Archives: Episode

Episode 67: Behind the Book Lightning Sales Ops – Matt Bertuzzi

Predictable Prospecting
Episode 67: Behind the Book Lightning Sales Ops - Matt Bertuzzi
00:00 / 00:00
1x
Download file Leave Review
Share

As much as every SDR loves using technology and programs to help them connect with prospects, no one likes to spend valuable time filling out endless online forms and getting crushed by an avalanche of pre-set tasks.

Our guest today is Matt Bertuzzi, VP of Sales and Marketing Operations at The Bridge Group and author of Lighting SalesOps, a book about how to make SalesForce work for you. We’re talking all about the top issues SDRs and managers face when using CRMs like SalesForce, and how you can tweak small points of conflict in the pipeline to reduce friction and close deals.

Episode Highlights:

  • What inspired Matt Bertuzzi to write Lightning Sales Ops
  • The issue every CRM faces
  • Encouraging leaders to lean into new tools and thought processes
  • Breaking down the concept of leads versus context and accounts
  • How to reduce the amount of effort and friction in the pipeline while maximizing impact
  • Eliminating “clicks” and letting the system do the work

Resources:

 

Episode Transcript

Marylou: Hello everybody, it’s Marylou Tyler. Today, I have a guest who I’ve been trying to get on this podcast forever. He’s so busy. His name is Matt Bertuzzi. He is the Sales and Marketing Operations Guru, VP Executive extraordinaire over at The Bridge Group.

The Bridge Group, if you don’t know, is a fabulous group of folks. They’re expanding out probably all the way down to pipeline but I first came in contact with them through that SDR role. They do a lot with playbooks and there’s some books out there by the team on those topics.

Today, we have Matt. Matt is one of us. He’s the sales ops guy. He’s the guy who makes sure everything is put together properly. He’s written a book. I will put the book in the show notes so you guys can go out and grab it. It’s available on Kindle and paperback.

Today, we’re going to talk about the why behind the book. I want Matt to tell us what really got him excited about doing this book for us and the types of things that we can learn from the book. Also, if there’s some one or two actionable things, I’m going to ask him to tell us when we hang up this phone call that we can do today in order to start building a pipeline that is just high velocity, that gets us to where we want to go with opportunities and then over to the close.

        Welcome, Matt, to the podcast.

Matt: Marylou, thank you so much for having me.

Marylou: This has been just an amazing experience. This book, as a systems engineer type, I love what you’ve done with this book so let’s start right away. There’s a lot of books out there, not a lot going on on the ops side and what I consider the actual tool sets of building this beautiful pipeline. What got you interested in taking this this to this level to help us really get a handle on our pipelines?

Matt: Like many people, there’s a talk, or a slide deck, or a story that you tell over and over year after year. For me, it has always been how to make SalesForce work for sales development teams, SDRs, LDRs, ADRs, whatever you call them. If you or your listeners imagine, it’s 2002, you’re a brand new SDR and you login to SalesForce or it’s 2016 and you’re a brand new SDR and you login to SalesForce. They look the same, the processes, the pages. The steps really haven’t advanced that much in a decade and a half.

                    I’ve been trying and failing, honestly, to try to bring the ops community to say, “Hey, still a development rep, building pipeline, or doing an important job that’s hard work?” Let’s make the system they work in day after day as pleasant and as enabling as possible. Really, you’d imagine, I did a user group talk with SalesForce and then I presented on this at Dreamforce.

                    People kept asking me, “Do you have that written down anywhere? That thing you talked about with screenshots?” I say, “No. I don’t have an ebook. There’s no webinar. It’s just the deck I’ve been working on for 10 years.” I decided to sit down and put it on paper and I wanted it to be more than just a bunch of screenshots, formulas, and process stuff. I wanted to tell stories behind it.

                    I interviewed a bunch of sales leaders, admins, ops people, actual SDRs themselves, and tried to lay out what I think is a framework for building SalesForce for sales development teams. A way that makes them more productive, happier, and at a minimum, makes them not dread when they find out the company they just joined uses SalesForce, if that makes any sense.

Marylou: It certainly does. The book is written for SalesForce and you’re an MVP for this type of application. Before we get started, I don’t want people to tune out now thinking, “Oh well, I don’t use SalesForce.” Can we take some of the concepts from this book and apply towards our XYZ CRM or is it really dedicated to the SalesForce app, the SalesForce engine, in your opinion?

Matt: That’s a good question. Honestly, I haven’t given it much thought but the way I organized the book was in five parts, thinking about the flow of a sales development rep and those are pretty system agnostic. Regardless of the CRM, you have to get the leads to the rep. They have to do their research. They have to conduct outreach and then you have to measure it. Those are CRM agnostic so those steps in the stories from the people who I interviewed in the book, they’re at the business layer, they don’t get into technology layer.

                    Each chapter is part lab which nerdy stuff and then part lecture which is more of the philosophy and the success stories. Those are CRM agnostic. And then, the screenshots, they’re obviously SalesForce specific but the concepts can apply to any CRM that has customization, that allows for customization, and is built for salespeople.

Marylou: Okay, for those listening, what Matt just said is there are screenshots that are specific to SalesForce but the overall architecture, workflow, and methodology of creating a scalable, lighting fast as his book has called, lightning sales ops teams, and the actual methods and systems underneath it are in that book for you to really take a look at and compare against what you’re doing now to get some improvement.

Matt: A lot of the issue, at least the issue I’ve experienced with teams is they use SalesForce how SalesForce is built. It’s like why do you do it this way? The answer is because that’s the way the demo works. You never want the process to be too prescriptive. That’s an issue with any CRM. Most people, there’s not an ops person when the company is founded. There’s definitely not an ops person by the time there’s one or two sales reps. The systems calcifies because there’s no one there to change it.

                    And then when they’re ready to have an ops person, then they’re like, “This is the way we do things because this is the way we did things.”

Marylou: Right. Last night, I went and had beers with a friend of mine who’s a CRM SalesForce guy. He came in and his shoulders were drooping. I’m like, “What happened to you today?” He said, “I am just having such a hard time getting these folks to adopt the system.” Adoption is I’m sure result of poorly configured CRMs but what you’re working on, Matt, do you think people taking a look and taking the stuff in and really understanding what it can do for them, does the adoption and does the actual compliance go up as a result of really looking at their workflows?

Matt: I have two thoughts on that. One, at the SDR role, those folks are generally so new to sales and junior that it’s all stick, there’s such little carrot. But then the AEs or more to the point field reps, remote reps. It just doesn’t work. You’re not going to get compliance. There’s little things you can do that are nudges.

                    But traditionally, I’d like to see if you agree, my philosophy is that sales for CRM has always been built for leaders on the back of reps. This is the tool you use because I want you to. The carrot piece is this is the tool that will make your life easier and unbeknown to you, without you taking extra steps, by virtue of you using the system, it’s going to throw off data that I will use to make management decisions. Versus you do these things so that I can manage you, you do you and the data will be created by virtue of your actions and I will report on that.

Marylou: Right. I’m a database programmer. That’s what I was formally trained as. When I started working with SalesForce and other CRMs, my immediate I hate it monitor went off in my head because I couldn’t get the workflow to go the way I wanted it to for the system I designed and planned out. I felt like I was the work around queen trying to get stuff done with the native way it was done.

                    One of the biggest problems we’ve always experienced and I’m sure that there’s a workaround now for that that you could tell us about is this whole concept of leads versus context and accounts. Do I create an opportunity first? Have you solved that for us, Matt? Please tell us.

Matt: It actually has two full chapters in my book where I talked about this. No, to be fully frank, I have solved it by saying #neverleads. This is a problem, don’t use leads. What I mean by don’t use leads is don’t have reps taking actions in the leads table of the database.

Marylou: Okay.

Matt: Let marketing use it but the system with logic, with code, with third party apps serve up accounting context to reps because like you know, that’s how any human thinks. You don’t think about the people at a company as a bunch of plat, non related business cards. You think of them as departments. That’s why the account in contact model makes so much sense.

                    The leads database is a technology decision that was made far before all of us were asked. My general philosophy is use technology to patch that. Do what makes sense for everyone and let the coders, let the admins, let the developers deal with the technology piece.

Marylou: We talked about this in Predictable Revenue, in the book. Aaron was just adamant that contacts and accounts but a lot of times, with the engines for marketing automation, they serve up the leads. Like you said, it’s like having houses on the street and all the people in those houses are all individuals and you can’t connect them together to living in the same house. It’s crazy and it’s stressful.

Matt: Here’s something I talked about in the book. Not to pinch it but just conceptually see if it makes sense. Let’s say President Obama and Vice President Biden. You are prospecting Vice President Joe Biden. A week later, President Obama comes inbound on your website. The way the technology works and the way teams are structured is you and the outbound rep, because you’re better at sales than I am, wouldn’t know that I, the inbound rep, just got a “lead” from the White House, the same organization.

                    The solution that most ops people say is, “I expect my inbound rep to search it.” Which is the absolute worst. Anything that requires someone to eat their vegetables, we should already know that’s not workable.

Marylou: Right.

Matt: You’re a technical person, I am not. I am a button click admin, if we probably say. I have built automation in SalesForce. If I can build it, anybody can do it. That essentially says, “Hey, Joe Biden’s email ends in whitehouse.gov, President Obama’s email ends in whitehouse.gov. We can have the system in one millisecond figure out that Marylou was already calling someone at the White House and present me, as the inbound rep, a visual flag that says do not go. Do not touch. Let Marylou know.

It doesn’t require me to eat my vegetables, to go searching, to do any database archaeology, to figure out who’s talked to this people. There are little things we can do since we know human nature is the path of least resistance. Never expect reps to do the hard work of searching and sorting for you but the system do the heavy lifting and reps just get warned or alerted.

                    The worst thing imaginable is calling the CEO of your biggest customer and saying, “Hey, have you ever heard of us?” They laugh at your face. That’s not good for anyone.

Marylou: No. That’s a great teaching point right there. Let’s pause for a moment so that everybody can absorb what we just heard because I see this in probably 90% of my accounts where they’re still asking the reps to search and see if there’s an activity on a particular record.

You just heard it from Matt that there’s a way that a non programmer, I’m going to call you that right now just because I don’t know what else to say, a person who is not necessarily in the weeds programmer can create a actual workflow that does this task which is a repeatable task. It’s done more than once. Therefore, in my world, if you do something more than once, it should be programmed.

Matt: Exactly.

Marylou: Good.

Matt: The reps appreciate it because no inbound rep wants to pass a meeting that they’re not going to get credit for. No AE wants the brand new rep to step on their account. No customer success manager wants to not know that leads are coming in or new contacts are being created. It’s about what we want everyone to do if they were all good and virtuous and time wasn’t a constraint and everyone gets everything. Great!

How do we do that without requiring people? Just like you said, happened multiple times. We make the systems do the virtuous things and let the people do what they’re best at.

Marylou: Yeah. Hypothetically, I can feel people listening to this saying, “Alright, we need to really look at this and figure this stuff out because we are wasting time and admin. There have been so many studies posted lately. This is an ongoing problem that existed back in the dark ages when I started about admin overshadowing the actual productivity so the return on effort numbers are off the charts. Where should I begin, as a team, looking at my pipeline and looking for areas where I can reduce the amount of effort but get a high impact?

Matt: For me, the biggest thing I hear is if they’re field reps, or AEs, if they’re inside reps, they’re not logging the activities and we need to see the activities to know who’s doing their job, the pre pipeline. What are the steps for pipeline? Or if they’re SDRs, measuring activities is quality conversations, whatever it is.

                    For me, the first piece of logic is how do we take out friction. If you want me to log my calls, how do I, as the admin, reduce friction so that you will log your calls? Everyone conceptually agrees with that but as soon as you say, “Will you show me how to log a call?” It’s 15 clicks. Let’s say it’s 10 times a day, 5 days a week, 4 weeks a month. That’s crazy. If 90% of the information is the same, why can’t I log that 90% case with 2 clicks?

                    It maybe takes me 15 to do the edge cases but if I can hit the bulk with 2 clicks, let’s do it. Let’s automate this. Let’s use logic or prefilled. Even if it’s bringing in developers, let’s do the things that are going to be done the most often, make it with the fewest clicks. Honestly, that’s going to be used as a system. You don’t pay them more. You don’t yell at them. You take away the 100,000 paper cuts and it’s better than buying them steak and lobster every night if they update their pipeline. Just take away the paper cuts and that’s how you drive adoption.

Marylou: This is great. I remember back when I ran a call center. I had 250 agents. We didn’t have a mouse at the time. This is pre internet. We used to figure out the way to reduce the number of hitting the tab key.

Matt: Genius.

Marylou: We would basically serve up, at the time. We would try to streamline the data entry process so that the wrap up, what we called wrap up is when they finished the call, hung it up. In the call center world, when you hang up a phone, you have to be able to file a call. It has to go somewhere. In SalesForce, you can be really bad about not really closing out a call. With dialers and stuff, you had to do that.

We really worked on what we call wrap up and trying to get that wrap up from a minute down to 30 seconds down to 15 seconds so that we could handle more calls. We did exactly what you’re talking about. We eliminated the number of tab keys that the reps had to do by combining keystrokes, essentially, in an app so they really hit like the number one and it would do five things and that would be it. We loved it. This can be done with native SalesForce coding.

Matt: Absolutely. You made me think of another thing. Let’s say you’re an AE, your AE closes a deal or they have the contract signed and now they have to close it in SalesForce. The thing I see most often is reps, if they’re at a high, “I just closed a deal. It’s great. Maybe it’s starting my quarter off or I just hit my number for the quarter.” They go to SalesForce and it’s like 15 required fields. No, you can’t save it. You forgot to do this. No, you don’t have a competitor. It doesn’t matter if you won. The moment of their high, the system is grinding the joy out of winning the deal.

Marylou: That’s very sad but true. It sounds like what I’m hearing from you is trying to eliminate clicks/in my world, it used to be called just the number of keystrokes, to create a qualified call wrap up. Wrap up, for the audience, for me, means we are able to track the sentiment of the call, or the transaction, or whatever. We’re able to track any new keywords or any new phrases we hear from our prospect that we think would be helpful for marketing so that marketing can incorporate the new language into the content assets that we use as we are marching people down the pipeline.

                    And then of course, we want to be able to close out that call and file it. Either it’s going to stay in the active pipeline because we haven’t finished our task that are meaningful or it exits out and goes some place for the next either long term follow up or do not call, whatever it is. That’s step number one. Like you said, trying to reduce the number of keystrokes, reduce the number of clicks and essentially capturing the bulk of information with the fewest number of keystrokes really will help a lot in adoption.

Matt: Absolutely. The moment your decision, you, as the manager, is getting the most value without lowering the friction. If you want to balance those.

                    The other piece that came to mind, that I talked about, and a lot of people have trouble adopting is the concept of you’re a rep, you can track your task, your specific actions, who do I have to call today, as defined by who do I have open tasks for today, or the concept I try to talk about is you track people, or accounts, or leads, or whatever your thing is.

                    Rather than having these tasks with reminders, don’t use tasks as your to-do, use leads or use opportunities. You’re working your list, your pipeline, whatever it is, and the tasks are being automatically created behind the scene so reporting an intelligence but you’re tracking open prospects not open tasks because it’s very easy and easier out there for me to log fake tasks, fake activity dates, put in 100 keystrokes a day just so people leave me alone. It’s much harder for that to be have I touched 100 prospects this week, this quarter, whatever that number is.

Marylou: Right.

Matt: That adds value to the rep. If I want to know which in my cadences, let’s say the other day and today is Tuesday so I want that prospect to disappear from my view because I just left the call. In two days, which would be Thursday, I want it to reappear. I don’t have to think about tasks and due dates. Let the system decide. This is a priority today. Once I call, it disappears from my list. I come in Thursday morning, it reappears. That’s what makes sense for reps. Who do I have to call today, not what tasks do I have to set. That’s kind of like a proxy that we use to remind ourselves but there’s other ways to do it.

