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Adapting Sales Strategies for 2024: Insights from Ruby Raley
47 Plays1 year ago
In this episode, Brian Dietmeyer talks to Ruby Raley, a seasoned expert in sales, product marketing, and leadership roles across various industries, about evolving sales strategies for 2024. They delve into the challenges and inefficiencies in traditional sales techniques, emphasizing the critical need for personal accountability, focus on existing clients, and the integration of new technological tools. This episode is essential for sales professionals striving to adapt and thrive in a rapidly changing market.
Timestamps:
00:00 Identifying customer persona, generating and using tools.
06:37 Expressed confidence, challenges, and strategic insights emerged.
08:45 Strategize, prioritize, and focus on achievable goals.
11:01 Realizing skills vary across the organization's staff.
14:13 Early coaching essential to maximize sales potential.
18:18 Confused by sudden ghosting, overlooked competitor threat.
21:34 Former biz dev relied on credibility, empathy. uniform sales approach lacks personal touch.
25:46 AI tools enable flexible and adaptive organizations.
30:05 AI, skills coaching, account intelligence, deal coaching.
31:17 Impact quality, scale, time management, AI coaching.
34:25 Sincere appreciation for an enjoyable experience.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to the Enterprise Sale Show
00:00:03
Speaker
Welcome back to another edition of closed mode, the enterprise sale show. I'm Brian deep Meyer, CEO of close strong. And today I'm really, really lucky to be here with Ruby really, who I've had a few conversations with lately. Um, and Ruby's had a.
00:00:19
Speaker
bunch of positions that I think really make make our conversation even more relevant. She's been a VP of Sales and Alliances, advises tech startups on their go to market has been a product marketing has been a CIO and healthcare and supply chain. So yeah, I am, I feel really fortunate to be here today and Ruby, welcome to the show.
00:00:40
Speaker
Thank you so much. I'm honored to be here. I love your sessions. Thanks. So we were the subject of our talk.
Is the demand engine broken post-COVID?
00:00:49
Speaker
We've changed it a little bit and it's a couple of weeks ago we were talking and you said you felt the demand engine was broken and that felt really truthful to me. And I was just speaking with a tech sales VP the other day who
00:01:03
Speaker
who said we're in a demand neutral or demand negative market, which is really, really depressing. But I have an opening question for you. I think a lot of that is true. How the hell did we get here? I think that we're in a hangover from COVID. I think when we all went home, marketing had to step it up to get virtual things going. We bought a bunch of tools. We saw some initial success.
00:01:32
Speaker
and we bought a bunch of tools, we didn't use all of them, but the worst thing we did was we spammed our buyers to fatigue.
Why are buyers fatigued by spam and cold calls?
00:01:44
Speaker
So when you're talking to buyers, I asked this question of everyone I network with, do you answer cold phone calls? And they all say, no, it doesn't matter whether they're a seller, a buyer, an HR person,
00:01:59
Speaker
a retired person, nobody answers a phone call from someone they don't know anymore. So it's getting harder and harder to get that breakthrough moment that you need in sales. Yeah. Yeah. And it's interesting that I've worked personally with my company, hired two different demand gen folks who both came back with similar comments. Like we ended up cutting off the thing after a few months. You need to ramp up and let's try it. And they're both saying,
00:02:28
Speaker
none of my stuff is working. Like they were really honest about it. Like I used to throw the stuff at the wall and it would stick and it's not sticking. So I'm wondering, yeah, when we talk about things that came out the last few years, what, let's talk specifically about some, some of that kind of demand gen stuff that you see out there that isn't working as well as it did, you know, in a market where the market was expanding, right? Right. Well, you know, obviously there's a bunch of tools out there for identifying people.
