Episode 36: Sales Implementation And Sales Team Accountability With Doug Miller, Fractional Sales VP
Doug Miller
Doug Miller is a sales expert with over 20 years of successful sales & sales management experience at both enterprise organizations and small to medium size businesses. At this point in his career, he now functions as an outsourced Senior Vice President of Sale as the CEO of SaylzeVP. Doug helps companies achieve breakthrough sales growth, discipline, and accountability, using proven sales processes.
Doug works with clients across all industries to create sustainable revenue growth by building great sales organizations. He does this by accessing and resolving issues with his proven sales strategies including assessing and managing sales talent, compensation plans and sales targets. He’ll ensure the team has the correct enablement tools, business development activities, and that they’re attacking the right markets.
In this episode of Prospecting on Purpose, we're delving headfirst into the dynamic realm of sales implementation, where strategies take shape, and businesses thrive. Sales implementation isn't just about having a product or service; it's about making it work effectively in the market. To shed light on this crucial facet of business, we've invited Doug Miller of SaylzeVP, an expert in fractional Sales VP services, to join us. Doug's insights and experiences are nothing short of transformative as he unveils the intricate workings of building a successful sales strategy. Whether you're a startup founder struggling to wear multiple hats or a seasoned CEO aiming to revitalize your sales team's performance, Doug's expertise provides a guiding light. Discover how his hands-on approach can help bridge the market gap, streamline your sales processes, and ultimately supercharge your business's growth. If you're looking for actionable advice on sales implementation and a roadmap to unlock your team's full potential, you need to tune in!
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Sales Implementation And Sales Team Accountability With Doug Miller, Fractional Sales VP
Doug Miller is a sales expert with over twenty years of successful sales and sales management experience at both enterprise organizations and small to medium-sized businesses. At this point in his career, he functions as an Outsourced Senior Vice President of Sales and the CEO of SaylzeVP. Doug helps companies achieve breakthrough sales growth, discipline, and accountability using proven processes.
Doug works with clients across all industries to create sustainable revenue growth by building great sales organizations. He does this by assessing and resolving issues with his proven sales strategies, including assessing and managing sales talent, compensation plans, and sales targets. He'll ensure that the team has the correct enablement tools and business development activities and that they're attacking the right markets. I just met Doug and every time we chat, we get sucked into this sales conversation vortex. It's so much fun. His experience is fascinating. What he is doing is inspiring and interesting. I'm excited that we met and I'm looking forward to this conversation. Without further ado, Doug, welcome to the show.
Thanks, Sara. It's so nice to be here. I'm very excited.
I'm excited to talk. Since you're a sales guru, I'm going to throw this question at you right out of the gate. What is the best sales tip you've ever received?
The best sales tip that I've ever received is to not spend all your time with people like you. It's a classic mistake that many salespeople make. You find somebody who is enthusiastic about what you're selling and the value that you're going to provide. It's like a drug. You want to spend all your time with them because they're providing you all this amazing positive feedback for what you're doing and it feels good.
The reality is in most companies, there are many stakeholders that make the decision whether to move forward with what you're trying to solve or not. Amongst those people are the people who aren't talking to you. They are the people that have objections to what you do. If you're spending all your time with those people that like you, you're not finding the issues that can prevent your deal from ultimately closing. You're not leaving yourself the opportunity to address and do the appropriate objection handling to get those other people on board so that your deal does close.
I would call that surrounding the project with all the stakeholders or decision-makers.
Too many people focus on a handful of them. All of a sudden, a deal goes south on them and they're like, “Why did that happen?” This person was so excited. You realized there were three other people who were not in your favor. You got to work on those.
When you think about that person who was excited, sometimes clients don't want to let you down or have the uncomfortable conversation of giving you the bad news that it's not going your way. I see that too. The customers or prospects like you back so they don't want to let you down but instead, you lose the deal. It's like, “If we had this conversation months ago, it could have prevented that.”
“Tell me what's wrong.” Another facet to it is don't focus just on the positives even with the people that like you. Ask them, “What are the challenges that you see?” Try to identify those early on so you're addressing those as you can. When the deal gets into the final stages of closing and people are looking at signing a check to pay for something, that's when their emotional concerns all come out. They're like, “What about this or that? What happens if this happens?” All those objections come out at the end. The more you can try to address those as you're going through the process, the more chance you'll get to a successful conclusion.
