december2022 Presentation AndyMiller

It is my pleasure and privilege and honor to introduce the last speaker of today, none other than Andy Miller. Please give it up for Andy Miller. Yeah. It's a star. He's a rock star.

Thank you. I've got that.

So thanks, guys. I'm surprised you're not sick and tired of seeing me yet. So I'm going to do this abbreviated because we got to get out of here on time. There's going to be buses at the end. We're going to go catch the rocket ship. I think that's exciting. So I'm going to jump around a little bit in my presentation, but let's see if this is working. Right? There we go. All right, so we're going to talk about how to maximize or optimize your sales performance. And this is really based upon the power of data analytics. So when we take a look at what's holding your sales team back.

Today, we've had lots of good speakers, lots of good topics, lots of good information. And the question becomes, what is it that we really need to solve to get to where we want to be? Right. Some people know it as a gap analysis. Where am I at? Where do I want to be? What's getting in the way? What do we need to take care of? So that's really what we're talking about. So when you take a look at what's going on in your team, what we typically notice are the symptoms. So, for example, somebody will say, we need negotiation training. Okay, why do you say that? Well, what we're noticing is we think we're discounting too much. Okay, what's behind that? Are we negotiating too much because our sales process is set up incorrectly and it's forcing a negotiation. Are we dealing with the wrong people? Do we not have the skills to do a good discovery call and find the value? Is it the end of the quarter? And the sales manager is under pressure to hit his or her numbers, so they're forcing us to discount. So they hit their numbers even though I'm hitting mine. So what are the things that are going on? So I'm actually going to spend time doing case studies. So our sales MRI, we've got data analytics on 2.2 million salespeople across 200 industries. And we're comparing you to world class. We're not comparing you to average. Because I forget which speaker was up here who said, in the Olympics, there's bronze, silver, and gold, but in the sales, you're gold or you're nothing. I mean, there's no second place, right? And we look at 462 data points on each individual sales rep. You can see our starting point. We look at if it's a smaller company or private equity owned, is there an exit strategy? If not, what's your business plan? And then we work from there. How does marketing support that? How does your sales structure support that? How does your culture support that? And then all the other things that go into it. So let's take a look at a couple case studies. Has everybody seen this TV show? What would you do? Have you seen it? I love this. This guy, he'll put people in a restaurant. As one example. It'll be a couple. They might be fighting, they might be rude, they might be obnoxious, and they're just going ballistic.

And there's a hidden camera and they're waiting to see if any of the patrons in the restaurant will get up and say something to them. So it's like, what would you do? So I'm going to give you some case studies and I'm going to ask you, what would you do? And I'm going to watch our time. So, okay, this is a common strategy. So this is a $1.8 billion medical service company. They just merged three companies together. They have five divisions and they're using a land and expand approach. And they have two divisions that are the landers or the hunters. Right. And three divisions that are the account managers, which are supposed to be the expanders. Now the problem is the expanders, which they call account managers. There's two types of account managers. There's the ones that see themselves in sales and they're expanding. And the other type are the ones that see themselves as customer service people. And sell is a dirty four letter word. Right? So in this case, they saw themselves as customer service. Now the question I always ask is, do they have a quota? And what's the quota on if it's expansion, okay, are they expanding the account and is that what they're recognized and rewarded for? If it's customer service, then it's usually retention. But here's the challenge they were being held accountable to renewing contracts.

Now what would you do?

Now, it's not fair because you don't have the 120 pages of data analytics that I had. Right. And I'm trying to, you know, what we did in weeks, we're talking about in two minutes. But what would you do as far as renewals? Okay, perfect. So, you know, the purpose of doing the data analytics is what are the hidden weaknesses that are getting in the way of them performing the function or their job the way we want them to perform. So here's what happened. So we did the sales MRI. The hidden weaknesses that were discovered was 34% of the account managers didn't want to do the job. So one of the speakers had talked earlier about desire. You can't make somebody do something that they don't want to do. So of those three divisions, basically one division was wiped out because they had no desire to want to do renewals. Second thing we discovered, they had the belief, the mindset, that they had to be the cheapest. How's that going to work when they come up against procurement, who negotiates every day?

