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This week on The Sales Transformation Podcast we’re bringing you a recording of our recent webinar with our AI partners Aviso on the topic of cutting through coverage myths and KPI games.
Phil joins Aviso CPO Ofer Zilberman to discuss the ways in which many traditional pipeline stats can be misleading, and how the Sales Mindsets can help you stop putting energy into making the stats look good and start putting it into generating real value.
Highlights include:
- [05:09] KPI pressures can make people prioritise looking good
- [18:01] The pipeline health pentagon
- [37:47] Measuring pipeline discipline maturity
Connect with Philip Squire on LinkedIn
Connect with Ofer Zilberman on LinkedIn
Join the discussion in our Sales Transformation Forum group.
Make sure you're following us on LinkedIn and Twitter to get updates on the latest episodes! Also, take our Mindset Survey and find out if you are selling to customers the way they want to be sold to today.
Creators and Guests
What is The Sales Transformation Podcast?
The Sales Transformation Podcast is brought to you by Consalia. Led by Dr Philip Squire, Consalia is the UK’s only Sales Business School, providing Masters, Postgraduate & Undergraduate Apprenticeship programmes in Sales, dedicated to the improvement of sales performance. For over 20 years he has provided sales consulting education services and training to brands including Apple, AT&T, Ford, Hertz, HP, Pirelli, Royal Caribbean, SAP and Zurich Financial Services.
He is one of just a handful of sales professionals internationally to have a research doctorate in sales. Philip is a subject matter expert for the UK TrailBlazer undergraduate apprenticeship degree in sales and his passion for professionalising sales led him to create the world’s first sales consultancy delivering university-accredited undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in sales.
Consalia's vision is to make sales the world's most sought-after profession and this podcast has been created to provide sales professionals with inspiring and educational advice, as well as tips on relevant topics within the industry that will improve your knowledge, your careers and your sales teams.
#181 – Webinar: Pipeline Health and Sales Mindset w/ Ofer Zilberman
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George: Hi everyone. George here, the editor of the Sales Transformation Podcast. This week on the show we have a recording from a recent webinar we held with our new AI partners of vso. Phil joined Aviso CPO, and longtime friend of Consalia Ofer Zilberman. The webinar focused on busting myths around pipeline coverage reporting, and how many stats are being manipulated to simply look good without any real measure of quality behind them.
And of course, Phil discusses how the sales mindsets can be part of the solution to this problem. Now, there were slides used during this webinar, so please head over to our YouTube channel to watch this episode if you want to see those. And with that said, please enjoy the webinar.
Ofer: we are online. Hi Phil. How are you doing?
Phil: I'm doing great. Ofer. Nice to, uh, nice to be here with you.
Ofer: Nice to reconnect. It's been a while since we did the podcast. It is.
Phil: Yeah. So a long
Ofer: time ago it was, and we thought it would be great to, uh, start connecting. Um, you know, we announced the partnership between Avis and Consalia, but, uh, both you and I go.
A scary amount of ears back now. Yeah. And we were talking about, I remember sitting in, uh, running meter thing. It was like talking about like showing you dots on the chart and how a measure reps coverage and, and how we drive action out of it. And, you know, we're finally here, now, we finally really doing it in terms of all the, all the moving parts, cutting through.
What does it mean pipeline health? What does it mean? Having a mindset that, uh, helps you, uh, to, to execute?
Phil: Correct. Yeah. For me, it, it's, um. You know, it's taken me a while, as you probably know, of talking to you to understand what it is you're talking about. And, uh, I would say it's taken me some years now, but I'm, I'm so excited that we have this, um, this new relationship through a, uh, aviso and, and sort of bringing together two very different but connected, uh, disciplines.
So I'm sure we'll talk more about it later on. But, you know, for me it's, um, it's been a bit of the whole, you know, the, the holy grail is knowing quite how we can use data and information in order to better predict sales performance. And we'd come at it through one, one angle, which is through my research around mindsets.
Of course, you come through it through another angle, which is looking at the data. But we've never really, until now begun to be able to sort of connect the two in a, in a systemic way. And I think this is where we've got to. Yeah. So I'm super, super excited about, about exactly, uh, the journey that we're now on.
So,
Ofer: yeah, and, and spoiler alert, artificial intelligence AI is kind of the, the entity that has reason and probably is the, the connective tissue that will allow us to do so. But
Phil: yeah, you know,
Ofer: let's, let's get into, into the content. So, you know, the topic of this, uh, webinar is why pipeline coverage gives force a comfort.
And, um, I'll speak a about what do I, that we, what do we mean by by that? And then, uh, we'll go into the solutionizing or talking about how to build a system of pipeline truth. And if we have, uh, questions and answers, we can, uh, address that later. So just setting up the scene, um, 25 years, uh, of, uh, doing revenue operations in various roles in various companies, big and small, various growth journeys.
What I've seen, um, in my experience is, um, pipeline is a really hard problem that people try to get away with. Um, unfit simple solution. Um, the conversations often revolve around coverage. Because it's the easiest thing. What is coverage? Three x four x? I have a number and I need to cover it. I have a few balls in the air and I need to end up, uh, throwing them and I need to end up with one.
