Ryan has a unique perspective as he went to a founder to the person who started, scaled, and handed off the sales management, operations, and enablement roles at his company. He came back in to re-work them at different milestones and when the owner of the role departed.
Companies often do "too much stuff" in some areas and ignore key priorities in others.
If you are growing and don't know how much or where to invest in ops, enablement, or management, this episode is for you!
Ryan has a unique perspective as he went to a founder to the person who started, scaled, and handed off the sales management, operations, and enablement roles at his company. He came back in to re-work them at different milestones and when the owner of the role departed.
Companies often do "too much stuff" in some areas and ignore key priorities in others.
If you are growing and don't know how much or where to invest in ops, enablement, or management, this episode is for you!
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. Ryan Vanture is joining me today and we're going to talk about something. I came up with something a little corny. I usually don't do this, but this is the Goldilocks Goldilocks of sales management sales enablement, sales operations Not too much, not too little, just right for today and as we scale into the future. Ryan, thanks for joining me. Happy to be here, man, I appreciate you having me.
Speaker 1:All righty. So Ryan and I have worked together. He was a former client of mine. He was a co-founder of a company called CourseKey. And, ryan, I usually don't do intros because I want to jump right into it, but I do, for context, want to talk a little bit about. Tell me just 30 seconds, talk about your evolution of your role, just so people can understand what perspective you're coming at this conversation from.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so my perspective is really focused on go-to-market. I initially started as the head of sales went out and kind of built the first initial part of the business, transitioned into client success and support once that needed to be built out, and then finally ended up in RevOps and sales enablement, which is where I met Corey and did a lot of work building out our teams and scaling up our programs.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So you bounced around inside the company and I love this because I think that when people do that, they gain perspective that you can't get from the outside. You've got if you're in it. You're in it all day, every day. You built sales and you build customer success and then you build ops and you build enablement, and what I wanted to tee this up as is the right level not too much, not too little, just right. So let's let's start with an example of something I physically saw you do is we rolled out triangle selling as a sales methodology at your company, and one of the things I saw Ryan do which I rarely see without a lot of poking and prodding from myself or others is he took what we rolled out in terms of the frameworks for the methodology and really tailored it to the business. I'm talking going in depth. So, ryan, talk a little bit about why you did that and what the alternatives were from your seat in terms of leaving it more open-ended or more out of the box, versus the tailoring that you did.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean. So part of it was we just have a very niche business with Gorski, being that we serve higher education and specifically the for-profit vocational space, and so the language, the terminology, the different stakeholders that you're going to encounter, they may be generically called something specific, but if you're trying to immerse your sales reps in training and onboarding and get them to understand who they're talking to, how they talk, what they care about, it really does require just sort of re-skinning and it doesn't mean change the fundamentals of the training, because we brought Triangle Selling in for what it was, but there was an aspect of like. Now that we have this amazing vehicle, what does the paint need to look like? What are the details of this car need to look like to make sure that it looks and feels and drives like a sales engine for Corsky? And so that was kind of the approach that I took to doing that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so you're so for-profit vocational selling to people that own things like cosmetology schools, for example, and and other. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Trade schools, cosmo schools, nursing schools, and so obviously that's its own world. When you're, you know talking about very specific education for employment, and so you've got to understand the nuances between you know mechanics doing, you know automotive, you know degrees, and folks on the other side of the spectrum doing hair and nails Like you. Just had to be very specific and you know, get, get prescriptive when it came to you know who we were talking to, how we were going about it and what their sales process.
Speaker 1:Well, it's interesting. So you say that and I agree with you. That's not what everybody says in terms of you've got to be very prescriptive and you've got to know this stuff inside and out. So, from your standpoint, what happens if someone doesn't understand the difference between an automotive trade school, a cosmetology trade school, a nail salon trade school, and they go in and they have a surface level understanding of whatever product marketing passed them but they don't really understand the differences between those businesses. What happens there?
Speaker 2:I mean you get, you get snuffed out pretty quick.
Speaker 2:I mean it's like me telling you I'm a airplane pilot and you know, if you didn't know me, you might accept that for two minutes, but if you knew anything about being a pilot and ask me a question, you'd know I wasn't. You know within the first couple of questions that you'd ask me. And it's very similar with these schools, like if you go in there thinking like I remember the first time I stepped on a campus that had the automotive programs and I came from San Diego state, which is a four university, 500 student lectures, and my concept of education was that. And so when I got to this campus for the first time 10 years ago, I was just like holy cow. There's like where is the classroom?
Speaker 2:This is all big automotive workshops and bays and machinery and equipment and supplies and inventory nothing like my education experience was so, without you know, getting into the market and seeing those things and absorbing your sales conversations and taking what you can, it's very clear that you're not the expert or you don't have the expertise that most salespeople claim to have within 10 minutes of an initial sales conversation. So to me it was extremely important that not only do we look and sound like we knew the business, but that we actually did.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think this is interesting because you use the word school and I think the example here is great, which is the difference between a school which could be a large classroom and a school which could be an auto shop, and they know what their version of school is, and I imagine that a lot of people that are in that business maybe didn't spend a lot of time in the other type of school, or at least they didn't recently, right.
Speaker 2:Exactly, yeah, and you, you know, for us a lot of our what we we found actually was when we hired from industry is when we started having the most success. So rather than having to try to teach them the ins and outs of the industry, we found looking for people with specific skill sets that came from those schools or worked at those locations or had that experience. They were our most successful hires. You know, when I was with the company oh, let's talk about that.
