Sales Pipelines, Black Books & the 4x Myth | E70 with Cohan Leon Daley

This episode gets real. Emma, Ruta, and special guest Cohan expose the madness of sales and marketing culture, from absurd pipeline expectations to commission nightmares. We tackle the age-old question: why do outdated sales tactics still exist—and who’s really to blame?

Cohan, a seasoned sales leader, doesn’t hold back as he spills the tea on toxic company cultures, leadership fails, and the collateral damage of BS metrics. Spoiler: it’s costing you revenue and sanity. Plus, we dive into the role of AI in sales (and how it’s failing at inclusivity) and call out the elephant in the room—why marketers always get the blame.

Takeaways

• How pipeline manipulation starts at the top (and ends with AEs fired).
• Why cookie-cutter targets and outdated processes are sabotaging teams.
• The myth of the “Black Book” and why it’s time to retire this relic.
• Why 4-5x coverage quotas are more about fantasy than strategy.
• The truth about commission plans (spoiler: it’s a mess).
• How marketing can align with sales to actually fix the chaos.
• The untapped potential (and pitfalls) of AI in tech.
• This isn’t just a podcast—it’s a call for sanity. Whether you’re in marketing, sales, or leadership, this episode is your blueprint for building a culture that works.

co@equityintechgroup.com

We’re Ruta and Emma, the marketing consultants behind Blame it on Marketing. 

If you’re in B2B SaaS or professional services and looking to do marketing that actually drives revenue and profit, we’re here for it.

Visit blameitonmarketing.com and let’s get this show on the road.

Transcript

0:00

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Blame It On Marketing. This is our somewhat seasonal, I would say, sales episode. And we are very excited to talk about just why there's so many hiccups and why certain stuff just doesn't make sense and why certain old school ways of thinking about things really are going to mess you up and set you up for failure. But before we get into that, of course we want to... introduce our lovely lovely lovely guest and I will go to throw it over to Cohen to introduce himself. I thank you. It's great to be on the podcast today. I really appreciate the time. basically been in sales for around 25 years now and I've had every position from kind of that SDR, entry level kind of early careers all the way up to RVP and general manager and looking after a whole entity. also worked in all verticals well. And also from the product and also to the software sales. globally. So in Europe, South Africa, America, India, APAC, et cetera. So yeah, I've got quite a good experience. guess some of the challenges that we all face ourselves and a lot of it isn't really necessarily everyone's fault. I think it's just more of these kind of archaic ideas that we all stick by that aren't necessarily worked out or there's no map behind it, let's say. Yep, absolutely. Ruta and I are really excited to talk about this. Also, I just want everybody to notice the fact that my, can I just say, is my wifi's holding up? Isn't it? It's finally actually working. Thanks everybody. Praise the fiber optic gods. I literally, Cohen, I literally always have shit wifi. This is the first time ever on this podcast. Ruta, I hope you leave this in, because I feel like we should celebrate. So. absolutely will. Before we get into the discussion about some crappy sales tactics that go on, we always start the episodes asking people for either marketing or a kind of sales confession. So are you prepared to confess what's the worst thing you've ever done on the job? That is. this and I think, well, where do I go with this? My first podcast, don't want to get cancelled immediately. there are a of things. I don't know if it's the worst thing, but it was, I crazy scenario of not really understanding someone's mental health properly and realizing the situation that you're in with the kind of work culture we have in sales. I basically took my team into London and we were having like an offsite, having a few beers after and you know, not everyone probably wanted to go for that drink and people had their own kind of, I want to go or family and everyone's like, no, no, pressure, pressure, let's all go together, let's all drink. That's the culture, right? So, you know, it was all going wrong anyway. One of my team used to make like inappropriate jokes. or say things that are out of turn. everyone was never comfortable and just thought, they're bit weird or odd. And actually, know, his mental health wasn't great. So looking back in hindsight. So anyway, this was just after COVID. And we were in a pub. And let's just say it was one of the football teams that are known for not just singing songs. Let's say they're quite a fruity team. I don't want to say what team it was. And one of my AEs decides to go up to the leaders of one of his teams, touch him and say that he had COVID for a joke. from my bodyguard days, which is a whole different life, I knew this guy. So I used to look after his team at the stadium. So he looked at me and I was thinking, wow, he's literally going to just take my AE away. And I'm going to have to explain where he's gone. I asked you to go in to this cloud, my AE out of the situation, talk to this guy really quickly, stop someone else from attacking him. And my other team, my whole