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Remote Sales Management

The World of Sales Demands Change: Part 3

What You Need to Know

  • The author makes the case that CRMs do more for the CEO than they do for the sales rep.
  • He sees the idea of the reps entering their own CRM data as insane.
  • He says sales reps need to have data updated automatically, in real time.

Last time, we looked at how the tools we need need to develop our team (virtually), engage, and convert prospects (virtually) and round the corner to hitting our numbers.

Here, in this part, let’s take a critical look at CRMs. You know, with the Work-From-Home and all that we’re encountering, right?

CRMs were developed years ago to give management some visibility into what is happening in current deals.

In the Salesforce movie “The History of Sales” (still on the Salesforce website), respected sales consultant Neil Rackham said that CRMs were never done to help the sales rep – they were done to help the CEO keep his job by giving him forecast numbers for his board of directors that he would meet or exceed.

Where the Numbers Come From

I have heard sales managers refer to the data in CRMs as the “Sunday Night Funnies” because too many reps wait until Sunday night to update their CRM in preparation for the Monday morning Sales Team meeting — limited by what they remember and limiting what they enter to what they want their manager to know.

In the Zoominfo September announcement of their $545 million acquisition of call recording company Chorus.ai, a senior exec at Chorus said you can’t believe data that is manually entered: “and on the left (referring to a chart shown during the webinar), you see Salesforce,” which today is still the source of truth for your deals, your opportunity for everything that’s going on.

And it’s really insane to believe that the data in Salesforce is purely relying on manual input from the reps. When they finish a call or at the end of the day, go to your CRM and update it. That’s how companies get the latest data. And it’s completely insane that even today, that’s still how the process works. And we all know that makes the data inaccurate. You basically have absolutely no idea what’s going on in mid funnel, how the deal’s progressing, whether it’s going to close, it’s just a black box.”

Sale people need their data automatically updated, in real time.

Imagine today’s rep being able to click on what is being discussed during the call to indicate what is being discussed, starting a time to track the duration of the discussion?

Isn’t duration a point is discussed the best indicator of the points importance to the prospect.

Here’s the thing, recording the calls and meetings does not give the managers the time to listen to anything but random samples of the recordings.

What if the manager could just click on discussion points of interest in a Story-so-Far (a sort of visual “call map”) showing unambiguously what was said — not relying on error prone key word recognition- but instead seeing forecasted deals to in a 3D view of the call — seeing the faces in the meeting, hearing their voices, and reading the transcription as they are hearing the words of the discussion points of interest, indicated by the subject and the duration.

The Change in Coaching is Already Here

This Work-From-Home environment makes it challenging for managers to coach their reps or suggest strategies to close deals.

What if it was easy for the manger to make specific suggestions to the reps, ins both notes in the lead record and documented suggested action items.

We need to make it easy for the manager to follow up to see if their suggestions are being implemented.

These suggestions should also automatically be emailed to the reps with a link back to the lead record to make it easy for the reps to implement the suggestions.

Finally, next time, we’ll take a forward-looking view at training and coaching.

“We have the tools, we have the talent!” – Winston Zeddemore

My family and I recently saw the newest Ghostbuster sequel, “Ghostbusters: Afterlife”. The original “Ghostbusters” was my son’s favorite movie growing up, and he wanted the whole family to watch the new one together for his birthday. It was well done and entertaining, but nothing can compare to the original.

One of my favorite lines from the original comes from Winston Zeddemore (Ernie Hudson) at the end of the film after they had vanquished the ghosts; “We have the tools, we have the talent!”. It was a great line in the movie, and it reminded me of the two most important things a Sales Leader must have to be consistently successful – tools and talent.

Recruiting, coaching, mentoring, and retaining top sales talent is an on-going priority for all of us; we must always prioritize our efforts towards ensuring that the sellers on our team are working at their best levels, and if not, taking the necessary steps to make them better or move them out of the organization. With the recent Great Resignation having taken place, many Sales Leaders are scrambling to either replace sellers who have left or are looking for additional sales talent to expand their teams for next year.

