Improving Productivity with Sales Enablement, with Giles House [Episode 431]

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Giles House, CMO of CallidusCloud, joins me on this episode to paint a picture of a more productive salesperson, from the personal habits to the corporate strategies needed to get there.

Key Takeaways

• Giles has been in sales and software for 12-13 years, with CallidusCloud since 2010. CallidusCloud’s mission is to become a top five cloud company, with ‘Lead to Money’ sales enablement.
• CallidusCloud offers a suite of connected sales and marketing applications, for a consistent, shared sales and marketing stack.
• Sales and marketing alignment involves shared information and consistent follow up. Giles explains the process.
• Giles gives his opinion on ABM. Aligned sales and marketing teams should be using it, but not exclusively.
• Lead to Money is a platform for generating more leads and prospect interest, helping marketing ROI, and providing rich information to sales for better buyer connection. It also involves sales training and coaching.
• Giles shares his understanding of sales productivity, concerning the organization and individual reps, with onboarding and goal attainment tracking.
• Productivity of a salesperson includes time they use for sales activities and tasks, and how effective they are. Giles considers CSO Insights’ report on quota attainment, and why it has been flat over the years.
• It’s difficult to correlate records between multiple systems in a typical sales stack, so history and other critical facts are not often available where they are needed.
• Giles discusses the concepts of productivity and quotas. He offers suggestions for setting quotas and commissions. Forecasting is critical.
• Giles would like to see quota attainment much higher than 50%, and he suggests how that could be done.
• Salespeople today carry great burdens of expectations, offset by great opportunities, if they can take advantage of them. The right technology stack is essential. The quality of the customer experience is critical to landing a deal.
• Giles says AI should refer to assisted or augmented intelligence. In Giles’ opinion, robots will never complete the complex sale, but machine learning is a great boost to sales.

The Sales Enablement Podcast with Andy Paul was formerly Accelerate! with Andy Paul.

Episode Transcript

Andy Paul  0:35  

Hello and welcome to the Sales Enablement Podcast. I’m excited to be joined by my guest today. Joining me is Giles House. Giles is the CMO of CallidusCloud. Giles, welcome to the Sales Enablement Podcast. Morning. This is actually his first interview. 

 

Giles House  1:17  

Yes. Looking forward to it.

 

Andy Paul  1:19  

take a minute, think of a brief introduction and tell us a little about yourself, maybe how you got involved with sales and CallidusCloud and so on.

 

Giles House  1:30  

Yeah, I mean, I’ve been around the sales and software industry now for, you know, 12 or 13 years and started life across the pond, and then moved about seven years ago, and joined CallidusCloud and it was a really exciting mission that the company was on and is still on. That’s me, you know, to become a top five cloud company and we’re well on the way to doing that. But really the sort of way in which we’re going to do that is with this idea of, or lead to money. And we think it’s sort of the next wave of Sales Automation Sales Technology. Some may call it sales enablement. But it’s, you know, forget the label for a second, it’s all about helping sales guys and customers make more money. And that’s really what we’re focused on. We think that in terms of the actual process of selling and giving people more time back and helping them make more precise cold calls and, you know, engage more buyer campaigns and things like that. We believe that the market has been very underserved. You know, sales is arguably one of the most important topics for a company to discuss, and it’s one of the most important processes that a company has. Yet it’s probably one that is, you know, beliefs served by technology or rigor.

 

Andy Paul  3:02  

I mean, over the last three to five years that’s what I started to call sort of the Golden Age of sales technology. And there’s been this little explosion in the number of companies with offerings for various aspects of the sales process whether it’s, you know, Sales Automation, Cadence Automation now, go down the list. But you still think it’s underserved?

