Episode 22: Leading Sales Teams During Difficult Economic Times, with Mark Stouse - Part 1

Hi everyone, I'm Ben Wright, successful entrepreneur, corporate leader and expert sales coach to some of the most talented people our amazing planet has to offer. You're listening to the Stronger Sales Team podcast where we bring together and simplify the complex world of B2B sales management. And to help the millions of sales managers worldwide build, motivate and keep together highly effective sales teams. Teams who grow revenue and make their businesses actual profits along the journey. We also provide great insights and actionable steps to managing your personal health. A happy and productive year is not only better for your teams, but everyone around you. So if you're an ambitious sales leader who wants to build the highest performing and engaged teams, stronger sales teams is right where you need to be. Welcome back to Stronger Sales Teams. The place where we provide real world and practical advice to help you develop super powered B2B sales teams. Today I'm really excited. We've got a guest who I've spent about 20 minutes talking with beforehand today and I've really enjoyed it. Our guest today's name is Mark Stuss. So Mark's the CEO of Proof Analytics. That's a sales and marketing analytics platform that helps CMOs and CFOs bridge their ROI gap by providing cause and effect analytics to show marketing and sales true business impacts and financial worth. So the company's Proof Business GPS that guides the whole marketing life cycle and it provides a really nice and complete picture of a company's marketing efforts. So what I really like about this solution is that it enables planning, budgeting and optimization of marketing. And in fact talking with Mark this morning, in fact your entire go to market operation across all your channels. So quite a cool stat. Mark is actually an award winning B2B CMO and CCO and he was one of the first leaders to connect all those types of marketing investment to revenue, to margin, to cash flow and how that impacts in particular complex and long life cycle companies. In 2014, another nice fact I love, he was named Innovator of the year. Well done Mark for his pioneering work by us marketing leaders. So welcome Mark. Thanks very much for coming on board. Very nice to spend some time with you today.

Hey, thank you so much. It's wonderful to be here and love Oz. Two thumbs up to Oz, right? Great place.

Yes, yes, it's a place it's very hard to leave. So Mark, before we get into it, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and Proof Analytics?

Sure. I mean, you know one of the biggest questions that CEOs and CFOs and many other business leaders have had for a very long time. Certainly as long as I've been in marketing, and that's about 35 years, is what does all this mean for my business, right? I'm spending all this money on it, right? What am I getting back? How do I need to understand that? It's been a huge issue for a very long time. I mean, to put this in perspective, I got into analytics as a marketing leader 20 years ago, right. And started climbing that hill. So, I mean, this is not new. And it's almost like a meme. It's almost like a joke, a dark joke, right? For marketers and business leaders, it's kind of a dark joke. So the whole goal here, right, is to say, hey, from a cause and effect perspective, how is this all working, right? I mean, so you got many different things going on. Stuff that you control that you're investing in, in marketing or customer success or product or sales, right? And you're doing all of that in order to power certain outcomes. Kind of classically these would be revenue margin and cash flow, performance. Right? But I mean, there are others. And so you're sitting there saying, how do I optimize this? How do I know how fast my investments are paying off? Because nothing is immediate, right? I mean, everyone would say that marketing takes time, but that's not the issue, it's how much time, right? Because if you're asking me to spend $10 million in some part of go to market, but I won't see any benefit from it for two years, I'm going to see that proposal very differently than if you say, hey, if you spend 10 million right now, in three months you'll get back 38 million, right? That's a completely different proposition.

Absolutely.

And so that's what proof is all about, right? I mean, using mainline data, science, right? So no secret math, no black boxes, nothing like that at all, right? You're able to see it all and optimize it all. So the reason why we call it a GPS is that it actually, it's not just an analogy. It works exactly the same way as the GPS on your phone. You know, when you double click on that icon and pull up the GPS on your phone, it obviously knows where you are. And then you say, well, I want to go here to this place. And it gives you three. A choice of three routes. Those are all forecasts. They are literally mathematical forecasts based on what a lot of other drivers, how fast they've transited each one, all that kind of stuff. And then also all of the traffic, weather, all this kind of stuff that either speeds you up or slows you down, right? So you pick one and you're cruising along and all of a sudden there's an accident ahead of you and traffic starts to pile up or whatever, and it says, hey, Ben, this was a really good route, and now it's not. Life has changed, things change, marketplace changes, right? And you're going to have to change with it. So here we're going to propose a couple of options to reroute you. If you stay where you are, you're going to be like three hours late to your dinner. And if you pick one of these two, you might be like 10 minutes late to your dinner. We obviously highly recommend that you reroute. That's exactly what happens with proof, right? It's going to give you a forecast based on the stack rank of how all these things were powering these outcomes. That's your root to value, right? You know, as the marketplace changes, I mean, Covid, all the ramifications of COVID the economy, all this kind of stuff, your competitor actions, whatever changes, it's going to say, hey, if you want to stay on track, you need to adjust what you're doing. You need to reroute. That right there is the essence of proof.

I love it. So it's like having a really experienced guardian angel that sits there on your shoulder and says, says, hey, this is what's been happening.

