Harry Hardman

“We have the tools, we have the talent!” – Winston Zeddemore

My family and I recently saw the newest Ghostbuster sequel, “Ghostbusters: Afterlife”. The original “Ghostbusters” was my son’s favorite movie growing up, and he wanted the whole family to watch the new one together for his birthday. It was well done and entertaining, but nothing can compare to the original.

One of my favorite lines from the original comes from Winston Zeddemore (Ernie Hudson) at the end of the film after they had vanquished the ghosts; “We have the tools, we have the talent!”. It was a great line in the movie, and it reminded me of the two most important things a Sales Leader must have to be consistently successful – tools and talent.

Recruiting, coaching, mentoring, and retaining top sales talent is an on-going priority for all of us; we must always prioritize our efforts towards ensuring that the sellers on our team are working at their best levels, and if not, taking the necessary steps to make them better or move them out of the organization. With the recent Great Resignation having taken place, many Sales Leaders are scrambling to either replace sellers who have left or are looking for additional sales talent to expand their teams for next year.

In today’s new Work from Anywhere (WFA) environment, having the right tools at your disposal to effectively manage remote teams is more critical than ever. No sales team has exactly the same level of experience, talent, or time with the company. In virtually every case, the Sales Leader must be able to bring new (or early career) sellers up to speed quickly, continue to manage and mentor existing team members, and keep the most senior (and productive) sellers engaged and working to their full potential. Not an easy task!

Having the right tool(s) to enable Leaders to scale seamlessly and uniquely to each seller’s ability and skill set is imperative. What tools do you use today to help with this daunting challenge? How valuable would it be to have a solution that would enable you to take immediate action on any recorded interactions with a seller and their prospect/customer – either video or voice recording – and provide specific coaching recommendations to him/her based on the specific situation, their skillset, experience, and expected outcome?  How helpful would it be to be able to easily see every previous interaction with the prospect, to the level of detail you want, in order to give you the full context of each prospect’s journey so far in order to give the best possible advice for the most appropriate next step(s)? Or how about the ability to compare how and what your top performers focus on during their calls, and share those results with the rest of the team to establish best practices?  Finally, how much easier would your life be if all the key points of every call were captured and automatically updated into the CRM, giving you the most comprehensive and up to date status of every opportunity – without having to hound your team for updates?

All the above are vital to being able to manage your teams remotely. As a Sales Leader for almost 2 decades, I know firsthand how important each of the tools mentioned are to my business and is the reason why I work for SalesTalk. We provide a solution that addresses all these challenges and more.

Change Is The Only Constant In Life

Change Is The Only Constant In Life

Most of us are familiar with the quote, “Change is the only constant in life”. Fewer of us know that it was written by Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher who lived around 500 B.C. (I didn’t until I looked it up!).

Two things come to mind when I think about this quote: 1). People have been wrestling with this issue for a very, very long time, and 2). It is truer today than it ever has been.

The last 2 years have been challenging for all of us, and the massive changes we have made in virtually all facets of our lives have been made at breakneck speed. This is especially true in my vocation – sales. As a career salesperson, and more recently a Sales Leader, I have always thought I was good with change; changing territories, changing quotas, changing management, changing companies – are all changes we have experienced regularly during our careers – but never as quickly or profoundly as we have been forced to do since the pandemic.

One of the biggest challenges I face as a Sales Leader today is how to effectively manage, mentor, and coach my sales teams remotely. Gone (at least for now) are the days of “ride a longs” with my sellers, going on face-to-face sales calls with them and listening to how they conduct themselves during a sales call, providing them with immediate feedback as soon as we got back in the car. Today, I must rely on call recordings and recorded video calls to listen to and see how my reps are doing – and to hear for myself prospect’s responses and tenor during those meetings – to provide feedback and coaching to them (also remotely).

It can be a daunting task trying to figure out which calls are most important to review, and once that’s determined, which parts of the call or video are most important. On average, a Sales Leader with a team of 10 sellers are faced with over 100 hours of recordings every week (or up to 300 if they lead inside sales teams). Nobody can physically listen to all of it, and many Sales Leaders get very frustrated or give up all together trying to review them because the tools they’re using aren’t helpful. In my case, I’m very lucky because we build a solution to address those very issues, but how does everyone else handle this painful process?