 

Giles House  3:27  

Yeah, I mean, I think you’re absolutely right. There’s been this explosion. And you know, if you ever look at those sort of sales tech, landscape pictures with all the logos on them, it’s like Where’s Waldo, but you need a micron nano scope to try and find an individual company. There’s just so much of it now. There’s so much technology that it kind of is overkill and it serves to create a different problem. It creates a different problem. which still focuses on the initial problem that there’s not enough of, you know, a consistent technology approach to sales and marketing. Now you’ve got all these companies that have sprung up. And quite honestly, they’re creating a headache for sales leaders, Marketing Leaders, CIOs, because every single thing promises to do you know, another piece of the sales cycle, solve another problem that the customer journey, and you can end up integrating sort of 15 different pieces of technology. Oh, yeah, I don’t know a single head of sales that wants to spend the next 15 years of his or her life in sales, integrating software solutions. And I don’t know many CIOs that would recommend that to their heads of sales or heads of marketing. 

 

Andy Paul  4:47  

Yeah, we’ve got an issue then as the sales stack is unnecessarily complex. And I presume then that one thing you would sort of advocate is that Jesus, you know, if we got more end to end solutions, lead to a money suite, that it simplifies the task for VPS of sales and CIOs and so on.

 

Giles House  5:07  

Yes, yeah. I mean, that’s why we embarked on this journey, you know, to build this suite of connected sales and marketing applications, because we believe they absolutely have to be on the same page to be connected the data that, you know, we’re sharing, and all the data that we’re discovering about our customers. We need to make sure sales has got that data. You know, there was this study a few years ago, and I think it’s largely unchanged today. But for us, the great analyst firm, they did a survey of CIOs. And they said, in all of your meetings with a buyer, with a salesperson, between a CIO and a salesperson, how useful were they and how many times did you do it? Did you accept a follow up meeting with that salesperson. That’s the ultimate test of was it useful? And it was only one in five replied that they would take a follow on meeting and they got value from that first meeting. So we know there’s a sort of, experience gap between buyers and sellers, if that’s what we call it an experience gap and their expectations are not getting met. And it’s very easy to sort of say how well you know, the sales guys are useless. But then the sales guy would say, Well, you know, those Marketing Leads with this terrible person that wants to buy anything, you end up in this perpetual cycle of finger pointing and nothing gets solved. The real issue is that it’s somewhere in the middle, and no one’s to blame. And we’re both to blame. And what I mean by that is that, we’re collecting all this information about buyers and, you know, when you’re looking at something on the web, we can pretty much figure out who you are roughly. What you’ve been looking at, what you’ve been interested in. So if we’re not making that available to the sales rep, then we’re creating a problem. We’re not arming that salesperson with enough juice to do a good job in the meeting.

 

Andy Paul  7:12  

Well, I was gonna say it’s certainly one of the topics over the last 6 to 12 months. And there’s a number of books that have come out recently about this whole sales marketing alignment conundrum that you’re addressing here. And I think, somewhere in your literature, you guys talk about fully 90% of sales marketing organizations say they’re not fully aligned. So carrying on with what you were talking about, what does it mean to be fully aligned between sales and marketing?

 

Giles House  7:42  

Well, I mean, that’s just one example. Right, making sure that the rich information you’re collecting is, is being shared with the salesperson and that the salesperson knows what to do with it. The other thing is, that sort of the opposite side of the sales and marketing value equation is to say He’s really following up with those leads, they’re doing the six touches or whatever it is that you agree between sales and marketing. And it has to be an agreement really has to be kind of like an SLA, like you would get into the days of IT support, you know, you have to have an agreement that you’re going to make these number of touches, because we know it’s not, you know, 90% of the time, you’re not going to make the breakthrough on the first call. So you’ve got to commit to work it. And you’ve got to commit to working these leads, so long as they’re a certain size and, you know, certain interest level or whatever it is that you agree that’s right for your company. And that’s something you have to review all the time. But they have to work it because otherwise you never get the feedback. And they have to be cold as well. And if they’re sort of working leads because they haven’t really got enough, then you know that information needs to come back as well because otherwise you’re creating a false sense of security that your marketing team is doing a good job. 

 

Andy Paul  9:01  

So how do you guys work on aligning sales and marketing? 

