The True Measure of Sales Productivity. With Erol Toker [Episode 521]

Erol Toker, Founder and CEO of Truly, joins me on this episode.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Erol says the biggest challenge facing sales professionals is how the nature of sales is changing underneath them. They need to take of their sales hat, and have an engineering approach to finding solutions.

Product and domain expertise is essential to meeting the needs of the customer. The key is to add value that goes beyond the product. Willingness to learn and provide service is an advantage in sales.

Truly is a sales communication platform. They build “the system of record for conversations.” For sales teams engaging buying teams, it is important to know who spoke to whom about what, by what channel. Truly gives that report.

Truly records how much time you are spending in which stage of the opportunity, with which customer contact role, and what is being said in the conversation.

Erol gives a client example on how Truly is used. In one company, among 80 reps, there was no common definition of a decision-maker conversation. Truly used quantitative metrics through analysis to formalize to a common definition.

Truly’s ICP is a larger revenue organization, with at least 40 reps within a sales team, such as 40 SDRs, 40 Account Executives, or 40 Account Managers. The objective truths they measure are more important on large teams.

Sales productivity is about understanding input and output. Truly looks at Customer Success. Outcome is more important than product. If a company does not understand their output, it is impossible to measure it against input.

Order-of-magnitude increases in inputs (how many email messages are sent) do not produce order-of-magnitude increases in outputs (responses). Companies at different stages have different levels of productivity.

Individual contributors need the data to learn whether they are productive or not. Reps need to know how to measure the right activities to enable productivity to go up over time.

Andy gives an example of an agile company he has helped. Will conventional companies retain the same business model in ten years as they do today? Andy suggests that the current structure of sales no longer makes sense.

There is a trend to think that technology will make you better, rather than to understand that making people more effective will make you better. Companies need to think long-term. Reps need the basic skills of human connection.

The future of sales is about becoming more human, not less. Helping the customer quickly gather the information to help them make the good decision, is what matters in sales.