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The world's best conversations about B2B selling happen here. This exciting new podcast from Andy Paul, the creator and host of the Sales Enablement Podcast (with 1200+ episodes and millions of downloads) is focused on the mission of helping increase your win rates by winning a bigger percentage of the deals in your pipeline. In this unique round table format, Andy and his panel of guest experts share the critical sales insights, sales perspectives and selling skills that you can use to elevate your sales effectiveness and create the buying experiences that influence decision-makers to buy from you. Host Andy Paul is the expert on modern B2B selling and author of three best-selling, award-winning sales books, including his latest Sell Without Selling Out. Visit andypaul.com to subscribe to his newsletter for even more strategies and tips to accelerate your win rate!
Hi friends. Welcome to the win rate podcast. I'm your host, Andy Paul. That was David Krieger. And David is one of my guests on this episode of the WinRate podcast. David is the president of SalesRoads. SalesRoads helps companies increase their revenues through their comprehensive lead generation and appointment setting programs.
My other guests for this really lively discussion, it does get lively, about sales effectiveness, the buyer experience, and increasing win rates, are Salman Mohideen. Salman recently went out on his own after years as a... Selling in house. He is the founder of the Salmon Sales Academy. Urge you to check that out.
Also joining us is Hamish Stevenson. Hamish is the founder and CEO of Seller. io. Seller. io is revolutionizing sales training in the SaaS sales industry. If you're ready, let's jump into the discussion.
Okay, friends, that's it for this episode of the Winrate Podcast. First, I want to thank my guests. Hamish Stevenson, Salman Mohuddin, and David Krieger for sharing their insights with us today. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to this podcast, the WinRate podcast with Andy Paul on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Also, before you go, don't forget to subscribe to my newsletter, WinRate Wednesday. Each Wednesday, over 50, 000 sellers and sales leaders receive my weekly newsletter. It contains one actionable tip. It's a great website to accelerate your win rates and a bunch of other great advice too. So to subscribe, visit my website, andypaul.
com again, thank you so much for investing your time with me today until next time. I'm your host, Andy Paul, good selling everyone.
Welcome everyone to this episode of the win rate podcast. I'm so excited to have gosh, this all star lineup of guests today. Everybody just take a second, , introduce yourself. Hamish, we'll start with you.
Cool. Thanks, Andy. Thanks for having me on. Always been a big fan of yours. And yeah, it's so good to be here.
Keep saying that you get to come back.
that's so good. We have each other, we have each other on each other's podcasts. It's just one big circle, right?
Keep talking nice about me. Welcome to come back anytime. All right, go.
Yeah, sorry. My name is Hamish Stevenson. I'm the founder and CEO of seller. io. We're a sales training and recruiting firm. We find salespeople for companies and then we train them and onboard them after the fact.
Perfect. Salmon.
Thanks for having me on again, Andy. I know I had the pleasure to be on your past podcast about a year ago. So I'm the founder of Salman sales Academy. And as of seven weeks ago, I left the tech world of sales after being a 17 year individual contributor at a company that was like IBM, Asana and Salesforce, and now I started my own consulting company where I do one to one coaching and group coaching for SDRs and AEs.
So that's me.
Well, and yeah, one of the voices to follow on LinkedIn. That's people should be following you if they're not great content. David,
it.
tell us about you, David. Yup. David,
All right, David,
Okay, well, we'll interview each other now. Andy, are you back?
Yeah. Can you hear me?
Yes, we can.
Okay. Go ahead.
So I'll go. My name is David Krieger. I am the president of sales roads. We are a B2B. SDR outsourcing company. So really helping clients fill the top of their funnel with qualified leads. And so I've been doing this now for 16 years before the term even SDR existed.
So it's been fun and great to meet everyone here.
So I was just reading an article. Gosh, where was it today about some, I forget who it was, but it was relatively well known name saying, the day of the SDR is over. And it was this guy, I forget who it was. It was saying they'd talked to 30 sales leaders or CEOs in the last month.
And they're all considering rid of SDRs. What are your thoughts on that?
who wants to go first?
First. So when I started 16 years ago and again, the term SDR wasn't there. I can't tell you how many people said cold calling was dead, and we have had the most, the biggest renaissance in cold call. We call it SDR and prospecting. And there's also great fancy terms. And obviously we do it in lots of great ways with lots more information.
And we're more relevant today than we were 16 years ago because of linked in and lots of other data tools. But I can't tell you how many times you hear it. And at the end of the day, The lifeblood of companies is leads and qualified appointments and listen, there's lots of great ways to generate leads and generates appointments, but proactive prospecting at the end of the day needs to be done.
