Sales Management Podcast
Cory Bray, 8x author and co-founder of CoachCRM, digs into hot sales management topics.
Sales Management Podcast
Dave Breshears
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Introduction to Sales Management Podcast
Speaker 1Welcome 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 . I'm back here in the Capital Fatty Criteria podcast studio , austin , texas , with my in-person guest Chief Revenue Mechanic of Silicon Hills Revenue Labs . Mouthful , mouthful , dave Brashears . Hey , dave , how are you ?
Speaker 2I'm good , corey . How are you man ?
Speaker 1I'm good we got this equipment set up .
Speaker 2Hopefully this sounds good because we're sharing a mic . It's really kind of intimate right now . If you could see it , you'd be impressed .
Speaker 1We're looking at each other over the top of the microphone , gazing longingly into each other's eyes is not an overstatement .
Speaker 1Gazing longingly . All right , here's what I want to talk about . First , let's dig into software and services and how they play together . You're currently working in a role where you're doing professional services . You're helping people implement software
The Gap Between Software and Services
Speaker 1products . Previously , you were inside the house at the software company . I've done both of these in my career too . My fear is , I think people undervalue services , and I want to dig into that and understand your perspective as somebody that's just in it day to day .
Speaker 2Yeah , absolutely so it's probably on me now , right ?
Speaker 1It is . Should we get a ball ? Yeah , they're connected .
Speaker 2No , I kind of got that the eyes again . I was just mesmerized If you could only see these deep brown orbs you too . So my two things are connected , because when I left my sales career I'd spend about 10 years doing software sales , and a big part of that is , you know , wanting to make sure that your customers are successful . So my last gig was at Outreach , and at Outreach oops , I'm not supposed to be hitting the table , you'll hear me .
Speaker 1He's still passionate , he's animated , he's pounding the table with his wedding ring .
Speaker 2Over here I'm taking a deep breath and centering myself .
Speaker 1At .
Speaker 2Outreach . My real passion was working with customers who we'd sold a lot of seats to really hadn't had deep penetration , so companies that were really really big and had a couple of teams that were on outreach but hadn't necessarily gotten us to a global deployment , and so I became one of the . Well , I guess I was the first strategic account manager , and what I really liked about it was I got to work on the problem of helping customers figure out how the hell do we use this thing right , because it was an amazing tool and if you were really into it and you set it up the right way and you had the right kind of support , you could do amazing things with it . But if you didn't , it was this really complex 747 cockpit of an instrument that could do a lot of damage if you didn't know how to do it right , and so I became very passionate about not just selling the thing but making sure that people knew what to do with it , because I believed , if they could really use it , that it wouldn't just be a tool for SDRs .
Speaker 2This would be the platform , and this is Manny Medina's vision . This isn't mine , but it would be the platform that unified the revenue organization , every customer conversation , every touch point on the journey , no matter what role you were in . If you had a customer facing role and you had conversations with them , you had conversations with them , whether they're prospects or existing customers , for 10 years . All that shit can be coordinated through outreach . All of it can be logged automatically to Salesforce Process consistency , continuous improvement , drive data from other platforms into it . I really believed in that vision and I think ultimately , that's where sales is headed . But to get there , we had a massive problem and that was you needed to support people in learning how to take the baby steps that would eventually get them to that full deployment right , because that was the services gap .
Speaker 1To do that . Before you even get to the point where you're implementing anything , you have to build a lot of features . That's right , because everybody's got a different business model . They've got different ways that they do things . You're going to get feature requests from customers and you're going to be in competitive deals against people that have those . So you're driving towards that world where you've got that 747 cockpit . I can't remember . I looked it up the other day . I think it was something like 650 buttons inside of a 747 cockpit . There are a lot of them . Now , if you take them one button at a time and you know which groups of buttons are highly relevant , which groups of buttons you're never going to need and how to get the user manual out when you need to push those buttons , you're in good shape . But if you just look at 650 buttons , you're overwhelmed and catatonic . That's right .
Speaker 2And if you unpack all of that for anybody , they quickly shut down . And so there was this challenge of you were handing people this enormously powerful piece of technology , but it just wasn't possible to sit down with each individual deployment and work them through what that meant . And not only was it outreach , but it was outreach connecting to Salesforce and being fed data by Zoom Info and putting output into Clary that was being fed back into the platform . It was a lot of different pieces of the mechanical puzzle that becomes the sales tech stack and nobody was really orchestrating it well . And so when I left outreach in 2020 , I went to Sapper Consulting and founded the professional services practice there with TJ Mackey , brought on Jacob Turner , who was like employee number four at outreach . Chris Dankowski , one of my former pals at outreach .
Speaker 2Katie Myers I'm going to forget and not name everybody , so I'm going to stop now while I'm ahead . But that group was really focused on on trying to fill that gap . It was figuring out how do we help outreach as customers become more successful on the platform that they purchased . But then we're having challenges and that was everything from . You know small businesses that didn't understand how to make this super powerful platform work for their pursuits to very large organizations that have been customers for years and had kind of let it get to a state where there were literally tens of thousands of sequences that had piled up of various use and quality and not really a lot of understanding of what was going on and not a lot of coordination . And so that's kind of the state of things . That gets us to your question what's the gap ? The gap is Wait , let's hold I want to do an interlude here
Speaker 1Let's history
Evolution of Sales Technology Implementation
Speaker 2on . .
Speaker 1do a lesson first the gap is Wait , let's hold on . I want to do an interlude here . Let's do a history lesson first . Historically , professional services , or when someone pays to get something implemented , is often done , sometimes by the software company , but often by a channel partner . Go back even farther . Let's go back in time , go back even farther to when it was hardware . Okay .
Speaker 2And when it was hardware , it was Accenture . It was hardware , it was Accenture , it was McKinsey , it was Bain , and they were coming in and doing deployments of large hardware packages , of which the software might be 20% of the world , that were coming in and managing the change management elements of that deployment and because they were working with major hardware vendors that had long lists of customers and credibility In the world of SaaS . When we had this explosion of now , all of a sudden you're not tied to the bundled software that comes with your hardware but you can go get any software to solve any point problem and we came up with billions of point solutions , not billions , but the idea is we now have all of this software . We lost the ability for the Accentures of the world or for anyone else to master all of those tools and to de-risk them in the same way .
Speaker 1Well , and they can't make any money off of it because the price point isn't tens and hundreds of millions of dollars , that's exactly right and the deployments can't happen in the same way .
Speaker 2They don't have the expertise to come in and say hey , at&t , we know that you're still on an old ERP , but we want to help you transition over to Salesforce and outreach . Right , they can do that and they do , and they get paid handsomely for it . But their knowledge of that intersection between outreach and sales loft does not exist , or it's at least an inch deep right , because that technology hasn't existed long enough for that expertise to have made it into the Accentures of the world , right ?
Speaker 1So you're left with vendors as the people who are the primary people who own the professional knowledge around their technology , which is a challenge , because if you look at the valuation of a software company , they're valued on recurring revenue . That's right . Well , professional services is not recurring revenue , that's right . You can only have so much until the folks that are on your cap table start saying , ah , you're looking too much like a services business .