Speaker 1:That's a great one to dig into. So the effort required to either equip somebody with industry expertise who's already good at sales, or to equip them with sales expertise who's already good at industry let's go a little deeper on that. What are some observations that you've had on both sides of that coin?
Speaker 2:So with at least with our industry it's it's unless you came from it.
Speaker 2:It's very hard to teach it without getting you in the field, and I mean boots on the ground, setting up meetings to go see these campuses and have conversations.
Speaker 2:Otherwise it's very theoretical.
Speaker 2:And so what I found was, when it came to training and onboarding, the longest part of that process was getting them to wrap their heads around the schools, the students, how they work, the business, like the underlying business and ROI stories that go with these places, because most folks just assume it's you know, everyday education, and so the sale, once we brought in triangle, selling like that sort of, became less of you know what do we teach and how do we train, and we had a very easy, you know, systematic way of onboarding and getting folks through that training program.
Speaker 2:What I had to figure out was how you know, how do I lay around some of that industry knowledge and while that helps and it's very you know niche to course key and it's it's usable, bringing people in with that knowledge to even help validate and poke holes in some of our assumptions was very useful as well, like things that were maybe put in training. Two years ago we found out. Things have changed or might not be relevant from this person who just came from another school that we hired on. So it's it's always nice to bring in that extra set of eyes that actually understands the industry, because then they can add to the training and onboarding, versus just accept it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So when we think about, tell me if this is fair. When I'm thinking about the diversity of experience, does diversity of sales experience really matter that much? If you want one team doing the same things versus diversity of industry experience? Where that much? If you want one team doing the same things versus diversity of industry experience where you might have somebody from different types of schools, different sizes of schools, in your case, different types of the the target market, if you had to pick one, it sounds like we're leaning towards diversity of industry experience versus. I've done all these different types of sales, uh, but now we want to bring together a team and have them all do something consistently I would agree with that.
Speaker 2:As long as you have a solid sales training and onboarding program, like if your sales process and methodology is dialed in. It's almost better if they don't have sales experience because you don't have to un-teach them the stuff in order to re-teach them the way that you're doing it. If they come in with that industry knowledge and you've got a solid onboarding where somebody who's got good skills contextually but maybe doesn't have 10 years selling, that's a person that we've been able to bring in and be pretty successful with. Just for me, it shortens that learning curve to productivity significantly, especially when you want them in sales conversation.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and for context, you're selling five-figure deals, low to mid, five-figure deals that have a handful of personas, a small handful of personas involved in the purchasing process.
Speaker 2:Right yeah, pretty much you know 50 to $100,000 for deals, four or five different stakeholders and sometimes multiple location. You know campuses, things like that.
Speaker 1:So you're not selling big enterprise deals, so I think it might be a little different. I would definitely say it's different if somebody was selling to Halliburton or Schlumberger or something like that and doing $500,000 contracts. But I think for what you're talking about, the ramp time to get somebody proficient at sales who has the DNA, who has the aptitude to do it and I think that's another piece that we look at is and we didn't work on this part together but doing pre-hire skills assessments is one way to really inspect that and understand does the person have the DNA and I'm not talking about Myers-Briggs or DISC or anything like this, but sales skills assessments and correlate where they're at versus other folks that have either been successful or washed out in the past.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and that's actually some of the things after you had left that we decided to start doing in the hiring process was, rather than just, you know, go through the standard hiring and referral process, we actually started thinking about the skills and coaching program that you put us on board with, and we're looking at those and saying, hey, you know, we want you to write a recap email to this persona about this specific thing you know and basically gave them you know like, show us how your sales process works right now so we can see you know where you're at as a professional. And so once we started doing some more of like skill you know assessments, it did give us a bit more of like an indicator on where we wanted to work with these folks coming in.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and if anybody out there is not doing skills assessments, if you want some insights into what's working for folks these days, send me a note at freestuff, at coachcrmcom, freestuff at coachcrmcom, and I'll flip you something over. So, as you do that, there's a couple of benefits. One is that you weed out folks that have signals that they won't be successful. And then the second is for folks that you hire, at least you've got some places to start coaching them on right.
Speaker 2:Exactly. Yeah, I mean it's, it's. There's a general training and onboarding, but past that 30, 60, 90 plan, you should have a pretty well thought out plan for how you're going to work with your reps individually and what skills they are deficient in. And so that was a big part of you know. After we got them the general wrap time, then it became well, how do we just keep fine tuning these reps in order to make them as successful as possible? And that comes from understanding their individual skill sets and you know what you need for your, your reps, to be successful.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so let's, let's jump into that now. So we've got this idea of Goldilocks don't do too little, don't do too much, do the just right amount. So after onboarding, you've got folks in seat. What are some of the things that you're looking at as signals for either enablement or ops, where you say, oh wow, let's, let's focus more energy there. And here's some areas over there that we might just not pay as much attention to anymore yeah.
Speaker 2:So we started taking this approach of looking at you know sort of results first and then going back and checking the objectives that we had assigned to achieve those results. And if the results weren't there and the objectives were happening, then we started diving into activity rather than just focusing purely on activity. So, like over time, what I found was you know the length of a deal, you know the, the number of, like you had said, the number of contacts associated and multi-threaded into the account, um, the deal size even there was like a goldilocks deal size where it was too big or too small. If it didn't land within you know 60 to 90 days, you know typically it would fall off. We were able to find these sort of Goldilocks levers, if you want to call them that, even things like access to power specific competitors mentioned in the sales process. There were these levers that we knew if we pulled them in the right time frame or the right spectrum, that we would be able to increase the likelihood of a deal closing. And so that's really what we started focusing on was like if we know that our ideal, out of all the data that we had over years, the ideal sales length was anywhere from 30 to 60 days, sometimes 90, but after 90, it became very difficult, for whatever reason, to close the deal. Don't know why. That's just what the data told us.
