Ben Tagoe – Building Better Sales Teams – Ep.181

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(00:04:03) The history of OMG and their business model

(00:06:10) The different product categories offered at OMG

(00:08:46) What are the methods for evaluating a salesperson or sales team?

(00:16:20) Improving active listening

(00:19:58) To-do lists

(00:21:19) The practice of changing belief systems

(00:24:40) Common themes across OMG’s case studies

(00:27:56) Skills that correlate with effective Sales Management

(00:32:31) The pros and cons of OMG’s small team size

(00:36:36) The importance and function of the Chief of Staff role

(00:48:11) What’s a strongly held belief you’ve changed your mind on?

(00:50:04) What’s the best business you’ve ever seen?

Alex Bridgeman: I’m glad we get to finally put our episode together. I’m looking forward to chatting all things sales and Objective Management Group. I love that your acronym is OMG. Getting emails from you is always exciting for that reason. But I’d love to kind of hear what’s the history of OMG and then kind of maybe an overview of the business model because it’s a really interesting one.

Ben Tagoe: Yeah, of course. So Objective Management Group, or OMG, is a leading provider of sales specific evaluations and sales candidate assessments. So, we kind of operate in the same category as a lot of psychometric test providers like Caliper or Predictive Index or Wonderlic. But what’s different about us is we are not a personality test, which those are. We are a skills and beliefs and competency based test. It is one that’s designed specifically for people that work in sales. So, the business model is we go to market entirely through distributors who are certified OMG partners. And these are training companies. So, these are independent sales consultants, sales recruiters, sales development experts who buy our assessments and evaluations and use it with their clients at the beginning of their engagement to basically establish, kind of develop a gap analysis and then build the training program based on what our evaluations reveal about the organization.

Alex Bridgeman: Would it be fair to classify it as somewhat of a franchise business model? Or what would be fair or unfair by that description?

Ben Tagoe: Yeah, that’s a good question. I would not, no, I wouldn’t classify it as a franchise model. Our partners operate, it’s a reseller model. Our partners buy from us, and then they sell to their clients. And they’re independent companies. They operate very independently. They have a great deal of discretion or entire discretion in how they use the product once they have bought it from us, as long as it’s kind of within the guidelines of our licensee agreement.

Alex Bridgeman: Gotcha. That makes sense. So, okay, that’s a helpful clarification. So, we’ve talked a lot about the different programs that you train your partners to offer. Can you give a walkthrough maybe of how those different programs work and the different plans and pieces of assessments you can offer?

Ben Tagoe: Yeah, so we’ve got three, roughly, you can think about it as three products or three main product categories. We have our individual evaluations, which you can give to people who are already on your sales team. And that comes in different flavors, a bunch of different flavors. We have different evaluations for individual contributors, we have evaluations for sale frontline managers, sales managers, and we also have evaluations for sales leaders like VPs and CROs, but it’s all for people who are already salespeople, who are already on your existing team. Another thing that we offer for the team that you already have in place post hire is a sales team evaluation or a sales team analysis, which we call our SCIA. And this is really cool because what it does is it basically takes the results from all of the individual evaluations, and you also provide, you as the client and the partner, provide us with essentially the org chart of your sales team, and we spit out additional, not only the gap analysis for the individuals, but we spit out additional analyses on how those individuals who report to each other basically perform and benchmark to other sales teams. So, you’re able to answer questions like: Are we coaching effectively? Or how can we coach more effectively? Or are we forecasting our pipeline accurately? And how can we forecast our pipeline more accurately? And that all comes from the data that we get from the client and from the individual evaluations. And then on the pre hire side, we have a third product, which is our candidate assessments. And that product looks and feels pretty similar to the individual evaluations. But instead of providing its people who are already on your team, you provide it to candidates who you are looking, sales candidates who you’re looking to hire to have join your team. And it comes with a recommendation from us based on our internal criteria as well as criteria that we’ve gotten from the client about that role about either recommended, yes, hire this person, maybe on the fence or consider hire the person, or we do not recommend that you hire this person.

Alex Bridgeman: I’ve heard the anecdote a few times that sales folks are great interviews because their whole skill set is built around selling. But I would love to hear how do you approach and what are the methods for evaluating a salesperson or sales team from a more maybe quantitative or objective view?