Right. And then the last thing that was revealed was they had poor negotiation skills. So lack of skills, wrong mindset. Didn't want to do the job for a third of the group. Right. So now we have a problem. So what do we do there? Now, again, I'm giving you the Cliff Notes version. So the action was to take the ones that wanted to improve. And the good news is 2/3 of them wanted to improve. Right. Put in a process in place, some skills, some mindset training, help them understand what is the value, get clear on their value. And we had them go talk to customers, what is the value that we bring? Why us versus somebody else? So we really had to build up their beliefs. And they got a 6% gross margin increase on every contract that they negotiated or they renewed. That's pretty good. We'll take that. Okay, second one, case. $800 million case management company. Okay. They wanted to increase their growth from 2% to the industry average of 3%. Now they were private equity owned. They were a year and a half behind their exit date. So they were late. So the private equity firm starting to panic. And they had invested. They had three divisions. They had invested 10 years into sales training, all three divisions.

So we can't do sales training. What else could we do?

Okay, here's what we did. Sales mri. Remember, we're looking for what are the hidden weaknesses that there's obvious solutions we could put in CRM. We could do large account training, we could do other things. But it showed that there were five options that they could use to grow their business. But only one option would get them above the 3%, only one. And when I laid that out to the CEO, he goes, whoa. And I said, now you're not going to believe what I'm going to tell you next, because we're going to get you a 15% increase. Here's how we're going to do it and it's going to take another year and a half to get there. So I don't know how that's going to do with your private equity firm and your exit. But he goes, I don't believe it, but I'll take it because I agree the other four can't get me there. So what do we do? We identify a Tiger team of nine people out of 102 that had the beliefs and the skills to go after marquee accounts, large accounts. We're defining accounts as 10 to 20 times their average size deal. And if you look at what happened between those nine people, we changed who's their target, the messaging to that target, and then what's the process? And what happened is their average deal went from 250,000 to 5 million. That's not bad.

$4 billion accounting firm. So these are fun. I hope you guys. It's like, okay, what can we do? Right? So we're playing the game. So $4 billion accounting firm wanted to increase their upsell. They have call centers, five call centers, all inbound calls. And when people would call in, they're like, okay, can we increase our upsell? So this is interesting. They hired customer service people and I already talked about. They saw sales of a dirty four letter word. The customer service people.

One of the problems was they were using a job description that was five years old. The job had morphed over the years. It went from a pure customer service role to now we need them to serve and sell. So they hadn't updated it. We talked to HR about changing it. HR had done this extensive study and all this research and they refused to change it. So it's like, okay, so our hands were tight on that. What do we have to work with? And they also said, we can't do any sales training. So we can't hire people that are better fit for the job now and we can't do sales training. What would you do?

This was a fun one. So here's what we did. Did our mri, hidden weaknesses we're looking for. Okay, here's the cool thing. Everybody in that call center wanted to get better. They wanted to do more, but they did not see. They didn't want to sell, they wanted to serve. So instead of fighting with them about you need to be sales, we embraced service. Now we did some research and what we discovered is in their market, their target audience, the people who are calling in had a problem that nobody had addressed. We said, can you develop a new product.

That we can bundle in with the existing products and sell it for a premium. They said, give us a month and we can build that. We did that. Then we did a two hour training session. We went amongst the call center and said, so the issue was fraud in small business that nobody had addressed. So we went out and we said, okay, who in the call center has loved ones that have owned a business and have experienced fraud and, and what happened? And there were horror stories left and right. So it wasn't us telling them what needs to happen. It was their own peers saying, my mom had this business, my dad had this business, my grandparents, my aunt, my uncle, my brother. And they were telling these horrific stories. And I said, okay, now that you know the consequence of not having this service, how many of you, if your brother, sister or loved one went into business, would let them buy these things without this fraud protection? And they're like, I wouldn't let us all do it. So now what happened is we gave them a differentiator, we gave them the conviction and they were able to sell. And this is crazy because the other call centers, other folks around the world were calling them going, what are you guys doing? Because their upsell went from 7% to 67%. That's mind boggling.

Okay, do I want to talk on this one?

