Sales Technology for Sustainable Growth ft. Dan Cilley and Steven Wright

Well, thank you for having us. I'm Dan Cilley, I'm the CEO of Vendor Neutral. Thank you for having us on today's webinar. Really excited to be here, really. Most businesses today are struggling with technology selection integration, seeing really low adoption rates and poor roi. Companies are really losing millions just really every year because of their sales tech solutions, because they're not thinking about what's important, how to prioritize their needs. So that's why we created Vendor Neutral. We created it to help organizations simplify that process and help guide them through the decision making sales cycle.

Okay, so let's get right into our first topic which is around, you know, we are now what we call post COVID 19 because we, we kind of hit everything in March and you know, here we are, it's not going away anytime soon and really we're selling in a whole new normal. So with this we're talking about sales organizations and with sellers and buyers working virtually and having to communicate virtually, we know a lot of that was face to face. Can you tell us in terms of technology decisions and how companies are pivoting what it looks like, any patterns and trends in investments or what they're doing to enable their teams in the new normal?

Well, I'll start off too. Too often companies don't evaluate how, you know, their sales technology solutions really address their priorities. Instead, you know, they're just out there, they're relying on peer recommendations, review sites and it's not focused on their, you know, their industry or their, their really their specific challenges. So that's where, you know, that's what I'm starting to see, you know, more than not is organizations starting to pivot towards more of a value, understanding the value of their resources rather than productizing. That's where we're starting to see some of the most significant pivots. But I know Stephen has a lot of thoughts around the tech as well.

Yeah, so when we're looking at that and hi, I'm Steven Wright, I'm the chief analyst for Vendor Neutral. Been working with Dan for the last couple of years. I think when you're looking at the effects of the pandemic and all of that, it is, particularly for sales, it is not so much about transformation as it is about acceleration of already existing trends. Because really, I mean, think about in the last five or 10 years, what's the difference between inside sales and account executives? Maybe what part of the process they handle. But everybody talks to everybody on the phone or it's by email or it's presenting on a zoom call, even before zoom zoom in terms of presentations or demos or things like that. So this really just drives that being much more the only way to be able to communicate and limiting face to face communication. But the trend I see going along with that was again another one that was accelerating, not transforming, was more and more sales tech that can do a better job tracking what sellers are doing and on the upside, recommending what's the next step they should take based on constantly evaluating what actions they've taken. Have people engaged with the email even up to analyzing and recording and analyzing sales calls for tone and intent and everything like that. By not being in the office, by not having a manager who directly hover over that's now being done remotely. There can be a downside to that because it becomes a variety of the carrot versus the stick. It's one thing to be able to say, here's a tool that's going to be able to tell you here's the next thing to say, here's the next piece of content to use, here's the next action to take. That's the carrot versus the stick that might say, you didn't do this and you didn't do this and we're going to punish you. The more of the remote sensing of that, how that gets positioned, how sellers perceive that and how management uses it as a tool to base growth on versus a tool that can be used to control. That's going to be variable, but that's going to make a big difference to a lot of organizations. It's better to sell from a place of hope than from a place of fear. Even though Glengarry Glenn Ross might disagree with that. But I think that's really, that's something that companies need to think about.

You know, we're seeing a big need for the frontline sales manager to have information tools to help him or her just manage their team better coach their team, if you will. What we know is that a lot of frontline sales managers, they've been promoted from the ranks. They were. A lot of them were the best sellers. Right. And then they get the next step. Step is be promoted into management. And what we find so many times is that leaders come to us and the big challenge is that, you know, they're not really coaching the team, they're selling and because that's what they know and you know. So in this environment, do you have any advice for how leaders or how frontline managers themselves can leverage certain types of technology or. Yeah. To help them manage and Coach their teams better. And to your point, we hear you on the whole big brother aspect of this where, you know, are you really just standing over me or you know, how do I, how is this used as a carrot instead of a stick? I'd love to hear your thoughts on frontline sales management enablement.

Well, I'll let Stephen take most of this, but I can say that adoption is probably one of the most critical parts of any bringing on any sales tech solution. And if a manager's not working and communicating and effectively, you know, training the rep on the value of those solutions and then showing them the results repeatedly, they're not going to be on board, they're not going to participate and they're going to be, you know, a flaw in the process. So that's where I'm starting to see it. But Stephen, what's your thoughts?

