Mark Danolo and Erik Charles discuss how COVID-19 forced sales teams to shift from field to inside sales. They cover changes to compensation structures, the challenges of managing remote sales teams, and why frontline managers became critical to keeping deals moving.
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Well, welcome everybody to this week's Sales Globe Rethink Sales Roundtable. We're glad you're here today. I'm Mark Danolo with Sales Globe here with Michelle Seeger.
Yay, we're here. Yeah. Thanks all for being here today.
So we're gonna have have some fun today. We were always talking about the future of sales and looking at indicators of what's going to be happening 20, 21 and beyond. And we have a great guest today that we're going to introduce in just a of weeks, couple, couple of minutes here. But let's give you a little background.
On who we are, a little bit about us. So Sales Club, we are a problem solving firm for sales and that means that what we do is solve the biggest challenges that sales organizations have. We consult in areas like business insights and that would be what's happening in the market and how do you pivot to that. One of the reasons we have the roundtables, we work in areas of sales strategy, sales segmentation, targeting, territory management and design. And then we look at things like your sales process, sales structure, how you go to market. And then of course the enablement layer which is, oh gosh, one of one of our guest areas of expertise, tools to enable the team and drive performance, things like CRM, SPM and also incentive compensation.
That's a whole lot of stuff and a whole lot of problems we solve there.
We do a lot. Yeah, we wrote a few books, as you'll see. We're probably hitting a little bit on sales comp today, maybe a couple of other things. But anyway, we're so happy to have you here today and spending some of your time with us.
Thank you very much.
We will introduce. How about we introduce our guests? So now without any further ado, let's introduce our guest today. So who we will have with us, Eric Charles. He is a colleague and he is a friend of ours. We've known him for so long.
Long.
I was so I was mentioning earlier before we went live that you know Eric, I'm very happy that he's here today. Right. So I'm not excited. I'm not, you know, it's not fine. I'm really happy he's on. And I remember Eric, it was about a year ago, the last time that we saw each other in person, we were at an event and you had actually introduced me to some people at your company and said, you Sales Club, they're like family to us. Which was really kind of nice. Anyway, Eric went to Stanford University. He's a really smart guy. And we.
Stanford. I'm impressed.
Right. And that's another thing why I like that he's on here because we, you know, you are who you associate with. Right. So Eric's really smart guy. I'm associated with him. It's good, good news for us. But anyway, and he is a. This I would like him to talk about. He is a world traveler and he has now been grounded for 229 days. And so Eric, I would love for you to come on and talk to us a little bit about yourself. And before you talk about what it is that you do at Xactly as a sales performance management evangelist, talk to us a little bit about who you are and you know what it's been like being grounded all this time.
Well, that's a fun challenge because one, because I do travel a lot and it's mostly for work. So much of my identity is done when I stand in front of one of those customs agents in another country saying, why are you here? I'm like, well, I don't know, I've heard the beer is good. I mean, you gonna let me in or what? But no, I live in Southern California. I live on the campus of the University of California, Irvine, married to a research psychologist actually. And I do some guest lecturing here and at some other universities as well in various areas that interest me. I kind of allowed my interests, my hobbies, my reading interests to slowly get into my life. I've got two sons. One is actually working as an SDR sales development representative in the world out there. I'm not allowed to say which company. He's actually under an NDA. And then I've got a senior in high school who's looking at universities trying to figure out where he's going to be going next. And you know, for the most part, you know, I spend my time hanging out here in Southern California now instead of. I used to. People used to say, where's your office? And I'd say Southwest Airlines, row nine, you know, with an aisle. Because Southwest has got a great little mini hub here at a John Wayne airport in Orange county. And that's where I worked. And other than that. But that's the work site. And then the cool thing is I was just looking at my accounts. I've got like 300,000 points on Southwest that I'm not touching right now because obviously we're not traveling like you said, 229 days. I was in Sydney, Australia, speaking at a Salesforce conference when I got a note from the company saying, don't continue your trip. On to the next location. I was supposed to be headed to Denver. Go home. We're closing the offices. I was like, oh, okay, I can do this for a little while. Got my dry cleaning cleaned up, got a couple of my suit coats, I like to say tightened up, but they're probably let out instead. And next thing I know and Here we are 229 days later and I'm still not going anywhere. And I don't anticipate going anywhere for the time being. One of the things I love is theater. I mean, I've actually worked on a couple of movies for some friends as a favor. And I love the stage. I try to catch plays and musicals in any city I go to. And one of the things is Broadway's closed until next May. On the flip side, I haven't worn socks in six months.
Well, Eric, I was going to ask you for one interesting non business fact about Eric Charles, so that'll start us off on that question. So beyond the socks, one interesting fact about you personally.
