🎯 own your team's number

SalesDaily for Leaders
November 1, 2026

This week: the CRO job, your next hire and your deal reviews.

In this issue:

• John McMahon: Run revenue like a business owner

• Sean Malkin: Hire sellers who own their number

• Mark Siciliano: Make every deal review ask for evidence

• Recommended reading: Four posts from sales leaders

STRATEGY

Run revenue like a business owner

On Topline, John McMahon talks with Sam Jacobs, AJ Bruno and Asad Zaman. He has been CRO of five public companies, and his team at PTC created MEDDIC.

Over 100 of today's CROs worked on his teams, including OpenAI's Dali Rajic. He covers when you're ready for the seat, how to work with your CEO and where AI helps a sales team.

Take the seat when you're ready

John once turned down a promotion Dali pushed hard for: "I'm not gonna do that to you because you're not ready." His reasoning: "you're gonna fail. Your ego's not gonna be able to take it." A leader who isn't ready blames someone else before themselves.

Readiness comes down to whether you can recruit, coach and lead people who want to follow you. Strong sellers ask two questions about any boss: is this person going anywhere, and will I learn anything from them? If either answer is no, they leave.

Carry a bag before you lead sellers

Asked if never carrying a bag disqualifies a CRO, John said: "100%." Without that time in sales, you can't follow a seller through a live account and see why they can or can't do certain things.

One host pushed back with his own case. His CRO came from RevOps, ran account management first and closed his first 10 deals himself to learn the process.

Talk to the CEO as a peer

John sees two problems with first-time CROs and their CEOs. Some founders think they know sales and want to sell to everybody right away. Early on, you need a clear ICP, a competitive edge and the pains you solve first.

A CRO has to be strong enough to say, "That's the wrong way to do it and let me tell you the reasons why."

Other CROs hold the C-level title but don't act like the CEO's peer. His coaching: "You're the CRO. You have a fiduciary responsibility. Tell the CEO specifically what you think is wrong with the business."

→ Come with a solution for what needs to change.
→ Discuss it partner to partner, then live with the CEO's decision.
→ Speak as a business owner about the whole company.

↳ Blaming revenue problems on the product "is a non-starter." John points CROs at the go-to-market issues they can fix with the rest of the company.

Use AI for research and keep qualification human

John sees AI as a research tool for now. It makes strong sellers better and lazy sellers lazier.

A lazy seller asks AI for an opening point of view, and the customer has already heard it three times. A strong seller uses it to learn the buyer's risks, threats, competition, persona and how they're measured. Then curiosity and better discovery questions set them apart.

He's blunt about conversational intelligence tools: "All they're doing is verifying that something was said, but there's no true qualification."

➤ When a seller in a QBR claims a champion on a $2 million deal, John asks 24 questions. By the end he knows if it's a champion, a coach or the enemy.

On capped commissions

One host heard from an Anthropic leader that its commission plans have a floor and a cap. John doesn't like caps. He allows that a company in a land grab may need one while it learns who's good and fixes gross margins.

Check yourself against John's bar

✔ Would your best people say you're going somewhere and they learn from you?
✔ Can you follow a deal in a live account the way your sellers do?
✔ When did you last tell your CEO what's wrong with the business, with a fix?
✔ Do your QBR questions prove a champion, or only confirm one was named?

HIRING

Hire sellers who own their number

On his Hit Your Numbers podcast, James Bissell, two-time VP of Sales and founder of The Revenue Enabler, talks with Sean Malkin, Head of Sales at RTB House.

Sean has built four teams over 12 years in AdTech and is staffing up for 2027. He shares the hiring profile he uses and the interview questions that show whether a candidate owns their results.

Write the profile for the stage you're in

When Sean joined RTB House about 18 months ago, he sat down with the MD to look at past hires.

Many had come from big-name companies and hadn't worked out. Sean and the MD wanted perseverance more than polish.

In its early years, the company hired industry veterans. That made sense: with no case studies, you need network and credibility.

Today RTB House works across 90 markets and has the case studies. So the profile shifted to sellers who own their number, run good discovery, stay curious and work the systems.

↳ The profile from your last company may be wrong for this one. Start from where the business and product are today.

