Empathy as a Leadership Core

In this episode of the East Coast Elite series, we sit down with Austin Stefani, CRO at DBT Labs, to discuss his career journey from EMC to his current role.

austin shares his fundamental principles for sales leadership, emphasizing the importance of making every individual on the team successful.

We learn about his focus on skill acquisition, the value of learning from challenges, and why empathy is crucial for both employees and customers. Austin breaks down his "playbook" for problem identification and how to apply it at various stages of a company's growth, from building a sales process and managing pipeline to scaling international teams.

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🏹 Key Topics Covered

00:00 - Intro

00:58 - Flipping the org chart upside down

01:48 - The fundamental principles of sales

05:00 - Focusing on productivity

07:13 - Using frameworks for problem identification

09:17 - Translating a sales mindset to a leadership role

12:48 - Skill training and retention

18:56 - The benefits of non-linear career progression

24:00 - Learning through setbacks and hard times

32:27 - Why Austin chose to leave Rubrik for DBT

35:35 - Empathy as a core leadership trait

41:31 - The biggest challenges and learnings as a CRO

43:35 - The advantages of in-house company culture

49:55 - The playbook as a blueprint

💥 3 Biggest Lessons:

Flipping the Org Chart: Leaders are overhead, and their primary job is to make every individual sales rep successful.

Embrace the Hard Times: The only way to get through tough situations is through them, which is how you acquire new skills and become more resilient.

Playbooks are Blueprints: A playbook is a framework for problem identification, not a step-by-step instruction manual to be applied universally.

🙌 Thanks for listening!

This episode was hosted by Simon Kouttis and Ollie Kuehne, founders of Hunters & Unicorns, and post-produced by the team at videoforce.pro

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💬 Notable Quotes

"If you're in one job and you just go the next job and the job after that and you're just learning from people that are exactly like you, there's only so much skill that you can get."

"Productivity is like the most important metric and everything services that."

"The leaders that do that really well will be able to grow with the company."

"I think it's a blueprint, not an instruction manual."

"Trust is generated by the quality of the questions you ask. The amount of try it next time like try talking... If somebody comes and asks you... 'I need some advice or can I pick your brain', next time somebody says that try saying nothing but questions about 10 minutes into this. The person will reach across the table, grab your arm and say, 'Oh my gosh, you solved my problem.' And they'll leave and you'll just be like, 'I didn't say a word.'"