Turn Every Sales Rep Into a Top Performer

And we are live. How you doing today, Suresh?

I'm doing pretty good, David. I mean, I know for sure I'm super excited. I know you and I've been talking about the sales, sales enablement for so many years, and I finally got a chance to sit with you. So I'm really humbled and thank you for inviting me for this. Uh, discussion with you.

Yes, thank you so much for coming on. I mean, this is a problem that I've been involved with, uh, now for way too long. I'll say 20 years. Um, and, and it's, it's evolved over the years. Uh, it used to be called sales training and sales coaching, and now sales enablement and go-to-market enablement. Um, it's evolved so much in the last few years. What I'm curious about for you, what challenges in the sales enablement space were you aiming to address when you started SalesTable?

Yeah, absolutely, David. So for me, I didn't necessarily come from a sales background, David. I mean, that actually helped me tremendously to actually take a step back and then really see what are sales teams doing today. Especially I think when I was at Oracle after my last company acquisition, I actually spent a good amount of time in actually leading the go-to-market teams out there. One of the frequent challenges that we actually get to is, are sellers prepared to actually go and sell? That's a constant challenge that every sales leader keeps asking. And one of the things that is really frustrating is, is that training falling on the VP of Sales, Director of Sales? Is it the sales coach that you need to bring in from outside, or is it the sales enablement? And at this point of time, we have made so many different orgs that are responsible for the sales efficiency. And I think, you know, it really gets confusing, uh, right from a small group of companies to a larger multi-billion dollar company as well. And I think that's really the biggest challenge that I've seen when I was there, as to say there is no standardized way to say that I want to really uplift my reps who are doing well and not well. And that's really where a lot of frustration exists with sales leaders. As to say, I'm sure, you know, we keep hearing about the 20-60-20 rule, where 20% of the reps, they will do really great, they are hitting their quotas every single time, and then 60% of them are probably doing okay, but you need to provide them help to really kind of bring them to the next stage of quota attainment. And then the last 20%, probably it's not a great fit for the company or for them. And then how do you coach them out in a way? And I think when we really look into this, a lot of sales leaders actually spend a greater amount of time on the bottom 20%, unfortunately thinking that, you know what, if I spend a little more time, they will actually become much better But the biggest thing that we've seen working with almost 400+ VP of Sales at this point of time, David, is if you can really focus your energy on that middle 60% of the sales reps, then think about it, even if they move 5%, 10% from where they are closing to the net new then you are actually looking at an exponential increase in your revenue. And that's really where a lot of very highly successful VP of Sales are doing at this point of time. And honestly, that's exactly where we've seen the challenge. And our mission with SalesTable is super simple, David, which is we want to make every sales rep revenue exceeding quota. training superstar. That's really our goal. And we are doing that in multiple ways. From— we've seen the whole of the coaching angle, the onboarding angle, making sure that the reps are doing the right things. And then most importantly, how do we really use the generative AI in the context of what sales reps do every single day? And that's been our progress so far, and we are super happy that a lot of our customers love for what we do.

Yeah, and, and how— so you're engaging with VPs of sales, and they have so many, so many responsibilities. Obviously top-of-the-line revenue at all times, and then making sure that it's efficiency. They have to staff up their team. They've got to continuously train, when you, when you work with them, where do you start?