How many balls do I need to to have in the air? You pick your, uh, analogy. The dashboards that, um, um, spun off this, uh, theory, focus on coverage in many ways, and they have really scary colors with, uh, green, red, and, and you name it, and yellow. And we often, uh, see leaders fall into the trap of trying to manage KPIs.
Um, it's quite scary when you, um, as a CRO, as a leader, uh, want to, uh, make sure that you have enough going on in the business, especially when sales cycles are long. Uh, you want to know that, uh, you have the cover to make the numbers that you, uh, are being held accountable for. But there's going, uh, and it is pretty easy to take the pipeline and divide it by the number, but it's also pretty easy to gain the system, so to speak.
If you apply enough pressure, you know, nobody wants to look red, it's pretty easy to game the system by adding stuff, inflating pipeline by, um, letting deals that are already dead to stay in the pipeline because nobody asked me and it's there, or somebody else could basically, um, uh, lost that deal and now it's showing up in my territory.
I don't want to lower my win rates. Uh, so you feel like folks prioritizing, looking good. Over being good because it, it's pretty, the, the metric is simple. It's pretty easy to, I don't wanna say game, but I will say game, um, the, the, the, the picture that everybody's looking at.
Phil: I think the, you know, one of the interesting things of, uh, that, um, you've been able to, to look at with the way in which you look at data is the connection between data and behavior. And I, I just remember, uh, doing a project with one of our clients in Australia and they were having a bit of a tough year.
And, um, there were a number of deals, you know, quite large deals going through the pipeline. And I remember that the CEO was under so much pressure in this organization that. That he was circumventing the activities of the sales team, uh, speaking direct to the customer to see if he can pull off a deal in order to, to reach the number for the country.
And of course, when you have that sort of behavior coming from senior management, it doesn't make you wanna share data, does it? To your point of earlier on that, that what is in the pipeline, you wanna sort of manage the expectations of senior management so that they don't interfere too much in the data that they're seeing and sort of inter intervening around, you know, the sales team.
Um, but I think what I found interesting, uh, through the past, you know, 10 years of beginning to beginning to understand how you're approaching pipeline health and management is the way you've started to link. A deep understanding of the behavior of salespeople and sales managers with data. I think that's, I think that's quite unusual.
Ofer: Yes. I mean, I think we have lots of stories. I'll, I'll, I'll tell another one just in the terms of, um, how people get, how you get the wrong outcome from the right discussion. So back in service nowadays, EMEA days, um, I identify that the coverage of HR is, uh, HR business unit, um, is going through the roof and we go on a pipeline call, uh, at EMEA level.
And the, uh, I, I, I bring that insight and I say it looks like it's really inflated. And when I look at the stages where it's at, um, in terms of the sales process, there are in the very early stages, and many of those opportunities look like ideas someone had rather than. A real customer, um, mm-hmm. Um, campaign, sales campaign or interaction, but I didn't have the tools to really, um, gauge that and, and say, Hey, you have a, an opportunity here, and there's no meetings in the system or there's no, it, it would, would require at scale, uh, a lot of clicking, so to speak.
So I just posted it and I, and we had the head of solutions in EMEA and the leader of EMEA on the call, and I said, look, this, this do deals are very early stage. There, no maturity. Uh, I think the action here is to go and qualify those deals and make, uh, and see if we, we have, uh, um, talk to customers, talk to, to reps, and see how we move those forward and have the overlay solution sales also get involved, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
A month passes and I open the dashboard. Guess. Lo and behold, the maturity of most of the pipeline went from beginning to somewhere, uh, into the value stage, into closing stages. And I, um, said that that's highly unusual to happen in one month. So again, we get on the pipeline call and immediate leader asked the head of solutions, Hey, what, what, uh, what, how did you do that?
That's amazing. In one month you moved the bid, you moved No, didn't move the middle. You, you absolutely blew it to the other direction. And the, uh, head of solutions answered. Well, we looked in the CRM system and all those deals had the wrong stage. So we changed the stage and the head of India said, Hey, um, did you actually move the business or you moved the KPI?
Phil: Mm-hmm.
Ofer: So again, mid lengthy story, but again, to set the scene that it's really easy to get the wrong outcome from the right discussion, as I said before, by applying pressure and not working with sales behavior rather than, uh, uh, um, focusing on the customer. So again, KPIs are there to take care of, care of themselves, not by applying pressure to fix something that doesn't look right.
And, um, I guess the story here, this is where we start getting into the story, because whereas before, um, all we, we, we were reading systems of records and building dashboards and in a, in a more sophisticated way. We, um, I applied, uh, the Health Pentagon, which we'll look at and we spoke about how do you, um, actually empower or, um, completely foolproof the, the, the system that you're looking at through, um, a set of KPIs that is much harder to game and artificial in inte intelligence layered on up upon There is, um, also a story to be told, uh, about the angle that you're coming from or Consalia is coming from field about, um, mindsets and, and how does that play with everything that's going on in, in today's world?
I think,
Phil: I think what's interesting is that, I mean the, uh, the mindset topic, which we may come onto into more detail is, is sort of based on a doctoral research program and we were approaching. Pipeline management from, from the buyer perspective and sort of working backwards. And, uh, our interest, um, was in what buyers were saying about the critical mindsets that salespeople needed to have in order to, um, be successful.
