(888) 815-080202. Kyle Healy (NFP, Senior Vice President, Sales Enablement)
What does it mean to sell with purpose? How can you bring immediacy and purpose to every conversation, no matter what you’re selling? What if success doesn’t just mean one more closed sale, but one more life saved?
Join Andy Paul (Host of Sales Enablement Podcast) and Kyle Healy (NFP, Senior Vice President, Sales Enablement) for a unique conversation exploring what it means to sell with purpose in the era of COVID-19 and beyond.
Learn how NFP is successfully enabling their remote sales teams and why selling with a sense of purpose helps you form stronger and more impactful connections with customers.
Learn more about Selling with Purpose podcast.
Conversation Transcript
Andy Paul: Kyle welcome to the show.
Kyle Healy: Thanks for having me, Andy. Glad to be here.
Andy Paul: Well, glad to have you here. And, um, where are you sheltering in place
Kyle Healy: Yes, I am. I am quarantining sheltering in place in New Jersey.
Andy Paul: In New Jersey and any kids in the house?
Kyle Healy: I do. We, uh, we, we, we have a three and a half year old, so we’re not dealing with the, uh, this homeschooling, thankfully, cause I’ve heard that is, that is quite a bit, but uh, dealing, dealing with our own trials and tribulations, I’ve locked the door to the room that I am sequestered in. So we should, we shouldn’t have any, any unexpected interruptions.
Andy Paul: That’s okay. Yeah. I think one of the things that’s happened during this period, as we come to understand that, you know, perfection in these, these types of events, zoom calls, recordings, just not necessary.
Kyle Healy: Isn’t that the truth.
Andy Paul: And yeah, that’s fun watching the late night shows, you know, the hosts at home there, you see the gray on the hair coming out and all these things.
That’s like, yeah, I think I prefer it that way. Then standing in front of an audience.
Kyle Healy: Yeah. Thank you, Andy, for doing a podcast and not a, not a video recording because my hair is definitely not camera ready these days. So yes, I very much
Andy Paul: No, no, we’d we, we saw each other before we started this and, and yours looks fine. Mine is like, my hair has not been this long since the nineties.
Kyle Healy: I just said the other day, I was like, I don’t think I’ve ever had hair this long in my entire life. I can’t, I can’t remember if I have, it’s a, I’ve been telling people how I want to grow it out. And now I have, and I’m like, eh, I don’t know. I guess there’s a reason I was cutting it, I guess.
Andy Paul: Well, yeah, mine as, as I got older, mine was more, a hairstyle was more about convenience than anything else. Right. And so I always kept it short, you know, I’ve, I’m a swimmer and, runner biker. And so I, you know, showering a lot and I just, I just didn’t want to bother styling it and combing up to do anything.
I just want it short enough so I can try it and go, yeah, not so much anymore. Now it’s back in. I think I needed hair product, which I don’t use.
Kyle Healy: Uh, we’ll send you some, I got, I got a good brand and he I’ll send you some.
Andy Paul: Okay, thank you. So I love your tagline on your LinkedIn profile, which is, as you say, helping companies and sales pros attract and retain because pursuing detain sounds too dark. Where’d that come from?
Kyle Healy: I can’t take all the credit for that. Andy, we have a, a fantastic marketing team. Uh, one of the women on my team, Natalie Berge, who handles a lot of our customer experience research and empowers my team and sales enablement and our sellers is kind of really good insights. And the people they’re trying to engage with, she did a whole series on understanding our benefits buyer specifically, and that was one of her and her team’s taglines that I stole.
So I can take all the credit for it, but it was, it was one of my favorites. Thank you.
Andy Paul: Yeah, it is. It is a very good, yes. So, well, so speaking about NFP, so tell us what you guys do.
Kyle Healy: Yeah, so NFP, we’re a global insurance broker and consultant. We work across several different sort of business lines as we would see them, um, corporate benefits, which includes, you know, health and welfare for, for mid market organizations, as well as retirement plans, uh, property and casualty, uh, and then also individual solutions.
The easiest way to think about it. On the corporate benefits side. Uh, we, we handle the insurance on people on the property and casualty side. We handle the insurance of things and on the individual solution side, pretty self explanatory. It’s like that one to one, B2C kind of insurance solution.
Andy Paul: So insurance are, are you also do, it sounds like wealth planning and financial planning and so on.
