Empower your personnel with deal management in crm for Personnel

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do you know most sales people would rather clean toilets than update the crm that's a surprising result or maybe not so surprising result that came out of a recent oracle survey about crm effectiveness so i couldn't wait to reach out to sam wilcox from tribecto to talk all about why we love to hate the crm and what we can do about it here is our conversation for key account management in action [Music] sam welcome to account management and action i am really excited to uh have you here today to uh you know discuss our love-hate relationship with the crm which i know is uh very topic very close to my my audience's heart so welcome thanks for having me warwick yeah it's it's great to be here it's good to chat with you again yeah uh likewise so listen just give us a brief rundown on what you do and how do you end up doing it sure yeah so i'm i run a company called tribecto automations and we kind of handle a lot of the sales process and software development for mostly b2b service-based businesses really and we we focus in on helping them trying to turn more of their leads into sales right that's a very specific piece of the customer journey we implement all the software that helps them do it and some of the marketing automation and stuff that helps with that piece as well i've been running the business now for around about four years um and yeah it's been a period of evolution i am constant constant evolution i would say in terms of trying to transition from being a freelancer into more of a consultative role into a small agency and you know that's kind of where we're at now we're kind of a small boutique agency that as i say kind of focuses on the software and automation side of things of this that part of the sales process and but the goal that our clients are trying to get really is to increase their lead to sales conversion rate so it's everything to do with that is what we focus on and that's how i got there yeah you can't just think like a sales person you you know in this day it's so encompassing now with the technology the customer experience you know to think more around as a marketer as a customer success person as somebody that's invested in the whole end-to-end process at least have an understanding of how the leads get to you yeah it's so important yeah i think the whole customer journey is something i kind of fell in love with so when i was working at the agency before i kind of left and started on my own it was it was the thing that i was really focused on so i i was responsible for the sales but as part of that uh you know being a startup i had to just learn everything about the customer journey you know from okay well there's inbound methodology there's outbound methodology how does that work in terms of you know feeding the sales pipeline what does a sales pipeline need to look like what happens when the customer gets closed you know how do we deal with the customer from there as i said we did a bit of account i did a bit of account management so you know you know developed my skills around that as well so it's that whole customer journey piece i kind of fell in love with and then i really i'm a bit of a geek so i kind of geeked out on the software side of that and how the software can help with the customer journey and the automation and all that kind of stuff so yeah they all tie in and i think from a sales perspective because we we help a lot of sales teams now you know startup sales teams growing sales teams one of the things that we always talk about to the reps specifically is they they need to not just know the product in and out but they really need to know as much about business as possible really you know yeah because it they need to have these conversations with business owners for most of the time because like i say most of our clients kind of b2b um companies so they're having conversations with business owners they need to understand the problems that their service or product solves obviously but it's more than that right it's more than just the features and benefits there's the emotional connection and where the where the business owner is currently at um you know with their goals and plans as well so the more they can understand business from the ground up the more successful the the reps tend to be and in this oracle report which is uh getting getting past the breaking point of yesterday's crm you know one of the one of the stats most people would rather clean toilets than update their crm that's how how much they hate it i have been there i hate the crm so much because it's like it was across purposes with how i work what do you think about like what's what's the pain point for most people like what's what what do you think what do you come across when it comes to just sales processes and crms the the biggest issue is data entry for for any sales yeah like one of the other stats in that report which i'm very thankful for you sending over by the way it was really insightful um was 90 of the 90 of the sales reps believe that job uh should be quicker or something like that right there should be their job should be fine it's costing productivity yeah right right so this comes down to kind of two things really in my in my opinion the reason why a lot of people feel that way about crm systems is there's there's too much manual data entry in a lot of cases not all but a lot of cases most of the clients that we come across are especially relying on sales reps for too much data entry um there's also a little bit of a problem there where you know the sales rep thinks that their job should be quicker and they're basically saying that job shouldn't be to fill in crm which is also kind of not true right like you know yes you want to be spending as much time as possible building relationships with clients but you know it is in