How to Optimize Your Sales Effectiveness, with Manny Medina [Episode 407]

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In this episode we discuss the state of sales software in 2017. For the latest in sales software, visit www.revenue.io.

Key Takeaways

• Manny was a telco software developer. He moved to Amazon, then to Microsoft’s Windows Phone, and then, sales.
• Manny founded GroupTalent, as the main salesperson. They developed internal outreach software, but customers wanted the software, not their service. So he began Outreach.
• The declining number of hours reps spend selling is the biggest problem Manny sees in sales. Why has it declined?
• Could CRM syncing take less sales time? Manny also has ideas for getting real-time client information to salespeople. What can be automated in communication?
• As sales is a process, Manny asks, for each action, what is the value of that action relative to the expected outcome. How do you optimize your time to be most effective?
• Marketing Automation provides customers with a lot of information before they buy. Salespeople should have a lot of information about the customer’s persona, and the individual contact, and engage them to fit their needs.
• In B2B sales, you need to know the structure of the prospect firm. Who are the influencers, who makes the decision, and what value proposition engages each contact?
• How can you set up your system so that when your automated message is sent to the contact, it lands at the right place and time to work? When should you use testing?
• The sales process has two issues: how well does the process fits the prospects, and are people well-trained to have the right conversations to engage with the prospect? What message resonates with each persona?
• Sales process training is largely ineffective, and, when effective, it fades in the absence of continued follow-up. When Outreach.io works with a client, they check for a process; if it’s being followed; and lastly, if the results are being measured.
• Manny cites Bill Walsh’s The Score Takes Care of Itself, about a standard of performance, that when followed, produce repeatable results. SaaS needs a repeatable process.
• What relationship does Manny see between quota attainment, and CRM roll-out? Are shops actually using their CRM? How can Outreach.io fit into the process?

Episode Transcript

Andy Paul  0:35  

Hi, I’m your host, Andy Paul. Join me as I host conversations with the leading experts in sales, marketing, sales, automation, sales process, leadership management, training, coaching, any resource that I believe to help you accelerate the growth of your sales, your business and most importantly, you.

 

Andy Paul  2:05  

Manny, Welcome to the Sales Enablement Podcast. 

 

Manny Medina  2:35  

Happy to be here. 

 

Andy Paul  2:36  

Thanks for joining me. So take a minute Introduce yourself. Your background, how’d you get your start in sales?

 

Manny Medina  2:43  

Well, I’m Manny Medina.I started my career as a software developer. And my first job was with a company called Bell Atlantic, which is now part of Verizon.

 

Manny Medina  3:05  

Actually, before that, yeah, I was back in the 90s. My career sort of evolved in the technical track, I was very early at Amazon Web Services. And then I moved to Microsoft, where I joined the Windows Phone team. And in the Windows Phone team, I joined the sales team doing distribution deals for Windows Phone in America, selling the phone to operators. And that’s what got me started in the amazing world of sales. And then I started a company as well, soon after that, and I was the main sales guy for the company that’s in that company called group Talon. And that’s where we sort of got the idea for art reach and after a couple years, slugging it out and group talent. We build a tool internally, that allows us to really scale out a very small sales team to reach out to many customers and sort of get a big pipeline going and when we get Hold up customers. And they would ask us, you know, you’re very persistent. You’re very personalized, however you do it. We would tell them, we tell them what we build internally, and people wanted to buy the tool, not the service. 

 

Andy Paul  4:18  

Interesting.

 

Manny Medina  4:19  

Well, that’s what got us here.

 

Andy Paul  4:21  

Interesting. So taking a step back and and before we dive into outreach, a little bit of your mind, what are you seeing today is sort of the biggest challenge facing sales?

