Customer focused selling for sport organisations

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hey good morning and good afternoon everybody Welcome to uh applied Frameworks webinar on agile selling um we're going to get moving here in a couple of minutes but uh those who've joined early thank you for joining and uh we're happy to have you yeah I think uh we'll give it what till about two minutes after and then we'll get started to Bob how are things in your neck of the woods Boulder Colorado is absolutely beautiful this fine early fall day I know I feel pretty lucky given what's going on in Florida at the moment that looks like whether I don't want to be part of exactly it's uh it's I'm dry it's dry and sunny and the wind is calm which is nice and yourself yeah same actually I think I'd need to pop up for a walk at some point after lunch because Chicago is beautiful nice and sunny and cold my favorite kind of weather that's great I just realized Laura we gotta get you more uh numbers more letters behind your name look at look at that uh alphabet soup no it's a competition and I'm losing actually I'm missing one I am a product owner as well um we'll fix it in future webinars that's what counts uh it's all the letters after your name yes foreign yes that's what I hear how'd you figure out am I actually missing anything else but I don't think so all right well maybe we should get started and um we are recording it so anyone who is going to be late and they want to see the introduction bit they can do that on the recording that's good well that's a I um let's see it's a minute afterwards probably kick off here well um again happy uh Happy midday everybody uh my name is Bob turnes I'm a director of client delivery here at agile Frameworks um and I'm lucky today to be joined by Laura kaldi uh our VP of sales really uh overseeing the revenue organization and our goal today is to talk about agile selling and especially as it plays into sustainable profitability which is I think the goal of every organization these days um and she'll kick us into our agenda so let's see if this works and Laura pass it over to you to talk about something to accomplish yeah well we're going to be um I guess touching upon all of these topics and bouncing around a little bit but the idea here is as as organizations evolve from agile to business agility to ultimately sustainability from a business model standpoint including sales and intentional and perhaps different ways but actually produces better outcomes so we'll be talking a lot about that over the course of the next what half an hour or so um we'll be talking about customer centricity which I know is a kind of a buzzword part of everybody you know part of everybody's kind of organizational objectives is to talk about customer centricity but I think thinking about it from an outcome perspective is really key then we'll be taking a looking at or taking a look at structures and compensation choices that are either in support of or make agility more difficult and then kind of round this up with talking about well what is sustainable profitability and in what way does the sales organization play into that so those are kind of the four key areas we'll be talking about over the next half an hour or so and the Q a button um if anyone has any questions stick them into the Q a and if we don't have an opportunity to weave it into the conversation that we're having then we'll definitely include some thoughts and feedback in our follow-up email that we'll send out to everybody who registered excellent thank you Laura so here's the problem statement um it's kind of a guiding principle for today um we realize that organizations have a need to smartly use sales as part of their profitability strategy to stay ahead of the competition now notice we did something interesting here we didn't say that organizations have to maximize Revenue through selling to stay out of the competition now while revenue is important and while we're talking about while we will talk about how to maximize short-term Revenue as one of those sales functions primary desired outcomes by selling bigger deals and doing so faster uh the temptation to use sales simply as a revenue organization which sometimes is bound by outdated rules constrains the potential of both individual sellers as well as sales as a function in an agile Enterprise which is focused on sustainable profitability so to solve that problem statement we propose the use of agile selling methods um why is that well first off for one agile teams and especially agile sales teams are able to sell bigger and faster Deals they also create happier customers both within that immediate transaction but then also in future deals by serving Active Learning roles and the agile Enterprises learning Cycles um agile sales teams are also uniquely positioned to support the larger goals around creating sustainable profit streams now I I realize that sustainable or profit streams better said is probably a concept that many of you have not heard but we're going to get into what profit streams are and how agile selling practices can help companies Define and improve their profit streams for sustainability and I do not see the Q a but if anybody has any questions uh feel free to drop those things in and Laura and I will tag team and answer them as they arise so we've just thrown a lot of information a lot of terms that you let's unpack some of them and especially what is agility now when when most people think about agile they think about the Define the roles the practices um that teams that are using scrum and similar methodologies employ to build technology and especially software they're thinking in roles and time boxes all the artifacts adapted and used in or adopted in technology groups to cultivate that agile mindset and it's funny in in the technology space to many agile is synonymous with scrum and scrum teams and if there are any folks in here or on our webinar who've sold agile Solutions in the past I think we've all supported pmos and organizations that claim to be 100 agile because all of their teams are scrum teams or using agile practices to some extent even though those pmos and same organizations are working off of yearly plans or even multi-year plans that see very little revision over very long time