Ben Tagoe: Yeah. So let me answer the question in two ways. There’s a question around how do we quantitatively evaluate the existing sales team, the post hire product? I think there’s kind of another question in there about how do we apply that framework for pre hire. And actually, maybe I can answer both those questions at the same time. So, the framework that we use, because you’re right, salespeople, good salespeople are, they are great interviewers. And that great interviewing skill is not necessarily predictive of their on the job performance. So, it’s not a very helpful splitter to just talk to a bunch of people who are really good at interviewing. So, the framework that OMG is based on is that we think that there are essentially 21 core sales competencies that you need and sort of varying weights or varying weights depending on the company and the role. And those 21 competencies we basically put into kind of three large competency groups. So, the first is pretty intuitive. It’s your tactical selling skills, how good are you at the day to day stuff that you need in order to be an effective salesperson, hunting and prospecting reaching decision makers? Are you able to manage yourself through a milestone sales process and appropriately follow and navigate yourself to each one of those milestones? Do you negotiate effectively? Or do you just discount everything and giveaway price? So it’s a bunch of tactical stuff that you have to do. One of the insights that our founder had and that is built into our product is that your ability to do the tactical stuff is going to be limited by two things, which are the other two groups. The first is your desire or your will to do well in sales. If you don’t want to learn how to do the tactical stuff, or if it doesn’t, if it just doesn’t agree with you, then the amount of training that your company is pouring into you doesn’t really matter. There’s kind of a personality or role and a fit mismatch. And then the second is some people want to do well, and they’re getting all the training, but their belief system as it relates to sales might in some way be hindering their success. So, there are things around, we measure things around what is your attitude toward money? What is your ability to be sort of empathetic or overly empathetic to a prospect in such a way that the prospect might use your own empathy to stall or otherwise sabotage like your sales process? And I think this is actually one of like the favorite things, my favorite things that we measure because it creates these lightbulb moments for the salesperson and for their managers and for the company overall where like, yeah, I’ve been paying for training for years, and nothing has really changed. And then they get these aha moments where they realize, oh, nothing’s changing because as much as we talk about you shouldn’t discount on price and this is what happens to our gross margin, we never really talk about this person’s belief system, about what do they think is a lot of money. And maybe they’re folding on price because the average selling price for our product or for our company just sounds like a lot of money to them. And so it’s only natural that they give some of it back. So that’s I think one of the particularly cool things that we offer to the market.

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah. Can you talk more about the belief system? That’s an interesting concept I hadn’t heard before, how your own personal views around money can affect how you approach sales. What are some common- Have you been able to like categorize or identify a certain set of beliefs that often conflict with an effective sales process?

Ben Tagoe: Yeah, we have. So, we measure for our salespeople, individual salespeople, we measure six core beliefs that we call part of the sales DNA. So, we already talked about comfort with money and large sums of money. That’s one of them, or comfort discussing large sums of money. Another one is need for approval. And this one is actually pretty interesting because going back to the beginning of the conversation around personality tests, a lot of people get into sales because they have a personality where they naturally gravitate toward other people. They are social, perhaps they are more extroverted. And what can often come with that is you want to be liked, and that is not- there’s nothing wrong with that. By the way, it’s great that people want to be liked and they should. But it’s good to also have some self-awareness around how that interacts with sales because it can stop the salesperson from, for example, pushing back on their client in a way that might make the client a little uncomfortable but it’s still tactful. It stops you from asking the really like deep insightful pressing questions that you need to ask the prospect to get them to like make a break change in their behavior. Because ultimately, when you’re selling something, you’re probably trying to get them to make some kind of break change in their behavior. So, need for approval is a really big one. One that we see a lot, and we haven’t done like a kind of age or demographic analysis on it but I’d be curious to, is what is your ability to stay in the moment? One of the things that we kind of observe, I observe it in myself, and we see it, it’s been measured empirically, is as a number of like devices and alerts and notifications sources increase, our attention spans have just like dramatically decreased. Like the average adult attention span has gone from sort of two minutes of like held concentration about 15 years ago to like less than 30 seconds. And what that means for the salesperson or when you’re in the sales process is you’re not thinking about what the prospect or what your client is telling you. You’re thinking about the next thing that you want to say to them, or you’re thinking about how are you going to present the price or this additional feature to them or set up the next meeting. Or maybe you’re just like distracted because you just got like a Twitter alert on your phone, and you just totally missed what the prospect is saying. And you just miss, when you don’t have the ability to stay in the moment, you just miss out on a lot of valuable data about why does this person actually want to buy your products? Why do they want to buy it from you? Why are they there talking to you in the first place? So that’s like a particularly important one that we surface for people as well. There are a couple of other ones. But I mean, I could go on and talk about this all day. But those are just a few examples.

