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Sales, Methodology, & Performance: An Honest Conversation w/Philip Aaronson
50 Plays1 year ago
In this episode, Brian Dietmeyer talks to Philip J Aaronson, former Director of Sales Enablement at Microsoft, about the intricate world of sales methodologies and their impact on sales productivity. They dive into the nuances of integrating and measuring sales methodologies effectively within organizations, and the challenges of aligning sales operations with broader business goals. This episode is crucial for anyone involved in sales or sales enablement seeking to understand the complexities of operational alignment and to enhance their strategic approach to sales productivity. Tune in for insights and strategies that could redefine your sales processes, right here on CloseMode.
Timestamps:
00:00 Refine organization methodology for sales productivity measurement.
03:12 Endorsed by Bill McDermott, CEO at ServiceNow.
07:24 Companies struggle with operational focus on predictions.
10:50 Discussing importance of sales reps' ability and training.
14:10 Sales team struggling with multiple methodologies frustration.
17:47 Understanding needle, tying into priorities, overcoming challenges.
19:11 Understanding buyers, marketing, and enabling successful sales.
22:49 Research showed value prompts impact deal closure.
27:40 High-pressure work on reports and global impact.
29:12 Emphasizing methodology overlooks design and context.
34:06 Need collective buy-in for productivity ecosystem.
36:19 Top salespeople not always great in ops.
40:49 Execute discovery to gain a seat. Appreciative.
43:15 Strong agreement and gratitude towards producer Dan.
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Transcript
Introduction to Phil Errington's Expertise
00:00:03
Speaker
Welcome to another edition of Close Mode, the enterprise sales show. I'm Brian Deepmyer, CEO of Close Strong. And today I'm really lucky to be here with Phil Errington. And you know, when I run the podcast, I look for people that have chops in the space that know what the heck they're talking about. Phil, Phil's been sales productivity director, head of global sales enablement, director of onboarding and field readiness, director of sales enablement, uh, in, in another role. So definitely comes with the chops today. So Phil, welcome to the show.
00:00:31
Speaker
Hey, thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.
Why is Measurement Crucial in Sales Methodology?
00:00:34
Speaker
So last week you and I were chatting just in general about sales enablement. And you talked about the intersection of methodology and measurement, which to me kind of felt like a holy grail, right? Especially the measurement piece. And, and can you expound on that a little bit? What do you, what do you mean by that? Sure. That's how I talked a lot about my last role as a sales productivity director over at service now. Um, and I really wanted to drive home a couple of points here.
00:01:01
Speaker
Right. Uh, anytime you're talking about mature organizations, there's always a thought of what we need to bring in a formal sales methodology for a number of different reasons. Right. We want to make sure that we have a consistent approach throughout the field. Absolutely. We want to make sure that we have a shared nomenclature. Absolutely. We want to align the buyer journey with the seller journey. Absolutely. And we want to make sure that we capture this correctly in our CRM of record, the UX.
00:01:28
Speaker
and to make sure that we're focused on all the elements that lead to a buying decision. Organizations in the Valley are at all different maturity levels when it comes to implementing a methodology, evaluating a methodology, getting the kind of uptake that they want, getting the kind of uplift that they've been promised. But at the end of the day, it's about training.
00:01:54
Speaker
This is about saying this is the what and the why of the methodology, and hopefully we're gonna interject company-specific hows. I would always talk about value selling, which was the methodology of record over at ServiceNow, and talking about they did a great job on the what and why, and it was really on us to focus on the ServiceNow how, specificity within our organization, and marry this up into this perfect whole, right?
00:02:21
Speaker
So in a lot of organizations, we roll out a methodology. We start looking for some of the leading and lagging indicators around uptake, and it becomes this thing that people use. Now, once you get past the initial stages of your rollout, we're all using this methodology. We've got the experience of this methodology and all the questions that we need to answer, all the information that's going to lead to a buying decision.
00:02:47
Speaker
within our UX, we have our sales leaders trained, we've got our sellers trained, then what? What does this become about? And so I'll talk about a story that talks to measurement, right?
The Influence of 'Data Driven' on Sales Methodology
00:03:00
Speaker
Because one of the things that really changed the way that I think about
00:03:04
Speaker
sales methodologies and seller productivity is the book Data Driven. It was written by Jenny D. Bourne, who is the chief learning officer at the time at SAP. I had the endorsement of none other than Bill McDermott, who eventually became my CEO over at ServiceNow. And it was co-written by the CEO of Enplay, which is a sales analytics firm that I've worked with the last seven or eight years at a couple of those stops where I had some of those titles. And we were always trying to focus on
00:03:32
Speaker
the right kinds of measurement. In a lot of organizations, when you talk to sellers, when you talk to methodology folks, when you talk to enablement folks, and they talk about the types of numbers that they want to focus on, there is usually a smattering of leading or lagging indicators. For uptake, it could be in value selling, we used to count the number of value prompters per deal, which was the story of the deal, how we captured all of that. When we do the initial training, we could have the net promoter score. How well was it delivered?