Speaker 2:So we started looking at, for example, triangle selling. How do we create more velocity using plan and, you know, some of these other tools that you teach to make sure that we're keeping these deals moving. We're setting up these meetings, we're setting the expectations every time at the start and the end, and what we found was that was the mechanism. Those were the tactics that we were able to use to ultimately show reps how to stay within that sweet spot of a deal cycle. Same thing for deal size right, which products and packaging are going to make sense? You don't want to stick a shock under where they run by trying to give them everything, but can we help you design pricing and packaging for this specific need? That's going to be in that sweet zone of deal sizes that we typically didn't close. So that's sort of how we approached it leveraging both the training and onboarding and then looking at some of those levers that we wanted to be able to make sure were used in the sales process.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that's the smart way to do it, I think, and it really helps when you're in the position that you're in overseeing enablement and operations, because a lot of the data and the reporting. It's frustrating to me when I talk to sales leaders or enablement folks and they say, yeah, I don't have that reporting yet, it's in the backlog. Well, the data exists in a database. It's just a function of somebody knowing how to get it and having the motivation to get it. Let's get it and start with the numbers.
Speaker 1:If you start coaching from calls, for example, so a lot of times people will be like, oh, we're going to do call coaching because guess what? All these software vendors have spent hundreds of millions of dollars convincing you that calls equals coaching. Well, that's wrong. I'll tell you that right now it can be a part of a coaching program, but that is just. It's wild. If that's where you start, start with the metrics Win rates, conversion rates, deal size, discount rates, net revenue retention, conversion rates from prospect to opportunity for inbound, for outbound and for inbounds, the difference between demo requests and asset downloads and trial signups and all of these different things. Start with those metrics and understand what did we expect, what did we observe? And what's the variability across time? Is there seasonality across reps, across market segments? And then you can figure out. Well, let's go listen to some calls and figure out what's actually going on, but starting with the calls is just silly.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, that, and most folks will say you know we just need to make more calls and we'll, you know, get more meetings set. But it's, you know we started looking at. You know, is it the calls or is it the connections? Right, is it the connections or is it the actual set meeting? And so we are able to dive in even a little bit deeper there where it's, you know you could tell me you make 100 calls in a day, but did you make them at the right time?
Speaker 2:Were you doing it during the time people were most likely to pick up the phone, or did you just get up and power dial 100 and get off? Like those are things that we started really looking at. It's like not the activity in of itself but the behavior that's going to go into it. Like are you working smart with the best known data or are you just out there power dialing just to say you did the number to get the a hundred calls? That really doesn't do anything for us. You know that we can measure down the road, but if your goal is to dial a hundred and connect with five, like okay, now we can kind of work with that.
Speaker 1:We can see if, whether that's happening or not Well, and I think some people are probably listening to this and saying, well, that's pseudoscience when to call Well, guess what? In certain markets, for example, when people's classroom is an automotive floor, there's probably times are more likely to be out there in the shop and times are more likely to be in the office, and you could probably figure out what those times are, because there's things like class schedules that are posted.
Speaker 2:Yeah, a hundred percent.
Speaker 2:And so we actually had the data where we knew that Monday through Friday yes, you had a chance of getting them on the phone, but for whatever reason, tuesdays, wednesdays and Thursdays between 11 and 1 PM, regardless of the zone, was the golden spot for calling, and most of the time was because at some point that's the midday break between the am and the pm shift at these schools, and so that's when all the instructors got their break, that's when the registrar had a chance to breathe, everybody was at lunch and so you can get a hold of these people or they'll respond to emails.
Speaker 2:So we were actually able to tell reps like, yes, you can call it one at three o'clock on a Monday, but the percentage of people actually that you're connecting with and that are you're booking meeting with, the data doesn't show it. So that's the way that I was. I was, you know, if you're going to dial, I call it the golden hour, like you don't want to just dial anytime, you want to dial when you actually have a chance of getting in touch with somebody. Otherwise dialing sucks Like if you don't talk to anybody. It feels kind of pointless sometimes.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you want to win, so what advice would you give to somebody that doesn't have direct access to that data?
Speaker 2:Well, part of it too is like intuitively, I knew some of this stuff. Like intuitively I can kind of sense know deal going stale after 90 days usually fell off. I just didn't have the data to say, look, it's true, but you sort of know these things and if you're picking up the phone and you feel like, hey, maybe one day, you know, you try mondays and you're gonna hit, you know 9 to 10 am and just see if that's, you know, if that's the thing you can literally track, just tally it up and see how many did I get at this time and figure out over time what does that trend look like. But you know, fortunately for us, steve, who was my former boss, was definitely not trying investing in technology that helped and enabled you know the sales team, and so we had a dialing system that was very data driven and we reviewed that stuff every single week.