Alex Bridgeman: Well, the active listening one is especially interesting. That’s one I’ve personally been trying to focus a lot more on. Every so often, I catch myself thinking about the next question versus exactly what you said, like trying to listen and actively listen and pay attention to what the person is saying. I’m reading Never Split the Difference, and that’s one concept that Chris Voss emphasizes a ton is that you’re- like active listening should be hard work. It’s not just this passive activity; you’re actively trying to record and observe every piece of communication that the other person is giving you. How do you feel like your own, as you’ve worked in OMG, how do you feel like your own act of listening has improved or changed over time?

Ben Tagoe: It is, I think you’re right, it is hard work. And there are days where I am better at it than others. I think it is, what I have found is that my ability to stay in the moment with my colleagues or with my partners or with their clients honestly has a lot to do with kind of my own emotional bandwidth and my own energy. So, on days where like- and that’s why it’s become particularly important to me, it’s always been, but it’s become particularly important to make sure I get a good night’s rest and do the things that I need to do to kind of stay healthy and balanced in other parts of my life. Like when I do that, then I can come in, and in a conversation, I can sort of like put my ego, myself, I can kind of put that to the side and really sort of like build an empathic bridge and like actively listen and be present with whoever’s in front of me. On days when I haven’t done that, then there’s just a bunch of chatter in my head. It’s like my own like internal stock ticker, like news banners running across my head, and I’m so focused on whatever that is, some issue in my personal life or thinking ahead to some company issue or what I’m going to tell the board or whatever, and I just end up totally checked out of the conversation. So, I would say I definitely have like a much greater awareness and appreciation for it than I did before I started working at OMG. And I also have a much greater sensitivity to the things I need to do for myself in order to like enable that competency.

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, I’ve noticed sleep is a big one for me. Like when I have a good night of rest, or I run in the morning, my focus and attention is much more honed for that day. I also found like writing stuff down is helpful. A lot of those like- I love the stock ticker analogy, like the thoughts crossing your head. But a lot of those for me feel like just reminders, like I’m trying to remind myself so I don’t forget it. But if I write it down, it tends to release some of those. What are some other tools and systems that you’ve used to support yourself in that active  listening effort or trying to reduce the noise and stock ticker in your head?

Ben Tagoe: Yeah, man, I’m still trying to get good at it. So, I will take any suggestions you have. I like the one about writing things down. I don’t do a good enough job with that. For me, exercise is a big priority. Like you’re saying, like you try to run. I don’t know if it’s just that like maybe if I just like tire myself out first thing in the morning, I don’t have the energy- I only have energy to focus on other things, I just don’t have energy to like get stuck in my own head. So, exercise is a big part of it. I really try to minimize the number of decisions that I have to make in kind of every aspect of my life, not in a way that’s sort of abdicating responsibility. But I’m a big believer in decision fatigue. So yeah, to the extent that I can just sort of like default to something or put in place my to-do list the night before so that when I come in in the morning, I’m just sort of like on autopilot going through what I need to work on. I found that to be very helpful and like really just sort of try to spare my energy for like three or four big decisions over the course of the day. And if I’m going over that, then I know that I’ve done something wrong, and I need to take step back and restructure.

Alex Bridgeman: I like the to-do list the night before; that’s a good idea. I do write them in order too, like work on this, then go to this, then this?

Ben Tagoe: So what I found is helpful is two things. One is just like taking five minutes to prioritize the to-do list, and kind of Getting Things Done was like a pretty foundational book I read a long time ago. And so, I think of like my work and my life and sort of projects and like very discrete tasks. And I’ll just try to prioritize individual tasks so that the top two or three things for each project get done. And then the other thing I’ll do is I’ll make sure my to-do list also includes the meetings that I have for the next day. And in like a one sentence or one line bullet, like what is the outcome that needs to come out of that meeting. And that just sort of really helps to focus me and make sure that either I set expectations appropriately going into the meeting or that I’m like laser focused on driving to that question or that outcome coming out of the meeting. Because otherwise, it’s like two o’clock in the afternoon, you’re seven or eight meetings in, the cup of coffee is totally run out, and everyone’s just kind of, just goes in a bunch of different directions, which is not a good use of anyone’s time.

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, that’s definitely not. Turning it back to the different belief systems you’ve identified, I’m curious how these are broken. I would imagine that a belief system is something that’s quite ingrained and probably difficult to change. Like you mentioned even just selling a product to somebody, you’re trying to get them to change a habit or something. But a belief system feels like or sounds like something that would be difficult to change. In practice, has that been the case? Or what are some ways to try to drive some change around beliefs or at least build maybe like a second belief system just for sales that they can use?

