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Welcome, everybody, to the Advanced Selling Podcast, the longest-running sales training podcast in podcast history.
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My name is Brian Neal.
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And I m Bill Kasky.
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And we are glad that you re here with us every week.
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A little special midweek drop on you.
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You know, we always release on Mondays, and this one s going out on a separate day.
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live recording with the guests.
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We ll introduce our guest here in just a second.
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If you re not already a member of our LinkedIn group, please go to LinkedIn, join our group.
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We will post lots of things like this.
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We post a lot of information about this event in there, kind of like a little special place to get it.
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And then if you haven t, or not a member of the Insider Program, highly encourage you to go check it out.
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What we got?
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Is this Friday that we
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Yeah, this Friday, we re going to be talking about referral strategies, modern referral strategies.
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Modern, I like it.
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Yeah, and go ahead.
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Yeah, I was going to say, so this is election time.
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Here we are recording this the first week in May, and I thought you d enjoy this story.
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I ve got a friend of mine who s running for a local office.
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It s like Clay Township Assessor.
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It s a northern suburb of Indianapolis.
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And this guy, his name is Paul Hensel, been around forever.
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I mean, he has a community.
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His dad, he does youth sports.
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I mean, everybody knows him.
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He knows everybody.
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This is going to be an easy election.
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So he was opposed by a guy who registered to run for this office as well against Paul.
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But he ended up saying, look, I m not really all that interested.
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He actually moved out of the territory, so literally couldn t run, but he couldn t get his name off the ballot.
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So last night was the election.
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Only two people running, Paul and this guy here.
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And I texted Paul this morning.
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I said, well, did you win?
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Which I knew he would.
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He goes, yeah, I won.
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It was great.
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We got 70% of the vote.
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And I m thinking, you got 70% of the vote is all against a guy who literally was not running.
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He s never campaigned, not one yard sign.
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But it kind of hit home the fact that 30% of the people are paying no attention anyway.
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If you re in sales and you re closing 70% of the deals you propose, that s pretty good.
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That s pretty good.
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It s fantastic.
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It does make you wonder.
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And I love the, especially where we are in Indiana, the small town races, so to speak, where you see the results coming in and the results, if I m running against Bill for, you know, Madison County Assessor, I got 48 votes and Bill got seven.
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It s like, what are we doing?
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I just love that.
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That is so funny.
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Tis the season.
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All right, Bill, you want to?
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Yeah, well, we have a special partner here today, Scott Barker.
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And I m going to let Scott introduce himself.
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But he s with Outreach.io.
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Outreach is a partner of ours.
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And we ve been working with them off and on here the past couple of years.
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And Scott s message today, I think, is really relevant.
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I mean, it s super relevant for the times that we live in.
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And we re going to talk about this whole idea of the sales execution gap, which we ve been teasing up over the last few episodes.
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But we re going to go deep into it today.
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and Scott s going to talk about some of his perspectives on things.
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All right.
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What s up, Scott?
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Tell the people who you are.
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Let s go.
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Who am I?
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Who is Scott?
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First off, thank you so much for having me.
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Excited to be here and excited for this conversation.
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My name is Scott Barker.
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I live up in Vancouver, Canada.
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I m currently the Director of Strategic Engagement at Outreach.
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And I can go through, it seems like a bit of an ambiguous title, so I can go through what that actually means.
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And then on the side, I actually run a small venture capital firm as well called GTM Funds.
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We invest in early stage startups, which is
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super fun and keeps my finger on the pulse with a lot of emerging technologies, both in revenue and outside of that in the broader SaaS market.
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But yeah, my role at Outreach is a pretty cool one.
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So I got to Outreach by way of acquisition in 2018.
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I helped build a media company called Sales Hacker back in the day.
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At the time, I think we were the largest community for B2B revenue professionals, got to do really cool conferences in San Francisco, London, New York, really all about, A, how to copy some of the best practices that these really fast-growing companies in the Valley were doing and democratize that information for startups, and then, two, how to actually use these new technologies because it s
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number of years ago, we saw sales of MarTech just like exploding and no one really knew, the common seller didn t know how to use these things.