 

Manny Medina  4:37  

There’s a few. The main one that we see facing sales is a couple things. So the declining amount that the sales rep in Spain has spent actually doing sales is what we see as the biggest challenge facing sales. So it’s got any amount of time they spend to find out yeah, exactly the declining amount of time that a sales rep is fans doing, you know, great you’re doing actual sales activities. And, and it’s interesting enough, the, you know, the corporate is sort of is a bit of a moving target. So one is, you know, when when, when the CRM was was created, it was a great tool for you to record what happens in your sales cycle but as sort of the reporting and in this one of the measuring got more, got fancier and got more more more complex, the reporting requirements just continue to go up. And the amount of time that I spend with administrative tasks used to grow very rapidly. And on top of that, the sales never got enough love from a product or technology side of the house. So you know, when they started doing this, they started layering tools on top of the tools to try to solve this problem, but the problem just got worse. So they now you know, fast forward to today, which you have a sales rep that has spent a lot of time entering activities and entering data into the CRM while others Same time, they have a number of tools that they have to, you know, sort of go in and out of just to do their day to day job. And his panoply of tools plus CRM is just creating a lot of friction for the sales rep to just navigate quickly through the admin tasks and get back to sales. sort of saying the sales stack is too big. So the sales stack is getting a little, a little too fragmented. I don’t know about size, but it’s definitely you know, getting a lot of a lot of different tools, doing, you know, single action activities that are not really helping yourself, right, become more efficient, but rather just introduce more complexity and chaos into their process.

 

Andy Paul  6:36  

I mean, the reason I’m saying big is based on description sounds like there’s opportunity for consolidation.

 

Manny Medina  6:43  

There’s definitely opportunity there’s opportunity for rethinking about the cell phone, the sales process and, introducing tools that sort of automate a lot more of what the rep is doing, instead of pulling back on the phone and putting him back.

 

Andy Paul  6:54  

Where do you think those opportunities are to automate that exist to but haven’t been automated?

 

Manny Medina  7:02  

So if you follow the funnel, there’s a number of things that you can do that I mean, the bigger the bigger pieces that are around, how do you get the rep to sort of sync their data into CRM without having the rep do it? Right. So that’s one of the holy grails that many companies are sort of chasing. So the CRM is sinking, how do you do it in a smart way? So the rep has spent the least amount of time on CRM and spends more time doing research or talking to the customer? 

 

Andy Paul  7:30  

What you say which ostensibly outreach.io helps

 

Manny Medina  7:33  

I mean, that’s one of those main value props. And the second one, which is more interesting, and this is sort of where we go with our, you know, intelligence releases, how do you bring the right information to the rep, real time so that the rep has all the bits or pieces of information in front of them when he needs it or she needs it so they can make a quick decision. So you know, if I’m doing research on you, I have to go in through a handful of websites, as well. Whatever information I’m buying from third party vendors to sort of get a feel for you know, who is Andy poll and how am I going to say when I call you what am I going to type in that email? So the ability to sort of bring that information in, instead of give you one window pane of information or sort of like a sort of like a dossier or idea that I can use an act on, right, the other piece where reps are spending proportionately amount of time and doing research and sort of going around and trying to find information. The third piece is around the communication workflow and what can you automate, and there is very tactical small things in it, but that are thinking to logically advance it for instance, the ability to drop a voicemail, where you’re calling somebody else, it’s, you know, if I’m trying to get ahold of you and you don’t respond, you want to move on to the next activity, you sort of dropped the voice on the lawn dozer because of the way you’re going to say in the voice was relatively the same. Every time you get up every time you get a voicemail, the other one is, how much automation and follow up can you use in a particular sequence of steps. And this is sort of where we were happy to jump on the soapbox and sort of really talk about the sales process. It is that process that you need to be measuring needs to be optimized for what you’re trying to get done. And it’s not about whether I’m making the call or I’m sending the email when I’m personalized, or I’m automated, it’s really what is the value of your action based on the expected outcome? 

