Optimizing Sales Performance with Streamlined Processes and Training

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are joining from. Welcome to Coffee Time with SalesTable. This is a meeting and meetups with sales leaders that we've been doing for the last couple of years with SalesTable. And today we have a great friend and a guest of mine, Dani. Welcome.

Hello.

Yeah, Dani, you and I met during the SaaStr a couple of years back. And then after that, I think, you know, pretty much talking about the sales enablement and the whole of the real connection between the sales enablement, sales processes, training, and that has become a passionate topic for both of us. So we will definitely dig deep today into some of those insights that you have. Before we get there, can you briefly kind of give us a path through on your journey and then I think, you know, what you do currently with that capital?

Yeah.

Oh, Suresh, I'd be happy to do that. And first of all, thank you so much for having me on. I know we've been talking about this for a while, so it's exciting to be here. Let's see. So my journey— I wasn't expecting that question. My journey started about 18 years ago. I've been in sales and technology sales for that long. Leadership for probably I think it's 14 years or so. But one of the things that makes me really passionate about the topics we're going to hit on today is part of my journey is I've held just about every single role you can have in a sales organization. So that covers sales administration back then. That was the name for sales ops. It has a sexier name now these days.

Yeah.

But part of what I've always done is I've always come in and figured out how to grow and maximize revenue plans. And launch new business lines. And from, from there, I, I actually moved into sales leadership quite, quite early in my career. I think I was in my mid-20s, uh, when I, when I was fortunate to be tapped and given that type of opportunity. And, uh, from there, I've helped companies and owners navigate and grow business strategies so they can accomplish acquisitions. So liquidity events up to the $55 million with publicly traded private equity groups. Um, I, I've been from the startup world for quite some time, uh, and then moved on to round out my experience, uh, with enterprise global sales and working with businesses even in the first Fortune 10 and doing deals, uh, with that, with them. That was, I think, part of the, some of the most fun I, I had. So, and that, that move was really intentional, uh, to get into that space so I could round out the experience I have.

And what I'm doing today is I founded my own sales consulting firm late fall last year. I gave myself a company actually for my birthday in October.

That was the official announcement.

And today I help founders, CEOs, and other sales leaders do what I've done for 18 years, which is effectively grow revenue to scale for for liquidity events, for different types of growth events. And yeah, I—

that, that's the exciting part about what I do. It's the same thing I've been doing for 18 years now. I just do it for, uh, for other businesses. So there you go. That, that's me. That's a bit of my journey and, uh, my background, what I'm doing today.

Yeah, uh, thanks for that. So the one that is, uh, very relevant and exciting, um, for our folks is you are, I think, you know, very valued experience between the startups and the enterprise and the mid-market. I think, you know, you've been there, you've seen everything. So today, here is what I think we will focus on, Danny. I think 2022, 2023, and 2024 has been very, very different years for many organizations. Doesn't really matter, multi-billion dollar companies or startups. I think everybody are seeing challenges, the longer sales cycles, the growth has slowed for some. And of course, I think a lot of AI companies are doing great, but then again, it's one thing to say what is ticking out there and it is another thing to say, are they really growing their revenue? I think there are 2 different things that people always get confused about. So first things first, a lot of companies companies that we talk to, the founders or the sales leaders have this kind of strange problem now, right? Which is to say, hey, you know what, in the last 5 years or 6 years, we've had a sales methodology, we have a sales process that has worked to some extent. And now 2023, it didn't work. 2024 Q1, then, you know, probably it is working, but we still don't know. What that really meant for us was whenever we went to sales leaders, we are like, okay, of course, as SalesTable, we want to make sure that their sales teams are exceeding their quota. That's really our mission. But at the same time, what is it that we can help them as a 360-degree overview of really reviewing their sales teams, making sure that the sales process is working, and they have the right toolset, and then making sure that the help that we provide from SalesTable fits in their criteria, right? I know you have done a lot of the sales process, the sales ops, and the methodology part of it. So my question to you really is to say, what does it really mean by a sales process? And why should somebody have sales process? The reason why this is a very critical question, as though for everybody, is a lot of sales reps, because they're doing great, they get promoted to AE. And then after that, they get promoted to a sales manager, and then director of sales. And all of a sudden, you have this role and title, but unfortunately you don't have the necessary training to actually get these processes set or to really think about which one is the right process for our organization. So if you can throw some light on what, from your experience, what does it really mean by a sales process? How do people pick and choose between different sales processes? That would be super helpful.

