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All right, well, welcome back today.
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Thrilled to death to be with a longtime friend, fan, friend.
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I ve been a fan of his for a long time, and very rare that we get interviews with local people who have founded software companies that support salespeople.
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So thrilled to death to have my friend Bill Johnson with me, the CEO and founder of SalesView, live from Indianapolis, Indiana.
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Bill, thanks for being with me, man.
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Brian, I can t thank you enough for having the opportunity to join you on this podcast.
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And I love that you were talking just before we got going.
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We re doing a little pre-show work.
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And those of you who listen to my podcast, you know we don t do a ton of pre-show work.
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We just go.
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Bill s kind of that way.
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We can riff for probably longer than we care to admit.
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But the one thing we just were talking about,
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was, we ve been doing this for a minute, both of us.
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And I want to start there, because I want to give some perspective to like, we ve got a lot of young listeners, it s podcast, you know what I mean?
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And let s talk about where sales was and where it s headed first.
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And I loved what you were saying, you were sort of self describing your initial entree into the sales function.
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Just let s talk about where it s been where it s going to start with.
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Sure.
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I m a dinosaur when it comes to selling.
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I chose the sales role because I wasn t part of the lucky sperm club.
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I had to make my own way.
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I knew the harder I worked, the more money I could make.
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Back when I started selling, there were no SDRs, there were no BDRs.
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I went and bought a $495 Harris Industrial Directory that had all the names of companies in various cities.
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You d find who you were trying to target, the VP of engineering, VP of sales.
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You picked up the phone and you called, because email didn t exist then.
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And you picked up the phone and you called, and then secretary answered the phone.
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And said, I m sorry, Don s not in right now.
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Can I take a message?
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Yeah, Bill Johnson calling.
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And, you know, probably 10% of the time, he d actually call back.
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It s a little different today.
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a multitude of data tools and intent tools and all this stuff.
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And as I was sharing, I ve got 76,000 unopened emails in my inbox.
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I don t take the time to delete them.
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And I recognize the challenge that if you re a 22, 23, 24 year old entering this sales career, I d, I still love it.
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I ve got one of my daughters and I love it.
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But man, I think about it was hard when I was young.
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It s harder today, in my opinion.
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The noise is great.
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So I love that statement, the noise, there s a lot of noise.
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And this is where I think as we evolve, and I love, so a couple of things.
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So that $495 for the Harris Directory, is that right?
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What it was?
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I mean, I m not gonna ask the year.
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That s a lot of cash then.
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83.
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Right, that s a lot of cash.
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$495 is a lot of cash.
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All you got, and it was a lot back then, was the phone number and the name, right?
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And it s so funny.
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Exactly.
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Even when I started in sales coaching, my number one, the number one subject I got when I started in this business in 1997, June 3rd, 1997, I started doing this, was how to get past the gatekeeper.
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I haven t, I haven t heard that in 10 years, how to get past the gatekeeper.
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No gatekeepers anymore, right?
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There are no gatekeepers.
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It doesn t exist anymore.
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It s so interesting.
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Um,
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And now I want to talk about the, this is so funny.
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You bring this up.
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So the sales thing is hard.
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It s hard to get attention.
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And then there s also, cause we have all this technology.
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You would think it would be easier because we have all the data, all the knowledge we can find anybody s email.
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We can buy systems that like load up emails.
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And then even with auto dialers that dial the phone for us, you and I didn t have that way to go one at a time, old school, right?
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Yeah.
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And so what where s the gap there?
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Why is it harder?
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Because I agree, it s hard.
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And we have all these tools to make it easier.
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It doesn t make any sense.
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I want your take on that.
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Well, I think, you know, the big challenge is so I ll go back a little bit my career where I was selling mechanical design software, and there were five companies and doing it doing half a billion a year each
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And I would tell competitors, I would tell companies, look, the only difference between us all is the person sitting across the table from you.
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And you got to trust them.
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And if you don t trust them, you shouldn t buy from them.
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And then along came an upstart that revolutionized the whole industry that was five times more productive than everybody else.
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And I got fortunate to join them and they displaced the other five competitors over time.
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The challenge today, in my opinion, is we make it easy for sales reps to send emails.
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We make it easy for them to find phone numbers or to find cell phone numbers.
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I think what s lacking is the innate ability to help sales reps differentiate and drive the value of their solution so that it is
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Recognized by the prospect they re selling to I mean somebody came to me and said You know you invest a dollar you ll get five dollars back shit.
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I m all in right, right?
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And and then and then I think you re right the we spend here s what i m seeing
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You said, so we ve got all the email, we ve got the email cadences.
