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[Music] it's time to accelerate I am your host Andy Paul join me as I host conversations with the leading experts in sales marketing sales automation sales process leadership management training coaching any resource that I believe to help you accelerate the growth of your sales your business and most importantly you hello and welcome to accelerate I am really looking forward to talking with my guests today joining me is Justin ruff Marsh justin is the founder of ballistics a sales management marketing consultancy specializing in the implementation and ongoing support of sales process engineering which is the subject of a really compelling book titled the Machine a radical approach to the design of the sales function now as you might expect friends they're listening to the show that I read more books about sales than the normal person and in the main I find them to be pretty much all the same and it's not to say I don't find value in them I almost always learned something new a tidbit here or there that apply to my own selling but it's rare that I read something that's as challenging as thought-provoking as Justin's book the machine yeah I wrote my first two books about an effort that's an effort to sort of fundamentally reprogram how sales professionals think about how they influence their customers decision-making process but I have to admit I wasn't nearly as audacious as my guest today as he has written a book about it really challenges the sales profession at every level to rethink the entire way it conducts business so Justin welcome to accelerate thank you for having me Andy oh my pleasure so take 'meme introduce yourself tell us how you got your start in sales so I got my start in sales selling insurance actually my brother and I had a Italian restaurant in Australia which which which for a long time really struggled and we got it to the point where it was kind of paying its own bills and I think at that point I realized there was just no upside you know if we shouldn't chosen the location well and so I was kind of disenfranchised with it and a friend of mine was selling insurance and making bongo bucks and I didn't believe that he was a particularly gifted salesperson so I thought gosh if if he can do that and he doesn't really have the gift of the gab neither do I I can we do at least half as well and that would be a significant step up from what I was doing so I said to my brother look you know you keep managing this thing if you really want to I need to go and make some money so I sold insurance that was how I got my start hmm so a path from there to writing this book by him what was what was the impetus to writing the machine I mean what what had you seen that said okay this is this is a question I have to address so I for whatever reason I was lucky in that I rose very quickly up through the ranks and sales I think my first weekend I made $8,000 in Commission which kind of woke me up you know I it made me realize well that there's actually some potential here to make some money and and I but because I was aware of the fact that I wasn't naturally a salesperson I was a student from the very beginning I never took a a thing for granted like a lot of salespeople I consumed all of the materials but I think different from my salespeople most people would consume them and customize them but I never did I consumed them and kept them exactly the same to the point where people used to say to me do you have an American accent because I'd listen to you know cassettes over and over again from Tom Peters and yesica and so on so I ended up I joined a bigger company I ended up running a team of 25 then I but then I ran a team of a hundred people and then I ended up running the team as a whole which was about 400 people and it running a team of insurance salespeople was a tough gig a lot of recruiting we recruited about 400 plus people a year to maintain a team of about a hundred so the best salesperson in the organization really you know got got given the recruiting gig that was what really drove the organization so it was a boiler shop type in a boiler room type environment I left and that was a point in time in Australia where the insurance industry was imploding and taking down some of the big players with it which is a whole nother story but myself and the founder of the firm that I worked for ended up in this startup called Hudson Institute and at Hudson we were selling a membership-based program which is which is popular nowadays but it wasn't back then and we were charging a monthly fee for I actually know it was an annual fee for access to this service and the the tagline was do-it-yourself wealth creations so each person got access to an advisor and they got like a budgeting system and they got you know to attend events and so on and it was reasonably successful until at some point we decided two things happened one is we started running events and the other thing was we decided to start selling financial services and today I think Hudson has probably I guess a billion dollars under management it's a you know for Australia it's a decent-size little financial planning firm but the one thing that we discovered in the beginning there was we didn't have the margins to operate as a commission based sales force like we did in the insurance industry where the margins were just mine staggeringly huge so we had to experiment with ways to make ourselves people more productive and we ended up with the model that you read about in a machine really as a result of a process of trial and error you know early in the piece we realized we should probably take away non selling activities from salespeople you know so we stopped them from filling out paperwork which was great because they were terrible at it and took away customer service and collections and everything like that away from salespeople and but then the then we got to the point where the last thing that's the last sort of non-productive thing that salespeople were doing was prospecting not non-productive because they couldn't do it but non-productive because it was a huge amount of effort for a very little return so we experimented with a couple of different methods and ended up building this seminar program that put about five four forty five thousand Ozzy's a year through paid seminars around Australia and that and we and you know we maintained that for probably over five years and as a consequence we went from salespeople who are the