Marylou: Right. Death by task. That’s a term I use all the time.

Matt: Anyone who has ever inherited a territory, I’m sure you have to. There’s nothing worse than your first login with someone else’s 800 avalanche of tasks over the past 18 months.

Marylou: I’m with you on that one, 100% agreement. I think tasks should be used for scheduled events that are meaningful, once again. Let’s take the SDR role and you made me your junior SDR, and you’re setting appointments, the actual appointment date and notes regarding that first appointment, same thing if you set a discovery call, you’re working further into the pipeline and are working on gathering stakeholders for a multi stakeholder discovery/discussion call, then that is a good thing to put into task because that also tells us relative position in the pipeline, where your prospects are.

Matt: Yup.

Marylou: The other thing I like is once again borrowing from the contact center, creating what I call cues, which sounds very similar to what you’re talking about in that. Basically, you come in and there’s a URL that’s a view. These are the accounts that are in my working status. These are the accounts that are in the qualification status. You basically work URLs and you start at the top, work it down based on the criteria of sort that the system is telling you. It could be last activity date. It could be most important, highest impact, lowest effort are first but that is a way to then come in and actually see your call log. I’ve seen your called cue of what you need to do that day. You just start at the top, break your way down.

Matt: Yes. A super simple example that our platinum prospects, we want to call them everyday, our gold prospects is every other, our bronze is I don’t know, twice a week. The expectation with most SDR managers is the rep knows these three cadences and is logging, closing activities, and scheduling future ones based on the cadence.

                    If it’s all problematic, why don’t you have the system do all of it so the rep is just working, as you said, I’m working the cue. It comes back tomorrow because it’s platinum. If it’s gold, it wouldn’t show up tomorrow. It would show up the day after. Let the system do this thinking and the date pushing and then you, as the manager, can report on all that stuff. Great! Who’s behind in their cadences?

Marylou: Right.

Matt: Who needs more leads? Who’s doing this and that? Who’s got a better connect rate, a better working rate? Let the system do the boring, problematic, clicky pieces on the backend and let the reps just say, who do I need to call, how do I customize my message and how am I doing the goal? Let that be their preview, not what’s the process and when is this due date, this is the sixth touch, I skipped forward. Don’t make them worry about that stuff.

Marylou: You’re saying that this can all be programmed or facilitated within native SalesForce.

Matt: Yeah, absolutely. I am not a rocket science. I’m not a fan of any kind. I’ve figured out how to engineer these types of processes. Not to say they aren’t amazing tools, they’re amazing, what I call cadence tools: phone, email, intelligence, and recording tools. SalesLock is one I’m a huge fan of. I think what they do is great. I cannot figure out how to make SalesForce as good as Sales Lock or what Sales Lock does but I can get pretty close.

Marylou: Right.

Matt: 70% or 80% of the way there.

Marylou: For those of you who are doing the math here, you got to think about the cost of the stack. When you start adding all this apps on top SalesForce engine, the cost per rep, monthly cost for doing business goes up dramatically. If you can get a good jump on some of these strategies and prove the concept using native, why not?

Matt: I’m stealing from someone. If they’re listening, I’m sorry. I forgot who you are. Feel free to reach out and let me know. This is the smartest idea I’ve ever heard. When a rep starts at their company, they want the rep 100% focused on giving the best message and executing the process. They don’t give them the automation and acceleration tools day one. Once they’ve hit 60 days, quota for 2 months or finishing their ramp, then they assume the rep knows how to execute the process, knows the business, knows the market, knows, the buyer profiles, knows the message, and then they get automation.

                    I’m sure you see it too. You have a rep 10 days into their job emailing 1,000 people a day. That doesn’t make any sense to me because you can’t be good at it after 10 days.

Marylou: No. That’s why we see all of those emails that people yell and scream about that are spam. It’s all about me. It’s all about me. I want 5 minutes. I want 10 minutes. I want 15 minutes. That is the work of someone who doesn’t really understand the importance of buyer intent and what people need to hear in terms of making a decision like this and respecting their time. That, you learn, like you said, you go through the sales messaging, figure out what makes your prospect tick. You’re in their shoes, sitting across the table belly to belly from them, really understanding what it is that they’re challenged with and what will transform their business if you were able to help them.

Matt: Absolutely. My sports analogy is a very football, soccer centric. I was like well, except for tennis, I think every sport you learn on a smaller pitch with a smaller net. You’re not shooting hoops in an NBA court. You start at a smaller place with a lower net and then that’s how you learn. Maybe don’t give people the nuclear codes, the email world in their first quarter at your company.

Marylou: Right. I love that advice. This is great, Matt. We’re nearing the end of our conversation. I want to be respectful for the time of our folks because they’re all pretty busy and have priorities today. We can get your book online at Amazon. I’ll go ahead and put all the links for that so people can go and get that book. I really suggest anyone, whether you’re SalesForce or not, the biggest boost to production is to really look at the sales process, plan it out, assess it, be sure you can draw it out.

A lot of people can’t even draw out how the process works or where the leads are coming from so step one is to do that and then overlay this book with these great, great stories and actionable teachings on how to get your stuff up to date and then explore the notion of the stack and whether you really need to put them on these Ferrari type apps right away or for Volkswagen, it’s okay.

Matt, how do we get a hold of you to have further discussions about this great topic of yours?

Matt: If you are a salesperson like I am, I am always on the Success Community, the ButtonClick Admins group, or the Lightning Now group where I hang out the most. For not nerds, for normal business people, probably Twitter is the most fun and easiest and it’s @mattbertuzzi.

Marylou: Okay, great. Thank you so much for your time. I appreciate the work that you’re doing for our community. We’re trying to get everybody one step closer to really focusing on what matters which is the messages that we share with our customers and getting more of those guys lined up with our wonderful products and services. Thanks again, Matt.

Matt: Thank you, Marylou. Thank you so much.

 

Episode 66: Accomplishing More Sales in Less Time – Jill Konrath

Predictable Prospecting
Episode 66: Accomplishing More Sales in Less Time - Jill Konrath
00:00 / 00:00
1x
Download file Leave Review
Share
 How many times per day do you pick up your cellphone? We all do it — mindlessly scrolling through our social media news feeds when we get a free minute, glancing over at every chime and vibration our phone makes throughout the day. While this behavior isn’t unusual, it’s definitely not beneficial. New research has shown that even these small interruptions are adding up to be huge distractions, sucking up tons of valuable time in the workday and leaving us feeling stressed and overwhelmed. Today’s guest, Jill Konrath, is a recognized sales consultant and speaker whose new book, More Sales, Less Time is all about getting more done in the time that we already have!
 
Episode Highlights:

  • An overview of Jill Konrath’s past books
  • What can More Sales, Less Time teach us?
  • Fighting distraction: How you can get at least one hour of your day back
  • Escaping the email trap
  • Taking a break and getting more done
  • How to leverage trigger events

Resources:
Unroll.me
DiscoverOrg
InsideView
Lead411

Books by Jill Konrath:
Selling to Big Companies
SNAP Selling
Agile Selling
More Sales, Less Time

