How to Move Your Sales Process Online

Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening to all of you, depending on where you're watching. This time is not real anyway. And the only way my weekends differ from weekdays right now is that my daughter permits me to eat ice cream on Saturdays. I know if you're wondering, she has not clarified her reasoning, but we take what we can get anyway. Welcome to the first episode of the Sell From Anywhere show presented by HubSpot. This is a show designed to help your sales team continue to sell in either a fully or partially remote world that we're all living in. My name is Morgan Jacobson, senior manager of sales productivity and enablement at HubSpot, but you can just call me Morgan. I'm working from my lovely basement office, which probably looks great to all of you. I will note that behind the other side of this computer that I'm speaking into, it does look like a tornado ripped through a Toys R Us, which is a nice reminder of the situation we're in and that my kids are only a few seconds away from barging in. So we record these videos very quickly. I'm here to kick the series off. This is the first of four episodes. Each episode is built around a specific topic, and today's topic is adapting your sales process to remote selling. Today we have an interview with Brian L. Cesser, senior director of sales from Aircall. Some new industry data on sales performance during a crisis, and we'll wrap things up with a template to help you build the foundation of your adapted sales process. Sound good? Let's jump in. We are extremely lucky to have Brian El Selcer, senior director of sales at Aircall, who just received $65 million in Series C funding. Clearly, he spent that, among other things, on a boat in which he's calling in from, which is excited. We welcome Brian. Give us a quick introduction of who you are and who Air Call is.

One of the funniest things about that is that it was the number one joke that I had recently with our CEO Ollie. I said, hey, we just got funding. And he goes, I need to get you out of your car. He goes, maybe I'll buy you a boat. This is not that boat. Nobody listen to Morgan. He has no idea what he's talking about. I'm Brian Elcessor. I run our sales development team and our outbound sales strategy over at Aircall. It's a robust company that has been. We've been fortunate enough to be able to help customers in a really unpredictable time and continue to do so. So it's a really exciting time for us. And yeah, before getting into aircall, I've been around the block a little bit. I've been at yext. I had helped build out their sales development team, one of their sales development teams. Prior to them going public, I had been a part of the old fashioned yellow pages. YP.com spent five years there in outside sales and running outside sales teams and a mix of those. And I also built out somewhere along in between all of that, I also built out a robust outbound sales Dev team for eMarketer, which was marketing research and technology.

It's a perfect transition to the main topic of today. The main impact on sales teams kind of in this Covid world is moving from a remote or field sales team to inside sales. It's pretty cool that you have a background that's kind of seen both sides of the story, which is, I'm guessing, why I asked you to be here today. But aside from the technology that you have to use, how does the actual skill set of a sales rep selling remotely need to differ from one selling in the field?

Yeah, man. I mean, look like I'd be remiss to say anything other than the entire environment of sales changes. It's not just that we went remote, right? Just back up and just say it out loud that sales requires process. Right? Like you have to have a fundamental process. Maybe it's one your company gave you. Like this is the way we go to market. That's great if you have that written out playbook game on. But maybe it's not. And then for many sellers, that's the case. They don't have that. And they're expected to come with that expertise off the bat. And so defining your process and how you go to market out the gate, that's a fundamental first step. But I think like I was saying, I'd be remiss to not mention that going into a post Covid world, it also means that the buyer has different expectations. And I like to start with all of my processes and thinking about the buyer because it's about them and the psychology of what's going on in their world. What is it that's happening right now that makes it so that what you're doing matters to them? Why are they reaching out to you? Why are you reaching out to them? What's the synergy? If it's outbound or inbound, that is. So I think in essence it's about understanding how buyer intelligence, buyer psychology is changing. Post Covid, that includes things like empathetical Outreach that includes things like knowing that they're probably really doing more research than ever before when it comes to spending money in an environment like this. And so, yeah, you know, trying to keep that in the back of your mind.

So, you know, outside of remote in general, I'd be curious to hear just how you build and implement a sales process and then get a whole sales floor to follow that process. What are your strategies there?