Yeah, so I'll say this, I think, and especially in 2023 and 2024, and this year, the number one challenge that every sales leader have on the top of their mind is to say there are 2 things. One, how do I build pipeline is number one challenge. Number 2, how do I serve my pipeline? Or rather, how do I execute my deals that I have in my pipeline? Clearly, as you see, a lot of technology, the AIs, DRs, and a lot of great companies that have come on the pipeline development side of it. The biggest opportunity that we saw is, let's say you actually got the pipeline that you wanted. in your company and then your CRM is full of great deals. But now the question really becomes, who are those sellers who are looking into this pipeline and what is your execution strategy looking like and are they doing the right things to serve the pipeline? I think that's really the second part of the problem that we address with the VP of Sales, David. What does that really mean? It really means a few things. One, A lot of VP of Sales, they are hiring sales reps, especially last year and this year. When they hire, the typical thing I'm sure you would have seen in your career is to say, give them some demos, give them some documents, and then say, you guys go figure it out, and then from tomorrow you join the sales calls. Which works to some companies maybe, but that is still not a great way to onboard sales reps. But most often what happens, and a lot of sales leaders are now realizing, is when you do something like that, what happens is sales reps don't have the right onboarding. They don't know about the product, they don't know about the pricing, they don't know about their process, they don't know about the customers enough, they don't know about the domain enough. And then what does that lead to is I just come on in front of a call and then they just wing it in front of the prospect.

Yeah.

Sometimes it works, but that sometimes is probably 1 to 2%. Most of the times it doesn't work. What it means is in the first call where you are supposed to make a big impression on your prospect, you basically blew it up. And then the deals sit longer than you would want them to close. And that is exactly the problem where we solve with Sales Table as to really say, with VP of Sales, we work with them as to say, what is your pipeline looking like? What is your sales process and methodology? And where do you see deals getting stuck? Let's think about this scenario, right? If a lot of deals are getting stuck After the demo, that basically means that during the demo time, the prospect didn't see a lot of value for themselves.

Yeah.

And what it means are 2 things. One, in the first case, maybe during the discovery call and whatnot, we didn't really ask the right questions.

Yeah.

To really bring them into the demo call. And then that became even worse after the demo call. They basically said, you know what, I don't even know what this product or service does. So they are basically chickened out. And that's really where we keep hearing about, oh, you know what, you know, my prospect is not responding, or they're in the dead zone in a way, right? That's because they haven't really seen that value across. And the way we work with the VP of Sales is really to understand their cycle and then whether it is via the regular ongoing coaching or the role plays that we provide based on the scenarios and the challenges that they go through. Because that's the biggest— one of the funniest things that we realize is a few of the VP of Sales say, you know what, we have senior salespeople, they don't need any coaching.

Yeah.

That's the biggest challenge that we always see because Just because you have the senior sales reps doesn't necessarily mean they know every single aspect about how to sell to your domain, your company, your customers. And that's the one where we actually kind of go through their specific scenario and then really think through on how SalesTable can actually add value to the reps in a way that they can actually move these sales pipeline from one stage to other in a much more faster way. So that's been our journey so far. And then a lot of sales leaders actually love what we do exactly for that reason. Yeah.

And, and so when you, when you work with them, do they usually have the sales process mapped out and the pipeline process mapped out and they can pretty easily identify where there's gaps in it? Or do you usually come in and they haven't done a lot of work to that extent and then you have to first help them to map that out and then implement the enablement?

That's a great question. We work in 2 different scenarios, David. One scenario is, where the product is selling really well. By the way, either think of it as it could be either pharma, it could be either manufacturing, the product is really out there and then the salespeople are really enhancing that to take it to their prospects or the customers. In those cases, what happens typically is their ARR is growing great. They have a higher revenue, but then on the sales side of it, what they see is, you know what, I'm adding more salespeople, but I'm not getting the same ROI that I want from the reps that I have. They really want to increase revenue per rep at that point of view. In that case, I think what we typically see is they might not have a great sales process on their own, so we actually work with them on the sales process as well. Then the second scenario is, the easy scenario, I would say, where they have a great sales process, they know exactly the numbers. And then what we typically do is to understand the numbers and the conversion ratios that they have. And at that point of time, typically, uh, it comes down to one or two things, which is when the sales reps are not exactly ready with the fast-changing product that they have In which case you need to get really trained on the product. You need to know how to position your product. Most importantly, we get to the same question again and again, David, which is, are you doing the right discovery call?

Yeah.

