How Great Sales Leaders Turn Instinct Into a System with Frederik Maris

Being consciously competent, the way I always explain it is, um, you've got artists, right? And some people, they just wake up and they start painting, and it's incredible what they can do. And then, uh, you ask somebody, you know, "How do you do that?" "Well, I don't know. I just get up and I start painting, and something beautiful comes out." And, uh, "No, but come on. You, you need to tell me. I- if I wanna do something, like, you gotta explain to me how you do it." "Well, I, I don't know. I mean, I might just smoke some weed or something, and then I get more inspiration, and I paint even greater," right?

[laughs]

Remember Bob Ross.

Crazy hair.

Exactly. And, and he, he would be on TV a long time ago, but he would tell you exactly how you needed to, you know, paint or do a face or do something. But if I see that, then I'm like, "You know what? I think I can actually put something on paper that looks decent," because he was telling you the science behind the art.

[upbeat music] Welcome to the Revenue Builders podcast, a weekly show featuring B2B sales leaders and executives, hosted by five-time CRO John McMahon and Force Management co-founder John Kaplan. The show takes guests in the barrel, behind the scenes with the people who've been there, done that, and seen the results. Revenue Builders covers best practices for scaling and growing your business while sharing the pitfalls to avoid.

In this Revenue Builders replay, we're revisiting a conversation with Fredrik Maras, who was CRO at Aetos Software SE when he first joined the podcast, and is now co-founder and chief revenue officer of Elite GTM. Across leadership roles at companies including Splunk, Zoom, DataRobot, BMC, and PTC, Fredrik has built and led enterprise sales organizations through periods of growth, transformation, and international scale. In this conversation, he shares what it takes to turn sales knowledge into repeatable execution, develop consciously competent managers, and train teams to succeed in complex enterprise environments. Let's dive in. [screen whooshes]

So Fredrik, you know, let's talk about a lesson that you might have learned selling enterprise software that you wish you really knew earlier in your career.

Yeah, I think it's, um, uh, so the, the, the, one of the lucky things that happened to me was I joined, uh, PTC at a very early age. I, I worked for a reseller only for nine months. Um, so I, I basically got a paid university of sales at PTC. Um, I, I really see it that way. And when you, when you look at the lessons that I learned there, um, I mean, I was forced to learn. I had to learn. But I think that early in your career, you wanna learn as much as possible, right? It, it's clearly just, uh, suck up as much as you can. Uh, try to figure out what's going on, what's important, um, you know, how things work. Um, and then the, the other thing is, um, the, the people that you're working with is incredibly important. So building that network and, and, and building that because it's gonna deliver you so much for the future. And in the beginning, you're gonna have to prove yourself. You know, you're gonna have to get experience, but it's only until later that you can