Do You Catch Their Drift?

Are you providing your reps with excellent sales training only to find that most of them drift slowly back to their old behavior? In today’s podcast, Gerry Hill, Regional VP/EMEA of ConnectAndSell, and Shane Mahi, Founder and CEO of SalesDRIIVN, join our Market Dominance Guy, Chris Beall, to discuss the solution to sales rep drift. Using the analogy of machinery that drifts out of tolerance and requires maintenance for necessary adjustments, the guys discuss the necessity and effectiveness of sales coaching in real-time. The solution’s success hinges on catching and correcting those little (or big) errors in message, tone, and pacing before your reps run through your lists and have nothing to show for it. Vigilance and just-in-time coaching: All that and more on today’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “Do You Catch Their Drift?”

Announcer (00:23):

Are you providing your reps with excellent sales training? Only to find that most of them drift slowly back to their old behavior. In today’s podcast, Gerry Hill, regional VP, EMEA of ConnectAndSell. And Shane Mahi, founder and CEO of Sales Driven. Join our Market Dominance Guy, Chris Spiel, to discuss the solution to sales rep drift. Using the analogy of machinery that drifts out of tolerance and requires maintenance for necessary adjustments, the guys discussed the necessity and effectiveness of sales coaching in real-time. The solution success hinges on catching and correcting those little or big errors in message, tone and pacing before your reps run through your list and have nothing to show for it. Vigilance and just-in-time coaching, all that and more on today’s Market Dominance Guys episode, “Do you catch their drift?”

Chris Beall (01:19):

Where were you guys running yesterday? Which production system? Were you running on 10X, on the big one?

Gerry Hill (01:25):

Yeah, 10X… [Inaudible].

Chris Beall (01:25):

I was going to go take a look, but I hate to admit to everybody, but I screwed up my password and I got locked out of 10X. What they are going to look at is this, Shane you said something shocking. Everybody in the audience should have freaked out, torn their head off and nailed it to a coffee table. And that is, you said that you pivoted during the test drive. Now I don’t think most people know what a test drive is. So take us through the basic stats.

Chris Beall (01:52):

So who were you calling? What were you trying to do? How many people did you have on your team? And then how long did it go on? And about how many dials were done for you? How many conversations did you have? How many meetings did you set? How many referrals did you get? How many follow-ups did you set? What was the average time that it took for somebody to get a conversation within that context? You can just be high level. Gerry can look it up too. I would look it up and we all have the bad luck that I actually do this all the time. So I know what those numbers are, but I don’t know what yours are, I just kind of remember them, Gerry you could give us that.

Chris Beall (02:26):

Here’s the interesting thing. The cycle time to your first adjustment was approximately what? Cause I think the test drive only went on for two or three hours, right? How long was it before you actually did something? Change the variable and then you put that into practice and then read the result off it. Obviously, if it all took place in three hours, this is math by the way, everybody look out, I am about to do some math out here. Oh, the math of inequalities, okay.

Chris Beall (02:57):

So the cycle time was less than three hours, but how long was it for real? And then, follow-up question is, in the real world going forward, say your guys are in the weapon all the time, your taking over the world. You know, life is kind of fast, how often per day, whatever, for any given engagement, because you’re being many companies at that point. You’re this company or that company or this other company. Each one’s got to be on its own improvement cycle. Do you actually see making adjustments, improvements and so forth as often as once a day? Or is it a once-a-week thing, once a month? Or hey, they paid us some money, screw them?

Shane Mahi (03:42):

Well no, we always have to make some pivots in any campaign. But if we use a direct example where people can take the most value yesterday. Calling VPs, directors and above, CROs at 5,000,000 to 100,000,000, IT-related computer software companies, four people on the team. Yes, three hours on the phone, three hours and one minute and 42 seconds to be exact. Was the exact time that we were on there, just to be specific. In the fuss, I would say hour and a half-ish, we had come into our second session. We had went on to the
ConnectAndSell list and we understood that it had been fatigued. So quick pivot guys, the team immediately shamed, like they are calling right now. We are not getting anywhere with this, we need to change, we need to change. And that’s my team’s feedback. That’s how I put the change in this list. Bang! Started getting the connection again, connection, connection.

