Marylou:          Steve is a SAAS, Sales Podcaster, and expert. Working hard is necessary but unless you’re effective, you could just be spinning your wheels. Getting your head right and maintaining balance in both your life and your pipeline isn’t always easy.    Our guest today, Steve Underwood, understands this and has some awesome thoughts about making the sale while keeping your mindset right. After starting out in the auto industry selling cars, he’s now an account executive with a project management software company called Work Front. In this podcast, Steve reveals the importance of role definition in sales and development, actionable tips for building a predictable pipeline, and how to document your calls and keep the process moving smoothly. Hi everybody, it’s Marylou Tyler. I’m here with Steve Underwood. Steve is going to talk to us today about his experience in sales and things that he feels are important to know. As you guys are listening, I just want to let you know too that we’ll be transcribing this conversation. I’m sure there’s going to be a quite a few nuggets in here that you’ll be able to pick up. I’ll also be putting some key things that I learned in as much as, we all do certain types of sales, we’re all in certain types of verticals and certain types of markets so we can learn from each other and how to better present the sales conversation to our clients and prospects. Steve is here to tell us about how he goes about his business and also share things that he’s learned along the way that he thinks are value. Welcome, Steve. Steve:    Thanks so much! Appreciate it. Marylou:          You’re a Southern California boy, right? You’re down in San Diego way? Steve:              I am. I’m in Ocean Side California which is San Diego County. Marylou:          Are you originally from that area or did you transplant? Steve:              I’m a transplant. I grew up in Arizona and lived for a couple of years in Ukraine, of all places. Marylou:          Wow. Steve:              Kind of bounced back and forth between Utah and Southern California, I think it might have stuck though. Marylou:          Yeah. You like it where you’re at? Steve:              You know more importantly than me liking it, my wife likes it which I’m really ecstatic. Marylou:          There you go. Is she from the area as well? Steve:              No. She’s actually from South Carolina but she loves the beach and the kids love the beach and that’s the way it goes. Marylou:          Very good. Tell us how you started in this wonderful career that we’re all in love with called sales. Steve:              I appreciate the opportunity to share that. I kind of have sales running in the veins. My dad was a car dealer in Arizona. He was a general manager and a part owner of a Ford-Lincoln-Mercury-Buick-GMC dealer which is kind of an interesting mix of brands. Marylou:          Yeah. Steve:              I grew up working around the dealership. Started emptying trashes there and worked washing cars and whatever else. I remember when I was eight years old, my dad had some friends come in, they were going to buy a red Aerostar Van. We got out the big shoulder-mounted video camera whatever and I did a walk through for them. I did the whole walk around demo of the van and, “Oh, look you have air-conditioning, by the way you live in Arizona, that might be important.” That sort of thing. I was kind of hooked. I knew from a very, very, early age that I wanted to do sales so that was kind of the trajectory that I went on. I focused on presentation and speaking for years and I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to be exposed to a few different languages. I love languages and talking with people. I did the car sales thing from when I was 16 all the way through let’s see, I took a couple of breaks, a couple of years when I lived in Ukraine but I came back, got married and for the first year and a half of our marriage, I was selling cars and my wife goes, “Look, the money is great but you’re out 70 hours a week. Let’s find something different.” That’s when I transitioned into technology sales. Marylou:          So, technology sales, wow that’s—well, is it a similar environment for you or do you feel that it’s 180 from the car sales methodologies that you learned there? Steve:              It’s very, very, different but there’s going to be things that are analogous. I feel like my experience in car sales really actually gave me a very, very, strong foundation for the rest of my career in sales. When you have to focus on building a relationship with a person to lead up into a transaction that takes place half an hour from now, your family relies on your negotiation skills in order to eat, you really start to hone those skills. One of the things that I’ve been very blessed with and that I’ve honed over the years is my ability to negotiate and that’s really gotten me where I am. I have a lot of success because of that. Marylou:          The other thing that I’ll share with the group that in my limited knowledge of car salesmanship is the concept of habit. You have a very difficult job when you’re in that type of sales but you’ve got to