Visit Jill’s website for free ebooks and other resources

Episode Transcript

Marylou: Hi everyone. This is Marylou Tyler. I am thrilled today. Finally, I’ve been waiting to speak to Jill forever. Jill Konrath is with me today. She’s a bestselling author. I’ve read all her books. I’m sure all of you have her books on your shelf. We’re here today to talk about her new book, More Sales, Less Time.                     Jill is a recognized sales consultant and speaker. She speaks at Kickoff meetings and a ton of places so you probably even heard her speak. Welcome, welcome, Jill to the podcast today. Jill: Thanks for having me, Marylou. Nice intro. Thank you. Marylou: I know that we’re talking today about More Sales, Less Time. Can you give us an idea of the other three books that you wrote in case people are just getting acquainted with you? Jill: Sure. I’ll go in chronological order. The first one I wrote is the book called Selling To Big Companies. It addresses a problem like the fact that salespeople don’t get their emails and their phone calls returned and it’s what to do if you want to land a larger client and they won’t respond to your messages. That’s really what it’s about. It’s about small businesses primarily in terms of how to get into the bigger clients.                     My next book is called Snap Selling and it’s all about how do you deal with busy buyers. People who seem interested but they just get caught up in their other priorities at work and just can’t move and your sales get stalled.                     My third book deals with the issue of how do you get up to speed fast. That’s called Agile Selling. That’s for somebody who’s new in the sales position and wants to be proficient as soon as humanly possible. What to do if you take a new job.                     My newest book is More Sales, Less Time. It’s really about the time issue that we’re all facing today. The fact that we’re on email and we’re working so hard and we’re working too hard from morning till night and we’re dying inside. Marylou: Of course, the quotas keep going up, up, up, up because people think since we have more technology now, we should be able to do more because we have automation to help us. Jill: Yes, the quotas keep going up. I’ve never seen anybody lower quotas. Marylou: No, that’s for sure. What is the main method of the book that if we were to stop right now and end this call, what is the main thing that you’re really focused on teaching us in this book? Jill: The main focus is really that there are so many things that we can do to regain control of our time and our day which then allows us to sell better. It’s really looking at time and it’s looking at sales and what it takes to be at the top of your game all day long, all week long, all month long so you can do what you want to do in your work and perform at the level you want to perform at and still have a life. Marylou: In the book itself, do you focus primarily on sales skills or are you also leveraging process and technology? What’s that mix? Is it focused on mindset or is it focused on leveraging people, process, and technology together? Jill: Let me be real clear. First of all, let me just say that my other three books all deal really with sales skills and mindset. This one is a real switch for me. It actually came about from the standpoint that I was working from 7:00AM till I shut down at 11:30PM. I was exhausted and I said there’s got to be a better way. I actually spent a year researching what everybody was saying in terms of how to get control of your life again so you can do the work that you’re trying to do but do it at the best level possible. I literally felt at my own that I was performing below expectations, that I was not at the top of my own game and so I guess I just spent a lot of time researching.                     The first thing that I really discovered that kind of blew me away was the issue of distraction and how as sellers, we are living in a distracted state all the time. It is expanding our workload by 20% to 40%, meaning it takes longer for us to get everything done. Plus the fact that we are operating from a distracted space. It means that the quality of our thinking is not as high as it could be.                     At a time when we need to be as savvy as possible to be competitive in this world of sales, we are operating at a subpar level because most of us are clueless about how distracted we are and the impact it’s having on our day, our week, and our performance. Marylou: Wow. I remember reading in the book something about time wasters and how we can reclaim them. I don’t remember the number but were you saying in the book you can have at least one hour? Jill: Yes, everybody who is listening should get at least back every single day just by making some of the changes. Some of these changes are very, very simple. In fact, I just read a blog post on one of them. Email is consuming us as sales people. We have an addiction to email and by the way, it is an addiction because our body does release dopamine, which is a feel good hormone, every time we check emails and every time we see that we got a new email in our inbox. It’s literally an addiction.                     We got our cell phones in our hands and we’re constantly checking in and out email all day. That in itself is really causing a huge issue. I had no idea that total distractedness that was coming from that perspective. Marylou: I was hoping you’d say that because it’s interesting I was just flying home from visiting my daughter in Boston and as I was waiting at the gate to get on the airplane, everyone was just checking their phone. I could see the thumbs moving. Jill: I just wrote a post today. It’ll be coming out on my newsletter momentarily.  I used a program. I found a program, an app called Unroll.Me. It goes through all your emails as they come in and anything that has an unsubscribe in it, it puts it in a roll up type of thing. Every morning, I get an email from Unroll.Me that says you have seven new subscriptions in your inbox yesterday. You have a choice in terms of what to do with them. I click on this link and then I have a choice. Do I want to keep that email in my inbox because it’s a valuable email coming to me, do I want to unsubscribe from it, or do I want to put it into a roll up, meaning that during the course of the day I get one email with maybe ten email messages in it so I can look through and select which ones are important to me or I want to read. I took a snapshot today of how many I had unsubscribed from in the last 18 months. I have unsubscribed from 1,813 newsletters. Marylou: That’s crazy. Jill: Isn’t that insane? Marylou: Yeah. Jill: We buy things online and we get emails from places that we buy things from. We are involved in some sort of causes of things that we’re very interested in. Whether it’s a Corvette Club or the Sierra Club, people are engaged with things like that. We get on people’s mailing lists. We download an ebook or we sign up for a webinar and suddenly, we’re getting a message jeff@anycompany.com. We unsubscribe from that, the next thing we know, we’re getting message from jane@anycompany.com. It’s just like, “Oh my God, leave me alone, will you?”                     But think about it. 1,813 emails from that I’ve unsubscribed from are probably sending me a message once a week, at least. Marylou: Right, at least once a week. Jill: You know how much that time that takes? Huge. Marylou: I know that with my folks who are mostly process oriented, we put things in blocks. The email process, if you will, is a block. In the morning, they can check their email. They allocate a block of time for that and then again in the evening before they go home. This will be the business developers whose job is to really stay on the phone most of the day so we pick the day and we block it out in single tasking efforts in order to try to eliminate distraction or reduce it and get them focused on a serial number of activities with one typical tool like phone activity would be 30 minutes to 90 minutes straight through.                     Are you finding in your research that that also is a good process? Jill: Absolutely. It’s absolutely what people need to do and yet most people, if you take a look at them, the way they’re operating this kind of haphazard, they have a whole list of things they want to get done today and they come into the office or they get out of bed and see all their email messages. They’ll delete as many as they can and they get to their office and they sucked into email.                     Getting sucked into email right away is the worst way to start the day. It’s like not even focusing on what matters and so there is a process and a methodology, exactly as you describe where you sit down first and you say what are the most important things that I need to get done today that will have the highest impact? To ask those questions quietly to yourself, like not in a frenzy about what has to get done but just what are the most important things. And then to block the time like you’re saying. Literally, half hour block for this, half hour block for that. I’m going to check email. For some people, they have to be in email more than others. It depends on what they’re selling and the urgency that they really do need to respond. It’s very different based on different jobs. For some people, their job is to respond to messages that come in as fast as humanly possible.         My man was talking to one company yesterday where when somebody pushes a button, it says they want information, they’re down to a seven second response time. Marylou: Wow. Jill: Because it matters that much in their competitive business. But if you take somebody who for example is running a company and they’re also doing their sales and they’re doing the work, for those people, the urgency isn’t the same. They could respond in two hours and it probably wouldn’t ruin anything.                     What people have to do is they have to really get a sense of what is the real urgency of email. When I did it, I went for days. In the weeks that I did it,  I think there was only one email that needed a response within half an hour which told me that my constant checking of email was a real bad waste of my personal time and that I would be much better served checking it every two and a half hour as opposed to constantly being distracted every time a new message came into my inbox. Marylou: It’s interesting because I know people are listening to us thinking, “Where do I begin? I feel so overwhelmed.” That word overwhelmed is for becoming this gigantic word floating around my head lately. Where would I begin? Let’s pretend I’m an executive sales person. I’m selling into larger accounts and I’ve got a lot of balls to juggle. I really want to be able to do this so that I can move from this sheer will of trying to get something done to more habit. Where would I begin? What would I begin to look at? Is there a priority order thing that I would look at? Jill: The reality is you have to start with the distractions. You have to start with minimizing the distractions because that’s what’s giving us the overwhelm feeling, that’s what’s preventing us from our best thinking. It’s what is extending our work day, our hours.                     Personally, I found that technology was what was interrupting me but there were many things I could do to leverage technology to regain control of my life. Something as simple as turning off all notifications on all your apps can be crucial.                     I think I read that 75% or 80% of the people just don’t do anything with their apps. They’re just picking on their cell phone and they get interrupted with everything: every Facebook mention, every news alert from their newsfeed, and they just bing, bing, bing. What are the latest scores on the baseball game? Their life is just a series of interruption.                     By minimizing those kinds of distractions, you can really get some space in your day. Reduce the frenzy and the feeling of the overwhelm. Once you have cleared the space, cleared open space, then you can focus on what is the best way to use the time that you have and then we move into time blocking, the quiet time at the beginning of the day. I really believe that people have to start with the distractions and eliminate them or minimize them as much as they can because anytime we are in a constant state of being distracted, actually our body releases a lot more cortisol which is a stress hormone so we really are working against our own best interest because when we have stress, we don’t think as well. The number of options we’re able to come up with is more limited. We’re less able to solve problems. We’re less creative.         All that kind of stuff happens when we’re under stress so we need to deal with the issue of distraction first and then the clarity of our thinking comes back in. There is a process and a methodology. Most people don’t realize that. We talk about process. Most people don’t realize that taking breaks for example will help them get more done. Getting up and walking around, if you’re stuck with a real problem that you just cannot figure out like, “Oh God, what am I going to do?” You can stare at your computer all day long. No good answer will come to you but if you would literally say, “Oh man, I’m going to get up. I’m going to do something fun for a while and play ping pong. I’m going to go out for 10 minutes and just walk.” There’s nothing like releasing your brain from the minutia that your brain gets the minutia, the teeny tiny focus that our brain is in when we’re sitting at the computer and literally, by moving away, by having fun for a period of time, by taking a walk or doing some exercise, you literally are taking your brain to a higher level and the quality of your thinking just improves. Your brain is able to find its resources and knowledge that it has stored to help you figure out new ways to do things. We don’t realize that we stare at this stupid computer sitting at our desk trying to wrestle a good idea out of ourselves when the best thing we can do is take a break. People talk about taking a shower or driving in the car. That’s the same thing when the good ideas come to you. Marylou: For me, it’s when I’m exercising and I’ve gotten in the habit now-actually, in the basement I have a pen and a piece of paper sitting because the ideas inadvertently come. I know I’ll forget it so I have something to at least write down. People can speak into their phones and record their thoughts. Jill: That’s what I do when I go outside and I’m walking. I bring my cell phone with me and I record my ideas as they just pop into my mind. They’re not all great ideas but if I try to hold onto them and remember them, you can’t do that if you’re trying to hold one idea in your brain. It’s literally not possible for other ideas to bubble up when you’re so focused on I got to remember this. I got to remember this. I got to remember this. Marylou: I’m the same way with subject lines, blog posts, headlines. I wrestle with them and then I go at some place. I go down into the ravine. I rake some leaves and all of a sudden the perfect subject line just comes right into my head. I know exactly what you’re saying of letting go. As you said, it doesn’t have to take a lot of time. 5, 10 minutes, you can be there in that zone. Jill: Right. Most of us, when we take a break, we take a break that is, “Well, I think I’ll check my email.” Or “During these 10 minutes, I’ll go check Facebook,” or whatever it is that we think is our pleasure. I’ll do some online shopping and check out that new outfit that I want to wear online.                     The reality of it is that does nothing for you. It just increases our overall burden, our mental burden. We don’t come back refreshed. It’s only when we remove ourselves from the situation. By the way, if you’d put in the exercise and do walking or get on a treadmill or just anything, actually puts more oxygen into your brain, which is food for the brain. Literally, it feeds our mental energy. It feeds us and gives us what we need to be better at our job. Marylou: Such great advice. Can you share with us what you mean by the concept of quiet time? I heard you say that a couple of times and I’m curious as to what that means to you. Jill: What that means to me, it’s like coming to the office in the morning or at the end of the day, rather than rushing in and rushing right to work, it means getting the clarity of thinking that you need in order to move forward with the day doing the right things to the best of your capability. So often, we just rush, rush, and rush. Rushing isn’t good. Literally, rushing isn’t good. We don’t do our best work when we’re under that kind of pressure.                     If you have any creative projects, certainly you need quiet time. You just can’t plop down and say, “I’m going to be creative.” If you’ve got a tough customer situation or you have a competitor on an account that’s trying to steal your business, under pressure, feeling overwhelmed, you cannot do, you cannot find new ways and fresh perspectives. It just doesn’t happen. The brain is not capable of multitasking and coming up with all these things under the pressure as well. Marylou: Relaxing, sitting in a comfy chair, whatever your rhythms are. Is it a ritualistic thing, is it a rhythm thing that will trigger that creative process within us? I know for me personally, it’s walking my dog in the morning or just sitting down, petting my dog, for example. This just puts me in a whole different ground. Jill: Different frame of mind. To me, I go out and walk everyday. During the course of the day, if I get stomped, I will take a break. Anytime I’m stomped, a break is the best thing I can do for me. A break is not in front of my computer. It is removing myself from the physical space that I’m in and doing something different. Marylou: One of the things that I think is helpful, that I’ve said to my clients, once we start thinking about how to prioritize or what’s important, I like to talk about let’s look at prioritizing in a way that’s simple as well. When I’m talking with clients and people that I work with, it’s looking at what can I do that’ll give me the biggest reward for the least amount of effort? Work it backwards.                     If something is really, really tough yet it’s not going to yield the reward that I’m looking for, then maybe that’s further down the list. Conquer the thing that has the least effort with the greatest reward from it. Meaning it’s going to have the highest impact and then work my way down. Do you agree with that or is there a better way to do that? Jill: No. I totally agree with that. One of the things that I’ve been teaching for years and there’s really only one subject that has popped up in all four of my books. It is leveraging trigger events. Trigger events are things that happen in corporations or organizations that change people’s perspective on the status quo. Suddenly, they have a bad fourth quarter or a bad third quarter and everybody in the company now is focused on how can we conserve money or how can we drive more revenue. That’s what happens if a company has a bad third quarter. They’re really looking at operational efficiency, reducing cost.                     A person who can identify, for example, the kind of trigger events that occur, that create the most opportunities for them will be able to get business much faster, number one because that company is now open to change. If they move fast on these trigger events, there’s research by Forrester that shows that the first vendor to come in after the trigger event happened, the first viable vendor to come in with a picture of what they can do and how they can change things for the better has a 75% close rate.                     For me, a 75% close rate, 78% or 73%, I can’t remember exactly but to me, that number is staggering. If you’re looking at how can you, as a seller, have maximum impact, then leveraging trigger events is one of the best ways that you can do it. But that means you have to sit down and you have to say, “What is going on with our clients that suddenly gets them to want to take action?” You have to have conversations with people.                     If they would call in and say, “We’re looking at making a change.” What happened right before this? What triggered this need to make a change? Research by DiscoverOrg shows that when there’s a change in the director of IT or the head IT person, technology within a company within three months, they’re spending big money within three months. If you are following changes and leadership in your specific target of market segment, and you sell into the IT department, or you found a sales organization, but say you sell in the IT, you see there’s a new chief information officer, VP of IT in the company, that means that there’s 80% chance that they’re going to be changing some things to make their mark real soon.         It’s not just that one company that you identified, it’s the person who left that job is getting another job. When that person who left the job goes some place, that means that that company would probably make some changes. If you take a look on it where the new VP, where he came from or she came from, they’re also going to be looking at new things in the first three months.         That to me is a maximum impact move. If you want to sell more in less time from a strategic perspective to really identify and track trigger events, by the way, you can track them through technology, you can have that first mover uplift in your sales. Marylou: Right. That’s a great piece of advice. The one that you said, you can leverage technology so that can run in background more for you and interrupt you when it’s important. Jill: If you find out where just the leadership changes or if you’re tracking certain companies, get on LinkedIn and you see that they have new people. There are so many different things. DiscoverOrg gives you information. InsideView gives you information. Lead411 gives you information. There are a lot of really good companies that you can target and you can put in multiple parameters that I want to work with medical clinics, with revenue of x number of dollars. You can be really specific about what you’re looking for and be fed the right types of opportunity. This doesn’t mean these people are looking but it means that they are amenable, likely amenable to the change because of certain factors that are occurring. To me, that’s simply every seller should be aware of and every company who is setting up systems and processes should be aware of and be feeding their sales people information and doing this from a leader standpoint too. Marylou: Definitely. We’re getting close to the end of our time together. I was hoping we could finish by letting everyone know the best way that they can get a hold of you or how to follow you and where you would like us to reach out. Jill: I would really suggest that people check out my website, jillkonrath.com. I have so many really good free resources on my website that people can leverage if they just go to my resources page. There are all these ebooks that I’m giving away for free. I think they’d find them really helpful. To me, that’s the biggest thing that I can give people from today. Marylou: Very good. I very much appreciate your time with us today. I look forward to the next pieces of information and course work or whatever else you’re going to be providing us because I know that as we walk through the sales process, especially where I hang my hat which is at top of funnel, this issue of distraction is not going away. It’s something that I really think if people could get their arms around and embrace, even if you’re working like we do where we’re working with a lot of records as opposed to targeted accounts in a lot of cases, still, working at a number of different records, but we do need to take that time to plan out each of the meaningful accounts that we’re going after and also to be just able to focus on like you said, those trigger events. That’s such great advice.                     Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it, Jill. Jill: It’s fun talking with you. Thanks.  

Episode 65: Frontline Sales Strategies – Alea Homison

Predictable Prospecting
Episode 65: Frontline Sales Strategies - Alea Homison
00:00 / 00:00
1x
Download file Leave Review
Share
Our guest today is Alea Homison, Vice President of Sales Strategy at GLG Group. What makes Alea different from some of our other guests is that she is actively working on the frontlines of sales every single day, training members of her team on the newest practices in sales enablement. She’s here today to discuss her work with GLG, her unique 3-stage hiring process for new SDRs, and her advice for curating the best sales environment possible.
 
Episode Highlights:

  • Alea Homison’s role and her unique process for training and new employees
  • GLG as a case-study for selling a service
  • Sales enablement and the SDR team
  • Alea’s 3 stage hiring process
  • Creating a positive team culture
  • Why daily role-playing with your team is the best thing you can do
  • Hyper-personalizing your messaging
  • Alea Homison’s top advice for SDR’s beginning to work with sales enablement

Resources: Connect with Alea Homison on Linkedin or email her at ahomison@glgroup.com

