers are adopting the free product, you have to kind of have a first principles thinking in terms of how do you go to market? What the team should be focused on, how they should be compensated and incentivized versus maybe your enterprise team who is going after a segment or market that doesn't have as many warm inbounds, that has to be really surgically focused on going after the right type of account and not spending their time across 50 accounts, but maybe rather three or five accounts, but you have to make damn sure that those three to five accounts are well within your ICP.

So I think you have to take it down to the foundational element of each part of your business and what matters the most and how you can drive outcomes and execute.

ELIO NARCISO:

The metaphor of the orchestra is great. The conductor - I absolutely love it.

JAVIER MOLINA:

Yeah, I'm a former collegiate athlete, so it's hard for me to stay away from sports references, but I know it's not applicable for everybody.

ELIO NARCISO:

So football or what?

JAVIER MOLINA:

Baseball, yeah baseball.

ELIO NARCISO:

Baseball, okay, very good. 

And you mentioned territory mapping and before starting Scalestack, I didn't have a full appreciation of the importance of that. And you've talked a lot - you seem to be like an expert, almost like a superpower, with the territory management process, which is core because distributing an equitable book of business across the org is one of the ways the conductor can do that. 

Can you tell us some of your secrets there? Walk us through some of the philosophy that you've applied at companies that you've built.

JAVIER MOLINA:

Yeah, this is - I feel like this is still a wide open market opportunity. And I feel like there's technology like Scalestack that are coming after this market in particular. But I just think that no one has quite figured out the Rubik's cube of really out of the box territory management. 

I think it's difficult because every company is different.

I think your job as a CRO is to create a common denominator across all of your sales organization so that the variable of execution is the people that you hire and their willingness and attitude and output of activity determines their outcome.

‍Meaning, I think where things fall apart as a sales leader and as a CRO and, frankly, as a culture is when you have part of your organization or one person on a team that is highly successful. But the success is determined by the accounts that they got. And everybody knows that - in the company or on the sales team, everybody knows that. So your job is to create a meritocracy of accounts. As you scale, as you take your sales team from 10 to 50 to 125 sellers, doing that in a methodical way and doing that in a data-driven way, I think is the only way to do it. 

And so I think from a territory management perspective, many companies make the mistake, in my opinion, of doing segmentation based on employee count and size. I know there has to be an element of that to be able to draw clear lines between your segments internally. But I think there's more - it's also more than just technical demographics. 

So meaning, many companies say, our ICP is over a thousand employees and they use XYZ technology. I think it's actually deeper than that. I think there's an element of - you have to understand the culture of the companies that you sell to.

ELIO NARCISO:

Mm-hmm.

JAVIER MOLINA:

What is the willingness to change and how low or high is that barrier of entry to get in? And being able to assess that from the outside in, looking at certain signals, whether it be people that they've hired or job description information, that level of detail - starting inward first of understanding who buys from you, I think is the first place. 

And so to quote our good friend Justin Dignelli, it's like, where, how, and why you win and understanding that first and foremost. That determines who your real ICP is. 

And then from there, ranking your territory by what is the prime account, right? Like if you were to make up a company, what would they look like? And then find real companies that look like that. Those are your A accounts, or your tier one accounts. Your step down from that would be an account that looks like that, but maybe has some higher barrier of entry. 

So for example, if you're selling a DevOps tool, but the DevOps leader at a company has been there for 18 years and it's very obvious that that person holds influence in the organization, they may be a much more difficult account to penetrate. 

And then you have the one below that - you're going to take a flyer on this account, maybe or maybe not it works, but it just seems like a far fetch, but if you were to land them, it would be a multimillion dollar deal. And so then you end up having three, four or five rankings of accounts, whatever the business needs. And you focus your marketing efforts, your sales efforts, the amount and level of activity across all of those. And so then it becomes a very focused and efficient outbound motion that ends up, I think, yielding some of the best results.

ELIO NARCISO:

Very interesting. I mean, the way you're explaining it, it reminds me of a lot of the motions that we've supported at MongoDB and other companies. I think we talked about how difficult - or maybe nowadays tech sales markets are certainly becoming more complex and more competitive and gaining visibility is harder and harder. And I think that the name of the game is prioritization. 

