Building a Powerhouse Sales Team with Andy Wills, EMEA Sales Enablement Director, Dynatrace

If steering a sales team to greatness has ever felt like herding cats, you're in for a treat. 

In this episode, we chat with Andy Wills, EMEA Sales Enablement Director at Dynatrace. Andy tells us when a business has all the ingredients to be successful it is the people that will make the difference, yet businesses very often neglect to invest in leadership skills.

We share laughs and learn about the grit it takes to face rejection head-on and convert it into a stepping stone for success. We uncover the secret sauce that turns a high-performing salesperson into an impactful manager.
 
We dissect the art of leadership with Andy, where management is not merely about oversight but about vision. Listen to tales of inspiring teams to rally behind a common goal, the transition from sales leadership to enablement, and the joy of crafting a culture where leaders breed more leaders. The Dynatrace story will leave you itching to redefine your own approach to leadership and team motivation.
 
To cap things off, we get a peek into the framework that moulds sales leaders at Dynatrace. It's a thrilling insight into the company's nine-month leadership curriculum, now going global, that does more than just impart skills—it instils a way of being that's synonymous with the company's forward march. 

We hear about the program's inception and the collaborative spirit that drives organizational growth. It's a masterclass in nurturing your most valuable assets—your people—and preparing them to conquer the tech world's ever-evolving landscape.

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Chapters

• 0:00 From Salesperson to Sales Manager
• 10:31 Leadership and Sales Enablement at Dynatrace
• 19:24 Exploring Leadership Development and Organizational Growth
• 34:59 Partnership and Development

Transcript

Sam: 0:00

Welcome to Get Amplified the podcast about people who power the tech industry. I'm here in sunny Buckinghamshire. Vicky, you got some up in deepest, darkest.

Vic: 0:09

Oxfordshire. No, no, sun, just out. However, I have sunshine on my screen.

Sam: 0:17

That's so cheesy, but I love it. So who have we got on the podcast today that's bringing you such delight?

Vic: 0:24

We have on our podcast today and I you know you say it sounds too easy, but it's just not because we have Andy Wills, who is a ray of sunshine. I'm sorry, Andy, sorry for saying that, but it is just a joy to work with you. So Andy and I have been partnering for about two and a half years and the project that we're working on with him at the moment I said it before it is just a joy, and what I really wanted Andy to do was share where he's come from and his experience and why this program kind of came about, because I think the tech industry needs to know about it.

Sam: 1:07

So maybe, Andy, if you wouldn't mind, give us a bit of a background your career, how you got to where you are today.

Andy: 1:13

Yeah, absolutely. Well, first of all, I do feel privileged, a bit honored, to be asked to do this, and I'm super excited about what we're going to talk about today. I have sales in my blood. I can proudly say I don't think I've done anything else but be involved in professional selling, and that's over the last 25 years. So, and I worked my way up from being a telephone market here on contract for different tech companies back in the days where you had big piles of paper and phones that looked like they'd been borrowed from doctors, receptionists and stuff like that you still have the dials on them.

Andy: 1:53

Yes, and it was the, the chant of smile and dial and smile and dial. But I feel very grateful that I had that foundation of being driven to make 150 to 200 dials a day. Speak to 30, I have decent conversations, or somewhat productive conversations, with 30 leaders a day and hopefully generate around 12 appointments or leads a week. Those are the metrics that have burned into my brain for many years of doing that. So again, I feel super lucky to have that. I kind of fell into these things wanting to earn some money and in my father, my brother, I've been in the sales profession. My father was my father was actually Xerox trained, so I grew up with being manipulated to do things that I didn't really want to do, like cutting my room and wash his car and things like that. But I loved it. I loved the conversations, I loved the achievement and the kind of the wins that you could have, every day of pride mixed up with loads and loads of rejection. Every rejection was just one step further to that point of success. And I was just a joke that I was a failed sportsman, so all I wanted to do was be like a cricketer or rugby player or a footballer. Unfortunately, hand-eye coordination and a lack of athletic ability led me into a world where you can be a bit of a hero and I loved that kind of recognition. But I worked my way up through the internal sales path, actually got employed by a software company and I just lobbied and drove and worked because all I wanted to do was be a field sales rep. That was my kind of dream in my early 20s and I achieved that. I think in the organization I was one of the youngest field sales reps in their history, which I was very proud of, but realized that I was completely ill-equipped to do field sales and at the time I was just confused. But looking back, it's pretty hard to sell enterprise software to some of the largest companies on the planet when you have no idea how they buy software and I'd not been exposed to that. So it was a rocky road. But I had the fortune to work for some incredible leaders in different organizations and some incredible companies and I felt invested in through a lot of my training. I was thinking back around this and thinking, hey, I did quite a few residential courses and I was invested in, but I didn't have the bigger picture about how companies bought software and really understanding what value meant to them, and I learned that the hard way. So I guess that was a big part of my individual contributor history before I got into the wonderful world of sales leadership, because I was good at selling stuff Always the way, always the way.

