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Speaker 1: Welcome to the SBI Podcast, offering CEOs, sales and marketing leader's ideas to make the number. Greg: Welcome SBI Podcast listeners and video podcast viewers. My name is Greg Alexander, and I am the CEO of SBI, a sales and marketing company, dedicated to helping you make your number. This is the weekly SBI Podcast. It's purpose is to help you make your number by getting your peers to share with you how they make theirs. Today's guest is Lori Chmura who is the Vice President of US Sales for Cordis, a medical device company specializing in interventional procedures. For example, if your doctor ever had to use a catheter on you, well, it was probably supplied by Cordis. Cordis is a division of Johnson & Johnson. Lori has been with the company for little over 2 years, but has 28 years of business experience, primarily all in the healthcare sector. Lori, welcome to the show. Lori: Thank you so much. I'm pleased to be here. Greg: Today, I'm going to ask Lori to help her peers, other sales leaders, set their companies up for success by demonstrating how to deploy a sales process. Let me provide some context there. Decision makers are making purchase decisions differently today. Traditional sales processes that sequentially move from needs development to solutions positioning will cause a majority of your sales reps to miss the number. That's what we're seeing anyways. A custom-built sales process tailor to the specific needs of your customers, results in shorter sales cycles and higher win rates, and who doesn't want those? We're going to use SBI's revenue growth methodology to guide our conversation, particularly pages 165 and 166, which deals directly with building a custom sales process. If you want to follow along at home, download a copy of our methodology at salesbenchmarkindex.com/2016-report. Lori, are you ready for my questions? Lori: I think so. Greg: Okay. My first question is going to start with your customer, and it's a little 30,000 feat, but do your best because we're certainly not experts in the medical device industry. How do your customers buy your products? Lori: How do our customer ... Well, it's actually ... That's a great question because that is really transforming as we speak. Healthcare reform is out there and changing the way that hospitals do business. What we're seeing is that represented the transformation on our market as well. Historically, our products were all purchased by the physician alone, and there wasn't really anybody that challenged them or looked at it. It's a highly complex medical device at the time, and it was largely decided upon by the physician and how they want to use it with their patients. What we've seen over the past, really about 2 and a half to 3 years is that now it's becoming more what I would call a complex sales process, in that the physician is one decision maker who's a very important decision maker. Really the decision is now being made by the economic buyers who are challenging some of those recommendations of the physician. Greg: That's a pretty big difference, right? That's a big change. Lori: A huge difference. Greg: You have a whole industry, the medical device industry, who's been fantastic in terms of sales excellence for many, many years. In fact, many of the best sales forces came from medical devices who sold to physicians for the longest time, and now they have to sell to this other person or other people, which is a great example of what I'm talking about here and how decision makers are buying products differently today. It's a great lead into the second question, which is, does your company use a formal sales process? If so, does it now map to this different buying environment, or is it still legacy based on the old way these products got bought? Lori: Yeah. That's a great question, and it's certainly something that we struggled with internally. I think the short answer is we really don't have what I would declare a formal sales process, but we have a pretty robust jury-rigged if you will. When I joined the organization about a little over 2 years ago, as you said, there was really no mechanisms in place at all to really track monitor sales or have a sales process. That was probably one of the things that I brought forth pretty quickly is looking at how we can get some robust data and use it to integrate into what we're doing and what our decision making is. Most of what we use right now is spreadsheet based, dashboard based, and we really home grew it, if you will, to make it as comprehensive as we need to really look at how customers bought. I would say that, and getting a little bit off track, but I think it's relevant. Because the focus was so on the physician before, and it was very relationship driven, I would say, and transactional, what we were noticing is that the business was opportunistic. As physicians relationships where there and the rep was physically in the room, they had the opportunity to demo the product to make out the product used. What we started to notice though is that we really didn't have repeat business. The churn rate was just very very high. It was very transactional. One of the things that we immediately started to do was to say "How can we really sustain some business, develop a strong foundation so that we can grow from there?" The only way that we knew to do that is to start coming with what kind of tools and spreadsheets and data that we can use to help drive that. Greg: Very cool. You're a great example of what I see a lot of right now, which is a very effective approach. Instead of waiting for the parent company or headquarters to understand the change in mind behavior and come out with a formal program and go top down with it. What you've done is you and your team are close to these customers, and you understand how they're changing, so you're bootstrapping a bottoms up organic process. Very often, when it happens that way, the results are really good, because it's driven from what's actually happening day to day, versus maybe something that might be a little academic that