Always be Learning: Scaling through a Focus on People with Dennis Lyandres

Dennis Lyandres spent more than 8 years with Procore during which
time Procore grew from $10m to over 900m+ in revenue. Dennis
started at Procore as Executive Vice President of Sales in 2014,
before moving to the Chief Revenue Officer role in 2018 where he
was responsible for driving revenue across all customer-facing
functions including Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, Rev Ops,
Procore.org and Business Development. From Nov 2022 to June 2023,
Dennis served as a Strategic Advisor to the CEO working on key
strategic projects such as procore’s emerging fin tech business,
key partner and customer relationships, and mentoring and
developing key leaders. Before joining Procore, he held various
sales and sales management roles at Cloudera and Pentaho. Dennis
began his career in mergers & acquisitions with BTI Group and
holds a BA from UC Berkeley where he finished with highest
academic honors.


Join us as Dennis shares his journey to sales leadership, from
his early days to the phenomenal success he had at Procore. He
discusses the core fundamentals he had to learn, including
prospecting, business acumen, account planning, and building
urgency. Dennis highlights the human aspect of sales leadership
and the important lessons he learned in recruiting, training, and
developing the right people; as well as the need to trust and
empower his team. Dennis also emphasizes the value of continuous
learning and the role of leadership in creating a culture of
success. Dig into the lessons he learned on his road to sales
leadership in this inspiring episode of Revenue Builders.


 


HERE ARE SOME KEY SECTIONS TO CHECK OUT:


[00:05:57] Importance of business fundamentals and financial
literacy


[00:09:39] Skills needed for sales leadership: recruiting,
training, developing, promoting, and terminating


[00:19:11] Unique aspects of training and development: clear
expectations, self-service, certifications, coaching and buddy
systems


[00:34:42] Transitioning to the CRO role: prioritization,
managing time effectively, hiring great leaders, aligning
cross-functional teams


[00:46:26] The importance of leadership and building more
successful leaders


[00:49:31] The value of showing care and having each other's
backs


[00:50:43] Assessing the most important problems and finding
solutions


[00:51:06] Scaling challenges: assessing the most important
problem and finding a solution


[00:52:09] Adapting to new challenges and focusing on the next
problem to solve


[00:54:13] Transitioning from a private company to a public
company


[00:56:16] Learning from mistakes and being proud of Procore's
impact


 


HIGHLIGHT QUOTES


[00:08:48] “If you're talking to someone low level, and maybe
that's some way to build a groundswell or get intelligence or
whatever your account strategy is there, then yeah, I think you
can talk more feature function, more jargon. But certainly, as
you get more and more senior, and as you demonstrate more and
more of a mastery of the subject. Simplicity is absolutely
essential, right?” - Dennis Lyandres


[00:46:34] “My mindset really crystallized by this role, which
was like, leadership is the most important thing to whether I
wouldn't. Right and so I've got to be spending my time hiring
great leaders and making sure they can be wildly successful and
within leadership. I've come to believe that the highest calling
of a leader is to obsolete yourself is to work yourself out of
the job.” - Dennis Lyandres


 


Learn more about Dennis Lyandres through this link:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dlyandres/


Check out John McMahon’s book here:
https://www.amazon.com/Qualified-Sales-Leader-Proven-Lessons/dp/0578895064