Andy: 5:05

Yeah, I think Gartner was the organization that probably had the biggest effect on my career. For me, an organization that epitomized kind of high performance and elite performance, very high bars, very high bars, which I found painful a lot of the time. But people didn't wake up in the morning and think, oh, I need more Gartner, I need some more research and advisory. And also, if you could sell that, you could pretty much sell everything. There was no product to POC. There was no buying cycles that were happening. Evaluating that did happen very, very rarely. Most of the time people had no clue what it was and thought, hey look, are you selling me magic quadrants and hype cycles? So I became a bit addicted to Gartner and, as you can see from my CV, I had left three times and I kept on rejoining Gartner because that elite, high performance culture. I was going to other organizations and I was thinking they did this better. At Gartner I had more clarity, more understanding, more investment and I just couldn't escape it really Very much an elite selling environment. I found.

Sam: 6:23

So tell us more about this jump from individual contributor to manager, because that's an interesting one. I did it, saw lots of people do it. Interesting that I saw some of our should we say mid table salespeople become very successful managers and our top tier salespeople become less successful managers. Not always the way, but the fact that you're a cracking salesperson doesn't necessarily mean that you're a cracking manager.

Andy: 6:55

Yeah, so the division within Gartner I was working at was will define as kind of hyper growth, so it wasn't really a massive decision. As somebody that was performing well and interesting, I had the support of my peers at an individual contributor level, which was great. But I kind of was thrown into this. Now I do remember going through a leadership preparation course, which is I think we talked later about the program that we have at Dynatrace right now it's relevant to that but there was something to help me prepare to be a manager. But most of it I just learned the hard way, things like recruiting, for example.

Andy: 7:41

What was I really looking for? Was I being too transparent with my staff that I led, or was I actually keeping it in the dark? There were so many things that I was utterly unsure if I was doing the right thing and there was no manual for it. And I'm quite an exact person, quite detailed in lots of ways, and I was like, well, where's the manual for this job, because I'm getting anecdotal advice from all kinds of places. But I found it tough. I found it difficult and I felt a massive responsibility. I remember a leader that I respected a lot come around to me and said you're now responsible for paying these people's mortgages. This is quite a job you've got, and that almost overwhelmed me. I felt so utterly responsible and I think it was good advice, but I don't know if I needed to hear it at that point in time.

Sam: 8:33

Yeah, you were probably intuitively aware of it, but seeing it laid out that explicitly, yeah, I took it over seriously.

Andy: 8:43

I was utterly committed to it, but I think I got the balance wrong. I just didn't know how to lead. I'd seen good leadership. Some of the leaders I worked for were incredible and made a real impact on my career and I was struggling to emulate them and I was almost saying I need to not be me anymore. I need to be them because they're great leaders. So I was pretty confused about how to do this and not understanding that being me was probably the most important part of being a leader.

Sam: 9:15

Authenticity we talk about, don't we Vicky?

Vic: 9:18

Yes, absolutely. But what you're just talking about there is I think we've had other I was going to say very experienced sales leaders. On the podcast we had Lewis G who talked about very early on in his career how he went through so much training, but actually now there seems to be less and less being put in place for these new managers, but they've still got that lack of experience.

Sam: 9:43

What would you, Andy, when you jumped into management?

Andy: 9:46

Oh Sam, that is a really good question.

Sam: 9:50

I've put it another way how experienced, how long had you been?

Andy: 9:55

working. Yeah, I think I was probably into my field sales career. I was probably about six years in. It wasn't desperately quick.

