Part II: Five Sales Effectiveness Moves You Should Consider for 2021

Hey, Michelle, how's it going today?

Hey, Mark. I'm doing great, thanks. Here we are, another week on our roundtable. I am so excited about this one. I feel like I say that every week, but one of the things that we are going to talk about is technology and you know how much I love technology enablement for sales. So I am really excited. We are going to share some stuff around that.

Yep. Yeah, yeah, we got some good topics today. So we're picking up from last week's Sales Globe Rethink Sales Roundtable where we talked about the five big moves that you can make during 2021.

Yep, that's right.

So, all right, well, let's get started. Welcome to the roundtable. Glad to have everybody here. And we're going to talk to you about how to think through some of these questions for 2021 around improving sales effectiveness.

Yeah. And just a little bit about us for anyone who is new on our roundtable this week. We are a problem solving firm for sales.

And.

And that means that we consult for any and all of your biggest sales challenges. We know one of the things is that companies are looking, for example, at technology transformation. They're really accelerating that. We do readiness assessments. You'll see that we wrote a few books here. We always touch upon some of these books today. But in particular we're going to be pulling out some of the concepts from what your CEO needs to know about sales compensation. So that's a little bit about us.

Yep.

Now, when we look at some of the major factors that are accelerating change, we did discuss some of these again last week. But basically what started to happen, you know, you got your field sales or just selling roles as the Internet came into place and greater information in the hands of people, particularly your buyers, they knew and know more information about your product and services and even your competitors, I mean, gosh, even pricing is out there. So that drove. Oh, that. And right. We know that there are an average of 7 buyers now in the decision making process. And that caused companies to really push on these pressures for efficiency. And that means that with the cost of sales growing, with people being on site more, with more buyers that they're having to interact with, there was that pressure for efficiency which led to then these new selling models that we've been talking about. New selling models are everything from job decontamination of a field sales role that may be working with inside sales and other roles. You've seen that the growth of customer success, for example, and then technology advancements, some of which we're talking about today, but all the enabling technology for your team, the one that would be, I'm sure most everyone listening, would have some sort of CRM system, for example. And the intent of that technology is to make your team more efficient and provide better information to them and to the management team so they can get a view as to what the health of your business. And then what happened, Mark? We had Covid.

Covid happened. Yeah. So what's kind of interesting about this, Michelle, is as you look at this curve here, it just started to go up pretty quickly. So change accelerated. And if you remember, back in March, we were talking about the four phases of COVID 19 for sales, and we were talking about the idea of acclimation, just understanding what's going on, getting into planful action, building and adjusting, and then planning for recovery. We're kind of right in this area here. We're planning for recovery and still building and adjusting. But we're looking at 2021 and trying to figure out what to do. So all these things have accelerated. The sales models have accelerated. Our ability to work virtually is accelerated. So it means we're going to have a lot of change coming ahead. So what we want to do is start to talk about some of the factors that are going to be driving this and these five big areas that you can. You can work on for 2021.

Yeah.

So five sales effectiveness moves for 2021. Last time we talked about partnering.

Yeah.

And we talked about the sales playbook, and we got into some of the whiteboards and the mind maps around what those look like. And today we're going to get into three areas. We're going to talk about tam, or total addressable market sales compensation and how that might change with evolving sales roles. And we're going to talk about technology, sales technology, which a lot of companies that we're working with are investing in further. So, Michelle, we don't know the answers. Nobody knows the answers to what's going to be happening. But the best thing we can do is know the potential drivers in how to solve the problem. So as things evolve, then we're equipped and we're prepared to start to make some of those decisions. So, you know, we always get these calls. Everybody wants to know, well, you know, what are companies doing about how they're doing hybrid selling? Well, they don't know. They want to know what companies are doing about hybrid selling. What they want to know is what should I do?

Right. What should I do?

We don't know the right answer for you yet, but as it's happening, evolving for 2021, we're going to give you the tools to do that. We could certainly help you do that as well. So let's get into the first one, Michelle, which is understanding total addressable market. And we'll recognize this one from last time. There are a few factors that are going to affect what we call TAM or total addressable market. So if we're looking at the question of how big is our market and say your market for your particular products was, I don't know, $10 billion in the US last year and maybe it's $8 billion or $8.5 billion this year. Well, it's not like it took a straight line change. That market could be shifting by industry, it could be shifting by company size, it could be shifting by geography as well. So as you've said before, history is history, Michelle. So we can't just take the past and apply that to the future. So we have to know where things are shifting. So we're going to look at what the TAM is by industry and how that might be shifting. We'll look a little bit at geography and then last time we talked about how their needs might have changed. So we'll focus on where that shift might have happened.

