Sales Management Podcast
Cory Bray, 8x author and co-founder of CoachCRM, digs into hot sales management topics.
Sales Management Podcast
99. Early-stage sales analytics with Janet Gehrmann
Analytics are important at every stage of business, but early-on, their importance is often overlooked, and founders + execs might not know about new analytic techniques that were hard-to-impossible in previous years.
Janet and Cory go deep into how to think about early-stage sales analytics and highlight that it might not be as hard as you think to get what you both need and want metrics-wise.
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. Another analytics show today, because this is critical. If we're not doing the analytics right, then we might not know where we're going, and if you don't know where you're going, you might end up someplace else, says my buddy. Not really, because I never met him. Played for the Yankees back in the day Yogi Berra. Today we've got Janet Gehrman, co-founder of Scoop Analytics, to talk to us about early stage sales metrics. Janet, how are you?
Speaker 2:Doing well today. Corey, how are you?
Speaker 1:Doing great Early stage sales manager. Early stage, we're just worried about product. Why are we worried about metrics?
Speaker 2:Well, oftentimes, especially for metrics, you have to start thinking about when are you going to fundraise? So that's always the question of all right, how much revenue do you have? What revenue do you need for VCs If you're going down the VC path, if you're going down the self-funded path? Well, I don't need. We're probably not already talking because you already know about the importance of getting in revenue, because you're going to run out of money.
Speaker 1:I've heard money is important. Money is important. It's funny, Employees have this affinity for paychecks. I hear.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that, and most people like to eat.
Speaker 1:Yeah, food, food's good stuff, Okay. So this is interesting. So we're talking about in the context of a financing discussion, not necessarily. Hey, let's go into meetings and look at all the reports and have arguments about this and that and the other. So let's I know there's other areas that we can hit on. Let's hit on this financing piece. So, when you look at a company, let's do this, let's do good company, bad company, paint a picture for me.
Speaker 2:Good company understands their data, understands their analytics goes out to run a financing process and then contrast that with bad company who doesn't. So there's a couple of ways you can take this. There's good company versus bad company in terms of analytics. If a bad company has 5 million of ARR on two people having formed one application, that's just crushing it. Maybe it's Crazy Birds 2.0. Apologies if I just got that name wrong. I am not a video gamer, which became very apparent there are it's probably good for your social life.
Speaker 2:Hopefully, there are ways that you can still raise money, but one of the key questions that VCs ask tends to be, especially in today's environment, is what is your customer lifetime value? What's your return on the marketing spend? How many customers do you have? What's the sales process that you're running? How long is it so?
Speaker 2:many of these questions relate to data and so many of these questions aren't necessarily what you're thinking about. And, corey, to your point, you're like we just need to build the product and get the next salesperson in, but one or next sales, not always next salesperson. But one of the key things to understand is you don't just want it, you want it in the right way. So I was talking with a founder, another founder, recently, and they're at that 10 to 20 space, trying to build every new measurement and every new thing for their customers. You also want to think through am I building the right thing? Take a step back. Are these use cases that could be repeatable?
Speaker 1:Yeah, because at some point you're not hacking in a garage anymore, you're building a business and there's a transition that goes from that original. We've got to get something, we've got to get traction, and then, hey, our customers aren't just the people that buy the product.
Speaker 2:They're also the people that buy the stock Exactly. You have to think through your customers as both the funders, whether that's VC, a family office or, if you're self-funded, that's your own metrics that you should be doing. So, even if you're self-funded and not going for the VC route, you really need to think about what metrics make this worth it and what metrics make this. You know what. This really isn't a good idea to invest all my life savings in.
Speaker 1:Do you have any fun horror stories where people showed up to raise money and they said here's our product and here's one metric that we have Can we have money? And then they get maybe not laughed out of the room, but they get hit with so many questions that their head spends.
Speaker 2:I think most VCs are very respectful of funders or founders.
Speaker 1:They know how difficult the process is, so they're unlikely to laugh you out of the room, but they're also unlikely to have a second conversation. Well, they're not doing it to your face. Yeah, they're all real sweethearts here, so, okay, so that's the way it looks. It's you get ghosted, you don't get a second conversation. You're like good product, probably good team, but how are we going to get the returns that we need to get to hit our business goals based on the way that these folks run a business?
