Manage Time by Categorizing and Prioritizing Accounts - Jamie Shanks - Revenue Today - Episode # 051

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Sales, marketing, and RevOps. It's sink or swim out there, and yesterday's strategies and tactics won't help you today. This is Revenue Today, and I'm your host, Jared Robin. Join me as we interview revenue leaders in our community to learn what steps we could take right now to help you scale yourself and your company. Revenue Today is sponsored by Rev Genius, and we're on a mission to bring inspiration and creativity to all revenue professionals in the world. Want to shout out our sponsor Demandbase. Demandbase is smarter GTM for B2B brands. They help marketing and sales teams spot the juiciest opportunities earlier and progress them faster by injecting account intelligence into every step of the buyer journey and orchestrating every action. For more information about Demandbase, visit demandbase.com. I am really excited to be here today with, with today's guest. So this person was the godfather of social selling, that term that we all use in prospecting today that wasn't here a few years ago. In fact, he invented the term and category social selling and wrote 2 bestselling books on the topic. He's trained 600 customers and over a quarter million sellers around the world. And in 2021, he launched and became CEO of Pipeline Signals. I'm so proud to have Jamie Shanks with us today. Welcome, Jamie.

Thanks, Jared, for having me.

This is gonna be great. And, and you know, it, this is something, the phrase I took for granted. I didn't realize the origins behind it. I realized I was doing it at a different channel and, um, You know, I've done it so much. I'm sure so many of the listeners have done social selling. But let's, let's get down to brass tacks. Like, we're in 2022. Debunk a myth about generating revenue today.

I guess I'm going to try to phrase it. I don't know how to phrase it properly, but that sellers are great time managers, and that time management is not the death to why sellers are failing to make quota. So take that as you will and phrase it in the right— I

thought you just need to know how to cold call or, or be relevant or personalized, right?

No, I am— I believe that the soft skill of decision-making, objective data-driven decision-making is what is truly hindering the sales community. And the byproduct, the end result, is terrible time management. And that time management is trickling down to how they're spending that time on specific accounts, account selection, and prioritization. It completely kills their year. They make decisions early in a year around accounts they select and prioritize, That ultimately, you know, the lagging indicator is they end up the year missing quota because of all the bad decisions they made at the beginning of the year.

Yeah. So walk me through what you mean by time management. This isn't just like call blocking a couple days a week or a certain time during the day. Yeah, help, help us understand.

Let's look at it from a mind of a seller. As a seller, I control only 2 things. I control the decisions I make and the actions I take. So now on the big left side of my brain is decision-making time. And as I make decisions, one of the most fundamental things that I have to decide is what accounts do I focus in on today, not tomorrow? And do I focus on account A versus account B? So that is what's called account selection, prioritization, and/or segmentation. That part of decision-making, that extreme top of the funnel, most sales leaders don't realize that it's the decisions made there. No matter what happens on the other half of my story, which remember sellers control decisions they take and actions, and then well it doesn't matter what happens at the action level if you have the wrong accounts focused in on day in day out. All the action in the world is going to get you nowhere. So let's unpack this poor decision-making around account selection and prioritization. So for the last 10 years, Gartner has been measuring sellers not making quota. And as we know, it moved from 6 out of 10 making quota all the way to worse than 50/50. But then—

Who's taking credit for it now? Right.

But then a company called Topo out of California began measuring the percentage of sellers not making their quota, and what they found was that 83.4% of the sellers that didn't make their quota, they chalked it up to poor time management. And that poor time management was that a seller was looking at their basket of accounts. As a seller, you're usually broken up in 3 ways: by geography, by vertical, or by named accounts. So they had this basket of accounts, 50, 100, 250 accounts, and most of them were spreading their time and effort and energy around it like peanut butter. They were giving equal amount of love to all of their accounts. They would build these cadence and sequences that would touch each of them once a week or once every 2 weeks, and it didn't go anywhere because there wasn't a Pareto's Law of high concentration. There wasn't spending a disproportionate amount of time on 5 or 10 of those 100 to 250 accounts. And the sellers that were making quota were doing deep dives into a very small fraction of their accounts because objective events were happening in these businesses. There were high buying intent, there was great product usage or integration opportunities, And more importantly, there's huge change at the human capital level. There are new executives that took jobs there. There are customers that left your customer base and became champions in those businesses. And so the great sellers were brushing aside the 245 accounts that didn't have any of those objective compelling events, triggers, signals, and they were doing a deep dive into those 5 that said, I'm going to spend my energy here because, you know, John Smith, the ex-chief operating officer of one of our customers, is now in that account. I'm going to dive into that account, and I'll have an asymmetric competitive advantage of opening that door versus the other 245 that are going to get me nowhere. So that time management is underserved, undertaught, never spent time on from a sales management