shortage of sales opportunities to salespeople who had more opportunities than they could possibly process in a life stay in a you know lifetime so ended up taking away cells people's autonomy putting them in offices and queuing up prospects like a doctor's office I thought just so they could process these damn opportunities at a reasonable rate and I think by the time we got to that point we realized well gosh this is kind of a this is kind of revolutionary we didn't start out with an intention to do this but what we've done is we've taken away cells people's autonomy we took away commissions somewhere in there too because we realized if we were spending these big dollars and incurring this huge risk to run this lead generation machine and it didn't work paying salespeople Commission anymore I mean we just want somebody who could show the plan to a reasonably good job of it and get a handshake and then send you know send the person at the front to talk to the receptionist to do the paperwork in their little office and then and then repeat with the next person I mean in fact then the salespeople were doing I don't know 12 or 12 presentations a day I guess and I I don't remember exactly what the numbers were but I think they would do 12 presentations a day and they were expected to sell probably at least seven or eight of these things because these are people who'd attended a seminar left you know you know wild frenzy look just looking for to write a check to someone right so that that was the first iteration of the model and it I left Hudson and launched my own business there were so many things so many learnings there to try and capitalize on so yeah we start off building a direct marketing agency which eventually but we but I always maintained an interest in the engineering of the sales function because of that experience that we've been through and over the years figured out how to apply the same sort of first principles to other other environments so once you just outline briefly you sort of touched on it is it's our outline the concept behind the machine I mean you've got some some guiding principles but just on top level so people understand because there is already taking place some specialisation in certain industries within the sales function but nothing that really takes it as far as you advocate for on the machine yeah so the the central idea is just division of labor that's although specialization and you would think that wouldn't be particularly revolutionary but but it is for a couple of reasons one is that that for whatever reason the executive team has assumed forever that sales is fundamentally different from the rest of the organization and it doesn't naturally make sense to apply division of labor but even even if you look at organizations who are maybe a little more progressive and who are trying to apply division of labor so today you'll see organizations where the marketing departments trying to generate leads to sales people or you'll see organizations where there's a customer service team that's trying to take away from sales people the responsibility for processing transactions and generating quotes and so on so one thing the one thing that you see when you look at all these organizations who proclaim that they that they're venturing down the the division of labor path is that in all cases the salespeople still owns the sales opportunity the salesperson still owns a sales opportunity and the salesperson still owns the account so you end up in a situation where the tails wagging the dog in effect you've got a lone agent out in the field with no visibility of anything other than the customer he or she happens to be sitting in front of right now trying to direct a team of people who are back in head office and that makes no sense in the world no there's no sense at all if you like and what we're talking about to a project environment it would be like saying let's let's send our project manager out in the field remote from all of them remote from the rest of the project resource pool and see how well they function as a project manager so I think that they at a superficial level it looks like organizations are pushing towards division of labor but they're actually not yeah and so I mean you talk about you label us the dysfunction that exists within sales and you have a like a six question assessment that companies can give themselves to determine whether or not they have this dysfunction existing in their their company want you to just walk through that real quickly because I thought that was really interesting oh do you remember the questions oh sure of course I do so the first one was you know that your sale expensive products are dependent on personal relationships and you know these are the myths you know do you still believe these about your but your company and and I thought that was interesting cuz you know research has been done multiple times that saying that of survey a surveys of buyers and Gallup Organization did one saying that yeah buyers don't value the relationship with salespeople nearly as much as the salespeople think they do so here's here's my view on that I think that that if you are if you're making a purchase your primary interest is not in a relationship with the salesperson the primary purchase is your primary interest is in the economics of the transaction you know will this thing that I'm buying do what it's meant to do and it doesn't represent value for money now there are some buying situations where where you can where you can make that decision fairly easily where there's not an enormous amount of uncertainty involved so in other words you can do like is it called a Benjamin Franklin analysis where you put the pros on one side and the cons on the other or you might even be able to build an to model the damn thing in Excel and and and determined and determine objectively should I make this purchase or not and to the extent that it's possible to do that customers are not idiots they will do that now there are certain buying situations where you cannot do that so let's say for example someone and I hope this doesn't happen decided that they wanted to sue you and you didn't have much experience going to court so you had to find a litigator now in a situation where you had to find a litigator you could go and meet with multiple litigators but you would be totally unequipped to determine which of those individuals is the litigating you should be hiring so there's very little value in you trying to