 

Andy Paul  9:38  

Right, so if you’re right, if you are the value for the fewest salesperson

 

Manny Medina  9:41  

Exactly, right, so the unit of measure that you have to trade is your time. And what are you gonna do with that in the next five minutes, next half hour, is really what you’re what you’re optimizing for. So whether I make a phone call, who are you going to call it? What do you say, if I’m going to place an email, you know how much time I’m going to spend that email and what I’m going to say in it? That’s really what you need to figure out, you know, where do you use your personalization versus automation?

 

Andy Paul  10:05  

Well, when you place the other half of the equation, though, which is that same, that same bargain equation exists on the other side, which is what’s the value that customers are getting returned for investing their time to listen to that voicemail or take that phone call or so read that email?

 

Manny Medina  10:20  

That’s absolutely right. And and that’s, that’s, that’s exactly a trade off. Right? So if you’re just educating a customer, is your value best spent sending them an email or calling them or letting marketing automation get to them? Or sending them a white paper and sort of being done with that? So the interesting thing is that because you you only have signals and so from the customer perspective, you what we have right now, which is a very interesting development is that we you know, it used to be that the customer and the days of marketing automation, right, the customer knew they the shipper assumption was the customer knew a lot about the product or service they’re about to buy before they bought. And you know, and they even got, as far as say, you know, sales reps are just order takers. Everything happens in marketing automation, who’s really walking the customer down a path of down down sales as sort of a sales learning path. And it’s really their, their app is just closing. And I think that was one view of the world. And I think that view has been challenged. And now we are sort of on the opposite side of that in which, as a seller, I know a lot about my customer before I call him. I know a lot about not only that person himself or herself, but I know a lot about that persona type. And I know a lot about that company in a lot of other industries before I ever pick up the phone or send that first email. So there is ample opportunity right now to be very personalized. You need to be very targeted and to do you know enough research, to make sure that when you send that email you’re almost dead on in terms of like what are the what are the opportunities What are those, what are the pains that you got to be pitching against. And so it’s turning this job from sort of, you know, taking all this activity to wanting, which, you know, you’re spending a bit more time trying to figure out your customer. And so you know, picking the right story to tell that customer at that time, so you can get a reaction from them, and then sort of using that story to walk down the funnel. And that’s sort of where automation comes in. Right. So depending on the number of deals that you have, depending on you know, your hypotheses, where the customer is in the buying journey, you’re going to be using that particular type of language. And then the question is, depending on your ACD and the unit economics or where you’re trying to do, whether that communication that you gotta do is going to be something that is gonna be automated semi automated or manual, right, depending on what it is. Where is that you want to spend your time and within them and etc. That makes sense?

 

Andy Paul  12:52  

Sure. But I mean, this is what we talked about, where do you want to spend your time and that’s also based, as you said earlier, a lot. It’s really about not just where you want to spend your time, but also what the customer needs at that point in time.

 

Manny Medina  13:04  

Correct. But it depends on a process perspective. You have to believe that if you’re using an inside sales rep that your ACV will justify the economics of your unit economics of your business. You know, I read reaching out, or a rep taking your inbound.

 

Andy Paul  13:28  

Yeah, just so people understand a service is average contract value, right?

 

