Is your CRM driving value in your business, or just something that people see as an administrative burden? If the latter, check out this episode where I talk with Kevin, an expert in how companies get the most out of their CRMs.
Is your CRM driving value in your business, or just something that people see as an administrative burden? If the latter, check out this episode where I talk with Kevin, an expert in how companies get the most out of their CRMs.
Welcome to the sales management podcast, your source for actionable sales management strategies and tactics. I'm your host, coach CRM co-founder, corey Gray. No long intros, no long ads. Let's go. We're going to have a great show today. We're going to be talking about making your technology work for you.
Speaker 1:Don't let the tail wag the dog and I've got Kevin Asher here with me, one of the strongest sales operations minds in the game. We're going to talk about tools, training, integration, winning how it all fits together. Kevin, good to see you, great to see you. Corey, thanks for having me. I love it, man. Well, here's the thing I don't think. People set their tools up in a way that works for them and all of a sudden, people start getting frustrated. Oh, I hate my CRM. Crm is hard to use. People aren't using it right and at the same time, you've got sales teams that are hitting their goals, that aren't executing, meeting and meeting out the way that they should be, and it's all kind of scattered all over the place and kind of a mess in some companies. Some companies have it nailed down, but I want to bring you on today because you're the guy that goes in there and looks at their system, so give me a stay through the union. What are you seeing in terms of how people have their tools set up to support their business?
Speaker 2:Well, usually, let me just say off the bat we're usually brought in to untangle a pretty big knot. Most of the time, when we get the call, things have already gotten pretty critical. So it's a little bit like cleaning up a crime scene, and the reason why it gets to that point is actually pretty easy to understand. Companies obviously start as startups and usually there's a guy maybe not literally a guy or a woman who takes on the CRM admin as a hobby job, as a hobby, but ultimately their butts on the line to bring in revenue. It's probably the first salesperson, or it could even be the head of marketing, or it's the company founder who gets it set up in the first place.
Speaker 2:So these people aren't trained, nor should they be, in database design, ui, ux or any of the disciplines that these companies get bigger CRM's usually rely on. So it ends up being kind of a Frankenstein system that just grows over time, like those snowballs or like the cartoons when people are fighting and the big snowball and goes down the mountain, all you see are arms and fists and kind of a big mess at the bottom. So what that ends up meaning is that oh, a hack here, a collage there, and before you know it, you have a pretty unfriendly, undesigned kind of mess of the system and now, all of a sudden, reps are being whipped over the head to use this thing. That's kind of this atrocious mess. That's typically how we how we have these problems start in the first place.
Speaker 1:Okay, it's an atrocious mess. So if it's an atrocious mess, that leads to something that I've seen twice this week already and it's only Monday, so that's a lot where the pipeline reviews are being run. Yeah, there's something on the screen from the CRM, but it's narrative driven, and sales leaders that they're asking a bunch of questions and people are just talking and the things that they're talking about are not represented in the screen, which is where you think all this information would be.
Speaker 2:Isn't it amazing how frequently that happens? And so ultimately, these one on ones end up, you know, really being more of a data quality. I mean, if you boil it down, it's what you're talking about, corey it's inaccurate or incomplete data, so they're talking about things that aren't even represented in the system, and then it's usually hey, is this, is this opportunity really at this percentage, should really be at this stage? And then it's a. It's a question over the, over the data, whereas I these conversations a lot more useful when there's actually strategy, when there are decisions being made, when there's higher order human brain power at work and not just either regurgitating or going over data points that aren't recorded anywhere.
Speaker 2:So it ends up being, I think, a source of frustration and just a big waste of time, where the better solution, I think what you're, what you're intimating, corey, is either this should already be in the CRM, where one on one is going over a common dashboard, a common set of information, and then I'll add to that is out of the data that get. How does that data get into the CRM? Usually it's all put on the reps shoulders, which is why they hate it, which is why they say it's a waste of time, whereas a lot of the information can be inferred, can be calculated, can be incorporated from other sources of data and don't have to be put on the backs of the. The rep to and I'm doing the finger quote here on radio keep the keep CRM up to date. Yeah, give me to that burden is unfairly put on the reps.
Speaker 1:Okay, so there's a couple things I want to dig in there. First of all, what are a couple examples of things that should be automated to often art?
Speaker 2:very often the opportunity stage itself. Next steps, if there's a company. Next steps is one of my favorite. Usually we're putting in as free form text and very often when we've, particularly where we have a pretty standard set of sales milestones, where, let's say, there's an initial call, discovery leads to demo, leads to aligning stakeholders, where there's a very predictable set of phases or steps, next steps can often be calculated and default value put in, so if the sales person forgets to update it, at least there's a baseline. That's pretty accurate, got it?