I had this whole different line of questioning but as the audience can tell, we go off a path here. I want to ask you a little bit about that. Let's say you have your champion that you're working with. I'm a little bit selfishly asking for myself because I have a deal that I'm working on with a client. I have a great champion who I'm working with. He has to go to his leadership and prove my value to them.
My strategy and success have always been to find a way directly to the top guy or the top decision-maker. Sometimes you have to be very delicate with that because you have your champion in front of you. You don't want to discredit their value or worth. What would you recommend if you have your sales champion and you're trying to get to the other decision-makers? You gave one script. “What are some challenges you see that could prevent this from moving forward?” Do you have any other tactics for getting to those different decision-makers?
This is a key area too. A lot of times, the entry into an opportunity is not necessarily with the top decision maker. As salespeople and sales managers, we are all trained that what we want to do is take a top-down approach. That's not always how it works out for us. The question becomes, “How do I effectively get to that top person without alienating my champion?”
A lot of times, the entry into a sales opportunity is not necessarily with the top decision maker.
The key there is to be inclusive. If you ask somebody to introduce you to their boss because that's the person that you think is the key decision-maker, that has the risk of feeling like you're trying to skip level that person or diminish their value or their importance to the process. What I like to do is simply say, “Can you schedule a meeting where you include your boss?”
That automatically validates that the person should be at the table and included in the conversation. It’s including your champion and not making them feel threatened by introducing their boss. Also, having a discussion with them about how that meeting is going to go. What are you going to say? It’s so that person can promote that meeting to the key decision maker.
There are a lot of ways where you can make that sales champion look great to their boss too if you do that ahead of time.
Another key thing is complimenting the person you've been working with on how well they've been handling the process and what a pleasure it's been to work with them. All those things go to making that person feel good and playing to their personal agenda, which is to look good to their boss, if that makes it a lot less scary for that individual to make that introduction.
One thing that has been helping me is I've been saying, “What will make you look good?” I'll ask them. Sometimes it's very direct because it's easier to be direct sometimes.
A lot of times, these are big decisions for people. My career has been focused on selling enterprise software. It's a significant expense to the business, both for the software, as well as the implementation process. There are people that lose their jobs if these projects go south. They're nervous about it. They're anxious. They know they need to do it but choosing the right supplier or business partner is critical to their success. They know that if there's a bad decision made and they were leading the process, that can reflect poorly on them.
The first question I was originally going to ask you is to explain a little bit about your background in sales leadership. You've worked for very well-known big companies and then medium to small-sized companies in C-Suite roles. Can you give a little orientation on your background before we get into some of these implementation and accountability conversations?
I have been in sales leadership at very large software companies like Oracle. I led a regional team at Oracle. I've also spent a lot of time at small to medium-sized software companies. Lots of them have some very memorable but fun names like Red Pepper Software and Blue Martini, which were some time ago. I worked at a company called Logistics Technologies and Jaggaer. Interestingly, each of them sold a different class of enterprise software.
I've sold everything from enterprise resource planning systems to supply chain optimization, contract management and procurement, CRM, and marketing automation. From my perspective, the class of software hasn't pigeonholed me into one track, but I had a broad experience, which has introduced me to a number of different sides of businesses because these solutions have been used by procurement, sales, or the contract team. It's been an exploration of business across all the different functions.
All from a software and support standpoint. Can you give a definition of what enterprise software means if people aren't familiar with that term?
Enterprise software is software that a company uses that typically impacts multiple areas of the business. It is something that needs to be on a platform that's scalable so it can handle everything from small to medium-sized businesses up to the very largest enterprises. I sold software in the day when we sold perpetual licenses and it was all installed on-premise.
Now, everything is in the cloud and it's all subscription based. There has been a large economic shift in how people buy software as well. When you're looking at an enterprise, a lot of times, these are companies that have global locations or at least multiple locations. They may have a plant, distribution centers, corporate offices, and so on. The software needs to span across all of those different entities.