Importance of Knowing Your Ideal Customer
00:02:55
Speaker
So we have all kinds of people that
00:02:57
Speaker
generate lists. And as we dig into that, you know, the first thing consultants tell you, and I do it too, is, what's your ICP? What's your ideal customer persona, or profile? And we need that to arm these automated tools. So then we go get this list. And then we write a sequence using some materials that marketing gave us typically, because we're salespeople. So marketing gives us some skeletons, we write some stuff up. And then we
00:03:26
Speaker
And we know from best practices, from a lot of firms that I'm not gonna mention, but I bet that your audience follows most of them. They'll tell you, you gotta connect on LinkedIn, you gotta send the email, then you gotta call. So we set up these multi-touch sequences and then we run them. I think we in sales are a little lazy. I'm talking to one salesperson right now who seems to be a good person
00:03:54
Speaker
I actually answered her on LinkedIn and she keeps sending me emails as if she did not see that answer. So I think these automation tools like sales is setting it up and then letting it run and it's not really checking the results. It just made me feel even stronger.
00:04:16
Speaker
that I don't want to engage with someone because I engaged and I didn't even get the courtesy of an answer. I just got more spam email, you know? Yeah. It's interesting because there was a demand gen company who did, I think, email marketing or something or cold calling. And I kept coming back to them with the same question, which is, hey, are you willing to do a rev share, a risk share
Do sales sequences need a change in approach?
00:04:40
Speaker
agreement?
00:04:40
Speaker
And then two weeks later, I would get the next sequence that never responded actually. And I was like, wait, you guys are in the business of demand, Jim. You're killing me. You're killing yourself. So yeah. And it's funny too, because I was speaking with a buyer the other day and maybe a lot of people listening will recognize this as well, like saying, I now know when I'm getting sequenced, which is kind of the point you just made and of the over, over-reliance on it. Yeah. So maybe it's not just fatigue. Maybe the buyers have seen our pattern so much now.
00:05:10
Speaker
that they're smarter than they used to be. And we've got to step our game up in order to get back in. And I don't want to say that all tools are useless because I still remain very intrigued by the intent tools that purportedly tell you by your intent. I have mixed results with them, but I definitely think that there's value in these tools, but something still
00:05:39
Speaker
is not giving us the results we need. I think that's a really good point and I'm glad you bring it up that I don't think any of it's useless. It's just not as effective as it was. It's that, again, we're throwing it at the wall and it's not sticking. You made an interesting point to me about sort of your pipe then and now that I'd love to hear you talk about your view on that and especially as it relates to people listening, watching to say, does this sound
Pipeline Dynamics and Challenges
00:06:05
Speaker
familiar? So talk to me about what shifted in pipeline.
00:06:08
Speaker
Yeah, so when I took the VP of Sales role, it was a turnaround role, and I rapidly got it fixed, and we're sailing along. And I can remember going into a QBR, trying to pull numbers out of our tool, and thinking, oh, this is going to look really bad. And I pulled my pipe for the rest of the year. This is like the end of Q1. We were still getting the year started.
00:06:35
Speaker
I had a 6X pipe and I just had this big expansive moment of, shit, I got this, right? But then in recent years, I would be like,
00:06:48
Speaker
telling the guys, you got to quote this in CPQ. You got to do this. You got to put some numbers in because I couldn't even get a 2x pipe, Brian. My pipe went from here to here. And then when you started really analyzing it, then you start seeing a lot of early stage stuff. And then
00:07:14
Speaker
You start looking at some of the late stage deals and are some of these the ones that sales has been kicking down the road? Like how many of these can really work? And what you end up with is a punch list that is a must do list. Like there there's no room for a mistake. Yeah. Yeah. So I, I wonder this is a thing that's in, in my head and you and I were speaking earlier about some primary research.
00:07:41
Speaker
We just completed and the question for me that's in everyone's mind is, okay, we still need to impact this stuff in 2024. So a lot of the old stuff is not as effective as it was. And so I'm just wondering what, what you see or what you're hearing as like what.
00:07:58
Speaker
Even these shifts, what the heck should we be doing in 2024? And then I'll share with you a little bit about what we just learned in our primary research. But yeah, what do you think? What should we be doing? You and I have kind of crapped all over what isn't working and how scary the world is. Everybody knows this. Well, I'd like to blame marketing and tell marketing to give me a whole bunch more leads.