comes out of a sales training department, something like that. Lori: Right. Exactly. We layers that ... What we did is we took those processes and we formalized them, as I said, through the spreadsheets. Then we implemented what we call, and I think it's relatively standard, but a quarterly business review process. Every quarter, we bring the division managers in, and started to look at the granularity of the business, starting from the rep himself, himself or herself, and looking at what competencies that we saw that drove results from a rep perspective, what their track record of success was, what their development opportunity were, what their strengths were. Then the second page was really a fairly granular and robust look at how they're performing within the territories. We look at their top 10 accounts, what the percentage of those top 10 accounts do for their overall business. Are the declining? Are they growing? Looking at their AFPs and their ABSs, and just really going through a week-long process, rep by rep, manager by manager, rep by rep, and helping to track kind of pipeline. Again, it's old school roll up your sleeve, no salesforce.com, no fancy funnels. Just, "Okay. You said you were going to do this last quarter, we're looking at this quarter. Are the results there or they're not there? Why not? Was it a rep problem? Was it a market problem? Was it a product problem? What drove our lack of success or success?" Greg: Awesome. I'm holding in my hand here a copy of the SBI Magazine, and I'm holding it up for those that are watching the video right now. I'm doing that really for 2 reasons. On the cover of this magazine is Dr. Mark Boxer who is the Chief Information Officer for Cigna. Many of you know Cigna, one of the largest companies in the world. He spends $1 billion per year on technology hardware and software, as well as services. He has one of the largest IT budgets in the world. Because of that, the best sales teams from the technology industry call on him. He allowed me to interview him, and have him tell me how he buys, which sales approaches he likes, which ones he doesn't, et cetera. I want everybody that's watching this or listening to this to get a copy of this. In addition, in that same edition of the magazine is an article with Pete Hayes. Pete is the Chief Sales Officer in Equinix, a large data center company. He talks about, in that article, which was titled "To Take a Closer Look," about this big deal process. His business lives and dies by the big deal, and he has this inspection process, similar to the one you just mentioned. It's a little old school, but sometimes the best ones are the ones that withstood the test of time. He details it the magazine. It's really helpful. Let's pause here, and let's make sure that everybody in the audience understands how to get a copy of this magazine. Stick around, we'll be right back. Greg: Okay. Welcome back. My name is Greg Alexander, and I'm the CEO of SBI. My guest today is Lori Chmura, the VP of Sales for the US Division of Cordis. Today we are discussing how a sales leader can shorten their sales cycle and win more deals by deploying a sales process. We're using SBI's revenue growth methodology to do it, specifically pages 165 and 166, which you should definitely check out. Before the break, Lori shared with us how her customers make purchase decisions, went from physician only to physician and others, most notably the economic buyer, and how she has modified her sales processes to accommodate the new buyer's needs. During this segment, I'm going to ask Lori to tell us and how to convert interest into a purchase order. Lori. how does your sales reps, your team, know when a buyer. for example, maybe moves from one stage in the sales methodology to the ne. moving along the buyer's journey? Lori: Yeah. That's a great question. and I will tell you t, candidly. we're probably not very good at predicting that ri. I think it's one of the areas of opportunity to that we've identified from a cycle perspective. Because our buying process have shifted from the physician. it was pretty simple before. The rep would meet with the physician. They'd detail the product. They'd be standing in the case. They'd look for an opportunity within that particular procedure to use and deploy the product. The physician would try the product. In the case it would work. he would sign a sell sheet, and the rep would walk down to the materials management office. hand it to them. and they'd order it. Today what we're seeing is that sometimes the reps are not even allowed in the cath lab or the operating suite to even be able to demo the product with the physician. They've got to go through a value analysis committee. They've got to present detailed information. not only on our products. but on our competitors. We compete with anywhere from 7 to 9 folks in the space. which is relatively unusual I think in a medical device space. They'd go through that process. Often times that process by the hospital is still ill-defined. because the hospitals are also transforming. We really. again, go back to the old school grassroots, asking a lot of questions. Where is it in the process? Who signed off on it? When do we think it's going to close? As I said. candidly, a lot of it is very subjective and a lot of guess work. Because of that. our sales cycle is much longer I think that it needs to be. to be effective, so we need to have far more deals working. in order to get a hit rate that helps us to make the number. Greg: I appreciate your honesty and transparency in telling us where you guys are in terms of your journey here to react to this new environment that we're operating in. What's interesting about your story there is that not only are you changing as a company and learning how to sell to this new buying dynamic. but your customers who are making these purchase decisions. they're developing their own new processes in reaction to the new environment. There's chaos on both sides. Lori: Right. That's exactly right. I often will be heard saying the medical device company that can figure out how to be that