It needs to be done. Well, and the tools and the ways that we do it are going to keep on iterating, but we see this a lot of times. And I know a lot of companies have to Cut costs, because funding's dried up and things like that. So they look to SDRs and maybe that's the first place they cut, but I don't know, for us, at least we saw some cutbacks in Q2 and I can't believe how business has just rebounded just in like a month or two and it just always goes back and forth.
And I think that.
Well, the question
thing that, Oh, go ahead.
was gonna say, the question really was not that you're getting rid of proactive prospecting. It's that people are migrating back to AEs generating leads and being full cycle reps. So that's really the trend and people saying, yeah, we're not getting rid of pipeline building. It's just, we're going to, we're going to have the AEs be responsible for it.
cAn, so I'll chime in quickly on that. I want to give other people a chance and I'm sure everyone's got their spot. But here's the thing I think is that each role is very difficult and sales is extremely difficult. Productive prospecting is extremely difficult. Being a great AE and doing discovery calls is difficult.
And what we've seen. Internally externally, it's just hard to do both roles well and to do it in a way that's really relevant to prospects. And so I still believe in the role. I think people will try to have a he's doing more with automation, whatnot. But I think we'll still see that this is a good delineation of talent, but I'd love to hear other folks chime in here on this as well.
Salmon, go ahead.
Sure, I'm happy to hear my share my thoughts. 17 years ago in 2006, I walked through the doors of IBM as an LGR. To David's point, the term SDR didn't exist. It was an LGR, a lead generation rep. I know, and here's the thing. And for the majority of my career, I had an SDR aligned to me. And the value that they bring is incredible, because I'll tell you why.
If you were to remove the SDR role, I am telling you, account executives will not have the time of day to dedicate to prospecting every day an A. E. I dedicated daily blocks for about 90 minutes for prospecting. I didn't get to 90 minutes every day. I had to skip it because priorities came up like discovery calls or negotiation or proposal reviews that would obviously take the priority over a call block. SDRs are necessary because it doesn't matter if people talk about AI and chat GPT, SDRs are the lifeblood to David's point, we need them because they're going to help us build that pipeline and AEs will not have the time to prospect to the level that they want.
So the short answer is, until every single person in the sales org is willing to cold call, the SDRs will exist. Because account executives for years have been spoiled by having leads pushed to them. And until every single account executive, like, like, Salomon, tell me, like, surely you've worked with enterprise account executives that have not picked up a cold call.
Or made a cold call in 15 years. And what, now, these like 20, 25 year enterprise veterans are now supposed to then cold call? It's just not, it's just not going to happen. And then on the flip side I know you haven't asked this question, but I think David kind of touched on it. And that's the whole cold calling instead thing.
Like, no, like Verizon, T Mobile and AT& T make their money off connecting people by telephone. Google and Outlook don't make their money from connecting people by email. So it's one of those things where if you stop people being able to communicate via telephone, then it's, these companies are going to die.
And they're not going to let themselves die. So there's always going to be cold calling because people are always going to be able to call each other. So on the flip side of that, SDRs are always going to exist, like someone said, they're going to be called something different in five years, but we're always going to go back to the stage of, there has to be, like, that entry level rep to be able to cut their teeth on things, and the easiest thing to do that is, is lead gen.
Well, let me share some data with you is so some work I'm doing with the partners, we're diving deep into companies, win rates, some companies really understand the composition of the revenue what we find a fairly uniformly so far, and it's not a huge sample, but it's getting close to being significant is.
Yeah, I think that's pretty good. What's the big deal here? Yeah Teens right, you can see this over and over again, you're taking people who are actually really pretty good at something and turn it into being less good at it and so Doesn't this have to be sort of maybe a middle ground or some other way to do this, that, that isn't sacrificing, but you know what, some people are actually doing pretty well, but we see this, we've seen this trend demonstrably in multiple companies where they've got something pretty good going on, but then they think, Oh no, we got to play by the playbook.
We got to get our SDRs in there. We need to start doing this. And it's like, yeah, then all goes to hell. Give me your take.
Did Andy cut out for everyone else?
Yeah. For about,
he did.
for like 15 seconds, but I think I got the gist of it.
Yeah,
well, gosh, I didn't realize we're having technical issues. Let me try that again. And yeah, my editor can hopefully take care of it, which is, yeah, is again. The partner, we're doing some work with companies as we're helping them really understand the impact of their win rates and the impact on their company and the future revenue growth through understanding where they're winning their business.