Yeah, I might as well. So oil and Gas Pipeline Company. $40 million was the size of the company. They owned the pipeline. That was their asset. They'd been working on a deal for seven years and they were still talking, but it wasn't going anywhere. So what do we do with that? So we did an mri and here's what we saw. Now again, this is such a big deal. So it wasn't a typical salesforce kind of thing. They didn't understand the seller's reason to want to sell their asset. So the coo, who is really the lead salesperson on this, had this problem. He needed to be loved like, like a golden retriever or golden lab puppy. I mean, he would just, you know, love me, love me, love me, love me. Now what's the consequence of that? He couldn't ask the tough questions, he couldn't challenge, he couldn't push back. So the thing dragged out. And then we had one other thing. We discovered there was a saboteur in the business. They had outside counsel who was helping them navigate and negotiate. But the outside counsel, it wasn't to his advantage to get this deal closed. Why? Because he was on billable hours. So it's to his advantage to string it out. So what do we do? We replaced the COO with another executive who was stronger. We developed and we replaced the council. We came up with a walk away strategy because it's like, is this thing real? Do we know what we need? I've got five sisters, and my five sisters taught me a lesson. It's called play hard to get, walk away and see if he comes back after you. So that's what we're going to do. We're going to walk away and see if they come back after us. And they did. And when they came back, we set brand new ground rules and a brand new process, and they got that deal done in seven months. It was a $40 million deal. And it multiplied the net value of their assets because it was a missing piece. They owned two pipelines and this was a piece in the middle that bridged it all together. So their value went way up. Guys, is this making sense? Is it interesting? And it's like, okay, because this is kind of the Reader's Digest drama. In real life, what would you do? Right?

Remodeling company. Oh, I love this one. So $162 million remodeling company. They wanted to hire better sales reps. And they had open spots In North America, 30 North American cities. HR was running this. They were getting a low response rate and long process, long ramp up. So again, we did the mri right, because we're trying to do data driven decisions. What does the analytics tell us? Because we, we do have a bias. Usually our bias. If you've been in sales for any length of time, hey, we tried this at this company. Why don't we just take that and apply the same thing here and try that. It usually doesn't work that way. So here's what happened. Sales RMRI showed they had an incorrect job description. Their job description, we're looking at it. Their job description for a sales rep didn't mention the word sell.

We're like, what? The word sell is not even in the job description. So we started digging into that. As we read the description, it sounded more like a tradesman. You know, can they do construction? So what was behind that? They had had a sales rep who sold a job for remodeling for a hotel to redo 300 rooms. And he measured everything wrong.

And they showed up to start installing and nothing fit. And they had to scramble. Even the executive team put on overalls and started showing up at the job site because they had to rip everything out and put everything in and still meet the deadline. We said, okay, guess what we need to change the job description because you could do team selling. The salesperson sells it, and you bring in a tradesman who actually knows how to use a tape measure and measure it correctly. Right. So the other thing is, we had area managers who were engaged in the process. The area managers were so busy doing things, they didn't have time. When a candidate came in, they didn't have time for the candidate. So we challenged HR because HR was totally against us. We said, you know, we're going to challenge you, but here's what we're going to do. We want to pilot to hire six reps. And that pilot was, okay, we're going to redefine the job. We're going to write new ads, we're going to change the process. We're going to add assessments. Now, when I say assessments.

There'S not a one size fits all. The question becomes, what are you trying to measure? Which determines what kind of assessment that you use. Okay? So we determined what's the right assessment, and we got a 10 times tenfold response on our ads. HR was blown away by that. And we added the assessments. And bottom line is, of the six people that we hired, three of them, they told us it would take more than a year for them to get to 50% in the organization. Three of them that we hired became top 10 reps out of 406 months. Now, the rest of the story is one of them crashed and burned. And they crashed. Well, they didn't crash and burn. Their mom got sick and they had to move back to California to help take care of her. Okay. You can't measure for that. Right. The other thing that happened is two others. They did okay. They were average, but the data analytics showed they should be doing much better. So we had to play detective and track it down and go, what's going on? We discovered they had three training centers. They'd hire the people, send them a training center, do the onboarding. They sent them. Those two reps had gone to the training center in Dallas.