Yeah, no, that's exactly. I've never heard somebody compare it to a really experienced guardian angel, but that is another great analogy.

There we go. If I see your tagline change on any of your marketing activity that says proof analytics, your guardian angel line, I'll know that I've contributed.

It is kind of the eye in the sky, right? It really is very cool.

So tell me, in the world of go to market optimization or marketing optimization, what's happening in 2023 and beyond? What do you see changing?

Well, so I'm in the middle of writing a book right now on this, and I'm interviewing a lot of Fortune 1000 CEOs and CFOs because it's really written about go to market, but from the perspective of the business, right? And I would say that while the frustration on this issue has been around for a very long time, I've never seen it as intense as it is today. And it shows up in all kinds of ways, right? I mean, average deal velocity has just, I mean, it's nuts in SaaS, right? I mean, you know, what used to take maybe three, four months now takes a year.

Right.

You know, you see finance more and more involved in every deal sometimes now they are the economic buyer and they didn't used to be. And so what where CEOs and CFOs are increasingly going with this is that they are seeing. And I think by the way, this is really smart. They're seeing go to market is a cohesive piece. So in SaaS, B2B SaaS, right. This would be product, this would be customer success, this would be marketing, sales, maybe one other factor. Right. And it's the interlock between all this because you're looking at the entire customer experience across all these functions. So one of the challenges that they have right now is that you look at CROs, CMOs, other kinds of lenders, leaders like that. There's not a standout, a consistent standout in terms of one person to kind of rule at all. So they're having to kind of say, well maybe the answer to this is not organizational alignment per se. Right. Meaning driven by a system of reporting relationships. Okay, that's really what I mean. And maybe it's more a single source of truth, right. Where we can all see what the cause and effect relationships are. The way it ripples across the customer experience, we can pick up where unintentionally we have teams that are working at cross purposes to each other. You know, there's all that kind of stuff. And I think that that is really where it's headed. I also think that T shaped talent. So there's a normal evolution of maturity in any major corporate function. I mean, enterprise it with the CIO post. Y2K was a great example of this, but it happens to every one of them. And it's happening now in go to market where the next generation of CRO and CMO in particular, those two will be business leaders. So the horizontal piece, the contextual piece in the business is going to really be developed substantially. They're going to be business leaders who happen to specialize in marketing or specialize in go to market or specialize in sales. Right. But it's not going to be the function first perspective anymore. It's going to be, hey, I'm looking at all this before I look at anything functionally. I'm looking at the business.

Yeah, right. So what I'm hearing is deal velocity is extending and extending rapidly. And I wholeheartedly agree with you there on every company I'm working with. It's a challenge for them at the moment. And as that deal velocity extends is any misalignment is being exaggerated because it's happening over an extended period of time. More and more contacts with the customer. So instead of looking at your go to market strategy as a sum of multiple functions, it's becoming a seamless experience, certainly at a senior leadership level and a customer level. And the more seamless we can make that experience, the better it's going to be for everyone. So if you're a. Let's pretend you're a sales leader. We were talking beforehand about how you've carried the bag. So you're a sales leader out there now. What are you recommending to those sales leaders that they need to be really focused on in their behaviors and their team behavior?

Well, so number one, I think that any period like we're in right now really reveals what anybody is made of. There is an unexpectedly large percentage, I think, of marketers, salespeople, and a lot of other kinds of professionals in the average corporation that appeared to be very, very successful. But that was largely due to the fact that they had significant tailwinds over which they had no control and they were only the beneficiaries. So when all of that is removed, Right. You find out what people can really do. Right. And so I think that, you know, like when we hire sales guys at Proof, I want to know that they have been through a similar kind of marketplace experience and been successful in the midst of it. You know, honestly. And this is not ageism, this is just realities, right? If they've only been selling for the last 10 years, I'm probably not going to be all that super stoked about talking to them because they've only been selling in the glory years. And so the muscles that are necessary to perform well in very tough times are just not developed. They didn't need to be developed. I mean, in a sense, it's not really their fault, if you want to talk about it in those terms. It's just the way that they, you know, it's the timing of their profession. You know, and I think we see this a lot. We being a lot of CEOs and CROs and CFOs see this on both the rank and file sales teams and the sales leaders. You know, there's just all the difference in the world between somebody who has been in the middle of the fire and knows what's necessary and someone who doesn't, right? And so this is why you're seeing all kinds of deal slippage and forecast failure and, you know, all this kind of stuff, because they don't know how to get to where they're going, and they don't know how to handicap appropriately, handicap expectations.

There is absolutely no substitute for experience in many things that we do in life. So personally, as a leader, I've always highly valued a blended sales team. So that's a blend of experience, that's a blend of technical capabilities, that's a blend of sharp selling skills. Right. So at the moment, what I'm hearing from you is that we're seeing that adversity is a quality that you're highly valuing in your sales leaders and your salespeople. How would you then go about if you're a sales leader that has a team that hasn't truly seen adversity? So I'm 40, I'm about 25 years in selling, so I think I've been through two cycles of relative hardship. And you certainly forget them. Right. Once you've had 10 years of fantastic sunny times.