team, they're like, what on earth is going on? And it was really, really bad. And, at times we all have to leave, but it is actually quite a bad situation when someone's magic helping is great, should they really go to a pub? Secondly, that whole work we all have something because someone says and my manager was putting a lot of pressure on us all go no one really wanted to so that was kind of a really bad thing that's definitely a confession that I knew there was something wrong with mental health but we still all went and it went totally wrong and it could have been really dangerous Yeah, nightmare. though, because I think we've all been there where we've like, especially if you have ever worked in London or in one of the capital cities or a big city and you're in the office and that pressure to make sure you are at the pub and joining in is so high. Like we talk about it now because we don't have that culture and we've, you know, moved outside of the city. But it is really hard to always get that right. So also you do have to take responsibility for yourself. and say, no, I don't want to go to the pub. It's hard, but you do. True, true, but I think that if you're in the leadership position, then it's up to you to protect the team and make decisions that they can't. and make So thinking about the topic that we have selected for this podcast, what do you think is going on at the moment that's making companies kind of really crack at the seams when it comes to sales and why are we seeing so many kind of really crappy sales tactics, which I think we all know don't really work. Yeah. It's a really good question. think, you know, we could be here for weeks, right, and trying to understand this. And I think ultimately it comes from pressure. So, and it comes from people being able to, unable to alleviate that pressure in their specific role. So at board level, there's lots of tactics around using the numbers to either create PR or to drive either market share or affect the competitor. Those changes will filter down and they're not always communicated in the right way. What happens is people want to so much pressure, I guess, in sales to not even to get their credit to exceed that, that it causes behaviors that are wrong. But if those behaviors work in any way, it's very hard to tell someone to not do it. you know, on one hand, leadership will say, you know, put something into pipe that isn't ready. pipeline is everything from first touch to negotiation that might close. That's And often, leaders will say, so move that from, typically their stages of pipe, so the stage one, they say, can you put that in stage three? Because I don't see on my reporting. Therefore, it looks like you aren't doing anything. then imagine every AE in your region, hundreds, all put opportunities from having one conversation into stage three, which is when you're starting to send pricing, you're starting to evangelize your product, start to talk about you can support them. So stage three is nothing like stage one. But apparently no one in the board sees stage one clearly too much to look at. So already you're telling your AEs to lie. by putting things in stage three that aren't, right? What happens then? When it's in three and it goes to four, it's actually at two. That happens all the way to negotiate. So at negotiate, you're still in a contract. The customer's still at two stages beforehand. Because they don't know what the procurement is. haven't raised the PO. They haven't negotiated the price yet. So that one mistake by leadership at the beginning is a domino effect, and it causes that across the whole sales cycle. The consumer, the prospect feels like you're being pushy and they feel uncomfortable. So if it does close, guess what? They're not going to upsell or cost sell. They're not going to buy from you again. They're not going to renew. Also, how does that affect your pipeline and will come onto your forecast, right? Your forecast is what you think will happen based on all the variables like climate, the economic state of the country you're in. your average close rate of the business, then your close rate, then your vertical, then your sub-vertical, and I can go on. There's so many variables that we don't talk about. All this is impacted, but apparently we're supposed to just pull a number out and get to an answer. It just doesn't work. Does that make sense? Yeah. It's a trickle down, and we see it from our side, because obviously we're on the marketing side of the fence, and we know this stuff is, we kind of know this stuff is going on. We don't like it. I think lots of marketers really hate the fact that our sales colleagues are put under so much pressure in this sort of like, yeah, just stick it in the pipe, or even worse, sometimes actually don't put it in the pipeline until it's about to close, you know, so that you kind of get these other, that opposing problem. And from marketing point of view, then it looks like marketing's not performing. mean, you know, this podcast called Blame It On Marketing, this is literally the root cause of why marketing get the blame because there's shitty things going on in sales. There's a senior leadership team who are kind of, or some senior leaders who are invested in doing things like Cohen's describing. And then who gets fired and who gets blamed? Us first and then sales. yeah, but think Emma, think it's kind of