Reading Harmon leads sales development at Motive, where he recently scaled a remote team from 6 to 118 reps in 6 months (yes you read that right, 118 reps in 6 months!!). 

He’s also steadfast about building real relationships in sales. It’s refreshing. No surprise that Motive is crushing.

He sat down with Luke from Origami to discuss practical tactics for building relationships on cold calls, scaling culture in remote environments, and what actually works when you're hyperscaling an SDR org.

Active listening isn't about waiting for your turn to talk - it's about catching the things prospects mention in passing.

When someone says "we like our provider, outside of a couple issues," most reps hear the first part and move on. What you should hear is "couple issues." No one's going to say "I'm drowning in pain, thank God you called" on a cold call. They guard it.

So you dig. "Walk me through those issues." They'll say something generic like "long hold times with customer support." Most reps jot that down and keep going. That's where they lose.

Instead, go deeper. How often are you calling support? What does that result in? Can we quantify it? If they're calling twice a week and waiting two hours each time, that's 16 hours a month of dead time. Now you're having a real conversation about impact, not features.

This is what consultative selling actually looks like. You're not word-vomiting your product. You're genuinely curious, asking questions, quantifying pain they haven't thought about in those terms. That's how you build trust on a cold call.

Sales is making friends. I know that sounds simple, but most reps don't operate that way. They're transactional. They want the quick win - book the meeting, move to the next call.

Here's the frame that works: if you're sitting across the table from a client, you've already lost. You're selling at them. But if you pull your chair to their side of the table and ask about their day-to-day, what they're dealing with, what they like and don't like - that's consultative.

People want to work with people they trust, and trust comes from character + competence. I might trust you as a good person, but I'm not letting you do open-heart surgery. And I'm not trusting a skilled surgeon caught selling organs on the black market.

The best calls I've had? I barely said anything about Motive. I just asked questions, showed empathy, and said "sounds like it might be worth a conversation." When you approach it like you're helping a friend figure something out, people actually want to talk to you.

We went from 0 to 118 reps in 6 months, all remote, all in Pakistan. The energy is unmatched compared to US teams I've run. There's no "too cool for school" vibe. Our Slack channel is constantly buzzing with shoutouts, bad call stories, wins, losses - everything.

Here's what makes it work: we hire people who want to collaborate. If someone's hoarding knowledge or protecting themselves, they'll kill your culture. We explicitly hire people who seek feedback, share best practices, and aren't afraid to fail in front of their peers.

To solidify this, we built a culture committee - completely volunteer. Reps lead it, they choose topics, they run enablement sessions. It's not management telling them what matters. It's them surfacing what the team actually needs. That creates ownership.

The other piece is making leadership accessible. My Slack is always open. You can reach out with dumb questions. I'll have dumb questions too. When you remove that hierarchy fear, people start asking for help, which becomes infectious. Next thing you know, everyone's working toward the same goals together.

The first mistake people make when scaling fast is loosening hiring standards to hit headcount. We did the opposite. We tightened the profile as we learned.

In Pakistan, we found most "sales experience" wasn't true sales - it was account management mixed with CS and maybe some SDR work. And "outbound experience" often meant outbounding on inbound leads, which isn't the same thing at all.

So we got specific about what we were looking for: people who understand true cold outbound, who want to build a career in sales, who have the motor and strategic thinking to figure things out.

The last piece is showing upward movement. We recently promoted a few people, and the energy shift was immediate. You can tell reps their hard work pays off, but you have to show it. That's how you keep 118 people motivated when things get hard.

There are probably 500 sales tools you could implement. We've looked at most of them over four years. The trap is thinking more tools equals better results.

We focus on a few North Star metrics: connect rate, connect-to-meeting rate, talk time. That's it. Everything else is noise for us. We're in blue collar tech - these guys answer their phones. We don't need elaborate email sequences or LinkedIn automation.

The philosophy is less is more, but the "less" has to be quality. When you give reps too many tools or too many plays, they generalize everything. They can't get into a rhythm or perfect their pitch because they're juggling 20 different talk tracks.

We keep reps purely outbound. They don't touch inbound leads. They don't handle partnerships. They hunt what they kill. That focus lets them develop genuine expertise in their territory and personas, and the math works when you add heads with smaller, focused targets instead of spreading everyone thin.

That’s it for this week!

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Find more Modern GTM interviews here.

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And connect with Luke + Eric, if you feel so inclined.

‘Til next time!