Transcript
Brian: Welcome to another edition of Close Mode, the enterprise sales show. I'm Brian Dietmeyer, CEO of Close Strong, the home of Precision Guided Selling. And today I'm super lucky and excited to be here with Maria White, who is the co -founder of Good Morning Enablement.
Brian: it's it's a How do we say a technology, a place to bring enablement thought leaders together? And you're going to be hearing more, much more about this soon. and prior Prior to co -founding co-founding Good Morning Enablement, Maria's got a ton of experience with Cornerstone On Demand Twilio, ServiceNow, et cetera, et cetera. It brings a lot of chops to the table here. So welcome to the show, Maria.
Maria White: Thank you so very much. Good to be here, Brian. I'm excited to share you know whatever I can to help your listeners.
Brian: Awesome. And, and, and I will also point out for our listeners slash watchers that those are real books behind Maria, which is really cool. I love that. Those are actual, the actual, tangible, fungible, whatever you call them.
Maria White: so
Brian: They're books you can touch. So we're going to chat about high performance sales teams.
Maria White: Yeah.
Brian: And, and last week we were talking about an initiative you executed with HP. to transform the sales team. And I love i love talking about, and I know you're the same, talking about evidence -based stuff, right?
Brian: It's not an idea.
Maria White: Yep.
Brian: This is something that was done. So let's let's start with this this sales transformation project. What were the business issue or business issues that were driving them to say, hey, we got we gotta to do something different?
Maria White: Yeah.
Maria White: Yeah, absolutely. And just to give a little context, so HP was the software um subsidiary, if you will, for HP, the overall like 300 ,000 plus massive organization, and they had increased their overall revenue through acquisition.
Brian: Yeah.
Maria White: So HPA was ah a multitude like Mercury and EDS, et cetera. It was growth through acquisition. And so that came with its own business challenges. But the key business issues driving the transformation at that time, which is around about 2011, was based on their strategic business issues that stem from the need for them to adapt to their changing product portfolio portfolio, the market conditions, wanting to achieve those growth targets and also staying competitive. And as you can imagine, I'm sure we've all been in that situation where in an organization, they acquire a company and then all of a sudden you're trying to amalgamate all of the the technology, the the talent, the people, the leadership. So that was like one of the main key drivers was this growth through acquisition and then trying to adapt the product portfolio to the market.
Maria White: But to just kind of like double click down on that, there was a ton of missed sales opportunities. you know It was difficult for the sellers to flank the competition with sales efficiency because of all of this change and growth.
Brian: Yeah.
Maria White: And so you know like as an example, at the time in 2011, we were top right you know in the Gartner quadrant for ITOM. And um we started seeing organizations like ShareWell and ServiceNow.
Brian: yeah
Maria White: really literally taking the market share from us. And that was you know another compelling reason to to make sure that our sales team was ready to perform. So that was the driving business issue, the the growth through acquisition and the changing landscape of the marketplace.
Brian: Yeah, you know, it it's one of the things that comes to mind for me is working with one of the major Supply chain expert companies in this country, there's only a couple of them that move packages around at at high volume. And one of them bought a competitor in Europe, which significantly changed their global footprint. And I remember asking their EVPS sales and marketing, how long before words come out of reps mouths to monetize that acquisition? And and he he said probably nine to 12 months. and And Maria, as you were walking through what they were facing, it's like,
Brian: You can sort of plug in plug in your shift here. We now need to go execute against this thing, right?
Maria White: Yep.
Brian: so oh
Maria White: 100%. And it's probably more like 18 months, to be fair, because they have to book it and see the see the reality of it.
Brian: Yeah.
Maria White: But yeah, 12 months is a good, ah you know, like a good measurement. But we have seen it take, you know, up to 18 months in some of the.
Brian: Yeah, and you can you you got you got to monetize that stuff. And also the the competitive cycle so dang fast now that okay, that thing you did that thing you're rolling out, like we need to, you know, day three, we should be out there talking about it.
Maria White: Yeah.
Brian: Or, but you know, by six months, someone's gonna copy it or acquire somebody else and and change that. no There's a one of my favorite books that our listeners have heard me talk about is competing, competing at the speed of change, I think, or something like that.
Brian: Oh, wait, and it's and Rita Hunter McGrath. That's not the name of her book, but I'll remember it in a moment. But she talked about that we used to compete on long term sustainable advantage.
Brian: And now We have to compete on a series of short -term transient advantages, which, uh, is just and unbelievable. But that, that is, is just a moving target constantly.
Brian: So anyway, that sounds like that's some of what you did. So I, tend to think in terms of like diagnostics, I think, uh, I went to see a doctor the other day and I said, Oh, my shoulders kill me.
Maria White: 100%.