I never set out to do this for a living and I don't even know what I necessarily do sometimes, but probably, let's see, was not born in the US I was actually born in Japan, military brat. And you know, I think my favorite one because, you know, that's a question I think one of my best ones is the best use ever of my ability to quickly change topics and speak was 31 years ago when I was trying to explain to the Stasi of East Germany, no, trust me, I'm just passing through your country. Please do not search me. Back in the old days of the wall had not come down yet. That's why I say it's 31 years in a month. 1989 and I found myself in East Germany on the wrong end of just say some people that really didn't like me.
Wow, good old days.
I mean, that was big. So we're going to have, as you can see, a lot of fun with Eric. So Eric, just very briefly, we brought you on here to talk about just what companies are doing and to look at some patterns and trends of sales organizations and all these things we're going to delve into. So just give people a brief overview of what you, what you do as a sales evangelist, at least the part that you might know that you do and that will help set the context for what we're going to be doing today.
Sure. So going back, I mean, so if I go back to my first, you know, my first solid, well paying job I was in management consulting and I worked on sales compensation and a few other projects. And from there I found myself in the very early stages of the technology industry. I used to joke that I was designing incentive plans that my customers couldn't actually run because they didn't have the same systems available that I had. And then so I got into software and spent a few years in that and then went into academia. And about 10 years ago, Chris Cabrera, who's the CEO of Exactly, reached out to me and said, I'd like you to come up to the office. I want to show you something we're working on. I went up to San Jose where the company headquarters is and one of the cool things is exactly had from day one used a master data model. And I'm going to nerd out here a little bit. They'd done a master data model for working with their customers and they had developed a system where they could anonymize and aggregate data for all of these people whose sales commission checks are being calculated. Because that's what exactly did. I mean from the very beginning I should talk about sales performance management and all that. But really the first stage is can you please calculate a commission check on a timely basis that makes sure it's accurate? Well, the cool thing is when you do that, what I know is the data system has all the quotas and it has the titles and it has the reporting relationships and it has the transactions and it has the revenue and it has the profits and it has the commissions and the commissions for everybody. So they're describing this to me and I've been accused of somebody, some people live on coffee that I kind of live off a whiteboard pen. Sometimes it's like if there's a whiteboard in a room and when we're back together, just watch it put a whiteboard in the room. Let's start talking and see when I start twitching. Because I will grab a pen and go up to the board and start sketching things out. I've actually got whiteboards here in my home office because I really can't live without them. Whiteboards and post it notes are the secret to my success. Or so I started sketching out some interesting analysis they could do. And I was just interested in it from a data perspective. And that's me. It's like I go after interesting challenges. It's like, oh, hold it. What if we did this? How about that? Could you switch it around this way? How would the math work out? Would that actually drive the behavior. And I just hear a chuckle from Chris, and I turn around because he's there with the head of product, a couple of people, and he's just smiling. And I'm like, oh, this is a test. This isn't a. Let me show you the toys. This is. Do you want to come join me? I joined exactly. I've had a variety of titles. I've run product marketing, I've run field marketing, and I've run partner marketing. But the core of all of it has been, we've got all this knowledge. What can we do with it? Which then. Let me come in. That's when we started working even closer together. I started throwing some stuff at Mark and saying, no, dude, sorry. I live in Southern California. I've been here. Everybody's dude. Michelle, you're a dude, too. It's a SoCal thing, dude. What if this is it? What does this direction tell us? What are we seeing here? And then I started hanging out with academics. A few years ago, I was asked to actually be the plenary speaker at an academic conference on the sales profession. I stood up there and I started doing it. I always joked it as my revenge of graduate school because I got to torture professors for their research. So instead of me standing up and presenting to my faculty, they were presenting their papers. And I was one of the people said, yeah, but did you think about this? Did you look at this? Did you look at this? And I could. And after the first person setback, I started watching people write notes. And it's just. There's so many interesting things in the world of sales and in the world really of human motivation. What gets us to change our behavior? What gets us to stay on a particular path? And how do we get people to do the things we need them to do, but also want to do it? And it's just. It's fascinating. So it's that data and so. Exactly. Cuts me loose to chase all these conversations.
And you bring up a great point, Eric, which is it's not about the structures. It's not about the incentives, the elegant designs or simple designs. It's not about the technology. It's about the behaviors. In the end, it's about the people, because we really want to motivate people to do the things that, you know, align with the goals of the company and, of course, align with their goals as well. So, you know, too often I see people forgetting about that in companies. It's about the people.
Right.
So you're looking at a lot of data, Eric, and seeing a lot going on within companies just like we are and we're curious about what are you seeing for patterns or trends as we're looking ahead here because we're trying to be predictive about 2021 and what we think is going to be happening.