It's amazing though, how fast it all comes back.

The muscle memory is amazing, like riding a bike. You're absolutely right. So if you're a sales leader and you have that team that hasn't truly seen adversity, what do you do to prepare them for what's likely ahead?

Well, I think you have to know yourself what's ahead. So if you're a CEO, let's say you know what's ahead, but your entire sales team doesn't, including your CRO, you've got a challenge there. And that means you're going to have to inject a lot of leadership and a lot of perspective, or you're going to have to completely reorganize and restaff your sales team, which is clearly a problem. Right? I mean, you know, it takes a while to bring any sales guy to full effectiveness. And so, I mean, you don't do that lightly. Let me say this. Sales in many ways is the entrepreneurial journey writ small, right?

Your own territory, your own macro territory, your own micro business. Absolutely right.

And one of the things that I've learned about being an entrepreneur twice over now is even when it's going really, really well, the entrepreneurial journey is more than anything else is about suffering. And you gain strength as long as you're bringing the right perspective to it. Right. You gain strength through suffering. I guess you could accuse me of using it almost like an intentionally melodramatic word. So if everyone feels better about working out in a gym as some sort of analog. Right, that's fine. But I mean, even though people really enjoy that they will also tell you that it's suffering when they're doing it, when they're lifting weights, they're running on the treadmill, when they're doing the marathon, it's suffering.

Absolutely. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. But none of us enjoy those first five minutes of activity. But gee, we feel good afterwards once we've had that suffering. And we know that we're better at what we do. So, okay, so we're dealing with adversity. And you're a sales leader there that doesn't have the option of simply rehiring your entire team. And in fact, we've just completed the largest piece of research that we've ever done and we've ever been involved with. And one of the top challenges that came out there, in fact, in one of the questions it was the top challenge was recruiting new staff and getting the right people on board. But what also came up as really high was that 51% of the people that we interviewed said motivating their team members to be engaged was a challenge. And 46.5% of them said that gaining trust from customers was a challenge. And we said both of them is pretty well interlinked.

Right.

If your team isn't engaged, it's going to be hard to get trust. Yet at the same time, we know that being prepared for adversity, certainly experiencing adversity is going to give you a better chance of strong performance when you have stormy waters or troubled times. So you're out there as a sales leader and you're trying to get alignment from your team. I think you mentioned a few minutes ago, particularly from the top line level, any go tos that you'd have for a sales leader around how they can get alignment with their team.

If you are seeking connection in the midst of suffering, empathy will get you there every time. And if you already know what they're headed into and what it's going to feel like, that is the basis of your empathy. And I think that the other thing is leading from the front is super important in high stress mind moments. That is the really important phrase. A lot of CEOs lead from the front all the time. And it's perceived as being more like, look at me, me, me, spotlight on me. Right. But in the middle of adversity, that's not the way people see that.

Right.

Because you're exposing yourself more than anyone else to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Right. So I mean, it's also a way of signaling to everyone else that you really do know what's going on like right now, I always make sure that I close deals myself. Not many, right? Because I've got a lot of other things I have to be doing, right? But when I show up in a sales meeting and just kind of briefly talk about a deal that I just closed and what was going on, you know, why it was hard, what the challenges were, how we got past the challenges. Because it's team selling, right? I mean, I just happen to be on point in these deals. It's not like it's just little old me, right? Everyone gets the point, right? And I think that the suffering part is rejection. There's so much rejection in sales. I mean, you know, even top sales guys, you know, in any company you look at their close rates, right? It's like American baseball, right? I mean if they're closing a third of their deals, they're in the hall of fame.

So being able to take that. No, being able to take those long deal cycles, being able to deal with customers who aren't engaged. Classic ways of handling adversity. What I'm also hearing though is that as a sales leader, if you haven't handled adversity yourself, if you haven't learned how to lead from the front in tough times, then it's going to be even harder for you to engage your team. And then at the same time we're hearing that team engagement at the moment is one of sales leaders biggest challenges. So for me, I encourage a learning program for a sales leader as the number one ticket item. It's the first thing that they pull out of their pocket every single morning to make sure that they're getting better and better at what they're doing. Well, thank you Mark. That wraps up today our podcast with Mark Stuss, MD, founder of Proof Analytics. Mark's actually going to be back next week for the second part of our interview so please stay tuned. It's a fantastic run, really worth investing your time. But until then, keep living in a world of possibility and you'll be amazed by what you can achieve. Want to be kept up to date with any of our free materials to help you build the best sales teams possible? Well, the easiest way you can do so is to follow us on your favourite social media channel. We're stronger sales teams on most of them and if you DM us stronger, we'll send you right back some great resources to help you build your super powered sales team. If you'd like a little more help, please get in touch directly and book a free discovery call with me. I run a limited number of these sessions and they're free for my podcast listeners. I'd love to help you out. Until then, see you next week for another podcast of stronger sales team.