everyone is on that same challenge, right? Because often I've actually had marketing and sales and inside sales that were put into me. So So the same thing happens in marketing, right? There's a marketing qualified lead, what's known as an MQL. and someone will look at the data set and look at all the MQLs and say, why are they sat there? And you give a plethora of reasons, genuine reasons why they're still marketing leads. They go, no, switch them over to sales. Make them SQLs. And you're thinking, well, if I give them to sales, sales are going to nurture it, or they're to be able to try and close them, because that's what their job is. So you just switch those MQLs to SQLs. Guess what happens? Sales go, these leads are rubbish. You say, they're not leads. Leadership say everyone shut up and do your job. So that's great. You're giving MQLs that aren't, haven't gone through a process that aren't nurtured properly to salespeople that aren't set up to then nurture and push those leads to a certain way or forget about talking about a cadence, right? worked for a company called InsideSales.com back in the day and they used to do a lot of research with Harvard Business Review, right? So I've got a lot of data on this and the average rep will try and call someone 2.2 times and then they'll give up. So imagine if you give all of your MQLs, flip them to SQLs even though they're not, say a thousand leads, you give them to a sales guy or girl and they're gonna attempt 2.2 times and give up. What a waste of data, do you how much it costs to consume a What have you had in the bank? What have you had in the booth? No, this is webinar data. This is really high expensive. really volume-based data that's been wasted because again, that pressure to try and push sales when they're not ready to be pushed, which really negates the customer experience that the customer wants and it ruins the relationship between you and your prospect. Yeah. Emma just had a very recent, bad sales experience with a company that we will not name, but they're the big, big, big data companies. And, they just refused to give Emma the pricing. Cause she was like, well, I need to know how much it is. Cause I'm a, I'm a freelancer and I'm my own, you know, agency owner. Like I just need to know how much it is. Cause otherwise I can't buy it. And also I've used you a hundred times. So like, could you just let me know what the price is? And she got chased down by like three different people. At one point, somebody was like, well, If you don't speak to us, then I'm going to put you down as don't contact on the system. And I was like, wow, okay, someone's really trying to protect their conversion rates because they're not even willing to like get Emma into the buying cycle. But what a waste of time. You can just qualify me out double quick because the only thing that I need to know is the price. They're still calling me now. This is like a week after the initial, I find out what the price is? I'm like, well, just mark me as don't contact at this point. Also, just for their knowledge, when they hear this episode, when they're still calling me in January 2025. I bought Apollo, don't you worry. So, you know, I mean, we've obviously talked a bit, we talked about some of the crappy kind of tactics that are going on. What are some of the other things that you see when we're talking about this scenario where there's just this massive disconnect between teams, between the pressure that's being pushed on people and why are they so damaging, not just damaging to your pipeline revenue, but what goes on inside the kind of company culture? Yeah, I think there's two things I want to pull out for this one one of them is the mysterious black book and the other one is four times pipeline or five times pipeline and Whatever you want to make up. let's address the black book first. I don't think I've ever had an interview apart from when I had my first interviews. So when I had my first sales roles that were very, very junior, no one asked me about that black book because I obviously had no historical relationships. I've been doing sales for three or four years and was very good at it. People would almost not employ me unless I said I had a black book. Even though when you're going from company to company, your customer you saw before might not buy from that company for multiple reasons, or might be different sector or vertical, or might have an incumbent provider that they've basically, say you look at voice, they're five year deals, CRM, five year deals. cybersecurity, four or five year deals. So no one's ripping anything out because you've got a good relationship with them. It's bonkers. Yes, I have good relationships. Yes, we could meet them and talk about other products, but not what I've sold to them before. That doesn't make any sense. And plus, in every sales contract, it says you can't talk to your customers for six months, 12 months, 24 months. So the same leaders that put these calls in contracts are asking you to break that contract, be unethical. straight away in the job interview. So you haven't started the company yet and they want you to be unethical. It's absolutely ridiculous and we should stop doing it. I did an article recently and I put a fax in the picture. That's how old school the black book is. There's no such thing. know, one of my leaders, a VP that was great, said to