this day and age it is also part of the sales role to be able to actually fill in a crm so there's got to be a middle ground there right and i think that's where a lot of people struggle because one of the things that you just mentioned which is 100 true we see it all the time is a lot of um organizations you're just collecting data for data's sake because it sounds like they should be collecting it and they've heard on this business owner that they're comparing themselves to is collecting this and they need these stats of when people sign up for this but if you really drill down okay well what you're actually doing with those metrics a lot of the time especially kind of startups and um small to medium-sized enterprises i would say you know they're not they're not even using the data that they are collecting so that's frustrating from a sales reps perspective because it's like you're asking me to collect all this information but what are we even doing with it you know and it's a waste of time there's obviously information that needs to be collected and there's the minimum which is the qualifying criteria right and obviously you deal information and updating pipelines and stuff like that but other than that i would re everything everything i say to our clients is you've really got a question like why are you collecting this piece of data every single custom field that gets created there should really be a reason for it it should be being used in a report at some point either on a weekly bi-weekly or quarterly basis if it's not you're not doing anything with it you need to cut it out right so it's also you know from a gdpr and data perspective you know this is also something that is a bit of a no-no just collecting data for data's sake you know there needs to be a purpose behind it so that's one of the main issues that i think that kind of breeds this mentality of sales people would rather clean the toilet than other crm because they're not seeing the benefits of the time that they're spending updating the crm right so if you can pull reports from the data that they're putting in you can show them metrics that are kind of beneficial to them and and you can identify areas where they can improve what they're doing so they can sell more i'm sure they'd be happy to import that information um but if you can't and you're not then it's just a drag on the sales person's time and it just you know it breeds a neg on the crm and people don't like to use it in that way you know people are now using these tools to collect as much information about transactions marketing activity all that stuff as possible and i believe that they should because it is a business tool at the end of the day yeah there is parts of it that you know like the pipeline element of things and the actual crm part of these tools because let's face it a lot of them aren't just crms now they're not email marketing platforms and marketing automation because the transaction platforms you know there are all these other things so it does become a business tool and i think you do need that data in there because again reports and stuff it shouldn't really it shouldn't be and this is kind of what we do is we make sure that that data gets import via integrations it happens automatically because it shouldn't be the reps responsibility to import every transaction or input every time that somebody's visited a website or you know every call that's happened these things these data points should to happen automatically so that it's as less as less time burden on on the sales reps as possible you know and the account manager wraps whoever's touching it right needs to be as least input from those guys as possible it needs to be as automated as possible but i agree with you i mean i think there's nothing wrong with that because then you can see what the when the left hand is talking to the right hand it becomes uh you know an area where you can find that information without having very different sources i like that part of it but i think what you touched on is that not having the automation to support it yeah you know where it suddenly becomes the burden of so like for example if i'm doing a if i finalize a contract i'm the one that has to log in and type in every single little detail of the contract terms and conditions pricing i'm like i'm supposed to be selling i've got a quota why am i sitting here for three hours plugging in all the bits and pieces so i think you write about the customization how you got to think about why you want that field what are you going to do with it and also i think you have to remember you either have to either attach an automated automation project that goes with it or you've got to think about a lower paid resource to do it if it's otherwise your sales people aren't selling now i do have to say though as caveat one one thing that does happen quite often is people try to over automate things as well which is an interesting dilemma which actually takes all of the human to human element they try and take all the human human element out of the sales process and they just want basically robots to just come in complete tasks click buttons and move things stages that's also not a good way to go so like i said at the beginning you know it does kind of depend on the business and there is a balance to be struck and i think that's where a lot of people have problems you know they don't really know where that balance is and they don't know how to find it like i remember having a conversation with my boss at one point saying look this i'm you're burying me alive with this crm bs tell me what's the minimum you need every week right because he was like you need to do everything so when we had that conversation was like look if you just put in your meetings and update this the rest you can do at the end of the month so thank god because i was literally spending three hours every friday updating this damn thing