Thank you so much for that description. What's interesting about your answer is it does illustrate all of these different areas of sales, including the high-stakes environments in which you're selling. I would like to get into a little bit of the front-end side of sales, the go-to-market, and the actual sellers themselves.
I'd also like to pivot to some of the more implementations management, accountability, and motivating because that's where your skillset lies. That's an area that I'm not focusing on in my business but I want to learn more about. Maybe let's start from there in terms of selling and the sales teams that you've led. What do you think is the biggest asset that a sales team can possess?
The biggest asset that a sales team has is the actual salespeople on the team. It's the people. The advantage of having the right type of salespeople is something that you can't put a dollar value on. Individuals need to be motivated, both to be successful as well as being motivated by customer success, which is the best term to describe it. It's twofold.
A lot of people think that salespeople are just about making money. The reality of it is it's nice to close a deal and get a nice commission check but if after the sale, you've got an unhappy customer, as a salesperson, you're unhappy. Getting that enthusiasm for closing the deal and winning but also combining that with the human side of, “How do I make my customer successful,” is the biggest asset of all.
Sorry to go down this line of questioning but I had an experience where I bought a software package. It's typical where there's lead gen. I got a call from sales. I got kicked over to customer support. When I have problems, I have to wait for 24 hours for the chat response. I was very clear with this gentleman about what I was looking for. He sold me a bill of goods and then when I got into it, nothing in the software was what I needed. It was all like, “Nope, you got to upgrade that.” I was frustrated.
I messaged their tech support. I said, “I have to tell you, this is the sixth thing that I've been over-promised and under-delivered. I'm disappointed.” I CC'd the sales guy on it. I was expecting a phone call from him or an email saying, “What's going on?” None of that happened. Maybe in his eyes, I'm a little fish but I'm never going to recommend that software to anyone. I'm actively looking to go do a different software platform because of the experience.
Customer success means a lot. I don't know why he didn't call me back is one of the answers. I don't know if maybe he's not motivated or accountable. It rubbed me the wrong way and I would never treat someone that way on the other side. In terms of motivating, accountability, and software sales, in SaaS, Software as a Service model, once the deal is closed, it might be different from your experience because it's enterprise level but how are they staying engaged with their clients after the fact?
You're bringing up one of the biggest challenges in sales in general. Software is an interesting area of sales, specifically. One thing I can say about having spent the majority of my career in enterprise software sales is that customers’ expectations of how the software will work typically exceed what it may be capable of delivering. There are lots of nuances.
Software is an interesting area of sales. Customers’ expectations of how software will work typically exceed what it may be capable of delivering.
In some ways, it will exceed their expectations. In other ways, they're used to doing their job a certain way. They have an expectation of being able to do things a certain way. A lot of times, what they're trying to do, the software is capable of doing but they have to modify their approach. Modifying their approach is not something that they're like, “I want it to work the way I expected it to work.”
There is a lot of expectation setting and working with people to go through some process re-engineering. Your experience in particular is one that somebody didn't necessarily walk through what your process was and how you would do your job once you started doing it with the software. In the world that I came from, we spend a lot of time doing demonstrations of software, taking a customer's process, and showing them how it's going to play out when they implement this new product that they're buying.
Commercial off-the-shelf software is for the consumer or a small business. Sometimes resources are not as plentiful to be able to do the same level of demonstration, walkthrough, and customized approach that is taken with larger businesses. That can be a disadvantage because all of a sudden, you get to it and you're like, “I thought I could do this or do it this way.” All of a sudden, you've got to modify how you're doing it.
There should be a support person that you should be able to go to that will help you through that process. The fact that the salesperson never called you back if you called him, I would say that's not particularly a good practice on the salesperson's part because he's left you hanging and he's left you susceptible to feeling bad. I always found and recommend to my team, “If you have an unhappy customer, don't run and hide from them. Pick up the phone and take the time to talk to them.” A lot of times, their problems are solvable but they're frustrated and that frustration is real.
If you have an unhappy customer, don't run and hide from them. Pick up the phone and take the time to talk to them because a lot of times, their problems are solvable.