Yeah. So before we get into it, I want to explain to people what we're going to be looking at today. So Mark and I are going to be sharing some insight data with you from a partner of ours, Corterra. And what Korterra has is $1.6 billion of B2B spending information. It represents in the US over 150,000 companies across the US from Fortune 500 on down. And, and when you think about the importance of B2B spending, what they're buying and what they're spending money on are things that are core to their operations. A company that's very healthy, that has high spending, it indicates that they're probably growing and that the health of the company is good ones that are really low, it indicates that the health of the company may not be as strong and it also does correlate to jobs in that company. So what we're going to is show you a little bit different views. So we're not just looking at your total addressable market the way that you did in the past, but we want to provide a glimpse into really relevant current information that represents a huge segment within the United States and how it might help you understand a little bit more about how your own total addressable market may be changing.

Okay. And then that 1.6 trillion represents about what percentage of the US market was about 60%.

Yes, it was over half of the US market. Over 150,000 companies are part of that. The first thing that we thought we would start with is something kind of simple and easy to look at. And this would be an industry view. And the big news, and this goes through the month of September. So this is year over year, September information. And the one big news is it's a lopsided recovery. So let's talk about the industries that are doing really well. And we're focusing on everything inside of the green box, which is basically 30% or more. They're up year over year. And let's start at the top mark, which is this whole professional computer equipment wholesalers up over 200% year over year. That is huge. For those of you that have stocks in those companies, I'm sure you're really excited anyway. But the point being that as companies are relocating people at home, we're finding that they're being equipped now to work from home successfully. There are, as we know, within the United States, a lot of homeschooling going on, which leads to this, electronics and appliance stores as well. So people are buying printers for their kids, they're buying laptops, security, other things to really equip them in working in a new way. The other thing that we see really up is building materials and garden supplies again, you know, up 40% year over year. And we were in a strong economy last year. So this is huge. The growth that we're seeing, probably a.

Lot of people doing home improvement projects, a lot of fixing up the house going on there. And we'll see kind of an indicator of that later. But big increase in that area. We kind of know that intuitively. You can just. You can see that here as well.

Yeah, that's right. And then another big area would be beverage and tobacco manufacturing. Unfortunately, people are smoking more and drinking more.

Nothing like smoking and drinking to go along with your home improvement projects.

Oh, boy. Which might be why ambulatory healthcare services are up. I'm not sure. I don't know.

Anyway, they're not up as much as the smoking and drinking. So at least we're getting coverage there.

All right, Mark, let's shift over and let's talk about what industries are just not doing okay.

Spending decrease. So, you know, some of these just through your own experience. So air transportation, way down. Oil and gas way down because people are driving less. Accommodations, hotels, motels, those type of things way down. Food service and drinking places down. So that would be your on premise consumption, but it's happening off premise at home. Ground transportation down. And then this one's kind of interesting, Michelle. Construction of buildings. Okay, so that one's down 18.8%, but it's up over here in terms of actual building materials and supplies. So that's indicating perhaps that a lot of that's happening at home. Not professionally, although we see a lot of construction here in Atlanta. It doesn't look like it's even ever stopped.

Right. You know, think about just, I know a lot of people, we're on calls every single week with sales leaders, with salespeople and they're home and they've been on the road and we are finding out that there is, there's a lot of home improvement going on. I mean, I'm doing some home improvement as well. Yep, yeah, big news there. So again, this is kind of a macro view of industry. Now we're going to take a look at supply chain. I just want to say one thing here. Well, there's three big points we're going to make, but what you're looking at are what Corterra calls bounce curves. And again this is month over month spending. So what you're looking at is through September. Don't try to read this, we're going to bring up the big points for you. But just know a bounce curve is something that's indicative and what they call the health of the economy or what the balance curve looks like tells you how things are going. And as you'll see across these four different supply chains that we're gonna dig down a little into, I think the big news is there's really no common curve. Right. So as you said, it's an unpredictable recovery across different supply chains as well. So just a few big points before Mark, you're gonna drill down into the technology part of it. What we know is that food at home, grocery store is up, grocery is up, all the wholesalers into food as well as beverages. So there's a lot of eating and drinking going on at home. And what we know is that conversely, restaurants and bars are down clothing. Very interesting. That would be this one over here in the clothing. What we have found is that year over year it's now coming back. And we have a theory around that, which is when we look at this April, May timeframe, people were home. You always talked about the bunny slipper fatigue and I think that's coming to fruition because what we're seeing is that now people are starting to make investments in that clothing. It's going up. Right. And we basically are level with year over year. And then finally when we look at the petroleum supply right over there that Mark is standing in front of petroleum, we see that that's coming up a little bit, which means that people are still at home. But we're starting to see a little, some people getting on the road. I know some people that have been putting things on LinkedIn and we've been talking to some of our clients and they're actually starting to get on planes again, starting to fly. So we're starting to see, albeit slow, we're starting to see a bit of recovery now. Let's drill down and talk about technology a little bit there, Mark.

