The Revenue Formula

If sales reps only spend 1/3 of their time selling... What are they doing with their time? And how can you fix it?

Also.. Maybe people don't know what selling entails? Irregardless, we dive into:

  • (00:00) - Introduction
  • (01:56) - Just 30% of time spent on selling?!
  • (06:43) - Find out the status
  • (11:21) - Eleminate
  • (15:38) - Delegate
  • (23:27) - Simplify

Find the salesforce report on sales here.

Creators & Guests

Host
Mikkel Plaehn
Head of Demand at Growblocks
Host
Toni Hohlbein
CEO & Co-founder at Growblocks

What is The Revenue Formula?

This podcast is about scaling tech startups.

Hosted by Toni Hohlbein & Mikkel Plaehn, together they look at the full funnel.

With a combined 20 years of experience in B2B SaaS and 3 exits, they discuss growing pains, challenges and opportunities they’ve faced. Whether you're working in RevOps, sales, operations, finance or marketing - if you care about revenue, you'll care about this podcast.

If there’s one thing they hate, it’s talk. We know, it’s a bit of an oxymoron. But execution and focus is the key - that’s why each episode is designed to give 1-2 very concrete takeaways.

[00:00:00] Toni: Hey everyone, this is Toni Holbein from Growblocks.
[00:00:02] You are listening to the Revenue Formula. In today's episode, we're going to talk about why your reps are spending 70 percent of their time on non sales related tasks, according to quite some research. Number one, is that actually true? Number two, what can you do to improve it? Enjoy.
[00:00:24] So tell me about the furnace
[00:00:26] Mikkel: Oh man. So. We have a gas furnace heating the house and all of a sudden the screen was entirely messed up, the pressure dropped. Not a good thing because it's really cold at the moment, so we want to make sure that the heat is on. And, uh, when we basically bought the house and signed the agreement also with the gas supplier, we got what is known as a service agreement, which means you can just call a guy, they come, you don't have to pay because you pay a monthly fee.
[00:00:51] It's a subscription, it's a subscription. And then obviously I call the company and they're like, yeah, you don't have a service agreement with us. I'm like, well, it said on the order that we do. We also send you all the material you ask. What, what's going on? It's like, ah, we forgot to create the agreement.
[00:01:07] Sorry. I'm like, well, can you just create it now? Well, then there's going to be a fee because you have a problem now and we need to send the guys, you need to pay for that. But we can still create the service agreement. I'm like, you know what? I'm just gonna find someone else. Thank you. Bye. So they lost the subscription right there.
[00:01:23] Toni: Well, they never had it apparently They never
[00:01:25] Mikkel: never had it apparently. That's the good news though. So where are we going with this? How do we turn this into a Segway? They could easily have gotten a deal. They could easily have gotten a deal. They wouldn't need to hire anyone. They would, they could just have said yes to me. They could just have said yes.
[00:01:42] That's what it is. There was some kind of procedure internally holding them back. A lot of red tape. It's a terrible segue. Let's go. Toni is going to salvage this episode.
[00:01:56] Toni: We're talking about, what are we talking about? We're talking about, that apparently, and we kind of seen this now across a couple of studies, Salesforce did one, HubSpot did one, um, I think McKinsey did one, um, basically all of them come to roughly the same conclusion that your sellers.
[00:02:16] Your account executives or whatever you call them. They actually only spend a third of their time selling. So that obviously sounds like what?
[00:02:25] Mikkel: Yeah. . Are they just spending all the time in President's Club or what's
[00:02:28] Toni: Yeah, pretty much. So if you're, if you have 30, if you have 30 sales reps. Yeah. 10 of them are actually selling, uh, and the rest are meetings and kickoffs and like, you know, president's club and, uh, I don't know, on the, on the smoking break or something like
[00:02:44] Mikkel: about marketing
[00:02:46] Toni: Well, there was something to complain
[00:02:47] Mikkel: about.
[00:02:48] Yeah.
[00:02:48] Toni: know, um, so that's, that's basically kind of, that's what's so shocking when you kind of read that, when you read that research and like, uh, I knew it.