be consistent and you’ve got to continue to do the things that you need to do and blocks of time in order to create the sales that you need. I’m sure that as you brought your skills into technology was habit as well as negotiation a big part of what you brought over? Steve:              It was. The other thing that I focused on, I make it a habit to look at what is the 20% of my activities that are delivering 80% of the results and then I try to use more of my time doing that sort of activity. Whereas, I do work hard but I try to work hard on the most effective things, there’s a difference between efficiency and effectiveness right? Marylou:          Yes. Steve:              Efficiency is being able to do a lot of things. Effectiveness is being able to do the most important things. I try to spend my time doing the most important things and the things that bring value to my employer and my customers and that has really served me. Marylou:          Do you focus on the entire pipeline? When you think Marylou Tyler, it’s sales process but it’s also just top of funnels. It’d be from starting conversations with people we don’t know, taking it all the way through to what we call a sales qualified opportunity. Tell us about your typical sales pipeline and if you cover all roles. Steve:              In my company, we are very blessed as account executives to be able to have a very strong lead development, account development team. They are doing a great job of filling up our funnel. I do a lot through social media, LinkedIn. We have some LinkedIn sales navigator so I do have accounts that I go and I engage with. The vast majority of my pipeline comes from those folks that are feeding me and filling up that top of the funnel. I engage with them from the hand-off from the ADM, account development manager, and I do my own discovery call, schedule a demo, and if we have to get multiple demos we can do that, face-to-face conversations, we can do that. Negotiations, contracts, legal, all that. I actually own the account through the first year and then hand it off after that first renewal to a corporate account development team that the manager’s expansions from there. Marylou:          You mentioned a couple of things I want to share with the group. One is that it sounds like there are distinctive roles. I’m going to ask you more about that but you also have account managers at the end of it all and you mentioned that renewals so are we talking a SAAS product primarily that you are involved in technology sales? Steve:              That’s right. My company that I work for is called Work Front, their base out of Salt Lake City. They do a work management software that focuses on marketers and also on project managers to be able to take collaboration and help the whole team be more effective and efficient. It is a SAAS software, we’re entirely cloud-based and that presents some interesting challenges as well as of course some great benefits. We know from Sales Force that the deferred revenue model is a little bit tricky but if you have the right amount of renewals, if your clients are happy, then it can be extremely profitable for both sales reps and for the company. That’s how we run things, it’s entirely cloud-based. Being that is the case, we are not setting up an array of servers for the client and having them sign a contract and walk away. We have to make sure that customer satisfaction and customer success is stressed from day one through second year, third year, fourth year, fifth year because clients really can just vote with their wallet, if they don’t like it they go away. Marylou:          That’s true. Tell us about the hand off piece. One the things that being out in the field with the clients who are introducing this what we call separation of roles where we have a business development team, we may even have a marketing business development team that follows up on what we call inbound leads which are marketing qualified leads, what was the biggest challenge that you saw in getting that setup so that what the business developers create for you has quality throughout? Steve:              I think sometimes there can be a little bit of a conflict of interest. Whereas the sales reps, we don’t make money on these things unless they close. They have to be a real opportunity. The account developers don’t make any commissions or any money off of it unless they get a qualified lead. I think sometimes there can be this tendency to maybe toss over something that is less qualified. We had to do some training but it’s also helping the account executives and the business developer to help them understand who their customer really is. I have three customers. I have my employer, certainly a customer, I have my client, and I have my account development folks. I don’t really gather people that are partnered internally but I want these guys to be successful. I want to make an impact on their career so that they work with me for six months or twelve months and then they can move on into whatever other field they want to move on or if they want to stay there and continue being successful, that is something that I want for them. I do weekly