Well, an awful lot of a wide array of solutions in this space from sales and a woman content management through accountant, opportunity planning and all kinds of others very specifically identify that they can target who needs coaching and when. And along with that, you know, it's a question of who's watching the watchers being able to observe how managers are engaging, when they're engaging with sellers and all of that, but actually guiding them and recommending actions, giving them data driven decisions from the tool about who to talk to and what to talk about and even to be able to suggest training and all of that, because I'm not going to suggest a first line manager is going to be an expert on everything. But if they can be pointed to what's the training available to do that, that's going to be able to help someone even to what they need to be coached about and have some ideas with that, that can be an effective tool. But all of that has to work within the understanding of what is the role of a frontline manager within that sales culture, not just the process and the technology.

So how do you see the role of the manager, the frontline sales manager, changing or shifting at all during COVID Because you know, when things happen, it puts pressure on a situation. So if you have managers that are just not highly effective managers, you can hide that to some degree because they're hanging out with salespeople, they're the big salespeople. But when you're not connected with them and you're at a distance in Covid, you know what happens? Are you seeing any trends in terms of changes in behaviors beyond just the technology?

Well, at the beginning I saw a lot of interesting things happen. I Saw daily check ins. What a mistake. You know, you're now virtual and your manager is calling on you every single day asking you what you're doing, how you're doing it, and it's not effective. It's putting them under a microscope and not enabling them. And then the technology on top of that, providing a lot of insights, really the technology can provide plenty of insights, plenty of visibility into what that rep, what that individual is doing virtually. You don't need to do the daily check in. There's still an opportunity and a value in check in, especially in the coaching opportunities. But I don't think that we need to be hyper focused on what our reps are doing. We need to give them a little freedom and I think that's where we're going to see the greatest success in this virtual world. But Steven, what are your thoughts on the tech side?

Well, I think one of the interesting things in a more virtualized work from home environment is if a company has a relatively robust sales tech stack, all of those tools produce a lot of data. But an awful lot of companies that have even a fairly small subset of those tools with all that data do a remarkably good job ignoring the data and really using it to drive decisions. Because oh, I see them in the office, this is what it feels like. This is my finger to the wind and the direction that I think we're going and all of that because I talk to these people and I see how they look today when you can't see them directly and all of that, you've got to find another proxy to be able to do that. And oh look, there's data. So I think there's a lot of time that not just frontline managers, but the level above that and the level above that to really start looking at this is data you've already got start doing the analytics properly to know what's working and also to spend time identifying what doesn't work and why and get past the immediate personalities and the nonverbal, whatever interactions you have with your sellers face to face and actually look at the actions, not just their actions, but your actions and you've got the data to support that, to tell you what you're doing. So we working from home almost removes a veil that I think has made it more difficult for people to use data and can give them an opportunity to be better about it.

So in the spirit of data driven creative problem solving, we may actually have an improvement or an increase in the data. We've removed that veil. So now we're more dependent on that. So now we have to know, what do we do with that?

Right.

So there are probably technologies that can help us start to think differently about that data as well, right?

Yeah. And I think the way to think about that is when you don't have access to one means of feedback, you can focus more on the other. By the same way that if you're just talking to someone on the phone and you don't have any visual clues like we have here, you listen in a different way to be able to pick up a lot of other cues and all of that.

Steven, you said something interesting before, tuning.

Into that data when you have other input that's not available.

So, Stephen, you said something interesting before about acceleration, not just transformation. And we're seeing an acceleration of use of a lot of technologies, but where does it become transformative? Where we start to do things differently. So I'll give you a quick example. We see an acceleration in the use of online, like this, communications. So the idea of just getting on a conference call and dialing in. In fact, I did it the other. And that video connection, and I was like, wow, this feels like the old days.

Right? I know.

So that's becoming foreign. So we're actually accelerating into that, but it hasn't really transformed yet because we're still talking to each other like this. We may have a little head talking, head in a box or the PowerPoint. When do we start to see transformation as a result of some of these technologies, to really start being able to connect better or do things better at a different level, not just incrementally.