And what you have on this slide is an identification of the critical mindsets that were established after a couple of years of researching customers from around the world. Um, uh, sort of based around authenticity, client centricity. I think these are no-brainers, but the, the areas that we found that were less common, but most valued by customers were proactive creativity and, and ful.
Audacity. What we did was then we took a number of control groups of salespeople, uh, selling complex B2B solutions, and we. We took these mindsets and, and we began to explore in every single aspect of engagement with, with an end customer. How can we live these mindsets? How do we demonstrate that these mindsets in the way that we, uh, pick up the phone and talk to people, the way in which we do our customer research, the way we innovate around different ideas, the way we challenge customers in the way they thought.
If we lived these values strongly, would it, would it make a huge impact? And we, we had an extraordinary, um, situation after, uh, another couple of years having to find the mindsets in running focus groups and being able to. Test whether these mindsets would in fact result in shorter sales cycles, uh, bigger deals and more cross-selling opportunities.
And indeed, we found that's the case. So we were coming at pipeline from the position of, it's the way, the way you think and the way that you, um, the way you think about, uh. The, the, you know, your, your personal values are hugely important in the way that you are successful in, in, in, in approaching deals.
And so, in a way, we were coming at this from the micro level, which is the deal level. And you are coming at it from the, you know, the customer level and macro information level. And what we're now looking to do is to merge these two philosophies together to see how, you know, can, can by merging these two philosophies in as you say, an AI enabled environment, is it gonna help speed up, you know, develop better quality business.
So for me, I'm very excited to explore this area.
Ofer: Absolutely. So just to really emphasize here, uh, as a rev ops guy internally in every company I worked for, we're looking for the best sales reps and say, and best sales reps, obviously, as the ones that. Kill the number and, and, and make a lot of money. And, and, and, and that there was a bias there.
Inherited bias because you could give a, a sales rep a really rich territory and they could compare to another rep that doing all the right things, but it's gonna take them more time to get to where, uh, um, a great trip, uh, or, or, or to get to success. So you can, uh, internally within a company really create, uh, an un, uh, uneven surface.
So to, so to speak, in terms of the potential you are giving up between, uh, territories and reps that covers those, those territories. You kind of put all that aside and you went to the client side and said, I don't, you know, the client doesn't care. What's the territory of the rep? They care about how they're being sold to, and you kind of completely distilled the noise.
And, and heard from the vendor, sorry, from the client. What is a, what is a great vendor, what is a great sales guy? And, and that's why I love those, um, this, uh, perspective. And I think we are at the cusp of, uh, really proving it at scale or dialing it if it needs to be. So let me, uh, move to the next slide, which is more of, um, clicked it too many times.
So here's what I had built and what we had built, uh, in Avis because we, um, again, recognizing that coverage is not exactly, um, the, the, um, end game for everything that's happening because as we said before, we can game it or even. The spectrum of behaviors that we have out there in the field. You will have the rep that will enter any idea that just goes through their mind, oh, I can sell that.
I'll put it as pipeline. Whereas, uh, pipeline definition, a great, or a good pipeline definition is when customer and sales rep decided to go on a sales campaign. You have intention from both side to do, um, a transaction, whether it happens or not, or, uh, um, it, it doesn't matter. But the rep decided this is enough.
Uh, there's enough value here that I can offer this customer that's also gonna retire a meaningful part of my quota. It's not a smallish deal that, um, even if the customer is extremely, is propensity to buy is extremely high, but it's gonna take too much of my time and not be impactful for what I, what I need to do this year.
So again, it's a, it's kind of a handshake between customer and uh, rep. But then, uh, comes the qualification part. There's a lot of research that, uh, show that the best reps kill deals early, and it came in several research papers that you need to have the eye on the right ball. And if you do qualification pro properly, you understand that there's ICP fit, there is the right type of intent and not just ICP, but it's a meaningful transaction.
You and, and you qualified quickly. That, uh, in or out, that is a big factor in, uh, health of pipeline because, uh, from a, if we go to gaming perspective to enter a deal in the very early stages, we'll get your coverage score up, but will lower your qualification score. And because we are looking at the entire Pentagon score to denote health.
Basically coverage and qualification, uh, um, canceled each other if you don't do the second part as well. So I'm spoke, spoke about coverage, qualification. Then comes maturity. Maturity is once you had proven the value, you've proven that you can solve the problem. You are now about, um, articulating the value, negotiating, contracting and everything, the good stuff that goes after that.
You put aside the, the ability you are, um, maybe shortlisted, even vendor of choice. That's where you are, uh, in the maturity. And so again, all measured by the sales cycle spread is about, um, spreading or de-risking your pipeline. Not all the eggs in the one basket. Um, famous case in ServiceNow again, uh, we had, um, um, uh.
If you looked at North Europe, which was dark, and, and UK combined coverage, qualification, maturity looked fantastic. But when you separated the two, you would see too much pipeline in UK and too little pipeline in, uh, in, uh, Germany. And, uh, UK was overheating. They couldn't execute on all this pipeline, and Germany didn't have enough.
