🎙️Transcript: Sales Development Professionals Must Represent
Salesforce.com's Dreamforce | InsideSales.com Booth
"Sales Development Professionals Must Represent"
San Francisco, CA
October 18, 2014
Ken Krogue:
...president come in and meet him. He runs the Number One users group, the chapter for the American Association of Inside Sales Professionals in the country.
It's the Silicon Valley chapter. I'm stealing some of his thunder, but I'm going to brag about him a little bit.
And they, out of about 70 chapters, they were awarded Number One in the country for recruiting, for growth, for participation.
He's been ranked in the who's who of inside sales professionals, and what we saw yesterday when he presented was the reason why. So, I hope you'll take some great notes.
I hope you'll remember some of the keys that he shares today. We've invited him back for good reason, but I won't want to waste any more of his time.
Welcome Ralph Barsi.
Ralph Barsi:
Thank you, Ken. Thank you everybody. Good morning, Happy Dreamforce. Day number three or four? Wow, unbelievable.
So yeah, please take good notes. If you take notes, not just in this session, but in every session, and draw a nice little line down the middle of the page and on the left side of the page, go ahead and write your notes, but on the right side of the page, write your action items.
What are you going to do with those notes? For years and years, I would just write tons of notes and tons of little Moleskine journals, and I literally have a stack of Moleskine journals and I haven't done too much with the notes since about two years ago when I started actually writing the action items next to the note.
So just a little thing to take for today for the remainder of these sessions, instead of using the stock profile pic that I've typically used at the top of my presentations, I thought I'd just let my true self shine a little bit, and that is that I love playing the drums.
I've played drums for over 40 years now, just aging myself a little bit. And my band is 20 years old and we're playing live next Friday in San Francisco.
If anybody's around, you can come. I'll put you on the guest list. How about that?
So a little bit about me and this whole talk that we'll do over the next couple minutes. The title of the talk is if you have chosen sales or sales development as your profession, then you must represent.
And what I mean by that is you're representing not only yourself and the best version of yourself, but you're representing me. If I am a sales leader in your organization, you're representing your company, you're representing your customers, your partners, the whole ecosystem.
So you might as well do it well and you might as well master your craft while you're at it. Again, if you've chosen sales, then learn sales and learn how to be excellent at sales so that you can serve that ecosystem.
As Ken mentioned, I am part of the Silicon Valley chapter, which I, too, love to brag about. We have an awesome chapter here in Silicon Valley, and candidly, we're a bit just because of where we're located, we have the best of the best among us within a 30-mile radius.
So it's a great marketplace for us to talk to some of the best inside sales leaders out there and learn best practices in how they're doing it in the SaaS and technology world.
I've done a number of different presentations that I've shared on SlideShare, so I encourage you to check those out. They go from applying these five philosophies to your work all the way to how to nail an SDR interview.
And SDR is a sales development rep. I work for a company called Achievers that was started in Toronto. We now have an office in London and we are here in San Francisco.
You could learn more about us at Achievers.com. But, essentially, we help large enterprise companies, specifically human resources teams with three key areas:
Number one is engaging employees, number two is aligning employees, be that with a corporate mission or corporate initiatives or value statements. And the third is recognizing employees.
There was a staggering statistic that was published by JobVite about 18 months ago that said 69% of employed Americans are actively looking for other work or they're open to it.
And for recruiters that's fabulous, but people like me who manage sales teams, that's pretty scary and it's a big light on me to step it up a little bit and stop thinking so much about the numbers and the bottom line and start thinking about the people.
So it's really a thrill for me to work for a company like Achievers that helps this very statistic get mitigated and minimized by engaging, aligning and recognizing employees.
So check us out. Not too much else to talk about here other than I've been married 18 years to the same woman. I met her in college at St. Mary's College here in the Bay Area.
We're big Giants fans and Giants won last night. Thank you. And I have three beautiful boys who went bananas when I showed them one of these drones yesterday that I took home from InsideSales.
So I encourage you to check that out too. This is my team. There's 11 of 'em. They are a hybrid role in our company, so they handle and follow up on all the inbound leads that we get, but they're also aligned with field account executives managing their territories and focusing on all the outbound prospecting efforts.
So they are a very busy crew and they're on my team for no more than two years. So to me, that's a very short finite amount of time that I have to work with them to them.
They're ready to get off the team in six months. They get bored fast, they have very short attention spans. And so it's a nice balance that we have to create on a daily basis to make sure that they are focused and staying in the present so that I can help them develop their skills, they can go on to be producing account executives that contribute value a lot faster versus consuming value for a lot longer.