me, would someone buy from you a game that they've bought from you before? That's a great question. Yes, absolutely. Not will they buy our products now you work for us. That's it's actually ridiculous. take them? It's like, it's like harking back to like going down the freaking golf club with your clients. Like my dad used to work in sales. He's now retired. Like that is, and my dad used to work in HR tech, massive, like biggest HR tech company going, I think you could probably say, right? so like he was dealing with enterprise deals and yeah, he used to take people out for dinner and go down the golf club with people. I remember. thinking that was shitty then and that's like 20 years ago. Like come on man, have we not moved on? mean yeah, he ain't gonna listen to this, it's all good. be honest, the point is that if you're good at building relationships, you're able to understand someone's challenges and you're good at what you do, you make new relationships, you new partners, and that's the whole point. Yes, you can leverage your experience, but not just to start on one day and bang those revenues. Again, it all comes back to this quickness for revenue, this eager to push people. they're uncomfortable until they snap. It doesn't work. So that's kind of the Black Books scenario. yeah, and I'm seeing, we're seeing that a lot within marketing and sales, VPs and startups. How long do we last? Year and a half, two tops. And it's literally, so marketing doesn't necessarily have a black book, but they expect us to have a playbook to put in and just get everything cookie cutter, get it right. And then for sales leaders, it's the black book, rinse your black book. You're good, you're out. Yeah, it's a real old school thinking and I'm hoping that, you know, as market changes that we start to change and start to challenge these ideas, you know, it's hard, right? Sometimes you can't speak out for multiple reasons. You don't want to not get the job. You don't want to get fired. So you don't say anything and that happens a lot, especially when we talk about the next point. So pipeline these quota, these forecasts is a challenge that everyone has. Now this Yep. I've seen some hilarious stuff. But also, when you're manipulating data, you're manipulating it for yourself and for your own reports. And each leader seems to be lying to their boss, lying to their boss about what the real situation is. And then, course by quarter, then you haven't addressed your data problem, you haven't addressed your marketing generation problem, or not understanding your best lead source. You haven't addressed if you haven't spent anything in your brand or your tone of voice. All you're addressing is that yes, we're all lying in that pipeline and yes, we haven't closed. So what happens is you put out PIP's, you fire people and then you hire people. This takes six months to ramp up on average, by the way. So how do they want to PIP after three months? They're ramping for six. At Strategic and Enterprise, you can ramp up for nine months. It takes a year to get on boarded to a bank. Yeah. find them after three months? It makes no sense. And remember that to hire someone, someone on six fingers and above, it costs one and half times their salary to employ them in a year. So you'll find someone after a year, you've wasted a lot of money. Now why? So your pipeline is everything in your world in sales from I spoke to them in a restaurant to it's about to close. your pipeline. Your quota is the number contractually that you've agreed to hit for that business and team. quota, that's pipeline. Your forecast is everything you believe in your world that could come in, might come in, or will come in based on the probability that you agree within your team based on a subset of lot of variables, including your average close rate. including the sector you're in. So for example, this is when call out BS. Let's say you're in the retail team. Retail end of year is July. all know from Black Friday to probably after Valentine's Day, they're not buying nothing. It's all BAU. They can't sell anything. But from March to July, they're going to buy stuff and sell stuff and that's when you can build. So imagine if you're a rep and you've got something in your pipeline to close in November in retail. Surely your leader is going to go, I call BS there because Cohen, they don't want to buy anything from you in November because it's BAU. Like it's their biggest period of the year. You know, or going to ski resort in January. I could go on and on about all these different examples, right? So at what point they then sit down and say, okay, that's not based on our close rate. It's not based on the vertical or the time of year. Stay through on public sector and there's an election, for example. There's a period of time where they won't purchase for 12 weeks. Man, you've got stuff to close in those periods. It's all made up. what's more funny is when they say, okay, you can't just have one times pipe, right? So what that means is, so people don't know, if my quota is a million, okay, I've got a million of pipeline, that means I've got zero coverage. It's 100%. So I have to close all of that to hit my number. Given in the UK, the average close rate is 19%. That means if I've got a million pound target, I'm 800k short. I'm a problem. That's when the coverage comes in. healthy coverage would probably be