Yeah, let's face it, there's one huge variable ahead of us and it's a big who knows, right? I don't know when a good vaccine is going to be released. I don't know what the next spike might be in any of that. At the same time, what do we do with data? We look at past challenges. We can look back at the last recession 10 years ago or so, whatever, 10, 12 years ago. We can look at different financial periods in time. We can look at economic indicators. And in this case, I can even just look at 2019 versus 2020 first three quarters. I've actually done this with actually in a partnership with Sun Lamb from the University of Georgia, Mike Ahern from the University of Houston and Mohsen, who's the graduate student who had to do all the work. That's a joke for any faculty on the call. We all know, you know that old joke. How many faculty does it take to change a light bulb? Zero. That's what grad students are for.
That's pretty funny.
So we go into this and we started looking at 3/4 versus 3/4. And what do we start seeing? Well, the first thing is obviously in some companies, in some industries, we see a complete drop in employment. So there's both. I could see an overall drop in the number of people in the sales organization as there was attrition happening. I don't know why people leave. I just know there's attrition and I can see that the positions aren't being filled. So there was a drop. The recovery has been an inside sales titles, not field sales positions. It's pretty much realizing, guess what? I'm not in your offices. I didn't jump on a plane to come on out, much as I would love to be sitting there and do this. Yeah, we're all remote. So the concept of a quote, field sales rep who goes to a customer site is on hiatus right now. And I can see that in the data and the recovery is on the inside sales.
So when you're seeing inside sales coming up, Eric, can you tell what kind of roles those are? Because one thing we're looking at is you've got your traditional inside sales, but then you've got your field sales that have become inside sales or they're more Hybrids. Can you tell? Are they different titles or the same titles?
Some of the companies are still kind of just still using the same titles, I think because we talk about compensation, you talk about motivation. There are people that are motivated by titles, not just by the pay. They're like, well, when can I be a senior sales development representative? Step two. I mean, we might make fun of that. It's the old Hay Group's early banding work from 40 years ago, I think, is when they were doing it. But we've all done these titling exercises in our careers. What's the appropriate title? Actually, when we did the title work for. Exactly, we had over 250 different titles for a sales rep that our clients use, because we went through that and cleansed it. And then we started creating some standards that does this. Are you calling this an account executive or an account manager? Trying to separate out hunters from farmers? And then we'd even say, hey, AKA frontline hunter. Frontline farmer, which one are they? Sales engineer, solutions consultant, subject matter expert. And you can find so many variations. So there is some humanistic factor and then you get levels 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 at different companies, just so people can feel like they are advancing even if they stay in the same position. But in general, what we can see is hiring done for more inside sales. Not seeing as much of title shifting like people having their title changed. In that sense, that seems to be an overall pattern, but it might be worthy of a secondary look. Again, looking to next year, I think the next big shift would be a revisiting of this will be next January. Most companies are on a calendar fiscal and I think a lot of companies might. They're going to take it to the end of this year and then there's going to be. At the same time, they're doing the budgets and they're doing the plans. There's going to be one. What should our sales organization look like now? You know, there's some other areas of where I can see the focus going on as well, though.
So when you say, you know, what's going on with the titles and the hiring, what about the pay? So just to kind of, you know, put a little color to it, what we're seeing on pay is thresholds are lowering, we're seeing some shifting in quotas, but performance measures are changing. I'm wondering from the big data, what you're seeing either in terms of pay structure or goal attainment or pay levels up or down.
Yeah, actually it's all of the above. In general, we're Seeing a reduction in the primary quota. Realize there is not one quota. Most companies if you start digging into it, have two or three quotas. So then we have to go. One of the things we do, one of the back end pieces of analysis we have to do is look for what appears to be the primary quota, the one that generates the most income. And so that has definitely shifted and it's honestly dropped about 15% in a lot of companies. Now that is all industries, industry by industry breakouts. I'm not comfortable diving too deep into it because I still think there's some fuzz and in the data set. But it's definitely been a lowering of the overall quotas. We've also though seen the measures themselves change. And this is really wild. Cause what we're seeing is think of Our favorite top 10 sales aphorisms. One of them is always it's cheaper to keep a customer than to get a new one. We've all heard that. I almost dropped into the voice of an old partner that I worked for. Wow, that was a memory bubble there. And so you look at that and what we have seen is a big increase in the focus of the quotas towards sell more and retain your existing client base is taking it more of the focus than just go hunt a brand new customer. And I think again that's the data. Now my hypothesis that is, you know, it's taking that aphorism. Companies are realizing they really do need to do a better job of reaching out to their long standing customers. You can't play the old game. I remember this. There was a person I worked for who used to joke, he's like, it's horrible but if I ignore them, they will come. You know, he says if I just stop calling this one customer then I can guarantee within three months they'll call me and ask for some work because they need to, they need us. But you know, they don't want to answer. They like to make the call themselves. That's changing the realization that you need to pick up the phone, not drive over unfortunately, but pick up the phone and call them and keep them. And we're definitely seeing that of focus, the new measures or expanded emphasis on measures of how much of on target earnings can be attained by retaining your current customers and cross selling and upselling to them. And this is where this other blending of the inside sales. But this is where we're also seeing more people being hired into the farmer role or maybe I think you called it the rancher at one point. Mark the hybrid of the Hunter, Farmer. I've always given you credit for it, so I hope you were the one that said that in front of me.