Kyle Healy: Yeah, that’s right. I need the visual side, a lot of, a lot of financial planning, financial readiness up and down, sort of the income spectrum. Uh, and then even on the corporate side, uh, our retirement teams, uh, don’t just focus on the organizational, uh, retirement plan, the 401k, or the 43 B. They’re also super focused on creating financial preparedness, financial readiness for participants, especially at those kinds of underserved types of organizations that tend to be mostly blue collar and gray collar. Um, where a lot of other organizations or some of our peers are mostly focused on sort of the people with a lot of zeroes after their name.
Uh, we’ve specifically tried to kind of carve a niche for ourselves by helping those people that don’t often get that one to one personal financial attention.
Andy Paul: Got it. So tell us about your role then. So you’re VP of global sales, global VP of sales enablement. I’ve done. I need to make sure I got that right.
Kyle Healy: Yeah, sure. Yes. Uh, global, it makes it sound really good. Yeah. So I’m the, I’m the SVP of sales enablement. So I am tasked with trying to make every last one of our sellers, we call them producers inside NFP, uh, as effective, as efficient, as successful as possible. And that spans a lot of different things from, uh, you know, training and learning to our sales systems to some of our go to market strategies and cooperation with our marketing team, essentially anything and everything to make them as successful as they possibly could be. And identifying the big problems our clients are kind of handed every day and trying to align them with solutions. We kind of have inside.
Andy Paul: And so you’re selling direct though.
Kyle Healy: Yes. Yeah. That’s right.
Andy Paul: So not using independent agents or anything like that. So you’re selling direct and I presume most people were out making prior to this route in the field making face to face calls on insurance clients or on benefits clients. And so on.
Kyle Healy: We, uh, we are in the insurance industry, I will say. And, you know, I’ll put myself in there to, uh, late adopters to, to a lot of the kind of more technology focused or sort of virtual types of selling. Yeah. Most of what our producers do, uh, is really face-to-face out in the field, shaking, hands, buying drinks, uh, I think what we’d refer to as sort of more traditional relationship based selling that was definitely a large component of how we acquired new clients. For sure.
Andy Paul: So let’s talk about that transition then. Cause obviously you’ve, your people are sheltering, your clients are sheltering. Um, what’s been the transition, like, I mean, how have you had to, first of all, set them up to be able to do this remotely for sure. And then maybe what’s changed as far as your go to market messaging.
Kyle Healy: Yeah, it’s it’s interesting. I don’t think anybody on our side was, was predicting global pandemic or complete kind of sheltered home work from home shutdown.
Andy Paul: your insurance guys, you should have thought
Kyle Healy: You know, it’s funny. Maybe we should have known this. Maybe we did. And I just didn’t write like somebody in a dark room somewhere was like, Oh yeah, it’s going to be bad.
Let’s let’s set ourselves up for success. We, uh, about 18 months ago, 24 months ago, I would say we, we started to kind of, like I said, with the help of some of our customer success and, um, um, customer experience and marketing teams, we started to really try to think about, listen, it can’t go this way forever.
Right while, while relationship selling and creating sort of the old golf course bar room networks is good. If we’re going to kind of continue to be successful, continue to grow, we have to find new progressive, more technologically based avenues to acquire clients. It’s just, that’s where buyers are going.
And so we as sellers kind of have to have to match them. There, have to mirror them there. Uh, and we started to invest in, um, A more robust and kind of diverse sales tech stack. We started to think about how to train our sellers, to be a little bit more comfortable with social selling, with videos embedded into engagements.
We, we started to dabble in a lot of that stuff, thinking that we would have a bit of runway to kind of. Uh, evolve our sales culture and our sellers to, you know, more, more broadly adopt those things. Uh, we had about a five year plan for that. And, uh, uh, funny enough, this came along and, uh, it was, it was one of those things where suddenly we were, we were trialing a lot of these things with small subsets of our selling population.
And then overnight it was, it was a business imperative, right? Like we had to equip all of our sellers and we have, we have a little over 300. Um, you know, really dedicated, direct, focused sellers. We had to equipment enabled them all overnight. And, um, thankfully we have great partners on the technology side who stood up 96% of our workforce, um, work from home and about a week, uh, and we’re able to get our entire producer population onto our.