about two and a half times, right? If that's even possible, because stuff falls out and comes in the whole year. But when you're on boarding and you first say, this is my stage, it's in 90, this is my plan. and you've just started in the business, you don't know the culture, you don't know anyone, they go, right, tell me this year what you're gonna hit Does that make any sense? It doesn't, because they don't know yet. So they go, okay, I'm gonna go like this and blag some numbers, make up some conversations. And remember that all these conversations are stage one and stage three, right? So they're all further along than they should be, right? Then they're gonna say, okay, all this pipe you've got, you've got coverage, we're good. My boss last to my boss and so on and so forth. When it goes to the board where they don't look at names, don't look at MR, don't look at retail code, they see numbers and a market share price they need to hit or any beta they don't want to go into, that's all they see. There's no names or nothing. They go, right, that fits with that. We're good, the projection is great. But no one's actually called bullshit on the whole pipeline for managers below, which doesn't make sense. Because if they address... that there isn't no three times or four times or five times pipe and check out like pipeline what would happen everyone would be fired right so the managers still let me bullshit even though you know it's not right because they don't want to lose their job and then push comes to shove it's the aes that will get sacked and i've seen that 20 times in my career I think we've witnessed it where like you've got a sales leader who, you know, I think sometimes it's quite obvious if you smell this bullshit, like lots of us know what this looks like and we've lived through it and some of us are still living through it now. But like you see that like AEs will get sacked maybe like four or five times. There'll be like four or five rounds of AEs getting sacked before the senior leader is looked at. it's also, it's like, potentially you have caused, I would say like maybe two to three years worth of damage to your revenue at that point. Like if you are going through maybe like maybe five AEs have been sacked and replaced in the, the course of a year. Yeah. It's like three years worth of damage and it is really hard to then claw that back, isn't it? It's like at that point, what do you do? Yeah. look under the hood and say, okay, if we don't have the pipeline cover we need to, what can we do about that? So it's actually sitting down with finance, just sitting down with marketing and the sales and saying, and a team, what do we do well? What works? What's our best close rate? So it could be that under the line item or part code or solution, it sells better than everything customers are selling. Okay, great. Let's just sell that. let's focus on that. who's best at having the most? Yeah, so it's looking at the milestones of how you get to that and then working backwards. So, who's best at having conversations in the team? Okay, it's Emma, right? Emma, I want you to partner with everyone else once a week. We'll do some role plays and you show everyone the conversations. Okay, great. Everyone else's meetings will get better and improved. Okay, who's best at closing? Okay, it's Ruta. I want you to sit with Kelly and &I and everyone else and go through how you close and the red lines and the metrics you use to negotiate how USP is valued that doesn't make you discount, for example. Once you're doing that, you're enabling your team, you're showing best practice, no one's being fired, you're all going to get to the same level because in sales, right, third of your team here, a third of your team average, and a third of your team are going to get sacked That's the truth. So you're interviewing all year because you know a third of them are gonna go, a third of them are gonna stay as they are, don't really care, and a third are gonna excel, it be amazing. But at what point do we not say, well, the ones that been successful, what are those attributes? Why are they successful? Because it's certainly not the company that's helping them. So let's have a conversation with them and say, why, so what are you doing? Because there's certainly no software or apps or support they're getting. Basically, you... Everything will get solved. Just buy more tech. you know, that's a prepared and some consultant coming and go, this is this is on the whiteboard out your strategy. Nothing ever happens. So there's a lot of BS going on because of the pressure to succeed and close. But customers know it, you know, everyone knows it now. When are we going to change? Yeah. I really like this point that you made about, essentially it's a two part. One, if you're bullshitting about your metrics, you're never gonna get to a point where you can actually have a discussion and fix stuff because we're all bullshitting about our metrics and need to keep face. And two, if you do bullshit about your metrics, you're gonna get to a point where you have to put everyone on PIP's And as soon as you put everyone on PIP's, they are out. Like how much recovery from a PIP is there in the world? If I'm on a PIP I'm fucking interviewing for other jobs like fuck y'all you know? yeah, I think it's less than 20 % will stay after they've given a PIP. Typically because of how they feel