Brian: And he, within 10 seconds, this orthopedic surgeon said, it's not your shoulder, it's your neck.
Maria White: Oh.
Brian: and and and And he's probably in his sixties, you know, really, uh, he's been around had a lot of surgeries and as I said, you're pretty good at this, aren't you? He was like, well, yeah, but diagnosed, diagnosing is so important.
Maria White: Yeah.
Brian: So what I imagine they, they, they kind of diagnosed their own things. So this is what's going on. But I imagine you, you did some further diagnostics.
Maria White: Yes.
Brian: What, what did that look like?
Maria White: Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, it was I wasn't an island. There was a ton of smart people in the organization doing other analytics to help provide us with the product mix and, you know, the different profiles, e etc.
Brian: yeah
Maria White: But there was an overall organizational change management initiative, and particularly in North America, we Just to put it give context, there was over 2 ,000 sales reps or pre -sales involved and about 145 products. So you can imagine that was a huge boulder to to roll up there. So to see through the seller's lens, we had to go through a ton of diagnostics using your your words. And so what we did was we did a lot of interviews to establish baseline for the transformation. We needed to understand, you know, what was the outcome we wanted? Where are we now? How are we going to get to where we want to go? What metrics are we going to use to track that process and validate? And here's the thing, when you're doing diagnostics, you have to have the buy in from the leadership or that that information is going nowhere. Two thousand, you know, two thousand individuals when we wanted to get that information, if we didn't get a thousand people replying, it wasn't good enough.
Maria White: you know, we, we couldn't get like, Oh, 5%, that's the average that we know.
Brian: Right.
Maria White: With this, we had to drive hard just to push the, commitment from the sales leaders to give us that information to drive it forward. And, and I was blessed to work with some fantastic individuals who helped us with that.
Maria White: But shall I tell you what we found? So our diagnostic
Brian: I'd love yeah, yes
Maria White: a sequence of questions and interviews and surveys, as you can imagine. And, you know, so looking at the sales lens, looking at their development, looking at the products, looking at the mix, looking at competition and persona, just to close off your actual question. Here's what we found. So guess what? And I know you know this, so you probably smile. Not all pipeline or opportunity management or sales methodologies were the same.
Maria White: So everyone coming from the different organizations, of course, were just carrying on to sell what they were confident to sell in the way that they were used to selling it.
Brian: Yeah.
Maria White: You know, that's the biggest hurdle that we were facing as an organization. And, you know, the opportunities. Let me give you a couple examples of what that looked like. So opportunities were lagging. Say I had product one that I'm used to selling and product two that I really wasn't confident in. the The product I wasn't confident in, you would just leave it because you want to win your revenue with the ones that you know. And there was a lack of upsell or cross -sell, so you couldn't expand the opportunities if you didn't have confidence.
Maria White: so bring them into the mix when you're you know when you're during your conversation negotiations. Confidence in the sales place was low, confidence in selling to the C suite was low, and that was a big one because we were enterprise -based, so we we needed to sell higher.
Maria White: And then, but but to kind of reel it back, you know, our top 20 % of sellers know how to do this. So those successful, you know, let me call them A -players, if I may, this was not the case for them.
Brian: Yeah.
Maria White: So our data was showing that in the large majority of our sellers, you know, those were the key areas that we needed to drill down into from an enablement change perspective.
Brian: Now.
Brian: It's yeah, another thing that comes to mind Maria, when you're saying that is an enablement pro, I was talking to a couple months ago, who was saying, you know, for 2024, especially in, in these times, focus on the middle of the pack for your team and what you're saying, like the eighth players, they got it. Maybe you can grab some best practices from them, but she was like, she, yeah, she said two things. It's up about the middle of your pipe and it's about the middle of your sales team, your B players, like that's boom. Good. And it's yeah, it's good to hear that that you went after that.
Brian: one One of the things you you introduced me to a new phrase, productivity coaching. And you said part of that transformation was direct coaching versus productivity coaching. can Can you build on that idea a little bit?
Maria White: Yeah, 100%. So if I can, once again, just contextualize it. So sales leadership is it's probably 70 -30 directive coaching versus productivity coaching. What do I mean by that? You're a sales leader. You may have between 7 and 10 individuals that you're coaching on a weekly basis. And maybe, you you know, you're coaching 20 to 50 deals, depending on where, you know, what's what sales territory you're in, if you're, if you're, know, top 2000 or whatever, you might have less. But anyway, from a time perspective, as a sales leader, you're doing directive, you're saying, do this to make this happen, or increase doing this to make this happen. And you're you're doing that on a sometimes spontaneous, reactive basis. So you're not leaning into their skill set and seeing how we can, you know,
Maria White: Enhance that so the productivity side that a sales leader may occasionally do and it is occasional is recognize that one of their sales the one of their sales executives.
