Uncovering Hidden Gaps in Sales Teams

First of all, good morning, good afternoon, good evening everyone, wherever you're joining from. Welcome to Coffee Time with Sales Table. And today I have one of the very exciting guests with us, Robin Singh, and he's been a business owner and SAML trainer and definitely my mentor for the last 2 years or so. Without further ado, Robin, welcome to the show.

Hi, Suresh. Thank you very much and thanks for having me. I really appreciate it and I look forward to our sessions together.

Yeah, absolutely. The best part of what we set out to do now, Robin, I think first of all, really appreciate your time and we have a great series, by the way. Unlike my previous discussions that I did, these are really very depth, casual conversations, talking about their real life, real experiences. I mean, of course, nothing scripted in that sense. One of the things that we always looked was it is one session, but I think this is the first one where we're actually doing a series, by the way. For those of you who are looking for it, this is going to be the first one and then followed by 3 more that really gets into much more depth of day-to-day sales leadership and sales rep challenges and how to fix and how to address them. So without further ado, this is probably— Robin, I know you and I discussed a lot, and for me it is always phenomenal on how you ended up being a sales trainer, and your journey is fascinating. And for those out there who is really thinking about what career direction that I need to take? What should I do? What am I really good at? I would love to really think through your story, and I would love for you to really bring a little bit of color to that.

Let's see if I can add color to it, Suresh, but thank you. My journey started in the early '70s when I left Guyana, South America. and migrated to Canada. And as you know, coming from a 5th-generation Indian parental background, the goal was to move to Canada, go to school, and become a doctor, right? I got to Canada and finished high school and decided, you know what, computers was just coming into age then. And I was fascinated by this whole computer technology stuff that I was learning about. So I went to school and I did some computing schooling stuff, some programming language, computer operations stuff, right? And I joined TD Bank, Toronto Dominion Bank, in 1977 in their computing division. And in those days, we had big mainframe computers Big terminals, big printers. Okay. Yeah. And so that was my journey, my start into the computing industry. In 1983, I left TD Bank to start my first business, which was a franchise called MicroAge Computer Centers. And at that time, the PC was just coming in into, you know, into the business world. IBM just introduced their PC, you know, 10-meg hard drive, 256K memory, monitor, green screen monitor. And that was the start of my, you know, my foray into the IT world from 1983. And from there on in, I had that business until 19— 1995, I think I sold it, did some consulting work, and then I had an opportunity to move down to Silicon Valley, uh, for a, for a night, for a computer distributor. I, I got there, uh, in 19-whatever, 1998, I believe it is. Um, I was there with them for a year before I got recruited by a dot-com company. Just, that's 2001.

You've seen all that then.

Yeah, I mean, I tell you what, dot-com, that was, you know, if people ask me, what is in your career, what was the most compelling, interesting, you know, career you had? And believe it or not, it was in the dot-com piece, understanding the pressure, the, the work, the hours that you put in, um, you know, in that dot-com, you know, the era of the dot-com world. And, and from there, I really, uh, one of my, one of my mentors K.B. Chandrasekhar, who I really adore. I worked for his company in that time. One of the things that I learned from him was that, you know, wherever you go, Robin, just remember you want to be a gorilla, not a monkey. Right? Hold that thought. That's an interesting thought. From there, I was fortunate enough to be recruited by a publicly traded company. I ran their global channels. I was fortunate to see the world, understand the cultures. of different, you know, Asia Pacific, um, you know, Europe, uh, South America. And then I, I kind of went into— I was then promoted to run our European division of that, of the publicly traded company. From there, you know, your management skills, you're working for, working for, um, you know, publicly traded company where the pressure is there to hit numbers.

Yeah.