conduit and how to be that helper between the economic buyer and the clinical buyer and define that process very well I think is the one that's going to win. because I think that's really a tremendous opportunity. I sat in at a presentation at a recent conference. Our products are called PPI. which are physician preference, because they're generally. like I said, highly technical. Our entire discussion was ... It was supply chain conference. I was the only device manufacturer in the room. The entire discussion really centered around how do the supply chain folks and the economic buyers gain control of these physicians preference items. because it's costing their hospitals millions and millionss by not conforming. by not consolidating, by not being com. I think the one thing that they felt is that the rep is really the evil person in this. because they feel like the rep plays the physician against the supply chain person. The supply chain team was looking at how do they provide the same services. which is helping the physician with procedures. what's going on in the industry and the marketplace. so that they can get alignment. drive alignment, and really drive compliance. To me. as I was sitting there and listening, I think that re-enforce my thought that. "Gosh. if we can just crack that code, and we can do that with the customers. and we can bring them together. and provide those solutions, and provide a robust process for them to follow. I think they're wide open to it. and ready to take that on." Greg: I'm going to introduce you to a friend of mine. His name is Dave Moore. He runs a sales team at Businesssolver. They're in the benefits administration business. He had a very same issue. The reps were perceived to be evil. to use your words. He basically re-invented the entire sales team and moved away from sales reps to what he calls consultants. They were less commission based than a typical sales person wou. and they would taught this new sales methodology. which was really to advice and consult the customer as they're trying to figure out these new things. They're absolutely blowing their numbers out. I will take a note here to connect the two of you. He migh. Lori: That would be great. Greg: Okay. Let's come back to this concept to sales process for a moment. I want to keep walking through this. It may not be very relevant to you. given what you just shared with me. However. in this use case, we're learning a lot of things. I want the audience to benefit from the method itself. so let's keep progressing on this. As a buyer moves through their journey. so to speak, what we've seen work is when a company has a formal codified sales methodology that maps critical sales activities spelled out in the sales process to make sure that rep is facilitating the purchase. acting as a consultan, and helping the buyer buy. Because to your point. in many of these environments where it's chaos on both sides. the person who's trying to give you an order is struggling with how to do it in the new way. Identifying how you can help there. I don't know, 3 to 5 key steps and handing that to a sales person when they run into that can really show in sales cycles and increase win rates. As you've gone old school on this. maybe even a little bit more tactically teaching a sales rep what to say and how to engage when they find themselves in that very situation. Have you attempted to do anything in that area? Lori: Yes. Actually. we rolled out a process. It's the aiding process of selling. It's. again, old school. It was what the organization had before I joined. Rather than introduce a brand new selling process. I basically share the vision on the team on how we can become more focused and more organized in terms of our process. One of my division managers really who has a real affinity for this selling process. he took it on and embraced it, and actually is doing it as an expansion role now in which he is leading the execution of the sales process. You're familiar with the process. Really. it a relatively basic process. They all have different names. starts with the approach and ends with a close. What this division manager has been doing is we trained all of our field selling folks on it. We also train ... Under me in the US. I not only have sales, but I have sales marketing. commercial operations, pricing and contracting. strategic account. I'm able to really drive pretty good alignment. What we did is we introduced this selling process to the entire commercial team. so that everything that we do, at least we're using similar vernacular. and we can start to map out along the process where we are. Again. old school, grassroots, but it does give us that common language so we can see where we're stuck. One of the things that we see through the QBR. as we look at the 11 competencies that we rate every quarter in the QBR. when we see that someone is struggling or getting 1 or a 2 in creating an closing opportunities. we're able to peel back the onion on specific accounts that we're looking at. and say, "Where are they losing it?" What we see is it's typically in that validate stage where the rep is really able to go in and validate that need so that they can drive it through whatever process is in that hospital. Again. little grassroots, little old school, but it's what we had to work with. and I think it's been working pretty well. We actually posted the first quarter growth in over 3 years. which was really exciting. Greg: Congratulations. Lori: Right now we just closed August. Our August closed on Friday 101%. which is spectacular for . Greg: Yeah. That's fantastic. I have to ask you. This AID INC process. is this the old Ron Willingham process? Lori: Yes it is. Greg: Oh my gosh. Lori: It's old. Yes. You should see the videos that we have and how they rolled it . They're from the early days. hilarious. Greg: I had a sales class in high school. I'm not lying, a junior in high school. taught by Mr. Olick. We were taught the AID INC process by Ron Willingham. I say that not to be critical. I'm a believer that the things that withstand the test of time. It's incredible