Speaker 2:Like we wanted to know who was dialing, what the conversion rates were, how many meetings were booked. We had callback lists that we can go back to. Like it was very systematic. But we also made sure that they understood when they were going to get the best bang for their buck. I mean, that's how we kept the SDRs happy and paid is making sure they knew how to get paid. Like if we didn't tell you when the time to call was and you just chose any time, your check's not going to look like the reps who understand the key windows for getting a whole lease in our industry.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think that's one of the things that impressed me the most about you guys is the connection between data and coaching.
Speaker 2:I feel I find it very hard to coach without something to point to right Cause. Otherwise it's just me telling you what I think is wrong. But when my coaching experience where let's pull up these dashboards that we had built specifically for you to track your own performance, I mean it's you're sort of collaborating on their success, with them, versus dictating. You know how they're, how they're not going to fail. It's just a little bit of a different approach. But the data makes it like they can't argue with the data, the data, the data is the data. You know, I didn't create the data, you created the data. I'm just showing you what it says and then from there we get to decide what do you want to do about it?
Speaker 1:Well, I think, in the spirit of Goldilocks, what you're doing is you're inserting a step and so you're saying it's too simple to go from hypothesis to coaching. What then? That's going to give me something to work on, where I could also just completely overcomplicate that thing and make it make it mad. But it seems to me and in my experience, this works really well for my hypothesis. Look at the data, what the data show, then translate into what some coaching opportunities could be. But it's still a hypothesis at that point, because you may learn as who is it? As Walter Was it Walter or the dude in the Big Lebowski says new stuff has come to light. Yeah, new stuff always comes to light.
Speaker 2:And that's probably one of the things I was like. Even you know, my best coaching sometimes was a little bit short-sighted, because they had these ideas of work with another vendor that they were a part of for 10 years at the same school. Like we had one lady come in who you know. In my head I'm like, oh, I'm going to have to teach her some stuff, and not me being kind of silly about her breadth of knowledge. You know, she came in and she totally blew me away with what she knew and had ideas I never thought of specific to the segment we hired her for.
Speaker 2:And so I'm like, okay, well, you have to have some flexibility in there too, for creativity, right, and those conversations when you're coaching, because sometimes they might have a good idea that doesn't show up in the dashboard because you've never, you've never reported on it before. And so if I see, hey, you're not making a bunch of calls, but you've got a ton of meetings booked this week, I'm not going to start yelling at you about the calls that you're making. If you're just hitting your Rolodex setting warm meetings with all the people you know from industry, you don't need to get on the phone and power dial If you've already got the contact, and those are things where I kind of had to adjust the coaching events. They know actually your results are right, so we need to take a look at our expectations on the input.
Speaker 1:I love it, yeah, cause I well, this goes back to what we were talking about earlier a little bit. So you're talking about someone coming in with a different perspective on the market and a Rolodex, and a Rolodex, which is great They'll burn through eventually, whatever but milk it for what she can get, right, right, yeah, and, and as they do that I mean. The other thing is. So I I'm usually pretty negative on the Rolodex, especially for leadership hires, but for reps that are in a very specific market. So, for example, you're selling to trades. I don't. I'm less negative on it in that case because they're literally a captured market. That is, I mean, in this world you guys were imagine. Tell me if this is fair. They're late to the party when it comes to tech.
Speaker 2:They're not a trade school is not the earliest adopter of technology. Right, I mean, you've got your spectrum, but yeah, there's a lot of more laggards and late adopters in the education segment than others. For sure, yeah Well.
Speaker 1:and then the other piece is regardless of what the technology is, there's always an earlier version of it. I mean, you can go from paper and pen to Excel. You can go from Excel to some kind of ERP system. That kind of does a lot of things, and then you can either have a better one of those or something that's more specialized, that hits different use cases. And the funny thing is when we're when we're're selling and this is why I love you talking about going out into the field, actually meeting these people, shaking their hands, seeing what they do if you're talking to somebody on the phone or over zoom and they've talked to people like you every year for the last 20 years but you think your stuff's new and amazing your credibility is not in a very good spot. Yeah, it's like you're the, you're the third iteration of the fourth generation of this thing that's kind of always existed Still didn't buy.
Speaker 1:Yeah, still didn't buy. And this is the problem, especially for companies that sell web applications. So anything that you look at your computer screen and click on, yeah, it's going to do different things, but what's that acute, specific pain point that really matters to that person? And we can learn that through enablement and onboarding, training, coaching, but it really gets solidified and galvanized in our minds as we actually see people use it, hear our customer stories, hear from what our customers say. So to that point, to what extent do you believe in having customers share their stories with the sales team, either directly and directly through video, through case studies, and how's that impact enablement over time?
Speaker 2:I would actually take it a step further and say share their stories with everybody, especially if you're a technology-based company with a ton of developers and backend folks who develop all day but don't necessarily get to see the impact of their work, like the just bringing you know marketing folks to us to onsites and you know showing up at the conference, conferences and getting face to face with these people in these schools, like that's what drives the needle, at least for our business. I mean, we did pretty well during COVID and we found a way to survive online, but at the end of the day, we we never have the have when we incorporate face-to-face in our sales process, and so not only do we try to, I think one of the things that me and Steve worked on more recently, that I think you also helped them with at a previous company, was this idea of capturing the sort of like investment thesis, or we called it sort of like the final document. Right, this is the business recommendation and this is exactly the ROI. This is what we're going to solve.
Speaker 2:Even if we didn't sell those, we still had all of these use cases and all these documents that were capturing pain, challenges, goals, solutions, roi, product packaging recommendations, quotes from those folks that we talked to that speak specifically to those challenges, and by using the business requirements or the business documents, we had way higher success rates when it came to closing, when the C-level finally came into the picture.