Put characteristics ahead of experience

James shares his own mistake from about five years ago at his startup StaffCircle. An enterprise AE from an HR tech company that had raised hundreds of millions applied.

James skipped steps in the process and paid more than he should have. The hire struggled.

His lesson: experience doesn't always equal success. Every salesperson in a role has experience.

A seller at a large company has inbound and outbound SDRs, a sales engineer, a deal desk and a partner ecosystem. At a startup in a young category, sellers generate their own leads.

Sean ranks what he screens for:

1. Mindset
2. Characteristics and skill set
3. Industry and product knowledge, a nice to have

The raw characteristics he wants: hard work, resilience, bouncing back after setbacks, ownership, honesty and integrity.

➤ He can teach the product, and industry knowledge comes with time. Raw characteristics he can't coach.

What he checks on the CV

✔ Experience in a tough startup or scale-up environment
✔ Two years or more per role
✔ Achievements backed by numbers
✔ How those numbers happened

The two-year rule matters because enterprise cycles can run 8 or 9 months up to a year and a half. A shorter stint can't show a full story.

On achievements, dig into the details. A seller who really delivered answers without skipping a beat.

Also ask what resources they had. A big marketing engine behind them changes what the number means.

Lock in the number, then hand it over

James treats every seller like the owner of a franchise. The company supplies the product, the location and the technology. The seller brings the customers in and keeps them coming back.

His process:

→ Show the seller the number and how you got to it.
→ Explain how you'll support them with skills, capability and technology.
→ Give them the chance to argue why it isn't possible.
→ Once it's locked in, expect them to do whatever it takes, professionally, to hit it.

↳ When a couple of deals slip and the pipeline looks thin, the pressure builds. A seller without ownership starts changing everything at once.

The question that exposes ownership

Sean's test is simple. He asks: "Tell me about a time that you failed. You tried something, it didn't go to plan. What happened? Why was that?"

A narrower version works too: talk me through the last time you missed a quarterly target.

The answer to "why" tells you who the person is. There are only two places to look: inward or outward.

✘ Outward: no product roadmap, marketing wasn't on point, the SDR didn't deliver.
✔ Inward: what they did and what they'd change.

Blame pointed outward is a hard no for him.

Two more hard nos

Low self-awareness. Sean asks for the last piece of constructive feedback a manager gave them. Recently, a candidate went silent for 10 to 15 seconds.

His follow-up: what's the one thing you need to improve on? Without a fast, true answer, the candidate is out. Sean could list five or ten things he needs to improve himself.

Negativity about past employers. Candidates who talk badly about their current or former company worry him.

James adds one for candidates who say they never got training or coaching: "What are you doing about it?"

Test accountability outside the interview

After the first interview, James gives the candidate a task and asks when they'll deliver it.

If they promise it by close of play and he's still waiting three days later, he has his answer.

Add these to your next interview loop

✔ Write the profile for today's stage: mindset, then characteristics, then experience.
✔ Ask the failure question and listen for where the blame lands.
✔ Ask for their last piece of constructive feedback and one thing they need to improve.
✔ Set a small task and let the candidate pick the deadline.
✔ Ask how every number on the CV was achieved and what support they had.

Cheat sheet of the week

What to cover in your 1:1s every day, week and month, from pipeline and deals to career growth.

Want the editable version to brand for your team? It's part of SalesDaily Elite, right below.

COACHING

Make every deal review ask for evidence

On Make It Happen Mondays, John Barrows talks with Mark Siciliano, Global VP of Sales Enablement and Productivity at Prometheus Group and author of Working the Gray.

Mark started as a CPA at PwC, then helped scale revenue orgs at Oracle, Marketo, Demandbase, Drift and Sprinklr.

He explains why forecast calls run on the seller's story and how first-line managers can change that with one weekly habit.

Name the discipline gap

The discipline gap is Mark's term for the distance between the standard a company announces and the standard it enforces week after week.

At Marketo, training was on point and everyone bought in. Four weeks later, the behavior hadn't changed. Nobody had built a system to check whether the announced standard was the one being enforced.

You'll see the gap in pipeline reviews, in forecast calls and in kickoffs that changed no behavior two weeks later.

↳ On a dashboard, a fictitious deal and a real one look exactly the same. The difference is evidence versus confidence.