So the companies that know how to prioritize their efforts are the ones that succeed. And that's why territory mapping and distribution of accounts is so important. And what I've seen is that the companies that can do that not just once a year, but sort of dynamically during the year are the ones that succeed.

JAVIER MOLINA:

Yes, a hundred percent. I mean, I think you've had several ex-MongoDB people on here, and rewinding the clock back seven, eight years, we had a good understanding of who and why people bought from us. 

And then we were tasking the sales reps to figure that out themselves. So the VPs would allocate accounts to new hires. And then we would say, come back to us in a couple of weeks and give us your best accounts.

Then we were like, how can we make this more efficient? And Megan Gill allowed us to hire a territory analyst and that territory analyst reported to James Underhill. And then we found it to be successful. So we added another one and we found it to be more successful, and James and team ended up building tooling for it. And then it became an actual consultative, proactive practice that we ended up embedding globally across the company. And then they built a product that they released a blog about with Argos and now it's a full functioning thing. 

My point is that when you have that strong understanding of who buys from you, when they buy, why they buy, it's then your job, especially in the state of AI and automation, of how do you create that system, that dashboard, that operating system that your entire team can operate off of.

And then you can not only assess the allocation of accounts, but I think go one level deeper and understand the account executive activity and the marketing activity within those accounts as well. Because I think that's the next level of, okay, now that we've allocated all these accounts, what is the level of activity that's happening in this account, right? Two-way communication, outbounding to more than three people, the cadence and frequency of communication - because then you can really assess your opportunity. 

Again, another example - if you have a team in New York and everybody has equal accounts, at least based on the data, and you have one sales rep that is crushing their number, and they have 15 accounts, and you do a deeper analysis, and they have 10 A accounts, but three of their A accounts are getting them to the number. Those other 7 A accounts are just sitting there. And there could be another AE or another team of AEs that could be getting to their number. That's hidden revenue within the business.

Being able to proactively identify that, reallocate, move accounts, split territories - that's really how you scale, but also do so in a way that creates repeatable productivity as you scale.

ELIO NARCISO:

I love that. And yes, this idea that those accounts are not yours, but they are yours if you extract the potential business value is very important. We have seen that across the most successful teams. Another thing that you were describing, in my opinion, is this very strong and mutually respectful collaboration between the field, the sales teams, and the ops team. 

I think that understanding of that dynamic differentiates great companies from companies that are not going to be able to scale that fast. Because if you want to scale, that collaboration is key. And invariably in my experience, if we observe the companies that are going to be more successful, there is mutual respect.

There is a common goal. The ops systems and processes need to support sales. Sales needs to spend time and be curious about understanding the complexity of all of that, while ops needs to be curious and understanding the needs of the sales teams and why are they clamoring for this type of insights or data or processes themselves. 

And so I like that description of the dynamic between you and Megan and James, because that's what we've seen at successful companies. What else do you think is important as you scale fast? I mean, there's only a limited number of companies that scale fast. And you've been part of several successful ones. Besides maybe this collaboration, if you agree, but what are the other things or traits you saw at scaling companies that succeeded?

JAVIER MOLINA:

 I think first and foremost, product market fit rules all. I think if you try to scale your organization or your business without that, and you're relying on a low participation rate and doubling or tripling your sales team, you're just setting yourself up for a lot of inefficiency. I think now going forward, that is a very important aspect of the job. 

If product market fit is there and it's just a matter of executing on a go-to-market motion that is repeatable and durable, then I think hiring is of the utmost importance. And I think what many companies don't appreciate about companies that scale extremely fast is the level of rigor that goes into hiring really top talent. And there's almost sometimes an overemphasis on it because

you have to hire really high quality at a really high velocity, but also do so in a way that is respectful and you're being thoughtful about the makeup of your team, the diversity of your team, where you're getting your talent from, how you're developing that talent, the engine that you're trying to create. 
So I think the thing with scaling companies is you have to build a development engine when it comes to the BDRs that you hire today are going to be your mid-market reps that you promote a year and a half from now that become your enterprise reps two to three plus years from now.