00:04:02
Speaker
we could talk about how many opportunities actually have the materials of the sales methodology attached. And then we can also talk about results. So if we had an opportunity and that had a value prompter and that deal closed, what is the likelihood that that is going to close at a higher rate than somebody who isn't using the methodology?
00:04:26
Speaker
Why am I speaking to all of this? Because this is really the story of how we were able to advance the art of measurement beyond leading and lagging and really getting into something predictive. But I want to stop right here for a second, make sure that we're being clear on what we meant by measurement. Because a lot of the measurement was the immediate results coming out and also what has happened in any particular quarter. The difficulty has always been, how do you tie up what we did in the training
00:04:55
Speaker
with the actual results. And what does it mean from a coaching and mentoring perspective? Any thoughts on that, sir? Well, yeah, there's one of the reasons I leaned in when you said that is because it's having run before this business, having run my own methodology company, like that measurement was always, you know, mayor and I've said this over and over again, American companies spend 26 billion a year on rolling out methodologies.
00:05:21
Speaker
And, and, and oftentimes it's, it's very difficult to land it. So there's like, to me, they're there. So landing it is one thing, right? Who, who, who's going to coach the thing? And that's, that's very frustrating before you can measure, in my opinion, maybe that's a leading indicator, right? Who's, who's helping to land it. And you said something else too about.
00:05:40
Speaker
about, um,
How to Make Sales Methodology Training Impactful
00:05:41
Speaker
kind of putting it in context. And this is a huge frustration of mine, which is we, we go from rolling out the methodology and they go, okay, now we have to put it in context. And lately it's just sort of hit my brain to go, why aren't we starting in context? And, and I think I have an idea about why that exists as a way we've always done it.
00:05:59
Speaker
And I think there's reasons why it's always been done that way. But yeah, I'm just wondering maybe about that first part from your perspective. Why don't we start in context? Why do we have to roll it out and then put it in context? Yeah. And it's usually one of those things where you realize it after the fact, right? Yeah. You've been doing this long enough, you start to realize
00:06:20
Speaker
We need a way to be able to measure success. We need to have a way to be able to support this methodology so that it has the kind of uptake that you're hoping for and that it has the kind of impact. Now, there are certain things that are concrete and certain things that, you know, I think have been classically considered a black box, right? So, you know, some of the things that we're talking about, look, if I have a sales methodology, I'm probably going to need product marketing to create some pre-colon materials that's up to
00:06:49
Speaker
the persona that speaks to the capabilities that we have even better if we talk about how those capabilities are better than our competitors and how we solve for these problems. Hopefully there is some element of value engineering where you could literally
00:07:04
Speaker
you know, talk to if you're able to, you know, X, Y, and Z, it should have this kind of uplift for the business and be able to define it in dollars and cents, right? But then there is the part that says, well, what's the efficacy here, right? We're expending millions of dollars. We're expending all this effort for taking people out of the field. For what? For what is it that we're actually trying to do here?
00:07:27
Speaker
And this is where companies kind of get wrapped around the axle because typically it's been operations that has been focused on everything predictive for the end of the quarter. You've got a bunch of sales reps. You know, it used to be that, you know, the beginning and the end of my interaction with operations in a, you know, sort of more classic, you know, format is, okay, you know, we've mapped out all the stages in our sales methodology, right?
00:07:56
Speaker
And, you know, hopefully in better cases, we've identified the verifiable outcomes at the end of each seller stage, like typically in Salesforce, you'll have anything from six to nine stages. And hopefully those stages mean something.
00:08:09
Speaker
So part of it is that definition of, okay, I'm a sales leader, frontline manager, I've got a rep, this rep is calling a deal for the end of the quarter. If I see that it's in stage four, that stage has meaning for both of us, and there's a verifiable outcome. We expect X, Y, and Z has already occurred with that particular opportunity, right? But when you take a step back and say, okay, well, how can this methodology be a force multiply?
00:08:39
Speaker
Isn't that what really we're talking about here? Isn't that the whole point of
Sales Methodology as a Force Multiplier
00:08:42
Speaker
enablement? Is that we're supposed to be a force multiplier, right? Oh God, this is where we start treading on some, some sacred ground here. Yeah. This is, this is how I've kind of viewed it and I'll, and I'll tell the story from service now because it really speaks to everything that we're talking about here. So I was brought on board at the end of 2018 and in the beginning of 2019, Kevin Haverty, who and David Schneider, awesome people,
00:09:08
Speaker
Great, great. You know, approached our organization and said, I need something that says that value selling works, right? We put the entire field through it. We're paying all this IP. I want to talk about how to accelerate deals.