that they've been treated. I've had PIP's in my career lots and I saw that as challenge and just to annoy them, I would smash the PIP's out of the park. I would still leave, just just to prove a point, I would smash that PIP and I coach people that are on PIP's, coach them how to beat it and then they leave because All you're saying is, don't know how to manage you. I don't know how to fix this. So I'm going to fire you, but I can't do it directly. So why, I mean, obviously we've talked a bit about the pressure that comes along with this, but how do you avoid doing this? Because I think quite a lot of us, in particular, I think the pipeline scenario where we're all sitting there going like, we've all kind of worked out this horrible metric where we're like, if we pull this number of leads in, we'll get this many, this will convert, these are our crap conversion rates, this is how much pipe we need. How do we, obviously we've talked about sitting down having honest conversations, but. How do we avoid it from the outset? We need to take it away from people. I've been working with AI since 2015-ish an algorithm that could say, look at all of your data points, millions of them in real time, and look at time of day to call, title to call, when to call them, how they're going to react to that call. And that goes as far as words in pipeline, right? The software will tell you based on everything you've ever closed in your business, this is a percentage where it's like to close. And that's called weighting We used to do waiting back in day in Excel, right? And that was painful. Every time someone changes it and reports it to board, you'll report in the wrong number. But let's move away from Excel and actually just wait it. So let's look at from an individual. My close rate is like 46%. Someone else's could be five or 20. So the software will look at my behaviors, look at how I use the system, look at what I do, how long I talk, what kind of documents I put in the system. And it's spit out a number of what is coverage that I need to hit my number. And it'll do that for the whole business. I think that's what we need to move towards. Cause I always say, don't the rep, ask the data. You know, when I take over as Perl's team, I don't ask them what the numbers are. I look, I run a report and the CRM will tell me what the numbers are. If And if you're a sales or marketing leader, one of the best metrics you can start by looking at is the accuracy of forecast. So just start putting down what they said the forecast will be and what you actually close that month. And when you see that there's a gap, you can immediately start investigating and actually making a change because otherwise you're going to constantly be battling, well, know, this and this happens like, yeah, but your forecast ain't right. I don't know if you agree with this or not, Cohan but it's almost like, When it's other teams, that's not acceptable. Like if marketers would behave like that, it's absolutely be like, that behavior is not allowed. But with sales teams, it's almost like kind of accepted sometimes that people, because of the pressure, they're allowed to behave like that. So it's a really good point and I think it's got two double-edged swords to it. One, sales are seen in such a negative light that when people in sales act in a negative way, it's like, they're salespeople. So they're bad. They're liars, they're cheats. Who cares? They're cocky, they're arrogant. So no one notices. But also no one's thinking that actually this behavior is caused internally by us and our behaviors. It's actually caused and effected, it's correlated. If you can't completely say to someone, you're going to be fired, you're going to be fired, you're going to be fired, you're going to be fired, it's going to affect the way they are internally and how they process information and how much they want to be there. self-people start really positive and confident, but also I have to call out, I have to call out, I think 70 % of the time when you're given a quota, when you're going to hit that quota, the company will change it or they increase it. That is disgusting. Now I know other roles go, well, they're earning so much, but why are they moaning? Well, no, because I've signed to get paid X and you're telling me now I'm going to get paid Y and of there's a lot of behaviors too. my, one of my favorite things in my very short sales career was when I was told that your sales goal is the bare basic to cover and that you should be not just reaching your sales goal every month. You should be like blowing way past it. And I was like, then why is it a goal? Like that's not what a goal is. You can't reach your goal and then be like, just go three times X that. No, so that comes from if a leader is smart, okay? And they know, for example, in their market, in the territory with the team they have, they're gonna hit 500k say. What they do is then, if this follows you, give you all 200k target. That means that he's got 100, he's now got a million, okay? But he only needs 500k, right? So he's doubling it up. So he goes to his leader and says, I think we'll do 750, yeah? He knows he's got 250 because you're all going to do 200 as a base. Does that make sense? So he's actually covered, he's actually helping you because he's you some leeway, giving you some bandwidth so if you don't hit it, he's then going to