That was me, unfortunately.
Okay, good. Just making sure, because, man, I've been quoting you on that for a few years. I love the concept of that's going on that they are just realizing now there's some other research that I've seen on hunters and farmers and what should the roles be? And we can get onto that later if you're interested.
And then I find it interesting, you said quotas are going down. We're seeing industry by industry changes. And we've gone through these on prior roundtables where we're seeing the bounce curves, which means the rate that industries are coming back are different by industry. So obviously technology, computers coming up faster, you know, food, food services coming up faster on premise, food not coming up. So, you know, varying quite a bit. Retail and wholesale coming up. Manufacturing has slowed down but now has to catch up either domestically or they're going to have to source from offshore. So I guess all that to say this is all different by industry. Yeah, it's not. It's not one monolithic movement.
Yeah, Very, very different. Luxury retail, which has been very dependent upon showrooms. For example, I have no problem buying, you know, a T shirt from Amazon, but if it's a dress shirt, I kind of want to go try it on. But then again, when do I wear a dress shirt anymore? I mean, you know, I have it. You know, how often am I throwing on the full suit, you know, getting a set of cufflinks for a French cuff shirt or anything like that? You think of all of these little shifts. You know, my poor dry cleaner is despondent, you know, sends me get well cards early on. They're like, are you sure you don't need to go someplace, Eric, and come back with a big bag of stuff for us to clean and press for you?
You know, I remember when I was a younger guy, it's hard to believe back in New York many years ago, when we get a suit back then we'd get the suit and then you'd always get an extra pair of pants because you'd wear the pants out faster. But right now, all we need really is the jacket.
Right?
We don't even need the pants.
Oh, my God. Okay, just so you know, he has pants on today anyway.
Not saying a word. This camera is waist up, you know. Come on. Actually, I will say I haven't worn. I've only worn long pants twice in the last six months. Again, I live in Southern California. I mean, you know, so it's a humorous thing and we all know it. We all know what's going on. I remember news anchors and things like that from the past in the same way I had a friend who was the news anchor back in Tulsa where I grew up. And he would laugh. He's like, no. He's like, you know, we just sit down. He's like, I just need the shirt and the jacket on. I can, I'll have jeans on sometimes. Drives my production team insane. He's like, when do I stand up? When I'm at the anchor's desk and didn't change until they shifted to those anchors desk, you know, where you could actually see someone's legs or the chairs or the shoes they had on or something. He's like, oh, now I've got to go, you know, check all my soup pants.
Okay, this is a good segue to our next topic because you guys, I think could go on about that one for a while. The, the field sales rep. You mentioned earlier that, you know, what are the motivators look like for that role now when you, you know, all joking aside, when we're talking about shorts, Mark, we call it on our roundtable this bunny slipper fatigue. Meaning that some of these field sales roles, these field salespeople, this working from home isn't what they signed up for. And you know, I've had sales CSO is calling me and say, what am I supposed to do? Teach them how to become Zoom experts? It's got to be more than that, Mich. Like, how do I really motivate these people? And just given your experience and your background and your knowledge about people and interest in people, I would love to know from your perspective what some motivators might be for. You know, I'm field sales. I've got this company that's, that's got these field sales roles. Maybe I've got inside sales roles too. But we know, I'll say, let's say we know we're not going to open our office till Q2 of 2021. Like, what do I do to retain and keep my best people outside of just money? And how do we motivate them in this new environment?