Speaker 1:Well, that's on the calendar to the next steps. On that's. The thing that drives me nuts is that people say the CRM is a system of record. Well, what's a better system of record? The calendar, because that's really the system of record. If it's, if it's happening in the future, that's where it's going to be most likely. So why don't companies do a better job of integrating their calendars into their CRMs when it comes to setting up next steps?
Speaker 2:I think most of them, the ones who don't probably aren't aware of how easy it is and how the major CRMs and now I'll just make the disclaimer, my expertise is in Salesforce more than any other CRM, however dynamics or HubSpot, salesforce, of course, they all have ways to automatically capture sales peoples. By capture I mean, from a data capture, sales people's emails and calendar entries, whether they're using Gmail or outlook to keep track of their calendars and emails. So having someone's next calendar meeting with a prospect can automatically get entered into the CRM, can get entered into a next steps or a next meeting field without literally having to do that. And often it's just overlooked by by companies not realizing that it can be done, or some. There might be some addressed, unaddressed concern about security and data sharing. You usually, once those discussions happen and the customer becomes clear on where data really is being stored in where it's not, those concerns go away. So usually, cory, it's a lack of education and understand it.
Speaker 1:Yeah because I can't tell you how many times I see pipeline review means I mean one of the things I love doing so with our consulting firm, close loop, one of the things we do on the front end of engagements and assessment, and we understand where's the client struggling today. You know, let's look at metrics, let's look at call recordings, let's look at reporting, let's look at the CRM, and one of the things I often find is that, a the next steps fields are mess. And B when I listen to the pipeline review meetings, they're talking about next steps and what you're telling me is that it's not hard to be able to just automate pulling next steps from the calendar where they already exist, pushing them in there, or potentially saying, hey, there's no next steps on the calendar, alert, alert, alert, salesperson, you can do something about this or not and push to work to them. And so it's not a conversation in a meeting, it's something that tools actually work for us on.
Speaker 2:That's right. So let's, let's, let's think more about what typical next steps are like. As you said, cory, very often it's a meeting. Now the meeting usually falls into the category of have we met all of the relevant stakeholders? So meeting can be oh, we haven't met with the, you know, we haven't met with the executive, or we haven't met with the ultimate you know, with an end user or who's going to actually be using this software or this product. So a meeting can often be it's identifying and interacting with the new stakeholder.
Speaker 2:Those things also should be tracked and, again, can be automated within a CRM of do we have the contact roles on these opportunities, what's their sphere of influence, their attitudes towards us, that that sort of thing. And it also meetings are often about, you know they can be gathering requirements, needs for proposal, where the meeting is about negotiating a proposal usually can. There's a relatively fine I topic that meetings know what the meeting is about and who it's with, and a lot of those things can either be Automated, like we're saying, with email and calendar capture, as well as Using the intelligence tools within a serum, such as sales force, to be able to quickly identify your. You have a deal in Negotiation stage, yet you have no economic buyer identified or interactive engaged with on this opportunity there, for this is a big risk.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's not the task of a sales manager. Here's the thing. I think that a lot of people, just because they came up this way and they've seen it before, they think the task of a sales managers to manually go through and inspect all that stuff and ask questions. Let's just silly, because that's not a high order activity. Your payments people a lot of money to really smart people. What sales managers are uniquely positioned to do is break down barriers, coach, develop people things like that, not nitpick. Is this data typed in the place where it should be typed in? Computers can do that for us.
Speaker 1:Computers can do that for us, yet it amazes me, how many I find there in general there's a laughing so hard right now you can't hear everyone, but I'm just looking in space and say I just see tea.
Speaker 2:Because I'm thinking of the two sort of cartoonish, so frequently I kind of different ends of the spectrum. One is, mister I back slapper. That's all about. That's very not data, not report, not analytical, yes, all about the relationships, in which case getting them to even log in and see the value of serum can be challenging. Then, on the other hand, the other, the other end of the spectrum, is the mister spreadsheet, mister, missus spreadsheet, who's who's face and nose is so far deep into the numbers.
Speaker 2:They don't spend any of the time coaching or developing, and I guess what I'll say is the ideal vp's are the ones in the middle, the ones who could recognize that a well architected serum With current modern capabilities will do the vast majority of the spreadsheet work for you. It can surface hey, this deal has been close, date has been pushed multiple times, we have no economic buyer identified, there has been no meeting for two. All these things that spreadsheet jockeying and report jockeying Is apparently supposed to do can be done for you, presented on one simple, easy to understand screen. So then, quarry, they could spend those one on one again discussing the strategy, the, the weather. Enough pain has been in uncovered, with the, with the customer all what you're gonna do about it.
