Q&A with Jake Monroe of Tesla/AMS and Ilan Kopecky of Talkdesk
We recently had the opportunity to sit down with two talented and respected sales leaders, Jake Monroe (previously at Tesla, now at AMS) and Ilan Kopecky (Talkdesk), both daily operators who have worked their way up the ranks, each with their own perspectives on what matters most in sales management.
We met up at Salesforce in S.F., shared a few ice-cold coronas, and discussed what makes for a successful one-on-one, they keys to time management, and why template emails will never be the secret to sales success…
Ben Apel (VoiceOps)
Guys, thanks for taking the time.
There’s a lot of content out there that is either created or produced by people who are not operators
We want to hear stories and practical tips from people who are operators, managers that are in the trenches every single day. People like you.
So we’re going to talk about sales, we are going to talk about coaching, we are going to talking about tools. But, we’ll keep it short and light.
Madeline Grubman (VoiceOps)
Exactly. Hopefully we walk away with some really invaluable information here. We also have super different backgrounds in terms of the types of sales and management you two have done which, will be really interesting to hear.
You both have a pretty dense area of work in terms of business development and management. If you wouldn’t mind, share a bit about how you got from your sales career into management.
Ilan Kopecky (Talkdesk)
I started as a renewals rep at a company called Veritas, which did backup software essentially. I did that for Veritas and Siebel, and then I realized that renewals was more paper pushing and hand holding of purchasing departments and less selling. I heard about this company called salesforce.com and this was back in 2004 before the IPO. And I had a friend there running purchasing and they said, “you gotta come over here — this is the next thing.” And I agreed. A
couple of other folks had left Siebel at that point and had gone over to Salesforce, and there was kind of a cease and desist going on with so many people leaving Siebel to go to Salesforce. So Mark and Tom basically agree that Mark was no longer going to accept any Siebel employees for the better part of the next year.
And Siebel was a sinking ship at that point or starting to sink. And Salesforce was starting to take off. Eventually the cease and desist was lifted, and I interviewed for an SR position, which is an inbound lead qualifier. Got the role, had an amazing, amazing boss named Nancy.
She is still at Salesforce today.
Ben Apel (VoiceOps)
Shout out to Nancy!
Ilan Kopecky (Talkdesk)
I learned a lot there and I did the SR role, I did what was called the EBR role which was prospecting. We didn’t have any of the tools we have today. It was a totally different world.
I went into an AE role and the more and more I thought about it, I realized I really wanted to impart the knowledge that was imparted on me when I first started in a sales role, in teaching people how to qualify, teaching people how to ask questions, teaching people how to call. Teach to break down doors.
So that put me into this management role at Salesforce, and then Yammer and then a couple companies after that. And now at Talkdesk.
Madeline Grubman (VoiceOps)
Amazing — thanks. And for you Jake, I know I that were at Tesla for a while, but walk us through the path there and now after.
Jake Monroe (Tesla)
Yeah. I worked for Tesla for a number of years. As you probably know they own their entire retail chain of command. So all the way down to the stores. I managed the inside sales team and sales operations for them couple years for North America and then managed the regional sales team of about 70 folks who were in the field doing retail sales.
Ilan Kopecky (Talkdesk)
Like the greeters in the stores and kind of doing the needs based selling type of thing?
Jake Monroe (Tesla)
Yeah exactly. I mean when I started at the company there was no one. They weren’t selling any cars. So literally I walked into the factory and it was a dead stop in 2012. I’ll tell you this, no one ever believes this. When I started at Tesla nobody knew what it was. When I was on the East Coast, no one. I would go to parties and people are like, what do you do? I’d say, “I work for a car company.” They ask, which one. I’d say Tesla.
This is in D.C. And people were just like what’s Tesla? And I’d say electric car company and they’d say “Leaf”. Times change.
I have since moved on from Tesla. I’m at a company called Advanced Microgrid Solutions. We are B2B, we sell to commercial and industrial customers energy storage solutions and there is a division of our company that sells to utilities as well. So I’m focused on the C&I side of things.