make a decision personally I mean the smart thing to do is to seek counsel from someone else but you are simply unequipped with the with the with us with the knowledge required or with the information required to make an objective decision UK it's not that making a decision is hard it's that making a decision is impossible now in such a situation and it occurs in other occasions too if you are considering purchasing a new ERP or something you're in a situation where you don't have available access to all of the information that you need to make a rational objective decision and in those circumstances I think the relationship that you have with the individual salesperson does play into decision-making because what you end up doing is using the relationship that you have with an individual as a proxy for the information that you would like to have in order to make a purely objective decision so in that circumstance it does make sense but the problem is well the difference is the quality of the relationship so the relationship though that customers want in that even in that environments you said it's a proxy for the company yes it's not a deep personal relationship it doesn't persist works with you on one or two court cases or if the software company builds one or two custom applications for you the next time you want to buy something for them you no longer have that information what's the word asynchronous or asymmetric asymmetric you no longer have that information asymmetry because you've fans I could with them two or three times so what ends up happening the more you transact with the customer the less the customer has a requirement for a personal relationship because they know that information asymmetry no longer exists it collapses yeah exactly okay great so one things I really liked about the machine was that it for me is one of the first books that sort of looked beyond really the tech bubble where you know so much of the innovation if we were all about sales what we see taking place surf happening in the text-based or my SAS companies and so on but you really look at it in the broader world which is which I loved because yes not only tech companies can benefit from this division of labor and the specialization of roles within sales yeah and tech companies are doing some stuff smart one thing that tech companies are doing really really well is avoiding employing field salespeople on unless they absolutely had to I spoke to a group in Silicon Valley just a couple of months ago and and somebody stopped me when I was building the case for inside and they said look just and we sold already you'd have to do this none of us have outside salespeople none of us even understand what why other organizations even would have outside salespeople you preaching to the choir there now in other areas I think there's there very much behind I think this whole this almost quasi religious frenzy around inbound marketing or content-based marketing has resulted in a whole bunch of SAS companies buying into a religion that makes no sense whatsoever and is leading them down a barren path so how are they being misled this idea that you can build a self-perpetuating lead generation engine by by producing content and and by publishing regularly producing content and as a result of the content and SEO juice that comes from the existence of that content having this never-ending flow of inbound inquiries I think that for most organizations like 99% of organizations that is a myth that's it's simply never going to occur and all you've got to do is go and talk to some of the companies that buy the software you know a year out and get then talk to them about their experiences to discover that but the problem is is that there are a small very very small number of organizations and we happen to be one of them and HubSpot of course is another one and probably Salesforce that do have a story that's compelling enough and and kind of timely enough that it is possible to generate this kind of self-perpetuating lead lead machine I think even in the case of some of these companies it's not true they have big in bands they have big inside sales people I would question if they generate a hundred percent of their sales opportunities from inbound but from most SAS companies it's just impossible so you see a lot of these organizations wasting a lot of time and energy generating content instead of just knuckling down and you know committing to the fact that there's got a there's gonna have to be a mix of inbound and outbound well I mean you would say in the book that most opportunities arise in spite of sales people's prospecting activities so are we referring to their what I'm what I'm talking about there is that most sales people's prosper activities are extraordinarily unproductive in prospecting is one thing that does benefit from economies of scale and this is one thing that in-band people have light I guess so that matters that the generation of sales opportunity should be the responsibility of the marketing department and and the other area I think where the in band people are kind of on the right track although they don't make this point explicitly is that is that marketing must subordinate to sales meaning that marketing must generate sales opportunities at the rate at which salespeople consume them and not the other way around in other words that the salespeople should be the system constraint and marketing should keep up as opposed to salespeople sitting on their thumbs waiting for marketing to hand them a lead so one thing that people who read the book end up discovering is that they have to have a way to generate sales opportunities at a scale that they never imagined was necessary before because salespeople cannot generate sales opportunities at scale they don't have the resources to do that right so what's the answer for them well there's a there's a couple of things number one you've got to move the responsibility to marketing or a subset of marketing what we call promotions and the other thing is you have to be prepared to have a mix of inbound and outbound you can't generate and most organizations cannot generate all the opportunities they need from out banz so somebody's got to be prepared to pick up the phone and and and reach out there has to be outreach or you know what now what's his named talked about as app interruption marketing as opposed to permission marketing so I think if we look at our clients I mean among in our little ecosystem we are the only