I can't tell you enough how many times we go into some of these customers who are generating, let's say, $10 million, $50 million, $100 million, and you would assume that all these customers would have figured out their sales process and they know exactly these conversion numbers. But we were surprised that that is not the case. Those are the 2 different scenarios that we work with to really make sure to understand where they are in their process and the scenario. Sometimes it's really about making sure that we help the VP of Sales to bring in sales table and make sure that their reps are trained, they are practicing their pitches really well. Because as you can imagine, David, especially in 2025, you are not getting a second chance.

Yeah.

You are going there, you are really putting your value prop and you are understanding the customer pain point once and then see if you can help them. and you are not getting a second call after that. So for us, it's really about focusing on that first call. Make sure that you do a good job of your elevator pitch, the value prop. Are you asking the right questions? And the objection handling is so unique for every industry. And that's what we actually help a lot of these sales leaders with using Sales Table.

Yeah, I mean, that's the question that I had. So, so say you, you go in and you identify, which it sounds like this happens a lot, you identify that the problem is the first call and you only get one shot on the first call these days because it's, it's such a competitive marketplace. So you identify that the problem is on the first call and, and then at the same time, every single one of these clients that you're working with is a different industry. So they've got a completely different vocabulary, they've got a different set of problems, et cetera. Say you identify that the demo or the first call is the problem, what would then the sales rep do to start to train using SalesTable to be able to accelerate their progress?

Excellent question. That has 2 parts, by the way. One is the tech part of it, David, which is the whole of the AI that we use.

Yeah.

We've actually trained our AI with almost 1.5 years of data in terms of the sales calls. What does a good sales call mean, bad sales call mean, and how do people improve and everything? And you actually got—

sorry to interrupt. Is it their sales calls of the client or sales calls in general?

So we initially just used our own sales calls, by the way, because, I mean, clearly we don't want to use customer sales calls. So we used our sales calls to really train the model on what that good, bad, ugly means. That's one part of it. And then we also have several sales leaders as our advisors who actually keep giving us the constant updates on what does that a good discovery call means? What does it really mean by a good elevator pitch, for example? With that input that we have, we build the entire model in a way that it has generic sales understanding. For example, if you are talking about medic, medpic, spin sales, challenger sales, and whatnot, it understands that lingo. Then on the top of it, in a much more optional way, customers put in their training data. What I mean by that is you have your training documents, you have your demos as form of videos and whatnot. We actually combine all this data to provide the highly contextual help from the role-play point of view, David. A simple thing, probably, you know, instead of me explaining, I would love to show what one of our sales reps, John, did in a recent time, by the way. Yeah, let me share this if you can let that one— are you able to see this one?

Yeah.

Okay, so think about the scenario where we said John just came into the company and then we wanted to make sure that John is really good with the elevator pitch. This particular AI model is all trained with what Sales Table does and then the customers that we have and everything. Now think about the scenario where John actually did his first pitch and then the AI basically completely evaluated on how John did. Now the question really for John is, hey, this rating is great, but I want to know why I got this rating and how can I improve in my next elevator pitch. Now all this rating, by the way, is actually done by the AI. Then in this particular case, I want to see the details. I can go into the details and then see from the proof point aspect, I got 2-star. The way I can improve is next time I can say, hey, at a specific company we saw 60% increase in sales after implementing Sales Table. That is a very specific example that will bring in credibility and the proof point to the sell that you have with your prospect. That's really where For example, John looked into it and then—

Is that the guy in the picture? Is he the person who works at your company or is he like an AI that you're practicing with? Yeah.

Hey, I can make John as an AI, but he's a real person, by the way, who is pitching.

Okay. John was practicing his pitch and then he was rated by AI.

That is correct.

Got you.

Absolutely. Then the great part is John now looked into this whole rating area and then he said, you know what, let me go do one more pitch and then make it better. Now he did a second attempt, by the way, and now you see that in the second attempt he got almost all 4-star.