Speaker 2:Exactly, taking it a step back. You have to think of the VC business model first. So ultimately they need to exit. Exits typically come in two ways an IPO or buyout. Sometimes there are mergers that give exits. Sometimes there are interesting things like what Sequoia just did with Stripe to pay back some of the early stage founders. But typically you either IPO or get bought. Thinking through that, you need to get to that point where you have enough predictable revenue of enough of a product to IPO. Ipos are typically that the predictable revenue For the purchasing. It could be a customer acquisition, it could be a product acquisition, it could be a team acquisition. Those are different, but one thing's pretty consistent More revenue, people are happier to purchase you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so there's got to be a pot of money at the end of the rainbow, and the question that we're answering with data is okay how big could that pot be? How are we going to get to that pot? What are the risks associated with getting to that pot? Those are some of the things that you're looking for, right?
Speaker 2:what is that pot? So, for example, in the type of a customer acquisition, when you're looking to do a merger and they're looking to acquire customers, do you have the customers that they're interested in that that company doesn't already have?
Speaker 1:Interesting. Wow, that's a pretty granular metric. Okay, say that again so everybody that might be missed, as people are listening at 1.5 X driving on the freeway. That was a good one so quick background.
Speaker 2:I did diligences for two years for private equity firms buying software companies and one of the questions that they would sometimes ask us is are we buying this for the product? Are we buying this for the customers? And if we're buying this for the customers, what types of customers? Are we getting very different customers for our current, in which case maybe we can't sell all the other technology to these new?
Speaker 1:customers Interesting. How early do we need to start paying attention to this?
Speaker 2:When you're super early. You're just looking for customers and you're looking for repeatability. You want something that can grow and scale, because that's always the question. You don't want 15 different deals that all look dissimilar, one of them's for $1,000. One of them's for a million dollars. And a VC comes in and they say did you overprice this and they were just too nice to you? Or what happened with this $1 thousand dollar deal? And it's a laugh. But I have seen things like that, where the same piece of technology can be sold for vastly different amounts. What VCs like is what everybody likes. You like predictability. They don't want surprises, they want to know something.
Speaker 2:And if it is going to be a surprise it better be a good one, but they want to know. All right, if I give you this seed round for this many million maybe a little early If I give you this A, this is what I'm predicting that you'll get to for the growth targets to hit your B. If I give you this B, these are the growth targets to hit your C. It's changed a lot. So for some of the folks who listen to your podcast, who have been around for longer, pre-seed seed they are more newer inventions so it used to be just A, b, c. Then we invented seed pre-seed, the angel round, the I got 10K from a college or university type funding round a lot of different ways to get money.
Speaker 1:Found 50 bucks in the couch. Hey, if it works, when I moved to San Francisco in 2014, I lived in this hacker house and there were definitely people finding 50 bucks in the couch I don't even think it was 50 bucks, it was probably more like five bucks and they were like cool, this covers our burn for two days. Let's go see what we can code.
Speaker 2:I lived in San Francisco in 2014. You couldn't buy salad for less than $20.
Speaker 1:Well, these dudes were very crafty. They were like, okay, we'll have half a ramen for now and we'll hit the. We'll hit the other half of the ramen later on. It was wild. No salad, it was just sodium.
Speaker 2:And whatever ramen is, I don't know pasta as long as you get your vitamin CN, so you don't get scurvy.
Speaker 1:That's it. That's it. You don't want any of that. Okay, so we've got series A, series B, series C, where you're starting to work with professional folks that are putting in substantial amounts of money. They expect to have some kind of outsized return so they can hit their goals.
Speaker 2:What are some of the key metrics that we're looking at? Where's this data?
Speaker 1:coming from and why are we talking?
Speaker 2:about this in 2024?
Speaker 1:Shouldn't this?
Speaker 2:be a solved problem by now. Well, I think the first thing we can say is nothing's ever a solved problem. I'm still waiting for the next we had Siebel Now we have Salesforce. Hubspot seems to be coming up. Let's see who the next CRM is, although Salesforce does say they're the nextICRMs. Let's see where that goes.
Speaker 1:Einstein was released in 2014 also, by the way.
Speaker 2:Fun, fun. So everything is. There's never a solved problem, because even if it was solved for a point in time, the problems that you're encountering are changing. So the interest rate we've all. I mean, we're probably all tired of hearing that we just got the half point cut about a week and a half ago. But one of the things that we keep hearing is you know, even if we solved this a couple of years ago.
Speaker 2:It's still existing now. Some of the things that they're starting to pay more attention to. We used to pay a lot of attention to growth at all costs. I'm sure everybody's heard that before. Now we're paying attention to more specific metrics customer lifetime value, customer acquisition cost. Yes, we used to pay attention to those, but in the current environment where we're in, where people are starting to look at things like ROI, like are you cashflow positive? Can you survive on your own without VC funding? It wasn't a question. Most startups got five 10 years ago. It's a question a lot more people are getting now.