organization that's fortunate enough to be able to generate all our sales opportunities from in-band so the N in fact we've tried to generate opportunities from our band it simply doesn't work for us but the opposite applies to every other organization we work with in band does not work for them and they have to generate all their opportunities from at bands so the trick is to come up with a proposition that we believe is going to be compelling email a pre approach send a pre approach email to prospects the day that you intend sells people to make initial contact pre-empting the proposition and then have salespeople pick up the phone and call and ask permission to do a you know an eight-minute presentation of the basic proposition so let's let's talk about that in the time we have because we're we've gone through a little bit of time here's is your for organizing principles of the machine just so people get a sense of what it is that you're advocating and if you could just sort of walk through those and we'll delve into them here a little bit so I mean look the first one is scheduling should be centralized and you used an interesting metaphor in the book of of an executive assistant so maybe you take people through that yes so these four principles I guess apply to any environment where you apply division of labor not just sales but and of course these principles are generally recognized everywhere else but not in sales departments and and I touched on the first that first idea earlier in the discussion if you've got a resource pool with people scattered all over the place you want to put you want to put the person who's beating the drum to which everyone else marches somewhere essential so that they've got visibility of what the hell's going on so I mean in a production environment that's your shop floor scheduler in an orchestra is your conductor in a sales environment yeah typically what happens is the tempo of the environment is determined either by a campaign coordinator with an inside team and that's the person who's pushing the opportunities to the salespeople so it's basically someone that's yeah driving marketing from a sales perspective yes yeah or in the case of a in the case of a outside team we pay a field sales people up with what we call BBC's business development coordinators and the BBC's plan sells people's calendars for them so they end up becoming like little mini project managers if you think about the sales opportunities a project then the the person who owns the opportunities the person who owns the schedule and the person who owns the schedule in the in the field sales environments we build is the sales persons executive assistant or PDC because they plan the calendar so in that environment if inbound marketing is not generating enough leads then how does the and you have a theory of this sales development model predictable sales model revenue model does that BDC coordinate between you no sale 12 reps on the field sales rep or the account exec so so I guess there's two types of two types of organizations that are there are organizations that are selling an enterprise proposition and nothing else and then in that case what what has to happen is that your promotions team has to generate sales opportunities just as I discussed previously and pushed them to the PDC and the BBC has to pick up the phone and schedule a time for either an initial face-to-face meeting or more commonly an initial conference call that's going to be performed by the the bbm you know like the 12 minute you know overview but but I think most of the organization's we work with sell a mix that you know they'll have they'll have sort of Trent normal transactional business and then they'll have enterprise opportunities on top so to pick a example outside of technology let's say that we're dealing with a organization that sells I know hydraulic component tree there's a lot of run right type business and the inside sales team would be predominantly chasing that run rate type business and then every now and again there would be an enterprise opportunity so that might be something like selling VMI or vendor managed inventory to a customer or it might be something like selling a high-end engineered product you need custom manifolds or something as the example I use in the book and in that case what what would tend to happen is you wouldn't actually pursue those major opportunities directly you would harvest them from the activity of your inside sales team so you'd go out and use your transactional stuff to win new accounts and to you know penetrate existing accounts and then as a result of all of those conversations you know you've got a team of four inside sales people having 30 conversations a day 120 conversations a day that that you know that's a lot of conversations you will end up discovering that you stumble across enterprise opportunities which can simply be escalated to your your your BDM in in partnership with their BDC so most of our clients or most people who go down this path they would tend to rely on the inside sales team for enterprise opportunities got it and the talk about really the specialization beyond just you've talked about their business development your BDC and then your vdm which is your your sales rep what other specialized roles do you see then as the way that breakout and sales so if you look at a tip if you look at a typical implementation of SPE you would have a much bigger much more effective MSPD I'm just going to so people understand sales process engineering yeah you'd have a much bigger much more effective much more robust customer service team and that customer service team would be responsible for processing all inbound traffic and for generating quotes processing simple processing orders or all orders not as simple orders all orders and and resolving issues and among issues technical questions and the difference between that and a typical organization is is is anything that fits into one of those categories a hundred percent of that work would be done by the customer service team meaning that sales people never touch it under any circumstances so that's the first that's the first kind of demarcation line right because all sales reps are gonna do in the model that you put together all they do is talk to customers all I do is talk to customers so if they're if they're if they're inside salespeople they have 30 conversations a day nothing else and if they feel sales people they'll have four face-to-face meetings a day nothing