Okay.

The way you really think through this whole AI aspect in a way, David, is when we go to our customers, it's really about how are we preparing reps to go in front of the customers and be super confident about what we are providing the value as. That's really what we strive for with every single customer that is out there.

Okay, and then so the— that, that guy's, uh, sales manager can go back in and, and look at the ratings and then use that for additional coaching, is that right?

Absolutely, absolutely. So I mean, we think about, uh, different scenarios, right, David, which is, um, either as a sales rep I just want to practice for myself and I don't need to even inform my manager that I'm practicing. It is really a self-guided practice that I can do, whether it's about the objection handling, whether it is about the whole of the role plays that we have, about the elevator pitches, the discovery calls. I can practice myself without anybody else in my organization knowing, but AI of course will give you that feedback. That's the one mode. The second mode is basically to say if there is a new person joining in, then we have a complete workflow that basically takes in— they go through the onboarding, they go through the training, and then after they go through the training, they are put through these role plays. Then once they are done with the role plays and they get at least a 4-star rating, until then the idea is they are still doing more of a practice and onboarding. And once they get really good at the pitch practice, that is when we let them go to sell.

Got it. Okay. Do they get like a certificate or anything or something?

Absolutely.

Okay. So they're now— they're ready to go. And how long does it take, say a VP of sales is going to set this up for their sales team, How long does it take to get all the information and all the pitches and decks into SalesTable so that it can start?

Absolutely. So typically our onboarding period is 2 weeks, uh, David. So during the 2 weeks period, I mean, we want to make sure that the domain is rightly understood by the AI within SalesTable as well as the right set of the sales methodologies are used as part of what we do. Then once the 2 weeks part is done, now sales leaders typically run Sales Table on their own. We made sure that it is simple enough for VP of Sales or a training manager within the organizations to run on their own. In some cases, of course, we also help sales leaders to create content. Because as you can imagine, some sales leaders may not really have the content already with them, and in such scenarios they ask us to help them to create, let's say, sales process decks, the sales decks, the pitch decks, and everything. And we actually kind of, you know, help them to kind of get that whole content going as part of that.

Okay, and then how would the VP of sales or the training manager monitor from a high level how people are using this and if there's gaps in the process or they need to focus on certain areas?

Excellent question. What we did is from day one, David, I mean, we brought in all analytics and dashboards within Sales Tables so that no VP or director of sales need to go out and do some technical integrations and all that. This is meant to be an all-in-one platform, and we do integrate with, of course, some of the CRMs like HubSpot for sure. But otherwise, all the activity and all the onboarding and training dashboards are available right out of the box within Sales Tableau. What that means is, if I can show you this.

Yeah.

As a sales leader, I just go into my dashboard and then really get a very good understanding on how are we doing on onboarding of the new sales reps that I have, and then how are we doing on the continuous training that we deployed as part of the organization. Especially on role plays, for example, how are people doing? How many people are net new? I get that entire overview of that. Most importantly, we have what we call as the pulse aspect, which is nothing but we want to look at the sales rep pulse in a way that who are sharing a lot, what are the lessons learned and best practices and everything. We think of this Pulse as a LinkedIn for sales reps, David. All my sales reps are providing the lessons learned or best practices that they really looked into, and that really gives me a pretty good idea on, let's say, I can say, hey, you know what, show me list of all the best practices, show me list of all the lessons learned, and that really gives me an idea on who is interacting and who is contributing well within the team and who is not. That gives you an idea on how different team members are working within your team at the end of the day. Hope that helps.

If someone, they had inherited a sales enablement system, like they're already using Highspot or some of those other ones, how do they think about potentially upgrading and using this instead?

Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things that we have definitely right from day one, we've been very conscious of is about delivering the value from day one and making sure that a lot of organizations now are basically saying, I don't want to really have the 20, 30 sales tools and then integrate them, or sometimes maybe, you know, they're not even integrated, to be honest, right?