Speaker 1:What you're gonna do about it. That's the conversation. The helpful conversation with the manager is around. What are you gonna do about it? Not what is the fact right? Yes, it's not. Oh, it's hot outside. It's oh. What am I gonna wear? It's not. Oh, the boat sinking, it's oh. How do we get to shore right? The yes, wayne Gretzky skate to where the pucks going, not where it is. Yes, great.
Speaker 2:So CRM's when, when, bill, should, should your expectations should be that they are extremely accurate in giving you your current temperature check and your rear view mirror of what's happened through now, all of your sales and related opportunity and pipeline activity. And then, as far as let's take it yet, what are you going to do about it? Again, the CRM can't tell you how to sell. That's not what they do. Right, again, what they can do is start to tie together different data points. They can show you the correlation that your opportunities are. Your opportunities that are sourced from partners are four times as likely to close as, let's say, sourced from a trade show. Well, that's just the fact. What are you gonna do about it? Is that, you know, in line with your business strategy, or is it? Yeah, you know in or not? Those are the conversations that you know that that should be happening on top. You know because you don't have to spend time Is. Is your pipeline up to date? Is it really?
Speaker 1:Well, and I think I'm gonna I'm gonna dig into that example you just gave, because what would I often see? So let's, let's say that Opportunities are four times more likely close at trade shows than from just outbound. Well, that's across the team. And if we look at the individuals within the team, what we're probably going to see is that for some of the folks, opportunities are six times more likely to close a trade shows. And for some of the folks they get all these leads from trade shows and they put up goosex, they close blue Tarski, zero point zero. Opportunities.
Speaker 1:Anybody's under thirty probably don't know what I'm talking about. Go watch the animal house. It's great. Zero point zero.
Speaker 1:So what ends up happening is you get distracted by the summary metrics. I think I'm gonna say these there's these guys out there that say you shouldn't have to go to college to be in sales. What I agree with, that you don't need a college degree to be in sales. But if you're gonna be a great sales manager, you need to be pretty dang good at math, you pretty dang good at critical thinking, you need to be pretty dang good at a lot of things that college makes you good at. So if you didn't go to college, that's fine, no worries. But there's a lot of things that you gotta learn if you're gonna be really good at this stuff. Because the back slapper can get by doing you know just fine. In the right environment. You know rising tide floats, all boats, your blacks back slapper, when everything's just going up and up and up, you can be great.
Speaker 1:But at the end of the day, if you're not in a position where you can understand the data, slice and dice it and then understand what to do as a result of that Because, yeah, four times more likely from trade shows cool, but what do I do now that I know that some of the team six times more likely and some of the team is zero Trade show wins? Now, all of a sudden, I've got tailored coaching opportunities for each individual on my team, and that's what really strong managers are able to uncover when that data is working for them, when the tools are working for them, and then they can go coach, which is what human beings are uniquely positioned to do, at least for now, until I take over, that's right well, I'd say that you know, your story reminds me of when I knew it was time for me to get out of direct sales and do something.
Speaker 2:Slightly different was when I was in the audience at a. I was working for a large media company at the time and the head of sales was up on stage bragging of being being a C plus student and that's fine and all like you said. But I was an A plus student at a pretty fancy school. So I felt a little out of place and afterwards asked her well, if the C students Are destined for sales, where the students? The answer was product management, which I ended up getting into technical consulting, and so I guess everything worked out in the end.
Speaker 2:But what I would say to add to your point Doesn't matter what your grade point average or you know anything like that in school. The best sales managers you may not need to know exactly how the technology works, but have an appreciation of what it can do for your business and be open to those ideas, such as Having the analytics come out of the page for you and using predictive analytics and using automations in other types of Generative tools to have work done on your reps behalf. Again, you don't have to know how the sausage is made, just know that it tastes good and focus you know on when developing your people.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love it. I love it well, and I think this is another place where we see sales methodology to be so important, because if everybody on the team is doing something different, then it starts to become sloppy. Because, I'll see, I did it analysis project years ago and what I found? I was looking at discovery notes and I was trying to correlate the where I just I don't know why I did this. I just probably bored, it's probably Saturday and I was like, well, I don't watch TV, so let's just do this. So, because that's what I do sometimes.