else or maybe you know they might spend half a day a week or a day a week in conference calls but they would do it the equivalent volume of work and nothing else so to enable that the first step is to take away customer service and the second step is to take away prospecting so salespeople don't have the prospect so what typically happens is upstream from sales people or BDCs we would have a campaign coordinator and the campaign coordinator would kind of coordinate a bunch of upstream activities that have to occur in order to generate the opportunities that are being pushed into sales people's cues so you know we watch very carefully the size of those opportunity cues upstream from salespeople in the job of the campaign coordinators to replenish them and then upstream from the campaign coordinator we'll have the marketing department that produces the creative we'll have typically a bunch of researchers often time outsource to do the list compilation and we will also have a promotional committee that generally consists of you know you know the head of sales and the floor supervisor from sales along with head of marketing and perhaps had a new product development sometimes a CEO and you know in organizations under 100 million let's say and that committee will be responsible for reviewing the return on effort from the previous period and using that data to come up with revisions to existing campaigns or to come up with new campaigns so what we're doing is we're we're saying that engagements with customers is not the salesperson not solely a salesperson responsibilities it's actually a high-level executive responsibility because the environment today is competitive enough that we can't leave it to salespeople to come up with propositions anymore right so our interesting is in in this model have you seen what the companies that you have worked with that I'm in blended the SPE model is does that sir conventional you know 8020 Pareto distribution of sales productivity or sales performance excuse me does that tend to level out and disappear it doesn't disappear but it levels out so we don't see the same we we see we don't see the same divergence it would probably be I would say it would approach what you would see in a manufacturing environment let's say you had a manufacturing environment and you had three lathe operators or guillotine operators or whatever the case was or painters in a body shop you would obviously as see a variation between their rates of work but you wouldn't expect to see like a power-law distribution and and and yes definitely if you build a sales environment and take away and normalize that environment such that all of the cells people have 30 meaningful selling conversations a day and assuming that they're all you know talking to you know similar prospects with a similar proposition you will see that divergence between different sales people's productivity reducing significantly now 30 conversations day that was predicated upon some availability of lists or names or our connectivity on a rate of connectivity that it has to empower that that rate of calls sure so there's a basic sort of level so there's a couple of things there number one obviously you need the you need to be able to push opportunities to salespeople at that rate but then if you don't have the lists or the offers then you shouldn't have the salespeople so I kind of assume that unless you are in a panelist management is in a position where they're comfortable that they can keep a salespersons queue full of 60 to 90 opportunities at all time they shouldn't about added that salesperson in the first place and if they did then we don't actually have a sales problem now assuming the opportunities are there I guess the first requirement is that the salesperson picks up the damn phone so Minh successful in engaging with prospects they're going to have sort of 92 or they're going to have more than 90 they're gonna have about a hundred and twenty connects a day or attempts a day and they're not gonna get they're not going to get engagement they're not going to get to talk to anyone now there's some basic there's a basic skill or set of skills that the salesperson has to learn to be able to engage with prospects to be able to you know get them to pay attention and and you know consider that initial proposition so that's a critical skill that salespeople have to learn and and that's kind of a a binary thing they either figure that out it's a it's a knack it's a basic skill or they fail to figure it out in which case there's no way they can progress any further in the job so that's kind of a necessary condition for ongoing improvement once they've figured that out you know you would expect that sales people are going to have you know somewhere between twenty and forty engagements a day but once they get competent it's gonna end up normalizing around 30 and then once it's once you've got those 30 meaningful selling interactions a day you are gonna get different results from different salespeople but there's not going to be the degree there's not gonna be the range of different levels of performance that you see in a normal sales environment because there's so many more variables in a sales environments and one of the things I think that determines the the top performing salespeople from the others often and communication skills and product knowledge often it's pain tolerance I've seen many sales environments where their salesperson who is posting the best numbers is not the salesperson that customers would best would most like to buy from it's a salesperson who's prepared to pick up a phone a hundred times a day and be a pest right the most resilient exactly so that you know that unfortunately the traditional approach the design of sales environments favors that person to an unhealthy degree the environments that we built don't you know the people who do best in our in the environments that we build are the people with good communication skills people who cut the prospects enjoy talking to and people who have great product knowledge well I think part of the way you can normalize performance as well in that environment is that given that you're just you've taken everything else off the plate they have nothing they can hide behind so no all they're all they're doing is selling so in that environment you you find out pretty quickly who's gonna succeed or not succeed or who's gonna thrive or not thrive in that environment yeah if you go into our if you walked into one of our