Mm-hmm.

And that really brings in a lot of security issues, data privacy issues, and whatnot within the sales organizations. And where we really took care of from day one is how do we bring in onboarding, training, the role-play angle, the activity management aspect of it, and then making sure that there is a virtual sales enablement manager that is available for people so that whatever questions that you have, you can actually go and, you know, we have a chatbot that is trained on all the sales data that I talked about, David, as well as some of the customer data. And then that will actually give you highly contextual help as part of it. So when somebody is actually trying to move from— we have customers who actually moved from the likes of the Highspot and then even some of the modern tools that we have, and for them it is super simple. I mean, we are moving to an easy-to-use, all-in-one platform which is SalesTable, and we actually kind of have migration scripts to actually bring in the data from whatever LMSs that you have or the sales enablement tools that you have.

Got it. And, and great. So we're taking questions on, on LinkedIn. I, I did have one question come in. If they're using Outreach, Salesloft, the different sales engagement platforms, how does that integrate with SalesTable?

Yeah, absolutely. At this point of time, the way we really think about that is all the sales calls and then all the transcripts and everything is something that we integrate into Sales Table so that we actually provide those signals as to what time the coaching is needed for the sales reps. That is the integration that we have. But would love to see if there are other ways that some of these customers that we can work with, by the way. That will be a great opportunity to integrate some of those data points.

I got one more that came in. We are not doing sales training yet. Where do you start? It might just be a startup, Or, or they just haven't done any sales training today.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Maybe even founder-led sales, so it's just one person.

Yeah, um, thanks for that question, by the way, because, uh, just yesterday I was speaking to one of the startup CEOs. They are about a $2 million ARR and, uh, they have 2 salespeople. And one of the biggest challenges that the founder was sharing is they are bringing in people, they stay for 6 months, 9 months, and then they go. It is super frustrating for the founder to train, retrain them every single time, for only to realize at the end of 9 months or 1 year they are gone. This happens especially in the small companies for a couple of reasons. Number 1, When we don't provide the right onboarding, then we are basically throwing them on their own. It's like drinking from a fire hose in a way, and some survive and most don't, unfortunately. That's really where we absolutely advocate and encourage startups or even SMBs in a way to say, Have some system. It doesn't really matter if it is small, whether you keep it in the Google Drive or whatever, but then have a system that actually works for you. And when people think about the training, honestly, you don't even have to think about, oh, do I have the right professionally looking videos or not? Do I have the right call scripts or not? You don't need to have any of those things. As long as you have your right pitch decks and then some of your videos where you are demoing the calls and everything, that is really a great starting point. And the rest, we actually take care of it.

Okay. And do they, do they have HubSpot at least, or some sort of system in some cases? Or is it literally, you know, Google Docs and a pitch deck?

Yeah, so that's a great one, David, because there are some customers that we talk to where they don't even have any CRM. And then it is very common in the non-tech industries, by the way, David. Some of the things like, you know, the retail, it is very common. Pharma, it is very common. They don't really have any CRMs and they actually literally use Excel spreadsheets to manage their complete accounts, by the way.

Right.

We do definitely have some of those customers who come to us. That's number 1. Number 2, on the training side of it, the biggest frustration that everybody has when they use the likes of the Google Drive or OneDrive or whatever that is, is let's say you have 10 different videos that you put in out there and then you have great-looking decks that you put out there. But how sure are you that your salespeople actually went through those? How sure are you that your salespeople actually internalized those learnings on how to pitch, how to demo the product? So that's really the biggest challenge that a lot of sales leaders face when they use some of these easy-to-use systems like Google Drive and OneDrive. Then when they come to us, what they see is very structured onboarding. At any point of time, you know exactly who is doing what on the onboarding side. Then now when you tie that with assessments that are AI-generated, that are real-time, by the way, which basically means the AI is really testing you, your knowledge based on how proficient you are. at that point of time. That really helps them to absorb that knowledge. That's one part of it. The second biggest thing is, it's not really about— I think a lot of sales leaders have this misconception training is all about one and done. Unfortunately, that's not. It has to be a continuous cycle on its own. That's really where we make sure that for some of these industries and customers, there are these continuous cycles of what we call as the everboarding, right?

