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[E91] Sales Tech Week: Using technology to enhance your sales team
Week 19, time to talk about sales
technology – your ‘tech stack’.
A lot of companies will try to talk you
into their software that is meant to ‘help’ your team close more deals, but
will it?
In this episode, I cover the purpose of
sales technology for your team and for management.
Fundamentally the one thing it should do
is allow your salespeople to focus more on what they are good at (talking with
prospects and moving them towards the close) and less on what they might not be
good at or don’t want to deal with.
Episode 91 – Transcript
What’s going on. Thanks for
tuning into the sales experience podcast.
My name again is Jason
Cutter, so glad that you’re here. This is week 19 if you’re new to the show,
this is going to be a fun one about sales technology. If you’re a long time
listener, I appreciate your support. I appreciate the comments, the reviews,
the ratings, the messages that I get, and if you want to get in touch with me,
please make sure to go to Keter consulting group.com you can fill out the form
there or you can find my contact info and reach out to me.
You can also find me or the
show on LinkedIn. Send me a message through there. I appreciate everybody who’s
been doing that for this week. I want to cover sales technology. Now. What is
sales tech, the tech stack, all these words and terms that people use and sound
really fancy, but what is it?
Well, fundamentally sales
technology is anything that helps a salesperson be more effective at their job.
On one end of the scale. In my mind, sales technology includes scripts. Even if
that script is printed and handed to you, the salesperson or as a manager,
you’re handing this out or putting it into your system, even if it’s just a
printed version that is sales technology, a lead sheet that used to be filled
out by hand by Penn for the Rep.
Each time they got a phone
call. To me it’s sales technology. Now in this day and age especially where I
live near Silicon Valley, everything is tech-based. Everything is systems and
AI driven and fancy. The challenge with that is that a lot of times you don’t
know where to begin. If you’re a sales leader or a manager and organization,
where do you start? What do you put in place?
How can you help your reps
and if you’re a salesperson, the last thing you want and what you’re afraid of
most is having more things to deal with. My guess based on over 16 years of
dealing with salespeople and teams and technology and companies of various
sizes and various verticals, is that fundamentally salespeople don’t like using
technology.
Now, what does that mean?
They don’t necessarily like using the CRM. If you’re a sales person, you
already know this, that you just want to be on the phone or in person closing
deals. You don’t want to have to fill out paperwork. You don’t want to have to
fill out forms.
You don’t want to have to
fill in details in the CRM, whether that’s salesforce or hub spot or whatever
it is that you’re using. All you want to do is have conversations. And so the
thought of sales technology might make you feel concerned or anxious because
what you don’t want is one more thing.
All you need is a phone and some people to talk to and that’s literally at anything else. It’s just gonna get in the way of what you want to do. You’re in sales not to manage [inaudible] technology, a process, a pipeline, all these leads, you’re in sales to close deals. Am I right?
Like if you’re listening to
this, you know that’s correct, at least for most of you. Again, this is based
on a ton of experience. Now, of course, there are salespeople out there who
love technology and entering the information and tracking their leads and their
pipeline and they have whatever the CRM is, plus they have a spreadsheet or a
notepad where they’re keeping track of it.
Those people, the true sales
professionals understand the value of all this technology for others,
especially if new [inaudible], all of this things that get in the way or cause
confusion or keep you from just having the conversations that you want to be
having now as a manager of a sales team or an owner of an organization with a
sales team in it, technology is your biggest fight against the war of the
unsalable.
What do I mean by that? Well,
if you’re in sales management, you know this, if you have five reps on the
phone all day, every day, and let’s say they’re on the phone five hours a day,
that’s 25 hours of phone calls.
Assuming those calls are
recorded and you’re one person, that means you would have 25 hours of calls to
listen to so that you could focus on what’s missing, what they’re doing well,
what you can coach on, the strengths, the weaknesses of each person on your
team, each interaction, and then get them to the winning point.
Like I covered very early on
in the sales experience podcast, I think it might’ve been week two talking
about watching film. If you’re a professional sports team, there’s the player
on the field, there’s the coach, and then there’s a whole team of people taking
all of that footage from the game and putting it into bits and then letting you
watch that as a summary form or go through it.
No. In a football game for
example, it might be 60 minutes, there’s going to be 60 minutes of clips minus
a lot of filler things and that’s once maybe per week that you’re doing it. The
problem for salespeople, sales managers is that you’re playing this game every
single day [inaudible] all day games and so technology is your important tool
to help you scale the unsalable.