00:09:21
Speaker
So we worked with our own internal BI team and we analyzed a few quarters worth of deals. And it was everything that was higher than a hundred thousand, less than a million. We want to get at that like right in the center and say, okay, how does value selling impact our seller cycle? And we were able to come up with some interesting bubble graphs. I mean, we looked at all these different, uh,
00:09:44
Speaker
You know, anything that could impact the numbers, we looked at all these interesting cohorts, and we came up with like four main areas, right? We talked about deals that had a value prompter as opposed to not having a value prompter. You know, you up level the propensity to close, right? Your close rate is going to go up. Multiple value prompters in a deal equates to a 1.75x uplift
00:10:11
Speaker
And it also increases the propensity for it to close, you know, so we looked at those things and my very first sales kickoff there, I'm standing there in the arena over at MGM huge place. I'm so excited to be at service now. Such a great story. But even like 2018, 2019, you know, the cat wasn't really out of the bag yet about service now, about what they were supposed to, what they were going to become.
00:10:35
Speaker
And I was so excited about it and there's our CRO and he's standing in front of this slide that came out of my organization and it's like, yep, value selling works. And I, we all gave ourselves a little pat on the back, went home from Vegas. We're feeling pumped. And my first meeting with the chief of staff in the Americas, you know, when we started talking about, okay, there's more folks that need to go through this. There's a couple of things where we need to dot the I's across the T's. And he said, look, you know, that was a nice slide.
00:11:05
Speaker
But the reality is, is that it's all correlation and it speaks more to the ability of my sales reps than anything we're doing with this sales methodology. Now, you know, look, I've often heard throughout my career and I, and I love this line, right?
00:11:22
Speaker
When sales is doing awesome, it's because your sellers are rock stars. And when it's not doing great, it's because enablement sucks, right? We weren't trained the right way, you know? We couldn't possibly do this, right? And so, you know, that correlation is strong, especially in like organizations that are meeting, you know, quarter over quarter, year over year, it's kind of like it ain't broke. So don't break it. And as much as I walked away from that meeting, very disheartened. It's kind of like we did all this work to show
00:11:50
Speaker
how the impact is and it's being outright rejected. I had to admit that he had a point. Well, it's, it's interesting, Phil, because when you bring that up, I think content management systems are great. Rep shouldn't have to look all over for him. But the problem is that core in my mind has been that correlation that you just talked about. Well, XYZ piece of content was used in this deal closed. So therefore,
00:12:12
Speaker
There's the efficacy. If you use this, you're going to close the deal. And that's kind of the same reaction I had when I was hearing you talk about that. And I wonder what your perspective is on this. So in fact, we just finished some primary research, but I don't even need my research to know this. Methodology is volunteer army. Companies are spending 26 billion a year on methodology.
00:12:34
Speaker
And I've heard people say, yeah, you know, the great thing is if they get one or two things out of it, it's worth it. And I said, no, it isn't. It is not. You have, you know, 200 people out of, out of pocket for two days. That's 400 selling days plus the cost of the thing. So this volunteer army thing. And then the other argument is managers don't have time to pull it through. How do you view, is that okay? How do you view both of those things, especially in light of what you were just talking about?
Challenges and Strategies for Implementing Sales Methodologies
00:13:01
Speaker
So two things. Yeah. First one, I think people are scared to actually get into the opportunity cost because it's so much more than what you're paying. And then the impact on the organization, if you actually drew up the numbers, you have think, Oh my God, you'd be crazy to take on this activity unless it paid out at, you know, a five X clip, which we know doesn't happen. But we also know that look,
00:13:25
Speaker
You know, there's a lot of selling organizations and sellers who are really experienced and sales leaders that are really expensive. And this is the playbook. Okay. Let's say, you know, we're a private company. We just got into our schedule. We just got into our round sea of funding. You know, we're being given this chunk of money to expand the organization. Great. Hire a bunch of people. Let's bring in a sales methodology, right? You know, it's really expensive. And unless you have a real strategy of how that is going to double and triple your sales,
00:13:54
Speaker
You know, you're throwing a lot of money, you know, into an area where you're not a hundred percent sure of what the return is. I mean, it's amazing. I've seen organizations pay the IP for sales methodologies for years without a clear understanding of what they were getting in return. Well, we, we, we just, we're, we're doing a diagnostic right now with a sales team, a pretty large sales team. And they've, I won't even name them, but in the last several years, they've rolled out three different methodologies and, and,
00:14:22
Speaker
I asked which are sticking, which ones are being, you know, and it's all the classic ones you would know and they're not. And I think part of the problem is I want to go back to this in context thing you mentioned. You know, my previous company, we did negotiation and we started out teaching people how to negotiate. And by the end of that company, we were getting so customized. It was how do you negotiate this value proposition on this product or solution of yours?