Well, one of the areas I always go to when I've been talking to vendors about this about years, and it's going to sound like a small thing, but I think it's both transformational and generational, is how much of selling is going on over text these days, Text messaging, particularly when you start looking at millennials or look at Generation Z or all of that, where at a certain point in the deal, they're communicating some data and prices back and forth and this and that. And it's happening on text. It's happening over smartphones. And is that channel of communication visible? No. So, you know, one area is like, how do you. I've started to see some vendors get into this where it's like, okay, we can tell them, here's a good text message to send and here's links to include and this, that and everything else. But there's a whole generational level of selling going on that is happening. Not on zoom, not on telephone and not on email. It's happening in text and starting to develop tools that can track that and look at that kind of engagement. And all I think is going to be is something that could be transformational. But again, that may walk up to that line between people see text as much more personal and authentic. So how far can you. And the idea that a written message where you can't figure out the tone and all of that is now seen as more authentic than actually having a phone conversation certainly tells me something about how old I am.

That's a great point, Steven. So you take text and go, well, text. So we all know about text.

Right.

But there is a hidden transformation in there because we have so much traffic via email and via everything else. So what do you do when you want to get a hold of somebody? Well, you send them a text, right?

Yeah.

So then you've got that familiarity or personal connection question or issue. Right. Well, wow, they sent me a text. I'm not comfortable with that. You know, we had that with email at one point too. Well, you know, can I actually just email somebody directly? So that actually could be a paradigm shift is moving to text for more, you know, cutting through all the static.

Yeah, I think.

Yeah. I mean, I'll give you just an instant example. I'm currently looking for a car and these salespeople, and this is not a generational thing by their age, I'm getting texted to death. Here's pictures, here's photos, here's this, here's that. But I mean, extend that and think about, you know, B2B selling and all of that. It's happening. It's just kind of invisible.

Yeah. I mean, look at the election today. I mean, I'm texted 40, 50 times a day, and it's all. I mean, it's a sell. That's what they're doing. It's a sell. So it's again, from every point of view, of course, but it's a very powerful tool. No question about it.

I think another technology that gets it seems to be on top of the hype cycle forever is artificial intelligence. And one area about that, in terms of analyzing communications or phone calls or all of that, anything to do with natural language processing, I think, is a really powerful application of AI. There's a lot of vendors, when they talk about AI in terms of we'll be able to predict or do a better job saying what you should do next. And all of that ignores the fact that it takes a whole bunch of transactions, a whole bunch of data to be able to arrive at a conclusion about that. When you think about B2B selling, it's not like looking at how many credit card transactions were there today and what patterns can we learn from that or how many people bought something on Amazon. It's not at the scale of millions of transactions for your company, even if you're a fairly large enterprise company in your sales. But on the other side of that, and what I keep encouraging vendors to do is a lot of you are gathering all this data. If you can find a smart way to anonymize that but still pull out. What are the principles that work to be able to say if you're, you know, if you're this particular industry and you have this particular sales model or use this particular sales methodology, what you know, what can we show you based on the millions of transactions we have from other companies and know you'll never know who they are to be able to say this is what works. I think there's a transformational opportunity there, but I don't think anybody's quite figured out how to do it yet.

So that's something that we kind of see as ahead, which leads to a fun conversation we wanted to have, which is what do you think the future looks like? So you just brought up some technology, Steven, that we don't think people are really leveraging quite yet or we haven't figured that out. Right. Figured out how to make that work for us. But what do you guys see ahead in technology over the next three to five years?

Well, I think it's more of the foundation in the identification of technology that's kind of required. Because you know, what's missing today is cross functional collaboration within these organizations. You have all the siloed departments and resources and data and insights and nobody's sharing, nobody's working together. And that's where the greatest opportunity is. And ignoring that opportunity is, you know, you're ripe for failure. You know you're not going to have the opportunity for success if you're not organizing together. But again, Steven always has a much has a different perspective, especially when it comes from the tech here. But I let him speak to that as well.

Well, I think one thing that we'll see, and here's another use of AI, maybe with virtual assistants or things like that. If you're selling something that could conceivably be sold using an Amazon like model that requires the minimal interaction or anything of salespeople, people will move there because that drives down cost. If you're selling anything that does need more consideration and all of that, you've got to pick the right technology that's going to support that. So if I think there's a great future for a lot of cold calling and all of that and first reaching out and contact to become completely automated and not even require people, but to be able to nurture a lead as far along as you can before you turn it over to someone. But the trick there is that's got to be based on the expressed need of the prospect, not on the interest or desire of the seller to talk to the prospect. And that's where the technology can really help to do the kind of scoring. Did you kind of measure the temperature to say, yep, they're ready to be engaged with directly, they're asking for it. They want the meeting, they want the call, they've sent you a text to be able to measure that and then be able to engage. And if that works properly, that saves a lot of time and repetitive effort and work. That's just not a lot of fun for any type of seller.