Because most companies have almost no idea about, had a really detailed level of how they're winning their business and where. And we're seeing the same trend over and over, which is in companies that sort of start with, In the earlier days where the AEs are focused on a certain segment and the AEs are self sourcing leads and they're winning at a pretty good clip, 40, 45 percent win rates. And then they turn on the SDR spigot and suddenly all these leads come in. And what you see the same AEs before winning deals that. 40, 45 percent win rate somewhere in the teens because they're feeling obligated to start servicing all this lead flow coming in when actually they were doing a really good job self sourcing their own leads before. I'm just interested in your take on that. There's got to be some middle ground where AEs have some responsibility because at least the data we're seeing is... And this was interesting for me to see it because I had served... I wasn't sure I was convinced that AEs are really winning at a higher rate on deals they're developing themselves versus those coming in from the SDR funnel.
But we're seeing it validated in multiple instances, that's the case. So it seems like there's got to be a different approach than what we're doing that's more blended or something. So I'm interested in your take on that.
I'm happy to share. Go ahead, Amish, if you want to.
can go David if you want.
sure. So I think there's a few different things. To think about and also to dive into the data a little bit. One is initially what you often see with age two, and I don't know how much of the data are you guys controlled for this is when rates can be much higher because you also tap into your current network and as we all have trained on people, you've got to start there.
You've got to start with, referrals of your network, direct people, old clients you've serviced and when they start. And maybe you guys have controlled for some of that, but that is just something I would, just think a little bit about, but the other metric, I think that you've got to take a look at it.
And I'd love to dive into strategies. I'm not saying that the system is perfect, and I think there's always ways to improve it is. Velocity and win rate, right? So how much? Let's say they are doing just cold prospecting, right? And these are not referrals, and they're not people who are currently in their network.
How much time is it taking them to get that lead to then close at double the rate? Right? But if it's taking them to More than double the time, which for really hard appointments, sometimes it is at a higher salary. A's could be 23 times what an SDR is. You got to do all that type of math as well. And so I think it's interesting.
I think it's good to look at all those things, but I would just control for those things. And what I would say is, There are probably some ways we can always improve handoff rates. And obviously it's not ubiquitous, 45 percent for everybody, 18 percent for other ways. Some people are doing it better, right, than others.
And but I would also say that, you've got to take a look at what your sales goals are and the best way to reach them. And sometimes you've got to, you don't have enough AEs and you don't have budget for enough AEs. And you, to make them actually more effective, you need to give them some partners to work with.
yeah, again, I'll give a handful of examples. And we know that generally in SaaS, win rates tend to be served in the twenties, somewhere 20, 25%. I would argue if that's the case, if you have sellers that are only able to close one of every five or whenever before the most qualified opportunities, the problem is not quantity of leads, right?
tO me, that seems like more than enough leads. This is just not being very good on the leads they have and the ones they choose to sell to. I think in general, when you have win rates are that low and we're working with companies that on one hand are growing nicely, but they've got win rates, like 18, 19%, it's like, there's a problem here, right?
The problem is not in there yet. They're investing tons of money and still generating pipeline. It's like, you don't, you really don't need more pipeline. You got to get better at working the opportunities you have. And this is, I think is endemic across sales and certainly the tech world. Is, we fall into this playbook of whatever and there's not this focus on, Hey, let's choose to do a better job on the ones that we decide to sell to getting a lot of nodding, but somebody say something,
Okay.
Alright, so I'll say something. I think it's a two, two pronged approach, Andy. And I think it starts with enablement and I'm not just because I'm a sales trainer, but I think that hiring people yep. Yeah I'm to blame. Blame me, then get me to come in and I'll fix it. And then I'll make the problem worse and then I'll fix it again.
Like a true management consultant.
Right. Right. Yeah. I
No, but I think it is a enablement issue. I think it's also probably a hiring issue. If you're going to hire SDRs, I think the age of specialist SDRs is going to become like a massive thing for companies. Like for example, hiring people that are coming from industries that are really focused on the industries that they're selling into. one, they come with a massive base knowledge of the actual industry, the product, everything like that, that are trying to get into sales. That's why I love like hiring transitioning teachers, like instead of hiring someone straight, like this is a grad, hire someone that's 10 years into their career that's trying to get into sales.
It's just genius. So there's one. And then those people are able to qualify so much better. And I think everything you're saying comes back down to qualification. Like if you have a bunch of leads. There's good leads and bad leads. Like, just because it's a lead doesn't mean that it's ever going to, like, land a sale.