clients inside sales teams you would see you know a friendly noisy environment with with people sitting at desks but but the first thing you'd notice is on the desks there's a keyboard and a and a mouse and nothing else and on their computers they've probably only been trained on a couple of modules in the CRM they know how to use the opportunity module and they know how to create an activity and assign it to a opportunity and and they really don't know the rest of the CRM that well because that's the only thing they do opportunities to queued up for them they have their headset on and they you know they they assign activities to opportunities to have conversations and you know close opportunities update stages that there's nothing else for them to do absolutely nothing now it's not a boiler room environment if you work in one of those environments it's kind of fun you know we'll have a couple of protected calling times a day so we have a couple of sprints so the idea is you sprint hard you know a couple of hours and then you relax if you want to go and play pool or some of our clients have you know called Table Tennis right when we ever client in Australia that has a weight room on the on the floor and all their salespeople get in stairs and push iron press iron when they're not on the for most of them do when they're not on the phone so it's you know it's it can be a fun a fun job it doesn't necessarily require those people with incredible pain tolerances okay well good so last question I have for you relative to the sales machine then we've got last segment show us some standard questions this is really has to do with sales productivity because there's really people conflate performance and productivity and sales and and I've long advocated that productivity and sales needs to be measured just like it is in the economy or in manufacturing which no one ever does you know survey unit of output per unit of input yeah so your method seems like you're really enable that for people is that they can really understand how much revenue they're generating per hour of sales time because you know you've taken the fluff out of what that our sales time looks like yeah well we don't not just by hour of sales chat time but by unit of effort so we track every single unit of effort and and we we don't just track outcomes either we track the achievement of stages so we I guess like everyone we break opportunities into inter stages you know so typical opportunity might have five different stages in it so we can see that there's sort of a progression towards a sale but we track the units of effort and we we normalize them using this idea of a slot so a standard you know the inside sales person's day might have 120 slots in it and the we have an idea of how many of those slots we want to fill with activity but then we measure the number of units of effort that are expended in the pursuit of each opportunity and at each stage in the opportunity so we can really see the relationship between effort and outcome and and really where outcomes concerned what we're talking about is the velocity of the opportunity to find us once well the speed at which I mean ultimately there but the velocity of an opportunity is the is the rate at which opportunities move from being open to being one right so the point being right exactly but generally speaking you you need to you can't just focus on the opportunity you're gonna win you have to maximize the velocity of all of the opportunities in order to maximize the velocity of the ones that you're winning so so velocities import an important concept and and I think where productivity comes into it is is if you're in a situation where there's a finite pool of sales opportunities as everyone is then obviously you're better off with someone who's productive because they will burn for you through that burn few fewer sales opportunities in order to generate the same volume of output I think that we build sales environments that are inherently measurable there's people around I mean there's I think there's a couple of books that talk about applying lean and particularly Six Sigma to sales and and I don't know if you've read any books that I have and I've gotta say I've been unimpressed simply because in a typical sales and typical sales environment is far too chaotic for it to make any sense to even think about applying any kind of you know formal process control to to such an environment I mean in in all of these environments and I come from a TOC background the rule number one is is eliminate the chaos right you know get the system into a state of statistical control and until you've done that do nothing else because because because any measurements you take if you take measurements in the system is not in the state of statistical control all you're doing is measuring noise now the the discussions about sales that I hold measuring sales that I've read conveniently ignore that point and they talk about how you can draw run charts and all that kind of stuff but it's it's it's BS you know the very first thing that you have to do is to build a stable environment well yeah and almost those everything that's wrong about productivity really sad confuses activity with productivity which it's not the same thing at all yeah okay so I've got some standard questions so the last segment is show I got the standard questions to ask guest and the first one is really and I've asked this of over 250 people at this point but you're really the first one who's probably really qualified to answer it so so the the question is is here's a hypothetical scenario you just have just been hired as a new sales VP at a company whose sales have stalled out and the CEO and the the board are anxious for things to turn around so when you think about what you would do your first week on the job what could you do that would have the sort of the biggest impact to start turning things around well I guess the first thing that I do is go out in the field or sit sit you know why Jack what sells people listen and the calls to get an understanding for the dynamic of the market and what's going on in terms of actually making changes I guess the first thing that I would do is is is measure and try and impact the volume of selling activity I mean that's the easiest win in most cases so in most cases there's a lot of activity but not a lot of true selling activity so the first thing that I would do is define well what is a meaningful selling interaction you know both on the telephone