scales missing I would say some core tenants of of agility so just as agility has several layers of potential application and product or I.T teams agility can also be applied to other areas as well pass it over to you Laura yeah I mean I think that's an interesting point where sometimes people get um maybe overly focused on how and looking at particular Frameworks like scrum and losing focus on what you and I try to think about when we're thinking about what does it mean to be more agile in the sales organization so I think always sticking with the core values first and foremost is really what any good agile framework is intended to make easier to achieve anyway so if we're thinking about the core agile values you know just the ability to respond to change you know that customer collaboration element I mean these are things that I think have made sense to people in sales for a very long time just like people in the rest of the organization like you know I think being able to effectively respond to change is something that I most people in their personal lives and in their business lives I mean they would say yeah that's important so as we think about what agile sales mean for um or what you know which values that we really want to think about if we think about the agile core values first and let Frameworks become something that may or may not help us in the way that it helps the rest of the organization I think that really has helped us become more agile in our sales and also help the rest of our organization kind of think about well what is that sustainable profitability piece look like so I don't know if there's anything else you want to add here but for me this is really a way to kind of help make decisions or make recommendations or even support conversations about how can we be more agile and our part of the organization and how we interact with other parts of the organization yeah I think it's really well said um I think the biggest thing to index on is agile mindsets right and I think you said it really well Laura that Frameworks should flow and support those mindsets rather than be kind of a process that's imposed to without consideration of that mindset so um I love starting with the values as a way to guide um contemplation of agility as a whole and most importantly kind of what that means for agile as applied to sales and as we're terminating here agile selling um so one neat thing and you mentioned in responding to change and and and also things like customer centricity which we'll talk about here in a bit um the when applied to selling that agile mindset means that the Sales Group you're kind of giving them license to join and to be an extension of the agile Enterprise that's going to create specific characteristics within the sales function itself and also um like for sales's own purposes but then also behaviors that support those adjacent functions and here's a screenshot that I grabbed from our upcoming profit streams book uh where where sales is uh is yet another function that supports sustainable profitability um within the Enterprise so as we get started here we're going to be talking about several aspects that for us comprise practices that support that agile selling mindset these are often related and so whereas we're talking about them kind of in discrete categories um they're all pretty interrelated to some degree and most of them springboard off of customer centricity as we I mean this is really the most important practice for agile selling as we see it which is a focus on the customer and really notably here customer centricity uh for agile selling for us puts the customer first or at the very least doesn't put the customer last which often happens in sales or organizations and I see Laura smiling here because I think we've both been part of sales organizations where we've realized that that unfortunately happens at some points in the sales cycle meaning putting the customer last so um to to optimize this and to create an agile selling organization that does focus on the customer there's a really clear do different in one of our first recommendations for agile Sellers and agile sales teams is to hire and select over time for customer orientation for sellers who are driven by customer success and really focusing on the customer itself this should be included in hiring wrecks and definitely screened for um in uh in interviews um we also realize that there's probably like an entire other webinar that we could do about gaining trust with customers in a selling posture that allows for a free exchange of information with our customers and for the purposes of our webinar today really we want to mention that the characteristic that we see most important for agile selling is that we are starting and ending with customer need yeah and it's it's that customer need piece that that you and I talked about earlier that I think there's a lot of interesting um I guess a lot of interesting uh thought processes that go into it and I try to distill it down into three things but it's actually Beyond need it's somehow extending need and evolving that into actually thinking about outcomes first right so so when you know and ask actually you could ask anyone a question like this but when you ask somebody what they need their immediate I guess thought process goes to solutioning right away and the disconnect can happen right from the beginning where if we don't really understand what the outcomes are that the customer is trying to achieve if we get sidetracked too early in the conversation about solutioning we might actually be recommending and selling and and delivering not quite the right thing so part of this figuring out okay who who's the right people to be in your sales team but also what's the right posture to take if you want to be customer-centric I think starting with outcomes when you're talking to customers is really the way to go and so to get to you know good understanding around outcomes then you have to move into well how do you how do you figure out what those are how do you listen for outcomes so I know we're going to be talking about the concept of a you know cross-functional team inside of a sales organization but you know you and I both find this super helpful where there's always a point in working with a customer where you