I would say that you just made the mistake that most companies are making. You talked about the field sales rep and you talked about the cso. The secret is that frontline sales manager one level up and they are so critical. But most people, I think of past engagements, plan design engagements, how often, how much Time is focused on the incentive plan for the field sales rep, the incentive plan for the, you know, the farmer, the incentive plan for the inside sales rep. And then the sales manager is just kind of a simple roll up that because the CSO doesn't have time to call all of their reps, they can't focus on them. They need to be looking at that frontline manager. Who is that person? Are they ready? Are they doing quick calls? I mean I can talk about tools all day long. We use Slack for example, internally and I mean we've even gone so far as to integrate Slack with exactly incent our incentive compensation management solution so that a rep can in Slack say basically show me the money and get an update of where they are against their goals and how much money they have without even leaving Slack. Now that's getting back to the coin operated stereotype. But I really do think it's those frontline sales managers that need to be having the conversations and not the morning standups. As much as important they are because we've got the zoom fatigue. So that's the first is like you've got to look at that manager, who have you promoted into that position and, and did they have the personality today to do it? Because they're not sitting next to them in the bullpen if it's an inside sales and they're not flying out to go with them on a sales call to see how they operate or to provide a little gravitas if it's field sales. So now you're looking at a different type of training. You almost have to be looking at how do you check in with somebody and yeah, I will freely admit, honestly, and there's some research out there, you know, the mental. I actually was on a panel with two research psychologists and a psychiatrist recently. It was an internal panel of what can we do about mental health in the corporate world? When you can't glance over and say, wow, Jim doesn't seem to be on his game this week. I wonder if everything's okay, you know, and it's so much easier to say hey, what's up buddy? What's you know, everything going. But man, if I schedule a zoom call with one of my staff, they're like, hi, hi, I'm ready. What do you want to talk about right now, Eric? You know, and so you've got to break down because think of, doesn't a zoom call always feel like a formal meeting? How do you informalize, I don't know, some of these interactions so that you can find out what is going. Because then when we get back to the motivation, look, why do people go into sales? They love being. They do like being measured because they like exceeding measurements. I mean, come on, we play fantasy football to look at numbers. We go into athletics. Athletics has always been a great measurement thing. The Dodgers are playing tonight kind of a thing. And I'll be watching the World Series and we'll look at on base percentages and Billy Beane and I had a beer with Billy Beane several years ago and it was great. He talked about the original Moneyball guy and everything he's done. And so that's all going on. But there is a personal side as well. Where do you think your career is going? Because I can't test your ability to mentor while you're remote. And then I think. And then we do have turnover, right? Attrition is happening. How do you hire an on board. If you had to go hire a new person to your firm out of, say, California, how are you going to, I mean, how are you going to interview them? How are you going to hire them? How are you going to see if they fit within your company culture? When, I mean, there's a company, I know that it's a small startup, everybody turns on their zoom cameras first thing as soon as the day starts. And they turn it off at the end of day and they never turn it off. The idea is we can look at each other at our desks, you can mute. But personally, I felt that was a little further than I'd want to go. But I understand. I don't know if we're all comfortable.
With that quite yet.
No, not yet. But I can see the reasoning, you know, to be able to glance over or, you know, I mean, I think of how often have I, you know, we've lost the hallway conversation. I'm bringing up more problems and solutions, I realize here, but we've lost the hallway conversation of. Hey, do you have a second? I've got a quick question for you. You know, and especially for the newer reps who've just gone through onboarding, we need to help those, especially the new ones who you've just brought into the company, not inexperienced, just new to the firm. How do you help them be comfortable asking for help? Do they really know all the people they can reach out to with a quick question. I've got a fantastic product management team and sometimes what I try to do is broker quick conversations because I'll have some reps because I teach in our bootcamp who will shoot me a note Say, hang on a second, let's do a quick zoom and I'll grab some from the product team. Have you ever met this person? No. Let me introduce you to. Now they have been working on this and they can explain this better. So here's how I present it, here's how they discuss it. And now internal networking used to just happen because you went to the office. Now it has to be constructed and built, crafted, curated, so that people can get all those alliances going. And this gets into some of the research I supported with Alan Benson, who's a professor at the Carlson School of Management. And Alan has published a paper on the Peter Principle. I don't know if you ever read that book, ages ago. It's a, we rise to our level of incompetency. And he, Alan was interested in who do we promote into sales management. Bringing it back to my comment on sales managers. And he said, we promote the wrong people. We promote the number one sales rep. Where instead he found if you want to look at performance of the team, the best managers are the people that have sold all of the company's products. They sell the whole portfolio, not the most revenue, but the spread spectrum. If they're just above median, you still, I mean, you don't want to promote someone who can't sell. But if they're above median, but they know how to sell everything, they can get more performance out of the team than if they're just the, quote, number one sales rep. We promote the wrong people.
Yep, absolutely. We end up promoting the high performers and then we end up getting big salespeople in sales manager positions.
Well, that's right. So as we think about. You just said that the frontline sales manager and I completely, I think that we completely agree with that. They need some focus and attention. You need to be not only really understanding what is it that they need that's different. If I'm, if I'm a leader, like, what do I really need to be looking at? I heard you say something that look and make sure you got the right skill set. We do end up promoting the best people. We do know that. But now we're looking for a different skill set that it sounds like you're going to be comfortable reaching out, talking to people, not only finding out, you know, here are the numbers and here's how you're doing, but how are you really doing?
Right.
And how are you doing working in this environment and what do you really need?
