Good afternoon, everyone. This is Kumar Dattatreyan with Meridian Point. I hope you're having a great day. Today, we're joined by Matt Hall from Pivotal Advisors. He is a passionate advocate for revolutionizing sales leadership. Matt is here to share his expertise on sales systems, structure, and processes, which are the cornerstones of a robust sales operating system. In fact, he calls it that, the SOS, the sales operating system. With a mission to equip sales leaders with the proper tools, techniques, and approaches, Matt is transforming how businesses approach sales management. So get ready to welcome Matt to the stage. We're going to hear from him and see how he does that. So here we go. Here's Matt. Matt, thank you so much for being on the show. I appreciate you being here. I hope I did your intro justice. I hope I covered all. I know you do more than just that. But those are the key things that I took away from our last conversation. So I thought I would highlight them.
I think you did a great job. Probably did better than I would have done myself, actually, because sometimes it's hard to toot your own horn.
That's true. I find the same issue with me. All right, let's start. So Matt, you're passionate about building world-class sales teams, right? Can you explain what this sales operating system is and how you've seen it work for your clients?
"In a truncated explanation of the sales operating system, it's pieces that all fit together that most importantly in the center of that is a sales leader. Could be a VP of sales, could be a sales manager, could be the owner who's also acting as that sales leader, but that sales leader needs to know how to operate all of those pieces of the sales operating system. So it's meant to work in that fashion, but when you think about it, everyone has a plan. Not just, 'Hey, last year, Kumar, we sold $5 million. This year, we're going to sell six. Go get it.' No, it's a plan. How are we going to get to that growth goal? Where is it going to come from? Not only for the team, but for each individual salesperson. And then if you're in that hiring mode, making sure you're finding the right salespeople. Not all salespeople have the same skills. Some come from a transactional business, which isn't bad. But if that's what their skill set is, and you have more of a consultative, longer sales cycle, it's not that fit. So having those people systems, measurements big, you and I talked a lot about measuring things in our first conversation, our last conversation. But measuring the right leading indicators and then using that to coach your team is very different than just measuring, 'Hey, they sent 7,500 emails last month and made 1,500 calls.' It's what are those, we call them the big three. What are those leading indicators for your business? I get asked a lot and it's important, sales comp. It's a piece of it, but also how are you rewarding them? Salespeople are not coin-operated machines. People just like everyone else. How are you rewarding them with comp being a part of it? How are other rewards that are non-financial fitting into that? And then last and certainly not least, how do you execute those pieces of that puzzle inside of your business? It's not the same for everybody, but you need to have an execution piece. Otherwise, it's just things on paper and that's not really valuable. So execution and getting all those things implemented and then keeping people accountable to them is a big piece of it."
"That's great. So, this podcast is focused on disruption and innovation. It seems to me that the SOS, the sales operating system, can be disruptive in an organization, especially one that doesn't have the systems and the processes in place. How do you coach the leader, the sales leader, and the team in implementing these new ways of working as a team?"
"Great question. Before we start implementing and driving change, we have to get their buy-in. We don't work with any company where the owner says, 'Oh yeah, sales operating system. Yeah, it's great. Best thing since sliced bread. We need it.' And then the sales leader is like, 'No, not for me.' We won't work with them because if that sales leader isn't going, 'Oh, I can see how this is going to help me. I can see how these pivotal folks are going to kind of run alongside me,' we don't get to that relationship. But more times than not, a sales leader whose owner is getting them some help, they're usually like, 'Thank you. I want to grow. I want to do better.' But once we get past that hurdle, the second piece to that, which I would argue is the most important when it comes to doing this disruption with the sales operating system, we need to get their buy-in. We need to get their input. Because when we come in, we're not going, 'Well, everything you did before we got here was hot garbage. So we're going to tear it all down, burn it, and start over.' No, that's not what we're doing. So we need to get their input. That's that first step of change management. We want to learn from them. What's working? What's not? They might not have a sales operating system in its purest form, but they usually have bits and pieces of it, or maybe they call it something else. Let's get, 'Hey, Tom, what works for you? Tell me what your process is.' Like getting them to share with us what they like, what they don't like, where they feel there's gaps. When we get that from them, it's been our experience that when we roll out some change or doing something different, they're like, 'Oh, well, yeah, this makes sense. Hey, they asked me about this.' Or 'Wow, look, that thing that I told them works really well. Look, they built that into our sales process. Wow, that must be our gold standard around here.' Without it, then we turn into the, remember Office Space? Remember the Bobs? Otherwise, we could turn into that and we don't want to. So that first step of getting that change is huge. In my experience, if you skip it, you're making things harder for yourself and you might not drive change, but you might make that change harder. It might take a heck of a lot longer if you don't get some input and get their buy-in on the why really early."