Episode Transcript

Marylou: Hi everyone. It’s Marylou Tyler. I have a very, very, very special guest. The reason why I say that I because she has the lucky draw of working with my co writer on Predictable Prospecting, Jeremey Donovan. Alea Homison is here today/ she the vice president of sales strategy at GLG Group. Her talk with me today is going to really lighten all of you up because she’s actually on the frontline. She’s executing. She’s activating. She’s responsible and I’ll let her tell you all the wonderful things that she does but she is really walking the walk.                     I talk a lot about how to do things and why we do things but she’s actually implementing and making things even better so she’s probably smarter than I am on what works, what doesn’t in the fields. Without further ado, Alea Homison, welcome to the podcast. Alea: Thank you so much for having me, Marylou. I appreciate it. Marylou: Tell us again, tell us your role within GLG Group. What life is like there and what area that you’re working on right now? Alea: My role at GLG is a bit unique. It expands both our new business efforts globally across our business units. Thinking about how do we partner with given AEs and sales managers with respect to process, execution, and accountability. Also, doing a lot of work around the sub set of sales enablement with respect to training, coaching, collateral. I spend a lot of time doing training as we on board new talent, reinforcement training with anybody on the team.                     Also, a lot of levelling up training, if you will. People that are already great at certain things and how do we make them exceptional and a bit more well rounded. It spends a bit of a gamut. One other unique thing I will mention about my role in the new business side is, we call them BDAs but for most organizations, they are called SDRs. They actually roll up into our team as well which affords an exciting opportunity to be on the frontline certainly on the prospecting side.  It’s a great tandem and complement to the broader work we’re doing across organization across the new business sales process as well. Marylou: You actually handle, if we were to look at the pipeline, the active pipeline, as an assembly line, you actually engage at the very beginning when we’re in pre sales conversation mode which is what I call it. That makes sense to me because you’re not quite in that first conversation but you’re trying to warm up the chill to get to the first conversation.                     And then, your follow up conversation is under you as well once it gets to opportunity and beyond to close one. You’re touching those folks as well, correct? Alea: Correct. Marylou: Wow. Okay, cool. Where do we begin? Let’s start, since most of my guys are top of funnel, I’m curious, you mentioned the word play book. How do you know what people need training on in the playbook or when you’re starting people out, do you take them through a standard process of here’s the things you need to learn before we’ll put you on the phone or get you out there starting conversations or do you wait and see based on the data saying where people are getting stuck in order to invoke certain types of training. How does that work? Alea: I would say we come out from a multiple different angles and obviously, we value certain angles more than others. Certainly, a starting point that we had with all the head of sales talking about from a process standpoint, where do we think we’re good? Where do we think we need improvement? In some instances, have we quantified and defined into that process in a way that’s trainable and indigestible for any sales individual that’s on our team. Really mapping out what are we doing in every conversation we’re having whether that’s on the new business side or whether on the account management side.                     Who’s accountable on the GLG side for owning those conversation and looping in other partners? And then who’s actually the target on the client side, client persona works but also really talking someone that’s a user of the GLG service, or a buyer, or a sponsor. But then I think also we’ve spent a lot of time on and some bit of a labor of love is how do you actually have those kind conversations? I’m sure as you know, that’s one thing to put on paper, what are you going to do and who are you going to have the conversation with, it’s actually how you have the conversation so for us, that translates to some habits around pre imposed called planning and be strategic about what we’re having in those conversations and defining what good luck is like in those planning meetings.                     But also we spend a lot of time on the actual client communication, thinking about meeting structure, thinking about sample language. But also informs where we have worked to do is we do weekly role plays across organization. The SDR team do daily role plays but the AEs across organization do weekly role plays. That’s a great way in an organic fashion to both coach and teach but also set out key pain points where it’s an environment where very tenured sales individual has an opportunity to showcase all of the great skillsets and talents that they have.                     But then, in exchange for that showcase, if you will, it makes them a lot more comfortable and exposes areas of improvement. I think a much more organic way than asking someone what do they need improvement by. And then of course the layer on top of that of right along with the sales managers that can inform key areas of need as well. Marylou: Okay. For those listening right now, GLG, give us a little background because you sell service, correct or is there a product in there or is mostly service oriented? Alea: It’s mainly service oriented. Marylou: For those of you listening who thinks process really works for widgets only, this is a great example and a great case study or use case on selling a high end service but separating the roles out and really honing in on not only interest stage but inter stage enablement throughout the process. It can be done. There’s a lot of work to do this as Alea was saying, trying to figure out those conversations and which ones you should have.                     In the book, Jeremey and I talked about the different levels of awareness as well overlaying the types of language, the types of conversations and where the buyer is in his purchase intent. All of that falls underneath your organization. Is that correct? Alea: Correct. Marylou: Let’s take the SDR teams first because that’s my wheelhouse. Where are you seeing that you’re having the most impact by leveraging this types of play books or this thing called sales enablement? Where is that showing up as being just paramount for an SDR world? Alea: I think for the SDR team specifically, our team is perhaps a bit unique. It’s full of exceptionally talented career switchers. I have the luxury of individuals that are super excited and invested in making a pivot of the sales and are hungry to learn. Don’t have any bad habits but also don’t have any kind of preconceived notions so we spend a lot of time not surprisingly on training. It interrelates with all of the play books and role plays and things like that that were doing with the AEs across the organization as well.                     If I could say three things that we do with that team that I think is exceptionally impactful, one is, on the hiring front, we’ve actually moved away from some of the traditional hiring methods, if you will and we actually what I think are fairly unique three staged process. One is phone screen where we ask candidates essentially same two or three questions, have them role play without giving them the heads up that they’re going to role play and looking for not obviously the perfect client conversational role play but looking for a bit of intuition, looking for coachability, especially we have a hyper feedback culture on our team and across the organization and sales. After that role play, we give build upon and think about feedback and so how a candidate is receptive to that feedback, engaged in that feedback is a key indicator to me of success of on our team and in our organization. To compliment to that, we have them complete essentially an assessment that scales across 18, what we feel like are key competencies for a hunting oriented sales individual. We not only have the subjective elements. We’ve also got the objective elements as well. It’s a combination of a phone screen and that assessment. Second phase is a bit of a case study which really is meant to be indicative of the research and the planning that they would do before they outreach to a given individual. Because in our team we’re all about quality over quantity and so we don’t necessarily dictate how many emails you’re sending, how many calls you’re making but we do expect you to be thoughtful, do great research upfront so you can make a connection with that prospect that you’re outreaching to. Third step is the standard in person but we’ll do some extra role play and things like that but each person in that interview has a defined skillset and competency that they’re flashing out. I think robust, adding some quantitative, the assessment and really extra structure to the hiring process has allowed us to identify and attract great talent. Second thing as part of the on boarding, we do a really intensive on boarding that’s less of shadow this experience to really effective salesperson. It’s much more building from the ground up with respect to not only sales skills and holding effective meetings, what are components of that meeting, how do they think about objection handling, reverse questioning, things like that and techniques but also really robust industry training for the industry that they’re going to be covering when they start outreach. We do that in a robust fashion so that we’re able to actually have incoming SDRs on the phone with prospects at the beginning of week four. We’ve got to QA obviously that they’re ready to do that. I think it’s an ongoing, once they’re actually speaking with prospects is we’ve got a program where we’ve clearly defined four modules for them throughout the year that they’re expected to be in SDR program. Clear responsibilities and roles that they have at any point in the SDR role and it is like a little micro promotion, if you will, with respect to you’ve been able to demonstrate. This is a key confidence and continued success. We’re going to add this element of responsibility on top of it. From time blocking and accountability, we’ve created a culture where you have four outreach blocks a day and you’re doing thoughtful, really constructive outreach during those times. We’ve also got great breaks interwoven in the days. It allows the team to flow in a really productive way and removes the distractions and the feeling, because sometimes it can feel like a grind when you’re sending emails and making the calls because you’ve got a whole team ebbing and flowing their day accordingly and they know they’re holding each other accountable during those times, it just creates a culture where people want to win and see each other win and invest in each other’s success. It’s a bit of the on boarding and then I would say the accountability and the time blocking and the daily role play that we’re doing with the team. I think you have the habit inspiration and so I think recurring theme to a lot of what we’re structuring. Creating that so it’s kind of second nature. A lot of, like they say, the creative thinking is freed up for that actual relationship you’re trying to build with the prospect. You don’t have to worry about how you’re managing the day. It’s already set up for you. Marylou: It’s set up for you and it’s generally like you said, the time blocking I call block time, it’s the same thing. In my world, that’s a single tasking as much as possible for a prolonged period of time that allows you for phone work. You get better and better as you go. But of course breaks are needed. Get up, stretch, walk around. You’re not just tied to your chair the whole time. It does allow you to compartmentalize the different tasks so that you are proficient at each.                     The day does go by quicker when you feel more focused. It doesn’t allow a lot of room for you to be checking your email or looking at any type of social things. You’re basically doing your work flow. Like I say, you plan your work and you work your plan which is what really works well for business development. Alea: I agree. Marylou: The other thing I heard you say was about daily role playing. When is that incorporated in your world? Is it early AM? is it as needed during a certain block time? How do you go about doing that? Alea: For the SDR team, standing time is at 3:30 each day. We’ve started as people progressed to the program and start to co lead and own that second conversation outside that initial outreach. For us, there’s role plays to pitch practices if you will. Those are standing times at 10:30 on Wednesday and Friday that are further along. If they have a pitch practice, they don’t also have a role play. But for the bulk of the team, the role play are 3:30.                     For the AEs in the business units, they have standing time on Mondays.  For times and reasons, they have essentially half the team at 10:30AM and then another half of the team in afternoon, either 1:00PM or 2:00PM. It’s a standing time each day or each week. It again, gets to be habit and so you just intuitively know, “I’m never available at that time on that given day because I know I have a role play. Marylou: Regarding the role play itself, how do you determine the schedule? For example, when I was doing this with my teams, I would have role plays for the different types of telephone calls that we’re going to do whether it was a find the right person call. This is pre having all this wonderful information now at your fingertips. Let’s pretend that we’re still mapping into an organization and we can’t find the right person because we have so many titles to deal with that we don’t know.                     We work on that kind of call. We work on a fit call. We call it an AWAF. Are we a fit call? We work on qualification calls. We also heavily, heavily on objection handling and that intro call. Are you set up that way as well? I’m trying to the fact that are these schedules dynamic or are they static? If they’re dynamic, what are they based on? Is it some type of discovery through the data that the call wrap up that you were talking about before that drives the role play or is it a set schedule? Alea: It’s a little bit of a blend. If we see either through conversion rates or just to be honest, sales individuals raising their hands and wanting some additional coaching will go the route of today we’re going to spend some time really focused on this type of the client conversation whether that’s pain identification for the qualification, that renewal conversation that may be a bit tougher on the account management side.                     If we don’t have that situation, typically what we’ll do is in the interest of making it as relevant and tangible as possible for the sales individual, we really like to practice real upcoming client conversation that individuals are going to have. What most often happens especially outside of initial on boarding and ramp up of the roleplay, people get acclimated, less of a we’re going to focus on qualification today and it’s more I’d like to volunteer. I have a really tough client conversation next week. Here’s the scenario therefore, they role play around that. We structured some really robust kind of feedback as well around each different client conversation throughout our sales processes both on the new business side as well as account management and are also helping to train people on what it means to give and provide excellent feedback to just make them as most impactful as possible. Typically, it lands more around a real client scenario that someone is preparing for and just above the benefit of peers and a manager giving them perspective on what they’re doing really great and what they could do differently. Marylou: That’s great. I love role playing. I think it’s one of those things that I’m so happy to hear from you that your AEs are doing that as well because I was just at a conference in Florida where I was listening. They were working on their new messaging and they brought an AE up to role play the new message. It was incredible to watch him because they just got this new messaging like the night before.                     He had to put together a conversation. He was talking to the CEO. They were up on stage. It was like, “Wow.” It’s because they felt so comfortable and practiced so much that type of conversation that he did really well. I’m sure he’s the kind of guy who practices what he’s going to say whether it’s a formal process through that company or not. I’m sure that the AEs probably really benefit from that.                     Do you see reduction in the lag in the pipeline through all these efforts? Is it intuitively speeding things up? Alea: We did a huge push around play books and the role plays and things like that on the AE front at the beginning of this year, in January. For our sales cycle, we’re just starting to see some of the fruits of our labor but definitely from people having confidence, I would say conversion rates are just starting to be able to see but what we’re seeing is like an early indicator to that is better and more confidence in the pipeline. People having the confidence to disqualify versus create these opportunities that aren’t really good opportunities so from a quality of the pipeline standpoint we’ve been seeing a lot of that for months.                     On the earliest with the SDR team where we’ve been having  lot of the structure in place since early last year, for that we’ve seen our conversion and our win rate from those initial outreaches and those emails to conversion to those pitch meetings so that second conversation for us. We’ve seen that continued to move from, out of the gate, we started with around 5%, I would say which is not bad but it’s not a bad starting point.                     Now, for the team of SDRs which are doing this day in and day out, their pitch rate is actually 12%. We’ve seen that accelerate tremendously. They’re really a talented team and they’ve been able to maintain that 12% as people have graduated out of that program into AE roles. We’ve incorporated new talent. We’ve seen a great consistency in that ramp of effectiveness to secure those meetings. Marylou: That’s wonderful. Wow. That’s great work you guys over there. That is the target that does ebb and flow sometimes especially, your path, it sounds like you’ve got, I heard, a junior SDR role, for lack of a better term, that gets those first conversations in place and there’s someone a sales business development but further is the conversation through qualification and then beyond that, the account executive.                     I think that maintaining that consistency and conversion rates with the movement upward so to speak or laterally depending on where they’re going within the company giving them growth, that’s fabulous. Let’s switch gears a little bit in our remaining time because I heard you say content. Do you also work on the content assets and making sure that the personalization pieces, if there are personalization, are aligned from the language because in the book, Jeremey was really instrumental in this, we talked about three levels of personalization.                     There’s the data driven which is the highest reliance on technology. One step from that would be where the data elements in our database help with the conversation. It’s still a mass personalized so we’re not taking that email or taking that body and modifying in any way. Hyper personalization would be where the SDRs are actually using a template and then creating more of a personalized message from that. Where are you with that now? Alea: I would say we definitely practice hyper personalization. The messaging to any SDR or AE across the firm is really your goal again because we’ve structured a lot of things that can be habitual for you. It really does free up. Part of that to me, is starting point templates that have tested well and you see in the data, put someone in a position of success. They’re freed up then to really try to get to know prospect A through their social accounts, through LinkedIn, through just general Google, etc. in any way they can and try to understand that individual and see how they can customize on top of that messaging to really resonate with that person in a way that it’s going to be different if they were hunting you or if they were hunting me. We really try to structure the role in a way that all of that creative personalization is really the mandate of the SDRs and the sales team. Certainly, we wouldn’t expect to see the same email coming from any individual in the team because of the expectation of what we’ve sent. I think that’s the key, probably not surprising to you, but I think that’s been a key to that kind of 12% win rate because instead of outreaching to 400 to 500 names in a given month, for us, we have certain level expectation of outreach to be successful but again, I’m not really saying to give an SDR, you’re making this many calls in a day and this many emails being sent in a given day. It’s during your time blocks, do you really [00:29:15]? That will result in that win rate, in a certain number of wins in the weeks for us. Definitely, hyper personalization is what we think is the name of the game certainly to be successful on our business. Marylou: Do you start them off, when you hyper personalize, with a template that has a majority of the sales messaging inside of it or are they starting with a blank screen? Alea: We have a template that has the majority of the sales messaging. They don’t have to worry how to position GLG, if you will. They certainly to understand how we’re positioned so we can have the client conversations but in the email, we’re much more how you do make that 101 connection with that prospect on top of the messaging that we’re putting forward for you. Marylou: Okay, very good. Are there other assets that you attach with hyper personalized as an example of should ask questions that they can link to? Is there any type of click through in the hyper personalization? Alea: There is and it depends. I would say key focus for us is probably thinking more broadly about the assets that we have available to us and different assets that we can create. Currently we’ll use, in great partnership with our marketing team, we’ve got some client testimonials that depending on the role in the industry that a given prospect may sit in and could resonate well.                     We also have just some great, what we call learning videos, if you will, that are examples of different council members in our network which are a key part of our service. Giving this a sense of the quality of those individuals and types of insights that they may have, a kind of quick snippet that will depend and link in our emails as well, again if it’s applicable. Marylou: Right. This has been a fabulous conversation. We’re running out of time here but I wanted to ask you, I’m sure people listening to this call and thinking, “Okay, role play is really important.” There is also a level of systemization here that you guys have been able to put into place, that have served you well. If you’re giving advice to a company and they’re just starting to think about enablement, what would be the top thing you’d want them to go home and just sort of noodle around in their brain and start thinking about and implementing? Alea: I would say probably over arching. I think a key thing is not to be afraid of structure. We’re building a lot of this whether it’s play books, the weekly or daily role play, depending on the team and things like that, some of the initial reaction was this seems really structured. This seems mechanical. Sales is an art which I 100% agree that there’s certainly an art and an inspiration to sales. I would encourage people to think about how structure can free up certainly your high performers to do what they do best and focus on that client conversation. What we’ve heard resoundingly over the past two years of we implementing a lot of this is, I see it on my day to day when I’m doing outreach to clients as well, is that structure allows you to do the work you actually want to do. No one signs up in sales and says, “I would love to log in from SalesForce. I would love to do all of this other system work.” They join sales and they love sales because it’s all about personal connection and communication. What structure can allow you to do is it’ll build that out for people and then allow them to not have to worry about things that they don’t want to focus on and really blossom and do what they joined this profession to do. I think you’ll see your high performers blossom and react really, really well to what initially may feel like, “I’m not so sure you want to add so much structure around this.” Marylou: I agree 100% obviously but I also was at a meeting the other day where someone looked at me and said, “You know, Marylou, if it looks like chaos to you, it’s really system that you can’t see.” What you’ve done with your group there is you’ve enabled that system so they can see it. Once they can see it, that frees them to focus what matters which is the sales skill, the sales conversations because everything else is put into a nice, neat system that just really frees up your time. I hope people will think of it that way. Alea: One quick thing to add to is I think critical when you build that system, is talk openly about that system. Don’t make it a black box for the sales team. Communicate to them why it’s built specifically for them and how it will help them be better at their jobs and how you’re using it as well and it’s going to continue to iterate. I think building that system without that active communication and dialogue can be difficult and probably less successful so don’t be afraid of it and don’t be afraid to talk about it. I think that probably would be the takeaway. Marylou: That’s great advice. How do people get a hold of you if they want to either further this conversation or find out more how you’re running things over there? Alea: Two best ways to get a hold of me, on LinkedIn, I’m Alea Homison. Feel free to either send me an email on LinkedIn or you can email me here at glg@ahomison@glgroup.com Marylou: I’ll be sure to put your contact information in the shownotes so that if anyone wants to speak with Alea, I really suggest if you’re a leader listening to this conversation or someone in the organization who thinks that it’s too chaotic and that you’re stressed, this is one of the things to alleviate that stress right away. It takes time to build as Alea said but it’s something that once it’s built, it’s iterating, it’s getting better, it will free up your time so that you can do what you’ve been hired for which is to generate new business, close deals, service great accounts, whatever it is that you were hired to do. A system in place will help you get there faster, better, and with less stress. Thank you so much, Alea. I really loved speaking with you today. Alea: Thank you.    

Episode 64: Upfront Client Contracts and the Ability to Say No – Jim Brown

Predictable Prospecting
Episode 64: Upfront Client Contracts and the Ability to Say No - Jim Brown
00:00 / 00:00
1x
Download file Leave Review
Share
Have you ever said “no” to a client and walked away from a deal? Maybe you knew that your services weren’t a good fit for their pain, or that they weren’t ready to hear the solutions you presented. In this episode we’re joined by founder and host of SalesTuners, Jim Brown. As a sales coach who specializes in every stage of the sales pipeline, Jim is an expert in client relations. He’s here to discuss his unique method of using upfront contracts: beginning a relationship by telling the client that either party has the right to walk away from the conversation!
 