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And so we would try and put people on stage and podcasts and things that could teach people not unsimilar to what you two do.
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And we had a great run there that,
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community media company was purchased by outreach in 2018.
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And I ve kind of been able to be a Swiss Army knife a little bit within the outreach organization, I was
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first part of the marketing team, and then I was directly on the sales team, and then I went over to RevOps for a little bit, and now I m on the marketing team.
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And so I ve had my hand in a lot of different pieces of the outreach organization, and I ve seen growth.
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So it s been pretty exciting.
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And my role now is really about
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unlocking the connectivity that lives within our organization already.
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And this could be through the VC firms that have put money into outreach.
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This could be through our board members  networks.
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This could be through our executive teams  networks.
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A lot of times when we re looking at our top 100 accounts, or even customers that we re trying to go wider in,
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we ll have all these connections that it takes really just someone to connect the dots.
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And so we can fly directly to the CEO or the CRO and have that high level conversation that we need to really move the needle on some of these accounts.
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And that s what I spend a lot of my time doing.
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So working directly with our strategic AEs and the strategic leadership to help them get more connected.
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And then
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It s not about just utilizing that network, but it s also about expanding that network through content, through LinkedIn, teaching folks at Outreach how to build their own networks and communities.
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It s a super fun role and having a blast.
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Love it, love it.
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So we re talking to Scott Parker from Outreach.
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It s funny, Director, Outreach, Outreach is the name of the company.
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It s kind of what you do.
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Yeah, a little bit.
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Part of the deal.
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They have, Outreach has done a really good job defining a problem.
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the sales execution gap.
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And they define it in three ways.
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So we re in this episode.
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We did some episodes leading up to this.
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We re going to talk to the three of us out loud about our take on these three elements that cause a sales execution gap, inefficient prospecting, weak deal management, and inaccurate sales forecasting.
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I ve always said to my clients on the third one, man, if I could figure out a way to accurately sales forecast, I d be a billionaire.
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And that s what outreach is already.
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So that I was right.
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It just wasn t me, no big deal.
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Let s talk about, and Bill, you want to start us off inefficient prospecting and hit the first domino in this deal and start talking about?
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I will, but I also want to,
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cite Scott s comments.
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We had a pre-meeting here about a week ago, and we talked about how we were going to flow this and what Scott wanted to get across.
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And one thing that you said that I really liked, and I think it needs to be a part of all three of these, is you ve had kind of a front row seat
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to all of the changes over the past 5, 10, 15 years.
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And so as we talk about inefficient prospecting, for example, I d like for you to bring your experience of how you ve seen things change, rather than just looking at a snapshot today of how to do it better.
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Kind of walk us through a little bit of the change, because you ve seen it all.
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or a lot of it.
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And again, the front row seat.
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And I always feel like on things like this, if you can, if the people listening can just get a slightly different perspective on something, it could change the world for them.
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So if you could do that as we go through these, that would be awesome.
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Bravo.
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Yeah, happy to do that.
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Do you want to start there with inefficient prospecting?
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Let s start with inefficient prospecting.
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I don t think it s all that important what I think.
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We ve kind of shared that, Brian and I have, over the past few episodes.
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I d rather just go to you and say, what s the problem?
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What do you see the struggle is?
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How has it occurred?
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So why don t you just rant a little bit on that?
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Yeah, I ll go on a bit of a riff.
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And like I said, I think it s been super interesting that I ve sort of built my career on while sales technology was exploding and was part of the beginning of my career when there was no sales technology.
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And I remember my first sales position was literally just calling people, emailing people,
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and using Outlook to try and like remind me to do something.
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And it was an absolute mess.
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I think it was like a three color-coded thing.
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And, you know, things were getting missed, of course, you know, follow-ups weren t happening properly.
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Maybe you d get two, three touches.
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And, you know, it was kind of the wild west.
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And what worked back then was just, I guess, raw,
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will.
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It was just do more.
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That only takes you so far.
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You re going to cap out.
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Then I remember going into my next role, and finally, I had this thing called like a CRM.
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Well, what is this?
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What do we have going on here?
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That was cool because it allowed me to make the call, send the emails, but also track them a little bit more efficiently.