Oh yeah, Suresh, that was a lot of great context and I'd be happy to talk about that. I actually, I've been that sales manager, that individual contributor multiple times in my life, my career here. But, you know, I think that there's— I think there's a couple of things that's happening really before I kind of get into the topic of your question. I think from everyone the last 5 years is one of the periods you're mentioning. I think everyone from the public space, from whether your business is publicly traded to the private privately owned businesses all the way through the private equity and VC valuation activities.

I think everyone, the trends we've seen the last 5 years really revolve around us trying to normalize as an industry. I think that's a big part of what is making these types of conversations and activities for sales leaders and sales managers so complicated right now. We have a massive amount of data that is really out of the norm of what we've experienced for years in that industry. So being able to kind of recalibrate, and this comes down to really in my mind getting focused on the fundamentals and assessing which part of your process actually needs that level of optimization. Yeah. Because what you find is, let's say for example, you are going through these steps and you you think you have a closing issue, right? So you think you have a closing issue, and what you're really finding is when, when you dig into this, uh, you don't necessarily have a closing issue. What you have is a fun— a focus on the fundamentals. And the focus on the fundamentals means, um, when you look at some of the pieces of the sales process there, uh, I think it was Jed Blount, the person I remember from like maybe 10 years ago, from one of his books talking about this. But when you focus on the discovery piece of the sales process, if you think you have a closing issue, what's really interesting is you might think you need negotiation tactics and negotiation training. But when in actuality, you find when you go, when you look at that initial data, when you dig back into the entire total sales process, is that you're not going, or sales is not going deep enough on the discovery pieces where they're not going deep enough on the business pain points and what their solution solves and the impact of their solution to alleviate those business pain points. Because when you don't do that early enough in the sales process, you don't capture what kind of levers you need to pull for an actual business case. And so when you actually, when you're seeing a closing issue, that actually, in actuality, could be rooted further upstream in this. So I, you know, I actually have a slide, if you don't mind, Yeah, absolutely.

Statistics.

Let me go ahead and share my screen just real briefly, and we, we won't do too many slides, don't worry.

Um, can everyone see my— can you see my screen?

Yeah.

Okay, so what, what you see here is there's a combination of what our outlook needs to be as we're going through, as we're going through and assessing our, our sales process. And what, what we are finding is that, um, this is a McKinsey quote, so more than 30% of sales-related activities can be automated with today's technology. And being able, as a leader, going through your sales process and identifying which parts of your sales process you can truly automate without losing value, right, without losing that type of brand value, is, is so important. And when you go through this, you actually see that 54% of sales professionals believe the technology is a great, great resource. So like, I think it's a combination when you're going through your sales process of figuring out how to leverage workflows and automation and AI really is going to be a major differentiator. But when you think about the other side of this, which is truly the art form of sales, is actually kind of going through— and I think that's the wrong slide, but— oh no, it actually is the right slide. So when you're looking at this, what we've found in some of the stats coming out is that 80% of sales and marketing teams don't review and correct their sales process. So I think there's a really big opportunity to go in and tighten on the fundamentals because I mean, look at this, this prospecting is such a major part of the initial funnel. So yeah, there's my rant on your sales process question.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So which is basically coming back to that aspect, which is to say data-oriented decision-making is key. key, right? I mean, for somebody, of course, I mean, when a— for a startup, when a founder starts, you know, it could be 1 month, 3 months, 1 year, there may not be a lot of data for them to really look into. But still, but when we look into the mid-market SMBs or even enterprises, I'm sure, you know, there is years or quarters of data that they can actually look into and say, How is the funnel? How are we progressing? What are the rates of the movement between the stages of the funnel? That is the data that you can absolutely look into. That's just the first insight. The second one, which is, I think I want to double-click on what you mentioned, which is to say a lot of sales reps fear the qualification questions. Because it's one of those things where if somebody is relationship-oriented rep, then they're like, oh, you know what, I want to get to a next call, which means I want to postpone those hard questions for some other day.