00:14:47
Speaker
against this specific competitor to achieve this set of commercial terms that you're CRO or your deal desk wants you going after. And that's why I asked that question because I saw our stuff, you know, back in my previous company become a lot more impactful because people were actually working on deals. And so this is a huge frustration to me, which is why I ask about this. I feel like if we made, and I'm seeing practitioners, by the way, I'm seeing enablement professionals at companies like Snap,
00:15:16
Speaker
and elsewhere who are doing this and they're doing it in house. They're going right to context to go, how do we sell this product against this competitor and sort of skipping over that first phase, which is let's roll out the methodology and then put it in context. Boom. They're going right to context. That feels right to me regardless of who's doing it.
00:15:34
Speaker
Right. That's where the value is, right? If we can get into a situation now, granted, you don't want to be so bespoke that, you know, you put a bunch of materials together for like one specific type of deal, right? You know, that's the point is understand. That's why I like working with companies like Databook that take a look at like, if you were selling into the global 2000, they would help you identify who has the greatest propensity to buy. So I always describe it as okay.
00:15:59
Speaker
The Global 2000 is a series of doors. That's a company that's going to help you find the golden handles and the most common use cases, and you want to write to those goals and use cases, right? That makes sense. It gets really powerful when you put it together with a methodology, because think about those materials. When I think about seller and productivity orchestration, think about all the groups that are involved. They're like, we're involved in seller productivity. It means you're going to have operations. It means you're going to have marketing.
00:16:29
Speaker
You're going to have sales enablement. You're going to have sales leadership. You might even include HR. That's about the right hiring profiles. But at the end of the day, the context that you're talking about, you have a bunch of marketing folks that are saying, okay, here is a solution for this type of person dealing with this kind of problem. How often is that produced in a way
00:16:52
Speaker
where a seller can use it in terms of pursuing opportunities. And that's the translation layer that has to take place. We did a ton of that around value selling at ServiceNow because we had a name like, okay, if we're going to sell into security operations, SecOps, which was one of the newer product lines,
00:17:11
Speaker
We have to understand who we're selling to. Okay, everybody who's dealt with event management, anybody who's dealt with security, anybody who's dealing with breaches, you know, it's usually going to be at the director level and above. Understand the challenges that they're dealing with. They might have some kind of security software, firewalls, whatever they're using. But when it comes to amelioration, when it comes to alerts, they don't have like, you know, one hand doesn't know what the other hand is doing. And so you've got this product that brings it together.
00:17:37
Speaker
But the materials that were produced by the SecOps organization were not ready to roll in terms of, I'm talking to somebody for the first time, and I need to understand what is the needle that they're trying to move? And how does it tie into company priorities? And what are the challenges in standing the way of overcoming those objectives? And that's where that material is written specifically for the methodology.
00:18:04
Speaker
Now, the methodology part is always considered a lot more expensive because it usually comes from the outside and there's this opportunity cost around being able to train and enable everybody on it, right? And your product marketing team, well, it's part of their product marketing duty. So, you know, at first glance, it's like, well, it's easier to produce all the context, you know, than it is around the sales methodology and which I say
00:18:29
Speaker
You need them both to have a really effective selling organization. And what I often talk about when I think about organizational maturity is what is their ability to build a revenue engine, right? And then do you have it defined enough where you can fine tune it, you know? I mean, I think a lot of what we did at ServiceNow as performance tuners
00:18:55
Speaker
And it was the first time I really got to get in there with my 11 millimeter wrenches and be able to do all the things that I want to do. Sorry. I just made like a bad like Porsche V-Dub reference on the 11 millimeter wrenches. I'm with you. I'm with you. I got it. I feel like an old car guy now. I kind of am.
00:19:14
Speaker
you know, you want to be able to set up all the elements, right? We understand from an operations perspective, the companies that are propensity by we understand from marketing perspective, the problems that we're solving the marketplace. From the sales methodology and enablement perspective, can we take all of the product marketing what's and turn it into the very specific company how how we go to market how we align to their buying process.
00:19:38
Speaker
and then get sales leaders, frontline managers, to see enough value in what we're doing that it drives the thing that's most important to them, which is the outcomes and wins and being predictably accurate, right? And then like HR, hey, we found the right background for these sellers. We might be selling this product. We've been pulling a bunch of people from this industry.