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I still had to manually put in the inputs, but I could set better follow-ups and at least follow a bit of a pathway for each customer, which was super helpful, but also time-consuming and annoying.
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And I remember spending like,
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you know, usually I do it on like a Thursday afternoon, because Friday afternoon we re sellers, we re hopefully going to get some happy hour drinks with the team.
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So I try and do it on Thursdays, but it would take a big chunk of time, like hours, to try and figure out not only what happened, but what I wanted to plan to happen, you know, and set all those different
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follow-ups and things that I had to do that I knew to be successful.
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That was all right.
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Then the next organization where I actually got to build out my own team, bring in my own technology, I was like, there s got to be something better that my reps can use that we can
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we can guide them a little bit more.
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And that s when, this is a long time ago, it s probably one of the first few customers of what at the time were called sales engagement platforms.
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Companies like Outreach, there was like Insidesales.com back then.
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And
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Finally, you have this system, and it was based around pretty simply around just like a, they call them sequences.
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So you would set up your sequences, ahead of time, it could be seven to eight, you know,
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up to like 15 if you wanted.
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And it was a mixture of emails, phone calls.
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Back then, I think it was just emails, phone calls.
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Since then, they introduced LinkedIn and all these different things.
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But it was basically, at its fundamental, it was all run off of a sequence.
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And you could actually automate a lot of that sequence through dynamic fields.
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First name, we ve all seen it now.
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But that was a really big game changer, particularly back then when people hadn t
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I guess, caught on to what a template would look like.
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And so you could just write some clever templates.
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And it was an extremely, extremely effective strategy for a long time.
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And then had a great run there.
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And then it s similar, like Aaron Ross, Predictable Revenue is coming out.
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They re talking more.
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If anyone s read that book, again, it s
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It s more of a SAS software book, but it s still a really good one to read.
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And again, it was kind of all around, OK, now we have this tool that allows us to do more.
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Let s do more.
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And again, that only takes you so far.
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So then the evolution of that became what Outreach is now, which is a sales execution platform that has gone beyond just sequences.
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It now looks at things like your response rate, but also the intent of that response.
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Is it positive?
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Is it negative?
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What kind of objection are you giving?
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So that in real time, you can start getting these data and analysis on what you re doing
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and tweak it and tweak it and not just kind of guess at what might work, but actually know, OK, based on the data I have, I can make an informed decision on the best next action for prospecting.
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And then, of course, it became much more multi
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multithreaded, you could do multiple people, you could go on LinkedIn, and it just became this whole kind of orchestration.
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And that s what it takes now to be an efficient prospector.
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And I think you use a sales execution tool, and then you also, I would recommend, you know,
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content is a big piece of being a seller and building a brand online so that when people check you out and they see that you ve gone on their LinkedIn, like, who is Scott Barker?
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Who is Bill Kasky?
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Like, what s this person all about?
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And they can kind of learn a little bit about you asynchronously and decide, oh, maybe this person is actually worth my time.
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I listened to some of this podcast.
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Sounds like he might know what he s talking about.
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Maybe he s worth having a chat too.
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So that was kind of my
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my story and the evolution really of inefficient prospecting, some of the tooling that came with it.
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Brian, do you want to, I thought maybe we ve got these other two that we want to go through.
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So is there anything that you have for Scott on that one?
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Well, my biggest question is, so our listeners, you know, our individual salespeople, and then we have their leaders too.
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If we were pointing to one of those two groups,
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And I m going to make us blame somebody on purpose, right?
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So we ve got, okay, there s the leader sets up the, you know, the processes or invest in the platform for sales execution, then there s the doers, the people that are out selling.
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Yeah, if you if you see a flaw, so yeah, I wouldn t let you go dead center and said, when this doesn t work, what group is more contributes more?
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Is it the sellers?
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So we need to get them more disciplined?
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Or is it the leaders?
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We need to get them more disciplined to hold the sellers accountable.
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If I had to make you choose one of them.
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Yeah.
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I m going to, I m going to politically answer this question.
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Leaders are the problem.
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Leaders create the process.
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So if you re creating the process, then, um, uh, then it s, it s your fault.