"That's a great set of advice that you gave out in terms of change. Change is a hard thing to manage. And the bigger the organization, the harder it is to manage it. In fact, change is almost unmanageable. You almost have to be a shepherd. You're kind of shepherding the change along. And so you have to really hear the people, hear what they're saying, both on stage and off stage. And I think there is a distinction. People will say what you want to hear when they're in front of their boss, but they're going to say something possibly different when they're talking in the water cooler with their colleagues, right? Like, 'Oh, this Matt guy, he's coming in here, putting this new operating system. We don't need this. We've been doing this, the way we've been doing it for 10 years has worked just fine. I don't know what he's doing.' So what do you do with that when you get resistance like that?"
"It's we, and we do run into it. It's unavoidable. Business is easy. People are messy, you know that old adage, but when we run into it, it kind of depends on our level of engagement with the organization. In some organizations, they pull us into a more deeper relationship earlier, which makes it easier for us to do that. If we do, you mentioned the one-on-one. We are huge fans of that because that's where the reality of their situation, their life, an opportunity, whatever it is, that's where it comes out. So we try to have those conversations in those one-on-ones and just make it an open forum. Like, 'Hey, here's what we're seeing. What do you think is getting in the way? Or what is that hurdle? Or why do you think this doesn't fit?' Maybe they didn't share it in kind of the early stages of our engagement. Maybe they were scared to say it. All okay. All okay to experience that. And I've been there myself. I'm like, I'm not saying anything. So we try to get all those parties individually, even if it's not them directly telling us, but maybe telling their sales leader or the owner or CEO, like, 'What are they saying?' Like, it's okay. You're not going to hurt our feelings. But we try to take it and not have it be water cooler type talk if we can avoid it, because some salespeople, and I'll pick on my brother for a second, they leave a wake. What I mean by that is, oh, wow, you know, Gina, she's the top producer. If Gina says that it goes and good or bad. And if that person leaves a wake, man, that can derail. Like we could have a whole team of people that are like, 'This is awesome. I love this new process. This growth strategy is legit. Man, this change to our comp plan. This actually makes me want to go a little harder because it aligns with our plan.' And then you have that one wake maker. Ooh, you can do that. So again, the cooler process, water cooler happens or the text messages if they're remote, but we're trying to make sure that we get those conversations to happen somewhere. And we ask a lot of questions and we ask a lot of the same questions over time to make sure that we're not missing what the real issue or opportunity might be."
"That's wonderful. I love that. And I see a lot of parallels in the work that I do. You're really a coach. You're helping implement some new way of working, a new process that is maybe different or better. Maybe they don't have a process at all. They're just sort of winging it. They don't collect any metrics, any data. It's just what it is, right? They just fly this by the seat of their pants. And a lot of times when I go in with a client, it may be like that. So I do a lot of organizational change coaching using agile and lean methods. And I love your analogy of the wake. It's like the big boat that has a large influence on the smaller body of water, right? Those people have a lot of influence, even though they may not have the title or position to go with it. But because of their influence, they can completely derail a change initiative. And so really understanding the forces at play, if you will, and being in touch with the people, developing relationships is really important."