Speaker 2:But we also had the documentation to show new hires that came in. Hey look, these are what these documents look like. Here's 10 or 20 different sales processes that were ran. Study these documents, because you're basically giving them an immersive document that captures 30 to 60 to 90 days of the sales process that they can look at over and over again. So, aside from just the marketing content, where everything that we develop is focused on client success stories and social proof, or the internal documents that we develop in the sales process that we make, we try to do our best to ensure that the stories of potential clients and customers are pulled fairly easily through the organization and if everybody knows what they're working for.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love that so you can work backwards from what success looks like and then equip everybody with what they need. Man, I was talking to someone last week, a founder who's furious because he realized that they had just spent a million dollars on a feature. Not just, but I guess over the last 18 months they spent a million dollars developing that got clicked on six times. That's brutal, it's wild, man, because the other parts of the company product engineering things like that. They can go down these rabbit holes and start building stuff that seems cool, looks cool, might be cool whatever it is. Or, more recently, let's just be chat GPT for chat GPT sake. And everyone knows that the world doesn't need more text. And the challenge when a technology's primary function is to create text Well, do you really need it or is there a way to make it a little more subtle and drive some value? So, creating an ecosystem to share customer success across all departments inside the company Absolutely huge. Love that. Yeah, 100% yeah. Business case is good because the business case piece, the CEO, comes in CFO, whoever, somebody with big title and gray hair. They want to know that everyone else on the team has done their diligence to evaluate a vendor if they're coming in later. And one of the ways is by hey, here's what we looked at, here's what we observed, here's the upside, here's the downside, here's the risks, here's specifically what we're solving for. Here's what else we tried, like all the different things that I think most people understand, at least in in pieces, but make that very concise. It's. It's wild how, in the tech sales world, it's wild how, in the tech sales world, the idea of memos is not prevalent, because in pretty much every area of business I mean, I work in a lot of different industries and I've done a lot of different things over the course of my eight or 10 gray hairs coming in Memos are a great tool to concisely articulate information to executives. I mean, jeff Bezos says that you write the memo before you build a product, right the press release for the same thing, and then everybody can get on the same page.
Speaker 1:But in tech sales it seems like we've got this idea that it's art and it's it's not art, it's, it's variability. That's not specifically knowable in advance. But the bounds of the variability you know. On the high side, this number of deals will close. On the low side, this number of deals will close. Same thing for stage duration, pipeline conversion, pickup rates for cold calls, whatever it is. It's not art, yeah. Yeah, might look like art to the untrained eye, though, but what do I know? I just host the podcast. Oh man, so people work in the system, they get better. You get people, you onboard them, you coach them up, they learn things. How do you keep pushing them?
Speaker 2:Well, I think a big part of it is understanding, you know, initially, when you're hiring them, if you're doing a job, like what motivates them right, like if you're, if, if they don't really have a strong motivation, or like a big alignment, you know, to to the core of what Horskey does and who we serve, like it's very, it's very hard for you to last in that business, particularly because it's been a startup environment for years and years and years and it's just not an easy industry to crack into and get to know. So for us, a lot of what we try to do is understand what motivates the reps and then, using that coaching program that you taught us, it's fairly easy to sort of use some of those frameworks and get those folks to be in alignment with you know, like, hey, listen, this is where you're at. You know this is what's expected, this is what the company needs and here's what happens. You know, in your situation, if we don't hit it, here's what it means for the company If we don't do it. Here's what it means if you do right and just being able to really talk through in a very you know, systematic, but data, you know centric way and and have them come up with, you know, some ideas for where they can improve versus just start, you know, hitting them with all the things we want them to do.
Speaker 2:That collaborative, you know piece of that coaching program is, I think, to me what made it really easy to keep up moving. Because when you design your own success plan, it's a lot harder for you to fail at that that if I just slapped you with it and said this is what you need to do. But if you told me, hey, my calls are down and what I can do is I can unblock my calendar and you know I'm going to make sure I call during the right hours and I'm going to make sure I get a minimum number of these calls, then let's see if you do that this week, right, and then maybe I throw something else on or maybe I challenge you a little bit more to try to get 150 done. But at least you know it was collaborative and they take that as sort of their commitment right for what they're going to do. And it's never like, hey, this is where you're going to be in six months, like go do it, like it's a weekly thing where you come back and check in and if they veer off path again.
Speaker 2:That's that motivation to remind them. This is what you said you wanted. You told me that you needed to get a house for you and your family, or you told me that your grandma was sick and you're trying to make sure you know like, do you still want to do that here? And when you can connect the why back to you, know their, their plan for success, it makes it a pretty easy process.
Speaker 2:I've always actually been a big fan of that coach framework. I mean that's probably the most easily repeatable but also you know, rep, friendly, I would say approach to coaching that I've come across.
Speaker 1:I love it. Well, if anybody's not familiar with the coach framework and they want a free book, email me freestuffatcoachcrmcom. Freestuffatcoachcrmcom. And I'll flip you one. I think that the key here is it helps underperformers recognize where their opportunities are, ties it back to what their personal motivations are and then helps them either up their game or make an early exit without you having to do performance improvement plans and garbage like that that nobody likes. And then, on the other side, you mitigate the risk that somebody says, hey, I think I've gotten everything I can out of this place. I'm going to go find the next one. People get bored when they don't get coached. Good people do Right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. I mean, you don't want to feel like you're on an Island. You know the whole time you need you need some access to civilization, I think coaching is one of the more consistent ways you can do that but both beneficial for the rep and the company, right?