mentoring with these guys, we do strategy, we look at the templates that they’re using. We look at the industries we’re approaching, the specific accounts we’re targeting, we look at messaging, we look at what are the case studies that would resonate with these types of customers and how can we craft a campaign. I’m very, very, involved with them and try to help them be successful on every level. Marylou:          Yes, and I think that one of the other learning points for the listener here is that Steve said that he does this on, did you say weekly basis or is it by weekly? Steve:              That’s weekly basis. Marylou:          That’s a key component of creating a predictable pipeline is to be able to constantly go back, review the sales conversations that are working because that is going to drive what your messaging looks like, it’s going to drive how you place the conversations depending on when people are entering the pipeline, and it also gives the business development team a confidence level that they are going to be passing over and what they pass over will actually be accepted by people. That’s a big, big, thing and we strive for a 90% acceptance rate from the people who are developing the original lead, the sales qualified lead to what’s accepted. Can you help us understand what percentage that our—like if I do ten qualified opportunities for you Steve, how many of those actually make it to acceptance? Steve:              With the guys that I work with, usually ten. We’d have to get much broader sample size to decrease that because it’s not going to be 100%, there are going to be those that just aren’t a fit that maybe felt like it to the ADM. These guys recognize that I’m not here to disqualify their stuff, I will do everything I can to bring it into the funnel as long as there really is an opportunity there. They’re passing me really quality stuff. We’ve got a great working relationship. They recognize that I am their customer and they need my trust in order to be successful. For the most part, they have it, they do a fantastic job. Frankly, that’s a really hard job they do so I try to make it as rewarding and easy as possible. Marylou:          It can be a very difficult job but because you are going back to them with regularity and sharing with them what you’re encountering in the sales process and the actual conversations that you’re having further into the pipeline, it can only make them stronger and more confident to be able to turn better leads to you. What I really want to emphasize here is not to set it and forget it, it’s constantly going back. Do you role play with them as well or do you just review together as a team? Tell us about that review process that you go through. Steve:              I haven’t role played with them. I’d like to start actually. I just reviewed Predictable Revenue. Actually, I was listening to it last night on audiobook as I was working on my truck. I got through the entire thing. The role playing and things, those are things that I’d like to start to do but I do the weekly reviews with them. We go through things that we’ve already talked about but I also do post-mortems on each every call. Right after the call finishes up, I call them and I get their thoughts and mostly I really focus on kind of drawing out to them what I can do to be better, what can I do to make you more successful, what thoughts do you have on that call. If it was you on my side of the desk, how would you have handled that differently? Would you focus on anything else? A lot of these guys are going—and I think they view themselves as junior but I look at these guys and they’re not junior, they do very good work in a very hard job. Maybe they have aspirations to be an account executive, a lot of them do. I will help them along the way but I really try to get them to put themselves in my shoes and understand how they could do what I do in their own way. It’s that post-mortem coaching that happens on every single call. The other thing I do is if it’s an opportunity, I convert it right then. It’s an opportunity right after, five minutes after the phone call is over it’s converted so they don’t have to wait. That immediate gratification for a job well done is something that I think is extremely valuable. Marylou:          That’s yet another learning point that we discover as we’re helping clients is that the what we call management by objective, MBO. When a business developer turns over an opportunity, the AE has to respond within a certain period of time. It sounds like you’re just way on top of that one which is great. A lot of times, if the leads sit, they’ll get colder and colder and colder. The fact that you follow up right away even though it sounds like that’s a Steve thing as opposed to a company mandated, that is going to also add to reducing the lag in the pipeline as you get further in. Steve:              If you have a company SLA on it, the SLA is two hours but I just had an ADM talk to me the other day she goes, “Man, thank you so much for converting us so quick. I’ve got guys that I’ve been chasing since March 4th or 5th. That was 3 weeks ago, that is nuts.” Marylou:          I