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So we set up all the email cadences in CRM, and the email cadence is working.
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I m sure you as a CEO and me as a founder of Blaine Zebra, I can t tell you how many of those things a day, right?
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And it s the cadence, you just watch it go, right?
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It s inauthentic, it s not targeted, even when it is like, so we re IU guys, Indiana University people, right?
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That s us.
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I ll get one that says, you know, the subject line says, go Hoosiers.
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Hey, Brian, I see you went to IU, go Hoosiers.
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And then it started.
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I m like, you have no idea where Indiana is or what a Hoosier is.
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I flunked out my third year.
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Totally right.
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Exactly.
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Yeah, exactly.
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I didn t graduate.
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Exactly.
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I had to go to the school of hard knocks things.
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So I like the idea of, um,
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The the value thing and I think that one of the problems is the attention has turned to getting the meeting And away from the communication of the value along the way Because those cadences are shit, right?
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They just they re awful.
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There s no value in the cadence.
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What if there were value in the cadence?
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Maybe I would have a better result.
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Maybe I lean into that.
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What are your thoughts on that?
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Oh, you re
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Caden s tools make it easy to blast people with a variety of lousy content.
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Amen.
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Amen to that.
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Everybody listening, write that down.
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It s what it is.
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It is.
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That s sad, isn t it?
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It s, you know, and I m, like I said, I m not saying it s easy to find relevant content that tweaks people s ears.
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So they want to hear more.
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They want to meet with you.
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They want to,
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play more, but man, it, that s what you have to work on.
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If you want to be successful today.
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Yes.
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The other thing I think about the, the time spent on trying to get the meeting with the cadence and the follow-up on the cadence and all that jazz and the chase, chase, chase to try to get a demo.
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That s a big, you know, software thing is chase, chase, chase, try to get a demo or someone else s chase, chase, chase, try to get a meeting.
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And when they get in the meeting, because they ve been chasing so long, and it s so hard to chase and find people, then they just vomit everything.
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And they get there and spew, spew, spew, spew, spew, right?
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How many times have you seen that, Brian?
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100,000, million.
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I can t even tell you.
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There s no number big enough.
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So what is one to do if one is leading a sales team, or if I m a salesperson, and I m kind of evaluating?
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It s nice, too, the timing of this to go into 2024.
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Um, what are some things that I can do or some, uh, things I can take inventory of that, um, as I had a 24, my up my skill ability, that sort of stuff.
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You know, the, the, I look at it back when I was a dinosaur selling you, you had face to face meetings.
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And so you could sit in somebody s office and look and see if they had a cross on the wall or.
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pictures of their kids or their wife or their bowling league or whatever.
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You d learn a little bit about them without having to ask a lot of questions.
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In the virtual world, I tasked my sales reps to say, learn two personal things about the person you re talking to.
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It s not always show up and throw up.
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It s not show up and throw up.
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It shouldn t be show up and throw up.
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Because despite the virtual world, sales is still a relationship game.
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People do buy from people.
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And you got to figure out a way to personalize the selling relationship.
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And if you don t do that, man, you better have the cure for cancer.
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I m buying from you.
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No, because the other thing, too, it diminishes.
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People don t want to hear this, salespeople especially, is that if you can t personally bring some element of that, like a knowledge thing or a connection or whatever, and if I can automate all the cadences, eventually I can automate the whole damn thing.
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I don t need any salespeople.
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So we re almost doing ourselves a disservice by not doing that.
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And so you hit on a topic that just drives me freaking crazy.
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So I m a LinkedIn junkie.
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I love LinkedIn.
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And here s what people don t do on LinkedIn, in my opinion.
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So I go to a profile, I m just randomly going to one.
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And I see the first one.
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So here s this person, her name is Lisa, she lives in Dallas.
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Okay, I just clicked on something.
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So and what they look at, and they re like, Oh, what does she do?
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There s her title.
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Maybe they look at her title there, then they stop.
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And this personal stuff, you got to give yourself a chance on LinkedIn to scroll past this stuff and get on down here.
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So here it says she did overseas volunteer work for six years in Japan.
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Six years she did that.
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That s very interesting.
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My cousin lives in Japan and I, if you flunked down in three years, I flunked down to Japanese as a minor at Bloomington, Indiana in about 18 months.
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Flunked out of Japanese, but I m so interested.
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That s such a unique thing, isn t it?
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Yeah.
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And it drives me nuts that people to your, so I love your charge to your sales team, find something personal.
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And then what I m saying, if you need a tool to do that, holy cow, LinkedIn is so easy just to be, you gotta scroll down a minute, just a little bit down.