Yeah, we do see a lot of. It's more like a seller will say, here's our new product and service, or here's what we want to sell out there. But it's not really, here's the pain point that we're trying to solve for. Do you have any tips for people for how they can start to understand leveraging technology, what pain points are for customers? Particularly now? Because what we're finding is, even with our clients, we do a lot of. Well, we do creative problem solving and discovery. We have a lot of conversations every day. But we have found that the needs and the pain points of our clients have clearly changed. And what we're offering as a result is changing. So we didn't, through years of being sales consultants, we didn't say here's what we think, but we found out what they needed. Do you have any tips for people for how they can really get down to what the needs are?

We asked this question, the first question we ask every single client. And if you take our leverage, any of our tools or assessments, it's going to ask you this question as well. It's what's negatively impacting your sales? Right. And the fact is that it's a number of things and it's a number of things. Keeping people up at night and knowing what that is is very important. A lot of value in that. Our top three responses are, number one, CRM. CRM. Not being used efficiently and effectively. Not, you know, not providing the value that your organization has made an investment into it. And then number two is too many tools, just too many pieces of technology not effectively working together, not working collaboration siloed across the organization and then just not being trained, not being effectively communicated to surrounding new technology, new resources that are available to you, not understanding where the barriers are to learning with those reps. And that's where we're seeing some of the greatest opportunity, I think, in the near future.

Stephen, what are your thoughts, I think related to that? One of the things that I see is, and Daniel alluded to this earlier, is if you're coming to us and the first thing you ask about is technology, we're going to back you up and say that's not time for that question yet. The first thing you need to ask about is what is process? Because people forget that technology, automation, whatever it does in any form, is simply a way of programmatically repeating actions that used to be manual. That. So there's a part of, you know, there's still a large part of your process, your sales process. I'll stay away from the word methodology because that's how you do the process, not what the process is. Is something that you've got to take a look at. That depends a lot on what's the nature of your business and all of that. I mean, I've worked for gee, a very large, very old software and hardware company for many years and all of that, you would think they'd be able to do a good job of automating a lot of their processes and how they do their deals and all of that. And they were selling to a well known customer base and all of that. Yet when it came to the contract and negotiation end of concluding a deal, everything was a one off. It was all incredibly manual. And yet I see that repeated because then many years later I was at another consulting with another very large technology company, but not at all as old as the first one. And when I went to visit them as part of a team I was with, I thought, well, they're going to be very sophisticated. They wouldn't have committed any of the sins of the past that I saw at this other company and all of that because they're too new, they're too smart. And I saw it on all of their enterprise deals. Everything was a one off, everything was directly about a relationship and they weren't tracking or managing any data or doing anything. The sins of the past will be repeated in other companies or in other ways as you grow. So you've got to look at the process, what works in the process? You may think a dialer is a great tool to have, but if 80% of your business is coming from 20% of your customers, do you need an aggressive outreach, cold calling set of technologies? If that's not where you're getting your business, why would you invest in that? So it's finding what those needs are. It's also about who were the real stakeholders for those different parts of the process.

So one of the questions we hear a lot, it's one of the things that you brought up, Dan, about CRM. One of the top considerations, one of the questions we get a lot is how do we improve the adoption of CRM? So you've got the technology and then you've got the human element, which is people just don't want to use it. It's a big brother. They're watching me. But we're hearing from companies now that being connected, getting that information, communicating through technology is more important than ever. What tips would you have for people to improve the adoption of CRM?

Well, your answer is in the question. It's technology. So artificial intelligence, machine learning, monitoring the channels of communication, especially the ones the reps are using to work with their prospects, work with their clients, you know, capturing that data, capturing that awareness immediately, pushing it to the account record, to the contact record within the CRM. Yeah, maybe it needs to be, you know, massaged a little to make sense. But at least all that information has now been pulled in. It's there. It's there for the next person who works with that company.

There's a lot of value in letting.

Technology do the work for you, taking that heavy lift out of play. That's why they don't use CRMs, because they have to go at the end of the day after their meetings. And now that we're all virtual, it is easier to data enter and to get the information in, but heck of a lot easier to take that zoom call, push it right into the CRM and have it all segmented by using conversation intelligence by the different stakeholders that were involved. It just makes a lot of sense. A lot less work, a lot less heavy lift on the sales rep side. Stephen, anything else you'd add?