realize hey the point of this meeting or the point of these next couple of meetings is really we need to learn right we need to learn before we can start to propose the right solution for our client and it's that learning set of conversations we're having more than one person having a nice cross-functional group from our perspective to sit in on that kind of meeting really means that we're um none of us are listening with the same bias and we can all be thinking about are we listening for understanding rather than anything else so that's a conversation where we don't like to talk at all if we can get the you know our client to be talking 80 of the time we know that we're listening and learning and you know the the third point that I was thinking about in terms of customer centricity is all of that learning isn't just coming from the external world coming from directly from your customer there's a whole lot of people inside your organization who probably know important things either about that client or about that industry that really help the sales organization so when we're involved in those site you know this is what we try to think about at applied Frameworks but we're thinking about outcomes right from the beginning we're making sure that that learning part of the the conversation we're having with our client is more than just one of us we try to really do that from a team approach so that we are doing the best we can at really understanding the outcomes that we're driving for and then you know the third one is hey there's a lot of people who we work with internally here who know a lot about various Industries and various customers and again that really helps us make sure that we're putting the customer first cool good thoughts thanks Lauren so we found that once you're focused on the customer their needs and the outcomes importantly you can kind of start working on your learning culture uh as an organization now we're learning and listening to to key on a previous point for both the organization as a whole as well as the sales function itself so here's the problem it's uh this is just conversational we don't have a text to support this but uh in our experiences few people in an organization actually talk to customers especially the larger the organization is the more distance people get from organizations now when that conversation or when those that communication does happen it's either super wide and shallow and this is the case uh that you'll find in surveys that are designed with as many questions as you can ask customers before they get bored or stop answering their survey which is actually not that many questions um or the other type of contact that we see is really narrow and deep which is when uh product people or Executives uh lean on a limited set of customers uh to create uh requirements for the next generation of that companies often um and I was thinking about how we support a learning culture and it actually reminded me of a past program that I supported at rally which is an agile software and services company a lot of you folks have heard of rally um and there was a a great agile organization that looked to create this learning culture internally uh they did so in engineering by instituting this program called know your end know your customer and it had it started in engineering with the goal of getting each engineer connected to two customers per year um and actually my old colleague Michael Fleetwood describes this really awesome and this medium article if you want to learn more about um this particular the the solution that he came up with uh which I'll describe here in a moment I'd read this article as well um anyway so the Engineering Group they realized that that the goal of getting Engineers to talk to customers you have a whole year to talk to two customers even that was a pretty lofty goal and so therefore partnering with sales which I was in rally kind of lured their Engineers to talk to customers with donuts as a reward and this practice of usability donuts like it's it's so simple and it worked really well to facilitate these discussions and it helps create these massively parallel connections between engineering and customers now that was a pretty novel way to address the really common problem of gathering customer data at a wide scale this problem exists not just in engineering but in a ton of internal functions that that sales either touches or relies on and there's a notable Point here whether those functions know that they need this connection or not so it brings us to selling right sales talks with customers or or should on The Daily they're they are they have wide deep conversations with I mean deservedly every single one of an organization's customer and if we think about data Lakes sales is gathering information that looks like an ocean it's wide it's deep it it covers everything that it possibly can however and this is a challenge all too often the incentives for sellers mean that that information um stays where incentive drives it to stay and that's in sales now that's not entirely bad because sales needs to be constantly thinking and reevaluating its approaches and using all the information that it gets from its customers to kind of sharpen the sword and figure out uh where to go next um however sales has a much larger responsibility within a true agile Enterprise to listen on behalf of the entire Enterprise so um in organizations that are utilizing sales as part of their learning culture sales serves as a super valuable conduit for early stage leading and incremental feedback between customers as well as the entire organization that sales is always all the adjacent functions that they touch and like switchboard operators sales needs to have their ears on for this feedback as they support all of these adjacent feedback adjacent functions so while every organization is ultimately going to be different in this regard or how they enact this learning culture it's really critical to establish mechanisms and to encourage the sharing of information between your sellers and those other adjacent functions you'll often find that there's a ton of automation especially in in mature organizations there's either automation or attribution data that tries to create Telemetry between organizational activities and what