and then i he told me he only runs the weekly meeting stat report so i'm like okay well that's great and he looks monthly at something else so i think sometimes even having an honest conversation with your boss about what's the minimum and then maybe even when you're planning and building your crm thinking about the cadence because too often i think they say i'll update everything all the time where it's not really practical and then it be it stresses people out becomes overwhelming what do you think yeah i think you're right i think one of the things you touch on there which is super important which is just understanding what what reports are required from a business perspective what the cadence of those reports are and this is kind of obvious but it's something that people don't think about enough it's like what are the real key important metrics that should be driving this function of the business right that we need to be reporting on once you know those things then you can figure out okay well how do we get all those metrics and when do you need them by and how can we make sure they're as accurate as possible and you know you can start off by delivering those metrics or tracking those metrics manually maybe your sales rep it's probably something that sales reps are already doing manually you know they're tracking the amount of leads that they're touching they're tracking you might have quotes or proposals and sending out you know all this kind of standard stuff but really what we want to do is figure out how to kind of once we know what those three things are from the from the reps perspective um one of the account managers perspective from from from your audience's side of things getting clear on those three things you should be able to then go to your director or the business owner and say look these are the things that we really need to focus on because that's what you've told me how can we figure out how to make sure that these metrics are as um accurate as possible and they get pulled automatically for you because it takes me too long to do this stuff and you want to require you want to me to spend my time on building relationships and selling more and making sure people stick around for longer so there's a business case there right that a rep can take to a director or a business owner once they understand what these metrics are that are really driving their performance and what the business owner wants to know so that's one thing i would recommend is if if if that's something that's unclear at the minute and you're spending too much time on make a business case for it because you know it's safe the amount of time and energy that you you as the rep would be putting into developing these reports is you know it outweighs the cost of getting it automated yeah you're right i mean too many people just want to be a hater and not actually come up with a business case to solve a problem and um there's some joy in hating the crm but you know ultimately it kind of is a little bit right a little bit but yeah you know that's where i think sometimes some of the bigger organizations in there in their desire to make it this end-to-end tool that covers the whole organization have lost sight of some of the functionality that is really going to help an account manager or a salesperson they think marketing they think marketo they think marketing department not a salesperson with 60 contacts that needs to have nurtured campaigns potentially selling 100 emails a week trying to get 13 15 20 touch points in a month who is doing it all manually because there's no other system there for them so i think that's where i think some of the challenges are with the crm myself people don't resonate with it so much yeah you're right because a lot of times the people let's actually this is a really good point and i think i've just kind of clicked with this so thanks for helping me kind of connect these dots in my head i think a lot of this um and it is kind of proof in this document that you sent over this oracle report a lot of the people that don't like crm tools and let's say a really heavily against them these these you know they're cleaning the toilets yeah that's the ones that rather clean the toilets you know they do work for these big enterprise sales companies i would argue this that's an assumption so you know i'm making an assumption there but i i would argue that that assumption is probably correct and it's because exactly like you said right if you're a smaller company you can flip and change to find the right crm and you actually get access to more features for much cheaper and generally a lot of the time the ui of those crms the user interface and like how it feels to use is much nicer when you're in a more of an enterprise situation and you're using kind of this clunky sales force or sap or something like this right and to get any change if you as a sales rep you want to say we need to change this because it just doesn't make sense yeah good luck with that because you know there's three international sales departments with 16 different directors and you know trying to make trying to action change in that kind of situation it's it's pretty much impossible from the from the rep who's actually using the system to you know to affect that change whereas lower down in terms of business sizes you can actually affect change in a much better way so i i would actually in in this kind of you know that's an oracle report right so it kind of makes sense uh that that would be the case again that's an assumption but i think it's a pretty safe one no it's true well in my last job we were trying to get a drop down changed and added adding one extra reason code it took six months because this company was in 270 countries 170 countries joint ventures uh massive global customers with 50 60 70 000 business units all from different countries different currencies different customization