Does that make sense? I am thrilled to announce that we just ended our fiscal year and for the fourth consecutive quarter, this very team exceeded their team goal. So this is a team of winners and I feel like I'm helping to develop Jedi and fighter pilots, sales reps out of this SDR team. And every quarter when we exceed goals, we celebrate.
I've made them coffee mugs that say, "Stay calm and hit your number" with a nice Achievers logo on it.
And I don't just hand it out to all the reps, but I post it on LinkedIn and I tag all of those reps, and all of a sudden, candidates that want to come work for our team are now seeing the joy that these guys are experiencing on a regular basis and the victories that they continue to hit.
Partners see those posts, customers see those posts, prospective accounts and contacts, see those posts, and all of a sudden you've got a world of goodness because you're actually touting the success of your team.
So you attract the best in the process. So my message today goes to leaders and it also goes to individual reps or contributors. This is very focused on sales development because that's the world I'm in, but it applies across an organization.
It's really agnostic when it comes to the message. So for the leaders, I think it's really important that they raise their standards.
And I mentioned earlier that they focus so much on revenue and in sales development we are driving revenue pipeline, which is absolutely critical to our organization's health, but there are people behind that.
So the responsibility of the sales development leader is twofold, in that they need to drive revenue pipeline, but they also need to drive people pipeline and they have to make sure that there are processes in place that get these sales development reps off the team and into a successful sales role two plus years down the line, because once these sales development reps get off the team of a good sales development leader, they're now alumni of that sales development leader.
I've been in sales for 20 years. Half of my career was spent as an individual contributor carrying a bag, managing a territory closing deals, which was fabulous.
But I have never gotten more fulfillment out of watching sales development reps graduate from my team or get promoted upward and onward into their own careers where they can manage territories in quotas or they can take on their own teams or they can start their own businesses.
Either way, when they get out into that world, they're representing me and they're representing that two year timeframe that I had them.
And I want the best version of them out there influencing and inspiring the prospects and customers and partners that they are interacting with on a regular basis.
So how do you do that as a sales development leader groom and manage a people pipeline? I listed a couple things that have worked for me over the years that might help you if you are in this role.
Sales reps becoming an alumni someday means you have to invest time with them and you have to understand if there's an outcome that everybody is trying to achieve, there's a purpose that has to drive people to take massive action to get towards that outcome.
If you as a sales leader are not in tune or in touch with what that purpose is of each individual rep, you're completely missing the boat because those sales reps are going to run into rough patches.
They're going to have a tough day, they're going to have a tough quarter, they're going to be in darkness for a little while, and they're going to be looking to you, the sales leader, to inspire them and influence 'em to get 'em going.
Yes, but they're human beings as well. So they're going to run into those rough patches and they're going to need a little arm around the shoulder to help 'em out.
And if you as a leader have no idea what's getting them up out of bed every morning anyway, you're going to really have a hard time firing them up. Also, I firmly believe that in order to inspire someone, you have to believe in them.
You have to see the potential that they have, and you have to have the ability to pull them forward towards the goals that they're trying to accomplish.
So a lot of this is derived from Tony Robbins who spoke at this year's Dreamforce. He was also here two years ago.
He's got a fabulous approach called the RPM approach: it's Results, Purpose, and Massive action. So begin with the end in mind and know what it is that's driving you every day in order to get you to that goal.
I do this on a regular basis with my SDRs through one-on-ones I meet with my SDRs once a week. It's no more than 15 minutes. And when we do meet, we shut the laptops, we put the notebooks down, and we actually go outside the office and we walk around the block.
We have the privilege of working in downtown San Francisco at Union Square, which is a gorgeous scene every single day. And so we take full advantage of that and we'll take nice walks around the block.
All of a sudden guards come down, you get some oxygen, you start to breathe and you actually start to talk and you talk outside of business.
You start talking about how things are going at home, what it is they're trying to get done this week or this quarter or this year that's outside of work. And suddenly guess what?
You get to know the person. So it's really important and they get to know you too. So there's that trust, there's that rapport and that credibility established and reinforced every time you have a really good solid one-on-one with your reps.
So that's what I encourage sales leaders to do on a regular basis. And then finally, making sure that when you host a weekly team meeting, which by the way shouldn't last more than 20 to 25 minutes, you revisit RPM and you revisit the outcomes that everybody wants.
That's part of raising your standards as a leader. Leaders are servants and a lot of 'em see a hierarchy where pyramid has the point up top and there's the leader up top.
Then there's the sales development reps, and then there's the account executives and everybody else. I like to inverse the period. So I'm the one serving them.
I'm the one making their lives better, making their lives more productive, making their lives easier. And you do that through clear communication and commitment to the goal.