Manny Medina  13:32  

All right. Okay. So once you make that decision, then  you have a number of options from then on, right? Like, you know, at an ACV of 20,000. Of course, going to have an inside sales team, you know, being very personalized, but I met a CTO 10,000 or less, and you really have to make the choices as to where you’re going to, what persona is your rep going to be spending time with and what persona is better educated the other means so that you know the economics continue to work out for you. You know, while respecting whatever you need. And run any hypothesis or whatever you know about a recipient of those communications. Because I mean, one of the things that is interesting about sales as well is that is that sales is not more, you know, it used to be, you know, there’s no more no such thing as one call close anymore, especially in the b2b world, right. And there’s no such thing as you know, the one decision maker, what you have is sort of, a political structure that you need to navigate, even for very small companies, even if you come into our reach, a year ago, when there’s only 40 people here,  if you want us to sell something, there’s still you know, I was eventually a Czech writer, but I will look to three or four people before I made that decision so one of them is going to live with it. But the other one is other people who sort of are knowledgeable in the space and I feel like that has changed across, all the b2b sales, you need to understand who are they, you know, decision makers and influencers and, and sort of use that kind of approach to really land the sale, meaning you’re going to have to, you know, talk to the end user and there’s a value prop for them. You’re going to have to talk to the administrator , the manager, etc. And then you have to talk to the check writer or even the leader, that organization, and there’s a different value prop for that person. And your job is to sort of work with marketing to figure out how do you group that into personas? And what is the approach that you take for each? You said, I mean, what is that they want to hear? What do you think they are in their buyer journey? So this is why, you know, sales has gotten more complex in that, there’s a lot more people into the decision and the decision cycle. However, you have a lot more technology in terms of what you can test, will an automated follow up, you know, get you where you need to go or you really need to personalize the hell out of this particular message and really bring it home in a way that is very personal because the time spent doing it has a positive ROI on your end. 

 

Andy Paul  15:56  

Yeah, I think there’s a couple things for us is that we, you know, the decision making isn’t more complex, but I haven’t bought into that yet because as someone whose career transcends both halves of the, let’s say, of technological evolution.

 

Manny Medina  16:17  

Yeah, yeah.

 

Andy Paul  16:18  

It’s not really different. I mean, despite what CB says about, hey, 5.8 or 6.8 people now, at least with what I saw in the past, it was always the case that was it. You know, they’re always these multiple stakeholders. And you weren’t just selling to one person. But I don’t think that really matters. As much as I think that what I heard you saying though, I think is really sort of interesting is that is it you can see the trend evolving is that if you do have this complex sales environment, especially in the lower a CVS, you know, 10,000, under, then what you’re saying is that companies increasingly, are always sort of faced with this choice where they’re using inside sales model. were paying below a certain ACV. You are and that ACB is getting higher actually if you are going to be almost purely automated in your sales process.

 

Manny Medina  17:11  

Well, and that’s the part that I’m not. So there’s two pieces, right? When you say purely automated, what you’re implying is that there is an element of human behavior, there’s an element of human interaction that the human needs to understand. They need to make the choices of how do you cut the data? And how do you cut the automation in such a way that when you’re reaching somebody something that was, you know, ultimately automated, that message or that piece of information, Lance, right. And the reason you need automation is to one is, you know, because of the obvious time saving visit. The other one is, you need at least some kind of assistance to figure out to continuously test your message and test your approach. You see, I mean, and this is why it’s hard to argue, you know, to get religious on this and really argue one way one side of the argument and another because at the end of the day where you’re doing, triangulating, right you’re triangulating your efficiency of your wrath versus worth the customer. Add in terms of their buying cycle in terms of what they need to actually understand more about your value prop, before he jumps on the phone that really makes that connection. So the only way to do it is by sort of continuously testing your message, testing your approach, testing your persona classification, and really have a system that sort of helps you go down that path as you get smarter. I mean, even when I and that’s really how you make a team successful, that’s really when we see sort of high performers versus low performance in a in an organization is that they have put a lot of this thought up front, and they’re they’re continuously refining their, their hypotheses and their views as to what’s going to work and what won’t, you see, I mean, so the, the arguments as to you know, who you call, when you call, whether it’s automated and whatever it is, you know, it’s it’s only one of the many data points that you use in terms of like, what action are you going to make yourself to take based on that persona that you’re in reaching out to?

 

Andy Paul  18:57  

So what are you finding in terms of the challenges in that environment for reps to really engage with the prospects on the level that they need to to build the relationship and the trust that’s going to result in a sale. And this is sort of a refrain. I’m hearing quite a bit from people in my interview for the show CEOs I talked to using inside sales as I see that as sort of their challenge, right is how do we get better at being persistent. We’re getting through the people, but then when we finally get the chance to have that person to person interaction.