The training center in Dallas had changed the training material, not gotten it approved by anybody, didn't tell anybody they were training the wrong thing. So because we're going, the data analytics doesn't lie. Something's missing. They got the wrong training.

It was very interesting. So let me jump to.

Number eight because I'm watching our time. So this is a $37 million SAS health tech company. So they wanted their reps to do a strategic account planning. They're fairly young, fast growth, fairly young in Their business. The new VP had used the blue sheet. And for those who don't know what a blue sheet is and you know, it's an account planning sheet basically, and he had used it to other companies. So he had drunk the Kool Aid of I want to use the blue sheet. Okay, cool. Do they need that? Yeah, they needed something to give them some structure. The reps were leading with a demo. Two technology people who didn't have the authority to say yes, but they had the authority to say no. So we're already starting off on the wrong foot.

Now. I said to the sales vp, I think the blue sheet is a good starting point, but the MRI showed there's some hidden weaknesses that is not going to allow you to leverage the blue sheet properly. And what was it? What we learned was from the analytics, the sales reps could not get to any other stakeholder. They didn't know how to have the conversation with the marketing stakeholder. They didn't know how to have a conversation with the business stakeholder or, or any of the others. All they knew is how to have the technical conversation. That's a problem. Even if the reps could get the executives that they identified on the blue sheet, they couldn't speak executive and they didn't know how to have a conversation to collaborate, to build a business case. So you might get there once if you're lucky enough to get in the door, but you're going to crash and burn and it's over. So what do we have to do? We had to build a playbook for them. And the playbook was built upon you doing the blue sheet. Let's show you how to leverage your blue sheet. Do the playbook. And then we had to do role plays, lots of role plays. Right. Skills and drills, and show them how to speak executive and business case. And now this is fairly new, so it's early to tell what the result has, but they just landed their first enterprise wide deal. So it's working, but there's a lot more work to do. So what's possible for you? You know, you've heard a lot of good speakers, you've heard a lot of good ideas. You had some of your own ideas before you came in here. You know, this is really about how do we explode sales, you know, accelerate sales in 2023? How do we make it blast off? So what's possible for you? What do you need to focus on? There's the what you think you need based upon what you've observed, and that may be symptoms or not. But the data analytics will give you that mri, that root cause analysis of what do we really need to work on. And here's what happens. So.

In that mri, I skipped a slide. So in that mri.

It looks at what are the issues, how much work is it going to take to resolve those things? How much time is it going to take? What is the ROI I should expect once I take care of these things? So what I was going to do was offer.

A sales MRI for one of your reps. I'll do that for 10 companies. And you can take a shot there of the QR code and sign up for a consultation with me. Or, you know, if you don't have your camera, you've got the bigswiftkick.com services, sales-mri.com and I'd be happy to have you test drive what are the analytics, and can you apply those to you? Okay, so we've got 30 seconds. Any questions?

Was this helpful? I wish we had more time to do case studies because it's like, how do we apply this stuff? What worked? What didn't work? But anyhow. Gerhard, are you in here?

You want to go chase them down? Because we're going to do 10 minutes of a debrief for the day. Well, I've got something we can do while we wait. I brought a little gift.

And I only brought eight. And it's kind of. It's meant to be fun. And they're called the sales crying towel. And the sales crying towel.

Is.

And I've got 8:32 excuses why sales aren't happening. Like, the phone was too heavy, my seat belt wouldn't come undone. I love this one. I use this in junior high. The dog ate the lead. So show of hands, whoever wants one. I only brought eight. Okay.

I gotta pass them around. Yeah. Thank you. Sorry.

Yeah, I got it. I want to get over there, too.

And just have some fun with it. Yeah, I'm heading over there.

All right, I'm gonna get them. I'm sorry. You know what? If you want to send me an email, you got email or big swiftkick, I'll send you one in the mail. Okay? It's fine. Because you know what? You've heard those excuses, haven't you? Our website hasn't been redone. My email got stuck in the spam filter. I mean, you've heard it all. And part of what we have to do is stop accepting excuses. So like I said, I didn't bring enough. Send me an email, I'll send you a crying towel. In the mail. For those of you put your hand up but didn't get one, please give.

It up for Andy Miller.