So between the two of them, both of them missed the number and, uh, and, and, and, and although the combined picture looked, uh, really good, so again, in the spread angle, we are trying to look one level down and see if we have a healthy picture there. And signal to the leader who is looking at this, you might look good on one, two, and three, but the one, two, and three go out of balance when you drill down and then you have quality.
Quality is the, um. Um, the silent killer again, the deals that, um, stagnant too much or, um, or, uh, dead in the water or hot air that is coming. There's always gonna be in a volume of pipeline. We talk about three x four x, sometimes six x coverage. There's always gonna be a percentage, which is rubbish. It just shouldn't be pipeline.
But if that percentage is mentioned field, um, working with behavior, if that percentage is constant and I had proven in the past that I can execute with that noise existing in the system, then I should not focus myself. On the noise just for the sake of, uh, reducing it, I should focus on teams where they go out of the standard.
So I speak spoken a lot here, but I, I think if we roll it up again, it's uh, it's a more sophisticated way. Uh, I I used to say to reps, managers, gaming this and doing your job, probably doing your job is more easy and then trying and, and end gaming this
Phil: of, I, uh, one of the terms that's often used when, when talking about pipeline is, is velocity and pipeline velocity.
And I don't know if now's the right time for you to comment on that. Um, but I I can
Ofer: comment on that. Yeah. I, I, I agree in principle, but what, um, I think. Is super important when you show dashboards and when you show, uh, KPIs is that they're actionable. And, um, when you look at velocity formulas, um, you see win rates there.
Um, average deal size. Um, uh, tho those KPIs are kind of, yeah, who doesn't want a higher win rate? Who doesn't want an average, uh, a, a, a bigger average deal? The question is how? So? Um, if you look at the angles I presented here, velocity is expressed here. Quality looked as, looks at stagnation. It looks, if it doesn't, if the average, uh, um, um, um, deal is, uh, is lagging.
If, if you look at qualification maturity, those are sales stages again, that you need to go through. This is you need to go through the motions and if you start bloating it, the pipeline, it'll immediately be flagged here. So again, velocity is uh, a notion. It's a great KPI at maybe for rev ops folks, but for sales folks, they need to look at something and say, right, I need to mature my pipeline.
I need to qualify my pipeline, I need to go. And in. Next level down and see what they're doing. So, uh, it's a healthy picture for them. And by the way, quality is sitting there and all the time ha pinging me and saying, you are going out of, uh, the range that is safe and you need to start, uh, looking and, and, and inspecting these deals because they are polluting your pipeline.
So again, it's, it's the actionable framework that I'm looking for rather than, um, notions of, um, that are desirable but hard to translate to what is exactly now am I supposed to do.
Phil: Great. Yeah. It always simulates an interesting conversation that,
Ofer: yeah. Yeah. I think, I think before we go here, um, actually I think we want to tell a story.
Phil: I. Yeah, I mean, it, it's interesting 'cause when we, when we start to talk about pipeline, I was, I was sharing with Ofer a particular scenario, which is, which, which is ongoing. But, but, but started reasonably recently. And, and this was, um, uh, a new account manager in 2018 had, had taken over, uh, one of the largest, um, aviation accounts in, in the uk.
Um, it was considered a kind of a platinum account and for years it'd been gen generating on average about $800 million, uh, pounds worth rather, of, uh, consulting engineering revenue, which was considered by them. Pretty significant. But as a new account leader, um, you know, what would you do? You're taking over this new account.
Um, you would want to get some perspectives from the customer about how they found it, you know, what's worked, what hasn't worked. And it was a bit like pricking a boil for this account manager because, um, the head of civil engineering at the airport really just poured his heart out and said, look, technically you guys are brilliant.
You're doing a fantastic job. But I never know really who to call upon. Whenever there's an opportunity, we tend to get senior management calling over us. Uh, there doesn't seem to be a, a clear strategy and you keep us in the dark a lot with some of the innovation that you have. Um, you know, I don't really know what's going on with all the teams or with all the people you've got working here.
They had about 30 or 40 people working on site, so I don't really know what's really going on. So, I mean, clearly there was a, a governance structure here and the, you know, the director came back and set up a new governance structure, reported back to the exec Co, and said, look, we've got a problem. Big, big account done, done a lot, but we need to up our game.
And so he went back with a new governance structure in place, uh, where he was the throat to choke, so to speak. And, um, it started then rebuilding trust. And what was interesting in, in the process of rebuilding trust, he began to understand the. Motivation of the head of civil engineering at the airport and found out that this, this guy who is going to be retiring in about five years time, uh, was passionate about creating a much more diverse workforce inside the airport and the engineering team.
He said, look, we've got lots of 50-year-old gray hair men. Mainly we need to get younger people coming in. We want to excite young people to come and work here at the airport. And this resonated a lot with the account director who also worked for a company that wanted to approach, uh, diversity in a very progressive way.
And they'd started this early career system. Well, they were attracting graduates out of, uh, you know, the different universities to get them to come and, and, and take jobs with them. And he went back to, um, this head of civil engineering and said, look, we've got this fantastic early careers program. I want to get more diverse talent onto our team here at the airport.
