Ep10 Accelerate the Sales Process & The NYPD

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 10

Are you: 

• overloaded by your inbox?
• concerned with the myriad of things being asked of the salesforce? 
• Worried you might be contributing to the chaos? 

How would you like to move from being highly reactive to how you are enabling revenue growth, to being more proactive? 

In this episode, Brian Lambert & Scott Santucci discuss practical applications of using five (5) sales objectives to help diagnose root cause problems and then prescribe more integrated programs that move the needle.

Highlights in this podcast

1) How do you apply the 80/20 rule to sales enablement? 

2) What are the five (5) universal sales objectives (and how are they NOT a sales methodology) 

3) How companies who follow this disciplined approach have win rates as high as 70% 

4) Understand then for yourself first, and then figure out how to socialize them internally 

5) Good conversations about strategies on socializing the ideas inside your company. 

Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Nick Merinkers 00:02

Welcome to the inside sales enablement podcast. Where has the profession been? Where is it now? And where is it heading? What does it mean to you, your company, other functions? The market? Find out here. Join the founding father of the sales enablement profession Scott Santucci and trailblazer Brian Lambert as they take you behind the scenes of the birth of an industry, the inside sales enablement podcast starts now.

Scott Santucci 00:33

Hi, I’m Scott Santucci.

Brian Lambert 00:35

And I’m Brian Lambert and we are the sales enablement insiders. Our podcast is dedicated to asking the big questions that you should be asking if you want to be successful in sales enablement. You know, Scott, we’re surrounded by lots of information. There’s a lot of ideas on what we can be doing on a daily basis. And quite frankly, there are a lot of choices that we can be making in sales enablement to be successful. One of the things that I wanted to do on this podcast is this idea of focusing on what matters. And when it comes to what matters. It’s often the little things that can get us the most traction. Scott, can you frame that out for us?

Scott Santucci 01:16

Sure, Brian, Malcolm Gladwell published a book, and I think it was 1999 or 2000, called the tipping point. And in that book, he talks about a lot of stories about how change happens. And one in particular that I think’s relevant is one about the New York City Police Department. And specifically, back in the early 80s, New York City, believe it or not had a lot of crime. And the crime was out of control. There was a whole bunch of strategies to do that. But the New York Police Department followed a strategy that seemed pretty strange. And the idea was any little thing. Stop it. So, for example, and they saw somebody drunk on the street, they didn’t give them a warning. They put them up and they detained them when any graffiti went up on the on the subways, they cleaned it off immediately. And just by doing these very little things, guess what happened? crime in New York City declined 60 some odd percent. And that’s a dramatic change. And that strategy became adopted throughout the country as we saw a massive decrease in crime across the United States.

Brian Lambert 02:28

As usual, Scott, that’s a great story. But what does that have to do with sales enablement? Obviously, we’re not going to be arresting people. What are you talking about?

Scott Santucci 02:37

Well, I like these framing, framing conversations to help us think a little bit differently, but really what it matters, and what we’re talking about here is how little things make a big difference. And that where many of us are as sales enablement professionals, is the inbox seems like it’s killing us. We’re overloaded by all these different activities. And is it really moving the needle? And how do we actually start figuring out where to focus on the small and a few?

Brian Lambert 03:11

Yeah, that’s a great point. There’s so much stuff, right. So not only the inbox, but meetings. I don’t know about some of our listeners, but it feels like I’m strapped to my chair all day long every single day. And the idea of any whitespace or the you know, working through anything, is just tough because I’m always responding or fighting a fire or handling some sort of issue or, you know, if you have a staff, you’ve got people write vacations, somebody else sick, somebody got hurt, etc. So, you know, there’s so many things that we can be doing the question that you’re posing, which I love is, you know, what should we be doing? You know, Yeah, great question. And

Scott Santucci 03:51

if you don’t know me, I’m a big fan of using math. I’m very mathematical and the way I think, and this is really what we’re leveraging here is the 8020 role. And you know, since this is inside sales enablement, the 8020 rule is a is a principle developed by an Italian mathematician, really observing that 20% of the choices lead to 80% of the outcomes. And this phenomenon has come up over and over and over again. So, it’s studying that mathematical principle or the statistical principle. And while we’re at Forrester, when we had a whole bunch of different data points, one of the things that I did is applied back and I tried to look for look for different patterns, and for simplicity, and really what we ended up coming up with or reduced down sales, no matter what kind of sales that you’re doing, whether you’re inside sales, whether you’re strategic account sales, whether you’re a geographic salesperson, a vertical salesperson, no matter what no matter what it is that you’re selling. There are only five universal objectives objectives, you must meet only five

Brian Lambert 05:01

Yeah, that’s great. So, I’m sure we’re gonna go through these five. But let’s, let’s, let’s pause before we do it. What’s the difference between objectives as you’re defining here? And the concept of activities or actions or quote unquote, priorities?