Yeah, and I agree. And it's funny, I was speaking with Ian Cognac on this podcast about a week ago. And he's like, I only had like 5 accounts, I had to pick which one to work on. Or I'm sorry, he might have 15 or something, or 10. He's like, I need to pick 2 to work on. And I'm like, let's be real, you picked a third. He's like, you're actually right. I picked a third because I'm like, Because when you have that little account—

But even within those accounts, there would be business units, geographic divisions, new markets. Like, you know, one account at, you know, Bank of America, you could spend a lifetime within that one account. You could break it into like 100 mini accounts. But which 5 business units or divisions or groupings of people will you spend your time on? Getting in the door. Yeah.

Yeah. So let's say, let's say your typical mid-market-ish rep and you have a couple hundred accounts. And if you have a couple thousand, note to the RevOps or the leadership there, like, like that's kind of out of line. Like typically like 250 might be a little high, but like that's acceptable high. 2,000 is crazy. And I remember back in the day, I probably had 150 to 200 accounts, right? Like when I was handling bigger stuff and it was expected to really work on half of them tops. But how do you pick which 20, which 40 out of that list?

Ironically, this morning our product team gave us some statistics to chew on. As we're looking at our part of the world is on relationship signals. So the human capital in the businesses, who's new to the business, who's been promoted, who came from your customers and so forth. So here's some statistics to chew on. Yeah. Our average customer has between 600 to 1,000 customers that you could reverse engineer and watch people pour out and leave. And that same customer of ours has on average between 1,500 and 2,000 prospects. So that is— that's not their total addressable market. That's what we'll call their serviceable addressable market or serviceable attainable market. So of those almost 2,000 accounts, within that, the average customer of ours is receiving 250 signals a month because the average CRM decays or depletes at 3% a month. 3% of your entire CRM is changing jobs Every month, give or take. What's happened is 16% of all of their accounts have a signal. Let's call it 15%. So 15% of your accounts, you should already be whittling down to where— and that we're getting into Pareto's Law here, you know, 80/20.

Well, and I'm thinking—

And those are the 16% you first start with because there is a human capital change that just happened there. The window of opportunity just emerged. Start there. Yeah.

I love that. You know, I'm, I'm of the school of thought. I, I'm, I'm playing around with this concept. It's not like hitting on all cylinders yet, but you have an ICP and then you have an ICP right now. Yes. And it's kind of like what you're saying, like, yeah, anybody that does this revenue has this many employees could buy, But there's a level of relevance that layers in that focuses you in on this. And, and my question to you is, whose responsibility? Because it sounds like you're putting it on the rep, but is it the rep's responsibility to whittle that down and give it to you? Like, where does that responsibility lie?

Yeah, I obviously, I don't believe that anymore. As a guy who owned a sales training business, I tried to transfer the knowledge of how to acquire that information. information to each of the sellers. But that decentralized model didn't work because some people did it, some people didn't, and kinks in the armor would appear. So, I believe you centralize that intelligence. A company like mine provides that intelligence automatically. Yeah. And there are 3 key stakeholders that are involved. You have the seller who needs to execute against the signal that is provided. You have a program manager, which is like CRM administration, sales operations, revenue operations, who controls the data flow into your CRM and routes the right signals to the right people. And then you have sales leaders who are holding the sellers accountable for doing something with those signals. But what you said was so spot on. If you think in the terms of how executives build business plans, You have a total addressable market. I'll give you an example. In my total addressable market, there are about a quarter million B2B sales organizations that are of the right size fit around the world that could buy from us one day. Then you shrink that pie down to what's called the total and static

things. It's important to understand that these are static traits.