Our kind of virtual tools, our sales tech stack, uh, really quickly. Um, but then also making sure we were really, you know, I call it hand to hand combat very engaged with every one of our producers, every one of our sales managers to help them adjust, not just their go to buyer strategy or their go to market strategies, you put it, but also their own expectations, right?
So we really quickly started to help them focus on listen, success right now is going to look different. Um, we all think about, sorry, go ahead, Andy.
Andy Paul: yeah. Well, how are you defining that right now? So for them, what does success look like?
Kyle Healy: Yeah, right. So historically it was, it was meeting set, right? Opportunities created revenue in the door. Um, right now we’re focused pretty primarily on trying to get them to get their heads around, you know, outreach, engagement, support. Right. Like, are, are we reaching as many people as we can with things that we think are of value to them, just based on what we know to be a value to our current clients right now, it’s not necessarily all about setting that meeting or, or getting them to sort of agree to allow us to sell them something, you know, for right now it’s about just, just outreach engagement, reaching as many people as possible with what we think are valuable insights, valuable bits of information.
Andy Paul: Well for the, your clients. So like your property and casualty, or do you just talk about your corporate clients and, and your, um, benefits packages? So what are sort of the critical issues they’re facing right now?
Kyle Healy: Yeah. I mean, and it’s different all over the place and every segment is different, but even if you just look at essential businesses, right? Like you think about. Grocery chains and trucking companies and food distribution, which I know has been all over the news recently because of, you know, some, some supply chain issues in meat processing and things like that.
The types of things they’re suddenly dealt with. A great example. We have a, we have a partner who is, um, emerging, a startup called future work. Their whole business model was about tracking the movement of employees in industries where they’d have people that move things right. So manufacturing, trucking distribution, and the whole concept was an app based platform that allows us as advisors to better understand the risks so that we could better negotiate on their behalf with the carriers.
Right? Like worker’s comp was kind of the focus. Um, they really quickly. Uh, adjusted on the fly and said, wow, the, the big problem right now is, is not necessarily trying to bring down a worker’s comp premium, but instead, how do we, how do we make sure that we’re keeping our employee population safe since they’re essential, they have to be at work.
If, if we’re, if we’re taking temperatures or gathering information to sort of identify and trace and track. Uh, at the moment, so we don’t have to shut down the whole, the whole warehouse or the whole factory. How do we do that? It’s a great, let’s open up our platform and start allowing people to, to, to track and analyze temperature data.
Uh, so things like that, it was slight pivots inside our, our understanding, our expertise and our messaging. Um, in very specific areas to say like, Hey, we get it. We understand this is a big problem now. And it probably wasn’t a big problem. Three months ago. It might not have even hit your top 10, but let’s, let’s understand what your big problem is now and see if we can help, help solve it for you, as opposed to trying to push the stuff that’s typically, you know, we’ll call it high revenue or high margin or the things that make us kind of the more successful organization right now.
Let’s pivot. And just try to figure out what the things are. That’ll that’ll help you be a successful organization.
Andy Paul: And that’s that’s. Yeah, fascinating. It’s. It’s like, what you’re saying is just so you can track real time movement of employees within a workspace, in a manufacturing, let’s say so from, yeah, from, uh, it’s almost like a, like a contact tracer within an organization.
Kyle Healy: Yeah. So even to that point, right? Like we have a lot of, we have an innovation lab internally. We have a ventures team internally. That’s always looking for startups. And even those resources have quickly pivoted to say like, okay, let’s think about what the problems are going to be for organizations as they try to return to work and start back up and let’s go find the people out there that.
We can kind of find the solution and then amplify it and distribute it at a scale. Since we have over 50,000 corporate clients that could be super helpful or beneficial to the, to the broader economy, to the economic space, right? Like let’s not just focus on what we’ve always been good at or where we’ve always made the most money right now for us.
It’s kind of all of a sudden been about helping, not just our clients, but any organization we can reach because of the distribution force. We have figure this stuff out. Which is, which has helped our producers stay motivated. Right. Because they’re just, they’re not, they’re not getting those traditional meetings right now.
Andy Paul: Yeah. Well, I think it also sort of gives them sort of a mission, right? Is they’re saying, look, what we’re really focused on right now is. Help people return to work. Uh, that seems like that would, that would animate somebody. If you’re out working with your clients on that or prospective new clients.