Speaker 1:if it's a win-win for everybody, you should do it more often. That's funny. Coaching is the bridge to successful salesperson island yeah, welcome yeah, that's good, that's good.
Speaker 1:Build, build the bridges. I love it. Yeah, because if they don't, a lot of folks, man, I'll tell you the last few years and I keep saying this the enablement teams focus so much on new hire, onboarding and coaching junior people that they a lot of times managers don't get any coaching. And if you neglect those folks and you're just like oh, our training program is for new hires and for SDRs, because that's what's easy, guess what? It's super easy because new hires don't know anything and SDRs don't know anything. And so if you think that your training program is focused on them because that's who needs it, I'd look in the mirror and I'd evaluate is that because that's who needs it or because that's who it's easiest to do it with?
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, that was one of the things I loved about Steve was he? He understood in whether I don't know where he got this from, but he knew that the sales manager was one of the key pieces of the sales organization and that that manager was somebody I had to spend quite a bit of time with as the RevOps and enablement person, because you're really it's almost like you know they're, they're the coach on the football field and you know they kind of got the playbook. But if they don't have all the resources and they don't have the staff and they don't got the equipment and they don't have everything they need to prep for the game, it doesn't matter what they do to prep. The team, like the rest of the organization, has to be ready for game day, and so that's what I felt like.
Speaker 2:My job was a lot of the times when it wasn't training and onboarding, it was helping transition new hires into the coaching program so that sales managers knew hey, through that 90 days, this is what they excelled at. You know, this is where they needed help, and I should have a complete write-up of who is this person, where are they going to need some help, where are they going to shine and you know what are we going to do to get them going. So that was a big part of just being in line and transitioning those reps over, you know, to that management team and making sure they had what they needed to help those reps through.
Speaker 1:And as you make that transition, how do you motivate the manager to keep that going? And so they don't just start going into pipeline mode and deal management mode, but they keep the spirit and the momentum of all of that, all of that work that was done during the onboarding phase going over time.
Speaker 2:Part of it was and again, I hate to sound like, and again, everybody did not pay me to say any of this, but we use the coach CRM platform. Well, it's funny.
Speaker 1:I never talk about myself on these shows. I just figured today we'd give a real example because you're here, so this isn't everyone that listens every week. If this is your first time listening, this is not an ad for anything that I do, but it works, so you should talk to me about it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that was the thing was having the tool that I get to start them in in the 30, 60, 90 days, you know, as they get into day 60 through 90,. They're now in the coaching platform and I'm doing skill development with them because we're doing, you know, discos and they're sitting in meetings and they're doing write-ups. So a lot of it was just giving the keys to that car over to our sales manager and saying, hey, here's the tool that you have. And there was no. I mean, there wasn't anything in that coaching pool that was like go dive into the pipeline and you know, look at all these details, it was here's the skills they're working on, here's what they completed, here's the activities we have them set up to do. So it was.
Speaker 2:It was very easy to bring somebody else into the fold versus, like you know, maybe all this is on paper and pen or however else people coach. It was just really easy for me to track progress. You know exactly what skill set were developed and then hand that over to the sales manager and say, okay, you know, the baton's been passed, go ahead and start running Right. So that it was. It was as easy as that.
Speaker 1:And then if someone uses coach, crm or not, whatever the the goal. The point here is if you're in senior leadership, if you were in enablement operations, whatever you should be able to go to your frontline managers and, for each person, say what are you working with them on right now? How did you choose that? Based on all the other things, what else did you consider that you could be working with them on a coaching perspective? And then, when you get done with this one, what's next for them? And if they can't answer those questions, that tells me one thing the frontline manager is not good at diagnosis and prioritization. And if you've got a frontline manager that's not good at diagnosis and prioritization, they're going to do what I talked about earlier in another context, which is whatever's easiest. I'm going to listen to this call. They said um, too much Cool. You shouldn't say um, but you'll also skip next steps. You shouldn't skip uncovering pain. You shouldn't start a call without an agenda. There's lots of other things that you shouldn't do too.
Speaker 2:And I would argue that those other things are more important than saying, huh, right, I liked, I liked your framework, where it was like I like what's the challenge that they have, right, like because, you know, is it a mindset thing where they just don't like, they don't believe it or they don't understand it, they don't know why it's important. The activity thing is kind of I think that's the obvious one where most folks gravitate towards like, oh, what's your activity? What's your activity? What's your activity? Because that's very apparent, right. But then even like the skill set challenges, I think to me most of the time it was either mindset or skill set, like it might have been activity surface level, but if you dove down one layer deeper and ask them questions, it was either mindset or skill set.
Speaker 2:Maybe they didn't know how to use the power dialer like other folks did, so their calls were way down. Maybe they didn't have the mindset that whole calling works, because at their old company they never had to do it and somebody told them it was dead. There's things like that where it's like oh, your activity is down, but it's not just the activity, you just don't believe in whole calling. Let me sit down and show you how this works. Let me show you how I'll dial right now and get connected with somebody on the phone. Let me show you the team's data and show you how our top reps you know making this many connects and dials at this time.