Manny Medina  19:36  

So there’s two main points here that we need to test out. So one is the process and how well the customer really understands their prospects and their customers. And the other one is how well we train our SDR as an ace or jumping on the phone and really having these conversations. And I mean, interestingly enough, we find gaps in both. In process wise, most companies don’t have a sort of a really detailed view or an understanding it hypotheses around their persona, meaning, who are they reaching out to? What are the potential pain points that they’re gonna be selling against? And at the end of the day, what is the story that they need to weave into the narrative so that when that rep calls he has a point of view that he’s just part of the longer story right? I call you,I have a hypothesis. It’s a matter of, you know, argument. Yeah, I’m calling you and there’s two ways to do it. I can either give you a number, tell me a challenge about your current situation and say, Hey, I bet you they know this, that they This little ticking time bomb that is happening in your shop. And if you don’t call me right now, there is millions of revenue you could be not making by not calling me or something else, right? Or you can use the positive upside of saying, you know, we can make your life a lot easier if you buy our stuff, you know, the nickel?

 

Andy Paul  21:16  

Yeah. And you ask a question about something that should know about their business, but don’t that’s a compelling, compelling leave behind. 

 

Manny Medina  21:22  

Right. So you know, that’s a fine general message. But, there’s the end users, there’s the administrator, and then the VP of Ops, for instance, who are all affected by this decision. So breaking it down and really getting granular as to you know, what is the messaging that is going to resonate for each persona, and it’s how it’s how this persona best receives that message, right? So if you are  in your 50s and you live in the Midwest, you may be apt to pick up the phone and that’s using a lot of phone calling interface, a very fine method of reaching out but if you’re a millennial and you live in one of the coasts, I don’t even remember last night you pick up the phone, and especially if you don’t know what it is calling in from so don’t use the phone, use something else use social use email, use whatever. So the idea is you break down the so you have this matrix or like even your n space, you know, in which you’re really defining all the different attributes of the persona, meaning starting with a story, the problem, the method, and in the end the communication vehicle to really sort of hone in and so how are you going to make that approach and once you make that approach, then you have to be able to sort of jump on the phone, and continue the story that started with the first communication. And that’s also where it breaks.Where did I make that? Where was that point of interest? And how do I navigate that into our compensation. And at the end of the day, it’s interesting that you said that, you know, things haven’t changed in sales. And I tend to agree with that but when you get on the phone, you’re dealing with, you know, just straight up human behavior. Somebody has, you know, they get on the phone and the guard is up. Your job is to bring that guard down. And, you know, if you end up after five minutes of getting on the phone, you’re talking shop, That’s the goal, one in which you’re both going back and forth you adding value, you’re getting value in return, you’re adding, the customer is giving you more information, which makes your approach a lot more a lot stronger. And all of a sudden, you’re in business, because you’re not selling, you’re advising you’re conversing. So, I think that to sort of bring this to conclusion, I think there’s two major gaps here. One is that the process itself is both not being well defined or followed. And B, once you get a rep on the phone, and the rep is navigating that the conclusion there is the rep is not equipped with all the story points and all of the sort of high in all the frames that he needs to use to be able to really, you know, get the best out of that conversation with a customer. And I think both are sort of large gaps. We’re only dealing with the process gap, but the training gap is something that we’re always thinking about because we have to deal with that in our own environment. See it across the board, you know, we have 15 under customers, so every time we talk to one, we get to catalogue all their pains. We’re seeing a lot of that.

 

Andy Paul  24:05  

And so if based on that, what are you seeing as their primary pains, even using your system now?

 

Manny Medina  24:14  

One is that only 10% of the people getting trained are actually seeing value for the training and sort of getting real return from training. And the second piece is that even after you get the training, very few people actually follow it. So you come, your new brand new VP of sales, you come into a shop and you’re like, Alright, we need X, Y, or Z training. So you bring in the trainer and you get everybody on the same page, you get all the playbooks, people leave and then you send your reps back to work and there is no training, drilling and ways to make Without the demotion so you setting play that you said in the US that you want to set in place or they are followed and respected along with all the different measuring mechanisms to make sure that that you have property inspection throughout the process. So when we sell against it, they say exactly that when we go into a shop, they all have a process, it’s a process follow 99% of the time.