Gerry Hill (04:45):

I’d actually, cause I was observing the first sort of hour, Chris. I actually say that the adjustment came eight minutes and 12 seconds in.

Shane Mahi (04:57):

Was that with Serage on the coaching?

Gerry Hill (04:59):

Yeah because Serage, she was sounding quite robotic on the breakthrough. We made the adjustment after four conversations. He was getting compensation every two minutes, one second. [crosstalk hh:mm:ss] We made that adjustment and then he went on to set six meetings.

Chris Beall (05:12):

All right, I want everybody in the audience to go back, replay what Gerry just said. Replay it as often as it takes to eat up that many minutes that he talked about. So you can probably get it in there 14 times. And imagine a world, where in minutes you’re making material adjustments that take a rep, who is heavily armed, going fast, same list, same everything. Modify one thing about the rep through coaching, as Gerry said, the fourth leg of the stool. And you go from output of zero to output of six meetings in less than the remaining two hours and 50 minutes or whatever. That to me is, that’s the key.

Chris Beall (05:54):

So the thing that we never had in manufacturing, that we can have in sales, if you think of sales as a manufacturing process for generating potential future business, right? Some of its potential becomes 100% because you signed the deal, but you still aren’t there because there’s going to be renewals. It’s a world of pushing uncertainty ahead of you in various ways, trying to reduce uncertainty and get to that potential to become actual, but you don’t control a lot, right? In manufacturing, we feel like we control a lot because we get stuff down to standard within tolerances, and then we lock it in, right? I’m going to make, I’m Intel, I’m making chips. I get everything set up on that big fab, okay guys. Now until it starts to produce some crappy chips, were making chips. As long as we can stay in Silicon and gold and whatever else we put in these things, right?

Chris Beall (06:45):

But sales sounds a little bit different in that our process or the machine is a human being. And they drift out of tolerance very, very quickly, but it opens up this beautiful opportunity. If only we saw it correctly. Which is that coaching, in real-time, done well can actually keep our machines, and I think of myself as one too, this is not a denigration of humans. This is us trying to be consistent. That can keep us inspect. That can keep us in tolerance. And I’m curious, cause you guys are both experts on this.

Chris Beall (07:26):

Is it even possible for a human being to stay consistent, interacting with other human beings going on their own life, their own life impinges on them, their blood sugar impinges on them, whatever it is they’ve had to eat, right? Their experience this morning, whether their cat wanted to be petted or dog has shat on their foot or whatever, whatever happened right? Plus all those interactions during a day, they drift. I don’t think drift is built into the system and is seen as a negative, but is actually a huge opportunity for competitive advantage.

Chris Beall (08:03):

Because if everybody drifts and you only address drift and you do it aggressively in real-time, then in a sense you’ve taken the most important component. The one that can’t be locked down because hey, your competitor might get the list, right? Your competitor might get the message right, by stealing yours. But you can have, I believe, ongoing sustained competitive advantage that compounds like compound interest, by doing one thing that you probably aren’t doing today, most of you in the audience. Which is ongoing coaching in real-time about, I’m not going to say against, about the subject of drift of the rep performance off top, dead center. What do you guys think about that?

Gerry Hill (08:48):

So I agree, I agree. I think in the world we learn today that that coaching kind of needs to be a bit player led as well. They need to come back to you with the feedback. Providing you can show them the evidence, so that they can course-correct themselves. You know, with an aggressive coach, let’s call them an SDR Manager. They’re probably not a coach, but they need to be a coach. What are we going to do? We want to go to our rep and say, “listen this deviated a bit from where you’re normally really good, take a lesson and tell me what you think happened”. That’s probably the right approach in 2021, wherever we are in society.