It's funny. The other sales tip that I would say, and this applies not just to enterprise software but any business, is people would always say, “I'll never satisfy that customer.” I always look at it. Somebody once said this to me, and I take it to heart. That is, “I've never known a customer that wanted to be unhappy.” There is no such thing. If a customer is complaining or upset, it's because they have a genuine problem. They would love to be wowed by what they bought as anybody would.
The key is to try to understand what the root cause of that unhappiness is and help them through it. A lot of times, it's not the software or the product that they bought. It's just that they don't know how to use it properly or how to apply it to the problem that they're trying to solve. If you can help them make that connection or get them to the right person who can do it, it's not always the salesperson who's going to solve the problem, but the customer wants that salesperson to connect them with the resolution.
The key thing is that they're going to always come back to the salesperson because it was the salesperson that made the promise to them. You're making that promise on behalf of your company and you're hoping and anticipating that your company is going to support those commitments that you've made. If your sense is the salesperson sold you a bill of goods, that's the worst reputation of the salesperson. You don't want that reputation.
If he called me, I would've said, “Here's what I laid out and what I was expecting.” If he would have asked me certain questions, he would have uncovered what I needed but he didn't ask me anything. That's the feedback I would give him had he called me back. I’m nice. I would never be a jerk. For the most part, I'm nice. I would use it as a teachable moment for both of us.
I'm on the side of the customer where I'm buying stuff. Maybe I need to ask more specific questions. It's a teachable moment for both of us, but he didn't choose to do it. It's okay. We're moving on. I appreciate that. When I think about the fear of upset customers, it seems like you probably have experienced a lot of difficult conversations in leadership.
I'm imagining you get pulled into when the problems get a lot bigger than when they're little Godzilla or an egg and now he's baby Godzilla. Now, he’s a giant Godzilla. It's harder to kill giant Godzilla so I like to kill the problem when it's smaller. How would you suggest people navigate difficult conversations? I like the script of, “I've never met a customer who wants to be unhappy.” They're the point person to solve and connect them to the resolution. Any other tips you'd have for difficult conversations?
Number one is you've got to listen to your customer. You have to hear their pain and understand. They had pain, to begin with, that you're supposed to be solving or they wouldn't have spent money with you. From a business perspective, money gets spent to solve problems or get something that they need. If what they have acquired from you isn't solving their problem, that's creating a different kind of pain and a new pain.
They haven't solved their problem and they spent money. They've got this new product that they've acquired from you and it's not doing what they expected it to do. Number one, you've got to listen and understand their problem. What they're looking for is a path to resolution. The key thing is you need to be the facilitator to help them get to the path of resolution.
It doesn't necessarily mean you have to be the one to solve the problem for them. Sometimes it's going to be somebody from your product management group or implementation team. There are different people who can solve these problems. Sometimes it's a technical issue that's going to require getting somebody involved on the engineering side to say, “Why isn't this working the way we thought it would be working?”
Typically, when they told you it could do something, it was their expectation that it would be able to do it. I will say this in defense of all salespeople everywhere. Salespeople don't typically say it's going to do something unless they believe it's going to do it. It never serves you well to promise something that you can't deliver on. That's a bad rep that salespeople get.
Promising something you can’t deliver on never serves you.
This is one of the other things that I coached my teams on, and this happened when I moved from being a VP of Sales into being a Chief Revenue Officer. I had responsibility for what is typically differentiated as new business versus selling to existing accounts or account management. It became very evident to me that to grow accounts, they needed to be happy customers. You're not going to sell more to customers that aren't happy. A lot of times, you find in account management that those people are salespeople too. It's a different focus like a new logo versus expanding on existing customers.
A lot of times, all the problems end up on the account manager's plate because they need to solve those problems to sell more products. People who are constantly moving on to new business are the ones like your guy who walked away from the problem and said, “That's somebody else's problem.” It's not necessarily the best approach with a new customer from my perspective but it does happen. When you find the account manager, they're more motivated a lot of times to help you find that path to resolution because they know that if they don't, you're not going to buy anymore from them.
That was a very helpful description. I would like to talk a little bit about business development as opposed to account management. Tell me if you disagree but I would bucket that as hunters looking for new business as opposed to farmers who are managing accounts and then getting deeper into their existing accounts. Would you agree with the hunter-farmer terms?