"It's huge. I'll add one thing to that when it comes to somebody who makes a wake, or maybe if their wake's not that big, but the smaller the body of water, your wake doesn't have to be. Something that we've done to empower sales leaders into that, like when we're kind of coaching them and working alongside them is, 'Hey, before we roll something out, who's going to be that person who makes a wake? Not even that, like who's going to be the person who's just sitting in the room just going...' Like, who is that person? Do you have one? And if you do, it's okay. It doesn't make them bad. It doesn't make them like, oh, we don't want him here. No. Like, how do we get out in front of that? And with those sales leaders, myself, other coaches on our team, other advisors on our team, they'll role play it. Like, 'All right, you know, Kumar, he's going to be a problem. Okay. So like, well, what do you think he's going to ask? Let's work through it.' And we might come to something like, 'Oh, you know what? Maybe we need to pull you aside and share that with you early. Kind of give you a preview. Now we haven't shared with the team yet. We wanted to get some of your initial feedback.' Again, is that every case? No. Sometimes that'll make a bigger wake in its own right. But if it's somebody that's that important, maybe we add an extra step to get them to go, 'Oh, yeah, okay. I see why we're doing this now.' And then when we rolled out the whole team, they're less likely to give you the, you know, kind of the idea. Again, it depends on the person, depends on the situation, but we're always thinking, how do we limit that as much as we can?"
"That's very insightful. And yeah, I definitely see the need to do that, to be proactive about it, to really identify your stakeholders, if you will, and the ones that have a lot of influence and come up with a strategy to not to deal with them, but to really hear them. They have an opinion. Maybe it's a good one that other people aren't thinking about. Change is such a complex thing to manage. You can't manage it. It's just complex because human systems are complex and you can't predict what they're going to do. It's almost like the weather out there. And so you might have little microclimates in an organization where people are really happy in this department and not so happy in other department. It just has to do with their boss, perhaps, the way they are treated or whatever. So it's good that you do that. So as a consultant working with your clients, you're not just there to implement a process. You're there to do it in a way that benefits the client as much as possible, right? To actually install a system that will raise their capability in some way so that they will get more value from sales. That's my interpretation. I think that's what you do."
"It's definitely a part of it. I'll tell you, the other reason that we take the approach that we do is I've had this experience recently where I talked to a client that we haven't worked with since before COVID. So like, what do we have four years now, four or five years. And again, the work was done. They didn't need us there. Their leading indicators. Everything was moving in the right direction from when we started to when we left. And that's a good thing. We don't need to work with somebody forever. I mean, we would love to have 10-year clients and we have some of those because up to your point around change, something changes, we need to adapt or help them grow and adjust. But with those clients you haven't talked to in a while and they're like, 'Oh yeah, hey, thanks for the call. I had a question on,' and they'll say something like the process we helped build or like the onboarding for new salespeople or whatever it was that we were working on in that moment. Like five years later, they're like, 'Hey, can you hold on? I'm going to pull it up quick.' Like they just, they still use it. And we haven't been in there for a long time. That's the other reason we build, you know, help them implement help kind of this wake situation if they have it because we want it to last. It's not just 'Hey, let's try this for six months and see if we get a better result and you know maybe they have a magic bullet.' I don't have any. If you do, call me. But it's so much more of like we want it still operating still working and then they make adjustments and tweaks when we're not in the room in every single room all the time."
"Yeah, that's awesome. So you're building in as part of your process, you're building in resilient systems that are going to stand the test of time. And there's proof right there, people that call you years later, they're still using these systems and getting value from them. That's awesome. I'm going to shift gears a little bit. You emphasize that sales leadership is very different from being a salesperson. What are some of those key differences?"