know. It just doesn’t work. These are little nuggets we’re learning from Steve as you’re considering how to put a process in place. There are definite levers, there are definite checkpoints, there are definite time-sensitive hand-off points that you want to make sure that are in your pipeline methodology so that people like Steve can take that ball and run to the close with it at a lot higher conversion rate. Tell us Steve, once it gets into the pipeline, let’s pretend that you have a close loss. What, if any, conversations do you use with the close loss on your team to learn from that and maybe change some of the messaging or change some of the methodologies as you start grinding through a lot more of these opportunities especially when it comes to close loss. I’m curious to hear how you manage those. Steve:              That is a great question. I’m going to have to talk to how I would do this in an ideal world. My direct manager left for a VP level role at a different company back in January and my new one doesn’t actually start until the end of June so we’ve been without a team lead for a long time which has really caused some interesting things to happen on the team itself. The way I would do that if, say if I were the director of the team or if I was participating in it, I would go back and I would look at the whole cycle. How do we set this up from the very beginning? I feel like from the very first conversation, it’s as if you’re drawing back the bow and letting the arrow fly, you can’t change the trajectory of that arrow mid-flight. Really, the negotiations, the closing starts on that first call. There has to be a mutual respect there. As you go back and you look over at the conversations, you look at your notes, which by the way for any sales reps that maybe listening, any managers that maybe listening, I would strongly encourage you to take copious notes throughout the process. Have your CRM tool open and actually document what happens on each and every conversation because that will help you especially as you start working 10, 15, 20 opportunities, whatever that number is, so you can circle back around and remember what happened on that last conversation. Like Aaron said on the book, sales reps have a reputation for being ADD. If you’re not documenting those conversations, you’re going to forget about them and you’re going to get de-railed. Also document and kind of point out somehow, maybe have a different field available in Sales Force that shows you what was the initial challenge that they came to you with. On every conversation, circle back and go, “Okay, are we getting closer to addressing this challenge with you? Do you feel like this is something that’s going to work?” Because as you continue to bang on that drum, it gets them away from the feature functionality comparison that often happens. Back to your question of how I would handle the close loss, I go back and I review the notes. I review the conversations. A lot of times, I can point to a very specific conversation that happened either on the phone or face-to-face where I lost the deal. I was listening to a podcast recently between Tim Ferris and Josh Waitzkin. They’re talking about these elite athletes where they’re no longer looking to shave off 10% improvement or anything. Now, they’re down to the ½% improvement and you’re a millimeter away from ultimate success or complete failure. I’m not a professional athlete, I feel like I’m good at what I do and I’m just barely getting to the point where I can identify ‘that’s where I lost it, that’s it right there.’ Marylou:          That’s awesome. I love your another teaching point about note-taking. My background originally was in contact center so this was before the internet. That’s how long I’ve been around. What we did there, we had a predictive dialing system and that’s what I love about meeting up with Aaron back in 2008 when we first got together, 2009, was that when I was looking through what he had done for Sales Force, it reminded me a lot of contact center. The predictable revenue model look a lot like predictive dialing model. The difference was on predictive dialers, whenever you disposition that call, it has to be filed somewhere. In order to file it, you have to wrap it up. What I teach my folks now is every call, as you said, has to be wrapped up and it takes 30 seconds to a minute to do so. The other thing that we do is we put codes because Sales Force is not necessary or CRMs are not necessarily set up for distinctive yields for wrap up, nor do we want to overwhelm the sales person so we teach them a couple of basic codes that they would put in the first position of a comment and that are going to tell us whether we’re on track. For the pain point of like what you mentioned, the original challenge, there is a checkpoint on that wrap up, are we still aligned with the original challenge or has it gone sideways? If it’s gone sideways, big red flag. We need to get them circled back in again. The other thing we did is when we wrap up is we get sentiment. What was the sentiment of the call? How did you react to the questions? How was the customer’s reaction? Again, very brief, one