When you finally ask yourself, is this really the path that I'm meant to be on?

Well, most founders and leaders push that question aside.

But the brave ones don't.

And that's where everything shifts.

Pete Harris knows that moment well.

He's now the president of Pipedrive, powering the sales engines of more than 100,000 small businesses across 180 countries.

But this turning point began years earlier inside of one of the most prestigious firms in the world.

One of my first jobs straight out of university was with Deloitte.

And as an auditor, I loved it.

But even as he climbed the ranks, one question forced him to confront everything.

For Pete, answering that question meant walking away from the finish line that everyone expected him to chase.

The epiphany that I came to was.

And it was only because I was asking the right questions that I was able to have that moment of clarity.

And that clarity didn't just change his career.

It unlocked a version of himself he'd never met before.

I went on to do, you know, know full distance Iron Man.

I wanted to see what is my mind capable of.

I broke down in tears.

I could not stop crying for about an hour afterwards.

And that same clarity and grit now feel the leader guiding pipedrive's global momentum.

Asking the right questions has unlocked a few things.

If you're navigating uncertainty, pressure, or a decision that feels bigger than you right now, this episode gives you the courage to ask the question within.

Let's dive in.

Welcome back to lead the team.

I'm your host, Ben Fanning.

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Pete, you said one question and changed everything for you during your partner process.

What was the moment you realized you needed to walk away?

There is.

There's quite a few moments throughout my career where asking the right questions has unlocked a few things.

Let me give you one example, which is.

Is.

Is actually a career defining moment for me.

I was at Deloitte as I talked about and I was actually there for 12 years.

I was there for a long time.

And when anyone, I believe, joins Deloitte and stays for that long, it's for generally one aim and it's to try and get to the partnership to try and Be a partner at one of the big four.

And I was going through the partner process, I was going through the interview process.

And because I'm curious and because I'm asking a lot of questions, which by the way, you have to be careful that you're not annoying.

Don't be the annoying person that constantly just asks questions like the five year old when eventually you're like, all right, be quiet.

Yeah, just time out.

Why, why, why, why, why?

Yeah, so don't be that person.

But at the same time, you know, be very thoughtful about why you're asking the questions.

And so throughout my interviews, pro interview process, I was asking questions and the epiphany that I came to was, do you know what?

Actually I don't want to do this.

I don't want to be a partner.

And it was only because I was asking the right questions that I was able to have that moment of clarity which turned out to be career defining for me.

I reflected on what is my purpose?

So why is Pete Harris doing what he's doing?

And part of the epiphany that I have is my purpose is to.

This sounds quite grand.

It's not meant to, but for me my purpose is to make an impact on the world.

And to make an impact on the world.

What I then led to was, well, what does need to be true for me to do that in the best possible way?

And again, my interpretation of that was actually to think about working in industry.

So working with perhaps small businesses, for example, is where I settled.

That's my love.

That's why I'm at Pipedrive today.

That's why I was intuit before this and it was really into it.

That brought out the whole small business love for me.

Like when you think about small businesses and the impact they have on the world, they are the lifeblood of the economy.

They power nearly every country around the world.

You know, the small market stalls, the mom and pop shops, the hairdressers, right up to, you know, 500 people.

Businesses still classified as a small business, a small and medium sized business.

So I fell in love with small business, realizing that to have the biggest impact on the world, I need to put myself in a position to serve them.

Thinking back over your career, what's the.

One action in your career that's accelerated?

At the most, I would say it's the courage to be curious and let me unpack why a little bit more.

So curiosity is one of the key traits that I think everyone should have in all aspects of their life.

And so if You've got kids, by.

The way, Ben, I have got a teenage daughter.

Okay?

So if you can, you can remember way back when, when your teenage daughter was maybe three or four, and constantly looking around the world with those wide eyes and saying, why?

Why is the sky blue?

Why is the grass green?

Why is this?

Why is that?

That curiosity is like absorbing into information like a sponge.

And what I found.

One of my first jobs straight out of university was with Deloitte.

And I joined as an auditor.

And as an auditor, I loved it.

Which you don't hear very often, people saying that, but I loved.

I've never heard anybody talk about auditing with that special glisten in their eye like you have right now.

But let me tell you why this is fascinating.

I think that an auditor's job is to rip a business apart, look at the guts, look at all of the different parts of what they see, and examine it forensically to then put it back together with some insight, with some recommendation of where either improvements can be made or where risk may reside.

And the only way that a good auditor, I believe, can really get to the true root causes is by being curious.

So from a very young age, you know, fresh out of university, I was taught to ask the right question.

And what that did was meant that no matter what the situation, I was asking questions.

