How are you using technology to boost your sales prowess? Is there more that you could be doing? Do you like your CRM, and if not, how would you improve it? Today’s interview may give you some ideas.
Today’s guest is Jordan Stupar, the founder and CEO of Sales Domination. Sales Domination is a company that provides CRM and technology tools to individuals as well as small, medium, and large companies. Listen in as Jordan talks about his company, his background, and how he thinks technology is affecting the sales landscape.
Episode Highlights:
- What Jordan’s company does
- Jordan’s background
- Which areas of technology Jordan focuses on
- Technological enhancements that can be used to improve meaningful sales conversations
- Using data to improve workflow
- How technology is improving analytics
- How analytics can suggest next steps
Resources:
Transcript:
Marylou: Hi, everybody. It’s Marylou Tyler. This week’s guest is Jordan Stupar. I hope I pronounced that last name correctly. He’s the founder and CEO of Sales Domination. When I was talking to Jordan about what we should talk about today to enlighten you all, he covers a lot of the things that we worry about on a day to day basis. We’re going to start the conversation and let him drive the learnings, the tidbits, those nuggets of information that you guys will need in order to start more conversations, more meaningful conversations and do it consistently so that you can scale your business.
Welcome, Jordan, to the podcast.
Jordan: Hey, great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Marylou: Let’s start with what you guys do so we can kind of get the context around the conversation for today, especially how you could help the business developer, be it account executive who also does prospecting or other areas that we may not be thinking or aware about when it comes to starting conversations with people we don’t know. Let us know what it is where you focus and why you decide to stay inside that area and expertise.
Jordan: Yes. What we do is we provide sales technology for individuals, to small, medium, and large companies as well. Many people would call us a CRM company, I know a lot of businesses know exactly what those tools are. Really, the whole point of what we’re trying to build is to be something a little bit more refined and at the same time a lot more comprehensive when it comes to helping salespeople and sales managers get their job done the right way.
My background is I come from about 17 years of sales experience. I’ve done door to door, I’ve done retail, I’ve worked in call centers, inbound, and outbound. I’ve been a top producer in many of them. At the end of the day, the biggest problem I always wanted to solve, I’ve always been entrepreneurial, I’ve always wanted to solve the problem of the technology that salespeople use. That’s what I’m passionate about right now. We’re building a company around those values of saving time and being able to simplify things.
Marylou: When we talk technology, a lot of the terms especially in the SaaS world, my SaaS clients, they use the term “stack” to define the number of applications that they’re using on a daily basis. They’re up on their monitors, they switch back and forth. There’s basically a threaded or feathered approach where they’re on one screen and then the technology comes in as needed.
The fact that you’re focused on tech, if we think of the triangle of technology process and then the people side of things, where are you seeing the greatest fit for helping the rep maximize return on effort in respect to technology? What areas do you focus on in the technology area?
Jordan: Yeah, great question. I would say that the thing that we’re focused on the most I would say is our highest value as a company which is saving people’s time. Back again, being a sales rep, working in a call center with my sales job. I just started looking at statistics and I found that the average sales person is spending 62.3% of their day doing non-sales related activities. I saw that between looking for prospects, then doing manual data entry, updating notes, switching between all those different tabs, and their text stack, was just a great waste of time because salespeople, we get hired to do one thing and that’s to sell.
As I was using different CRM, different dialers, different screen share tools, and different go-to meetings, and so on and so forth. I just felt, a lot of the time, overwhelmed, that I wasn’t actually doing things that I was supposed to be doing which again is sell. Where I see the greatest opportunity using technology in that triangle that you mentioned is the relationship between the technology in the software products and then the people that are actually responsible for using them. Then, how that relationship between technology and sales people actually helps influence managers and executives within companies to actually make good business decisions based on data that a salesperson is entering.
What I see from doing a lot of studying and being involved in this industry is there are tons of problems. Salesforce, obviously the largest CRM company, 91% of all the data that goes into any CRM is inaccurate or goes bad within 12 months. That’s a problem on its own. There’s also a problem for managers and decision makers above the sales people running a company that have to make decisions based on bad data. The conversation that I really love having at a really high level is what are we doing with all the data that we’re having from all these interactions with customers? How do we streamline the sales process? How do we streamline the communication between sales and marketing? How do we streamline sales and marketing into customer service? So on and so forth and really right now it seems that the rabbit hole goes pretty deep.
Marylou: Yeah, definitely. I know that 62.3% number is a really important number for our listeners to absorb because that number also means maybe there’s bad habits being formed as it relates to technology—in the use of technology. We hide behind technology as a way to excuse ourselves from having these meaningful conversations. Really, technology, I’d like to think of it as more of a form to our functions. We really need to amp up the number of meaningful conversations we have. One of the best ways to do that is to leverage technology. A lot of times we get stuck behind, “I got to have this, I got to have that. I got to put this in.” It turns out like you said, this overwhelming factor comes into play basically paralyzing us.