You want to get more diverse talent into yours. Why don't we do it jointly? Um, they hadn't run a early careers program at the airport, and so the head of civil engineering, um, thought this was a great idea. Now, bearing in mind all of this has got nothing to do with selling more, this is simply addressing something that was really important to the, uh, to the persona, the buyer here.
Anyway, um, the guy said, look, we can do this. Let's do this together, but we can't just do it with you. We need to do it with your competitors as well. So it's all of the consulting groups that are providing services to the airport need to chip in. But what we'll do is we'll recognize that this was your idea.
Um, and this started to build, um, a climate of trust. And if we, if we start to talk about the mindsets earlier on, it was very much authentic in the approach. It's very much client-centric and it was proactively creative because this was an idea that this person had never really thought of. And it was the account manager that took the idea to the airport anyway, this worked really well.
Uh, they began to attract a much younger, so if we start to look at the years that progressed and the business then started to increase from 8 million a year up towards 12 million, we got these little airplanes here. And you can see we have this crash about to appear. This wasn't a physical crash, but of course we then had the pandemic.
And what was interesting here is of course all of the capital expenditure projects at the airport. Was were canceled, staff were being laid off. A lot of the diverse talent that had been recruited into the airport were going to be let go. So again, the account manager went back to his own company and said, look, aviation's nose diving.
But we've got other projects in water, in carbon sustainability, in rail, which governments around the world are really investing in. Why don't we offer to take on and seconded staff from the airport back inside our own company for a period of time? Then when aviation picks up, we hope that business will will come through.
So in 2020, you have this crashing of revenue and if the organization was only focused on revenue. They would do what many of the competitors of, um, this account director would've done is walked away. Because there was not the ROI in the account at the time, there was no certainty about how long the, the pandemic would continue for.
Um, but they went with this idea to the airport and said, why didn't we sit on your staff? The airport did something very similar to that, that they did before that said, we will, it's a great idea. Uh, but all of your competitors need to, um, also follow through with the, with the same idea. And, um, they did, uh, they were all invited to pitch, if you like, for the talent that existed within the airport.
There're about six or seven of these consulting groups. And what was quite clever about the approach taken by. The account director was that rather than having rather stuffy corporate presentations, they got that early careers group team to talk about what fantastic fun it was working for their company.
They sort of stressed the bakeoffs and the other activities that were going on during the pandemic years. Anyway, 50% of all of the top talent of the airport ended up working for the uh, uh, account directors company. And they were dispersed into a wide range of different varied projects, both in the UK and in other countries.
Business was still slow. Business was non, non non-existent. And of course, when aviation started to pick up, all of a sudden there was this huge backdrop of. Of or projects that needed addressing. And at that point, the airport then wanted to take the, the, the teams back. They'd had 18 months worth of fantastic sort of training and development.
So it's not as if they were a cost to the account directors company, they were contributing towards their business. But many of these youngsters were promoted into positions of management. And what was really interesting as we approached 2022 was that as a sign of thanks, they found themselves being awarded very significant contracts based on the goodwill that had been built up between the, the account director and, uh, the, uh, the airport.
And I know that we've got this trailing off at 16 mil, it's over 20 mil at the moment. So you've seen a sort of tripling of the annual recurving consulting fees after a period of time. So I, I'm sorry, I've gone on a bit long Ofer with that story, but it would be very interesting for you to sort of take that story and weave it back to the way in which you'd look at data
Ofer: Yeah.
Though, because that story, uh, in details shows behaviors and mindsets. Exhibit, exhibit, exhibiting the, exhibiting the mindsets that we are looking for. And if you put two reps, um, on a very boring, uh, no flavor, uh, dashboard as one, they both are struggling. They both don't have pipeline, but one is doing all the right things and one is, um, not as, um, as productive.
The one that is not productive may be under pressure. Um, and, and inserting opportunities that might not be the, uh, real, real opportunities or idea. More of ideas. And, uh, let's say that the other one, the rep spoke about also entering and saying, this is the potential I see if we continue doing what we're doing.
And, but it's a very, like when once you inspect what, once you go down and you understand and you coach, you as, as a manager, as a senior manager, you, you see completely different picture. And the question is, how do we do that in scale? That's
Phil: great. And this is why I'm so excited about it because, um, you know, a lot of our experience has been working in, in at micro level detail on very specific opportunities and accounts and being able to, you know, sort of see this over a period of time.
Um, but the challenge is, you know, how do you do it at scale? How do you, in, in all the micro activities that take place, how do you start to assess whether or not the mindsets that we know are going to work can play out or are being played out? And that's what I think the AI layer that we've been talking about and, you know, where Aviso is going with this is so exciting.
Uh, so it can be scaled and people can know that, you know, the input in terms of the qualitative behavior. You know, is, is being carried out by the, uh, you know, by the reps.
Ofer: So, um, prelude to this quite, uh, a quite busy slide, however, if you wanna think about it, is what, uh, we call in the industry maturity curve where you have, uh, all kinds of checkpoints to ask yourself, where am I here?