00:08:18
Speaker
The truth is it's halfway through the year. Marketing is going to help me, but what they're starting now is probably going to yield value for me early next year or the end of the year where I can't close it. So I got to be honest that the way to succeed lies in my own hands and in my own team's
Sales Success Depends on Sales Team Actions
00:08:38
Speaker
hands. It's not outside. It's not marketing's issue. It's not product's issue is on me. And what I've got to do.
00:08:47
Speaker
is figure out what I have a line of sight to close. And I've got to put the plan together to be on top of that, make sure everyone on the team knows the place they're running, knows how to deal with the objections and is on top of it. The next thing I can try to do if I can't get to my number with my line of sight is look at my existing customers or my named accounts that aren't active and what can I do to get them active.
00:09:15
Speaker
What can I do where I already have a customer that'll take my call? I've got to get pragmatic. I've got to get practical. I've got to get what I can control starting with what I can see and then what can I reach in one step or two steps? That's where my focus has got to be to win.
00:09:38
Speaker
So, so much of that resonates. I was just speaking to one of our advisors the other day, who's also an industry analyst who said, you know, close rates in 2000 and 2000 were 46% close rates in 2023 or 47%.
00:09:54
Speaker
And so that first of all is frightening, but we spent a lot of money on a lot of stuff over those years and win rates are still about flat and less than the flip of a coin. And what he also told me is that in the same survey over the
00:10:11
Speaker
most previous 10 years, generating top of the funnel has been the number one investment for all these same companies. So his point is like, it's not working. It's not, you know, it's been the number one priority. Wind rates are still flat. And his argument, you just talked about line of sight. And his argument is it's, it's the, it's what's in your funnel right now, right? That's if we're going to yet have impact in 2024.
00:10:34
Speaker
We've got to convert a much higher percent of than, than 46 to 47% of what's in our funnel. I spoke to a VP of sales the other day who said, not only that, it's the stuff that's in the middle of your pipe and it's the middle of your team. Your top performers are already going to get you what they're going to get you. The bottom performers aren't going to do it. And so that to me was a kind of a pretty cool prescription. It's like middle middle of the pipe, middle of your team. I'm just wondering how you feel about that. You know, that's, that's absolutely right on the money.
00:11:05
Speaker
And I have an insight that I got last year that I had really been missing because I'd been working with a group of pretty successful sellers who were pretty good at their numbers and pretty good at reading their accounts and their ops and what was happening or not. And then my role changed and I got to deal with a bunch of others. And what I realized was skills are not even across the organization. And as a VP of Sales and the CRO,
00:11:33
Speaker
You don't always get that because you're not on ride-alongs with everyone and you probably aren't listening to every single call. And what seems to be missing is some of those old gills, Brian, that you and I probably spent lots of time on in the past and maybe we kind of missed. And some of these are setting up the compelling event, like getting the ROI lined up, setting the sequence of events and really making sure that you lined up
00:12:02
Speaker
who has to approve this in the Portfolio Committee, what's procurement processes, all these sort of old school things. Not everyone really understands what that means. So they all can talk the talk, I think. But when it comes to really implementing it and
00:12:22
Speaker
understanding how to navigate it. That, that maybe isn't as good as you think it is. Yes. In your organization. Yeah. So many thoughts you spark in, in my brain. I, I'd mentioned this, this primary research we just did in, in concert with, uh, Sama Strategic Count Management Association. And we looked at,
00:12:43
Speaker
We broke it out. Top performers were people who were closing at 60% rate and had all beat their sales goals last year in the bottom percent. We're at a 40% close rate or below and missed their goals.
How does coaching impact sales performance?
00:12:55
Speaker
And it's interesting that.
00:12:57
Speaker
We took a look, what are you doing? And how are you doing it? And where are you spending your time? And it's interesting that the number one and number two points that came up for folks who were in the top percent was coaching, right? They say we're doing it. And not only coaching, I think the average percentage of pipe that's coached right now is 5%, right? And these groups write a much higher percent. And it wasn't
00:13:18
Speaker
It wasn't just the coaching, it was, it was the quality and the rigor. And, and the same thing happened with, with, um, with, if they made investments in training or they made investments in tech tools, they had a ton more rigor and, and, you know, do people have to use it? Right? Is it measured? Is it that sort of thing? And it just sort of blew me away that they're saying, yes, we're making investments in these things.