As a technology expert, where do you see taking the typical sales scenario where our goal is to have more meaningful conversations a day. What type of enhancements or technology assistance should we be putting into our daily rhythm in our stack?
Jordan: Yeah, good question. One of the inside jokes that we kind of have here at our office between our developers and our sales people, the conversations that we have is usually a line that starts with, “What’s better than?” For instance, what’s better than doing data entry? The inside joke response would be not having to do it. What’s better than figuring out what email to send to the CEO of this company? Not having to do it. What our real goal here is not only just to help utilize technology to make things faster, make it easier, and simpler to use. At the end of the day, what we want to do is be able to use all this data that’s just hanging around and analyzed it so we can build algorithms, technology that takes away some of those time consuming actions and just automate them on the background while the sales person gets on to that next more meaningful conversation.
Really, at the end of the day, there’s a lot of different ways to do it. I would say the biggest challenge that we have is the company looking at all these tasks and put them in a way that they are automated. Again, they’re just so many.
When I think that we’re pioneering some really great tools that will help automate a lot of some of that, like you said, paralyzing list of things to do in so far as the sales process is concerned.
Marylou: The other thing I like about what you’re saying is that one of the things I come up with a lot is the concept of workflow. This other term I like to use called block time where we’re trying to singletask our conversations whether they be telephone conversations, email conversations, social admin time, and put it into blocks of time that evolve around our buyer. Technology is the best resource for us to figure out in our day when is the best time to call, when is the best time to email. That information is out there but we don’t leverage it as we built our daily workflows.
I love the idea that you’re taking that data, the previous history, what we call scripted data. We’re using it to create more of a predictive environment as to when we should be having these conversations, with whom should we be having them, and what should we be talking about. All those things are what I’m hearing from you, you’re leveraging in the technology stack so that when we do get on the phone and we are belly to belly–so to speak–with our prospect or buyer or even an existing client, we have a relevant conversation that has been curated on our behalf so it’s meaningful in nature, it resonates with the buyer, and allows us to then get into our sales group and talk to them about why it’s relevant, why it matters to them now, why they should move now.
That’s what I think what you’re doing, leveraging that historical or other heuristic data that could come in from the internet or elsewhere gives us that advantage.
Jorda: Oh, absolutely. Everything that you just said is exactly what I stay up late and wake up for early for us to figure out exactly how to deliver that to CRM users. There’s a lot of data out there. Like you mentioned, a lot of people, we can kind of make sense out of it but how do we actually apply it to our work or salesflow. Some of the things that we’re doing are just a button click away from being able to get that data and get that information.
At the end of the phone call, if you call somebody everyday between the hours of 9 and 10 o’clock and you’re telling the system that the person is unresponsive and you can’t get them on the phone, well, why doesn’t our system tell you next week on a Monday when you walk in, “Don’t call John at the hours of 9-10. Why don’t you try calling that 4-5 PM because obviously what you’re doing isn’t working.” Switching up the contact list and just being smart about the way you’re actually contacting people.
Furthermore, once John does pickup the phone, have you actually done your homework? Homework is something that’s very valuable to do. You figure out people’s affinities, their interests, hobbies, activities. Again, that takes time. You have to Google somebody, their company, find their Instagram, or Facebook, or LinkedIn profile, and read up on them. What’s better than doing your homework? Not having to.
We built in an enrichment feature inside of our system. I’m talking on the phone with Marylou here, I can click an enrichment button, use your existing contact data which I have inside my system, it will go and scrub the web looking for your bio, look for your profile photo, your LinkedIn, your URL, your Facebook URL, any of your social media, so that I can go check out what you’re into before that conversation. Some of the features we’re building are again, along the lines of that inside joke of what’s better than doing your homework, well, not having to would be the answer.
Marylou: Right. On the other side of that, I’ve already shared this experience with the audience that I had a piece of software that popped up some information socially on a particular prospect I was calling, discovered that he liked a type of beer. It was like a smoking something beer. I thought, “What the heck is that?” When I contacted him, I warned my first sentences that I spoke about, “Tell me about this beer that you like because I’m also a fan of the various microbreweries. I’ve never heard of this type of beer.” We went into a conversation about that. Then, it turned around because there was this trust and rapport that was developed just because I had an interest that he also experienced an interest in. We were able to take that conversation and move it to a business conversation. From there, we moved to a next step.
Had I not known that ahead of time and I didn’t do any research, it popped up and alerted me of the things that he liked and some interests he put it as something he want to talk about or was interested in. That made a difference, I think, in this conversation. Not only that, it shortened what normally is a two, sometimes three, call step for me to one call. Instead of taking an hour or 15 minutes, I took 20 minutes, boom! Talk about saving me time. That really made a big difference.