What’s unsalable [inaudible]
unsalable is listening to every call watching everything the reps do, managing
the whole process, distributing calls where it needs to go, watching the leads,
all of that is unsalable and we’re talking if you have a team of two reps, but
imagine if you have a team of 50 or 20 or a hundred then that just becomes
impossible.
So the last thing you want to
do is have to scale up the number of managers for the team just because you’re
adding more reps and this is where technology comes into play.
The nice thing is in 2019
there’s so much stuff that’s automated and that can help you do what you do
best as a sales manager as well, which is coaching, leading, correcting
training, building up your team, helping them set goals, and then holding them
accountable for those numbers.
So when the rest of the episodes this week I’m going to talk about technology and various areas that would help you as a sales manager or an owner of a team with your reps and making sure that you get the most productivity out of them. Now it’s not necessarily about doing their jobs for them. Really the goal is to fill them [inaudible] as many of the gaps as possible to help them stay in their sweet spot.
What is their sweet spot?
Ultimately, you want your salespeople to be spending most of their time in
interactions with prospects, moving them to clients, whether it’s phone calls,
whether it’s face to face visits.
Do you want to try to
eliminate or reduce as much of the time possible on emails, follow-up,
nurturing things? Now let’s address the giant elephant in the room when it
comes to sales technology. The biggest factor that I see and what you’re
probably thinking, if you’re a sales manager, listen to this [inaudible] who is
going to implement this? Who’s going to run it? And I already don’t have time
for this.
That’s the biggest issue with
this theory, with this possibly putting in more stuff, is that you’re already
busy. Your team has already busy. No one has time for this and fundamental, you
know, they don’t like change and so who’s gonna run this?
The first thing I would say
is that make sure as you’re going through and you’re adding these things to
your tech stack, which is a fancy way for just saying the technology that
you’re using as you’re adding and building up your sales technology stack.
Just take it one bit at a
time. Add one thing, get that running smoothly and then add another. Make sure
you’re playing a long game. Now the challenges is that there’s a lot of cool
things you can implement. There’s a lot of great things that you want to put in
place right now.
Throw it the team, fix all
the holes that you can and plug everything that you can so that everyone’s
working better. The challenges, that’s not reasonable. You got to focus on one
thing at a time. Second, a lot of the companies that I’m going to suggest I
have paid product placement with, so none of them are paying me to endorse them
in any way.
However, what I would say is
that most of the companies that [inaudible] I have vetted and talked to have
implementation. They will help you. They will roll it out with you.
They’ll make it easy so
they’re not just handing you this kit, this puzzle that you have to put
together and then roll out yourself. Third, I would say if there’s anybody in
your organization that’s tech savvy, maybe you have a tech team in house or
outsourced, whatever it is, you can get them on board to roll these out one at
a time.
The key with all of these
tech items is to make sure that they fit in well with your other items, whether
it’s your CRM, your phone system, whatever you have in place. Because the last
thing you want to do is add another component onto everything that you’re
already trying to manage.
The last thing you want is
another piece of technology you have to open up and run. The best thing you can
do is have things that are either natively built into what you’re already
using.
So if you’re using
salesforce, then what widgets can you plug into that? So that’s all built into
one, so it’s not external with another thing that you have to use for reporting
and logging in and then making sure that it runs really smooth. And then lastly
with this, if you do need help with any of these, as you’re listening, you can
reach out to me as well.
So I’m familiar with all of
these things that I’m talking about. I’ve rolled them out in various ways,
whether it’s the companies that I suggest or even the technology in general. A
lot of times it’s the basic principles of what is available, what I cover that
would help your sales team. Those basic principles can be applied in different
ways or can come from different sources. So if you know how to fix a car, then
basically tools will help.
Fancier tools are great, but
you just need to know the fundamentals on how to fix that car. And then you can
use whatever you’re given. I’m not going to say full on MacGyver mode, but
sometimes it comes to that where problem and you know what the solution is that
you want to get to.
Then a lot of times it’s
taking all of the parts that you can put in together and make it successful, a
cohesive system. And again, if you need help with that, reach out to me.
[Inaudible] consulting group.com you can send me a message where they are or
find me on LinkedIn. Super easy. We can get on a call, have a conversation
about the sales technology.
That’s it for this episode.
Make sure you do rate and subscribe to the show. Catch the rest of the ones
this week as I go through the tech stack. Do you have any questions about your
tech stack or your team looking for coaching, training, consulting, wanting to
turn around the current team you have or build out a new team. Make sure to
reach out to me.
Always, remember that
everything in life is sales and people remember the experience you gave them.