Speaker 2:It was probably college football started up again.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's not a big college football fan, it's I can't keep up with. It's like pro wrestling if you miss it, if you miss, if you miss a week of pro wrestling, use toast because you don't have a storyline anymore. You miss half a season to college football. You're like I don't even know who these players are anymore. But it does help you with your fantasy draft of you if you really get a college football and you don't know what the team, like mine, didn't smoke this week. But anyways, the the idea with the sales methodology is ensuring that the team knows what to do at each step in the sales process, at each step in the conversation with the prospect. And if you don't have that, then all of a sudden you've got a world where you've got the CRM, you got all this information in there and then you've got these discovery notes. So the project I did whatever it was project knows. Is that all right? Let's look at the word count of the discovery notes and see how that correlates to sales performance. And what I found was that the best sales people had the least number of words in their discovery notes and the worst sales people had the most number of words and their discovery notes. So I'm digging into that a little bit more.
Speaker 1:What I what I realized was that the top performing sales people in this company I was looking at was just one company, wasn't some grandiose study.
Speaker 1:Well, they'd been there a long time and they were just executing on talking to the right people, uncovering the winning zone, pain points that they saw for them, disqualifying folks that didn't have those, and then closing deals and they didn't. Then it was more transactional products, so they didn't feel like they needed to write down a bunch of stuff. The underperforming salespeople, on the other hand, which is type and type and type and type and type, and I said this one guy I think he had the average 600 words per opportunity of a note and it was just words. It was just like the whole story of what happened in the meeting and all of that type of stuff. And it was confusing because at first glance you think, okay, well, did they just write it all down and just paste it here and didn't take a moment to summarize it and figure out what's actually going on? Or are they just trying to put a bunch of words in there and so they can show their managers that they're trying?
Speaker 1:And I think, what I realized was that if you are unable to summarize and synthesize and analyze all what happens in the meeting and abstract that up to here's the core of the deal and here's what needs to happen next, then you're gonna be in trouble and that, right, there is something to CRM. I mean, maybe large language models can get there and maybe that's happening to some extent. They need to be well-trained in specific instances, but the salesperson still needs to be able to say, okay, over the course of 30 minutes. Here are the three salient points that I abstract from that extract, from that and that's the deal. And if that's in the CRM and if management can glance at that and either say, thumbs up, based on the stage this is in, this is good, or hey, let's coach on that, because it seems like we need some improvement opportunities and use the sales methodology to backdrop and so everyone has a common language and knows how to have that conversation. That's good stuff. And that's a monologue for you, brother. What do you think?
Speaker 2:Well, I think I'd interpret with your one company study, one company study. I think I'd interpreted a similar way that the experienced, successful reps knew how to distill the salient points down to a few key words and key phrases, while the less savvy ones were basically they didn't know how to summarize and do that higher level thinking. Now, as far as where CRMs are today, and with voice transcription and analysis, call summaries are now becoming table stakes. So, whether it's a product such as outreach, is Kaia or Gong or Salesforce's Einstein conversation insights we are very quickly getting to the point where having an hour call summarized by the system as far as what was covered transcription, for sure, that's been around for a little while now, but even just distilling the call down to its key summaries. And then to your point, corey, if you have a consistent methodology, there are gonna be certain conversation topics, actual words and phrases that you expect to be used. So now, all of a sudden again, these different systems have similar functionality where you could set those as tags or basically as signposts for the engine to be searching for, and so you can very quickly start to do some machine based scoring or at least analysis of.
Speaker 2:Did we go through a consistent set of discovery questions. You know, when a competitor was mentioned, how did we handle those things? Did we just? You know, again, there are more and less effective ways to handle these different situations and we're also getting very quickly to the point is based on the outcome of this call. You know, if they ask for more pricing, can we have the system automatically, you know, generate the first draft of the email with that more pricing Again. Where things are very quickly going to is if you imagine each salesperson had their own personal assistant to do the grunt work for them. That is very quickly becoming a reality. So that's, you know, that's what's very exciting these days, because you know salespeople well, it's a double edge for salespeople. It's very easy to complain that their time is spent doing admin, non-selling stuff. Well, pretty soon you'll have automated assistants doing the non-selling stuff for you.
Speaker 2:Now you gotta step it up, yeah, you better step it up, because that excuse is going away.
Speaker 1:It is. It is Well, you know what else I'm seeing. Now that we're talking about this, I see a huge opportunity for folks to practice some really strong management skills. One of the most important management skills is being able to edit what someone else has done and move it along the assembly line towards production. So any world where you've got someone that's junior to you, that's doing a bunch of work especially if it's around research and content development or things like that the more senior person's gonna be in a position where they can they can edit, they can get feedback.
Speaker 1:And what we're seeing in your example is that the computer is acting as that junior person that summarized the meeting and the salesperson is acting as that senior person, saying all right, well, let's look at that old summary, that chat, gpt, whatever it came up with, that's right, okay, well, nailed it. Nailed it, missed it. What about this other thing? Tweak it. And all of a sudden, you've just spent two minutes on the summary with a higher level thinking process and you're developing this skill. That's critical if you're gonna move into management. Have a big team.