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You know what I mean?
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Drives me nuts.
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Right.
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And, and, and then all you have to do is ask one open-ended question.
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What was it like spending six years in Japan?
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That s it.
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20 minutes later, 20 minutes later, right?
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You know,
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What was it like spending, didn t that a great.
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Yeah.
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See everyone listening to this, you just take that.
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Well, what was it like spending six years in Japan?
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That s it.
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Right.
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No, one s doing that.
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You know, well, Hey, thanks for taking the time today.
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I thought what I do is like, ask you a few questions about your business.
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And they blew into that, you know, upfront contract from Sandler and like, Oh, the, you know, and then right into the business stuff.
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I was saying, you know, it s interesting.
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My cousin lives in Japan.
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I studied Japanese.
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I was horrible at, I see.
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What was that like?
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It s then you re there, right?
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Like, Oh gosh, no, no, no, no, no.
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You re different.
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You just differentiate.
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Instantly.
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Instantly.
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Sales reps.
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Instantly.
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Nothing to do with your product.
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Nothing to do with what you do.
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Nothing to do with feature function.
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Just by being a human.
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That s it.
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So funny.
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I go crazy.
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As you know, I m referee football in the national football league.
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It says it right there on my LinkedIn profile.
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I ve had to go back and count all the cadences I m a part of that are air quotes personalized.
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I haven t had one person mentioned that.
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You talk about a lay down.
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I m like, what are you doing here, man?
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drives me nuts.
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Oh my gosh.
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You hit a nerve with me.
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Okay.
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So now, so we ve, um, oh, I want to validate something else you said.
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And I love this.
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This comes from a young woman.
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I think it s her second sales job.
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I know a friend of a friend.
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I know, I think she s less than 30 or right there.
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Like, so she s young in her sales career.
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We re on a training call the other day.
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She goes, Brian, I got to tell you something.
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I go, what?
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She s like,
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face-to-face is the way to go.
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And I m like, whoa, you know, hearing that from a Gen Zer, I m like, she s like, I ve been chasing this one client that her prospect, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
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And finally I m like, screw it, I m going to go see him.
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And I went and see him, we had the best meeting, da, da, da, talked about all this stuff, got to know each other, went to lunch.
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We ve lost the art of face-to-face.
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We think, we think, we think the scale wins.
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So we stay back here behind the mic, behind the Zoom, right?
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Yeah.
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No, it s, it s funny.
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At a previous job, I was accused of being the VP of golf.
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Because I would try, you know, I try to get the decision maker out on the golf course.
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And if they went, I never once talk business.
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It was all family.
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That was a good shot.
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Oh man, your putter s not working very well, you know, and inevitably, inevitably.
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They d come around and say, hey, you know, we ve been out here to three hours.
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You haven t brought up your product once.
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I said, you know, the golf course is for you to get to know me a little bit and me to get to know you.
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And I ll share a funny anecdote on that.
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Yeah.
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You can go to any Lowe s or Home Depot and find Aaron s lawn and garden tractors, uh, for sale.
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Yeah.
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Back in the early nineties, we were trying to sell engineering software to Aaron s lawn and garden.
1
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And so we invited Dan Aarons.
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Oh, happened to have the right last name.
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I think I was going to say, I know there was a guy named Aaron.
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Yeah.
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And at that time he was, he s now president and CEO and he sits on the Packers board.
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So he s the NFL.
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Anyway, I invited him out to play golf at Whistling Straits up in Wisconsin.
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He goes by there.
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On the 12th hole, he finally says, hey, Bill, it s been fun playing golf with you, but you haven t brought up your product one time.
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He said, I m out here.
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I want to learn about your product a little bit, but I ve enjoyed it.
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I gave him a good analogy and they bought.
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Nine years later, working for a different company, happened to be 15 minutes away and I called him up and said, hey, Dan, I m in the area.
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Can I swing by and say hi?
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Not trying to sell him anything.
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He was president of the company and he told us,
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He told his admin, find 15 minutes or Bill can come by.
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Awesome.
1
SPEAKER_00
Awesome.
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SPEAKER_00
Right.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
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Easy, easy, easy.
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You know, if you can, you know, and not everybody plays golf and not every prospect plays golf, but if you can get somebody away.
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for four hours to spend with you.
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It is what your young lady said, face-to-face.
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It is.
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SPEAKER_00
It is.
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Her name is Lindsay.
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She said that.
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And I just wish, you know, I think we had the COVID thing, and then Zoom came along.
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SPEAKER_00
And I appreciate the efficiency, but we ve made it binary.