Scott Santucci 05:17

That’s a great question. For me, it’s pretty simple. I can accomplish a task or a goal by doing a million things, or one thing. So, what happens is that in a lot of cases, we over prescribed sellers, a whole bunch of things to do. And then they feel obligated to do all those things when they can get creative and just accomplish that objective one way or another. What mat- you know what matters is, if you if we were to use a different analogy here, before we get into the details about sales, it matters that you score the touchdown. Doesn’t really matter how you score the touchdown. It matters that you get the first down it doesn’t really matter how you get the first down. Now, obviously in those sports, you have to do plays and make sure your blocking assignments are achieved, etc. But at the end of the day, you hit the first down, you make the first down, you keep the drive alive, you score the touchdown, you score points, end of story, black and zero, are black and white one and zero, it’s binary. And that’s really the the idea here is what are the five binary things that are ones or zeros that we can know we either did or we didn’t do so that we can communicate to everybody else that sales is actually an awesome game. There’s no such thing as an expected value or a weighted a weighted goal or a distributed outcome or any of the other math that that we tend to be applying to this, this pipeline game. It comes down to ones and zeros. So, what are the ones and zeros that we need to we need to check off in engineering or manufacturing sales pipeline?

Brian Lambert 07:02

Yeah, I love it. And I’ve certainly used at 20. I’ve used these five objectives. And they do they do netted out and I love, and this is important, I think for the listeners, as it was for me this binary nature ones and zeros and what pops into my head? Scott, I know we’ve talked a lot about this movie but it’s Moneyball, right? So, you know, we can we have batting averages, we’ve got, you know, all you look at all of the score sheets on a player, you’ve got all this all these numbers, and Billy Beane and Moneyball said, you know what our job is to get on base and getting on base and getting a base hit as binary, you either do or you don’t. And you built the whole team around that. That’s the same thing here is the binary nature of these five objectives. You either help sellers do it, or you don’t. So that’s awesome. Let’s, let’s hear what they are. Why don’t you walk us through those?

Scott Santucci 07:53

Sure. Before I walk you through those. What I’m going to do is, Brian, you’re throwing me for a curveball. You didn’t bring up money. balling our prep call, but I’m going to roll with it. So, what I’m going to do is I’m going to try to toggle back and forth between Moneyball and and these five sales objectives. So, I’m going to go through the five sales objectives really, really quick first, and then we’ll talk about each one, there are only five things, five things, that’s it five things that any salesperson needs to do. The first one is know who your target audience is. The second one is to be able to have at get access to that particular person. The third thing is to have a successful meeting with that person. The fourth one is to create a shared vision or a buying vision or whatever you want to call it a shared vision of success with the client. And the last one is to present to them a business case that they accept and frame this out the target and at the end of the first one, knowing your target is your on deck, you’re getting ready for hitting the gaining access is getting on first base, having a successful meaning is getting on second base, create a shared vision is third base and creating a business cases home, you’ve scored a run.

Brian Lambert 09:15

Yeah, that makes sense. And, you know, obviously, if you don’t do them in that order, you know, it’s not gonna work. And also, you either did it or you didn’t. That’s binary, like we talked about. And another thing that this does, Scott, you know, in my role I deal a lot with, for example, l&d professionals or trainers. And I’m thinking that this helps with is, you know, not dealing with the outliers. So, we’ve talked at 20 these are the 20 that we want to focus on this is the these are the principles or the objectives that cut through a lot of the noise. But if we’re if we’re losing sight of that, or perhaps, you know, not as disciplined as we as we need to be on the on the base, running and getting on base, and then the first second third You know, and then home. And we focus on other things like the weather conditions or, you know, whether the suns in our eyes or what we’re eating for lunch. Just kidding. You know, but but there’s a lot of distractions through the inbox, etc, right, so you can lose sight of the game and the objectives and in the l&d space, I’ve spent a lot of time, you know, saying, okay, those are things that we could be doing we Yes, we could spend time on making sure that the elearning is better, or Yes, we could be spending a lot more time on the assessments or whatever. There’s a lot of things we could be doing, but what should we be doing to help sellers, in this case, get on first base, and does that really matter? And I think that’s a critical piece of this whole concept.