And the reason at the start of this answer, I said, it's the courage to ask the right question is because I do believe sometimes you need courage.

You know, can you remember when you've been maybe with a group of people and you look around and think, everyone is more intelligent than me, everyone knows more than me, but I have no idea what that person is talking about.

And you have to have the courage to say, put up your hand and say, what does that mean?

Or what do you mean there?

And I can guarantee you that 50% of the people in the room will also be asking that same question.

What I found is that it can open up a room, it can open up the conversation if you do that properly.

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Well, such a good thing for a leader to be saying.

And I hope this is resonating because usually, regardless of what most leadership books say, most leaders want to look like and feel like the smartest person in the room.

And if you're shaking people, listeners are like, ben, that's not true.

Come on, you know it's true.

Right?

The leaders don't like to look dumb.

Right.

You don't like to look dumb in front of Wall street, certainly among your investors.

You definitely don't want to look like you don't know in front of your team.

And it's hard because it can be humiliating not to know the acronym that everyone's throwing around.

Like, you should know.

So what do you do in those moments when you're thinking to yourself, I should know what that is?

Like, maybe you're visiting like a big customer and I should know.

They're throwing us around.

What do you do?

Yeah, two bits of advice there, because I think you're absolutely right.

The first one that I love to do is prepare.

So I am a very prepared person.

My diary is so regimented and logical.

I'm a very sort of red blue person.

So I love structure, I love data, I love routine.

And as a part of that, I like to have spaces and capacity to do my research.

So if I'm talking to a big customer, any customer, in fact, I will always make sure that I'm going in the right tools, going into pipedrive, having a look at the latest comments that have been made about that customer, maybe doing a bit of my research, going into ChatGPT.

Tell me something I don't know about X, Y and Z.

Based on everything you know about Pete Harris chatgpt, tell me a few interesting insights that could be great conversation starters for.

With this customer or this situation.

And what that does is a couple of things.

One of them, I believe, is that it's a bit like the.

I can't remember the name of it now.

The, the, you know, drug trials where you have the pseudo.

The.

The one where it isn't truly the drug.

Yeah, I know what you're talking about.

You know what I mean?

It's.

Yeah, it's the, like there are two drugs and one or the world's not coming to me, but it's the one that does it.

A placebo.

It's the placebo.

Placebo effect.

Yeah.

Thank you for putting it back to yes.

So it's like the placebo effect of when you've done research.

I believe what that gives you is a bit more confidence.

Okay.

So it gives you the confidence to then ask the question and be curious because you're coming from a space of being prepared.

And I think that that's truly important.

The other thing which I said two things that's.

The first one is prepare.

The second one is surround yourself with people that generally know the topic better than you do.

So when I hire people, I hire people for two things.

The two things I hire people for is not what's on their CV or resume most of the time.

I, I think that's interesting and I think experience is great.

But what really tells me about someone is do they have self awareness and do they have curiosity?

And if they have those two things, I think generally speaking they will ask the right questions.

They will they reflect on that because they've got self awareness on do I actually know the answer or do I need to ask someone that is more prepared than me or knows more, has more experience about that subject than me or to advise me on that answer.

And I think therefore surrounding yourself with those people is, is just phenomenal for getting ahead.

I, I love how you're breaking that down.

Like it takes it from like a, like a one liner about curiosity being important to what I'm hearing is Ben, it's strategic curiosity.

Like how old were you when you ran your first marathon or in an ultra?

So when I did my uh.

So Ironman was the first big thing that I did.

And by the way, let me give you some context there because I think this is quite a cool story.

I signed up for a full distance Ironman about four years ago.

It was Christmas Day four years ago.

And that is a 2.4 mile swim, 112 miles on the bike, followed by 26.2, a full marathon to finish off and you do them back to back.

So it's a lot and it's hard but I couldn't really swim.

I had never ridden a road bike before and I've done some running but not too much.

But I signed up because I wanted to see what is my mind capable of and what I've learned out the back of this, which I think is brilliant for business for people in difficult situations is grit and grit and endurance and back to purpose by the way.

Purpose.

If you have your purpose and you're sure about, why are you doing this?

So for me, my.

Why on earth are you doing an iron man?

Well, I'm doing an iron man to show my kids that anything is possible.

Yeah, it's hard.

Yeah, it's difficult.

But again, your purpose, if you're sure of it, you can then endure.

Well, thank you for sharing that with us because most of us ain't going to do an Ironman and much less finish it.

And you just gave us some, some great tips that we can glean from that.

What, what did it feel like when you crossed the finish line 12 hours later?

I, I broke down in tears.

I, I could not stop crying for about an hour afterwards.