Speaker 2:But that was really for me what helped with the coaching aspect, because then when you teach that to the sales manager, they're not just going to gravitate towards activity, especially if they know that the first thing they can do before they offer any coaching at all is try to help identify. What is it like? Is it mindset, is it activity, is it challenge? And then figure out you know what the next steps are. But just going blindly and saying your activities down we got to work on that to me that I used to get caught up in that too, and this always helped me kind of think like okay, which path are we starting on here? As we go down this skill, the skill, yeah, so, yeah.
Speaker 1:So the thing, the thing I've put into place since we were together, was is we start with skillset and we say can they do it? Can they do it well? Can they do it well under pressure? And if they can do it and they can do it well, they can't do it well under pressure but they're still not doing it. Maybe it's skillset, maybe it's mindset, but if they can definitely do, it's at the top of your challenge list. If it's at the bottom of your challenges list you know, this is the 12th thing that I could work with this person on then it might just be a pure activity thing, but on the skill set side, it's crazy because even things like setting next steps, for example well, can they set next steps? Do they know how to ask? Well, that's fine, that's pretty easy. Or is not setting next steps really just a symptom of poor time management?
Speaker 2:because they get demos and it calls ended.
Speaker 1:They ran out of time. But is? Is that really a symptom? And this is where we just go nuts with the Toyota five wise root cause analysis. Is the time management a symptom of a mindset challenge where they think they have to show the whole product in order to complete a demo meeting? Or is that a symptom not being able to set a meeting for the amount of time that they need because they're worried about damaging a report?
Speaker 1:This is an important person. I can't ask them for an hour. I can only ask them for 30 minutes. So is that a mindset challenge around executive presence or creating a peer-to-peer interaction with somebody that might have a bigger title than them? So there's a lot of things that you can dig into, and if you're not having these types of conversations, like I'm having with myself right now, with your managers, then you're going to be in big trouble when it comes to performing at the top of your game. You can perform at a C plus level, just picking something going with it, but to get to a B plus A minus ain't going to get there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I also think it's important to. One of the things I took away when we worked together was just not like the whole Goldilocks things. Right, like, don't give them 10 skills to work on in a week. Like, let's focus on the most important skill to move the needle over the next seven days and then we can talk about the next one and you can even have them in the queue.
Speaker 2:The way that we set the system up, we knew what the next skills were going to be, that we were going to work on, but we didn't want you going out and you know, trying to do six different things correctly when you weren't doing nothing right in the first place. Right, like's let's focus on the things that are going to matter the most. That way, you can feel those little wins. We both see that you're making progress and then we'll tackle the next thing. But that was something that that also, I think, helps right when, when you're not handing a new sales manager, a rep, with 10 challenges and it's like hey, here's the top three things that we're working on with this one person. That also sets them up for success when they know where the bodies are buried before they get them.
Speaker 1:Exactly, yeah, and it's hard because sometimes people do have a lot of things to work on, but I think that the cool thing with that is you can summarize and consolidate them. So, for example, if there's somebody that's struggling with discovery questions they're struggling with next steps, they're struggling with objections, they're struggling with what to show in the demo Well, you can take all of that and consolidate it into pre-meeting prep. So if a manager comes to me and says, hey, corey, I've got all these problems. You know, this person sucks at this and this and this and this and this, all right, what was their last discovery meeting? And they say it was Alpha Corp. Okay, can you show me two things Show me their calendar for when they prepped for the meeting with Alpha Corp, and can you show me their prep document?
Speaker 1:And guess what response I usually get to those questions? Don't do that, don't do that. Well, you know what? Gee whiz, if you don't prep for a meeting, you're probably not going to be very good at it, unless you're just really, really, really good. I mean, yeah, can Phil Mickelson turn his club backwards and hit the ball right hand, sometimes when he's behind a tree? Yes, he can, but guess how many times. He's practiced that shot Way more than you ever will.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I think that's also another good point about when we're talking about sales management was one of the things that we always had to make sure.
Speaker 2:Especially if you're going to bring any other resource in the business into a meeting, you have to have a pre-meeting prep on the calendar and it can't be like 15 minutes before the meeting starts, like we had times where we'd have to bring in one of my co-founders to have integration conversations to try to flush out issues before the deal signed, just to make sure the technical requirements are solid.
Speaker 2:And I'm not going to bring that man into a meeting, throw it on his calendar and expect him to show up knowing what's happening or take it from the top at the bit, like I want him coming in there knowing exactly what's going on, why he's in there, what the objective of the speeding is and what risks have I identified so far that I'm concerned about, and whether it was with him or whether it was just you know me me having a demo coming up.
Speaker 2:You know where we got a bunch of stakeholders that were willing to come up and see the demo. I also want to take time to prep and just make sure I've got my key talking points and I know what I want to show and sometimes, importantly, what I don't want to show, like that's all stuff that can happen in the pre-meeting, but a lot of the times times I think most folks, either one their reps are too overworked to even have that on the schedule. I found at times I, you know I didn't have breaks when I should have, and so that time management right Making sure you leave yourself a little cushion between meetings if you're using schedulers, and things like that but that that 15 minutes before and sometimes the 15 minutes after is also where you could win deals right by just being prepared and recapping nicely.
Speaker 1:And if anybody wants to dig into this topic further, I did a whole show with Alice Hyman on engaging executive stakeholders and pre-meeting prep for execs, because a lot of times people are scared oh, I can't tell the CEO what to do. Yeah, you can.