And, and, and, and as a client, as a, as a. Um, as a vendor and, and, and really understand what are the next steps that needs to happen in order for you to move to the, uh, next, uh, uh, stage in the maturity. And what, um, we try to do here is layer, okay, the Pentagon, which was extremely advanced a few years ago, but is, um, um, even more powerful now that you can feed it with AI insights that are super hard, uh, to gain.
You have AI sitting on top and you have the mindsets because in the end of the day, we have humans that we're trying to make extremely efficient and impactful, um, in front of the vendors. So if I took like, and looked at the left more hand, more, uh, left side, where we call it manual tribal knowledge. Um, the journey starts there because there could be an organization that have all the right components and they're executing it, but, um, and, and it's working.
So it's working, don't touch. But however, if strategy changes or growth becomes a priority, then um, they don't have the tools to really go and execute in that way. They think they're gonna increase frequency, maybe, or keep doing what they're doing and expect a different outcome, and that doesn't work. And you, you run a too simplistic setup to take on challenges.
The next, um, level is more of an awareness level. You are now, um, understand that from a pipeline perspective, which is your oxygen, which is your, uh, ability to achieve long-term, uh, targets is more than just coverage. It has more components to it. So you're trying to build some kind of dashboard that is, uh, uh, uh, is more 360, so to speak.
Um, you are aware of ai. You use ai. Somebody, uh, bought a point solution for this, a point solution for that. Um, maybe you're using Chachi pt, you're trying to do things around ai. It's sporadic, not systemic, so to speak. And, um, you're looking inside your organization and saying, somebody must be doing this right.
And you're looking for the best practice and trying to take that best practice and copy it over across the organization. So here you turn into a bit more proactive approach. The next level is where the corporate decides, you know what, we're gonna do things differently. Now we are looking at a set of KPIs that are our North star.
There's no, nobody has a different dashboard, a different spreadsheet, a different system other than this. We mandate it across the board. You start using AI as a tool to eliminate basic gaming. So if you have no engagement on a sales transaction whatsoever, you, you call it out and say, this is not a real opportunity.
Whether it was an idea of someone who entered it or whether it's an ongoing transaction that, um, you'd, that died, uh, or lost and nobody called it out. And, um, mindsets are accepted by the organization and the managers are. I don't wanna say running around, but they are the multiplier that we rely on to go and put the mindsets into people or coach people or inspect if the right things are going on.
So back to your story field about the rep who is handling an airport. Um, okay. Um, I have to have a conversation with that rep and see what's going on in his territory in order for me to kind of certify or say, wait a minute, we have a gap here. And again, the, the question of scale, um, comes, uh, to the fore.
And you need to have, uh, a span of control of managers if you are really serious about executing this. The span of control of managers must be, uh, limited. Meaning, uh, a manager can handle four or five, maybe six reps more than that. You are basically diluting the message or the ability to execute the mindsets.
And I'm gonna go on this monologue and, and call out field transformation. It's when the field finally, uh, adopts the corporate app, uh, uh, uh, approach. But not only the, the real change here is around ai because AI got to that stage where it can inspect outcomes and call out mindsets. And that's the exercise you, Consalia and Aviso are going.
We are building avatars and AI agents. That we'll be able to inspect and look for those mine states on scale, because most of calls are being recorded, interactions are being recorded, emails, account plans, um, messages. All those in the end of the day can get distilled. And we can look for the evidence, uh, of, of mindsets by training those agents with the materials, the years worth of materials, ships, and the books, uh, you've written Phil, to try and, and at scale say to a manager, Hey, on rep one, two, and three, you're good.
Four is wobbly, five doesn't know what he's doing. Focus over there, leave those alone. And I'll pause for a second. Does that resonate?
Phil: Yeah, it does. And I, I think, uh, I think this is, um, it, you know, the, the, the technology now is, is sort of transformational. And I, as you were talking, I was thinking that, um, if you go back, I don't know, 20 years, you know, to the kind of systems that were available then to help manage Salesforce, um, they were really unsophisticated.
And sales has taken a hell of a long time to sort of catch up with having a systemic approach to the way they manage the business. Finance, manufacturing, other functions of a business of actually in, in many ways been much further ahead than sales in terms of system support. Um, but I think what we have now with AI is potentially enabling.
Sales by bringing in together the behavioral dimensions that you've been speaking about with all the data and the analytics side of it. So producing a, a way of working, a system of operating, which is incredibly sophisticated and very exciting. Uh, I hadn't shared that thought with you, but I I do think that we're sort of moving into a very new way of actually, you know, it's enabling us to really rethink how we're going to operate.
Um, how can we become more productive with the way in which we manage time, manage data in order to get better results?
Ofer: Absolutely. And I think the world, this is what we are having that discussion inside of because we have a new product called Ha Halo. And, um, we're discussing the positioning because that product is.
Basically what I think the future is, or, or maybe even the present because we see those glasses come out, right? If you think about it like a sensory system, right? You, you get signals from, uh, as a human, from touch, from e, uh, from vision, from speak, from voice, um, from smell, though all those, all those sensory systems are available to you.
