Driving a Sales Discipline with Carlos Delatorre

Carlos Delatorre is a seasoned sales leader with a career spanning several companies, including PTC, Oracle, Symantec, BMC, VMware, ClearSlide, MongoDB, Vera, and TripActions. He is also an active investor and advisor in several software companies and sits on the board of Yellow. In this episode, Carlos talks about the three basic things he considers when making a career move: market size, product differentiation, and the team. He also discusses the importance of focusing on the customer and the value proposition when selling. Additionally, Carlos delves into the complexity of a product and the selling environment, highlighting the importance of having a sales team that can effectively differentiate from the competition and create demand.

Chapters

• Carlos' background and achievements (0:01:16)
• Carlos' career moves and acquisitions (0:01:56)
• Carlos' decision-making process for his next move (0:02:30)
• Three basic things Carlos considers when making a career move (0:04:31)
• The importance of focusing on the customer and the value proposition when selling (0:06:00)
• The complexity of a product and selling environment (0:06:41)
• Carlos' lessons learned from climbing the sales leadership ranks (0:10:54)
• The importance of persistence and going as high as you need to go to get your message heard (0:15:58)
• The importance of paying attention to the little things about people (0:32:22)
• Importance of new logos and expansion revenue (0:43:12)
• Looking at conversion rates to learn from successful sales reps (0:45:23)
• The danger of only relying on existing new deals (0:48:18)
• Gaining insights from a combination of metrics (0:48:46)
• The importance of a Management Operating Rhythm (0:51:23)
• Defining priorities in each time frame (0:52:11)

Quotable Phrases

• "If there's not a big market, there's a chance everything else could be okay, and then you just run out of market and you can't grow anymore." (0:04:48)
• "You're really trying to solve a problem for the customer, and that's what you're selling." (0:06:30)
• "You want to hire people that are going to be able to scale with the business." (0:09:40)
• "The role of technology is to make the sales process more efficient." (0:11:55)
• "Data is absolutely critical in sales." (0:13:45)
• "The most important thing is to focus on the customer and the value proposition." (0:16:20)
• "The future of sales is about being more customer-centric." (0:18:25)
• "COVID-19 has accelerated the trend towards digital selling." (0:20:15)
• "You have to be persistent and creative in sales." (0:11:34)
• "Your job as a manager is to make the sales reps self-sufficient." (0:18:14)
• "It's really about developing your people." (0:19:53)

Additional Resources

• Connect with Carlos: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cadelatorre/
• 5 Questions to Answer in Every CFO Deal: https://forc.mx/46Dhqcq
• 3 Strategies to Cultivate a Customer-First Mindset: https://forc.mx/3NP899K