Optimize your digital sales process for higher education

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[Music] hi my name is will and welcome to the salesman podcast on today's episode we're answering the question what is a digital sales room and how can we use them to win more sales today's guest is george donovan he is a chief revenue officer over aligo.com here's 20 years of experience in sales marketing and operations and with that george welcome to the show thank you will thrilled to be here i'm excited to have you all mate so i'm somewhat familiar with this but i want to pitch this conversation especially at the beginning of things to a place and perhaps position ourselves as the audience who are unfamiliar with this idea of a digital sales room perhaps it's a knuckle dragging caveman-esque salesperson who's only just kind of been pulled away from spamming people on cold calls and is just coming into this idea of content can be really helpful for sales people so with that can you give us a brief overview of what a digital sales room is then we can dive into the ins and outs of it and perhaps sell the audience on the fact that maybe this is the future of sales right sure i think of it as a great way a technology and a process that helps close the gap between and we've heard a lot about this right the buyer's journey versus the seller's process and how do you map these together and have the the prospect feel good about the buying experience and not feel like they're being dragged along by that caveman sales person as you say and i think digital sales rooms are a great way to do that and what they are is they're a virtual space it's technology it's a virtual space that allows customers and sales people to interact so customers can access all the content that they need to provide uh comfort for them through their buying journey and it's one place that they can go to for all the exchanges that have happened between the sales person and the prospect it could be history of emails it could be video recordings if you had a recording with the with the prospect it could be proposals spreadsheets you name it anything could be in this digital sales room that customers need along their buying journey and the nice thing for the customer is they can share it with other people they can bring other folks on their buying committee into the room into the digital sales room to access this content and and then the benefit for the sales person is they can see the engagement so they know who's in the sales room what they're doing what content is hot and what content is not what does it look like for someone who's unfamiliar and perhaps we can throw in some screenshots and i'll link to the product demos and stuff in the showing up to this episode over at salesman.org as well but what does it look like on a screen is this a a live zoom kind of chat room or is this a series of content that outlines the buyer's journey what does this look like i guess from the seller's perspective and was it look from the buyer's perspective as well yeah good question it looks the same well looks the same from the the buyer and the sellers perspective and it's probably not that much different from you know a b2c uh buying journey that you've had where uh certain b2c companies start to know your preferences they know what you like what you might be interested in so it's literally a room a virtual digital room that you go into and there is nice structured organized content and it can be completely customized by the sales person based on the customer's needs wants um past behavior uh predicted future behavior so it's very very customizable by the salesperson to give the the customer what they want and i'm playing playing dabs artificate here slightly because we're both on the same wavelength of all this and it's going to be a boring conversation otherwise but is this an opportunity for salespeople to be super lazy and just go here you go customer or potential customer here's a bunch of stuff that you probably need go through it yourself i'll spy on you from my side if you get stuck i'll i'll cold call you and jump into this or is this something that has real value for the buyer and perhaps it even gives them more control over their own buying journey yeah both i would say it's a little bit of both we hope that sales people don't get lazy they just have to change their selling process a little bit right you've read recent studies gartner right the tech analyst company they did a study earlier last year uh last year about a year ago now that maybe i think it said that 50 45 50 percent of b2b buyers not b2c buyers but b2b buyers preferred a reckless buying experience replace that's stunning bain baning company a consulting firm they just did one as well their numbers were even higher now i'm sure these i think they were at 90 percent so people know that reps aren't going away but our time is shrinking our time is shrinking face to face or belly to belly or ear with customers so when we have that time we have to maximize it and we have to drive value and how we can do that if we're not face to face is through these technologies like digital sales rooms by making sure that we're getting the customer the right content at the right time based on their needs so just so i can clarify this for myself in the audience as well we're not trying to do this purely on the basis of rather than doing three calls throughout the buyer's journey where i explain this in person uh we're we're not just trying to use content so that i can scale my calls to a thousand people in a thousand rooms and i i drop in occasionally and touch on them we're still doing the i hate the cliche like this human to human kind of sales process but we're just and again i hate this term also but because it's all you use this as well i'm sure we're enabling the buyer to do some of the work not some of the work