Ben Tagoe: Yeah, that’s a great question. And I would say, of the things that we unearth, they’re probably like the most difficult to change. Tactical stuff you can drill someone on, assuming that the other two pieces will enable it. Kind of will or desire tends to be like very contextual based. But the belief system and sales DNA is like the piece that’s toughest to change. A big piece of it just comes down to self-awareness. So often, and I’ll have these conversations, people have these conversations with me, I’ll have them with other people where I’ll say something like it’s a fact, but it’s not fact. It’s what I think is true. It’s what I believe. And every once in a while, like thank God, I have people around me who be like, that’s not- we don’t know if that’s true. That sounds like something you believe. And that’s the way that they frame it to me. Our partners who are the ones who are like going out and delivering this to their clients every day are, one of the things I love about working with them is they are just so expert not only in the nitty gritty, tactical selling stuff, but they’re just really expert at kind of unlocking the psyche of the salesperson in such a way that like they grow their own self-awareness around these beliefs. And the conversation, I think the most effective conversations are not, hey, this is your belief system and it’s sabotaging you, so let’s change it. It’s, hey, this is your belief system. What do you think? Does this sound right? You self-reported this, you took the test, and this is what you said. Do you believe that? And sometimes they’ll say, oh, yeah, yeah, you’re right, whether because of things in my background or my prior work experiences, like I do believe this. Other times, they might push back and they’ll be like, no, no, no, that’s not me at all. And I think some of our partners who are quite expert, they don’t force the issue. You don’t tell someone, someone says, I don’t believe this, you don’t say yeah, you do. You just say okay. And then as you keep working with them, you’ll see it pop up. And you can- the art is like you find some sort of tactful way to like raise their self-awareness about it – hey, I remember when you said that you’re actually really good at staying in the moment Tell me, what were the last five things that I just told you in this conversation? What do you remember? What really stood out to you? And then, they’ll kind of say, oh, well, maybe this and that. And were there five? I don’t remember five. They can only play back the last thing. Huh, why is that? They kind of like answer the question themselves.

Alex Bridgeman: You’ve, of course, looked at millions of case studies of individual salespeople and tens of thousands of organizations. Are there common- What are some common themes you’ve seen from all these different case studies and work that your partners have done with clients? Is there anything commonly interesting across lots of case studies or lots of examples that you personally have enjoyed reading about or studying and observing?

Ben Tagoe: Yeah, so we just did kind of a big piece of research on frontline sales managers. And one of the common themes that we saw sort of across industries and across size of company, across geography, managers don’t really spend enough time coaching their sales reps. And when they are coaching their sales reps, or when they report that they’re coaching their sales reps, they’re not really doing the things that enable like a very effective sales team often. So what I mean by that is they’ll say, when I’m coaching, I am helping my salesperson to sell a deal, or when I’m coaching, I am giving my salesperson positive encouragement, or I’m reviewing their pipeline. And what they’re not doing is, often what that means is they’re helping them sell the deals, they’re probably rescuing the salesperson. The salesperson struggling to sell the deal, and the manager who very often is like kind of one of the top salespeople themselves, they go to like their own sort of natural sales muscle, and they just jump in, and they sell the deal for the salesperson, and they hand it back to them, which is great for the company because you sold the deal but is also terrible for the company because that’s a very inefficient way to enable the salesperson to sell. They didn’t learn anything in that process. So, that’s one that we see a lot. And I think part of it is because what I said earlier, very often, the way you become a sales manager is by being a very good sales independent contributor. And I think what a lot of organizations miss and fortunately they’re kind of building more awareness around this is this a very different skill set. Being an elite salesperson is a totally different thing than being an elite manager. And one can do the other, but you have to enable them with like the right training and the right tools. You can’t just say, okay, you crossed your quota two years in a row, so now here you go. Here’s a team of salespeople. Help them crush their quota too. They’re going to fall flat on their face.

Alex Bridgeman: Are some of your assessments designed for the contributor and manager? Like, do you have assessments built for both?

Ben Tagoe: Yes, we do. So, we have evaluations for individual salespeople. We have evaluations for the manager. And I think one of the things that I really love about what we offer is, if you buy the sales team analysis that I talked about at the beginning, the SCIA, we show you a bunch of analyses about what the sales manager says about their salespeople, what the salespeople says about their sales manager, and essentially measure like the effectiveness of that manager salesperson pair.