But what's available to you today to, um, AI or uh, or machines are either structured data. We moved on to unstructured data that gets consumed by the LLMs, the Chachi PT of the worlds. Um, and all those come come inside and gets processed and, and understood. Um, but where we going, I think is, is gonna be a part of us, like an extension that we walk with and sees.
What we see is, here's what we hear. Um, when you look at the screen, when you look at your phone screen, when when you do stuff, it'll gauge everything that's happening and people will become more and more open for that. Like, it's amazing to see just as in our lifetime, the, the transformation between, oh, this call is being recorded to, yeah, sure.
Of course this call is being recorded. It is part of the part of our life. And I think that it just, the devices will keep on, uh, giving inputs. And speaking of the last stage here, or the, what I call evolution or, or mindset or, or optimizing you, you will see AI doesn't just inspect and give alerts. AI actually coaches, right?
And we already have that avatar in Avis, so we now need to train it on the Consalia, uh, learning. But that's, that's the next evolution that you have an assistant and a coach and uh, and uh, go get it kind of escorting you wherever you go. And it's probably gonna be glasses and devices, uh, to begin with, and then implants, because Alon is working on that as well.
That is all the time with you. And it will hear and it will optimize and people will just get used to it. Maybe there'll be a switch button when you want to be by yourself, but those times will be quite, quite low because in everyday life it is extremely helpful.
I exciting ahead. So, you know, we're, um, have a couple more slides here, um, around, um, win rate transformation, some, uh, numbers, um, and uh, kind of the journey that you take. But I think if we took a, a pause here, uh, I think we gave a lot of input to our audience. Um, again, building it in layers there is, we start with a simple, what seem like now ancient problem, but very prevalent in.
Many organization and, and making it more sophisticated. And then layering, uh, ai, but also layering the mindsets that really tell us about long-term success. And maybe open the floor for questions unless, uh, there's something you wanna add. Phil.
Phil: No. Happy to take any questions. So there are any from the audience that they want to share.
Ofer: I see a question from Ann, which are, sales mindset is the hardest, hardest to install across large teams and why?
Phil: Uh, for me, the, the, the hardest is, um, is tactful, audacity, uh, tactful audacity. And I, I think I might gr group it with proactive creativity. Um. And that's the, from our research, those are the rarest least common, um, but most desired by customers.
Um, why is it, uh, why is it hard? I think some of it's to do with confidence. Some of it's to do with, you know, skills. I mean to, you know, some, some people don't see themselves as particularly creative. You know, say, can you teach someone to be more proactively creative? We believe you can. Um, um, some of it's to do with being allowed to make bold decisions by the companies for whom you work, you know?
So there, there's sort of multiple reasons, I think, why, um, these two mindsets are the rarest. Um, but, but my point of view is that they're the most fun. Uh, they may be the rarest, but the hell of rules are fun. And if you've got a client relationship, which is built on trust and deep understanding of the client's business, then it's amazing what you can do in terms of taking, you know, sometimes crazy ideas and saying, look, we're not sure if it's gonna work, but we've got this idea based on this, and do you mind if we spend some time talking about it?
It's amazing how much clients will respect that. Some people think you can, you can simply go to proactive creativity and tactful audacity without being authentic or client centric. You can't do that. You destroy trust by just trying to live the two, uh, rarest, uh, values. You need to have them all together, like spinning plates.
Um, but yeah, I think part of it, you build
Ofer: them. Sorry, it sounds to me you need to build them. You cannot just walk through the door. You cannot
Phil: walk through. You need to start off. I mean, it's, it is basic trust to begin with. And to what, you know, how well are you really invested in really trying to understand my problems?
And it's amazing. I mean, we're currently doing a big global research project at the moment, going back to the doctorate research, and we're still coming up with very similar feedback from customers. You know, there's, but there's a basics need to be in place, you're right, of before you can really start to innovate.
Uh, uh, you know, some of it's to do with leadership skills, the way in which you work with different departments across your own organization. So, you know, it's, there are many factors that actually feed into what can, what can help, uh, live the proactive creativity and tap floor audacity values.
Ofer: Really, I think it's worth me.
Yeah. Sorry, Ofer. No, I, I, I said I think it's worth mentioning that in the partnership that we're creating. I mean, of course we're gonna, uh, try and, uh, not try, we're going to build avatars and AI that inspect and look and, and analyze based on the, the thousands of pages of research that you, you had given us.
But at the same time, um, you can't expect avatars to do everything. There is, there is engagement that you can do with Consalia to really think about the change program in the organization. Mm-hmm.
Phil: Yeah, that's right. I think what, what's what's going to be really interesting for us as we move to the next phase of our development is the, is the testing of the mindsets against the data.
You know, that, that, that we have, and to see to what extent would. We feel the sort of AI enablement on its own can actually start to push the boundaries. 'cause quite often the innovation, you know, in the story that I shared, for example, Ofer earlier on, um, the early careers initiative is not an SKU you know it's not a product, it's something that's intangible, but it's the mindset, you know, of that individual linking what we call some of the intangible assets of a business.
Just clever thinking doesn't cost them anything to do yet it's of huge value to a customer. So I think that, that, that way of thinking is, is, um, you know, there are tools and frameworks that can help you do that, but it's gonna be so interesting to see whether the AI coach is, is going to be able to challenge salespeople.