But my first customer service role was at Tesla and it was delivering vehicles that had already been essentially purchased. So these customers had put a large deposit down and I was doing the paperwork, doing the logistics and getting the car to their house and giving them a delivery experience that lasted anywhere from one to four hours (because these are products people didn’t know how to use).
At the time there were very few cars available for a test drive, so this was the first time a lot of these customers had ever interacted with the car they were buying. And so it was largely about making them feel comfortable in it and understand how to use it. I did that for about a year and really enjoyed it.
I moved from that into the inside sales roles. So I was an inside sales rep at first. I moved from D.C. over to headquarters in Palo Alto and was fielding web leads — just calling every single person who had any questions about Tesla. It was really eye-opening and it was an opportunity to go through the talking points and really understand A) what customers were asking and B) have an opportunity to practice the answers, taking 100 calls a day or 200 calls a day and going through with these customers and answering the same questions and figuring out the best way to answer that question.
And that is really rewarding once you land at the right formula and you realize what gets through to people.
Like when you have that one conversation where someone’s eyes open and you say, ‘this is the answer. This is how I’ll always answer this question from now on.’ It was also very much the trenches at Tesla. You had 20 or 30 sales reps sitting in a tiny, 300 sq foot area and you’re listening to everyone. So between calls you’re hearing what other people are saying, going through the same process as you, and you’re learning from them. So that was really exciting.
I moved up into a team lead role from that and was training new reps and bringing them in, imparting that wisdom, as you said Ilan, and working with the team to create collateral and make the onboarding process more efficient. And then moved into the management role and then moved into field sales.
It really is just exciting to see people’s eyes open and understanding how to get there and walking salespeople through it as much as you are walking the customers through it.
Madeline Grubman (VoiceOps)
What is that big difference between being on the ground as that BDR and having no system in place to kind of working where the systems are flushed out?
Jake Monroe (Tesla)
Like I said, Tesla, I think they had sold a couple hundred model S when I joined and we went from selling several a week to several hundred a week in the time I was there. And going from a U.S only company to global company, and that was all about systems.
The systems in place to sell 500 cars a year don’t sell 10,000 cars a year. They don’t keep up. And so once I moved into management and had felt the inefficiencies of the system we were using as the company grew, it was an exciting opportunity to build out those systems.
Ilan Kopecky (Talkdesk)
I think it’s much about the process as it is about systems. But as Jake mentioned, you’re constantly inspecting what you expect, and you’re constantly looking at the different workflows that got you to this point, to figure out ‘how do we cross that chasm’ for lack of a better phrase.
And it’s the same thing with people as well, because there’s VP of Sales that can get you to 10 million but is that VP of Sales the same person that can get you to 100 million. Maybe so, maybe not. So it’s very important to have the right people, the right systems, the right tools and obviously the right processes in place to make sure you can facilitate that growth.
Ben Apel (VoiceOps)
Let’s talk about the tool box. What’s the one thing that you can’t work without?
Ilan Kopecky (Talkdesk)
Salesforce.
Ben Apel (VoiceOps)
You’re saying that because we’re in Salesforce, aren’t you? I don’t know if Marc’s listening.
Ilan Kopecky (Talkdesk)
There was a couple years ago a company called me up and they wanted me to interview for their Head of Global Sales Development. And I said, “You use Salesforce, right?” They said no. And part of me couldn’t get off the phone fast enough because I didn’t know how I was going to write my reports, I didn’t know how I was going to get my apps off the app exchange, I didn’t know how I was going to integrate my telephony, my sales automation, and everything that went with that.
So yeah I think Salesforce for me is — if you don’t have it, we can’t really continue this relationship.
Ben Apel (VoiceOps)
This is starting to sound like an advertisement.
Jake Monroe (Tesla)
I’m not going to help.