Because you can't report at the end of the quarter, your numbers are down, right? And you know what happens there, right? So That was another interesting, um, interesting time in my career, being able to run Europe and take it from a losing proposition to the 2nd most profitable division within a 2-year period. Uh, that was an interesting challenge and a great accomplishment for me. Um, the company got acquired, and for personal reasons, I kind of moved back to, uh, to Toronto, Canada, where— which is where I am from right now. And did some other stuff. And, you know, in 2016, I said, you know what, I had enough of this IT world. I wanted out. And I came across Sandler Training. And Sandler is a global company. They're franchised. They're a global company. They provide sales training, management, and leadership development to business executives and organizations, you know, in all ranges, small, mid, and large enterprise clients. And I felt that was a really good match for me from a career change perspective because here you are, you know, at my age, and I don't want to tell you my age because I'll give it away. But, but, but, you know, making a career change at a part in your life which says, hey, does this make sense or not? Right. And that's what I did. And I'm 9 and a half years now with Sandler, and it's been an incredible journey. And probably one of the best career moves that I've made. So, you know, there you go. As high level as I can give you. Okay.

No, absolutely. That's incredible. Because at the end of the day, Robin, sales and making changes and looking at the world in a different way is really where I believe it brings in a lot of empathy. in people, looking at different cultures. I mean, working with organizations of different sizes, you really understand the agility versus process orientation versus everything hybrid in between.

Yeah, absolutely.

Now, thanks for sharing that. With that as a context of, I think, where your experience is stemming from and As a Sandler trainer and a business owner, I'm sure you are looking at so many mid-market enterprise and small businesses out there in the last couple of years. I think our discussion is exactly that for today, right? Which is last year and this year, a lot of business owners, whether it is small, big, it doesn't really matter. They're all struggling. They're all going through the challenges of whether it is stalled growth or falling revenue.

Right.

Or sometimes even the decisions of making, hey, you know what, I'm not able to really grow anywhere, should I sell my company? There are so many variety of challenges that business owners are going through. One of the biggest things that probably I want to really dig through is how do I even know what are my blind spots as a sales leader? Because it's one of those things where sales is very execution-oriented. Yes, there are strategies, but it's not as though that as a sales leader, I'm doing the strategy for the entire day or entire month.

Right.

It's really about the 90% of every day is really about the execution. If that is the case, How do I really know to take a step back and then really think about if I'm doing fine or not? I mean, can you—

Yeah, yeah. I think first of all, I think we need to understand, you know, what are the blind spots, uh, that, that you, that you could recognize. And, and some, some owners, some, some executives know and some don't know, right? And, and, you know, Dave Matson, who's the CEO of Sandler, um, I mean, he spent, you know, multiple years working with business owners, executives, sales executives. He found that there were 13 blind spots that were pretty consistent across his many conversations that we have. I see it as I work with business leaders also. I think I shared with you those 13 blind spots. If you want to pop that up, we can look at those at a high level.

Yeah, absolutely.

I believe that the rest of the webinar sequences is really to drill down and on multiple of these as we embark on our journey here. If we look at the 13 blind spots and we see this consistently when we work with business leaders, as you bring that up, I'm going to give you a high level of each one of them.

Are you able to see this one at all?

No, not as yet.

Let me Yeah, share the entire screen.

Uh, there we go, we're getting there. Yeah, there you go, you got them. Okay, so, so here's the— here, yep, there you go, perfect, right? 13 blind spots. I'm gonna go high level of these without, uh, getting too much detail into it or granular into it. So the first one, if you think about it, not having a process for hiring, right? There's a blind spot, huge blind spot, you know, because what is the— what do we— what is our process for hiring? Do we have one? Typically what we see is, hey, we need to hire a sales guy, we need to hire somebody else. Okay, okay, Suresh, you're going to interview the guy, I'm going to interview the guy, and in the end we'll come together and what does our gut feel tell us?

Yeah, yeah.

And that's the hiring process. The guy sits in that interview room and does one hell of a job selling you, selling to you, and you go, that's the guy I want. And 3 months later we go back, we look, we look back at it and it says, hmm, Is that the guy that I really hired, right? Because yeah, yeah, right. So we don't have a process there. What is that process? And that's a blind spot. Okay, so we do hire somebody, we find our champion, we bring them, we hire them in. What's the onboarding? What's the onboarding process?

Okay, yeah.

Typically what I see, and I've experienced this, okay, you come in, you start with a company, they go, hey, you spend half an hour or a day with HR filling out all the paperwork. Stuff like that. And then they, you know, walk you around, introduce you to some people. Here's the washroom, here's the cafeteria, here's your desk. Okay, somebody's gonna reach out to you later on. Okay, right. No onboarding process for, you know, success over, you know, a 90-day or 60-90-day period. Okay, so we see that as a blind spot. Corporate goals, failing to tie corporate goals to personal goals. Interesting. Most of us, most leaders really don't spend time to understand what are the personal goals.