Kyle Healy: That’s a great mission, I think is a great point. Yeah. I hadn’t even, we haven’t used that word yet, Andy, but I’m now going to steal it. I’m going to want to make sure all of our producers understand they have a mission. That’s a great one.
Andy Paul: Well, I think it’s really important at this time. I think sellers in general, I mean, there’s people writing quite eloquently about the fact that yeah, if we’re going to restart the economy in many respects, it starts with sales, right? You have to sell something. That’s the engine, right. For, for our economy.
Well, I think it’s also, it’s good for people in this time to feel like there is a mission that they’re contributing somehow. And I think for more sellers than realize it have a role in that.
Kyle Healy: Yeah, giving our producers, sellers something to focus on. Like I said, at the beginning, reframing success for them. Um, Has been one of our big, big challenges, but what we also think can be kind of the thing that helps our, our producers, uh, you know, kind of sustain and thrive through this, giving, giving people a purpose every day when you’re stuck inside, especially I know Andy you’re in Manhattan.
We have a big sales office in New York city. A couple of members of my team are kind of stuck in 800 square foot apartments with a dog and a husband and right. Like it’s
Andy Paul: Wow that much space.
Kyle Healy: that much space that’s even in New York city. Yeah.
Andy Paul: I dream of 800 square feet.
Kyle Healy: I’ll hook you up with their realtor. Andy, I’ll get you. I’ll get you the I’ll get you the hair product and the realtor
Andy Paul: Well, no, we, uh, we’re very fortunate. We are primarily based out of San Diego, but we have a place here. Um, but we had to come back from my wife’s work. So we ended up being in a place which is really intended to be a place we use occasionally to someplace where spending months. And yeah. So anyway. Yeah, no, no complaints, no complaints.
Trust me. Um, So that’s what sort of interesting. So let’s think about how do you now, could you talk about meeting set and the other metrics you’re using is, so when we’re just trying to stay in touch and trying to, you know, you’ve got all these other missions that we just talked about, us helping people think about what the next normal is going to be and how they can help them with that as is how are your managers measuring what people are doing?
Kyle Healy: Yeah. So that’s luckily, um, we have some great partners. We, we have Salesforce, obviously we have, um, sales loft is our, is our client engagement platform of
Andy Paul: choice.
Yeah. So I was talking specifically about like metrics though.
Kyle Healy: Yeah. So they’re looking at, you know, new contacts, right? Like have we identified new contacts, new contacts place they’re looking at emails sent, um, we’re specifically looking at, um, uh, play deployment and then abandonment. So one of the things we’ve kind of really focused on, we’ve built a lot of plays and a lot of sort of prepackaged sales kind of on a shelf for our producers. And one of the things we’re trying to focus on to again, keep them motivated, keep them focused on a mission. You know, play abandonment has become a big stat for us. Have you, have you run the first four steps and then kind of given up?
Andy Paul: Well, give us an example of what one of those plays is.
Kyle Healy: Yeah. So for instance, um, cyber insurance, uh, cyber risk has gone. Through the roof, because most professional services, white collar organizations. Now they’re now suddenly in a reality where they’ve, they’ve stood up their entire workforce in a work from home environment. And. That’s not how they were designed to be.
Right. Um, we know that kind of malware phishing, all of these types of attacks are significantly increased in this kind of environment because they don’t have the control or the site from a, from a technology department perspective on what their users are doing. Right. So one of our plays is great. We understand this to be a big problem right now, instead of going out and kind of looking to kind of talk to them about, you know, whatever, uh, general liability, like.
This is a problem they have right now, we can certainly help them both with a cyber assessment of their broad cyber risk and then an adjustment and a tweak, maybe an amendment of their existing cyber insurance policy to cover and fill in the gaps that they might not have even realized exists because they’ve so quickly went to this work from home environment, right?
So we, we put a number of steps together. Right. All in a, in a sequential order, right? You got six emails, four phone calls, three social touches. I need you to reach out to the CTO, the CFO and the risk manager. Right. And we set it all up, explain to them exactly who to look at and exactly who to talk to and they get excited and great.
Yes. We’ve got a problem. I’ve got my mission. But obviously as sellers, we like to be replied to. We like to feel like our efforts are well received. And so if I send my first three emails and make my first two phone calls in that, in that sequential play and don’t get any feedback, I don’t get a reply. No, one’s. Picking up on this trigger that I’ve kind of said, I know you’ve got this problem. Let me help you. It can be discouraging. Uh, and even though we know that the play needs to be, you know, 30 days or 35 days long, or it needs to include 17 to 20 steps because that’s kind of empirically or statistically, what will give us the highest probability or yield of reply, right?