Speaker 2Which is why companies like Salesforce went the other route . If you look at what Salesforce did , the growth in and I'm drawing curves with my hands the growth curve of Salesforce as a platform , right , is this one line that is up and to the right , but the growth in terms of the Salesforce implementation partners and that ecosystem of providers , who are the ones that actually deliver the services , has grown even more than the install base . Right , and Salesforce made that happen . They deliberately chose not to own all of professional services but instead supported an ecosystem of third-party services , professionals who were able to fill that gap and were able to build an ecosystem that was capable of handling the massive growth that they have . I don't think I've seen the same thing necessarily from the software vendors that are sort of stage two of sales technology development , and that's from the outreaches of the world and gongs and sales lofts to the Clarys and Six Senses and Zoom Infos and the ancillary tools .
Speaker 1Yeah , well , maybe one of the reasons is because in between phase one and phase two there's a phase 1.5 . And that Because in between phase one and phase two there was a phase 1.5 . And you mentioned point solutions a second ago with very simple point solutions .
Speaker 2Yeah , like Yesware , Yesware , ToutApp or things like this .
Speaker 1That were just extensions inside of your email . That did a few things .
Speaker 2And individual reps could download them . There was no contract with the company . Right , we were all experimenting with that 1.5 stuff and they were just like oh , you've got email things going on .
Speaker 1You got email at 20 bucks Are those extensions Sweet . Yeah , yeah , swipe your card Right .
Speaker 2I paid for recurring yes , we're across like three jobs because it wasn't one of the things that they provided .
Speaker 1but Right , and so you could do that , and then all of a sudden , those types of products .
Speaker 2Well , how do we do integrations ? How do we do reporting ? How do we make it relevant for inbound and outbound ? And I sold to a very large let's just say fortune 10 company that hadn't yet made the transition to a modern sales architecture , and in trying to get them onto outreach , one of their biggest concerns was email deliverability . Rightly so , but , like five years before , this was a topic that it is today , and they understood what was going to happen if we connected to their email servers and started sending through that Right . And so I think outreach was one of the early companies that recognized , when you start to touch these critical systems email , your Salesforce , instance , hell , even purchasing and payment software platforms you were going to have to be a much more rigorous platform , and that was , frankly , one of the reasons why it was so easy to sell at the enterprise level and why we were winning such a disproportionate number of those deals is they were just first to market with that level of platform sophistication . They were the first really enterprise ready thing .
Speaker 1Checking a lot of the boxes that the . It people needed .
Speaker 2You just couldn't . You could just flat out beat people by asking a certain series of questions that we knew they couldn't get through . Wow Right .
Speaker 1Yeah , that's great . So then you get there and all of a sudden you've got something that is the next generation of that simple self-serve tool . That's actually much more complex and the partner ecosystem is not built up in a way where they can make money , where they can go out and implement with expertise . So what happens next in this ? I think we're just digging into this evolution of going from a simple software product to a more complex one and understanding where the professional services comes in , and then we'll get to that in a little bit . And I want to really dig into why a lot of software implementations fail that have led us to this culture of tool consolidation , which I think is BS , and we'll talk about that here in a few minutes .
Speaker 2So you want to talk about what's the big challenge on the implementation .
Speaker 1Yeah , so we start building more and more and more features inside the product . Your team internally doesn't have the bandwidth to go do a white glove customized implementation . There's not enough knowledge base out in the consulting world to do it .
Speaker 2What do you do ? I mean , at some
Software Implementation Success vs Failure
Speaker 2level , part of the problem that happens with a platform like Outreach or Sales Loft or Apollo or Groove or any of the others that are trying to be a system of action , is that there are so many differences in terms of workflows . Are you a transactional seller that's trying to reach out to an SMB audience , or are you a complex enterprise seller that's only talking to the Fortune 50 , right ? Are you having to talk to people in financial services that are highly regulated , and does that change the way that you do it ? And so we've got these platforms that are fairly malleable , but to get best practices , you typically wind up talking in language that doesn't really take into account all the nuances for all of those different potential deployments and , as a result , we wind up way , way , way outselling our ability to master what it takes to be successful , to master what it takes to be successful . And so you have this period of growth where , really , from like 2015 to 2019 , let's call it there was just a massive growth of companies that were suddenly deploying sales engagement technology . They had effectively armed their sellers with a weapon of mass engagement . Right Now , they had their ability to fucking be Marketo if they wanted to be Marketo .
Speaker 2Only , that totally wasn't the plan . That's not what anybody wanted them to do . That's absolutely not what SalesLoft or Outreach or Groove or anybody else was recommending , and all the companies that were doing great weren't doing anything remotely close to that . But we so oversold our ability to tailor what was happening that inertia takes hold , people do their things , and then you've got this mountain of people who are spewing bullshit about best practices that those folks who have actually been on the inside are like no , god damn it , they're not email sequences . If you say that again , I'm gonna fucking hit something right , because that's just not what anybody was doing .
Speaker 2So what did they want ? What did you want it to be ? I mean , we wanted it to be this sophisticated platform that allowed you to effectively communicate with accounts by engaging multiple potential stakeholders based on their entry point value High touch sequences for those that are champions and decision makers . Low touch to medium touch for lateral influencers and informants , but doing it in a way that you were picking a handful of accounts every day and a handful of prospects . At Outreach . We had something called Rule 52 . If an account's worth engaging , it's worth engaging a minimum of two people who are in a decision-making capacity , somebody at the director level or above , and no more than five people per account .
Speaker 2So we weren't spamming them , we were preserving deliverability , but that plan wasn't to go grab a slew of people from accounts and slop them into a sequence and then just pray to God , something good happened . It was to hunt with an arrow to be able to say this is the account I'm going for today . I'm going to go research who the right five people are for me to engage at this time . I'm going to put them into sequences that are tailored to their buyer persona , that are shared across all of our SDR teams . Nobody's right , no SDR should be writing the sequence what in the hell are you doing ? Like ? We all did this , and that's all of the companies that were doing it . Well , had these shared things , and it was well-structured sequences designed to get people on the phone . They were not intended to convert on the first touch . They were planned to be an engagement that drove engagement over time or detention . I mean , that's what the plan was .
Speaker 2That's what outreach sequences were for years and they were sexy as hell and they worked like crazy . And the companies that were doing the same basic thing following the same basic playbook the snowflakes of the world , the Clouderas of the world before that where Lars was pioneering all this stuff like they've just been wildly successful DocuSign , zoominfo they all ran the same playbook and they all crushed . It was only when we lost that ability to talk about that playbook , because now we weren't just in standard SaaS technology deployments but we were selling to the small market business and we were selling to , you know , services , industries and other things that we didn't build the playbook out to support it .
Speaker 1Yeah .
Speaker 2And that's where I think things went off the rails .
Speaker 1What's the phrase ? You spam cannon .
Speaker 2Yeah the spam cannon it's the became the spam cannon . It was like Holy shit , look at this thing . We can now we can reach 10,000 people and it's like motherfucker , that's Marketo .
Speaker 1Meant to buy marketo and so , since the marketing team , the marketing team , won't let us use marketo , right , here's this other thing that we can buy marketers , by the way we're thrilled .