"I've lived this in a past role in another organization. Typically sales leaders are promoted from the highest producing salespeople. It was my case there. I mean, there's a lot of cases like that. I'm by no means alone. And it makes sense. Like, 'Hey, this person's good at selling these purple widgets or these services or whatever it is. Yeah. They will lead this team to do what he did.' Okay. But when you're a good salesperson, most good salespeople do a couple of things different than the average salesperson. One, they spend a lot of time planning, usually two to four times more time planning. And I'm talking their year, their quarter. Okay, well, that's great when you're a salesperson. That doesn't always work when you're a sales leader. What do you mean time to plan? No, I got to chase down these fires. I got these people problems. I got to report up to the boss. Okay, so one of the things that they were successful with that time planning, now that's gotten taken away. That's a huge difference in one aspect of what made them successful. And when you're a sales leader, you still have to hit the number. Actually, you're more responsible for the number, but you are not responsible typically for closing the deals, which is another thing you used to be good at."
"So I will share for myself is when I got put into a sales leader role, I'm like, 'Okay, what's the plan?' I always had a plan for myself, but no one ever taught me how to build a plan for a team. No one ever gave me the guidance to say, 'Okay, if you go to your team and you say, okay, Kumar, this is your plan. Julie, this is your plan. Tina, this is your plan. You don't care. It's my plan. I'm bestowed upon you.' No one told me how to go, like, give them a framework of what you kind of are thinking about a plan, you know, framework or give them a tool and make it easy for you. But then you build it. And then you present your plan to me. And I'm like, 'Oh, wow, I might have some feedback.' But then the power of that is really tenfold. Now it's your plan. Not mine. Yours. You will be much more accountable to your own plan because you built it. And then it's my job just to make sure you stay on track. But, again, those two things, the planning in particular, and then the, 'Oh, well, you know what, I'll just do it. Kumar has his deal. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's got this deal. Well, I know how to close deals. I'm the sales leader. Just get me on that call. I'll go close that deal for you.' Okay. It's not necessarily bad, but what I did there is I made you dependent on me. I didn't coach you. I didn't make you better. None of it was your idea. It was just, 'Hey, yeah, yeah, we need this deal. Bring in whomever that we need to close it.' Those are the planning and then the, 'Oh, I'll just do it,' are the two biggest things that I see with sales leaders who don't get shown what good looks like. They don't have the tools. They don't have the training and that's why kind of when what I shared of we're really trying to build the best sales leaders we can because that's where the growth is going to come from is when those leaders can build up their team to go out there and win more business and keep them accountable so they don't have to do everything. It's just, it's not scalable. You can't have your sales leader working 80 hours a week and completely expect like, you know, unicorns and rainbows on everything. It's not scalable or sustainable."
"Well, it's also not a good way to lead anyway if you maintain that kind of control, that level of control. It also shows a lack of trust that you don't trust your people to close a deal, right? If you're jumping in to close deals or you're giving them the plan to follow, then they're just monkeys on your team and all they're doing is just turning the wheel for you to go close them."
"It's funny you say that. We have a saying that kind of just permeates through our team. You know, don't, are you carrying the monkey? Like we say that a lot, like sales did, when I was a salesperson on a team, I did this to my sales leader, his name was Todd. And if he watches this, he will have a chuckle and probably call me afterwards. But I did that to him. Yeah, man, this is a mess going the way I want. So I made him carry the monkey. Yeah. It just wasn't good for him, wasn't good for me, wasn't good for the organization, and most importantly, wasn't good for the client. When you say that monkey, who's carrying the monkey? Because again, sales leaders help. Maybe sometimes, well, I'll carry the monkey over this next block, but you're a monkey, not mine. If you build them up in that fashion, give them the tools, they're more likely to carry the monkey themselves."
"Yeah, absolutely. The key to building resilient teams is to empower them so they can operate autonomously. They don't need your help. But as a leader, any kind of leader, no matter what you are, you're there to provide them coaching and guidance and support and critical feedback so they can keep getting better. And so that's what I hear you're saying as well as the coaching and the training you provide sales leaders allows them to do that because you're right. A lot of people get promoted because they're really good at their job, not because they have great leadership skills. And so those things have to be learned on the job. I remember when I first got promoted to a leadership position, I had to learn how to lead. I didn't know how to lead. I was just really good at what I did. And it's hard no matter what your role is. And it sounds like your company and you provide that kind of guidance and coaching. So that's awesome."