To think more creatively. Have you thought of this? Have you thought of that? So I'm, I'm really looking forward to it.
Ofer: I, I, I think, I think deploy at scale. Um, again, talking about, um, we, we we're discussing, you know, we have clients with thousands of reps, and if you think you put all those AI companions next to them and all those AI companions learn together with the rep and, uh, have awareness of the mindsets and they draw on resources in order to, uh, um, um, coach for the mindsets.
And at the same time, all that data rolls up, you can really refine or. We find in, in the context, not just of, of the organization, you are deploying it in, in the context of the person that, um, is, uh, your coaching. I, I just seen, uh, a wonderful clip, uh, from Google, uh, that they have changed. They have now in an AI that to the, to change the way you learn.
If you think about textbooks, um, that we learned in school, you would have an example. You, you would learn some physics or maths and you would have a very, like example, one size fits all and maybe I like football and I don't like, uh, whatever the example is. Uh, um, machinery. I don't connect with machinery.
I connect with football. But the same example, the same math problems. Can be represented by a football type, uh, example. So they basically taking textbooks, they understand the person that is learning and they adjust the, uh, textbook to be examples that are close to the person, that are familiar to the person that is learning.
And they completely, uh, and, and the research proved that, uh, those folks, you know, do much better in exams than those who are only using the textbooks. And I was thinking about it just today. I saw this, uh, I was thinking about in the context of ai, in the context of what we're trying to do. Um, that will be, uh, another exciting way of.
Really understanding the person. Um, yeah. 'cause the companion is always there, so they know the behaviors, they know how they like to engage and nudging them into the right. Yeah. Uh, mindset. Yeah, because I love your analogy and I let you speak about it between Caterpillar and, uh, um, butterfly, I suppose, and let you take that, uh, that, uh,
Phil: well, the analogy, I think the analogy is one of, you know, are you trying to build a faster caterpillar?
Um, you know, what's the problem you're trying to solve? Or you, you know, it is a problem you're trying to solve. You know, requiring you to be a butterfly. And, uh, I think that business now is, you know, is going through so much change that it is often about transformation. You know, the, the solution is not going to necessarily be about, uh, efficiency.
It's all about being effective. I think this is a term that you use Ofer. Um, so, um, yeah, I think that the only way that you'll get transformation if you shift mindset, you know, the mindset really underpins so much of what we do. So that's, that's why it's such an in, you know, important component of sales performance.
Ofer: Absolutely. So you just answered Diego's, uh, question. When you talk about mindset, do you mean, you mean the sales approach and Yes. We, we, we are talking about again, sales, but we are talking about maybe advisory and, and, and all the, the, the good stuff that, uh, you see here on the slide. Yeah. Uh, another question just came in, um, Molina.
Oh, also from Dego, how are the mindsets connected to the choice of sales methodologies? Good question.
Phil: Doesn't matter. It really doesn't matter. It's, it's methodology agnostic. That's what I love about the mindset. It doesn't matter whether you're using medic or spin or whatever methodology you use. The methodology is, is just a process.
You know, for me, for me, if the mindsets are right, then it doesn't really matter what methodology you have. They're all good. They all serve a purpose. Uh, but you can have a great methodology, but if you've got people with the wrong mindsets it won't take you anywhere. And so, you know, for me, uh, you know, the, the other thing I just like to mention is culturally what we found doesn't matter which part of the world you're in, whether you're in Japan or whether you're in.
America, you know, the mindsets are, are still statistically relevant. The difference is, is the way in which they're embellished in terms of behavior. The way you earn respect in Japan is very different to other countries. The mindset is still important, is just the way you, you, uh, convey it. And so, um, so I think what's interesting about approaching sales behavior from a mindset point of view, it's geographically agnostic and it, and it's also methodology agnostic.
And I'd ask you a question, Diego, what would you rather, would you rather a sales team of people with the right mindsets, but with the wrong sales process? Or would you rather a sales team with the right sales process but with the wrong mindset?
Ofer: I think it's a rhetorical question, and I think we're, we don't have time.
We're outta time, but I'll, I'll end with the story like linked to, to this very short one. Um, I say, I always say there's a, the different business, Salesforce, uh, sorry. Sales process and methodology, um, is, um, my wife, the process of washing dishes is always the same. You go to the kitchen thing, you, some of them go in the dishwashers, some of them you wash, uh, by hand and, uh, put away the request to wash the dishes for my wife, if it comes at 7:00 PM.
Now I'll just go and do it. If it comes at 11:00 PM there's gonna be a very different outcome. No dishes washed, and I'll be, what were you waiting for? And she will be, what were you waiting for? Didn't you see them in the sink? So the timing here is very different. Define a very different, different outcome, and obviously having the right mindset, um, um, helps to avoid it all to altogether.
So, you know, the, the, the difference between uh, a smart person and a clever person is that, uh, a spouse, a smart person, doesn't walk into, uh, a trap. A clever person knows how to get out of, and I think with that, very good. Thank you Ofer. I think we're, uh, gonna say goodbye and, uh, look forward for the next one.
Thank you. Yeah, thank you. Ofer.