Speaker 2:That's right. Yeah, you're absolutely right, and what you know I've been. I have some gray hairs in my head, I've been around for a while and so Looks good, man, you got a lot of black hair too.
Speaker 1:You got a little salt and pepper thing going on. Yeah, I got a little salt and pepper, that's right, all right.
Speaker 2:So, sorry, ladies there's a ring on my left hand.
Speaker 1:I counted my gray hairs the other day. I found 11, so I'm getting some. Yeah, I don't have a ring on my hand, but I'm working on it.
Speaker 2:We'll do that in a separate episode. So you know, been around to see a whole bunch of different sales methodologies come and go. You know a challenger sale and Miller-Hyman and strategic selling, spin selling. You know they're all different flavors but what seems to be a very consistent common theme is that sales people do best when they could shine a light on a customer problem, either in a different way Maybe the customer who had a general idea and you're educating them on you know another way to look at this problem or they weren't even aware in the first place. Like you know, easy, for instance, can be companies that have 16 different tools in their sales tech stack and again, because they may not be aware that half those tools can be eliminated because they're redundant.
Speaker 2:Functionality with something else that they already have licensed For, you know, can be a simple example. So, but a computer can't really do that for you. So the more that we free ourselves from the busy work from the lower level, very little thinking from just assembling information, you know it really comes down to business acumen. How do my products or services help this customer do what they're trying to do better than either they're not getting the job done right now or they are getting it done and how you can do it better. Enough that the price of change is, you know, is less than the pain of the same.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the pain of change is less than the pain of the same, because there will be pain of change, no matter why. Okay well let's have some fun, because I always like to bait in people on stuff. Do you think challenges are sales methodology?
Speaker 2:No, I think it's a conversation technique. It's, maybe it's, but it's not a methodology. Yeah, what is it if?
Speaker 1:you had to put it in a bucket.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know, when done well again, I think it's in a productive, professional way, bringing enough discomfort to the prospect because they realize that the same isn't good enough anymore and that you know it is bringing that healthy tension into oh, we need to start doing something differently. And since change is inherently stressful, it's I think that's where the challenge comes. It's that it's opening up your prospects eyes that, oh, I'm not getting the job done anymore the way that I really can or should, and now I'm open to change, and that's in itself can be a bit uncomfortable, yeah.
Speaker 1:What do you think it is? I don't know. I I'm trying to think of what I can say without being disparaging. So I'm not trying to be disparaging. I mean, I think it works. Here's where it works. It works if you got senior folks using it well, with the right prospects, and yeah, let's dig into this a little bit because it's fun. So if you've got somebody as a salesperson that really knows their buyer, they've, like they've how many salespeople have you met in Silicon Valley? They've never actually shook hands with their buyer? It's insane, that's right.
Speaker 1:They're a mythical creature that product marketing made up. You know they met the, the. The number of dragons they've met and the number of CFOs they've met are the same number. So you, you've got that. That's pretty prevalent. And so what works is you've got someone that's senior, maybe they've been that role. I know there's a lot of Fentac companies that hire people that used to be accountants or that used to be in finance and they actually understand the job inside and out. So if you've got that type of person who understands what that role not only looks like now but has looked like and the evolutionary trajectory of it, because a lot of software products aren't really that innovative, a lot of software products are just the second or third iteration of the second or third generation of the same thing.
Speaker 1:We've all seen this trajectory of Microsoft's Excel. We've seen Excel since. I don't know what was it for some I got Excel, probably 95 or so and every two years they come out with a new one and every. You know those buttons different, this feature's different. Oh, they're gonna. Let me record my macros now cool. Oh, pivot tables are easier to use because some dork didn't know how to do a pivot table. I'm like, oh cool, now everybody can do pivot tables. They're pivot tables for all. So now all of a sudden it's just kind of the same thing but it's different, and they repackage it and there's marketing behind it and all those types of things. Most software products are just the same thing and the marketing department has to make it different. Ceo has to make it different so they can get funding, so they can get investors and do all this stuff. But the prospects have been pitched on the same promise or the same ideas for years, if not decades, and so if a salesperson doesn't understand the evolutionary trajectory of the market, challenger will not work.
Speaker 2:Challenger takes an extreme level of mastery which I don't know if I've ever reached it. I don't know how many people have it sold books. It sold consulting gigs. I mean, that's the other thing. Unfortunately, you have to really look at motivations and what's had a separate truth from not so true. So was Challenger developed to help sales people do better? No, I don't think so. It sold books, sold training methodologies, sold consulting gigs.