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You train these people, you enable these people, the buck stops there.
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But, and,
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I m an extreme accountability guy.
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If I m an individual contributor out there, it s not an excuse not to hit your number.
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I ll give you an example.
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Very early in my career, one of my first BDR positions at a FinTech company.
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And it was rough.
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It was like 100 calls a day.
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And they would just arbitrarily make up campaigns we would do.
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But we re calling dentists this week.
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And it was not based on data.
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It wasn t like anything.
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It was just like, we re doing a dentist campaign.
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And we re going to send them some flyers.
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And you just need to call.
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We re doing a blitz.
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We re doing a blitz.
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very quickly within six hours of calling people, you can make, this is not our ICP.
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They re impossible to get on the phone.
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I haven t even talked to one dentist today.
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They re doing dentist work and also running this practice.
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This is absurd.
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In that case, I was given a broken system.
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I played the rules.
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I still had to hit my 100 calls.
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But after that, I would put my
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creative hat on and be like, okay, I still need to hit my number though.
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So what do I do to hit my number?
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And I critically thought it was a FinTech solution payment processing.
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I was like, who needs that?
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Who actually needs that?
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And it s likely new businesses.
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So there was a new business registry that came out every month and all the people in Vancouver
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And I would make my 100 calls to whatever dumb campaign we were doing.
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And then I would call these new business registries.
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And that s where all my ops came from.
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I became number one in my first month on the job, not because I was following the process, because I was thinking creatively.
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And so there is this extreme accountability where, even if you re given a broken process, play within the confines.
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Show that you can creatively think and create your own systems.
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and make it happen.
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That s great.
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That s what high performers do.
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They find their way.
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And I bet you didn t get in trouble for being the number one rep, even though it wasn t in the dental.
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They made it the process.
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Exactly, they did.
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Yes, yes, yes.
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Great answer.
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Well played.
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Number one in the company, sold zero dentists.
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Sold zero dentists.
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That was great, man.
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Really good.
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So Scott, we re talking again today with Scott Barker with outreach.io.
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Scott, I know that we re going to send an email out to people who are registered and enrolled in
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and if they wanna speak with one of your people, they can elect to do that.
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But if someone doesn t have the technology tool of outreach, what are maybe one or two things you would recommend people doing to kind of get their prospecting more efficient?
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Whether it s a checklist or what would you suggest to a listener who doesn t have the tech tool right now?
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Yeah, that is a really good question.
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And I try,
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I try to answer these questions as much as I can.
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I m like, okay, let s strip away the technology.
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What is the underlying thing?
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There s a few things that technology allows you to do.
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One is focus.
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When you don t have technology, focus is going to be so, so important.
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We talked about the arbitrary dentist example.
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That is almost helpful if you re at least shooting at the right persona or ICP.
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Don t try and go after the whole blue ocean because it will really help you when you start speaking the same language as the people that you re talking to.
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So here s one thing I did that really, really helped me.
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This was at a different company.
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We were selling to VPs of marketing and I was doing my thing and I was calling the script and then I could feel like there was these
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terms I didn t fully understand.
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I knew how to say them.
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I knew how to say brand awareness, demand generation.
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I knew how to say these things, but I didn t actually know what it meant.
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When I was on the phone, I could feel like people knew that.
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I was going one layer deep.
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And it would fall apart if they took it too far.
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And so what I started doing is I actually started taking my VP of marketing for lunch every week.
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So whoever you sell into, nine times out of 10,
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you ll have one of those within your organization.
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And if you don t, and you happen to be selling to, I don t know why dentists keep coming up, but if you re selling to dentists, like go incentivize a dentist that you know is in your family network or is in your friend s network and start taking them for a free lunch.
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Most people don t say no to a free lunch.
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And so those are two things, like focus,
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um and really understanding the the language of a persona and just do that one by one if you have multiple personas don t try and do one one at a time and then for tracking and things i mean you can use excel sheets you can you can do all of that just you know make sure you re understanding it s always
2
SPEAKER_01
There s always a new shiny thing.
2
SPEAKER_01
I was guilty of this in my career too.
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SPEAKER_01
The grass is always greener, there s going to be an easier industry, there s going to be easier something.