Speaker 1:And you're getting them earlier, right? That's kind of the point you're making. Oh yeah, you're getting them more and earlier Because it used to be. It's really hard to calculate these things, or it doesn't matter yet, and once we're bigger we'll worry about that type of stuff. Well, as you get them earlier, you got to figure out, I think it's. I love that saying if you don't know where you're going, you might end up someplace else. So if you don't know what types of questions you're going to ask, there's a concept that I know you love talking about, which is snapshotting. So talk to us a little bit about the risks of not knowing what that means and where somebody might find themselves if they don't know where they're going.
Speaker 2:So here's a question, Corey.
Speaker 1:What did you eat for?
Speaker 2:breakfast yesterday.
Speaker 1:Oh, I have no idea. I probably didn't eat breakfast yesterday. Maybe a Diet Dr Pepper.
Speaker 2:All right. So if you've got 400 different sales deals that you're going. Which ones were stage three or stage four last week?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I have less idea about that.
Speaker 2:Exactly, and that's the importance of Snapshotting is you need to track where the data was to know how it's changing. Oftentimes in a lot of these reports it's pretty easy to see great, we've got 57.5 million in pipeline this week. We had 56.5 last week. It's a delta of a million. Doesn't matter. If you're in kindergarten, maybe first grade, you probably should have been able to.
Speaker 1:I went to public school in Texas, so that's more of a second grade question. But yeah, I got you.
Speaker 2:Public school in Seattle. I honestly don't remember which grade I was, a little slow, there we go.
Speaker 1:I love it. So we've got that delta, but that delta doesn't tell us the whole story, right, that's just one piece of it.
Speaker 2:Exactly. So what changed? No-transcript.
Speaker 1:Does.
Speaker 2:Salesforce snapshot out of the box, Not out of the box. There are ways that you can. I was actually talking to somebody today. They paid about $50,000 for a consultant to start doing some fairly basic snapshotting for them. Wow, that sounds like a lot Okay, I don't know what you're spending money on, but $50,000 to me seems like, oh, it's a half, an FTE.
Speaker 1:You can do a lot of things with $50,000. And if you took all the things in the world you can do with $50,000 and stack rank them, snapshotting would not crack the top 10,000 for me probably.
Speaker 2:You think it wouldn't. But if you can't track say you've got 100 sales reps If you can't track how the US is doing versus EMEA, or if you can't track which product line is getting stuck with POCs that take five weeks versus the POCs that take five months, especially for larger companies, or even just one week versus four weeks. Say you've got one product line that has POCs that take an extra three weeks, You've got a hundred POCs throughout the year. Where that takes, that's 300 extra weeks of solutions engineers time.
Speaker 1:Wow, and then you can. So we can. And then we could look at that by salesperson, sales team, sales engineer, product customer type, all of these different ways that we could. We could look at the information. But if we just pulled up a Salesforce report and just said, hey, let's look at this stuff, we don't have the context, we don't have the depth, or just we don't have dynamic information to be able to make a decision off of.
Speaker 2:Exactly, and Salesforce is a very robust CRM. Other CRMs Close HubSpot, insightly, zoho. They don't have these capabilities.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Okay. So let's get back to painting the picture for how early stage companies can leverage this information. So you gave a couple of specific examples. What is a founder? What is a sales leader? What is a sales manager thinking about in the context of? Okay, I insert this concept of snapshotting, I insert some more robust data analytics into my world. Okay, cool, it's helpful for the VCs. What about for me, as I run the business, as I run my team day to day?
Speaker 2:Well, my guess is most people are getting hired and fired based on is there more revenue closing now than there was last year and, ideally, is it enough more that you're hitting your targets?
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a good assumption.
Speaker 2:So how do you track that? How do you know? How do you know where those things in the pipeline are? It's really easy, especially in how sales has evolved over time, to say, all right, we're going to take him out for a steak dinner and a baseball game, and this is how the old school software game goes.
Speaker 2:2024 is a different time. 2025 is going to continue to be different. It's no longer that gut instinct because, honestly, half the time there's enough data that shows that half the time our gut instinct is wrong and I probably can find studies that show you 75% of the time your gut instinct's wrong. So it's knowing what the data looks for, it's finding those surprises, it's looking through the data and saying you know what, I know, both pharma and health. Pharma, healthcare and finance are all really highly regulated industries. Turns out, actually, finance has a deeper need for our stuff and those deals are closing a significant amount faster. Or, turns out, it doesn't matter that those deals are closing faster, because the pharma deals are worth so much more, the POCs take almost no time and you can close them so much more.