Yeah.

The problem with that mentality is you have this huge pipeline that is generated because you have that pipeline, but the closing of that pipeline is taking much longer because these people are just kicking the can down the road and you never get to ask those questions in the fear that what if the prospect rejects or what if the prospect doesn't really have the need at this point of time. But that's really where I think it comes to the next point that you talked about, which is we have to on a periodic basis, I mean, it could be every quarter for somebody, it could be every half a year for somebody, whatever that is, to review those sales data and then see what is making sense. I mean, who is performing well and not, and then really get to the next level.

Yeah.

The one part I want to get to is, Dani, there are so many sales processes out there. When I say that, I mean, we have the Medic, MedPic, Challenger sales, and the Sandler sales. Everybody has, of course, I mean, there is merits for each and every one of them. But in your experience, how do you think about a particular methodology for sales and how do you kind of bring something into the organization and fit the needs of your sales team and the context?

Oh, great question.

That's interesting you bring up all the different sales methodologies because I talked about this recently, I think, on Midday Connect on their stream. And one of the things that I, I highlighted is all of these different sales methodologies, they really focus on, um, on the what, right?

They— I think of them— that's how I think about them. I think of them as what frameworks, right? So, uh, just to add a couple more into the mix, you have, you have the Miller Heiman Consultative Selling, you have Thomas Frazee's Question-Based Selling, you have, uh, Command of the Message by Force Management, right? To just to name a couple additional ones. And what And Challenger, with the exception of Challenger, Challenger has a bit of a different, uh, a different vibe to it because it's very much, uh, it's not a what I would consider a consultative approach. All the other methodologies that you mentioned are really consultative approach, which I, I think is what's necessary in the market, especially today with how prevalent information and competition is. And when you really go through and dig into all these different methodologies that, that you just talked about and the ones I added, is they all have They all have a— they're all different, but they have a common theme. They have a common theme of focused— of being focused on asking really amazing questions, right? And I, I think that that, um, is, is a— what you— a common factor that really, as salespeople, we need, we need to focus on. So when you think about it, just changes about how you frame those types of questions and how you deliver your value props. So you have Thomas Frazee's, uh, question-based selling that focuses on not only asking the initial top-line question, but asking questions that go a couple different layers deeper. And they say that they're helping prospects uncover those latent needs that they didn't necessarily know they had in this conversation, but are related and how you can work that into your advantage in the sales process. Another one that I'm really, that I think is applicable is force management's command of the message, because what that does is it helps you frame those questions where you're saying, okay, well, this is what we do, this is why we do it, and here's the proof, right? It kind of serves up that type of format. So when you think about, and when you think about like how you can leverage these in your sales process, really it's when you take the common themes out of all of them, right? All about the what framework on how to get there. And what I think is incomplete there is those aren't customized to your business. Right. And so if you can take one of those frameworks that works really well for your business and couple that with a really effective customized sales playbook, I really think there that that's where you have something you can, you can coach to. And Suresh, when I, when I think about, when I think about a sales playbook, actually, hold on, I'm a sales playbook nerd. So I actually have something for that. When you think about sales playbook, some of the major traits there are, can you hand it to someone? If you hire somebody tomorrow, can you hand it to a sales rep of any skill level and can they execute on the steps to get, to get a deal in closing position? Um, are the process steps repeatable? Uh, 80% of the talk tracks are the same. The question— the answers to the questions are different, but 80% of those talk tracks and questions that open up those conversations to get those answers from businesses Those are the same. And what the value you get by bringing in one of these customized sales playbooks, and I have a link and a template I can share here just as a free giveaway. But what you find is that any manager can coach to the sales process and it helps make sales ramp predictable. And the format, right, is easy to use. 'Cause if it's not easy to use, people aren't gonna do it.