Yeah.

Of the folks working for them. Because if I can help you reach your personal goals, believe it or not, those corporate goals get hit, get accomplished. In sales, we give them a personal— we give them company targets. Well, let's understand what their personal goals are, what revenue is important to them personally, because if they hit those revenue numbers personally, I can guarantee your corporate goals are going to be hit. Not creating a culture of accountability. Again, what does that mean? How do I hold people accountable? It's a simple thing. I tell my teammates, hey, you need to attend your meetings on time. You have to be at our sales meetings on time. If I start the meetings late, where's the accountability there?

Yeah.

I ask you to complete reports and you don't complete them. I don't follow up with you on it. Where's that? So a culture of accountability is critical. It could be playbooks. I know you did a session on playbooks, right? What are the playbooks that we have and how do I hold my team accountable to using, executing on playbooks? Here's another one. My favorite one, no common sales language. This is one of the most popular ones we see. Okay, I can, I can guarantee if you go to your sales teams and said, hey, what is your sales process? Yeah, you're probably going to have 5 different processes with different languages built into it. And so there's inconsistencies there, right? And somebody don't have any sale, any common language. Right? It becomes tough to manage. Yeah. Uh, lead gen. Lead gen is the, is the bread and butter of every single company.

Yeah, yeah.

Without lead generation, revenues fail, right? Revenues fall. Okay, so where are we for— how are we focusing on lead gen? What are, what are some of the focal points we need to look at? We see that as a blind spot. Not capturing best practice. There's another, another interesting blind spot.

Yeah.

We've got good people. They've developed some good practices within the organization or the divisions. They get up and they leave and they take with them their best practices. How are we documenting best practices that we've learned from our experts, the years of people, years of experience people have worked for us? And not failing to train and coach management staff. Well, this, this is an interesting one because, you know, we do a lot of training, product training, CRM training, you know, whatever that is.

Yeah, yeah.

But how often are we training our management team?

Right, right, right.

This is— yeah, we think about it, we promote, we promote good, excellent salespeople. To manage us, but we don't train them. These guys, they, they don't perform. 6 months later, we, we just lost a good sales guy who wasn't properly trained, and our company is back to where it is. Okay, um, so that's blind spot for sure. Okay, and you've seen this already, right?

Yeah.

I'm not building the bench, not building the bench. If you think about sports, sports games, right, we always have backup players. for each of the positions that we're looking to build. While in organizations, we see this as a blind spot because I've got a good person that is sitting on a, you know, in the right seat on the bus. If he leaves, where's my backup?

Yeah.

Right. I'm now going to— I now go into reactive mode. But if I'm proactive in saying, hey, I'm going to groom some people for these key positions just in case, then, you know, I'm building my bench there. Okay, um, not knowing to coach, not knowing how to coach. Again, there's an example of what we think coaching is. Leaders, they wear 4 hats on an ongoing basis. Okay, the 4 hats are, are, you know, coaching, mentoring, supervising, and training. Right, and we believe 30, 30 to 40% of, of your time as a leader should be spent coaching.

Gotcha. Okay. Okay.

So think about the 4 hats that we wear and what percentage of that is coaching. We find that that's a weak, uh, a blind spot.

Okay.

Not sharing the vision with, with those who have to implement it. So we're good— leaders are great at creating vision and, and where we want to go, etc. And we do the budgeting with our management team, etc. And then we push it down to the troops. Yeah, we say go deliver on it. But we never tell them why. Why?

Yeah, yeah.

And we find that's a, that's a blind spot.

I mean, Robin, the moment you are saying, you know, immediately for me, what comes to mind is, we are really good at keeping this vision and mission on the website. It's there somewhere deep in. Yeah, nobody knows how to execute that.

Isn't it? Absolutely. The why, right? Why are we doing this? You know, culture of learned helplessness. This is a perfect example of whereby I can get training coaching mixed up. Because if you come to me, Suresh, every single time and says, Robin, how do I do this? And I tell you, right? And I feel like I'm training coaching you.

Yeah.