Speaker 1:The POCs take almost no time and you can close them. Barely a salesperson getting in contact yeah, love it. So one concern I have just about this whole conversation is that when you think about folks that came up through sales, that are in sales leadership roles now, having analytical skills and analytical rigor is something that they didn't go deep on. So some people do. Some people have gone to various levels of depth. There's not really a hardcore requirement. Oftentimes the reports are given to you, the data is given to you. Look at this, look at that, whatever. How do folks that didn't have a background in finance or accounting or that weren't required to build or investigate their own reports and analytics coming up, build that skill set? Mid to late career.
Speaker 2:So one of the best things about sales folks is they're always so curious they're focused on how can I do this better? Who's that next person? How can I get multi-threaded an account versus single threaded? And it's that same curiosity that can fuel them to start to look through analytics. It sounds super scary because when you get this Tableau report that's coming out of Snowflake or whatnot or another different type of tool, it's like wait, I don't even know Salesforce.
Speaker 2:I don't even touch that or submit my deals in it. But then you look and everything is just what one rep entered into a snapshot report. That's every single piece of data. It's something you yourself have entered, or your team entered, or you told your team to enter five times before they actually updated the field. We've all been there Thinking that through and then thinking it through with all right, this is just numbers, it's not complicated math. It's not advanced multi-level, multi-variable calculus, which I didn't even take. So I'm not quite sure what multi-variable means.
Speaker 1:It's not fun, trust me.
Speaker 2:Technically I did learn at 1.1 multivariable means, but I did skip those classes because I was not a math major.
Speaker 1:And here we are doing sales. Love it, yeah. So the I think this sums it up well is we're we're just doing discovery, but we're doing it of the database as opposed to of our prospects.
Speaker 2:Exactly Love the way you phrase that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so we just ask a bunch of questions. So where are our best leads coming from? Who are our best customers? What types of deals close the fastest? What salespeople are getting stuck? Where are people getting stuck? I love that one.
Speaker 2:Where are people getting stuck is such a great metric that one where are people getting stuck is such a great metric. I'm sure most people have already done this. Because salespeople are smart. Salespeople will look through the deals. They'll be like, oh, they know. When you get on a call that BDR, SDR, the gen passed them, They'll be like, oh yeah, this doesn't close. And then if you ask them why, they're like, well, all right. Well, I've seen this type of company before and this level of prospect and like this type of conversation, and here's why I don't think it's going to go any further. So there's data that they have. It's just writing it down in a systemic way.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Well, then you get that trap of unconscious competence, where they don't know why they know what they know. And I've seen it lots of times. People, especially if they've been in the same industry for a while they look at it, they say that's a good deal, that's not a good deal. That's a good deal, that's not a good deal.
Speaker 2:And then when you say, okay, explain to me all the reasons why it takes two or three nudges to get it all out of them because they just know, like you said, because they're smart people who have just the ones who know it. It's the ones who can then teach it. So, essentially, this is just a salesperson then becoming a teacher of the data that's already in their head.
Speaker 1:What's the time commitment to get data fluent?
Speaker 2:Depends on how much data that you've got. Pretty basic reporting we should all be able to read. We can all do. You know if X plus Y equals this in Excel. We all know the basics of okay. Stage two deal should close at 10%. A stage POC should close at roughly 50%. Negotiations should be 75 to 90. Every company has it slightly different. I'm not here to tell you these exact numbers.
Speaker 1:Well, I think this not to cut you off, but this is I think this is a really interesting one to dig into, because I think my questions sound pretty basic and people are like, oh well, that's easy, Of course, but what you just said is critical, which is stage two deal. So if we assume that stage two deals are going to close at 35%, well, at what rate are stage two deals actually closing and how's that change? That's, that's what I want to really hammer home here, which is it's simple to talk about it, but to actually do it and put it into practice. Let's just say, quarter over quarter, we had a hypothesis, scientific method, we had a hypothesis that stage two deals will close at 35%, stage two deals actually close at 17%. Huh, then we got to go figure out why.
Speaker 2:Or 17% might be good.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Maybe it's good. Maybe we're just crazy out of the gate. We're like we thought 35%, but why did we think 35% and how did that mess up our assumptions everywhere else?
