Accelerate Sales Engagement for SDRs and AEs w/ Chris Rothstein [Episode 612]

Chris Rothstein, CEO at Groove.co, joins me on this episode.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Chris says the single biggest challenge facing sales reps today is overall noise. There are more products, so, to stand out, you have to provide true value that your competitors can’t or don’t offer. Bring your ‘A’ Game.
• Groove.co is a sales engagement platform helping reps while they are selling, by email or phone. The target market is midsize and large companies, with 20 to 50 reps up to thousands. Groove is data-driven and efficient.
• Groove.co has an all-in-one solution for the entire sales team — SDRs and AEs. Google was one of their early customers and Groove built processes for the needs of Google’s complex sales force.
• Started in the Midwest, Groove has brick-and-mortar clients but now focuses on analytics in the tech space. It works well with A/B testing.
• Andy talks about InsideSales.com’s audit of cadences and activities. Cadence is largely fictional unless you count sending one email as a cadence. Chris has seen some companies go all in for cadence. It comes from the top.
• How do you drive the adoption of cadences in a way that makes a difference to outcomes? We are in the Golden Age of sales tech but where are the outcomes? It’s not enough just to blast more emails; you burn relationships.
• ABM is great for a small segment of the market but what do we do with small customers? Groove.co knows the top 10,000 accounts they want to get into; they tier them and work the list analytically.
• Groove.co uses a variety of tools, including some of their own scripts to generate data. They organize the accounts and they match an AE to an SDR to get as much business out of their list as possible.
• Chris tells his definition of sales productivity. Every company seems to measure productivity in their own way. Can a dollar amount be assigned per hour of selling time? Can paperwork be removed from selling time?
• Chris believes that for every efficiency made available to a rep, more information is demanded, so reps never get a break from data entry to use that time for selling.
• It’s hard to make clean comparisons between now and five years ago, but are reps doing better now than then?
• Andy and Chris discuss what is happening with customers who do their own research to the point where they are self-qualified when they enter the pipeline. Why are closing reps still so low? Is sales overstaffed per client?