that what that means for customer Behavior those are tough and rarely are they perfect it's tough to like perfectly gather behavior and turn it into numbers and data and so as a result um sellers are looking for for at least a limited conduit for a voice of customer now a really common way to do this is like when lost notes in your CRM Salesforce HubSpot Etc to understand what happened at the end of a deal this is absolutely helpful information but necessarily these win-loss notes happen at the end of a deal which means that they're a lagging indicator they're also kind of one way like it's almost like throwing a message in a bottle throwing in the ocean these things are rarely followed up on and there's rarely um from the most impacted functions there's rarely tracked back to the actual seller on these so every place is different but oftentimes these go into a big spreadsheet that's reviewed much much later and um these this feedback is also somewhat limited because it's kind of binary it only talks about wins or losses now it doesn't talk about um incremental or early stage feedback from the customer that could deservedly change either that individual deal like maybe it's a feature that would let the deal get bigger or as constraining it in some way or there's some interaction with the legal group that is affecting the timeline hopefully positively but often negatively um and so the goal here is to create Cycles or create channels so that you're capturing that early stage feedback from your sellers now this could be like a it could be a lunch and learn it could be a variety of other mechanisms but point is is that well win loss data and the traditional methods of gathering this learning detail from selling it there are good points about it we would urge organizations adopting agile sales to accelerate those learning Cycles do so earlier to capture leading indicators from Individual deals as well as market trends it's almost like those you know if you're if that's what you're doing and you think you're doing it well and you don't examine the practice it's almost like um a barrier to to True Improvement because you think you're doing enough and you're really not right and so it's it's this combination of and it in fact you know I I might even say that there are some other techniques where if you were to stop doing the traditional win loss and actually start doing more of some of the other things we were talking about you might actually be better served in the longer term um it's just a really interesting um kind of combination of how you collect the data and how can you take action against it and oh I think a lot of places and you've said it already it's like it's not as actionable as what people think it is right you know so we do it but I don't know if it helps as much as some of the other things that we also do yeah and a final thing and I'm only saying this not because sellers are coin operated but incentivize this data put a bounty on it maybe something meteor than a donut but make sure that that it's known by sellers that their feedback is valuable and uh and and incentivize it in your in your context so there's you know one of the things that that I was also reflecting on is well what what are some of the activities that other parts of the organization might already be doing to support the learning culture that just may not have made their way into the sales organization yet um and so at applied Frameworks we're certainly doing these things now and you know for example one of the things that we'll do is uh an intentional retrospection or retrospective session that may be about a particular customer it may be about a particular product or solution that we're selling it may be about the process itself I think the the key takeaway here from for us is that we vary that what we call a central question we vary the purpose of the retrospective so that they're useful for the rest of the organization as well as for um the sales organization this kind of learning and continuous Improvement culture um we we can borrow techniques from agilis and other part of the organ other parts of the organization to improve our own ability to to be more agile um one of the other things that we can do also is look at you know value stream mapping as a way of thinking about how do we work within our organization and how do we interact with other parts of our organization including the customer in order to make sure that we're thinking about outcomes we're designing uh solutions that help our customers achieve their outcomes and when we deliver the services or the products or the combination of that that we have a mechanism for making sure that we have done the best we can with the customer and we continue to help them be successful so maybe my my takeaway here is there are things that agilists and agile teams are doing in other parts of the organization that can certainly be adapted for the sales organization to help us also learn and get better and improve and continue to support the broader goal of sustainable profitability for the company so on by the way on that value stream mapping um there's always kind of side work I think of it almost as from the service industry if you're a waiter not only do you talk to your customers take orders and and uh and kind of do the actual meal service you also do side work you roll up the silverware you know you you do all that side work now sellers always have side work and it's really interesting to do value stream mapping on that side work because it's surprising how many inefficiencies show up in that side work that have just there's their old policies or activities that kind of ossify into things that take a lot of time for sellers so don't disregard value stream mapping is a great tool for Sellers and for sales organizations to optimize the reference mm-hmm so uh on structure so agile sales we have these two interrelated con uh topics one is structure and one is uh compensation again we're going to talk about them separately but they're strongly interrelated now there is a very common structural issue with sales groups really of any sufficient size um and you can even see this I would say in small groups that are organized poorly and no surprise it's silos so fortunately there are there there's a better way to organize whether