Speaker 2:And there are ways I've seen companies analyze the historical data for the past X thousand sales cycles. If here's the different close rate, here's where stage two differs and here's where stage two in this size company and this industry and whatnot that I hope sales leaders aren't the ones having to do. They've got other things to focus on and I hope you've got somebody who can run the numbers and spreadsheets or a slightly more sophisticated tool than that. Yeah, but the basic idea behind it sales leaders are smart, they they can understand this stuff. It's just making sure that they're helping their teams ask the right question. So that's the other thing for a lot of RevOps folks. They're brilliant in numbers, they're incredibly sophisticated, but most people in RevOps I know have never closed a sales team.
Speaker 1:Ooh, I'd agree with that.
Speaker 2:And it's bridging that gap. And this is exactly what sales can do. Sales knows how to talk to people who aren't necessarily in sales, and it's communicating with them. Here's what I'm looking at. Here's what I'm thinking of. Let me hear more of what you're thinking of and why you did this number.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So then they collaborate. So you got the sales expertise, you got the numbers expertise. People come together and you're not forcing. So the whole goal of this conversation isn't to make the salesperson a senior analyst or the sales leader senior analyst. It's to make sure that a folks are aware of what information exists, be what transformations you might need to make that information to make it useful and see what to do with it. And then collaborate with your team that has access to it and go find some values, find some hidden nuggets in there.
Speaker 2:Exactly and it's finding if you really empower your RevOps, person sales ops, kind of whoever is that ops function? It differs a lot of different companies and I'm not here to tell you which method to use, but I am here to say that you've got to empower them because you've got to figure out what's working and what's not.
Speaker 1:Because you want to start doing more of what is and a lot less of what isn't. Yeah, I love it. Okay, so here's one of my least favorite phrases in the world. It really annoys me. It annoys me more than pretty much anything which is it depends, and I feel like with what we're talking about, we could fall into a really big it depends trap, because everything depends it. Show me something that doesn't depend. I think it's just the dumbest thing that somebody can say. And it's, you know, it's great corporate speak. If you work at a 10,000 person company, I bet you've got 20 years in your career and just say the word it depends in every meeting and people just think you're smart. I don't buy it because everything depends. So how do we avoid this endless loop of it depends when we're talking about sales analytics?
Speaker 2:Well, I'd start to look at what do you care about? So that's I'll. I'm going to toss it back. It depends, but are you a B2B company or a B2C company? Do you have recurring revenue or not? Do you have? And it's figuring out, what are those key metrics that your board is looking at?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:That's what it depends on, and then filter down from there. Great we have. We've got our North Star. We know where we need to aim for. How do we do that, and is our current strategy the right one, or do we have to execute on this strategy while trying a couple other experiments to the side?
Speaker 1:So we know what it depends on. That's the answer which I like. I'm fine with that. It depends on these specific things that I'm outlining to you, not it depends. I'm exiting the conversation claiming victory and demonstrating how brilliant I am. That's just so annoying. It is the most annoying thing on earth.
Speaker 1:One of the beautiful spots of small companies is you can't get by on. It depends for very long. No, not at all, especially if you're at all, especially if you're on me. If you're on me, you get by with it zero times. It depends. Oh my gosh. Okay, that's good, that's good, that's good, okay.
Speaker 1:So we go into the conversation. So everyone listening to this probably b2b everyone listening to this is probably doing some kind of sales five thousand000 annual contract value up to low seven figures and we're probably trying to get recurring revenue. And if we don't have recurring revenue, you've got some aspect of recurring revenue. I love these consulting businesses. I see consulting businesses, recruiting businesses. People look at it like that's not recurring revenue. It's totally recurring revenue. Look how many times they have transactions processed with the same customer. Just because there's not a contract doesn't mean that it's not recurring revenue. And go, look at a lot of SaaS companies that sell something and they've got 20% of their customers churning the next year. Well, that recruiting business that works with the same client over and over and over again for a decade, that looks much more like recurring revenue than somebody that has 20 or 30% turnover there on a SaaS contract. So it's fun to look at different things like that.
Speaker 2:It is, and there's a lot of different types of revenue models that I'll be curious to see in the next couple of years. I was talking to somebody recently who thinks that the future is SaaS services, a hybrid model. We'll see.