to two words, and that’s it. The last thing we do is we put something for keyword analysis for the marketing people because if they’re using language that you haven’t heard before or they’re saying things phrase-wise that didn’t sound like you’ve heard before, we want to know that, from that call. Those are the kind of things we wrap up. Like I said, it takes 30 seconds to a minute, sometimes three minutes if you’re really being detailed. But if you’re having three to five meaningful conversations a day, that’s not a lot of time out of your day to do that type of wrap up call. The data that we collect from that is just gold because we can do a qualitative analysis on it, we can do phrase analysis and frequency analysis just by running a simple report and dumping it into these analysis tools that are available now on the internet. I love that you’re doing that. Steve:              I would be very interested to see kind of a screenshot of something you get out of that. Maybe it’s a different conversation I had this morning but I’m a total nerd. I think most guys are kind of techie but I’m an absolute nerd. I used to be in the closet about it but I’ve come out, I’m a nerd. Those sorts of things just really fascinate me. Marylou:          Most of the people that I’m attracted to are—because I’m an engineer as well, so we love data, we love numbers but now we love words and text because we can take the qualitative data and there’s analysis, free analysis all over the place that you can run word and frequency analysis and get two, three, four, five, word analysis to see if there’s anything common and that feeds right back into marketing so that they can start really being and living in the mind of the buyer. Because you’re tracking along the way what stage you’re at when you had these conversations, they can prime up the right content at the right time with the right message to the right buyer. Steve:              It’s beautiful. That’s a very, very, sophisticated marketing department. Sophisticated organization that can do all of that but if you are in an organization that has that sort of capability, you’re very, very, fortunate. That’s incredible. Marylou:          Yeah. Having said that, what have we been using in the olden days, Excel, to track all of that. We basically feed in the information that we want. We outline the stages as column and then pretty much the rows are the different types of things we want to be aware of when we hit that stage for that buyer. It’s fun. It’s fun to do and like you said, if you do these analyses often enough, then you’re going to really create a reduction of lag and that’s really—I don’t know if you remember page 42 of The Predictable Revenue book, is a formula that I have lived my life by and I wrote a second book based on that formula which is Predictable Revenue is the funnel itself so the pipeline plus the average deal size plus time. All of the things we’ve been talking about just now reduce lag and time is a killer in terms of creating conversations with people you don’t know, taking it all the way to close. Steve:              Close all deals. Marylou:          Yeah, there you go. In closing, we’re kind of running out of time here, I wanted to make sure that you shared with the audience everything that you want to share and also how do we get a hold of you if people are like, “Wow, I like what Steve’s doing, I’d love to have a chat.” How do we get a hold of you for that? Steve:              How much time do we have? I want to make sure that— Marylou:          I usually like to keep somewhere between 18 and 22 minutes for podcast calls. As you know, we’re driving, we’re going places so sometimes we don’t have a lot of time. Steve:              I’ll do my best. I wanted to talk about a couple of things and I’ll tell the group how they can hear more, learn more about me. I think that our mindset in our profession or really in our life in general is huge. That is something that I’m keying right now in a very big way. When I talk about mindset, it is as broad as you can imagine. Everything from I’m going to envision how this sales call goes and I’m going to envision the outcome that I want and try to help that come into place. First thing in the morning, you reset your mindset and make sure you’re focusing on positive things and being grateful. Everything from that. There’s been studies done where they’ve taken groups of people and they had a control group that didn’t work out and just kind of a typical thing, they have a controlled workout. They have another group that they had a meditation regime where they would have them focus on their physical body and how they would like that body to develop whether it’s more muscle, fat loss, skin tone, everything. They would focus on that. They found—that group by the way did no workout routine, they found out that that group that just did meditation and worked on the mindset, achieved 90% of the results as a group that had a controlled workout routine. Marylou:          Wow. Steve:              They never hit the gym. If anybody in the room here wants to start to look at that, I’ll show you some tips that I learned from Gary