Speaker 2They were like , oh my god , now we can reach these 10 000 mqls . And it's like , first of all , that's garbage and second of all , no , that's not what we're supposed to be doing right . So I think we we lost that vision . We lost that sort of way because we didn't have a professional services layer that was capable of growing the community and growing the use of the technology in a way that propagated best practices and , as a result , it's just been a laissez-faire approach to sales development for the past four plus years . We were lucky that we had such great economic tailwinds that you couldn't basically throw a rock without hitting someone willing to take an initial meeting . And now that things have gotten tight , everybody thinks , oh , the technology sucks . And it's like , oh , holy God , guys , it's not the tool , it's that you don't know how to use it .
Speaker 1Right . So how does the implementation vary from a unsophisticated customer that buys it , loads up contacts and just goes versus somebody that really thinks through an implementation ?
Speaker 2So I don't get to see a lot of implementations up close . Most of the time I'm doing rehabs . So I'll tell you the difference and not to evade it Is this why you call yourself a mechanic .
Speaker 2Yeah , Cause that's most of what I'm doing is I'm coming in and helping you fix your revenue engine . At some level , You've either got a problem with your fuel , you've got a problem with how you're converting that fuel , or you've got problems with the exhaust on the back end of that system right , and at some level you've got something that needs fixing . When I see companies that have been successful in outreach and have deployed effectively , what they're usually asking me to come in and do is build a new workflow . We've figured out that we've got this user base that's starting to use our platform more , and we want to figure out a product-led growth approach that lets us use this user data to go reach the decision makers at the organization , and so those folks have built their instance of outreach in a way that says , for each role , we're going to have a set of sequences and we're going to have a set of plays that are designed to do specific things Inbound conversion for hand raisers . Inbound conversion in terms of warm outbound .
Speaker 1So there's a business process tied to every single thing .
Speaker 2Everything that they do is tied back to . What is the role , what is the channel that we're trying to convert ? Is it inbound , is it outbound ? Is it expansion , is it , you know , you can call it near bound , you can call it all the other things , but is it anything other than right Like , is it something different ? That we need to build a different set of processes around it ?
Speaker 2That's what the teams that do it well do , and they usually start with a couple of teams . They'll figure out that we're going to start with our SDRs and we're going to do an outbound motion and they master that motion and then they layer on and once they get people comfortable on the platform and they get them using on a consistent basis and their managers know what to look for and they can drive adoption , then you can layer on all of the workflows that you want and you can bring on additional teams and you can drive collaboration with AEs and SDRs . The ones that don't do it that well typically set the platform up and have some basic starting points where they kind of say okay , here's how we're going to use it .
Speaker 1They put a little bit of energy into it .
Speaker 2They've certainly invested in . Some of them may have invested a lot of money , but it's just . If you're a large organization , you're probably trying to support mid-market accounts , commercial accounts , strategic accounts . You're probably doing some inbound , some outbound . You've probably got folks who only sell to the install base . You've probably got other folks who are in Latin America and some are in Asia , right , and so when those folks who I help a lot , what they've typically done is they've taken sort of a standard blueprint and they've put it across a ton of different workflows and they've said go , get them tiger , and then they expect all of the individual frontline teams of managers to just figure that shit out , and that usually leads to chaos .
Speaker 2Some people are wildly successful . I've seen organizations that , frankly , have results that blow my mind and they , but I couldn't tell you why .
Speaker 2All I can tell you is this crazy 20 people doing 20 random fucking things is blowing a number out of the water , but consistency no idea yeah most of the time , what you wind up with is massive variance people that are simply succeeding through sheer brute force or talent , and , on the other end of the spectrum , people who are wildly flailing because they have no idea what to do . And then a lot of people in the middle who may be sort of skating by , but aren't doing it confidently and certainly aren't improving .
Speaker 1And , as this is happening , is there a way for the company , an executive in the company , whoever owns this RevOps who knows , to see what's actually happening and to be able to identify variance against what should be happening ? Isn't it crazy , Doesn't it say ?
Speaker 2yes , not only is it , but it's bizarre to me that when I I have a lot of conversations with folks who come into it somewhat late , I'm usually brought into a conversation by somebody who's very close to the problem , and then we eventually get to someone who's in a leadership position , who's a little bit distanced from it but aware that there are things going on , and I'm surprised by how few of them actually go into their sales engagement platform and look at this stuff .
Speaker 1But it is all right there . Executive is aware there's a problem . They see some smoke .
Speaker 2They know their pipeline number is bad . They know their conversions are going down . They know these sort of general things but in terms of well , how many sequences are you running in a certain area ? Or how many touches are your reps making per prospect that you engage ? How many prospects per account are you engaging in this segment ? How many touches does it ? Those questions that are all answerable within their sales engagement platform . They should be provided in some aggregated report at the very least . Yeah , they have no idea .
Speaker 2So they have no idea that that data even lives in many cases .
Speaker 1So it sounds like and I think we're using sales engagement platform as a great specific example here , but I think this probably transcends to other types of products . What's your thought on how well executives are onboarded as part of the new software implementation process , or are they just left out of the equation ?
Speaker 2Well , and it's not that it's horrible . In the same way , I think the bigger issue is how managers are left out , and that's probably a separate conversation , because I think they're the true linchpin of any successful deployment yeah , let's talk about both .
Speaker 2But leadership , I think , is left out , because leadership
Executive Involvement in Software Deployments
Speaker 2often exits the table once the decision is involved , and I think part of the way that we can do that is by bringing in other customer leaders to talk them through what a successful deployment looks like . They need to understand what level of commitment they need to have , because there's a lot of things that have to happen . We have to decide rules of engagement . When do handoffs happen between marketing and sales ? What's qualification of an outbound opportunity that we create or meeting that we set up right ? There's a ton of decisions that are going to create friction , either between roles or between functional units within the organization .
Speaker 1And that's the same for leadership has to decide that . Sales engagement platform , conversational intelligence , CRM , business intelligence Six cents If you're going to set up six cents .
Speaker 2We have to make some decisions about what we call buying authority and which buyers we're going to value , and what activity is more important than other activities . And in order to get predictive , the organization has to align on some general decisions about what an ideal customer looks like and what our best entry points are . These are decisions that shouldn't be outsourced to the front lines . They need to be in executive hands , at least to the point of saying this is our true North .
Speaker 1Yeah Well , and I've seen this so many times on that specific topic right there , where you get a bunch of folks at the junior to mid-level sales enablement role having a bunch of meetings , talking to a bunch of people . The executive is not involved in that , and it blows my mind how they'll go to the executive two or three months later and say , hey , here's 15 minutes . That's the person that actually knows the answers to these questions and is the person who's ultimately responsible for the results .
Speaker 2Yeah , and ultimately a lot of those conversations wouldn't have to happen if you could get that executive to buy in early on , because many times what you're doing is you're collecting the information about what the different fiefdoms care about and so you're doing the lower level conversation that we basically need an executive level person to come in and help resolve some of those disputes .
Speaker 2It means a good consultant and a good professional services person ought to be calling out those areas of friction , like one of the things that I spend more of my time doing is trying to gather more people into the conversation , because marketing ops certainly has to be involved in the conversation . That's involved with rev ops , that's involved in the conversation with how we're going to be routing new contacts into the crm right and what that means .
