- Everybody, welcome back to Squatify Teams in Tech. We're excited to introduce our guest here today. Jason, would you like to introduce yourself? - Yeah, Jeremy, thank you. Jason Thomas, I'm a sales professional. I currently work on a sales force. I've been with that organization for six years. And I've been in IT and management and software sales for, I guess, going on 20 years? Yeah, that's scary, but yes, 20 years. - Nice, nice. And everybody for those who don't know, I'll introduce myself. I'm Jeremy from Squatify, a team productivity accelerator. Teams like Salesforce, Santa Fe and Endo, you Squatify to identify team issues, take actions recommended by the Squatify team coach, build engagement and accountability, track improvements month over month, and achieve 10% increase in productivity, 11% growth in team engagement, 13% uplift and performance over year over year, and 60% improvement in happiness at work. So, Jason, let's dive right in. Could you tell us a little bit about the roles and responsibilities of you and your team at Salesforce? - Sure, so I lead a group of individual contributors that are selling into an industrial market, automotive, energy and utility. So, automotive is less the OEM space, those large car manufacturers that are name brands and everybody's heard of, and more the folks that supply into them, dealerships, kind of the second tier of that space. And then the energy and utility world is, you know, folks that are moving oil, gas and electricity around the United States. So, we cover the central part of the US and have a bag that includes everything Salesforce has to offer, including all of our subsidiary companies. So, it's a very broad spectrum. We end up, I end up talking to customers a lot about the concepts that are kind of embedded within digital transformation. I try not to use that phrase all that much because people are tired of it, but that's kind of the thing that folks are working on that's interesting today. - And you mentioned Central America. Does that mean that your team is spread across as Central America as well? I'm curious to hear a little bit more about your team. Are they real? - Yeah, that's the middle of the United States center, the central region of the United States. So, we have, we are spread across. You know, I've got folks in Minnesota, Kansas City, Virginia, St. Louis, where I sit. And so, we naturally live around the middle of the country and that kind of represents the geography of our customers as well, up from the Dakotas down to Louisiana, over through Ohio, Kentucky and that area. It's a big, it's a lot of dirt, it's a lot of dirt together. - I think ever since COVID and remote work has been a huge shift, right? Everybody's been shifting to remote work. I was curious to hear a little bit more about your strategies and your processes around bringing your team together and creating collaboration. I also had, yeah, actually, let me ask you about that. So, how do you approach bringing your team together in a remote environment? - Yeah, so pre-COVID, I was a remote employee. So, I've been thinking about this for six years, minimum. Like, how does this work? How should it work? What's awful about being remote and what's great? So, the pandemic, absolutely, it made it a requirement and it made it kind of spread to everybody whether you wanted it or not. So, we, you know, I was handed a handful of tactics that were working to some degree. I also got to see things that didn't work and I think that was something that was interesting. So, some of the things that we do, I have very regular team calls where we're all like, you're kind of expected to be on camera, it's important to be on camera, it's just us. And I make it really clear, if you're in a bad place, you're sick or whatever, don't be there, first of all. But, you know, turn your camera off if you must, but also show up wearing a t-shirt and your hat on backwards because, you know, that's life and we need to be in each other's lives 'cause that's the reality sometimes. So, we do that currently I'm at a cadence of, you know, about two and a half a week, two and a half of those meetings a week on top of one-on-ones with every individual of my, every individual on my team where I'm showing up in a very human way. Like, I think the way a leader shows up demonstrates what's expected. So, you know, folks are in my house and I mean, this is mostly what they see, it's like I'm walking around in the living room all the time. But if there's data that I don't feel good, I'm on camera because it's a commitment I make to the team to show up as if they see I don't feel good, it's fine, we're human. Then, at least on a quarterly basis, I'm looking for ways to get my team together and create some cohesion. I run a sales team, so individual contributors on the sales team, they don't necessarily need each other all that much. So, on a day-to-day basis, they're selling to different accounts. So, you know, Kathy doesn't necessarily need to talk to Greg to sell the completely different accounts, but they're selling the same products and we have the same motions within those accounts so we can cross-pollinate and learn from one another. So, when we do get together and we're playing in one of these in early April, we'll have a couple of things. We really try to break down, what am I doing, what am I, what's working, what's not working and help each other from that regard. And then we also do a pretty healthy amount of what I call stand-and-delivers. I think it's a, I don't know if that's an everybody term, but I think of it as professional development where there are parts of our job that we need to practice. The first time you say some words, a certain set of words might not, you might not want that to be in front of the customer. So, let's bring those things that we know we're gonna do all the time and let's role play, let's practice with each other. We do that as much live and in person as we possibly can because it makes the stakes higher and it makes it easier at the same time, which is weird. And then we do, that's one of the sessions that I do on a pretty regular basis when we're working remotely. One of the things that is critical, I think, when I worked on teams pre-pandemic that were a mix, some are remote and some are in the office, if we've got a meeting where half the team is gonna be in an office and the other half is remote, it's really tough if the team that's in the office gets to have their own little meeting and everybody that's remote is kind of stuck somewhere else. So, I've asked people to like stay at your desk, don't go to the conference room. Or if you do go to the conference room, if