requirements different legal requirements with taxes and vats super complicated so i think at the really large enterprise end like you say it becomes this massive steamliner ship that becomes impossible to turn quickly so the mid the the minute you're stuck in this canal right stuck in the sewers canal mid market space are a lot more agile i guess uh because yeah i could i can take advantage of some of these features i don't have to deploy them across 170 countries and 10 000 staff and the licenses are cheaper you know whereas in previous jobs we were the only ones that had access to it sometimes had shared logins because they didn't want to give people certain access so trying to even share information with say an operations team or a product team was difficult because they weren't allowed access so they'd have one team log in because they want to pay for licenses so become really messy and the and you know the business owner and the director doesn't really challenge what the system's doing they just challenge the people that are using the system that's their kind of job right honestly that's such a great way to put it it's exactly what happens yeah so so but realistically one of the things that we that i have to do is you know running this business to try and get people to understand okay well look if you could take the crm that you've got now and you could implement two or three very minor things that would take a little bit of time up front and that increases your lead to sales conversion rate by at least 10 percent like what impact does that have on annual sales and you need to get people thinking in this way because these these small you know task automation so that you know john doesn't have to remember to automatically set a task to follow up with tim two weeks later or you know these automated emails that go out because you know the the conversation that john's had with you know some other person that used to have it is striking up a deal with is generally the same as it was last time right so each one of these things saves time from that specific reps they can focus more on building their sales and their relationship skills and if that increases the output by 10 you know even just 10 you know what impact does that have so less challenge on the people also challenge the crm and the system itself you know reviewing the process the sales process that's i mean that's like my aha moment because when you've said it like that i've literally realized that's what's happened most of my career is that it's not the crm's fault it's mine i'm the one that partners my time i'm the one that doesn't is disorganized i'm the one that's um disregarding procedure i'm the one that doesn't care or has a bad attitude no the crm's almost like become this untouchable because they've invested so much in it and being sold the promise it's becoming infallible something's infallible nobody wants to criticize it and instead the burden comes on me and the all of the problems with this area and the ones that i created because i didn't do my part in keeping it up to date so i think that is such a brilliant observation and i would encourage everybody to think about is that happening to you like is it actually that they're transferring the fundamental foundational issues with the crm not being fit for purpose for your business and for the way you work um and transferring that onto you and you suddenly becoming the center of that problem instead of the the tool itself so one of the things i wanted to ask you about because this has happened to me uh with some of our crm trying to kind of evolve it make it fit for purpose right the job became mine and my teams and oh my god it took forever cross-functional teams in different departments all trying to figure out what was what i don't know a crm i don't know what's capable what it's capable of i don't know the back-end functionality i don't even have time to think about what i'm doing and i begged them to get me a consultant i was like can't we hire like a salesforce person that knows what they're doing like i'm sure what they could do in a day by talking to us evaluating us looking at the systems going away and thinking about stuff could be done in a day versus never by just trying to assemble you know with some internal project yeah what are your thoughts on that like why are people reluctant to hire external consultants or should they or what would you advise people that are in this space whether crms not fear for purpose they recognize it needs some work what are their next steps well obviously i'm slightly biased seems this is what because i know that's your line of work i mean i legitimately have had that issue so many times that yeah we hit this brick wall because the company won't hire people that are actually experts to help us break past the wall difficult that's a difficult one though right like if you're the one you're the person that's experiencing the pain because you're the one that's using the system you're the one that is in charge of managing your sales process or your account management process or whatever it is you know you're experiencing the pain but if you're if you're acting responsibly and sharing that with you know um directors and business owners to say look this is an issue you have to understand why it's an issue and really it kind of comes back to that business case perspective before which is like there needs to be a business case for it not just why is this a problem for you because you're dealing with it every day because it's easy for the business owner to just go we'll just do it you know but why is it a problem for the business because then you're going to get more ears on the situation it's like look this is a problem for me because it's stopping me from doing x y and z which means we can't achieve this goal in the most effective way wouldn't it be better if we could beat that goal by 120 rather than just hitting