Episode Highlights:

  • The meaning behind the SalesTuner brand
  • Learning through failure
  • Qualification versus disqualification
  • Creating an “upfront contract” with your prospects
  • How to prepare for a team call
  • Getting a client to close: Jim’s number one question to ask a client
  • Self-diagnosing problem areas
  • Funnel math

Resources: Want more from Jim Brown? Connect with him Linkedin, follow him on Twitter, and check out the SalesTuner podcast! Download the SalesTuner workbook for free by visiting http://www.salestuners.com/roadmap

Episode Transcript

Marylou: Hey everybody, it’s Marylou Tyler! I have today Jim Brown who is the founder, CEO, el presidente of SalesTuners. He’s also a podcast host and he actually interviewed me for his podcast not too long ago. Welcome, Jim, to the podcast!Jim: Marylou, I am thrilled to be here. Thanks for having me. Marylou: You specialize in the entire pipeline. You start with that initial conversation and take people all the way to close. Tell me though what does the name SalesTuners mean? It sounds very interesting. Jim: SalesTuners is just there. It’s just a thing about tuning an old radio down. I’m just tweaking little bits and pieces all throughout the process to get the best outcomes. I’ve helped take two companies from just over $1 million dollars in revenue to more than $10 million or on acquisition. I actually turned around and raised $1 million on my own and ran that company to the ground. I’ve seen both the success and the failure, so that tuning aspect for me is very critical in the process. Marylou: It’s funny that you mentioned that about taking things into the ground. Actually, the impetus or the foundation for Predictable Revenue was because Aaron Ross, who was my co-author on the book, had a company Lead Exchange, I think it was called, and he borrowed $5 million and that ended up a disaster. He really focused on how did that happen, number one, and number two, why did it happen. That was the genesis of Predictable Revenue because there were a lot of lessons learned along the way. A lot of times, failures are our best resources in terms of learning going forward of what to do differently or what not to do or to avoid. I’m sure that served you very well in helping your clients go from where they are now to a revenue that is 10x, it sounds like with some of your clients, which is great. Jim: I’ve had a lot of success with my career but I can’t think of any time where I learned more than through that failure. I tell you Marylou, when I came out of the funk, if you will, because I definitely had a little bit of depression and a funk after that. I started talking to a lot of founders, CEOs, and presidents of companies and all of them told me, “We’re about to go hire a VP of sales or we’re about to do this and that.” But the reality is they are the VP of sales. These founders are the VP of sales until they get some kind of traction going on in their business where they can either truly hire a VP of sales or raise enough money to then hire VP of sales. That’s one of the reasons why I got into the business that I’m in today. Marylou: We’re going to talk today with you about not the entire pipeline but a lot of interest for my folks is because, I didn’t realize this but, over half of the listeners in this podcast do all roles. They have the prospecting piece, they sell and close and they also service accounts. It would be fun today to really focus on, although you can handle the entire pipeline, let’s talk about what happens from the qualification on down to close one. I’m going to ask you, the first question is, especially in this day and age, what are your views on the term qualification versus disqualification? Jim: It’s a great question to start with, but the reality is I think that you qualify or disqualify throughout the process. Even when we’re out prospecting, we have known things that we say, “Okay, this makes a qualified prospect, this would disqualify them.” The whole time, again, once they become a qualified opportunity, I want to find a way for them to be a no because I think it’s faster to get to my no than it is to get to the yes. If I come up with all the reasons why I should be disqualifying them, they’ve got to convince me that they should be a yes. Marylou: That’s a great attitude. I was just talking to another colleague of ours and we were talking about this hope, I call it hope prospecting where we’re taking people into the funnel who are the minnows instead of the whales because we had a good rapport, we had a good conversation. We know in our heart that they’re really not in that upper right quadrant of high revenue potential, high likelihood of closing, but we keep holding onto them because it makes us feel good. I love your idea of saying, “Look, at every stage, at every microstage, at every forward movement metric, we really need to have that litmus test to test is this person, is this company worth my time to take them to close? Are they going to be a high profitable revenue generating client that’s going to stay with us for a good lifetime value or are they going to be a pain in the neck? We’re talking about opportunity to close, clearly not my area of expertise, but what types of things or milestones, or markers, or red flags, how do we go about figuring out whether they’re still worthy of our time from opportunity to close? Jim: One of the things that I do, I do it both with my clients and I do it when I’m actually selling to my prospects that become clients, I set up an upfront contract. In my upfront contract, I have what I call equal business stature. If you take anything away from today’s conversation, if you want one way to separate yourself from every other sales rep on the planet, it’s simply to create equal business stature with your prospect. What do I mean by that? You have every right in the world to tell them no, that they are not a good fit for your company. How many times Marylou have you actually gone and told a prospect, “Hey, I may have to tell you no.” Marylou: I can think of one instance where I was sitting in a conference room in Los Angeles, California, we had a meeting and somewhere during that meeting I realized it was not a good use of my time. It just wasn’t a good fit. I politely closed my notebook, I stood up and I said, “This meeting is over, we’re just not a good fit for each other.” I walked physically out of the room. Jim: Just out of curiosity, did they actually lean in towards you and said, “No, no, no. Wait, come back.” Marylou: I think they were shocked that someone would actually do that. Jim: Imagine though starting every meeting by telling your prospect that you reserve that right. A lot of power can be had with that. Here’s what mine sounds like, it says, “Marylou hey, thanks so much for your time today. At the end of our conversation, one of three things might happen. The first thing that might happen is I might have to tell you no, that you’re not a fit for the services that we have. Are you okay hearing me tell you no?” That literally is the first thing that I say to them. After they say yes, because it’s a conversation, I want them to say, “Well sure, I guess I’m fine hearing you tell me no.” The reality is most of them say, “Why on Earth, Jim, would you tell me no?” As a sales rep, you better have the reasons why you would tell them no. I have five clearly defined ones that are reasons that I tell my prospects. But the second thing is I said, “No. Once we get that out of the way, you may get to the end of this Marylou and you may decide you don’t want my help.” My word choice there is very intentional. I do not allow my prospects to tell me that I’m not a fit because that’s not true. I know whether or not I can solve their problem but they may not want my help and that’s very intentional. The last thing that may happen is we may both say yes and depending upon the stage I am, I say, “Okay, if we both say yes today, here’s what that means and it’s very specific. It could mean we’re now going to agree to a 90-minute meeting. It could mean we’re now going to bring in your boss and we’re going to have a demo. It could mean I’m going to send you a contract and you’re going to sign it. We’ll have a kickoff call on Tuesday.” But by getting out there and saying, “Hey, here’s what yes and yes means today, I can now clearly define our entire meeting and we have set equal business stature the entire way.” Marylou: It’s funny, I’m going back in time. This sounds very Sandler-esque to me and maybe it’s because you used the word upfront contract. I haven’t studied Sandler in a very long time. This equal business stature, is that a term that you have invented or if I were to do a Google Search, would I see it? How do you go about establishing equal business stature? Jim: It’s a great question, very observant of you. I actually put myself through Sandler training 10 years ago. My coach at that point, who was my coach for 10 years, is now my business partner and we actually do teach a lot of the Sandler fundamentals in our business. It’s very much a Sandler thing. How you create that equal business stature is just by letting your prospect know, hey again, you are just as committed to the relationship as they are but that means you have just as many rights in that conversation as they do. Marylou: I hate to back you up in the pipeline but I’ve got to do it. Let’s pretend we’re on our first call and the hand was raised, our email engines or whatever we used to get that first meeting happened. We scheduled a call, and now we’re on our call. Is this something you introduce in every call or do you pick those milestones in the pipeline, those positional locations where you would put this contract into place? Jim: For me, I use it in every single call I do. It may sound different depending upon the stage that I’m in but I’m going to have some sort of that in every single one of them. We’re going to be general today but let’s assume you have an SDR working for you and they set an appointment and you’re an AE. I get the question a lot, “Jim, how do we do that turnover? How do I actually come in and run that call?” I said, “You should have an agenda going into that call but before you reveal your agenda, why don’t you ask them what they want to get out of today’s call?” It simply sounds like, “Hey Marylou, I’ve got a full agenda that I want to get through today, typically how I handle these meetings from our SDRs but before we get started, what were you hoping to get out of today’s conversation?” Depending upon what I hear from the prospect, my entire meeting may change at that point. I realize I didn’t tell them my agenda, I just told them I had one. But based on what they tell me, I may change it completely. Marylou: That’s a great thing to do because I know it’s funny, I was teaching a class recently where I went in, I’m an expert in this so I know exactly what they need to learn, but I actually did a survey prior to the class asking them what their expectations were, what they hope to get out from the class. The responses caused me to do almost a 180 in what I taught. I can totally relate to what you’re saying. We know what the buyer should be doing but that doesn’t mean that it correlates to what they’re expecting to hear. I love the idea of what you said about having prepared a meeting agenda, or a reason for the call, or doing your call planning, but always opening up the conversation with, “What did you have in mind for today just to make sure we’re on the same page?” Jim: Yeah. But again, just because they tell me something doesn’t mean I’m actually going to cover it. I just want to know what it is that they were hoping to get out of the call. Here’s the thing, depending on the size of contract that you are selling and the type of person you’re selling to, you may end up having, three, four, five, six different discovery calls and while you definitely need to understand and take notes throughout the entire process, every time you change people, it’s a brand new discovery call. You need to ask that person, “Hey, before we begin today, I appreciate being introduced to you by Marylou but what were you hoping to get out of today’s conversation?” Again, this is where you’re bringing in everybody’s individual motivations and business intentions because they’re different. Marylou: Exactly. We’re a little bit above opportunity right now with what I’m curious about but the other thing is, in Predictable Revenue, we talked about having a 15-minute are-we-a-fit call. That will just set the agenda for the actual discovery call, if you will. Then, there was this call that would go with one stakeholder. If you are in more of account-based type selling or larger strategic accounts, you might speak with one person and then suggest the call to action would be to get with the team. When you are preparing for the team call, are you suggesting that part of the process is to make these individual calls ahead of the team calls so that you can determine what their wants, needs, desires, challenges are or are you asking when you get on that call itself when you’re on the call with the team, are you going around the room and asking them? What’s the preferred process? Jim: I don’t know about preferred. That one is really going to be determined upon what you’re selling. For instance, I’ve sold seven-figure deals and that’s going to be a completely different thing than when I’m selling five-figure deals. One of the things that I love to do Marylou, is have everyone in the room, each individual person tell me their top three things and the reason why is because I get to hear from each of them but they get to hear from each other. Now all of a sudden, the person who’s from finance versus the person that’s from marketing, and then you get a person from sales, now they start to understand, “Okay, here’s where my roadblock is going to be in getting this deal across the finish line internally.” You start to build those champions and then when you have your follow up conversations, you know which pieces of the fire you want to stoke in order to get that person motivated and moving forward. Marylou: Let’s go back to the bottom of the funnel, getting to close. Obviously, that’s wild, wild, west in my world because there’s so many steps that you ebb and flow through. When you’re actually working with a client in planning about getting to close, how do you go about setting up where these equal business stature type of conversations come into play? Is it based on stage? Is it based on call within the stage? How do you normally help a client plan that out? Jim: Let me give you mine so we can be very specific. Like I said, I’m going to set that equal business stature up at every single stage of the cycle. When I come in and I’m doing my closing presentation, meaning I know the group that I’m in front of, I’m at the end, I’m going to say, “Hey again, I have the right at the end of this meeting based on what I discover that I may have to tell you no or you can hear me tell you no.” When they say, “Jim, why on earth would you tell us no?” I literally say, “Guys look, the only client that I bring on, I’m looking for five pieces of criteria. I’m looking for desire, commitment, intellectual humility, the ability for me to give you a 10:1 return on investment, and decisiveness.” And then I actually say to them, “I don’t know where I might find trouble with those but what do you guys think? Which one of those are we going to have the most challenge with finding in this organization?” It’s amazing. They’ll start talking about it. “You won’t have trouble finding any of those here.” “Oh, really?” But if they tell you, all of sudden, guess what? I can change my agenda again. I can focus on the fact that they are not going to have the desire to do this, or they’re not going to have the commitment. I can really focus in on one of those. But then, once we get towards the end, and I’m getting to my yes and yes, I have laid out, “Here’s what we are deciding today. That decision is I’m sending you an SOW, you’re going to sign it as we’ve talked about today and we’re going to have a kickoff call on Tuesday.” All that stuff is planned out and I’ll say, “Is that the version of yes that you’re willing to say today?” Again, it’s okay if they tell me no but I’ve put it out there because if they say, “No.” I’ll be like, “Okay, hold on. What were you hoping to decide today?” They can tell me that path. Or I say, “Okay. If you’re not going to say that version of no, help me understand why are we here, what were we hoping to do, what’s it going to take that version of yes?” Now I can layout my closed plan with the people who have the ability to say yes as opposed to letting people who only have the ability to tell me no and make that decision. Marylou: This is all sounding really great. What I’m curious about now is if I can ask you to describe for the audience, let’s say I’m listening to this, I’m thinking, “Wow. I know I don’t have these types of checks and balances and conversations and contracts in place in my pipeline.” Can you walk us through a success path meaning here’s where I am today with my pipeline, my lea flow, I’ve got various people in various stages, I’ve got different types of buyers, what is the success path of working with you from where I am today to where I can get if I implement your methodology, your training, your wisdom, in my pipeline? Jim: It’s my belief that people do not buy intellectually, they buy emotionally. The whole time I’m asking any questions, I’m trying to get an understanding of what their current status is costing them. When I say what it’s costing them, that doesn’t necessarily mean money. It could, but it doesn’t necessarily mean money. It could be costing them time, it could be costing the money, or it’s costing them emotional pain or disrupt. In my plan throughout the funnel, I have to understand what is current state, what was the previous state because that’s where the pain lies, that’s where the pain lies, in the previous state, and what’s the gain? One question that I love to ask and I ask this as early as possible Marylou, let’s fast forward a year from now and let’s pretend that you signed the contract and we got to working with each other, we’ve now been working with each other for a year and you’re having wild success, what would have happened? They will tell you the future, they will tell you all these great things and then you follow up and says, “Wow, that’s amazing. What happens if that doesn’t happen?” Now, they start to unpack all the challenges that you’re going to have to get through. Again, regardless of where you are in the funnel, these are some of the questions and objectives you can use to try to pull into your conversation now so that you can say, “Hey, you told me that in order for you to get here by the end of next year, you have to accomplish this, this, and this by q4, q3, q2. Here it is, April of 2017. If you’re going to implement this by the end of q2, we know it’s a 45-day onboarding cycle. You are really going to be signing this contract the next two weeks to have any chance of hitting your numbers for q2. Is that where we are? Because it doesn’t seem like we are.” Marylou: There’s a little bit of math there or funnel math as I call it in this process of yours. It allows us to look at velocity, timeline, lag, and then also milestones. Would that be a fair assessment that you put all those into your magic pot and come up with? The other thing that I’m curious about is are there common problems that you immediately hone in on to see? For me, for example, I’m working with sales organizations that are primarily split roles, not always but I have a business development team or an outreach professional who’s handing off a lead to quota carrying field sales type of direct sales person, the first thing I look at is that hand off, what you talked about before. If I don’t see 90% or higher compliance of what was handed off to what was worked and put into the active pipeline for forecast, I know that’s the first spot for me to look at. Are there some indicators, leading indicators, that you look for or if I’m listening now, that I can kind of self diagnose some of this to figure out where I should be applying more knowledge? Just instructional aid to get to where I want to go for the revenue I’m trying to generate? Jim: One of the things you just mentioned was that handoff and you’re looking for 90%. For me, that’s what I would call a pain indicator. It doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s where their problem is, maybe they have a marketing plan that’s going on creating a high volume of leads but they’re actually not that good and they just can’t convert over to sales. To me, that’s an indicator and I want to dive deeper into that. But for me, it really is at each of those stages of the funnel. One is are they generating enough leads or are they generating enough appointments for an outbound perspective, that’s number one. The answer there is no. It’s because everybody wants to look at the end of the funnel. We didn’t hit our numbers, we didn’t have enough to close one contract etc. But to me Marylou, it’s the bad management and bad managers who focus on the end of the funnel because I can’t control that. You can give me a million-dollar quota and I have zero and a million in front of me, I have no clue how to get to a million. It’s the single steps and behaviors that we do every single day is the only place that management and managers should be focusing their time. At the very beginning, how many calls, how many emails, how many personal outreaches are we doing on a daily basis? That’s going to lead to some amount of first calls. How many first calls are going to demo? How many demos are going to proposals? How many proposals are going to close one? I’m looking at that, as you called the funnel math earlier, I’m looking at that funnel math all the way across the table and trying to understand, “Okay, your goals are here. You’re here. What are the things that are getting in the way of that?” Again, I’m looking for those pain indicators but then I’ll start to unpack them and I’ll get to the emotional reason why. That’s the case. Marylou: The other thing that we’ve now talked about a lot, which I’ve always done because I grew up in this world, is to segment the accounts, not only looking at the funnel math but looking at the characteristics of the accounts that are gliding through the funnel to see if there are segments or tiers of accounts that are performing better than other. An example would be a client of mine has a dream 100 account. They have 100 accounts that they’d love to get into so they’ve divvied up those to their account executives and they work those independently of a lead gen process. There is some lead gen going on but it’s very hyper personalized, it’s not necessarily running through an engine other than they’re in control of how many emails they want to send and to what level they want to personalize it. The next tier out is what we call extending universe which could have been a core or the dream account but for some reason didn’t qualify for that. What we also do is we look to see, contributing to those revenue numbers, what types of accounts are swimming down the pipeline a lot easier and that’s easy to close, high revenue, low risk versus the other types of accounts. Are you seeing more of that segmentation coming into your analysis or are you looking at the funnel purely from the math perspective of revenue at the end and what generated that revenue? Jim: I love what you’re talking about. I wish I was seeing it a lot more with my clients but the reality is I’m not. I think that could be the size of customers that I call on. I typically work with B2B SaaS companies or technology companies less than $10 million a year in revenue. They’re kind of pre-series A even but right after series A, I’m taking them from there. It’s funny, I had someone on my podcast just a few weeks ago and they talked about this concept of a win wire. That’s just what they called it. It’s basically an after action report. After every deal that wins, she’s the president of the company, she would gather all the known information about that win. What was the actual reason why they bought, were we competing against anybody, who is the sales rep that close it, what was the average deal size, all this data and she would use that information at the weekly sales call to say, “Okay, how will we get more of these?” It’s not a case study, they literally just sold the deal but it starts to spark interest in the SDRs and AEs to say, “Oh, I know four people just like that. I can use that information. I can use the tactic that they used to pull this deal across or just the demographics of the buyer to say, “Hey, it sounds like we have someone just like you. Would you like to have a conversation about this?” I thought that was fascinating. I also spent some time at Oracle. Oracle acquired a company that I lead sales for a few years ago and they did something similar but they did it for every deal, win or lose. If we lost a big deal, they would go in and they would basically have an interview with the customer. I don’t know how they did that because I can’t get it done all the time. But they would have an interview with the customer we lost the deal with to truly understand what it was that caused us to lose and caused them to go with one of our competitors. When I study that information, I can just find so many patterns, as you’re talking about, what’s sliding through the funnel a little bit easier, and it allowed me to truly prospect into deals that made a lot more sense and moved faster than I wanted them to. Marylou: I love that idea because being a numbers person, being an engineer, being a process person, if we can analyze and study descriptively what happened whether good or bad—I love the good and bad thing, doing the close won and close lost, love that. We used to do exit interviews basically exiting out of the pipeline even. That’s how detailed we used to get. “Why did you leave us?” That’s a detail that a lot of people aren’t going to do but just doing the value grids or what you call the win wires of close won, close lost, and getting an understanding, and if you can take it even further and interview the people that are involved in these decisions either directly influencing or indirectly influencing, you now get an understanding of the stakeholders. When they ebbed and flowed in the pipeline, you’re building not only a fabulous sales process that’s based on the buyer needs but think of what that does for marketing. The fact that you can feed this Intel back to marketing so they can organize the cadence, the rhythm of their content based on how people buy and also bubble up those objections early in the content so they can answer them and get people ready for the conversations that the sales reps are going to have. It’s so valuable. Jim: It really is and that’s one of the biggest things that has caused me to be successful both in my career as well as in training the reps that I work with. I often say Marylou, the best presentation you will ever give is the one that your prospect never sees. What I mean by that is I know where you’re going. I’m leading you down the entire path but instead of telling you how great I am, how great my product is, how great my services are, all the features, benefits, etc., I’m asking you questions that I know specifically are going to uncover things in you or make you think about things that no other sales rep is causing you to do. Just by me going deep and asking some really legitimately good questions, the prospect sits back and says, “Wow! This person’s really smart. They know what they’re talking about. If they’re asking these questions, their product has got to be just as good as they are.” They’re kind of self selecting into my sales process. The whole time I’m really just presenting but I’m doing it by way of questioning. Marylou: I love that. We’re getting short on time here so I’ll make sure that the listeners of this podcast know how to reach you. What’s a good next step for people as we end this call today to take in what we’ve talked about today and take something away to do as one action point? What would you recommend? First, tell us how to reach you and then tell us what our homework should be for today.           Jim: Sure. There’s a couple of different ways to reach me. One is I love to converse casually on Twitter. I’m @jim_brown. If you want to go more professional, you can hit me on LinkedIn. Just search for Jim Brown. I’m probably going to be one of the first few results. Type in SalesTuners if I don’t come up. Marylou, I would say the thing that I would tell everybody is we all have goals, we all have quotas or individual income goals that we want to achieve but it’s a really big number and it’s so far off into the future, we can’t actually see it. Therefore, we don’t know the incremental steps to get from where we are today to that number. I’ve put together a completely free ebook that you can download as a workbook. You’re going to have to actually do some work in it. But it’s going to say, you plug in all the numbers, here’s where I want to be at the end of the year and based on the amount of time that I work, the average contract value that I have, the amount of leads that I get on a monthly basis, the amount of opportunities, it’s going to break all those numbers down for you and tell you what you personally need to do on an individual daily basis to be able to hit that big goal at the end of the year. You can get that at www.salestuners.com/roadmap. Again, I think it’s like a 17-paged book. It’s a workbook. You’ve got to put in some work. But again, www.salestuners.com/roadmap and you get that daily plan for you personally. Marylou: That’s great and I will add that to our notes on the web page once the podcast is active for everyone. If you didn’t get that or if you’re driving, don’t stop and write. I’ll make sure that it’s out there for you. One of the things that starts off a good process is to understand your numbers. We’re all athletes out there even though we’re in the sales world. Think of yourself as an athlete. You’ve got to know your numbers. You have to know what you need to achieve both for your what I used to call the marginally acceptable goal, the goal, and the stretch goal or the whoopi goal as we used to call it. We really want to always strive for the whoopi goal but we don’t want to do the marginally acceptable. We need to what those numbers are so that it allows us to a plan accordingly our schedules for the month, the week, the quarter, whatever we need to do in order to meet our numbers. Thanks so much Jim for your time. I really appreciate you joining the podcast today. Jim: Marylou, thank you. It’s been a great pleasure to be here.