forecast up lower. And some companies are very good at doing that because all the leaders were ex-salespeople and they get it. So I've had that once in my career. you ever achieve... bang, you then got us over that mark. And we know what we're going to do, right? But the leadership don't know that. What that happens is, it means that the board aren't saying, okay, to Cohen, tells Emma, it tells Ruta you're on a PIP you haven't hit. They're saying, well, that Ruta's amazing, she's overachieved. Because the board don't know the numbers that we gave you individually. had the, so my experience was the opposite. My, my sales target was apparently just the bare minimum that I had to hit to perform. I actually had to do way more than my sales target. And I'm like, then why have you targeted me at this number? If you're, yeah, if you're expecting me to do way more than that, it's like, it's my target. I'm a goal oriented person. When I hit my target, I'm going to be fucking done. You know, like it, it doesn't make any sense, but yeah, I see where you're coming from. Yeah, they did that in one way. You're supposed to do it to protect and enable and inspire your team to then run it over a team and then put kickers in. Or for example, they say, if you get to 100%, then it's two and a half times kicker, one and a half times kicker. You're like, wow, I'm going to make a lot of this year. You get to it, they say, you know what, market conditions, sorry, we can't pay you that. I have closed you know, millions and millions millions of pound deals have never been paid. And that's really harsh. And sounds illegal. Isn't it illegal? Can't you sue people for that? No. You can't. that that happened to who closed, I mean it was a huge enterprise deal and then she did not get her commission on it because they all of a sudden they changed the rules. were like, I can't remember what they actually did to her, but they basically were like, we'll give you like 20 % of the commission we promised you because you did do something, but other people worked on this deal with you. It's like, hang on, no, no, fuck off, give me my money. And also just to say like the personal impact of that on this person, when she hears this will be like, my God. But she was trying to buy her house. She wanted to buy her house. So she had gone out, she'd smashed her target. She was waiting for her commission. She waited a whole year for the bloody commission. Then they didn't pay it to her. Yet the whole time she's fantasizing about buying a house. I'm like, what are you doing to these poor sods? Like in that situation, like it's not that is. I know there's a couple of things. so, Emma's, yes, Emma's example is called a windfall payment. A windfall payment is when you overachieve so much that it could change or affect the margin or the operating cost of the business. If they can prove that paying you would affect their operating cost or margin, they don't have to. That's called a windfall payment, which basically stops them paying anyone lots of money. That's called a windfall. Every contract in 25 years, right? The second one is commission is based on your manager's authorization only, not contracted. So if your manager wakes up and doesn't want to pay you, pay you? They want to change your commission plan mid-year? again, sometimes it's good for you from a marketing side to understand these things like contracts. You didn't know were there. The windfall there, the manager's decisions pay commissioners there. If for example, a big organisation that I was at recently, one of the female employees went on maternity leave. and she'd worked on a deal for two years, okay? And this is a multi-million five-year deal. She's not gonna pay commission. Because she's on maternity leave. When you're on maternity leave, you don't earn commission. Same with paternity leave. There's a lot of bias and prejudice here based on the role you have as well. And remember that, know, paternity is like weeks, it's crap, right? Maternity could be a year. So you've built up pipeline, right, for four or five years. You want to have a family, that's your right. You have a child and you lose hundreds of thousands of pounds because you're a woman basically. So these are some of the examples that are ridiculous. And to me, if you're a leader or manager, that strategic AE who is bad ass at what she does by the way, she's going to leave. It's like, what? now you're going to ramp up and hire and train someone else for five years? It makes no sense to me. Why wouldn't you want to keep her? Make her happy. Even if you said to her, we're going to pay you 70 % of it, she'd go fair play. I'm not there. I'm off. But nothing? Honestly, it drives me absolutely insane. Dude. someone at this company hears this podcast and they should be ashamed of themselves because that's awful. Like know they don't care. That's the problem is they don't care. It's what's so awful. They do not care. talk about pay, which people do a lot, which I can't stand, I don't care what my base salary is. You don't know what my outgoings are, you know what my life is, you who I support. If you agree to pay me something, then pay me. If you agree to up at a certain time, show up on time. If you agree to do anything, do it in life. Don't then change your account based on what you perceive as right or wrong. Why put it in writing then? quickly before we get