ERP092 - The art and science of sales

Why would I add yet another security product? Like there's not lack of security products out there in the world today. Like Wiz in Israel and a bunch of others, who's big awesome companies now that have done highly innovative things. They, oh, but our way is different than what everybody else is now doing. Our technology does solves this problem of desktop access and mobility access, you know, differently than how others do. Well, great, I'm glad it's different, but why do I need it to be different? Welcome to Evolved Radio, where we explore the evolution of business and technology. I'm your host Todd Kane. Every client needs cyber protection, but that doesn't mean service providers have to deploy a jumble patchwork of solutions to get it done. Modern protection starts with Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud. Acronis combines backup, anti-malware, endpoint protection, management, and robust ransomware defense, all in a single console. That's why successful MSPs use Acronis to generate more recurring revenue and reduce churn. It's easy to get started at Acronis.com. Today on the podcast, I'm joined by Alister Wolcott, Chief strategy officer with revenue.io. Alister has had an incredible career in technology sales, strategy, and industry analysis. Today Alister is rolling those skills together to help build a sales enablement platform with revenue.io. It's a very cool technology that we touch on at the end of the interview. Also, Alister shares his thoughts and experience on the art and science of being successful at sales. The people, the tools, and the technology. Please enjoy my conversation with Alister. Alister, welcome to the Evolved Radio podcast. Thanks, Todd, great to see you again. You as well. So, you've got a great history in sales and been very, very successful in in sort of all facets of your career. So, one of the things I love sort of asking people that do have this history in sales is there's this debate I always see. kind of when I ask people about what makes a great great salesperson or a successful sales process. And there's seems to be this sort of weighted debate person always ends up on one side or the other between the art and the science of the sales process. So I'd love to get your perspective on that. How much of the sort of the waiting is on the art versus the the process that you build in being a successful salesperson? Or building a successful sales team? I I it's an interesting question. So, I mean, I'm straight and I and I hate to sound like a consultant on this, but I think it depends. on where you are in your stage of growth. Right, it's a different answer for a very early stage company, it's it versus a enterprise company. Right, so because in the enterprise piece, you're you are looking at scale function. You're looking at repeatability, you have brand items you're trying to take care of and be consistent around in every conversation. But when you're getting going, you're the opposite end of going, how do I just actually get somebody and actually have a good conversation with us? I'd be thrilled with that, right? You you're concerned about the at bats a lot more. And so, you know, I think I think that depends. Now, the art and science is you need both. The art is you need to have extraordinary conversations with people. There's no doubt you need to have that. That's what sales is. Right, it's it's it's it's the storytelling that is germane to being human. But the science is getting to the conversation. And then how do we improve upon that once we're there? Because you can't just phone somebody up and have a sales conversation. Unless you're really lucky, right, these days, it's it's it's very hard to do that. So that's where the science and a lot of things come in. And science being often tooling, data and a bunch of other things, knowing when and where and how to to connect with somebody effectively. Yeah, that that actually lines up fairly well of and maybe I'll I'll sort of run this past you to get your your feedback on on what I suggest to people is. similar, like I think it is important to have a process so that you're kind of building those blocks and you can you have a framework that you can train other people on later and you know sort of what good looks like. But often what I tell people is is just getting started, the most important things is just having conversations. Now, there's successful sales friend of mine, he gave me probably the best advice early on in in building my business. He said, Todd, just legs and lungs, just move around and talk to as many people as you can. It seemed so simplistic, I was like, yeah, okay, whatever, I'll try this. And it was actually incredibly effective and so I kind of relate the same thing to people when I'm talking to them. And I think part of the reason why this is so effective is you need to build that confidence about talking about what you are eventually selling. And just sort of the moving around and talking about that to as many people as possible is is really crucial. With your read on that. I think it's true. And yes, so that is what I would say is solving the aspect of getting the at bats, right? Like you're engaging, you're testing, you're understanding what's there, and there's no better way than to do talk about what you're up to, right? So when I was at Gartner, I was an analyst over there, work I worked with a lot of tech CEO clients, right? So these are companies that are early stage, they're trying to scale, they're trying to grow. I worked with 5, 600 a year around the world. A lot of them have that thing, right? But they then want to it's almost like they want to outsource that conversation to others. They just want to hire people in. And like, but you don't even know your fit yet, you don't know what people actually see valuable in what you're doing, either your service