00:20:01
Speaker
they actually don't have the right mindset to ask the right questions. We find people in this particular area. I see that all the time at data companies that are all SaaS-based. You'll have folks who are better at selling SaaS, do better in these new SaaS-based data organizations than people who have sold data hardware for decades. Because they're different selling motions selling to different people. So once you have that all defined, that's building your revenue engine.
00:20:31
Speaker
right? If you know how all these parts are going to come together and how they're orchestrated, is let's face it, you have five groups are all saying they're part of like sales productivity, it's not going to orchestrate itself. The only thing that grows organically in any organization is chaos. And what you'll have is a bunch of repeated efforts in all those different areas. It's funny, we haven't even gotten into the predictive part of measurement of where we were going with that story. I like how we're
00:20:58
Speaker
We're digging in a little bit because there's reasons as to why this is all happening. And I also believe there are reasons why, even though we've seen examples of measurement and methodology working in companies, that it hasn't become the de facto standard.
00:21:17
Speaker
So would it be okay if I kind of just continued that story? Would that be helpful? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll wander back to where we started. Is that kind of your point? Yes, please. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because I really, I walked away brokenhearted and apologies to Mike
Correlation vs. Causation in Sales Success
00:21:34
Speaker
Rich. Right. But in a lot of ways, you know, he's the new chief revenue officer over at Z scale or good dude. I got to tell it's like, it's your staff is the reason.
00:21:45
Speaker
that we went down this road and it was a great thing. I like getting pushed. I like being told that isn't necessarily how we're going to do it. So I went back to my sales data guru, Sanchita Sur, CEO of Mplay, and I said, here is the issue, right? We kind of aligned this. They said it was correlation. I can't tell them they're wrong. I want to get into causation. She's like, we need to define a couple of things. She's like, what is it that you're trying to prove?
00:22:15
Speaker
that our methodology works. She's like, break it down for me further. Where do I see all the elements of a deal? Well, that's in a value prompter. Okay. Does the quality of the value prompter, do you believe that it impacts the propensity to close? And it's like, well, yeah, I mean, that's what we push all day long is that good sales hygiene will give you the kinds of results and specificity will give you the kinds of results. I mean, we've all looked in records and it's kind of like, you know,
00:22:42
Speaker
How many, how many, you know, how can you draw up the business case when somebody's like, I'm focused on digital transformation? Okay. So there has to be that specificity piece. So she came back and said, we got to prove out this hypothesis that high quality value prompters will yield a higher close ratio for your deals. All right. Well, how do we prove this? Well, we've got to define what we mean by value prompter quality.
00:23:12
Speaker
And that's where she did her magic. She took all kinds of data from our organization, not only from our CRM, but also, you know, our CPQ systems. There was some third party data and she built this really awesome data warehouse, brought this all together, and then built an analytic engine to understand out of the 144 unique cohorts she was looking at, what were the top five things that moved the needle?
00:23:40
Speaker
And we set it up in three different deal buckets. It was everything up to 100,000, 100,000 to a million, which to me was too large of a bucket, but we did that anyway, and a million plus because we felt there's different decision makers and different motions involved. And so we were able to show the top five value drivers for each one of these deal buckets
00:24:02
Speaker
And what was the impact of having a certain level of quality on close ratios? And we went with a baseline of, hey, any deal with a value prompter closes at 39%, right? So anytime we saw one of these unique cohorts that had an impact plus or minus one on 39%, it's all statistically significant, are ones that we're going to say, this is where we need to focus on our value promtters, right? So we did this.
00:24:32
Speaker
And we show and we analyze two quarters worth of deals in the Americas. And we demonstrated how if we had upleveled all these value prompters and these deals, we would have driven an additional $60 million in revenue. That is a powerful message to deliver to sales leaders. That's very different.
00:24:50
Speaker
than anything else we were communicating before. And so I went back to the chief of staff. There was actually a new chief of staff. Brian, great guy, went to Snowflake. John was brought in. And he was a guy who was leading a sales team. So he wasn't a pure RevOps person. I was just saying, there is something we can do to drive better sales hygiene. So I presented the solution at
00:25:16
Speaker
at a sales leader QBR, you know, and I was warned ahead of time to like, don't be too wonky here. You know, we've got other folks from hops and it's 45 points of spider grabs. You know, don't bore us, get to the chorus, make sure that everybody's engaged. So my presentation was about 15 minutes long. It was, here's the problem. Here's what we've done. I even acknowledged the correlation argument. We were trying to get to causation and I talked about what we found.
