00:00 Pim Roelofsen: Today we are talking about why B-players are the worst. 00:04 Andy Whyte: You don't agree with this, do you, Lucy? 00:06 Lucy Williams-Jones: I don't. 00:07 Andy Whyte: Why? 00:07 Lucy Williams-Jones: We've talked a lot about this today, haven't we? But I think B-players are your reliable ones. Your steady Eddies. They're consistent — around 80 to 100%. And actually, I think if you intentionally invest time in B-players, you could increase your sales capacity by up to 30%. 00:27 Pim Roelofsen: What do you think about that? 00:28 Andy Whyte: I think with B-players you spend 80% of your time — which is then not spent on A-players, where you unlock most of the results. What I think here — and I hear what you're saying — is that this may be a definition thing. Because I would say those people who are achieving 80-ish percent are probably A-players who haven't had the right leadership. So to your point about investing in those people — if you put your arms around them, give them the environment where they can thrive, they probably are actually A-players. Versus the B-players. 00:58 Andy Whyte: What we mean when we talk about B-players is people that — well, we see being an A-player as being a form thing. So you can be an A-player and be out of form, and find yourself acting as a B-player. We also see it as relative. So if you've got someone who's in their first year as an AE, and someone who's been an AE for 20 years, they can both be A-players. One is of course vastly more experienced and effective than the other, but relative to where they are, it's all relative to their experience. And so in that context, if someone is a B-player, it means they're not meeting the standard they could in that seat. It's like you're letting someone operate below their best, below the standards you'd really want in that environment. 01:54 Lucy Williams-Jones: Yeah. And I guess sometimes if you think about A, B and C players, the B-players are like your middle child, aren't they? Middle child syndrome. They're not the best. They're just — in the middle. And I don't think there's anything wrong with being in the middle, as long as internally as a B-player you're comfortable with that. But will B-players aspire to be A-players? Or are people comfortable being a B-player? 02:20 Pim Roelofsen: Well — I know one thing: A-players are never comfortable, right? They want to be growing. They show up with this attitude of wanting to prove themselves every single day. And so for me, if someone has that attitude — the natural result of that attitude is that you're consistent with it too. An A-player is not always directly tied to results, but to who someone is and how they decide to show up. And for me, B-players — what I've seen, and there may be a little bit of a difference here between really mature companies with a solidified proposition and startups where you have to fight for every dollar every day — but as a leader, you end up spending a lot of time with B-players who require a lot of support and hand-holding to ultimately deliver a number that's there or thereabouts. Whereas if you invest the same energy and time with your A-players, you'd get a multiple of that. And C-players — it's not even a conversation. You just don't need those people on your team. 03:29 Andy Whyte: But one of the things I'm getting from this conversation — which I think keeps recurring — is that we're falling foul of the trap we criticize others for. We're basing our rating of our teams on their revenue performance, which is a lagging indicator and not necessarily a very good one. Because as we all know, over the course of a year you can have two identical twins — theoretically the same ability — and they're not going to end the year the same, because every opportunity, every territory, every lead is different. 04:06 Andy Whyte: And so what I would look for — and why I feel strongly about this — is that you shouldn't even have a term "C-player." Because if you're not an A-player or a B-player with potential to be an A-player, you're basically just making up the numbers. And you don't want people like that because, if nothing else, they upset the culture. And they're more likely to leave anyway. So what I'm thinking about is: what are the behaviors A-players exhibit? What are the standards they exhibit? And if you think about that as the way we rate people — rather than waiting until they've ramped and got a year or a few quarters under their belt before making a call — I'm just looking and saying: do they do the basics really well? Are they consistent in what they do? Always following up? Always on top of their CRM? Always focusing on building stakeholders, uncovering value, really understanding the customer's process? That's how I think we should judge whether someone's an A-player or a B-player. Otherwise it's too late anyway. 05:02 Andy Whyte: And you also get into this trap where you look at performance — like I said, it doesn't tell the full story. If we bring in C-players for the sake of this example, all of a sudden the A-player is just the person who's done the best. They could have had a brilliant territory. The C-player had the worst performance — for all we know they had a stinker of a territory, some real bad luck. We've all seen those things happen. And what could have actually happened is the A-player did OK — quite good — the C-player had bad luck but actually sold some things — but the B-player in the middle may have discounted more heavily, may have had more opportunities than anyone else. And if you put the C-player into the B-player's territory, they might have done even better. So these lagging indicators are ones we should largely ignore when making this judgment. If you're a frontline sales leader, these are the traits and behaviors you really want to get closely into: how good is this person at building value? How good are they at engaging with stakeholders? And how well do they manage the process? 06:13 Lucy Williams-Jones: Yeah, absolutely. So for you, Pim — what are the measurable things you'd look at to see where someone sits on this sliding scale of performance? 06:24 Pim Roelofsen: So I look at skill and will. And I think that an A, B or C player can have the will — but they may not necessarily have the skill or the experience. As you said earlier, you've got someone who's been here a long time and someone who's new — they could both be A-players, just in different ways, because one has a lot more experience. So I'd look at skill and will. But actually I'd look at not so much how well they're measuring pain or looking at value — I'd look more at the traits of an A-player: not giving up, not taking blame, being tenacious, being curious, always asking questions. A lot of leaders say they want EQ, IQ, curiosity, coachability. But I think it goes deeper than that — into someone who owns everything, who will go above and beyond. But also not someone who's super busy all the time, because they know how to prioritize. They know what they need to do each day to succeed. A-players are planners, through and through. 