 

Andy Paul  25:22  

It’s 99% of the time not.

 

Manny Medina  25:34  

Let me tell you why the process is followed by only a handful of people and even those who are not you know, nobody knows what their process is even working or not. So the longevity of the process that was in play that was set in place usually finishes over time, right you know, and given and given the churn, etc, that you have in sales team, you know, give it a year or two and then the process is known recognizable, yet the highest level people think that they do have a process so all we do in the first you know for most of our sales engagements is just make sure that the process is being followed and measured that alone you know gives you the first bump in ROI and Rachel that was that is you know our mostly our bread and butter is making sure that your process is being followed and that you measure what the result of that is. And even in some instances you know we come in when people have you know, heavy emails, non personalized email or heavy calling is the wrong process for the audience right. So the moment you measure it becomes obvious right now that compared to your peers you’re not getting the results so you should be getting a unique to tweak it.

 

Andy Paul  26:46  

So here’s an interesting question. I guess along those lines, and this is something I hear quite a bit from executives, they’re looking at hiring and so on.I get your opinion on this is okay, you’ve got a problem. So I’m going to hire people that fit the process and will work the process as opposed to even if they’re not necessarily a player or would you reach out maybe to get that Maverick, a player who maybe won’t adhere to the process but might still perform at a certain level? I mean, it seems like that’s a trade off a lot of people are sort of looking at making.

 

Manny Medina  27:22  

Yeah, no, that’s a great question. And it really depends on the type of business you’re in.So the obvious answer is, of course, you’re gonna know, the process should make the team different different approaches, the people should follow the process. And that makes for more scalable business right. So, your risk, is less defined by the type of people that come in, people may come and go But if you have a process that can take an above average person and turn them into a powerhouse salesperson, and they can do it consistently, then you have longevity in your process and your prosperity in the business.

 

Andy Paul  28:14  

Yeah, I call that the Bill Belichick method. I mean, that’s precise, notorious for having a great process. But he doesn’t go by at the expense of free agents. He gets people that fit the slots and the roles they have.

 

Manny Medina  28:26  

That’s exactly right. I mean, one of my favorite books is that discord takes care of itself. Well, Bill Walsh talks about the standard of performance, and everybody has a standard performance. And the standard performance is to sort of bring anybody in who adheres to this on our performance and then you get pro tip production out of the person that is very repeatable. And I think this is especially acute in SAAS businesses, because that’s what this is what you’re buying as an investor. It’s not so much You know that disruption in the software world blah blah blah you’re getting is, you know, recurring revenue, that’s what you pay for. So as a recurring revenue machine anybody in the SAAS world has to be able to create a repeatable process for sales. Because you know, no nobody in the SAAS world buys a company that has lumpy or that has lumpy growth or that growth is very susceptible to the type of salesperson or the vintage or the the ability of a particular salesperson and one of the things that as a venture funded business, you know, when we went for fundraising last time, one of the items one of the areas where you know, VCs like to dig deep is how much of your revenue is driven by one or two superstar individuals versus Is this a process that are needed and you have quota attainment across the board, etc. You know, and if you look at the latest surveys coming from both CSO and etc, etc. 

 

Andy Paul  30:13  

Well that raises an interesting question when I’ve asked more than one guest. Okay, we’re in this box a quote unquote golden age of sales, given the explosion onto the scene of all these great sales technologies. And yet, what we’re seeing is that performance least on some measures, and whether they’re 100% accurate or not is far beyond the point. If we look at them as trends in terms of CSO insights, we look at Forrester, their research that said that the close rate for b2b sales is dropping, and has dropped consistently over the last five years. What, what’s happening? I mean, is this just an inflection point where learning how to use these technologies, or are they really not not helping?