And if you can do all that while also retaining them and also making them successful and giving them leaders that they respect that are well-trained and can develop them, whether you promote leaders internally or hire them from the outside, that's like the infrastructure of your sales team and your sales culture to help you scale. Because if you don't have that, it all falls apart and you can't just hire externally because they lack context. It's a longer path to trust. You also can't promote everyone internally, right? 

If you have to hire 15 sales leaders over the next year, there's an element of bringing in outside diversity, both in gender, but also in experience and other company practices.

Some of the best things that I learned in my last 15 plus years have been from people that come from other companies that have best practices that you end up incorporating and folding in that end up giving you this situation where you're just operating at a really high level.

ELIO NARCISO:

Lots of amazing things - culture, hiring. I spent time at Amazon, so Amazon is crazy about hiring and the processes around that. So I'm a big believer that hiring well is so key to scaling. 

And I absolutely agree that the composition of the team and who you hire from outside versus who you grow internally are all really important dimensions of growth. One of the things that I remember at Amazon, I was a bar raiser, which is basically this persona of somebody that has done a lot of interviews and then becomes, you know, and joins other people's hiring processes, other managers' hiring processes, and they have veto power. So if the hiring manager wants to hire, but the bar raiser says no, you cannot hire that person. 

And I mention this because a lot of the training that I did as a bar raiser was around bias. And you recently wrote, in my opinion, a beautiful LinkedIn post. And if people haven't read it, please go and like it on Javier's LinkedIn page and search for this conscious or unconscious bias post. 

I'm very curious about, you know, if you're hiring fast, you can make mistakes of bias. And so how do you instill that like, okay, you want to hire fast, but also you need to check your conscious or unconscious biases. How have you achieved that in the orgs that you have led?

JAVIER MOLINA:

Yes, it's a really good question. And that article was - if you read the article, it was built out of an opportunity to be able to share my own story of someone that deeply, deeply cares about unconscious bias that had an unconscious bias in a moment. 

And I think the thing that we have to realize is that we are biased as humans, right? We face this bias every single day, we do it personally in our social networks. 

Think about your closest friends or if you're married or not, who are the people that you hang out with the most? My wife and I, we've been married for 17 years now, we have three kids. We hang out typically with people that we knew from college, people that have kids. That's our social network, because that's our bias, because it's socially convenient. And I have faced bias myself throughout my career. I face bias even to this day.

Even yesterday, right? Like I'm too enterprise for some companies or I'm not enterprise enough. I'm from Austin, but I'm not from San Francisco or New York. So can they respect that level of talent? I'm too young for a certain role or I'm too senior because I've seen too much scale. And you kind of just always have this feeling of being in between. And it's other people's bias and it's my job, I think, to figure out how to communicate myself and put myself in a situation where I can remove that bias from other people when they're facing me. 

And so as a hiring leader, I think of my role as a CRO, and I've said this for the past several roles -

I have three goals. Number one, if you come and work in my organization, regardless of what role that you have, I want you to develop personally and professionally,

‍Either directly through me or through the leaders that I have on board. And if you don't feel like that's happening, then that's an issue, right? So I want to create this development culture where you're always becoming bigger and better versions of yourself.

Two, because we all work in tech and everybody wants to be successful, I want everybody to have a successful outcome, whether that's getting to a higher level role or a VP level role or a financial outcome - that is really important to me. And then three, changing the landscape of software sales

I mean, the way I think about it is if you're working in a multi-billion dollar organization or even a startup, you're investing hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars a year to get people together, to train them, to put them through boot camp, to help them become a better seller or what have you. That's like a university. And if you're not taking that opportunity to then hire people that can develop into enterprise sellers or CROs or VPs of sales one day in tech five, 10 plus years from now, and you're not being conscious with the type of people that you hire and where you hire from, then it's a missed opportunity because then it's just going to look the same. 

So I just think that being conscious about your hiring practices, where you source talent from, how much of referrals versus how much is intentional outbound - taking what seems to be a chance on somebody when it's actually you're just removing your own bias and putting somebody in a great opportunity. Like I have multiple examples of people that on paper, I don't think they would have been the down the middle candidate for what we set out to hire. But in the end, they ended up exceeding everybody that got hired because of just their drive, their ambition, their intelligence. 