Absolutely.

So that's one of the next segue that we definitely want to do, which is the sales playbooks. I mean, a lot of it, what we see is people often get confused between, hey, you know what, I have a great email sequence, I have a great LinkedIn sequence, and there is a talk track. But then that's more or less like when founder-led sales kind of are transitioning into more of sales-led sales. That's one of the aspects where there is a lot of confusion as to say, What should a playbook have? I mean, at a minimum, right? I mean, again, we're not really trying to boil the ocean. I mean, we don't need a 1,000-page reference manual. But from your point of view, from previous experiences that you have, how do you think about sales playbook and how often do you typically change sales playbook?

Okay.

So let me take the last part of your question and answer that first, and then I'll double back to the rest. I love that question about founders transitioning out of being founder-led sales organizations. So when I'm thinking about the last part of your question here, that is really about how often do you change and update a sales playbook, right?

Yeah.

So a big factor there is in a sales environment, you always want to be working on how you can have an edge on your competition, or how you can stay ahead of your market demands and where your market needs to go and the needs of your clients, right? All those things are really closely related. And when— the way you can do that is, um, I, I did this in one of my first sales leadership roles, is always be looking for different aspects of how to increase sales velocity. Okay, so when you think of how to increase sales velocity, uh, that could be a a handful of different activities. And to your point earlier, sales velocity, just to define it so we have it for the audience, is how quickly a deal will move through those different sales stages, right, that as part of the sales cycle, right?

Mm-hmm.

So if you can shorten any piece of that and you're, you're, let's say the real-life example that I went through is we had launched a new product. We were trying to move clients from being on an on-premise software solution to a SaaS platform. And that was very— it was a very, very, uh, low-tech type of market. It was the construction industry. So very high-tech in their area, very low-tech in their practices, and they're catching up now, uh, even more. But what, uh, what I found is that, uh, even before we were trying to get— grow this revenue stream, and even before, uh, prospects would agree to go into that type of sales cycle discussion, there— my, my salespeople were spending such a large amount of time on the education piece about why, why someone should move from an on-prem to a cloud solution. And, uh, in order to really solve— that's an example of kind of always be listening to how you can move your sales cycle, your sales processes faster. Because what we did then when I identified that is I actually, uh, went and I worked with the marketing VP to create these long campaign drip education pieces that just focused on one pain point.

Right.

So, I mean, by the time we got there, um, we were seeing people agreeing to enter into the deal cycles very, very early on. And when I think about whether it's a founder leading sales or it's a founding sales account executive, right, it's like I, I played both roles in some of these environments. And what, what I found there is you want to really— it comes back to the fundamentals again. What, what initially started your business? What grew your business? What had people invest? What have your clients that signed on originally? Why did they rave with you? And why did they rave with you? Why did they rave about you? And when you go back and you examine those as part of building out your sales playbook, you really want to focus on what those business attributes were initially with your ideal customer profiles, your ideal profiles and made them move in the first place. And when you, when you can take that and transition it to a sales playbook with different— and that's, that's talking about your elevator pitch, that's talking about your value proposition for cold calling, that's talking about the different motions and the different time you do those motions in your sales cycle to, uh, create that education and that relationship, right? And, and introduce that information at the right times. Those are the elements really that you want to focus on.

That's amazing. Not to give away too much, the elevator pitches, the cold calls, and then the objection handling, you know, that's the kind of coaching that we just released, by the way, through our platform. I mean, at some point of time, you and I should definitely talk, but that's an amazing piece for us because that makes salespeople confident. I think, you know, at the end of the day, When they go in front of the prospects, customers, doesn't really matter, events, wherever that is, they have to be able to represent themselves and the company and the product well. And the only way to do it is by practice.