Speaker 1:It's super expensive to implement. I've never met someone who can implement it on their own. That's right. That's the true test, I think. Did I create a sales methodology? Yes, here's the goal of sales methodology triangle selling Easy to learn, easy to do, easy to coach and guess what.
Speaker 1:You can go on Amazon. You can buy a triangle selling the book. You can buy the triangle selling field guide. You can roll it out to your team. If you're more help, you can go to Closeup University. You can buy some videos, roll it out to your team. So you're talking tens of dollars for the first one, thousands of dollars for the second one, or you can hire us or someone else to roll it out for you. Then you're in the tens to hundreds of thousands. But I'm more than happy if you all go buy the book and roll it out for 25 bucks. Go for it, get it.
Speaker 1:Lots of people have, and I think that's what the difference is. That is it something that was built to just print consulting dollars? No, and I think the trick is the only way to get, the only way to build a big professional services from these days is to do something that's very complicated and that takes a long time and the economics just don't work. You can't do it because you're not gonna be able to get clients fast enough and to keep clients long enough in order to build a truly large scale professional services firm, unless the thing is overly complicated. And guess what? Sales methodology doesn't have to be overly complicated. Whole ideas.
Speaker 1:Do we have? Next steps? Have we uncovered some reason for them to do businesses? What's their pain? Have we? Can we show a product demonstration or presentation? Can we manage the resistance? Can we maintain the poor? Can we land and expand? Can we drive velocity between meetings? And then, from a management level, can we coach? Can we hire? Can we onboard? Can we train? There's this stuff. There's like 15 things you gotta do and none of them really that hard independently. And to think that you know, like challenger, could I challenge or sale some stuff? Sure, but I don't. You know why? Cause it's harder.
Speaker 2:It's harder and also, I think, a lot of ways it gets interpreted. Sales people take that as a license to be a dick and that usually doesn't go over very well Nobody likes that, Because again. So it's a different Go ahead? No, because when you apply a little bit too heavy of a hand, it comes across as telling your prospect that they're either stupid or doing you know, or you know outright doing something wrong, right, and that usually the abrasive approach rarely works, maybe outside of a few borrows and queens.
Speaker 1:Correct. Yeah, that's funny, and adults don't like to be told that they're doing something wrong. And here's the thing right, If they're doing it wrong, then whatever they're doing is either something that they decided to do and so then you're telling them that they made a big mistake and you're going to go surface to their executive team or it's something that they have decided not to fix, which is kind of negligence, Yep, and so neither one of those. Those are great, but I mean you said you brought up earlier it's helping them uncover a problem they didn't know existed. And or maybe that was in my last meeting, I can't remember.
Speaker 2:I'm talking to somebody about that. No, that was this one. That was this one and we're at least we're I mean my colleagues. Where it comes in is the problem that they didn't know existed or the flip side of that is the opportunity and the way to alleviate suffering that they didn't know was possible. Is that if reps are complaining about spending too much time in a CRM and not getting any value, it's likely because there's lack of awareness of what the CRM can really do on your behalf, how it can do and generate that data for you and how it can provide meaningful insights, meaningful predictions and actionable intelligence to sell and move deals forward on your behalf. Usually comes a fraction of those activated?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, so here's a question I want to ask you related to that. I heard a quote one time that most Excel users use 1% of its capabilities. Right, what percent of a sales tech stacks capabilities do you think most sales teams use?
Speaker 2:I'd say somewhere in the maybe 20 to 25% at most. I mean some of the things that you know that are very obvious within the first few minutes of logging into a new customer's organization is, you can see quickly whether or not any of the defaults have been modified and customized and particularly whether or not any of the automation tools have been used. Because the advantages of these CRMs is that they're extremely powerful and can be customized on your behalf, but usually they come with very few things ready to go directly out of the box. That makes sense for you, so they're great pallets, but often it involves not a complicated amount of setup but something more than zero.
Speaker 1:Yeah, something more than zero, and there's a lot of companies okay, so 20, 25% of functionality is being used. That's low. I almost expected to be lower, but that seems like a reasonable number. There's a lot of software companies building tech on top of CRMs to make things easier. Is that necessary, or is that just a workaround, because people don't know how to use the tools that they already own?
Speaker 2:I don't. I think there are whole categories of other companies. Well, let me answer it this way there are very few sales technology companies that are providing completely net new functionality that isn't addressed at all from CRM providers. Okay With that.
Speaker 1:Keep going. I'm gonna get a sponsor here in a second.
Speaker 2:With that said, there are. I am not saying that, oh, you should only buy stuff from Salesforce or only buy HubSpot add-ons or only buy stuff from Microsoft if you're using Dynamics.