I really just have to echo that because, I mean, I think having a CRM is just table stakes. I mean, you've got to have someplace where you're keeping a complete, definitive record of the interactions that you have with the customer from the beginning of the sales cycle to the close and then certainly well beyond that. But Anything that can simplify getting the data in there, in the background, automated in the background with the technology. And I'll sound like a little bit of a broken record. Then looking at what are the analytics that are going to give useful information as a tool to the seller.

Yes.

So it's about the seller. It's about the seller. So you're saying it's easier for them to enter the information now because they're at their desk and they can just.

No, no, but this is really about tools that will enter the information for them.

Okay.

The phone call and all of that is just transparent in the background. That's all entered there. It's then a question of how do you transform, I hate the word transform sometimes. How do you evolve your CRM? Not to become a, you know, here's a bunch of tabs and here's a bunch of data, but what can you leverage in a CRM? And there's a lot to leverage in most of them or add on technologies. A lot of what we get involved with that can actually give the seller an interactive dynamic dashboard to say, here's what's really happening. To be able to zoom in at an account level to know what's going on, but also to be able to zoom out across the territory to say, what are patterns that I'm seeing or where do I need to pay attention?

That exists today in CRM. And there's a lot of tech beyond that that can really bring those insights to light. But today the dashboard is the most effective tool in the CRM. And based on the company's hierarchy and the organizational structure, that data is invisible, of course, at the highest level in a different view than it would be at the end user level. So that's what the real power is today, is making sure that the data is there and then it's communicated through these, you know, personalized dashboards that are effectively transmitting, trans. Communicating the information effectively.

So, Dan, I can't help but notice all the different types of software technology vendors you have behind you where you're sitting. And you know, I think one of the messages that communicates is, wow, there's, there's so much out there, it's confusing, right? And then you get this technology stack of so many things. And one of one thing we're seeing companies working on right now is how do we get, as you said before, how do we get it to all work together? If you had to pick, say, the top three categories that you must do as a company and you got all this stuff, you're doing. But what are the top three areas that you'd say, you know, this is the probably the most important thing that we see companies need to use in terms of technology. If you didn't want to get into the entire stack, what really, you know, from a Pareto rule standpoint, what really makes a difference for companies?

Well, when we're thinking about the virtual world, first of all, conversation, intelligence, understanding what is being communicated by each individual in the sales process. Very powerful sales, engagement, prospect, engagement technology. Just I'm not going to call out vendor names but that's a very strong area of growth in the sales tech space. And then sales enablement, content management, the largest. Whoops, sorry. The largest number of the largest category on our landscape. It's loaded with organizations that are focusing at the SMB through mid market right up through enterprise, providing a lot of value, a lot of resources to the selling community.

I can say one other thing and.

I'll let Steven, I know he dying to say something here, but the.

I'm going to say one other thing.

This is a landscape of 70 vendors. The greater sales tech landscape today is 700. If you add CRM to that, it's over 800 solutions. That's out of control. Now let's think about the Martech side. Martech landscape has 7,000 solutions on it. It's insane. It's paralyzing. There's no value in a resource that with any and trust me, the people involved in that landscape agree, there's just no value in that resource for the buyer. So organizations like ours, you know, we help clear the fog, simplify and that's why we created this landscape. It's because it's simpler. It's still 70 vendors. It's going to be 100. But that's where we're going to stop because there's really, you don't. There's no more than 100 solutions that are needed to really support this enterprise space. Especially large mid market organizations that are really working to build a stack that works together across all their stakeholders. But Steven, I'll let you speak to this as well.

Well, when it comes to the top three things, well the first would be engagement. How are your sellers engaged? How do they engage in training? What, what information are they engaged with? The second thing would be engagement. How are prospects engaging with content? How are they engaging with email, how are they engaging with presentations? Even if it's just how are they engaging with a website, how are they engaged socially and doing all of that? The third thing would be engagement. How do you measure the analytics and all of that? Unless you can see that people are engaged or actively involved, are interacting and proceeding and conversing, whether for good or for illness, none of the rest of it matters. And if you look at almost every tool that we profile, it helps measure engagement in one way or another to be able, whether it's from outbound prospecting or the sales enablement, content management, or even if it's value selling, because either they're engaged in looking at their ROI or they're not. Tools that help drive engagements such as compensation and territory management and everything, certainly the skills development on our other landscape with the sales training, all of that. So that engagement, engagement, engagement, that is a lens to use to evaluate any technology you're bringing in. How does it affect, impact, drive, improve engagement internally and externally?