When I joined the company where I am today it was a different sale. It was B2C sale at Tesla and it’s a B2B sale at where I’m at now. But the output is also important. The reports that come out of Salesforce, what our investors are used to seeing, what our sales managers are used to seeing and executives are used to seeing, and when you tell them you don’t use Salesforce they say, why not? And we’ve gone through that and we’ve since implemented Salesforce since I joined at AMS and it’s a game changer.
Madeline Grubman (VoiceOps)
I’m actually curious with that kind of B2B to B2C transition, what was different in terms of learning how to sell into that type of market.
Jake Monroe (Tesla)
I think the sales cycle is the biggest difference, at least in my experience. A car is an expensive thing but it’s also something people typically come to shop when they are ready to buy. And actually I will say a difference between the two markets is — we’re entirely in the educational phase of energy storage, not to get off topic, but most people aren’t shopping for energy storage.
So a lot of what I’m doing is educational. The sales cycle is 6 to 18 months, and that’s industry standard at this point. So — what are the metrics you’re looking at to manage that long process? Because in B2C sales, you can look at how many phone calls you made, a couple of weeks later you can see how many of those converted to an opportunity, a couple weeks later how many of them converted to a sale. When you are in an 18 month sales process you don’t get that immediate gratification. So it’s looking at the smaller things in between those big steps.
Ben Apel (VoiceOps)
Ilan, your sale cycle is much shorter.
Ilan Kopecky (Talkdesk)
Yeah, although we’ve quickly learned that telephony evaluations and contact center platform evaluations don’t grow on trees. It is a timing thing and it’s very hard to unstick an incumbent because much like how I was previously running a team trying to sell billing platforms and recurring revenue platforms, when they’re stuck in there they’re stuck in there.
You need a damn good reason to change your phone system. Now obviously it might be call quality or reliability or reports or usability, but still it’s very much a timing thing. Trying to get a VP of Support to change their phone system, even if it’s going to reduce handle times, is a tall task.
I think it’s very important for us to not lump ourselves in with just telephony and dialers, and to talk about the bigger picture of customer experience. And the fact that what now 57 to 60 percent of people still prefer the phone as a means to get an answer to their problem, even with the proliferation of knowledge bases and chat, you still want that human voice.
I think it’s important to elevate the conversation and that’s what we’re doing right now; calling in VPs of Customer Experience or Chief Experience Officers and asking them about hold times, handle times, personalized conversations, and all those metrics that go with customer service. Educating them on this is not a dialer, this is an experience platform. A customer experience platform that is actually going to help increase sales, CSAT, and NPS.
Ben Apel (VoiceOps)
So you are relying on a narrative to create a new category.
Ilan Kopecky (Talkdesk)
Very much so.
We are growing, we’re hiring.
I think for the team that I have, we’re almost at 16 people. We are about 300 between here and Portugal, and we were just named in the Forbes Cloud 100. It’s a great time to be at Talkdesk.
Ben Apel (VoiceOps)
I want to know what’s the hardest thing that you do on a regular basis is.
Ilan Kopecky (Talkdesk)
I think the hardest thing is time management. I get pulled from all different directions, from meetings to front-line managing, to spending time not just in one-on-ones but coaching at their desks, listening to their calls, looking over their emails, looking at what they are sending, looking at what they are not sending.
There’s just never enough time to do all that. But balancing career aspirations for your reps, balancing career aspirations for yourself, and making sure that the pipeline is healthy and getting healthier every day of every week.
Jake Monroe (Tesla)
Yeah, I think balancing career aspirations is really an interesting point. Growth in sales can go a variety of directions. It can just be purely how much money you’re making, it can be moving into an executive role, it can be moving into another area of the company. It can be leaving sales but you need to prove yourself in that world first.
And you have to understand what those needs are, and help guide them toward that specific goal because it’s going to be different for everybody. Inside the sales team we had, like I said vacillating between 20 and 30, but if everyone wants an hour of your day for a one-on-one, how frequently can you have a one-on-one with them? And it’s a fair request. It’s something that you want to give them. You want that opportunity.