Maria White: is closing lower than everybody else. What i what do I mean by that? So and three sellers over here but need get a three times pipeline and they're getting you know between 80 and 100 % of their quota. And then you have this other rep who's got three times quota pipeline and they're like missing their quota every time, 50 % or 60%. And you know a good sales leader will could recognize that and then do this productivity coaching specifically leaning into that.
Maria White: But, you know, if it's all about the amount of time that the that the sales leader has to coach a team. And that isn't that much when they're running their their book of business as well.
Maria White: So what we're looking for is to focus on how to increase. yeah I'm going to take you back to what you just said. If you focused on your B players and you could get all of your B players to increase their revenue attainment by 20 percent, that is a huge win.
Maria White: You know, 10 to 20 is a huge win.
Brian: Yeah.
Maria White: So productivity coaching is is a little different, and it creates really safe spaces for coaching circles with peers to learn from each other. But it also creates a one -to -one relationship with the productivity coach. And they will focus specifically on their areas of selling to identify how to increase, increase productivity.
Maria White: It could be that they're you know their initial, like their medic, their investigation, their fact -finding in the account isn't as good as another rep. And if you can lean in and educate them on that, you're going to elevate their productivity. So um that's what they do. And it focuses on the the the productivity coach that I have created you know in organizations is they focus on pipeline velocity, close rate, product mix, and time to close and the sales cycle.
Maria White: Each area yeah can be developed, but you have to first identify there is a need. And with this type of need, you definitely can increase the retroproductivity by probably over 15%.
Maria White: I've seen it so many times now that I kind of think that it's irrefutable. You focus on the pain, the problem, it's going to transform the behavior.
Brian: Yeah.
Brian: So we, uh, we, we did talk about this a little bit in our pre -call last week. Excuse me. that we, we know frontline managers don't have time to do this kind of coaching, let alone the the quality of what kind of coaching are they doing?
Brian: But we don't even have time to do it. The last debt I saw was 5 % of deals in pipe or getting coached. you mentioned that if, if I got this right, that in this initiative, you added, added FTEs.
Maria White: Yeah.
Brian: to try to get over that hurdle of frontline managers may not have skills or time. And and then there was there was ROI. And I think you just started speaking to some of the ROI. But yeah, who did who does this work?
Maria White: Yeah, so in my example, I approached the sales leaders, got budget from the sales leaders, and we actually a program where we said to the sales leaders, what if you gave us some of your sales reps that want to become managers? We'll take them into a productivity coach role for a year, and then we'll give them back to you.
Maria White: you know, to to be like part of the funnel, part of the pipe. So that's where we were getting them. We we took our productivity coaches mainly in one company from, know, high -performing sellers. In another company, we literally recruited externally for these specific people, people who were used to doing that kind of coaching. So those are the two, are the two areas we got them from. So they were professional coaches or successful sellers that we trained to coach.
Maria White: That was super important to us. With regards to results, we saw increase in deal size in HPE. I think it was around about 15 % when I did it in another organization, which was Twilio, for example, where we really honed into it. I think there was about 25 % increase in deal size starting from onboarding. It was quite phenomenal by starting it at the onboarding point. And then the win rate of the reps was increasing. So we were seeing a better win rate from the reps. Can't quantify it because it was various based on the groups of people that we coached. And the last one in HPE specifically, which was phenomenal, was we saw an increase in our C -suite meetings in the EBC as a result of some of the transformation that we did with the productivity coach.
Maria White: and also you know just the generic training of getting them confident in having it. And that's really, the yeah when we don't know what we don't know, there's a little and energy of anticipation, fear of the unexpected. And so when you can coach or educate your sellers to have the confidence to sell higher or to understand where their gaps are and work towards closing those gaps to give them that better chance of succeeding more, they're very into it and you do see the results very, very quickly.
Brian: So I love that idea about where to source them, by the way. And it it occurs to me as you're talking, how how is this different than a deal pursuit team? Someone might be saying, oh, we have deal pursuit teams, you know, we're going to, ah or or is it different than a deal pursuit team?
Maria White: Yeah. Well, it's very personal and individual and and ah and a deal pursuit team is looking at a ah ah list of deals that fit a criteria.
Brian: Right.
Maria White: So for example, it might be top 10 deals over 250K have to have like you know a value prop or you know a close plan, et cetera.
Brian: Right.
Maria White: So show the deal pursuit teams or even the war rooms as they are sometimes called to do deal deal advancement, They're focused on just the deal and not necessarily the individual.
Maria White: That is the difference.
Brian: Got it.
Maria White: That's the difference.
Brian: Yep, yep, yep, that's awesome. and And results you, excuse me, you've already talked about the results, but I wonder, this is my last question for you, and and it has to do with failing to launch.