Like, you can sell to your mum, but that doesn't mean she's going to spend 500k on Asana. Like, it's just not going to happen. But at the end of the day, like, if you can figure out how to train your staff... In qualification, then everything else will fall into place.
Yeah, those are amazing points and I wanted to touch on both of them. So David's point. So let's say an enterprise AE is finding their own leads. Maybe they're spending 30 percent of their week uncovering new leads, whether it's from networking, whether it's from their own cold emailing, what if they could use that 30 percent of their time on just progressing and closing deals?
That would be huge. So the value of an SDR, Amish's point is spot on, it's enablement. And I posted about this two or three days ago. There is a direct problem where enablement and onboarding teams are focusing on product enablement. Versus problem enablement. Product enablement is like, this is how I've been enabled in all my roles.
This is our product. This is the value that we bring. This is who we sell to. These are capabilities. Here are the use cases, but what it should be focused on is the first couple of days should be focused on. This is the problem that we solve for. These are the three personas that we target here, the roles and responsibilities.
Forget about the solution. These are the problems that they're facing on a day to day basis. Here's the impact, this is the KPIs that they care about. You have to speak your prospects language. Your prospects, they don't care about your product or capabilities, at least initially. They care about the problems that they're facing on a day to day basis and how to hit those targets.
It comes down to enablement in your first few days. And that's going to help you and SDR find better leads so the enterprise reps can work on it.
mean, it speaks to a broader mindset shift that needs to happen within enablement and within management as well. Right. It's not purely an enablement issue. This is cultures that we set up for selling. I think your point is right on. I, I. I look back on my own experience and things that were formative for me, which was going through a phase relatively early in my career where I was selling basically custom products that didn't exist, right?
I had a basket full of technology, and I had to show up and find a prospect and then engage them in a conversation about, possibilities of something that they may have a problem with, they may not, and how. But I couldn't pitch a product because I didn't have a product, right? And it teaches you so much.
And I sort of think like that's a mindset. Seller should go into every situation with us. What if your first conversation, you just forgot that you had a product and you're not selling the product. You're just trying to understand what the problem is. To your point, Solomon.
100%.
AnDy, it's, so are you saying like it's more about what getting to know the customer
Yeah. It's funny. I posted on yesterday on LinkedIn about. Yeah, our job in sales is, starts with the relationships and you've tried so many people get upset about that because, Oh no, our job is to, sell a solution, blah, blah, blah. It's like, well, sure, but that can't happen if we don't make that connection with someone, if we don't start building that level of trust, so we can actually ask the questions we need to ask and get the answers we need.
And this is, the reason that, the fact that people still sort of deny the importance of this. To me is mind boggling, right? Because we've had study after study with Gartner coming out with the research just, a few weeks ago, a couple months ago, actually, at this point, saying, hey, here are the nine most important factors buyers tell us that influence their choice of vendor.
And number one on the list by far was trustworthiness. Well, you can't build trust in the absence of a connection with another person.
and send them.
It doesn't happen. Yeah I think that part of the failure of enablement, to follow on what someone was saying is. We don't focus on teaching these human skills to people that are new into sales.
and that's about
and I got to mention your book and I'm plugging your book
Oh, okay. Thank you.
read the line in your book. Yep. So without selling out the Anthony Bourdain quote, it's when you when you show up to a foreign location and if you just show an interest.
depends on
In a different car. Oh,
Salomon.
I've got it in the other room.
Andy, that I've bought it.
Yes, I know. I know. I know. We've talked about it. Thank you.
make it, a
but like you shop to a foreign,
are not paid endorsements. Thank you.
It's just a
you shop to a foreign location, you show an interest in their cuisine and then you share, like you break bread with them and then everyone just starts opening up. Like you show, it's the same, like in SAS, it's same in sales.
Like you show up to someone and you show a genuine interest in what they're about, their company, their background. And then it's just, everything starts unfolding for you.
Yeah. Anyway,
So though, Andy, I'd love to go back to your original question, because I think it ties into something that I just was thinking about as we're talking about this connection that needs need to have with prospects to do that. Well, you need to have time. You need to have time to research your prospects to be able to understand their needs, their problems.
To be able to have the bandwidth not to be rushing from demo to demo, right? To be able to follow up, to be able to understand the other people in the buying committee and also think about them. And if you are, your CRO is telling you and you need to cold call. For 50 percent of your day, there's only so much time in a day.