it 100 right so yeah if there's a business case behind where the pain comes from it's easier to get somebody to listen but if your company is just you know not willing to work with outside experts it's pretty tough tough not to crack to be honest i think that there needs to be willingness to lean on outside expertise and help and i think in this day and age it's more common than it used to be you know i've only been running this business for four years but i've been in this industry for 10. so i know how um you know consultants were hired at the marketing agencies i used to work for and we needed help but i was very close with the you know the business owner was my next in line so i understood his thought process in terms of hiring consultants and stuff and over the time that i worked there it became more and more common that we would lean on experts because why wouldn't you right it's cheaper you don't have to pay somebody to come in and learn all the skills and you know a full-time salary you can just pay somebody to come in and solve this very specific problem but there has to be a business case for it and you have to be able to improve why right why is this whole thing's pointless yeah i think looking back my my business case was i don't want to do it or um i'm paid too much we should get somebody junior to do it i hadn't taken it further to go actually this is preventing me from this or we could get these results faster if we looked at this in this way or we've got something and maybe even done some homework called a couple of consultants said look give me some ballparks how do you work built the business cases say yeah oh not because i think when people hear consultant they think you know pm pwc kpmg you know 10 000 pounds a day it's not always like that so doing more of the groundwork so you can present the business case and get the conversation started it doesn't mean you're going to have to close this out but get people in to talk 100 yeah and it's kind of the most it's probably one of the most rewarding parts of the project well the projects that we do is is is that ah-ha moment that i was you know happy enough to give you earlier on uh but when you can when you when i can get on the phone with somebody and we can unpick what the situation looks like and say well why are you doing things like this now and how does this work and there's a lot of why like why why why why do you do it this way why is it always been done that way why isn't it done like this along that line of questioning at some point there's like a the switch that goes off it's like oh i get this right we should we should be looking at it this way not the way that we are looking at it and that it's hard to get people to that moment though unless you can unless you can obviously have the conversation but also to even get that conversation started there has to be a business case in a lot of in a lot of these instances because if there's no pain and it's just you as the rep or the account manager that's having the pain and you're just moaning about it then it's not really interesting right like yeah that business nagging isn't a business case right right right unfortunately not i think uh people further ahead than they are what's your workflow like how do you manage to stay up to date with crm like what's your own personal kind of approach do you do it like in chunks you do it on the go do you block time how do you kind of fit fit it into your schedule so i'm a very sales-focused individual because i'm a business owner and you know for my business it's me and a small team right so i am the person that's doing the sales essentially um so i'm very connected to the sales process the crm that i use is plugged into my email it's plugged into my calendar so i don't open gmail i don't open google cal i don't open outlook or anything like that i open up the crm in the morning yeah you know so i live in the crm essentially the businesses run all the communications happen from with inside the crm so i have to check daily now in terms of like how do i keep filling the pipeline up and how am i kind of keeping on top of that per day it's a boring answer it's just time blocking i have to say that look i'm wearing many different hats but i have to say that at least an hour a day i'm contacting people i'm reaching out to people that look like good partnerships for good partnership potential where there's you know potentially um what's the word i'm looking for complementary service providers that we can connect with this is how we got into this conversation me and you today right so um you know we want to reach out and network with people and communicate with people and i have to dedicate time to that every day because if you don't then it doesn't happen it's just as simple as that right like you have to it's a universal truth yeah you know so yeah i'm a big i don't believe in luck but i'm very fond of this phrase of like increasing your look surface area which is you know the theory is like you know more people that you you you reach out to and try and provide value to just the more opportunities that are going to come your way in the end right i'm so living in the crm is one which forces me to actually keep on top of things daily time blocking so that i can make sure that i'm constantly trying to find new conversations and following up with people yes we have automated email sequences uh i don't personally i don't use them all that much right now you know it sounds like whoa you know this guy's talking about automating everything and you know building these email services for my size of business and what the way that i work i don't need to right a lot of our clients do i'm not at the point where i'm trying to scale a sales process right now i'm still trying to keep it very personal one-to-one relationships because that's what i enjoy and that's kind of the goals of the business so i'm never going to be the