it's the sales team or adjacent functions as well and that is to create cross-functional teams um one tentative agility is self-forming teams and it's pretty idealistic it's a bit of a Nirvana to say that you can tell your sales team become to become self-forming um it's a it's a difficult task to do but there is something that there's kind of an intermediate goal that we would uh encourage and that is to create cross-functional teams instead and by that we are looking to encourage the formation of persistent teams that pull members in from the adjacent functions that sales needs to require or that sales needs to be successful it could be engineering more likely it's going to be legal in the Ops Team it could be a member of the marketing team but think of ways to encourage the formation of these cross-functional teams whatever their their reporting structure is in ways that allow them to chase goals much larger than just sales can do on their own thoughts yeah it's like you know thinking about well what are what are the things that a sales um a customer you know an engagement with a customer or deal with a customer what are the things that have to happen in order for it to go from being a known opportunity to be well understood and all the outcomes are understood to have crafted a proposal and get a contract through legal and all those kinds of things you know one of the things we're trying to do here at applied Frameworks is the team has all of those capabilities built into it so we don't need to go outside to another group and then wait a long time for them to help us with something we have all of those bases covered in our team and we work together all the time so it's it's a way of of being very self-sufficient within a single team it just again gets at that speed and and quality piece of it where we have all the all the brains that we need at you know within our team in order to make sure that we're doing the best job that we can and able to go quickly yeah so so how do you how do you fix this you just wanted to put the crashing I I thought that this this GIF properly pronounced thank you everybody um was was appropriate the way to get there is tear down silos um as much as you can and we'll talk about this in a bit in compensation um but make everybody part of the same team allow those cross-functional teams to form um kind of let teams become self-forming to an extent um we've talked about Staffing in the past and this is another point where we should mention that um the success of self-organizing and uh and really cross-functional agile teams it starts with who gets hired for those roles uh and the ability as well to work with others there should be again something that you should screen for uh when I got when when you hire individuals um also I think this is a good segue right here to to jump over to compensation because how you compensate people is driver's Behavior and um and structure is really highly interrelated with compensation so so Compass comp is interesting it's it's a funny category it's it's it's there's a lot of benefit there's a lot of risk to it um and in most companies we find that sales are some of the highest paid non-executive roles and and while there's there's nothing inherently wrong sorry I'm going to close this door while there's nothing inherently wrong with most comp models they're really not in line with agile mindsets so a lot of people have seen Dan Pink's work and his work especially on the subject of compensation is super compelling um this uh this RSA anime clip it's on Den picks Ted Talk which is the puzzle of motivation um let me just play this his part about the compensation for knowledge work is fascinating as long as the task involved only mechanical skill bonuses worked as they would be expected the higher the pay the better their performance okay that makes sense but here's what happens but once the task called for even rudimentary cognitive skill a larger reward led to poorer performance now this is strange right a larger reward led to poor performance how can that possibly be now what's interesting about this is that these folks here who who did this are all economists at two at MIT one at the University of Chicago one at Carnegie Mellon okay the top tier of the economics profession and they're reaching this conclusion that seems contrary to what a lot of us learned in economics which is which is that the higher the reward the better their performance and they're saying that once you get above rudimentary cognitive skill it's the other way around what so what's interesting about this is that people act like sales is different than other knowledge work right and and it's almost like saying if we hire you into the sales profession you don't act like a human which I think is there's kind of an implicit humor in there um I'll let the audience decide if that's actually true or not but um suffice it to say that sellers are human well as long as and so um so from that we can look at the rest of Drive which is that dance pink epic Dan Pink's Epic book about uh human motivation not only are there those surprising findings about financial rewards but he found that once people received adequate compensation their their next drivers were autonomy Mastery and sense of purpose agile sales finds a way to fill those cups um and with an interest in time I'll move quickly through this I will say that there is a really common problem with compensation that we'd like to address in a couple of slides and that is the the moral hazard of the issue of sellers indexing on individual or personal compensation I think we've all seen the frankly the damage that's caused by even high performing sellers who at times require the rest of the organization to compensate for their behavior we're trying to drive good experiences and good outcomes for customers and we want to think about compensation models that drive those good customer outcomes yeah one of the things Bob you that you and I were talking about is you know when when you do when you have developed skills that for whatever reason are putting you kind of at the top of the the um the seller Community inside your organization you're considered one of the better or best sales people in your organization if you're not motivated or compensated in the right kind of way all