Why The Best Salespeople Stop Jumping (And It's Not the Money) with Sam Costello

Welcome to Revenue Builders, hosted by John Kaplan and John McMahon. This podcast is brought to you by Force Management. Today, we have a segment from our episode with Sam Costello, CRO at Harness. Sam has scaled the platform from sub $1 million to $100 million ARR by ruthlessly recruiting elite talent, running a champion-first sales process, and building a culture of radical candor, all with his co-leader, Carlos. In this clip, Sam breaks down what actually keeps elite salespeople long term when everyone else is chasing OTE. Let's dive in.

I probably interview 400 people a year right now, so I've honed it a lot over the last couple of years. I would say I was not a great interviewer a few years ago. What did you change? What did you change? It's separating the story from the facts. That's the biggest thing. And then learning a pattern of asking the right questions at the right time in the interview to get what you're trying to suss out. And then one that's a little bit uncomfortable, but I've had to get better at is interrupting people. I prepare them for it now because time's constrained and I need to figure out what I need to know to make a decision. And so I like oftentimes you're there in the middle of their story. That's if they practiced it, they're trying to win a job. Right. They know what they want to say. And so kind of breaking the flow and getting in the questions you need to get in to make a decision is super important. But I think a lot of people are just sitting there listening. and trying to parse through the kernels to see if they got what they wanted versus like kind of directing the dialogue and owning that discussion to make sure they're bottoming it out.

Really qualifying is what you're doing. Exactly. Exactly.

And what about the war on talent? Cause you're in this tech stack. And the war on talent, Johnny and I were just talking earlier today about certain companies that are sucking the life out of the industry with all their resources. And they're sucking the talent out. They're offering huge amounts of money with this war on talent. How is interviewing changing for you as it relates to how much you're qualifying an individual and how much you're actually developing a value proposition to draw them into your company? Has anything changed? No. What's the situation

today? I would not say on that front, nothing changed. We're always selling until they're buying. Once they're buying, we qualify them. We're in sell mode until we have a candidate that's leaning into what we're doing. Then we want to qualify that we're getting what we want out of it. What is happening today, though? Yeah, it is a talent war. We had one a few years ago during Zerp when every VC was flushed with cash and wanted to expand their sales team. This is different because it's OTEs and guaranteed compensation and things that we haven't seen in the industry before. And based on companies with crazy product market fit out of the gate with up to the right revenue curves. So that's an interesting situation we find ourselves in. I think that's when it's really important to have built something that gives them more than just money. Like I'm big on, like if