Episode 63: Sales Organization Architecture – Tito Bohrt

Predictable Prospecting
Episode 63: Sales Organization Architecture - Tito Bohrt
00:00 / 00:00
1x
Download file Leave Review
Share
Building sales pods is the latest fad to hit sales departments worldwide, but is it really the best way to set up your team? In this episode we’re chatting with Tito Bohrt, CEO of AltiSales and Chief of Sales Staff at AppBuddy, about his unique concept of architecture of the sales organization. Bohrt walks us through his philosophy on POD and round robin factory models of organization, and when the best time to use each is!
 
Episode Highlights:

  • Introducing Tito Bohrt
  • Defining the POD and the round robin factory models
  • When to use each type of organization model
  • Client success stories
  • When is the best time to implement a new organizational structure?
  • Account based selling, prospects, and the POD and farming models
  • Being pleasantly persistent

Resources:

The tech stack Tito Bohrt uses when building early stage sales teams::

Why does he use these products?

  • Salesforce: Good to start with this from day 1. There’s no better CRM, and switching CRMs later can be costly
  • Linkedin Sales Nav: The most up to date employees and titles to help you find Buyer Personas at your ICP
  • ZoomInfo: The best source for direct lines, lots of accurate emails as well.
  • Hunter.io: Good tech to help you guess emails if you don’t find them on ZoomInfo
  • Outreach.io: Allows the tracking of all KPIs for SDRs and has the dialer integrated. This is a must have for SDR teams at every B2B company. Very superior to SalesLoft when it comes to analytics and customizations
  • Jabra Headset: Likely the best sound quality, but also pricey. If on a budget, any USB headset (even those for gaming) will be good enough.
  • GridBuddy: GridBuddy gives you an excel-like interface to make sales reps lives easier and allowing sales leaders to capture all the data they need for accurate forecasts and analyzing KPIs. This is another must have if you are a data-driven company (and you should be).
  • Rightsignature: All the e-sig capabilities you need for an affordable price.

Want more from Tito Bohrt? Connect with him on Linkedin or send him an email: tito@altisales.com