In today’s new Work from Anywhere (WFA) environment, having the right tools at your disposal to effectively manage remote teams is more critical than ever. No sales team has exactly the same level of experience, talent, or time with the company. In virtually every case, the Sales Leader must be able to bring new (or early career) sellers up to speed quickly, continue to manage and mentor existing team members, and keep the most senior (and productive) sellers engaged and working to their full potential. Not an easy task!

Having the right tool(s) to enable Leaders to scale seamlessly and uniquely to each seller’s ability and skill set is imperative. What tools do you use today to help with this daunting challenge? How valuable would it be to have a solution that would enable you to take immediate action on any recorded interactions with a seller and their prospect/customer – either video or voice recording – and provide specific coaching recommendations to him/her based on the specific situation, their skillset, experience, and expected outcome?  How helpful would it be to be able to easily see every previous interaction with the prospect, to the level of detail you want, in order to give you the full context of each prospect’s journey so far in order to give the best possible advice for the most appropriate next step(s)? Or how about the ability to compare how and what your top performers focus on during their calls, and share those results with the rest of the team to establish best practices?  Finally, how much easier would your life be if all the key points of every call were captured and automatically updated into the CRM, giving you the most comprehensive and up to date status of every opportunity – without having to hound your team for updates?

All the above are vital to being able to manage your teams remotely. As a Sales Leader for almost 2 decades, I know firsthand how important each of the tools mentioned are to my business and is the reason why I work for SalesTalk. We provide a solution that addresses all these challenges and more.

Change Is The Only Constant In Life

Change Is The Only Constant In Life

Most of us are familiar with the quote, “Change is the only constant in life”. Fewer of us know that it was written by Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher who lived around 500 B.C. (I didn’t until I looked it up!).

Two things come to mind when I think about this quote: 1). People have been wrestling with this issue for a very, very long time, and 2). It is truer today than it ever has been.

The last 2 years have been challenging for all of us, and the massive changes we have made in virtually all facets of our lives have been made at breakneck speed. This is especially true in my vocation – sales. As a career salesperson, and more recently a Sales Leader, I have always thought I was good with change; changing territories, changing quotas, changing management, changing companies – are all changes we have experienced regularly during our careers – but never as quickly or profoundly as we have been forced to do since the pandemic.

One of the biggest challenges I face as a Sales Leader today is how to effectively manage, mentor, and coach my sales teams remotely. Gone (at least for now) are the days of “ride a longs” with my sellers, going on face-to-face sales calls with them and listening to how they conduct themselves during a sales call, providing them with immediate feedback as soon as we got back in the car. Today, I must rely on call recordings and recorded video calls to listen to and see how my reps are doing – and to hear for myself prospect’s responses and tenor during those meetings – to provide feedback and coaching to them (also remotely).

It can be a daunting task trying to figure out which calls are most important to review, and once that’s determined, which parts of the call or video are most important. On average, a Sales Leader with a team of 10 sellers are faced with over 100 hours of recordings every week (or up to 300 if they lead inside sales teams). Nobody can physically listen to all of it, and many Sales Leaders get very frustrated or give up all together trying to review them because the tools they’re using aren’t helpful. In my case, I’m very lucky because we build a solution to address those very issues, but how does everyone else handle this painful process?

Another huge challenge is managing my business and forecasts. Accurate forecasting has always been an art based on science, but the fact that my team is 100% virtual, 99% of the sales calls they make are virtual as well, and I am only on a very small percentage of those calls, has made forecasting even more difficult for me. I have been forced to change how I look for key data and feedback from my team, how to better qualify forecasted deals, and to determine – quickly – what next steps must be taken to ensure the deals close on time. Most of us live in 89-day increments; (the first day of the quarter is clean up of the previous quarter) and as Sales Leaders, we live and die by the sword of accurately forecasting our business. What new Best Practices have you incorporated in your weekly, monthly, and quarterly cadences to help address these new metrics and challenges? What’s working for you? More importantly, what’s NOT working for you, and why?

I hope these scenarios ring true to you, and I am very excited to read your responses in how we can most effectively deal with the biggest Constant in our lives – Change.

Thanks for reading, and I’ll write to you again soon.

Harry