It's static traits. So you got total addressable market is your biggest one.

Revenue, funding.

Serviceable, uh, I think it's called a serviceable addressable market, which is like, what's a better fit for you? So we've narrowed ours down to about 15,000 accounts in North America. Then all of a sudden you've got serviceable obtainable market, to your point, which are more likely to buy today, not tomorrow. And that's really where we want to be focusing on. Because like, yeah, there's 15,000 accounts in North America I'd love to win. But there's 50 that I'll probably win this year. So how do I do that? Yeah,

it's so funny. I got a cold— and I was telling, um, this other podcast I was on, I got a cold call and it was whatever it was, and it was cybersecurity company. And my first question was, because I'm always curious, I said, why are you calling me? Why are you calling me? Like, I just want to understand, like, what type of relevancy there is. Like, why? Like, like, why are you targeting me? I don't care what you do yet. I want to understand why you're targeting me. Because if you're targeting me because you see a lot of people like me right now in my stage or whatever needing something, I want to listen.

Yeah.

And I want to learn. I don't care what you're selling. But like, like, if you If you have— and think about this, right? Like, I just thought about this. Like, if you call me with anything under the sun and you have a really good answer to why are you calling me now, I, I, if it's really good, I need to listen to you to learn. If it's not good, I don't care if— I don't care what it is, right? Like, isn't that crazy? So I asked him that and, and his response was, well, You're a company with da da da da. And then I'm like, what? Like you're you're he's like companies like yours da da da da. I'm like, but and he's like it doesn't sound like you're the IT person. And I'm like I'm like you're right I'm not the IT person. You're called the CFO you idiot. Like like you don't even know who I am now. So that that I mean there's table stakes data stuff there that they they lost but. The question, why are you contacting me now? You probably have such a good answer to that question, which probably is the leading for everything you do, right?

Well, and that's exactly it. I, when we prospect, kind of like open up the can or open up the vest and explain how we prospect is we've isolated the type of accounts we believe would in fact be a good fit. But then what we do is we pre-mine signals on their behalf. So we reverse engineer their case studies on their case study page and we provide them free signals. And it's by giving them free signals, we're saying, this is happening to you. I think we can help because if you get these signals and you go in your CRM and you are not calling them, you didn't know about them, your team's not engaging on them. You need help. I think we should talk. If you have noticed these things, you don't need us. Have at it. And it's a way for them to validate, A, that this can work, but B, kind of opt in themselves and say, if I do not have this information, then the opportunity cost of not knowing more is pretty high.

Now, let's say somebody doesn't have a tool as robust as yours. Like, like, what are some simple things that reps and teams could do to, to really be relevant and to make a big addressable market serviceable right now?

It's the way that I did it and everybody did it before we invented this technology, which was you have to sit down with your customer success team and ask. And a lot of sellers don't actually know who all their customers are. That is, that's kind of like big problem number one. Yeah. Is you as a seller might be given a territory, a vertical, a group of accounts, and they say, go prospect. And you know about some case study stories that are on your website, or, you know, people you hear in the grapevine, like, oh, these are some of our customers. No, no, no. Work with customer success. Get a list of your customers, happiest to not happiest, you know, high net promoter score, great power users, highest ticket sales, whatever you need, however you want to segment that data. Reverse engineer your customers first. That means people will leave your customers, and there we'll call them fans, and they'll sprinkle into three different type of accounts. They'll go into other customers; might not be for you; it might be for somebody else in your office, another customer success rep. Two, they'll go into named accounts that you might be prospecting or a peer of yours might be prospecting. Or 3, the greenfield. They'll go into another business that looks just like a prospect, but for whatever reason you didn't know existed. That is really important to companies because you're unearthing opportunities that somebody's going to engage that company one day. It better be you, because if it's not, you didn't even know about it. Yeah,

I like that. So we have, we have a pretty good game plan here, but help walk me through, uh, some of the KPIs that could help guide appropriate time management across your team?