Like. And we know that our producers use to follow through 75, 80% of that play. And now they’re abandoning it 20, 25%. That becomes kind of a statistic for us where it might not lead directly to like we talked about earlier a sale, but it’s also a red flag to us to say like, “Hey, what’s wrong with Bobby?”
You know, Bobby used to sell all the way through. He used to finish all of his plays. Like he’s abandoning a lot of his plays right now with a lot of his targets at 20, 25%. We need to go to Bobby. And make sure we’re, we’re helping Bobby out. We’re we’re, we’re giving Bobby something to work towards. We’re understanding what his problem is.
We’re trying to remove that friction. Um, right now, mostly because we care about Bobby, but also because we know if Bobby continues to kind of. Go with the program, follow through that kind of outreach, that kind of engagement at the volume that we’re not used to. We used to be super focused on really one to one authentic small volumes of outreach, because that was kind of complex selling how we ran.
Now we’ve started to say like, listen, let’s just get in front of as many people as possible because we know there’s so many people out there that need help and we have some things we can provide help around. Let’s focus on those things and let’s focus on the value on volume. So that’s. Those are kind of the metrics we’re focused on right now I’d say, Andy, is, are you reaching out to more people than you otherwise normally would have? Are you getting in front of a larger number of people? That’s really key to us right now in terms of our strategy. And then we’re also using the stats that we used to view is kind of like, an opportunity for discipline, right?
Hey, mr. And mrs. Seller, you’re not doing your job. We’re looking at it as like yeah. Our coaching, right improvement. Now we’re looking at it as like, Hey, maybe, maybe Bobby needs some help right now. Right? Like, is his, and Bobby’s a made up name. We don’t have any seller’s name, Bobby that I’m aware of, but like, you know, his, his Bobby is Bobby struggling. Is this an indicator that actually just from an interpersonal perspective, one of our hashtags is people first. Like we actually need to get, get out, reach out to Bobby. Beyond just like, Hey, is he selling enough or is he doing enough? Like what can we do to actually help Bobby? Cause it seems like something might be wrong.
Andy Paul: Well, yeah, and I imagine at this time in particular, especially with people stuck inside, and as you said, if they’re not getting the response, it’s, it’s a tough environment for sellers. So the question is. Yeah. What, what are you doing in that, that circumstances sort of say, well, this is really a, this is a contextual issue because this is, this is happening in the context of the shutdown and people working from home.
And usually not an issue for Bobby.
Kyle Healy: That’s right. That’s right. So that’s, that’s the kind of stuff where, Hey, let’s, let’s, you know, we don’t have really small to, right. Like a lot of our sales managers, you know, manage 30, 40, 50 people in some of our regions. Um, so something like that could easily get overlooked. Um, You know, we’re trying to use some of this data, like you said, that we might have historically used as, as a coaching opportunity as a way to say like, Oh my gosh, Bobby’s email writing is horrible.
He’s getting no replies. We got to sit down and have a, have a conversation with him about email writing. We’re trying to push our sales managers to go a step further and say like, Hey, this, this is, this is true leadership here, right? Like this is people first. Like it’s not about. Helping Bobby get better at writing his emails, like dig a little deeper. The next time you talked to Bobby, like what’s, what’s wrong? Is he struggling? Is he okay? You know, as a benefits organization, we have a lot of resources, partners like total brain, you know, mental health vendors that we provide to our clients all the time that we’ve tried to say, like, you know, let’s see if we can make sure when we think we see people struggling, we can take that opportunity to dig a little deeper and not necessarily on their selling behaviors, but just.
You know, as a person, you know, what’s going on. Um, we extended a lot of our, you know, PTO days, people can take days a lot more frequently, things like that. I, to your point, I think sellers are always under a lot of stress, right? Like it’s not easy being a salesperson. We deal with rejection and negativity and those kinds of things.
And we deal with it well, which is generally what makes us good at what we do. Um,
Andy Paul: Stick with it, deal with it. Well,
Kyle Healy: Those to stick with it. Right? Right. We’re in a, we’re in a scenario in an environment where it’s not just those stressors anymore. It’s not the usual stressors. And so I think in aggregate, it can become really difficult for even the most resilient, the most disciplined sellers to kind of push through this.