So it sounds kind of Steven. It just comes down to engagement.

So that should be.

So why do you suppose, dan, you mentioned 800 different vendors and then you said Martech 7000.

That's a lot.

So why is there a 10x difference between those two?

They had a head start and we have the B2C world to thank for that. So the consumer world is, is 10 years ahead of B2B, the world when it comes to technology and resources. Now we're starting to see because of the heavy competition in the B2C MarTech space, that it's transitioning now over to sales tech. So you're seeing organizations that were thriving in the Martech space with their insights from website interactions. They're taking those same insights from the buyer at the B2B side and then they're connecting it to the ERP insights and the CRM insights. And what's happened with a customer year to year and what's different and is there an opportunity here that we didn't have before? And now it's all working together and there's technology leveraging, AI and machine learning on the Martech side, that's pushing it to the sales tech side and now pushing you to call on that rep or call on that prospect immediately, because there's something there.

So I want to take a step back and ask this question. We touched on some of this, but not all of it. We know that over 60% of the Fortune 500 CEOs have said that they're accelerating their technology transformation. We also know that over half of them said they're not even expected to opening up, open up their offices before Q2 of 2021. So if I'm being tasked to, you know, help with the technology, the acceleration of the technology enablement. In my organization, you discussed taking a step back and saying, okay, look at the process that you, you've got in the organization and understand where you've got real pain points there and what might need to be addressed. What else would I do? Just, you know, if, if I've got to, to accelerate technology and there's so many choices out there, what should I do internally to assess what I need as the starting point?

So you need to ask your reps, you need to, you know, take a moment, survey your entire team. They are the most technically adept resource within your organization today. They have an incredible understanding of what tech is out there for their own social purposes and how it could potentially be leveraged for B2B purposes as well. So that's your first step, is taking advantage of the team you know, there and their willingness to also take on new technology as early adopters. You know, identify those, those leaders on, in your organization that are going to step up, show the real results, show the real effort in the utilization of these resources and is it going to make sense? So that's the first steps that we, you know, if you're going to be thinking about this, identify that group, identify that those early adopters. Think about them as kind of a, a target audience. When you're communicating your strategy now, again, you have to do all the legwork ahead of time. You have to understand all of your stakeholders internally, what data they're leveraging, what resources they're leveraging. Because there's a lot of overlap in an organization. You know, you may have four solutions doing the exact same thing. You're paying for all of them in each individual department. Why, you know, so work together, identify those opportunities to remove the overlap technology and we can help very easily identify those overlaps within an organization. But that's where I think you need to take the first steps.

So I just wanted to add a.

Little bit to that.

That all sort of fits in with what we call our stack audit, which, you know, involves files. Five steps. Identify your stakeholders. Look at the technology. Audit all of that technology. What is it doing? How is it being used? How much are you spending on it? What does it do in all of that? Compare that. Because we often find working with clients that you don't even know some of the things this particular tool can do and you're asking for this other tool that you want to have do that. It can do that. It might not be 100%, it might be 90%, but how much do you really need how much do you really want? And then compare across all of that and then know the questions to ask your vendors, but also ask your stakeholders and everybody else will what they need. I think one of the other things, and you mentioned it with transformation is evolution. And acceleration tends to be an iterative process. Certain CEOs and it could be CSOs or it could be a lot of people at the C level sometimes I think sort of want to move fast and break things that used to be. Whose advice was that? Oh, never mind. But you got to be careful because if you're really transforming and disrupting, you cause a little bit of an interregnum, you may be causing a pause and actually a dip in your revenues and everything else in the process of that transformation. Now, depending on how realistic or valid or the competition or what the business model is, the end result of that may be what worth that disruption. But it's a hell of a lot better to understand what that transformation may cause as a little bit of a dip and then a growth versus stumbling into that and not knowing that ahead of time.

Yeah, we always ask that question of the sea levels, Stephen, of how important is it to make this change and what level of damage or broken glass are you willing to sustain to make that change?

Right.

In some situations it might be we're going to have some broken glass because this is really, really important and it's urgent.