You know, I talked to a sales manager, Eric, in the other day and he said two Two of his biggest problems, and one of them you called out, which. Which is when I'm hiring new people, they're not sticking because they're coming in in this virtual environment, and they're not connecting with a team. And they're saying, well, this is really not what I was looking for in my job. And they end up going away. And the other one was the frustration that sales reps are feeling about their own inefficiency. And we talk about, well, people are working at home now. They've got kids, they're homeschooling. They've got all this distraction, all this stuff going on. And his reps are telling him, look, I'm getting stressed out because I've got kids here, I've got the dog. I've got all this stuff going on. And he's saying, wait a second. What's happening is you're not actually on the road. You're not driving from Westchester to Queens to New Jersey to Manhattan. You're not traveling and having all that inefficiency that you used to have. So even if you used up half that amount of time dealing with some things you have going on around the house, you know, you're still probably better off. But his whole message was, be a little bit more forgiving of yourself. And, you know, so as a coach, he's telling his people, you know, ease back a little bit and kind of, you know, slow it down and don't worry. And this is just a different environment, but you can be. You can still be efficient in this role.
Well, think about. Yeah. That flexibility mindset, which is so hard to embrace.
Yeah.
I mean, what's the easiest thing you can measure? I remember sitting in a sales bullpen once, and it was a late night. I was there because I was in another company's office. I was just working late there rather than going back to my hotel room because I didn't like the hotel desk. They had a nice chair and a desk for me. So I'm there, and the CSO comes out, and he looks around at how few people. He's like, well, I guess everybody's hitting their numbers, because the one measurement he had is butts in seats. And he would check it. He was the first one in, and he'd be watching to see who came in early and he'd be watching or at least on time, and who was still there at the end of the day. It was a tough environment, but that was the measure. He just figured there has to be a correlation between butts and seats and Performance. Now I wonder if that's really there. And actually there was a piece of research that I saw last year talking about activity based incentives. Mark, I think you and I had over a pint discussion about this once of should we pay reps to do their job. Okay, think about. I think if it's not in Salesforce, it doesn't exist. Is a line that we use internally on a regular basis. If you haven't logged the call, the call didn't happen. You can see new companies like Chorus AI that has software that will now automatically log calls, log calendars and all that stuff. It's pretty cool. It's kind of creepy, but it's great. It does auto updating of everything. Do you know the activities necessary to succeed as a company? I mean do you really know? Is it the account plan? Is it the at least five contacts at the customer? Is it the rate of talking? Do you know those? How long is your sales cycle? Is your sales cycle, let's say, let's call it a five month sales cycle. Not uncommon for say mid market high dollar deals. Okay, are you willing to pay for some of those? What if you paid for having a full account plan fleshed out and submitted and signed off? Not a lot, but enough to remind people to do it. Now why am I going down this path? Because people are sitting down at their desks and thinking what do I do now? What could I be doing right now to help me? They kind of know, but they don't. You know, people don't necessarily see the connection. Even I don't always see the connection. It's like working now. Hey Eric, if you'll start working out every day, it'll be in health. Well, I worked out for two weeks and nothing's happened. Hey, we'll get, you know, but you can see these things where you can put in a wager like you know that you have to make a donation to charity if you don't work out for one month straight. So that's a negative incentive, but it's still there. And that's one of those things to go with. And the reason I bring that up is when that manager calls up, are they saying how's it such and such deal? Or are they saying hey, let's go over all of your account plans. What does a pipeline review meeting look like today when everybody's remote and then back onto the schedule thing? My schedule has changed. I live again in California. More importantly, I'm in the Pacific time zone now. I will get up pretty early because I support people in Central and the east coast, but I also support people in London. Recently we had our user conference in Europe on BST and so my alarm went off at 1am I grabbed myself three hours of sleep, got up, showered, put on a jacket, got on a Zoom, still no socks and did two different presentations and conversations with our European customer base. They had no idea where I was now. Then I went, you know, when it was all done I went back to bed and I didn't start the next phase of my day until around 10am Pacific. And I cut a little early and nobody cared because that was the shift. Are those frontline sales managers empowered to allow their sales reps to say, hey boss, here's the thing, I get up at 6, I do a first round of emails and calls. I then take a one hour break. I have breakfast with my 11 year old. I make sure that they're set up in their desk in their bedroom with their computer and they've turned off the gaming stuff and whatever it is or not or I play a game with them so they get it out of their system, they get started in school. Then I'm back on doing this stuff. Now at 3 o' clock I'm going to sign off again because I'm going to work with my kid on their homework. But then at 5 o' clock I'm going to work on all my emails and my account plan. We can start breaking these chunks up and scatter them throughout the day. And at that point I think the sales manager's bigger job is yeah, but how many hours are you putting in? Not are you putting in enough, but are you putting in too many and just spinning your wheels?
So where's the line between work and non work? And I'm hearing that from a lot of people that they're actually spending more hours. I know we can speak for that as well. They're spending more hours working because there's, there's a gray line. Right. And so yeah, so you got that and you got the big question which we've been talking about, Michelle, which is what does the new sales playbook look like? Because we're in different environments, we're working by ourselves, we need to receive coaching in different ways.
That's right, yeah.