Um, and that’s, those are the kinds of stats we’re looking at. Again, we think. That just sort of increasing our volume, making sure we’re getting the name out, providing value in very specific places, as opposed to sort of thinking more broadly about how we can help will result in, you know, a quicker velocity to normalcy for our pipeline on the back end of this.
But for us, it’s also about, like I said, more, more concerned for the individual seller at this point and how they get through this. How, how we’re kind of. Using the typical sales data to also sort of flag and understand struggles people might be having where we can kind of jump in and help out from a sales enablement and sales management perspective.
Andy Paul: Right. Well, interesting thought. I mean, you had talked earlier, your managers. Are managing a ton of people. And it seems like certainly from your perspective, as in charge of enablement, to me, that seems a little problematic or perhaps an opportunity for improvement is, is what are you guys sort of thinking about longterm in terms of. Yeah, closer, or let’s say fewer people reporting to one manager in terms of, you know, propagating your, your coaching and opportunities. Cause hardest if you’re managing 50 people, it’s hard to coach 50 people on an individual basis. I just wondering what your sort of thinking about that strategically.
Kyle Healy: Yeah, really hard. So the one thing that kind of understand about us is, is where we came from was, you know, over 400 discreet brands, seven years ago, eight years ago now, that merged into one. And so a lot of our producers. Historically, we’re always kind of almost individual contributors. Right? They had no manager, they were, they were self motivated.
They were self-driven they figured it out on their own and made it happen.
Andy Paul: Yeah, I’ve seen, you’ve been doing a lot of acquisitions.
Kyle Healy: Yes, we, and we, we do right. But what we’ve realized as we’ve we’ve gained scale, and this was part of our rationale over the past two years is like, Hey. There’s only so far each individual producer, no matter how good they are, can go by themselves. Right? Some level of organizational support should help our producers go from, you know, whatever level they are.
Right. We always hear people talk about like CNB B and focusing on them because they have the highest, you know, the best opportunity for growth. But even our, a producers for us in a producer might easily become an a plus. And that could be meaningful to the business. Uh, that was, that was one of our kind of. Theories are our kind of overarching thesis around the creation of sales enablement of coaching. Some of the things we were focused on was producer development of producer support, and that’s why we were kind of created an exist. So we we’ve always thought since we kind of started down this road, that it would be valuable to the organization to continue to kind of figure out what the right team structure was and how much support each kind of different producer needed in their evolution or maturity inside the organization. To your point, this is, this has kind of really brought a lot of focus to that because where a lot of our producers were able to kind of be independent and, and, and be very successful with sort of just glancing oversight. Right. Um, This has been a spotlight for us on, you know, data integrity, data, consistency, the need for a little bit more regular oversight, more frequent meetings.
And coaching is one of the things we’ve we’ve, we’ve identified just ourselves and looking at the data over the past four to six to eight weeks, instead of like, huh, maybe managers being coaches too. Like maybe the managers have enough work on their plate being managers. Maybe we need to think about. You know, kind of investing in a, in a sales coach, that was something we had explored years ago and then thought like, maybe not, but it’s, it’s a great point you bring up.
Cause it’s definitely something we’ve we’ve been talking about at the, at the kind of sales leadership level. Like, Hey, at what point, at what point does it make more sense given all that we’re learning from. You know, this is, I said to somebody on my team the other day, this is a fantastic stress test for us in sales enablement of all of the theories we had been kind of thinking about over the past two years, as we’ve been building this kind of producer support out at NFP, like this is, this is the best kind of stress test.
Like everybody everybody’s turned it to us, looking for our help right now. And so it’s good. We can kind of gain insights that would have taken us a much longer time to arrive at sort of pre pre pandemic. I guess you can say. That coaching is definitely one of them.
Andy Paul: No, I think it is. I think it’s, it’s sort of more global thought is, you know, historically in sales is, is managers are presumed to be. You know, experts at everything, right? Motivation mindset, the metrics, the KPIs go down, get on the list and you can’t reasonably expect one person to be good at everything.
And to your point is him. If you have that type of structure you have is yeah. Maybe the logical step is let’s, let’s bring onto the staff, people who are just coaches. And why, why do we assume that the coaches always have to be the managers?