I see you 'cause I'm almost always one of the people that's remote, if I see that I've just made a note, that you need to include us in the meeting and that doesn't. So, I'm probably gonna ask you what's going on, what's up? Tell me what we're talking about. Not as a way to call you out in class for talking, but as a way to make the meeting inclusive. Otherwise, we gotta go back to our desks. So, it's just a little thing, but it kind of plays out in a big way. I really appreciate hearing about how you build this collaborative inclusive team culture, as well as you build a system where folks, even though the work itself can be isolating, you bring people to get the share notes and learn from each other. And I think that the system is the thing that allows that to happen, otherwise it wouldn't happen. It'd be very difficult to happen naturally. And I wanna touch on what you said earlier about approaching your team in a human way later, but I wanted to, before that, I wanted to ask you something and I try to ask all our guests, just as a learning experience here. So, wanted to hear from you, how do you measure and track your team productivity and performance? What's your process for driving consistent and discipline execution? And also improving productivity and performance month of a month? - Yeah, I think in sales, we actually, this is one thing that we have easy. Our job, I think, is really hard. I equate sales versus a lot of other areas in an organization as when I show up in the morning, there's nothing in my inbox. There's no stack of things someone's asking me to do. I have to go make all of those and I typically make them and hand them to someone else. I make to do this for the rest of the company. Because of that, we have to think of productivity a little bit differently, but the output is super clear. Like it's on a dashboard, everybody can see it any moment of the day, those dashboards, we're unfortunate enough to work at one of the best sales companies in the world, are created by bonds that are geniuses and figure those things out and hand them to us. And I'll refine and refactor and take theirs and make it specific to my team. And we'll look at that regularly. The getting there part is also important. So, I try to identify with the team. What is the, are there metrics that really matter that are difficult to measure in a CRM? We sell a CRM. So is it difficult to measure things here? The answer's almost invariably yes. There's one or two. And sometimes it's kinda because we can track meetings. That's a pretty in sales. How many people did you meet? Is it an important leading indicator of how much will you sell? Some meetings are more valuable than others. This is a very valuable meeting for us as people to get to talk to each other, Jeremy, but I don't think you're buying anything. So it's not super valuable from that perspective, right? So I don't get to count it there. So I work with the team. If there are those kind of hidden metrics, let's identify them and make them not hidden. Let's show up to a once a week meeting where we bring those things to the table. We pull out of the dashboards, two or three. Like I really try to shrink down the number of KPIs that we're following. Let's pull out two or three. Let's track them over time. And let's create a little fun competition out of it. - I see, I see. I want to touch on something you said earlier, which I found very intriguing. How do you approach, sorry, why is it important for you to approach your team in a human way? Why is it important? - So we spend about a third of our lives at work, right? You sleep for eight hours a day. You work for eight hours a day. That's kind of a joke 'cause I work for 10 hours a day, probably most days. If you're going to do that, if we want people to choose to do that, if I'm going to choose to do that, it has to be fun. It has to be engaging. It has to be real. I don't, I can't expect people to show up to this artificial workplace that feels like handcuffs and concrete and a jail and then do their best work. Like I want your best. I don't want a shell of what you could do. If that's the case, then we've got to, like we think about and we talk about very openly on my team anyway, how do you bring your best self toward? For me, that means, you know, I've got to do some prayer and meditation every day. I've got to work out four to six times a week. That's a part of my job. If I don't do that, I can't be good here. I can't be great here anyway. So if that's the, and I don't think I'm special in that regard, right? I didn't figure something special out. This is science. It's the truth. So if that's the case, how do we encourage people to show up to work in a way and make that okay? I think the biggest way I know how to do it is do it myself. Like show up authentically me every day. Good, bad, and ugly. Apologize when I make mistakes. Be, tell people I'm having a hard time. Be okay with the both sides of humanity. You only get people's best if you're willing to talk about their worst. Be okay with that. And then people are willing to give more. Otherwise they can't. You're just cutting it off. - Wow. Something you said earlier really resonates with me. I want you to bring your best and therefore, right? I'm leading by example, showing up as, you know, as a human and also recognizing everybody else, as a, you know, multidimensional human person. I wanted to ask you something before we hop off. You hosted your own podcast. Can you tell us a little bit about that and why you started that? - Yeah, so it was a long time ago. I hosted the podcast called Hard Way MBA. It started as a project when a colleague of mine and Steve Fallik, I was falling backwards out of social services into sales. And I told Steve who, you know, was a general manager at GE for their Asia pack. Like he knew things, right? And I was a kid and I knew nothing. And I told him, hey, man, I'm thinking about going to get an MBA. And he'd taken me under his wing a little bit and he said, you don't need any more school. You get a master's degree and how are you using it? So what you need to do is find hard projects, volunteer for them, pay attention and grow. And I said, ah, it sounds like an MBA to the hard work. And he said, exactly. And that's where the concept was born. So I started doing exactly what he said and writing it down and it became a blog. And the blog was, I don't know, please don't go read that, you can read the blog, but please don't pass judgment. It's codifying trying to codify what I was learning as I'm going through a maturation process. That's, you know, as I said 20 years ago now. The podcast came from that when I realized I