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SPEAKER_01
don t give up once you ve decided something, like actually see it through.
2
SPEAKER_01
There is all those stats out there where it takes like, I think it s up to 11 touches or something crazy to get a meeting these days.
2
SPEAKER_01
So if you re constantly bouncing and you re not getting there, then that s a problem.
2
SPEAKER_01
But I feel like there s even like free tooling out there that can do stuff like this, you know, so.
2
SPEAKER_00
What I m hearing from you, Scott, which I love, and I love that you said, you know, you re a high accountability person, extreme, you said extreme accountability, didn t you?
2
SPEAKER_00
Even better.
2
SPEAKER_00
That this all fits under that umbrella around this, that salespeople need to look in the mirror and say, I can do this if my, most companies these days have a CRM.
2
SPEAKER_00
Even if they don t, I go find one, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
It s just really, really, really good.
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SPEAKER_00
Really, really great.
2
SPEAKER_02
So- Here s a question.
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SPEAKER_02
I ve got a question here from our listeners.
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SPEAKER_02
Does this software that you have outreached, does it integrate with Salesforce well?
2
SPEAKER_01
Absolutely.
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SPEAKER_01
Yeah, yeah, yes.
2
SPEAKER_01
So we would, a good way to think about it, and I would say probably 90% of our customers have Salesforce.
2
SPEAKER_01
A good way to think of it is Salesforce is a system of record.
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SPEAKER_01
which is super important.
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SPEAKER_01
You need that, you know, so the leadership and things can look at all these graphs and charts and make decisions.
2
SPEAKER_01
Outreach is a system of action.
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SPEAKER_01
So these are where the actions take place.
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SPEAKER_01
And you re actually doing the things in forms of, you know, email sequences, success plans.
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SPEAKER_01
This is where you re doing your forecasting.
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SPEAKER_01
So,
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SPEAKER_01
That s the relationship.
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SPEAKER_01
And yeah, it s all async.
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SPEAKER_01
So everything you would do in Outreach automatically gets tracked into Salesforce.
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SPEAKER_01
So you don t have to waste those Thursday nights like I had to, like actually.
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SPEAKER_02
Back and forth.
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SPEAKER_01
Putting everything in.
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SPEAKER_02
Good answer.
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SPEAKER_02
John didn t ask this, but I will.
2
SPEAKER_02
Is Outreach a tool that I could use without Salesforce or without another CRM?
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SPEAKER_02
Could it be a CRM if I don t have a huge company?
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_01
I ll put my political hat on real quick.
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SPEAKER_01
I ll do a reframe.
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SPEAKER_01
When you own all the actions, all the actions that are happening, at one point,
2
SPEAKER_01
you also are the system of record, but we ve got all of the action.
2
SPEAKER_01
So why do you need the system of record?
2
SPEAKER_01
So you can definitely see that playing out.
2
SPEAKER_01
For the time being, I would say, yes, we do have quite a few customers that just use outreach, but they typically be, I would say,
2
SPEAKER_01
SMB to mid market companies.
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SPEAKER_01
But certainly, I think there s a day when we, we do get there.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, well done.
2
SPEAKER_00
Good, good, good use of challenger methodology, by the way.
2
SPEAKER_00
Those of you paying attention to reframe any of my challenger people out there.
2
SPEAKER_00
That was well done, Scott.
2
SPEAKER_00
I like it.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, that s, that s
2
SPEAKER_00
The thing I struggle with, I mean, this might bleed into weak deal management in the middle and I m gonna raise my hand and say, I suck at this.
2
SPEAKER_00
In fact, in our company, we are salesforce.com crazy.
2
SPEAKER_00
Like we have a salesforce.com admin, we re an SMB for sure.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I don t have a login to Salesforce because I m not a disciplined person of record.
2
SPEAKER_00
Um, what advice do you give to people like me?
2
SPEAKER_00
I know I need to do it.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s important.
2
SPEAKER_00
We invest a ton of money.
2
SPEAKER_00
Our whole business lives on Salesforce and I m the founder.
2
SPEAKER_00
I don t have, you know, so what do you give advice or people that might resist or they re just not good at it or they still just don t see it, you know, like worth the effort.
