Episode 17, Part 2 - Benchmarking Top Performers for a Sales Playbook, with Guy Rubin

ultimately, on valuation of your business? And so trying to get under the skin of that challenge is absolutely key and and the answer to it in a single word, is consistency. It doesn't have to be hard, but there aren't any shortcuts. So to address the challenge, you need a combination of four things. We need the data that underpins now, just because you've got Salesforce in place for the last year and you've worked 1000 opportunities and 120 5% of those, that doesn't mean you've

got the data you need. So if you look back at an opportunity and it's got one contact and three emails associated to it, it's not going to be enough to build the benchmarks you need to actually affect change. So the way we address that is by solving the data quality issue with the engine that we talked about earlier, and what we call relationship intelligence. Once you've solved the data quality issue, we're then in a place to

deliver insights. We can convert that data into insights, and then we can use those insights to build benchmarks for every different go to market motion. You have different geographies, different products, different size and shape of customers. You need to understand what good looks like, not just

holistically, but at every stage of every sales cycle. We need to understand which personas need to be involved, or what's the impact of having certain personas engaged earlier versus later, and is it, and you might find that the data will tell you which personas are important, and most importantly, how much engagement you need to have with those personas before you move

on. And the biggest mistakes we see that the top that the B players make is they skip through those early discovery stages, and then the leadership think they've got a late stage churn issue, right? They've been working the sales process. They think they're in stage five or six, but in reality, and then the deal closes, lost. But the reality was the customer's never really in a sales process in the first place, because we never

qualified them well enough. So we recently built an engine that can plug into things like your old Gong recordings or your zoom recordings. We can go back through the last year's worth of calls and the discovery, and then associate the qualification to the deals that close won and lost, and suddenly it's like turning a picture from black and white to color. You can suddenly see, look, this seller is consistently losing deals at

late stage, but they're really bad. They might be really good at the Med, but really bad at the pick or whatever qualification you're using, right? So understanding where your team are falling down in those early stages and being much more consistent about what they need to achieve to get through the stages, and using the data to set those benchmarks gives you all the insights you need to introduce consistency. And as I said earlier, we've recently introduced our own

brand guarantees. We guarantee to get more sellers hit and quota within six months, or customers can walk away, and we've never lost a customer yet.

week. And in that meeting, it doesn't matter who the manager is, it doesn't matter who the seller is, the format of that session should be identical. We should be that the seller knows what questions are going to be asked, because all of the issues with the opportunity are automatically populated into the Salesforce opportunity record. So they know in advance the

questions that they're going to be addressed with. With this with the manager, the manager knows what questions to ask and doesn't get bombarded or bamboozled with they love us. They think we're great. They I've really got a great relationship with this. I don't care about any of that. Why haven't we got an engagement 67 with the five? Seven with a finance persona, right? That's what I need to know. Because the playbook tells us that when we win, we do at this stage.

help us build our weekly pipeline review frameworks? We love the fact that they've. Approached us to see if we can help that second, how have you got that big without having a deal review and a pipeline review process in your organization? It's insane, isn't it? So is it the fact that they just haven't needed one, one of the big four tech US firms are talking about, is it because they haven't needed one, or is it the fact that they definitely need one now, and it's become

that realization point. What's your perspectives on that.

sales, we still largely have inconsistent process. And depending on who the manager is or what who the seller happens to be, you'll have a wildly different experience through your through your your pipeline inspection meetings and the inefficiencies in sales, you know, we saw an average win rate of 19% you know, but we're spending over 80% of our time with customers that are never going to spend any money with

us. And that's okay, apparently. And people don't seem to be concerned too much about that, but, but the data will tell us what we need to know if, if, if, when you win in stage three, you spend 15 days. Well, once you get past 15 days, we need to be asking whether this opportunity is real. Yeah, but if you don't know the average number of days you spend in stage when you win versus when you lose, you don't even have the data to be able to make those decisions.