"Yeah. And a lot of people just don't know it. And I've talked to sales leaders who've been sales leaders for a while. And I've just been like, I've just been working my tail off. And I care about these people. I had one guy tell me we were just doing random acts of sales. I'm like, all right. But again, it doesn't make them bad. And it doesn't make them like, oh, my gosh, they're a terrible person or whatever. No, they just haven't been shown what good looks like yet. And we have a plan and a system. Yeah. So we come back to that coaching because so many times it's, 'Oh, yeah, here's the situation. Man, I've never run into this before. What do you think I should do?' And we have a conversation with them, but we eat our own dog food. We don't just tell them what to do. Like it's more of a, 'Hey, like, how do we come to this solution? Like, what are you thinking? What are you seeing? What have you tried in the past?' It's that coaching, like you said, like it's that mentorship almost where you're like, 'Okay, we'll take stop. Take a step back, slow down just a beat. Let's talk through this situation so you're more empowered and confident and have some tools ready for when you actually go to address it.'"
"That's great. That's awesome. It sounds like it's not just 'Here's a system. Go do it.' You provide lots of support in all areas within a company. All right. Next question. So let's get into those big three metrics that you focus on. Right. So opportunities, close rate, deal size. Tell us about that and how they play into the work that you do with your clients."
"They're really important. And there's really three main reasons. One, how do you know what your revenue forecast looks like? Like salespeople by nature, we are terrible self-reporters. Why? Some of us think we're gonna win every deal. Some of us, it is what it is. Like there's a confidence, okay, kind of makes us good at our job. But when you start to look at from a sales team perspective and kind of from a trend perspective, we wanna know, How many opportunities are we getting? The things that you mentioned. So like just from a, I'm not saying forecast your pipeline. I'm saying forecasting like, hey, how does, and depending on your sales cycle, how does Q3 look? How does Q4 look? How does Q1 look of next year? Whatever your sales cycle is. So you want to have that data early so you can know to pivot or adjust based on what that initial data is telling you. So that's the reason, one of the main reasons. The second reason is coaching. Because if, let's say, I'm really good at scaring up opportunities, I'm great at it. But my close rate's 5%. And my deal size, oh, okay. It's what we expect. It's average. And then, Kumar, you know what? Your close rate's 60%. But you're not scaring up enough opportunities. But we're on the same sales team, you and I. Well, our leader needs to coach us a little differently, doesn't he? Or she. Why? Well, Kumar's close rate's pretty good. Probably don't need to worry about his discovery questions. Probably don't need to worry so much about you getting commitment because you're good at that. But if you're not scaring up enough opportunities, well, we need to ask you like, 'Okay, maybe is it your activity level? Maybe is it, again, depending on what our process is, maybe you're not going to enough events. Maybe you don't follow up fast enough on the inbound leads we get.' Whatever it is, that coaching based off that data is different. Now with me, Okay, I'm scared of opportunities. We probably don't need to focus too much on that right now. But 'Hey, Matt, how's your discoveries going? Are you using the tools? Are you asking the right questions? Are you providing the right value? Are you following the process? Are you chasing the wrong clients?' Whatever it is. But what I see in those situations is they'll go, 'Hmm, you know what? Matt's pretty good at scaring up opportunities. Kumar's pretty good at closing them. Hey, why don't you guys just talk to each other? And Matt, you do what Kumar does. Kumar, you do what Matt does.' Well, if we have those big three leading indicators, we have that data at our disposal. Now we know how to adapt and adjust our coaching to the individual on our team. And then when we give that coaching, we give that feedback. Now we also get to look at the data. Okay, we're working on some things. Is Matt improving? Is Kumar improving? So that there's a lot of reasons for it, but that coaching one is big. It's really big. And the third one is expectations. If you have that data and you know, okay, we know we need to get five opportunities a month and the whole team knows that expectation. And if I'm only getting four, I know in my one-on-one, my sales leader is going to talk to me about it and ask me some questions about it. I know what's coming. It's not my gut feel. It's not their gut feel. There's no like, 'You suck.' Like, no, it's, 'Hey, you know, this is what we kind of expect. And, you know, you're not reaching that. What's getting in your way?' It's not combative because it's data. And once your team starts to take accountability to that data, and because we're all held to the same standard, that's where you start to really see that the accountability become easier on the sales leader because the salespeople take ownership because they know."
