The #1 Area Sales Orgs Bleed Money: The Tech Stack
Jake Dunlap
“Understanding the power of sales technology is not optional.”
If you want to stop the bleed, this is how you do it.
For your team to be more productive (meaning increasing your revenue numbers without increasing headcount), sales technology is the only way to do it.
So I want you to think about not only are you bleeding money because you’re paying for technology that’s barely being used or used incorrectly, but you’re not seeing the productivity gains that you could be. You’re potentially losing $100,000s per month per rep versus just the $100 – $1,000s technology cost.
What I actually cover in this session are the three reasons why you’re not seeing the return on your tech investment and how to flip them so you are.
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- You aren’t buying the right sales technology to solve the right problem in the first place.
- Technical implementation is easy, but the real deployment is a change management exercise.
- Ownership of technology adoption should be in the hands of your frontline managers.
Recap: The #1 Area Sales Orgs Bleed Money: The Tech Stack
The important bits:
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- 5:40 – The way we buy tech today is the first problem
- 9:20 – Implementations are the second reason we’re bleeding money and impact
- 12:30 – Frontline leaders matter the most and why
- 14:45 – The three reasons tech adoption fails
- 17:45 – Sales Ops hasn’t created a roadmap to eliminate bottlenecks or have a seat at the table for proper implementation
- 21:15 – Your “expert” hasn’t implemented these tools before or only 1-2 times
- 27:45 – Never think of a go-live date. Always focus on “when we need to see value” date
- 30:30 – Always train leaders first and make sure you bring them in during the last stages of the partnership/vendor vetting
Three reasons why you’re bleeding money and not seeing adoption
#1 How we buy sales technology today
Here’s how many companies buy tech in sales. The SVP of Sales or Sales Operations goes to a conference, talks to a peer, plays golf with someone, and says, “We have to buy Gong.”
The issue with this is it’s not that this tool isn’t useful or interesting, but the question is, when do you need it?
Unfortunately, many sales leaders don’t have a logistics or project management background, but the way we should be buying technology is first to understand where the team is stuck?
If you look at the whole system from lead to cash or lead to renewal, however you measure your customer journey, where is the bottleneck that you need to fix?
I want to be clear here. There is only one bottleneck. If you were to pick up the bottle next to you, there is only one neck.
Analyze your system and understand how you will fix this bottleneck (could be one, could be more than one tool), and then look at the other pieces in the system that need tweaking.
#2 Implementation Plan vs Deployment Plan
When buying technology, most salespeople will tell you that the implementation process is easy and their customer success team will take care of everything.
They are full of crap. Or at least mostly full of crap.
Setting up a new tool and getting it integrated and connected is easy. But fast forward 60-90 days, and you’re thinking, why haven’t we gone live? Why aren’t we seeing the ROI?
Because there was no deployment plan put in place. It wasn’t a part of the implementation process or what customer success was supposed to help with.
Most companies roll implementation and deployment into one and think it’s a technical setup or project when real deployment is change management. And that’s really the crux of what I talk about in the LIVE session and who should be owning change management and adoption to ensure you get the most out of your investment.
Another area I see teams go wrong when thinking through a deployment plan is focusing on a “go-live” date when they should be focusing on the “when we need to see value” date.
Going live can be a milestone for sure, but you’re not going to see return the day you go live, so when do you need to see return? That’s how we should be developing the deployment plan by thinking backward from the business case and how you will create power users.
And that’s the goal. To go from fresh out of the box, to ramping up and kind of using it, to power users.
#3 Frontline leaders matter the most
Case and point: Frontline leaders are where reps go if they have questions, and if managers themselves don’t have proper training, they’ll (1) give reps the wrong answer or, even worse, (2) tell them to just go back to what they were doing before. Therefore, the frontline leader is the most essential person in any technology deployment.
I think frontline leaders as power users are going to be the future. A sales leader who can manipulate Salesforce and get the data out that they need versus someone who doesn’t has a massive upper hand in effectiveness. The same thing goes for Outreach and Salesloft and other standard sales tools.
But let’s go back to #2 for a second on implementations being easy. When they have trainings, these implementations are also overly focused on the end user (SDRs, BDRs, AEs, etc.) and not at all on the frontline leaders. Ideally, frontline leaders should go through the training first and then the reps. So then frontline leaders have the vernacular, and they know what will be expected of reps.
You should also bring frontline leaders into the last stages of a deal. Frontline sales leaders love to feel like they have their fingerprint on something, and they don’t like to feel like they have things thrust on them by someone who doesn’t understand their job. If you bring them along for the journey and train them first, you’ll get better adoption and leadership from your managers and, therefore, throughout the whole team.