[00:02:56] These guys are lazy.
[00:02:59] Mikkel: Proven.
[00:03:00] Toni: Yeah. Finally, finally check Mark, every RevOps person, every sales person listening right now, it's like, you know, actually, so I didn't need to have McKinsey figure this
[00:03:09] Mikkel: They poked the CRO. I was like, told you, told you. but.
[00:03:14] Toni: not that simple as it turns out. So we looked into this, we dug a little bit into this, and um, and at the beginning it was like, banger episode.
[00:03:21] Mikkel: Yeah, oh this is gonna be awesome. Yeah, yeah.
[00:03:23] Toni: and then we started, checking out, what is it actually that they're talking about here? What, what is, what is the other two thirds? What are they doing? Is it, is it just a, you know, it would be funny if McKinsey comes out, Two thirds slacking off,
[00:03:34] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:03:36] Toni: just chilling in the corner doing nothing.
[00:03:39] no, apparently, yes, they are spending a third of their time selling, which McKinsey defines as, you know, meeting customers online and offline and prospecting, right? Those are the two. Main things. what, um, it's not McKinsey, it's Salesforce, apparently. Thank you for the nudge. Um, and then what Salesforce defines as apparently non selling related tasks.
[00:04:03] researching prospects sounds a bit like selling to me.
[00:04:10] Planning and prioritizing leads sounds also a little bit like selling to
[00:04:15] Mikkel: You know what, this is equivalent of saying, so you're a chef, you only spend a third of your time cooking, but you spend another third on prepping all the produce, you know, getting the pots and pans. It's like, that's not cooking or what?
[00:04:28] Toni: then in a little bit less than a third, uh, they spent on, you know, listen to this quotes and approvals. It's like, I want them to spend a hundred percent of their
[00:04:37] their time on it. said
[00:04:39] Mikkel: docusign.
[00:04:40] Toni: man. And then, you know, now it's becoming a little bit more interesting. Data entry, admin tasks, and then another, like, roughly eight to ten percent internal meetings and training.
[00:04:49] Mikkel: Yeah, so actually shockingly small on training.
[00:04:52] But, side note.
[00:04:53] Toni: Yeah. Um, so really kind of, that's how it breaks, breaks down. So obviously kind of overemphasize the, the 30 is 28, 28, 27 and eight. So that gets you roughly to a hundred, I guess. so, and this is again, you know, the main bucket meeting customers online and offline and prospecting main bucket.
[00:05:10] You know, undisputed that's selling, then secondary bucket, researching prospects, planning and prioritizing leads. You know, we can have a debate whether or not that's selling, quotes, approvals, data entry, admin tasks is the third one. And the fourth one, internal meetings and training.
[00:05:24] Mikkel: Yeah. So maybe people don't know what selling actually is.
[00:05:28] Toni: is.
[00:05:28] I think, I think that might be another great episode. Um, but, uh, generally speaking, right. So I think first of all, no. Unfortunately, we won't be able to tell you how to 3x the output
[00:05:41] Mikkel: that would've been awesome. That would've been awesome.
[00:05:43] Toni: Yeah, it would have been great. but I think there's some, you know, once you kind of really dig into what is that person actually doing or what's the team actually doing, there's some, there's some really cool, you know, learnings and also ways to optimize coming out of this, right?
[00:05:58] Kind of that's, that's what we're seeing across the board with everything. If you are able to peel the onion back and see a little bit more detail into what you previously have been considering being a black box, suddenly all kinds of small things were like, oh, You know what, actually, you know, maybe can, you know, optimize this, maybe we can optimize that and so forth, which then, you know, might eventually help you to actually be more successful and having more optimized account executive team in this case.
[00:06:24] Right. And so the, the other example as well, you know, once you actually look at your funnel and you get more granular, it's like, Oh, I didn't know that this was going on over there. And you can jump in and fix it, right? It's kind of the same un, un blackboxing approach, that we are, I think, talking a lot about on the go to market funnel side.