Sam: 10:11

The second half of your 20s, kind of thing.

Andy: 10:14

Yeah, nearing about, I think it was about 30.

Sam: 10:16

Yeah, because that first step into management you can end up taking it quite young, can't you? And I always think you become an amalgam of the experiences that you've had. If you get thrust into management too young. You haven't had those experiences.

Andy: 10:31

Yeah, I had an idea about what it should be and again, I was really kind of diligent at observing the behaviors of leaders that I just felt compelled to follow and the high levels of trust and kind of adulation for some of these leaders I had. I was really trying to inspect what they did and how they were doing. I was really trying to understand what they did and how they did it. But of course it's the kind of swan analogy it looked very, very smooth on the surface. A lot of the great leadership was done where you couldn't see it. We were talking about this recently, actually as part of the program being a filter or an amplifier and the great leaders really doing a great job of filtering what I needed to know and giving me kind of clear direction and focus and purpose on what we're doing and taking the noise away. There's so much noise. I think that's what crippled me in a lot of my career is what's urgent versus important, where everything is so work 20 hours a day and feel quite miserable about it, is it?

Sam: 11:35

worth exploring, as you kind of take that jump. But you use the word leadership a lot, but your first step is typically maybe a management role rather than a leadership role. How do you feel about the difference between the two terms?

Andy: 11:49

I thought I was quite clear in my own minds that I had a good understanding of the difference between being a manager and being a leader and not wanting to sound arrogant, but I was always quite clear on.

Andy: 12:03

I wasn't confused by those terms and I knew exactly what I wanted to be and I could recognize it in others around. Leadership is not defined by the level of authority that you have within the hierarchy that you operate within, and I saw management of just as like it's kind of administration really, it's administration of somebody that reports into you, and I always used to define it so I do do my expenses and you sign up for a holiday, and that's certainly what I didn't want to be. And I had these views of leaders lead from the front and these old kind of cliched areas of don't ask people to do something unless you're prepared to do it yourself. So leadership was, in my view, about them from the front and it was rolling up your sleeves and getting your hands there, and so I felt that I had quite a clear definition of it.

Sam: 12:59

But doing it is knowing it and doing it are two very, very different things. That's why I asked the question, because you're absolutely right, there is a delineation, I think you're along those sort of lines, but it's a really important one. It's relatively easy to be a manager. Yeah. It's relatively difficult to be a genuine leader.

Vic: 13:23

Yeah, yeah, I want to call out actually so Andy Bryars, who we've worked with for four and a half years. He announced yesterday on LinkedIn that he was leaving Okta, and the messages back in to him there's been nearly a hundred, and it's not a good look. In your next gig it's you're going to leave a hole. What a leader you are. I've learned so much from you. It's just incredible to see just how much he was a leader, and it's not just of his team, but across the organisation. But in there, I wrote to be a leader. One of the most important things is that you make others leaders.

Sam: 14:03

Yeah, yeah. You're eventually trying to make yourself redundant, aren't you? Effectively, or give yourself the opportunity to retire or move on to passives new I don't know if that's my take on it.

Vic: 14:14

I think it's growing other people, which I think is what you do in your role, Andy.

Andy: 14:18

It's interesting you say that story about Andy Bryars, because that was my vision as a leader. I wasn't so much financially driven. I wanted the people that worked under my leadership to have that type of reaction towards me. That was I wanted them to say Andy had this incredible effect on my career and that was how I was built. That was my North Star. So the financial thing would come later, but what I wanted them to do was feel that I was a massive part of the success of their career.

Vic: 14:56

So is that why you're now doing what you're doing, in enablement?

Andy: 15:00

Yes, essentially, yeah. What I loved about leadership was coaching and developing, as you say, Vicky growing, helping people grow, supporting their growth journey. I found that in enablement and sales only and development. That was what the job was about. Sales leadership is a part of the job and I've got to be honest with you. My transition from sales leadership into sales enablement to sales only development I was pretty resistant to it initially. It wasn't something that I sought out, it was by chance. Somebody had introduced me to it and somebody that I'm still friends with now just kind of tricked me into having a meeting With the sales enablement team at Gartner and I just decided to give it a whirl and I quickly, quickly realised that I just loved it. I loved it and I feel very lucky to say that I love what I do.