View all episodes
By Jason Cutter
4.9
3535 ratings
Week 19, time to talk about sales
technology – your ‘tech stack’.
A lot of companies will try to talk you
into their software that is meant to ‘help’ your team close more deals, but
will it?
In this episode, I cover the purpose of
sales technology for your team and for management.
Fundamentally the one thing it should do
is allow your salespeople to focus more on what they are good at (talking with
prospects and moving them towards the close) and less on what they might not be
good at or don’t want to deal with.
Episode 91 – Transcript
What’s going on. Thanks for
tuning into the sales experience podcast.
My name again is Jason
Cutter, so glad that you’re here. This is week 19 if you’re new to the show,
this is going to be a fun one about sales technology. If you’re a long time
listener, I appreciate your support. I appreciate the comments, the reviews,
the ratings, the messages that I get, and if you want to get in touch with me,
please make sure to go to Keter consulting group.com you can fill out the form
there or you can find my contact info and reach out to me.
You can also find me or the
show on LinkedIn. Send me a message through there. I appreciate everybody who’s
been doing that for this week. I want to cover sales technology. Now. What is
sales tech, the tech stack, all these words and terms that people use and sound
really fancy, but what is it?
Well, fundamentally sales
technology is anything that helps a salesperson be more effective at their job.
On one end of the scale. In my mind, sales technology includes scripts. Even if
that script is printed and handed to you, the salesperson or as a manager,
you’re handing this out or putting it into your system, even if it’s just a
printed version that is sales technology, a lead sheet that used to be filled
out by hand by Penn for the Rep.
Each time they got a phone
call. To me it’s sales technology. Now in this day and age especially where I
live near Silicon Valley, everything is tech-based. Everything is systems and
AI driven and fancy. The challenge with that is that a lot of times you don’t
know where to begin. If you’re a sales leader or a manager and organization,
where do you start? What do you put in place?
How can you help your reps
and if you’re a salesperson, the last thing you want and what you’re afraid of
most is having more things to deal with. My guess based on over 16 years of
dealing with salespeople and teams and technology and companies of various
sizes and various verticals, is that fundamentally salespeople don’t like using
technology.
Now, what does that mean?
They don’t necessarily like using the CRM. If you’re a sales person, you
already know this, that you just want to be on the phone or in person closing
deals. You don’t want to have to fill out paperwork. You don’t want to have to
fill out forms.
You don’t want to have to
fill in details in the CRM, whether that’s salesforce or hub spot or whatever
it is that you’re using. All you want to do is have conversations. And so the
thought of sales technology might make you feel concerned or anxious because
what you don’t want is one more thing.
All you need is a phone and some people to talk to and that’s literally at anything else. It’s just gonna get in the way of what you want to do. You’re in sales not to manage [inaudible] technology, a process, a pipeline, all these leads, you’re in sales to close deals. Am I right?
Like if you’re listening to
this, you know that’s correct, at least for most of you. Again, this is based
on a ton of experience. Now, of course, there are salespeople out there who
love technology and entering the information and tracking their leads and their
pipeline and they have whatever the CRM is, plus they have a spreadsheet or a
notepad where they’re keeping track of it.
Those people, the true sales
professionals understand the value of all this technology for others,
especially if new [inaudible], all of this things that get in the way or cause
confusion or keep you from just having the conversations that you want to be
having now as a manager of a sales team or an owner of an organization with a
sales team in it, technology is your biggest fight against the war of the
unsalable.
What do I mean by that? Well,
if you’re in sales management, you know this, if you have five reps on the
phone all day, every day, and let’s say they’re on the phone five hours a day,
that’s 25 hours of phone calls.
Assuming those calls are
recorded and you’re one person, that means you would have 25 hours of calls to
listen to so that you could focus on what’s missing, what they’re doing well,
what you can coach on, the strengths, the weaknesses of each person on your
team, each interaction, and then get them to the winning point.
Like I covered very early on
in the sales experience podcast, I think it might’ve been week two talking
about watching film. If you’re a professional sports team, there’s the player
on the field, there’s the coach, and then there’s a whole team of people taking
all of that footage from the game and putting it into bits and then letting you
watch that as a summary form or go through it.
No. In a football game for
example, it might be 60 minutes, there’s going to be 60 minutes of clips minus
a lot of filler things and that’s once maybe per week that you’re doing it. The
problem for salespeople, sales managers is that you’re playing this game every
single day [inaudible] all day games and so technology is your important tool
to help you scale the unsalable.