And so I actually think, and I'm not saying that there are again ways to make the handoffs better and to be more relevant in prospecting and whatnot. But I think we have to be careful with this trend of, people saying that AEs need to do everything. Of what we're asking of them to be able to do everything well, takes time, takes focus.
And I actually think it plays into the human aspect of some of the things that we're talking about.
we're
Well, let's get into this time thing because
SPAC about so many
did my own prospecting
talking about. But let's
it was expected. I built my own pipeline. Yeah. I didn't, I was working for startups. I didn't have the advantage of marketing. I was selling, six, seven, eight.
One nine figure deal, large, complex communication systems to major enterprises around the world.
Yeah. I had an account patch other, we had like 300 possible prospects in the world for what we were selling.
300 possible predispositions or whatever or
Yeah, I prospected
them. That's all I can do.
because
So how many years ago was that? Just to timeframe, just,
Like, you
why
well, anyway,
to be satisfied
Well, here's the thing is people are getting so much harder to get on the phone now,
think that's bullshit. I think that's bullshit.
Think about it when I was prospecting, there was no direct inward dialing.
or a
pick up a phone and call somebody. Every call went through a receptionist
full stop.
all the time,
when people say, oh, it's hard to get hold of people, it's like, bullshit.
You had numbers to call people. You can, we can reach them. We, it was impossible to get hold of an executive.
be an executive. There was a gatekeeper you had to go through. I think nowadays it's just a much more competitive market. Back in the day, IBM, yes, we had Oracle and a couple, like WebLogix, a couple other customers, competitors, but now it's such a. Saturated market where you have a dozen competitors that are fighting for the same time with your customer is very difficult to get your attention.
In that way it's getting more difficult. It takes more
I'm not saying it's easy. And that's just my point. The only thing I rapped to is people thinking, oh, we're comparing, different generations and it was harder now or easier then than is now. It's like. No, it's just hard. It's still hard. I don't, I'm not denying the fact it's hard, but
sure. No, it's out. And no, it's listen. It's always been hard 100 percent but we've seen in our data over the last 16 years . It takes like three times the time that it took us. 16 years ago to get somebody on the phone. Now there are other ways and there's amazing tools to do that better.
100%. But , the way people communicate now is less over the phone. Right? And so therefore they're not picking up the phone as much. And so you've got to be more creative. You've got it. do more dials. You've got to do more activity to be able to have those meaningful conversations.
Yeah. Only thing I'd say is that we just weren't tracking that data back in the day. Right. So how many times did I have to call somebody to, I was doing most of my prospecting for a period of my career as cold calling large enterprises overseas. Right. Yeah, I didn't count how many calls, but it took a lot, right?
Cause you know, either somebody had to be inspired. Yeah, that's it's never been easy. That's what I thought. I think the generational comparisons are sort of a moot point. It's, this is hard work, but to your point about time though, we have the studies that come out to say, sellers spend 35 percent of their time basically on actual sales activities. And I remember a study that came out pretty early in my sales career, which is ages ago, same number sellers spent about a third of their time actually selling. I don't think that numbers changed at all. So this idea that somehow AEs don't have time just doesn't sort of resonate with me. Because even the current data says they only spend a third of their time actually engaged in sales activities.
that's a really important point. I think though, that before we tell them we've got to do all these other things, we've got to help enable them to have more time. And so we can't just click, and I do this with my team all the time. Like, even my operations team, I'm like, why is it taking so much time?
Just do it faster. Well, there are roadblocks in their way, right? We can't just, snap our fingers. So I think it's a really important point you're making, Andy. Absolutely. So much time is wasted. I think though, before we throw more on their plate, we've got to strategize and think, okay, what are the things?
Is it updating your CRM? And there's now some great tools that actually will do that a little bit better. Other things that you can do to take off their plate. And then you can add on, and I just worry in this environment, it's tough. The CRO's job is tough. They got pressure, there's financing pressure that, right now, and they're being asked to do less with more.
And so I don't fault them but we can't just say, all right, we're going to get rid of the SDRs. Your quota is going to say the same. I'm not going to figure out some enablement things to give you more of your time back. We've got to look at it holistically. I know you're not saying that we shouldn't, but I think that's a really good place to start.
That 35%, we've got to figure out ways to expand it. And then we can add on some things.
It's not like, like, come on, like, what's the, like, this week's quota percentage? This, like, I read somewhere this week, like, 28 percent of reps are making quota. It's, alright, so let's remove the SDRs and see that go up magically? Like, it's not like the AEs out, out there are killing it.