Vic: 16:00

It's very apparent though.

Andy: 16:02

Well, that's good. I suppose that's good because it's infectious.

Vic: 16:07

Well, we've just seen it from the pitch that's come to buy.

Sam: 16:09

Yeah, yeah.

Vic: 16:12

I've been a home, not quite.

Andy: 16:18

Yeah, I was talking about that trip. This is one of the things I love about my job is that we had cross functions there from all over our Middle East Africa team and to see the evolution in the way that they behaved after just two days was incredible, and that one example of what I kind of love about this job is that vision of being impactful to people and supporting people to grow and actually in a very kind of hands-off way, just throwing hand grenades into groups and seeing them explode and then seeing the evolution of it. That's highly satisfying. So I'm very, very lucky I get to do quite a lot of that.

Sam: 17:03

So we talked about this move from sales leadership to enablement. So what's your role right now in Dynatrace?

Andy: 17:14

So I'm the director for Sales Enablement in EMEA. That's exactly what it says on the tin. I guess Exactly what it says on the tin. Yeah, I'm going to be grateful again or feel privileged again that I think this environment at Dynatrace Sales Enablement as a function and as a profession is treated quite differently from one organisation to another. Dynatrace take it very, very seriously, which is why I feel bonded very much to the organisation.

Sam: 17:45

The fact that there is a Director of Sales Enablement for EMEA speaks volumes doesn't it?

Andy: 17:52

It does and you're at the centre of it. In enablement, you get to see cross-functionally what's going on. You get a line of sight into our go-to-market strategy. Yeah, Dynatrace take it really seriously.

Andy: 18:09

I'm lucky to work not just within the EMEA region but within our corporate organisation of people that see the opportunity and the potential and the power of what Sales Enablement can deliver, and I feel that they give me a lot of freedom and a lot of licence to try and innovate and create and improve the success of the organisation generally. So, yeah, we have quite a close knit. I think we have an incredible culture within the Sales Enablement group at Dynatrace, where I operate within, we have lots of conversations about the way that we are going to scale enablement and scale the programmes that we've got. So that's within the corporate function. But I also work very closely with not just the sales leadership team but all the cross-functions solutions, engineering and customer service and post sales. So, yeah, it feels like a bit more revenue enablement than sales enablement, but we're evolving that within the organisation. I think Brilliant.

Sam: 19:20

Tell us a bit more about Dynatrace. We haven't explored that yet.

Andy: 19:23

I'll tell you what I do, sam. Three years ago I joined the organisation and what I saw from my research and investigation before signing the contract, which was an incredible product set. And I had the opportunity to be involved in the user conference and I just kept on hearing customers talk about the impact that Dynatrace was having not on their businesses but their personal lives, in terms of how much time it was giving them back. And it was very, very clear to me the customers loved the platform, not just the platform, but they would talk very enthusiastically about the support and the partnerships they had with the individuals within Dynatrace. And then I did my research on the numbers and I thought this company is going somewhere. Really it's. We're delivering great growth numbers. We're consistent about the way that we do the business.

Andy: 20:23

And then I met the people and I've got to say that an incredibly supportive environment. Everybody wanted to help me right away and I'm like hang on, this isn't. This is a bit unique. This is a bit rare, I think, that tech companies where this kind of culture is not so prevalent. So we have an incredible demand for our platform. We have incredible customers. The people here work brilliantly together and I saw this opportunity to evolve that even further and be part of something that is really really special. I think that often you look at an organization and you look at the finances and then you look at the way that we operate and our operating procedures and modules and so forth. We've grown organically, through a team of really really dedicated people and customers that love us, to go to the next level. That's it's a tough journey. It's a tough journey and we're on that journey right now and it's probably exciting.

Vic: 21:31

Can I just say, from my perspective, working with Dynatrace and having numbers to be able to measure how special Dynatrace is, you're in a different lead to every other organisation that we work with, because it's not because we're just working with one team. We can see this across the organisation. You have a very, very special culture and you marry that with the product set you've got and the reputation you've got with customers. I think it's really exciting, which is why, from our perspective, we're so committed to partnering with you in the way that we do.