Alex Bridgeman: If being an individual, a strong individual sales contributor isn’t a prerequisite to being a good sales manager, what other skills or abilities have you found do correlate with effective sales management?

Ben Tagoe: Great question. So, there are a couple. One is there are kind of a couple of like foundational pieces. One I would describe as like it really, really helps if you have a passion for being a manager and for being a coach. And you can see this. This is not a sales specific thing. You can see this in other job functions as well. There’re some people who their real passion is helping to develop other people and like make them very strong at whatever that skill area is, whether that’s technical, engineering, or finance or whatever. So having a passion we found has been like a big splitter in terms of strong managers versus not strong. Relationship building with the individual salesperson is also really important because the manager salesperson relationship, you can think of it kind of similar to like the client sales relationship or the prospect sales relationship. You need to build trust, you need to be liked, you need to be respected, they need to respect your skills and your ability, and they need to trust you. They need to trust that when you are- they need to trust you because sometimes you’re going to tell them things that make them uncomfortable, or you push them into an uncomfortable place because you’re trying to get them to make a breaking change to be better. And they need to trust that when you’re delivering that message that makes them uncomfortable, it’s coming from a place of good intention and not ill will. So, like when I tell you, hey, we made a joint commitment that you are going to reach out to X number of prospects or that you are going to not give away this amount of price of margin within your pricing discretion, and you’re breaking your commitment, Alex, what’s going on? I need to be able to deliver that in a way and you need to be able to receive that in a way where like you don’t, like your back doesn’t go up against the wall, and you’re like, well, no, I’m not. What are you talking about? Because then you don’t develop, you don’t change. So trust is super important. And so those are the foundational pieces, passion, respect, trust. And then beyond that, there’s a real question around like time allocation and frequency. Managers who coach daily are dramatically more effective, their sales teams are dramatically more effective than the managers who say that they only coach on a weekly basis or who say that they only coach on a kind of as needed basis. And then the last piece is like the tactical stuff, like what are you actually coaching on. And one of the things that we found is most predictive of the team’s success is the manager- does a salesperson say that their manager is coaching them on helping get a commitment out of their prospects? And what I mean by that is, basically, are they getting the prospect to the point where the prospect agrees that this is the right product for them, that they have the budget for it, and that essentially they are ready to move ahead, kind of talk to the right decision makers or stakeholders and that they’re ready to move ahead. And I think part of the reason why that’s kind of so predictive of success is because getting the commitment requires coaching to a bunch of other skills. You have to, we talked about staying in the moment, you have to have trained your salesperson to have very good listening skills, active listening skills where they’re not just hearing, like collecting data, but they’re asking the right questions to uncover why would this prospect buy? Why would this prospect make me- make a commitment to me? Yeah, and basically, if you get to that endpoint, you have effectively trained or coached your salesperson through an entire sales process, which takes quite an investment.

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, one other- This is fascinating. I want to ask a little bit more about, I want to learn more about OMG as a business, too. And one thing that’s so interesting about it is it’s a fairly small headcount since you have these partners who are working with the end clients and allowing kind of the OMG team to be relatively small for kind of its reach as a business. How have you found working in a small team, and kind of what is that like if you’re looking to grow or add folks or change the team around? I imagine being small has lots of advantages but potentially some cons too.

Ben Tagoe: Yeah, a lot of advantages and I love it. We are far more nimble than any organization that I’ve ever worked at. And I think part of that is just like all of our feedback loops are so short. I sit next to one of our developers, and I can literally just open my door, poke my head out, and say, hey, can we make this change? And we’ll sit down for like five minutes and mock it up and then push it into testing, and a couple hours later, it’s there. So very short feedback loops. That also means like relatively short feedback loops between everyone in the organization and our partners too. So that let’s kind of all of us in a bunch of different roles, me as a leader, developers, customer, client service reps, coaches can all kind of get real time feedback from partners, deliver that to the right person and that change or whatever intervention needs to be made can happen pretty quickly. So that’s awesome. I will say from a- it means that like from, as I think about like growing the organization, I think there’s kind of a, or at least I feel sort of like a heightened, I wouldn’t call it pressure, but I feel sort of there’s a higher bar to making sure that like that incremental hire is good. Because you feel culture in a 10 person company in a way that’s very different than if you’re even in a 30 person company. So, you want to make sure that there’s like the right cultural fit, that there’s the right attitude, and the right skills fit as well. I think there’s just a much higher bar for all of that. But we’ve had really great success so far. The folks that we brought on have been awesome and total rockstars and very well received. So just got to keep that going.