Like, and what, so put more on their plate? Like, I just don't see it happening.
Yeah, and I think it comes down again to your great points about enablement. I'll give you a perfect example. I was speaking to an account executive earlier today. They got promoted three months ago from their SDR role to an AE role. They have had no formal training at all. They are so confused right now.
They don't know how to run a cycle. They haven't been progressed. One reason is because the management team doesn't have the resources in time. They don't have enablement teams. This person is lost and they're looking for guidance. And it's a big thing. Even companies that I've been part of in the past, they may be large, but.
Managers don't have the time of day to coach their team. They're enabled in teams. Material isn't very active. Why do you think people are looking for external coaches? Why do you think they're on scouring LinkedIn and buying all this material for them because they're not enabled properly and that is causing them not to hit their growth numbers and they're constantly getting pressure and they're not hitting their numbers.
It comes down to a lot of enablement and that's why they're looking externally.
Well, I think it's a bigger issue. Let me ask the question of you three of this, cause this is, I haven't talked about this for a year or so, but one of my favorite things to talk about, which is why don't we have dedicated coaches? on the staff's sales teams. Why are we seeing this as the responsibility of managers?
Because coaching, much like about SDRs and everything else, it's a specialized skill. There are people that get trained at it, and they become quite good at it. So why are we laying this on the manager? Why not have coaches on staff? I make, going to my rant about, how professional sports teams manage performance and performance improvement.
And how we're so far in the dark ages in sales compared to what other companies and enterprises are doing, other professions, let's say, like sports, and specialized coaches on staff. Why do we presume just because you, Salomon, are, have a certain title, that you know what the hell you're doing when it comes to coaching and helping people improve performance.
And so thus, since you don't know really what you're doing, you're not feeling comfortable with it, you tend not to do those things you're uncomfortable doing, the sellers suffer. Yeah, let's make some investment in our teams and let's reorganize how we think about how we organize our organizations for selling, put coaches in, hire a staff psychologist for goodness sakes, right?
We know we've got a mental health issues and sales. How much, how many lost days would you need to recover in order to justify the cost of even a part time person on staff to come in and help on things like that? Anyway, that's my rant.
I think a staff psychologist, a brilliant idea. Like, I think that's an incredible idea. Like you see it in billions
Yeah, Wendy. That's, yeah, my favorite character, Wendy.
Yeah. And yeah, she's a great actor. The other, but on the other, on the flip side of that, I think the reason that companies shouldn't hire full time sales coaches is because you hire sales coaches to come from a different perspective.
Like to everyone else in the house, like, and this is, I get asked this question all the time. Like, why are we going to pay you? We've already got L and D staff. And my answer is, well, I'm not there to replace the L and D staff. I'm there to help enable the L and D staff as well with a different perspective because of all these other companies I'm dealing with.
Like, it's like, why do people hire outside recruiters, which I also am one because we're here to enable the talent teams. So it's one of these things, if you're full time in one role, then naturally you're very much, like, you've got tunnel vision on that company.
right.
Does
Yeah, there's always this thing as, at what point do you transition from being part of the solution to part of the problem?
Sure. I
gO ahead
so I think doing both though is great. And so I think to, to both of those points, we had a model where we had managers managing the SDRs but managing the clients and doing the strategy and doing everything for a long time, and then we decided to break that role up to people managing the clients and then individuals who are coaching the.
And our retention skyrocketed. And so I was really worried because we basically doubled our management costs in many ways, right? But by really working and investing in coaching and training, it just pays dividends. And so I think it really is great, Andy, to your point, to really have.
Dedicated coaches who are really working with SDRs on a day in day out basis, but then also to bring in every now and then fresh ideas from an outside trainer. And then they can come. That makes the, we call them talent development managers that helps them. They want to grow. They want to learn, right?
They don't want to, and I think that being able to do both is all star.
I agree. I think for the self aware organization understands the need to have that outside perspective, right? But too often, I'm sure maybe Hamish, you run into this or Salman, you are now is you run into a CRO who thinks, well, I can't. If I say I need to bring someone in to help, suddenly I'm not the person they thought they hired, right?
I'm less than because, oh, I need help. And oh, you're no good. You need help. Right? And I've always found over time, 23 years I've been doing my businesses. My client, my contracts always come from the CEOs, not the CROs because CROs are always playing defense. Salman, you're going to say something.
Yeah. So to both of your points, both are needed. So the reason I believe that sales leaders, CROs are relying on internal resources because they have their product marketing team. They know what they believe resonates product wise with their customers. And then they have their enablement team that works together to put together.