Speaker 1:I'm one of those people. Tell me more. What did you hear? I'd love to provide some insight here too, because that's the world I'm living in. Not many people know this, so if you're hearing this for the first time from me and you're like Corey, what are you talking about? Shoot me a note on LinkedIn and I'll tell you more about what I'm working on, but go ahead.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so SaaS services is the idea at least. I'm not going to say that I'm the expert in the subject, but maybe after this podcast comes out if you have any speaking engagements, please let me know. But it's the idea that it's not just the software, it's empowering the people too, especially in the age of do more than less. Who is more the expert in software than the people who created it? So, and in addition to that, do more with less. It's going to take somebody a couple of hours to figure out how to use a new software platform. If they can pay somebody a couple hundred bucks to just get it all set up for them, great, even if it's a hundred dollar software or $200, oftentimes they'll just pay for it because it's one less thing for them to do.
Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure. And it gets really interesting when you start looking at it in the context of employees and, I think, with what both you and I do. So you from the analytics side, me from more of the sales enablement side. You can hire an employee to do these things. You can hire an employee to augment them. You can build a team of people to do these things. Well, at some point you have to separate the build plus the operate. The build and the operate. Those things need to be separated.
Speaker 1:And the thing that I always say is that if you hire a W-2 employee to do build, you're probably making a pretty big mistake for a couple of reasons. One, how many times have they actually done it? And it could be lots of things. So it could be build a sales playbook, build an onboarding program, roll out training to your team, set up analytics, integrate lots of data sources, whatever it is. How many times have they done it at your company's size and scale, in the context of what your company's facing right now? And they're willing to take the job for the pay that you're willing to offer at the title you're willing to offer?
Speaker 1:Typically, we're looking at folks that have done it zero to two, maybe three, maybe four times before. That's the build. Now, if you hire somebody that's an expert at it, that just does that all the time for all different types of companies, you're going to run into somebody that's done it 50, 100, 200, a thousand times. Who would you rather have set things up for you and then have that W-2 employee operate it on a day-to-day, week-to-week, quarter-to-quarter basis? That's the world that I see everything transforming to. Because, oh man, how many teams have got burnt by hiring people into sales enablement roles that have literally never done sales enablement, that had created dumpster fires. Over the last two years, I've personally seen over a hundred companies do this, and it's wild. What happens in there? Build a bunch of stuff, don't create a bunch of value. Move things around. It's wild. Some people are doing great at it, but a lot of people are oh my gosh, it's wild.
Speaker 2:I'd also add on top of that the rise of fractionals.
Speaker 1:Yeah, right.
Speaker 2:The two trends are after that same target of do you want? You know? We've all gone through this process for a website designer when we were deciding. It's not like we hired somebody. We're looking out and saying, all right, we want absolutely the best website designer as our marketing person. We need them for one website. We can iterate on it once it's done. If you love our website or hate it, shoot me a note in the comments, I feel.
Speaker 1:but we what's your website? Give a plug.
Speaker 2:Scoopanalyticscom.
Speaker 1:Boom. I bet they love it. You have a nice website. I like your website.
Speaker 2:We found a fantastic agency that we worked with, but we don't need them full-time. We need them for one website. We don't have five websites, and that's the exact idea, corey, that you're talking about is you want the best person to do it for you, and then we're executing it. For the rest, we have a new landing page that's easy to pop up, but we were operating it. We're not the ones building it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, external build, internal operate, and then you can. And the cool thing is, from the services providers perspective, all the new technology that exists today. Well, now they can put AI on top of it, not to say, hey, look at our cool new AI tool that all these features exist. A lot of times you don't even see it because they're just able to do their job better and faster, which is going to create all kinds of downstream, upside to the client more value capture for the third party, more value for the internal company. And you don't have to hire all these employees that are W2 employees, hired to do projects. And if you've ever managed somebody whose title was special projects or who worked on a special project, you're probably scratching your face really hard right now and frustrated because those hardly ever work out well.
Speaker 2:There's a lot of times where people used to throw bodies at problems, then they threw technology at problems and now they're taking a step back and thinking what is the right resource for this problem?
Speaker 1:That sounds like a good caveman. Graphic.
Speaker 2:Don't ask me. My sister was the studio art minor.
Speaker 1:You know, I'm talking about the caveman graphic, where it's the little person and then they grow up and then all of a sudden it's this big caveman.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:We had bodies and then we had technology, and that's just the it's the evolution of work.
Speaker 2:It's kind of what it is evolution of white collar work.
Speaker 2:And it's thinking back to this. It's the same thing that you think of for analytics. It's always figuring out what is the problem that you're looking to solve. Problem is is it more revenue? Is it how do we get our website up and running? Is it our sales enablement program? What tool do we have? Is it hiring a full-time person? Is it hiring a consultant? Is it using a software to do this for us? What are those different resources and how do you fill that in?
