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Bud Hyler | Aligning Sales and Marketing Through Feedback
Michael Webb: You're listening to the Sales Process Excellence Podcast with Michael Webb. B2B sales and marketing works to find the highest quality prospects, reach decision makers, and sell value. Operational excellence uses data and systems thinking to make changes that cause improvement and eliminate waste. My name is Michael Webb, and this is the Sales Process Excellence Podcast. In the next 30 to 40 minutes, we're going to destroy the myth that these two groups conflict and show you how to bring both strategies together to create more wealth for your company and your customers.
Hello everyone, this is Michael Webb, and I can't tell you how excited I am to introduce you to my friend, Bud Hyler. Bud, welcome here.
Bud Hyler: Thank you.
Michael Webb: Please tell the audience a little bit about your background so they have an idea where you're coming from and why I'm so excited.
Bud Hyler: Well, it's a combination of two forces. My early training was in physics, so it taught me to be more structured than average. And then my second training came from an MBA with Stanford, which taught me about the customer. So it was combining the structure of physics and the customer orientation of MBA really caused me to bring those two things together. We want to keep the customer focus but add structure. Without structure you can't scale. You can't compete or replicate.
Michael Webb: I was going to ask you, why is this important to a CEO, but that word structure says it, because CEOs are about scale. They're about making the organization work, not just make the product work or make the sale work or make the manufacturing work.
Bud Hyler: A lot of companies I go see, they had a really bright revenue officer, either marketing or sales, who instinctively got the principles and he was doing the right things. And they got the company humming, so revenue is going up, productivity's going up, but then they left. I mean, the average life expectancy for a job in sales and marketing is what, three to five years or less? So the guy whose instincts were right left. With him left all the principles. Then they hire another marketing and sales person who's more average, who may not get it. And so things start falling apart, because there's no structure in place. They were following the instincts of the leader, and when they left there was no momentum to keep the growth going. If you can't repeat it, then you can't leverage it. And the structure [crosstalk 00:02:41].
Michael Webb: Yeah, if you can't articulate it, you can't grasp it. Right. Before we lose this issue, I asked about your background, can you tell us a little bit about some of your business experience where you began to learn how to apply these thinking principles from physics into business problems after business school?
Bud Hyler: One of my managers told me, you can tell how fast you're learning by how far back in time you have to look to realize you were stupid. I've been fortunate enough to have a lot of good company experiences, starting with Digital Equipment Corporation, where I ran marketing and sales for the commercial group marketing. There were no constraints. It was a free group, so you would go talk to sales people all the time, and we had a great arrangement. It was so good that the salesmen would introduce me to their accounts as the supervising manager for the company, simply so that when the the account got angry at the salesman due to some mistake, they'd call me. They thought that was the way to lash out. That was great. I'd much rather have them call me than call a competitor.
The first time DEC was selling to a bank, salesman in making a sales call to Manufacturers Hanover Trust, and it wasn't going well, because DEC was an engineering company. As he was being asked to leave, he said, "I'm sorry, maybe I just don't understand enough about what you do. Could you explain what the leasing department does?" And as the customer was kind enough to explain it, the salesman said, "Oh, you do financial engineering." "Well, you're right. I engineer financial instruments." "Oh, well I can tell you how to do engineering much better." So it created a tie between DEC products and the customer. When the salesman called me and told me that, it took two days to get it out to the rest of all the salesmen calling on banks. So that's how I learned the power of the linkage between sales and marketing.
Michael Webb: This is back in the days when computers were sold as a product, right? And there was a market for computers. People would buy them. I was in that business too, worked for a company a little bit later than the early days of Digital Equipment Corporation, but I remember those days. When I got hired, they trained me to sell computers. They said, "Here's what you got to do. First of all, here's all the features and benefits of our product, this disc drive and this operating system and these interactive terminals and stuff. Now here's what you do. You get a phone and a phone book. Call people up until you find someone who is going to buy a computer."
Because I remember this diagram they had. It was a bowl of water. It was boiling, and the little bubbles would start to reach. When they get to the top, at the top of the water, they burst, then they buy something. You find one of these bubbles on the way up and show them your product and you're likely to get an order, because our product was better than IBM's. And that's as sophisticated as it got, but that company almost went out of business a few years later, and they had to teach the whole sales force how to begin learning and understanding what customers really, what problems they were trying to solve and attach our value to that. And that was a huge transition.
Bud Hyler: Yeah. I learned so much at DEC. I remember we had a great salesman. His name was Ken Cannizzaro. He could sell refrigerators to Eskimos. He had just inherent people skill, communications capability, people trusted him, so he made quota easily in the first part of the year. Well, I was so stupid that I put him in front of the branch in New York and said, "Here, do what Ken Cannizzaro does. Well, that was so stupid. That was like telling me to become an NBA basketball center. I don't have the skills to do what Ken Cannizzaro did. There I learned the hard way that I can't simply replicate what the best salesman does, I have to transform that into something the average salesman can do also. And it can't be all skill-based. We had a lot of those.