Andy: 22:10

Yeah, it feels very much to me like a special place and the fact that I've me and many others have got the opportunity to we feel very much part of the journey. We don't feel passengers in it. We all feel, I think, that we go back to leadership in a way. I think we all feel, regardless of your position in the hierarchy of the company, we all feel that we're leading and we're driving the company forward. Generally, what I feel about this organisation, I think it's pretty special place.

Sam: 22:42

That's also fantastic. So you've got a programme running at the minute. Oh yeah, has it got anything to do with Vicky?

Andy: 22:51

It does. It's got quite a lot to do with Vicky and the team at Amplified. It's funny because we've been talking about my journey from individual contributor to leadership. We realised that a lot of the enablement that we'd been doing was with our sales group and really focusing on the sales people, the individual contributors within the sales organisation and as a hyper growth organisation, just like our experience, we were taking people who were really strong individual contributors and the natural progression of for their careers was to be managers/ leaders, depending on what your definition is. And we realised and this wasn't just within the enablement team, this was in many different places around sales leadership that we could have had this opportunity. I wouldn't say we were under investing in leaders, because that wasn't fair, but we had an opportunity to, I guess, to supercharge the way that we took the multipliers and we were referring to the ideas of the multipliers. They're the scalars. If we really want to scale this organisation at speed, we have to be able to equip our leaders to lead in many, many different areas. So we just started playing, building out okay, what is sales leadership mean, and we ended up with about 15 different components.

Andy: 24:16

We could have gone more, but we would try to be a bit more concise of different aspects of leadership. Examples would be I mentioned recruitment earlier on right. Who's training people to go and recruit people not just on skills and experience, but on traits and characteristics and understanding what are the kind of non-negotiables around those characteristics, in traits? Another example would be planning right as an individual contributor. When I was an individual contributor, business planning was not a big thing in my remit. It didn't need to be.

Andy: 24:49

Then all of a sudden you take someone into a world and you said now you're going to need to provide a vision, a destination to people and you're going to start to be able to. You need to be able to script out the critical moves to get them towards that destination. If you've not been trained to do that, that's really difficult to do. That's a trial and error In our industry. Trial and error. We don't have a lot of time for that. We built a curriculum out. This thing kind of organically grew. We had great support from our leaders in enablement Rudie Roy and Rick LaCasse an incredible job of supporting it. We have the most incredible program manager in Rosie Beedle who keeps us all in line.

Andy: 25:34

We essentially quite quickly with a lot of positive pressure from certain sales leaders to deliver this Ricky's laughing because Ricky was objecting to this as well. We created what is essentially a nine-month curriculum that we piloted in the media and began this around May June time of 2023. To take all of our leaders and our second line leaders or our RVPs, through this curriculum it's a massive investment of time from all sides. We're getting some incredible feedback. We're starting to see some great results as well. It's now gone global. Our North America team have kicked off their curriculum. Our Latin team are chomping at the bit to get going. I think our Asia-Pac team are going to be close behind them. Things have just accelerated massively, which is very exciting a bit scary. The program is up and running.

Vic: 26:50

That success has spread success, hasn't it? People have really had such a positive experience going through this, Particularly the RVPs. They wanted to accelerate more people getting access to it.

Andy: 27:04

I didn't anticipate at all this. I thought we wanted to create a program that, quite frankly, we didn't have to push. We wanted to get it out there and let the demand come. I never, ever felt I wanted to drive something into the sales force. That was really, really important.

Vic: 27:29

I remember having the conversation with you about that. I also think it's really important. Again, we're so excited about this. It's a sales enablement I need to get the term right. I don't know whether you guys have done Medic or MedPick or all of that sales processor that every tech organization seems to be doing that. This is just taking sales enablement to another level. One of the things that we do is we measure the speed of execution.

Andy: 28:04

Yes, because that's a key measurement that we have as part of the program. I'm going to go back a little bit Vicky. I'm going to get to this.