Speaker 2:But there is a very real trade-off of do you go with a single platform in a single unified set of tools or is it worth it to go best of breed? Yet you might have multiple different platforms, different login points and again and then the answer can be somewhere in between. These CRM companies are platforms. So if you're a third party provider, do you provide a good native plug-in experience so someone can use your product with its seeming quite seamless and to the end user, invisible to them that it's actually a third party product?
Speaker 1:Got it. Yeah, so just behind the scenes, it's not more buttons for people to click, it's just doing its job and working.
Speaker 2:Just yeah, and then that can be by basically iframes or different types of components and manage packages. So an admin sets that up, but the salespeople again, they may have or nor should they really care if it's a third party product. But ultimately what I am saying is that for the company, let it be an informed decision. Let it be an informed decision that, hey, we are gonna pay for Insight, squared or Clary or Visa to do our forecasting because we've evaluated that versus the Salesforce capabilities and going with a third party in a different license and having to do the integration in the setup is worth it for us because we're making that decision, not just, oh, we're trying to buy our way out of our problem and we got a good sales and marketing pitch and we weren't even aware that we're building redundant functionality into our system.
Speaker 1:Okay. So let me ask you this question. You go play the Mega Millions, you win and you're like I'm gonna go buy a big company. Not a big company, you're gonna buy a medium-sized business. You're gonna buy a company that's 50 salespeople. You go buy this company, you're CEO or chairman of the board or whatever you wanna be, and CRO comes to you and says, hey, I need help with forecasting. Do you encourage them? You're the decision maker. Yeah, do you use Salesforce or do you go third party Given with the capabilities around the market today?
Speaker 2:I go, sales force hands down.
Speaker 1:Okay, let's walk through this. This is great. I love this. So, because here's my view on forecast Again, I don't think it's that hard. I think it's second grade math and yeah, is it second grade math with a bunch of moving parts? Sure, are there education? Sure, are there education, moving parts and literally everything in life. Yes, so let's talk through why you would make that recommendation and decision.
Speaker 2:Okay Well, so let's also define and just be clear on what we expect from forecasting. So let me just the way I interpret your question first-shorter is I, as a sales leader, want to easily see all the different deals obviously the dollar amount, close dates, percentages, all that and being able to roll up my sales team and say for Q3, 2023, I'm forecasting that my team is going to come in at $9 million versus a quota of $10 million. So I know that I'm 10% shy of goal.
Speaker 1:Sure. And we could go sixth grade math, do a little expected value. We could go 10th grade math and do some confidence intervals.
Speaker 1:I mean, I think, because that's the piece right. And this is again why it's just so hilarious that these dudes are out there saying you don't need to go to college to be in sales. I'm like, okay, cool. So do you know what I expected? Define expected value, define confidence intervals? Talk me through those concepts. If you can't do that, then you probably shouldn't be a sales leader. That's my take. So if anybody doesn't know what I'm talking about, just Google, it's on there.
Speaker 2:So actually Khan.
Speaker 1:Academy has some pretty good statistics classes. I recommend to somebody to set the rock, so go Khan Academy.
Speaker 2:Yeah, all right.
Speaker 1:So tell me, yeah, tell me what. So I'd say when it comes to sales force.
Speaker 2:Most companies, most sales leaders, think of forecasts as. Let me run a report on opportunities and opportunities by stage, yeah, and then maybe the report will get them the answers they need, or they'll export it into Excel and start doing some what if? Analysis and calculate their expected values. That's most commonly how it's done. Most companies aren't even aware that there's a different module called forecasting in sales force. That's different, where you can start looking at what's my best case, what's my worst case, what if everything that my reps have committed to, all these different levels, can I do a manager adjustment, you know, and all that is just basically functionality built on the reps creating opportunities, and then you're rolling them all up and doing some like said, some additional math on top of it. What grade level? Middle school at most, probably Elementary. You know, sixth grade. When I grew up in New York, sixth grade was still part of elementary school, so I'll go with that, that me too.
Speaker 2:But again where things can get more interesting is the reason why I say hands down sales force is because there's lots of different data sources that companies should be using to make their forecasting more accurate, more predictive. So we talk a lot about SaaS companies. What often doesn't get connected into the CRM is that the actual usage of companies who are logging into the platform that you just sold them and doing stuff with it that rarely I see, that rarely get connected back to the customer's information within Salesforce. You know there's Zoom info. There can be marketing and website activity cases and troubleshooting lots of different data sources In a CRM.