Yeah. Right.

And there is unfortunately a misconception that everybody has that, oh, you know what, if there is a star salesperson, you don't need to really coach them. They will do whatever they want to do. But that's actually counterintuitive because you can't really have one star person and then let your other 9 salespeople to be whatever they want to do.

Right.

That's really where I think which gets into the next segment, which is you talked about, hey, you know what, when you have these sales processes and then sales playbooks, it should be in a way where I give it to my new hire or somebody that came in from a different product sales to this particular product, whatever that case might be. And that leads to the question, which is a lot of customers that we talk to and the prospects and the customers that we have in the last 8 to 10 years, there are these budgets where they brought in the sales teams probably once in a year, twice in a year to a location And then they did a 2-day or 5-day sales training.

Okay. Yeah.

With the products and then the depth of it and then the cross-selling, upselling angle, everything. But now, especially in 2022 onwards, those budgets have vanished, right? It's not just about the budget now, but then unfortunately a lot of the middle management, think of them as the sales managers or the training managers, they were all unfortunately let go. Because of the economic and revenue reasons. And now the question that they're all thinking through is, hey, now that we need to make this, we see the value in training, in onboarding, and then continuous upskilling of my sales team because they are the ones who have to go out there and sell. So from that angle, Dani, from your experience, what are some best practices that you've seen In onboarding salespeople?

Yes.

Okay. Yeah. And, you know, even when, Suresh, when we had those— when those budgets for sales training were more prevalent, right, even when we had those, I think this theory or this concept still applies.

A lot of what I believe is, I mean, it goes back to one of your original points about practice. So as a sales leader or a salesperson myself, I never really want the first time I— a concept— I know sometimes this is unavoidable, but you never really want the first time, uh, we're practicing some type of sales material that the business has given us or concept, you never want that to happen the first time in front of your prospect or customer, right? If that's avoidable. And in some circumstances, that may not, may not be, uh, possible.

I think I've been in that situation. More than I care to remember. But what you find is that by going kind of going through those steps, it's not necessarily about what you're doing; it's more about how often you're practicing.

I remember somebody, a CEO I worked with, said off the cuff to me after we were I think we had interviewed some some salespeople, and we were talking about the candidates, and one of the qualities they they raised because they didn't have a sales background, the CEO didn't. a sales background. Most folks I work with don't. And he said something like, uh, well, they just didn't seem like they could roll with something because even when they maybe they misspoke or they made a mistake or whatever, they, uh, they, they couldn't brush it off. It actually, uh, caused them to like to hurt themselves, right?

Yeah. It threw them, it threw them off base a little bit, off, uh, balance.

And that, that's a very big note of not practicing your craft, right? So when you're very comfortable with a topic, when you're very comfortable with this type of sales training, you're able— even if you make a mistake or somebody kind of makes you go out of order, you can recalibrate. And that only happens when you have regular practice. So when I— one of the things I do for businesses as part of my business is produce customized sales playbooks tailored to their company. And one of the things I include is the actual follow-on practice. Because if you're not moving step by step in some way, shape, or form, practicing the fundamentals with your team on the regular, it's just like a sports team. Somebody else who practices more regularly than you, that practices harder than you, they're gonna kick your ass. Sorry, it's just the truth, and it's a competitive world.

That's it.

Completely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, so from that angle, I think, you know, one of the follow-up that I have is some businesses, some companies, some sales leaders exactly understand the value of continuous coaching.

Yeah.

Right. And some don't. And what is your approach to say, how important is the aspect of continuous upskilling, continuous coaching, especially in the scenario where in 2024, The deals are kind of taking longer to close for all the right reasons. And it's not as easy to convince somebody to, let's say, just buy something because it is valuable. I think now the barrier to entry into no matter what kind of software, hardware, or whatever is the business, I think everybody are facing these challenges of slow growth in general. So, how do you really think about that continuous upskilling to the sales teams?