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SPEAKER_00
We ve made it gone.
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SPEAKER_00
We used to do face-to-face, and now we only do Zoom.
1
SPEAKER_00
We only do Teams.
1
SPEAKER_00
We ve gone too far, right?
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SPEAKER_00
Let s go back the other way a minute.
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SPEAKER_00
That s good.
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And unfortunately, some big companies, and we have several of them, that refuse to let any of their employees do something like that.
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Even though they ve been customers for five years or six years,
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And it s, I d love to reward them with the opportunity to get out for four hours.
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SPEAKER_01
And I, you know, it s not like we re doing kickbacks or anything illegal, but it s right.
1
SPEAKER_01
You know, Oh, uh, we can t have, you can t send us anything worth more than $25.
1
SPEAKER_01
How much, how much of that yeti mug costs?
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, totally.
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SPEAKER_00
A hundred percent.
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SPEAKER_00
A thousand yetis are broke.
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SPEAKER_00
So let s talk about, there s something that came up, your group, I heard one of your team members talk about this idea.
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I wanna switch gears into the.
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This is a very hot topic.
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So CRMs, for a lot of salespeople, are the devil.
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SPEAKER_00
They hate them.
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SPEAKER_00
I feel like it s big brother talking to them all the time.
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SPEAKER_00
And I heard one of your teammates talk about this.
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And several of my clients heard this.
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SPEAKER_00
And I asked what stuck from some of the people you heard talk at this event we had.
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SPEAKER_00
And they said, this guy said, make your CRM,
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What do you say your system of action of action over system of record, make it a system of action over system of record.
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SPEAKER_00
And of having, you know, I hear lots of stuff as you do, like through the years, very few things stick, that thing is stuck.
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SPEAKER_00
So can you talk about what it means for a salesperson who despises their CRM to make their CRM their system of action over their system of record?
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SPEAKER_01
Yeah, that s it s it s a great it s it s a struggle because traditional it s why.
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Sales view exists.
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It s why we do what we do, but the challenge is.
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SPEAKER_01
The traditional CRM was a system of record.
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SPEAKER_01
It was meant to capture names, contacts, phone numbers, supposed to capture activity.
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SPEAKER_01
The problem was it was too hard to.
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load activity.
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SPEAKER_01
As a career sales guy, I always look for the easiest way to get a deal done.
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SPEAKER_01
CRM has done nothing to help me get a deal done.
1
SPEAKER_01
Did you log that appointment you had on Tuesday with Brian Neal?
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I ll make sure I go put it in.
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Nobody knows that I made 10 phone calls to get that appointment with Brian Neil because I didn t log it.
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The fundamental issue is there s a salary being paid for a rep to do that activity or those actions.
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If it s not recorded anywhere, there is no history of the action that was done.
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We know that the sales rep turnover game is not any better today than it was
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30 years ago.
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If you re rocking it and got a good product and you re selling a lot, you re sticking around.
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If you re not, you re going on to the next job.
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You look at people s LinkedIn profiles, one year, one year, one year, one year.
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The history, that system of action that everybody s done, if it s not there, it s gone.
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It s incumbent upon companies
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to help make their CRM become a system of action.
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That s what we enable.
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I m not trying to turn this into a commercial, but I think it is one of those things that people need to look at.
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How do I make it easier for a rep to log all their actions that they do?
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Not only for history s sake, but let s figure out what works.
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You know, if some specific email content is driving a 10% response rate versus the typical 0.0001%, by all means, we should leverage that across the organization.
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But it s not that that action isn t recorded.
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Nobody learns.
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That s right.
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We don t know why people bought, and we don t know why they didn t buy, right?
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Yeah, interesting.
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And I love this.
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So and I even think, I mean, I know you all have software that helps with this, but on the other side of that, I think just a mental shift.
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And I m with you.
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I m glad you said what you said, which is it s the company s responsibility to make the CRM the salesperson s system of action over the system of record.
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And I think that s not how companies think about it.
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I think companies think of it the opposite.
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I want to get this data put together so I can manage my sales team.
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So I love that.
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And then I just think the mental shift of that in general is step one.
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There are some things I can do that I don t need software to do, right?
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that just, you know, just some common sense sort of things like to say, okay, I ll use myself as an example.
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So if things don t get on my calendar, they don t exist, they don t happen.
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So if I had some follow-up mechanism with my CRM that would force me to schedule a meeting or something like that, or tell me what to do, that would be a system of action for me.
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versus just recording my notes on something will be a thing.
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Or if it helped me, if CRM helped create space for me to make proposals, because I hate writing proposals, whatever it is.