Gerry Hill (09:21):

But actually getting the opportunity to segway the time and still have full production and environment for your business requirement, for that person, the reason that you paid them to exist and getting that coaching and it’s tough. And that’s just one thing, downstream of it, these refract to overlay and get that insight so that I can maybe look at this weekly, if required. And then the next thing I’m looking for is consistency, right? What do I want? I want consistency across my entire go-to-market. Wrap drift has a material impact because if the handle meeting that goes to the AE is inconsistent from the top of final message. You get massive deviation of value there.

Chris Beall (10:04):

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Gerry Hill (10:04):

Right? So most people aren’t going to remember the first outcall they have, unless supremely accident or terrible, okay? But they’re going to remember some of those emotional words that we’ve designed, that speak to economic waste, frustration, personal waste and frustration in their business cycle. The reason they took the meeting, the reason they would carry us, because we crafted those words.

Gerry Hill (10:23):

Those words in that next meeting need to be consistent. The words in your demo need to be consistent with whatever happened in that first cold call. The word in your closing meeting needs to be consistent with what happened in the first call. Guess what? The words, if you need to go back and re-pitch somebody else in your business, needs to be consistent with whatever happens in that first call.

Gerry Hill (10:44):

So everybody goes, I don’t mind my SDR saying whatever it is that they need to say. If they’re not policing drift, competitive advantage erodes massively, because you’re AE that doesn’t necessarily drift, the state is consistent. Might be curating a completely different message and that was the message that was intended. While that first outcall message is so important, because it is where the company strategy meets execution and at first point of contact. All the other stuff can be manufactured, but if I’m not consistent with that first message, I’m screwed. Like Mike Tyson says “Everybody’s got a plan until they get punched in the face”.

Gerry Hill (12:04):

Well, guess what? If you’re not prepared by having a solid, capable, consistent message, delivered over and over and over again, by people with the correct voice. Then rep drift will continue to be a place where you have value leakage before you’ve even got into the actual active selling motion. And that’s why it’s so dangerous. And that’s why it needs coaching and catching on.

Chris Beall (12:28):

Wow.

Gerry Hill (12:30):

That’s the why behind it.

Chris Beall (12:30):

That is a big why. So Shane, you got to execute this for lots of companies, not just one. So to the degree that we’re on the hook, and we are, but only for our own execution. We help other companies, but we don’t do it for them, right? We delivered the conversations and we try to teach all this stuff. We run Flight School, but you’re stepping into the cockpit and you’re flying that airplane for them and you’re telling them I’m going to come back with good intel and dead bodies. So for you, it’s even more important, right? In a way it seems to me, it makes it easier in that the rep is the consistent thing in your world. You’ve got your peeps and you’re going to have more over time, but it’s not a different person every day. We don’t, we’ve got a thousand of them, right? And yet they’re drifting and we don’t own their coaching and so forth.

Chris Beall (13:19):

So do you think that from an outsourced top-of-funnel standpoint, or even an outsourced, anything standpoint and sales, do you actually bring competitive advantage that companies might not be able to source for themselves? Because of the luxury you have of coaching against drift at the rep level and being able to amortize that or leverage that, across multiple relationships, whereas a company can only do it for themselves. Are you actually in the catbird seat with regard to market dominance as a mechanism?

Shane Mahi (13:52):

I believe so. I believe so. If I’m able to prevent that drift from happening by coaching the right way with the right technology. That I am able to provide that consistency each and every time, that we deliver every single call, every single conversation and more importantly, every single meeting. And then more importantly, with every single element of our activity backed by copious amounts of bay up, we’re able to deliver above all competition on a consistent daily basis. So to answer the question, yes, it does help us give a competitive advantage.

Chris Beall (14:30):

Yeah. It’s a fascinating element that we haven’t brought out before. Because most of the time folks would be advised, you’ve got to be careful of outsourcing because you won’t have two things. You want to have transparency. You can’t see what the hell is going on. You don’t know if they’re setting tame appointments or God knows what, right? And then the other thing is that you don’t have solid information flow coming back, both explicit and tacit information coming back about your market. I’m going to guess that your claim is yeah, maybe if you do it with the wrong folks, with the wrong tooling and the wrong approach.