or your product. You need to go have conversations and be prepared that you're going to fail at nine out of 10 of them. But that's the at bats to help you actually assess something else, which is product fit or service fit. And then you're tweaking your offering, once you know that, you can start to add and hire sales people. But if you don't know that, you're you're asking people to do something that you yourself haven't solved. So I think your advice is spot on. It it's all about making sure you have a place in the market and you begin to know what what works in the market. Now the caution I have in that though is. You tend to then get fairly bullish entrepreneurs who then go, well, I'm out there talking with everybody all the time and it's no problem and I have all these conversations. Great, and they and they have an elevated expectation of these people they then hire in. And they don't know actually how to transfer what it is they've learned correctly over. So that's where a little bit of process, just a little on the enablement to help them and train them is important. Right, you have to get the knowledge transfer over. And knowledge transfer is not we'll just bring me along to your meetings. Yeah. That's not knowledge transfer because you haven't set the person up to go get the meetings effectively. So I know I added a lot to your advice there. But yes, I think your advice is very germane to you have to nail product fit first or service fit. And you do that by actually rapid testing against anybody that would listen to you in any form out there initially. So I think this is useful, a large sort of listener section of of the audience. is kind of the small business owner, often technical, but sometimes not. I'd love kind of your advice on, you know, I'm a new not even necessarily a new business owner, but say a technical owner. that knows they need to do more sales, but is sort of afraid of uh sales, feels scary, I'm not very good at that. Where do they just start, is it just that of like having those conversations or is is there other bits of advice that you give someone on on building out their sales capacity? Uh kind of from zero or from very early stages. I would first of all start with again, let's assume they've solved the product fit piece. Right, that we just went over. Next is, all right, you're you're you may not quite be at the point of hiring a sales people. And and I'm going to come back to when we when we hire sales people what to do. So we're in that in between piece. And there it's going to be really very much about leading with the insight and begin to be fairly quantitative on what you do and how you do it. Right, because in order to make sales work, sales is actually a fairly data driven thing. Right, it isn't we don't live in a world anymore where golf and lunches are going to get you there. Right, that's that's not what happens, right? When you have 83% of all sales engagement now happening via digital channels, right? So what we're doing right now on a on a virtual meeting or on the phone, right, very little is actually happening in person. In fact, it actually reduced further coming out of the pandemic. Which is very interesting, so, you know, the genie's not going back in the bottle there. So you have to figure out how are you going to digitally engage with your key customers, how are you going to reach out to them in a way that is supportive and helping in in what they do. And and start down those basic pieces. So that often leads to yeah, it could be a little bit more marketing investment initially before you do the sales investments. And understanding where you're going. But when you go down the marketing side, you know, this is where you're looking at uh things to do email cadencing, outreaching and stuff like that. You're not doing it to just send another email to say, hey, our product's amazing, you should consider us. You got to lean in back to my point on the data that is specific to that person, the outcomes you can create for somebody. So really just asking yourself in that communication, and now we're going to increase the volume of communication, what outcomes are you helping that said prospect achieve? If you don't know that answer, figure out that answer before you begin to talk to more people. Because that's that's the critical piece that that is there, right? You cannot you cannot just buy a bunch of marketing tech and start bombarding everybody. You'll get blacklisted, you know, something like that, or you just won't get any response. Waste money. And then you won't you won't have it figured out for when you hire the sales people either, which will be equally as frustrating. As most sales people will expect some form of basic structure there to be successful. So, so and remember, final comment there. Technology is not a differentiator. Right? Technology is amazing, I love technology. 22 years I think it is in the field now, right? Uh you and I've been around it longer than we probably like to admit. But it's not the differentiator, it's what the technology does and helps me achieve that is the differentiator. And that's that's where a lot of technical entrepreneurs, business owners get caught up in their own thinking of, oh, but I solve something great. I know just give me an example of this. I had a friend the other day that pinged me and it was this uh earlier stage company, they're just getting going. A new security product. And they're trying to raise some capital and do some stuff, right? And then hire some people. Great, it's exciting, everybody it's an exciting world to be in. And you look there and go, well, why would I add yet another security product? Like there's not lack of security products out there in the world today. Like Wiz in Israel and a bunch of others, who's big awesome companies now that have done highly innovative things. They, oh, but our way is different