00:13:41
Speaker
And, but we're, we're now requiring use. And I think about you and I discussed this outreach paper that just came out about sales as a process problem. Right. And the expanding market, you know, process, whatever, who cares? But now they're saying, no, we've got to, and this is what I just saw from these top performers. We're looking at stuff in the pipe and we're coaching, and we're coaching earlier, as early as we can in the process to start setting up the clothes.
00:14:05
Speaker
And just again, a reaction to that. I literally, we just dug through the first draft of this, this research. So you're the first I've had to talk to about it. You know, coaching earlier in the process really resonates with me because if you're sitting on top of, let's say you've got the ability to take an ongoing run rate with an existing account and make it a seven figure deal by moving them to your cloud or
00:14:32
Speaker
converting them into a new model or signing them up for subscription or whatever. And you're not on top of their renewal dates. You're not on top of their volumes. You're not on top of like their past buying processes. By the time you run through the phone at in sales cycle, okay, you got the solutions engineer to demo, you got product to give you the latest features and functions, you ran all that.
00:15:01
Speaker
you may have missed a key date, like they might've already renewed for next year, or they might have missed a budget process where they needed to go to the portfolio committee and forecast their own expenditure. So now you're really, excuse my French Scrooge, because you weren't on top of it early enough to see how their world lays out against your world so you could match those milestones up and nail it, right?
00:15:31
Speaker
So, and that, that wasn't bad French. My French has been worse. And there's, there's a, there's a thing that you call like sayings like that, that I'm fascinated. I can't remember what you call them, but I always look them up and this is one I need to look up. Where did, excuse my French come from? Because it just, it's fascinating to me. So I asked you at the outset, you know, what, what the hell happened? And I think one thing we missed that I've been seeing a lot, and I'm sure you have and, and everybody listening, watching.
00:15:56
Speaker
that buyer, you know, the buyer's journey has gotten more complex. There's more people involved, it's committee decisions. Because of that complexity, no decision is on the rise. And there's also all that uncertainty out there, which is then driving those buying committees to say, let's hold off on making commitments.
00:16:14
Speaker
What's the impact in, like, I feel like that's such a fundamental shift in 2024. What, any sense of how we might address that buyer complexity in this uncertain market to help them move forward? You know, I think this is one of the areas where sales and marketing have to partner to really deal with this because we're all getting these stats and these findings and big time analysts are saying that
00:16:42
Speaker
It's, you know, there's not one economic buyer anymore.
Complexity in Buyer's Decision-Making Processes
00:16:46
Speaker
There's multiple, right? There's multiple stakeholders in the decision. I've had procurement tell me no after I had everyone else lined up and they stuck it. So, you know, things you think are just check boxes are not anymore. So I think we are struggling in sales and you mentioned the sales process is broken.
00:17:10
Speaker
I think that's exactly right because I don't think we have reinvented our selling motions across our state to match to the buyer world. For example, buyers can go to G2, they can go to other sites, they can look you up against your competitor. In fact, buyers today can go get chat GPT or Gemini or Bard and say, okay, pair this company to that company,
00:17:40
Speaker
What would you recommend? Now, the AI engines always put the caveat at the end for illegal protection. So they're going to say, you can't rely on me, situations vary, all this. But they're going to give you a side by side layout of these things. G2 certainly will. And you may have been only talking to two of five recommended people. You might stop talking to two and go pick up
00:18:10
Speaker
a vendor who's listed four or five on that finding. Now, if I'm the salesperson from vendor one or two, I'm going, what happened? I had all this conversation going on and all of a sudden I'm ghosted, what happened? And I don't know that now all of a sudden they did some sort of research and discovered I got another competitor in the mix that they're spinning up on while I'm waiting, thinking everything's fine and all that. And I'm reporting, we had this fun conversation too recently,
00:18:39
Speaker
like the classic phone the same message in on the spreadsheet every week for the punch list for closing, like waiting on sponsor to return phone call, spoke to sponsor, everything is fine. And then you start looking and it's the same answer because they don't have a new answer. So we have this tendency not to realize what went wrong.