You know, I want to ask a follow up question to that is as I'm assessing my technology, we'll often go into companies as a consulting firm and we find out, you know, that they've got a certain technology and it's this needs to go. It just doesn't work. How do you know and how do you make a good decision around whether the technology you have really does need to change, whether it should go or whether maybe it's the way that it's been implemented and how the team is leveraging it. How do you go through a process of understanding whether you pull the plug or shore something up, if you will.

Steven, why don't you take this but take it off and begin.

I could go back to the engagement, but I will actually start there. Depending on what the tool is adoption, how is it being used and all of that. Is it being used? Compare that adoption to if you go back to that vendor of that tool and all of that and what are their best customer stories and all of that about how it's being used and what's going on with it. How does that look compared to how you're doing it. So adoption would be one thing. If you forced adoption and all of that, maybe you were going one direction or just adoption. I mean, how are people using it? The other thing I would look at two other things I would look at. I always try to keep things. Threes is what's the data being gathered by that tool. Now, that can work a couple of ways. If it's the CRM, it could be how good is the data you put into it? If it's any sort of sales tech that is gathering information about what sellers are doing or how customers are engaging, it's what's the value of that data being gathered and what are you doing with it? And I said three things. So what would be the third? What else have you got that's maybe doing some of the same things? So where does it fit in the process and all of that? And not just tactically, but strategically, is that something you're still going to need in two to three years? But you know, what's, what's, what's the adoption, what's the data, and what's the forecast for where it's going to be used?

Yeah, I'm sorry, I was just going.

To add to that.

So ignoring these challenges means that they just keep losing revenue and they're just overburdening their salesforce and they're just increasing this siloed environment and decreasing the overall adoption across their organization. Now it's just. It's just throwing money at a problem and they're just going to see less efficiency, less roi, less productivity across the organization.

I think that's extremely good advice. And that's what I was just going to reiterate on that piece because we often also see that different, particularly with enterprise companies. They end up having all this technology and a lot of it does the same thing. And then maybe somebody in marketing bought this and somebody in sales and then operations, and all of a sudden they've got all this exception spent. So I think that was great advice. Now it looks like we have a couple of questions. Are you guys game to answer a couple questions from people that have left them? All right, so our production manager is going to bring them over to us. Thanks, Caitlin. So the first one, is there a good way for a company to take an inventory of its sales technology to see if they have the right tools? What should they keep in mind as they review their tech and what questions should they be asking?

I'll take the first and then Stephen could take the other two. So a quick way to do an inventory and to think about your technology, if it's effective in any way, is add a field to your opportunity management strategy. So if you've got a CRM and you're managing opportunities in your CRM, add a field that asks what technology did I use or series of resources did I use to get this opportunity to close, to engage, to do whatever and include it. And IT can build it, can be one solution, could be five solutions, doesn't matter. But at the end of the month, the end of a timeframe, you can quickly go back and see what solutions were used to close deals and to effectively manage opportunities for it. And then you can see the ones that are not. And you could be spending a lot of money on things that you're not using at all.

And.

And it could be a really quick way to reduce your budget in those areas. Steven, what else would you add?

I would say depending on the size and maturity of your company, everybody hates to do it, but I talk to IT because that can give you two views. Not only what is being paid for, what licenses they're responsible for, if they have control over that, but how much stuff did you build that is being used or not being used or being used badly and all of that. So that's another place I would look for that information. Obviously talk to the sellers to figure out what's going on and don't be surprised if you find tools that are being used that sellers themselves may be paying for that you've never even heard of personally.

That's a big part of this.

A lot of LinkedIn sales navigator got started.

Yeah, it's true.

A lot of Organizations give a 50, $75 a month budget to a rep and say, you know, whatever tools you'll need to reinforce your ability to sell, go for it.

Yeah, I didn't realize that.

Wow.

And I have to agree with you. Well, I'm agreeing on everything, but I have to assume story from yesterday. I was talking to an IT person and they were talking about the sales performance management system that they have in place. And IT isn't integrated, but the value of your IT person. This particular person talked about how they grew by acquisition and then acquisition again and how everyone was allowed to keep their original plan designs and how they've got, well, hundreds now of plan designs across maybe five or six different seller types, but a lot more titles than that. He said, you know, they just need to simplify the plans, bring it down to just a few, align it with what the strategy is, and I'm thinking and he's it. Right. And everyone thinks that it doesn't listen. But don't underestimate the value that they may bring to the party. We have another question here, which is, have you seen cases where companies are misinterpreting data or ignoring potential learnings because they're overwhelmed by too much data? Can you talk about how to draw actionable lessons from the data that sales teams are receiving from their enablement teams? These are smart questions.