Yeah.

So that the reps are absolutely aware of the product releases, the pricing changes that are happening. Because one of the biggest fears a lot of sales leaders have is, especially in the innovative economy, you can't be selling a product that is 6 months old. Yeah, and that happens very much because the sales reps didn't really get upgraded to the latest release of the product that you have, and that really frustrates, um, VP of Sales and then the founders of the companies equally.

Of course. And, and so there's a few things— we're right up against the time, but, um, you know, there's sort of the Wild West of sales reps out creating their own thing and it works for them. And as long as they're selling, they're happy with, with whatever pitch deck they're using. You see that a lot. And then also, if someone's been in sales for 20 or 25 years, how do you get them to continuously keep training and, and being up to date on the latest information, um, if they, they think that they know what they're doing already? So those are 2 big challenges.

Yeah, completely. So David, I mean, that's a great point that you mentioned, which is about the learning culture in a way, David, because a lot of leaders that we talk to, they say, hey, you know what, I have these senior reps and they don't need any training, right? Which seems to be fair on the surface level, but then when you kind of, you know, really dig into Hey, that's great. Are they hitting the quotas consistently? Are they helping out the other junior reps that you have? And when they go out, what is their win ratio compared to the others? And when you get into some of those details, more often than not, you will see that there is a lot of scope for improvement. And that's exactly where I'd say a lot of winning sales leaders actually keep that learning as their number one priority within the organization, along with the revenue generation. And that actually works out really well because it is a culture issue, David. At the end of the day, if we don't really keep the learning as one of the top priorities, then it always gets kind of, you know, punted to something that is nice to have. And that basically means we always have those reps who could have done much better had we given them the right training in the first place.

Yeah, I mean, you're, you're kind of leaving money on the table just assuming that, that they know what they're doing and they'll keep making their quota year after year. So Um, what a great opportunity. Suresh, thank you so much for coming on. Um, I, I, I want to go back and map out my sales process right now and understand where I'm, I'm missing.

Um, hey, you know, we are here, by the way, David. Yes, you don't have to go.

Use, use your own product, right?

So absolutely.

Yeah, well, thank you for coming on and, and helping us out with this. And, um, if folks want to get in touch with you, what's What's the best way?

I mean, I'm pretty active and helpful on LinkedIn. So LinkedIn is a great way to reach out. Or if it is email, it is simply suresh@salestable.ai. And that should be easy to find. And I would love to kind of work with the sales leaders and really understand what they are going through. Because at the end of the day, for us, It's really about understanding the trends within the sales enablement space, especially AI is disrupting a lot of the assumptions that we have about enablement. And that's really where I would love to really understand what challenges sales leaders are facing, sales enablement leaders are facing, and then really share what we have learned over the last couple of years, by the way.

Great, we'll take you up on that offer. And this is totally random for the, for the handful of people that are still on. Um, this conversation reminds me of a great book, one of the best books that I've ever read on managing a sales pipeline. Um, it's called The Qualified Sales Leader, um, by John McMahon. I'll put a link in the, in the comments here. Um, and, uh, John McMahon, yeah, he, he's a look him up. He's, he's been in, in, in this game for a long time, and he— it's a, it's a great narrative read, and it really brings you through the whole sales process. And then from what Suresh was talking about, um, where do you see those gaps and how do you address those? So, Suresh, thank you so much for coming on, and, and, um, we'll see you again soon.

Absolutely. Thanks for having me here, David, and, uh, would love to again Uh, come back on a different topic. But until then, thank you so much. Thank you.