2
SPEAKER_00
Um, when it comes to the deal management side of this thing in the middle, how do you advice you give and or things that outreach does to, to help that?
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_01
And I mean, this is a big part of kind of the sales execution gap as a whole, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
And the whole thing kind of plays together.
2
SPEAKER_01
And I ll share a quote.
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SPEAKER_01
I believe it s James Clear.
2
SPEAKER_01
And it s, you do not rise to the level of your goals, but you fall to the level of your systems.
2
SPEAKER_01
And I think that captures a really interesting challenge that most revenue leaders are facing.
2
SPEAKER_01
We all have big goals, but OK, we got to hit
2
SPEAKER_01
$500 million next year, and let s go hire a bunch more reps and do this thing.
2
SPEAKER_01
And we don t actually have informed decision.
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SPEAKER_01
It s still largely based on gut.
2
SPEAKER_01
And that s where this gap starts widening.
2
SPEAKER_01
And the gap is really missed revenue, but also the time it takes to achieve that revenue.
2
SPEAKER_01
That s a big piece, that second piece.
2
SPEAKER_01
You can probably get there, but what if you could get there faster?
2
SPEAKER_01
And so we internally kind of
2
SPEAKER_01
measured this through our collective experience and with a bunch of public company data that is out there, and tried to get a grasp on this gap.
2
SPEAKER_01
And it is huge.
2
SPEAKER_01
I can share some examples later.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s not a joke when we say it s a trillion-dollar problem.
2
SPEAKER_01
And a lot of that comes down to inefficient prospecting, what we talked about, inconsistent field management, which we ll jump into, and then inaccurate revenue forecasting.
2
SPEAKER_01
And those three things
2
SPEAKER_01
They map really nicely to the three pillars that I think are most important for sales leaders and go-to-market teams, and that s efficiency,
2
SPEAKER_01
predictability, and growth.
2
SPEAKER_01
If you have those three things working in lockstep, you will close your sales execution gap, you will hit your number, you will rock and roll.
2
SPEAKER_01
Those are happy days.
2
SPEAKER_01
And when we talk about predictability, that means your business becomes more realistic, less chaotic, and you do need data for that to happen.
3
SPEAKER_02
I think.
3
SPEAKER_02
At least in tech, a lot of us got almost drunk on data, and everyone s like, data-driven, data-driven, data-driven.
3
SPEAKER_02
I ve kind of switched it to say data-informed.
3
SPEAKER_02
I think that s a better way to do it, because data is only as strong as the wisdom, experience of the person reading it.
3
SPEAKER_02
And you can draw a lot of the wrong outcomes from it, but you still do need it.
3
SPEAKER_02
And so ways you can affect predictability are
3
SPEAKER_02
A, getting your reps on all the same success plans.
3
SPEAKER_02
So templates of like, hey, here s how we run a deal.
3
SPEAKER_02
They re probably all going to be different from your SMB enterprise strategic and have that built out, right?
3
SPEAKER_02
A framework.
3
SPEAKER_02
This is how we go through it so that you can go in at each and every step before it s even like close to being forecast and get an understanding of where they are in their deals quickly.
3
SPEAKER_02
And it s a quick snapshot.
3
SPEAKER_02
The second piece, I think, in predictability.
3
SPEAKER_02
is like revenue intelligence.
3
SPEAKER_02
We have a solution called Kaya, but there s a ton of revenue intelligence solutions out there.
3
SPEAKER_02
And those are formerly called conversational intelligence.
3
SPEAKER_02
So these are tools that are basically listening to your calls and teasing out things that you could do better and things that are good signs of deals, things that are bad signs of deals.
3
SPEAKER_02
So when you re armed with that as a leader too, you can also get ahead of a lot of these problems.
3
SPEAKER_02
The next evolution of those rebel intelligence is like in real time coaching.
3
SPEAKER_02
So like, they ll be like, oh, they said pricing here, here s the pricing.
3
SPEAKER_02
Oh, they said this competitor, here s the here s the competitor stuff, sending out the action items, which personally was
3
SPEAKER_02
my least favorite thing to do as a seller was the follow-up email.