Scott Santucci 10:47

And let’s let me go through let’s go through each of them with a little bit of color. So as basic and as simple as that sounds, and this is one of the phenomenon that I’ve encountered. When you bring something Simple to people they rejected. But what they want is something simple. It’s this whole, what simple is a very paradoxical conversation. But let’s talk with just target audience. Who are you selling to? Who do you want to sell to? In most cases, I get an answer like, well, we want to sell it a large enterprise companies or to the mid market. And when I asked more specifically, like, who is the wallet owner, that you’re targeting? Who is your primary stakeholder? Very few companies can actually answer that question. And so right from the get-go, we’re not really focused on people. We’re focused on sort of generalities.

Brian Lambert 11:49

Yeah, and then also because, you know, this is our on-deck piece, right. So, you know, I oftentimes get well, you know, at first, we try to go to this All, but then we need to over you know, be in a different role and they start talking about, you know, a bunch of people instead of the specific entry point into the account or the specific wallet owner, that should maybe talk to you first.

Scott Santucci 12:13

Right and, and it’s, the entry point would be the gaining access point, right. And the goal here is really to say, who is our ideal stakeholder that we want to be communicating to, it’s unlikely that every seller all the time is going to get access to that person. But the reason going through this exercise is so important. If we just apply a little simple math here, a CIO, if that’s who we’re trying to target, their budget and access to funding might be 100 x more than an individual user. So, the reason that this is very important, is because we want to make sure that the efforts that we’re doing is targeting individual people who have buying authority. And that buying authority tends to be higher level people. Obviously, we don’t want to try to think everything that we need to do, we need to call them a CEO. That’s ridiculous. But that’s why I’ve actually really spending the time to figure out who your target is, is incredibly important. In most cases, companies that I’ve worked with very large, well known smart individuals don’t have that information, or they don’t have that agreement on who they’re who they’re targeting. So that creates a lot of problems for Problem number two, which is okay, now that we’re at bat, we want to get access to somebody. So, in the game, getting access to that somebody let’s think about the workflow of a regular salesperson. They have a whole key of different leads that they’re that they’re given. In many cases, we’ve always heard that salespeople don’t fall but leads I myself when I was a salesperson, chose to not follow up on the leads. I was given for marketing, because the level that they were at were so far low level a I’d be restricted to people who maybe had a $20,000 budget and I was trying to sell with people with lots you know, with with adult money, or, or b it was gonna make me start a campaign way low and then the work that I’d have to do to navigate all the different stakeholders up to the person who can make a decision was making the job of me selling much more difficult. So, the goal of the of the gain access is how do we actually gain access? And then if you can imagine all of this stuff, do we have the right call scripts for doing that? as a salesperson, I’d love to roleplay out with other sellers like techniques done on press day for it. How do we do that if we’re not clear on who it is that we’re targeting, in terms of the demand generation or the handoffs or the content or the collateral or all of the different activities, by the way, it’s exploding now with email and social media and outreach or Reference programs, all of the different things just to get a meeting is great, but I need to get a meeting with somebody. So that’s, that. That’s all of the activities. And to your point about being distracted, there’s a lot of distractions just getting on first base.

Brian Lambert 15:15

Yeah. And also, in today’s world, you know, there’s, there’s so many there are so many platforms, but there are also a lot of, you know, point solutions. So, you know, what’s your thoughts, Scott, on what we’re selling, you know, the solutions that we’re selling, or the product that we’re selling as it relates to getting access, right? Because, depending on where and who the specific who the sellers are going after, you know, for example, CIOs may not care to engage in a conversation about something that’s super tactical. So, you know, they’re gonna ignore you

Scott Santucci 15:50

The way that I think about this simply 8020 rule, so this will happen at you know, a percent of time. Of course, somebody listening here is going to be able to find an exception but Let’s concentrate on the rule not not the not the outlier. If you think about it this way, if you’re prospecting, you should probably never talk about your products. If you have inbound stuff going on and they they’re bringing up products, well, then it’s okay to talk about products. It’s kind of that easy.