Episode Transcript

 Marylou: Hey everyone, it’s Marylou Tyler. This week, I have a friend of a friend. Mark from Outreach is a friend of mine, introduced me to Tito Bohrt who’s on the line with us today. Tito is the CEO of AltiSales and he’s also a jack of all trades, everything sales. Mark, my friend, really wanted me to talk to Tito because of this concept of the architecture of the sales organization, what I call the architecture. It’s this whole POD versus a factory or farming.Tito wrote this fabulous blog post about the architecture, the set-up. It’s changed the lives of so many people in sales and executives that I really wanted Tito to come on the show today to enlighten all of us on when to use what and how things work in terms of setting up the SDR role, the AE role, customer support, if there’s any technical liaisons. I was a sales engineer back in the day so I was part of the team. Really, we want to talk about when you should set these things up, how they should be set up and at what level? Because I’m always interested in the theories of accounts because I work more on enterprise of market and Tito works probably what, is it correct to say early stage Tito that you’re more involved in or do you take it all the way to the older companies too? Tito: I do all the way, actually. Marylou: Without further ado, welcome, Tito, to the podcast. Tito: Thank you. It’s such a pleasure to be here. Marylou: Tell us how this all got started. How you made your mark in the world? You were telling me a great story about Mark so why don’t you start there. Tito: That’s interesting. Mark contacted me after I wrote this blog post that you were talking about. Kind of talking about the differences between the POD structure, which has recently become super popular in regards to mapping your team and how it’s going to grow, your SDR to AE to CSM ratio. I wrote a very thorough argument for doing it the opposite way. Doing it like the round-robin/factory model where I still believe that you should scale proportionately. Your SDR, AE and CSM teams should definitely be growing in whichever proportion worked initially to maintain the deal flow but you still think you should cross end the leads. Any SDR combo for any AE can close deal and give it taking care of by any CSM. Marylou: For those of you who are listening, just in case you don’t understand these terms, the POD structure Tito explain what that is, the architecture of that. Tito: Right. The POD structure would mean not in sales, everybody has the sales of owner reps. Many times in the POD structure, they are also assigned just the territories. You might have a sales of owner rep who’s covering Florida. If he sets up a meeting for an account executive, it would be for the exact same account executive who has the exact same territory, they’re working like a unit. If that person closes, then the customer success manager will take over that same account. Those three people, in whatever proportion you structure that team is always working together. They’re like a unit of work and then you can scale those units. Marylou: Okay, versus the let’s call the factory model for this telephone call because I’m sure there’s some other term. Tell us about the round-robin factory model. How does that look? Tito: In the round-robin factory model, you wouldn’t necessarily use territories to assign the specific accounts to your team. In this complete round-robin, you can assign it in different ways. One of the things I proposed in a different blog post was actually do it alphabetically which makes it easier because if I go look at HP for example, I don’t necessarily know where the headquarters is. Then I go bump into intermedia like, “Where are they headquartered?” You don’t necessarily always know where the HQ is but if you do it in an alphabetical way, it’s very easy to know like, “I own all the accounts that start with A.” You could do a lead bounty and all that very quickly and easily and intuitively. However, the factory model, what it means is then any SDR will be booking meetings and then those will be spread out throughout all the account executives. As the account executives close those deals, those will be spread out across all the customer success managers. There are specific reasons that you’d want to do that. They have to do with understanding your key performance indicators and really understanding how your reps are performing across sales development, account executive, and customer success. As well as preventing your team from breaking down in case of somebody getting promoted or somebody leaving your company. It eliminates the fragility of the team. Those are two big reasons why you would not want to do a POD structure. Marylou: Okay, let’s devil’s advocate here. We’ve been ingrained from everything down to the lonely email to segment, segment, segment. The POD concept represents segmentation in a way. How does the factory model render when you have, let’s take the fictitious company who’s selling two or three products scenario, we call them buying scenarios which one particular buying scenario, maybe a project-based sale, where you go in there’s a defined project, the sale cycle is a little bit shorter. Same product but there’s a project in mind at the client at the prospect. The second scenario would be they’re doing some long-term planning. They eventually want to replace their legacy system with something new. Same product but their sale cycle is longer. We typically like to separate those in segment, those two specific SDRs because of the skill set. In the factory model how does that render? Do you just put everything in a big pot and the next number that comes up is what they call and work on? Tito: That’s interesting. I don’t like going to either extreme, when you’re saying the POD likes super segmenting. I’ll give you this example. Let’s say we have these two product lines. Let’s imagine you have a big sales team just for the purpose of understanding the concept. Let’s say you have 100 SDRs, 100 AEs and 100 CSMs that are working. Because you have two product lines, I wouldn’t have everybody call every product or both markets. I would separate my team into two different teams. I wouldn’t consider my sales team just one team. After you have two teams though, I wouldn’t say that, “I’m going to grab one SDR, one AE and one CSM and make them a unit. And that SDR, every meeting he books, he will be booking for the AE. Then, every meeting the AE closes will be going to that one CSM.” I’ll grab those 50, 50, 50 and say, “Any meeting you, 50 guys book in the SDR team could go to any of the 50 account executives.” That is what I am referring to the factory model. Yes, when you have a specific different products, I think you should still segment. When Aaron Ross and you talk all about the segmentation of roles: SDR, AE, CSM, I’m all in for that. I think those were fantastic ideas. Marylou: Okay. Really, this is sounding like the old call center models when we used to have predictive dialers in the call center. We had SDRs, the predictive dialer was the one who dictated where they were calling at the time. Geography wasn’t as important but we did segment it by product line. We also segmented it in some cases by sales cycle, only because the sales conversation that we needed to have to get to a codified opportunity may have been three to five calls versus one to two calls so we did segment out that way. That’s kind of like by product but it’s really by sales cycle and more complexity that was built into the product. Predictable revenue talks about that which a lot of people either tore out those pages and didn’t read it or I’m not really sure what happened but we were talking about this 315 process where that was a natural split for SDRs even to have people who qualified during the AWAF, the Are We A Fit Call which was a 15-minute qualification call. Then we had more seasoned SDRs handle the longer calls where they did one-hour call with the decision maker and then maybe a two-hour call with the stakeholders, more of the challenger type model that they talk about with the three to five stakeholders in each account. But I love the concept of what you’re talking about because it’s efficient. Tell us about how effective it has been in the clients that you’ve worked with, who had the POD concept and then moved over to the factory model. Tito: Yeah, happy to talk about. The interesting thing is when the POD structure started emerging, even companies like Aldridge where Mark’s at, they start doing a POD without any necessarily big thinking or reason behind why you should do POD. They’re all selling the same software, Aldridge. Then you might have had 10 SDRs, 10 AEs, 10 CSMs and there was a 1:1:1 structure where every deal was flowing through, and there was no real reason for that. That creates three problems. If you have one great SDR and he’s booking you more meetings than your worst SDR, which will always happen, then the AE who’s getting the meetings for your best SDR has a bigger pipeline. It’s not because anything he’s doing, it’s just because the SDR that supports him directly is doing a better job. Then, what will happen soon is, “Oh, that SDR is great. He wants a promotion. He finally gets it.” Now your entry level SDR goes and supports that small unit again. Then that small unit, because they have a new SDR who’s training might be now underperforming. Your AE who has gone to, initially he was over quota, 50% over quota now he has a new SDR. Now, he just puts his time and prospect himself and now he just missed quote. You’re like, “What happened?” What happened is you created a straight line of traffic of deals that is not allowing everybody to take everybody’s deals. The first thing is uneven SQL distribution. If you were to have all 10 of your SDRs book meetings for all 10 of your AEs, you can much better measure not only the quantity but also the quality of those deals. If one of your units, you have 10:10:10, let’s say this AE is getting 20% more demos than anybody else but he’s not closing them. You’re like, “Oh my God, my AE needs training. He’s getting 20% more demos but he’s not closing those demos.” Then, when you actually get into the nitty-gritty of what’s actually happened, and you go listen to the calls of the SDRs, you realize that this SDR might not have been qualifying the deals as much. He’s been trying to push people a little bit more than anybody else. Even though the AEs is getting 20% more demos and his close rate now looks lower, it’s not his fault. He might be your best AE but because he’s getting all the same deals from this only one SDR who’s pushing people a little bit more than everybody else, now his metrics look really bad. When you do the factory model, every AE is taking deals from every SDR and now the metrics for your close rate for every AE are actually representative of the skill the AE has to close those deals. It’s kind of like the bell curve. You are giving everybody a variation of data points left and right, up and down. Just like slicing a tiny part of how good the SDR was and sending him over that, “I’m just working off of that.” The first thing is kind of like the SQL distribution. Just understanding that if you don’t run a factory model, the key performance indicators that you are measuring, you’re contacted to booked percentage for your SDRs or your meetings performed to deals closed or your AEs might not be entirely representative of their skill. They are also representing what’s happened right before they took that or right after they hand it over to the next team. Marylou: Plus, like you said, you have a statistically relevant sample because of the fact that you’re using a round-robin methodology, means that you’re looking at a sampling that’s a larger size to begin with. Then, once you start analyzing that data set, you’re able to then drill down to the minute component, which in this case would be the SDR skill set, it could be the least issue. You would not necessarily see these things red flag if you have a smaller sample to work with. Because you’re not able to really look at the gap and the contrast, as well as if you do have everything set in one bucket that has a statistically relevant sampling number of records. It sounds just like the call center model back in the ‘90s that we used to use. It wasn’t called farming but it allowed us to take a universe of records and distribute them across a wider range of data points which allowed us to really find tune a lot more about that list itself, the complexity of the list, whether it was getting fatigued. We could also look at the skill sets of the people using the list. We could also from there, look at the geographies product lines, everything else that we needed to look at in order to, in our case, replenish the list because we were constantly working from a cold list and back in the day you couldn’t just go online and pull records down. You had to purchase lists and purchase phone numbers and you had to be a lot better at analyzing what was working and what wasn’t. Tito: Yeah, correct. I think the primary reason that so many companies have moved to the territory and/or POD structure has been because so many companies had field sales reps. We’ve seen this changing over the years. 10 to 15 years ago, you couldn’t sell $100,000 contract over the phone. Now, I’ve seen that happen multiple times. Six-figure deals being closed over go-to meeting and just e-sign it, send us back and we’re all done. Now, we require less people to actually be flying around and be on the field. It doesn’t necessarily make as much sense to have territories if everybody’s going to be doing inside sales. Marylou: Right, right. I’m sure the audience is sitting here thinking, “Okay, this is sounding really interesting. Where do I start?” Can you help us by giving us some characteristics of when it might be a good time to consider putting in a factory type model? Or are you going to tell us that you should do that from the beginning? Help me understand that. Tito: Yeah, I would do that from the beginning. The only scenario where you would not start this from day one is if you are really considering doing field sales and either selling maybe high six-figure deals or seven-figure deals and you are likely going to need people on the field. Other than that, even when you have one SDR and one AE, I would think that as soon as you higher your second pair of SDR and AE, I would have cross-book meetings. I could get slightly more hectic on the counter because one reason people advocate for the POD model is if the SDR only has one AE, he can quickly look at the counter, make it so much easier, there’s no scheduling conflicts. But at the same time, all the things that you lose by not doing the factory model of round-robin hurt you much more than the easiness of booking something on the calendar. Marylou: Okay. Let’s break it down then into theories of accounts. Mid market, which is usually inside upper mid market which is usually inside and some enterprise which is usually split inside and out, those are great opportunities for the factory model. If you have field sales reps where you’re handshaking with actual belly to belly sales reps or actually going to the client site, this may or may not work as well in that environment. Correct? Tito: Correct. I would still have my SDRs, if they’re all inside. I would still have them do all the whole territory. But then for the AEs, you could assign the AEs specifically to the territory they’re going to be covering. Sometimes the CSMs, it’s also a good idea to have covered territories. Because for some reason if there’s a conference or something’s going to happen soon and you want to fly somebody over there and meet with their corresponding clients in the area, that would make sense. The sales development side, I could still see everything running in a factory model. As long as the value proposition is the same for a mid market and enterprise company, there’s no reason to split them down and say, “Okay, we’re going to have a specific team for mid market and a specific team for enterprise.” The targeting and the messaging and the value prop is exactly the same. I would run the factory model just because the better KPIs, easier scalability. Marylou: Okay. Tell us about the new buzz word which is the old buzz word of strategic selling, it’s called account based selling. How is this or does it even matter? I’m hearing that it probably doesn’t but just to set people’s mind at ease who have embraced account based selling methodologies. Does the factory model apply and work in those types of environments? Tito: I think so. There are a lot of things being said about account based. I feel some confusion in the market. Some people are saying the account based just means reaching a wide variety of people of the other company. Other people say account based is actually just going beyond and then having your whole team go reach to their whole team. Again, I think the factory model would apply to both of those cases because even within your CRM if you set it up correctly, you should have some indication that your team and whatever company you’re trying to prospect into, has a specific connection or a way where we can get in there in a warmer way. I would still flag to those accounts and still ask my CEO, my president, my head of customer success or whoever has a connection with the other company to send them email and help my team get into that account. You can still have somewhat of like a small target accounts list that gets cycled through. One SDR for this month or six weeks you might say, “I want to try to get into Markesan and I want to grab the 12 people that I’m trying to prospect into for Markesan, want to put them into my cadens. I’m going to throw them into Outreach and then when I try that account but if I don’t book it, it’s not mine anymore. After six weeks, it’s open floor. Anybody who wants to take it, he can grab it and prospecting.” It’s so important to set up your CRM correctly and be able to make it easy for all your SDRs to understand when is the right time to go after which accounts and what has happened in the past. Marylou: Right. There’s a lot of angst over accounts and ownership. In the world I work, AEs are just really wanting to own a core number of accounts that they go after. They are essentially the owners of those accounts and drive the sales conversations. The SDR is typically in a support role of helping it get in the door. But it’s still prevalent where we see these core counts in the inner bulls eye owned by the AE. Then, there’s a tear out from that what we’re calling extended universe that is more of that round-robin style that we’re going to put it into a big pot. They’re statistically qualified using the predictable revenue model and the predictable prospecting model of the ideal account profile, the ideal prospect personas are put into this bucket for the extended universe and then that’s utilized in a round-robin fashion to try to generate first meeting or get responses back. But there is still some holdout from the AE side of wanting to have those core accounts. Tito: Just to reiterate here for the audience. The idea that I wrote about and I proposed in the factory model doesn’t necessarily mean that the AEs will now be thrown any deal, anytime. Because if you have an account executive who just worked at one of your target accounts and he’s like, “I want to own that.” I think they should still own that. However, I wouldn’t tie them to one SDR. I wouldn’t have them say, “Okay. AE Jonathan I want to be working with Cindy who’s my SDR and she’s the one who’s just going to be supporting me.” The only thing I’m trying to break is that idea of one SDR and one AE working together. If your AE has strong connections into one company and they want to take that account for two or three months and say, “I know a bunch of people. I want that to be my account.” I think you can still run named accounts. I like the idea of named accounts. I like the idea of specializing roles. What I do not like and the only thing I’m trying to advocate against is let’s not tie one SDR to one AE, let’s not tie one AE to one CSM or in any proportion. If anybody books Markesan and we have this one AE who used to work at Markesan for 20 years and he has a bunch of friends there, we should send it to that one AE. Then, the next one that they were supposed to take, let’s send it to somebody else because what we want to do eventually is just maximize the amount of revenue the company can make through leveraging every possible connection we have and every inside into every company while still maintaining our metrics healthy when it comes to the distribution of who’s doing what and what’s the reason we’re over or under performing in certain areas. Marylou: One last objection that I know people are thinking of and I’ve heard this from my clients is what about the prospects? If we have these different SDR people calling in, there isn’t the chance to develop any type of rapport with the SDR. Then the lead gets handed off to the AE and there’s a disconnect there. Is that a growing concern, issue in your mind or is it just we need to get better finessing the hand-off? Where do you sit there? Tito: I don’t think I’m too concerned about that if the hand-off is done correctly. I’ve seen a lot of companies have their hand-off completely broken. Everywhere I go I really advocate for people to actually rethink about their CRM a lot. This is one really big thing for me. I recommend everybody use GridBuddy which is a prog by AppBuddy, a company I’ve worked extensively with. It’s just fantastic. It gives every sales reps so much visibility over their pipeline. To give you some idea here, the way we build that team was every SDR would get assigned target accounts for the month or six weeks. They would get those three accounts. They’re the only ones prospecting to those accounts. You all are building that rapport. You’re not going to get one account being hit by four different SDRs. They only own that account for six weeks. After that, it’s not theirs anymore. This also makes it competitive. Otherwise, an SDR if they don’t book a meeting and somebody’s like, “No. Call me back in six months.” This is a very high value prospect for your company. They just set themselves a reminder in six months and then they call back in six months. Here they know that that’s not a thing. If somebody tells you, “Call me back in six months.” That’s not your account anymore, that’s going to be somebody else’s. You have to book in the next six weeks and you should try to get in through a different way or keep being persistent and always persistent in a nice way. Marylou: Yep, Karen used to call me pleasantly persistent. Tito: For those six weeks if they book and it’s complete, yes they are building the rapport with the whole account. There are so many cool things you can do. We try to get the SDRs to always be very creative. I’ve seen things work from the story from my persistence email that is very more popular nowadays than it was before like sending pictures of puppies or sending personalized videos. If you really know that they are good fit for your product and you are pleasantly persistent, you’ll build a rapport and you could do a great hand-off to your AE if you understand how the deal needs to flow. Marylou: These are all such great ideas. We’re introducing scarcity. I love that idea of the six weeks. It’s out of your hands that the opportunity appears more valuable. That’s Cialdini’s rule, one of the six principles persuasion of scarcity when something appears more valuable because it’s less available to you. I love that idea. How can people reach you if they really want to dive deep. You mentioned a couple of software apps, I’ll make sure that I put all the links to you and your companies on our show notes. What’s the best way, Tito, to get a hold of you? Tito: I’m very active on LinkedIn. If you send me an invite saying, “Heard you on the podcast, definitely will be glad to connect.” You can also send me an email at tito@altisales.com. Marylou: I will also, for you guys, put a link to that blog post that turned my friend Mark around. Mark does billions of records, he’s processing all the time. He’s Outreach, he’s got an app that’s allowing us to start a conversation to people we don’t know in a very systematic and effective way. He was so excited about me speaking with Tito today because of the concept. We should look at that. We shouldn’t just accept the POD or accept a particular structure. We should really look to start thinking outside the box here because it is all about revenue. It’s all about consistency and scalability. Great ideas, Tito. Thank you so much for your time today. I look forward to maybe having another conversation down the road to see how somebody’s things planned out. Tito: That was fantastic. Thank you for having me, Marylou. We’ll talk soon.

Episode 62: The Dangers of Automating Your Sales Process – Anthony Iannarino

Predictable Prospecting
Episode 62: The Dangers of Automating Your Sales Process - Anthony Iannarino
00:00 / 00:00
1x
Download file Leave Review
Share
How many of us keep track of calls and personas using a process that feels way too complex and doesn’t deliver the desired results? Today we’re joined by Anthony Iannarino, international speaker, sales leader, and best-selling author. His new book, The Only Sales Guide You’ll Ever Need, is an absolute must-read for anyone who wants to sell more and sell better. In this episode we’re talking all about the dangers of automating your sales process, and the research and science that backs up Anthony’s methods for creating an effective and lucrative sales process.
 
Episode Highlights:

  • Understanding sales by using the OODA Loop
  • Why successful prospectors have the mindset of a competitor
  • When asking for a referral goes wrong: Why we can’t rely on technology to do our work for us
  • “Automation is marketing, not selling”: Why you can’t automate intimacy
  • Creating value for multiple personas
  • Getting into an efficient sales rhythm

Resources:

 