Yeah, you know, it's a little bit, it's kind of related to how we originally started this talk about the sales process, because if you don't, let's take the devil's advocate piece and say, if you don't have that type of philosophy and use that type of approach with helping upskill your team on the regular, What's going to happen is you're going to start to see leakage in your sales organization, whether it's like a hole. Think of a leaky ship. Leaky ships are going to, right? That's the analogy I like to use because as time goes on, just like a ship on the water, as time goes on, if you don't maintain it, you're going to actually start seeing an issue with the performance, right? So that can look something like when you see it, you could see a retention issue.

Right.

And some of these things, depending on the age demographic of your team that you have, um, people at different levels in their career— let's say they're a bit earlier in their career, let's say they're in their mid or late 20s or early 30s or something, or 40s, and they, they're in that stage in their life where they're trying to move, they're trying to move forward and increase their skill set because they want growth, right? I mean, those people that have that drive and have that desire They're gonna find it one way or another. And it's a matter of, okay, well, are you going to help? Are you going to help guide the narrative for your business? Or are you going to start seeing this issue in something like retention, where you have, you have employees that are going into other companies because they're not stimulated with that growth factor? You'll start seeing fatigue, I think, in your sales process where things will start kind of slowing down and you're not really sure why. You kind of sit there. I mean, Suresh, you've probably been in these board meetings just like me in these management meetings, and people are sitting around scratching their heads saying, okay, well, we didn't change anything. The market's humming along. Inflation is coming down a bit. What's happening? And I really think that those, when you start seeing some of those symptoms, it's just like a muscle fatiguing. That's it. It's just sales is like that.

That's it. It's a living, breathing organization.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the one thing that you talked about is very relevant for us as to say, when salespeople leave, when there is a high churn or turnover of salespeople, a lot of sales leaders don't understand, unfortunately, the hidden cost of salespeople leaving.

Right.

It's always about, yeah, okay, salespeople left. I mean, a salesperson left, so let me go redo the hiring. Okay, hiring actually costs, right? And then hiring takes time. And then once somebody comes in, there is an average of about 4 to 5 months for somebody to get really onboarded on the sales side of it. So which you are effectively thinking about 7 months when a salesperson leaves, you know, you are spending all the time for the hiring, you are onboarding them, and which— in which case you are spending the salaries on these salespeople without actually having the revenue generated. And all this time for the 7 months, there is no revenue generated.

Yep.

Right. And that's really, I think, you know, a huge case where we need to really put it out there for a lot of sales leaders where, ah, okay, I mean, if salespeople leave, I'll go bring somebody else. Yeah, yeah, sure, you can bring somebody else, but making sure that the people that you have right now, they are given the right tools to get upskilled and then really perform better, is a much better value proposition for them rather than having the mindset of, oh, I'll put them in the PIP, they will go out, I'll bring somebody Yeah. Right. So from that angle, the one of the things that I'm looking at is when salespeople come in, typically, what would be your idea or what you have seen in the industry as to say, what should be a typical onboarding and training process should look like?

Okay. Yeah. And so just to, to think about that, to quantify that, um, I, I think that the attributes, the attributes of a sales and onboarding and training process are very similar across enterprise, mid-market, SMB. Uh, I think the period, the ramp period that we're talking about is, uh, is shortened or longer, right, for the different market sizes, right? Obviously for enterprise, you're have the longest ramp period that we're talking about here. But I mean, really, some of the key elements for sales onboarding is, uh, it's building, it's building this right from the get-go. I think, you know what, I, yeah, I actually was in, uh, I was in a group session, a chapter meeting by, with the Sales Enablement Society, um, with my late mentor, 6 or probably 6 or 7 years ago now. And, uh, there was a really, there was a really good example where you had a business that was scaling past how they could— how they— this is, this is before the gravy days of SaaS, right? You had a business scaling past, um, how fast they could onboard reps and they couldn't keep up. And what— when they, when they positioned that question to the group, uh, the group got really excited and wanted to do like a live workshop of the session, which is really cool. And, um, I, I can't remember the company name. It was over in Carpinteria. But the person— the reason I'm bringing this up, Suresh, is the company Procore at the time had one of the tightest onboarding, sales onboarding processes I had heard of back then. And here's kind of the elements of it, which I thought were so cool. So it focused, it was really the bootcamp. First, there was a 30-day bootcamp.