00:19:05
Speaker
And we're just riding the course thinking everything's okay. So there's just a delay and might not be, you might be in trouble. Yeah. You said something, you say a lot of things always that get my brain working. One of the multiple things you've said today and in previous conversations is that like we look at the sales process and the sales stages and we're not tweaking them enough for the current environment. And I had written a note a few moments ago that it's,
00:19:32
Speaker
might be a new playbook for 2024. Some of that might be resurrecting some things that I think you said earlier that we kind of stopped doing in a market that was a little thicker and a little heavier than not as lean as it is now. And I feel like sellers at the highest level need to start being more prescriptive. Another terrible stat that came out from CSO Insights buyer study they started years ago is that buyers said that sellers are ninth
00:20:01
Speaker
out of 10 places they go for insight. So, and that's almost dead last because they're not, and that's not necessarily seller's fault. Are they getting what they need? But the good news was buyer said, I will talk to them. I'll see Ruby, but Ruby's got to have a good reason to talk to me. And it seems to me, this is another area I'd love your impact that their input buyers are struggling with making these very complex decisions in this uncertain environment.
00:20:28
Speaker
I think sellers are still coming in and saying, I need to understand your decision process. Their decision process is broken. They are struggling with it. It's also, I feel like this is a core skill for 2024 and the last six months of the year is helping buyers navigate these crazy complex decisions. We know, um, I often use the metaphor of, of doctors that, that, you know, buyers are like veterinarians.
00:20:52
Speaker
that a snake, a bird, and a camel all walk into their office and they're dealing with these different critters all day long, where we as sellers and not only neurosurgeons, we're spine specialists, neurosurgeons, and how to buy, like we're selling, I don't know, firewall protection software. We've watched thousands of customers buy this over many, many years. And thinking about marketing and pull together, what's a really good holistic way to help guide a buyer's decision, not necessarily toward your stuff, but provide that
00:21:21
Speaker
that, that prescriptive help to go from how are you making your decision to look, I'm going to share with you some best practices about how people are making complex decisions in today's market. And another area I'd love your reaction to. Yeah. Well, you know, back in the day when I was biz dev more than selling,
00:21:41
Speaker
people would drag me in because of credibility. So the seller would say, hey, come with me to this meeting in case a customer has any question. My role was because I had recently been a CIO, was to sit across from the leader and the customer and show them that I had empathy and I understood them, right? I'd walked a mile in their shoes. So that built credibility for us. And then it typically opened the conversation up. But what I see now is we have one process that we use for every single customer.
00:22:10
Speaker
We have the discovery questions and we ask everyone these questions. And then our solutions engineers don't trust sales. So they ask them another set of questions. And then you finally get the demo and you finally get the price point and you finally get whatever. But I, my recent experience is small, medium organizations have no patience for that anymore. They want to get on the first call. They want to know exactly what you can do for them.
00:22:38
Speaker
and exactly what a price point is for budget so they can weed you out or keep you in and you don't have three or four or five meetings to go through these things in this prescribed order. And so if you can't sense and adapt, or if you haven't already, like since this customer is this kind of customer, they're probably going to buy this way and you already kind of re-steered, then you're going to mess up and you're going to annoy the customer.
00:23:07
Speaker
I have been in this situation where I had to follow my company's process and I had the head of procurement for a global systems integrator who wanted to buy our stuff telling me I wasn't going to make the cut because I wouldn't do it their way. Right. And I've got my legal and my solutions engineers telling me, well, we don't believe this is real and we're not going to do this. And literally I could see
00:23:35
Speaker
a multi-million dollar deal swirled down the drain because I couldn't adapt to the buyer. And the buyer was in a rush and they weren't going to mark up an agreement. They weren't going to go through steps. They had this plan. And if I couldn't go with them on their model, I was out. And guess what? I was out. I never got back in again. The best I could get out of procurement was, well,
00:24:05
Speaker
the other people fall out, we might consider you again. Yes. Like as a seller, I felt you have, you have no idea. Like, like my husband's asking me what's wrong with you. It's like, I just like lost my whole year. Yes. Because I couldn't adapt to the customer.