we're enabling them to do what they want to do and have a buying process that they feel appropriate rather than the stereotype of the used car sales person of dragging the person in and not letting them go until they made a decision you've got it you've got it and this is more about when they're at the point where they want to engage that's the real value of digital sales room so this isn't uh replacing sales engagement platforms that help automate messaging and cold calling and and email um outreach to customers it's not that this is you've gone through that and a prospect says okay i want to engage i want to have a conversation now what we've all learned um especially folks who did a lot of face-to-face selling in the past is that you have to change your process right as this trend of less seller engagement continues to happen and with the fact that many of us are virtual and will stay virtual sales people have really had to take a step back and think about how do i change my selling manner how do i change my motion to include more of this virtual selling methodology if you will and also appreciate that that customers don't want to engage with me as much because like us well most most of our customers are back-to-back on calls like this and they don't have a lot of time to engage with sales people is that because we just suck as salespeople if we were doing a better job would buyers want to spend more time i know this is like kind of paradoxical but if we were if we if the for example if i was buying your product the organization you worked for right i'll go and i got the opportunity to speak with yourself as a cro i'd be going right i'm going to take that call i don't want some sales room because george is going to have way more impactful insights and knowledge and he's going to say i'm going to say you'll get on a call with you for half an hour it's going to save me 10 hours of researching and the buyer process now this is an extreme example because you're a you know executive in a high-flying tech company right but if sales people weren't uh thought leaders and were experts true experts in their space would this be turned on its head slightly and that buyers may proactively want to speak with them or do you think buyers still don't want to speak to anyone they just they're just so focused on solving the problem they want to get their head down and just get it done i think a little bit of both i really do i i don't again i don't think this this is the intent is not to replace sales people and i i as a buyer right i'm a buyer too i do like to talk to salespeople especially when i feel like they understand my world but we all know again more studies lots of these have validated that most b2b buyers are 60 70 80 of the way through their buying journey before they ever engage with a salesperson so with a lot of other technologies not a lego but other technologies you can track how many times have they hit your website what are they looking at you can obviously we can look at them on social media so we're collecting all these bits and bytes of information to help us understand this persona what does george donovan want what is he looking at what does he care about what are his pain points and now when i have a chance to engage with george i'm engaging live and i'm also engaging in this digital sales room to make it really easy for george to continue his journey and pull other people into the buying process okay i'll give you a real quick example if i may well just to bring it bring it to life okay uh you're selling to me you learn a little bit about me through my activity online and then you come at me with a real customized message and i say well let's talk great now you and i are going to have our first meeting coming up you may send me part of virtual selling you may send me a video ahead of time that says hey george it's will just wanted to propose an agenda for our first call based on what i know about you feel free to tell me if you want to do something differently but here's what we're doing now the reason for this is twofold one is uh it's nice to come to a meeting with an agenda right and a plan and two it's personalizing who you are you're introducing yourself to me because one of the things that we've found is with the condensed time frame a lot of sales calls are half of half an hour now when you're on a zoom call and you don't have that time to do bonding and rapport you don't have time to learn as much about the sales person or the customer people want to get right down to business especially in the tech world and so using an introductory video is a nice way to bridge that gap now that video can go sit in the digital sales room that's the first piece of content so you and i have our initial call i get your video we have our initial call now um we i'm gonna you're gonna tell me you're gonna say george i'm gonna start something called a digital sales room for you and this is a place for all of our exchanges to be in one spot and i'd you could explain the benefits to me and now we're off everything you share with me proposal goes in the digital sales room a powerpoint deck goes into digital sales room the recording of our first call goes in the digital sales room so you can memorialize this entire sales process to help the buyer go back to it and access content when they need it i want to come back to making this practical unreal for the audience but i'd be i'd be totally amiss here of all this hype around facebook's metaverse and nvidia have just come out with their version of of the future of like virtual reality and and augmented reality could we get to a position or how far away from a position are we where we jump into a 3d zoom call maybe we don't even do that i i i don't even know where i'm going with this question i've kind of pulled this together as i go along with it but it seems like sales virtual selling being