Brian Lambert 16:19

Yeah. Makes sense. So, when it becomes what, you know, that challenge that the that you’re talking to up to that person about needs to be about the challenges that they’re having, not necessarily your products. That’s right. How does that help get a successful meeting?

Scott Santucci 16:34

Well, we have to have access first, so that they will agree to meet with us. Now, obviously, on a phone call, if you get them at the right time, you might be able to move into that first meeting. But realistically, you’re probably going to want to set that up and schedule it out. So, in the first in the first access, you framed out a particular issue. Now we’re having our first meeting. And I don’t know about you, I remember myself as the seller, I don’t know if anybody else is listening to this is carrying a bag or have heard this from any anybody who’s is carried a bag. You go into a meeting and you walk out, and you think, dang it, I wish I would have just brought up x y&z and that goes into the preparation. So really the goal of base to get back to your Moneyball analogy, Brian, in a successful meeting, it’s, let’s pre let’s already have an idea of the common business objectives that they’ve got, and map different ways that we can initiate or help them explore it. That’s very knowable, especially if we already know who the stakeholder is. We shouldn’t put all that burden on our reps. And we sure as heck shouldn’t try to do that all in a pitch deck. Because a pitch deck is the biggest red flag to an a to adult money wallet owner, they say I’m not gonna spend time with this particular individual Because they are not going to be able to help me solve my problem, they’re just going to be able to regurgitate some really slick, slick materials.

Brian Lambert 18:09

Right. And and in the idea of a successful meeting, sellers today can probably make the assumption that there are more people involved than, than this one buyer that there’s there’s probably a network of folks. So, you know, if you’re if you’re in a PowerPoint mode, you won’t be able to tailor because when you walk into the meeting, you actually may have multiple, as a seller, you may have multiple people in there, or you need to have a sequence of meetings to string it all together.

Scott Santucci 18:43

Yes, that’s probably true. I think that if we think about sort of that first meeting, the sequence of events meetings are going to happen over time. So, let’s let’s put it this way. Let’s say that we’ve engaged with Chief Marketing Officer, and she’s liked what we had to say. But she wants to include other people to decide whether or not to explore opportunity further. So yes, we’ve gotten some access. We’re now establishing more buy in for, for peers. This is fantastic news. But we still haven’t accomplished the objective. And the one or zero is that they agree to explore for further. And I’m a big fan of, you know, I love the concept of always be closing. But it’s not closed for the contract is just closed for the next step, which is another integral point behind these behind these objectives.

Brian Lambert 19:42

And that leads you to the third base, if you will, which is this idea of creating kind of a shared momentum, right, but multiple people through a series of meetings, is that right?

Scott Santucci 19:54

it may be a series of meetings, it may be one meeting, it really doesn’t it doesn’t matter what What really matters is the concept that we’ve shared in at second base, the successful meeting. Hi, I’m Scott Tucci on with company x, we’re here we have this idea, this insight for you this commercial insight for you about making your business better. That particular individual says, oh, that’s, that’s pretty interesting. But that stakeholder that we’re that we’ve communicated to, is unlikely, especially if we’re engaging at the executive sponsor level, they’re unlikely to actually carry it on forward. So, we’re going to have to create buy in from a bunch of different people and the bigger the opportunity and the more stakeholders involved, the more buying that we’re going to have. So, during these two bases, what we’re going to be doing is is listening and crafting a solution in a lab collaboration with our customers, so we get to third base. The issue is, okay, our idea for how to help you achieve this commercial insight or this idea or this outcome, or what’s the solution? Here’s what it looks like. And we have to get them to say, yes, that is also what it looks like for us. We agree that what you’ve laid out will help us solve our problem. Once we’ve done that, guess what? We’re, we’re cleared we’re cleared at third base and we’re ready to go home.