"Yeah. That's awesome. I love that answer. You are breaking up a little bit, but I think it's going to be okay. Let's see here. What do I want to ask you next? So, you know, when you go into a client, they most, any company that would, I think would hire you, it's unlikely that they don't have a system in place. They must have something in place, right? What do you do when you go in with a, where there's something in place and how do you adapt your system to fit theirs?"
"Really good question. The first thing we do before we start to kind of go down the system process structure route is we benchmark and we analyze. What are they doing now? What's working? What isn't? There's a reason they brought us in. There's something. Typically, it's, 'Hey, our revenue's flat. It has been for a while. Or we want to be growing at X percent, but we're not and we can't figure out why.' Very rarely will a business that has some kind of system structure and process in place hire us if everything's unicorns and rainbows. Something is amiss there. It's our job to uncover, to the best of our ability, what that is. So before we even go down that sales operating system route and like, 'Oh, you need to do this, we need to do this,' take a beat and go, 'Okay, what's working, what's not?' Like that is, that's big. And through that process, what we learn is the parts of their system that are really strong and something is strong. We want to one, make sure that if everyone knows what it is, you might be shocked. Like we've seen it. We're like, man, three, four people on a sales team. And like, they don't know what the other people are doing. They don't know what tools they're using. They don't know like, 'Oh, so-and-so asked this.' If we can understand what's their gold standard, that's huge. And then it turns into like the implementation, which we talked about earlier. But like, if we find that inside of that organization, that is enormous because then we don't need to take time, energy and dollars to rebuild it. Then it's just a matter of like, 'Hey, this is the gold standard here with whatever it is. This is how we do it here. Does anyone have questions?' Like, then that's that's a conversation that we kind of just facilitate. They'll be like, 'Oh yeah, I didn't know Jim did that.' 'Oh, Tina's like, he does that?' 'Like yeah, it works really well.' Like then that's just us making sure we found it because that that's it happens a lot. There's a recent client that we started working with where we went in there and they're they're a larger company. They're globally about 300 million dollars, which is kind of larger than our average client actually. And they were They got all kinds of system structure process. They had pieces of it kind of all over the place. What we started to realize though, their biggest issue wasn't system structure process at all. It was, and we found that through that process that I mentioned. We realized that their sales leader, leaders, I should say, because they have a different structure with their team. Their leaders didn't know how to execute the parts of the system. We had to backpedal and backpedal strong. We had to kind of stop and say, 'Okay, here's what you tasked us to do. Here's what we've seen. Here's our recommendation on what we should move forward with to make the biggest impact.' Kumar, they had data upon data, amazing data, but the leaders didn't know how to use it to lead. So like, so sometimes it's, that's what, that's, this is what gets me up in the morning. Cause it's so unique and different, like organization to organization. It's on, you know, how do we get in there? But also like, sometimes it's not the system at all. Sometimes it's pieces. Sometimes it's implementation. Sometimes it's accountability. Sometimes it's a leadership issue."
"Yeah. You know, it's, it's not unusual. I see this in my work. I'm not, I don't do what you do specifically, but I work with people, right, in organizations and in small companies and large companies. And what I see is the biggest gap is the flow of information between people and flow of knowledge, right? Or there's a company that I'm working with that is a fairly young company. They haven't been around that long. They're growing like crazy, but they haven't put in systems in place to allow for knowledge sharing. So what works in one part of the company isn't being shared with another part. And so this leads to inconsistencies and eventually can be worse, right? I mean, they're young, they're doing well, they're providing a service that their customers love, all great but eventually if they don't do something to shore up their systems and shore up the way they share information between teams then they're gonna they're gonna get disrupted by someone else that does a better job at that."