Why managers fall back on deal chasing

John points out that managers get almost no training. Then they're handed call recording tools and told to coach.

John's math: coaching one 30-minute call properly takes at least 45 minutes. Multiply that by five sellers and every meeting on the calendar, and the time isn't there.

So managers go back to chasing deals, the thing they're good at.

Mark's fix costs nothing at any company size: a weekly cadence where every manager asks their sellers the same questions in the reviews that matter.

Make the standard "evidential"

Ask what the customer said and what proof exists on the customer's side. What the seller thinks they heard doesn't count.

John once took the words "feel" and "think" out of his team's forecast reviews. First the objective facts, then the opinions.

His old proof was the summary email. The buyer replied to confirm it was accurate, and the notes became evidence.

AI made summary emails a commodity, and buyers barely read them now. So John looks for a defined next step locked in on the calendar.

➤ Mark puts it this way: a seller without a next step is riding the bus, and someone else is driving it, probably a competitor.

Build your five questions

Mark's approach with managers: look at the deals you've closed and find what every one of them had in common. Turn that into five questions every manager asks, each one backed by evidence, plus a next step.

Managers run these with their sellers before their own forecast call with the CRO. The answers decide whether a deal is likely or commit.

A recent example: a seller built a business case and sent it by email. It never went into the digital deal room, so nobody could see whether the buyer opened it or forwarded it.

The questions that would have caught it:

→ Is the deal room built?
→ Do you have the business case?
→ Did you build it with the champion?
→ Did you validate the number before the meeting with the economic buyer?

↳ These standards exist because they move deals forward. Mark would never add a process that slows a deal down.

Where this sits next to MEDDPICC

John's worry: frameworks turn into box checking. Mark's answer: MEDDPICC and similar frameworks teach sellers how to move a deal through.

His questions build habits that keep the seller's evidence current and lower the risk of losing the deal.

Copying MEDDPICC into a manager checklist would be "silly," he says.

The bigger point is timing. Great CROs ask the uncomfortable question because they're always thinking about how the deal could be lost.

Mark collected those questions so managers ask them in week two or three. Asked in week 11 or 12, the same question turns into an emergency.

Borrow judgment from your best CROs

With AI, everyone will have the same information. In Mark's view, AI creates time for judgment, and judgment is what newer sellers lack.

Experience can't be trained. So Mark built a catalog of what the three to five best CROs he worked with did. They asked the extra question in a QBR or deal review that made the room go quiet.

John adds that judgment starts with curiosity. If a deal looks too good to be true, ask why.

Mark doubts curiosity can be taught. He works with recruiting to hire people with a "motor": curious, diligent, always asking the next question. Bartenders often make good sellers for that reason.

Train to the ceiling

Mark tells his students onboarding should never train to the floor. Train to the ceiling and set the expectation far higher, so the field feels easier than practice.

⇢ New hires know from day one that their progress is tracked, with a 90-day checkpoint.
⇢ Sellers learn faster from peers, so get your best sellers to show what good looks like.
⇢ The gap grows in small pieces, every time something slides. Holding the line falls on the manager, enablement, the CRO and the seller.

Five questions for your next deal review

✔ What did the customer say, in their words?
✔ What's the next step, and is it on the calendar?
✔ Who on the buyer's side has opened the business case?
✔ Did the champion help build it?
✔ Was the number validated before it reached the economic buyer?

Recommended reading

Kevin Dorsey: Ask for "I agree, and I will"

A thumbs-up on Slack only means someone saw the message. When you ask for a change, have each person reply "I agree, and I will," or say where they disagree.

Scott Leese: Eight call mistakes to listen for

Two sellers who've never met made the same eight mistakes, from no agenda to letting the buyer own the close. Use it as a checklist for your next call review.

Steve Richard: Ask about evaluation criteria in pipeline reviews

On competitive deals, ask your sellers how the buyer group will compare options and which criteria weigh heaviest. Then plan how to align with them.

Warren Zenna: Define what your CRO owns before you post the role

PredictLeads data shows sales leadership postings fell 14.3% from mid-August to mid-September. Before hiring for 2027, decide whether marketing and CS report to the CRO, what they can change without you and which number they'll be judged on.

Quote of the week

Humor

If a fellow sales leader would get value from this issue, forward it to them.

Talk soon,
Haris