Right, so this is a drill down on the chart that was on the lower left there. Computer and electronic supply chain. So supply chain. Basically we're looking at the manufacturing in green, we're looking at the wholesale in that rust color. And in the blue we're looking at retail or stores. And what you can see is that the manufacturing has been gradually increasing from February and then it's dropped off recently. At the same time, manufacturing continued to increase while wholesale and retail were dipping. So you see around May right there, wholesale and retail dipping down, manufacturing still increasing, which would indicate we're probably increasing inventories at least based on US Based manufacturers of computers and electronics. So building up inventory. Then the blue and the rust are starting to pick up here. So you can see them accelerating quickly while the manufacturing is tapering off. So that would say the purchasing is picking up of these types of products. The manufacturing is probably going to have to catch up, at least the US Based manufacturing. So what that would look like right now is it say, well, they're starting to use up the inventories of what the manufacturers made. So one of two things has to happen. So the manufacturing has got to pick back up again that green line. So we might see an improvement in US Based manufacturing for computers and electronics or the wholesalers and retailers are going to get it from overseas, which they may already be doing. Okay, so if you're looking at companies that may be in this market for you, you might say, well, I'm going to watch manufacturing US based, if I'm a US based company. And I'm also going to watch manufacturing that's overseas because I think that's probably going to start to pick up because the demand is there through wholesale and retail. So I think what's kind of cool about this, Michelle, is you can actually look at these curves. It's kind of like looking at the tea leaves. And if you're doing estimation of your market opportunity from an industry standpoint, you can start to make predictions about where it's going to be going versus looking at how do we do last year? Do we use a rolling through your average and discount it back? Look at what's really happening.

Yeah, yeah. And this is just real time data. Now let's take a look at what's happening across states. The big news that we found here is that some of your key states, Florida, we see California is on that list. We've got Pennsylvania and then North Carolina. You went to school in North Carolina?

I did.

You did. Georgia, our own home state, and ohi. So these are just some of the states that we called out where they are actually up in spending the businesses that are located there year over year. So if you're doing business in some of these regions, you might want to look at where the bright spots are and some of the low points. Now, what was kind of interesting for us, right, Mark, was when we were looking at some of the decline. Do you want to talk about some of that?

Right. So on your gains, as you said, Michelle, shift your focus to those big states with the gains, with the big gains. If we look at declines, question your focus on the declining areas. Right. And also keep looking at the data to see if that's going to be changing. But if you look at the big, the big states, big declines, well, Alaska is probably not going to have a high impact on a lot of manufacturers.

Hey, I got family who lives there.

D.C. is down. They're busy fighting. Colorado is down, Texas is down, which I think is kind of interesting because Texas has more Fortune 500 companies than headquartered there than any state now.

So I think, you know, it made me wonder, California. Yeah, you're right. And it just made me wonder, is this being skewed because of the petroleum and the oil manufacturing?

So the kind of thing you want to do here is you want to drill down for your business and say, okay, let's see what's going on in Texas. Because you know, intuitively you would think Texas would be doing well. But you really need to, you need to understand for your business what's going to make a difference there. And you got South Carolina, you got Maryland, they're busy with D.C. oh, boy. So you get a picture. So if you put the two big chunks together here, we looked at industry and then we looked at geography, and you want to combine those together so you don't want to look at them separately. You want to combine those together and start to see where your market's going to be heading. And again, this is so you can be deploying resources correctly, so you can be setting quotas correctly, which we'll talk about a little bit later.

And as you're looking at segmentation, so this is just, again, it's just another view goes all the way down to the account level. But we wanted to just open your eyes to a little bit about, you know, what's going on, what states are happening, and you can look at this really real time. So we just thought it would be interesting. And again, in summary, giving you just something to consider as you're looking at your total addressable market and how it's changing.