Ilan Kopecky (Talkdesk)
You don’t want to be known as the manager that’s not approachable. I find it difficult at least personally, to be sitting in my desk building a deck or putting a campaign together, and then constantly have someone come up and say, hey do you have a minute? Yeah, of course I have a minute. Why wouldn’t I? Even though I need to get this, this, this, this and 10 other things done.
But I just feel the need to drop everything and I don’t know if that’s the right way to do things.
Ben Apel (VoiceOps)
Yeah what’s the trick for protecting your time and being approachable?
Ilan Kopecky (Talkdesk)
Honestly that’s one of my faults. I’ll just admit it. It’s hard because my reps are everything to me and the only thing I want for them is to succeed and to get not just their gratification but their accolades. I don’t need the limelight, I don’t want it. I want them to get it and if that means putting off a deck for five minutes to help them, then so be it.
When that light ball goes off as Jake mentioned earlier, and when they get that response through an email that I helped them write, that’s the greatest feeling in the world.
Madeline Grubman (VoiceOps)
Do you ever think you’ll go back into just straight sales, a one-man team player?
Jake Monroe (Tesla)
Yes. There is always a piece of you that enjoyed that, enjoyed the rewards from it, and enjoyed the process of it. I think it’s a different gratification. Just like moving from an individual contributor to management.
Ilan Kopecky (Talkdesk)
I actually did do that. When things ended at Yammer, I took a few months off and I thought for a long time that I wanted to run an entire sales org. VP of a Corporate Sales, managing AEs. And the feedback I was getting during interviews was, we love you, we love your experience, we love your pedigree but you’ve never managed AEs before, and you stopped at the small business level at Salesforce.
They said, if you’re going to manage AEs we need to see that you’ve worked larger deals, mid-market, commercial-sized deals. And I was getting that feedback time and time again.
So I decided to go be an AE at Twilio, and I said, I’ve got this great foundation of sales development, how to prospect, I have taught people how to prospect. So I’m going to approach this AE role a lot differently than I approached the AE role the first time round at Salesforce. And I was successful at it, but I saw holes in the SDR process at Twilio and I got my fire right back. And I realized I needed to manage reps again.
That’s what I love to do.
Madeline Grubman (VoiceOps)
What are some of the holes facing SDR teams? The common mistakes people make.
Ilan Kopecky (Talkdesk)
Letting leads fall through the cracks I think is a big one.
Jake Monroe (Tesla)
Yes. Follow-on. 100%.
You mentioned time management from a manager’s perspective.
I think it’s the number one skill of any sales person we can hire.
I’d rather have the person who is not the loudest, nor the slickest, but the person who has amazing time management skills and organizational skills.
And it comes back to what are you doing between the phone calls. That’s where sales are lost.
Ben Apel (VoiceOps)
What do you want them to do?
Jake Monroe (Tesla)
I don’t want there to be time between the phone calls.
Ben Apel (VoiceOps)
Is time management one of the most common reasons why salespeople fail to succeed?
Jake Monroe (Tesla)
100 percent.
Ilan Kopecky (Talkdesk)
Absolutely.
What else is there? Bad process. Lack of process and bad process.
Aaron Ross talks about predictable revenue. And I’m a disciple, I worked under Aaron at Salesforce, so I believe in the process. But I also believe in just having a process. You approach a discovery call the same way you would any other call. Obviously it may go awry, and people might throw you curve balls, but if you have a designed sales process that you mentally are going into every call with, you should succeed theoretically, as opposed to just winging it and saying, “So, what do you guys do?”
One thing I will note about time management is, that’s a conversation we’re having at Talkdesk right now and the conversation I’m having with my SDRs, because there is this internal argument about the effectiveness of a ghost call. For those that aren’t aware, a ghost call is a call where you call and don’t leave a voicemail. I believe in the effectiveness of a ghost call if you’re calling from the same number.