[00:06:40] And in this case, you know, the black box, so to speak, is the accounting
[00:06:43] Mikkel: I it
[00:06:43] fits think it fits also very well with the classic,
[00:06:46] flywheel
[00:06:46] you need to turn it, friction will make it go slower, it's gonna take longer for you to get the velocity and momentum. So this is a massive efficiency driver and obviously there must be something to it to some degree since there's some, so many studies out there pointing at, hey, not a lot of time is being spent on selling.
[00:07:04] You have to obviously dig a bit deeper and I think One thing is what all the studies say, another thing entirely is what is actually happening in your organization. And we've talked about in the past that it's probably a great idea, and maybe you do it while you're on holiday with a glass of wine, to try and just request a demo, hop on a sales call, see that experience.
[00:07:22] I think there's some work to be done in actually seeing what is it the experience of being an AE? What is the work actually, where, where is there friction for them in the day to day where they lose time and momentum, right?
[00:07:34] Toni: And the way, the way you should be thinking about this is you should be digging up some of those, uh, some of those research pieces that those big companies here did.
[00:07:42] Uh, they help you a bit, you know, classify the different tasks basically that are going on, and they might fit or not fit for you, you know, depends. I think kind of the, the Salesforce one is like one, two, three, four, five, like roughly 10,
[00:07:55] 10,
[00:07:56] 10 different buckets. I think it might be a bit too granular for you.
[00:07:59] but the takeaway here could be to, do a little bit of desktop research. and maybe this is a RevOps task for
[00:08:07] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:08:08] Toni: And actually
[00:08:09] Try and scan through the calendars of your reps, and try and figure out, well, how much of their 40 or 50 hours that they're working a week. Are they spending on like meeting, meeting actual customers or prospects, right?
[00:08:23] How much of their time are they spending on this? I think a lot of the other pieces like planning or, you know, researching prospects or administrator, they will not put this in the calendar, right? So you wouldn't be able to see that. but you know, at least you kind of get a first baseline on what is it actually in terms of what, what are the 30 percent looking like here?
[00:08:42] Um, are there in our case, more like 10%? or they're more like 50%. I think this can give you insights on, how much time they're spending with prospects. and that might have different reasons, right? We talked a lot about this is like, if the calendar is pretty, pretty white, pretty clean all the time, it might not be because they, uh, you know, they don't want to talk to prospects.
[00:09:03] It might be, they don't have anyone to talk to. and that might be a good sign for you. Well, maybe you don't need as many account executives, et cetera, et cetera. In this case, it's also more about like, well, let's just assume you need those folks. Um, you know, how can you, how can you check how much time they're spending on actual selling?
[00:09:18] And I think going in, you know, doing a bit of research on like how, how many meetings do they have per week, uh, with actual, you know, people outside of the business, I think it's a great, you know, first starting point. I think then number two, what you can also see just from calendars is.
[00:09:34] How much time are they spending on internal meetings?
[00:09:36] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:09:37] Toni: And I think people will be shocked once they actually do this.
[00:09:41] Mikkel: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:09:42] Toni: and this is, you know, and everyone's like, well, they have a one on one with the manager and then they have a team meeting and that's it. But you know, guess what? It's, that's not true. Um, there's a bunch of other meetings that are creeping up and it might be.
[00:09:53] Uh, some, some handover to, you know, the, the AMs. It might be some marketing folks want to have a case study. It might be some, uh, Hey, they need to be onboarded on this new tool. It, you know, it's a lot of stuff that actually happens internally. And, you know, then you have the quarterly kickoffs that take out like a whole day.
[00:10:14] You have, you have all of these things that are basically happening. Um, and I think, um, people underestimate how much time AEs. are actually spending just on internal stuff, right? And that is already kind of a big bucket for you to be like, Hey, well, is that actually all necessary? Um, do my, do my reps really need to kind of go to all of those meetings, and, you know, have all of those discussions or number one, is it a luxury problem?
[00:10:42] They shouldn't be doing this. Someone else can do this. They can be one representative or they're basically starting to shield people. And it's like, Hey, stop talking to my reps all the time, marketing. Um, or whatever it might be. Right. Kind of, that's, that's another massive bucket that you can just see from scanning the calendar, actually.