What’s unsalable [inaudible]
unsalable is listening to every call watching everything the reps do, managing
the whole process, distributing calls where it needs to go, watching the leads,
all of that is unsalable and we’re talking if you have a team of two reps, but
imagine if you have a team of 50 or 20 or a hundred then that just becomes
impossible.
So the last thing you want to
do is have to scale up the number of managers for the team just because you’re
adding more reps and this is where technology comes into play.
The nice thing is in 2019
there’s so much stuff that’s automated and that can help you do what you do
best as a sales manager as well, which is coaching, leading, correcting
training, building up your team, helping them set goals, and then holding them
accountable for those numbers.
So when the rest of the episodes this week I’m going to talk about technology and various areas that would help you as a sales manager or an owner of a team with your reps and making sure that you get the most productivity out of them. Now it’s not necessarily about doing their jobs for them. Really the goal is to fill them [inaudible] as many of the gaps as possible to help them stay in their sweet spot.
What is their sweet spot?
Ultimately, you want your salespeople to be spending most of their time in
interactions with prospects, moving them to clients, whether it’s phone calls,
whether it’s face to face visits.
Do you want to try to
eliminate or reduce as much of the time possible on emails, follow-up,
nurturing things? Now let’s address the giant elephant in the room when it
comes to sales technology. The biggest factor that I see and what you’re
probably thinking, if you’re a sales manager, listen to this [inaudible] who is
going to implement this? Who’s going to run it? And I already don’t have time
for this.
That’s the biggest issue with
this theory, with this possibly putting in more stuff, is that you’re already
busy. Your team has already busy. No one has time for this and fundamental, you
know, they don’t like change and so who’s gonna run this?
The first thing I would say
is that make sure as you’re going through and you’re adding these things to
your tech stack, which is a fancy way for just saying the technology that
you’re using as you’re adding and building up your sales technology stack.
Just take it one bit at a
time. Add one thing, get that running smoothly and then add another. Make sure
you’re playing a long game. Now the challenges is that there’s a lot of cool
things you can implement. There’s a lot of great things that you want to put in
place right now.
Throw it the team, fix all
the holes that you can and plug everything that you can so that everyone’s
working better. The challenges, that’s not reasonable. You got to focus on one
thing at a time. Second, a lot of the companies that I’m going to suggest I
have paid product placement with, so none of them are paying me to endorse them
in any way.
However, what I would say is
that most of the companies that [inaudible] I have vetted and talked to have
implementation. They will help you. They will roll it out with you.
They’ll make it easy so
they’re not just handing you this kit, this puzzle that you have to put
together and then roll out yourself. Third, I would say if there’s anybody in
your organization that’s tech savvy, maybe you have a tech team in house or
outsourced, whatever it is, you can get them on board to roll these out one at
a time.
The key with all of these
tech items is to make sure that they fit in well with your other items, whether
it’s your CRM, your phone system, whatever you have in place. Because the last
thing you want to do is add another component onto everything that you’re
already trying to manage.
The last thing you want is
another piece of technology you have to open up and run. The best thing you can
do is have things that are either natively built into what you’re already
using.
So if you’re using
salesforce, then what widgets can you plug into that? So that’s all built into
one, so it’s not external with another thing that you have to use for reporting
and logging in and then making sure that it runs really smooth. And then lastly
with this, if you do need help with any of these, as you’re listening, you can
reach out to me as well.
So I’m familiar with all of
these things that I’m talking about. I’ve rolled them out in various ways,
whether it’s the companies that I suggest or even the technology in general. A
lot of times it’s the basic principles of what is available, what I cover that
would help your sales team. Those basic principles can be applied in different
ways or can come from different sources. So if you know how to fix a car, then
basically tools will help.
Fancier tools are great, but
you just need to know the fundamentals on how to fix that car. And then you can
use whatever you’re given. I’m not going to say full on MacGyver mode, but
sometimes it comes to that where problem and you know what the solution is that
you want to get to.
Then a lot of times it’s
taking all of the parts that you can put in together and make it successful, a
cohesive system. And again, if you need help with that, reach out to me.
[Inaudible] consulting group.com you can send me a message where they are or
find me on LinkedIn. Super easy. We can get on a call, have a conversation
about the sales technology.
That’s it for this episode.
Make sure you do rate and subscribe to the show. Catch the rest of the ones
this week as I go through the tech stack. Do you have any questions about your
tech stack or your team looking for coaching, training, consulting, wanting to
turn around the current team you have or build out a new team. Make sure to
reach out to me.
Always, remember that
everything in life is sales and people remember the experience you gave them.