Brian Lambert 21:29

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And let me I feel like this would be good. A good time, Scott to just share a brief you know, sales call series of events here to to breathe some life into this, right. So, we’re talking about these objectives. I once and I guess, I don’t know, five years ago, I was trying to sell as a consultant. And, you know, a company called us up and said, Hey, you know, we’re going to ask our sellers to Sell higher It was during the whole we need our sellers to sell higher phase of the market. So, you know, I met with them I said I did what you said you know who Who’s your target audience or who you’re trying to sell to, and they said purchasing. So immediately that was a bit of a red flag. And I said, you know, what, what is selling higher looking like in purchasing? Well, we don’t we don’t want to go there. We want to go over to marketing. I was like, well, that’s interesting. And these guys sold, you know, like water bottles, like, you know, so the bottle in the lid. Right? So, they sold that, and they sold like, dishwasher bottles and the the twist on lid and, and they were basically a servicing company that worked with manufacturers in China. So, you know, okay, so you guys want to get out of purchasing the marketing. So how are you going to get access, quote, unquote, to marketing well, who specifically they didn’t know. So, we focused on that then Well, you know, through their capabilities, what is a successful meeting look like. And there was only one salesperson who could actually meet with marketing, because the sellers to this point had pretty much gotten into purchasing mode. And they would talk about half cents, you know, difference in price, and that’s where they would compete on price. But there’s one one person who could sell, quote, unquote, get a meeting with marketing. And that person sold completely differently. A successful meeting there was talking about the vision of the water bottles or the you know, dishwashing detergents, etc. And they spent a lot of time work talking to marketers about what this new product might be. And I said, hang on a second new product, what are you talking about? Well, you know, the idea of a successful meeting using using these objectives was talking about, you know, a new product. And I said, Well, this is interesting because you’re talking about selling bottles and lids. Now you’re talking about helping an aompany bringing a product to market. And those are two completely different things. So, the long story short is, you know, the company wasn’t sure what its objectives were, they knew that they needed to, to shift their strategy. There was one person who could have a successful meeting and they didn’t know what it was. And the bottom line, that person was selling, not a half cent off, you know, 20,000 or 200,000 bottles, they were selling this idea of, you know what using us, we’re going to help you bring your product to market as radically different. So, the idea of number four, you know, your objective for this sequence of meetings to create a buying vision, you know, that space is completely different than the company wasn’t equipped for that type of dialogue, you know, how do you as a bottle and lid company, help marketers bring products to market and that was a tough shift, but they they figured that out and you know, we help them etc. And I think that’s an example Apple that pops into my head of the idea of objectives and staying focused on objectives versus all the other things, especially in a shifting sales pattern or different sales strategy. You know, this concept of quote unquote, go sellhire. What does that really mean? And there’s a lot of nuance and more portly there’s a lot of detail there. That competitiveness.

Scott Santucci 25:21

That’s right. That’s right. That’s right. One thing that now we’re ready to go home and go to home plate, home plate is the business case. business case, you might want to call it, it might be the, you know, the final proposal. Ultimately, what you need to be able to do is provide a short little summary of all the different bases and pull it together and say, here are the economics going forward. And if you’ve done a great job on the vision case, you’re going to be able to defend your your pricing position, you’re gonna probably expect that they’ll shop that deal out a little bit. Maybe not if you’ve included enough stakeholders, and it was a very, very, very confusing, you’ve been the one that got them all together in the first place. But it’s likely, you’re also the category leader. So, you’re just going to get compared, probably just to make sure that your pricing isn’t insanely out of whack. So, you’re in the you’re in the command position, act like it. So, one thing that I found is there were very few clients that we work with at Forrester. And then since since I’ve left that think this way, the ones that do their win rates are over 70%.

Brian Lambert 26:40

So that’s the ones that that say, okay, we’re in the command position. So, let’s act like it.

Scott Santucci 26:44

No, I mean, I mean, having this discipline of following these objectives,

Brian Lambert 26:47

Oh, the discipline of the object. I gotcha. Yeah. Because along the way, you know, everybody’s focused, you’re, everybody’s playing the same game. So, to speak back to our analogy, and the simplification here of the binary nature of each we know where we’re at. And we know what adjustments we need to make.

Scott Santucci 27:06

So, we both know remember our friend Dave at the data, the marketing data company, right there, their company was so I would say bought in and even up to the CEO of following this this plan, that their growth conversation every year was how many new clients will we allow to work with us? Right? I was their orientation, right?

Brian Lambert 27:35

Remember that? Yeah. And it was so, so radical for me to go, okay. Well, these guys, they would go in and say, you know, here’s the outcomes we would drive and here’s how much it would cost. And based on those outcomes, you know, and the pricing structure, here’s what they can deliver. So that means we can take x clients this year and be able to deliver it is amazing.