could learn faster if I talk to other people. Like everything I'm learning is when I'm talking to somebody else. What if I had an opportunity to ask somebody three to five questions and I could get best-selling authors, business leaders, it just became a no-brainer. So I started it, say, it's been six years ago that I let it go and I ran it for three years. So it was eight or nine years ago that I started it. It was at the very beginning of the podcast, Bobble. So it was a ton of fun. A ton of fun to interview executives. Hear their story and try to learn something from them and then be able to share that back with the world. - I'm curious, when you were doing your MBA the hard way, what was the most important thing that you learned from that? - Mm. Probably from the, this is probably a couple, I probably learned some things from the actual interviews that I should pull out and be a little bit more thoughtful in this answer. The thing that jumped to mine first, which is what I'm gonna say, is don't let perfect be the enemy of good. I waited a long time to get started on that project. It took me a long time to get a website up. Everything was just so, I made it, so hard. It didn't need to be, I could have been a little bit less self-critical and published. I think, you know, Seth Godin talks about this all the time, ship the work. If you're not willing to ship the work, you don't ever get the feedback. So that's probably the biggest. I think a secondary thing was everybody I talked to from best-selling authors to, you know, presidents of large publicly traded companies, they're all human. They all put their pants on in the morning. They all had failures. Most of them had been fired way more than me. These are all things that we get so worried about. It happened, they lived, and they succeeded, and they moved on. - Speaking of being human, another question I wanted to ask you earlier in your career, you started off in state government. I was very curious, and in the work you did, I was curious, how did you get into that? - Yeah. - So I'm gonna master, or I got a bachelor's in psychology with a minor in criminal justice with the intent from a small child thinking I wanted to be a psychologist. And that's me in that talk therapy. So whatever it means, it meant I was gonna do talk therapy. The path to that is a master's degree, and I needed a way to kind of fund that master's degree. So I got into the work in for the state, doing social work kind of things, child abuse and neglect investigations, working for the Division of Family Services here in Missouri, not fun work, gratifying. I love that there are people that still do that work, and I love some of those people dearly because they're very close friends. It's not work that I'm built for, I found that out. And that eventually kind of funded, not in the way I thought it would, that did kind of funded master's in professional counseling. I got out of that program and realized this is, this is not for me, I don't like this. So it was a very expensive therapy session, or three year long therapy section, and kind of got me into sales eventually. - I'm curious, besides helping to fund your school work, is there any connection between the work you started off doing and the work you're doing today, or your passion for psychology, does that still live on somehow in your work today, whether it's leading your team or working with customers? Is there anything that ties the path to the present? - A lot, if you think about what I really wanted to do with talk therapy is help people solve problems. I solve problems in a personal life as a good avenue to do that, it's a great avenue to do that. What I do today is help people solve business problems, and I help them solve people problems. Like, how do we change? How do we, you know, we sell up. I sell technology, but technology is a part of the thing. We've got people process technology, how do we change the people in the process? So huge connections from a very, very tactical perspective. I've thought about this a lot, Jeremy. In my master's program, one of the things we had to do was record sessions, therapy sessions, and I was working with teenagers, mostly, record these sessions, and then transcribe one a week, 10-minute section of it. I would challenge, so imagine, well, everybody out there that's got modern technology and telephony and systems is doing this in sales right now. You're recording your sales calls, and then some AI agent is running through that and saying, this is how many times you mentioned your product, this is how much you talk versus the customer, all those things are happening. I did that 25, 30 years ago. Before technology could do it, I just manually brute force did it. Take what technology is handing you, it's kind of my advice to sellers now, and it's painful, painful work to listen to yourself, sound foolish, to listen to yourself, talk 25% more than the customer, take it and use it and learn it. That was, I learned more from, I don't know, a session a week, 10 minutes of a session a week, and listening to myself as I transcribed. Then I did, I don't do it today. No, I have. Salesforce has tools, it does it for me, and I still listen, I look at those tools, how much am I talking? I talk way more than I should. Every customer that I talk to will tell you, yeah, I talk twice as much as I do. Anyway, it's important to do it. I think especially as you're younger, especially as you're growing in seniority and you're figuring these things out, but I know I talk too much and it's something I think about because I look at those call recordings. - Jason, thank you so much for speaking with us today. The last last question here is, who we should reach out to you and what's the best way to reach you? - The best way to reach me is I geth linked in, every other social media I've turned off or ignored because bandwidth and who should reach out to me? So I am building a small but mighty sales team. We have got eight people. I like to keep in touch with the absolute best salespeople in the country, in the middle of the country, that like to think about these industrial kind of things. I'm not actively recruiting, I don't have positions, but I like to know the folks that love that space and love technology. Otherwise, if you're my customer, I already know you. I know customer, they're happy to reach out anytime, but if somebody's thinking about how do we change, how do we build a sales team? On top, it's fun stuff. - Awesome, links will be in the description. Thank you so much, Jason, for speaking with us today. Everybody, thank you for listening to another episode. We'll see you all next time. Thank you.