 

Giles House  9:06  

Yeah, when we have that sort of contract, we have a certain criteria for what a lead looks like. And that’s the most basic piece of sales and marketing alignment, because the sales guys care most about leads. So what is a lead? And then what are you going to do with that?

 

Andy Paul  9:23  

Score?

 

Giles House  9:24  

No, it comes before even a score. It becomes its fundamentals, what your target company looks like? How much revenue for example, you know, how many salespeople do they have much more interest for? And are we talking to a decision maker? What’s their timeframe for buying? You know, it’s things like that a lot of people use the band budget authority needs timeline, type criteria, variations on the theme of that, and that is what a leader is and so if I find them as the salesperson. Don’t expect you to make six calls and get after it. Once you’ve done that six call pattern over a two or three week period, if it’s no good, you need to recycle it back to us and tell us why it was no good. And then, you know, simply, from the marketing perspective, we can then look at the leads, is there a correlation? Did they all come from the same program that they all come from ? You know, the paid social media program that we were testing? And if they did, guess what, I’m gonna stop spending money on that, because none of them turned into leads, or turn into sales, you know? So that’s really how it works in a nutshell. It’s not rocket science, but it’s back to basics. And I think, you know, going back to the technology, the technology can kind of obfuscate really the underlying problems.

 

Andy Paul  10:51  

So you talked about lead to money and I want to delve into what your elite money suite does. But sort of at a top level is at least in terms of large, more complex sales, now we’re seeing the whole move to, you know, count based revenue generation, which, yeah, they take great pains to contrast the saying, Yeah, this is an account based approach versus a lead based approach to developing. So how are you playing in that space? 

 

Giles House  11:19  

You know, it’s something we’ve sort of, we’ve sort of been doing but somebody’s got a clever bit of packaging around it. And, you know, there are a few tweaks to the model that people have made, and they’ve called it this, but essentially, it’s certainly what a lot of sales development teams are doing. And the good marketing teams start aligned to their sales org should be doing anyway. You know, I still believe there is no way that you’re ever going to credibly get away from saying we need to have a good day. reputation for providing, you know, sales automation technology. And that we’re not going to spend any money on that. We’re just going to go after a set number of accounts. It’s like fishing with a spear versus fishing with a net, you know, you can be very precise. And you might catch that one fish you’re looking for. But what about those other fish out there that are pretty good. They may not be the fat, juicy, fresh Alaskan king salmon. Sure, but you know, they’re pretty damn good and pretty damn close, and we’ll make good money from them. So I think it’s good. And the further you get down, the notional funnel, the further buyers get along their journey, I think it is to have some target accounts. And I think it’s good for marketing to be completely lined up to those types of accounts. Because there’s lots of technology that you can that you can throw at it, you know, you can run very precise, targeted ads. That laser focus on those companies in the face. hits Forbes, you know, they’re gonna see your ad, for example, you can do that sort of stuff. But I still think you need to have that initial bit of brand building reputation, the traditional stuff still works. And I don’t think that’s ever going away.

 

Andy Paul  13:15  

Yeah, and I think that no one will hopefully no one would argue that account based marketing, sales, whatever, is something that you’ll do for all you said all the opportunities in your funnel, because, you know, you can’t just buy the resources for all of them. Okay, so let’s talk about what leads to money then. So tell us briefly what that does.

 