 

Manny Medina  30:57  

Now, it’s interesting you say that so if you look at if you look Look at the CSR numbers instead of you know go go one level deep from the obvious metrics what you’re seeing is that this is happening with inverse relationship with CRM adoption. So all these shops that are there that have been underperforming have had 85% and above CRM adoption so it’s either non correlated or inversely correlated, meaning they’ve you know, rolling out CRM is doing nothing to your quota attainment ability. So, then the next question is, so what is it? What is it? What is it related to like, what is actually causing it? And one of the areas where, where CSL digs a little deeper is, do you follow your own process and it gets back to my previous point, and what you’re seeing is that, you know, those who follow the process have you know, 60% of both chance of quota attainment or still Who don’t, which is you know, the the midsection and sort of the the average performers and low performers those who have less than 50% loss, you know, their own process actually tend to misquote more often. So the one the quick fix for the majority of these shops is just following their own process. And it sort of correlates nicely to the study. Mackenzie Did you know a few articles that I read on HBr that the ability to nitpick once you follow your process, you will be able to measure it once you’re able to measure it you will be able to optimize it, but most people don’t even follow the wrong process. And the problem is that he is administratively heavy, a lot of his playbooks, you know, require a lot of human interaction with the CRM. The CRM, frankly, was designed for the value of the CRM as a value the human gives it to the CRM, meaning it’s a human, it’s not manually inputting all this information into the CRM, the values here and goes, you know, diminishes quickly. So this is why you see in Atlanta, which you know, CRM adoption is increasing. According to me, it’s actually decreasing because they did a process that has not been followed because the process is in itself very burdensome to the wrap.

 

Andy Paul  33:07  

Well, it’s been really interesting to see look at those figures sliced with, let’s say, those that are using tools like outreach for instance because to me I think one of the genius of what Salesforce has done is said we want, you know, on outreach.io, because at one respect, it is the easiest way to get data in Salesforce. I mean, so there seemed like a really clever move on their part to say, look, we’ve must fundamentally rejigger architecture. Let’s get all these other tools that are out there that make it easier to get data into our system.

 

Manny Medina  33:45  

That’s exactly right. You know, funny you mentioned that because one of the reasons our customers are buying outreaches because it makes it Salesforce investment work. And, you know, it’s interesting when you think about the fallacy of the sunk cost fallacy. It is that it exists, but nobody wants to be the one who sunk it. You see, I mean, nobody says, Hey, you know, this cost is sunk. Let’s move on. I mean, that’s a fine economic argument, but it doesn’t make any sense. 

 

Andy Paul  34:15  

But that’s interesting you bring that up, because, you know, outside sales infrastructure you’re talking about, I mean, the sunk cost dilemma in sales itself is, why, and why are pipelines so full of prospects that they’re never going to close? I mean, because that whole sunk cost dilemma. 

 

Manny Medina  34:31  

So I mean, it’s the behaviors perverse across the board, but unless you have a, you know, a tool when we come in and sell outreach, you know, outreach makes the first investment validated first investment because it now keeps the service hearing clean and puts out all the information they should be there, etc. But in the sense of, you know, in the pipeline, it allows you to sort of work on the areas of the pipe that are actually you know, are going to pay out, you know, I mean, input in the activity. where, you know, we’re in Minnesota put in the activity. Now, the, you know, cleaning up the pipeline and, and, and so dispensing with opportunities are not going to close are going nowhere. That’s a great topic, especially around one of the biggest benefits we get from our sales VPS is that  every time you trying to forecast opportunity closing you look at the opportunity pipeline minutes, you know, there’s a lot of 90% there’s a lot of things that are gonna, just gonna close or about to close, we’re given final word final talks, etc. But if you correlate that to the activity, very little is happening. So you know, you see a lot of reps committing opportunities that they haven’t had activity in in days or even weeks. And if you even go down one level, what you’re seeing is activities that are happening with the right people, right. So  if you’re in a 90% opportunity and you haven’t really engaged in, say , procurement, you’re not closing that opportunity in the next two weeks.