Speaker 2:And you can also tell them something that they don't know. That was that was. That was Steve's thing with me is like no CEO wants to take a meeting to find out something they already know. And so I always, because the schools we work with their attendance data and their financial aid and stuff it's pretty public Right. They have to report this to the government. So anytime I went into a meeting I went to it was called iPads and it's like a database for their success rates and how much they charge and I can do a quick back-of-the-napkin map on how much money they're losing throughout the year from their tuition of students who are not being retained through the program and it's an easy formula.
Speaker 2:We would put it in type in the numbers in the CRM. It would spit up the exact 3.5% retention boosts that we offer. It was our average retention boost when we did our study and I can retention boosts that we offer. It was our average retention boost when we did our study and I can call you and say, hey, it's looking here. If this is even directionally accurate, you might be losing half a million dollars a year to students who are dropping out at the midway point. We actually do about a three and a half percent boost on average, right, and that equates to this much dollars.
Speaker 2:Do you want to get that back? And almost always those dollars cover the price, of course, right, the money that you would get back on top of that and that's a revenue impact. But then you add in you had mentioned, you know, spreadsheets and paper, the efficiency, the time gains, the higher value tasks they get to do, the happiness factor of students and staff. You can really build a compelling you know argument for your solution and that's what we did with those business case recommendations. That was the. Let me show you something you don't know and tell you how, every dollar you spend, you're going to get that back. Yeah, it makes it pretty easy when you get those late stage newcomers in that you know why the hell are we talking anyways and, just you know, get out of here and they don't know what's going on because they keep bringing it you uncover a bunch of pain during discovery with the other folks.
Speaker 1:You bring them and you have the business case. And for those of you that run triangle selling at your shops, we're going deep on intellectual resources here. So, understanding what is the current state, what's the future state, what metrics do we want to impact, what's the current value of those metrics, what's the desired future value of those metrics? And then we tie it back to whatever we're charging. So when someone comes to us and says you're too expensive man.
Speaker 2:I've had it. Actually, what you're doing right now is too expensive.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I've never said that that's too expensive. Well, what you're doing? Listen here, bucko, what you're doing right here is too expensive.
Speaker 2:I mean, you're losing half a million dollars and I'm telling you, with 50 K you can get it back. Right, how expensive is it?
Speaker 1:Yeah yeah, that's wild man, you know. Some people just have that reactance to. I don't want any. I don't want to buy anything from anybody. I'll tell you that I have observed one thing in my life. I've observed lots of things in my life, but I've observed one thing I want to mention right now, which is the people that have had the most career success around me are the people who have spent and by spent I mean invested the most money on behalf of their company, and by spent I mean invested the most money on behalf of their company.
Speaker 1:I don't know anybody who's become a CEO or a very senior person or a board member who's gotten their cutting costs. I know people have become CFOs in restructuring. You can go work for a restructuring firm because you're really good at renegotiating contracts and cutting costs, sure. So if you want to work in finance, cool, there's a path there for you. But when it comes to the revenue side of the business and a very large percentage of CEOs come from the revenue side of the business and when private equity funds are out there looking for, who do I want to put in place to run this business I just bought? That's kind of what they're focused on growing top line, growing EBITDA.
Speaker 2:You don't get there by cutting. You get there by investing, right, yeah, and you and smart investing for sure. But this is also, you know, we also understand this is sort of an economy in a time where you know costs were being cut over the last few years and so if you didn't have a really you know I would say respected is kind of the word that I lean towards, because I don't know how many times I heard running triangle selling that they appreciated the way that we did business. I mean, it was almost every time we closed the deal. It was like they knew that we were different than under vendors because we ran this process. That was very much about them. It was more all about staying in alignment with the buyer.
Speaker 2:Yes, we had our steps and stages that we, you know, on our backend, should follow, but the better we stayed aligned with the buyer, the more they appreciated the way that we did business. And I think over the last 12, 24 months, if everybody is trying to convince you that you're just wrong for not buying without taking the time to tell you where you're going to recoup the cost or who's going to have a better life, or why your reviews are going to go up Like there's. There's a lot to be said for companies that can do this during a time like that. We just went through so exactly.
Speaker 1:And if you don't have as much success as you wanted to during that macro headwind, well you're. You're teed up for when things are good again. It's wild man. So many people tell me that things are different. Now Things have changed. I was like, no, they haven't. Things are exactly the same as they were in the last recovery cycle, and I don't need any more 29-year-old sales VPs telling me that the world's changed because the world hasn't changed. The world's exactly how it was in about 2010,. Literally the same.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, you were in middle school, cool, got it. You know what? It's also very similar to what it was like coming in 2003. And I wasn't in the workforce then, but I imagine it's what it was like coming out of the tech recession of 84. I was born in 84, but then we had a big tech recession in 84. And so 85, 86, what Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and her predecessors were dealing with back then. It's like that Bon Jovi song it's all the same, only the names have changed. Yes, right, I know we hit time. How can people reach out to you if they want to get in touch?
Speaker 2:So definitely you can find me on LinkedIn, slash Ryan Bancher and maybe you can give that out and sort of the notes or whatever.
Speaker 1:And then we're putting the title. You're in the title, you don't get you're, you're not in the notes. I mean I'm the one full name. So yeah, I guess people figure out how to spell your last name.
Speaker 2:Yeah, beautiful, so yeah, linkedin is the best bet. If anybody has any questions on like email, you can just hit me at rvancher first initial, dot, last name and then 228. At gmailcom.
Speaker 1:Beautiful Ryan. Thank you so much. This is a great conversation and let's stay in touch. Absolutely Thanks, Corey, you had a great one.