Predictable Prospecting
Common Environments that Breed Sales Issues
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This week we’re chatting with the CEO of Score More Sales and the president of Women’s Sales Pros, Lori Richardson. As an expert in helping people become better leaders, build better sales teams, and ultimately increase company sales, Lori is here to explain the most common environments that breed sales issues and what you as a salesperson deserve from your manager. Lori is also a champion for women in the sales industry and we discuss her reasons why companies aren’t getting the strong female job candidates they want and need.
Episode Highlights:
- Why Lori Richardson is so passionate about working in sales
- Pinpointing the pain of sales issues in a team
- The top triggers that breed problems in the pipeline
- The metrics of a good salesperson
- Coaching a sales rep
- Why women in sales are the next big thing
- Workplace assessments and coaching
More From Lori Richardson:
- Check out Lori’s company Score More Sales and follow them @scoremoresales on Twitter
- Visit Women Sales Pros on the web and follow @womensalespros on Twitter
- Want to speak directly with Lori? Send her an email at lori@scoremoresales.com
Quotes: “It takes many ‘whys’ to get to the bottom of things”- Lori “At the top of the funnel, companies are more alike than not”- Marylou “You have to have somebody in your corner, specifically your sales manager, and they need to coach you and help you develop professionally”- Lori “To see leaders who are both men and women, who are different ages, young and old, it’s really important to be able to see that because it helps people to better envision themselves in those position”- Lori
Episode Transcript
Marylou: Hi everybody, it’s Marylou Tyler. Today, I have Lori Richardson who’s a CEO of Score More Sales and she’s also the president of Women Sales Pros. I met Lori through the Women Sales Pros organization and I was extremely impressed by the work that she’s doing for women in sales. If you’re a woman listening to this which I know my audience is mostly male but if you’re a woman listening to this podcast I’m hoping you’ll be inspired by the work that Lori has done but she’s definitely someone you’d want to connect with. At the end of the podcast when she gives us her contact information, please write it down. It will also be in show notes because the more women that we can get involved in this organization the better. Lori welcome to the podcast.Lori: Thanks Marylou great to be here. Marylou: Tell us about your area of expertise and specifically what I like to do on this podcast is to have a couple take away, a couple tips or things, or just food for thought that people listening will want to ponder after we disconnect. You’re really focused in the area of leadership and I’d like you to share with the audience what specifically in that area. Are you focused on that get you up in the morning and wanting to really help the world be a better place when it comes to leadership? Lori: That’s great. It’s just a pleasure to be here and to speak with you and your audience I have been looking forward for this. I have to give you a little bit of a background before I tell you why I’m so enamored with what I’m doing right now which I really am and I wasn’t so much a number of years before. What I used to do, what I did for a number of years was sales training and some coaching. It was very much reactive for a long time even though we like to tell people were not reactive, we’re working with companies in a more holistic way. The fact is that a lot of companies perhaps some of the leaders listening to your podcast today think all of a sudden, “Oh, we need a speaker to come in for our website. Let’s do a workshop when we get everybody in.” And that’s reactive. It’s based on kind of the flavor of everyday. And for a lot of salespeople, they don’t appreciate that, giving different ideas at different times and nothing really cohesive. What I found for me was that it wasn’t very rewarding at the end of the day when I look back to think about companies and specifically people that I’ve made any impact with. I had a big change a couple of years back and really started working with the leadership teams and companies when they realize they have some sort of a sales issue and from their helps to figure out if in fact they really did know what the issue was, to help confirm it, and kind of do an EKG for the sales team if you will, kind of medical analogy and the help solve the issues. What happen in our company and in company that we work with is that it’s very holistic, it’s very easy to see the whole sales ecosystem and to see how everything works together to make sales revolve. It’s not anyone training, it’s not anyone coaching, it’s not anyone person, it’s everything punching together which I think you could really appreciate. Marylou: Yeah, definitely. You mentioned something that really resonated with me and that was the term, “When they realized they have a sales issue.” How is that manifested? I know it’s a variety of ways but the coming to the awareness is really a key element in all this and not unlike going to the doctor, you have a pain but you may not be able to isolate where the pain is, what the pain is doing to the rest of the body but how are you able to drag that out of the sales leaders? What is actually going on? Lori: Yes, that’s a good exercise for sure. I think a general comment about leadership is that, it takes many whys to get to the bottom of things and as people talk about peeling back an onion. The first answer to usually not the real issue or the symptoms and it’s not