But really, I'm not, because you now know that you can come to me every single time and I'm going to tell you what to do. I'm going to help you how to do it. But there's no learning happening there. And so as a leader, I think I'm training or coaching you, but in fact I'm not. And that's what we define as learned helplessness, right? I'm dependent, right? I'm dependent on my leader because I know he's going to help me every single time. The last blind spot we see— sorry, go ahead.

Sorry, I'm just thinking, so is the idea here with the culture building to say we want to build a culture where yes, people have to come for help when the things that they want to learn, then they become good at, but the coaching aspect is to really say you coach them to become better And after that, they are self-sustaining on their own.

Yeah, exactly. Adopted. So if I— if you came to me and says, Robin, I don't know ABC, and I go, okay, let me show you ABC. Here's ABC. And you go, okay, I got it. You got it? Okay, tell me. Help me understand ABC. You go, right? Okay, good. You got it. You come back to me the next time and says, hey, Suresh. Hey, Robin, help me with ABC. If I tell you the same thing, that's learned helplessness. But if I said to you, hey, Suresh, Think about it. Remember we talked about ABC? Remember we talked about what the process is, what the steps are? Help me understand what that is again. What did we talk about? And then you go, oh, okay, we did A, B. Ah, yeah, there you go.

Yeah.

So now I'm kind of forced to learn whatever it is, whatever that process, that step is that I have to do versus you telling me every single time.

Gotcha. Okay.

That's an example of that, right?

Yep.

And then no methodologies and systems, which is the 13th blind spot. It's really about, you know, if you think about it, great organizations that have developed products and services over the years, I mean, their claim to fame is consistency, the repetitive excellence of their products and services. And they build that through these processes that they have. that they've developed over the years and implemented it. I've seen companies that I work with, their processes, they lack processes and systems in place. We see that as a blind spot in anything that they do. Suresh, those are the 13 blind spots that we see within many organizations. Now, the initial question you asked was, how do you know these? Right? Yeah. And interestingly enough, some people know they've got it. And some people don't want to admit it. And some people don't know they've got it. Right?

Right.

Yeah. And that's where—

Yeah. So Robin, I mean, When we look at these 13 blind spots, it's really a complete lifecycle that you, I think, nicely captured over there, which is right from the hiring all the way to the organizational culture and then bringing it down to the teams and then from the accountability point of view, how everybody is doing. Then that's really a complete lifecycle if I can imagine it. that way, right?

Yeah.

And just going back to my earlier comment, where when sales leaders are executing, they are like into it every single day, right? So it's very difficult for them to kind of take themselves away from what they are doing, and then relook at what's working, what's not working, until something negative happens. And then they're like, oh my goodness, you know what, you know, either we didn't meet the quota, or people left and I'm now being asked to bring in more revenue or whatever that event is, then we become much more reactive.

Right.

Right. So from your experience, can you talk through on how do you typically let sales leaders think about these blind spots?

Yeah. So You know, if so, I think if you start at, if you start at the, the why, then why, why is revenue— let's use revenue as an example, which you hear quite a lot, right? Why is revenue down? Okay, if I look at why is revenue down again, and then I need to look at a couple of things, right? Who do I have on my, on the bench?

Okay.

What is the, what is this when I say on the bench? What is the salesperson? that I have on the bench, right? What is his role? Is he a hunter? Is he a farmer?

Yeah, yeah.

Right. All right. So if he's a hunter, then we need to figure out, you know, is he going after the right clientele? What is my ideal client profile? Okay. So if we haven't defined that, right, that could be a blind spot also.

Okay.

What's my ideal client profile? If I'm going to set him to go hunt and I don't tell him what I'm hunting for, then he probably doesn't know. Okay, um, so then once I said I'm hunting, okay, uh, what is his— what is this prospecting talk tracks?

Yeah, yeah.

If I sound just like the traditional prospecting sales calls that I get, right away when he picks up the phone, he goes, hey Robin, how are you? I kind of go like, here comes the sales guy. Okay, so there's, there's what's my prospecting talk tracks there. Let's assume that I get a good lead. Now I come back to the blind spot of not having, having a selling system or a process in place.

Yeah, yeah.