00:25:42
Speaker
And then I started talking about, well, we built this predictive analytic engine, which means that we can take all of your current deals that are forecast for the end of the quarter, and instead of giving you a bunch of dashboards, because we know how much sales frontline managers love five or six screens to look at to figure out if one deal is at risk. That's what we've done with all of our modern tools, let's face it, to have one sort of, I'm not even gonna say ultimate source of truth, I'm gonna say a sanity checkpoint that says, okay,
00:26:11
Speaker
Your deal is at risk based against these five value drivers. We see two where we did a simple system of green, yellow, red. This one's yellow. This is red. You're calling this for the end of the quarter. And here is the directional coaching to provide. Here's a good example.
00:26:28
Speaker
Like you've called this deal, it's for the end of the quarter, it's in excess of one million. And we see that everybody that you're talking to on your buying decision committee, everybody's at the director level, right? And we see that one of the value drivers at a million above is that you have to have a VP involved. So who is the VP that's ultimately going to sponsor this? Who's their SVP?
00:26:49
Speaker
right? And the next time you discuss that deal, you can talk about whether or not that's happened. So we would do these snapshots, these points in time. So we pitched this out to the folks in the Americas, and I didn't get a lot of pushback during the meeting, to which I said, okay, you know, either this went over horribly, and nobody knows what I'm talking about, or I was so crystal clear that everybody's like, nope, we got it, we're good. I really didn't know what to think. So I spoke to John Chief of Staff after, and I said, you know, what do you think of the presentation? He's like,
00:27:19
Speaker
We loved it. We've been looking for stuff like this. You know, you're kind of opening up a black box. Let's go with it. And I was like, all right, cool. Let's do this pilot. Where are we going to start? We're going to start in the southeast. And he's like, no, we're going to turn this on for all the Americas, Latin America and Canada. And we want this right away, which was a different problem. Yeah. A scale, a scale problem. Yeah. Big time.
00:27:41
Speaker
I have some very funny moments of being on vacation in Mexico and talk, calling up Bangalore and try, you know, where it's like super late at night on a Friday and trying to get, you know, all the data pulled so we could have these reports for Monday. Cause we knew that, you know, our credibility was at stake and everybody had signed off to it. So we were, we were able within six months to get about three quarters of the globe on this standard. Right. And we would do stack ranking.
00:28:10
Speaker
on whether or not this was effective. We didn't even talk during the stack ranking like whether or not they actually used any of our insights. We simply said, okay, take a look at managers. The managers who have the greatest number of value prompters attached to their deals and who had the highest rates of closing, who had the best wins, right?
00:28:34
Speaker
And we found that people in the top half of that stack ranking, their deals closed on an average of 52%. And if you were in the bottom half, they closed on an average of 24%, which was less than a single value prompter. So once again, like I didn't have to stand up and be like value selling works. And I didn't have to combat that thought that I was presented with, you know, when sales are going great, it's because your reps are awesome.
00:29:00
Speaker
And when it's not going well, it's because the enablement sucks. It's like, here's data, right? This is what this is telling us. And if you use this system, you're going to be able to uplift your wins. Well, so you just, you just said something about, about the system. So what's been rolling around in my brain
Key Components of Sales Productivity
00:29:20
Speaker
is.
00:29:20
Speaker
What you just laid out, and not in a sort of disrespectful way, but this diminishes the role of methodology. We put so much emphasis on methodology. Methodology is one piece of the design, the delivery, and the measurement that you just talked about. And it's wrapping an entire system around it, like that context piece is the design, and then you deliver it, and then you measure it on the back end. And that, yeah, I guess it's problematic to just look at that thing on its own, but we're going to roll out methodology. Guess what?
00:29:50
Speaker
It's not going to stick, and it may even not even be the methodology's point, or methodology's fault. Here's my message to everybody watching this at home. You don't take away anything from our talk. And I understand if you guys need to get sleep aid, you might have turned this on and checked this out here, babbling around sales methodology. Take this away. Sales productivity in the engine is a three-legged stool.
00:30:20
Speaker
The methodology is only one piece of it. The other two are really going to be around what are the inputs from the organization and what are you doing around measurement. That's the only way you can performance tune. That is how you extract all the value in the IP that you're paying for. Now, I'm not going to get into cost versus value. We know that methodologies are expensive.
00:30:49
Speaker
But I'm here to tell you that that is a worthy sunken cost, but only if you are looking at it in the perspective of creating a productivity engine. If what you're doing seems very checkbox and any sort of deal risk is going to be, you're only looking at Clary or you're looking at the gut of sales leaders, I can't believe in 2024 we still have all these gut pulls.
00:31:20
Speaker
It's really about how do you extract the value from these systems? Because we put so much money into it, which leads us into the trough of disappointment. There is a reason people are saying we spent all this money and it didn't work. And so that's where you want to play detective and figure out.