Hey, here are the three most common use cases that we should be focusing on. And it's very product focus based on use cases. And there's some, competitive material thrown in there as well. But the challenge is that, and I can tell you for a fact, 95 percent of my training over the last 17 years has been it.
Product and use case focus. I can count on two hands how many training sessions I've had from external people that were focused on. Prospecting best practices that have nothing to do with your product. Discovery frameworks that have nothing to do with your product deal strategy that have nothing to do with your product or capabilities.
Those are what drive value and real impact because those are the majority of conversations you're going to have, especially when you're closing new logos for companies that don't know who you are and a lot of companies don't realize that.
yeah,
That's the fact.
well, I think I like to say is, we've, you look at the sort of the sales conferences that, have serve, sort of buzz around it, it's inbound, it's outbound, it's, all these things I'm like, the conference we need is discovery and qualification, right?
Discovering qualification 2023, then we know sales is on the right track, right? Because, again, I think we are obsessed with pipeline to the detriment of selling. And you see it in the win rates and quota attainments.
mean Pipeline is the cure to all sales related illnesses. And then Discovery's there to, for 80 percent of the time.
Well, but, okay I'll make the argument with you, Hamish, that's not the case, right? When we're in situations, again, we look at what we talked about before, stats of four, and SaaS and other industries where, you know, average win rates. Well, in the book, Strikingly Different Selling, they talk about the average win rate on deals over 100K and B2B across the world, across multiple industry segments, 17%. Again, I make the argument when you're at that. At that point, pipeline's not the issue.
I'll argue if that's okay. Pipeline is not the issue. Healthy pipeline is the issue.
That's exactly what I was going to say,
exactly. And I know you were getting there for sure. And here's the thing, unfortunately. There's not, I haven't had one training session in my career on disqualification. Like what are deals I should not be wasting my time on?
Because here's the thing. When a customer talks about their problem that resonates with me, it's music to my ears. That's exactly what we solve for. But wait a second. How high of a priority is it? Is it really high on their list that is impacting their business? Or Are they just happy to see a demo? Like, Hey, if my mom asked me, if I asked my mom, Hey, do you want to see a demo?
She'd probably say yes. And that's how a lot of sales reps are. And then, yeah, exactly.
Well, she has to see a demo and she has to buy a half million dollars worth of product from you.
Yeah. But that's the type of fluff that's entering pipelines. And that's what's affecting the win rate.
but pipeline,
a vicious circle though, that goes on, right? Because if marketing is relying on sales for intelligence from the field about the deals that are going to close, which that's part of the loop that happens. If you're getting feedback from low win rate sellers. If you get more crap into the top of the funnel, it's just sort of the, what happens, we have to break that cycle. Hamish, go ahead.
Is, and is pipeline really pipeline if it's not qualified pipeline? Otherwise
agree. I
it's just stupid digits.
yeah. Which is what many people take comfort from though. Right. I was talking to a conversation with a client earlier this week and it's all about, yeah, we need to have pipeline, but to your point, exactly. It's like, what's your wind ride solo? Most of it's immaterial to you.
I hear all the time about my people who say like, Oh, I generated like 5 million of pipeline in the first six months of the role. And I'm
Yeah,
how much of it closed? Like, you can write whatever you want on the forecast sheet. Like, you can write, I called up a company and they said, Oh, I've got a million of training budget.
Alright, I'm just writing a million. Down here, and it's going to be great, but honestly, like it it's nothing. It's nothing unless you go through your 12 qualification questions and you go, okay, they're going to hit eight of these 12 boxes. That's an actual qualified prospect. That's qualified pipeline.
And that's what I'm saying. Like if qualified pipeline fixes all sales related issues.
I wouldn't go so far as saying that as qualified opportunity, but it's qualified pipeline. Yes.
And I've been on forecast calls where I'm the AE and my fellow AEs, we're going off or a pipeline, people will come in with, Oh, I got 700 K in pipeline for this month. But once they walk through it, it's absolute crap. Most of it, I'll walk in or somebody else will walk in for 300 K in pipeline, but it's a real deals.
Who's probably going to take more seriously,
yeah. But then you also though have managers and I've witnessed this, who will come down on you for not having sufficient pipeline, but you said I'm going to win all of this.
Well, they'll believe it when they see it, but that's a big problem too. Hey, you got a 300 K pipeline target for the month. And you're not hitting it. Well, what if it's quality pipeline?