to me that you're using that in 2015. and look what just happened. You're 101% compliant. Unbeliev. Lori: It's really been ... Again. I go back to, and I drive this with my team. create the vision, understand how you want to get there. and use the tools that we have. You put them out there and drive accountability. I think if you can do that ... I love your process that you've. I read your ... Wake up in the morning. first thing, and I read your blog and your post. and really just try to extrapolate the best of everythg that I can find. and drive that accountability, and create that vision for my team to follow. Greg: Fantastic. It really is. Last question in this segment. You're using a formal process. AID INC, which is great. It's resulted in a measurable improvement in your business. which is even better. You've mentioned that level 1. level 2. It looks like you're measuring a few things. What type of metrics do you track to determine the success of this AID INC sales process? Lori: That's a great question. Again. it's probably not as formalized right now as it need. What we look at is we have a competency rating. One is entry level. two is ... Depending on what they competen, creating and closing opportunities. they're able to , identify a need within a defined period of time. close i, and we rank folks on that 1 to 4 scale. It's an element of objectivity. but probably a little bit more subjectivity as we're trying to drive that process and that accountability. Greg: Has it been fairly accurate? Lori: I think it has. specifically because we're ... How many have done now? Probably 7th or 8th QBR. Because we're using the exact same competencies quarter after. and we literally go through. and every single DM is sitting m and hearing it and I'm in every single session by rep. challenging it and going back to the competencies. I think it really is working. I think we have a nice common vernacular now. I think we can see some of the results. Greg: Excellent. Fantastic. You mentioned that you read our blo. Have you had a chance to check out our TV show yet? Lori: I have not. but Mike was mentioning it to me. They gave me this stuff to do it. I just have to say I've been deficient in getting on to it. Greg: That's all right. There's one particular episode I want you to check out. It's a panel with the head of sales from Ryder. the trucking , MYtel. a telecommunications firm, and Broadridge, the financial services firm. It's relevant to this conversation. because these 3 sales leaders have increased their win rates by implementing a standardized sales process like you have wit. and I think you'd get a lot out of it. Our audience who's listening to this. who's hung with us to this point in the show probably would see some value in that as well. Let's take a quick break here. and point everybody to SBI TV. Stick around. and we'll be right back. Greg: Welcome back. My name is Greg Alexander. and I'm the CEO. My guest today is Lori Chmura who leads the US sales group fo. a medical device company. Today we're discussing how a sales leader can deploy a sales process to shorten sales cycles and increase win rate. We're using SBI revenue growth methodology to do it. specifically pages 165 and 166. If you want a copy of this and follow along at home. go to salesbenchmarkindex.com/2016rep. Before the break. Lori and I we discussing exit criteria, rep adoption. and tracking metrics. During this segment. Loris is going to share with us her use of technology and her approach to training. Lori. you mentioned to me old school a few times. My questions really is. are you using any type of technology to provide your reps an easy way to facilitate these new sales processes that you've installed? Lori: We started to ... We have iPads. and we started to deploy a lot of our materials and such on the iPad. I will say it's definitely in its infancy. and we've not really capitalized on the full potenti. We are company in transition. so there's a lot of other competing priorities right now. but we definitely have started with the iPad and are looking at different apps and different ways to leverage that technology. Greg: Okay. What was it about the iPad that attracted you? Lori: I think that it was ... First of all. it pretty readily available to us. because it was something the company had invested in across the entire corporation. and so we knew that we had that. We felt like it was a vehicle that because of the app creatiot of it. that wasn't as cumbersome in terms of deployins that are more customized. We have a gentleman in our operations group. he's just like a rain man with all this stuff. He's really been able to come in a relatively short period of. look at a lot of our processes. and he started to develop a bunch of different apps and mechanisms of tracking. One specific is we deal with consignment. In our industry. that's a standard in which we put product at our expense on the shelves of our customers. As they use it. we bill it, and then we're in charge of maintaining it. ensuring that it doesn't go outdated. and replacing it. We were writing off essentially 48-50% of all the inventory we had on the field on a quarterly basis. because we don't have a good mechanism of tracking it. We didn't have good strategy in deploying it. As I said. this gentleman came on board and looked at the proc, looked at where the gaps were. and he ... We developed a strategic process. and then he was able t. The technology available with the iPad and the apps is to create an entire tracking system. so that we can segment account. understand how we can manage our inventory better. how we can count it. how would it interface with all the different systems. Greg: iPads are great for that because they're so mobile. If you have sales rep deployed counting inventory. that's real. Lori: Exactly. and they can take a picture. They have to send back a lot of inventory. and then it goes through the process. The nice thing is they're able to take a picture of the invent. a picture of the package and have that all so we can track it through the process. Greg: Perfect. All right. My last