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, you had a role as a chief of staff at a FinTech business I’d love to hear about as potentially a proving ground for eventually having this CEO role. But before doing that, like how do you think your- you talked about running a 10 person business even compared to a 30 person one is different culturally. How do you think your role would be different if OMG had 50 or 100 or 500 employees? Like, what do you think would be different about it?

Ben Tagoe: So I think my role today is a hybrid of kind of building, building the organization, rather let me take a step back and put this in order, setting the vision for where we want to go, building the organization to get us there over the long term, like in a sustainable way, and then actually going and doing the stuff. Like when I join in diligence and conversations with partners, I’ve gotten a lot of feedback around the way that our products are laid out and the way that the information is delivered. And there was essentially what it boiled down to is like there was, I felt that there were some pretty significant like UX changes that our clients and that the partner network needed just to kind of catch the company up to where UX is on our category today. So that was sort of like kind of vision number one, set the vision for that, put the resources in place. And then, I rolled up my sleeves, and it was me and our COO, who’s our technical leader, who were going in and doing like design and wireframes. And we were literally just like building and writing every single piece of, rewriting every single piece of this ourselves, which was great. But I think if we were a 500 person organization, it probably would not be appropriate for me to be the person who’s kind of deep in the weeds, like making sure that the semicolon’s in the right place and we’re using EM dashes instead of regular dashes or whatever else.

Alex Bridgeman: And talk about your Chief of Staff role. That’s interesting role to have before being a CEO. I’m in a similar Chief of Staff role now that feels like a great way to learn about how companies grow and how teams are managed. I’d love to hear your experience.

Ben Tagoe: Yeah, so I have this, I was so fortunate to have this experience to be a Chief of Staff for FinTech, venture backed FinTech company that had just IPOed. This was kind of right after I finished my MBA, and it was a fantastic experience. Like we grew, in the time I was there, about two years, we grew the company from about 300 people to almost 600 people. The CEO and the whole leadership team, but especially the CEO, was just like one of the strongest operators I’ve ever seen. And in the decades since, kind of I’ve reflected a lot, probably almost every week, on what exactly did those people do that made them such effective operators and like what can I, what parts of that can I hope to like poorly emulate to capture some of the magic. I think the thing that I actually took away from that role the most, which I didn’t expect at all, was that role gave me really great exposure to managing up as a CEO. I wouldn’t call it managing up ,but it’s like managing stakeholders as a CEO and putting like really, really heavy emphasis on communication as your management tool, as your leadership tool, as your management tool. And I remember one of my first jobs as the Chief of Staff was to, we would do town halls, I forgot now, maybe like every quarter or something, or every half, we’d do town halls and we’d set out like the goals for the company and OKRs. And I remember like the first time I did it, I kind of rolled my eyes, like this is just like, this just feels so, I don’t know. It just felt very remedial, and it was not like the fun, exciting thing I thought I was going to get to do, M&A integration or whatever. And it was only a few years later as I kind of moved into leadership roles myself that I appreciated that companies of any size, especially when you get put- especially when you get bigger, the folks that are like in the weeds on a day to day basis, like they want to know why they’re doing what they’re doing. And they want to know how it ties to the bigger picture, and having the opportunity to sort of set what those goals are, and they would always be like very simple, like you could print them on a three by five card. We would actually print them on laminated three by five cards. Getting to like set those goals and like set the agenda was really like our way of kind of moving the entire organization of 600 people in unison in one direction or in another. And it’s an incredibly, incredibly helpful and powerful management tool. We would use it with the board as well. It would give the board like a very helpful framework to understand this very complex business with a bunch of parts that you don’t necessarily grasp, like all the intricate details. You can understand like are we going in the right direction or not based on the four things that are on this three by five laminate? So yeah, it just gave me like a much stronger appreciation for being a good communicator in a leadership role.

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, and repeating yourself too, repeating the same message and same mission statement and all that other stuff, too.

Ben Tagoe: Yes, I’m laughing because we would, we’d be working on like a presentation to the company or some group of stakeholders. And I would just kind of be like we said this already, like we already- The CEO would be like, yeah, that’s the point, like we just say it over and over and over again. And you say it enough. He’s like, we know that it’s working when you walk into a room and someone says it for you. And I think he’s right. And that stuck with me.