3
SPEAKER_02
I don t know what that says about me, but I hated it.
3
SPEAKER_02
I always wanted to be doing the thing and not be just sending that, but revenue intelligence and then tools that are going to show you your overall deal health.
3
SPEAKER_02
You do that manually by understanding by
3
SPEAKER_02
by category, by industry, by segments, whatever have been our historical hiccups in the past.
3
SPEAKER_02
Some sales leaders can do this by memory.
3
SPEAKER_02
They re savants, they can do it.
3
SPEAKER_02
And they ve just had enough experience where they re like, ooh, I know that procurement in the healthcare industry is a nightmare.
3
SPEAKER_02
So deal health on that one is probably not as good as you think.
3
SPEAKER_02
But you can also lean on tools that will pull that for you and can just give you a deal health score.
3
SPEAKER_02
And you can use your best judgment if you think that,
3
SPEAKER_02
the tool is right or wrong.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah I like that because I think a lot of times we can t over complicate this and one of the things I work with my VPs of sales on is do you have a template for does a deal even get quoted on or not and if we just have a checklist and maybe it s 12 things do we know the owner do we have they watched any videos that we ve done
3
SPEAKER_00
Are they on our, how long, how many times have we emailed them in the past year?
3
SPEAKER_00
Some of those things are relevant to, are we, are they really asking us to quote because they re interested or just because they need three quotes?
3
SPEAKER_00
And so I think I like the idea of a checklist, whether it s committed to a tech or just, you know, just success plan, as you call it, how are we successful at deals that we re successful on?
3
SPEAKER_00
There s probably a formula for it.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yes.
3
SPEAKER_01
I also believe that there has to be a fluidity to this, meaning a deal either needs to be moving toward green to close or backward toward red to close lost.
3
SPEAKER_01
Closed one versus closed lost.
3
SPEAKER_01
I see so many companies and more salespeople, back to like extreme accountability, who treat them all the same, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
The funnel s just the funnel.
3
SPEAKER_01
The funnel is not the funnel.
3
SPEAKER_01
You need to be sorting the funnel constantly.
3
SPEAKER_01
And that when you talk about weak deal management, that s one of the problems.
3
SPEAKER_01
Our sales teams, they just create them.
3
SPEAKER_01
They re all the same.
3
SPEAKER_01
I m just close as much as I can, Scott.
3
SPEAKER_01
I m doing the best I can here, man.
3
SPEAKER_01
Working my funnel, right?
3
SPEAKER_02
And then in that scenario, that s when you have this huge, like everyone s stuck somehow.
3
SPEAKER_02
You have all these stuck.
3
SPEAKER_02
That s what happens if you re not pushing it up or out.
3
SPEAKER_02
It s just like you have this
3
SPEAKER_02
You know, we all have stages in Salesforce, and every organization who isn t kind of good at predictability will have one stage.
3
SPEAKER_02
I promise you, I ve been part of so many organizations that just has so many opportunities in it.
3
SPEAKER_02
It s just like a stock stage.
3
SPEAKER_01
Totally.
3
SPEAKER_02
Need to be working.
3
SPEAKER_02
I agree.
3
SPEAKER_02
Working them out or working them up.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, but it s not, they don t call it the stuck stage.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s the problem.
3
SPEAKER_01
We re in negotiation with them.
3
SPEAKER_00
We re at about 35 minutes now.
3
SPEAKER_00
Do you want to start kind of closing up in the last couple of minutes?
3
SPEAKER_00
Is there anything that you think we should ask Scott that
3
SPEAKER_00
he maybe hasn t weighed in on that he might want to.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I think let s do a brief because we are kind of pushing the time window a bit on this inaccurate sales forecasting.
3
SPEAKER_01
If there s one trick of the trade or even one habit that you see people that are good at this do, I m sure you ve been in organizations and you have clients that you like, they re really good at that.
3
SPEAKER_01
And if I could pinpoint one thing, this is what makes them really good at that.
3
SPEAKER_01
I d love to hear that before we wrap.
3
SPEAKER_02
It s going to be a super unsexy answer, but you need the answers.