Yeah. I will tell you that when I moved into managing account management, I realized at that point in my career that the term hunter farmer belittles the person who's doing the account management. Farming sounds more like an easier job than hunting. We put these new logo salespeople on a pedestal and we forget the challenges that the account management side has.
I wish I had a statistic off the top of my head for this but it would be interesting to follow up to find out. Across all businesses though, what I've seen is a large percentage of revenue, and sometimes a larger percentage of revenue is coming from existing customers, getting them to buy more and expand. I don't know if you have used this term in your business but there's this concept of land and expand.
Somebody is going to say, “I'm going to buy this product for one plant. If it works and I'm satisfied, I have ten other plants that I can roll this out to.” Your success in that first plant means there are nine other opportunities but as the new logo rep, typically, that opportunity will get passed off to an account manager who will take responsibility for selling the other nine accounts. That's nine times the value of what the initial sale was.
Granted they're not having to make that initial sale, but interestingly enough, each one of those plants is going to have its unique requirements and set of stakeholders. In many ways, they are not as dissimilar from a new logo sale as people think they are. I'm throwing a bone out there to everybody who's managing in cash.
I like that. If you're a strategic account manager too, you're hunting within your account.
A key thing is you hire these uber-professional salespeople who are accustomed to working across very large organizations and different divisions. A lot of these companies which are divisions of larger companies have autonomous decision processes. They don't necessarily have to follow suit with what their counterparts did because their business model is different and the products that are coming out of that facility may be different. What they're doing may have a different set of requirements than somebody else in the same company that you sold to previously. It's an interesting business model.
When you think about the skillsets that are required from hunters, new business development, as opposed to account management, a good sales team needs the skills of both types of people. One of the things that I will admit I was weak at was some of the CRM stuff. I love to find new customers, get the value in the product, and get them over the finish line.
I would never leave them hanging ever because I know how to connect the dots but the CRM side of it and some of the more backend organization side would not be my strong suit. I'd like to spend a little bit of time on that part of it. There's a lot that salespeople are juggling. There are a lot of moving parts and pieces. Leadership, pipeline management, and product management, you need that to be updated. Can we talk a little bit about the implementation side? We now have our team. It's a mix of all the skillsets. How do we get that team to meet their goals using some of your implementation tools?
For anybody who doesn't know, maybe we should define what CRM is. It is Customer Relationship Management. Typically, the biggest one out there is Salesforce and it's that system that keeps track of everything from your leads and the conversion of those leads to opportunities, and then how that opportunity progresses through the various sales stages.
Salespeople are supposed to utilize that tool to report all of their sales activity in one place. Who are the various contacts in that account? You can set up contacts. You can go ahead and identify qualification information about it. It tracks your emails. You should log your calls. All the activity the salesperson does day-to-day should be recorded in that CRM system.
When CRM systems were new, I was at a company that implemented Salesforce. The CEO of the company said, “Everybody needs to start using this tool.” I was the top salesperson and I was a bit arrogant, probably what would be known as the Lone Ranger. I was like, “This tool is for you. This is not going to help me close business. I'm not doing this.” The CEO of the company said, “If you're not interested in doing this, you might want to look for a new job.” I was like, “I can do this.”
I went from that person who was averse to doing it to being a huge promoter of utilizing CRM. Honestly, any company that is not tracking their sales opportunity is missing an opportunity to be able to evaluate the opportunities that they're in. If you don't have that information available to you, even as an individual contributor salesperson, you are working on multiple opportunities.
Any company that is not tracking their sales opportunities is missing out on being able to evaluate the opportunities that they're in.
There are key metrics about that opportunity that you will not have visibility to if you're not tracking how long that sales cycle has been in process. A salesperson can blink and that sales opportunity may be three months old. It hasn't moved forward very much. That might be a key indicator that you're spending time either doing the wrong things in that opportunity that it's not progressing or maybe it's an opportunity that you shouldn't be investing your time in anymore because it's not moving forward.
Be able to build out a map of your stakeholders. If you don't put who your contacts are in that account, you can't start to break it down and say, “Here are the various people that I'm working with. What are the various roles, and how are they connected to one another?” Being able to utilize technology to help you sell better is what CRM is all about.