than what everybody else is now doing. Our technology does solves this problem of desktop access and mobility access, you know, differently than how others do. Well, great, I'm glad it's different, but why do I need it to be different? Yeah. Isn't using one of the other like 20 technologies that already exist in that way good enough? Like what what is this doing for my business that is so much better and different than the well, better threat protection. I already got pretty good threat protection, like what's that last 0.5 of a percent worth to me? It may not be worth it. Right. And so again, that landing on that differentiation, knowing what that does. talking to the outcome, you have to nail that before you start adding people. Yeah, that's really crucial, I think working backwards from already knowing what the value that you provide is in a very sort of communicable and transmissible way. So that people it really lands, like it may make sense to you, but you have to validate that it makes sense to somebody else and then work backwards from there in your in your marketing and sales strategy for sure. I know you're you're pressed for time here, you got stuff to do. I do want to touch on on the product that you guys are building and we chatted on this earlier. And I was really blown away by sort of the the capability and sort of the promise that I think that of what you guys are building. Very cool like sort of sales enablement and data driven platform that that layers over top of uh the sort of the existing sales. and and really accelerates things. Do you want to give us kind of the the download on what you guys are building and what you hope it can achieve for organizations? Yeah, I will I will, but maybe I'll just back it out to the audience to some context here. So, you know, the world you know, I lived in, I came out of as a Gartner with all the vendors and now here obviously over revenue IO. is there's kind of a few things that have happened in the world. And we definitely work more upper mid market enterprise type companies. Just so everybody knows context here of this solution, right? There's a lot of investment in time spent on training sales reps. Right, and and how have we classically trained them? Well, we needed to train them because we had big marketing teams that do what, create a bunch of content now. Like go to anybody anybody's website these days, there's content galore, everybody's got blogs, they got video, like there's stuff everywhere, right? We all know that we get inundated all the time. Well, then that all gets produced because marketers get hit by product teams to go get my information out there. And then eventually somebody goes, hey, we got to tell the sales reps about this stuff and give them access to all this wonderful content. And make sure that they use it with every one of our customers. Well, anybody who's ever been around sales people know that sales people are they tend not to represent a lot of products really well. Right, no different than a technologist can represent a bunch of technology extremely well, right? You tend to be a specialist in something. Sales tends to go the same route, right? So, you got this big content problem. That gave rise to the enablement space. And that's where enablement based platforms came along and said, hey, we're going to take all of that, slam it together and make it easier to train reps. But then you had the world shifted where there was the rise of the digital, right? So everybody's emailing, people are jumping on social stuff all over the place and buyers are not talking as much as they were. An interesting fact, Todd, when you when you think of the amount of time a buyer today spends with a sales rep. So when they're out buying a technology in the world, the amount of time that they spend with a sales rep through the total of their sales process is only 17%. And that's them and all the competitors. So an average rep is getting, you know, about fourish, four and a half percent of that face time. Okay? So you get very limited face time, so then we said, holy smokes, we got to figure out how to engage with people. So then we gave rise to technologies that would email and sequence and do a bunch of stuff, right? So we trained, then we said, hey, we're going to figure out how to engage. Then the pandemic hit. And the pandemic hit, everybody's like, holy smokes. I got no idea what anybody's doing. Because everybody's at home. I don't know if my sales reps are even calling people. I don't know what's going on. And so we better record everybody. And so that gave rise to what you call conversational intelligence technology, start recording. Out of those recordings, you could then after a phone call, go and say, hey, do this a little bit better. I listened in, I heard what happened here, you could you could coach people effectively. So that's what's happened. But the but now everybody's got a bunch of these technologies. And if that sounded confusing to everybody, it is. That's very confusing. That's a lot of technology that goes underneath there. In fact, an average go to market team in an enterprise today has upwards of 30 technologies, reps are using upwards of eight to nine technologies each. Wow. So they're inundated with tools. And yet. sales reps are missing quota than ever before, in fact, 70% miss quota. 