If I get a good lead, and it's very hard, and leaders will tell you this, sales, sales executives will tell you this, it's very difficult today to get to that key prospect, that ICP. You got one chance in probably 10 or 12. Okay, to get to him. And when you get to him, you've got it. You've got 5 seconds or, or less to make a good impression. Okay, maybe 30 seconds depending on how we look at it.

Yeah.

Yeah. Uh, so you got to have— you've got to be— your 30-second commercial has got to be crisp. You can— you got to sound different and be different. And when you get that, when it's a qualified lead, you better have a good system and a process to take that lead through. Okay, so it's a long-winded way of answering your question, but these are components of a selling of, you know, any organization. When we go in there and we look at an organization, they say revenue's down, you know, we start doing a deep dive on what aspects of that organization, what's being affected by it, right?

Yes.

Right, you know, you have the right people in the right seat in the bus. Right. Do I have the right prospecting, uh, uh, commercial? Do I have the ideal client profile? Am I hunting in the right area? So, you know, yeah, I don't know if that—

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, thanks for that. So, uh, which is basically, I think, um, the— based on what you're saying, it's really like saying there is no silver bullet, by the way. Right? Because these days on LinkedIn, and then I'm sure, you know, we keep getting these emails, oh, we want to increase your revenue by 50% in the next 3 months. And then some of those things, again, of course, I mean, they are trying to get attention of some people, which is fine. But at the end of the day, if you have a process that has worked previously, there is no guarantee that it will work in kind of changing times, right? You know, it's really the question of saying what has worked for us before. Let's say in 2020, what did work for us? In 2021, what worked? Because every time, every year, especially in the last 4 years, things have changed so dramatically every year. It is really the aspect of every sales leader to think about just because there is a high demand in 2020, yes, you know, To your earlier point, if I just define my ICP as every sales leader out there, yeah, sure. I mean, that may have worked in 2020, but that wouldn't work in 2024. You have to go much deeper, you have to go much niche, and then define much more other variables to define your ICP. For example, instead of just sticking to something that worked before. Right. That really brings down to the aspect of saying for sales leaders, there is not like a one day of, oh, you bring in an expert from outside or internal expert and then everything gets fixed in a day or a week. But it's really about, I think when we looked at all these 13 blind spots, Everything is actually a major theme that I would imagine somebody needs to work on.

Yeah. So let me— so here's the first thing I believe, right? So if I'm developing a product or service, and a lot of folks out there, they've got— they've defined their products and services. And in if we look at it from the aspect of these products and services solve these pain issues that clients are having. If you look at it from that perspective, then I'm able to now accurately or better set my sales guys in a direction that they know where they're going in. Go find out Go look for prospects that have got these issues.

Yeah.

Because my products and services solve these issues. Okay, so I think that's one, one piece that you were saying earlier. We need to define, you know, from a product services perspective, what are the, what are the issues that we solve? What are the pain issues we solve? Okay, and go find prospects that have those pain issues, right? And then align it together. Okay, and there's different ways of doing that. In, in the Sandler world, we call them pain We look for impact. What's the impact on the pain? How much is it costing the company? Okay. So we look at it from that perspective. You talked about training. Okay. Near and dear to me. Okay. There are many, many training courses out there and they're pretty good, right? I've seen 3-week courses, 3-month courses. We see different things and they all have, you know, different impacts on organizations. The methodology that we believe at Sandler is one of reinforcement. Okay. Yeah. So if I take, if I take a system and a process, uh, that's a blind spot, and in Sandler's world, you know, it, it, it's, it's a 7-step process. Okay. And what we have found over the years, uh, and we've been doing this for, you know, 50 years plus, okay, we find that, that reinforcement along with coaching is the best— is, is one way of really reinforcing a methodology, uh, in a system within an organization, right?

Yeah.

So if I came to you and I said, Suresh, hey, what is your selling system? What's your process in your sales organization? And you go, I don't have one. Well, okay, let's look at this. Let's, let's implement that, whatever that is in your world. Okay, let's implement it so that every person that comes into the organization now has one common language.

Yeah.

But that happens from a Sandler perspective, that takes a while. We have to train. We believe in training, coaching, practicing, role-playing to ensure that the methodologies gets reinforced within the sales professional that we're training and coaching.