When I
And the other issue we obviously have all seen is that when you have such an emphasis just on pipeline is that people are reluctant to let pipeline go. And you've got to know when to let it go, again, to be able to prioritize your time and be able to do good work on that qualified pipeline.
Yeah. Oh, I agree. Yeah, that's, that is the hardest thing for a manager, I think, because managers also feel the pressure, again, conversations you've all had, I'm sure, is they feel the pressure to keep a certain pipeline coverage ratio going, and it doesn't really matter whether it's crap or not, they're concerned just about get the coverage ratio, because they can look good to the people that are, that they're reporting to.
For the, for everyone else in the room. I don't know if this is the case for you guys, when I was a junior, like my first ever corporate sales job, if I was 10 percent out of pipeline at the end of the month, then I'd have to stay like two hours extra on a Saturday, no, not on a Saturday, on a Friday afternoon, when everyone else went to the pub, I had to stay there cold calling different time zones, if I was
Sure. You got the best qualified leads that Friday afternoon, as you were trying to make that last 10%, right?
was like I was riding on a chalkboard. I will never mess up my forecast.
I saw something yesterday on LinkedIn is not the first time I've seen it. Somebody shared it with me because as a client that we've had conversations about this, where, you know, people advocating using lead allocation as a form of rewards or tacit punishment for people that maybe aren't generating enough pipeline or whatever.
And it's just like, Seriously, this is really, this is what you're going to do. You're going to, I,
it Alec Baldwin that was posting that on LinkedIn
people that, trust me. And I was just like, yeah, I can't. This whole idea is, I, this got me going a few months ago. I was reading somebody again, a relative, well, no name, not that we're going to name check anybody here, but it's just like, yeah, give your best leaves to your best sellers. I'm like, Oh my God, how lazy could you be? If you've got people on your team that you don't trust to give a lead to, , that's a challenge for you as a manager, right? That's on you. You hired them, you train them, you're enabled and you're coaching them. If you can't trust them to take a lead, that's you.
Don't just keep giving, hand out to your favorites again, because then you create this, inequitable situation. That's but yeah, I still see this all the time. It just drives me crazy. Lazy management.
reps, who weren't doing well and you found what, was one roadblock and you motivated them and they jumped back and they hit quota the next month. To be able to take away their best leads. So basically tie one hand around their back when they're already not feeling well, they're already in a slump.
It's just pouring salt on the wound. That is the best way to to just force somebody out. Basically you're saying, I don't want to fire this person. I want them to just quit. So either if they don't have the skillset, you got to put them on a plan and get them out, or you got to give them the right leads and coach them to really handle those leads in the right way.
Yeah. Again, if you don't trust somebody, then yeah, it's time for them to find a situation where they can be trusted and have a manager that will develop them and coach them.
But the biggest problem is Andy and David and Amish is that managers don't have the time. This from experience, they are battling territory challenges. They are working on people, disputing their commission checks. They're working on, you're on forecast calls like three times a day. They don't have the time of day to sit down for an hour to coach their one on ones or just say, Hey, how you doing?
Whatever. Maybe a little bit of coaching. They don't have the time. And then they're not getting what they need from their enablement teams. I hear it all the time. I speak to A's every day. They're not getting what they need internally. And I don't know how you solve that in terms of a manager doing coaching.
I really don't. Cause they wish they
coaches.
Yeah, there you go.
I think we solved that problem though as Hamish said, maybe not the long term solution, but yeah. Hey, people turn over in jobs relatively quickly and bring them in. You'll get that self sustaining, right. We'll refresh every couple of years anyway. All right. Unfortunately we've run out of time, but this has been great.
I wish we could continue for another hour. We could easily, I literally haven't touched most of the topics I want to talk about, but it's it's been great. So just quickly before we go Hamish, start with you. Tell people how they can connect with you.
Yeah, cool. My email address and I'm just going to say it out there cause go for it. It's Hamish at seller S E L R dot IO. Contact me about anything. Honestly, I'll respond. And hit me up on LinkedIn. I'm posting posting discovery and sales nuggets every day. And Hey, if you ever need any sales training or sales recruitment, hit me up.
Perfect. All right. Solomon.
Yeah. That was find me on LinkedIn, a website at SalmanSalesAcademy. com and yeah, hit me up if you need anything.
Yeah. David.
Yeah. David Krieger, I, you could just search for me on LinkedIn active there, if you DM me with any questions, happy to help it any way I can my company sales roads. So you can just Google us and find us there if and reach out anytime.
All right. Gentlemen, thank you. That was fun. We'll do it again.
Thanks guys.
We appreciate it.