All right, compensation, so linking compensation to the evolving sales role. So let's take a look at here and big picture, Michelle?

Yeah, we're going to start with the big picture. And for those of you that are familiar with consulting with Sales Globe, you know that we do not like to look at the incentive compensation plan myopically, meaning that we don't just go immediately to the plan. And what we can tell you is that companies that are doing well and that tend to have high performance, good performance, do four things well. So they have insights on their customers and in the market and what's happening, things that we just showed you a moment ago. For example, their sales strategy is very clear. Products and services they're selling, their approach to segmentation and targeting. For example, the coverage model is aligned fully with and is completely well defined around the sales process, the roles, people know, what is expected of them. And then again, enablement. Enablement includes highlighted in red is the incentive prompt, your compensation plans, but also quotas, your recruiting strategy, your talent, and then of course, technology enablement. So again, what we like to do is make sure that when you're looking at your plan designs, make sure that you're taking a step back and that you're looking at the upstream disciplines, things that may impact what and your approach to incentive compensation. So what's changing and how will that impact your plan designs for 2021?

Because when we look at sales compensation, Michelle, it's rarely just constrained to that one little box.

Yes, that's right.

A lot of the questions that are, that are coming up in terms of sales compensation issues are not sales compensation issues proper. They're actually happening in some of these other disciplines. So you really have to understand, you know, like you said, the bigger picture, even to what we just talked about what's changing about the market. So we go up to insight and sales strategy. Well, your total addressable market is going to play into that and then we'll talk about roles here in just a minute. But your roles are going to be foundational for how you design the incentive compensation plan. So make sure you get out of, out of that little box.

So we know that roles are evolving and that's why we really want you to think about that. So don't just go to the plan, you know, we've got. I just want to take a moment to caution or just talk to people. We get calls every day and it's sales comp season and we're helping people with their plan redesigns. And the question is this, are businesses down? Our sales cycle is elongated. So 12 months, health cycle we're hearing are 18 and 24 months. Budgets are different. How do we keep our people in the money? That's one of the common questions we're getting. And we're saying, okay, we could do that and look at your plan and say, okay, here's what you can do. You can lower thresholds. There's all these tactical things. However, without looking at it in the context of how is your strategy changing, how is your total addressable market changed? Without looking at are you addressing and are you changing your roles? We know that there's hybrid roles coming out. If you jump right to the plan, you're not going to get it quite right. You might do some short term changes that might be a short term fix, but not necessarily address the root cause problem and what you want to achieve.

Right.

So Mark, when we double click down on that, what do we see?

You would see something like this, which we affectionately call the sales compensation diamond. But I want to take one second on this. We've had other sessions where we've gone deeper, but I want to use this as a context setter. So as you're looking at your sales compensation program again, remember, don't just jump to the mechanics you know as you're indicating, Michelle, look at the foundational components. So right in the middle, understand what your C level goals are going to be for 2021. And that's in the area of what's important from a market standpoint, an offer standpoint standpoint of your organization or coverage, design, talent and financial. So if you understand those five things, that gives you a good foundation to start with and then start with, then go to your sales roles and how are those roles going to be changing and from that you can work your way around here in terms of the plan framing or the major plan components. So your target pay, your pay mix, et cetera, getting into linking pay and performance together. So what measures you're using, your weights, the level of those measures, your mechanics, and aligning the team and financials. So how all the plans are going to work together as the team works together, and how you're going to set your quotas and then finally how you're going to operate your plan. So this is what I call mece, mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive. Right. So this covers most of the areas that you're going to need to know about. Remember, it's sales compensation. So you want to have a MECE look at your sales compensation. So a lot of people that have seen us before have seen this, but I want to take this a little bit further into looking at 2021. And so let's take a look at what this means. So if we take our sales compensation diamond, ask some of these basic questions here. Well, what's going on in terms of coverage? Well, we're getting less geographic, so we don't have people necessarily on the road as much now. We think it's going to start to swing back to that at some point, but at least for probably the foreseeable future, probably less geographic and more hybrid. So you can see our poor person there. He's lost his tie and he's gained his bunny slippers. Right? Well, there's some cost to those bunny slippers because what that's going to do is it's going to cost us in terms of what's happening in the organization. So the big factors we see affecting sales compensation are the ones you see here. We're going to go through and make predictions in just a couple of minutes. But you're going to get a higher efficiency of reach because you have more hybrid or more online. Right.