Andy: 28:14

The inception for this really was you and I having a conversation which started around change. It started about we as a very successful hypergrowth organization. The change in our business is so. It can be so, so overwhelming. How we get that through to the people that really matter, the people in the field, that's really, really difficult to do. Again, we know change is really important. We know that as we change the way that we go to market, we add more components and more capability to our platform the way that ourselves, people, articulate that and are able to work with our clients and prospects. But we didn't know how to do that. That's when we started our real journey, which is like how do we do this? This is when you introduce Switch to us, and we started working through that. This concept of and this goes back to what I saw when I first joined Dynatrace is the platforms there, the markets there. What is the element that's going to supercharge it? And it was the people. It's the way that we work together. The rest of the ingredients are there. We've just got to mix them up and get them at the right heat. This is going to fly.

Andy: 29:39

We started on this journey around change, but then we started to, I guess, bring those people components together and that culminated in the way that we looked at our speed of execution. That was what we really wanted to tag on to. The speed check methodology or the process, has been really, really important to us. One of the things. I think that, as we consider those four elements I think we're going to talk about this Vicky but the correlation that we've seen within our organization around the higher the speed check result, the higher performing business that is. So we've actually seen real evidence that the way that those individuals operate as a team and collaborate and communicate with purpose and clarity and simplicity, we've found that we've got evidence now that says those are the highest performing groups and that's been super, super powerful for us.

Vic: 30:47

Yeah, nice. It's just been wonderful to see the response of the sales teams to it, and I remember an email that I think I sent on a Saturday to one of your RVPs and his response and this was a top performing region. I was doing all of this unconsciously, I didn't realise actually, because people have wanted to know what was my secret source. I didn't realise that this is what it was and actually I have had this operating system of trust and purpose and clarity and simplicity that I was just doing subconsciously. You talk a lot about the unconscious things that you're doing when you can't teach. You can't share that with other leaders if you don't know what they are, and I think you tried to understand from him what they were previously.

Andy: 31:45

Yeah, absolutely.

Sam: 31:48

Well, if you kind of codify it, it becomes repeatable Exactly, and if it's codified and repeatable, it's injectable into somebody else.

Vic: 31:56

Exactly which is really what this programme is doing is picking up the best practices, but, as we've described it, as an operating system for teams. So the fundamental piece that we've been helping with is driving change, leading through change, and then the other one is around driving accountability, which is based on something that we've talked about many times, is the 5 Behaviours.

Andy: 32:21

Yeah, I think that's a really, really important point around consciousness and unconsciousness and sense. We often talk about being consciously or unconsciously competent or incompetent, and we look at ourselves regularly across that quadrant, if you like. What we've really seen that Vicki's touched on that raising the conscious of, when you're conscious of things that you're competent at. That's when you can go and coach. That's when you can be the most effective coach and the most effective leader. And I had this as a leader, which I was good at selling.

Andy: 32:59

So I was given the manager job, but I had no idea how to articulate it. I didn't know I did. I had no, I was unconscious, I'd been doing it long enough to be unconsciously competent at it, but now I was responsible for coaching somebody and be like well, just be a bit more like me. That, of course, is impossible and doesn't work, and that's what I was trying to do with others. I think the other premise that we've got for this is that we create an environment for people to learn from each other, rather than lecture and teach them from the enablement team. I think the power of bringing these people together and making it a very, very highly interactive and engaging and letting them work through problems together and think about the solutions.

Vic: 33:41

A real problem, not hypothesis, Real problems. I think that there's no case studies in here. What would you do with this? It's real.

Andy: 33:50

Yeah, absolutely. And we mentioned a couple of models there. We didn't also anticipate that driving change through the Switch framework, utilising the five behaviours model to try and build accountability to get us to results, grow coaching, format, communication these models that we've brought into the curriculum, they just flow up all the way through. We almost thought that they would be standalone. But when we talk about MedPick, for example, where we're utilising Switch to drive that change within our organisation and then we utilise grow coaching to make sure that we're continuously increasing the level of proficiency through highly effective coaching, that was I'm ashamed to say this almost that was a bit of a surprise about how those five behaviours in, switch and grow those foundation modules would just permeate through every area of the rest of the curriculum.

Vic: 34:54

It's very cool.

Sam: 34:56

I can't stop grinning.

Vic: 34:57

I told you my ray of sunshine was on the screen.

Sam: 34:59

How long have you two been working on this programme together?

Andy: 35:02

Can I start talking about this? About two and a half years ago, it was a vision of something that how?

Vic: 35:09

can we just say it was your vision, please?