[00:10:57] Yeah.
[00:10:57] Mikkel: Yeah. And so I think, um, there's. You know what, the analysis work, I think people can figure this out. Let's just say there's a lot of work to be done here to figure out what is the time actually being spent on, where is the friction. At some point you're gonna end up at the place where You know, you know what the time is being spent on, and now you can start to define how much time do we actually want to spend them on selling, you know?
[00:11:21] And so how should we, how should someone in revenue operations approach, once they have that report or analysis done, how should they approach identifying potentially how to change that and give more time to actually selling?
[00:11:33] Toni: Yeah. And I think the first instinct of everyone will be like, Oh, we need more tools, more, more tools that can all be optimized away.
[00:11:42] I think, um, before I go into this, this is like, you know, starting with the solution proposal, usually kind of the wrong way to do it, but I think the first thing to do is. And again, you know, I don't think this analysis is like trivial. I think you will need to do some desktop research and you will need to ask around and just maybe shadow someone and sit and so forth.
[00:12:00] but you know, once you kind of get to this list of what people are roughly spending their time on, um, you basically gonna have. Three options. One is you can eliminate something, kill it, you can try and figure out, you know, some of these things can be delegated and delegation is usually like, Oh, you're handing it down in the hierarchy or something, but it can also be pushed up and down the funnel, for example.
[00:12:22] Right? There are different ways to delegate. And the third one. is to simplify, you know, make things simpler and simpler usually means it's less time consuming. Yeah. I think those are the three main buckets I would I would be signed to shoot for.
[00:12:37] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:12:37] Toni: So how to get started on this? It, you know, it can be very, um, scientific around and it can be super stupid simple. And the trick is actually.
[00:12:49] And this is, this is a technique learned from this whole Lean Toyota stuff we had. uh, what's his name? Pablo Dominguez on talking about this. Instead of you as RevOps and CRO going like, oh, you know, this should be done differently and this should be done differently. why don't you just ask the AEs?
[00:13:06] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:13:09] Toni: I know. Silly idea. Silly idea. It's
[00:13:12] Mikkel: obvious. It was staring us right in the face all the time.
[00:13:14] Toni: Yes. So just go and ask them, kind of, what are the stuff that you're doing? you know, how could it be done differently or better and so forth? And obviously every single rep will tell you. Everything is shit.
[00:13:26] I just want to have my commission check. and, and, you know, I need to navigate through this, but I think I would simply kind of start by, you know, what are the things that you would think are superfluous? What, what is just non value adding on this whole thing? Right. And they will tell you updating the CRM.
[00:13:43] Mikkel: Right?
[00:13:44] Toni: and I think there, there's already, there's a balance that needs to be struck. It's like, well, you know, you're right. I think that's time consuming, but you know, we need some of that information. Um, but already here, you should basically just, you know, watch them once. Or you try and do it yourself. And I dare every single RevOps that listening to this, try and create an opportunity and get it all the way to closed won.
[00:14:06] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:14:07] Toni: Just try and click it through my friend. And it's, you know, I've, I've seen, uh, I've entered like an organization kind of as a CRO and it was like, RevOps person do that for me. Couldn't do it. It's like run into so many flow errors. And it's like, ah, you know, Oh, which, which field do I need to actually click now?
[00:14:22] just start there and you will find so many things that are superfluous that he could cut out some other things you obviously need. Um, and this is then the balance you need to strike with the account executive team, right? I think this is also a healthy conversation to have and a healthy balance to kind of strike in terms of.
[00:14:39] Do we really actually, you know, need to track these things because we're not reporting on them? We're not using them for anything. It's, it's sometimes it's like nice to have tracking. It's like, Oh, you know, maybe in a future scenario when AI has solved everything, we can run this piece of data through and we're going to.