It was a phenomenally emotional experience because remember I told you my purpose, my why was to show my kids that anything's possible.

And my kids watch me go over that line.

And then I just like all of the training of nine months of just hard work just came out of me.

And by the way, during this time I'm in pipe drive, you know, very, you know, on the executive team running a multi billion business like that, that's not easy either.

And so you've got to balance all of this stuff and make sure that you, you know, you're being a good husband, you've been a good father, you're being a good executive, you're keeping it all balanced.

But just on a side note, by the way, I'll tell you, I didn't tell anyone a pipe drive that I was doing this for the first three months of training.

And one day my CEO, we just finished a call and my CEO said to me, pete, I don't know what's come over you recently, but you are on fire.

I've never seen you with such energy and emotion and just getting stuff done.

You just, I don't know what you do, but whatever you do, keep doing it.

And I was like, well, it's funny you say that because actually for the last two months I've been training really hard because I've signed up to an Ironman and he went, wait, what?

And he was like, why didn't you tell anyone?

I said, because I, I'd worry that you thought I was just trading all day.

I wasn't actually working hard enough or something stupid like that.

And he was like, are you kidding?

Like whatever you're doing, just do, do more of it.

Do a double Ironman.

Like keep going because this is brilliant.

I, I keep myself very accountable.

Okay.

I believe, you know, within.

So I do a lot, I've done a lot of selling in my career, which is why I love Pipedrive and I love being at Pipedrive because obviously we're, we are a, a sales tool.

We're built by salespeople.

Our founders were salespeople.

So Everything within Pipe Drive is about selling and I am fascinated about selling.

I think it's so interesting.

And so as I was thinking about how do I sell in the best possible way?

I believe the most effective salespeople are those that have a very high say do ratio.

So when they say something, they follow it up and they do it.

So Ben, if I was trying to sell something to you, we had a call and I understand, I understood your, your needs.

I listened and I under her I heard, you know, what is it that your real challenges I want is the value I think that we can offer you.

And I said to you, tell you what I'm going to do.

I'm going to follow up with these three things.

Ideally, I should be following up with those three things within the next couple of hours.

That's the next action that I think is really important.

That is very underrated.

Within a lot of our kind of AI automated world today, that kind of personal relationship touch on.

Whatever I said I would do, I do.

So.

Okay, man.

A lot to unpack with that listeners.

Do not let that go past you because that, that's really big and I haven't thought about it that way.

How AI is taking a little bit of that, that is taking the humanization out to some degree, but also it could be stealing the human side of doing what we say we're going to do.

If AI is just going to do it, why do we need to, why do we need to do it?

And I think there's something, something that unlocks when, hey, I'm going to say it, I'm going to do it.

And it like puts, puts a world in motion when there is that human side.

You're.

And I'm curious from your standpoint because you all heard how big pipedrive is, how many people they're dealing, they're dealing with sales organizations around the world and you have a front row seat to what people are saying they're going to do in your system and what they don't do in the system.

So what are you seeing there?

And I'm also curious because you're heavy technology and AI is supposed to be, you know, the godsend of, of everything on this front.

So yeah.

What piece this together for terms of what you're learning as a leader and what we need to be looking out for?

It's such a good question.

Pipedrive, we're very lucky in that we have over 110,000 customers.

We're in 180 countries.

And with that you get to see the sales Data of what does a successful salesperson look like and what typically do we see as the reasons why they don't sell?

Now the sales data has to be kept up to date and AI, by the way, I think is great for that.

It's brilliant.

So if you're on a call or you're sending an email, AI should be able to summarize all of that and pop it into your CRM notes for you so that it's all automated and you don't have to do that.

That would be beautiful.

Yes, yes, makes sense.

So in pipedrive world, you're integrating into the sales call meeting recorder or you've got your own version, I don't know.

But it's integrating and so it's populating with, hey, this is what you all talked about and even this is what you said you were going to do for the client.

Yes.

So the beauty of pipedrive is it was built by our founders around this concept of activity based selling.

An activity based selling is essentially what do I need to do next?

What's my next best action in order to sell in the best possible way?

So I think one of the key themes that I see in really successful salespeople is that next step, discipline.

It's following through on the call, the email, the next best action, and making sure that that happens just as a habit, so that it's routine.

And so as you start following that through, you really then get to see the benefits of that discipline.

But on the other side, what I see a lot in a lot of salespeople's day to day is a lack of discipline over their pipeline.

So you can, a pipeline can easily be diluted with very low quality leads.

Those leads that you haven't spoken to or interacted with for the last month, those leads, which are a bit of a long shot, they're probably not going to come off because, you know, they're not really the perfect customer for you, but you're hoping they are.

And so it becomes a vanity, a vanity metric.