I mean, thanks for mentioning that, Robin, because then what we see very often is whether it is about the startups or SMBs, they bring in people and then to your earlier point, hey, you know what, tomorrow I have a prospect call, come on to that Zoom call or whatever that is. And then they would go, they would have this sales rep attend 1 or 2 of those such calls. And then, okay, now you are good with that. Now you go figure out, you know, bring me the pipeline, whatever that is, right? And then clearly, yes, I think, you know, that is a good starting point for sure. But then not enough in a way where the sales rep is confident to actually go talk to prospects, you know, talk through the objection handling. I mean, let alone, but the whole previous aspects of what's the product, why is that product important for that prospect, what is the prospect going through the pain, and then can we provide the value to prospect in what ways, and knowing the competition that you are going against. Because at the end of the day, as much as people think about, oh, competition is irrelevant, but at the end of the day, if the prospect is actually looking at multiple products, you better know.

Mm-hmm.

and gauge yourself about your product and the service in relation to those competitive products. And all that is training.

Right.

At the end of the day, right? Sometimes, yes, I think there might be some sales reps who are like really proactive, they do their own work and everything. But in general, I think the one that you talked about, the methodology, it doesn't really matter which methodology you follow at the end of the day. But there is something for you to give it to these new people and say, guys, you know what, this is what we follow. Please go through for the next 1 week, 2 weeks, whatever that is, just so they know about the product and service, they know about the CRM, they know about prospecting, they know about whether it is inbound or outbound and everything that happens in the company. That's what a lot of sales leaders are realizing that, yes, we grew super fast in 2020, 2021, And now the same growth is not there anymore. If so, everybody's struggling how to readjust everything, right?

Yeah. So a couple of ways to look at it, right? I mean, if you think about, if you think about accounting department within an organization, and you go say, hey, accounting, accounting department, give me a P&L statement. They have a system and a process that they follow, right, to, to give you a document or provide your P&L statement. Right? We accept that. You go to HR and the HR department and say, HR department, you know, tell me what the process is for reviewing or, you know, conducting, you know, performance appraisal. Right? They probably have something in detail that's done. Okay? But if you go to your sales organization and say, okay, what is your selling system and process for your sales organization? Not many, not many places can tell us that, can tell us, can outline that to us. So now you bring your teams in, right? And you go, okay, go sell, right?

Yeah.

You're now dependent on, you know, John Jones for his expertise, right? Uh, for at Company X, um, and the Rolodex of contacts that he's got, right? And maybe he'll succeed, maybe he'll succeed. But then you bring a guy that's 2 years into the organization, right, that is now learning the ropes, right? So now you have inconsistency in your organization.

Yeah, yeah.

And that's where we see blind spots. That's why one of the blind spots is not having a system and a process, okay, in the organization. And this is where we see inconsistencies. And when that happens, That's where we see, you know, the up and down in revenue targets. There's no process, there's no system. We're not coaching, we're not training our guys properly, right? Product training is nice, but, you know, where's the ICP and how's that aligned with where we're going after? Yeah. What are the pain issues we're trying to solve for clients? What's the decision-making process within an organization? It's changed today, right?

Yeah.

Now it's not one person. Right, it's multiple, multiple components in multiple people in an organization that now makes decision, is in the decision-making process. How do we map that, you know, against mapping your organization against your prospect, your client's organization, right? Um, there's a decision-making process, yeah. What's the budget step? How do we know what's the budget step? What, what is, you know, what does that step look like? Okay, who's gonna— right, um, so yeah, I mean, you know, we go into a meeting and what happens when we go in a meeting, right? What is the agenda for the meeting? Who sets it up? Typically I hear, hey, you know, we've got, uh, you know, we go into a meeting, a prospect says, tell me what you got. Okay, you know, yeah, yeah, who's in control of the meetings? And if you don't train our— if you don't train our you know, our associates or team members to properly take control of these meetings, the prospect takes over. When they take over, you know, they're not leading us to the bank.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, Robin, which is basically, I think you hit the nail on the head, which is there is, there has to be consistent training and reinforcement over a period of time No matter whether somebody is senior or junior or mid-career level reps that we have in the sales team, everybody needs that reinforcement. And especially the products these days, no matter if it is technology product or pharma, manufacturing, whatever, there are multiple product lines. There is always opportunity to upsell and cross-sell and all that. All these complexities actually now increase with actually the post-pandemic remote era. Because previously it was super easy for sales reps or the sales organizations to say, every quarter let's meet in San Francisco, New York, Toronto, whatever that is, and then do a 1-week-long sales kickoff and the training. But that luxury is gone. Nobody have these budgets anymore, which basically means you have these 10, 20 salespeople that are spread across the country. And now the accountability piece that you talked about in the blind spots.