turbulent. We're finding that sellers probably at that 86% maybe the ones who have ridden the wave have all of a sudden gone actually. Selling is quite hard, and we're starting to see them maybe move out of these tech firms, but they're wanting to command six figure salaries anywhere between 203 $100,000 but when we've actually challenged, Can They Sell? Guess

what? The answer is no. 86 so is it the fact that they're just been riding that way for the last 15 years and absolute bucket loads of cash by because these market forces taking orders, you know? Is it the leadership that just haven't, you know? And maybe the leadership are not that competent in these firms?

bad sellers. Put people in sales roles that shouldn't be but if you've got the drive and desire to win and you want to be in sales, the leadership team you have around you will dictate how successful you are. You know, again, I claim to be an expert in the space, even we're getting much more accurate and much more

focused on what our ICP is today than we were before. You know, we're all learning as we go, but your if your sales organization, if your go to market motion, is not data driven, if you're not tracking engagement with different stakeholders within the organization, whether it's in the sales process or the customer success process, if you haven't got benchmarks of what good looks like at every stage of every sales cycle, and if those benchmarks aren't evolving over time through the engine,

you're not going to have that transformation on the flip side, the the impact you can have by introducing that level of consistency, by understanding what those benchmarks are, and holding everybody to account, is transformational. And we saw recently a customer, a P backed business. Their growth rate was single digits. They had about just over 130 sellers, turning over nearly $200 million really struggling to get double digit

growth in a year. They got to 27% growth just by being data driven and just understanding what drives the right behaviors. And introducing that level of consistency was transformational for the business. So it can be done and it can be done quickly, but there's no shortcuts.

of these different siloed individuals responsible. And while the theory of it was very good, you get these specialists that are really good at their piece of the puzzle. In reality, the buying experience had a had a big negative impact on the buying experience, because you were constantly being handed

over from one persona to the next. And what we saw last year was companies really leaning into this idea of full cycle selling, which frankly, was where we started, kind of 25 years ago, right when I was selling, when I started selling, I was responsible for generating my own leads and and what we see today is nearly half of businesses have started to transition into this area of full cycle selling, where the sellers are responsible for generating a proportion of their

own pipeline. They are obviously responsible for running the sales cycle as well. But if you think about it, they then, they then are responsible for holding on to that account for the next 12 months. And the data tells us that a number of things. First of all, again, if the buyer has built enough trust in the seller to sign a contract. It seems crazy to let that relationship

die and then hand them over to somebody else. We also know that the vast majority of cross sell up sell opportunities happen in that initial 12 month period, so allowing the seller to continue to hold on to the account does two things. First of all, it maximizes your chance of winning those cross sell up sell opportunities. But also it means that the seller doesn't feel under pressure to get the whole deal done in the initial signature, because that's the only thing they're going to get

paid on. So we've seen a real push towards giving that customer experience, that single point of contacts, that main right until the point where the customer's kind of normalized, which could be six, 912, even 18 months. And my gut feel is that by this time next year, when we look at the data again, I think it more than half of businesses will be in that phase.

customer. We were delivering a large project this year for a large bank, and we asked, you know, quite rightly, seen, what was the reason for selecting us and and their their top criteria for selecting us as an organization was making sure that the people that were in the sales process. Post selling was going to be part of the delivery process because they wanted to buy the people. They didn't want to buy expose the brand, because they didn't know how good the quality was, I suppose, until

you start using it right. And actually the businesses, there was four others in the process. One organization sent a pitch team in, and they said they'll bring in this other team to deliver no and then this other organization was neck on neck with us, because the, you know, they really like the person. So I think that's interesting.

and how we can kind of drive that through. We've had guests on the podcast talking about the importance of understanding, recognizing competencies and how to develop those and of course, we do that on a kind of day to day basis, but yeah, what are you hearing in the market when it comes to how organizations are managing to find those people that can cover all of those aspects?