Giles House  13:37  

What it sort of does what it says on the tin, it starts with generating more leads and getting more people interested in your company and helping marketers to engage with those people. And, you know, the ROI that’s marketing is that they run better campaigns and show better ROI from the programs they run. And it’s making sure all of that rich information gets inTo the hands of salespeople, we can align it with, you know, the territories that the salespeople are in, so that we can get leads to them faster. And then we can start to really focus on the salesperson. How do we enable them? How do we onboard them? How do we train them? How do we make sure that the managers are doing a good job coaching them? A lot of companies are growing and scaling and you know, how you onboard your sales talent and how quickly you get it up to speed is an absolute differentiator in the difference between winning or losing. So that’s a very important problem that we solve for sales leaders. And then it’s sort of getting down getting along the road in the sales process a little bit more, helping the sales guys generate the quotes, figuring out the pricing and the margin and all that good stuff. So configure price quotes, quite a popular topic these days. So we do that. Can we find that helps people get much bigger deals and solve headaches? Like how do I sell new products, and how to I improve my cross sell rates and things like that. And then it’s all kind of glued together with incentives, making sure that we’ve got the right incentive programs like commission is paid to the right salesperson. And frankly, are not spending hours and hours doing shadow accounting, building complex spreadsheets to try and figure out, hey, what am I going to earn on this deal? You know, we provide that information to them within Salesforce within the CRM. And it’s very, very motivating. It’s very powerful, they can see the dollars that are at stake on this deal. So, kind of the end of the process for the sales guys. And there’s some very rich analytics and predictive analytics underneath that whole cycle. The data is very interesting.

 

Andy Paul  15:46  

So one thing she talks about is helping sales become more productive. So the topic we talked a lot about on the show is how do you define productivity for sales?

 

Giles House  15:57  

Well, it’s different for every sales organization. But, you know, we look at productive sales capacity, we look at the numbers that we need to do, the numbers that we need to do to have a good year next year. And we look at how many heads we’ve gotten, how many heads we think we’ll need. And part of that equation is well, how productive are our sales? What’s the average? You know, yield per salesperson, if you will, how much is each one going to produce? And you have to keep tracking that. And you have to track it for two things. One for the new reps that come on board, as we talked about the onboarding is a really critical process. Are we doing a good job at getting our sales guys getting up to speed faster and faster? And that’s usually a measure of quota attainment, depending on the sales cycle, you know, you’ll give them a certain period to sort of ramp up and, you know, you may think about a quarter of their, you know, annual target for the first six months and then we expect them to hit 50% and then after that we expected 100% whatever your company looks like, you’ll have a different sort of slant on that. But it’s very important to be able to track. You know, how many people are hitting those goals? Are the goals improving, that will gauge the effectiveness of your onboarding program?

 

Andy Paul  17:14  

When you say are the goals? Are the goals improving meaning attainment improving, improving?

 

Giles House  17:18  

Yeah, let’s say we expect them to do 25% of their number in the first month. You know, how many sales guys are doing that? If we’re getting more and more of them doing that, the onboarding programs are getting better and better. If not, it’s getting worse, we need to change it. So it’s just tracking that sort of thing really. Which makes a big difference on that side of things. And then the other equation is really how long how many of the salespeople are hitting, hitting their numbers for the year. And the simple, productive sales capacity thing is how many of them are hitting that number. What’s the total revenue that you’re doing versus you know, the number of salespeople And if you can keep improving that number, then you know you’re doing the right things productivity wise, but it’s getting worse then you’ve got a problem.

 

Andy Paul  18:10  

Alright, so to start two questions come on that for me. One is, if we all see the same industry reports about now CSO insights and so on about really what a small percentage of reps attain quota. I think the numbers at roughly 50% if not a bit, yeah. So given that’s the case, and given that we are in this, you know, this golden age of sales technologies and so on, that number is not moving with all this investment we’re making into the technologies to help improve mental health improve the productivity of sales reps, so what are we defining productive? So I get asked a question about productivity, are defining it incorrectly or what? What’s missing? What’s the missing link? You know, I think that we’d see an increase in productivity through this investment and technology. Especially since it’s been underserved. 

 

Giles House  19:02  

Well, I mean, the productivity sort of hints at the time side of a salesperson’s successfulness, doesn’t it? How much time are we giving them to complete their activities? How long does it take to do certain tasks? And how much time are they going to spend selling? That’s one side of it. But then the other side of it is, how effective are they, when they’re doing these activities. And both of those things need to be, you know, really in good shape for sales to hit their targets. And I think the quota attainment, the CSO insights, a great report that they do. And it’s, I think it’s been for the last four years or the last three years, maybe the number of reps hitting quota has declined or stayed flat. Meanwhile, targets have kept increasing. So there’s this disconnect. People are chasing growth and studying higher targets. People aren’t achieving them. And I think it’s really because we’re trying to throw loads of different technology solutions at the problem, versus looking at the data and figuring out what really is wrong. Because if you’ve got, you know, seven or eight different systems, in some cases, you know, we’ve helped clients, I’ve got 12 or 15 solutions, I’m sure. 