Speaker 2:that's the hub the central repository of all that data. All that can be used into predictive models where, ultimately, it's not just a sales person's estimation of this deal is gonna close at this amount in this fiscal quarter, but there's actual some data to back that up that's saying, hey, your forecast matches what we've seen over the last thousand deals that look like yours. Oh and, by the way, we're also keeping a running list of how accurate you individually, bob, are at forecasting and your forecasting sucks, and so your manager knows that.
Speaker 1:So is one of the. Okay, let me ask you this how do people get into sales ops? And is one of the reasons why what you're describing not happening? Because people that get into sales ops don't get that foundational understanding of what tools they you know what the buttons do and the tools that they have at the disposal.
Speaker 2:Well, I think people get into sales. People get into sales ops either because they, frankly, washed out of sales or just tried sales and it wasn't for them. I could even put myself in that category after 20 years of carrying a bag and selling products that other people built, which sometimes I stood behind, other times I did. Sometimes that could be a grind. And so you tried sales for whatever reason, or wasn't for you, or you never, or I'd say even worse, you've never been in sales. And so then you went straight into sales operations, and so now, all of a sudden, you're in a position to have great influence over the sales team's life, having never walked in their shoes.
Speaker 1:And you can't take a couple trail head classes and get there.
Speaker 2:It's really hard. It's really hard Now. Sales operations, I think has when we talked about all these different tools and consolidation or not, I think sales operation and go back to my point of follow the money, or what incentives are in place. Sales operations, I believe, fundamentally has an incentive to have lots of tools, Overly complex system, because now, all of a sudden, if it was a one tool stack, then what do you need sales operations for? What do you need If it's not a diagram with 20 different nodes and some complex flow lines that sales operations have stitched together lovingly over the course of year, then what value are they bringing?
Speaker 1:Of course. So for every tool I buy, every tool I implement, the expected value of my job security goes up.
Speaker 2:That's right, that's right. Of course there are always exceptions, but I'm saying in general that motivation and that incentive structure makes sense. It's real.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So who keeps that in check? Whose job is that? Who will guard the guards? As one of my buddies used to say?
Speaker 2:CFOs, that's it comes back to, I think, CFOs and CROs who have enough knowledge about how these systems can be put together and architected again they don't need. So, as I've studied to become a Salesforce architect, let me just use a metaphor. I don't need to know how to write lines of code. I can write a few lines of code.
Speaker 2:I just need to know enough about when code is warranted and what makes good code versus bad code. Same way, if kind of traditional analog architecting, I may not need to know how to hang drywall. I just need to know what drywall is and when it should be hung, and how to know when it was hung.
Speaker 2:well, like, my wall is straight and I don't see hands and the studs are an even distance apart and the nails are in consistent places. So same thing CFOs. Cros may not need to know the details, but they need to know when the systems are built and architected well, because they're simple, there's minimal overlap and end users get value. They win on the value equation. They feel like they're getting more value out of the system and out of the tools than they are putting into it. That's really how you know, you've got a success.
Speaker 1:I love that and I agree with it. I think my big concern that I've seen over and over again is you hire someone to either weed sales ops to be sales ops or to work in sales ops. Well, how do you look over their shoulder and be confident all of these things are true without losing trust with them?
Speaker 2:You know that, I'd say, ultimately comes back to well, fundamentally, are we as a revenue organization, are we meeting our goals of revenue growth, customer satisfaction growth and satisfaction, so new and existing business retention rates, renewal rates, some measure of problem resolution, because all of those again can be our indicators of are we selling honestly? Are we selling to customers who actually needed our products, you know, and are we good at continuing to innovate and provide an overall customer experience? No one metric is the be all, but together they form a picture and so, if your user, so the experience is the sales experience going well.
Speaker 2:Is the customer experience going well? I'd say those are the main ways to look at whether or not your sales operations function is doing its job. Because if one of those one or both of those sides of the equation the sales internal experience or the customer external experience will start to hemorrhage, if sales operations is just built for deliberate inefficiency because of these incentive structures we talked about man so much to do, and I just I lost track of time.
Speaker 1:We're already at four o'clock, it's time We've been going for about five minutes. Well, great chatting with you, kevin. How can people reach out to you if they want to learn more about what you're working on and see if maybe they need eyeballs on their internal sales operations from a third party that has seen us hundreds of times and can give them insight into if there's opportunities for improvement? Or hey, you're A-O, okay.
Speaker 2:Please visit us at acousticsellingcom. Or again, my name is Kevin Asher and you could find ASCHER. You could find me on LinkedIn, love it.
Speaker 1:Thanks, Kevin, Great seeing you. This is Sales Management Podcast. I'm Corey, co-founder of CoachCRM, Closeloop, Closeloopcom with Z, CoachCRM Without a Z Like. Subscribe Apple Spotify. We'll see you next time.