until you really go deeper generally speaking. But we do an evaluation of the sales course and it includes metrics and pipelines and people. Between all of that there’s a vast amount of data that gathered and gives us a lot to look at together come with the leadership team. That’s the short answer. I think people see the symptoms and they feel the symptoms. One of the best times as I’m sure you would agree to is when there’s a change in leadership either on sea level or sales leader level because that’s always a fresh opportunity. People are lot more open to seeing what issues might be going on. I also like very much working with the type of sales leaders who are big picture thinkers, who want to work themselves out of the job as one of the senior VPs are work with Ted. He was okay with finding out what flaws he has and what hand he may not have in the current sales situation. I come in as more of a secret weapon and an assist then anything confrontational which is what a small minded person tends to think. Marylou: Are you saying that a change in leadership is a natural time when it make sense? Are there any other triggers that you come across more often than not is to when people finally thrown a towel and say, “Okay, we’ve got a problem here.” Lori: I’d like to ask you the same question. It varies, sales are down, competition’s up, what worked before is not working anymore, the market’s change. I think there are a lot of things that happen. What do you find? Marylou: For me, since it’s sales process, the all of a sudden the pipeline is filled with gunk, it’s sluggish. There’s a physical aspect to it in my world because in my world there’s tangible visual signs whereas with you, it’s skills and metric. I’m just curious how you’re able to bubble up that pain to the top because of the fact that it is manifested in ways that you have to know how to drill down. Not very many people are good, not even consultants are good at that drilling down process, the five whys whatever you want to call it. It sound that you have a metrology with your folks. Lori: We use some different tools to do that and I do try to stay very data oriented in the beginning. For example, we’re helping a leadership team to bring on a sales leader or a sales rep. We start from a very metrics focused position rather than personalities and good feelings and take it from there. There’s definitely some strategy involve in that. Because, do you want someone who can sell or do you want someone that you like, that you can hang out with? I find that people get very hung up on candidates whether they’re for a leadership role or for a sales rep role because of an unusual feeling and I want to find out what do they really can sell and if they have the characteristics or the DNA to be successful. Marylou: That’s a good point. Once again, in my world I feel very fortunate because it is numbers, it is activity that is forward movement and not necessarily activity for the sake of activity but activity with motion. And because of that the testing process, the on boarding process and really the interview process is very much habitual driven type of interview process. I hear this all the time from the sales people, I’m sure you do too. Every account is different so we have to go through different process. I believe that and I applaud that but in top of funnel they’re more alike than not. We’re like speed daters at the top of the funnel. We want to get know you just enough so that you know you can trust us to get to that next step but then when you get from opportunity to close then you’re getting engaged, you’re meeting the family, there’s a lot more going on there and what you guys do to me is just magic and how you figure out the right people to get to the close. I’m eternally enamored with what you do. Lori: Sales organizations are more alike than not too. That something I always hear, “Oh, no but you don’t understand. Our company’s really different.” That’s a very common theme I’ve heard for a long time, working with companies. Marylou: Yes, very long time. I think from the sales cycle point of view, in selling, to get from opportunity to close, there are different levers that you pull. But nine times out of ten there’s going to be a pattern there and it’s sometimes new ones but there is a pattern. The same thing with what you do, I would imagine, when you’re trying to diagnose just like a good physician. I just had knee surgery for example and wasn’t sure exactly what part of my knee was giving me problems so the doctor took me through a very involved diagnostic not a test with machines but just question that they ask me of how I moved, of what I did. I’m assuming that’s exactly what you’ve come up with your folks is to get through that way. That’s fabulous and fascinating, cool. Lori: Really changed the satisfaction level for what I do because we see sales team. The revenues rise, people who are not happy they’re just engaged don’t stay usually or they move somewhere else to another department because you can hide in a sales team for a while. I work a lot with manufacturing companies and older businesses. I’m not in Silicon Valley working on cutting edge staff typically although we have technology clients and that’s my background. But I found that people can hide for a good while before they’re found out and what they’re trying to do is they find out who really is working on creating more opportunities and who isn’t. Marylou: The other thing too that I see a lot is as you mentioned hiding because the ability to track and data enter what’s going on in the sales cycle is horrendously inadequate now in terms of CRM compliance, whatever you want to