That's the good news. Right.

You're going to, you're getting more efficiency reach. You're going to get less collaboration with your sales team and with customers because you're not there and you can't work together in the office and you're not having that kind of connection. And the collaboration is critical for problem solving and creativity and innovation. Right.

That's the bad news.

Over the past, one of our predictions is that as we see less collaboration, we're going to see a drop in productivity. So we'll come to that later as well. More goal risk. Okay, so this is a big one, 20, 21. How do you set a quota?

Right. Yeah.

It's not a joke. I mean, we don't know how to set a quota because we don't know what's happening in 2021. So there's risk there that you're going to account for. In terms of goals for 2021. All new business is going to be good business. So yes, people want to. Companies want to sell solutions, they want to sell certain offers. But I'll be honest, what we're seeing is all business, all bookings are going to be good business. And good bookings. Right. It's a really important period for that. You're going to start to see some higher turnover and we'll talk about why that is in a minute. And you're going to start to see some communications challenges. Okay, so you've got six big factors here in addition to the changes in coverage. And we want to get into some of our predictions here, Michelle, in terms of what we think is going to happen with 2021. So listen carefully.

Yes, we're going to dig down into these now.

All right, so let's take the first couple higher efficiency of reach and come on over toward me, Michelle.

I'm coming over.

So higher efficiency of reach, less collaboration, what is that going to mean for sales compensation? Well, geographic boundaries from a deployment standpoint are going to matter less. So we're going to have more broader deployment contacts, going to become more efficient. It's going to increase productivity. So that's a bump up for productivity. The average price may decrease as companies have new offers. Now this is going to depend on your business in your industry. But if you're putting out lower profile, easier to buy offers for customers, your average price may decrease, which is going to be a challenge, which could actually decrease productivity in the short term. Team's going to collaborate less. That's going to decrease productivity. And the sales capacity models are going to have to be recalibrated. So if you think you know what your sales capacity model is for 2021, either A, no you don't, or B, you're way ahead of everybody else because everything's shifting in terms of how we're working with customers. Okay, so more goal risk. Let's talk about more goal risk here. Quotas are going to become possibly shorter term. We're hearing that from some companies. So we might be looking at quarterly or semi annual quotas simply to account for the uncertainty. So we don't know what's ahead. So it may be easier to say let's set a half year quota and then let's set A second half quota as we start to see what's going on. Okay. That's going to have implications to the compensation plan in terms of accelerators. So you could be hitting accelerators twice in a year. So you're going to have to watch out for that type of thing as well. Quotas are going to become more account opportunity based and as you mentioned, history is history. So go back and you know that that whole point we made on total addressable market. So we need to look at the bottom up and how we're going to be setting that. So the sales potential data sources are going to be required. You mentioned some of them that we're using there. But you're going to need better bottom up sales potential estimators. And the industry targeting again as we just talked about is going to become more important to start to be looking at healthier sectors. Okay.

Right. So now let's talk a little bit about the good news. Right. So all new business is good. You just talked about, Mark. Offers are changing. Right. So we have seen that companies that are being creative, they're listening to their customers, they're meeting them where they are, they're. So budgets have changed. We do know that. We know that sales cycles are extending out and people may not buy. Companies may not be buying quite as much. Right. Some are like we just went through and looked at total addressable market but just know there's a bounce there. So what are some of the things that we believe is going to happen? We believe pay mix is going to become more aggressive. And why is that? It's going to emphasize, we believe again our prediction performance and lower any of the fixed investment that companies have now. This is really good news for really great salespeople who can have an opportunity to even earn more. Because if you follow the standard, the more pay that you have at risk, that's more pay that you should be able to incrementally earn as a high performer. So again Mark, we talked about bunny slipper fatigue and salespeople working from home. By changing that payment, you can motivate people to continue to sell upside opportunity that falls right into upside opportunity. We see that increasing to attract top talent and to offset this goal risk that we just discussed. And then revenue we already know now we did a study with world at Work. There were over 400 companies that participated. And the one key measure that came out in the incentive comp plans was revenue. And we do know that that is going to be a key metric. But we are also seeing where companies. This is something that was more popular with SAS companies. But we're seeing it beyond SaaS. Is paying something out upon a bookings. Now you get to define as your own company there's a lot of definitions for bookings. When is something considered booked? When is when it's something considered revenue. Every company will have its own standard. But the reason that you're looking at paying something on bookings again is because of that elongated sales cycle and the fact that people may not be selling. Your sellers may not be able to sell as much as they did in the previous year.