...
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By Michael Webb
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Michael Webb: You're listening to the Sales Process Excellence Podcast with Michael Webb. B2B sales and marketing works to find the highest quality prospects, reach decision makers, and sell value. Operational excellence uses data and systems thinking to make changes that cause improvement and eliminate waste. My name is Michael Webb, and this is the Sales Process Excellence Podcast. In the next 30 to 40 minutes, we're going to destroy the myth that these two groups conflict and show you how to bring both strategies together to create more wealth for your company and your customers.
Hello everyone, this is Michael Webb, and I can't tell you how excited I am to introduce you to my friend, Bud Hyler. Bud, welcome here.
Bud Hyler: Thank you.
Michael Webb: Please tell the audience a little bit about your background so they have an idea where you're coming from and why I'm so excited.
Bud Hyler: Well, it's a combination of two forces. My early training was in physics, so it taught me to be more structured than average. And then my second training came from an MBA with Stanford, which taught me about the customer. So it was combining the structure of physics and the customer orientation of MBA really caused me to bring those two things together. We want to keep the customer focus but add structure. Without structure you can't scale. You can't compete or replicate.
Michael Webb: I was going to ask you, why is this important to a CEO, but that word structure says it, because CEOs are about scale. They're about making the organization work, not just make the product work or make the sale work or make the manufacturing work.
Bud Hyler: A lot of companies I go see, they had a really bright revenue officer, either marketing or sales, who instinctively got the principles and he was doing the right things. And they got the company humming, so revenue is going up, productivity's going up, but then they left. I mean, the average life expectancy for a job in sales and marketing is what, three to five years or less? So the guy whose instincts were right left. With him left all the principles. Then they hire another marketing and sales person who's more average, who may not get it. And so things start falling apart, because there's no structure in place. They were following the instincts of the leader, and when they left there was no momentum to keep the growth going. If you can't repeat it, then you can't leverage it. And the structure [crosstalk 00:02:41].
Michael Webb: Yeah, if you can't articulate it, you can't grasp it. Right. Before we lose this issue, I asked about your background, can you tell us a little bit about some of your business experience where you began to learn how to apply these thinking principles from physics into business problems after business school?
Bud Hyler: One of my managers told me, you can tell how fast you're learning by how far back in time you have to look to realize you were stupid. I've been fortunate enough to have a lot of good company experiences, starting with Digital Equipment Corporation, where I ran marketing and sales for the commercial group marketing. There were no constraints. It was a free group, so you would go talk to sales people all the time, and we had a great arrangement. It was so good that the salesmen would introduce me to their accounts as the supervising manager for the company, simply so that when the the account got angry at the salesman due to some mistake, they'd call me. They thought that was the way to lash out. That was great. I'd much rather have them call me than call a competitor.
The first time DEC was selling to a bank, salesman in making a sales call to Manufacturers Hanover Trust, and it wasn't going well, because DEC was an engineering company. As he was being asked to leave, he said, "I'm sorry, maybe I just don't understand enough about what you do. Could you explain what the leasing department does?" And as the customer was kind enough to explain it, the salesman said, "Oh, you do financial engineering." "Well, you're right. I engineer financial instruments." "Oh, well I can tell you how to do engineering much better." So it created a tie between DEC products and the customer. When the salesman called me and told me that, it took two days to get it out to the rest of all the salesmen calling on banks. So that's how I learned the power of the linkage between sales and marketing.
Michael Webb: This is back in the days when computers were sold as a product, right? And there was a market for computers. People would buy them. I was in that business too, worked for a company a little bit later than the early days of Digital Equipment Corporation, but I remember those days. When I got hired, they trained me to sell computers. They said, "Here's what you got to do. First of all, here's all the features and benefits of our product, this disc drive and this operating system and these interactive terminals and stuff. Now here's what you do. You get a phone and a phone book. Call people up until you find someone who is going to buy a computer."
Because I remember this diagram they had. It was a bowl of water. It was boiling, and the little bubbles would start to reach. When they get to the top, at the top of the water, they burst, then they buy something. You find one of these bubbles on the way up and show them your product and you're likely to get an order, because our product was better than IBM's. And that's as sophisticated as it got, but that company almost went out of business a few years later, and they had to teach the whole sales force how to begin learning and understanding what customers really, what problems they were trying to solve and attach our value to that. And that was a huge transition.
Bud Hyler: Yeah. I learned so much at DEC. I remember we had a great salesman. His name was Ken Cannizzaro. He could sell refrigerators to Eskimos. He had just inherent people skill, communications capability, people trusted him, so he made quota easily in the first part of the year. Well, I was so stupid that I put him in front of the branch in New York and said, "Here, do what Ken Cannizzaro does. Well, that was so stupid. That was like telling me to become an NBA basketball center. I don't have the skills to do what Ken Cannizzaro did. There I learned the hard way that I can't simply replicate what the best salesman does, I have to transform that into something the average salesman can do also. And it can't be all skill-based. We had a lot of those.
...