The great KPI is, I think, that every seller, step number 1, should come to their leadership with a simple visualization of their market, their total addressable market, a simple pie chart. We used to teach this at Sales for Life, and it looks— we used a transmission analogy. A drive analogy. So park, reverse, neutral, drive. You take your accounts and you categorize them as a P, R, N, or a D. And basically you visualize with a pie chart to your sales leadership and say, this is the 100 accounts that I've been assigned. This is where I think they sit today. Which ones are in park, reverse, neutral, or drive? That sets the foundation of an objective understanding that you took a moment to back up, Look at your market from a bird's-eye view and state, I think I know which ones are vibrating forward and excited and which ones are regressing and not going anywhere. So that I'm— so that if ever I'm caught giving equal love to every one of those accounts on the pie chart, sales leadership can say, hold on a second, objectively you told me that this pie piece here of 34 accounts— They're— they'll never do business with us. Why are you prospecting them? That's step number one. I'll pause there. But that if you are not visualizing that total addressable market and giving that to the leadership, then leadership can then understand when you are only spending your time on the cohort of like 27 accounts and they ask, well, aren't you calling the other, you know, like 78? You're like, no, no, no, no. We had this conversation. Those other 78 will never buy from us for these various reasons. Let us spend all of our energy on these 27. Oh, okay. Now, from a time management perspective, there's an alignment between leadership and the seller that says, I now know why I would do this.

Is there a cadence? Like, because this is buy right now from us, right? Like, you could have 200 accounts, 27 of them are ready to buy right now from us, or 100 accounts, 27 ready to buy right now, the others aren't. Is there a cadence to like bring new accounts in? Because like, like next month you could say, leadership, there's 2 new accounts that I should be focused on out of these 100 because they all hit A, B, and C. In certain markets that'll happen frequently, right?

Yeah, I don't know.

Is there a cadence? Like, do it quarterly, annual?

Well, and I guess that would be a reverse engineer of the goal itself. So, sure, a great organization would have taken their revenue need goal and reversed it from an uncontrollable number, which is dollar value, into a more controllable number, which is units. units of net new versus units of upsell cross-sell from the core customer. And let's focus on the net new. From the net new units, you would then have a reverse pyramid that thinks through what are the things we need to do to highly influence getting to that number. Every business is different. I know as an example in my business, my business, we went from— We closed 2 times more accounts in 2022 at Pipeline Signals than we thought we would. So that it's been great. That's how we overachieved. But now what it's done is it's rejigged the model. The model now, I'm further ahead on my net new, but now I'm going to have to, to get to my next goal by Christmas of next year. The model just changed on the number of net new, but now it gives me the energy of thinking, Well, maybe I actually do more with the core customer than I ever thought before because we're further ahead. So I'm going to spend more time on things like upsell as an example. I don't know.

No, it's great points. And the key takeaway is that things evolve, right? Like overperforming, recalibrate in a good way and understand that. And now, I mean, if you had to pick any You know, it sounds like a lot's going well. And, and geez, if everyone who listened to this had 2x their goals, well, it's easy. The space would be a different space right now.

It's easy when you're a startup, right? The numbers start to compound exponentially.

But like, what, what's keeping you up at night still?

Um, well, I'll give you an example, uh, from, uh, this is— this can apply to sales 'Cause it helps think through product-market fit. But I'll tell you something that we've learned. There's obviously, there's a million learnings that you write stuff down at the beginning of the year on your business plan that either come to fruition or were complete, like, oh, we missed on that one. One of them is, it's interesting, as you know, finance is around payment. So one of the things we took a big bet on is that we would make our product payable via credit card. And at first it was because we just didn't want to have day sales outstanding. We wanted to have cash in the door quickly, but it's actually become part of product-market fit. And what I mean by that is there are companies like your competitors will do annual contracts, and we're on a— we're on month-to-month contracts for a reason. We want to get High net promoter score and net promoter score feedback early, giving people the ability to cancel anytime. But with that freedom and flexibility comes payment via credit card. Now at the beginning, a lot of companies push back. Oh, I don't want to pay by credit card. All the excuses in the world. But in fact, it's allowed us to help narrow down what is our ideal customer profile. To your point, like, should you buy today for from that account or account A versus account B, I'd rather account A because they'll pay by credit card than account B who might have a sexier logo, might be like the most beautiful account to show off to your friends, but they're the kind of company that pays net 90. And when they say net 90, that really means net 120. So you're never getting paid. So I'd rather—