Kyle Healy: To your point, the specialization, right? Like, yeah, we are, we are definitely, and this is something we bat around all the time internally, right? Weight, like most organizations, um, you know, we took successful sellers or people who have matured in their careers and been an NFP for a long time and had sort of that defacto player coach sort of role anyway, and elevated them.
Right. And not that that’s, I think a lot of organizations will say like, Oh, that’s the wrong thing to do? Or there’s so many research papers out there about like, how, how that’s such a bad decision. I like that decision. They, they, they know the company, they know the producer, they know what it takes to be out there, our gap and what we’ve been trying to solve for him, but super focused on is not even just enabling the producer, but really laser focused on how we can enable upskill and equip the manager to be a better manager.
And that’s. Part of those conversations is where we’ve, we’ve started to spin out into like, you know what, maybe we’re asking these people to do something that they’re just not good at. Maybe, maybe it is about specialization and finding that opportunity to say like, manager, here’s what we expect you to do.
And then coach here’s what we expect you to do. Um, so yeah, I think you’re right.
Andy Paul: Yeah, I think, cause if we look at this as issue of performance, if we say sales is a performance based profession, just like pro sports
Kyle Healy: That’s right.
Andy Paul: And you look at the way coaching staff, this is again, listener to the show, know this is a soapbox I get on quite occasionally, quite often as it is. Why, why aren’t we putting specialized experts onto our staff of sales?
You know, coaches give, watch the show. Billions.
Kyle Healy: of course, Andy,
Andy Paul: So why doesn’t every sales team have a Wendy?
Kyle Healy: listen, I would love a Wendy. Um, I think that’s a great idea.
Andy Paul: But, I mean, we’ve, we’ve specialized our sales roles in many industries and SAAS and so on, and it makes great sense to do that. Yet. We still have this heroic manager who was supposed to be all things to all people, um, which just doesn’t make sense.
Kyle Healy: No, and I love that. We, so again, I’m going to steal that from you because we use the pro sports analogy all the time. When we talked to our producers about, you know, data integrity and data integrity and behavior capture and right. Like we, we use the whole, the whole game film. My favorite metaphor that I tell people all the time, I was like, listen in my head when I’m out there making phone calls and sending emails and trying to get somebody to buy something from me, my motion.
Looks like, like tiger woods, slow motion swing on that Nike commercial, right? With opera music in the background, it is a sight to behold. It is gorgeous and it isn’t until I get to see the film of me actually swinging a golf club that I realized I look about as uncoordinated and athletic as I possibly could look.
Right. And that’s. That’s the same thing. We’re trying it right. When we record phone calls, when we look at the number of emails that are sent, when we try to understand reply rates and click through, it’s the same as game film. Right. And I’ve never taken it to that next step, as you just took it like, and think about professional sports.
They have batting coaches, pitching coaches and strength and conditioning coaches. And there’s a coach for everything. It makes total sense that we should. And I it’s funny cause now that I think about it, I mentioned our, our customer experience person, um, Natalie Berg, she focuses most of her time on actually empowering and equipping the producer, which is a little different than how most organizations treat, um, customer experience.
Our role, our view of customer experience is she’s really trying to understand it become laser focused on the needs of the buyer, the needs, the needs of our customer. In order to better serve the producer in there, communicating with targeting of, and kind of handling of the, the buyer. And so, you know, now that you’re saying specialized coaches, we’re dabbling there, right?
Like we’ve thought about like, you know, engagement almost as a specialized skill. And, but yeah, we, now, now I need to go codified that. Andy. See, thank you. This was, this was better for me than it was for you. I think.
Andy Paul: We’ll talk offline. I’ll give you some help on that. All right. Well, Kyle we’ve run out of time, but it’s been great talking to you. So how can people connect with you?
Kyle Healy: Yeah, so everybody can feel free to find me on LinkedIn. I am an open profile. Everybody can get me, they can send me an email, Kyle dot Healy and nfp.com. And obviously can always go check us out and find us www dot NFP dot com. Lots of great free resources right now on our website. Um, related to kind of just risk management benefits around the time of COVID. Uh, so everybody feel free to go kind of download and read to your heart’s content.
Andy Paul: Excellent. Well, Kyle, thank you very much. Look forward to doing this again.
Kyle Healy: Thanks, Andy. Take care and stay safe.