Speaker 2When a new lead comes in , are we creating a new lead ? Is that going to be a new person ? Are we going to somehow unify those things in the back end ? Are we just going to create 50 new leads for cory's that we got 50 Corey Bray's ?
Speaker 1every time you download something , That'd be a pretty cool town , it's a pretty cool town .
Speaker 2But those conversations , I think they require you to have folks in the room that frequently think they don't need to be in the room , and so companies need to figure out how to get leadership to remain committed and engaged throughout the deployment .
Speaker 1Okay , so for someone listening to this who's a manager they're a frontline manager , they're a VP , they want to get an executive involved . How do you position that to them ?
Speaker 2Yeah .
Speaker 2So if I'm a frontline manager who wants to get my leadership involved , I'm going to .
Speaker 2The thing that you need to document are the conversations or the decisions that need to be made that cross roles and functions and that explain sort of why people have vested interests between marketing and sales and where these conflicts have to be resolved in order for us to make process and policy decisions .
Speaker 2To make process and policy decisions right . So if I'm a manager , I'm going to go in and say , hey , we're implementing this new platform and one of the things that we're going to be able to do with it is take these inbound leads and handle them on the sales side of the house and hand them to account executives , which means we have to resolve tensions around what qualification means before we hand it to sales , tensions around what it means to set up a qualified meeting and tensions around whether or not that's accepted as a qualified opportunity . We need to set criteria for each one of these things that involves these stakeholders . I think it's the only way to do it and force that leader to either say I'm outsourcing that , go figure it out which would be moronic or they got to step in .
Speaker 1You got to make a decision . You got to make a decision . That's what you're paid for . Executive .
Speaker 2But a lot of times we don't let them know what those entailments are and I think ultimately this falls back to the vendor .
Speaker 1Like I said , I think the person who's doing , or whoever you're , the consultant you're working with on this yeah , they should be figuring out how to leverage someone who's successfully done this and is in that executive seat to be in the conversation and say this is what you're going to need to do during implementation . Fun question for you when you're bringing an executive in and you want to transfer information to them slides or memos .
Speaker 2Oh , so hard and so often you're not even the person in the room . I think there's always got to be a slide deck at some level . I'm going to fight him on this one . This is going to be fun . This is going to be fun . There are so many conversations . This is one of the reasons why I think Fluent is one of the coolest pieces of technology out there right now and why I really admire what they're doing .
Speaker 1Fluent . Thanks for sponsoring . Dave . Yes exactly .
Speaker 2I get no kickbacks from fucking anybody .
Speaker 2I bought my shares of outreach but other than that I don't take shit from anyone . So as I talk about stuff , just know nobody's paying me dick , I'm not getting anything . So what I like about that is the concept of many of the conversations that are happening in sales , especially enterprise sales , are happening behind a door that you don't get to go behind . And it's not just you don't get to go behind because you didn't do the work to get it open , it's that it's deliberately closed on you . It's a conversation that you're not intended to be in , which means you've got to ultimately arm your champion and hopefully decision maker , as high up as you can get to talk to the CFO that you're never going to get to meet , and there's going to have to be some piece that that grounds this conversation . Whether it's a deck , whether it's a memo , we can debate on what sort of the best way to consume it is , but ultimately it's going to be what is your champion or decision maker most comfortable in terms of communicating to that executive to get the story ?
Speaker 1right and what can they do most effectively ? Because this is the first time they've ever sold your product .
Speaker 2That's exactly right and you've got to arm them up and that conversation is going to happen . Hopefully they've sold other products . Hopefully they've bought other things and we can ask them .
Speaker 1If they have and we can , we can ask them what they did .
Speaker 2Well , I've only been here six weeks . I have no idea what procurement looks like . Like your hair should be on fire with . That is not my . That's a champion , but I'm gonna need a coach it's .
Speaker 1It's no different . I'm pulling something out of my pocket right now you know powerball tickets numbers ? Let's see we're looking what is what is today ? Today , $516,800,000 . I got some swings at it . Let's go . I love , I love lottery tickets .
Speaker 2It's one of life's , so what's the lotto ticket ?
Speaker 1Well , somebody's going to win . Yeah , why not me and my friends ? Yeah , there you go . So , sam Max , job , let's go . That's awesome , I love it . Plus , I've been on a heater at the poker table recently , so I figured I'd reinvest a little bit of seat fours money . Very nice , very nice . But yeah , so bringing the executive .
Speaker 1I like memos over slides for two reasons . One , for people that aren't good at making slides slides are very hard to make and you're going to spend a hell of a lot of time making those and second of all , you can only see what's on the slide in front of you . You can condense more information into memos in the form of tables , bullet points , diagrams , all those types of things . And if the executive doesn't read the memo , that tells you a lot about what you've invested your career in , because every share of equity that you have is dependent upon that person and the person that hired them doing something big . And if that person doesn't even read and the person that hired them hires an executive that doesn't even read , what's your equity going to be worth ?
Speaker 1yeah , it's a and it's a
Building Effective Implementation Governance
Speaker 1epidemic problem , but I think you do both I mean honestly , this is one of those things where I'm not a good slides , I just don't want to make them .
Speaker 2No , I get it . I get it . You know , the best organizations that I've worked in really did a good job of finding the repeatability and stuff like that , because this was the hardest thing of scaling a company like outreach the market at one point was so goddamn hot that we couldn't get bodies in front of it fast enough . Right , it was simply one of those great things where you needed to hire and you needed to get them skilled up and you needed to have them be fluent , because just putting bodies in front of it didn't mean you got a sale , because when that happened .
Speaker 2They were in at bats , but they would get sales a lot of time . Killer fucking sellers , great sellers . And so if we just put fresh bodies on a great product in front of you , know , know , a customer head to head with a great seller , they get killed . And so , no matter how good your product is , you're up against a competitor who's going to have someone awesome , and the big limiter was how fast could you get those people to be great at selling outreach ? And that meant they had to figure out how to get into those conversations , the late stage conversations , right with very structured pieces of collateral , knowing what you wanted them to see at the end .
Speaker 2And I think that's this is the part where sales organizations can do their best work is by figuring out what the best practice is . Well , like fluent figuring out that best practice for how to make that end conversation happen in your favor . Figuring out what a good business case looks like for your particular product , what it means to have an impact on businesses based on what your customers say , when to leverage your best customer reference to the appropriate contact . Those are the places that companies that do well focus their attention , and so you shouldn't be having to create that deck . That ought to be something that is almost automatically produced as an end result of the sales process to run to its completion .
Speaker 1Yeah .
Speaker 2I'll reach out a fantastic job of that , by the way , and it's heyday like just we were empowered to sell . It was fantastic . I love that .
Speaker 1Well , I think that the thing that that reminds me of is that if sales enablement spends their energy there , that's a super high return on investment . The challenge and we've talked about this in a couple episodes is when you've got a sales enablement team that is so heavily focused on new hire , onboarding and the sales development team and running towards things that are simple . That's right , Because these are harder areas of the business . How do we take somebody from a position where they've selected two vendors and we don't quite know how we're going to win ? Maybe it's a coin flip ? How do you turn a coin flip into something that's a little more likely for us ? That's harder problem to solve than teaching somebody about something that they have zero basis in .