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, that’s good. Oh, plus also, like new people are joining the company, and so they haven’t heard of before. And so repeating is good for them. But I agree. What was it, like a message doesn’t stick in your head or like an advertising doesn’t stick in your head until like the seventh or eighth time or something like that? Yeah. Repeating yourself seems like a crucial skill. I think there’s lots of more interest today or it seems like there’s more interest today in hiring Chief of Staffs at companies that aren’t the government Chief of Staff’s or startup Chief of Staffs. It seems like a lot of certainly search businesses or other growing companies are hiring Chief of Staffs. Can you talk about like the different flavors of Chief of Staff that you’ve seen and what kind of each role, what the goal is for each of those roles?

Ben Tagoe: Yeah, I’m glad you asked. This is something that I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about as well and kind of a bunch of the different stops I’ve had. So I would- the framework I have is I think there are probably like maybe three flavors of Chief of Staff. There’s like a gatekeeper or maybe like a super admin, someone whose primary responsibility is they are managing the calendar for the principal, they’re handling executive operations for the principal, and they’re really the one who’s saying these are the meetings you should take, this is kind of the conversation that you need to have. If you think back to what I said earlier around kind of the to-do list every day and what is the goal of every conversation or every meeting, there’s a flavor of Chief of Staff that kind of handles that for you or for the principal. I’ve also seen like Chief of Staff as essentially like the de facto CEO. Like they actually get delegated a lot of decision-making authority for most or some pieces of the company, like in the absence of a CEO. I think I’ve seen this more in like kind of bigger like enterprise sized organizations, but I’ve been surprised to also see it in some like smaller startups, too. And then there’s kind of like the Chief of Staff as like the wildcard executive. There’s like, hey, there’s a special project that is kind of a jump all between a bunch of different departments, so let’s just have the Chief of Staff like go figure that out or go own it. Or there’s a new product or there’s a new division or a new segment that doesn’t really have a natural home, so let’s have the Chief of Staff be the person who is responsible for that. And I guess my soapbox is like I think all three of these are like very, very valid, like there’re very good reasons to have all three of these. But they all require different skills and different personalities and different belief systems and temperament. And, at least in my experience, I don’t know if the people who are hiring for these roles have been like that thoughtful or that structured about like which one they need, and I think like with any job, if you bring the wrong person into that role, then they’ll struggle. I think you have a lot of organizations that say, let’s just go hire like some really smart, well credentialed or some super hardworking person and like they’re just going to figure it out, which is true, they probably will. But I think the thing that’s missing is there’s a question about like, what’s next? Like, someone who is very hardworking and ambitious, and usually these people tend to be in Chief Staff roles tend to be younger, earlier in their career, they are naturally asking like what’s next, and they want to figure out what the kind of follow on opportunity is going to be for them. And those kind of three structures that I laid out all have like very different paths. And you also as an organization, I think, folks can do a much better job of thinking about like what is that next landing spot going to be? And if you do that well, you actually have like a really well trained, super empowered, and honestly probably very grateful young executive because they’ve been given like this great opportunity. Then if you don’t do it well, then kind of it’s a strike, like you just kind of miss an opportunity to really like add a ton of value to the human capital of your team.

Alex Bridgeman: How would you think, if you’re a CEO who wants to bring on a Chief of Staff, how do you kind of think through, or maybe before even thinking about bringing on a Chief of Staff, like there are certain things you want to accomplish, how would you kind of fit your situation and organization with one of those three types of Chief of Staff?

Ben Tagoe: Yeah, I think the first question I would ask is, why is this a job that can’t be filled by-? Why does it need sort of the Chief of Staff function or the Chief of Staff title? Why isn’t this something that can be filled by like a traditional function? Like if I say, for example, I’ve got a bunch of these special projects, I’m doing some M&A integration, and we’re moving into a new market segment, and we don’t have a GM for that market segment. So let me hire a Chief of Staff, and they’re going to do- they’re going to like be responsible for this market segment as a GM. And they’re also going to do like our M&A integration for us like off the side of their desk, then I kind of step back and ask myself, like why aren’t I hiring a core dev person? And why aren’t I just going out and hiring a general manager for XYZ segment? And I think that’s also like a good- it is a good forcing function to help that leader or tell me as a leader, just be very crisp about what do I actually want in a way that I would expect of the people who report to me to be very crisp about what they want and how are they using the organization’s resources. There’s less of a check on that when you’re the CEO. And I think putting that check in place for yourself like, okay, why can’t we just get someone to do this job on a full time basis?

Alex Bridgeman: Have you thought about a chief of staff at OMG at one point?