If I am calling someone in Boston and I’m repeatedly calling from that 617 number, maybe I’ll leave that person 3 or 4 voicemails, and try to call them eight or nine times over the course of a week, I think that’s okay. The problem was that we were counting those as actual touches and activities — the ghost call was being overused and we weren’t leaving enough voice mails.
A couple weeks ago I said, you guys can still leave ghost calls but we no longer count those as touches. I want you to make 40 quality dials a day. And that means voicemails, connects whatever. And the thing I keep getting over these last few weeks is, it’s so hard to make 40 quality calls and still do my admin work and still prospect.
I mean, I really want to call bullshit, but say it in a very diplomatic way.
I said, I respectfully disagree. Because if you are making 100 calls and 50% of them are ghost calls, then fine. But if you are making 40 calls a day and 75% of them are ghost calls, are you really using your time effectively?
Ben Apel (VoiceOps)
You talked about one-on-one’s briefly, about how if you’ve got 30 people on your team or 25 people, and they all want a one-on-one every week and each one-on-one is an hour, where is the rest of your time coming from? You want to be the approachable manager but you still have your own work to do. Where are you finding time? What’s the cadence for those and how do you have a successful one on one?
Ilan Kopecky (Talkdesk)
I have one-on-one’s scheduled on my calendar every single week. They are 45 minutes long. I only miss them if another leadership meeting is book over them, but I rarely miss one-on-ones. If I need to reschedule for the week, I will, but I rarely miss them. I think they are the most important time for that rep and I.
Sometimes it’s a walk around a few blocks of the city, sometimes it’s in a conference room going over account planning or ways to get into a particular account or discussing a persona.
Sometimes it’s call coaching. Today I spent my one-on-ones playing back recordings and whiteboarding what they said and what they should have said. What questions they should have asked.
Typically a one-on-one is 15 minutes for me and my observation, it’s 15 minutes for them and what they want to talk about, and it’s 15 minutes looking forward.
Jake Monroe (Tesla)
You mentioned rescheduling, that’s a slippery slope, right? You reschedule a couple times in a row, suddenly you haven’t had a one-on-one for a month with that person.
Ilan Kopecky (Talkdesk)
Right. I’m talking about rescheduling for later in the week though.
Jake Monroe (Tesla)
But I think there is always that temptation of saying, we are going to skip this week, right?
You feel like your week is booked out. We’ll talk next week. I think your comment about going for a walk, leaving the area is super important and super valuable for the sales rep to feel like they have your time and attention. Because inevitably someone will come up to you, even if you are having a conversation, if you are in that area then that’s a distraction and that’s a distraction from the person you should be having that one-on-one with.
Look away from the screen, go on the walk, go to a conference room. Get away from those distractions. I think that’s absolutely key to a successful one-on-one is providing your full attention.
Ilan Kopecky (Talkdesk)
And sometimes you have to have the dashboard open. Sometimes you have to have that metric-driven conversation. Sometimes it’s a career conversation, sometimes it’s the “why do you keep asking to work from home?” conversation. It can be anything. But Jake’s right I try to mix it up. I don’t always go for walks.
Sometimes I have conversations that require us to be in front of a screen, but it’s important to just give that person your undivided attention. That’s very difficult to do when you’ve got all these distractions around the office and a lack of conference rooms. So sometimes the one-on-ones just happen at the kitchen table.
Ben Apel (VoiceOps)
Are there distinct differences in sales coaching based on performance? Is the structure of your one-on-one different with your top performers versus your middle and bottom performers?
Jake Monroe (Tesla)
I think you are always having to consider what do we need to talk about this week? What do we need to talk about this time around, and that’s going to be different depending on what that person’s goals are and what their needs are.
Madeline Grubman (VoiceOps)
How do you avoid repetition, especially for someone who is maybe struggling on the same points over and over, thinking of new creative ways to coach them up?