00:24:24
Speaker
Yeah. Um, there's, as we look toward maybe, you know, again, what works, I think having that flexibility and that, and that kind of customized and prescribing a little bit more because people will meet with us more. That's the point that came out of that by a research, but we got to rethink, we can't come in with the old discovery, what's keeping you awake at night, blah, blah, blah. And, you know, I've, I've blogged a little bit about guided discovery.
00:24:48
Speaker
If we're bringing value to them through guided discovery, we're asking questions. It's really getting them to think. And I've spoken to a hundred sales leaders between the blog and other interviews we've done over the last year. Everybody's frustrated with discovery. It's like, and that's one of those old, that's new again. Like we have to execute discovery, but to the point you're making, we have to execute discovery in a way that's guided. It's maybe helping them.
00:25:14
Speaker
make their decision more, but we've, we've got to rethink some of these old skills in 2024. And some of it is getting back to the basics, but maybe in a different way that reflects this market. Yeah. I think you nailed it. So, you know, when we were doing the e-commerce transformation in the 2000s, we were talking about masked, masked customization, right? Yeah. So that you could actually provide a unique experience to an individual customer when you were selling to millions of people. Yep.
00:25:43
Speaker
Amazon is the example we all hold up, but Apple does a good job as well, and so do a whole bunch of other people. That is what the power of some of these new tools like AI and some of these things can do. They can take the things that these really top guys do that they don't even understand how they do.
00:26:05
Speaker
And we can start seeing how we can be a more flexible and adaptive organization using the tools in that way. And AI is a very good example of how it could help us because we could go load up scenarios and we could have sellers ask questions like, here's my scenario. I've got this company. They're a gaming company. They're based in Vegas.
00:26:32
Speaker
They've got a problem. They're coming in. We got cold calls. So they're probably talking to a bunch of people. They're pretty small. Can you tell me how big they are? Do you know their IT budget? Because a really good researcher can often find all these things and all these tools we bought. Zoom info has stuff like that in it. And a whole bunch of the others do. And even Crunchbase has it.
00:26:57
Speaker
And so you could probably go find that, but would that seller go find it for that deal? Probably not. But the AI engine could bring it to them and then say, hey, based on this, they're going to have a tight budget constraint. They're probably not a process oriented company. You're going to need to cut some process steps out. You're going to need to establish credibility and really understand they're probably pretty smart tech people because they write gaming software. So how are you going to be on that first call to get that trusted advisor, establish this,
00:27:27
Speaker
and guide the conversation in such a way that you get to the next meeting and, and you meet their expectations and they like you. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. I think, I think you nailed it and you just morphed into my final question was about,
How can AI tools improve sales outcomes?
00:27:41
Speaker
all right. So what's, what's out there that's new that we can yet do in 2024 to make a difference. And, and that the work you just talked about using those tools for in the AI tools.
00:27:51
Speaker
is, is prepping us to come in with, with more prescriptive, more value added stuff early. And again, the research in my real life experience shows that they will slow down. They will slow down a little bit if, if we're doing things that are adding value. So yeah, you talked about, um, some, I, so now, now that we're into that, um, like new tools that are out there that, that are working and you talked about kind of some skills coaching stuff that you're seeing that's, that is making a difference. Yeah.
00:28:18
Speaker
Yeah, so I'm on a personal mission to learn more about AI in sales. So I've been sniffing around everywhere, joining up in things. I've talked to multiple startups who are actually building tools for sellers using AI. And they do tend to fall into a couple of buckets. And the most common one is this coaching bucket that falls into role play and then
00:28:47
Speaker
right adjacent to it is the customer research one that actually can either help you write the account plan or help you research the customer for that first call. Those are really pretty good first steps because
00:29:07
Speaker
These are things that, to your point about the middle of our bell curve of sellers, maybe they're phoning it in. Maybe they've got a large territory, not many highly productive accounts. And in that large territory, there's no way, no matter how diligent they are, that they can be armed with everything about every account. And if they just got a bunch of new accounts, maybe they inherited crap from the guy who didn't put anything in Salesforce or whatever.