and in the field and then I would figure out how to make that number go up significantly in a lot of cases when we start working with organizations we go to work on customer service first we don't we you know we leave sales alone we're not prepared to touch it until we have a really robust customer service team for fairly obvious reasons in customer services you define it in the book which is is really that you said it could be the quoting operation and so on that's not it's not the post sales support as people commonly think about it yeah quoting processing transactions handling questions technical questions all that kind of stuff so we build now while that's occurring we don't want salespeople to stop work and sometimes you know people think management assumes that salespeople going to be terrified about this stuff actually salespeople tend to be pretty excited about the work that we do and the danger that we have is they'll sit on their hands waiting for you know the ballistics process to provide them this miraculously productive more environment to operate in which they're excited about now that's not such a good thing so one of the things that we get the sales manager to do and often it's it's very challenging for the sales managers we say look we want you to sit down every week if not twice a week with your sales team and and the either face to face or what you know in a web conference typically so you know goto meeting and we want you to get all their calendars up on the screen side-by-side for the lot for the last period in the next period so last week in next week and we want you to go through we want you to talk to each of the salesperson in turn about their calendar why it looks the way that it looks and what are we going to do to ensure that next week looks better than last week does and and in my experience you amazing things come from putting the sales persons calendar up on the screen in front of everyone else number one it forces them to start using the damn calendar to put stuff in and of course you can put some rules in around you know how it's used for example if you booked an appointment it goes in your calendar when you book it not when you do it but it puts enormous pressure on sales people to have a calendar that looks like you would expect a professional person's calendar to look in other words it should have activity in it now and typically we'll get sales will say let's set some rules for color coding activities so that you can see a difference between the meaningful selling interactions and you know other types of activities which you're generally going to want to eliminate but but the amazing thing is we oftentimes see fairly significant uplift in sales performance just as a result of that ritual and and I guess it kind of it would it should prompt the question well why wasn't sales management doing it already that's a whole other episode it is yeah so that's what I do in the first week okay perfect love it so who's your sales role model well it's a difficult question to answer because I'm not that that interested in sales as a technique I'm more interested in the design of the sales function now there's nothing to be learned about the design of the sales function from well there's not a lot to be learned from many other people because we're kind of pioneering a new thing here mm-hmm to be honest I've learned a lot more from manufacturing I've learned an enormous amount from manufacturing and I've been a student of manufacturing faith for years so so yes it's too hot in Deming and and called wet in particular you know we have a huge debt to to Elia who called wet who wrote the math the goal right right that years ago yeah and W Edwards Deming of course hmm look scientific management all right so I mean that's where the answers are there's no answers in sales I mean there's the the sales space to be on to be frank up until now has been generated as has been dominated by high school jocks with the gift of the gab who kind of produced some sort of pseudo scientific sounding justification for all the crap they do there's not a lot to be learned and now there's some that if you read the sales books you can pick up some good communication skills and some good negotiation techniques but you're not going to learn anything about how to design a sales function I mean heaven forbid somebody goes and reads up on sales and takes what they learn about sales management and the design of the sales function and a plot and tries to apply it to the rest of the organization truth I mean the rest of the organization couldn't survive with that kind you know with that kind of approach to workplace design so there's no art to selling sure there's an art there's an art to there's an art to all sorts of things I'm thinking of manufacturing you know I've seen people you know hand wiring heaters you know and there's an art to that but but but the the art subsumes under the science not the other way around I have to think about that for a second I'm a tennis player so I think of it in a sporting context you know the what what makes the game of tennis magic is the constraints you take away the constraints you've got two people on a beach whacking is but a ball as hard as they can that the game doesn't exist anymore what's true of every game right yeah every game the game is defined by the constraints so so art actually flourishes the art is no different from a sport but flourishes within constraints right within the constraints yeah so the the artistry has to subsume to the overall system so first you design a workspace well first you design a productive work environment and then you end up with people developing artistry around how they perform within that environment you take the environment away and I suspect you end up with less art ya think well that cuz actually they don't constraints oftentimes on the artistry are applied by the buyers as well it's not just your work space constraints I mean certainly that that plays into it but you know there is this you know for all the the processes you have but some point there still is this I'll call this gap like sometimes called the last mile where it's still a person talking to a person there is yeah so salespeople have to have communication skills just like a lathe operator needs to know how to program the lathe that doesn't go away but the problem is if you're trying to build a sales function where these conversations happen at scale you you you actually need a formal design for that sales