Well, aren't there other I get it. Aren't there other attributes outside of payment? And don't get me wrong, payment is—

Oh no, there's lots of other attributes.

To make them a perfect client, right? Like, because you could be so successful if you're getting that money in 90 actually.

Well, so you were asking about what keeps me up at night is—

Oh, fair.

As you grow and scale the business, it's amazing how little things that you don't think are part of your sales motion are part of your product market fit become part of the product. And what we've decided is you don't have to be as sexy a logo as your peer group. But if you pay in the way we've designed product market fit, in the way that our sales process is, in partnership with our customer, you're, you're an ideal customer. We'd rather focus on you as a customer than another type of an account. So that's what keeps me up at night because that's swimming upstream. That's pushing the boundaries of the comfort level of certain accounts, certain customers. But it allows us to grow in a healthy, profitable way, which is why we have a business, right, in the first place.

Yeah. And I think you gave the answer to my next, like the advice that you would give Is find your perfect ideal customer, right?

Yeah. And I learned this at Sales for Life. It took years and years to find that ideal in a sales training capacity. As you do an exercise that it took a bunch of years, I think we founded the business kind of 2012. By about 2017, 5 years in, I did an exercise called Will. which stands for What Does Ideal Look Like? And you basically take like 25 data points from pre-sales and post-sales. You take 50 customers and you put them in a giant spreadsheet and you ask a question, you give the answers, and you'll start to do a regression analysis to recognize that your best customers start to look alike in many categories. And long and the short is we're getting there much more quickly with pipeline signals. And little details like how they pay and how they come into the funnel and how they act in onboarding are helping us determine much more quickly what ideal is.

I love that. And what I love the most about this conversation is how objective you've become. I'm assuming you were probably less in the past, but how objective you are today.

Oh boy, like crazy. As I am a CEO, I am a very malleable, teachable CEO who's been smart for most of my life. I've only been an employee for a few years of my entire career, so I've always been a founder. Sure. But as a founder, it's amazing how many cowboy decisions I made. And how now I'm 44 now, how it's much easier to recognize A, things are not going to be the end of the world. There's B, there's almost always optionality for every fork in the road. And C, pause and sleeping on things rather than jumping in like a cowboy. It's amazing. You sleep on things and the answers come in the middle of the night. But man, I have made a million bonehead decisions. decisions because I acted before I consulted or thought. And being objective in decision-making is probably like the thing I focus on the most, um, because it was not a skill that came natural to me.

Oh, I know. And without going too much on a tangent, I always think like the best email you send frequently is the one that you never send, that never gets sent. Because like, how many times have we written emails with emotion and we're like, oh, Let's just pause on this. Let's save it as a draft. Maybe let's delete it. And if I have to rewrite it, that means it's meant to be. But anyway, what excites you for the future?

I'll give you a— try not to be long-winded. I believe that COVID taught the world— COVID and this economic crisis has taught the world a lot around Yield per seller, and let me back up with what I mean by that. Before COVID if you looked at how chief revenue officers were scaling their their teams, all their entire sales motion was just hire more headcount, just hire, hire, hire, and it became unruly. And then COVID hit, and now you had millions of field sellers being pulled inside sales. To now, for the next couple years, work on a digital or inside sales motion because of COVID And every CFO in the world woke up and went, "Wow, like we didn't lose a lot of money." And so, in a way, our gross profits skyrocketed because we don't have people like on planes, trains, and automobiles all day long. And now, in this economic climate, I think combining the two, I think between the CFO and the CRO getting together. They're looking at it and saying, "I'm not going back to the day of just sprinkling sellers everywhere." Right. I need to get way more yield out of every seller you have. So I think it's going to lead to process and technology investments into the people. So you know that saying, "People process technology."