Andy: 35:17

I think I've got an absolute shout out to my two other amigos within Dynatrace, which is Troy Stoll and Patrick Nalu. The three of us leads the main geos from an enablement perspective. So EMEA, North America, or North and South America now, and Asia PAC we started this journey together. I will say that we've become quite conscious, through the work that we've done with Vicky and the team and through building and starting to deal with this curriculum, about how we operate as a team, how we cover for each other. That has been critical. I definitely shout out those guys, but that vision that we had for doing this started about two and a half years ago. It was pretty basic then, wasn't it, Vicky? I'm surprised at where we are now based on thinking back to those conversations.

Andy: 36:17

When the program continues, it does, it evolves. One of the things that we've just identified is that we were talking, I think maybe even before we started recording this, which was about being that step and how we've spoken about that step going from an individual contributor to a leader, a people leader. It's a pretty big step. I found it gigantic. What we're now doing is we're inviting some people that are not currently in a leadership position to join us through the curriculum and go through the modules to try and give them a much more visceral understanding of what people leadership actually is Taking top performers or people that we think could be leaders in the future, but give them the experience through the curriculum about what it is to be a leader and a choice. The program continues to evolve into different avenues and different values. It's exciting, very exciting, to be a part.

Vic: 37:24

I think the other piece that's come out of it is just as moving into a consumption world, just the importance of that cross-functional piece and how, as a leader, you might have your direct reports, but actually it's the cross-functional team and how they come together that has really been highlighted, I think, as this program and bringing everybody on the journey.

Andy: 37:48

Yes, 100%. That is all underpinned by the overused cliché term of value not just saying it, but living it from a customer perspective. That requires the whole organization to be aligned. The program has been a really, really important part of that around bringing everybody on the journey rather than just this is the sales team and this is the VSE team and this is the VSE other.

Sam: 38:20

Andy, with all that wealth of experience, sales, sales leadership, enablement and so on, why on earth did you need to work with us, an external organization?

Andy: 38:28

to help you out. There's not one thing. I started working with Vicky and I just felt an absolute alignment into what the purpose is of the Amplified Group than what I was personally very, very passionate about and what they did. I feel very, very lucky to be able to work with Vicky and the team. I think they're operationalizing what we had as a vision. They're helping to bring that to life. I think that being I spoke about this earlier on, but we started out on change how do we drive change Without Amplified's involvement in the program? We would still be properly discussing that right now. So we talk about speed of execution, the speed of execution, the module. It's been a massive part of our partnership with Vicky and the Amplified team. So, yeah, I'm probably not doing that justice, to be honest with you.

Vic: 39:32

I was trying to be concise. The key thing for us is it's a partnership. We've worked together to evolve, to fulfill the vision that you had.

Sam: 39:44

And we're learning as much from you.

Vic: 39:45

As you, you know, we're doing this together.

Andy: 39:48

Yeah, I think as much as we wanted to bring the how how do we become great leaders? What do great leaders do and how do they do it. Vicky and the team brought a lot of that to us immediately. Where I've seen this organisation, that just incredible Dynatrace, incredible platform, incredible customers, great and incredible, quite unique culture. We were kind of missing that. How do we go to the next level? That's what Amplified, Vicky and our team of people to the table.

Sam: 40:26

You got there on your own, but maybe they got you there a bit quicker with their framework.

Andy: 40:33

That's a really good point. I don't know if we would have done because timing was key to get this programme up. I think if we'd have waited too much longer, we would have lost momentum and our industry just we all know moves just so so fast we would have lost our window. So we had to act this fast to get the thing going, otherwise the enablement group wouldn't have delivered. I wouldn't have delivered what I committed to deliver. So we work on the pretty tight time frames. We currently are delivering modules at the same time as we're building modules, which is hilarious and also very scary. But that's the speed in which we need to move, that we can't delay. We can't say, oh, six months time, don't worry, we'll have this for you. At times now we have to do it now, and so I think without Vicky and the team, we'd probably be trying to find new stakeholders that would support us. Probably. The truth of it.

Sam: 41:39

Fantastic. What a journey. Would you help us to summarise for our listeners by giving us three quick takeaways, please?