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly. And how do you put this all together?
Speaker 2:How do you put it all together? And then I have to add this in for 2024. Ideally in a low cost way. There are many ways you can spend a lot of money to solve a problem. Lots of money isn't what people love these days. I mean, they love getting it, but they don't love giving it.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, and for uncertain outcomes, it's easier to buy piecemeal solutions and wire. Well, it's funny because, okay, so we've got two ends of the spectrum. So you've got. People want just acute problems solved. So let's talk about marketing, for example. So you might have a website, you might have some content that you need generated, you might have a marketing automation tool that you need implemented, so you might have several things that you need. So there's experts that can come in and do each one of those pieces. But the other trend, if we're talking 2024, is vendor consolidation, which doesn't align with that at all, and so it's the best of both worlds where, oh, we want fractional experts to be able to do all these things, oh, but we also want to consolidate vendors, and so we don't have as many invoices to pay or as many throats to choke, as they say.
Speaker 2:Vendor consolidation. It's an on-again, off-again trend. Sometimes people want as much software as they can do to automate the processes as much as vendor consolidation. As we have everyone's buying say at LinkedIn, salesnav. Everybody these days is paying for Clot or OpenAI, so there still is some vendor consolidation. There's also making sure you look at the security on certain vendors. There's enough stories about people plugging some stuff into open chat models that perhaps should not have been plugged into there. But it's also thinking what's the right way If you have 200 tools to manage like? I don't know one person who can manage 200 software billing cycles. Most people still are like wait, do I have to pay rent this month?
Speaker 1:Or more. That's funny, yeah, because if people actually want a vendor consolidation, everybody would just be on Microsoft everything, everything, because microsoft pretty much has everything right if I say yes, someone's going to point out something in the comments what we're both wrong about technically, it's okay. Don't read the comments. Comments are bad for you. Comments are bad for your, your body or longevity um comments are the cigarettes of social media every.
Speaker 2:There's always a best way to do things, but it's the best way for you. It's not the best of great yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1:So tell me a little bit about what y'all are doing with making putting a analytic solution on top of existing things, because people have data, people have ways to see reports inside of other things. So give us a little context around why Scoop and what impact it has on orgs that already have some data some places and they're not able to get that information that they need to get those reports for VCs, to help their financing or to help to run the day-to-day management of their teams.
Speaker 2:So we've been talking a lot about doing more less and that's really the goal of Scoop is data. Resources are very expensive. Getting your data out of Salesforce or HubSpot, netsuite, pipedrive, jira through DBT into Snowflake, into a data blending into a front-end visualization layer. That's a lot and that's a lot of that's impossible for every.
Speaker 1:There is not a single person that listens to this podcast that can do what you just described. I guarantee you that.
Speaker 2:Exactly For Scoop. We do it in a much simpler way. We get data directly out of operational reports. We can do it through API, we can do it through emailed reports. We can snapshot data straight from your Google sheet daily. If that's what your CRM is, then we blend it together. If you're looking to blend in sales or marketing data together, or even we have a number of customers who have just been lending HubSpot reports with HubSpot reports, salesforce reports with Salesforce reports, super sophisticated tool. Google Sheets is what we use. Microsoft says that one in eight people in the world know spreadsheets, so we're kind of assuming that that's a decent sized ham.
Speaker 1:Well, considering that, I bet that one in eight people are children and one in eight people are elderly, maybe two in eight people are children, yeah, so so most people are pretty good at spreadsheets, or at least elementary proficiency.
Speaker 2:And that's where it's what Scoop does shouldn't be any more complicated than a VLOOKUP, and if you need help with a VLOOKUP, there's a lot of different tools that we have there for you. And really the goal of Scoop is how do we empower these business users Revenue finance, marketing operations, sales operations how do we get a tool for them so that they don't have to go and rely on a data analyst every time, and every time their sales VP says we're adding a custom object to Salesforce, you don't have to go back through that whole process.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's good, love it. Okay. So you're making things easy by using tools people already have, but augmenting it with what exists today, which is great technology in 2024. We're the first tool that's purely for the business operations, professional Sweet. That sounds useful.
Speaker 2:Hopefully. So far a lot of people have found that useful because they don't have to go and learn a new skill set. I know I've learned SQL probably half a dozen times.
