Dennis Lyandres spent more than 8 years with Procore during which time Procore grew from $10m to over 900m+ in revenue. Dennis started at Procore as Executive Vice President of Sales in 2014, before moving to the Chief Revenue Officer role in 2018 where he was responsible for driving revenue across all customer-facing functions including Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, Rev Ops, Procore.org and Business Development. From Nov 2022 to June 2023, Dennis served as a Strategic Advisor to the CEO working on key strategic projects such as procore’s emerging fin tech business, key partner and customer relationships, and mentoring and developing key leaders. Before joining Procore, he held various sales and sales management roles at Cloudera and Pentaho. Dennis began his career in mergers & acquisitions with BTI Group and holds a BA from UC Berkeley where he finished with highest academic honors.
Join us as Dennis shares his journey to sales leadership, from his early days to the phenomenal success he had at Procore. He discusses the core fundamentals he had to learn, including prospecting, business acumen, account planning, and building urgency. Dennis highlights the human aspect of sales leadership and the important lessons he learned in recruiting, training, and developing the right people; as well as the need to trust and empower his team. Dennis also emphasizes the value of continuous learning and the role of leadership in creating a culture of success. Dig into the lessons he learned on his road to sales leadership in this inspiring episode of Revenue Builders.
HERE ARE SOME KEY SECTIONS TO CHECK OUT:
[00:05:57] Importance of business fundamentals and financial literacy
[00:09:39] Skills needed for sales leadership: recruiting, training, developing, promoting, and terminating
[00:19:11] Unique aspects of training and development: clear expectations, self-service, certifications, coaching and buddy systems
[00:34:42] Transitioning to the CRO role: prioritization, managing time effectively, hiring great leaders, aligning cross-functional teams
[00:46:26] The importance of leadership and building more successful leaders
[00:49:31] The value of showing care and having each other's backs
[00:50:43] Assessing the most important problems and finding solutions
[00:51:06] Scaling challenges: assessing the most important problem and finding a solution
[00:52:09] Adapting to new challenges and focusing on the next problem to solve
[00:54:13] Transitioning from a private company to a public company
[00:56:16] Learning from mistakes and being proud of Procore's impact
HIGHLIGHT QUOTES
[00:08:48] “If you're talking to someone low level, and maybe that's some way to build a groundswell or get intelligence or whatever your account strategy is there, then yeah, I think you can talk more feature function, more jargon. But certainly, as you get more and more senior, and as you demonstrate more and more of a mastery of the subject. Simplicity is absolutely essential, right?” - Dennis Lyandres
[00:46:34] “My mindset really crystallized by this role, which was like, leadership is the most important thing to whether I wouldn't. Right and so I've got to be spending my time hiring great leaders and making sure they can be wildly successful and within leadership. I've come to believe that the highest calling of a leader is to obsolete yourself is to work yourself out of the job.” - Dennis Lyandres
Learn more about Dennis Lyandres through this link:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dlyandres/
Check out John McMahon’s book here: https://www.amazon.com/Qualified-Sales-Leader-Proven-Lessons/dp/0578895064
Revenue Builders