89% of buyers say that the conversations they have with the sales rep are and and the quote used is worthless. And so you have a massive mismatch of once we're actually engaging with people and talking, like you and I are now. There there's there's just complete mismatch between the seller and the buyer. Right, they they aren't they aren't congruent anymore. All right, so that's that's a big problem. That's a messed up go to market problem for a lot of organizations. So, you know, we we have for quite some time, we look at the behavior. and the context of conversations. So we listen and understand what happens, we understand, well, how would I engage with Todd? versus how would I engage with Susan or Jill or this other person over here? And then we apply that in real time through using we've you know, dare I say AI, everybody says AI, but it's you know, we use basically some ML models on the back end to learn the behavior. We then have five bands around using the AI that allows us in real time to apply context, guidance and assistance to a rep. And and you're now able to in every conversation, instantly guide the rep both in what they are saying and also what isn't being said. So as an example, like right now, I'd be monologuing on with your question. Right, if this is a sales call, it'd be a terrible sales call because I've not been asking you any questions. And so and the monologue is terrible because I'm not engaging you back as a buyer, right? I would be warned of those types of things. Behavioral based warnings to say, look, you got to ask Todd a question. By the way, you should be asking Todd something that is based upon where he is right now or something that he read recently and here's what he's been up to. Um and then in the conversation, you may say, well, I don't understand what you're doing on AI. How does this piece of the technology work? Well, often reps don't know that, they go, I don't know, let me get my pre-sales engineer. I'll set up a follow-up. Instead now, you can instantly go, well, actually, here's the information that answers that question for Todd. So not only am I arming the rep to answer the question, but then you can help the rep go, by the way, Todd, let me just click this and text it to you right now. Right? So it's this instantaneous advice and serviceability of information that is contextual is key. Contextual in the moment to the conversation being had. So it's not advice for advice sake. It's contextual based advice. And that's that's exactly what we do, contextual based advice, we augment human intelligence using AI. And that that creates better engagement. This is really amazing, like I I I'm geeking out on this idea since we talked about it. Just to give people context for kind of layering onto this, like I see sort of uh an an analogy. between the speech coach in teams, which a lot of people are becoming familiar with, it'll kind of coach you in real time on on what you're saying in a meeting. And this is sort of an amplification of that, and I love this contextual idea that it recognizes these are the data points. This is what this person has consumed, they downloaded this white paper, like you mentioned that, hey, have you read this because they've they've the system says notice. notices that they've read it and you should ask about it as context in the in that that that meeting. So really cool technology and as you said, it's it's augmenting. It's not replacing anybody, it's it's just assisting a very experienced rep to do better and engage in in a context that makes sense to amplify their experience with that customer. I think it's really cool. Yeah, like the top, look, we've all had bad moments in conversations. Like I think if anybody listening in, just ask yourself, is there ever a conversation you've had where you got, boy, I wish I didn't say that. I wish I'd had reacted slightly differently. We've all had those moments. That's a very real human problem, right? Now put the pressure cooker on where your your job is dependent, your livelihood is dependent on having extraordinary successful conversations. And you're meeting with a wide variety of people on any given day, all of which have probably more information than you do. Exactly. And are probably more experienced than you are, and yet you have to meet that expectation of that buyer. How are you going to do that at scale? Because you can do it on a one-off conversation, right? You and I can prep today and come on and have a wonderful podcast conversation. But if you and I had to do 10 of these today. rolling back to back every single day, you'd be ready for every single moment, every single conversation properly. Nope. I'm not sure I would be. And so that's where you have to start to think of how can I augment a person with contextual based information that is relevant. And to your point, teams is a great example of that. Look, starting to look at talk rates, looking at basic sentiment attributes. You know, the market's already, yeah, that that's there. You can you can get some good pieces on there. But you know, where you really have to get to is this idea that to your point. You know, it's it's understanding the buyer. It's taking two people and helping them be successfully aligned in what they're solving for in that moment. That's both understanding what that person has read, what they've done, who they are. But it's then in the conversation itself, giving the appropriate insights and data. Yeah. Remember what what what do we say at the beginning of the call, one of the keys that people look for in sales calls now? They are looking for quantifiable information from the rep. Right. So you got to be able to service the right fact base and insight relative to that conversation and that buyer. You can't randomly just pull stuff out of your head and throw it on the wall. You you have to be contextually there correctly. And then you can have amazing conversations. So that's that is to bring this full circle, that science being applied, that's revenue science, which is now a discipline in the world, that's revenue science being applied to the art of conversation. Right. Very cool, appreciate your time, Alister, this has been great. Yeah, this has been fantastic, so happy to be on here, Todd, and you know, enjoy the time up in British Columbia, hello to everybody in Western Canada and elsewhere who is listening in. And uh hope to see you again soon. Okay, take care. Thanks.