piece. I think with all change, when you get pushback, and sellers generally will push back on any change, the way to address that in an organization is more about is to pick a pick a group, pick a forward thinking group that want to be special, and make them special and help them be successful, and then show the rest of the business how they're performing. Okay, because ultimately the sellers want to win, because they want

to earn money and they want to be successful. When you show them the path as to how they can do that, suddenly it becomes their idea. Now they want now they want that now it was that they were already bought in in the first place. Okay? And so find a small group that are going to go along with whatever the changes that you're bringing in, and it will lean into it, make them feel special, help them be successful, and then make the others jealous that they aren't part of it, right,

that that way is the quickest route to move forward. And I think it's our job as leaders to give people that vision of why they should go through this exercise. Change is painful, so there needs to be a really good justification as to why to do it, rather than just because I told you so. The early adopters splendid with scarcity. I was watching a Simon Sinek video just the other day that he was talking about exactly that. I forget the exact number, but I think it's a sort of the first

11% is what you'll get. And you'll get kind of good engagement with as the early adopter group, which is probably smaller than lots of people would think. But once you get those on board, then the rest of the across the the average, average distribution, you've got, then that middle group that starts to go, hang on a minute, and that's interesting. And we sort of drive change that way. I think there's two types of people in the market, and both are valid, right? So you've got

those that really enjoy turning zeros into ones. We're breaking new ground. We're going to work out how this thing works, and we're going to refine it and get better at it, and those, those your early adopters. And then you've got those that really enjoy rinse and repeat. You know, I know what I've been told to do. I understand the structure. It's been really

clear to me, and I'm going to follow that playbook. And they're really powerful too, but we need to give them the structure and and the mistake we make as leaders is we put is we mix the groups. And when you ask people that are really good at turning zeros into ones to continue to rinse and repeat the same process, they get bored. And when you ask those that are really good at following process to start getting creative and work out how we solve a new problem or change something,

they get very uncomfortable about it. So again, it's our job as leaders to find the right people work with them as almost a almost a black ops team, right? Let's work out how we fix this challenge. How do we improve our win rates? How do we how do we go for sales cycle, and is it worth it, right? Let's, let's see. Let's, let's try and experiment. The results will tell us, and it'll all be in the data. So really, work out

where your team sit. There's no good or bad as leaders, our job is to understand where people's strengths are and lean into them and stop getting frustrated about square pegs that don't fit in what round holes.

earlier, it's not difficult, but there are no shortcuts. Okay, so the four things you need to think about if you want to introduce want to introduce that level of consistency and get that growth in and get more of your sellers hitting quota, step one, you have to start by solving the data quality issue. And you need that historically. You need to be able to go back a year or two through this, through the data, fix the data

in a consistent format. We're not the only players in the park, but we have a plug and play solution that can connect to your mail servers, your calendars, your phone systems. We can go back and fix all of the historical data in Salesforce and give you an engine that keeps it up today over time. Once we've got an engine that once we've got the data consistent in the system, and by consistent if you're still relying on any humans, then you will not have the level

of consistency you need to build your benchmarks. So once you fix the data you want to you, then need to convert that data into insights. What does good look like at every stage of every type of sales process we run? What are the warning signs we need to look out for at each stage? Once we understand what the benchmarks are, we're then in a good place to be able to introduce that level of consistency to our sales cycle.

We can then introduce some technology where we can do pipeline inspection and forecasting tools, and obviously ours is delivered inside Salesforce, but ultimately, the final piece of the puzzle is key here, and that's a change agent.

Now, a lot of organizations think their change agent might be the VP of sales or their rev ops function, and that may be the case, but more often than not, we find that those internal revolts functions are really more sales admins than they are strategic thinkers, and you need a strategic thinker helping you with that change. Age as a change agent. Don't underestimate that final piece of the puzzle. Have someone

responsible for that change. We talked earlier about how you can kind of almost gamify it by having a pre a team that are getting access, early access to this information and that so we can show the rest of the business. Look what happens when we get more consistent. We get better outcomes, and then everybody else wants to jump on that. So. So in summary, fix

your data, turn it into insights. Have a consistent platform you can use, or some technology that gives you a consistent way, an easy way of running your pipeline, inspection and forecasting process, and then have a change agent you can lean into. And every quarter, you should be seeing incremental improvements on things like time to close a level of coverage each rep needs to hit quota conversion rates at each stage of the sales cycle and then ultimately, win rate.