Andy: 41:49

Yeah, I think the investment in people to learn and develop. I don't see a huge amount of companies doing this. I think people expect that they employ people in, or that they spend long enough in their organisations, that they're going to have the skills and the capabilities to do the job that is expected of them and to do the job that they want to do. And there just seems to be a merry go round of everyone else expecting someone else to do it. So I kind of employ organisations to take that kind of risk. There are a number of organisations that do, but I think the majority don't. They always want to employ it in thinking that someone else has done it.

Andy: 42:33

So I'm proud of what we're doing within Dynatrace to say we're going to protect our special culture in the way that we work together. We're going to make this an organisation where people wouldn't think about leaving. Not only do we attract top talent, but we keep it and we keep developing it, because that's the high performers want to be invested in and they want to develop and they want to be challenged. So I don't know how many takeaways that is. Maybe that's all three cents, but that's certainly something that I hold very, very dear in our industry and in my profession within sales and enablement is that at certain points in time, we need to go beyond the operational training and move to how we develop people moving forward throughout their careers, and that's what we're trying to do.

Vic: 43:23

It is a really good summary and actually apologies for doing this again, but in looking back at the work that we've done with Andy Bryars, he was looking at how many promotions he's had in his team and this is an annual review. Promotions this is people growing and moving forwards. In his team, over the four and a half years, there have been 20 promotions of growth. I think that's pretty phenomenal. That's how you keep people, because they're growing and this is not necessarily just moving up but changing roles and taking on more responsibility and different responsibilities Just developing, yeah, exactly.

Vic: 44:02

I just thought it was a really interesting measurement that we haven't thought of.

Andy: 44:09

Yeah, when you interview our high performing leaders and salespeople, that's one of the things they talk about. The financial reward is a consequence of their development and they need to be challenged and they need to feel like they're progressing and they're being invested in. They're progressing and they're being challenged in their thinking. That's what high performers want and, of course, what tech company doesn't want the highest performers? Exactly, you have to create that environment for that. You can't just expect organically that it's going to happen. It's work and it's conscious work that you need to put into it, and that's what we're trying to do.

Sam: 44:47

It's cool, fantastic. Any book recommendations for us, we always squeeze that one into the end. Thank you.

Vic: 44:58

I'm laughing because this man doesn't like books.

Andy: 45:01

Okay, no, yes, this has been a source of.

Sam: 45:06

Maybe a film recommendation or some music we can listen to.

Andy: 45:11

So, yeah, embarrassingly, Sam, I struggle massively with business books and so I'm kind of a visual kinesthetic learner so I need to get in and do it and I'm really visual. So Vicky's been making me do audiobooks because I have to as part of that. We can't do five behaviors and switch and get through it If I haven't read the book. That would be really embarrassing. So I have, yeah, fast point, fast point yeah.

Andy: 45:39

But I would say that for those who haven't maybe are like me that learn in a certain way outside of the written word, I went through the audiobooks of Five Behaviors. I will honestly say that I was sad when that was over, that I was wrapped up in that story in the way that the Five Behaviors of a Dysfunctional Team was written as a fable. I was really kind of sad it was over. I wanted to see what was happening to that CEO and a leadership team within that fable. So if anyone hasn't read that and, like me, a bit resistant, I implore you to give it a try, because I was very, very happy, surprised, and I needed just to add when it was over.

Sam: 46:26

And if you don't want to read it, you can always listen to the audio book.

Andy: 46:30

I walk around the countryside with headphones on listening to these books and I thought I'd never tried it before, until about seven, eight months ago.

Vic: 46:43

I've had to nag him to do it.

Andy: 46:46

Yeah, but funnily enough, I'd been making each other accountable within the Enabling team to do this and that's been pretty cool. And that's not been forced, it's. My colleague in North America said ah, I've just done Five Behaviors. He said have you done it yet? And the shame and embarrassment that flowed over me was powerful.

Vic: 47:06

Peer pressure.

Andy: 47:07

Yeah, account it yeah, making each other accountable Exactly. Yeah, good health, good, healthy, good. Thank you, andy, fantastic, appreciate that.

Vic: 47:13

Excellent, really good.

Sam: 47:22

So thanks, Andy. We really appreciate your time, and it just remains for me to say thanks for listening to Get Amplified from the Amplified Group. Comments and subscriptions are always gratefully received.