 

Andy Paul  20:23  

Yeah, I saw a survey of sales, sales enablement, directors, or whatever, you know, asking what the typical number of apps they had in their sales stack was. And I think they’re saying 5 to 7, and they go to the sales floor and talk to the reps and it’s 11 to 13. 

 

Giles House  20:38  

Oh, yeah, easy. So if you’re trying to, if you’re trying to really understand what’s going on, and having to get that information from 13 different systems or even five different systems, it’s very, very difficult to correlate. You know the records between the systems and get a proper picture of what’s going on. Some people try to do this with sort of expensive bi toolkits that, you know, the ID department has to get involved in. And that doesn’t work either. Because as soon as you’ve got all the data together, you know, you’ve added a new field to Salesforce and the models broken again. So a lot of the issue is that it’s all these different systems that we’re trying to stitch together. And we’re trying to understand what’s going on. And we can’t, because we can’t get at the data, which really tells us what’s happening. So this idea of being able to predict our forecast and manage our pipeline effect change before it happens. It’s a pipe dream for most organizations, because they can’t really see what’s going on in the deals, or what’s going on with the salesperson. And based on previous quarters, of which we know the results. You know, how are we trending? And sales managers would love to see that. They’d absolutely love to see that but they can’t. Because all this information resides in different places, and has terrible data quality, most people just can’t even get at it. So it’s kind of, you’re running your sales or looking through the rearview mirror rather than the windshield.

 

Andy Paul  22:15  

Yeah, no, absolutely. Well, I love this topic about productive sales capacity. Because, you know, to me the capacity, and what you’re measuring is an hour of selling time. I mean, it’s, it’s, I think, ideally, if we really want to understand productivity and sales, we’d say, Okay, well, how much revenue Can you generate per hour of selling time? Yeah, because we looked at productivity just serving a general generally it’s measured, it’s always serving a rate of output per unit of input, which is like a unit of labor or an hour of labor, that’s input, you know, what’s your production method? And it seems like we can really start measuring that way relative to productivity versus quota, which means quota seems slot artificial. We’re always going to be running behind really understanding what productivity is.

 

Giles House  23:07  

Yeah, I mean, productivity is important. Don’t get me wrong, a lot of people do these time and motion studies where they’ll shadow different segments of their sales team and figure out how much time they’re spending on different activities, etc. And you can get a lot of this now for reporting, if you’re using tools to, you know, we provide content management for sales, right? So we can see how much time people are spending looking for content. On average, they’re spending three or four hours a week to try and find that one document they’re looking for. So clearly, there’s opportunities there to solve that. And we’ve done that. But it’s important not to get too hung up on this number of hours of productivity. It’s also important to look at what they are doing with that time, and then from a quota perspective, I think what a lot of people miss on the quotas is not so much about, you know, the right quota isn’t so important for the salesperson. Obviously, if you get it too high, it’s very demotivating. But if you get it too low, it’s great for the salesperson, but it’s very bad for your organization, because you’re going to end up with a massive over achievement on commissions, because most people have accelerators. And, you know, a lot of the smart guys will not have those accelerators capped. So it’s very important that we can kind of model what we think the quotas should be. We can run some simulations on, you know, what do we think the pipeline is going to look like this year? How much will we think it’s going to close? And also look at the historical performance of the sales guys. Again, that’s something people really can’t do very easily right now, without that connected technology. So what we’re doing is we’re leaving money on the table, because we’re either budgeting too much in terms of the Commission’s expense, or we’re not budgeting enough, and we’re giving ourselves a headache to our revenue goals for the street. So it’s for quote is really important because that money, you know, that money needs to be put to work, the money needs to be put to work to grow and hit the targets, and if it’s tied up, because you haven’t got a good forecast on attainment, and likely expenses and the sales and marketing line items, you know, that’s a big problem. So quota is much more of a sort of finance operational problem that has massive implications for sales.