Yeah.

Do I want to talk to my salespeople every single day, every single week, or I come to know about the progress only at the end of the month? or at the end of the quarter, right?

Right.

And that's really where I think a lot of sales leaders are readjusting their strategies because when the demand was high, yes, I mean, maybe most of your sales reps are able to meet the quotas. And then at the end of the quarter, people are coming, oh, okay, you know, I met 70% of the quota or 80% of the quota. I know it's all fine, but now at the end of the quarter, you are kind of, you know, shocked in a way that only one person met the quota.

Yeah.

Right? And that's becoming a huge challenge for everyone. And that's really where I feel the complete, the blind spots that we talked about is so important for people to understand, especially for the sales leaders to really think through. In that context, Robin, the one question that I always had was, let's say, as a sales leader, there are, of course, several symptoms, right, in a way that Either the people are leaving that I have, I mean, the sales reps. I mean, last month, you know, 2 salespeople left, and then this month, you know, another 2 salespeople are leaving for whatever reasons. And then that's one symptom. The second one, probably my sales, the revenue has been flat over the last 3 quarters, let's say, or my revenue is declining at that point of time. So let's say If I get into some of these symptoms, how do I really know how to diagnose the problems that I have? Because as a sales leader, I'm optimist and I always think that whatever I'm doing is right. In those cases, I'm sure you'd have seen several of your customers and helped them. How do you typically guide them through that process?

So yeah, okay. I mean, there's multiple pieces there. When you look at why are salespeople leaving or why are members of your organization leaving, there's a culture thing there, right, that we look at, right? What is the culture of the organization, right? Is the culture of the organization, you know, is it one of a scenario where it's toxic in nature? If it's toxic in nature, that's the CEO. There's a blind spot here. Where's his vision, mission? Does everybody understand what that is? How, as a leader of the organization, am I really working with my team members, my management team, as an example? From a selling perspective, As a sales leader, if my guys are leaving, one of two things are happening. I'm not coaching, not training them properly.

Okay.

And if I'm not training, if I'm not coaching, training them properly, then yeah, they're not hitting their numbers. If they're not hitting their numbers, their personal goals aren't being met. They're gonna— I got personal goals. I gotta pay mortgage. I gotta, you know, I gotta take the wife on vacation. I gotta put aside money for retirement. Those are their personal goals, right? As a leader, if I don't understand that and I'm not coaching, training my guys to help them get their personal goals met, then my corporate numbers are not going to be met.

Yeah.

So, there's a coaching training piece of blind spots. There's a training piece for sales leaders. How many sales leaders have gone through sales management training? Now, how do I hire? How do I recruit? How do I maintain? How do I coach? How do I do funnel management for my teams? You know, maybe, maybe they know it. Maybe some of them know it. But what we're finding is that a lot of them don't. They know pieces of it, but not all of it. And so there's the blind spot. There's the big issue we find with sales leaders. So when those things happen, the teams aren't motivated, right?

Yeah.

If I'm working for you, you're not helping me get to my number, right? If you're not coaching me properly, training me properly, not providing the right guidance, leadership, I might leave and go elsewhere if I'm not getting to my numbers. So, you know, whatever it is, every area, every company pain issues are different. Some of them are forecasting. We hear that a lot. The 3 things we hear a lot is forecasting issues. My guys aren't hunting forecasting enough. There's a lot of stuff in the funnel. Nothing is closing. And the 3rd thing we hear a lot of with sales leaders is discounting.

Wow.

They discount to close the deal and that's affecting profitability and bonuses. So where is that? There's a training issue there. Okay, so yeah, I mean, you know, you could, you could— when we do a deep dive into the, the organization, these are all the things we look at, right? What's the culture? How toxic it is, right? Are the leaders— hey, listen, as a leader, if I'm not passionate about the company, my guys aren't gonna be passionate. Yeah, right.