question here for you is training. You rolled out this sales process. AID INC. obviously you had to train the people on it. How did you train them on the new sales process? Lori: That's a great question. What we did was at the beginning of our national train. probably about a year and a half ago. what we did is we brought all ... First. we gave folks some pre-read stuff to do. Then we brought all the leadership team in a day early. Like I said. because I have all of the commercial organizations, I was able to drive that alignment. so we brought everyb, our marketing leadership. commercial ops, pricing, contra. We did a full-day training event. Then what we've ... We've literally ... From start to fin. it was very hands on. It was very interactive. Then we chose this DM that I talked about. and he now leads that process. He now is doing follow up routi. Every quarter when they come in for QBR. we're doing a refresher on one element of it. We're continuing that training. Then he's deployed 2 reps that are pretty good at this. and they are hosting series. They go through a series of 8 session in which they just get . they do a WebEx. and they bring real-life situations to talk ab, and they go through the process on different aspects of the pro. We also incorporated it into our marketing materials. so that they know in the process if they're... If we're rolling something out. they know where. If it's in the process. to your point earlier, what to say. Again. that alignment between all those cross functions I think is really helping to reinforce that training. Greg: Fantastic. All right. We're going to take one more br. When we come back. Lori and I will discuss what to do next if you're a sales leader who needs a fresh coat of paint on a tired sales process. If you like listening to Lori and want access to more peer drn best practices. here's how to subscribe to the SBI blog. Greg: Welcome back. everyone. Lori. let's package this up in a little call to action for the. If I had you here in our SBI set and pointed you in front ofa and told you to speak directly to the 30.000 people who are going to watch and listen to this. and give them 1 to 3 things that you think they should do immediately following this show. what would you have them ? Lori: That's a great question because I feel like you can boil the ocean with this and do so many things. I think the first thing I would say is take the time to look at yourself and your organization very critically and ensure that you really do have a process and a system that drives accountability. whether it's fancy like Salesforce.com or as antiquated as what we're using in AID INC. really understand how it's being used in the field. and how it's being used to drive your number. Then I would take the time to meet with your sales leaders and your field leaders. and really hear from them what's wog and what's not working. Then roll up your sleeves and continue to drive the processes. and drive the accountability that you need to get the results that you need. Greg: Great advice. It really is. All right. Let me give you my 2 cents. What does all this mean to you. the audience? To make your numbers. you need to improve 3 critical metrics, win rates. cycle length, and deal size. You can net it down to those 3 things. Those are the 3 things that will impact your number the mos. A custom built sales process will move these 3 numbers. If these metrics are not moving in a meaningful way. it may be time to upgrade your sales process. To net this out. that is why you should care about what we talked about in today's show. If you want to make sure you get this right. get a copy of this year's report. which I talked about a s just to remind you. It's How to Make Your Number in 2016. You can find it at salesbenchnmarkindex.com/2015-r. If you feel you might not know how to do this. because we have varying degrees of experience in our audience. and you want some help. don't be afraid to ask for it. We'll send one of our experts out to you. and put you through a workshop to teach you how to do this. Go to the same website. salesbenchmarkindex.com, but this time it's /2016workshop. Lori. I want to pay you a huge compliment. I learned something from you today. It has actually reminded me of a key attribute of a great sales leader. and that is grit. You have clawed your way to the number. The tools that your company has provided you. since they're in a period of transition here. are a little old school and a little antiquated. There's many sales leaders that could have just thrown the towel and said. "Hey, woe is me, it was my company stinks for not g" You didn't do that. You said. "All right. I'm going to take what I have. I'm going to drive the use of it. and we're going to get to the number." There's a lot of people in this audience that are behind a number right now. that might be having the self-pity parade. I think you have motivated them to get off their you-know-what. and make it happen with what you have. You inspired me. and thanks a whole bunch for being on the sh. Lori: No. Thank you. and thanks for all the work that you guys are doing. It's absolutely fabulous. For those of us that don't have a lot of tools. it's great to be able to go on your phone in the morning as you're traveling. whatever, and find what you need, so than. Greg: Great. All right. I also want to thank you. our audience, for tuning in. This show has become very popular. In fact. it wouldn't surprise me if this episode gets downloaded over 20.000 times, which is a lot of the niche that we play in here. With this popularity comes great guests like Lori. If we want to continue to have those great guests. we need to keep building our audience. because that's what attracts great guests. Thank you for tuning in. Really. I sincerely appreciate your attention. Until we meet again on the next episode. I wish you much success as you try to make your number. Speaker 1: This has been the SBI Podcast. For more information on SBI services. case studies, the SBI team and how we work. or to subscribe to our other of, please visit us at salesbenchmarkindex.com.