 

Andy Paul  25:37  

Right, then, as we were talking earlier about the CSO insights reports is that you know, maybe as an industry that the sales industry looks at, geez, how are we improving performance and productivity of our reps? Is your point about the financial equation maybe 50 percent the right number?

 

Giles House  25:56  

Yeah, I I’m not sure

 

Giles House  26:00  

It doesn’t feel like the right number. And I think a lot of I think any CEO would tell you it’s about 50% too low or 49% too low. I think you can have I know where you think I know where you’re getting at. But I think you can have it so that you’ve got everybody hitting quota, and you’ve got the right dollars set aside for the Commission’s because what ends up happening is you end up with roughly the same commission expense, but it’s massively skewed. You get the, you know, the players, the top 20% that do 80% of the revenue. They’re into very expensive accelerators. They have a terrific year. And then you get the CD players. You really don’t cost you anything in commissions because they haven’t really sold much and then you sort of get the mid table mediocrity of the big players, you’ve got great potential, but they’re not quite. You know, they’re not quite hitting it yet. So it does tend to average itself out from the Commission’s expensive perspective. But really you want that flat. You know, you want the players to overachieve and have a great year and then good money. So they continue to stay and be loyal. But you really want a kind of much flatter distribution of dollars in that sense.

 

Andy Paul  27:19  

Interesting. Yeah, that’s something big. I think about that. That’s a different way of looking at it. So I guess one question sort of comes out of this is, is there some thought that we’re asking sales professionals to do too much these days?

 

Giles House  27:39  

There are a lot of expectations that we put on salespeople. But, you know, as we were remarking before the call, the Gone are the days where everything involves driving 50 miles to an office park, somewhere, to go and sell something to somebody. There’s so much of it’s done over the phone. There’s so much technology so much you can glean about the buyers and there’s so much they’ve already gleaned about you that I think it’s, the demands we’re placing are offset by the opportunities if we can take advantage of them. And I think that’s why there’s this, the gap is widening between the haves and the have nots, the haves, being the people that have figured it out. They’ve got their technology stack, they’ve focused on, you know, a few key applications and they’ve made their bet with their partners. And the have-nots are the ones that simply haven’t and they’re, throwing technology at their problems. And so I think if you, if you do get it right, you can cope and you can be very successful. But if you haven’t got it, right, I think it’s a really bad experience for the customers and the buyers. Because at the end of the day, it used to be the case, if you were selling for Acme Corp, and your arch rivals, The court down the road provided a little bit of a better experience throughout the sales cycle, the customer engagement, the support everything they could charge up to four times the price, and they would still win. That’s what the reports will tell you. If you get a really good customer experience. People will pay up to four times more for that. And so it was Acme Corp versus Beta Corp. And we both sold photo copiers, let’s say for example. Now, Acme Corp isn’t just competing against beta court for a good experience. They’re competing against Amazon. They’re competing against the Apple iPhone. They’re competing against Google Home, they could be against Alexa. They’re competing against any good experience that the consumers have had, regardless of whether it’s with technology or something completely unrelated. We’re getting spoiled with things like Uber and Airbnb and the iPhone and Alexa all that stuff we just talked about. We’re getting spoiled with that. It works so beautifully. We can talk to our house and tell it to turn our lights on, shut out garriage and all that stuff. That’s great. It’s a great experience. So when you get a salesperson that turns up, knows nothing about you has done no homework on you doesn’t know that you’ve downloaded XYZ white papers that you’ve had to give your email address for. So it’s not like Big Brother spying, right? You know that they know that you’ve looked at this stuff. So when the salesperson turns up to talk about something completely different to what you want to talk about. It’s a massive gap between what you’re used to getting and what you’re getting from the salesperson. And so that experience gap is really making the difference for the organizations that get it right. They’re winning a lot more. The ones that get it wrong. It’s terrible.