on to the marketing gossip, Cohen, if you're a senior leader and you're listening to this, like we've obviously found out some stuff that we didn't know about salespeople's contracts. I wish they told us this before we started to hate on them about being lazy. Like we didn't know this shit. Now we know. yeah, you would have a little bit more, a little bit more empathy now. A little bit more compassion for our sales colleagues. What should senior leaders do to stop? So like if you want to have a good company culture, because this is really fundamentally what it boils down to, and hopefully by proxy of good company culture and treating people fairly, you should hit your targets. What do you think senior leaders can do to make sure that stuff happens? I think everything we spoke about Mike goes on every day and it's our way of thinking. It's just drawing the line in the sand and having a, I always do workshops and cleanings and say, look, just understand you're actually in the market you're in and the trends that are happening. Let's look at a realistic number. So let's look at year on year on your growth. look at your competitors year on year growth. And then as a medium, look at what number you can hit. That's realistic, right? Based on that, what people do we need to hit that number? What software do we need to enable them to hit that number? Let's wipe the world out what that looks like and then build a strategy to hit that. That's what I would say. It's like stop, realign, look, gain knowledge, enable yourselves on the market, what you're doing, speak to your leader and your leader about what you're doing so they're confident. Because a lot of these behaviors we speak about the whole podcast is about, about mistrust and someone not trusting, I don't believe they can hit that number so I'm gonna push them or people you trust, or don't hire them is the first thing. You have to have trust and value what they're saying. If you're paying them a salary you're not comfortable with, don't pay that salary. Be comfortable with the salaries, be comfortable with what you're doing, and then have a strategic plan to move forward. So marketing and sales are lines. What is brand, PR, and digital, and software? Don't give people a pen and a laptop and say, go ahead. No onboarding, no culture awareness, no understanding of assets, no materials, no nothing. can say, go and hit a million pounds. Are you joking? Let's be realistic here, and let's be fair. Yeah. Love that. Yeah. So is there any sales or marketing gossip that you'd like to share with us? Something that you've seen that's been interesting or irked you or is living in your mind rent free? it's not something that hurts me. It's just that, I guess, yes, I do my fractional role and trying to put an understanding of how to look at their strategy and their go-to market. Another part of what I do, which is mentioned in the intro, was my equity in tech group. It's basically trying to support marginalized groups getting to tech. and to have a career whether it's through certification pathways, whether it's through enablement, through CV, through soft skills, et cetera. And I had someone come through to me the other day and say that we've built an AI app. We think it could really help you and your cohort. I was like, wow, this is amazing. through like three or four calls for hours of my time. When we went through the demo, I said to him, are any of your team? not white and he was like no. I was like well in regards to linguistics of your algorithm what names did you put in? Did you put in know Peter, James and Paul? They don't sound like us. He's like no no it'd be fine. I gave him 10 names, AI couldn't pronounce one. Gave him another 10 names, the AI couldn't pronounce one. wasn't a bad person, he wasn't trying to upset me, he was just ignorant. to he's pitching to a person's trying to drive diversity and his software can't pronounce any of our names. So it's just really to think about AI, think about your biases, think about when you're building something, not for yourself, if it's a global product for everyone, that has to be, know, women, men, black, white, and everyone in between, it can't just be for your cohort of where you grew up and who sounds like you. Therefore, it's not equitable, especially if you're pitching to guy that's trying to drive diversity. I was like, you're being serious. I was like, come on guys. So it's a waste of my time. Yeah, it's a waste of my time and really frustrated because it was really cool app. And it's like, wow, another thing that actually can't work in my organization. So that was a frustration. I love AI. I love what it's doing. Obviously, I work in AI, but let's be... careful and mindful about how we use AI and make sure it's available for everyone and not just a specific group. Yeah, it's like it's like accessibility in tech. It's like You made a piece of tech and then every tech founder I have have ever met has gone has said we'll make it accessible when someone asks for it Exactly. We've definitely learned some stuff and as Emma said, our empathy has been upped for sales. So I hope that that translates to the rest of our podcast going forward. If you want to get in touch with Cohen, we're going to leave his details in the description below. And yeah, if you have any questions for him, please go to chat. And yeah, thank you so much for being here.