That is a great question.

Yeah, no, we're brought in very often for this exact question is, you know, it's just too much. It's just so much going on here, so much technology. So, you know, how do we organize it, how do we understand it? So we have a process, we have a methodology that we follow. It's quite extensive. It's not simple in any way. But the fact is it looks at each stakeholder, it looks each of their organizations, it asks all the difficult questions around tech usage, around data, around the insights that they're looking to achieve, but that's what we're seeing. Stephen, what would you add to that?

I would say something that gets very related to that is in terms of some of the adoption of the usage questions that come up with tools and all of that and being overwhelmed is depending on the type of technology. Sales only about content management is one example, but it's true to all of them, to one extent or another is underestimating the internal requirements for ongoing support, administration, curation, keeping it in front of the salespeople, marketing the tools themselves to salespeople and all of that. That is something where a lot of people thought it was going to be waving a wand and it's not. If there's any sort of customization, if there's any ongoing basis where it's being used to communicate or what are sellers supposed to be doing if you don't have the right people assigned to that. If you thought you could just throw that over to some little $20,000 a year admin and that was going to cover it? No, probably not. It takes a little more intelligence than that or a little better, more experienced person that can be able to do that and being able to get that out in front of the salespeople and demonstrate that value, I mean, it's sort of like, you know, you go back to the CRM. Is it that the CRM is bad or that it was badly implemented? Whose fault is that?

Right. Yeah.

I want to throw one more question if I can, because I know we're in Time here and you kind of mentioned it a little bit before, which is it, right? And this is like, you know, it is from Venus and sales from Mars kind of thing. So how do you get sales and it to work together? Because we see all too often, you know, sales gets the budget to do a new system, then it gets involved, they start throwing up the roadblocks. They want to have somebody else because they already have that as the ERP vendor and they just don't seem to see the world the same way. Any tips for how to get them to line up?

It's communication. It's really, it comes down to communication and engagement.

Working with them ongoing.

They are, it does not want to be obsolete.

Everything's moving to the cloud.

Everything's a software in the cloud solution. And the fact is it's done a lot of work, especially in the enterprise, to build that foundation for their success. They've developed solutions internally to support a lot of these needs that should be utilized. Those things should be leveraged in addition to sales technology to make a difference. So it is not somebody that I would ignore. A lot of newer organizations don't even have the resource. You know, they have a ciso, right, A Chief Information Officer and they've jumped over it because they've put it all into the cloud and they're leveraging third party resources. But I can tell you this, it's an incredibly important resource, especially at the enterprise level. Stephen, what would you add?

Well, I would say, you know, one of the things, almost all of these tools have some level of integration and having data talking back and forth and all of that. So understanding what those requirements are and making sure it understands that is critical if you're looking at technology that you're acquiring one of the resources. And I think vendors know they just haven't. They don't put it out as content that they commonly share is. So how have you involved it selling this at other companies you've been at and based on other services or implementation implementations that you provide as part of getting this up and running. What have you learned about talking to it about this that we can use as part of selling this or other things and all of that internally. So there's a wealth of experience there that may not be talking to their salespeople, they may be talking to their, the vendor system engineers and all of that to really say, okay, where does the rubber meet the road and how do I convince it this is a good thing? Smart vendors should be prepared to answer that.

Well, this has been an extremely engaging discussion with you all. Thank you so much. It's been really great conversation. We really appreciate you. Dan Cilley, Steven Wright, Vendor neutral Thank you so much for joining us today and providing some insights to our listeners. Next week, everyone, we're going to have a special guest, David Horswood, and we're going to be talking about how you sell in a virtual environment. It's going to be everything from the logistics to, gosh, I heard a horror story about somebody who had, they had like dead animals on the back of the wall and the client didn't like it very much. But anyway, like, what do you do, right? What do you show? What don't you do as well as how do you have meaningful conversations? So please be sure to join us next week. We'll have a lot of fun. Again, thank you, Dan. Thank you, Stephen, for sharing your time with us. And thank you. Have a great weekend. I think Audrey is going to go get a cup of coffee and my chocolate croissant.

Time to get out of here.

Thanks, guys.

Enjoy your weekend.

Happy Halloween.

Halloween, everybody.

Happy Halloween.

Bye, guys.