[00:14:56] You never do that. It's, it's, it's all gone numbers. so try and kind of slim it down. Um, you can say, is it simplify? Is it, is it, is it eliminate? but you know, on that end, simply, you know, ask your reps what's time consuming for them when they need to do all the clicking. Right. and obviously you can't, You can't, you know, delegate this to someone else and they should just do that.
[00:15:16] It's, it's, it's what it is. And yes, there are some tools out there that might help you with updating this CRM or making it easier for them and so forth, right? There are plenty of solutions out there. you then obviously kind of need to figure out if this is actually helping or if it's just further complicating the day,
[00:15:32] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:15:33] Toni: do you have another idea on the eliminate piece?
[00:15:36] Mikkel: No, I think it's delegate time. Yeah.
[00:15:38] Toni: So then the next piece is really, delegation, right? What can you hand to someone else? And you know what? Again, ask them,
[00:15:46] Mikkel: them,
[00:15:47] Toni: what are things that are obviously crucial to be done, but Could be done by other people. and again, the list will be everything besides receiving the commission check.
[00:16:00] And again, there, you need to kind of balance things out. Right. Um, I think for example, the handover to CS or account management, they will say, well, it doesn't really bring me anything, which they're totally right about. but yeah, no, you have to do it. Yeah. In the interest of the company. And that's what you simply will have to do.
[00:16:17] there can be a conversation then there again, well, is this a lot of work, kind of this, this handover, you know, writing a big document, you know, that is again, something, can you eliminate some pieces, can you simplify, um, and so forth, but, um, that's basically kind of a conversation to have, there might be some, you know, research items in your prospecting, maybe it should be handled by an SDR, maybe it should be handled by a software solution, AI, whatever the fuck, um, but there might be different things where it's like, well, I do these things.
[00:16:45] And you actually don't need my brain for this. You need someone else's brain, or you could use someone else's brain. And think about this, pushing up and down the funnel. Uh, is one way to do it. And then pushing up and down the hierarchy is another way to do it. Well, that actually can be done by sales ops or by the manager.
[00:17:02] This can be done by an SDR. This can be done by, I don't know, uh, pre sales engineer or whatever you might have. Right. Um, and again, here's a balance, you know, you just try and strike the balance, but usually the AEs can tell you pretty much like, Hey, that whole thing over there. Really not important to me.
[00:17:19] Right. And if you combine that with some of the research that you did previously, it's like, well, that one bucket is 8 percent of their time. Suddenly it's like, okay, this might be worthwhile to really think about delegating this. Right.
[00:17:30] Mikkel: I think we also talked about the whole, if you're running a pod setup. And you're, you have AEs and SDRs collaborating closely, tasks like researching prospects. You know what? The SDRs might be way better suited.
[00:17:43] And I get, you need to be careful because they also need to be able to actually book meetings for the AE. But just to say, maybe the AE shouldn't spend time on that. There's a reason the AE sometimes throws rebooking meetings to the SDR. It's an efficiency thing, to be honest. Right. and I think, you know, it, it.
[00:18:00] Think about this, the SDRs, they're specialized in research and outreach. So you have a specialized role who can probably even do it faster than the AE, they cost less, there's a lot of other efficiencies in there.
[00:18:12] Toni: there.
[00:18:12] Yeah, I think, I think especially with Delegate, it's, um, it's a delicate, uh, balance to strike because yes, you can go down the path, and I've, I've done that myself, it's like, well, you know, you have this closing resource, and that's scarce, and that's rare, and, you know, we should maximize the closing resource, and everything else around that should kind of...
[00:18:31] You, you sometimes run into... Entitlement issues that you build yourself with the account executive team. It's, it's sometimes it's also things like not every time saved is, you know, efficiency gained.
[00:18:43] Mikkel: No.
[00:18:44] Toni: It's just more time for TikTok and Instagram and coffee and cigarettes. And, uh, and especially when you, you know, hand things off to other people, you sometimes end up in this assistant relationship.
[00:18:56] Dangerous, right? I
[00:18:57] Mikkel: I think there is an important point you're making here as well, which is you're building so much pipeline any given quarter, right?