You do that by pulling them towards the goal instead of pushing them on a daily basis, sitting next to 'em and asking them to go through numbers with you.
It's a real drag if somebody was doing that to me on a daily basis, and it surely wouldn't motivate me to do what I do every day. So this is just a nice reminder to leaders out there that this is an optimal way and it's been a great way in my experience to create leaders on your team.
For the individual reps out there, especially sales development reps who I said are in their role for about two years, you got to live in the present. I can't tell you how many times sales development reps have come to me just six months into the role asking for promotion.
They want to be account executives, they want to go out and get it done. And I love the ambition and I love that they're fired up about it, but they are in a role that they have not yet mastered. And specifically around sales development, it's absolutely critical that you completely comprehend the inbound effort versus the outbound effort.
I saw John Barrows for example, he's a great sales leader who was speaking at Dreamforce in a number of sessions this week, and he has been selling for probably 20, 30 years and still prospects on a daily basis. And as a result, he's got a fat pipeline.
And he said, so when he's negotiating with a prospect and it just doesn't look like the deal's going to click and it's not going to happen, he's not the one sweating it because he's got 3, 4x pipeline that he can go work with, and that's a wonderful place to be.
It's a good position to be in. So it's absolutely critical that sales development reps, while they're on the sales development team, understand the inbound and the outbound process as you get older.
You all know your personal network just starts to go like this, and you could probably count on one hand the five to six people that are the most important people in your lives. That's great.
It's also very normal and very natural. So it's also a sign to get up, get off your butt and start meeting people and expanding that professional network.
There are people that, because I went up and shook their hands 20 years ago, I actually work with them today or I refer business to them or their nephews or cousins or nieces now work on my team.
It's a trip 20 years later. How much things come to fruition when you're planting the right seeds way back then?
So that's what I mean by really driving your professional network when your personal network starts to get smaller and smaller.
Master the role you're in right now and whether we have sales development reps in this room, sales leaders or not, master the role you are in right now.
Live in the present. Stop thinking one week from now, two years from now, it's irrelevant right now. There's nothing like the present.
So I hear sales development reps coming to me and they're saying, yeah, I'm going to be in sales. That's the career I've chosen.
And then in the next sentence, they're telling me about last night's episode of House of Cards or they're talking to me about baseball or they're talking to me about their commute into work.
They were playing Angry Birds or Candy Crush, and none of that is going to get them to where they need to be in their careers as great salespeople.
So it's really critical that they start attending network events, networking events like Dreamforce. They start attending events like the AAISP, local events, the chapter events, as well as the leadership summit that's held every year.
And they start looking people in the baby blues, pressing the flesh, adding value, thinking about others rather than themselves, and all of a sudden they're going to start to learn and master their craft and goodness comes as a result.
I always encourage them to learn as if they need to teach someone else. If they're in the sales development role and they want to become senior account executives, then they need to act as if.
And when you believe you are a senior account executive in your mind and you take the actions of a senior account executive, guess what? You become a senior account executive. Okay?
So always think a step ahead and for the sales leaders in the room, treat your team as if they're already a role or two beyond where they are today, and they will start to fall into step and become that person.
And it's absolutely critical in sales to hustle until you no longer have to introduce yourself. Sales reps struggle day in and day out with obscurity in the marketplace.
Nobody replies to people's emails, nobody picks up the phone anymore. It's because nobody knows who you are. You are not adding value, you do not have a brand, you don't have the credibility yet.
So get to work on doing that first and adding value to the marketplace. And the more value you add, the more valuable you'll become and suddenly your phone will start ringing and you're going to start to get responses because your reputation will have preceded you.
Continued education. I'm constantly throwing this type of stuff at my team. It probably drives them bananas, but there's a lot of value in here. I encourage you to do the same.
Even if you grab one little nugget off of this slide, I guarantee it's going to change the way you're doing things right now for the better.
I'll do a quick summary of each one on the top left. That's Coach John Wooden of UCLA's basketball team. He led his team do roughly 10 world championships basketball championships in college.
And his philosophy was if he has the best version of every player on his team coming to the court every single day, he doesn't need to look at the scoreboard and he doesn't need to talk about winning because if the team collectively is doing their best and playing their best, victory's going to come.
And it obviously did. He has quite a track record. Jack Welch, one of the greatest CEOs of all time for GE, did a great talk about candor in the workplace for the graduate school of business at Stanford.
And in this very talk, which is a YouTube discussion, he says that when you become a manager, life changes for you because it's no longer about you.
It is about everybody now on your team and you just stop thinking about yourself once you become a manager. And that underscores what I said earlier, how leaders are servants you need to serve.