person that always says you've got to do it this way you've got to do it that way because it depends on what you're trying to achieve so so yeah you know they're the kind of only hard fast rules that i stick to is always stay connected to the crm make sure all the emails flow through it and your calendar is done through it forces you to be in there and uh spend time on your pipeline daily um you know for for a rep or an account manager per se the process is probably very different because you're not running a business and wearing four different hats like i am you're probably going to be spending most of your day in that pipeline finding prospecting new people but that's kind of what i've got for you so any um any sort of resources things you know you know podcasts anything you want to recommend to the audience about you know anything we've talked about or whatever's just something that you're interested in sure i'll do a little bit of a self promo here but we've got a place called the full stack business podcast which i would love to have you on at some point soon so i would love to get you over on there so check that out guys um but in terms of books there's there's definitely one book which stands out always from a business perspective i think again if we if we go back to what we said right in the beginning in terms of reps or account managers understanding businesses in general as much as possible i don't 100 recommend this reading this book it's very short but i think it's super valuable it's called built to sell by uh john warrillo and it's actually a fiction book right so it's not um it's not like it's not a true story or like a parable kind of thing yeah and it's about a um it's about an agency owner who's running a traditional marketing agency and he's tired and you know he's he he needs to sell the business but he can't because he doesn't have any processes or anything built everything's creative all of the business ip and the value of the business lives in the individual's brains on the teams and it's about how how this mentor kind of guides him towards building a business that's fit for sale right and this whole process of going through um if more productizing a service i think which is something that is true to rings true to the way that i like to do business so um that's a super valuable book short read um even if you're not building a business to sell it's still very very valuable because i would argue that you probably even if you're not going to sell your business you should still build it like you're going to um so great yeah check it out i'll put the links to everything in the description um i have listened to a podcast a great podcast you also do some great videos on linkedin too don't you i've seen a few videos yeah thank you um so make sure to connect with sam there i i like the idea of like thinking of you should be thinking of your job as a as a business when my boss said to me it's your business that blew my mind i was like like thinking about it like that i was like oh i made so many different decisions and i thought about things so differently even though i was just an account manager but it just made me think right well there's an implication for that downstream i need to be better plugged into the business goals i need to start thinking like if the process is broken it's like if you see litter on the street you don't just walk past it you pick it up and put in the trash same with a broken process same with a system so you know that book sounds really interesting and a great kind of easy way to just have you think a little bit differently you know you know i think a lot of that kind of tracks back to having a growth mindset right um which i know is a bit of like a fluffy term but essentially just like you want to be learning new stuff all the time and you're interested in business right or like if you're somebody that's working at a company and you are constantly learning about business and your area of expertise are you constantly trying to expand your learning because you're passionate about it you're just gonna have much more success in the long run for sure rather than just like turning up to a job and just doing what somebody tells you to do um i think that kind of ties back into kind of when somebody says like oh think about this as your own business that's really what they're trying to tell you it's like you know you've got to be resourceful you've got to figure things out for yourself you've got to learn about this role and what it really means and where the values driven and how you can expand it and all that kind of stuff that's kind of what they get into so yeah i agree with you i would definitely think about those kind of things yeah and other podcasts just kind of on the side you know because i just want to drop my own one in there yeah i'd like to listen to the tim ferriss podcast i also like to listen to um there's a podcast called the all in podcast which is probably one of my favorite podcasts right now which is a bit more like tech news and um sort of like venture capital investment conversations also a lot of kind of like modern uh not modern current affairs so yeah it that's a good podcast as well so any and you may have already said it because i loved that expression you said about increasing the surface area of luck uh but any wisdom advice that's held you that you'd like to you know leave the audience with right so from a business perspective because i could kind of split these into personal and business i suppose but like from a business perspective one of the things that's kind of very top of mind for me at the minute is as i like to say i wear many hats and stuff so i'm doing a lot of different stuff as a as a somebody who's running a small business right so i'm knowing every day whether i'm to coin a gary vaynerchuk term whether i'm in the clouds or in the dirt right so whether i'm whether i've got strategy