[00:19:04] And so if you, if you basically increase the capacity of your account execs, because they gain more time, you also need to be ready to fill it. With, you know, otherwise it becomes just, hey, now I can go home earlier today. Great! Um, and, and that's, that shouldn't be the case, obviously.
[00:19:20] Toni: And, and I. I sometimes call it, you need to build positive pressure, right? Uh, and positive pressure is not, Hey, you need to work more. Positive pressure is like, Oh, I have all those opportunities I want to run. Um, and to know I have pressure because I'm getting that pipeline and so forth.
[00:19:37] Right. And, and I think this is then. This is then when you kind of get into the really valuable spots, right? You create efficiencies and those efficiencies immediately filled with higher value tasks Yeah. Versus nothing. Right. Um, because if you don't do that, to your point, you end up with, money. You need to pay to other people helping you.
[00:19:55] Yeah. Uh, but you actually not closing more deals because of it.
[00:19:58] Mikkel: And it's also back to another kind of a hidden efficiency gem is if you improve the efficiency 10 percent on a 30 person AE team, that's three roles.
[00:20:07] You don't have to go and hire that budget can go into actually demand creation for the team as well. Right? So you have something to fill it up with.
[00:20:15] Toni: And I think to a degree also the, the way you should be thinking about AEs and this kind of you know, lends itself as a topic might need to change just a little bit, right? It's not about they need to hit this quota. It's actually how high quality is their processing. That's actually how I need to think about it.
[00:20:33] and the way we have, uh, I've, I've done this in the past. and we might be doing like this in Growblocks as well in tool. Let's see. feature requests. Um, basically, what do you want to, the way you want to judge your reps is not whether or not they hit target. The way you should judge them is how well are they processing those, this pipeline or the opportunities coming their way.
[00:20:54] And, and the way you kind of figure this out is you need to basically have an understanding. What is the, Average conversion rate. So this is, you know, boring, but I'm just kind of breaking it down. Uh, what's the average conversion rate of that class of the inbound versus outbound. What's the, you know, sales cycles, ACVs, all of that jazz.
[00:21:13] And what do you then do is, um, you basically have a, let's call it a digital twin of that sales rep, you know, sitting there and that digital twin, you know, you feed them the same opportunities and the digital, you know, spits out, well, that means. according to data, you should have been closing X amount of money, but the rep only closed Y.
[00:21:36] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:21:37] Toni: And now there's a gap between those two things. Basically means, and. And we had this before, I was invited to his Christmas party, by the way, looking forward to that. We had this before where a rep was getting a lot of opportunities, hitting target, everyone was high fiving, but he was basically performing like up to 60, maybe 70 percent of the quote unquote digital twin next to him.
[00:21:58] And guess what? He was actually not doing a great job. You know, he's a fantastic sales guy, by the way. And Cooks extremely well and you know does all the things but you know on that one data point there You were kind of losing hair basically over this because was burning through a lot of your
[00:22:14] Mikkel: Stop sending my opportunities to this person, please.
[00:22:18] Toni: and and and really it's not about you know, is someone hitting target or not? It's about, are they processing this stuff, as expected, and if not, then that actually warrants a conversation, whether or not you hit target or not, right, kind of, that actually needs to be there, and folding this back into the efficiency conversation here, you know, you can then give them more opportunities, yes, you will probably in step one, not be able to increase their quota.
[00:22:44] So that kind of goalposts will stay the same because, you know, you haven't proven that really. But what you want to have is you want to have an expectation of like, well, now that you get more stuff. You also need to actually close more. And the only way you're going to get to that expectation is by having this, you know, we call it, you know, digital twin, basically of understanding, well, what should have happened versus what is actually happening.
[00:23:05] Um, and then it can use it for coaching. You can, if you want to, you can use it for, you know, compensation to some degree, but it's kind of really neat way to.
[00:23:12] Mikkel: way to
[00:23:13] Toni: Try and actually see whether or not you're reaping the benefits of, you know, in this case, the specific kind of delegate and or, uh, improvement, uh, that you're doing with the rep.
[00:23:22] Bit of a tangent here, but I think it was warranted for, for that specific piece. Yeah.