There are advantages from a management standpoint too. In most sales environments that you're in, you need to somehow keep your managers up-to-date in terms of your activity. What I found was that when I started to keep all that information in Salesforce, the number of times my manager would call me to ask me about what was going on went way down because they could go into the system and look at it.
Vice versa, if I'm the manager and I have a sales team that is doing a great job, keeping that information in there, I may be answerable. In sales, you got these different levels. You can be a VP of Sales, SVP of Sales, or Chief Revenue Officer. It depends upon how big the company is, but as you move up that chain, the more information that's already in the system, the less these individuals at each level have to call the people on their teams to get that information. It all trickles back down to the individual salesperson who says, “What's going on in this opportunity?”
Some salespeople will spend their whole day and say, “I don't have time to be able to update the CRM.” They come back and it's this whole other task. They look at it by doing expense reports. I always equate it to that because I always hated doing my expense reports. The reality is the more you learn to work in your CRM, the better it is.
I would take my notes electronically and then I could copy and paste them in. I didn't have to rewrite all of them. If I had a desk day where I was following up and making phone calls, I would keep my CRM open and log my notes about the call as I was doing it so it wasn't this task I had as a follow-up at the end of my day. If you do it that way, it feels like a chore and a burden every day to keep it up-to-date.
That was my issue. I live in Los Angeles so you're driving all day. You’re on all day. By the time you get home, you're so hungry. You want to make a quesadilla and turn off your brain, “I got to go do Salesforce.” It was a burden. That’s how it felt. I appreciate you talking about being able to use the technology to make you sell better. I also like your point about managing the time you spend, whether that's addressing it if it's not moving forward. Is it because I'm not pushing it forward or is it because I need to drop the opportunity? That's very helpful too.
I'll make one other comment. I've been selling for a lot of years so I've seen the evolution of a lot of technology to help salespeople. The reality of it is salespeople have the advantage of much more sophisticated tools to help them record that information. There are tools that will transcribe your calls that you can use while you're on a phone call. I don't have to try to write all that up after my call. I can use a transcription.
If your company is using a tool like Gong, not to do a commercial for them, they automatically record all my calls and use AI to identify if I cover the right topics in my calls. Am I talking more than I'm listening? There are all kinds of tremendous metrics that these technologies provide. What I recommend to salespeople is to embrace the technology. It's there to help you. Sometimes people feel like it's Big Brother watching but that's not the objective of most of the sales tools that are available today.
Embrace the technology. It's there to help you.
That's a great positive spin on it. I've never heard of Gong. With the talking or listening, I don't know if I'd want to know. Let's talk a little bit about what you're doing. You are a fractional CRO. Can you explain what that means and what your business is doing?
It wasn't an easy decision to make because I left my last role at the end of the year. I went through a little bit of soul searching and evaluation of where I was at from a life stage perspective. The most obvious thing was to go on and find another VP of Sales role in another company. When I was looking at what I've been doing, I've been working with a series of smaller companies and I've been helping them set up their sales infrastructure.
It’s all the things we're talking about. I’m helping them define their comp plans and even create job descriptions for the salespeople, implement the CRM, develop what the sales process was that we were going to put into the CRM, and all of these different aspects. Also, managing the sales teams out of the gate and trying to help them identify what the strategy was that we were going to do to increase revenues and close more business. We evaluate the demonstrations and presentations that we were giving.
What I found was that I loved that whole process. I had been doing it successfully with smaller companies. I decided that a lot of these companies have a love-hate relationship with their VPs of Sales. VPs of Sales don't come cheap today. A lot of times, particularly with smaller startup companies, that's an expense that they're not ready for. They try to find one person to do both. They say, “If I could find a sales manager that would also be willing to sell, that would be perfect.”
The reality is if you have somebody who's got a wealth of experience and has reached a point where they're in a management role, it's not that they're not capable of selling. It's that they've developed another skillset and matured into a different role. I would say to somebody, “Sure, I can sell too,” but the reality is if you're spending your time doing both, you're not doing either effectively.