of those things that you're doing really well that are helping your customers be happy and be successful on all those kinds of things helping you sell more you're not inclined at all to share that with anybody because and yeah I know you and I have both been I mean we've I've personally I've been in sales for over 30 years you know and I remember thinking well why would I share any of that because I want the trip to Hawaii that was the you know if I'm the number one salesperson then I get the trip so in some ways I was you know the incentive was created for me to keep that stuff a secret and it's just not healthy for the customer or the organization when sales people are thinking that way uh even exactly like when uh information and techniques and customers when they're guarded because they're totems of power and prestige so so let's let's fix that um in addition to creating um that culture of of larger teams really cross-functional teams agile sales uh also thrives on cop models that are more inclusive and I mentioned that compensation drives behavior and therefore an organization should compensate sellers in a manner that best befits the goals of the organization and it's no surprise that actually ends up being the actual goals of the organization um and I'll talk about one of my past experiences here this is a good time um so in in 2010 the sales group that I was in was very fractured um we we were in one of those circumstances Laura where knowledge was treated as a source of power and Prestige is guarded people did not communicate it was not a collaborative environment and so the the leader of that sales team Francis Kelly if you're out there um introduced a revolutionary concept which was one team one number now this was not a small Sales Group um and it was it took a while to get used to but adopting this much more inclusive comp model which um in that organization was one team one number everybody working towards the same quota it allowed us to tear down the silos between groups and not in scope deals not just as big as one team could make and I ran a territory I we made our numbers but in this but suddenly I was incentivized not just to think about my team but the entire organizations um success people shared information right it no longer became guarded it became a community good and previously competitive people chipped in a way that helped everybody's performance that year we had 124 of our annual Target as a team this was like a 50 million dollar number so not inconsequential um Everybody did well financially and the team and the team work we felt um was was like immense so thinking about this much more inclusive Revenue numbers based on larger teams or even the entire organization enable a lot of the other behaviors of agile selling and notably using sales as a learning function for the rest of the organization if I don't have to think about how these two hours that I'm spending with product affect my individual paycheck directly I'm much more inclined to create learnings that ultimately uplift the organization much more than two hours of my individual effort as an individual contributor or even as a manager and a sales group so this also matches with a lot of observational data so this hbr article motivating sales people really solid read and it speaks to how these collaborative comp models and non-monetary incentives work uh Donuts or otherwise and and how they can be related to team goals so a couple of different types of social pressure both program induced and nor and natural social pressure are really strong motivators as well as designing contests with multiple winners people want to be part of a team and so so index on that and create structures that support that um so Laura we've talked so much about agile sales why does that matter yeah well I think it matters because what the um overall objective of an organization is to create um kind of like from a systems thinking point of view how do we create a sustainably profitable organization or product or company sustainable meaning we are developing the opportunity to continue to play the game right if you think about running a company or running a business or being a profitable business as it's like a never-ending game right if you're lucky the game never ends and so how do we think about the value of a sales organization not just for the people who are in sales and not just because of the the customer interactions are improved but actually it improves the entire ability for the company to develop what we call a a sustainable profitable software-powered business right and so profit streams are really part of that so this this canvas and and by the way we can um include a copy of the canvas as part of the the follow-up to this webinar but the idea here is there's a there's a if you take a systems thinking view to this this canvas kind of represents that so every sustainable business has a known profit engine but to get there there's a lot of insights and a lot of learning that has to happen in order for the head of product or product management generally to be able to optimize for sustainability right we need to be profitable it needs to be in service of meeting customer needs and it needs to work for both us as the company and also the customer so if you have an agile sales organization pulling them into this conversation of optimizing the system around profit streams is a pretty easy ask right we're already collaborating across different functions in the sales organization we're already collecting and sharing a lot of customer insights and we are motivated by success of the bigger system not just our pocketbooks so having so pulling sales into these key conversations is actually fairly easy to do as compared to if you were trying to do that with you know individually compensated and individual sales people that aren't necessarily very collaborative internally just based on you know the structures that might be in place so if we you know look at one way of thinking about it if we look at that right hand side of the the canvas The Profit Stream or the customer side of the canvas these are questions that sales are really well positioned to help answer right what are from a customer's perspective what are their goals and aspirations and what are what's the nature of the problems that