Episode Transcript

Marylou: Hi everybody, it’s Marylou Tyler. This week, I have Anthony Iannarino. Anthony is the bestselling author of a book called The Only Sales Guide You’ll Ever Need. It’s a red book. You need to go pick this book up. I’m not sure if it’s the only, but it’s one of the only books that you’ll ever need in sales. Anthony, welcome to our phone call today. Thank you so much for joining. Anthony: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Marylou: We talk a lot, in our world here, with my folks about sales process. Predictable Revenue written in 2011 and then Predictable Prospecting written in 2016 really focused on the sales process, sales enablement from a process standpoint and metrics. I’m seeing that as we put these frameworks and these methods in, it’s really starting to amplify and accentuate what I call sales skills and what you probably call mindset. What I’d like to do today is discuss with you Predictable Revenue but looking towards the actual mindset piece. I believe that you’re exceptionally good in explaining that and getting people excited about the fact that it’s not just process and technology, it’s people as well. People is mindset of the sales rep themselves and also the buyer. Anthony: Happy to talk about that. I think I would start with the work of Colonel John Boyd who created the OODA Loop and if you’re not familiar with that, there’s a great book by Robert Coram called Boyd that explains Boyd’s journey from being a fighter pilot to being someone who actually designed airplanes, fighter jets, particularly. What this OODA Loop was is he recognized that he went to college and got advanced degrees on Science. He recognized the second law of thermodynamics and entropy and he started to realize that the reason that American planes did better than Russian planes is because everyone was trying to build a plane that could go longer, further and faster. What he realized is none of these are important when you’re in a dog fight. What’s important is how quickly you can adjust and turn so that you can flip over and get behind your enemy. What Boyd continued to admonish the United States Military about in joint sessions of the congress and in hearings was that it is people, ideas, and technology, in that order. They would get the order backwards, they would say, “Wait, it’s technology and then it’s ideas and people.” He would continue to tell them, “No, it’s people first.” I think we do this in sales quite a bit. We start with the idea of we have this technology so we can automate emails and we can do things now with video and all these other things that we think we want to do. We’re automating things that don’t lend themselves to automation. What it turns out to be the differentiating and defining factor between people that succeed and people that don’t succeed comes down to just a couple of things. The first thing is the willingness to do things that other people are unwilling to do. Successful people have a mindset to do things that other people are unwilling to do and they have a certain set of disciplines in a mindset that says this is how this works and this is what is important and that’s why we do it this way and in this order. What happens for many, many sales people is you can be really, really good on the telephone at prospecting and you can be really, really good when you’re in front of a client but if you’re not on the phone and you’re in front of the client, then none of those things matter. The differentiator tends to be people who believe that they are disciplined about their prospecting and that they put pipeline above everything else. When you look at people who do really well, their pipeline looks different. They’re disciplined about making calls, they’re disciplined about nurturing their dream clients overtime, they’re disciplined about following up. They don’t tend to give up, they persist for long periods of time, long after many salespeople will have made a couple calls and sent a couple of emails and gone away. The framework that I used, Marylou, is mindset, skillset, tool kit. It’s not tool kit and then skillset and then mindset. It starts with what does that person believe. If you are not generating the revenue that you want to generate, the first problem starts with you and the disciplines and the actions that you take and it’s what you really believe about prospecting. I just shot a video this morning for my YouTube channel about our mistaken expectations of emails and voicemails. We send an email and we expect some of these people will reply to my email and schedule appointments to meet with me. That doesn’t happen and the salesperson is disappointed. Or we leave a voicemail, we say please call me back at this number and then we say no one ever calls me back. No one is ever going to call you back. That’s an expectation that’s out of line with reality. We’re pursuing their business. They’re not pursuing buying from us. If there was a line of people in front of your company waiting to buy from you, you would be redundant and we wouldn’t need you. What we need you to do is understand that the way the relationship works is we’re in pursuit of them and so you need the mindset of a competitor, you need to be resourceful, you need to take initiative, you need to be disciplined and you need a prospecting process that gets executed with such a great consistency that it actually produces predictable revenue. Marylou: Most definitely. One of the things I heard you say was the fact that you need to have consistency, what I call habit. I do a lot of talking about habit trumping inspiration because a lot of times what I see from the inspiration side is that we’re hopeful. It’s hope prospecting as opposed to consistently prospecting. The other thing I love that you said for some of this with predictable revenue is that it was all about asking for the internal referral, what’s the actual predictable revenue but I’m seeing all these email coming through now from folks that have embraced that process that ask for 15 minutes of time without giving you any. It’s almost like you have to look at the email and try to figure it out yourself. They give you this email and there is no sense of urgency, there is no reason why and then at the end of it, they want you. They want your time. It’s over and over and over again because technology allows us to just put those emails all into a string and send them out over a period of time. Anthony: Yeah. I’ll just give you an interesting story about how this goes wrong for people. I got an email from a sales person at one of my companies and the email said, “We’re doing business at companies that look like yours. Here’s a name, here’s a name, here’s another name that we’re working with. Click on this link and see what kind of work we’re doing for them.” There’s links built into the email because clicking on it is an indication that I’m interested. At least that’s their perception of it. It’s not, but that’s their perception so we’ll leave that as it be. I did not reply to the email. Three days later, I get another email from the same sales person that says I wanted to make sure you didn’t miss this email. That email was pasted below it. It said, we really didn’t want you to miss this link. We’re doing important work in this area. I deleted that email too because it really wasn’t about me and it wasn’t for me. The third email came in and it said this link is still up but I don’t know how long it’s going to be there. We want to make sure you didn’t miss it and then some more text with some more proof providers which is why us, not why change until the proof providers were not aligned with where I was in a buying process by any stretch of the imagination. Finally I sent the person a note and said, this strategy sucks and you should [00:14:52] prospecting because what you’re doing is not working. I didn’t get anything back for about three or four days. And then I got an email from the sales person saying, I’m sorry. I didn’t send you any of those emails. They were all sent by our CMO who does marketing automation. This is not even a person who’s trying to reach me. It’s a piece of technology that’s trying to reach me. It’s not tailored to me, even though they have the industry right, it’s not tailored to me. It doesn’t create any value for me. We’re trying to automate relationship building. Relationships don’t lend themselves to automation. When you’re checking the box and saying yes I communicated to this person because I sent them an email, that’s not the same as saying I’m nurturing, I’m developing a relationship, I’m creating value, I’m sharing insights, I’m helping understand where they are in the buying process, I’m delivering a message of why they should change and what their better future might look like. None of those things were happening. I think that’s the mistake that we make thinking that we can turn something that’s going to take more effort and energy into something that technology by itself will solve. I’m a technology guy. I do think that technology has a role to play and I even have a number of presentations I give about intimacy at scale but it’s the intimacy that matters. You need to know me and you need to know what’s important to me and you need to speak to me about why change and what you know that might make a difference for me or basically what you’re doing is not going to have the desired impact at all because it’s not aligned to who I am and what I want. Marylou: I think what’s beautiful about what you’re saying to the audience is that we can’t rely on technology to do our work for us, number one. Number two, it’s still about the conversation. It’s still about the relationship. It’s still about learning about our prospects. The rebuttal part from the audience will probably be something like you know what, that’s great, Marylou and Anthony, but we have thousands of records. We are given 250 records a week to work and this is the new business development, for example. How the heck can we have conversations that are personal in nature with that many people and then remember where they were in the sequence because our boss wants to send out eight touches or so. There is a catch 22 here as to how we can do this and do it in a way that’s impactful, yet it’s personal. Anthony: That would be 12,000 leads a year per rep. There’s not a single way that you can manage 12,000 leads per salesperson with any consistency and with hope of developing relationships with 12,000 people. Intimacy doesn’t scale that far. If you look at the research of Robin Dunbar, the most relationships a person can handle on average ends up being about 150. The best people can maybe get to 225. I have some thoughts that leveraging technology can probably get a little bit more than that because silicon is a better substrate than the human brain when it comes to remembering things. There’s no doubt about that. You can use technology to remember things but you’re never going to be able to manage 250 and automating it is not selling. Automating that is marketing. Marketing is not selling. Those are two different functions in my view of the world. Marketing says I’m going to try to message something, a value to get interest and awareness. Selling is different. There’s a communication where we’re having conversation about what’s important to you. If you’re selling transactionally like Amazon does, you can send me something saying, Anthony, you tend to buy books by Jablon. Jablon has a new book coming out. We can automate that part of a relationship because the price of Jab’s book is going to be like $27 but when I’m trying to send something that creates massive value that is strategic, that comes with risk, that’s going to require multiple conversations. Automations is marketing, it is not selling. There’s not a way to put eight emails together that say, I’m going to send eight emails and convert these people when you’re selling something that’s not transactional. It’s not the right approach. What do you say to a rep who does that? Make 250 dials, 180-200 go to voicemail. Those are calls where you got to leave a message of value and that you can follow up at some time on the future. You’re going to have some conversations with people. Some of those are going to be leads that you can convert. There’s not a way to manage 250 leads per week and have a meaningful conversation with that many people. It’s not a problem that can be solved by applying additional effort. You’re going to have make decisions about what’s important and what’s not. I would say that anybody who’s giving the reps 250 should think about what they’re doing. Marylou: That’s a very good point because another question that comes in a lot for me is this is our directive. How do I enlighten my manager that it can’t possibly be done in a way that’s going to generate a predictable outcome? Anthony: I don’t know that you can have that conversation. I think that a lot of people have to learn this by looking at the results and sailing over and over again. They have to have the experience of saying these people are making 250 calls and they’re not turning them into what we want them to turn into. Why not? Because they’re not reaching enough people, number one. Number two, they’re not targeted. If you have 250 a week, 1,000, you have no targeting at all. That’s absolutely a way to fail and not produce the results that you’re capable of but I don’t know that a rep can go to his boss and say that or her boss and say that. I think what they have to do is say what’s the process? There are two kinds of people, Marylou. There are people who believe that everything is their fault and people who believe nothing is their fault. All you can do is decide what am I going to do to succeed and I would tell you that would be find a way to look at that list of 250 and say this look like greater probability prospects than these. If you can make that slice, if you can say this 50 look better, and I’m going to double down on that so that I can produce the results that I want to produce for me, for my success, for my family and for my future and try to be as smart about it as you personally can. I will tell you as a sales leader myself, there are plenty of salespeople who are succeeding in spite of their leaders in just about every company on earth. Marylou: Yes. It’s interesting that with the new buzz word around account-based selling, it’s taking from it. I’m looking from a process record point of view. It’s taking those top 20, 40 accounts that you think are going to hit that high probability of closing, high revenue potential that you have a good conversation started with and those accounts you apply hyper personalization or what they’re calling hyper personalization of emails, of conversations, so that you’re getting to know that person at a deep level. I think that’s the reason why I’m seeing a lot more of rather than lead follow up, account follow up which is funny because that’s how Predictable Revenue was written originally. It was at 3 hour 15 minute sales process which means it was more of an enterprise based sale. There was more than one stakeholder that we had to get a hold of and have a conversation with. Somehow, that account lost in the translation as 250 a week, thousand records, they don’t all have to be different accounts but it turned into more of a machine and less about quality. Anthony: I don’t think that is the fault of the authors. I think it’s the fault of the people who believed that you can automate intimacy. Intimacy is what you’re talking about and I don’t really know what account-based to anything means but I know there’s account-based to everything. There’s like account-based coffee, account-based muffins, I mean, everything has been account-based now and I don’t know why. It’s like it’s the new social selling. Here’s the thing, it is targeting. Anybody who’s been selling for any number of years knows that you’re going to start with a list of defined targets that you’re going to develop intimacy with. That list is going to be finite. It’s not going to be 1,000. For me, I like the number 60 personally because I can make three phone calls a day, five days a week and cover 60 accounts in the course of a month which I would call dream clients. I’m going to go super deep on those and I’m going to get to know the people inside those companies. I’m going to create value for them. I’m going to nurture those relationships over time. I’m going to try to find my way in so that I can expand my relationships within that company. I’m going to create the intimacy where I know them and they know me as a value creator. Then, when they have an issue, they’re going to say you know what, we need to talk to Anthony. He knows us, he’s been talking to us, he’s been giving us these ideas for months or years. Now it’s very easy to make a decision to bring me in. That’s not something that lends itself to automation. I do think that there’s a place for content creation and content delivery and intimacy and creating that and sustaining it over time but I don’t think it can be done with eight mails that were written months and months ago. When somebody downloads your white paper, they get into a funnel where they get hammered with emails. I don’t think that that creates intimacy. I think that there has to be a human being that they’re communicating with and that human being needs to know something about them to personalize this or else it’s marketing. Marylou: Right. A lot of times, we’re also getting records that better cold in nature. We do target. We work through our ideal account profiles. We work through an ideal prospect persona that’s not a marketing persona but more of a sales driven persona. What I mean by that is typically the call to action for us top of funnel is to get that first meeting, to get that first conversation going or follow up conversation. We’re really looking at where people are positionally in the pipeline as we start having these conversations and trying to get a better sense of defining who they are and what their roles are or what their challenges are because they may be different or they may be languaged differently. When you talked about mindset before and getting your own internal mindset, what is your advice for people who do talk to multiple personas like an IT guy versus a marketing guy. Do they need to change themselves in order to be able to have these conversations? Are they always themselves but just languaging a little bit different depending on who they’re talking to? What would you say there? Anthony: I think it’s the obligation of the person who’s making the call to understand how to create value for the person on the other end of that call. If I’m a tech guy and I’ve got to call a marketing person, I need to have enough of what I call situational knowledge to be able to have a conversation with them about what I suspect is important to them or what I suspect their challenges might be and what I suspect their goals might be. That’s my obligation to figure that out. I’ll tell you what I see, Marylou, maybe this is what you see too. There’s an extraordinarily heavy reliance on [00:20:25] in a lot of sales processes now and because there’s so much of a reliance, a lot of salespeople have given up the idea that they have to have deep subject matter expertise because they’re always going to have [00:20:40] with them. The problem with that is you only need two things to be a trusted adviser. You need trust and you need advice. If you don’t have the advice because you’re not conversational and you don’t have the business document and you don’t understand that person’s role or their business well enough, and the only thing that you have is that you know a guy or you know a woman who can help them, then you can never be the trusted adviser. You can just be the person that knows somebody who can help them. I’m not saying that sales people aren’t orchestrators because for sure, we are. We are definitely leading teams on our side and on our clients side but the fact of the matter is you do need to have enough knowledge to be conversational with the people that you’re going to talk to in a day-to-day basis in sales. If it’s a marketing person, you’re going to have to do some work to understand that but it’s not that difficult to do. If you ask people to help educate you, even clients, if you say, “Help me understand what someone in your role need from a person in my role.” They’re going to be happy to share with you what kind of things they want and you can get that situational knowledge and that awareness of that quickly. Marylou: I think also another error that I find very helpful is if you’re in a larger company and you can look at some of the surveys that were taken on behalf of the client role like a marketing person being interviewed via survey and their responses to any type of loyalty or customer service or quality of service question and also challenges. You can get a lot of information by studying these responses and getting an understanding of how people talk. That’s one of the biggest things that I know my troops get a little bit weary or nervous about is how to use their language. I keep saying it’s mostly about your tone but there are some pieces of language that would be helpful so that they get a feel for, “That person understands me. He’s talking my talk. He understands where I’m coming from.” But like you said, it’s not a huge amount of effort to get this information but you do need to be consistent with the roles. That’s another area that we have a little bit of a challenge with this technology is that we’re sometimes fed multiple records, multiple roles. We can’t get within a rhythm in our calls if we’re not in charge of ordering our records in a way that we can make phone calls to certain people of certain roles during our block time. We have to switch ourselves around a lot which is really hard to do. Anthony: I agree with you. I think it’s much easier to get momentum. This is a mindset thing too. I see so many sales people who pick up the phone, they make one dial and it takes them 10 minutes to research and adjust to make the next call. That is just an ineffective use of time. What you’ll see high performers do is to do their research and then when they sit down and dial, they’re dialing and they get into a rhythm and they get this momentum. I do think that if you have to keep switching gears, it’s difficult. If you’re having one conversation over and over again with a certain stakeholder in a certain role, you get super confident at that and you get this momentum going where the conversation gets easier and easier because you keep having them all day. When you don’t do that then you keep switching the conversation, I don’t think you ever really get that rhythm. Marylou: I remember seeing one of the women as I was walking through the business development area. She had sticky notes on her terminal of three different colors. I was looking at that thinking, “Wow, what the heck is that?” I went to talk to her and she said, “This is my call log. This is who I’m talking to and they’re three different people.” She said she never knew who she would need to talk to next. She just kept notes in order for each of the three different roles on her computer, basically, so that she had the conversation pieces. I thought, wow, that is very inefficient. Anthony: But that’s what probably took her to be straight when she picked up the phone and called somebody. Marylou: That’s exactly right. For her, it was a nice fix of saying, look, we need to reorder your view so that you lump everybody and clump them all together. The other thing that I suggested and I hope people still do this is sometimes it’s easier to plan your calls the night before. Meaning, do the research you need to do on the people you’re going to call in you’re calling queue at the end of the day or the time when there’s a block of time where there’s not great phone activity and organize that. Then, go home, rest and your subconscious will work through some of those conversations so that when you do come in and do your blocks, then you’re going to be fresh and like Anthony said, you just start to talk and work your way down. That’s the best way to do it. Anthony: I think that’s right. You separate the research and the calling and you do get into a rhythm and it gets far easier and you’re far more effective that way. Marylou: We’re running out of time here, Anthony. I could talk to you all day. I was hoping if there are a couple things because a lot of my folks, some of them are new, some of them are doing all roles but if they were to like, “Okay, we’re going to take one thing away from this call that we can put into action.” What would you suggest? Using that word predictable again, thinking about mindset, what would you suggest that these folks do? Anthony: There is one thing and it’s the first chapter of my book, it’s discipline. It is to determine what the disciplines are that create predictable revenue. If that’s what you want, it means that you’re going to do x amount of prospecting every day. You’re going to do this much nurturing every day. You’re going to do this kind of follow up every day. It’s called discipline, you call them habits. I call them disciplines because it really is in my view, it’s a discipline. Anything that you do that leads to success, it’s the discipline consistent action over time that produces the result. It’s not the one day of prospecting that build predictable revenue and it’s not the desperate trying to catch up with 250 prospects. It’s specifically just the daily, day after day doing the same thing over and over again that gets you there. That’s what I would say first and foremost, put those processes in place and then execute against them with great discipline and that’s the secret. Marylou: I’ll be putting all these in the show notes, the links to your book. Where else can we find you? Anthony: Best place to find me is thesalesblog.com and then the other place is youtube.com/iannorino. I do a daily blog post and a daily video blog at those locations. Marylou: Wonderful. Are you going to be speaking anywhere? This is airing probably at the next month or so, are there any places that people can meet you in person that you’ll be at? Anthony: The only live event that we have on the calendar right now is the Outbound Conference on April 13 but if you keep your eye at outboundconference.com, there’ll be three or four more shows this year. Those are lead public events that people can attend. Marylou: You guys will learn all about the entire pipeline at those events, right? Anthony: That’s right. Marylou: This is not just top of funnel, it’s everything which is great. Thank you so much for your time, Anthony. I really appreciate it. It was great speaking with you. I love the book and I know that you shared with me there maybe another one on the horizon but we’ll get you again coming on the podcast when that one’s launched. Anthony: Sounds good, thanks so much for having me, Marylou. Marylou: Thank you.