We need to sell in different ways and we need a new playbook. Each company needs a new playbook about how they're going to do it. Because when you think about it, think about the sports metaphor here. We're on a team. Traditionally everybody's together physically. We're Connecting the coach can see what's going on. The coach meaning the sales manager. And now you can't do that when you're by yourself. You know, like you said, you know, you're working out by yourself. I had this one sales VP said to me once, he said, you know, he said, it's like we're down in the basement and we're bench pressing 110 and we think we're knocking it out. And he said, but, you know, you don't have anything to compare it to. You don't know what you're doing. You lost your coach.
Yeah.
So what's the playbook?
Yeah, I think that playbook is critical and that quick connection and that finding the time without it being yet another. I do think there's a value in giving people time back, as they say. You know, I have changed my settings. We use the Google platform for email and calendaring. My calendar setting is for 25 minutes. I'm about to knock it down to 15, my standard meeting. I don't need more than 15 minutes most of the time. I really don't. We need to review an issue, get it done and give people their time back. If you saw my calendar, you would see every day from 3 to 5 Pacific is blocked. And it says dir ducks in a row. All I do is I spend two hours every day to make sure that any small partial things going on were completed, done or teed up for the next day. And it has actually made me so much more productive to have that block, to not get into another 30 minute or 45 minute or 1 hour meeting overlapping where I can't do anything creative. I can't really think through a challenge or something. And so my, I mean, honestly, think about it. I have 10 hours a week, more than a full workday, blocked to get my ducks in a row. Now that was always there before and sometimes, you know, it's, you know, you talked about the driving around. Yeah, I used to commute up to la. It was an hour each way, plus or minus depending upon, you know, what, what time of day I got on the road. When I stopped doing it, I kind of missed it. Which is for someone to say they missed driving in LA traffic. You know, you might want to send me back to that mental health team I was on a panel with. But what it was was I would make calls to the east Coast. You know, I had a nice speakerphone system in the car that I installed at an old Lincoln Continental, you know, that I was driving. It was great, silent, big tank And I could just hit dial and have the call and move on. And I got. I would get stuff done sometimes or I would do a books on tape or something like that. When I was flying all the time, I realized my flying time was almost a downtime for me because emails weren't coming in. On the flip side, while we've been talking, I can see a counter up on a tab on a browser. And I've gotten 25 emails now. 20 of those are some poor BDR SDR hoping that I am their angle into the company, and I really, actually have respect for them. We hire them, we all deal with this. But you talk about the selling model, right? Think of that plan. Who has fixed their plans? What was one of the stages of the old plans? Send them some swag. I'm gonna send you a coffee mug. Hold it. Hey, Mr. Client, you know that I'm trying to sell to. Can you give me your home address so I can send you a present? My home address? I mean, think about it. But we're all working from home because I get that.
I mean, it's a little creepy.
Think about it. But if you wanted to send that care package, if I want to send you a bottle of Cabrera wine, because our CEO has his own vineyard and I've got a case of his wine, I need your home address.
Our office is open. You can see.
I knew. I knew I was coming. That was a total setup for you, Michelle. But, yeah, think about it. Okay? So the swag delivery is gone. I can't bring the box of donuts. I can't take you out to dinner for a cocktail. The personal side of selling is so hampered right now if you don't already have the relationship. Which is the other reason why I think companies are focusing on the existing customer base where you have a relationship, but that part is gone. Which means your sales reps that were really good at personal relationships, that part of their skill set is not as critical. Or they have to find a way to do it over a call. The sales manager I was talking about, who built their entire career on being everybody's best friend and going to ball game. I've rented out suites and taking partners to, like, a Giants baseball game. We've got tickets for the Sharks hockey, which we couldn't use. Okay. I mean, I interviewed the president of the Sharks recently and talked to him, and Becker was talking about all the challenges they have. But, like, one of those things, those corporate suites. Think of all the corporate suites that exist to create a personal live engagement how are you going to replace that in your action plan for sales?
Boy, that's tough. You know, one of the things that we've said is, to your point, you can't send them the swag. You're not getting together with them. And you know, we talked about prospecting being a problem, so I mean, same thing with even penetration. And what we're saying is you've got to be better as a salesperson of doing more upfront discovery, becoming like this data driven creative problem solver. And that just means what's going on in their industry? What are the problems they're solving for? Doing some. We were just talking to a global telecommunications company that does cable and other things and they're actually looking at some intelligence that would say, you know, what are the wi fi needs in a home? How many people might be living in a home like answering questions and looking at things and providing information to the sales team that maybe they didn't have before so that they can have more intelligent conversations when they actually get them on the phone. So we're saying is they got to be better at looking and analyzing data and understanding where opportunities really might be so that they're solving problems.
Yeah, the future is going to go to the data driven problem solvers. So the salespeople that can, that can use data effectively in lieu of the relationship.