Yeah.

I think because they come in order. There's a reason why that saying is said. It's said in order of operations. First, you hire a jockey or a person for a project, and then you build— you put the people and you put the process technology around them. I think that companies are going to invest a lot more in process and technology to surround the existing people in a business rather than over-indexing on hiring again.

Do I dare say yield per employee, period? Right? Like companies like Mailchimp, Companies like Mailchimp famously had like $600K per employee, period.

100%. Well, you get like tech companies that—

Especially in PLG movements where everybody's—

$1,000 per employee. And you're like, I come from the land of professional services where, you know, the benchmark is you got to get over a quarter million an employee. And, you know, that's how pro-servs think because they think in EBITDA and profit. And these kind of— that kind of thought process is going to come into SaaS as well. That you could do a lot more with a lot less people.

And when it does, you'll see more. I think it's the perfect convergence of like, more bootstrapping founders, more bad economy, more profitability needed, all of that. But anyway, Jamie, it was incredible learning from you. I want to learn a little bit about you before we get out of here. Like, like, who is Jamie Shanks? Like, The Godfather of Selling. How did this all happen? Take me through it.

I didn't want to be in sales. I wanted to be a stockbroker really bad. So my father's best friend— 2 best friends. One is like an oil baron. My father's a geologist in the oil business. So one buddy becomes an oil baron in Calgary, Alberta, makes ungodly amounts of money, and his other buddy runs Bank of Montreal, Nesbitt Burns. And so when I'm a kid, I wanted to be a stockbroker. I watched Wall Street. I was wearing, you know, like I dressed in the britches and the shirts and the tie. And I, even in high school and university, I did job shadow days as a stockbroker. In university, I worked at the Bank of Montreal on the bond desk and then eventually as an investment rep. And then I saw the collapse of the stock market in 2000. And I watched people's wealth just get wiped out, and it disenfranchised me with— I thought stockbrokers were stock pickers, not salespeople. So then I left and did my master's. I lived in Australia for a couple years, did my master's degree, and when I came back, no one would hire me because I had no sales experience. The only sales experience I had was being a stockbroker, which are really sellers. So I got hired in the only company that would take me, which was in commercial real estate, at 100% commission job. And there I cut my teeth in prospecting. And it turns out I loved it. I love cold calling. I love— I enjoyed booking meetings as much as doing deals. And so that's where it kind of all began. I've always got a rush in booking a meeting. I don't know what it is. It almost feels more gratifying to me sometimes than even the winning of the deal. So I've always been a top of the funnel kind of guy.

And from Canada, putting it together, listening to your accent.

I don't have an accent. You have an accent.

Touché. Touché. But no, Jamie, how can everybody get in touch with you?

Yeah. So as a Canuck that I am, yeah, you can get in touch with me. Go on LinkedIn. You'll notice me on LinkedIn, Jamie Shanks. Number 2, go to pipelinesignals.com, connect with us, show you how this scales. Happy to talk.

You have a podcast too, right?

No, I—

Oh, you don't have a podcast?

I like to be guests on other people's podcasts.

Understood. But no, thank you again for coming on, Jamie. It's great learning from you.

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Awesome. And everybody who's listening, if you like this episode, share with a friend, come back next time. And again, Jamie, it's meant the world. This is another episode of Revenue Today. Whoa, another great episode of Revenue Today. For show notes, links, and mentions, visit revenue today dot live. For all my friends in the Rev Genius community, thank you. It's been awesome to spend this time time with you. Please DM me any feedback and ideas in our Slack channel or on LinkedIn. If you're not in Rev Genius, join us at revgenius.com. It's free and it only takes like 2 seconds, and you'll be joining a group of 27,000 revenue professionals strong. We've got it all. Looking forward to seeing you there. Catch you on the flip side.