Jake Monroe (Tesla)
I think to some degree repetition is intentional. I don’t think you were suggesting that it’s not valuable but I think repetition in itself is valuable. And we are working on it until they are an expert at delivering that message or handling a particular type of call. And then with repetition, you eventually get to graduate and move on from it.
Ben Apel (VoiceOps)
You’ve got reps that are underperforming and they have been underperforming for the last three months. How do you weigh the cost/benefit between letting someone go and bringing on someone new, onboarding and training versus investing more in coaching.
Jake Monroe (Tesla)
Yeah, is it a science or an art? Is it a calculation and I’m weighing the time or does it reach a point where you’ve invested enough that you feel like anyone else would have gotten it by now?
A case where you’re going to invest more going forward with this individual then you would invest in training someone new. These are the questions you are asking in your mind. I don’t quantify it.
Ilan Kopecky (Talkdesk)
For me if the effort is there, I’ll keep investing in you. If they just keep trying and keep trying something new and keep leaving those voicemails and keep tweaking their emails. Look, this outbound thing, especially outbound, there is no silver bullet and one of the hardest transitions you can make in sales is going from an inbound rep, solely qualifying warm leads and hand raisers to now trying to call up someone who doesn’t fucking want to talk to you.
I have promoted many reps from inbound to outbound and they think, I mastered the inbound thing so I’m going to kill in the outbound. And just fall flat on their face.
Cold calling is tough. But if you show the drive and the desire to want to improve, I’m going to keep giving you at bats. Maybe that’s a fault of mine. I don’t like to give up on people. I really don’t.
Madeline Grubman (VoiceOps)
You both sound like extraordinary nice sales managers.
Ilan Kopecky (Talkdesk)
But finding good SDRs is tough. If you continuously put up donuts, then yeah we’ve got an issue. But if you’re incrementally improving, we can figure out the tweaks hopefully that can get you to being a top performer. But I’m guilty of investing in the wrong people and it has bit me in the ass before. It’s a learning experience.
Ben Apel (VoiceOps)
That’s humility. What’s the difference between an okay sales leader — manager, director, VP, and a great one?
Jake Monroe (Tesla)
I think one element of it, and it goes back a lot of things we’ve talked about, is just understanding urgency versus importance. That has to do with their own time and their team’s time. You know we talked earlier about distraction, like how you manage distraction.
It is being able to quickly and respectfully sieve through the needs to determine what needs to be dealt with now and what can be dealt with later, and imparting that on the team.
I really think it comes down to, do you feel you’re being listened to? And if a sales manager is giving you the time of day you feel like you’re being listened to, but it’s not wasting time on things that don’t need to be dealt with now.
Ilan Kopecky (Talkdesk)
Big rocks versus little rocks.
I echo that sentiment exactly. I think that if you are being given the time of day, and continuously challenged, questioned, and asked for your opinion, that’s a sign of a good leader. If a leader just says we’re going to do things my way and I don’t really give a shit what you think, then you know you’re probably in the wrong position, or the wrong company, or under the wrong people.
Ben Apel (VoiceOps)
Parting words of wisdom.
Jake Monroe (Tesla)
Make time and make it efficient. I really think that’s what it comes down to as a sales manager. I think it’s really easy to say ‘not now’, because you’ve got your own things to deal with, because you’ve got other reps, because you’ve got a problematic rep, when it’s one of the better ones trying to get your time. It’s figuring out how to make people feel like they have your ear.
Ilan Kopecky (Talkdesk)
I don’t mean to sound cliché, but never stop learning. I’m still learning about prospecting. Prospecting is different than it was 5 years ago, 10 years ago, and it’s probably going to be different in 5 years. I keep telling my reps, if you keep sending crap like that you’re going to automate yourself out of a job.
And I don’t mean you are going to lose your job here, I mean if you continuously send just spammy, robotic emails, we are not going to have this job to create pipeline anymore. We’re not going to be needed.
If you send what a machine can send, a machine will send it.
Ben Apel (VoiceOps)
Guys it’s been awesome. Thank you.