Okay. Yeah.

And before, I think before people even hit the ground, before they even came to HQ, they had a packet that was delivered to them, which was what you would consider, like in a college course, you consider prerequisite knowledge, right? So maybe you have, you know these things already, maybe you don't, whatever. Here's a refresher if you do. If you don't, here's the prerequisite work that you need. And that really is, are things like, to make it applicable to the audience, that's industry trends, that's industry language. How do you talk like these folks that you're selling to? That's, uh, uh, identifying and understanding your ideal client profile inside and out, right?

Right.

If we wanna lean back to one of the sales methodologies we talked about, like MEDDIC, or I'm sure all of them referenced this, but who's your economic buyer in that situation? Who's your, who's your common economic buyers? They could be different roles as well. Um, and then who are your common champions and what are the common pitfalls that you run into Um, when, when trying to talk to these type of organizations. From, from there, the type of prerequisite work is understanding the, understanding the pain points that make your business relevant and that make your solution relevant, because that's what you solve. And then understanding how you solve them, right? So that, that to me is all foundational coursework that you need when onboarding a sales rep, and that they, they had a really tight way to bring in their reps through all those different stages. And I think part of what I loved so much about the way the program was designed is they had such a tight playbook system where they would get you through. The idea was to get you through a sales cycle in your first 30 days.

Got it. Wow. Okay. Okay.

That's fast, right? And I think in some organizations that's too fast. That's not possible. Like if you think of my last role with ERP sales, that, that, that wasn't— that, that's not realistic. Like, a fast time frame is 3 months, for that, which is fast to begin with. But if you take that concept in itself and you take what your average sales cycle is, helping a rep get through those steps in the first 30, 60, 90 days of a sales cycle, depending on what your length is, uh, that's the confidence boost and that's the confidence builder that you were talking about, I think, earlier. in this talk, because if you— I kind of call them at-bats. So the more at-bats you can have somebody have in a sales process, right, earlier in the onboarding period, the more they learn simply by doing. That's it. You've got to do the work. You've got to go out there and actually do the steps and whack your head a couple times to learn.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So now, as a kind of, I think, a last follow-up, Um, when you talked about the Procore, by the way, I think, you know, I didn't realize, um, I was in the construction industry for almost 6 years, by the way. Um, and, uh, we were doing all kind of, you know, project management for the construction. A lot of the, um, in 2011, 2012, a lot of, uh, IoT, um, is a big deal. And we actually sold into a lot of construction innovation teams, Martinson and DPR Construction and a bunch of Webcor and all those great guys out there. And one of the things that we realized is when we talk about the economic buyer, sometimes based on the product and the lifecycle that you are, it is very difficult to understand who that buyer is. until you get into some of these cycles. What I mean by that is, for example, we always went into the construction ops and then construction managers to actually kind of sell our technology. But then we realized that they are not the ones who are buying it. They are not the ones who are making decisions. And it actually goes all the way to chief information officer in some of these these big companies. But then even the hurdle for us was some of the CIOs were like, no, no, we are not really taking any new technology. And then after a couple of quarters, we realized that there are these VP of Innovation, VP of Technology, who are much more willing to accept new ideas, and they want to prototype things before they actually become the mainstream products that construction managers or field supervisors can use, for example, right? So to discover that path, it always— it almost took us about a year to really go from one company to another company. And then the sales cycles in these kinds of things are super long. And that is a very important thing for all the salespeople like myself. I mean, you know, even to understand it's not just about, you know, having that product and then knowing that, oh, you know what, I want to get into a CIO or a chief sales officer. But then you need to really understand who is having that pain and who is willing to take that product and then try it out to see if that can become the part of their stack.

Mm-hmm.