[00:23:27] And let's go to the last item here, which is basically simplify, right? Eliminate, delegate, simplify. I think on the simplify side, you, I think it's, It's a really underappreciated bucket. Um, I think we are, you know, it goes a little bit into like, Hey, let's, you know, eliminate some steps in the process and make it simpler by that.
[00:23:49] But there's something bigger here, which is especially for quotes and approvals. you know, creating those quotes, going through the CPQ, you know, creating those things, that should just be simplified and go faster. Um, we, uh. And this was before all the CPQ craze, uh, happened. We basically built an internal tool for, you know, how to kind of put together a quote, with like color coding on, Hey, too much discount and blah, blah, blah.
[00:24:16] What happened? Did I tell you that story? What happened was we built this tool to such a, you know, it was really good. and you know, the, it was very visual. It was like too much discount, you know, you can't go lower than this. Um, and, uh, Rep started using this on screen share with their prospects. And they basically
[00:24:32] And I basically say like, Hey, listen, you know, I can give you this deal, but the tool is screaming at me that, uh,
[00:24:38] Mikkel: can't do it.
[00:24:39] I'm not going
[00:24:40] Toni: further, I'm giving you the best deal there is.
[00:24:43] But you need to sign tomorrow, basically, right? Um, anyway, different, different story, different time. but, you know, that is, that is an example because it was super simple. They could, you know, put this together, hit a button, boom, that in an inbox and
[00:24:55] Mikkel: Yeah,
[00:24:55] Toni: it out without all the fat finger stuff that, you know, usually kind of happens there.
[00:24:59] I think the other thing is, and it's like, you know, again, you need to strike a balance here.
[00:25:05] is, the approval side, you know, getting approval for a deal. It's one of those things where you strategically want to add friction to a process. You, you don't want to have approvals just to kind of auto approve them like boom and done.
[00:25:19] Yes. Send it out. Um, you want to basically kind of make it a little bit difficult and difficulties sometimes can be expressed in timing to spend or wait for that. And so it's kind of. Sure, you can simplify, and kind of automate all the approval stuff, but it's kind of not the point, you know, and, and that's why I'm kind of saying, uh, there are ways to kind of simplify some pieces.
[00:25:41] Sometimes you maybe actually don't want to do that. Sometimes you want to have a little bit of friction, a little bit of complication in there in order to get the right behavior out of the reps.
[00:25:49] Mikkel: Or what you don't
[00:25:50] wanna have is reps spending all their
[00:25:51] time on kickoffs, presidents
[00:25:53] clubs all that stuff
[00:25:55] Toni: That's
[00:25:56] Mikkel: They should spend some time on it, for sure but it's about the balance.
[00:26:00] And I think what's really cool is. It's so catchy when someone publishes, uh, research and says, you know, a third of the time it's been selling and then, you know, it's wait a minute and actually dig deeper.
[00:26:11] I think the bottom line is you need to go and find out yourself, do the research, do the steps, figure out if there actually is a major efficiency gain there. Could be, uh, and that's potentially going to help
[00:26:20] Toni: to help
[00:26:21] Mikkel: Yeah, ask
[00:26:22] Toni: the reps, ask them, um, and then what's actually really, really important. Once you get to the end of all of that work. You need to find a way to actually get them more stuff so they can literally be more efficient and instead of like, Oh, now I have more time on TikTok.
[00:26:38] Mikkel: And actually even more important than that, once you've done all those steps, you go to iTunes, go to Spotify, you write a review, five stars, ten stars, doesn't matter, it's a high number we're gunning for here.
[00:26:50] Toni: Um,
[00:26:51] Mikkel: Help us, uh, help us get more
[00:26:52] Toni: You know, it really helps the cause.
[00:26:54] Mikkel: Yeah, the cause. Yeah. Well, on that note, thank you, Toni,
[00:26:59] Toni: Thank you, Mikkel. Thank you, everyone. Thanks for listening. Have a good one. Bye bye. I see this a lot with the, with the YouTubers. Yeah.
[00:27:08] Mikkel: Like, subscribe!