Chris Beall (15:02):

You’re actually going to get something else, which is even if you still have your own team, who is working side by side, so to speak and after the same goal at the top of the funnel. You’re going to get better results for two reasons, because we, over here at SalesDRIIVN are going to do what you can’t afford to do, which is essentially coach every conversation. You can’t afford to do it because your sales managers are busy being sales managers. We’re not sales managers. We’re performance artists here, with science underneath and technology and weaponry, but we’re into performance and we will perform. And that’s what we’re going to do. And we’re going to coach the performance and leave it to us.

Chris Beall (15:42):

And then the other thing I think you might be able to claim is, and we’re going to bring you back the information in actionable form and sometimes even actioned form. That is, if we’re going to pivot after eight minutes on a campaign, don’t you worry your pretty little head, we’re going to go to a better place or we’re going to find out it’s not, we don’t have to have a meeting about it, guys. We don’t have to actually get together and say, oh let’s have a meeting to decide if the one word and the message can change. Or if this list is better than this list, we’re going to do it objectively. You can trust us to do it, but we will be transparent, so that you know what we did. Is that kind of what you see as the differentiators?

Shane Mahi (16:24):

I think just as you said, it, transparency is the key, right? One thing we are very, very known for is being completely openly, honest, and transparent with everything we do. Not only in all verbal messages, but in the activity and the fact that we can support the activity with so much evidence that is real, you can’t fake data. You cannot fake the numbers.

Shane Mahi (16:50):

The fact that we can support everything that we do with them out of data. That for them is enough transparency in themselves to say, look, a great comment from one of our clients was you guys are like an insurance policy. We know that everything you guys do is protecting us. If anything, falls to share and all side of the organization, you guys are there. And we have all the activity to, if we want to increase it, if we want to perform better or at a higher rate, we know from seeing the data, all we got to do is, Shane, turn this up just a little bit more, or let me add this much more money to it. I want this kind of result. And without having the evidence, you can’t do none of that.

Chris Beall (17:30):

I love it. I love it. So we’re approaching the end of the show here. We got about six minutes and I’ve got to jump in a call. One of the things I love about this business is, it’s not wait for the big deal. We flow orders through this business every single day. Test drive orders, little first deals, my favorite. My favorite is the $9,500 deal to put six people through flight school. If I feel bad, it’s from failure to have invented that 10 years ago. It’s good. This goes back and I want to go back to Gerry’s original set of points. It seems to me that to develop the kind of insight and approach that Shane has, you have to be very, very close to the customer. You have to have your screw ups, that are their pain, hurt you more than it hurts them.

Chris Beall (18:22):

And to me, that’s one of the issues with taking venture money. Is you’re so busy getting that next customer, so busy, I’ll say, making it appear that you’re doing the things that would reduce churn, even if you can’t tell they are. You’re so concerned about yourself, because you have this big pile of money, that it’s hard to be properly concerned about the customer. Which to me is not some ethical things, not like, oh good people are concerned about their customer and bad people aren’t. It’s like Edward Abbey said this once, the famous writer of the American Southwest, who wrote some pretty radical kinds of things, including a very beautiful book, Desert Solitaire. He once said, “You want good drivers? Strap them to the bumper.” Right? You’ll get good drivers.

Chris Beall (19:09):

And Shane you’ve strapped yourself to the bumper. And Gerry, I think you’ve said something which is the rough equivalent which is, if somebody isn’t strapped to the bumper, their chances of learning what really works all the way through, what Jeffrey Moore calls ‘the whole product’, pretty close to zero. Especially if that learning or since that learning, has to involve operational execution, that itself is hard to come by because there’s plenty of variables, we only have four, thank God. How long did it take us to discover four? Well, Gerry just added one. So yesterday we thought we had three. So clearly we’re still learning right now. We have four.