Ben Tagoe: Yeah, totally. And I’m not ruling it out. I think I’m not ruling it out. I think for us, it would be a little bit of like the wild card executive, of like there are a bunch of things that we are starting to do or that we are investing more in that are taking up more of my time, which is great, but my time was also needed elsewhere. So, how can I kind of like clone or cleave off a little bit of myself in like this Chief of Staff role and have them do it? And what stopped me is when I asked that question, the answer that I come back to is, ultimately, if those pieces of the business are successful and marketing or pricing or whatever else, we’re going to want someone who does that on a full time basis. So then what does that mean for the Chief of Staff? We’re going to want someone who does that at kind of like a pretty high level of proficiency and with some tenure and stuff. So what does that mean for the Chief of Staff? Let’s say, I hire a Chief of Staff and like you’re my Chief of Staff, and your portfolio is primarily product marketing. What does that mean when two years from now, I decide that I want to hire a product marketing director? What does that mean for this person’s own trajectory and what they’re taking on next? And it doesn’t mean that I won’t do it, that I won’t hire that person for it. But I think if I’m pushing other people to have the what’s next conversation, I want to like push myself to be very disciplined about that as well.

Alex Bridgeman: That’s fantastic. Wrapping things up, what’s a strongly held belief you switched your mind on?

Ben Tagoe: Man, I think earlier in my career, I felt very strongly that the numbers are the numbers, the data is the data. And you just look at the numbers and the story is there. And that’s it. And everyone who’s looking at the same set of numbers should come to the same conclusion. And I think over time, it’s kind of still a work in progress, but like over time, I’m becoming like slowly disabused of that notion, where I realize like, yes, the numbers are the numbers, but numbers and data are actually most helpful or most intuitive when they fit into a narrative. And people can arrive- the narrative that people use to arrive at the data can be like vastly, vastly diverse and all still valid. I think about like conversations we have internally about some of our internal performance data and some of the pushback I get from folks on my team, and they’ll say things like, I know that this is what the numbers say, but I’m telling you, from what I’m actually doing, the reality is different, and I can explain why these numbers- I’ll say, well, explain why these numbers are what they are. And they’ll walk me through why the numbers or chart on the page is what it shows. And I’m like, oh, yeah, you’re right. That could be how we got there. And I see- I believe your story is totally different. And then that leads us to a totally different set of decisions than we had before. So, I think that’s kind of especially important to keep in mind as someone who’s like leading and growing a very data focused business is anchor myself and anchor ourselves in the numbers, but not lose sight of the fact that like the number needs to be tied to like a greater narrative.

Alex Bridgeman: I love that. What’s the best business you’ve ever seen?

Ben Tagoe: Wow, good question. So, I spent a lot of time working in the credit scoring world or the credit score model development world to be more precise. And those are really, really fantastic businesses. They solve a cool problem because we talked earlier about like the heterogeneity of data that you’re getting from kind of a bunch of different housing data sources and how the quality of that data can be different. And one of the cool things about the credit score model developers is they solve the problem of essentially standardizing that data and standardizing the outputs that you’re getting from it into this three digit number that all of us understand. 850 is really good, 300 is quite bad, and most people fall somewhere in between. And just by solving that problem, they basically have been able to embed themselves in every single part of the financial system. You and I see it in apps that we use or when we go to apply for a mortgage or credit card or something. There are 5000 banks in the US, there another 5000 credit unions, and all of them use one of these credit scores that usually come from one or two, two or three different companies. And the interesting thing is like once it’s kind of embedded in your process, it’s actually quite sticky. It’s very hard to switch out. And then it makes its way into other parts of the ecosystem where when you want to take a bunch of mortgages and securitize them, and you’re trying to help someone understand are these good mortgages or bad mortgages, use the credit score to describe that. You’re like, well, it’s a bunch of 800 mortgages, and like, oh, great, I love that. You’re like, it’s a bunch of 400 mortgages. Like, oh, no, I don’t want that. But everyone kind of understands what that means and in a very intuitive way. So, what that means is like an upstart can’t come in with a business where all of a sudden, they’re describing credit as like ABCDEF because when you say, oh, this is a bunch of D mortgages, people are like, are those good? Are those bad? I don’t get it. Is that 400? Is it an 800? So it gives the businesses that do that kind of tremendous like market power and stickiness, and I think it’s just a very cool, underappreciated piece of the country’s financial plumbing.

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, we’ll need to have a separate episode on credit scores. That sounds like a fun, much deeper conversation. But in the meantime, Ben, thank you so much for sharing a little bit of time and coming on the podcast. This was super fun.

Ben Tagoe: Yeah, Alex, thanks for having me. This was great. Really enjoyed it.