Yeah, right. They've got to be a little bit smarter. I mean, think of how many times have you gone in and you ran into a sales rep who is reading from a script. I joke, I've got people who call on me and I'm like, hold it. Do you even know what my company does? I mean, seriously, my LinkedIn profile is not hidden. You know, you can find Eric Charles on LinkedIn. It's really easy. It's right there. Come on. And one of the things I've said in sales training is like, before you ask for 30 minutes of someone's time, you owe them at least five minutes of researching them and their company. And I watch people write that down. I'm like, why do you have to write that down? And since you've lost the personal, you need to get twice as much professional information. I agree. It's like, what is going on in their industry? What are the executive priorities of that company going on back to the sales plan? I mean, really, executive priorities. You can find interviews with our CEO, you can find their blog. And yeah, blog is professionally written, but it's still, it's not gonna, it is still going to be an accurate reflection of where the leadership wants to be.
You know, I think, Eric, I don't know if you share this with me, but one of my sick guilty pleasures is when one of those salespeople calls you on the phone, and I don't hang up. And I let them do their pitch.
It's very important.
And then, you know, then I talk to them, and I give them some feedback and coaching. I mean, so, yeah, I mean, you know, one by one, we're gonna. We're gonna train all the inside.
I do the same. But my wife laughs. She'll see me answer the phone, and I'll say, just like, let me get my headset. And I'll put on just a set of. I'll keep doing the dishes or cooking dinner. I mean, even if no matter what time, she's like. Or I've been out walking my dog before. And she's like, what were you doing? I said, well, it seemed like a good kid, and they just needed a little guidance. True. They were so nervous. They're. Hi. Hi, Marcus. Really great to talk to you, and it's wonderful if you've ever heard about this. And. Whoa, bro, breathe. Okay, you got me. I made the mistake. I answered. I will also tell you that there's been at least one person on our payroll that I poached from another company. They called up. They had a good. They were really good, but the product was atrocious. Like. And I just said, why are you selling this? Why is this your thing? Now, here's the thing I want to bring up. Do we have. I mean, you guys are in the office. We're not. We're a basic. I think we're at 20, 25% capacity in one of our offices. The other one is still empty. One of the things we are proving right now is we don't have to have offices in that sense. And, you know, we. The. So you can hire wider. So think of what that means to your hiring plans. Now, that hits your onboarding, but it also hits your recruiting. So now when I get a really good person cold calling that I like how they operate in their research, I tell them we're hiring, want to sell a good product, want to work for a, you know, something else that's a little. Little more dialed in. That'll give you some more resources to work with. And I've had one success out of it where someone actually, like, took it down and brought them on board. Well, now, I mean, I'm. I can hire from anywhere because I don't. You know, we started this conversation. Where do you see the future? I see part of the future is I'm realizing I don't have to just hire in Denver and San Jose again. I'm a remote. Other people can be remote, but I am going to have to figure out how to manage them remotely. Could be anything from the systems that automatically record the calls. And good managers will sit there, hey, let's listen in on that call together. I'm going to hit record on Zoom and we're going to review how you presented and what you did, which is nerve wracking. But I went through that. I went through a presentation skills training early in my career and I actually every couple of years there's a drama professor here that I have audit me. He does it on the side. Eli Simon, he runs the drama department here at UC Irvine and he's beautiful. Shakespearean productions he puts on. But he is also really good at looking you and saying, okay, let's talk about your stance. Let's talk about where your hands were. Let's talk about Eric. You talk too fast sometimes and he's great. And I think that's one of the ones, you know, thinking about this a little deeper. There we go. There's a job position that used to exist, presentation skills for the Zoom meeting. I'm sure there's somebody out there and I'm going to get 15 emails in LinkedIn. I accept it, but who's training people to do a better job presenting over Zoom or WebEx or whatever.
We'll have a few, at least a couple future roundtables on that. So everybody that's listening, come back for those, too.
Yeah, come back for those. So what we're hearing is that boundaries matter less now. We are out of time, everyone, and we have some things we want to bring Eric back to talk about, I think, because I know one topic, Eric, that we'll be talking about on my podcast, at least around women in sales. But we'll have to come back for that one. So everyone stay tuned. This has been highly engaging and thank you so much for sharing your time with us, Eric. It was really, really, really super fun. Next week we're going to have a special guest, Dan Cilley, who has a company vendor neutral. And what we're going to be talking about is something we've been addressing, Mark, which is, you know, we know that 90% of Fortune 500 CEOs have said that they're accelerating their technology transformations and this is going to be about, where do you start? So thanks again, Eric, for being with us, everyone. Thank you. We hope you enjoyed this week's roundtable. Don't forget to register for next week and give us a call. Talk to us about your toughest challenges. And everyone, have a great weekend. And thank you again for being here today.
Thanks, everybody.
Bye bye.
Thank you.
Thanks, Eric.
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