Chris Beall (19:49):

And I agree with you, Gerry. I think the coaching variable is truly independent. I’m going to leave you with the last word on this. Gerry, is there a hope of market dominance for folks who don’t take the approach that you’ve suggested? Which is that they engage with execution and they turn their hypotheses into actual measured outcomes and they iterate and they don’t cushion themselves from that reality with a big pile of fluffy money that keeps them from being able to feel it.

Gerry Hill (20:22):

So I’m probably going to give you the answer that you’re not expecting. And there are outliers that exist in the world. The problem is, we’ve now got trans-copycat those outliers. The outliers and the companies that have got really robust product leg growth, get to YPO without really having to actively sell products. I’m thinking Box or Datadog note kinds of OCT. And everybody with a software code in their product believes that they can do POG. They can’t, and they have got no hypothesis to defend that strategy with a go-to-market plan that has to be driven by sales and marketing activity. And they’ll fail, because they don’t have a scientific measure for helping them determine product-market fit in the first place.

Gerry Hill (21:10):

Scaling product-market fit to the needs that they identify, being able to serve first order. Crossing the chasm to second product-market fit for the next market that they want to take. Because guess what? They’re in a rush to flow a trend, coffee color a whole bunch of people that managed to get it right once for time about the gate. And believe that that’s the only way you can grow your business. Full cycle, where does it end up? Put PLG in your fundraising deck on the go-to-market slide, investor’s going to give us money because now we don’t have any sales and marketing friction in our process. They don’t fail nine times out of 10. So long answer to a short question.

Chris Beall (21:49):

Yeah. But a hell of an answer. I love it. I love it. All right. So we always do this at the end of the show. Everybody does this with me when I’m a podcast guest, Hey, if anybody wants to get ahold of you guys, I’m going to go first with Shane and then with Gerry. How in the world can they do it? Good to say, Shane, somebody is so smart, they listen to this and go, wait a minute, I want me some of that SalesDRIIVN. Or say, Gerry, somebody listens to this and goes, well, I probably want me some of that SalesDRIIVN, but I got my team and I want to turn them into sales drivers, here with the weapon. So I’m going to go, Shane first, then Gerry. Shane, how do people get ahold of you? And which ones are you going to pay attention to? And who are you going to ignore?

Shane Mahi (22:30):

Easily go to LinkedIn-salesdrivn.com/s/sales, like the word sales D.R.I.V.N.com. I’m going to pay attention to people that, they are willing to learn, they’re open to grow, they’re open to innovation, open to ideas, and they’re willing to try something new. And I do not want to work with people that are stuck in their old ways, want to do things on dinosaurs and think like the old age models are going to still work. So in a nutshell, that’s me.

Chris Beall (23:02):

How about you, Gerry? How do folks get ahold of you and who are you getting?

Gerry Hill (23:07):

I’ll pay attention to anyone with the appropriate check attached to the conversation, not Medicare then. How did it go to me? It’s really easy. It’s plus 447,702,034,001. I think I’ve appeared on about 18 podcasts this year. And I’ve given up my mobile phone number and every single one and only two people have called me. Apparently, over 70,000 people in total have listened to the book I’ve been on. So two against them, 2000% either means I had nothing interesting or relevant to say or people don’t want to pick up the phone and speak to me, but that’s it, that’s how you get hold of me. Who do I want to speak to? I want to speak to CEO’s who are questioning that growth imperative and trying to figure out the best way to get the market dominance fast and cheap.

Chris Beall (23:56):

I love it. I want you to speak to those folks too, both of you. And on behalf of all of our listers and Corey, Frank, and you guys have given me an incredible opportunity to feel. And I tell you what, I’m looking forward to continue to work with both of you guys, helping folks dominate markets. It’s going to be pretty marvelous over the next, oh, I don’t know, at least month or so, maybe even two or three years. So thanks so much for being on and for everybody here at Market Dominance, Guys. Thanks, Susan. We’re happy to be here, bringing you great folks like this and look forward to next time.