Speaker 2It absolutely is , but it's so much more impactful , yeah , basis yeah , it absolutely is , and it's the but it's so much more impactful , yeah , right . When you think about what it takes to get to the point that you're actually with somebody who's ready to buy and you're head to head with another vendor , that loss is so much more of a loss than the 20 prospects that you put into a sequence that didn't wind up taking a meeting .
Speaker 1Right .
Speaker 2Right , those weren't buyers , these are buyers , and when you lose a buyer , oh man , you've tangibly lost something .
Speaker 1So these are buyers , and when you lose a buyer , oh man , you've tangibly lost something . So if you're listening to this and you're concerned that the enablement team is not focused on the late stage deals and how to make our best sellers better , one thing to check out is the idea of how do we coach our best teams . Send me an email at freestuffatcoachcrmcom . I'll send you a copy of our coaching salespeople course that does highlight how do you coach your best people , because I'll send you a copy of our coaching salespeople course that does highlight how do you coach your best people , because if you spend all your time with your underperformers , it's going to frustrate your top performers and the underperformers might get a little bit better , but long-term , that's not going to be what makes or breaks your company . Focus on getting more out of the piece . You're at the end of a sales process .
Speaker 1One thing sophisticated buyers care about is implementation . What are my risks ? How long is this going to take ? What's it going to take for me internally , in terms of manpower , to take folks off of other projects ? How can you position services in a way that helps get that deal over the competitive finish line ?
Speaker 2I mean Mike Zinni said this whenever he's the I think now chief customer officer , maybe at outreach , his title was SVP of customer success when I was there and he's one of my favorite people , one of the smartest dudes you'll ever meet and when he got to outreach we were just sort of reaching that point of maturity where we were starting to do real enterprise deals .
Speaker 1And .
Speaker 2Zinni had come from places where they had done those before and he knew that to really win one of those you have to have a fairly sizable professional services contract component that goes along with it , or they're going to know you don't know what the hell you're doing- Wow , right , so it's a signal you're charging them less , but it's a signal that it's not going to work .
Speaker 1You would chart we .
Speaker 2it needed to be a not quite you know a multiplier up , but needed to be a significant percentage of the overall contract value for them to believe that you had invested enough for them to be able to actually be successful .
Speaker 1When I was selling business intelligence , the rule was we had to sell one to three times the first year license deal and services . Yeah , Otherwise it wasn't going to work . That's right . And if you didn't sell at least one time the first year license and services , they wouldn't countersign your , the executives wouldn't countersign your contract and you couldn't get a deal .
Speaker 2It's , and it makes sense why you have to do that . Look , this is one of the problems of having short-term objectives for growth is that the I won't say growth at all costs , because nobody was ever stupid enough that we were doing growth at all costs . There was a ton Only at Hopin yeah , okay . I won't say no .
Speaker 1I'll take outreach .
Speaker 2And only because he took .
Speaker 1the guy took 200 million off the table . Yes , so I can say that Hopin did growth at all costs .
Speaker 2That's some pretty fair . That's a pretty fair statement , I'll say . At outreach , when we were growing our fastest , we also had incredible discipline around . Were they a good customer ? Now , the problem was we had a very broad definition of what a good customer was , and I don't think anyone was outside of that definition . It was simply that the amount of services that were required to fulfill that promise were a little bit greater than I think anybody knew or intended , and I don't think it was a malicious thing or anything else .
Speaker 2And I think this is the same problem that all of us collectively in the sales technology space now equally , are culpable for , because if you think about the sixth senses of the world and the lean data of the world , then all of the other components of the technology stack that are now integrated together in some billion permutations possibilities right Like . There's just no one that has the native expertise at a single vendor to be able to intelligently talk about cobbling all of this stuff together . The person from lean data doesn't know outreach best practices in terms of integration with Salesforce , and the outreach sales engineer or whoever's managing the implementation doesn't necessarily know the best way to consume Zoom info data or what we should be doing with sales navigator or the better of the gong implementations right there . The thing that we have to get to with our understanding of services is that we've entered this phase of innovation that's so goddamn rapid . It is impossible for expertise to reside at the vendor level .
Speaker 2Vendors simply can't be the place that expertise lives . It has to be something that exists at a community level . It's not even something that's going to be a firm . I'm not going to go out tomorrow and start the agency and this is one of the frustrating things why I'm on a very long sabbatical . There isn't going to be an agency that pops up and does this awesome with everything . Instead , a lot of this is going to have to be RevOps people coming together and talking about the things they learn
The Myth of Tech Consolidation
Speaker 2so that we can get a large enough scale across a large enough number of deployments that it's not one single person saying I did this one thing , this one place and it worked , and that becoming the template for other places .
Speaker 1So , which is currently what we do , in a world where there's enough money and there's not a ton of friction , to get deals done , there would be an agency . Talk to me about those two variables . So consulting firms , third-party implementers , systems integrators , they make money .
Speaker 2If I had infinite budget , I could right now go out and hire people who have worked at each one of these companies and pull together the people who have worked at each one of these companies and pull together the engineers who have a knowledge of how each one of the platforms work . The problem is that I would also have to hire the consultants who understand the difference in building pipeline for a Fed sled team . Somebody who understands how channel works . Somebody who understands how PLG works and PLG and consumer versus right work . Somebody who understands how PLG works and PLG and consumer versus right . Like there's so many other variables about the actual deployments that I fear we're going to lose that knowledge . I'm either going to hire a bunch of people who understand the tech but don't understand that greater picture , or I'm going to hire the people that understand the greater picture but can't get me down to the nuts and bolts of the tech .
Speaker 1Could you have a core group of people that are just really good at doing hard things , learning new things , and then have a GLG type network where you can pull on people for 500 bucks an hour and they'll tell you everything they know ?
Speaker 2I'll give you a little sneak preview , but that is kind of what the brain trail here is . The ultimate upshot of this is trying to figure out how to pull that talent together in a decentralized , Because you don't need a full-time employee .
Speaker 2That's right . You need to be able to deploy forces based on needs , which means , if you think about a network like Pavilion , right , pavilion has pulled together a lot of folks who are coming together to solve problems . As those folks say , hey , I've got a need . If there was a place that you knew there was vetted , credentialed , knowledgeable people that you could come ask for help , that would be an amazing resource . The problem is , how do you create that with that , All of the crackpots who show up and say I'm a ?
Speaker 1consultant yeah .
Speaker 2Then you're like motherfucker , no Right .
Speaker 1So it's got . We just start commenting on people's LinkedIn posts . I'm just going to be like MFN at Dave and it's going to be hilarious .
Speaker 2I do have some salty language , I apologize .
Speaker 1Oh , I like it .
Speaker 2I don't really apologize , I use it all the time .
Speaker 1Yeah , I don't think anybody cares . I don't care . I don't really cuss in public though , but if anybody wants to come play pool with me and hear what I really think , then you get it all . Let's go . That's fantastic .