Yep. All right, so let's take a shift over here this direction and take a look at all the pain and suffering we're gonna see. So higher turnover. So we talked about productivity, we talked about a lot of the bunny slipper fatigue. Okay? So the employee value proposition we think is going to erode for reps looking beyond work from home. So bunny slipper fatigue. Very simply, there is a value proposition for salespeople of getting out and working with people and collaborating. And some people are only going to last so long working out of the living room in their bunny slippers, and they're going to be looking for new opportunities. So turnover is going to increase for companies not offering an attractive employee value proposition. So what do you do there? Look at your roles, look at how they're working. Understand what you need to change about that value proposition for those roles. Compensation levels are going to recalibrate with productivity. Okay, so go over to higher efficiency of reach, less collaboration and the changes in productivity. If productivity and value of that job to the company changes, the compensation levels are going to change. That could be up or it could be down. Right. So it's not going to be that necessarily. A field salesperson is going to be at the same pay level. If the goals change and the productivity changes, the value changes. Everybody does pay benchmarking. Michelle Rapid Insight. Pay benchmarking is going to become more important as compensation as the competitors shift. And what that means is doing your annual surveys through the big comp survey houses. That's going to simply be too slow because the market's going to be moving faster than those annual surveys. So you're going to have to go out and get that information directly from competitors and they will participate in doing that.

Yes, we are seeing that already, aren't we?

We're doing it right now and we can help you with that, by the way. So, you know, we can pick competitors, go out and we can talk to them. We can get that information for you. So that can help you, but you're going to have to have that insight or else you're going to be operating a little blind or a little anecdotal just based on what everybody says. And then finally, Michelle, communications challenges, okay?

People are remote.

We've talked about this for months now. You're gonna have to get better at coaching and connecting with reps on their new sales processes and of course, their compensation. And then that goes into technology investment. We are seeing an increase in technology investment across companies in a couple of areas. One, and we're gonna talk about this in a second, is to bring together all of their technologies and become better at technology because they realize they. It's essential to tie the team together. So when I can't reach out and touch somebody and see what they're doing, technology helps me to connect better with people. And then of course, spm, Sales Performance Management, which is technology to manage your incentive compensation programs, that's going to increase in performance and probably will increase in investment because again, back to that World at Work survey. We saw that the SPM was rated as really, really important and effective for communications. But we also saw that not a lot of companies were using SPM. I think it was probably like 30, 40%, 36%, like best in class SPM from providers. A lot of it. They were building themselves.

So lots of opportunity. Now, I know that Mark and I just covered a lot of information here. This is an infographic that we have prepared for you all. So if you would like it, please reach out to us, infoalescope.com, we're happy to send this to you. A great thing for you to cover with your team.

Yep.

Yeah. Now we're going to shift over into technology. Will you get off my words, Mark? No, I'm only kidding. So technology investments to create visibility and drive growth. What you see behind me here and Mark, a lot of technology. What's the big news? The big news that we know is that we discussed that Fortune 500 companies, so 90% of Fortune 500 companies participated in a survey recently with Fortune. And out of that 90%, 75% of the CEOs said that they are accelerating their technology transformation within these companies. What we see here, behind me, what you see is a plethora of different categories of sales enabling technology, everything from CRM to plan administration. You see a couple. There are a few of our partners are on here. And so this is this study. What you're seeing behind me is from one of our colleagues, Vendor neutral is the name of the company and what they do is they assess individual technology. So this happens to be their top 100 list. We certainly can get you that information as well. But the big news here is that we believe that companies, before you start looking at all this plethora of technology out there, you need to know where you need to start. So you've got to start with doing an internal technology assessment, readiness assessment within your sales organization. Let's find out. You need to find out where are the weaknesses and the biggest area where you'll get the biggest bang for your buck. And because there's a lot of stuff out there and there's a lot of technology companies that can sell you a lot of stuff. Right. But what you need to really get it down to is what are the main things that you need to be successful. Couple notes that I thought was really. That we believe is really important for you to understand the two big ones. Right. So if you're looking at performance visibility, the biggest bang for your buck and the quickest way to get that and for management visibility down to the front line is your CRM and your spm. So let's just talk about some of the issues that we've had around CRM. One of the biggest complaints that we have heard from salespeople and sales leaders, sales managers, is that CRM is viewed as an administrative tool. And what we have started to hear already is complaints, even at the management level, that they're being asked to put more information to the existing CRM and they're really looking at it as more administration rather than valuable information on what's going on in the business. So the first thing that we're going to ask you to do a good technology investment is to take a step back and make that CRM easy to use. Now where do you start? First thing is ensure that IT is aligned with your sales process. What typically happens, and we see this all the time. Mark. With. With. I looked the wrong way. You see this all the time with companies that we are consulting with and what we get in there. And we're looking at sales process. And they want to know why CRM adoption is 15%. Because the implementation went in by the IT group. No knock on it, they did a great job on the implementation, but nobody talked to the sales team. So it's not aligned with the sales process. And it's made it very difficult to use.