 

Andy Paul  36:02  

Oh, no, absolutely. We’ll do this as a whole separate show on forecasting because, yeah, don’t get me started if we don’t have time today.

 

Manny Medina  36:14  

What you said is everybody’s hot button. I haven’t made ourselves as LDP, in which if I don’t press that I don’t get, you know, a good 15 minute rant about you. Sure, lots happening, etc.

 

Andy Paul  36:26  

And I wrote about this in my last book. The fallacy of forecasting with CRM says that they’re all stage based. And that virtually just by virtue of submitting a proposal, so if you’re say, that suddenly gives you a 75% chance of winning, it does get me especially if there are four other competitors on the deal. Well, mathematically, you can’t all have a 75% chance of winning because you all submitted a proposal. So anyway, we’ll come back to that one. And so many We’re moving to the last segment of the show. I’ve got some standard questions I ask all my guests. And the first one is a hypothetical scenario, where you’ve just been hired as VP of sales to do a sales turnaround at a company and sales have turned stall out. The CEO is anxious, like yourself anxious to get things back on track. So if you’re in that role, what are the two things that you could do your first week on the job that have the biggest impact?

 

Manny Medina  37:23  

It’s funny, you mentioned that because we touched on this just a minute ago is that I would look at your sales playbook. And I would make sure that the reps are following the playbook. And that my instrumentation that I got from my sales operation actually reflects what people are supposed to be doing as part of the playbook. Okay. And that’s, that will be that’s my first that’s step number one. Then of course you move down to looking at rep performance, versus you know what to expect from another rep, and then you look at the performance versus your market. Then after that, you look at his stage, for each stage of the pipeline, you sort of look at, you know, time spent on the stage and conversion rates and so on and so forth to make sure your story matches the business that you’re trying to sell or pitch in the audience. You’re going after. 

 

Andy Paul  38:34  

Okay. Excellent. Some rapid fire questions for them. The first one is what’s your most powerful sales attribute?

 

Manny Medina  38:46  

That I’m really good at getting somebody to sort of talk shop with me very quickly.

 

Andy Paul  38:51  

All right. Who’s your sales role model?

 

Manny Medina  38:55  

There’s a few. I love Mike Weinberg. His book was very influential into me you know growing as a salesperson

 

Andy Paul  39:35  

Excellent. So what’s one book you think every salesperson should read?

 

Manny Medina  39:39  

Oh by far my Weinberg’s sales simple button. Okay, here we go. Let’s read that. That’s a good book and your book. 

 

Andy Paul  39:54  

And all right last question for you what music is on your playlist?

 

Manny Medina  40:00  

Depends on what I’m trying to get done. So if I’m just cranking in the heads down Sex Pistols is my go to.

 

Andy Paul  40:12  

I like it. Good. Yeah, you might I think you may be the first one out of let’s answer the Sex Pistols out so that’s a good one. Hey, Manny, I thank you for being on the show today and telling folks how they can find out more about outreach or connect with you.

 

Manny Medina  40:32  

Yeah, please go to outreach.io or email me directly.

 

Andy Paul  40:36  

Okay, excellent. Well, thanks again. Remember, friends, thank you for taking the time to join us today. Remember, make it part of your day every day to deliberately learn something new to help you accelerate your success. easily do that, take a minute to subscribe to this podcast. That way you won’t miss any of my conversations with top business experts, our guest today, Manny Medina, who shared his expertise about how to accelerate the growth of your business. So thanks for joining me till next time, this is Andy Paul. Good selling everyone. Thanks for listening to the show. If you like what you heard, and want to make sure you don’t miss any upcoming episodes, please subscribe to this podcast on iTunes or Stitcher.com for more information about today’s guests, visit my website at AndyPaul.com