It becomes.

Yeah.

How big is your pipeline?

Well, I've got millions and millions of dollars in there.

Never mind, I don't know, like they're over three years old.

Yeah.

And we're not doing anything with them.

Yeah.

And so in pipedrive, you know, incidentally, we have something called deal rotting, which is basically a rather odd term for saying they're getting rotten.

You know, they're, they're decaying.

Like you don't, you shouldn't be focusing on these.

So it's, it's focus.

And ultimately, as a salesperson, you want to be able to focus.

But what I think AI is doing brilliantly is helping automate steps, reduce clicks, make it easier for salespeople to get some of the more mundane tasks done.

But the flip side of that is that.

Back to curiosity.

I think it could make salespeople less curious because, as I described, I can easily go onto ChatGPT and just type in, research this client for me, give me some insights, and that's what I'll go and talk to the person about.

And I end up not listening to the real problem that I'm being told.

I just go to my scripts that ChatGPT is telling me.

So you need to be a bit careful of that.

So good.

And it's powerful to hear it come from an executive of an organization leading an organization.

That's.

That's what you do.

I mean, and leaders need to strike the balance here and understand the intent and the purpose and to bring about what people want.

Like the why of why are you doing.

Why do you need a technology for your sales force or your productivity anyway?

Why do you need it?

And it is so.

It is worse than ever to be able.

And you can just.

It's so easy just to fill something up with AI gobbledygoo that's never got a human action.

And I do believe the technologies that help us take more effective human action, those are the ones that are going to be the most powerful.

Now I'm thinking about you.

So as big as Pipe Drive is, you guys are competing against some behemoths out there, and y' all are.

My perception of it.

Pipe Drive is you're like the scrappy.

I mean, as big as you are, there are some giants out there, and you're the scrappy, nimble ones.

As an executive of an organization, leader of an organization that's fighting against giants, what.

How do you lead.

How are you, like, leading the insurgents?

Like, how do you think about leading a team of insurgents in an industry like that?

Yeah, I mean, first of all, I think competition is great.

It keeps you lively, it keeps you energetic.

It's keeps you on your toes as to what is everyone thinking and how we are going about it.

So absolutely love that we're in a genuinely crowded space, but also a very competitive space.

I think that the ways and the advantages that.

That we have at pipedrive is experimentation, which may seem a bit odd, but I don't believe any of us know the right answer.

Anyone that tells you they know the right answer, I think is wrong.

And here's why, like, here's why, like, you, you.

We can quite happily say, I'm going to do a new brand campaign.

And let's say we're all going for super bowl ads.

We're all going to put an ad on the Super Bowl.

Now, I could come up with an idea.

We could all sit within, you know, this ivory tower and think about what.

What do people want to see as a part of a Super bowl ad?

And that is one way.

Or you could come up with 10 ideas scrappy on an iPhone and you could throw out there, you know, four months before, get some feedback and have people tell you what the right answer is.

Now, what I love about Pipedrive is that we really try and balance this mindset of artist and scientist.

So we apply a scientist mindset to a problem of what's the data telling us, what's the logic of structure telling us.

Yeah.

But then we also try and get our, our inner artist of experimenting around that and having some fun around that.

Because I do believe none.

No, I don't know the answer.

An exec doesn't know the answer.

It's your customers and your prospects that will resonate towards a particular answer.

And that is, I believe, how you scale.

And in a way, we have more freedom to do that, but not a public company.

You know, we have more protection in that regard.

We can have a bit more artistic fluency than some of the others.

And I find that really attractive.

I love that.

Pipe drive seems fun.

And, you know, sales can be rough and it can be a rough job.

And I love the fact that you guys bring and prioritize that experimentation.

You know, I think the listeners can probably hear from you like you're a fun guy to probably work for.

You know, you're doing interesting things, you're curious, you know, you're open to new ideas.

And I think in a lot of ways a great, a great leader to emulate from that standpoint.

It's been a fun one today.

Pete, what's your partying thought for our listeners?

Only the team, my friend, just two.

And I've talked about it throughout.

My red thread is about curiosity.

And so if you can just ask that extra question the next time you don't understand something or ask that extra question to go one level deeper on something that you think you do know, please just ask the question.

I'd see what happens.

And if something interesting happens, please reach out to me.

You can find me on, on LinkedIn, look me up, send me a message.

I'D be so curious.

I'd be so curious as to see if any of your listeners do anything interesting as a result of this.

Yeah, y' all reach out to them.

Tom, you heard them, only the team.

And ask him when his next ultra is going to be or his next Iron Man.

Pete, thanks for joining us my friend.

Thanks so much.

This was fun.

Cheers.

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