"So true. It's something you said really resonated. They're growing. Yeah, you take from the outside, you're not, if you're not behind the curtain, you're like they're one of these rocket ships. They're going like this. Yeah, to a point. And eventually something catches up to you. I've seen that clients in that space, like, man, we grew like wildfire. And then all of a sudden it went like this. And crashing down. Not necessarily crashing. They got level. But when you get on the rocket ship and now you're level, people are concerned. So like, yeah, flow of information. It's funny you mentioned that. Something that we help clients with, it's really simple. You don't need a tool. You don't need to spend anything on it. We call it five and fives specifically for your sales team. It takes here's five by five, five minutes, five things. That's it. Have your sales people say, and they can type this in an email. And again, five minutes, I've heard somebody say to me once, 'Well, I spent a half hour on that.' No five minutes. That's it. But what are the five things that happened good to you or your business this week? It's simple, right? It's kind of starts that flow of information. Yeah. 'Oh, and sometimes sales inside of small to medium-sized businesses is kind of like a black box to the rest of the organization.' This makes it real simple like, 'Hey, Kumar did these cool things.' 'Oh wow, I didn't know he went to that event. I've been to that event. Cool. Maybe I should talk to you about it.' Yeah, again, Now, again, we start with that simple tool where it really starts is salespeople communicating to their leader and then the leader able to communicate up to the owner. That's where it starts. We've had some clients take that and kind of share that out company-wide because sometimes people go out. 'Sales doesn't do anything like these deals just happen.' Yeah. So there's all the misconceptions. Simple tool to make that communication. Flow of simple data doesn't replace CRM, no simple tool to make that communication. And we had a client that during the pandemic, they were a retail establishment and the CEO reached out to us and said, 'I read this five and five roll up every Saturday morning.' She goes, 'It's the best thing I get all week.' This was in the midst of COVID, like, oh my gosh, like this poor woman, she was just keeping herself and her business afloat. 'I read it on Saturday morning because then I go, okay, good things are happening.' And that stuck with me when she shared that."
"So describe it again, five on five. Is it five good things that happen or anything that happened, five things?"
"Yeah. I mean, we want to focus on the positive. You lose a deal, I mean, yeah, it happens. You probably don't want to put that in your five and fives, but like for example, mine this week will be this, doing this with you because why? One, it's fun. It's positive and so that'll be one of mine. I've had a couple of discovery calls this week, turned over a new opportunity. And I have a new customer kind of on the cusp of working with us."
"Beautiful. That's it. It shouldn't take more than five minutes to do that."
"No. And I just type it. And I'm not a grammar expert. But again, nowadays, my five and fives take me about 45 seconds. Yeah. That's awesome. And I did it my first week in this role. Yeah. I wasn't closing business the first week, but I had things that were happening. And we roll ours up and we send ours out company-wide. We're about a 20-person company, so we're not getting 10,000 corporate emails a month, but it's something that like I know everything that people are working on. I know where I can help. Maybe I can plug in. Maybe I know somebody. Like it just makes that simple flow of information and the communication simple."
"Yeah, I like it. I'm going to suggest it to my partners and just something for us to do as a company. Just share our successes each week. You know, the five things that were good about the week. I think that's fantastic. That's a great idea."
"Yeah. We get caught up in the trivial and sometimes the negative."
"Yeah, that's right. For myself. And why not just focus on the positive?"
"Yeah, for sure. And I send mine out every Friday. It's like the last thing I do to wrap up my week. And it always leaves me with a smile, which is it."
"Yeah, that's awesome. That's great. All right. One last question. And that is, again, disruption, right? This theme of disruption. AI is in everything, right? Everywhere. Everywhere. How is AI either helping or hindering your ability to serve your clients?"