That's a great lesson that we learned as part of that whole process, because that's one of the points where we always think about, when sales leaders think about it, you need to be on the constant outlook to refine your ICP until you have that volume that kind of, you know, is coming in on a natural basis. So, Dani, as a last thing, especially in 2024, how are you really seeing the market and sales leaders trying to adopt these, whether it is about the new process or tools? What are you seeing, especially in 2024?

You know, I think the sales leaders, and when I think of a sales leader in this context, that's probably like a director, sales manager, our sales ops, and our sales enablement folks, right? So you've got the team that does the selling and then all the supporting teams that make what this revenue growth plan is happen. I think, Suresh, I think everyone's still trying to sort out AI. Yeah.

I really think that's it. And for me, with my technical sales background, background, uh, I'm still trying to sort it out myself. And when I, when I see a lot of these, um, when I see a lot of these stats out there, like, I— one of the things that you're seeing is that, um, like, high-performing sales professionals are, are more likely— they're 2x more likely to use AI in their selling. And that, that's a stat from— that's a quote from Salesforce from, from surveys they've done. And the, the end of the day, I think everyone's really trying to figure out what that I mean, even on Yahoo Finance, when I watch it or have it in the background in the morning and listen to the interviews, the topic of AI is always out there, but it's never really, okay, this is what kind of AI we're using, we're using it for this problem, and this is how we're solving it, right? And this is the kind of return or the acceleration we're seeing. And I think we're still, as a community and an industry, still trying to sort out kind of what, how we can leverage that, whether it's, uh, in AI automation, like having actual email conversations and having a bot do that for us, or whether it's a chat on a website, or if it's something like, um, I saw Gong.io was piloting or had something in beta where, uh, people could talk to, they could talk to, I think, effectively their pipeline, right? And based on the data in there and the, the data that they had, they could kind of get an idea of deal closing probabilities. So I think that as an industry, we're all just trying to figure out, cut through the noise, right? And figure out how to leverage that.

Yeah, yeah. That's a great insight that you provided, Dani, because the way we see at SalesTable, talking to hundreds of sales leaders in the last couple of years, and then of course, we are ahead of technology in terms of what we need to do in terms of the AI and help our customers really get to that mission of helping them exceed the quota. That's really our mindset. One of the biggest challenges that we see is, for example, you have these hundreds of tools that are coming in every single day.

Yeah.

Somebody doing the email personalization, somebody doing doing automation, somebody, for example, ChatGPT, Claude, I mean Gemini from Google, and you can create these personalized GIF files or you can create these 30-second videos. Yes, they're all great, but then I don't have a budget to buy 50 different tools even if something is $10 a month.

Right.

That's number 1. Number 2, yes, all these tools are great, but how do I use them in the context of a single prospect that I have? I think now we are actually seeing this whole thing of, yes, I think there are a lot of these technologies that are coming in, but I think the winners will be those companies where who can put in the right context and use the AI to solve that problem on a daily basis, I think that's going to be the one, right? Because it's very easy to be super excited about, oh yeah, I'm using ChatGPT, I'm using Claude, or whatever that is. But then, uh, that kind of excitement kind of, you know, slowly dies down because that has to work on a daily basis, not just on an excitement more. Yeah, right. So again, I think, you know, Danny, this is actually a great conversation. Thanks for, I think, you know, putting together all the insights that you've had from your 18 years of expertise out there. And I would love to kind of, you know, really think through— and for the viewers as well, if you have a direct question for Danny or myself, you know, please feel free to connect with us over LinkedIn and then send a message. And, um, Danny, I know you've sent me the, uh, free, uh, playbook link, and what we will do is I'll post it right after, uh, the session is ended on LinkedIn, and we'll go from there.

Suresh, sounds great, and congratulations on your— uh, congratulations to you and SalesTable on your recent award. It's well deserved.

Thank you. It's all teamwork. And, uh, Dani, again, looking forward.

Yeah, great. Loved it. Thank you so much for having me. Have a great day, everybody. Suresh, take care.