And I think there's a common factor which it's not seen as valuable to the sales team.

That's right.

So why do I like you? Said administrative. Why do I need to use it? Well, it's for management. I'm giving information to management versus me getting some value out of it by getting feedback on what I can be doing better, where the opportunities are, that type of thing.

So what can you do? What you can do is make sure that look at things like automated workflows. First thing is make sure it aligns with your sales process and if you're making changes to that process, make sure it aligns to that before you start doing this, you know, ad hoc configuration. Then make sure you're looking at things like automated workflows, ideas and suggestions. What that means is this technology today based on a response that a rep does, it will push things to the next opportunity. It can push things out to them like send this piece of collateral. So take a look at that second thing on SPM as we know about 70% of companies right now use manual spreadsheets to manage the incentive comp or homegrown they developed or a homegrown system. And what we know is that they're fraught with errors. We already know that a lot of disputes. They also aren't really giving visibility to either the frontline or as a result there's a lot less visibility to the frontline and management as to what people's performance looks like at the individual level. So you'll see there are a few that we mentioned there. Verisin Exactly. Anaplan have to be partners of ours and Bicom is also one SAP Oracle you'll see there. But basically what you want to get down to is accurate administration of your comp plan and provide performance visibility. So these tools in spm it's not just about administering the plan but it provides visibility all the way down to.

The front line communications point.

So just a couple big messages there right on those. When you're looking at sales enablement out of that list and these are just a few of our partners and companies we know that do a really good job. Scalex is a company that does does task automation at scale if you will. Very valuable tool Insight Squared, another one of our partners. It provides prescriptive information to sales managers and leaders and that means that based on it aggregating activities so your sales reps don't have to do it by the way and it aggregates activity that the sales reps are doing as well as automates activity that the sales rep is doing and then provides management real time feedback things like when do you walk away from a deal? It's really kind of cool It's a.

Whole machine learning thing, right? The whole machine learning clx, Insight Squared, both AI types of solutions that can accelerate your understanding so you don't get into just kind of doing the tasks or manage a pipeline manually but it learns how you should do that and gives you answers.

Yeah, it's really, really cool technology out there guys. LinkedIn Navigator thought I'd throw in here one that's an easy one. Really quick, quick use. So what that I mean LinkedIn Navigator, if your teams aren't using it today, they should be great way to connect. Great way to as you're looking at prospects and even existing customers to understand who they are, who you talking to. You talked about that early on. So you're a total addressable market. We discussed earlier on that there are an average of 7, 7 decision makers in big B2B purchases. It's a lot of people to get to know being out there on LinkedIn Navigator, being out there and understanding Also as we're looking at we see a lot of people leaving jobs and shifting and moving over to other companies. Great way for you to make follow what's going on with your buyers and understand where they are. Could be a new prospect at a new company for you. And then just thought we'd mention one of the companies High spot. It uses AI analytics, it does security integrations for you. But again another sales enablement tool that's one of the top rated ones out there by Gartner Group Selling power endorses it. Certainly it's on the vendor neutral list and we're familiar with it. It's a good quality product out there as well. If you're looking at some augmented intelligence. Just a few things to call out Simon AI that's actually part of the Verison spm. I kind of like that one. What they do is they will answer these sales performance questions Actually on behalf of so me I have a question about my incentive. I can call up and based on or type in based on the question I'm asking Simon gives the answer. So your comp administrator is not having to do that anymore.

So Simon says.