When you have a very small sales team, anywhere from 1 to 8 salespeople, you may or may not need a full-time Sales VP. The fractional model has been around in CEOs, Chief Marketing Officers, and Chief Financial Officers for a long time but it hasn't been around in the sales arena. The fractional Sales VP is a growing discipline where people like myself, who have managed teams and built sales infrastructure for companies, take that experience, work with smaller companies, and do it on what they need as a business.
They may need a VP of Sales to do a sales meeting once a week and one-on-ones with their salespeople to keep track of the opportunities and hold people accountable. They don't necessarily need somebody full-time to do it. That's me or other fractional Sales VPs who are doing what I'm doing and that are available for these companies to employ on a part-time basis or a contract basis.
It makes so much sense because it is a gap in the market. It's great to see that people are filling that gap. I've started to see now that I'm working with more startups or encountering more people who are in a founder type of role, where they are making money but it feels like the founder is the salesperson. Can you speak to that a little bit about what you see there when it's the person who started the business who's running the business and who is also going out and selling? It seems like this role is a nice solution to that.
Sometimes it's a huge relief to the founder or the CEO of a company. Sales is a profession unto itself and it's not necessarily for everybody. Not everybody is good at it. Not everybody likes to ask people to sign a contract and give them money. It's not their comfort zone. My answer to any CEO or founder of a company is that's a big role.
I was a CEO. You're managing marketing, product development, finance, and procurement. Every aspect of the business is your responsibility. You’re probably not spending as much time with sales as they need to be. Get somebody on your side that's focused on it. If a CEO is spending half a day a week and hire a fractional Sales VP for 1 to 2 days a week, that's anywhere from 2X to 4X the amount of time that they're spending with sales.
Sales Implementation: If a CEO is spending half a day a week and they hire a fractional sales VP for one to two days a week, that's anywhere from 2x to 4x the amount of time that they’re currently spending with sales.
There's a lot more benefit that the sales team is going to get out of having somebody to go to. Instead of having to work directly with the salespeople, you have your eyes and ears on your sales organization to make sure they're executing what you think they should be doing without having to invest the same amount of time. That's huge.
The other key thing that I would say to clarify what the role is, a lot of people say, “You're a consultant.” I'm like, “No, I'm not a consultant.” To me, a consultant comes in and comes up with a strategy and a direction and maps that out for a business, and then hands them the playbook or the roadmap for how to go about doing it. The people who are going to be the executioners of that strategy, like the consultant who came in and did it, are people who are at the company.
That's not the role I play. I come in as the Sales VP for a company. I’m hands-on managing what the salespeople are doing, helping them manage, review their opportunities, and helping them identify what the right strategy is. It's a sounding board. A lot of these people have done it for years and can come up with it on their own. Having somebody to go to that understands what they're going through, being able to strategize, and bounce ideas off of is typically something that most salespeople appreciate.
I feel like when you think about the founder or the CEO and they're doing so many things, they probably can't manage eight direct reports of a sales team. There's that buffer piece there but also, salespeople need support. They want that type of leadership, strategy, and collaboration like, “Doug, I made a big boo boo. Can you help me through it?” I've had to lean on some of my leaders for some bigger situations that I found myself in.
I've always appreciated the people that I've worked with. I'm sure that you are providing the solution to the founder from an actual delivering on implementation and numbers and managing the team, but also comradery, morale, and investment in the company and want to stay and see the company successful and their customer successful.
The other thing is that salespeople themselves often don't want to be the person to present the numbers to management. If you have multiple salespeople, somebody has got to accumulate those numbers and put them into a forecast or a report that says, "Here's where we're at today. Here's what we're going to close this quarter. Here's what we're projected to close by the end of the year."
All of that administrative overhead is not the best use of the salesperson’s time. You want that salesperson out in front of customers, review their opportunities, or look for new opportunities. You don't want them spending all their time trying to put together the sales report for the management meeting. That's another role that the Sales VP plays.
It's my responsibility to get those numbers from the individuals on the team and then accumulate them in the sales reporting. If everybody is doing a great job updating the CRM, that whole job becomes a whole lot easier. Holding sales reps accountable, reviewing their opportunities, and making sure that they're doing that activity make the whole process flow a lot more smoothly.