00:29:36
Speaker
definitely real value there. But you know, let's go back to our pragmatic lens. Like you and I are headed in to our QBR with our chief revenue officer. And what does he care about? He does not care about our AI tools. He does not care about our coaching strategy. He cares about our number.
00:29:56
Speaker
Yeah. So we've got to make sure we're getting help on these deals. Yep. And I'm really intrigued about AI engines that can help in deal coaching. Yeah. And we're, you and I have had this discussion about separating. I'm finding that people think of AI and deal coaching as monolithic where there's, there's skills coaching, which is this role play stuff and account intelligence, which is what you talked about. Um, and then there's also deal coaching, which is, I don't want to go too far into this because this is your podcast, but that's a business we're
00:30:25
Speaker
is scaling deal coaching, right? How do you compete against this competitor? What's the best way to configure your solutions, those sort of things. And that, again, we know that when deals are coached, again, more research that companies who drive their percentage of their pipe coaching up are getting 2x win rate improvement over people who don't. They're getting 10x in terms of deal quality. They're not just reacting and selling what the customer asked for, they're prescribing.
00:30:54
Speaker
something that's better for both parties. The problem again is frontline managers, 5% are doing it because one, by and large, they don't have time. Two, a lot of them don't have skills. We all know the problem. They were all promoted sales rock stars. So they don't, they know what made them successful. So yeah, the question is we, we have got to the one thing we know for 2024 is deal coaching will impact win rate. It will impact quality.
00:31:18
Speaker
We've got a, we've got to scale it. And I think some of that scaling can come from, uh, I interviewed a VPS sales the other day. I said, what do you do when frontline managers don't have time? And he said something very simple that I've loved. He said, you got to make time. So that's one, one part managers have got to in 2024, find time. They're still not going to be able to scale it. And that's where I and deal coaching is coming into play. Like if we could go from.
00:31:43
Speaker
You know, if I were talking to you from 5% of your pipe being coached to 60 or 70, you don't want it all coached, but 60 or 70 points being coached by AI and then delivering that to the frontline managers. And then he or she can then double click on a pre-coached AI deal. This is some of the stuff that's, that's coming out right now. And, and that is the one thing from all these conversations I primary research is someone who's a capable coach has got to touch more of the pipe and, and the reason the results are there.
Equipping Frontline Managers for Success
00:32:12
Speaker
And so I do think that's, that's definitely a big issue for this year. Yeah. Yeah. And, and that's really kind of how I would like to close this is I think that is easy to blame the seller is not getting the numbers and the numbers show that sellers aren't, aren't closing as much. They're not making their number as much as they used to, but what we aren't doing is arming the frontline managers. Yes.
00:32:40
Speaker
with the tools and the skills to affect the seller's success. And I believe that the sales VPs and or directors, depending on your organization, who are running these teams are not as skilled up as they need to be. And they likely don't have the reach. So we need a combination of educating them and tools so that they
00:33:09
Speaker
can make sure those middle of the road guys pull it in and get success. And they can faster, they can make a determination faster for the low end of town, whether they're keepers or not. Yep. Yeah. You just summed it up. What this is, what I'm learning is 2024 middle of the pipe, the middle of your team.
00:33:31
Speaker
really value-added coaching, right? To go from five to 60 or 70% of your pipe. And that's what we know will make a difference yet this year.
Community Insights in Enterprise Selling
00:33:43
Speaker
So yeah, you're, you've been super generous with your time and your ideas and your prep for this. You had multiple conversations getting ready because this is such an important subject. And as I started to do lately, I'm going to ask folks who are watching and listening to Ruby and I
00:33:59
Speaker
We want to keep the conversation going, like at Ruby, at Brian, and the comments on LinkedIn when we post this stuff, and tell us what you agree with, disagree with, what are you seeing that's working. But yeah, I think it's something we're all facing, and we look at this podcast as a kind of community tool for those of us who live in an enterprise selling to look at what our peers are doing. So please add to the discussion and really, Ruby, thank you again for all of your time. Thank you. I really enjoyed it.