And I just think that we're in such a leveraged position as a CRO or VP of sales when you're hiring talent in your organization to be conscious about your own bias and you can really make a change and make an impact.

ELIO NARCISO:

Please read that article, it's really good. 

I think that being aware of the biases makes us better leaders and better humans actually. Because also a lot of the biases I feel come from not knowing. You just don't know. A lot of the bias is just that you don't know that other person or that other group of people and you have very limited knowledge and that's why you're biased. 

So the majority or all of the biases, I have to think about this, but probably all of them are - you actually don't know. And so that's why you instinctively react in a certain way, because you have been limited to a certain knowledge, you don't have the other knowledge.

And so you can't really judge and you use bias to get to that quick judgment.

JAVIER MOLINA:

 Really well put.

ELIO NARCISO:

Very good. Maybe the last question is, you have grown a lot of sales leaders over your career. What is maybe an advice and maybe even a contrarian piece of advice that you've given or that you've received over the course of your career that you think it's very useful in terms of developing leadership skills and capabilities for managing sales teams?

JAVIER MOLINA:

Contrarian advice for developing leaders. Is that what you're asking?

ELIO NARCISO:

Yeah, so something that you have advised your leaders or people that you coach to become leaders in the organizations that you have led, or maybe advice that you have received as you were growing your career. It was counterintuitive or contrarian to what people normally think and that you have applied or have seen people apply successfully.

JAVIER MOLINA:

Yeah, I think I'm going to go two routes on this one. 

Number one, I think you have to treat recruiting like revenue.

‍I think the thing with sales is that quota is the most quantifiable thing in the company, right? Like how do you grade a seller? How much did they get to their quota? How much do they exceed it by? And I think that's just such a bad way to assess someone. Because like I mentioned earlier with territory, I've had really mediocre sellers be the number one person on the stack rank because of a deal that they got that was handed over to them or transitioned from another rep or was inbound, what have you.

How you get to your number is so much more important to me than that you get to your number. Because if you have really strong outbound processes, you follow a repeatable sales motion, you do great discovery, you can build great champions,

you can fill in all the MEDPIC boxes and do a great job across the board of facilitating stakeholders in large enterprise. And you only get to 90% of your number. I would take that every single day over someone that lands two large enterprise deals. And they really can't speak to the problem that they solve. They didn't have a strong champion, so on and so forth, because the first one is repeatable at scale. You can put them in any environment, whatever technology that they're selling, and they're going to be successful. 

Quota is an arbitrary thing. Me and the rev ops leader set your quota. Like being able to hit 90% or hitting 130%, that's a number that we set at the beginning of the year. Your ability to repeat that process, to be able to close deals that is dependent on the individual. And so I think that's one thing that I teach sales leaders - to understand at a deeper level, at an intimate level, how are your sellers performing every single day?

What do they do at an activity level from putting together their account plans to their outbound prospecting, to how they run meetings, to how they prepare other executives to meet with their champions, to how they build champions, to how they approach procurement conversations. All of the details matter. And I think if you're in the details, then you can really make an impact. So I think that's one. 

I think the second piece that I'm giving these days around contrarian advice is I think many things are changing. I think there's a modernization of sales that's happening, and we're starting to see signals from it. It started being like the more data-driven CRO, but now you have AI, we're talking about diversity. We're in a phase where we haven't really crossed a chasm yet, but we will soon. And so the core fundamentals still win, right? 

You need to focus on enterprise. You need to have all of your foundational principles around your three whys and MEDPIC and doing great discovery, but they need to be applied in more modern ways.

You're gonna be using AI. You need to be more conscious of marketing paths. You need to understand how people come into your sales funnel so that you can teach different playbooks depending on the situation that your customers come walking into. I think gone are the days of, here's the top 10 banks in New York and go prospect into them. I think you have to think more strategically and more data-driven around how you approach revenue.

ELIO NARCISO:

Javier, this was great. Thank you so much for this conversation. 

We touched on, I think, very important topics that go from leadership and bias and hiring to the data-driven and curious approach that we'd like our sales teams to operate within. So thank you so much for joining us today. Good luck with everything. And to all of you, thank you for joining us. Until next time.

JAVIER MOLINA:

Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

ELIO NARCISO:

Bye

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