Brian: There are, we kind of started with this, that there are so many things, again, plug in your shift here, plug in your change here, and then let's let's let's diagnose it, let's prescribe, let's roll it out, and then it doesn't launch.
Maria White: yeah
Brian: what's What's your take? what what's What's missed when we failed to launch? What happened?
Maria White: This is, you can imagine, this is actually not the first time I do some coaching with enablement leaders, you know, like all the time. And this is not the first time I've addressed this question. I get asked it a lot. And it is generally from enablement leaders or sometimes like product leaders or marketing leaders, like why isn't that, why aren't the things moving forward? And it's it's not just limited to an enablement project, it's it's projects in general.
Maria White: And I believe strongly here, there are some items that are missed when designing and rolling out an initiative.
Brian: Thank you.
Maria White: It doesn't matter whether it's a sales transformation. In my you know in my world, that's what I'm doing you know with an enablement and such. like But it could be any you know like any project you're rolling out. And here's the thing.
Maria White: It's very specific. you know your If it's in an enablement project, let's talk about sales transformation. Your enablement team leaders are about as close as you're going to get to the sales team as a trusted advisor.
Maria White: That one element is so hugely overlooked by other organizational lines of business. it's It's incredible. You know, they are in the sales meetings. They design training for them. They sometimes coach them. And more often than not, the sellers are reaching out to them, you know, on the chat channels for a seller's advice. So in a lot and a lot of large enablement initiatives, it you know, in the en enablement team is Sorry, in a lot of organizational projects, the enablement team is an afterthought.
Maria White: That is a mistake and a point of failure, in my humble opinion. I think that's a mistake.
Brian: Yeah.
Maria White: You know, your enablement team can actually collaborate throughout the design process, helping to bring different pieces of insight from the field, and not only from the sales laid leaders, but from the feet on the street, the core sellers, which is priceless.
Maria White: and they help you create the buy -in. Once you get the buy -in of the leadership, then they will support your initiative from start to finish as long as they have a stake in the ground. Let's be you know let's be honest about this. you're I'm not saying they're the best team in the company, but your sellers are the people who are bringing revenue to the table, you know the the large velocity of revenue to the table, and they're the closest to your customer.
Maria White: So it's it's good to make sure that they have a stake in the ground in any initiative that you want to roll out in the organization.
Brian: Thank you.
Maria White: It will be successful. But I would say about 80 % rolled out are not even measured. That's the second point. Get the sales team involved with your en enablement team. and measure it like have this you know like a standard project would say here are the key gates we need to go through to confirm that we're on the right track and this is a success and I've been part you know of hundreds of projects throughout my career from a sales leadership perspective and an enablement perspective where some of those projects are not measuring the outcome and then I think that's the main the main reason for failing to launch there' there's those two there.
Brian: Okay. All right. uh, it's funny. I, I, based on a couple of conversations we've had, I don't doubt your ability to be focused, but you were all in on this project. You moved to a different country to come and execute this project, which at which I really like you're you're all in at that point. so I appreciate that. But yeah, what I, what I love about this discussion is I think Maria you've had, there's a huge problem that this notion of 5 % of pipe being coached.
Brian: And then ah it's and some of that coaching is just interrogation. It's not really even coaching. So what is it we should be doing and what quality and how how do we staff it up? So what happens and what's the ROI? it's it's it's ah ah It's a really good solution with some really good evidence. And yeah, I really appreciate your time and your generosity with with your ideas and all the work you put into this.
Maria White: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, just to kind of round it off as a closing thought. if you If you really want to help the sales team in a different way, you will come up against resistance when you're talking about, you know, let us coach your sales team. So before you want to approach to get that, you should meet with the sales leaders. You have the closest relationship and pitch them the idea of the, you know, the what, why and how. And, you know,
Maria White: say to them, we can utilize your sellers and then we'll train them also to become a leader in the future. I found that that was the most successful way to get the buy -in and 100 % articulate that they not only are they going to see the increase in you know the rep productivity, but number two, you know they're along for the journey and it will free up more time for your sales leaders when we can identify the gaps in the productivity of the rep. What are those skills that are missing? That's really what it's down to.
Maria White: identifying the skills that you can build upon to increase direct productivity.
Brian: Awesome. And I can't wait, on a final note, I can't wait to see ah more coming out of Good Morning Enablement. I think you have a lot to share and I will, I rarely do plugs for someone's business on the podcast because we're talking about problems we're solving, but yeah, I'm really looking forward to to seeing more there.
Brian: So again, thank you so much for your time and your energy.
Maria White: and Thank you so much, Brian. It's an absolute pleasure. And you know people can reach out to me on LinkedIn if they you know if they want to find out more, basically. I'll be happy to participate in that.
Brian: Yep. Great. Thank you.