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So I think there are some things people can do just to flip.
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And I would challenge sales leaders.
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Not many sales leaders listen to our podcast.
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They should.
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They don t.
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But the sales teams can forward this episode to them and say, hey, boss, listen to this at minute 2139.
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is they should evaluate all the stuff they require their sales team to do and ask the question, is this requirement helping them close a deal?
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I loved what you said there.
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And if it is, let s keep it in.
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If it s not, let s don t.
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And if it is, like you said, let s learn.
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Then we have to extract the stuff to learn from.
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Don t just do it to say, hey, we learned that you suck.
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You don t make enough calls.
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How about, hey, we learned that our hotspot for getting a meeting booked is between stage 11 and stage 13 in our cadence.
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And you re giving up at stage eight or whatever.
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I don t know.
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I like that idea of the company s responsibility.
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Well, I think, you know, what we see is the really good reps that are highly successful, they will find a way to do
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to have a system of action.
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And nine times out of 10, it s an Excel spreadsheet.
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Because the CRM is too laborious, and it s a lot easier to put a check in the box, call one, call two, email one.
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And they do it themselves.
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And it s a travesty for corporate America when that happens, but it is.
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It s a thing.
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So we re talking to Bill Johnson, CEO and founder of SalesView.
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And how can people, so our listeners that are, and I will say, he won t say it because Bill s not this way, but I will.
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Their product is awesome.
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We have several Blaine Zebra clients that let SalesView overlay their CRM.
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And I love it because here s my description of what your product does, Bill.
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And I m this way.
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I m a lazy guy.
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I do a lot of stuff in life, but I fancy myself lazy because I do what you said.
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I try to find the easiest path.
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That s my lazy way.
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And what SalesView helps me do is it basically helps me not think.
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I almost don t have to think.
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It just tells me what to do.
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That s my state school version of the description.
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I love that you said that, Brian, because it s a great segue.
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We had a large financial services client
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that a 200 reps, a 26-year-old new hire was 300% of plan his first year.
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I got invited to a meeting with the SVP of sales who basically called him in and he just said, how did you do it?
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What did he do?
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This has never happened before, a rookie blowing everybody away.
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I showed up here, my boss said, hey, we got this tool sales view.
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It helps you organize your day.
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I want you to use it.
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He said the first day was a little weird.
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Second week, it got a little better.
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By the third week, I would walk in and my day was in front of me, usually Wednesday, Thursday, Friday.
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Thirty days later, people started applauding me for calling them back when I d say I would or the persistence.
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The SUV said, OK, you just follow the process that we enabled.
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Yep.
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We had to get everybody.
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He said, well, you pay him a salary, don t you?
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You tell him you either use it or you go find another job.
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That s it.
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I mean, literally, that s it.
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That s I mean, it s just but that s exactly what it does.
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It just plans your day for you.
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And you don t have to go through some of the cumbersome things you might on the back end of the CRM and tasks and all this baloney and stuff.
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And it s just it s a really great tool.
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So encourage all of our listeners to check it out.
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How can people find you or SalesView, Bill?
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Well, it s bill.salesview.com is my email.
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And I m on LinkedIn.
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And send me a message.
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I try to respond and go from there.
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78,000 unopened emails.
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I don t know about that.
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I m kidding.
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I m teasing.
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If it s a sales call, you ll respond, right?
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The problem is,
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If you, everybody takes one minute, make sure your content is relevant.
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Yes.
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Yes.
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You know, I do see the subject line, you know, and you know, yeah, I ve got a pixel blocker, so they don t.
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Yeah.
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So the subject line I would just put there, I want to, I want, I listened to Brian Neal s podcast and I want a demo.
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I want to see sales view.
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Someone hook me up.
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By the way, sales view is spelled funny ish, right?
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Well, it s S A L E S.
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V as in Victor, U as in umbrella, E as in elephant.
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V-U-E, not V-I-E-W.
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Yeah, we gotta tell people that.
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You know, there s this thing called the web.
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I was kind of slow to figure it out.
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By the time I figured it out, V-I-E-W was already taken.
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You can probably buy it back for like 250 grand now, couldn t you?
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Something like that.
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Yep.
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Okay, hey man, thanks for being with me.
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That was awesome.
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And so we ll send all of our podcast people to you and all of our clients to at least check out what Bill does.
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Their work is great and it solves the problem that most salespeople have, which is trying to figure out what to do next and makes all your CRM way, way easier.
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So it s an agent of, or a system of record, or a system of action rather.
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It s good.
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All right, man.
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Go Hoosiers.
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Appreciate your time.