Another huge challenge is managing my business and forecasts. Accurate forecasting has always been an art based on science, but the fact that my team is 100% virtual, 99% of the sales calls they make are virtual as well, and I am only on a very small percentage of those calls, has made forecasting even more difficult for me. I have been forced to change how I look for key data and feedback from my team, how to better qualify forecasted deals, and to determine – quickly – what next steps must be taken to ensure the deals close on time. Most of us live in 89-day increments; (the first day of the quarter is clean up of the previous quarter) and as Sales Leaders, we live and die by the sword of accurately forecasting our business. What new Best Practices have you incorporated in your weekly, monthly, and quarterly cadences to help address these new metrics and challenges? What’s working for you? More importantly, what’s NOT working for you, and why?

I hope these scenarios ring true to you, and I am very excited to read your responses in how we can most effectively deal with the biggest Constant in our lives – Change.

Thanks for reading, and I’ll write to you again soon.

Harry

Measuring CI ROI at the Sales Manager Level

Being in Sales Management has always been challenging . . . and ever more so in today’s Work-From-Anywhere environment, where our “ride alongs” with reps and in-person account reviews are a thing of the past. With almost every call being virtual today, Sales Managers are turning to other methodologies – like reviewing call recordings – to accurately know what is happening in the deals they need to make their commitments. 

Effective utilization of Conversation Intelligence is helping Sales Managers overcome the obstacles of virtual management – actually making their job easier, making them more effective as coaches, and more dependable as “the sales team that always hits their quota.”

Consider the following statistics and challenges facing Sales Managers today:

  • The average Sales Manager salary in the United States is $120,030 as of September 01, 2021, but the range typically falls between $101,604 and $141,034. 
  • For an ROI calculation, let’s assume $120,000 per year in salary for working 50 weeks – 2,000 hours:  so, the Cost of the Sales Manager is $60 per hour. 
  • The average span of control for U.S. sales forces is 10-12 salespeople per manager, but there is wide variation around this average.   Let’s assume 10 salespeople per manager. 
  • If the average sales rep spends 20 hours per week talking to prospects on recorded phone calls or virtual sales presentations, the sales manager has 200 hours of recorded sales calls per week to shift through to know what is going on in the pipeline that he is responsible for managing. 

Here is how our Conversation Intelligence (CI) solution meets this challenge:

  1.  We automatically create a list of the “Interactions That Matter” for the Sales Manager to review.  Deals can be selected on any criteria:  over $X, over Y% probability to close this period, etc.  Assume that the creation of this focused criteria for review saves the Sales Manager 3 hours per week.
  2. We allow you to create a “Call Map” of all conversations of each sales rep by simply clicking on a description of the conversation subject.  Sales Managers can quickly scan our Story-So-Far to see which conversations (recorded calls or video meetings) they want to listen to (or see) based upon the criteria in step one above.  Sales Managers will select the Topics of Interest based upon the subject and the Duration of the Discussion, which willsave the Sales Manager 6 Hours Per week.
  3. Sales Managers can contextually make suggestions to the reps on how to move the Relevant Deals to close by using the Suggestions2U™ feature, which puts the suggestion(s) in the lead record, sends an email to the rep with the suggestion, and creates follow up list to discuss with the reps – automatically! Saving the Sales Manager an additional 3 hours per week. 

The ROI of the proper technology is incredible:

SalesTalk’s Conversation Intelligence solution is only $59 per rep per month, so the monthly investment for SalesTalk to support the Manager’s 10 reps is $590.  The 12 hours per month saved of the Sales Manager’s time is valued at $720 (12 hours at $60 per hour).

  • A monthly investment of $590 for the whole team SAVES $720 per month in the salary cost of the Sales Manager who would have used this time on non-revenue producing admin functions!
  • Imagine how much more revenue will be generated using Suggestions2U – and by the manager knowing which deals / conversations can be fine-tuned? Especially since they have been given an additional 12 hours per month to help close those deals!
  • How much more revenue will the reps generate with the insights the Story-So-Far gives them?

Sales Teams using SalesTalk’s patented CI solution can see up to a 500% ROI given the improved effectiveness, efficiency, and enablement we provide. Want to take a test drive and see how SalesTalk can work for your team?