Speaker 1Yeah what happens when I miss ? Oh man , I had a shot the other night . I missed the eight ball . I was playing nine ball . I missed the eight ball because I was trying to get cute , because here's the thing about pool and it's the same . It's what I'm trying to do with my business career too .
Speaker 1The people that spoke me in pool , they're not out there making heroic . If you Google pool videos , you go watch Efren Reyes make all these insane shots . Yeah , sure , that's , that's entertaining . But if you watch an Efren Reyes match for two hours , he's just hitting the most boring shots in the world . Because he knows how to get the ball . He's thinking three shots ahead or everyone's probably thinking nine shots ahead . But if you know how to get the ball to a spot where it's going to be easy next time , you're going to make balls and you're going to win the game . And if you can't do that , you play defense .
Speaker 1You don't try to be a hero , and I think that that aligns well with what we're talking about here , which is make this thing easy , make it easy for the managers , make it easy for the reps , make it easy for the executives and if you have to spend some energy , some cash on services . So if someone wanted to go implement a sales engagement platform today , if they wanted to do it , great , let's say , you know standard company , 50 people that would use it SDRs , aes what are they spending ? What's the range there for services ? Oh , shit .
Speaker 2I don't even know . Like I said , I don't do implementation work , so you gotta give me a guess . If I had to guess , I'd guess they're probably in the 50K range , but it's been years since I've seen a pro serve implementation package . I should ask my buddy , jacob . But what I'll say is the thing that they need to keep in mind is trying to eat this whole thing in one big bite , thinking that you're rolling this out and that it's going to be in its final state after three weeks of technical integration between outreach and Salesforce and Gmail and your calendar's all synced and that's really the lightest of the lift , getting the platforms to talk together .
Speaker 2Doing that integration work is something that you can do all at the theoretical level . Sure , the challenge becomes how do we now make this support an actual workflow ? How does an SDR sit down in the morning and know which account should I pick ? How many prospects in that account ? Where do I find their contact information ? How do I validate that they're still there ? How do I make sure the email is going to work ? It's a workflow orchestration that I think most companies don't spell out all the way through .
Speaker 1So spell out , spell out . I did this in 2009 , 2008 . It was 2008 . 2008 , I was working with these guys and we had a company and I mapped out the business process and I think there were 400 boxes that showed what does someone do . What are the assets that support that ? What machinery supports that ? What software supports that ? What percentage of the times when you walk into a company has someone actually written down what they do ? Right , and SDRs it's even worse . Does it exist ? It does SDR organization ? If you had to guess what percentage of time when you walk into an SDR organization you're trying to help them with their technology and their processes , how often have they actually written down what they do in any way ? That's , it is a small percentage .
Speaker 2There are a few that do it , but I would say that percentage is probably less than 20% of the companies that I've worked with have actually had a documented , either a lucid chart that literally documented every system and workflow all the way through for all the processes , or an actual enablement document that reps could go to and learn from and I've had spec it videos . There are a very small number of companies that do that very well , but very few do it and it's because they don't have an articulated process .
Speaker 1they don't know what it is . They don't know it's it's culturally .
Speaker 2Go get some go , get some people and put them into sequence yeah now , fuck , does that mean go get more , then go get more , write more sequences . Do you have enough sequences ? Make another sequence .
Speaker 1What the no , oh , it's not . Oh , we just hired Timmy . We just hired Timmy yesterday . Timmy is going to come shout at you and then Timmy is going to make some sequences .
Speaker 2Now we're going to have generative AI that will just start spitting out sequences willy , nilly it's like guys in order for you to look . The dream of this platform , from my perspective , was ultimately , this would allow us to get some consistency in the things that we did . One of my biggest complaints . I'm an ex-academic . I spent my first 20 years about to be a professor , before I had a kid and went holy shit , can you not feed a family on a professor's salary ? And so I got into sales , and one of the things that always frustrated me was how much of our business is driven by just gut . It's just the most charismatic person in the room saying I did it this way before , and then everybody going okay , let's do it Right . No fucking data to back up so many decisions .
Speaker 2The promise of this platform was it was finally going to allow us to get a good data trail of everything that we did , because it was going to automatically log out that shit processes that were in a system of action that you had to execute the workflow for , so that we could consistently do the same things , which meant we could reduce the number of variables and allow ourselves to actually test what works and what doesn't .
Speaker 2We could do true A-B testing , template by template , sequence versus sequence , and we could start to understand what the primary drivers of success on inbound outbound you name it are , what the primary drivers of success on inbound outbound you name it are . In a world where you don't have that consistency , you've eliminated that value of the platform . It's no longer about optimizing , because what are you optimizing ? You are in the world where you throw shit at the wall , see what sticks , and then don't even learn what that was . You just go grab some more shit and throw more . This is the insane part of what we're doing right . We've taken this platform that was designed and this technology that was designed to help us figure out how to better communicate with our customers and we handed it to the least experienced people in our organization and said do whatever you want .
Speaker 1And then more .
Speaker 2And more and do it faster right , what the fuck Like . No wonder sales development is terrible . But that is not outreach or sales loft or Apollo or group . That is not the tool's fault . That is a bunch of people who are looking for the easiest path to success and you had to know that shit didn't exist , or we all would have been doing it 20 years ago . It does . You're just going to have to invest .
Speaker 1Okay . So now you walk into a company and their , their walls are full because they've thrown . So much at it , you can smell them from a mile .
Speaker 2What do you ? What do you do ? One it's . It's almost like an alcohol intervention , right . One of the things that you have to do is get them to admit that they have a problem . Those are not fun .
Speaker 2They're not fun to go to and nobody likes to hear that . I used to always joke that I always felt comfortable telling people that their baby was ugly because I was a consultative seller and I felt like I was in the ugly baby business , like if you didn't , if your baby didn't need to have , you know , reconstructive surgery , then you probably weren't going to buy something from me . So I've always been a believer that if you can walk into an organization , actually point to the things that are holding them back right and demonstrate what it's going to take for them to get better , that they will have one of two choices they're either going to come to Jesus or they are going to call you a heretic and throw you out .
Speaker 2Either way , you got to tell them what they got to do right and so what I found with most organizations was that it's an uncomfortable conversation that has to be ultimately escalated up to the people who make decisions , and those people are the ones who have to say we're not going to continue doing it the way we have . And that starting point then allows you to talk about things like governance programs . Who is going to get to request a sequence , build a sequence , decide when a sequence needs to be updated or retired ? Who's going to set the standards for what sequences have to look ?
Speaker 1like and the software allows for all of these things . Software allows for all of these things and for anything else that's outside of the scope of a sequence tool . I think that anybody that's selling to the enterprise . This is one of the features that folks have requested , especially if it's going to be deployed across a bunch of different business units and a bunch of different teams . So the governance features are there . It seems like these might be some of those that are hidden beneath the surface that folks don't get to .
Speaker 2They're hidden beneath the surface and they require decision-making on the part of the organization . So the more complex the organization , the more decisions that have to be made between different regions , different roles , different teams , different parts of the organization functionally . So a lot of that is just they're trying to get started , and one of the things that VPs of sales hate more than anything else are people like me as sellers . Walking in and saying like , hey , let's not move too fast . I'm afraid if we try to launch this in three continents at the same time , that might be a mistake . Well , that doesn't sell as many seats as walking in and saying , sure , we can do that , right , and so you know there's . You're not paid to be cautious , but it would pay to be cautious .