Let's talk about accountability a little bit. You're a new sales leader. You've got a team that you're getting to know. You're implementing the tools. What have you seen works from holding people accountable and motivating them in their roles? Give us some golden nuggets there on accountability.
Some of that comes back to the question you asked previously. You said, “I never liked to update the CRM.” The reason you didn't like to do it is you didn't see how it added value to what you were doing. It seemed like overhead and not really doing it. The key thing in holding salespeople accountable is helping them understand the value of what you're asking them to do.
If they don't see value in what you're asking them to do, most salespeople are going to be dismissive of it. They've got better things and other ways that they would rather spend their time. If they can get their work done and go out on the golf course, that's something we all desire to do, or spend time with your family or whatever it is that you do outside of your work time.
You need to help people understand why you're asking them to do what you're doing. Telling somebody to do it and not helping them understand the why is not generally a path to success. I have found in general that if I showed people like, “Here's the report I'm using. Here is where your information will come into this report,” if I don't have that, I need to get it from you somehow so you're going to have to spend more time with me on the phone. That's one aspect.
The other thing is to follow up with customers. If I get an escalation call from somebody like yourself where you call in and you're like, “I've called my sales rep and my sales rep is not calling me back,” most salespeople don't want that negative feedback. When you have a lot of escalation, get the salespeople involved in those escalations and make sure that they understand that you're not trying to single them out or doing it.
The question is, “How did it get to this point? What can we do to try to avoid these escalations?” That helps with accountability a lot because most salespeople don't want problems escalated. It makes their life harder and it also becomes a distraction of their time from their core competency, which is going out and selling. It's being transparent. Trust is a big thing too. They need to trust that you're there to have their back. You're not doing this accountability to admonish them or be negative. It's about how we can improve the sales culture within an organization.
Let's maybe end on a little bit about trust. What can sales leaders do if they’re managing a team to make sure that they are instilling trust in the sense that they have their team's back?
One of the hardest things as a sales manager is if you have a team that ultimately doesn't trust you. I've experienced that. Coming into a new environment and winning over a team is not always the easiest thing to do. My approach has always been to be straightforward and honest with myself and the team. If there are challenges that are being communicated by senior management, it's like, “It doesn't serve the team well to not have visibility to what those are.”
When you say, “This is what I'm hearing and this is what we need to address as a team,” if everybody gets on board and gets behind that, it makes it a team effort to solve those challenges as opposed to something that is punitive to an individual. That's never what you want for your team. Most salespeople want to know what's going on at the top of the organization. If you're a Sales VP and you're in the middle of senior management and individual contributors, the best thing you can do is try to find a way to make that information available as best as you can.
Transparency, being direct, and illustrating the why. That's excellent. Doug, we could talk about this stuff all day.
If we go by the type of conversations we've had, that's what we’ll keep doing.
It's like little sales nerds. I appreciate your insight and wisdom and for taking the time to be on the show. I would have loved to work for you if you were my VP of Sales. I'm sure that your clients are happy with having you on board. Where can people find you if they want to learn more about you?
I have a webpage at SaylzeVP.com. I joined an organization called Sales Acceleration. I don't work for Sales Acceleration. They're more of a support organization for fractional Sales VPs, depending upon where the company is located and whether they are looking for somebody that is local. It can be on-site. I'm in the Chicago area but Sales Acceleration has sales advisors like myself that are all over the country. I've worked virtually most of my career. Depending upon the type of business and what their needs are, if they're looking for somebody local, it might not be me, but if they're looking for somebody virtual, the best way to reach me is to fill out a contact form at my webpage.
Doug is coming to Los Angeles so we might meet up in person. Hopefully, we'll get a picture together. I'm trying to get more tangible behind-the-scenes assets as part of the show. I want to thank you for your guidance. You've been a nice mentor to me. I know that's probably not what you were signing up for but I'm grateful to have met you. I'm looking forward to seeing you.
I'm looking forward to meeting you in person. I appreciate you are using the term mentor but I feel like I've learned so much from you already in our conversations in this show and your ACE Your Sales. It's all great content. I look forward to working with you.
I appreciate you, Doug. Thanks for coming on the show.
Thanks, Sara.