hat on and i need to do high level thinking or whether i need to just get into the detail and make sure that you know stuff gets done um it's very very helpful for me and i've only kind of only that's only that advice has only really kind of landed with me recently because i kind of heard it many times in many different forms in the past but um i was charging towards burnout very recently and i realized it's because i was spending far too much time in the detail and that kind of gets me down a little bit because i can't see the bigger picture so so being conscious and self-aware enough to know when i should be spending time in the detail and when i should be spending time at a high level is something that's proven to be very valuable for me right now so hopefully that helps somebody else but advice is a funny one though right because everybody hears advice all the time you know if you're listening to this podcast you probably listen to a million other podcasts you probably watch youtube videos that you're probably trying to learn you probably have this growth mindset but advice has got to hit you set in the right way at the right time and you've got to be in the right mind frame to accept it so you know hopefully at least one person can take something away from that i love it and i i think sometimes you know it's that thinking time sometimes i say to people um just give yourself an hour like you you might just sit and stare at the window and nothing even enters your brain but it's just that you're giving yourself that opportunity nine percent of people could not sit in front of a window and stare out of it for an hour i get your point but i'm just yeah it's tough it is tough um so your advice is better because i like that idea of just actually well it just means you're focusing your mind in the right way you're like okay and i know i've often said this i can do admin like if i go to the office i can just churn through emails i can update crms i can plow through my admin um because i know that's what i'm there to do i can't think in the office i find it really difficult to actually spend time on the strategy i'm better at home other people are the other way around but i think being intentional about how you're going to spend your time and thinking okay today's a day i'm just going to get done or today's the day i'm actually going to think about moving the needle what i need to do and just what you've said about clouds or dirt you know and just strategy and and you know tech because admini day-to-day stuff makes sense you'll know as well as running your own business that you kind of feel like you have to be in the detail a lot i don't know if this is this is if you relate to this but for me when i spend a lot when i spend too much time you know on strategy and how we're going to move the needle in the long term i kind of feel guilty because i'm not in the emails and replying to people i'm not spent this is like a bit of a guilt thing that creeps in as well that you have to kind of manage so um but yeah i think trying to be as self-aware of that situation as possible and not beat yourself up about spending time away from the detail and letting the team go and figure things out on their own and not being there you know 24 hours a day when somebody's got an issue you know people need to be resourceful and you can kind of crack on with you with your uh strategy and part of strategy is also reflection so looking back at what worked what didn't work how you'll fine-tune doesn't actually mean coming up with brand new ideas right that are going to change the world it could just mean let me just look at my last quarter why did the pipeline not get where why did i why did i miss my quotas what prevented what went well what can i repeat out of the things that went well what you know weighed me down what was a challenge how do i strip that out of my job or stuff like that so i think also looking at it in that way as well is having that time to reflect and learn some lessons from what went before agreed i'm definitely guilty of not doing that i know for sure yeah so listen uh sam uh any final words anything else you'd like to add before we close it off no it's been great to chat to you warwick it's been a really interesting conversation thanks for having me on um hopefully we got to do this again sometime yeah and if people want to reach out connect with you what should they do yeah visit tribecto.com so that's t r i b e c t o dot com tribe and then cto i suppose dot com um where you can check out um what we do there in terms of helping businesses build better sales processes and increase those conversion rates and but other than that connect with me on linkedin say hello i'm always open to having chats with people connecting with people um yeah that's what this is all about for me so um yeah connect me on linkedin or visit the website awesome all right thanks so much sam have a great day no worries cheers so what did you think i had so many aha moments like uh you know i loved sam's expression about increasing the surface area of luck i really resonated with his um you know advice to build a business case about change for the crm rather than simply just complaining about it and also that sometimes you know the the organization transfers their frustrations with the crm or the ineffectiveness on the crm to us as account managers and sales people and blaming us for the failures of the actual technology so many more insights really really compelling conversation so i hope you enjoyed it let me know what your favorite moment was or you know an id that you got from this conversation i'd love to hear from you comment below and if you would like to be my next guest on key account management in action drop me a line you can send an email to hello at accountmanager.tips i'd love to hear from you alright heroes well that's a wrap on this episode and until next time bye for now [Music] you