3
SPEAKER_02
You need your reps to be giving you all the correct inputs.
3
SPEAKER_02
to correctly forecast.
3
SPEAKER_02
So I think the best organizations make it hyper easy for reps to give all the answers that the leader needs without it feeling like a tedious task.
3
SPEAKER_02
Most of that should just be automated now.
3
SPEAKER_02
And you need that.
3
SPEAKER_02
Again, it s unsexy.
3
SPEAKER_02
But if you re missing a few key fields, you could be massively off your forecast.
3
SPEAKER_02
And if you re a public company or if you re
3
SPEAKER_02
you know, accountable to your board, these are not okay.
3
SPEAKER_02
You can t have those, you know, little misses.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s really good.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it s good.
3
SPEAKER_01
And we let that happen, don t we?
3
SPEAKER_01
Sales leaders, we let that happen.
3
SPEAKER_01
Like, oh, because they re nice.
3
SPEAKER_01
Oh, they re trying.
3
SPEAKER_01
I know Scott will get it eventually.
3
SPEAKER_01
And then we still forecast on blank data.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s really great.
3
SPEAKER_01
Really great.
3
SPEAKER_00
Want to hit the chat room real quick, Bill, for a couple of questions?
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, one quick here.
3
SPEAKER_00
Here s a question from, I hope I m pronouncing the name correctly, Kid R. What percentage of time and effort a week should a salesperson be putting into populating their CRM tool?
3
SPEAKER_02
Zero.
3
SPEAKER_01
Oh, my man.
3
SPEAKER_02
I think if you re if you re doing that, there s tools out there that that, like, like outreach, like any sales execution platform out there that will automatically do that for you.
3
SPEAKER_02
And if I would make a case to your leader, that, hey, I m spending
3
SPEAKER_02
three hours a week on this, extrapolate that across however many AEs you have on the team, it becomes super meaningful.
3
SPEAKER_02
And then it becomes a problem.
3
SPEAKER_02
They re like, okay, maybe we can go fix it.
3
SPEAKER_02
And there is a solution.
3
SPEAKER_02
So that would be my answer.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_00
So you re saying you re spending 150 hours a year times the number of salespeople.
3
SPEAKER_00
It doesn t take long to
3
SPEAKER_00
to pay that off or to find a huge ROI on that.
3
SPEAKER_01
Well, if you were looking for people interested in outreach, I think you just got about 40 million.
3
SPEAKER_01
Even though people love Salesforce or HubSpot or whatever, they love it.
3
SPEAKER_01
They don t like populating it.
3
SPEAKER_01
I don t know anyone that likes plugging stuff into it.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so there s your reason, everybody, to go talk to Scott and his team at Outreach.
3
SPEAKER_01
You don t have to do that anymore.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s great.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s a huge problem to solve, that it just kind of comes, the population part of it comes with your normal behavior.
3
SPEAKER_01
Like you said, it s a doing tool.
3
SPEAKER_01
Bravo on that, man.
3
SPEAKER_01
Glad we saved that for the end.
3
SPEAKER_01
I hope everyone listens all the way through.
3
SPEAKER_01
Jeez, that was right there.
3
SPEAKER_00
So for the people on the live call here, we re going to be sending you an email over the next few days.
3
SPEAKER_00
And you can get a chance to be on the phone with one of Scott s people or Scott.
3
SPEAKER_00
For the people who are hearing this on the normal stream, in the show notes, there will be a link to outreach.io.
3
SPEAKER_00
You can learn more about how to get with somebody there a little bit about the tool.
3
SPEAKER_00
So
3
SPEAKER_00
We can leave it at that today.
3
SPEAKER_00
That way everybody s covered if you want to learn more about the tech tool.
3
SPEAKER_00
And Scott, we really, I really appreciate having you here today.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s been awesome.
3
SPEAKER_00
Great perspectives.
3
SPEAKER_00
Thank you guys.
3
SPEAKER_02
That was a lot of fun.
3
SPEAKER_02
Thanks, man.
3
SPEAKER_01
All right.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s it.
3
SPEAKER_01
We ll see you next time.
3
SPEAKER_01
See you next time.
3
SPEAKER_01
Bye.