Schwertner, he’s the CEO of Selling Car magazine, he’s a wonderful man. If you want to affect your mindset,  actually have an affect on your mindset, I want you to go ahead and reach both arms up above your head and put your hands and fist kind of like in the victory stance and just hold that there for 30 seconds. This is your physiological state affecting your emotional state. If you’ll do that, you’ll start to see a difference in your mood. Another thing that you can do is you can go for a five-minute walk outside and as you’re out there, notice the smell, notice the sites, notice the sounds and be really present on that walk. Again, five minutes. The third thing you can do is keep a gratitude journal. This could be something—I use the five-minute journal, it’s fantastic. You could certainly use just a spiral notebook and write down three things you’re grateful for whatever, but those things will have a huge impact. Another podcast that I believe I—maybe it’s in the book, you have to correct me Marylou. The concept of being ‘our poor and your rich.’ Marylou:          That wasn’t in the book but I like it. Steve:              Okay. We look at our lives and we go, “Oh man, we got ten things we need to fix or more.” And we go, “I’m going to do all these things.” This is why new year’s resolution fail. We have five of them but if you will take on an hourly basis or on a daily basis, and go, “Okay, I’m going to focus on this, this little thing.” Your mastery over that little thing, over the minutes and the hours and the days, will have an enormous impact on your years. Marylou:          That’s awesome. The gratitude one. Another one I’ll add to that I do before I get out of bed so I’m still lying down, if a dog isn’t sitting on me trying to wake me up, I’m lying down and before I open my eyes, I think about five people in my life for whom I’m grateful to have . I thank them for whatever it is and let them know I’m grateful and then I get out of bed. Steve:              That’s wonderful. Marylou:          I’ll add to that and the gratitude journal is wonderful too. All these things, it’s so true about getting out in nature, it’s so true about doing that victory. I’ve heard that before and it does lift your spirits. We’re in a tough profession. We are not necessarily seen as a noble group of folks at times but this profession has given back for me. It’s just the most fun I’ve ever had it’s in this field. Coming from engineering, I feel blessed that at the time that I got into it, I had no option because we were selling disruptive technology. The reps who were selling at that time walked in one day, they are all fired and the engineers were told, “Okay now, you’re salespeople.” Little pat on your head, a little wand on your head, “You are now a salesperson.” Steve:              Bippity boppity boo. Marylou:          That’s how we got into it. I love that. I think mindset is a big—do you have any reading materials? I know you mentioned the One Gentleman, anything else that you follow that you want to share with our group as to if they want to learn more about that. Steve:              I do talk about that some on my podcast and blog. My blog is kicksaassales.com.You can also listen to my podcast there so I talk about mindset a lot just because again, I’m a total nerd. There are some other things out there, Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. Marylou:          I read that every year. That’s one of my new year’s things that I do is I just I re-read that book. Steve:              How to Win Friends and Influence People, oldie but a goodie. There are a couple other ones, The Miracle Morning for Salespeople. Marylou:          Okay. Haven’t heard of that one. Steve:              That one’s fantastic. Those are the kind of things that I’m into. The other things that I do, frankly I’m a Christian and I don’t know if you talk much about spirituality but I try to do start off every morning in prayer and reading a little bit of scripture. Those kinds of things really affect my mindset in a huge way. Marylou:          I think all of those things are very important because balance is a very important thing. Whatever we need to do to have that balance and keep it as a ritual, as a morning routine, whatever you want to call it, habit. If you do these things every day then your body settles into a really nice rhythm so that when you do get on the phone with people, and I can tell just by speaking with you that I’m sure your clients must adore you because you’re just so calm and confident and helpful and that all comes across just in the way you speak. It’s awesome. Steve:              I have some that love me and some that don’t talk to me. Marylou:          Yeah, okay. Well, very good. Steve, I’ll put for everyone listening to us, Steve’s contact information inside of the show notes and his podcast. You should really hop on there and download that as part of your listening education as you work through how to better yourself in your career and your life, whatever it is that you’re looking to do. Thank you so much for your time, Steve. I really enjoyed our conversation. Steve:              It was absolutely my pleasure.