Well, first and foremost, you can't build a process without the people that are doing it, right? So if you're a sales leader, it's like, oh, we need process, and you go and write one, you bring it to the team. No one's gonna enable it because, frankly, they don't. They don't understand it or they miss the why. Right. The first thing to do is understand why you need the process in the first place and get the team on board of what you're trying to solve. Right. Source everyone's information, ask questions, understand how they group up different sections of the call in their head, maybe in their CRM, you know, I don't know. Let them decide and talk to you about how they do it. From there, you can gain overall inferences as to where to say the current state of affairs is where the opportunity for improvement is. And then you need to document and then get. Get buy in, right? So you get, after you document out a process, you get buy in from that team, you show it through them, make sure that they're like, yeah, this seems like it's on board and makes a lot of sense and consistent with what the feedback was we gave you. And then you go on implementation. I think in terms of what good processes look like, like, you need to understand everything of not only how the person entered that sales funnel, but how are they exiting and not only how they're exiting the sales funnel, but what are the different stages in between and what are the criteria for leaving those stages? Right. So we call that exit criteria. You need to establish entrance and exit criteria for each stage of your cycle. You don't want too many stages, frankly, because the more stages, the less usage it is.

Right?

You want to have a healthy mix. I'd say I think we have five or six at airquall, and I've seen that be as much as much as nine. And I think. I think that one was a little. Was a little much, to be honest. But, you know, and then you want to see how much of that can be somewhat automated through the CRM system that you're using, be it HubSpot or anything else. And so I think that's also really important. And then I think there's other opportunities right now which are, and I'm going to go a completely side sideways here but I think it's really important that you keep in mind if you're building a sales process is that your sales process doesn't just live in sales. You have to go cross, cross channel more than ever right now you should be reaching out to your partnerships, your marketing division, your channel, partnerships, divisions. You should be understanding how all those different channels might relate to the different sections that are in your stages. Maybe there's opportunity for those channels to help you accelerate those stages and you want to, you want to make sure that you're vetting all those opportunities.

I love the idea of the bottoms up approach. You let your sellers tell you what they're doing successfully and build a process around that. I think that's a, a mark a lot of leaders miss. They build the process that they envision in their minds. Then they wonder why people don't follow. I know we are just about a time want to be sensitive to that. Any final words for the audience before we wrap up the interview?

I think right now it's never been more important to lead from your heart. And I've always thought about myself as a, or at least I've tried to think about myself as a leader. And what is it? What's the leadership style that I have? What's my management style? And you know, I know that I lean more towards that compassionate, empathetical leader than I do that, you know, number hungry, you know, rah rah sales leader. But I would say that to those sales managers out there that align with the latter more than they align with the former, it's never been more important to lead from your heart because your people are going through stuff. They're going through stuff and they're living it in their own world and through their own lens. And you need to try to understand, understand that and meet them there.

Well, thank you so much for the time, Brian. Anybody who's interested in getting a phone in their computer, go to aircall.com morgan.

It's been an absolute pleasure. Thanks for the time.

Hi, I'm Dane. Welcome to the Sales Forecast where we'll talk about today's sales climate with our benchmark data. This data is aggregated from HubSpot's global customer base of over 70,000 companies to help understand how metrics are shifting as companies grapple with the impact of COVID 19 as you can see here closed deals are back above pre Covid benchmark levels. However, deals created are still 5% below the line. Entertainment and travel are still creating the least deals, a trend we've been seeing across the globe. The higher percentage of closed deals could mean people are feeling more comfortable spending money, but the volume of deals created might mean sales professionals are still having a hard time getting interest or traction. Sales email sends are 36% above pre Covid benchmarks. Email responses are at the second lowest point since we've been tracking the data. And lastly, sales calls are notably lower since the previous week. Last week they were down 21% against pre Covid benchmarks. Thanks for listening to this forecast and stay tuned for next week's episode. For more education, check out my online selling lesson in the description. Next up, Morgan with the resource rundown.

Before we wrap up the show today, one final resource to share with you all and that's a sales plan template. So this template is made to give you some direction in terms of getting things like your mission and background, the tools, software and resources available to your sales team, marketing strategy, prospecting strategy, an action plan, goals and budget so your team can really align around all of the kind of key aspects of your go to market strategy. It was always important, but it's even more important now that we are living and selling in a remote world. So that's it for this week's show. Tune in next week for episode two where we're going to cover skills every sales rep should master when going remote. You can find the link to the sales plan template in the description. Thank you so much and have a great day.

Yeah. Hey.

Wow.