able to meet people in person via virtual means and this metaverse it seems like the next step of this of an actual room with actual virtual paperwork or screens on the walls is this is that the future that sales is heading to where there will be uh whether it's even an avatar who's not even it's just an ai who's guiding the the buyer through the the buying process until they need to speak to an actual human is that where we're moving to with all of this in the next kind of five to 10 50 years yes absolutely i think we are and we're halfway there i think we're halfway there already right you you do need the intelligence of a salesperson to problem solve and put the right content in the digital sales room and facilitate the whole process but you still need the person but eventually right ai is going to get smart enough machine learning is getting smart enough to understand and start to populate i mean even today in digital sales rooms while it's it's not alive we're not face to face in a digital sales room there's chat capabilities where you're reviewing some content you have a question i'm gonna get a notification that you have a question on that and we can go back and forth right so we're heading in that direction and imagine replacing me to answering that question with some sort of an ai bot very very doable today so we'll come back to 2022 in a second i'm ready for i love this topic because this is clearly this is where uh a lot of the less complex b2b if you're signing up for an app a sas software service like that i think avatars and ai is going to solve a lot of sales pain and buyer um buyer journey problems for for buyers in the future how far away are we let's talk about a product i don't know but we'll talk about a a maybe not a crm because that'd be complicated some kind of software product how far away do you think we are of combining of multiple ais or or apis to integrate with different organizations and different softwares and tools where the buyer doesn't need a salesperson just doesn't need one all the questions been answered perhaps we've got now five years of data of sales people having or maybe in five years time will have the real time data of sales people creating content sharing it with individual sales rooms knowing what makes a buyer put their hand up knowing the response that the salesperson has to give to them so we're not just uh we're not just imagining a scenario where all knowing ai comes along and just solves all issues because we're all knackered at that point that's that's a conversation for another time terminator territory there but let's assume that we've got data on real life activities from real interactions and we can use machine learning and other techniques to leverage some of that how far are we from taking all that data and creating an avatar for an organization that can just nudge the buyer along the buying process help them along give them the insights give them the content without a sales person being involved for a i don't know like like a mid-sized b2b deal yeah there that last that last point that you added the mid-size b2b deal i think that's the key i can certainly envision a replace b2b buying process for smaller deals right smbs smaller deals five thousand ten thousand maybe even fifteen thousand i think people are comfortable going forward and buying that if it's not new technology new technology they need to do a lot more exploration understanding a lot more questions but if this is a i'm replacing what i have with something new that's just a little bit better based on peer reviews and the price is about the same and i don't need to you know get anybody else involved they're going to do it that capability is going to be there in the not too distant future um it may even be happening today well i think where it starts to get interesting is if it's a two things a new technology again a lot more questions that have to be answered from a live person and then if it gets above a certain dollar threshold i don't know what that dollar threshold is but there's certainly a dollar threshold where human behavior people get uncomfortable without engaging with a human to make a purchase sure i know for us it's an n equals one experiment says data doesn't mean anything in the grand scheme of things but we uh this year moving forward of our training program which the audience can find over at salesman.org we for years and we were ahead of the curve and it's i want to say i was some visionary in in the world of sales training george not really i just didn't want to have a team of sales trainers so we did all our training online and we pushed people to go for our online training rather than in-person workshops i didn't want to travel around the world and so and do what doing in-person training and so we lead into that we built data on it there's we and i don't board the audience because they know all about it at this point what we did in december moving forward though was we we've had a couple of new team members and i do some of it as well we've now added a mentoring element to the product so the price has gone up substantially because of that and we've found we're doing way more revenue people are way more excited and it's because the differentiator now everyone having gone virtual and all sales training companies kind of got on this bandwagon that i've been banging the drum off of online training uh when when they were pushing for in-person training before covered in the pandemic now that we are doing more um one-on-one interactions more mentoring more group training people are like loving and happy to pay extra for that human touch so it's interesting to me of your cutoff there of if you've got a product and you mentioned peer reviews which could become clearly massive over time if not the road if not they're already massive at the moment but having peer reviews from from colleagues from people