Jordan: Exactly. Yup, very valuable.
Marylou: Let’s switch now to analytics. As part of the technology stacks and technology, we also have analytics. As you said, sometimes the analytics are there but if we’re not savvy enough to know what to look for, then, we’re not going to find that gap, that needle in the haystack. Are you saying now that technology can actually do that for us and then serveup the next day’s workflow and order that next higher maximization of return on effort for us? Is that what these systems that you’re working on actually leaning towards?
Jordan: Yes, there’s different steps. Right now, there’s a lot of predicted tools out there based on data which is awesome. Obviously, being able to predict things is better than nothing. What we also want to do using the data that’s continuously being put into our system is being able to analyze it and use experience data as well. For instance, we’re developing a personality profile tool based on the contacts that are inside our CRM.
Again, if I’m contacting for instance Elon Musk, a very direct character. Somebody that probably doesn’t have a whole lot of time to fool around with your ideas, he’s fooling around with his. If I’m writing him an email, what do I want to write? I don’t want to write things like, “Hey, Elon. I’d love to stop by at your office at 9:00 on Monday.” Instead, I might want to consider writing, “Hey, Elon. I will be at your office at 9:00 AM on Monday. See you there.” It’s more direct. It’s more of a commanding type of “I’m going to be here,” rather than a suggestion or something that you actually have to reply to.
When it comes to behavioral and personality trait type of data, what we’re leaning towards is taking all the data analytics, all the reports, and all the different things that we would generally have to look at and then decide on what to do. We’re going to develop a system that will basically be able to write up the email for you based again on the contact that’s inside the system. We’ll be able to make suggestions like Grammarly does based on how you’re writing your sentence. That’s one side of the thing.
The other side of this system is being able to provide managers and c-suite executives or people that are actually responsible for making business decisions the data that they need to so that they can make the right decisions right now with sales people not entering in notes with the fact that 37% of sales people don’t even use their CRM. Business owners, the executives, the managers, are forced to make based on bad data which leads to a big problem. We’re trying to automate the data entry process because sales people don’t want to do it. They’re not going to ever do it. They’re not detail oriented people. I know I’m not one.
We’re going to be automating the data entry process where there will be no sales person ever that have to use their keyboard to write data entry on what happened on the last phone call, why should they? Wouldn’t it be a little bit easier if we just recorded the phone call and converted this speech into text?
Marylou: Yeah. It’s funny that you say that because I can see how right now we have to budget, obviously, in a non-tech world. I actually have disposition codes that the reps key in. My argument to them is, look, we have maybe five meaningful conversations a day. This is business development. This is basically for an 8 to 10 opportunities a month, we average around 5 meaningful conversations sometimes each day. My argument to them is is that going to kill you? Thirty seconds to a minute to disposition this so we have our codes in place. There’s picklist for call disposition, picklist for next step, and then comments they do have to enter. Again, we’re trying to even simplify that process so they just put the main keywords, pain points discussed, etcetera.
When you do these to your speech to text analytics, how do we get that so that it can then suggest the next step? Is that what your software does? Or is it recording it on their behalf and then they still need to navigate where they’re going with this record? Just like in call center, you know in call center, they work you in predictive dialing system. You have to disposition the calls so it knows where to file it. Does your software actually act as a switching station as well based on the keywords from the text analytics? Does it kind of know where the stage is next whether active pipeline or inactive pipeline? Or is it still lit up in a direction on the sales with executive saying the next step is this particular position in the pipeline.
Jordan: Good question. Right now, it’s a little bit more of the latter than the former because we’re acquiring all the data that we need to. For your listeners, I think, this would be something that sounds like baking a cookie. It should be very simple and it should be done already but for some reason it just haven’t. Our idea of a good time is to have a sales rep, make a phone call. The only interaction that they’re going to have with that contact file after hanging up the phone call and selecting the disposition, from there we’re going to take the call recording, convert it into text, upload the note of the phone call so there’s no manual data entry.
After that, in the background while the rep is on to the next phone call, we’re going to be running the text through a separate API and a separate computer, that again more and more data. We’ll be able to say that your girl, Helen, on the phone, when she calls a prospect and says, “Hey, just looking to check in to see if you got the email.” We can literally report back to her and her manager that when she says, “Just checking in,” or “Just following up,” if she’s found tentative. When she’s found tentative, Helen’s closing ratio goes down by 42%.
Instead of traing her on closing technique, maybe we just need to train her and take a couple of these tentative founding speech informations out of her vocabulary. There’s a lot of really cool things we could do with that data.
Marylou: Yeah. The only thing that I love, I do this as a research analyst is that we take keywords out of the data—adjectives, nouns—and we start building a sentiment database by persona. We also know that kind of health nature of a conversation. We can’t articulate the tone but we can understand the use of words and how that translates to sentiments which then translate to challenges that they may be having by persona.