function which otherwise it collapses under its own weight well I mean otherwise you never have the conversations opportunity to to to have those conversations yeah you end up with a whole bunch of highly caffeinated prima donnas Mattel ikot away stories and not a lot of selling happens yeah no I couldn't agree more than that but just room for thought on the yeah I still think there's a human element as much as as I completely agree with the way you talk about sales process isn't sales process engineering is I think we have this sense a to overlook the importance in the value of what happens when two people talk to each other in that conversation I don't think it's all just communication skills so that's that's prominently yeah but I don't know look at it's just it's not my job yeah it's like asking a surgeon about his bedside manner okay I mean he doesn't he doesn't talk I mean with not with it with my no except he he saw surgeon doesn't make money out of bits I know that surgeon makes money out of what he does in between when the patient falls asleep and when they wake up again their bedside manner doesn't make a significant contribution to their you know and I you know we're the same I mean yeah absolutely yes there's a requirement for communication skills and certainly you know if if you go and look at the environments that our followers build you quickly discover if salespeople don't have those communication skills they got nowhere to hide I mean here's the thing if you go into a typical sales environment that's built along with standard practice you you would be shocked at the level of incompetence I remember we were with a furniture manufacturer just recently and we got all of their sales people to watch a presentation from production and new product development people where they were presented new pieces of new items of furniture and we give that gave the salespeople time to prepare and then we had them come and present back to us these items of furniture that they were meant to be selling with only two exceptions the rest of the team members were cringe worthy in their ineptitude but and in all but two cases the engineering and NPD people actually had done a better job of pitching these new products than the sales people could speaking to the chorus there so yeah so in the sales environments we build sales people can't get away with that but in the traditional environment where managers will defend those environments by using the artistry or the relationship defense but the reality is those those those environments foster the developments of shocking levels of ineptitude yeah no I think that yeah there's a mix there's a blend you said it's just not you're not your responsibility but yeah you gotta move the ball all the way across the goal line not just 99 yards right exactly it's a necessary condition that I mean again in sport I think that you know when you're a kid if you want to be a soccer player you learn the basic skills and your career is obviously not going to progress if you can't dribble or do whatever the basic skills are in soccer and I suspect relative to learning how to play soccer you develop the basic skills were well pretty quickly and then the rest of the time you spend learning how to actually play the game you know how to pass and how to understand the game ins yeah exactly and and I think that's very very similar to what we're talking about here of course it's necessary that when we when our clients employ a salesperson they have to sell that's a given just like a soccer player has to be able to kick a ball but but you know if you're talking about building us an environment that generates sales at scale then that's kind of table stakes that's the price of entry right you'd hope but again to yours your question to your point you made before about the furniture manufacturers you know there's levels of an aptitude that persists that yeah yeah because sales people can spend an entire career staying busy with just customer service oh yeah claiming that takes that half their day just in terms of their tape into the CRM system so yeah and solving problems for customers and they have a good justification if there's no one else to do it then they surely have to do it but it I mean there are sales people who spend you know their entire career hiding avoiding selling yeah hiding right so it probably doesn't matter that they can't present any better than an engineer can well I I think arjen ears present very well I've got a whole chapter in the book about that so absolutely I mean I'm a big fan of taking engineers and turning an intercessor I've made have made a career out of it so yes and the other the other role that will enterprise sales people in my experience the best enterprise salespeople are external consultants interesting find someone who's worked for accentual McKinsey and you know really they're comfortable in the boardroom they're they they think and they think in the abstract they're comfortable selling high-level concepts right they make exceptional enterprise sales people alright great recommendation what we're running out of time but I want to thank you Justin for being on the show taste and a great conversation tell people they can find out more about you so my blog is the obvious starting point sales process engineering dotnet and if you're interested in the book and you go to four appointments a day calm you can require and if you're in Australia or New Zealand or Canada or the US or the UK you can request an extract for chapters we send it to you in the mail so it's four points a day calm okay excellent welcome thanks for being on show thanks avonlea and remember friends make it a part of your day every day to deliberately learn something new to help you accelerate your success and hopefully you did that today another easy way to do that is make sure you make this podcast a part of your daily routine whether you listen on your commute and the gym or as part of your morning sales meeting that way you won't miss any of my conversations with top business experts like my guest today Justin Roth Marsh who shared his expertise about how to accelerate the growth of your sales so thanks for joining me until next time this is Andy Paul good selling everyone thanks for listening to the show if you like what you heard I want to make sure you don't miss any upcoming episodes please subscribe to this podcast on iTunes or stitcher comm for more information about today's guests visit my website at Andy Paul calm [Music]