call it. It is more difficult with distributed teams and I’m sure you work in organizations were teams are spread out all over the place. It makes it more difficult to manage and to figure out where those holes are. You look out the spreadsheet, you see the forecast but how reliable is it really? I would imagine that there’s just a lot or working parts that you deal with in your processes. Lori: I think that sales people, because of the hard job and it’s a career, you have to have somebody in your corner specifically your sales manager and they need to coach you and help you develop professionally. Good managers do this no matter how skilled the salesperson is that you can always take someone from where they are to approve a point from in my opinion. I’ve seen that with athletes and I see it a lot with sales professionals as well. What sometimes happens is that sales leader says, “They know what they’re doing. I don’t really need to add to their development or maybe I don’t think I can as a sales leader.” But I really think that salespeople deserve that. And they deserved to be coached on a regular basis weekly, one on one. Marylou: How long of a coaching process is that typically per sales rep? What do you think? Lori: Time? Marylou: Yeah, is it 5 minutes? 20 minutes? 30 minutes? How much time do you typically see? Lori: I personally like 20 minutes in commence for a lot of things because it’s not 30. 30 is a half hour. An hour of time slot is a lot. You can meet with someone and convey what you need to say and get feedback and have enough time and not be too rushed then that’s the right amount of time. That might be 12 minutes or 15 minutes. I think the important thing that you have it and honor that time, have it on the calendar. It’s not like huge side coaching you know as I am walking by. It’s much more than that. Marylou: To relate to that in the work that I do, we put that coaching in as part of the block time. There is a set time where the reps are making telephone call. They build up from some percentage of time to about a two hour block is what we do. In the warm up process we do role playing and then when we’re ramping somebody fresh were looking at coaching them almost on a daily basis until we get ramped up to point that their producing the way they should and they’re feeling comfortable in the role. After that point in time, then there is periodic training that we put in. but it’s somewhere in the 20 minute range as well, once a week. Once they are seasoned but when we start out, we meet every day, me as a consultant of the team and it really works, it really does. Lori: It shouldn’t be a surprise if someone isn’t up to the standards that a leader wants. I know sometimes personalities get involved. I’ve seen it we’re a manager won’t even talk to the rep because they think they don’t listen. Whatever it is, they create some issues and you should always know where you stand in a sales role and you deserve to have a good leadership. I guess that’s the biggest thing that I want to say about that. Marylou: Let’s switch gears now and talk about your other passion and that’s a how met which is the Women Sales Pros. I will admit to the audience and I admitted this to you that I never really thought about this is a challenge issue, something that we’ve need all work together on. Having been on engineering all my life, the only girl graduating from my engineering class, it just never really dawned on me that we were faced with crisis is too strong. We have some challenges, women in sales. Lori: Yeah, absolutely. In the number of industries, technology of course, technology, manufacturing, distribution, telecom, oil gap, there’s a lot we could name. There’s a lack of women in a sales role and a real lack in leadership in fact DiscoverOrg held a data set recently and found that just 12.8% of BP sales and above are women. That 50% of college graduate are women. We’re actually more than 50%. There are more women graduating than men from colleges and universities and yet everybody’s looking for more salespeople and sales leaders. There’s definitely an opportunity. There are some companies that really is dire for them to find more really good rep and while I don’t think that every woman is necessarily a good candidate, I think that they should look into the possibility if that’s their interest and at least see because what I learned in doing a lot of panels this past year with sales leaders was that about 75% of the women sales leaders I talked to had someone on their immediate family who is in sales or entrepreneur. What that tells me, this is unscientific but I believe that there are a lot of women who don’t know the great possibilities of a sales career because they’ve heard the negatives and the negative persist and yet it could be an extremely flexible job opportunity, career opportunity and also a very high paying one if you compare a marketing career to a sales career. Millions of dollars difference in someone’s career timeline. I just want more women to know about the opportunities and know that sales have changed so that it is very much a profession where you can help other people, you can solve problems, you can work collaboratively, bring great communication skills and use empathy. I mean what a great career. Marylou: One of the things that I wanted to share with the group here is the “aha” moment that I had when you were telling me about job applications and how they were worded. That was just mind boggling. Why don’t you share that with the audience. Lori: Yeah. There are some studies that have been done and there are actually companies that can go through now with all the data tools we have