Simon says that's right. Predicts outcomes based on activity that's happening which I thought one of the fascinating things that they had talked about is it even tells you when your employees are at risk, let alone when you're getting close to closing a deal. So I think that's kind of interesting thing Chorus AI it's another it's a conversation intelligence platform. So basically it helps sales team how it says that they win deals, writing, coaches, reps. Well, based on what you're saying, it recommends other things for you to say. And then Zant is a company out there that manages lead, follow up and prospecting cadences, automates those tasks out there that that reps are doing administratively. Again, the point is that it helps you understand who you should engage with. When do you walk away a gong, another one like Korus AI and then Grapevine? There's a lot of technology out there. I think that's the big message here and it's a lot for you to go through. Again, take a step back, don't panic, don't worry. Just what you need to do is take a step back, do a readiness assessment within your organization. Because you don't need all this stuff. You may need just one. So let's look at the biggest pain point that you have and then we can. And then what you want to do is understand the technology out there that can help you most address that pain point.

And we can help with that. From what I understand.

Yes, we do. Yeah, we do technology readiness assessments, everything from spm, CRM to the tools that you see here. Of course, we'd love to help you with that.

So when you look at that first picture you had of all those companies and all those technologies, for a lot of companies and a good number of our clients, that's what it looks like. And they're using this time to get all that together because they've got so many layers in the stack and so many systems that they're trying to manage all that. So you really have to get it down to the critical few that you need with a forward looking view, as you said, on the AI component.

Right. So that is everything that we have today. But I did see. Do we have time for some questions?

Take a couple questions. Yeah. Okay.

All right, we're. Take a couple questions. Oh my gosh. I hope we have the answer. No, let me read these for you. Okay. On sales comp, how often can you switch if, for example, Covid cases increase or decrease in a particular area affecting the impact of your sales team?

Okay, so how often can you switch your plan or switch your goals? I guess you could look at both of those questions. So, you know, you can certainly make goal adjustments. We're always very, very cautious about doing those kind of things, especially during, you know, during the, during the plan year. Unless it's a critical thing because you're setting precedent to do that on compensation. You may have components in your plan that you want to have as variable components that if you think there are certain geographies at risk or certain types of measures that may be at risk, you may want to do that. But I guess my simple answer to that would be don't switch unless you absolutely have to and hold steady. But that's why, again, again, that's why we're probably going to start to see some shorter term goals. We're going to probably start to see some simpler measures. We know companies are going down to fewer measures now so that you have less complexity in the plan. So it allows you more latitude for management around the plan as well.

And we can help you with that. So just be sure to give us a call. Now this next one's kind of funny. Somebody knocked on you a little bit. It says Simon says. I groaned.

I think they were knocking on you.

Yeah, you're the one that said Simon says. Anyway, what's the difference between AI and machine learning? Can you provide an example of the way each is used in sales? Okay, so I like this stuff. It's really fun. AI, artificial or augmented intelligence that basically takes based on things that are happening within your organization. It can predict. Right. AI says based on this activity, here's what is going to happen next. Or based on this activity, I'll give you a real example. I actually wrote down one. Okay. What will have the highest impact on our business? Which players and opportunities are at the highest risk? How do we give ourselves the best chance for success? Can we catch the smallest mistakes before they become big issues? Now this little cheat sheet that I have, it was really questions that Simon AI happens to answer for you. So that would be augmented intelligence. It takes all the information that's already in there within your. That, that all the activity that's taken place and all the data that's been aggregated and tells you predictive outcomes. Machine learning is the process. They're really related, right? Machine learning is the process of the technology. Learn something about your business based on repeated actions, activities and results. So really, I mean they're, they're very well related and they work together and I hope that that helps you out a little bit.

Okay, last question. We have time for how can we obtain a copy of the infographics slides? Great information. Well, that's easy to just shoot us an email and request it and we'll send the slides to you. Also we have these.

Infoalesglobe.com right? Go ahead.

That's right. Infosalesglobe.com and then we have these up on our site as well. Just go to salesglobe.com and go to Rethink Sales. And we have all of our videos. And Michelle is also on the rethinksales podcast. So if you want to listen to this while you're running or mowing the lawn or whatever you do, you can check out the podcast.

We haven't launched it yet, Mark. We're launching it very, very shortly, guys. But anyway, I love to listen to.

Podcasts when I'm going to bed because it kind of helps me go to sleep, so.

Well, let's hope people don't fall asleep when they're on our podcast. But anyway, guys, please reach out with us with your toughest sales challenge. We're happy to answer your questions. We would love to help you with your tech assessments. We'd love to help you with your plan designs. We hope that today has been a valuable time for you. We really treasure all of you. We appreciate the time that you give us each week. Thank you for being with us and you all have a wonderful weekend.

Thanks, everybody. Enjoy your weekend. Bye.

Bye.