"I wouldn't say it's hurting. I haven't heard it. I've not heard from anybody that directly or anyone on my team said it's hurting. I'll start with that. The one thing I have been seeing is There are a lot of, heck, one of my clients is in the AI space, does different types of AI training. So I've learned a lot from that gentleman about this. But what I've really been seeing with it helping is when a business has a plan with it. Do I see it replacing human beings? I do not. That's just personal opinion. Do I see the businesses that are using it and having a plan as it pertains to how sales is using it, marketing, operations, finance, whatever? That's where I've seen it helping where they're like, you know what? Part of our process, usually early in the process when it comes to like list building or identifying, okay, you know what? Here's our target customer. Here's what we're going after. Let's use AI to like go and find more of those people or where they live or maybe fine tune some communication. That's where I've seen it really help. So it hasn't hindered anything. No one has told me, 'You know what? AI is running all of our sales now.' Not saying it hasn't happened somewhere in the world. It just hasn't come across my desk yet. Yes, where because we about a year ago, We were getting so many questions as a business about this, like, 'Hey, how do you guys do this?' I mean, we don't sell an AI platform. We, you, we dabble with it ourselves in our own business day to day. We don't tell our clients to use it or not use it. So we were getting so many questions, but like, we are not experts on it. So we did a webinar about this topic, but it was seriously more, I call it more of a research project is like we went and did some analysis, we looked at a lot of different tools. We looked at a lot of different providers to be able to just frankly share an intelligent thought and here's our stance on it. Here's kind of our viewpoint. And the big takeaway was, and three or four different providers were kind enough to tell us this. It was, you know what? People will buy our solution and then we have our kickoff call. And then we, and this is the solution provider talking to the client. They'll go, 'Okay. What's your plan?' And the company will go, 'What? We bought this tool.' And the tool is the plan. So that's, I don't want to say that happens a lot because I don't know that answer, but it's been more common than I thought where they're searching for something and they think the tool's the answer. Usually it's more of how does this tool fit into our system and our plan? And how does that tool make whatever we're working on better? That's kind of what I've been seeing. But I, again, you probably, I know for a fact you play in AI more than I do, but that's what I've been seeing from the clients and the folks that I've been talking to."
"Yeah, it's definitely there's I mean there's now AI sales agents that you know that pick up the I mean they don't literally pick up the phone it's all computerized digitized right and they talk to people and stuff but I don't know how effective they are. I just I do know though that AI is progressing at an exponential pace and it's the playing field is going to look completely different a year from now six months from now you know and so I'm curious. We don't have time to get into it. Maybe I'll have you back on on another show and we can talk about the future of Pivotal Advisors and just in sales consulting in general to explore some of those topics. Where does sales go in the future? I mean, it's already doing so much for us with AI, helping us with lead generation, with copywriting, with all kinds of things, right? With combining business intelligence and decision-making and things to make our jobs a little bit easier, regardless of the role we play. What does the future look like? So maybe... put your thinking hat on and we'll get back on for another session at some point."
"I dig that. My wheels are already turned on you. I love how you planted that seed with me because there's a lot there and there's a lot there. There's a lot there that is unknown. And yeah, I would love to talk to you about that further. And kind of, as I think about it, I kind of, I mentioned it, have a plan. Yeah, of course. And again, if AI is part of your plan. Fantastic. Love it. What's the plan? And who's accountable to the plan? And how are we measuring success? How do we coach people inside that plan? And whatever tool you use is the tools you use. But yeah, we have another chat about that."
"That's good advice, Matt. Thank you. Thank you so much for being on the show. Is there anything I didn't ask you that you'd like to get out, get off your chest?"
"No, this was good. I can't believe we are already 45 minutes in. But no, there was nothing. This was great. And I hope kind of the viewers get some feedback or get something they could use. And if they have feedback, you know, they could look me up and I'm happy to chat in whatever channel or whatever mode they would like."
"Yes, I will include your information in the show notes for this podcast and this YouTube so that people will be able to find you and reach you for to have conversation about their sales process, about their process in general. Right. So thank you again for being here. Thank you for watching the show. Appreciate it. See you next time. Bye bye."