00:31:43
Speaker
It's really helpful. And to do it at the level, the level you did it, I think is a kind of fundamental shift in the way we think about rolling this stuff out.
Steps for Unified Sales Enablement
00:31:50
Speaker
So, and, and you, you just leaned into this a little bit, but my final question for you has to do with, you know, what are the next steps we need to take an enablement? And I think you may have just laid out some of that, but yeah, your, your answer, where, where should we go from here? I'm going to talk about what should happen. And then I'm going to talk about reality. Okay. Yeah. What should happen?
00:32:11
Speaker
Number one, I'm a huge believer in the RevOps movement and it's really about making sure that all these functions that contribute to seller productivity are under a single umbrella so that they have visibility, there's a duplication of efforts, people aren't, you know, fighting for resources or even worse trying to create fiefdoms. You got to pull the walls down, you know, and there's a lot of reasons that those walls are up, unfortunately.
00:32:39
Speaker
Right? So that's, that's number one. Number two, you need to get an understanding of the role that methodology will play in the sales cycle. Now there are organizations that have really liked sales methodologies. They're almost just like, these are the boxes that we want you to have filled in.
00:33:02
Speaker
in terms of our CRM, but it doesn't mean that they're doing a poor job. It just means that they have leaned into some other areas. They might have a product marketing team that really understands the types of open and closed questions that sellers need to ask to get to the right outcomes. It could be that the organization has already leaned into either analytics or a better
00:33:33
Speaker
pipeline discovery, there's a lot of different areas that companies can lean into, right? But when you start thinking about RevOps, you've got to get everybody leaning into these equally to see the importance of how this comes together in a productivity ecosystem. I was thinking about this a lot before our conversation today. And I do think there should be a productivity ecosystem.
00:34:01
Speaker
And I realized I've been talking about it for 10 years without actually giving it a name. But that productivity ecosystem has to make sure that everybody is on board. Here's some things that we've been saying that I think are very difficult. And please feel free to stop me if you feel like, Phil, that's crazy talk. I go to a bunch of these conferences, sales and ailment conferences and given talks at sales and ailment pros.
00:34:31
Speaker
you know, and there's always this sense of, I want a seat at the table, you know, we've addressed young and ailment folks. And it's like, how do I get people to take me seriously? How do I get the organization to take me seriously? You know, and and I think that there's this fundamental misunderstanding, right? I know that there's a lot of folks
00:34:55
Speaker
You know, who might be like a manager, a senior manager, and they want to lean into sales, efficacy, sales, productivity. What are the conversations that their leaders are having with sales? Because that is going to either inhibit your activities or it's going to create some really fertile ground for partnerships. And I've seen that go in either direction.
00:35:20
Speaker
The problem also is like when you're trying to get that credibility with sales leaders, like this is where I talk a little bit about the tropical disappointment. You know, if sellers have been let down in the past by either the efforts of your predecessors or prior lifetimes, you know, they're not going to jump on board and be like, you know, I'm going to, I'm going to bet the moon on my position and, and you're going to be my co-pilot.
00:35:49
Speaker
You don't get that. If anything, power is being taken away from CROs because here's something that I'll say in a whispered tone. There's a lot of CROs out there who are really great at driving deals, really great at providing leadership both with and without influence in getting people excited about this and getting people to focus on good forecasting.
00:36:19
Speaker
Right there. And the best ones out there are really good at this, you know, the kinds that could sell ice to Eskimos and also handle, you know, culturally their organization where they haven't been as good. Traditionally, it's been very rare that a CRO really gets into the mechanism of productivity and understanding like, you know, clarity and CPQ and your CRM and a sales methodology and
00:36:46
Speaker
Maybe, you know, some of our other systems that we're utilizing and maybe our training function, maybe mind tickle, uh, you know, maybe something like Gong or second nature, like how this comes together in an ecosystem to drive productivity. They are not experts at that. So.
00:37:04
Speaker
If the expertise isn't coming from the CRO, if revenue operations, traditional operations kind of has never looked at an ailment and be like, you're the people that I really want to partner with when it comes to data. You know, if anything, they just assume we don't know anything. I've seen bad attitude play out time and time again. And sometimes when you ask for things like
00:37:26
Speaker
Hey, I want a Tableau instance. Hey, I'm going to pull some of these numbers myself. Hey, I want to work with some of these BI folks. Honestly, like almost 100% of the time when I've asked those questions, the response from operations has been, why? Why? Why do you want to get into this? This is our area. And it's entirely the wrong attitude.
00:37:48
Speaker
It on both sides. I mean, look, if you come to that table and you've got nothing to offer and you're like, okay, operations, people teach me about data, they got better things to do then, then up level you. So my recommendation is, you know, understand the world of rev ops and how it comes together, read books like data driven, understand how data can accelerate your relationship with sales.