That helps us organize eventual content assets. If we’re seeing this person, a caller duty who is basically coming up with a pain point in call number one and further into the sales cycle, she ends up with pain point number five, and call number ten, whatever it is, we can actually see that transcript. We can see that transition from what she thought the initial challenge was, what she articulated with the initial challenge was to actually what’s important to her that got her further into the pipeline.
This is a huge win for marketing. They’re never getting feedback or very seldom getting feedback from the actual sales conversations that are happening by sales. With your tool, it’s very simple then to organize these adjectives and nouns with the existing databases that are out there into sentiment which would help marketing then to organize the assets and also look at levels of awareness at the same time.
In addition to sales skills, we have now marketing insights. And then my hoping is, okay, what is the next step? What on average if we talk about this pain point, positionally, the pipeline, where do we go, are we still active, or do we go inactive, what happens? The combination of all three, I think, is very exciting, what you’re doing in taking that text analytics, and having it available in text format so that people can do further analysis on it.
Jordan: Absolutely. I’m certainly excited about it myself.
Marylou: Yeah, definitely.
We have a little bit of time left. I want people to understand where they can get ahold of you. You do have the CRM, does it compete with the existing CRMs? Is it […] on? We’re do you see yourself positioning in the market so that people will know where you are relative to what their needs are?
Jordan: Yeah. I’ll just be candid. I don’t think that there’s probably any of your listeners or anybody I’ve ever spoken to that’s actually enjoyed the CRM. It’s more of those understanding that it’s better than using the spreadsheet so this is what I have. These conversations I had with people, I don’t think that there’s many people that is walking to work and getting excited to login to their CRM.
Where we’re at in the market, we’re a newer company and we’re solving some big problems. Where I see us going is I see us being the dominant force in CRM technology calling again, communication technologies. We’re going to be creating our own indigenous apps, if you will, that people typically have to purchase separately, and keep tabs open on a browser such as screen shares, conference calling, proposal tools, invoicing, so on and so forth. We want to really condense all the different applications separately for, and then have to train on, and have it all located in one easy place.
If you’re even a little bit satisfied with the CRM product that you’re using right now, there’s probably a good reason that you and I as a listener should jump on the phone for a couple of minutes to figure out what your pinpoints are and what you would actually like to use or see your CRM do. We integrate with a thousand other different apps, all the things that you’re using. We make it very easy. Our pricing, I think, is well underpriced compared to the other things that are out there.
Just want to talk to other business owners, the executives, the sales people, about the problems that they’re having. If I can provide any value at all, I call that a good day.
Marylou: Perfect. Remember, everybody, the name of the game now is computing or actually curating compelling conversations. Technology allows us to do that because it’s tracking for us what we said on the phone, what we said on email, and essentially scouring those conversations so that we have a very good profile of our person that we’re talking to on the other end of the line, and also where to go next, and what to say next. That’s the biggest thing that salespeople can use is this whole what they’re calling enablement. Enablement is only good if you’re in the moment with your prospect. The way to do that is to curate data that you’ve been collecting over period of time with conversations you have in similar prospects or personas.
Jordan’s software sounds like if you’re really focused on not only saving yourself time but curating those compelling conversations so that the next conversation you have, like I experienced, went from an hour, 15 minutes, or 20 minutes, down to 20 minutes. That’s huge savings and also compels me to make more calls because I’m going to have more time of my day to generate the types of opportunities I’m looking for.
Jordan, thank you so much for your time. I very much appreciate it. Before we go, I’m going to put all your links on your web page for the podcast. Why don’t you let us know right now how we can get ahold of you? I know you have your own website. Give us the website for the actual software as well.
Jordan: Yeah, absolutely. If you’re interested in doing a little research on us, you can go to dominatesales.com. That’s where you’ll find all the info. You can schedule a demo with me, with the pricing, so on and so forth. Then, if you’re interested in actually personally reaching out to me, I am very active on all social media platforms, @jordanstupar in Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, you name it. I’m there. I’m very responsive.
Marylou: Yes, because you’re in the biz, you love to have conversations. I always tell people, my phone number, and my Calendly are on my website, that means I love to hear from you. Very few people pick me up on that which is kind of interesting. Same thing with you, it’s nice having these conversations. If anything, pick his brain, learn about where he’s going, and I think you’ll see that some of these older CRMs are nothing more than data repositories. They don’t really help you sell better, help you sell on purpose, help you save time, and maximize your return on effort. It’s the newer ones that are going to give you those tool at a touch of a fingertip. Again, you don’t have to think, it all just happens right before you when you click on the record, all the relevant informations come up. What could be better?
Again, Jordan, thank you again. I appreciate your time.
Jordan: Thank you, Marylou. I really appreciate it.