and find words that are more male focused than words that are more female focused. For years a lot of companies have looked for sales people who were athletes in college, for example. I did that myself. We would want a former athlete because that’s someone who is competitive, tenacious, hardworking and yet there’s not a direct relation to being successful on sales. That’s not to say there aren’t some former athletes who do very well. I also know a lot of athletes who did not do well in sales. When you put in words like that in the job description or even things like competitive. I’m a very competitive person but I didn’t necessarily look for jobs that competitiveness was at the top of the list. A lot of women are like that where, “I can be very successful and I’m not trying to close someone.” It’s like a verb to close them and kill them. It’s not a war with me and that’s a difference with words between women and men in a very general level but words matter and if you’re not getting a female candidate for sales roles quite often it’s either the way the job was written or the way it’s been written up and presented or it’s the atmosphere in the sales for the sales team. Marylou: For homework everybody, for those of you who are looking for sales executives, business developers, account managers, account reps take out your job descriptions and come over them and see if they are written from a “male point of view” and try to make them to be more enticing to everyone. Lori: Show them to get it from different points of view, from different people that can be another way and get some good feedback. Marylou: Right. When you showed that with me, that was a major “aha” moment for me because I never really thought of that. I think most of the people listening to this call are thinking the same thing. It never dawned on me. Lori: I gave a talk at INBOUND HubSpot. A big marketing conference and there were more than one, there were at least two young women in the room that were telling me about their hostile sales environment that they put up with a lot of locker room talk or just kind of a fraternal feeling and you would not think that in this day that would happen. The other thing is if you say, “Our job descriptions are fine.” Nothing’s wrong with that. What do other people say about your company? What does it say on glass door and what’s the reputation among former salespeople there? Because that matters too and I like the leaders that stand up and set the tone for the atmosphere in the company in general and in a sales department as well. Marylou: Definitely. We’re closing in on the top of our talk today and I wanted to make sure that for those people who were listening and want to get involved, especially on the Women Sales Pros side. What’s the best way to reach you to offer guidance, to get assistance? How do you refer? Lori: Most people can find me through Score More Sales one way or another on the web lori@scoremoresales.com, @scoremoresales on Twitter and @WomenSalesPros on Twitter. We talk to a lot of companies through Women Sales Pros about leadership topics as well. It’s not just women we work with a lot, a lot of leaders who are both men and women. Marylou: Definitely your expertise is the umbrella, leadership is the umbrella and then underneath that is the ability to cross all boundaries and Women Sales Pros is one of those areas that is an off shoot where you’re really focusing on awareness and action and moving. That’s great Lori. Lori: Right. That’s what it is. It’s the action because they all get it but nothing’s really changing. Marylou: Right. If I’m a corporation, are there ways for corporations to get an assessment? How do you work with companies? Lori: We definitely work with companies. I talk to HR executives quite often sometimes they’re looking for a candidate and while we’re not a placement agency around so many different leaders and companies that I know. I tend to kind of match people up. People that are looking for candidates or people who are looking to find out what the opinion is of their sales team. We come in and we do some evaluation that way as well. Happy to talk to anyone about it even if it’s a quick question or a quick answer. Marylou: Yeah, And then you have the, and I’ve attended this, the annual get together and speakers, mentoring. If you’re a women sales pro out there who’s unaware of this organization, the other thing that you can do to get back is to mentor and to come speak and share your experiences because a lot of this sharing of experiences gives people that courage to take that next step sometimes. You just need to hear that someone has gone before you in order to say, “You know what? I can do this too”. Lori: I think to see an example, to see leaders who are both men and women, who are different ages, young and old, it’s really important to be able to see that because it helps people to better envision themselves in those position. For companies that are losing women in sales, that’s part of it too. To retain people, they have to be able to see some of kind of a growth path and a growth plan. Marylou: Well Lori this has been a wonderful talk. Thank you so much for joining us today and I will put all that information about how to get hold of you in show notes. For those of you who’ve wrote down furiously but didn’t quite getting all, it will be on the show notes with Lori’s picture. Yeah, we’re looking forward to hearing how this is going to help our industry and get people better leaders and then a lot more women in sales and you’re just taking on that role. We you appreciate what you’re doing to get us further along. Lori: Thank you so much. It’s my pleasure.