in the same or similar industries going from one price point to a similar price point changing on features or benefits or new innovations i totally agree that all that is just that market for sales people should be wiped out that's just going to be customer service people managing those calls answering questions or even being pushed into customer success of just get people on this is likely going to be a subscription service and we can deal with issues as we go along so with all that said let's imagine a scenario now where we're doing mid to high deal sizes so 50 to you know a million a quarter a year it's a complex product we need an engineer in there we need an on-site visit we need something else going on uh that's that's the there's gonna be a barrier to people just signing up and using ai chat bots stuff like that what do we need to do to make an effective uh digital sales room is the starting point to map out the customer's buying cycle or is it to look at our typical sales cycle that we take people through and map the experience in the digital sales room there do we start with what the buyer wants or which may be right or wrong or do we start with what we know gets people to make purchases a little bit of both um in the legos digital sales rooms for example we have templates we work with our customers to build up templates so if you know that you're selling to this persona with these interests in this industry the digital sales room can be pre-populated in seconds by a sales salesperson with some content that we believe might be of interest to this persona or you can completely allow the salesperson to to customize the digital sales room with hand-picked content because they do know more about the buyers interests and where they are in their buying journey so you've got flexibility to do both and uh i think most of them most of them do start with some you know some pieces of content that you know are in the general area of interest based on the engagement of that prospect to date but where it changes is once you start to engage and you talk to that person and you are asking the right questions and you're hearing more about what's of interest to them and where they are in that journey as you say and where they need to go next and you're helping to facilitate right it might be white papers it might be roi analysis whatever it is that's important to that prospect that's the stuff that's going in the digital sales room because they access that repetitively that's what we have seen customers just don't look at these things once they go in and they look at it three four times and that's a hot piece of content and then all of a sudden you see they invited someone else well i'm going to invite will in here now right will comes in will starts heat seeking to that same content what does that tell you as a sales person you start saying okay they're really interested in if they're looking at that roi right return on investment content that would probably tell me that they're trying they're interested and they're trying to think of a way to cost justify it or trying to think of a way to go get the budget so as a salesperson you might put two and two together and say maybe i might want to add a white paper in here on return on investment from some of our other customers that might be helpful so now as a seller you make an educated guess you put a little piece of content in there that's a case study from another customer on roi and you see if that content lights up meaning all the people in the digital sales room start accessing it now you're on to something if it goes cold and nobody touches it maybe you're off right maybe you're off direction and you've got to go back to them and ask more questions so that's why i say it's it's a little bit of a new of a new selling process right you get sellers have to think about things differently than the way they did when they were always communicating face-to-face or or over the phone sure how do we know and i'm i'm coming from this from the perspective of i am just a knuckle dragging sales person right i think i probably know better than what i actually do so knowing that people and having data that people have clicked on this they haven't clicked on this um clearly that's going to be very valuable especially if you've got a team of 100 sales reps a marketer some kind of data scientist will be able to pick up on some of this the platform itself can hopefully give us some insights as well but is the is there all where i'm going with this is is is this just an experiment for six months on hunches and best guesses because if i put this together now for my customers i think i would know what i was doing but being honest i'd be blagging a lot of it and i'd be hoping for some kind of insights on on the back end is this something that we've got to use the scientific method of making hypothesis testing it then refining our hypothesis until we get as close to the results as we possibly can is this something that's that we need to just accept that that's part of the process um and refine it over time yeah i i think it's easy i think it's easier than that i think it's common sense a lot of it is just common sense you have right we've been studying this now right so you have some customers don't ever go in there they don't they don't go into the digital sales room they'd rather email back and forth when they need something even if they need something three or four times right they'll they'll keep asking for it rather than going back to one place so take them aside and then you have other people who just spend so much time in there and you can clearly see patterns and another thing we can layer in is the lego also has a module for conversational intelligence we're recording calls and you know ai analysis on the transcripts of those calls so now you're starting to combine what the customer is saying with what