Scott Santucci 27:57

Yeah, that’s right. And so, at each step along the way, I’d work with Dave on each individual part, what’s the optimum thing that we need to do to drive those results? How do you incorporate that in into the sales team? How do you incorporate that to all the different people who are interact with the sales team? How do we make sure that all of our deliverable message, all the deliverable method is methodologies all match to that, to the point where when they get to the vision stage, they can map out the clients and map out exactly what they do? And they did that. So well, one time, the client said, Hey, wait a second. We actually would like you to do X, Y, and Z for us. And the client offered up three extra million dollars of new business that they didn’t even know about because they were so clear. And that was I don’t know if I’ve ever heard of an opportunity where you’re scoping it out and suddenly it got to x larger just because you were trying to make sure that we’re signing off on the on the value statement. All that along the way they would pick knowing full well that they have a 75% win rate. And if they want to take on 10 clients, that means they target 15. And that’s it.

Brian Lambert 29:11

Yeah, that’s it. When they’re rounded for home, it comes next to 3 million bucks. That’s nice. So, Scott, we’re running out of time on this, this has been great. You know, as usual, we like to leave our audience with some some takeaways. So, I thought, you know, you could give one and then I’ll get one and we’ll go back and forth. I can think of two or three, he probably can too. Do you want to go first? What takeaways, what takeaways Do you have or some added items you have?

Scott Santucci 29:39

One takeaway for audiences is really thought that this framework, it’s simple, and it brings focus to what’s hard. And by specifically what I mean is hard. What’s hard is the work that sellers need to do to accomplish each of these objectives. That work is invisible to most of the company and this decision Prime helps bring that work to the frontal lobe. So, it can be addressed and made made more clear.

Brian Lambert 30:08

Yeah, great point. My first takeaway would be, you know, when I when I think about it, and we’re talking here we’re talking five universal objectives. And what was nice about it is we didn’t have to go into, you know, a methodology discussion, you know, what type of sales, quote unquote, sales methodology or sales process, you kind of kind of clicks up or rises above all that, but you know, that it doesn’t matter what the methodology is, which are the actions that the sellers would take, because these objectives are universal. That’s, that’s a great focal point, as we’ve been discussing, regardless of the methodology at play.

Scott Santucci 30:54

Well, I’m glad you brought up the methodology point. What’s interesting is when I’ve talked about the Five sales objectives. I’ve talked about them with heads of private equity companies, CEOs, CFOs. I’ve talked about it with chief marketing officers, all of them are elated. And wow, that makes a lot of sense. That’s so much more clear. Where do I get the friction? I get the friction mostly from sales ops, or many sales managers that say, no, you have to do all these other things. And what I try to reiterate is, we’re not trying to replace your sales methodology or sales methodology is the mechanism by which you are choosing to manage your individual sellers by I have nothing to do with that. I’m never going to have anything to do with it. It’s not my money, my position. It’s not my role. It’s not my job. It’s not my business. My business is to help those sellers be more effective. And the only way I can do that is if we can get this supply chain. Behind the sellers on the same page, and that means getting them empathetic about what your sellers are actually really having to do. And it’s a very difficult conversation because they want to reject these that I’m selling a sales methodology right from the get-go. But no one else in the company has that same reaction. It’s it’s pretty fascinating.

Brian Lambert 32:19

Yeah, that is fascinating. And so let me get my second one then because I want to piggyback off of that and then I’ll give you I’ll give it back to you for your second one. Because what’s popping into my mind here is this idea of a Rosetta Stone. Right just as in story sales ops sales management, I talked a little bit about my view of training. I talked about that example when we moved my one of my clients from purchasing to marketing it to me these five objectives are a Rosetta Stone, they allow for a translation between functions between people, and you can have a dialogue and more importantly, you know, we talked a little bit about Moneyball, but analogies like that, I found are helpful people on the same page. And for everybody to add their unique value. Yes. Second one.

Scott Santucci 33:07

Yeah. So, to add to that, I can’t stress enough how important it is to give folks the space to absorb these five objectives. One of one of the people Brian and I both know is a woman named Carol and Carol has spent a tremendous amount of time just socializing these five, five objectives and the three companies that she’s been with, and she runs into the same kind of difficulty over and over and over again, but once people buy in, it becomes very easy for her to prescribe programs to, you know, make her job a lot easier. So, it’s really important to spend the time to get that buy in. Because what that’s going to do is my second point, it’s really going to free up a massive amount of time to actually focus on the things that really matter the most, which is the hard work that has seller must do in order to accomplish these objectives. And without some sort of structure, it’s going to be almost impossible to diagnose and talk about what those specifics really are.