07:25 Pim Roelofsen: Yeah. I think that's kind of putting these things into a code of conduct, if you will. Like what we have with the C8 — our framework for a winning culture. It really encapsulates some of these things. Because the thing you were talking about — spending time on the right things — that is clock speed. Connecting the dots: I'm doing this thing, I'm focusing on it, I'm doing it really well. Mixing it with craft, which is skill. And then another one is the craving — how badly do I want this? Am I going to put in whatever it takes? And ultimately it boils down to someone taking real ownership in terms of what it takes in a winning culture. And the reason I come up with these is that I think it's important for companies and leaders to have their own version of that. What do we look for in people in terms of leading indicators, rather than just looking at the revenue figure? 08:30 Lucy Williams-Jones: Yeah. And for me, it's back to this: if I'm in a team and we're not trying to win, not trying to be the best we can — I'm going to be unhappy. And I think that's a trait that winners have. You're never going to want to be on a team of people who aren't like that. And if you've got people who aren't striving to be A-players, that's what you're filling your team with — and people are going to be unhappy. Their performance is going to drop because they're unhappy. And they'll look to go somewhere else. People don't leave companies, they leave leaders — but it's probably more nuanced than that. It's not just a bad boss. It's the environment the bad boss has tolerated. Performance — especially in sales, where you sit there as an AE knowing that the people to your left and right have opportunities that might have come your way if they weren't there. 09:30 Lucy Williams-Jones: One of the toughest things I ever found as an AE was sitting in those forecast calls and hearing about deals. Just sitting there thinking: if only. Not because I thought I was the greatest in the world, but because — going back to standards — you'd think: why have they done that? Why have they not done that? And that just takes the air out of your sails like nothing else. 10:07 Pim Roelofsen: I think it's interesting that you attached that to the thing people say — "people don't leave companies, they leave managers and leaders." But what you're really saying is they also leave the environment that's been created around them. And so a leader's biggest responsibility is to make that environment powerful — where people grow, do their best work, and are held to high standards. That's where the danger of B-players really sets in. You look to your left and your right and apparently it's being accepted that lower standards are OK. And so it becomes the leader's responsibility to either eradicate that and level people up so that the standard is maintained — or to say goodbye to the wrong people and hire the right ones to keep the winning culture alive. 11:02 Lucy Williams-Jones: Yeah, I do agree. I'm really, really passionate about repeatable operational excellence — creating a framework that everyone has the opportunity to strive towards. And that's when you see the difference. We spoke about it earlier around people using ChatGPT to create decks. When the deck's there — use your brain, don't be lazy. You can really tell. And it's typically the B-players that use that for laziness rather than efficiency. But I do think — and this is especially for leaders — these things can become vague quickly. So as a leader you want to create real clarity: what does this standard look like for us? Something that we've done — Lee, our head of sales, and I, for our sales team — is we've created a code of conduct. It's an extension of the C8, our framework for a winning culture. These are the five almost-laws of being part of this team. Everybody commits to them. We sign them off together, we commit together, and we uphold ourselves to them. Which also means that if I'm falling behind, they can say: "Hey — you remember number nine, right?" 12:10 Andy Whyte: Yeah — that's a really nice thing to do. I like that. And the one final thing I'd like to add: if you think back over our careers, we've seen some really great stories of great organizations with tons of success. And you almost go: "Oh — that person was on that team, at that company." Nobody ever says "best product they had." It's always about the execution. It's always about the team. And the best people gravitate towards that. It's almost like an unfair advantage. It's why we talk about playbook companies a lot in our industry. But when people talk about playbook companies, it's not just that they know the playbook — of course, that's part of it. It's that you know by proximity to those people that they are the best people. So they kind of go hand in hand. 13:00 Pim Roelofsen: Yeah, absolutely. So to wrap this up — more often than not, attitude is what's creating what you see. Whether it's an A, B or C player — whatever definition we use — attitude is the change-maker. And so the leader's responsibility is to eradicate any attitude that doesn't work. And also make sure that on the hiring front, the skill — or craft as we talk about it — you can test for that. Get the right people in from a craft perspective. Then if you create a culture where people can powerfully operate — and if they don't, there has to be an end to it. 13:42 Lucy Williams-Jones: Yeah. And skill, as you said — craft. But the will is really the craving and accountability behind that. We can let people join the team who have relatively low skill — they might be new to the sector or the size of deal they're doing — but they've got to have that innate coachability and craving to open their mind to learn what it takes to be an A-player. 14:04 Andy Whyte: To have lower skill but higher will. 14:06 Lucy Williams-Jones: Yeah — because they're more coachable. You can get their skill levels up because skill is learned. 14:12 Pim Roelofsen: Yes — skill is learned. Whereas will is you. 14:15 Andy Whyte: I 100% agree with that. I'll drink to that. Cheers! 14:18 Lucy Williams-Jones: Cheers! 14:19 Pim Roelofsen: Cheers!
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