they're doing in the digital sales room to give salespeople a real good picture of where they are in that buying journey and how you can help facilitate with the proper content or commentary to help them get to close does how much of this er well what i want to get out of you george is yeah how much of this a lot of salespeople in my experience will use a tool like not necessarily aligo but and there's other tools in the marketplace we'll talk about uh the product you represent towards the end of the show right they hide behind some of this and people are hiding behind social selling right now this is the the key one of people will ping someone on linkedin and comments on the post for four years before they'll pick up the phone and ask them if they're actually interested in engaging with them and because it seems nice and it seems you can automate some of it and it seems like you drop a few emails in a cadence you're going to be rocking and rolling but then the reality is for a lot of people that it takes years of uh learning how to copyright for these emails it takes years of data collection within the organization you work for to pinpoint as we're discussing here some of the right content at the right time some of it is common sense a lot of it's common sense some of it is gut feeling which is obviously not very scalable for talking from a leadership perspective um how do we know whether we are procrastinating by going here's another piece of content here's another piece of content when some of this could be solved by just picking up the phone if the buyer is willing and having an actual one-on-one conversation with them how do we bridge the gap between this is tons of valuable content this allows the buyer to go at their own pace but also i've got a quota to hit and really if this conversation if a couple of conversations can solve these issues in real time um maybe i should be doing that as well how do we balance out between the two if if there is a way absolutely there is a way and that's that's what we uh at a lego that's what we teach people to do uh our co-founders wrote a book last year called mastering virtual selling right we were obviously have the technology around virtual selling and it really isn't a you know a canned methodology for virtual selling so we wanted to to try to create one and to your point well we've got this concept of the salesperson is a maestro okay and there's front stage work which is live with the customer that's very important what are all the things that you do when you're on stage you're in performance how do you master that and then when you're backstage and as all of us who've ever been to a concert or participate in a concert you know there's a lot of work that goes on backstage to make that concert that front stage performance successful so what are all the things that sellers should be doing on the back end which is including things like managing a digital sales room but it doesn't take away the importance of that front stage activity it's a way to balance the two front stage and backstage and we have a term in the book called creating presence in your absence creating presence in your absence so we all have live calls and then what happens a couple of weeks until you can get the customer back on the phone maybe a month between calls how do you create presence in your absence with smart content that's adding value to the customer's buying journey and that's what digital sales rooms are all about love it we talk about a similar concept all the time and i pinched this from who do i pinch it from oh he's i can't think of it but this idea of uh building trust at distance right similar kind of thing if you can keep uh adding insights adding value over time you inadvertently build trust you have you know a bit of a kind of a following on linkedin and stuff so do i i find this all the time i speak to people i've never spoke to them before they've listened to 400 episodes of the podcast they know everything about me my dog my my life and i've built that trust at distance so i feel like that's what we we're kind of doing on a smaller scale on a one-to-one level here in uh with digital sales rooms and and sharing content let me ask you this because this this this was a contentious issue maybe like two or three years ago but i feel it's less contentious now should sales people be purely curating content or should they should there be an element of them creating content for uh the buyers and and the line is a little bit blurred as we talk about digital sales rooms because i guess what i'm asking as i'm not saying a sales person should probably write an ebook on the problems that their buyers have that's gonna be a waste of time unless they wanna build that thought leadership and perhaps take their career in a slightly different level or different angle but should sales people be in a digital sales room going through the content um whether this is possible not by highlighting things or say go to go to this page in this pdf and really drilling things down and making things simple for the buyer or is that the job on marketers to create amazing content that sales people are really proud to give to their potential customers i think it's a bit of both uh i do believe it's marketing's job to come up with really relevant and good content based again the more finite we can get based on industry persona size of business interests uh past buying behavior purchasing behavior the better off we can be we want to be relevant and that is the key today because nobody nobody has time to just go through a boring generic sales process you just don't no matter what business you're in so yes a lot of it is on marketing but a lot of it is on the sales person too again to think differently and really maximize those how do i maximize my digital sales room and then how do i maximize proving value and helping the customer solve