Overcoming Challenges in Aligning Operations and Enablement
00:38:13
Speaker
how you can provide people with directional coaching, directional insight, as opposed to another dashboard, which is also different than what they're necessarily going to get from operations. So it's almost, you need to challenge prevailing notions. Now, as I tell you to go and challenge this, let me tell you why it's so hard. These attitudes are entrenched.
00:38:39
Speaker
Operations is not looking to the VP of Enablement to drive. They're looking for them to, you know, up level, train, new product, sales methodology. If they're really good, you know, you might even get in some that's like deal coaching. That's when there's a level of trust, right? But operations is not saying, you know, perhaps how you're looking at this is better than what we're doing with something like a Clary predictive software. That's not happening.
00:39:10
Speaker
Right. The second piece is, you know, CROs are no longer being looked to as you are the guys who are going to make the decisions around what we're going to do for seller productivity.
00:39:20
Speaker
The most they'll be focused on is a sales methodology. So who does it fall onto to bring that revenue operations together? It's really about your relationship between enablement and operations and starting with some baby steps. That's really what we had to do. I mean, I remember taking my first data studies, you know, when I wanted to get from correlation to causation, I introduced them. I won't, I won't give you the name of this individual, but I, I, I spoke to him. He was out of APAC.
00:39:49
Speaker
He's at Tokyo, brilliant guy, multilingual. And I started showing him the data. And he just kind of went, you need to give me a crystal clear story from A to B. Because that is how I'm going to explain it to people. And if you cannot do that in short order, then this conversation isn't going to go anywhere. And it was sobering, but it's the right level of conversation.
00:40:19
Speaker
You know, it's kind of like when you're talking to executives. We, I don't want to go too much on a tangent, but as an inalienable person, we want to tell you everything that we know. Right. And there's the attitude and nailment of like, I'm going to tell you what I'm going to tell you. Then I'm going to tell you that when you're trying to put forward this, you know, with operations or the most senior people in sales, it's like, here are my three headlines. Tell me what interests you and we'll start to get down. Right. So these are all the things that are kind of holding us back.
00:40:48
Speaker
But it's, it's interesting too, Phil, because what, what, what you hit on is, is sort of discovery, right? It's, it's execute discovery internal. And that's been my, that's been my sense of how do I get a seat at the table? I love that notion.
00:41:04
Speaker
And it's like, well, how you get it seated at the table is, is your, you're about executing strategic initiatives, right? How, how do I, and in order to understand the strategic initiatives you're executing against its discovery. So I think, I think it's helpful and I feel like we could have a whole, a whole nother call on, I'm getting a seat at the table because I have some strong feelings about that as well. But it's, it's, I really, I appreciate your prep on this and, and the time.
00:41:30
Speaker
that you took your generous with both and adding to this community we have here of, hey, these are people struggling with stuff at the front line and let's all talk about it. And yeah, the promise of this one was methodology and measurement and you nailed that one for me at a level I haven't heard in a while. So yeah, I really, really appreciate that and appreciate all the time you put into this.
00:41:56
Speaker
Hey, I appreciate you guys reaching out to me. I love having these conversations. That probably didn't come through. This is a real passion project for mine. And I have to admit, there were times in my last job where I was trying to figure out, where am I going with this? What is this going to do in my next role? And I'm still figuring that piece out. But if this has been helpful for the audience at home, I'm super glad and people can reach out to me on LinkedIn. I love talking about this stuff.
00:42:25
Speaker
And before we wrap this up, I really want to thank both you and Dan for, for having me today. Um, you know, these are issues that I think are, are really hard to cover off on. I probably would not have taken this in the format of like, I'm going to talk about this at the next sales enablement conference. But I think it's important for us to realize like.
00:42:49
Speaker
It is not a clear path for enablement folks. If you really want to touch on productivity and enablement, you can't just jump in and say, you know, I'm the data guy. I'm here. I'm ready to do this. It's gotta be small steps. It's gotta be conversations. There has to be some value to your presence as part of that executive decision-making other than
00:43:13
Speaker
Hey, we're going to train a bunch of folks. Couldn't agree more. And for those who are wondering who Dan is, that is our handsome producer who's behind the scenes. So who makes Phil and I look smart on these calls. So thank you. And for everybody, I've been trying to encourage folks more. Once we start posting this, give Phil and I some feedback like, Hey, I've done similar thing and it worked or you guys are crazy.
00:43:39
Speaker
We want to, once we post these, keep the conversation turning into a conversation versus a one-way. So again, Phil, thank you for all your time. Really super appreciate having you here today. Awesome. Thank you. I appreciate it.