Brian Lambert 34:13

Yeah, love it. Yeah, that that actually leads to my third one. Which is this idea of, of managers, so sales managers, I think, you know, if I could speak directly to them for a second, maybe there’s some some in our listeners here, I would say, you know, everybody knows that the goal is to help sales management be successful and help sellers sell more. But, you know, sometimes it means bringing people along internally to help you help you out sales managers, and this is one of those things where, you know, what’s wrong with focusing on five objectives that that are universal since the you know, since the late 1800s. When NCR started selling this is the same type of job What’s wrong with doing that to bring the internal supply chain along? And is there a way to, you know, meet people halfway, who have budgets who have resource that have time to help you, and use these objectives as a way to bring people along. And more importantly, you know, dare I say it, but even hold folks a little bit more accountable instead of just discounting it. As you know, I’m not saying every manager is like this. But sometimes when I talk to sales managers, it comes across that they know everything, and everybody else doesn’t know what they’re talking about. So that’s not every manager. But if that’s the prevalent wind internally, the Help is going to come very, it’s going to come very sparse. It’s not going to be a lot of help, there’s not going to be a Calvary come in to help if that’s the vibe coming from management. So, you know, this could be an olive branch, and more importantly, it works. I mean, I’ve used them repeatedly and they work so it’s to me, there’s not a lot of risk in it. And maybe there’s a way to take some of the angst out from the management side. And that’ll be my third, my third takeaway.

Scott Santucci 36:07

So, Brian, I would, you know, add to that in terms of sales managers, I think the the issue isn’t so much the cavalry. It’s Hey, we’re from corporate we’re here to help is more. It’s more the paralysis. Right. I have too many calories, stampeding them. And yeah, I think that

Brian Lambert 36:28

The semi truck of all the help

Scott Santucci 36:29

Exactly right. Yeah. Right. Exactly. So that’s that tends to be more my my way. I guess. Boy, I definitely, definitely can empathize with the level of frustration. Because all of this help is what we like to call random acts of sales enablement. And that’s really the key point here is that this structure this methodology is disciplined and simple as it sounds, actually reduces so much Random Acts. allows you to push back. So even you mentioned training, for example, what about content? The amount of assets that are content assets that are available for sellers is all over the place. If you want to really reduce or organize that, that content, do it by the failed five sales objectives. I go right now, while you’re listening to this podcast, if you’re at your desk and look at your intranet, and ask yourself, if the assets that are on your intranet or your sales portal or whatever you want to call it, if any of those things, is there a document specifically focused on gaining access? Because if not, and it’s it Oh, well, that’s in this document, and that document that document

Brian Lambert 37:40

Well, what I’ve had is it’s an all of it’s got all of it helps you get access.

Scott Santucci 37:44

Right. Well, so then that’s that’s me. So that’s you going well, I’d like to answer on best practices of demand generation. Well go Google it. That’s it’s more or less the same answer, right? You’re not really hopeful. It If you provide a galactic repository of information, and also, you’re not really focusing in on and giving people examples of how other people have done it. So, another thing about the, the reduced Random Acts is by having this kind of structure, it makes it super easy to create simple videos of other salespeople doing the same thing. You can do a spiff and a program pay reps for the first 10 to do it, give them 1000 bucks. That’s way less expensive than creating the content yourself hiring a bunch of subject matter experts and it will add more to the thousands of thousands of documents already. So, it’s a it’s a great way to keep making things simpler and simpler and simpler and simpler over time. It just takes a little bit of effort to get it started.

Brian Lambert 38:51

Great. Absolutely. Well, thanks so much, Scott. And this has been a great discussion through the 5 Objectives. And, you know, all the way back to, you know, the tipping point story of focusing on some of the little things can make a huge difference. So, appreciate it. And as always, listeners, thanks so much for joining us here on the podcast. Make sure you head over to inside se and reach out to us give us feedback on how we’re doing. We really appreciate all the comments and suggestions and the ideas along the way here as we are as we’re into our fifth or sixth podcast here. So, keep it up. Thanks so much for the community around this and the ideas and we’ll see you next time.

Nick Merinkers 39:38

Thanks for joining us. To Become an insider and amplify your journey. Make sure you’ve subscribed to our show. If you have an idea for what Scott and Brian can cover in a future podcast or have a story to share, please email them at engage at insidese.com You can also connect with him online by going to insidese.com following them on Twitter or sending them a LinkedIn request