problems while i'm having that short window of opportunity to speak to them live so i think it's a bit of both well that makes sense so george we can wrap up a few more questions now uh let's say sam the salesperson wants to sell to you george i'm sure you've got some decent sized budgets uh in in the organization they wanna they wanna suck some of that cash from your back pocket they wanna convince you they they know the value of a digital sales room you know the value of a digital sales room but you're freaking busy right you maybe you don't want to commit to jumping in here you know that once you get in you're gonna get sucked into it there's gonna be loads of content you're probably gonna have a great time you're gonna learn a load but you've got your own quotas and targets to hit in the meantime what would a salesperson what would be the process of sam the sales person from uh called outreach whether it called email linked and whatever it is what would they have to what steps would they have to go through to get you into a digital sales room oh that's a tough question did you say a sandler sales person is that the word you use sam the seller sam's just a generic oh sam okay that that is a tough question let me think about this one again the primary intent of digital sales rooms are to be used once i'm engaged once we've had some form of hello it's not to pursue me uh through you know a sales engagement platform that's not what it is so let's assume you've got my attention a salesperson got my attention and now we're having a conversation i have some sort of a need the reason i personally love sales digital sales rooms and i've heard other vp's sales cross say the same thing is because if i'm if i'm buying something will and i have a need i have an interest it's not about sparking that interest it's about like i know i have something i want to look at buying or i know i'm going to buy it now i might talk to two or three vendors okay and i've got two or three vendors sending me follow-up emails i got two or three vendors sending me powerpoint decks proposals white papers uh pricing spreadsheets changes to their pricing spreadsheets i don't know about you but for years i've faced the challenge of not being able to find that content right i'm searching through my email who sent that who sent this how is this different but with a digital sales room as a buyer how my life gets easier i just go to one click one link for a lego in this case let's say and there it is it's all right there and i can see all the exchanges and all of the content in one place so it's a lot about convenience for the buyers as well as that ability as i said to bring in others so if i want to bring in you know my vps of sales into the digital sales room to be part of that buying committee it's easy to do so that that's how i would i would sell it as i would sell it as convenience and one stop shopping for the buyer that alone is a benefit so what i'm hearing is that what we want to do is rather than just pitch george on getting into our our digital sales room at all costs we could not possibly do a deal unless you're in our digital sales room everything's in there george you're a sucker if you don't join us perhaps what we should be doing is saying hey uh the meeting notes of what we just discussed and the content follow-up that rather than emailing you i've put it in the digital sales room here's the link if you view the digital sales room everything's in there and it's all tracked and we can uh we can we can we can see we can we can add stuff to it over time so you can keep track of everything then the next meeting hey well you asked for this this is this here's the the features and benefits specialist at the specifications uh list the pdf of this pdf that it's in the digital sales room check it out when you when you need access to this that is that the approach to get an executive like yourself to buy into it as opposed to saying we could not possibly do any business with you unless you you suck it up and join our sales process you got it that's the approach soft-handed they quickly see the benefits even if it's just a place to put the call recording so other people who might have missed the meeting we hear that a lot right my right-hand person missed the meeting can i get that call recording sure it'll be in the digital sales room and then they love the ability to invite others in as they go it could be you know i.t people lawyers you name it but having that one place for everything is really a benefit to them and they get it pretty quickly but you don't want to be heavy-handed with it sure it makes it it's almost like it's like dropbox for a deal is that a fair way to describe it that's right dropbox for a deal you got it with a little more a little more intelligence and tracking and uh and communication capability but you got it sure amazing stuff well we'll wrap up with that george tell us more about aligo whoa and how this relates to uh kind of the discussion today and where we can find out more about you as well sir yeah sure the lego is a sales learning and enablement platform we work with customers all around the world large and small to help move the needle on sales that's really what we're all about whether it's training coaching collaboration conversational intelligence anything that's going to help a seller in the flow of work get information that they need to be able to advance their knowledge and add more value to customers engagement customer engagement that's what we're all about you can reach me george donovan on linkedin with a lego please uh say hello anytime you'd like amazing stuff we're willing to that and everything else that we talked about on this show in the show next episode over at salesman.org and with that judge i appreciate your time your insights on this and for joining us on the salesman podcast thank you will likewise [Music]