Speaker 2:I barely remember it because you don't use it daily it's the thing If you've got one project that you're going to have to use SQL for every six months, by the time you use it again you're half forgotten what you learned Spreadsheets here in daily. So we chose a deep a skillset that everybody has because everybody keeps in touch with. And then creating the charts, the graphs, adding in the colors, like we, we've all done that enough on PowerPoint and you can present directly out of Scoop.
Speaker 2:Because I know as a consultant, one of the banes of my existence was that midnight at 2 am, do I have every single cut of the data that the partner will ask for in the morning to present to the PE firm? The answer is you never have every cut of the data. So our solution was why don't we just be able to drill straight on straight from the slide and present? You can drill and filter so that you don't have to worry at 2am Did I remember to do customer two and did I remember this cut? And is the 200 slide appendix enough?
Speaker 1:Wow, yeah, that doesn't sound fun. Do you have any fun success stories from what investor reaction or executive reaction has been when they say, oh, this is possible now.
Speaker 2:Usually the first thing we get was oh, that's a lot easier than I thought.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Because we get in the data, we get in the snapshot data, we'll blend it together and we're like wait, but don't I have to do something super fancy for that cohort analysis. It's like nope, that's automatic, like we just added in the. If then and now you can sort by webinars or you can sort by you know your 2023 customer cohort versus your 2024.
Speaker 1:I love it. One of the things that I think is underappreciated is how much investing in tools and advisors and consultants and things like that helps someone's career. So, for example, if you work at a company, so if you're listening to this, you work at a company and you think, oh, we can't do any of that stuff, Our stuff's a mess, we can't get the reports that we're asked for, we can't run our team because we got blind spots and all these other things. The person that solves that becomes a hero inside of the company. And what better way to help your career and nobody's getting advanced in their career for not spending 3,000.
Speaker 1:I don't know what you cost, I'm just throwing numbers out there. 3,000 or $30,000. Nobody cares. You're not going to put on your resume. Hey, four years ago I saved the company 30 grand and that's not going to put you ahead of anybody in a hiring process. Nobody cares. It's budget to be invested. And the folks that can wrangle I'm telling you, the people I've seen just skyrocket in their careers are the folks that have been able to create leverage for themselves by wrangling internal resources either being able to hire people on their team, being able to bring in consultants to help accelerate what they're doing or to be able to bring in technology that just puts them into a new stratosphere. So I think one piece of advice I always give my friends especially is, if you've got the opportunity to buy stuff for your company, do it. Do it as much as you possibly can Just make it work.
Speaker 2:Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. I know so many exactly, corey. I know so many folks who have looked into different tools and they're like but it doesn't do 100%. Nothing's ever going to be 100%. We see all the time in public companies then restate their earnings reports from the prior quarter. Multi-billion dollar public companies can do that. Like you have to be good enough, don't fudge them. I'm not saying fudge the numbers or lie. I'm saying do absolutely the best that you can and focus on that and don't focus on well, technically, this one tool didn't have this one widget this other tool had, so I just did nothing because that was the easiest.
Speaker 1:Yeah, don't do that. That's no fun, that doesn't get you very far and nobody's going to be happy with you. Like, oh yeah, corey, he's great, he doesn't ever buy anything. Okay, well, you know, that's cool in one quarter, maybe if you're in super cost-cutting mode. But having the reputation for the person that moves and shakes and innovates is much better than the person that sits there and pinches pennies. They're not even your pennies.
Speaker 2:They're going to be spent on something, something at some point. Why not leverage them to advance your career? That's what I say exactly. Doing nothing is doing something. If you're staying at the same dead-end job for six years, that's still doing something. You're actively choosing to stay every day. If you're following the same sales process that hasn't worked, you're still following that. You're trying to do different things with the same old technology and you're like well reporting's never worked. We'll try something. Sometimes you'll fail at it. You'll make a bad hire, choose a bad consultant, something won't work out. But you're never going to shoot a shoot a free throw if you don't even throw it in the basket yeah, and you're going to learn something.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you have a lot of good zingers doing. Doing nothing is something and nothing is a solved problem. I've never heard that before. I used it's a solved problem all the time. Now you're just going to be in the back of my head thinking, wait a second. But Janet says nothing is a solved problem, and that makes sense too. So now I'm confused about what I should say next. That's great, cool Janet, great conversation, love it. Everybody. Check out scoop analyticscom. Anything else you want to say as we wrap up?
Speaker 2:Corey, I've known you for a decade and I'm excited to see where your career goes over the next couple of decades.
Speaker 1:Same to you. Let's do it All right, everybody. Thank you so much for checking out the Sales Management Podcast. We'll see you next time you.