18. Conor Hyland, GTM at ComplyAdvantage - Why High-Performance Sales Teams Are Built on Trust

Conor Hyland is Regional Vice President of GTM for EMEA at ComplyAdvantage, the AI company helping enterprises fight financial crime. He started his career selling on the shop floor at Ted Baker, worked across the Middle East, then moved into SaaS before joining GoCardless as an Enterprise Account Executive and progressing into sales leadership. He later joined ComplyAdvantage to help build its sales-led growth motion, hire the team and bring more process and rigor to how the business goes after larger accounts. Conor breaks down why the old idea of a high-performance sales culture, built on pressure, micromanagement and fear, gets performance wrong. For him, the foundation is trust: clear standards, psychological safety, shared goals and a team that is willing to challenge each other because everyone knows it is in service of getting better. He also explains the ICE framework he uses when hiring, prioritising intelligence, character, coachability and entrepreneurship over simply choosing the candidate with the most experience, and why "trajectory beats position" when assessing talent. He also gets into why ComplyAdvantage still invests heavily in cold calling despite the rise of automated outbound, how his team uses data to identify exactly where a rep's conversion is breaking down before coaching them, and why enterprise sellers need to arrive at an account with a genuine point of view before they ever make contact. Outside of sales, Conor talks about reading roughly a book a week for several years, learning to become more vulnerable as a leader, and how becoming a father changed his definition of hard work from always being available to being deliberate with his time. If you're building a sales team, hiring for potential rather than pedigree, trying to create a high-performance culture without falling back on pressure and micromanagement, or figuring out what great enterprise sales leadership looks like today, this one's worth your time.