David Rutherford is a United States Navy Seal and I put together a compilation of some of his videos on YouTube and I created a playlist that's no more than 11 minutes long.
You click on that before you start your day, and I guarantee you you're going to get fired up. He talks about seven different missions that help people forge their self-confidence professionally and personally. So I encourage you to check out those videos.
We're at a networking event like Dreamforce. For a lot of people, it's their first one, and for those who have even been to several of them, they still don't get how to network with people.
This book by Jeffrey Gitomer is a great starting place to learn how to network. It's called the Little Black Book of Networking, and I highly encourage you to check that out.
Watch how Salesforce does it. Everybody. If you are a sales development leader or even in sales development world, Salesforce is one of the best out there in terms of the model they use and have used successfully over the last 10 years in how they handle inbound, how they handle outbound.
Aaron Ross wrote Predictable Revenue. He spun right out of the Salesforce sales development world.
So this is an encyclopedia of information on how to run an effective sales development. And it is a presentation that was done about three Dreamforces ago.
It's audio only, and it shows the slides that these two sales leaders from Salesforce put together.
And then lastly, TOPO is a consulting firm run by a gentleman named Craig Rosenberg who's walking around and has been presenting throughout the week.
He just type in TOPO, "T-O-P-O" and "Proven Framework" in Google and take a look at the document that Craig put together on what sales development is, why it exists altogether, why it's growing as fast as it is.
And you could see some of the studies that Ken and the folks at InsideSales have done to underscore that and why everybody is benefiting from a sales development organization.
So I hope this is helpful to you. I just want to remind everybody, the leaders in the audience to raise your standards, start thinking about the people and not just the numbers.
And for the individual reps in the room, make sure you're always staying in the present and worry about right now versus a year from now.
I think we've got a little time, maybe a minute or two, so thanks for everybody's attention and I hope you all have a great rest of Dreamforce. Thanks for being here. You've been very generous.
Ken:
Let's give him a hand. Isn't he awesome? I was busy taking pictures and tweeting - just so you know - all your cool stuff.
We have a question we ask each of our presenters, and you've already presented with us once, but tell us why you love salesforce.com. Would you?
Ralph:
Sure. I don't want it to be a long answer, but in short, just using Salesforce, I've been a customer of Salesforce and a user of Salesforce for a good decade, and I look at Salesforce as a big virtual house for me.
I don't have to leave Salesforce when I'm working. I go upstairs and I'm working in Opportunities. I go downstairs, I'm working in Leads, it's all in one location.
And over the years, as they've adapted to the mobile technology space, I take Salesforce with me. So I always have my finger on the pulse of where my organization is against plan, et cetera, et cetera.
And then on the outside of that, we have events like Dreamforce where I've seen the Red Hot Chili Peppers. I've seen Metallica. You could see I'm a big music fan.
So I like Benioff's style and it's always a pleasure to be here for Dreamforce.
Ken:
Any questions for Ralph? You guys? One right here.
Ralph:
The question is where did I come up with the two year number? There are a number of statistics, industry statistics that back up the average tenure of sales development reps.
Typically in the SaaS world, for example, sales development reps start on the inbound side only where they do nothing but lead qualification follow up.
And that usually lasts about a year until they get promoted into an outbound only role, which is another year to a year and a half.
And along the course of that two, two and a half year period, that's where they're really developing their sales skills before they go on the outside and become quota carrying account executives.
So having run sales teams, sales development teams since 2000, that's been the average tenure I've seen in my experience, it's usually about two years.
There are some organizations that lose sales development reps much earlier than that, about eight months in to be exact.
And I'm doing everything in my power and in my experience to mitigate that number, I want them to be on the team for two years so that they learn as much as they need to know before they can go on and be an account executive.
So I set those expectations in the recruiting and hiring phase that this is a two year gig, you commit to me, I'm going to commit to you, and both of us are going to win as a result. Thanks for that question.
Ken:
Alright, let's give him another hand you guys. Thanks so much. We've got Jill Rowley up next. She's the Chief Evangelist and Founder of #socialselling.
She's probably the queen of the industry of social selling. She was recently ranked in the top 30, backed right up in the top three in the world by Huffington Post and by Forbes Magazine.
So she'll be with us in just a moment. Ralph will be out in the hallway. Make sure you get your Dreamforce drones.
And remember, there's a video you can watch on how to fly the Dreamforce drone. Don't make the same mistakes we did and fly it by a power line. That's not a smart thing to do.
Alright, we're loading up the next presentation. We'll be going with you here in just a moment. Thank you. Thank you. You rock Ralph.