they're trying to solve what is valuable to the customer how do they perceive it right what are some of the economic choices that they have to make and even down to more detailed um insights into well what kind of Licensing structure would actually work for a customer it's amazing how many times people in sales have these related conversations like we we learn a lot in um the multiple conversations that we have with customers and while they may not directly relate to the the deal that we're working on they do relate overall to like I think this concept of thinking about profit sustainable profitability or profit streams so this is why it's really great to pull sales into these conversations if you're a product oriented organization or if you're a product manager and if your sales organization is already organized with agile principles and values in in play it's an easy ask to get your customer your sales team to be involved in these conversations and so they can represent the customer but they can also represent what we would call The Profit engine itself it's this um I guess the connection of thinking about well what is what's the right licensing strategy what's the right pricing strategy how do we think about that value exchange model with the customer again sales isn't the only group that's part of these conversations I mean certainly this involves product and engineering and legal and compliance and all those other parts of the organization sustainable profitability is definitely a team game though or a team sport here and and I think sales will almost always have a unique set of information that we can inject into these conversations that help round out the decisions that are made based on you know thinking about what we want to do with a particular product or service or combination around sustainability so there's a lot of value in developing an organism a sales organization by injecting you know agile principles and values and really thinking about structure and compensation and paying attention to what motivates knowledge workers um those are all things that'll make your sales organization more effective it'll help you with engagement it'll help you with retention right it's it's just those are tend to be real high energy positive sales organizations the the extra benefit that maybe we don't always appreciate is the fact that the sales organization is now better positioned to work with the product team and the rest of the organization to optimize for sustainable profitability so I don't know if that gives you any um other thoughts or questions Bob that you think we should talk about um but I I like the idea that what we're trying to come up with at applied Frameworks and what we're also working with some of our customers on is you know by optimizing a portion of the organization you should be trying to do that in service of the whole so that you're not um accidentally maybe um tipping the system in One Direction or the other like if you take a systems thinking view when you're making these kind of departmental changes or process changes or deciding that you're going to work differently when you think about the system as a whole and you're optimizing a piece of it it tends to um you know it tends to be a better choice than if you're trying to make some of these choices independent of the bigger system that you're interacting with yeah that uh yeah I think you should put a lot of things really well right there and one thing that uh uh you called out which is treating sales first off from a systems theory sales needs to be integrated into the whole right the days of treating sales like an outsourced Revenue function should be over right we need the learning we need to integrate them into into the entire Enterprise and make them much more cohesive again from that systems view thinking about how value flows to the system the other things uh that um or that are resonant with what you said is that we should be chasing from that system's thinking we should be chasing um Global Improvement not just local optimization you see local optimization in Old comp plans where one individual does extremely well really to the at times even the detriment of others and given the way that large organizations can purchase they can even purchase across territory bounds and so reducing some of those silos enhancing the teamwork and the cooperation minimizing the competitiveness competitiveness across sales teams all of those things will help both the sales function itself but then optimize it for participation in the overall Lane Enterprise yep I would I would agree with all that I mean if we if we were happy not here I mean to be honest it just makes your sales people happier and we all know that that's really important for everyone who has to work with us it's like happy fulfilled sales people are pretty productive so uh you know being knowing that you're contributing to kind of the bigger goals and the longer term strategy the company gets at some of those Dan pink motivators right I mean it's it's not you know we're not coin operated really um where we really do appreciate the opportunity to solve customer problems in in meaningful ways and to feed key information back into the organization and actually see how it can help support growth and speed and all of those things that we care about if we want to remain a successful sustainably profitable company absolutely so yeah good I think I don't think we have any questions to answer I think as we went along we answered what we needed to so maybe just a few remaining housekeeping bits here but we'll definitely be um answering any other questions that people have so if you haven't had the chance to put them in here definitely send us um your thoughts and ideas and we'll be sharing the recording and the deck and and if there's any other resources that we can think of that we should throw in there we will definitely do that well thanks Laura this is really fun to pair with you on um thanks to our participants uh and the folks who attended today and um yeah as Laura said we're open books on this stuff and these are definitely passion areas for us so feel free to reach out to us and if you have any questions or thoughts about um improving your organization so thanks all all right take care see you Bob thanks everybody