Speaker 1Yeah , well , that's . That's the problem . When growth is the goal , that's right .
Speaker 2Instead of healthy growth , and it's still . Growth should still be the goal , but there's got to be an understanding of what healthy growth looks like . There have to be longer time horizons for the return , and what's ironic is this that the I'll take outreach as the example . I think the time horizon that we were on for an IPO led for led to this idea that we needed to grow at a certain pace , and the irony is that the growth at that pace has now led to the IPO being farther away because we grew in a way that was unsustainable If we had , ironically , grown in the appropriate way and done the things that in hindsight I wish we had done .
Speaker 2I think we probably would have been there by now . And so in trying to speed up too much , I think sometimes we slow ourselves down when we set ourselves up for the greater trough of disillusionment and longer climb out then we necessarily need to have .
Speaker 1Yeah , there are some troughs . Folks are climbing out of these days a lot and I think there might be some hesitation to invest to fix . You know we . So if you're looking at a company that's struggling , that sales are down , pipelines down , all of these things are down , and then the ask is hey , we need budget and bandwidth for fixing something . Yeah , how do we , how do we get over that ?
Speaker 2I mean , I think a lot of this comes down to in order for customers , in order for you to be successful with your customers . I'll take larger ones right . So I think it's different if you're selling to a smaller mid-market client and they've got a different set of concerns , but if you're selling to a corporate customer or larger , I think one of the things that you need to help them understand or that you need to understand from them are what are the priority of the business challenges , beyond what you do .
Speaker 2Too many times we get really fixated on , hey , are you having a problem with this ? And then we investigate that thing and we understand that business challenge and where that fits . The one thing that product marketing told us about , the one thing that product marketing told us about , and now we're going to drill that home . We go , oh , there's a big deal for them . Well , it's a big deal If you only look at that one thin sliver .
Speaker 1I'm making a little time and it's a big deal . If I say , is it a big deal for you , and they say , yes , it's a big deal .
Speaker 2Is it the top deal ? Well , no , it's not in the top 50 , right , that's the part that you have to to do . To sell in a world where they're not willing to make any additions is to figure out how to put a dollar value on the problem that you're solving . And I know that's the most obvious thing in the world . Everybody's like build a business case , but I think it literally comes down to the technology investment side that there are a ton of things that folks are considering cutting and you've got to figure out how to elevate the thing that you're buying and priority against those other considerations . They're going to be making some choices and some investments , but if you don't know where you sit in relation or who the other champions are for those other things , it's going to be really hard to win .
Speaker 1Yeah , and if you don't know what they do , what is the ? What does the company do ? What does the person at the company do ? How does seasonality impact that ? All of these other things that again , if you've got an organization where you've got one or two or three sales enablement people and they're just focused on the most basic of onboarding to get you around what matters to your product , but that's not looked at through a wider aperture around what is the business , what is the industry , what does this person care about , then you miss all these things .
Speaker 2And it's the the irony of it is this in sales , we've moved far away from product sales at least like intellectually , I think it'd be very hard to find almost anybody who's like .
Speaker 2Oh yeah , we need product centric messaging . I should totally be talking about our companies , Like everybody sort of embraces this idea of product centric , customer centric conversations and product-centric sorry , problem-centric customer-centric conversations and understanding the problem hypothesis versus a value prop that's tied to a feature and a benefit of the product . The irony is that , while we embrace that sort of as this is how you should approach the market , we don't enable people to understand our buyer personas through the lens of the problems that they deal with , how they're rewarded . We do this sort of superficial buyer persona but it's sort of the marketing version of like hi , I'm Mary , marketer and marketer . It's not and it's all how it relates to us , Right , Exactly , it's not . This is how they get promoted and this is what they get promoted to and this is what their KPI it on .
Speaker 1And here's how they have to go , they get promoted to and this is what they're KPI'd on and here's how they have to go report these things . Oh , and here's the history of the industry . They've been in this job for 20 years and they've seen three different generations that each had two iterations of what you do .
Speaker 2And understanding the difference between somebody who's been at a company for 10 years versus somebody who's been at a company for 10 minutes .
Speaker 2And how do I understand the difference between someone who's senior ? There are a lot of things that we need to teach our sellers to be that kind of problem-centric , customer-centric seller , and it means the expertise that we need is on what you just described , which is understanding that broader context and the problem set , versus having a deep expertise on our product . You also need that , yes , you also need that , but that it it's so overblown . We spend so much time focusing on the knowledge of the product that I think we forget our principal value here is , as consultants , our principal value is to help them solve a problem and after a lot of work , our product is at the very , very end of that conversation . Yeah , it's not . You don't get to that end point in the conversation by starting at the product . You , you end up there , right ? That's what we got to get back .
Speaker 1Well , to me , the place where product knowledge helps the most is after you uncover pain . You know specifically what to demo in the product . Yeah , that's it . It's the linkage , the linkage between the pain that we solve and how we solve it , so you can show that during a product demonstration . And the reason that we want to do that and I talked about this before in a previous episode is to make sure that we address the information asymmetry where we believe something , the prospect believes something different . We need to get that overlap .
Speaker 2You know and it's funny I hate the definition of discovery and demo right . This idea that first you do discovery and then you do demo . No , discovery is a thing that happens throughout the entire customer experience . So the discovery is a continual process . It's not a step , it's not a thing . There's an initial meeting and you discover some things in it , but , honestly , in an outbound conversation , the customer is discovering more about you than you are them .
Speaker 2So it's not if you get an outbound prospect on an initial meeting and you start saying questions like so you got a shovel ready project for me , you got a budget , you got a time . You fucking moron , you call them give them something to be excited about . Show them a little bit , right , like you can't not demo at that point . But that's a demo , right ? So demo doesn't mean now is the time when we show you the bells and whistles on the platform . Demo is an opportunity for you to say so . You got this problem and I understand you guys are trying to deal with it this way right now and you've done X , y and Z and that's been a pain . I want to show you something . I want you to tell me if this looks like something that might solve it . If you could do this and this and this that resulted in these things , would that fix that for you ? You , yeah , right , and then you stop and you have a conversation about that , and what would that mean for the business ?
Speaker 1well now . This is why I push for . Have you seen this before ? 50 , 50 talk time during right when the screen's up . If you're talking 80 of time , you've stopped discovery and show them , show them the .
Speaker 2And this button over here also could stop remember there's a fuck about the .
Speaker 1You ever go to the donut shop and ask them to open up the donut before you buy it no no , of course you don't . You know that's right . Yeah , don't show them admin in a software product . Jesus , don't see the inside of a donut a use case .
Speaker 2Show me , tell me what their problem is and show me how you would resolve that very functional problem that you get so , dave , does the apple filling actually go around the entire circumference of the donut or is it only on ?
Speaker 1I'm gonna have to open it up to see . Yeah , we're gonna have to open up that , that donut . And that is literally demoing admin in a sales .