 

Andy Paul  30:47  

Which raises a question, I just saw a post. Yeah, some predictions for 2017. And, one of them was yeah, so I’ve increased use of bots and AI and sales. Three points you’re talking about. I mean, what’s your vision of that? 

 

Giles House  31:07  

I think the A is a little bit wrong in AI. I think it’s more sort of assisted or augmented versus artificial.

 

Giles House  31:23  

And I’m happy to be proven wrong, but I don’t think that’s going to be the case. What I do think is that AI and machine learning technologies, you know, subsets of AI like that have a massive, massively exciting opportunity. We acquired this company called Data Hog and very exciting technology. And it’s sort of machine learning, pattern recognition, looking at who our sales people are connected with and who other people in the organization are connected with. Anyway, the beauty of that is, it starts to look at the communications and figures out who the buyers are, you know who the key is. Decision makers are and there’s opportunities and figures out for really making good traction with them. I mean responding to our communications, right? Are they looking at stuff on the web, and we can use that to start getting a real, much more accurate deal score, and much better forecast. So when the managers have their coaching sessions, it’s almost pointing out to the manager looks, you know, this sales guys forecast this deal to close in three weeks, but the deal score is red. Because, you know, the person we’ve identified as a decision maker, barely responded to anything. They haven’t looked at a proposal and haven’t looked at any of the marketing stuff that you’ve sent the follow up to the meeting, right? So really, here’s what you need to do. And that’s where I think AI and machine learning and that sort of stuff, has a real place to play. alerting, suggesting that next best action, you know, throwing up outliers so that you can do something about it, versus Oh, yeah, we didn’t get a steal. Why didn’t we get this deal? So I think that’s where AI and all that sort of stuff has a great opportunity.

 

Andy Paul  33:09  

Okay, perfect. We’re just gonna wrap up the show here. Quickly, I got some standard questions I asked all my guests in the segment of the show. And the first one is a hypothetical scenario in which you, Giles, I’ve just been hired as VP of sales by a company whose sales have stalled out, trying to do a sales turnaround, CEO board really anxious to have that happen. So what two things would you do your first week on the job that could have the biggest impact?

 

Giles House  33:35  

The first thing is to take a break, analyze the data and figure out what are the top three problems standing in the way of success for the sales org? And you’ve really got to look at the data to do that. I think the second one, Well, it depends on what the first one throws up, doesn’t it? But I think, you know, the research tells us that there’s a massive dearth of sales and marketing linemen out. Probably a place where I would start getting the marketing perspective on what they need to change, what they think should change and what we think should change with marketing. So I can probably start there.

 

Andy Paul  34:12  

Alright, sounds good. So some rapid fire questions so you can give me one word answers or elaborate if you wish. So when you Giles are out selling, what’s your most powerful sales attribute?

 

Giles House  34:26  

Well, I’m a marketer. So storytelling.

 

Andy Paul  34:43  

What’s one book you think every salesperson should read?

 

Giles House  34:48  

I think the complex conversations book is a good one.

 

Andy Paul  34:55  

Okay. And lastly, what music is on your playlist these days.

 

Giles House  35:01  

Music’s on my playlist these days have a varied selection, anything from WC to Coldplay.

 

Andy Paul  35:11  

All right, that works well Giles, thanks for being on the show. Tell folks how they can find out more about CallidusCloud and connect with you.

 

Giles House  35:23  

Well, good place to start the website CallidusCloud.com or on Twitter, and I’m on Twitter as well. Very easy love to talk to you.

 

Andy Paul  35:39  

Excellent. Well again, thanks for being on the show. And friends. Thank you for spending this time with us. Remember, make it part of your day every day to deliberately learn something new to help you accelerate your success and easily do that. Join my conversation with a top business expert like today’s guest Giles House, who shared his expertise well how to accelerate the growth of your business. So thanks again for joining me. Until 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 for more information about today’s guests, visit my website at AndyPaul.com