Well, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, you know, Yeah.

I don't know if that— No, that really makes sense. Robin, probably as a last question for today, again, we have these 13 blind spots. I'm sure, I think probably every organization might be dealing slightly different. Not all 13 blind spots are relevant for everyone, but are there any patterns that you've seen where certain blind spots are much more occurring in organizations than the others?

For example, there is, there is 2 of the 13. There is 2 that's consistent.

Okay.

Okay. Not having— if you go back to the—

can you?

Yeah, you can pull the slide up. The first one is accountability. Okay. So, um, not creating a culture of accountability.

Okay.

That's the first one. And the second one is no common sales language. Those are the top 2 that, uh, that we see. I've seen them. Dave Mattson's seen it as a CEO. These are the ones we— I see the one I see most is no common sales language because my ICP, our VP of Sales, in the, you know, mid-sized organizations. And this is what we see the most of. And all the things that you asked about— revenue down, sales guys leaving, right, etc.— it all boils down to, you know, no common sales language and training, management training. That's what we see. Yeah.

Well, That's impressive because at the end of the day, if people understand the language, what we need to really think through, that could basically mean even objection handling. For example, if I have 10 salespeople and then everybody is dealing with objections in a completely different way, then there is a problem.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly, right? If there is— think about an agenda for a meeting, right? Think about which is one of the most important steps in Sandler Selling World. It's referred to as the upfront contract. It's the second step in our selling process. And the upfront contract says, hey, when you meet with a prospect or a client, right, understand what the purpose of the meeting is. Understand what the time of the meeting is. Understand what their agenda is and what your agenda is. Let's have a clear definition of what's going to happen at the end of the meeting. Okay? Yeah. If I understand, if I implement those 4, those 5 steps in every single sales process, right? My meetings, we find our meetings are a lot more successful.

Right? Yeah.

Versus just going into a meeting and going, okay, prospect says, okay, what do you got? Right? And you start going and you think about it. You've done 2 hours, 4 hours, 5 hours, 10 hours of prep work for the meeting. And you get in there and you're ready to go. And he goes, tell me what you got. And you start going in. He says, okay, give me a price. And all of a sudden, he's taken over. You leave at the end of the meeting. He goes, thank you very much, Suresh. We'll get back to you. And you go like, what happened?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So how do we take control? There's an example of one step upfront contract where we actually take control of those meetings. as a step in the process. Objection handling is all about questioning, right? What are questioning strategies? They're objecting for what reason? That's probably, you know, anyway, I can, I know we can go on and on with this.

Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. But Robin, I think today is super exciting because I think this is really a level set for a lot of sales leaders to really think through which of those 13 blind spots that they are going through at the end of the day. Because one of the crucial things, even for us at Sales Table, we are meeting with tens of sales leaders every single week. And one common theme that everybody has is they don't know what they're going through. Right? Yes, I think, you know, there are symptoms that we see for sure, but What solves the core and the root cause of these symptoms is something that everybody is trying to figure out. These 13 blind spots definitely helps them to have their framework to really think through. At the end of the day, whether they use tools or not, and that's a completely different issue. But at least I think that awareness is so important.

Yeah.

In this first session, I think we've set that common language in that sense. I'm really excited to dive into the rest of the 3 sessions as well because now we need to really dig into what does it really mean by good hiring? What are the steps that you need to take to say, should you hire, let's say, VP of Sales or Director of Sales or AE or SDR?

Yeah.

Based on the situation, I'm sure I think the answer varies completely. But it's really about thinking through your situation, your level of the revenue creation, where are you at that cycle? And then there are so many things for you to weigh in to get to those conclusions. And I'm really excited to get to the next steps of our episodes, Robin.

Yeah, same here, Suresh. And I am excited to continue on with this and do a deep dive. on some of the, the popular blind spots, uh, and hopefully this will add, you know, some, some light to the organizations, uh, that you work with. And, uh, hopefully, you know, some of these things they could implement, uh, within their organizations. Yeah, I look forward to it, man.

Absolutely. Robin, again, uh, thanks a lot for your time, and, uh, talk to you in 2 weeks then.

Yeah, sounds good, Suresh. Look forward to it. Take care.