Speaker 2It's you know there will be a time somebody's gonna raise their hand at some point and say , hey , can I see the admin ? And even at that point , if you're in a big group demo . The answer is absolutely , and there's so much shit . Can I book an hour with you to do that ? Yeah , and you don't start doing it on that call .
Speaker 1All right . So I made a promise at the top of the , at the top of this session , that I wanted to talk about this tech consolidation thing really quickly .
Speaker 2Yeah .
Speaker 1I think the idea of tech consolidation is BS .
Speaker 2In terms of like everybody going to one platform , as opposed to best of breed .
Speaker 1I think the idea that people actually want to do it is not true . I don't .
Speaker 2I think that they are enamored with the idea of consolidating a lot of functionality that appears to be duplicative , and I think that they would like the idea of being able to have fewer vendors that they have to deal with and they would like the idea of overcoming what I described earlier , a lot of those gaps in implementation that exists because the different point solutions don't necessarily organically talk to each other . I don't think that means that they will ultimately want to consolidate in the way that they think they want to . I think there will be a kind of consolidation , but I think it's going to be this I think there's going to be a CRM battle and I think that Salesforce has largely won it . But whether you go to Salesforce or HubSpot or you know , you end up on Dynamics for some God forbid awful reason , because Microsoft has everything .
Speaker 2They've got some nice stuff . They might wind up buying Outreach , so it should be nice because they may be our you know ant overlords someday . But the idea is , I think they're going to be CRM ecosystems .
Speaker 2I think the CRM ecosystems are going to integrate with systems of action , and this is what I think , ultimately , the sales engagement platform space is really about . I think Outreach and Apollo and Sales Loft and Groove and now Gong Engage which I can't wait to see , and Zoom Info apparently has some flow things that they're doing right . So all of these things are attempting to now orchestrate the workflow , make it so that I know who should I reach out to next . What's the next step of my conversation ? Who should I pull into this ? What else is happening on the account ? Who else on my team is engaged ? What play is it appropriate to run now ? What intent signal is telling me that I should do ?
Speaker 2All of that needs to happen in a single location , a cockpit from which you take actions . That other system is the system of record . All my shit will flow to it and everything from other systems will flow into my cockpit from it . It's the hub and I am the secondary hub . That is the place that my reps have to go . The fewer other systems that they have to directly touch , the better , but I still want Zoom info or Apollo for my data , or the seamless , or anybody else I want to touch via API , which can touch the API .
Speaker 1It can all go through Salesforce into my outreach instance , the AI piece what AI is going to do for APIs , probably five to 10 years from now , is going to be insane . The manual wiring together and mapping out and all these things . You can go into chat GPT . You can ask it a question , you can get an answer . What if a chat GPT like AI bot could consistently ask questions of a network and consistently get responses and push data and pull data ?
Speaker 2And start querying all of those other systems Cause . Think about what we're doing . Right , we're creating a single system of record in Salesforce , but we're not really going to be logging every fucking event that happens in outreach . That's also happening in Clary , then it's not a system of record , right ?
Speaker 1Well , the data warehouse will . This was what we were pitching in 2013 when I was working with burst is . We were pitching the data warehouse that sat beneath the bi tool as a system record .
Speaker 2That would be on the top of from sales from anywhere . Yeah , well , from salesforce . There's a reason to run it through salesforce , and that's simply . At some point you're going to have to normalize that data and you're going to have to decide what is my canonical record here .
Speaker 1If it's so , I'm not going to get out of that . Yeah , I , yeah . I think there's a lot of things you can't do that with .
Speaker 2That's the problem , I think . At the end of the day , though , getting back to your point , I think people that want to consolidate are right in their instinct of wanting to have fewer things that reps have to interface with . The answer isn't going to be to pick a single platform and go with it because it has all of the bells and whistles incorporated . It's going to be getting better at the integrations . There are a few best of breed things that are now starting to separate themselves out , and you're going to pick one or more of a couple of base stack combinations .
Speaker 2You're going to be on the HubSpot Dynamics or Salesforce ecosystem . You're going to have Apollo , groove , salesloft , outreach . Salesview , I hear , is a thing now .
Speaker 2Sounds good high velocity sales garbage . There's any number of things that you could plug in and that's going to be your system of action . All of those other systems . I think we're going to have to get better at integrating them in , and I think outreach does a fantastic job with things like the outreach galaxy , where they're actually doing a lot of those pre-configured integrations with different vendors . I think that may be our new battle .
Speaker 2The consolidation battle is not so much going to be a battle that wipes out all of those ancillary satellite companies . It's going to be a consolidation battle against the CRMs and the systems of action , all of the SEPs . You will see consolidation on a single system , and this is where Gong and Outreach , I think , are about to battle it the fuck out , because they are two sweet ones and I think Sales Loft will be right there with them and Apollo is doing fantastic work . Shit . I don't even know who to bet on at this point , but that's going to be the place that I think people centralize . I don't think we're getting rid of all the ancillary stuff , no , all the other stuff .
Speaker 1The only thing people are getting rid of is stuff they don't use . That's right , and if it's something that they have to have and they use it . Try to take something that your best salesperson uses every day and gets a lot of value out of it . Take it away from them to save a hundred bucks .
Speaker 2And the other thing that's going to split out is there's a lot of stuff that , like you know , you've got a great internal net taker Fantastic . That's going to be super easy functionality for any one of those big vendor platforms to do in an integrated fashion . So there are some things that you should look at and go . Fuck man , I'm about to lose my differentiating .
Speaker 1Well , it's just a lot of founders out there it's going to be native . A lot of founders out there . They struggle with this whole idea of am I building a feature , Am I building a product or am I building a company , and I think a lot of the folks that are building on top of generative AI right now are at risk of building a feature or a product .
Speaker 2Absolutely the amount of sheer waste that is going to be laid in this next little bit , where we meet the intersection of AI and low-code , no-code entrepreneurship and the desire that everyone has that thinks they've got the next billion dollar idea , in spite of them having like six seconds of experience in the world . This is going to be awesome . We are going to see tens of thousands of venture backed disasters waiting to explode Like this is a time , sales brethren , where you should be picking your horses very , very carefully , because there's going to be a lot of fucking horses .
Speaker 1Yeah , one thing there . If you're concerned about how to pick the right company to work at , hillman and I wrote a book called hiring , onboarding , ramping salespeople . We've had a lot of folks tell us that they read the first half of the book to figure out how to pick the right company to work at . If you want a free Kindle copy of that , send it out to freestuff at coachcrmcom . Freestuff at coach serum dot com . Well , dave , we got to get out of here . Thank you so much . Anything you want to plug today ?
Speaker 2No man . Follow me on LinkedIn If you like anything that I said and find it interesting . I've got a book that I will eventually be coming out with and I've got some Kajabi things that are about
Final Thoughts and Closing
Speaker 2to be launched . I will be at Unleash in October . If any of you outreach people are going to be out there , definitely look me up .
Speaker 1Love it . Well , thank you so much . Everybody else check out coachcrmcom . We've got a free version . We've also got a paid version If you want to check that out , if you're concerned about your team's ability to hit their goals , or if your managers could up their coaching game a little bit . Lots of things over at coachcrmcom . This is the sales management podcast . I'm your host , corey Bray . We'll see you next time .